The Source of Life QUOTES

1 " But the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God's
first love. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

2 " The opposite of poverty isn't property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own
hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

3 " Christian faith isn't just a conviction, a feeling and a decision. It invades life so deeply that we have to talk about dying and being born again, which is what corresponds to the death and resurrection of Christ. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

4 " The longer I have lived with this new hope, the clearer it has become to me: our true hope in life doesn't spring from the feelings of our youth, lovely and fair though they are. Nor does it emerge from the objective possibilities of history, unlimited though they may be. Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: 'I live and you shall live also.' We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command - a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

5 " It is only as a unity in diversity that the Christian community will become an inviting community in a society which is otherwise pretty uniform. Creation is motley and diverse, and the new creation even more so. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

6 " The friend standing next to me at the firing predictor was torn to pieces by the bomb that left me unscathed. That night I cried out to God for the first time: `My God, where are you?' And the question `Why am I not dead too?' has haunted me ever since. Why are you alive? What gives your life meaning? Life is good, but to be a survivor is hard. One has to bear the weight of grief. It was probably in that night that my theology began, for I came from a secular family and knew nothing of faith. The people who escaped probably all saw their survival not just as a gift but as a charge too. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

7 " Out of hope for eternal life, love for this vulnerable and mortal life is born afresh. This love does not give anything up. If we had to surrender hope for as much as one single creature, for us Christ would not have risen. The love founded on hope is the strongest medicine against the spreading sickness of resignation. The modern cynicism which is prepared to accept the death of so many created things is an ally of death. But we Christians are what Christoph Blumhardt called `protest-people against death'. That is why out of the deadly depths we cry out for God's Spirit. That is why we cry out for the Spirit who sustains the whole creation, and wait for the Spirit of the new creation of all things. Our cry from the depths is a sign of life - a sign of divine life. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

8 " The gift and the presence of the Holy Spirit is the greatest and most wonderful thing which we can experience - we ourselves, the human community, all living things and this earth. For with the Holy Spirit it is not just one random spirit that is present, among all the many good and evil spirits that there are. It is God himself, the creative and life-giving, redeeming and saving God. Where the Holy Spirit is present, God is present in a special way, and we experience God through our lives, which become wholly living from within. We experience whole, full, healed and redeemed life, experience it with all our senses. We feel and taste, we touch and see our life in God and God in our life. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

9 " The Spirit is more than just one of God's gifts among others; the Holy Spirit is the unrestricted presence of
God in which our life wakes up, becomes wholly and entirely living, and is endowed with the energies of life. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

10 " We shall not be redeemed from this earth, so that we could give it up. We shall be redeemed with it. We shall not be redeemed from the body. We shall be made eternally alive with the body. That is why the original hope of Christians was not turned towards another world in heaven, but looked for the coming of God and his kingdom on this earth. We human beings are earthly creatures, not candidates for angelic status. Nor are we here on a visit to a beautiful star, so as to make our home somewhere else after we die. We remain true to the earth, for on this earth stood Christ's cross. His resurrection from the dead is also a resurrection with the dead, and with this blood-soaked earth. In the light of Christ's resurrection we can already trace the contours of the `new earth' (Rev. ii.i), where `death will be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more' (Rev. 2.1.4). "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

11 " with Christ in faith a wholly new life begins. It is not a restored life, and it is not a rejuvenated life either. It is not even a life reborn out of its origin. The resurrection of Christ has no historical prototype. It is something completely new in history. It is the beginning of the new creation of everything. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

12 " True Easter faith is the work of the Spirit, for believing in Christ's resurrection doesn't mean affirming a historical fact, and saying `Oh really?' It means being seized by the life-giving Spirit and experiencing `the powers of the world to come' (Heb. 6.5) in our own living and dying. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

13 " The Holy Spirit does not `proceed from the Father and the Son', as the Western church's Nicene Creed maintains. The Spirit proceeds from the Father, rests on the Son, and from the Son radiates into the world. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

14 " But for us this also means that in place of the spread of our Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Protestant churches we have to put a passion for the kingdom of God. Mission doesn't mean `compelling them to come in'! It is the invitation to God's future and to hope for the new creation of all things: `Behold, I am making all things new' - and you are invited to this divine future for the world! "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

15 " You only live once!' we are told. `You might miss out on something!' This hunger for pleasure, for possessions, for power; the thirst for recognition through success and admiration - that is the perversion of modem men and women. That is their godlessness. The person who loses God makes a god out of himself. And in this way a human being becomes a proud and unhappy mini-god. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

16 " Mission doesn't mean `compelling them to come in'! It is the invitation to God's future and to hope for the new creation of all things: `Behold, I am making all things new' - and you are invited to this divine future for the world! In God's Spirit you can already anticipate now this becoming-new which God will complete on his day. Once a passion for God's future
replaces a passion for the spread of the church we shall stop exporting our ugly European and American church divisions, and extending religious denominationalism instead of hope for the kingdom of God. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

17 " As Christians understand it, creation is a trinitarian process: God the Father creates through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. So all things are created `by God', are formed `through God' and exist `in God'. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

18 " People who ask for the Holy Spirit to come to us - into our hearts, into the community we live in, and to our earth -
don't want to flee into heaven or to be snatched away into the next world. They have hope for their hearts, their community and this earth. We don't pray `Let us come into your kingdom' either. We pray `Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven.' The petition for the coming of the divine Spirit to us frail earthly people implies a great, unbroken affirmation of life. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

19 " From its foundation and by its very nature, the church is cosmos-orientated. It was a modern and a dangerous contraction when the church came to be narrowed down to the human world. But if the church is cosmos-orientated, then the ecological crisis of earthly creation is the church's own crisis, for through this destruction of the earth - `bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh' - the church is destroyed. When the weaker creatures die, the whole community of creation suffers. If the church sees itself as creation's representative, then this suffering on the part of the weaker creatures will turn into its own conscious pain, and it will have to cry out this pain in public protest. It is not just our human environment that is suffering; it is the creation which is designed and destined to be `God's environment'. Every intervention in creation which can never be made good again is sacrilege. Its consequence is the self-excommunication of the perpetrators. The nihilistic destruction of nature is practised atheism. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life

20 " When I love God I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses in the creations of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me.
For a long time I looked for you within myself and crept into the shell of my soul, shielding myself with an armour of inapproachability. But you were outside - outside myself - and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others. "

― Jürgen Moltmann , The Source of Life