Quotes by Jürgen Moltmann

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dantes hell is the inscription: Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.

The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives.

God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is apathetic. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is pathetic.

Judgement immobilizes, only hopeful love leaves an opening for Gods alternative future.

When the crucified Jesus is called the image of the invisible God, the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.

Our social and political tasks, if we take them seriously, loom larger than life. Yet infinite responsibility destroys a human being because he is only a man and not god. ~ p.23

Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the adult… Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience.

...the triune God will indwell the world in a divine way - the world will indwell God in a creaturely way.

Well, first I would ask them if they had read the Bible; then I would ask them if they had understood it.

In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.~ Theology of Play, p.33