My Year with Jurgen Moltmann, Who Just Died

While I was away on our long car trip to Arkansas for a family wedding, Jurgen Moltmann died.  A year ago, I did not know about him at all.  But I've spent the last year reading his work for Systematic Theology class, across nine months, so it seemed important to note his passing.  I am intrigued that the major newspapers have yet to report on his life and death, but maybe I'm just not entering the correct search words.

My Systematic Theology professor called Moltmann the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, as are many others who commented on his death.  I've now read several of his books, along with chunks of other books.  The material that I read didn't seem that profound, but that might be because much of it was 50 years old, and maybe it's impacted theology so deeply that what was once revolutionary is now taken as a normal approach to theology.

I think of all the great theologians of the twentieth century, people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Walter Wink and Walter Brueggemann and more feminist theologians than I can name.  Was Moltmann greater than those?  He may have been more wide ranging because he was a systematic theologian.  But nothing that I read over 9 months unsettled me to my core (or even to a lesser extent) or made me think about God differently.  I do realize that may be my fault, not Moltmann's.

Or maybe it's foolish to think in these terms at all.  Moltmann spent much of his life crafting a systematic theology that addressed essential questions, a task that most of us will never do.  For that reason alone, I stand in awe.  I think about my papers for Systematic Theology class, and I think about revising them into book length works, and I realize the scope of what Moltmann was able to do and the sadness of losing such a mind.