몰트만의 메시아적 창조론

Abstract

Jürgen Moltmann(1926-) deploys his doctrine of messianic creation which indicates that new creation in the scripture as the promised messianic event occurring in the end has first creation as its prerequisite and shows consummation as the goal of creation. Moreover, the triune God’s historical event of redemption shapes up the eschatological images of new creation in three ways. First, the resurrection of Jesus Christ promises and guarantees the new creation as the general redemption of the world. Second, regeneration as the event of new creation presents “Incipit vita nova,” which means that new life begins. Third, justification clarifies the feature of new creation in the point that God's righteousness renews the guilty through their faith. According to Moltmann, the goal and completion of the created world is that God rests fully in the world. Before it is preceded the liberation from God’s self-limiting which results in the transition from time to eternity. And “a new heaven and a new earth” become God's environments participating in aeonic life, but the creatures still remain as the status of them at a new creation. Moltmann’s doctrine of messianic creation gives two contributions. First, it is Moltmann’s merit that he grasps the God's transcendence with the concept of the future. It is understood as the Adventus of the coming and the understanding of the evolutionary and the progressive history are rejected by him. Second, his doctrine of creation, showing “the creative theory of Sabbath” in an era of the global ecological crisis, is evaluated opportune. This point is the unique feature of the doctrine of creation in the 20th half-second and the contribution of Moltmann’s doctrine of creation. Meanwhile, Moltmann’s doctrine of messianic creation gives the following weaknesses. First, he has the problem that he obscurely thinks the optimistic future. According to him, the gospel reveals the God's newness in the way of resistance and the christian eschatology contains the sufferings but the end of the history is a new creation. Though the sufferings are experienced in reality, the world of the sufferings is easily ignored, neglected, and misused on the conditions that the optimistic future is convinced. Second, his arguments, that the resurrection of the Messiah is the first messianic event of a new creation and the “the resurrection of the dead” is for all the people including the believers to participate in the messianic event not the Last Judgment, are connected to universalistic eschatology and they are questionable. But the scripture evidently says “double outcome of the Judgment(Rev 20, 11-12).” In spite of the gloomy situations of the various ecological calamities and the world-wide evils, Moltmann’s theology talking about “God of hope(Rom 15, 13)” by adhering to God’s faithfulness to the world and His transcendence over the world offers both a challenge and a criticism. This is what we need the continual researches and dialogues about Moltmann’s doctrine of messianic creation.