This Festchrift honouring the 70th birthday of Professor Jürgen Moltmann of Tübingen University is a delight to read for all students of serious and substantive theological reflection. Few if any other theologians have done as much as Professor Moltmann to shape the discipline of theology in the second half of this century and his influence is demonstrated by this Festchrift whose contributors read like a ‘Who’s Who in Theology’ from many different countries and theological perspectives.

Miroslav Volf, the primary editor of this volume, was himself a graduate student of Moltmann’s during the 1980s when Volf taught in Yugoslavia before becoming Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. He has organized the essays around the theme of the ‘future of theology’, with each essay being a proposal for the normative shape of the discipline in the 21st century. The three subdivisions of the book are organized loosely into the categories of ‘challenges’, ‘perspectives’ and ‘themes’, but the assignment of particular essays into different categories is not exact since many of the ‘perspectives’ and ‘themes’ give challenges and perspectival articles suggest themes. Needless to say, such a diverse collection of authors have considerable disagreements over the shape of that future. Evangelicals will agree more with some perspectives than with others.

Among the most central challenges of the future for theology is the pluralism not only of what Volf calls ‘social worlds’ (p. x), but of theologies themselves. This fact leads to both the promise of more authentic dialogue and the adventure of exploration along new paths, but it also brings the threat of an ‘anything goes’ quagmire. Contributors like Douglass John Hall, Dorothee Soelle and John Cobb Jr acknowledge the threat, but place more emphasis on the promise. On the other hand, contributors like Stanley Hauerwas, Johann Baptist Metz and Wolfhart Pannenberg see the threat as larger than the promise, even though they acknowledge the latter. Volf, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Paul Ricoeur are among the most balanced in weighing these possibilities. Similar diversities are displayed concerning the challenges of the progressive marginalization of theology in public discourse and the further alienation of the discipline from the life of the Church. To this are added the numerous challenges of a whole line of significant issues that concern the life and happiness of millions. Ought theology to avoid being issue-driven? Or are issues like gender, race, poverty and ecological survival to be among the topics of sustained theological reflection? Do such issues (singly or together) require a radical rethinking of classical theological loci, or would attempts at minor adjustments or even a simple retrieval of genuine Christian tradition be more appropriate? All of these are issues that have been important to Moltmann’s work, and the essays challenge all to rethink their own perspectives.

In the course of his long theological career, Jürgen Moltmann has taken seriously the perspectives of liberation theologies (Latin American, African-American, South African, Asian, feminist), evangelicals (who have taken longer to engage with his work, especially in the US), Anabaptist Mennonites, Roman Catholics, mainline ecumenical Protestants, and postliberals. Many of these same interlocutors are among the contributors to this Festschrift, but one of the drawbacks is that some of their essays do not interact substantively with Moltmann’s work, either to praise, critique or advance. James H. Cone’s essay, ‘Martin, Malcolm, and Black Theology’, repeats essays that he has published in several other places. Further, despite the fact that both Cone and Moltmann have drawn repeatedly on each other’s work over the years, Cone’s essay does not show that Moltmann has any significance for Black Theology, nor vice versa. By contrast, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elizabeth Moltmannn-Wendel both show the significance of feminist themes for Moltmann and of Moltmann for feminist themes. Ruether’s essay is among the most balanced of her presentations in several years.

Evangelicals will be more comfortable with some of these essays than others, but ‘comfort’ is not always the best guide to the best reading material in theology. Working through these perspectives is rewarding for all who take the theological task seriously. It is helpful to have read some of Moltmann’s major works prior to reading this Festschrift, but it is not absolutely necessary. The volume could serve both as a good introduction to Moltmann’s work and to much of the contemporary theological scene. This is one evangelical theologian who hopes fervently that Jürgen Moltmann continues to be active in his theological output for several more years.

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