Johann Baptist Metz

Johann Baptist Metz (born 5 August 1928) is a German Catholic theologian. He is Ordinary Professor of Fundamental Theology, Emeritus, at Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster, Germany.

As a teenager, Metz had been recruited in to the German military towards the end of World War II in 1944. Six months before the end of the war, he was captured by the Americans and sent to prisoner of war camps in Maryland and then Virginia. Following the war, he moved back to Germany and studied at the University of Innsbruck, producing dissertations on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the theology of Thomas Aquinas under the supervision of Karl Rahner. His experience in the war matches that of the German Calvinist theologian Jürgen Moltmann who would go on to write with Metz on political theology against a background of direct confrontation with Nazism.

A student of Karl Rahner, he broke with Rahner's transcendental theology in a turn to a theology rooted in praxis. Metz is at the center of a school of political theology that strongly influenced Liberation Theology. He is one of the most influential post-Vatican II German theologians. His thought turns around fundamental attention to the suffering of others. The key categories of his theology are memory, , and narrative. Works in English include: The Emergent Church, Faith in History and Society, Poverty of Spirit, and Hope Against Hope. Collected articles can be found in A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, translated by Matthew Ashley and in John K. Downey, ed., Love's Strategy: The Political Theology of Johann Baptist Metz.

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