On the eve of what would have been Jürgen Moltmann’s hundredth birthday on 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 mark the German theologian’s life and to assess the continuing relevance of his thought for a church and a country living under war.
The seminar was held on 23 April 2026 and moderated by Oleksandr Geychenko, rector of OTS. It brought together theologians from the United Kingdom and Ukraine, and the organizers describe it as the most substantial Ukrainian engagement with Moltmann’s work since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Simultaneous Ukrainian interpretation was provided throughout.
The event was offered as a sign that, on the 1520th day of this war, the community of Ukrainian theological educators continues to serve the local church, forming a new generation of pastors and chaplains and theological leaders under shelling and between 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: about a hundred participants joined from thirty-six countries across five continents, with Ukraine most heavily represented, along with participants from Australia, Austria, 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 given by Professor Paul S. Fiddes, professor emeritus of systematic theology at the University of Oxford and senior research fellow of Regent’s Park College, who pursued postdoctoral studies under Moltmann in Tübingen in the 1970s and whose The 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 prisoner-of-war experience at Norton Camp 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 engagement with aspects of the social trinitarianism and the treatment of eternity.
Two Ukrainian responses 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 the project through the categories of provocative anamnesis in Moltmann and dangerous memory in Johann Baptist Metz. Denysenko argued that Moltmann’s theology is inseparable from his biography, from the firestorm over Hamburg in 1943 and the photographs of Bergen-Belsen shown to German prisoners of war in 1945 through the long confrontation with Auschwitz, and that the central question of The Crucified God is the wartime cry “my God, where are You?” rather than the abstract theodicy question of why God permits suffering. Drawing on Dostoevsky, Camus and Elie Wiesel, he traced Moltmann’s replacement of classical theodicy with a dialectic of love: a God who enters suffering rather than justifying it, and who is present in godforsakenness precisely as the crucified One. He closed 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 and children and civilians into generic categories of evil, and insists instead on naming and remembering and theologically honoring each life lost since 2014.
Taras Dyatlik, engagement director for the Vital Sustainability Initiative at 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 from a family in which five siblings and cousins and nephews have been killed by russian forces since 2022, including his brother Andrii, an army doctor fatally wounded by a russian drone on 6 July 2024, with another six relatives currently serving on the front line, he offered what he described as the response of a fellow prisoner from another captivity rather than a student’s response to a professor.
His argument had three parts. He defended Moltmann’s often-dismissed doctrine of the millennium as the morally most serious move in twentieth-century theology, and as the one Ukrainian theology had been waiting for, insisting that God’s justice has to 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 instrument against the ideology of the Russkiy Mir, naming its architecture as one God on one throne, one patriarch, one emperor, one canonical territory, one sacred people, which he argued is the theological premise on which Moscow’s empire still rests and still blesses the shelling of other Christians. And he proposed completing Moltmann’s pastoral theology of presence with the imprecatory registers of Psalms 137 and 109, of Habakkuk, and of Revelation 6:10, arguing that the call to love one’s enemies in Matthew 5:44 does not abolish the martyrs’ cry of how long, O Lord.
Three recent Langham volumes were cited as concrete evidence of what he called theology written under missile fire rather than 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, with Roman Soloviy as editor-in-chief and Oleksandr Geychenko and Taras Dyatlik as co-editors. The seminar closed with an image from April 2022, tulips growing out of the rubble of Borodianka, applied to Moltmann himself: his theology did not choose Ukraine, since 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 express particular gratitude to Kseniia Trofymchuk and Roman Soloviy, who together carried out the practical and logistical work that made the event possible. Their labor illustrates the larger conviction that shaped the seminar as a whole. Moltmann once wrote that there could be no honest theology after Auschwitz had there been no theology in Auschwitz. Ukrainian theological educators, on the 1520th day of an ongoing war of terror against their country, say the same thing in their own idiom: there will be no honest theology after Ukraine if we do not do theology in Ukraine now, in the seminaries and the theological programs, in the basements, at the funerals, in ministry to refugees and displaced people and to the families of veterans and of the fallen and the missing and those in captivity. Supporting the formation of theological leaders during a war is not a luxury to be deferred until peace arrives. It is the condition under which any postwar 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), eeit-edu.info; Odesa Theological Seminary, otseminary.org; Taras M. Dyatlik, dyatlik.blog
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