Professor Moltmann lives in Germany. His childhood was spent in the era of atheism shortly before and during Hitler's reign. Only as a prisoner at the end of the war did he begin to seriously study about God. Since then, he has been a professor of theology at several universities.
He explains the change in terms of time: his early years of atheism and Nazism were focused on the past and the present, he says, but had no clear vision for the future. Yes, Hitler's plans for an empire gave a notion for the short-term future, but the questions which all humans ask were left unanswered: What happens after I die? What happens after the universe ends? An physicists from Newton to Einstein to Hawking tell us that the physical universe will indeed end.
Atheism, says Moltmann, may provide a basis for Hitler's plans of racial supremacy, but it does not provide a foundation for thinking rationally about the distant future. So Moltmann began to think about God.
Moltmann's vision of the next life is that God will "answer the cries of human victims for justice, without simply meting out vengeance on the perpetrators of injustice," as Peter Steinfels summarizes in the New York Times (January 20, 2007). Moltmann's "eschatological vision would not involve the retributive justice of human courts, but" a creative form of justice "which can heal and restore the victims and transform the perpetrators."
Moltmann's view of the end of this universe, and the beginning of the afterlife, "is not reward and punishment, but victory over all that is" evil; it will be "a great day of reconciliation."
According to Moltmann, God is not primarily an angry judge, as he is sometimes depicted, but rather motivated by love for humans, and a desire to forgive them, and to fix the problems of the universe.
