How to stump a leading theologian

Last week we had a visit by a distinguished guest, the highly influential 20th century theologian Professor Jurgen Moltmann. You might never have heard of him, but if you've heard a sermon in the last forty years you will have heard his ideas.

Professor Moltmann was speaking on the occasion of the 2nd annual Moule lecture, held in memory of Charlie Moule, another key theologian who had a long association with Ridley Hall. A marquee full of staff, students, former students, invited guests and members of the public listened to his lecture for nearly an hour, before the floor was opened for questions.

And this was the first question. (Don't worry, it really doesn't matter if you weren't there for the lecture itself. It makes no difference whatsoever to your understanding of the question. Or indeed to Moltmann's understanding of the question. If by any remote chance the questioner is reading this, please let us know who you are. We're not quite sure why we want to know, we just have a morbid fascination.)

Questioner: “This is a double whammy if you will pardon the approach. The first thing is that for years there have been sermons preached about the Parable of the Sower which I think to have been quite erroneous for the simple reason that they ignore the work of C.H.Dodd and Joachim Jeremias in pointing out the context of the parable and trying to make out that Jesus was an idiot because he taught in parables which was a traditional Pharisaic method. So therefore my question is, starting from that point to ask the question: do we not recognize that the Parable of the Sower has two contexts? The context of the ministry of Jesus when he stands in the Hebrew background to understand that there is one particular truth held which is the victory of God that’s coming with a magnificent harvest that is far beyond anything we can dream of and then the context of the Greek speakers who couldn’t understand the Hebrew thinking and tried to deal with the allegory. That is the first bit, and the second bit is related to the question of time, which has been something that has run through all of your lecture, that is the question of how you relate time to eternity. And years ago I came to a certain picture and I’ll share it with you for your consideration, which is to say that if you take a ball and let that represent eternity and you draw a tangent to touch the side of that ball then that represents the amount of time that is in existence from when time began to when it ends. But everyone’s time is interpermeated with eternity and therefore we have that to add to our picture of the historical Jesus who is the eternal Jesus, who interpenetrates everyone’s time, our time now, he’s with us, their time then when he was with them. I offer those two things to you….”

Jurgen Moltmann: “Errr.. I’m not quite sure whether I understood every word you are saying…”


Jurgen is not alone. This was one rare occasion when I was on the same level as the staff.