God For A Secular Society: the Public Relevance of Theology

Written by Jürgen Moltmann. Trans. Margaret Kohl 1999 Reviewed By Jenny Taylor

Suddenly everyone is writing about secularisation. Lesslie Newbigin led the way with his now legendary The Other Side of 1984 that attempted to turn the missionary sights of the church 180 degrees back to the ‘home countries’. The World Council of Churches produced Religion, Law and Society in 1995, stimulated by the trenchant Islamic critique of the West. And in 1998. Kenneth Cragg and Lamin Sanneh both made heroic contributions to the debate. ‘Multiculturalism’—since it forces us to create community alongside people who believe ‘the secular’ is godlessness, rather than the religion-free space God has given us—is forcing a fascinating new agenda. Theologians must stop talking to each other and start addressing Western civilisation about its own meaning—and this wonderfully effervescent collection of lectures, delivered over the last six years, brings a joyous affirmation to the long overdue task of re-engaging Christian faith (not the same thing to Moltmann as ‘religion’) with the West’s public life.

Many Christians unwittingly bought the atheist distortion that since the State no longer governed the conscience, the conscience had no right to influence the State. This spelled ‘political shut-down on religion’ writes Moltmann—which is wreaking catastrophe not just for the poor but for the planet. While Western religion keeps to its corner as a leisure activity, ‘the world is going down to destruction’ (22). ‘[F]aith is for public use’, Moltmann can say, as if he has suddenly remembered it (43). And it is true, that in the post-Rushdie, post-Soviet world, Christianity is publicly visible again. Secularisation was a religious achievement, especially a Protestant one, built upon the religious freedom of men and women (42, 98, 212). It has now gone too far, and the onus is on Protestants to pull us back from the brink of extinction (23).

The book is divided into three sections: Theology and Politics: In the Changing Values of the Modern World; and Theology and Religion. It is in the third section that the ‘new mission’ is spelled out (239 ff). ‘[T]he political existence of churches and Christians’ ‘must be Christianised, in accord with the yardstick of Christian discipleship given us in the Sermon on the Mount’. Protestant distinctives do not detract from a broader ecumenicism that recognises our common plight. ‘Jesus didn’t bring a new religion into the world. He brought new life … Christ is the divine yes to life’. This neither excludes non-Christians, nor posits pluriform ‘truth’. It means a pneumatology of life that must overcome anything that hinders, destroys or sacrifices that life—including religion. The biblical distinction of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians should inform our theologies of religion.

Moltmann is still too uncritical of a liberal-left agenda to which he has been wedded all his life. It re-emerges in his unquestioning faith in human rights: ‘The idea of Protestantism is the modern, democratic form of the evangelical faith which by way of human rights extends to all humanit’. Yet human rights, without biblical legitimacy, can prove a skittish target: the woman’s ‘right to her own body’ versus ‘the right to life’; racial equality (under which religious equality has confusingly crept); parental rights versus the rights of the child—relatively discrete topics that often contradict each other, and fail to challenge the system in the comprehensive way Moltmann wants.

This book communicates. It is full of wisdom and quotable aphorisms. Moltmann’s own temperament governs his eschatology, rendering the distant view hopeful, and rallying the doom-weary. ‘We must trust that God will not let [his creation] go’ (23), is a good note on which to end this grizzly century in which I am writing.


Jenny Taylor

London