Moltmann reads from Weiter Raum

It was a lovely evening at the Stadtmuseum listening to Jürgen Moltmann for an hour and a half read from his new autobiography, Weiter Raum. The last three-quarters of an hour were taken up with Q&A, personal conversation and book signing.

I asked him about his recent relation to the Pentecostal movement, what he sees as its positive influences on him, and what worries him about it. His answer however, in sum, majored on the positives. Among other things he told an amusing story of when he preached at one of the big meetings at (I think) David Yongi Cho’s mega church in South Korea. The translator of Moltmann’s sermon was adding the ‘hallelujahs’ to spice the message up, but Moltmann admitted: ‘I’m no revivalists preacher!’ He also spoke of the lively worship and faith for physical healing all as cheering elements. The negative aspects he has trouble with, he said, are the hell-fire damnation and dispensationalist aspects.

I took my wife’s new Digital Camera but I’m afraid I wasn’t too successful. I took three videos and promptly filled up the chip card. The third, and best, video was too large to cope with the process of uploading to the computer and crashed everything within a meter. The second video was, err, the wrong way up, and I don’t know how to turn it back! The first, and worst, came through but I was jittering all over the place as I hadn’t learnt, at that point, the importance of keeping ones hands still! Nevertheless, it is something. However, I uploaded it to youtube only to discover the sound had somehow been lost in the process! I’ll work on that, but until then enjoy about 50 seconds of lip-reading Moltmann!

I’ll sort the sound thing out tomorrow – I need to get to bed now – and if any of you know how to turn a video picture, then perhaps you would be so kind as to let me know in the comments ...