Moltmann's journey to Jesus

 Science and Christian Belief has a fascinating article by Jurgen Moltmann, "From Physics to Theology - a personal story". It is based on a Faraday Lecture at Cambridge which you can watch here [Search under Moltmann]. He recounts living in a British POW camp without any hope and feeling shame for what Germany had done.

Then I read Mark’s Gospel as a whole and came to the story of the pas- sion. When I heard Jesus’s death-cry: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ I felt growing in me the conviction: there is someone who understands you, who is with you in your crying to God, and who felt the same forsakenness that you are living through now. I began to understand the forsaken Christ, because I knew he understood me. He was the divine brother in need, the companion on the way who goes with you through this ‘valley of the shadow of death’, the fellow sufferer who carries you in your pain. I summoned up the courage to live again and was slowly but surely seized by a great hope for God’s ‘wide space where there is no cramping any more’. This perception of Jesus did not come suddenly overnight, but it became more and more important for me. I read the story of the passion of Christ again and again and discovered my little life story in his great story.