BEING HUMAN

On the eve of what would have been Jürgen Moltmann’s 100th birthday (8 April 1926), the Eastern European Institute of Theology and the Odesa Theological Seminary jointly convened an online international seminar, “Jürgen Moltmann: Historical Figure and Theological Legacy,” to commemorate the German theologian’s life and assess the continuing relevance of his thought for a church and a country living under war.

The seminar, held on 23 April 2026 and moderated by Oleksandr Geychenko (Rector, OTS), brought together theologians from the United Kingdom and Ukraine, and organizers described it as the most substantial Ukrainian engagement with Moltmann’s work since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Ukrainian simultaneous interpretation was provided throughout.

The event was offered as a sign that, on the 1520th day of the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine, the community of Ukrainian theological educators continues to serve the local church (nurturing a new generation of pastors, chaplains, and theological leaders under Russian shelling and amid air raid alerts), while also learning to serve the global church with the hard-won lessons of doing theology in wartime. That dual vocation was visible in the geography of the audience itself: the seminar drew about 100 participants from 36 countries across five continents, with Ukraine most heavily represented and additional participants from Austria, Australia, Belarus, Belgium, Cameroon, Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, the Netherlands, Nigeria, North Macedonia, the Philippines, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The keynote lecture, “Jürgen Moltmann: A Leader for Our Time,” was delivered by Professor Paul S. Fiddes, Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow of Regent’s Park College; a theologian who pursued post-doctoral studies under Moltmann in Tübingen in the 1970s and whose “Creative Suffering of God” (1988) remains a significant interlocutor with Moltmann’s project. Fiddes traced Moltmann’s intellectual arc from the flak battery in Hamburg in July 1943, through the Norton Camp POW experience near Nottingham, to the publication of “Theology of Hope” (1964), “The Crucified God “(1972), “The Trinity and the Kingdom of God” (1980), and “The Coming of God” (1996). He offered close readings of Moltmann’s trinitarian theology, his critique of political monotheism, his doctrine of the millennium, and his universal eschatology of joy, while also registering his own critical engagements with aspects of Moltmann’s social trinitarianism and treatment of eternity.

Two Ukrainian theological respondents followed.

Dr. Anatoliy Denysenko, research fellow at the Eastern European Institute of Theology, presented “The Theology of the Cross of Jürgen Moltmann in the Ukrainian Context,” reading Moltmann’s project through the categories of provocative anamnesis (Moltmann) and dangerous memory (Johann Baptist Metz). Denysenko argued that Moltmann’s theology is inseparable from his biography (the firestorm over Hamburg in 1943, the photographs of Bergen-Belsen shown to German POWs in 1945, the long confrontation with Auschwitz) and that the central question of “The Crucified God” is not the abstract theodicy question “Why does God permit suffering?” but the wartime cry “My God, where are you?” Drawing on Dostoevsky, Camus, and Elie Wiesel, Anatoliy traced Moltmann’s replacement of classical theodicy with a “dialectic of love”: a God who does not justify suffering but enters it, Who is present in godforsakenness precisely as the crucified One. He concluded with a direct application: that Ukrainian theology must now develop its own discipline of dangerous memory, a theology that refuses to abstract the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, children, and civilians into generic categories of evil, and that insists on naming, remembering, and theologically honoring each life lost since 2014.

Taras Dyatlik (VSI engagement director for Scholar Leaders in Eastern Europe and theological education consultant with Mesa Global) delivered a response titled “On the Centennial of Jürgen Moltmann’s Birthday: A Theological Reflection amid the 1520th Day of Russian Aggression against Ukraine” Speaking on the 1520th day of the full-scale Russian invasion, and from a family in which five siblings, cousins, and nephews have been killed by Russian forces since 2022 (including his brother Andriy, an army doctor deadly wounded and killed by a Russian drone on 6 Juley 2024), with another six relatives currently serving on the frontline, Taras offered what he described as “not a student’s response to a professor, but a fellow prisoner’s response, from another captivity.” His three-part argument defended Moltmann’s often-dismissed doctrine of the millennium as “the most morally serious move in twentieth-century theology” and the one for which Ukrainian theology had been waiting, insisting that God’s justice must be done on the same earth where the injustice happened: “on the soil where Bucha lies, and Izium, and Olenivka, and Mariupol.” He redeployed Moltmann’s critique of political monotheism as a direct theological instrument against the ideology of Russkiy Mir, naming its architecture as “one God on one throne, one Patriarch, one emperor, one canonical territory, one sacred people,” the theological premise, he argued, on which “Moscow’s empire still rests, and still shells, and still blesses the shelling.” And he proposed completing Moltmann’s pastoral theology of presence with the imprecatory registers of Psalms 137 and 109, Habakkuk, and Revelation 6:10, arguing that Matthew 5:44’s call to love one’s enemies does not abolish the martyrs’ cry, “How long, O Lord?”

We also referenced three recent Langham Publishing volumes as concrete evidence of what he called “theology written under missile fire, not after it”: “Light in the Valley of the Shadow of Death” (Carlisle: Langham, 2025), “Beatitudes and Terror: Ukrainian Theological Response to Russian Aggression” (Langham, 2025), and the forthcoming “Pastoral Ministry During Wartime: The Ukrainian Experience” (editor-in-chief Roman Soloviy, co-editors Oleksandr Geychenko and Taras Dyatlik). The seminar was closed with an image from April 2022 – tulips growing from the rubble of Borodyanka – applied to Moltmann himself: “His theology did not choose Ukraine. It was written in German, in Tübingen, about Auschwitz and Hiroshima… And yet it bloomed here. In our rubble.”

On behalf of the participants, we also express particular gratitude to @⁨Трофимчук Ксенія Ігорівна⁩ and @⁨Соловій Роман Павлович⁩, who together carried out the practical and logistical work that made the event possible. Their labor is a small illustration of a larger conviction that shaped the seminar as a whole. Moltmann himself once wrote that there would be no honest “theology after Auschwitz” had there been no “theology in Auschwitz.” Ukrainian theological educators, from the 1520th day of an ongoing Russian war of terror against their country, say it in their own idiom: there will be no honest theology after Ukraine if we do not do theology in Ukraine now: in the seminaries, in theological programs, in the basements, in the funerals, in the ministry to refugees and IDPs, and familiies of veterans, fallen, missing and those in Russian captivity. Supporting the formation of theological leaders during the war is not a luxury to be deferred until peace arrives. It is the condition under which any post-war theology will be possible at all. Peace be with you, Taras D (Ukraine), on behalf of the organizers.

For further information: Eastern European Institute of Theology (Lviv) – http://eeit-edu.info · Odesa Theological Seminary – http://otseminary.org · Taras M. Dyatlik – http://dyatlik.blog