Jürgen Moltmann fought for the Nazis in World War II and was taken as a POW to the UK for 3 years. It’s obvious he suffered from PTSD if you read his accounts, but he also suffered terribly as he and his fellow prisoners were shown pictures of the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust and realized what he had really been fighting for. He says all of the prisoners felt a sense of overwhelming shame. He was also afflicted with “survivor’s guilt,” as he constantly thought about all those who had died all around him and wondered why he had been spared. In the prison camp, a chaplain gave him a Bible which he read “without much comprehension.” I thought you might like to read a few quotes from his book on the Holy Spirit called, “The Source of Life”… Flipping through that Bible, Moltmann stumbled upon Ps. 39 and was suddenly captivated, “I was dumb with silence, I held my peace and my sorrow was stirred… ‘my lifetime is as nothing in your sight… hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were’…They were the words of my own heart and they called my soul to God.”
“Then I came to the story of the passion, and when I read Jesus’s death cry, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’, I knew with certainty: this is someone who understands you. I began to understand the assailed Christ because I felt that he understood me: this was the divine brother in distress, who takes the prisoners with him on his way to resurrection. I began to summon up the courage to live again, seized by a great hope…This early fellowship with Jesus, the brother in suffering, and the redeemer from guilt, has never left me since. I never ‘decided for Christ,’ as is often demanded of us, but I am sure that then and there, in the dark pit of my soul, he found me. Christ’s God-forsakenness showed me where God is, where he had been with me in my life, and where he would be in the future.” (5)
In a chapter called, “A Meditation on Hope,” Moltmann talks about paintings by famous artists of two angels; one, ‘the angel of history’ and the other, ‘the angel of the future.’ The angel of history looks back over the wreckage caused by human sin, while the angel of the future looks ahead to the coming of the promise of God. Moltmann writes, “Many painters have painted this angel of the future, and he has come to meet many of us in one way or another. He seldom encounters us in our successes and victories but generally when our life lies in ruins; for the angel of the future and the angel of history belong together. This angel came to meet me fifty years ago exactly, in a dark, cold hut in a prisoner of war camp near Ostend. As I despaired over the ruin which my people had caused everywhere during the war, I was born anew to a living hope. When I wanted to give up my shattered life, I was raised up by God. When I felt completely abandoned by everything good and hopeful, I found in Christ my brother in necessity.” (Moltmann, The Source of Life, 38, 39)