Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope (Theologie der Hoffnung, 1964) announced one of the most significant theological programs of the twentieth century and redirected Protestant theology from its preoccupation with the existential present toward the eschatological future that the biblical texts had always been about. Published in German when Moltmann was thirty-eight, it was an immediate international sensation, translated into English in 1967 and rapidly recognized as a watershed.
Moltmann's central argument takes its departure from Ernst Bloch's Marxist philosophy of hope - The Principle of Hope (1959) - and transposes it into explicitly theological terms. Where Bloch argued that history is driven by the 'not yet,' by the unfinished promises of human flourishing, Moltmann argued that the God of the Bible is constitutively a God of promise, whose being is not static but dynamic, pulling history toward a future that has been initiated by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
1 Peter 1:3 - 'Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead' - is the keystone text. The Resurrection is not primarily a demonstration of divine power, nor a consolation for individual believers, nor a metaphor for spiritual experience: it is a historical event that has changed the structure of time itself. The God who raised Jesus from the dead has begun to make good on the promises of creation, and the world is now oriented toward their completion.
Romans 4:17-18 - 'God, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist... in hope he believed against hope' - gives Moltmann his account of Abrahamic faith as paradigmatic: genuine faith is always faith in promise, always faith in what is 'not yet,' always hope against the evidence of present experience. The pattern of Abraham - called out of everything familiar toward a destination he could not see - is the pattern of all genuine Christian existence.
1 Corinthians 15:20 - 'But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep' - provides the eschatological framework. The Resurrection is the beginning of the end, the first installment of the new creation that will encompass all things. This means that present suffering, injustice, and death are provisional - real, but not final. The 'not yet' of the full resurrection is the space in which Christian action happens: between the promise already initiated and the fulfillment not yet completed.
Revelation 21:5 - 'Behold, I am making all things new' - is the telos toward which history moves. Moltmann insists that this is not a spiritualized metaphor but a cosmic promise: the God who began creation will complete it, and the completion will be not the escape of souls from material existence but the transformation of all material existence into the mode of the resurrection.
The political implications Moltmann drew from this were significant. A Christianity grounded in eschatological hope cannot be politically quietist: if the Kingdom of God is coming, then every arrangement of human society that contradicts it stands under judgment. The church's role is not to bless the present order but to bear witness to its provisional character and to resist arrangements that contradict the promised future.
The Theology of Hope directly influenced the liberation theology movement that emerged from Latin America in the late 1960s, particularly Gustavo Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation (1971), which took Moltmann's eschatological framework and applied it to the specific situation of the poor of Latin America. The political theology developed by Johannes Metz and others in Germany also drew heavily on Moltmann's program.
The book was the first of a projected trilogy - followed by The Crucified God (1972) and The Church in the Power of the Spirit (1975) - but Moltmann continued producing major theological works through the following half-century, developing the trinitarian, pneumatological, and ecological dimensions of the program the Theology of Hope had inaugurated.
Moltmann's eschatology also offered a theological basis for political engagement that went beyond the Social Gospel's ethical reformism. If the Kingdom of God is the genuinely new future that contradicts present arrangements - not merely their improvement but their transformation - then Christian hope is inherently critical of any social order that presents itself as final or adequate. This critical function of eschatology was immediately taken up by Johann Baptist Metz in Political Theology (1968) and by the liberation theologians who drew on Moltmann for their argument that the Gospel's promise of a new creation requires the transformation of unjust social structures, not merely the salvation of individual souls.
Theology of Hope remains the most important work of Protestant systematic theology published in the second half of the twentieth century, not because all its arguments have been accepted - there has been substantial criticism of Moltmann's treatment of immanence and transcendence, and of his tendency to collapse eschatology into political hope - but because it reoriented the entire discussion. After Moltmann, Christian theology had to account for the future in a way it had largely neglected since the nineteenth century's loss of nerve about apocalyptic. The book gave back to Protestant theology the eschatological nerve that Barth had partially restored and Bultmann had demythologized away, and in doing so, it changed the questions that systematic theology asks.