Mark's Notebook


	And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. - Soren Kierkegaard

God Behind Barbed Wire

Christianity Today

Tuesday 30 August 2005, 10:12 pm
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

by Philip Yancey

Jürgen Moltmann was planning on a career in quantum physics until he was drafted at age 18 at the height of the Second World War. Assigned to anti-aircraft batteries in Hamburg, he saw compatriots incinerated in the fire-bombings there. The question "Why did I survive?" haunted him.

Moltmann felt an inconsolable grief about life, "weighed down by the somber burden of a guilt which could never be paid off."

After surrendering to the British, the young soldier spent the next three years in prison camps in Belgium, Scotland, and England. An American chaplain gave him an Army-issue New Testament and Psalms. "If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there." As he read on, Moltmann found words that perfectly captured his feelings of desolation. He became convinced that God "was present even behind the barbed wire — no, most of all behind the barbed wire."

Upon release, Moltmann began to articulate his theology of hope. Through all of Moltmann's dense theological works run two themes: God's presence with us in our suffering and God's promise of a perfected future. If Jesus had lived in Europe during the Third Reich, Moltmann noted, he likely would have been branded like other Jews and shipped to the gas chambers. In Jesus, we have definitive proof that God suffers with us, as Moltmann explains in The Crucified God.

"God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him."

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/009/20.120.html