Quotes from Jurgen Moltmann

The messianic hope was never the hope of the victors and the rulers. It was always the hope of the defeated and the ground down.31 The hope of the poor is nothing other than the messianic hope.

The ordination of women is not a matter of adaptation to changed social conditions. It has to do with new fife from the beginnings of the Christian church: life out of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. But he does suffer from his love, which is the overflowing superabundance of his being. And in this sense he can suffer.

The freedom to talk with God and of God is being opened by God's joy. It cannot be forced. For true awareness cannot be coercive; it does not come about by either authoritarian pressure or the force of logic. It presupposes liberty. Being aware of God is an art and--if the term may be permitted--a noble game.

We experience what life and death really are when we love, for in love we go out of ourselves, become capable of happiness and at the same time can be hurt.

The history of the kings is the story of how those who had been anointed failed to live up to that anointing. It is this fact alone that can explain the rise of messianism: belief in the anointed one who will fulfil his anointing.' 14

As the Christ for all human beings, Jesus takes hold of our divided and peaceless human society at its lowest point, among the miserable, the despised and the unimportant.

If it were merely sin that existed, and not the resulting transience as well, contrition would be appropriate', said Athanasius, and goes on: `But God becomes human and subjects himself to "the law of death" so as to take away death's power over human beings and his creation, and in order to bring immortality to light.'16

In the New Testament, Christ's 'virgin birth' is related only by Luke and Matthew. It was unknown, or considered unimportant, in wide areas of early Christian belief (the Pauline and Johannine sectors, for example). But from the third century onwards it became a firm component of the Christian creeds and theological christologies.

In its final words The Spirit of Utopia expresses the new symbiosis of Jewish commandment and modern will: `Only the wicked exist through their God; but the righteous - God exists through them

the triune God will indwell the world in a divine way - the world will indwell God in a creaturely way.

As far as we have any historical information on the subject, the public history of Jesus began when he was about thirty years old (Luke 3.23), with John the Baptist.