His family confirmed this to the Protestant Press Service of Germany. Jürgen Moltmann died on Monday June 3 at the age of 98. The Protestant theologian, of Pentecostal orientation and defender of the ecumenical movement, was considered “one of the most important Protestant theologians of the 20th century,” according to the news agency. She adds that her book Theology of hope (ed. Cerf-Mame, 1964) has been translated into many languages and “has influenced theologians around the world.”
Born in Hamburg on April 8, 1926, he began his theological studies while a prisoner of war in Britain thanks to a New Testament given by an American chaplain. From 1953 to 1957, Jürgen Moltmann was pastor of the Wasserhorst Church in Bremen. Then professor at the University of Bonn, from 1967 until his retirement in 1994 he taught systematic theology and social ethics at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. He was the husband of the feminist theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, who died in 2016.
Among his other well-known works: The crucified God (ed. Cerf, 1972) and The Church in the power of the Spirit (ed. Cerf, 1975). “People who hope in Christ can no longer tolerate reality as it is, but they begin to suffer from it, to challenge it. To be at peace with God means to be in conflict with the world because the sting of the promised future inexorably pricks the flesh of every unfulfilled present,” he wrote in his Theology of hope.
