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This article takes a genetic approach examining Moltmann’s early post-Reformation studies in Moyse Amyraut, Petrus Ramus, Jacob Brocard and Johann Coccejus as the secrets to the tacit tradition of his theology of hope. I contend that the gold he struck in these studies is a historical impulse and legitimization of his own turn to the horizon of the empirical and the historical. However, with respect to the dross, Moltmann critically notes that with the post-Reformation covenant theologians the word of God got entangled in a ‘system’ of hope because of their symbolic-prophetic approach to Scripture. In place of their symbolic-prophetic exegesis he substitutes a promise-exegesis as a way of pointing to God’s relationship to this world and to the human beings in it. He thus replaces the theme of a restless history, and a restless soul, with the restless promise of which God is the author, the originator and the fulfiller. In this way Moltmann found a way beyond post-reformation covenant theology and Barth’s dialectical theology, culminating in his Theology of Hope. This article takes a genetic approach examining Moltmann’s early post-Reformation studies in Moyse Amyraut, Petrus Ramus, Jacob Brocard and Johann Coccejus as the secrets to the tacit tradition of his theology of hope. I contend that the gold he struck in these studies is a historical impulse and legitimization of his own turn to the horizon of the empirical and the historical. However, with respect to the dross, Moltmann critically notes that with the post-Reformation covenant theologians the word of God got entangled in a ‘system’ of hope because of their symbolic-prophetic approach to Scripture. In place of their symbolic-prophetic exegesis he substitutes a promise-exegesis as a way of pointing to God’s relationship to this world and to the human beings in it. He thus replaces the theme of a restless history, and a restless soul, with the restless promise of which God is the author, the originator and the fulfiller. In this way Moltmann found a way beyond post-reformation covenant theology and Barth’s dialectical theology, culminating in his Theology of Hope.
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