I have long enjoyed Phillip Yancy. I have found him mature in his faith;
thoughtful, sensitive, and authentic. I have long enjoyed Phillip Yancy. I have found him mature in his faith;
thoughtful, sensitive, and authentic. Reared behind the walls of
fundamentalism, he has ripened as a mature, fruitful thinker. Yancy described
finding God confined inside a barbed wire fence, where he met Jurgen Moltman.
As a youth, the German theologian planned a career in
quantum physics, only to be drafted by the German Army at the peak of World War
Two . Assigned to anti-air-craft batteries in Hamburg, Moltmann saw others incinerated
by fire bombs and was long haunted by guilt. Questions pressed his mind and he
wondered, “Why did I survive?”
Moltmann was surrendered to the British Army and
spent three years in the prison camps of Belgium, Scotland, and England. Seeing
German prisoners collapse from within, lose all hope, and become sick unto
death. He experienced his own growing grief while learning the real truth about
Nazi Germany. It weighed him down with a somber burden of guilt he could never
pay off.
Coming from a non-Christian background, Moltmann brought two
books with him into battle: Goethe’s Poems
and The Philosophical Works of Nietzsche
Finding no hope in either, the young prisoner of war opened an Army-issue New
Testament and Psalms given him by an American Chaplain, signed by President
Roosevelt.
“If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there,” he
read. Was that possible; he wondered. The
words captured his desolation and disillusionment and convinced him that God “was
present even behind the barbed wire—no, most of all behind the barbed wire.”
Reading sparked a tiny flame of hope. Walking the
barbed-wire perimeters during the night hours for exercise, he described
circling a small hill in the center of the camp, where he found a hut that
served as a chapel. In that chapel, he found a symbol of the presence of God in
the midst of the suffering that surrounded him.
Transferred to an educational camp in England operated by
the YMCA, Moltmann experienced a warm welcome. They brought him food, taught him
Christian doctrine, and never mentioned the guilt the soldiers felt over the
Nazi atrocities. Moltmann described how he felt better treated there than by his
own German Army.
Following the war, Moltmann began articulating this
personal theology of hope and how we exist in a state of contradiction between
the Cross and the Resurrection. We are surrounded by decay while we hope for
restoration—a hope illuminated by the faint glow of Christ’s resurrection.
Faith in that glorious future, says Yancy, can transform the present, just as
Moltmann’s own hope of eventual release transformed his daily prison-life.
We find two themes: God’s presence within us in our
suffering and God’s promise of a perfected future. Had Jesus lived in Europe
during the War Years, he likely would have been branded like other Jews and
shipped to the gas chambers, observes Moltmann. In Jesus, he found definitive proof that God suffers with us, as he did in the Crucified God.
Today, searching people assume from the suffering seen in
Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere that God is neither all-good, all-powerful, or even
all-wise. Yet, faith allows us to believe God is not satisfied with this
world any more than we are, and he intends to make all things new and right. Thus,
Christ’s Second Coming brings the Kingdom of God to the fullness of its
intended shape.
In the meantime, we establish our Kingdom Outposts and we
continue using the Gospel as our template. While the Old Testament inspires a
certain fear, the New Testament fills us with hope, because those authors have already
come to know and trust the Lord whose Day it is.
This is walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com
Seeing a summary of our human past, present, and future captured in the sweep of the pen that describes “from Good Friday to Easter,” and knowing
as others before us have observed
“God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”
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