[7] Moltmann took his entrance exam to proceed with his education but instead was drafted into military service in 1943 at the age of 16, during World War II, serving as an Air Force auxiliary in the German Army.

"[a][8] He worked in an anti-aircraft battery during the bombing of his hometown of Hamburg by the Royal Air Force, an attack that killed 40,000 people, including a friend standing next to him.

[4][9] Ordered to the Klever Reichswald, a German forest at the front lines, he surrendered in 1945 in the dark to the first British soldier he met.

[10] After Belgium, Moltmann was transferred to a camp in Kilmarnock, Scotland, where he worked with other Germans to rebuild areas damaged by bombing.

The initial reaction of the prisoners was that these photos were propaganda, but gradually they began to see themselves through the eyes of the Nazis' victims.

[12] Moltmann was given a small copy of the New Testament and Psalms by an American chaplain and reading these gave him a new hope.

[4][6] In July 1946, he was transferred for the last time to Norton Camp, a British prison located in the village of Cuckney near Nottingham, UK.

His experience as a POW gave him a great understanding of how suffering and hope reinforce each other, leaving a lasting impression on his theology.

Moltmann later claimed, "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.

"[7][11] Moltmann returned home at 22 years of age to find his hometown of Hamburg (in fact, much of his country) in ruins from Allied bombing in World War II.

[7] In 1947, he and four others were invited to attend the first postwar Student Christian Movement in Swanwick, a conference center near Derby, England.

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3, NIV)), and knowledge of his return.

Hope strengthens faith and aids a believer into living a life of love, and directing them toward a new creation of all things.

[34] Moltmann sought to defeat a monotheistic Christianity that is being used as a tool for political and clerical absolute monarchism.

"[35] He suggested that we "cease to understand God monotheistically as the one, absolute subject, but instead see him in a trinitarian sense as the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

This mode was rejected by Moltmann, who saw it as corresponding to a God who rules over his creation, which exists merely to serve Him.

This is the mode favored most by Moltmann, who correlates this relationship with the one humans share with God in the realm of the Holy Spirit.

[36] Upon his return to Germany in 1948, Moltmann began his course of study at Göttingen University, where he was strongly influenced by Karl Barth's dialectical theology.

[6] Moltmann grew critical of Barth's neglect of the historical nature of reality, and began to study Bonhoeffer.

Weber suggested a seventeenth century Calvinist who advocated a universalism within predestination which later formed the foundation of much of Moltmann's theology.

[37] Moltmann cites the English pacifist and anti-capitalist theologian Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy as being highly regarded.

Bloch is concerned to establish hope as the guiding principle of his Marxism and stresses the implied humanism inherent in mystical tradition.

Bloch claims to identify an atheism at the core of Christianity, embodied in the notion of the death of God and the continued imperative of seeking the Kingdom.

[38] The background influence in all these thinkers is Hegel, who is referenced more times than any other writer in the Theology of Hope.

Like the Left Hegelians who immediately succeeded the master, both Moltmann and Pannenberg are determined to retain the sense of history as meaningful and central to Christian discourse, while avoiding the essentially conformist and conservative aspects of his thought.

They are also implicitly offering a critique of the Neo-Orthodox theology of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, which they see as ahistorical in its core.

[40] While Theology of Hope was strongly influenced by the eschatological orientation of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, in Moltmann's second major work The Crucified God, the philosophical inspiration comes from a different vein of philosophy.

In "Explanation of the Theme", his introduction to the book, Moltmann acknowledges that the direction of his questioning has shifted to that of existentialist philosophy and the Marxism of the Frankfurt School.

[41] Moltmann cites Joachim Iwand, Ernst Wolf and Otto Weber as major influences on his theology as it was developing at Göttingen.

This work and its footnotes are full of references, direct and implied, to the New Left and the uprisings of 1968, the Prague Spring the French May and, closest to home, the German APO, and their aftermath.