A Theological Reflection amid the 1520th Day of Russian Aggression against Ukraine
Introduction
Can the crucified God of Jürgen Moltmann speak directly and urgently to a people being crucified today? This, the core question of Moltmann’s centenary, has pressed on me relentlessly since February 2022.
Before I try to answer, let me share a personal note. In 2011, I contributed a chapter (on pastors’ and local churches’ expectations of theological education in the former Soviet Union) to The Church of the Future, a Portuguese-language volume edited by Manfred W. Kohl and Antonio Carlos Barro, which included Moltmann as a contributor. I mention this not to claim any closeness; I never met him. But as a Ukrainian theological educator ministering near and in the Russian empire that would invade my country in 2014, seeing my name in the same table of contents as Moltmann’s was a small, concrete gesture of inclusion. It felt like an invitation to a wider conversation, one that Ukrainian theological voices had rarely been part of at that time. I want to acknowledge that, in this centenary year, as a debt I have not forgotten, before moving forward.
Hamburg, July 1943. A seventeen-year-old is manning a flak gun during a British fire-bomb raid. His schoolfriends are killed. The one standing right next to him is killed. He survives. That night, in his own words, he cries out to God for the first time: “My God, where are You?” [1]
Eighty-three years later, on the 1520th day of the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, I stand before you. I come from a theological community serving people wounded by this aggression, and from a family in which five siblings, cousins, and nephews have been killed by Russians since 2022, while another six serve on the frontline. The seventeen-year-old Moltmann’s cry – “My God, where are You?” [2] – is the same question my family and I ask today. This draws a direct line between Moltmann’s experience and our own, deepening the urgency of this reflection.
But a critical difference marks our context. Moltmann’s theology reflects on suffering after the violence; he developed his ideas with the benefit of postwar reflection and relative peacetime. In contrast, our theology must emerge amid relentless violence, with no post-war silence — the Russian bombs have not stopped, and the dead and ongoing destruction are still among us. This distinction is key to understanding the urgency and shape of our own theological search since 2014, intensified after 2022, when Russian aggression escalated.
By contrast, we do not have that post-war silence. My colleagues and I have been writing and editing Light in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Beatitudes and Terror: Ukrainian Theological Response to Russian Aggression, and the forthcoming Pastoral Ministry During Wartime: The Ukrainian Experience — attempts at theology under missile fire, not after it. For us, the line “When freedom is near, the chains begin to chafe” [3] is no abstract formulation. It describes our nightly reality. This situational difference explains the urgency and distinctiveness of Ukrainian theological work today.
On this centenary, I come not as a student to a professor. I come as a fellow who read his letters from an earlier captivity and discovered they were written in a language I did not know was mine, until the Russian war of terror taught it to me. I want to say three things today with one closing image.
1. In defense of the millennium
It has become fashionable, in the “white corridors” of academic theology, to be quietly embarrassed by Moltmann’s millennium. His doctrine of a thousand-year reign of Christ on this earth (a period before the final resurrection in which the poor enjoy freedom on earth and the martyred enjoy fullness of life on earth) – is treated as a curiosity. As if the old man, in his last systematic book, permitted himself one eccentric indulgence: a wart on the face of a great theologian and a patch over a conceptual seam…
From Ukraine’s perspective, I respectfully disagree. Moltmann’s millennium is not a conceptual embarrassment, but one of the most morally serious ideas in twentieth-century theology. It is a move for which Ukrainian theology has long been waiting, perhaps unknowingly. Exploring this point helps connect Moltmann’s theology to the Ukrainian context.
For almost five years now, we have been often told (gently or forcefully, pastorally or ecumenically, sometimes even with tears of compassion) that our longing for justice is theologically immature. That we should move toward forgiveness. Toward reconciliation. Toward a “cheap peace,” that is, in practice, the quiet erasure of the crime. That justice, if we must speak of it at all, happens in eternity, where all things are made new, every tear is wiped away, and the victim and the perpetrator stand together before the Throne kissing each other. On earth, meanwhile, we are asked to be silent, to be kind, to stay “above” the situation, to consider “both perspectives.” To be, in effect, non-Ukrainian, while encouraging Russians to remain and be Russians…
I have been writing against this counsel for almost five years. [4] I will not rehearse the arguments here. I will simply say: Moltmann’s millennium cuts through it like a blade… Because what Moltmann insists (and this is the part his critics often miss) is that justice must be done on the same earth where the injustice happened. Not in a timeless, simultaneous abstract eternity. Not on a “new earth” that has no continuity with the one soaked in the blood of its victims. On this earth. The earth on which Babyn Yar lies, and Bucha, and Izium, and the mass graves of Olenivka, and the tortured bodies in Mariupol…
The widow of a soldier killed at Bakhmut does not want her husband’s justice performed in a simultaneous eternity where the killer sits at the same heavenly banquet. She wants it performed on the soil where the killer killed him. She wants the children he will not have on the earth he defended. The wedding anniversaries, the grandchildren, the quiet Sunday mornings, the stupid weekday arguments that were stolen from them – not compensated with an abstract eternal timelessness.
Moltmann understood this. The man who spent three years in a POW camp, who watched his country wake up to the photographs of Auschwitz and the ashes of Hiroshima, understood that a purely vertical eschatology (one that leaps from present suffering straight to eternal bliss) dishonors the dead by making their earthly losses unimportant. It is the eschatology of those who have not recently buried anyone killed in the war of terror…
The millennium refuses spiritualization and insists that God’s justice must happen in history — not just in eternity. It affirms that vindication for the poor and martyred occurs here, among their descendants, and on the earth scarred by violence. This conviction is not abstract for us; it shapes our hope and our demand for accountability. The historic root of hope, not mere future promise, is central to our theology under fire.
This is why Moltmann can write, after a lifetime of eschatological thought, that Christianity “from first to last” is defined by hope, [5] and why an eschatology that omits the millennial aspect is one that withdraws from real history. [6] An eschatology withdrawn from history is precisely what Ukraine cannot accept, and what some of our Western partners (not all, and we do recognize and discuss the distinction), out of great love, goodwill, and a desire for immediate reconciliation, often offer when focusing on victims but not on those supporting Russian aggression.
I want to be honest. There are aspects of Moltmann’s millennium that I cannot accept as they stand. His tendency to render eternity as a kind of simultaneous now (all times coexisting, without development, without growth, and story) places an unnecessary burden on the millennium. It forces the thousand years to carry a weight they would not need to carry if his eternity were more dynamic. If I were writing a book, I would probably push harder on the eternity side. But this is not a book. It is a response.
For us in Ukraine, Moltmann’s doctrine of the millennium is essential. It grants permission to hope for and demand tangible justice and resurrection on the same ground where blood was shed. This belief transforms the abstract into the concrete: there will be a date, a place, and an earthly answer for the suffering endured…
2. Political monotheism and the Russkiy Mir ideology
Turning now to my second point — political monotheism and the Russkiy Mir ideology — I recall Moltmann’s critique of political monotheism, presented earlier as a systematic thesis to a European audience. I am grateful for this framing. From the Ukrainian perspective, however, that statement is not simply a thesis; it is now a tool. This transition clarifies how the issue becomes practical in our context.
A theological resource we reach for when the bishops and pastors across the border are still blessing the missiles and Russian imperialism, blaming Ukrainians for being Ukrainians. The argument Moltmann develops most fully in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (1980) runs like this. Much of Western Christianity (and Eastern Christianity in its imperial forms) has functioned practically as monotheism rather than as trinitarianism. The creed says Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the working picture of God, in church and in society, has often been of a single divine sovereign: One absolute ruler and One heavenly throne. Unilateral authority over a subjugated creation. God as Sole Ruler. God as the Great Monarch. In post-Nazi Germany, Moltmann was diagnosing how “Christian” Europe had tolerated, and in places actively supported, the absolute state. In Ukraine, the same diagnosis names the theological architecture of Russkiy Mir with uncomfortable precision: one God on one throne of the Russian World, one Russian Patriarch, one emperor, one Russian canonical territory, one sacred Russian people. When Moltmann said the Trinity is not a sole ruler, he was not making a scholastic observation about the inner life of God. He was denying the theological premise on which Moscow’s “Christian” empire still rests. And still shells and blesses the shelling of other Christians, and only them…
The Russian theology we are resisting (not metaphorically, but in our streets and in our graveyards) is not some exotic heresy from a forgotten council. It is political monotheism in its purest contemporary form. One ruler. One empire. One truth. One church. One “canonical territory.” One “Russian world.” One sacred people permitted to torture other peoples for the sake of a higher spiritual unity under the Russian World…
Yes, Moltmann’s social trinitarianism has its philosophical issues. Theologians will debate for another century whether “three centers of consciousness” can avoid tritheism. Let them debate. We are free people, I think… What Moltmann gave us in Ukraine was the vocabulary to say that the Trinity is not a sole ruler over a subjugated creation, but a Communion of Persons whose fellowship with one another is the template for a fellowship of peoples who do not need to crush one another to be one.
He gave us the vocabulary to say that the Patriarch of Moscow’s “symphony of church and state” is not Christian; it is pre-Christian imperial monotheism with a golden miter. He gave us the vocabulary to say that a church which has collapsed into the person of a single Autocrat has collapsed into idolatry, regardless of how many icons hang on its walls or how many heartfelt sermons and prayers are delivered from the pulpit…
This is a gift. I want to name it publicly, in a centenary year: Moltmann did more for Ukrainian ecclesiology than he himself probably knew.
But I must also be careful. Moltmann’s “fellowship of the unlike” (his beautiful vision of the church as a community that welcomes those unlike itself) must not be weaponized against us. It is sometimes deployed in our direction by some well-meaning Western Christians who would like us to include, in our Ukrainian ecclesial fellowship, those who are still shelling, killing, raping, looting, and torturing us; who would like us to sit down, in the name of openness, with bishops and pastors who bless the Russian World…
Trinitarian openness does not mean the abolition of the distinction between perpetrator and victim. Moltmann, child of the Third Reich, knew this better than anyone. The fellowship of the unlike does not ask the tortured to embrace the torturer while the torture is still going on. It asks something far more demanding and far more honest: that we refuse to dehumanize the torturer even as we refuse to reconcile with him before his repentance. And that the call for the “fellowship of the unlike” must be addressed, first of all, toward Russian Christians and church ministers…
3. The imprecatory prayers
And now the hardest move. The one I owe to Moltmann, and where I must also press beyond him… Moltmann, following his own formation, directs us to the psalms of lament and to the cry of dereliction in Mark 15. He teaches us that God is with the sufferer. That the crucified God is present on every gallows of our world. Auschwitz is not the last word because God was in Auschwitz before any theologian ever spoke about it. In his own words: no “theology after Auschwitz” if there had been no “theology in Auschwitz.” [7]
This, I think, is the deepest pastoral line in twentieth-century theology. I owe my own theological educational ministry to it. When I sit with a widow in the church, and she has nothing to say and I have nothing to say back, when I listen to a veteran who is afraid of the dark and cannot sleep with the light off either, when I refuse to rush to solutions and only stay present, when I resist the temptation to turn her grief or his trauma into a sermon illustration… I am learning to practice a discipline that Moltmann taught the global church. The discipline of not leaving…
But…
Our Psalter has more than laments. It has imprecations. Psalm 137, with its terrible closing line about the children of Babylon. Psalm 109 curses the wicked. Habakkuk demands, “How long, O, Lord” – not as a pious question but as an accusation. And the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6, crying out, “How long, O Lord, until you judge and avenge our blood?”
Ukrainian evangelical theology in its fifth year of war has had to rediscover these texts. Our seminaries have had to teach our students that the “love your enemies” of Matthew 5:44 does not abolish the “How long?” of Revelation 6:10. That pastoral presence with the victim does not require pastoral silence before the perpetrator. That the crucified God suffers with the victim – yes – and the risen God also judges the perpetrator. Both are true. You cannot have one without the other without becoming sentimental. And sentimentality, in this war, gives permission for the Ukrainian people to be killed…
Moltmann gave us the first half. He gave us the God who is hanging on the gallows next to the boy in the camp. For that, we are in his debt… But from Ukraine, in this centenary year, let me complete the sentence. The God who hangs on the gallows next to the tortured boy is also the God who will raise the boy and bring the torturer to judgment. Not in a distant spiritualized eternity. I want to believe: on earth. In the millennium. At a specific place. At a specific hour. In a specific court. On the soil of the specific crime…
It is not a departure from Moltmann. It is a completion of him, made possible only because his life’s work gave us the blessing to speak this way…
Conclusion. The tulips in the rubble of Borodyanka
Moltmann said: “There would be no ‘theology after Auschwitz’… had there been no ‘theology in Auschwitz.” [8] Ukrainian evangelical theologians must now say, very quietly and very soberly: there will be no honest theology after Ukraine if we do not do the theology in Ukraine here and now: in the trenches, in the basements and subways, in the bomb shelters, in the trauma-counselling sessions, in the funerals, in the chaplaincy training programs, in the seminaries that continue to teach and serve while missiles fly overhead, in the pastoral networks that accompany widows and prisoners of war and families of the missing… If that theology is not done now – by us and our voice, on our soil and in our scarred bodies – the world and the global church will one day write a theology about us that smooths over the scars. And we will have lost twice…
In April 2022, I took a picture of tulips growing from the rubble of Borodyanka. I wrote then in my diary: “That flower did not choose where to grow. It simply grew where it was. But in that ‘simply’ lies the entire mystery of our divine calling.”
I want to end with the same image, applied to Moltmann. His theology did not choose Ukraine. It was written in German, in Tübingen and probably at other locations, about Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the long aftermath of European catastrophe. It did not anticipate Bucha and Bakhmut. It did not anticipate the Azovstal defenders, the silent phones of Mariupol mothers, or the theology now being written in our seminaries during cherry nights…
And yet it bloomed here. In our Ukrainian rubble. By the time Moltmann died in June 2024, he had already lived through two and a half years of Bucha, Mariupol, Izium, and Bakhmut entering the world’s vocabulary, and through ten years of the “slow war” that began in 2014. He did not write against this war, and I will not speculate why… What I know is that his categories reached us anyway, through earlier books, for an earlier catastrophe…
It bloomed because it was always a theology of things growing where they were not expected to grow. Like hope. Of seeds of hope carried by wind across borders, no one drew. The millennium on this same earth, not another earth. The crucified God beside this specific victim (beside my brother Andriy, beside the woman at Bucha, beside the boy at Olenivka, beside the parents of those missing in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions) is not a general humanity. Hope in this chain, chafing now, on the 1520th morning, not a hope deferred to a cleaner decade…
A flower in the rubble of Borodyanka is not an argument for me. It is a fact. Moltmann’s theology of hope in Ukraine is not an imported doctrine. It is a fact. It simply grew where it was. And we have been gathering what it produces: in our Langham volumes, in our Mesa Global educational development, in our Scholar Leaders vital sustainability initiatives, in our Read Ministry library development, in our Open Eyes, Keys Connection, Overseas Council Europe, Local Leaders Global Online, Dnipro Hope Mission, and other partners’ ministry in Ukraine and our region to support and nurture theology of hope amidst the ongoing full-scale war of terror… These partners and others decided not to wait to support the hope when the war ends… And, ultimately, this hope has grown in our funerals, too, without always knowing whose seeds we were tending…
Post scriptum
Will there ever be Russian theologians who write what Moltmann wrote – a “theology after Bucha”, the way he wrote a theology after Auschwitz?
Honestly, not in this generation, I believe. Moltmann could write what he wrote because he had three things that contemporary Russian Christianity and, in the vast majority, Russian evangelicals lack: a defeated Russian army, a denazified Russian state, and a church that survived the Confessing Church’s resistance with at least some moral capital intact. Russia today has none of these. Its army has not been defeated. Its state has not repented. Its church is not a victim of the regime; it is, in the vast majority, the regime’s court prophet and chaplain. Without those three preconditions, no “theology after Bucha” is possible from Moscow. Perhaps from exiled Russians, in twenty or fifty years. But not sooner…
Happy centenary, Professor Moltman. Thank you for the seeds. We will keep gathering the flowers of hope from the rubble. Until there is no more rubble… Keep your children away from war… Taras D, Ukraine (1520th day of the ongoing full-scale Russian war against Ukraine)
[1] Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), chapter 1. The episode is also recounted in A Broad Place: An Autobiography, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), chapter 1. The episode is also recounted in A Broad Place: An Autobiography, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
[3] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), Preface to the Paperback Edition.
[4] See Taras M. Dyatlik, “Sunday… You rose… But Why With Scars?…” (5 April 2026) and the “Grief Unmasked” series at dyatlik.blog; also “Biblical Reflections from a Ukrainian Theologian’s War Diary,” Christianity Today (June 2024); “Unanswered Prayers in Ukraine,” Plough (December 2025).
[5] Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1967), 16.
[6] Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), Part III (“The Kingdom of God”), esp. §3 on “Historical Millenarianism.” The claim that a de-historicized eschatology abandons Christian ethical engagement with history is developed throughout Part III.
[7] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1974), 278.
[8] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1974), 276–278.
Leave a Reply