Giants in the moment. . .

So guess what -- I am still behind in my reading!  I just found out that Jürgen Moltmann passed away last month.  He was 98.  He, along with Wolfhart Pannenberg, were giants in the moment when I was in my final years of college.  Although I think I gave to the Seminary the last volumes I had by these authors, I cannot imagine people reading them now except to explore a footnote in history.  Their great promise gave way to a largely forgotten contribution to theology and that is probably best.  Although he was ostensibly from a Lutheran perspective, Moltmann had long ago decided that Luther was mostly in the way of what he wanted to explore and believe.  Unfortunately, that could also be said of Scripture.  It was also in the way of his theological expression.  Moltmann was not driven either by the witness of Scripture or its theological framework but by the concerns of and context of the moment.  

I wish I could recall why we had to read Moltmann and Pannenberg.  It is probably because they were the newest and most orthodox of the radical voices that were pervading Christian thought in the early 1970s.  That is probably not saying all that much.  After all, the concerns for the oppressed and the so-called injustices of capitalism have become the fodder for many books but long ago the Marxist structure of a version of Christianity has fallen out of fashion.  Yes, the whole communist and socialist promise has revealed its darker side and most have been replaced by some form of democratic socialism or capitalism or dictatorship.  It makes it hard to build your theology on the moment when you wake up one day to find out that the world has moved on and you were left with yesterdays construct.  Oh, well.  At least you sold a lot of books and generated a fair amount of heat but not much light.  Maybe Wiki will mention that in his listing there.  

What I find so strange is that were it not for a couple of Seminary professors, I do not think I would have found out about other Christian teachers whose lives were not lived out in fifteen minutes of fame but in a growing esteem that has not faded and most likely will not.  Here I am speaking about the Early Church Fathers and those who are claimed by Roman and Evangelical alike.  Yes, there are such theologians!  Their witness is not meant for the museum of history but for the engagement of God's people with His mystery evidenced in Scripture and the goal of proclaiming that mystery so that any might be saved.  Yes, that was Moltmann's complaint about Luther -- he was too concerned about the individual's salvation to be much use to a profound and modern theologian.  Curiously, Luther has not gone out of style but I am afraid Moltmann and Pannenberg certaintly have.  Maybe Moltmann and others who participated wittingly or unwittingly in liberation theology have themselves been liberated from our notice of those who were giants only in a moment.  If that is the case, I hope and pray that it will give us more time to listen to the great fathers in the faith whose voices and vision seems to become ever more profound as the clock ticks.

In the end, Patristics should have replaced the engagement with the moderns in my college years.  Ultimately it did with a few voices -- including someone who actually was at university with the likes of Edgar J. Goodspeed!  That is where my attention ended up going and rightly so.  For all the Moltmanns and Pannenbergs of this world, their contributions are fairly small and their impact almost negligent in comparison to the Greek and Latin Fathers both prior to and after Nicea.  If you want my vote and I suspect the vote of folks like Heino Kadai and C. George Fry and William Weinrich, you will find your way to an earlier era in which unpacking the faith was more important than departing from it.  If you, you will head to the Ante and Post Nicene fathers along with those of that generation.  I know that is more where I end up and more often.  If you do grow up you soon realize that your job is not to explain God or define Him but merely to proclaim what He has done through His Son.  When that happens, you learn also that building something up is always better than tearing it down.