Valmae Beck: on the care of criminals

A nauseating news story today in my home state of Queensland. Convicted child-murderer Valmae Beck is currently in a coma in hospital, following heart surgery this week. Some members of the public – gleefully spurred on by a certain newspaper – are “calling for authorities to let her die,” since they are “outraged” that taxpayers’ money should be paying for the medical treatment of such a wicked person. (Nearly giddy with moralism, this newspaper adds: “When she dies, taxpayers could also be expected to pay for a cremation under Queensland law” – and the same tabloid ran as its front-page headline: “Let her die with shame.”)

Such vicious moralism is driven by a direct identification of the person with her works. In contrast, the necessary gap between person and works has been highlighted by Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel, in his brilliant book on Justification (pp. 269-72). Jüngel speaks of “the absolute primacy of persons over their works.” The doctrine of justification describes God’s recognition of persons irrespective both of their achievements and of their deficiencies. For that reason, Jüngel writes, a society must be assessed not primarily according to its successes and achievements, but according to its treatment of those persons who contribute nothing to the society’s political and economic life, such as children, the elderly, the infirm – and criminals.

Why I am (finally) going to read Herbert McCabe

I’ve been meaning to read a bit of Herbert McCabe ever since Kim’s posts – but somehow I’ve just never gotten around to it. But when I read Halden’s new post, McCabe was suddenly pushed straight to the top of my must-read list. Here are some of the passages Halden quotes from McCabe’s book God Matters:

“The story of Jesus is nothing other than the triune life of God projected onto our history, or enacted sacramentally in our history, so that it becomes story…. The historical mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal mission of the Son from the Father; the historical outpouring of the Spirit in virtue of the passion, death, and ascension of Jesus is nothing but the eternal outpouring of the Spirit from the Father through the Son. Watching, so to say, the story of Jesus, we are watching the processions of the Trinity.”

“There was, from the point of view of God’s life, no such thing as a moment at which the eternal Son of God was not Jesus of Nazareth…. The eternal life of Jesus as such could not precede, follow or be simultaneous with his human life. There is no story of God ‘before’ the story of Jesus.”

Which is exactly what Barthian thinkers like Jüngel, Jenson and McCormack have been telling us as well. The “pre-existence” of the Son is always and only the pre-existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth. The trinitarian relations exist not as a hidden “depth” lurking behind the history of Jesus, but precisely as the surface on which this history is enacted.

Theology in the 1960s

No question about it: there was some pretty wild stuff happening in German theology back in the 1960s. This morning I was thumbing through Dietrich Ritschl’s 1967 book, Memory and Hope: An Inquiry Concerning the Presence of Christ. It’s not a bad book actually, but you have to feel sorry for Ritschl when he makes the casual remark in his preface: “My manuscript was almost completed when two important new works came to my attention: Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope and Eberhard Jüngel’s God’s Being Is in Becoming.”

A bit like completing your definitive study on contemporary Irish literature, just as James Joyce publishes Ulysses.

Oswald Bayer (and Jüngel?) in translation

Many of you will be familiar with Jeff Cayzer’s brilliant and vigorous translation of Eberhard Jüngel’s Justification (T&T Clark, 2001). Jeff has now also completed a translation of Oswald Bayer’s important work, Freedom in Response (Oxford UP, 2007), and he has also recently translated an old German study on the Lord’s Supper for an SBL series (Albert Eichhorn, The Lord’s Supper in the New Testament – this will be released at AAR/SBL in San Diego).

Jeff is especially keen to translate more of Eberhard Jüngel’s essays – but it sounds as though British publishers are no longer able to fund this kind of work (I suspect the German government is no longer subsidising the translation costs). It would be a fine thing to see more of Jüngel’s essays translated. He is an essayist par excellence – his best work is in this genre, and many of his best essays haven’t yet been translated.

So does anyone know of any publishers who might be interested in this kind of project? And am I alone in thinking that there is more and more interest in Jüngel these days?

On the quirkiness of theologians

It was very nice to spend some time with Alister McGrath while he was here in Brisbane today. We were talking about the personal quirkiness of theologians, and McGrath related this splendid anecdote about Eberhard Jüngel:

One day, while Jüngel was giving a lecture to his students, he broke off mid-sentence and started writing something down. The students waited patiently – and Jüngel continued writing silently. This went on for some time. When the students finally became restless, Jüngel looked up and said: “Well, if you had a thought this good, you would write it down too!”

Denkwürdiges Geheimnis: Festschrift for Eberhard Jüngel

Ingolf U. Dalferth, Johannes Fischer, and Hans-Peter Großhans (eds.), Denkwürdiges Geheimnis: Beiträge zur Gotteslehre: Festschrift für Eberhard Jüngel zum 70. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 653 pp. (review copy courtesy of Mohr Siebeck)

This extraordinary collection of essays was presented to the Tübingen theologian Eberhard Jüngel on his 70th birthday. For the past four decades, Jüngel has distinguished himself as one of the world’s leading dogmatic theologians, and as the most brilliant and creative of all Karl Barth’s pupils.

In their foreword, the editors offer a succinct and acute summary of the central themes of Jüngel’s theology. More than any other theologian, Jüngel “placed God’s advent at the centre of his thought. Since God comes, we must speak of him and we can think him. Without God’s advent, there would be no faith, the Christian would have nothing to say, and Christian theology could not think any truth” (p. ix).

Although God comes always “from himself, to himself and through himself,” he nevertheless comes “to the world and to humans.” Indeed, God comes “as the mystery of the world by showing himself as the human God” (p. x). And this coming of God as the world’s mystery is by no means a “worldly necessity” – on the contrary, it is “more than necessary.” God’s coming “does not follow from any conditions inherent in the world, nor does it fulfil any preceding human needs” (p. x). In other words, God is neither merely possible nor necessary for the world – instead, he is actual, since he freely comes to the world. And because God comes to the world again and again, “we must always speak of him further, and we can never be done with thinking of him” (p. xi).

This has always been Jüngel’s central concern – to engage in the difficult business of thinking God; to think God as the coming one, the one who relates to the world in sheer freedom and actuality, and therefore the one of whom we can truly speak.

In honour of Jüngel, the editors have thus gathered a massive collection of 32 new essays, all centred on the theme of “God and the thinking of God” – since this is the central theme both of all theology and of Jüngel’s entire career (p. xii).

The list of contributors reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary academic theology: there are biblical scholars like Martin Hengel and Rudolf Smend; ecumenical theologians like Kasper, Küng and Lehmann; German dogmaticians like Pannenberg, Moltmann, Dalferth, Krötke and Rendtorff; as well as three leading Anglo-American theologians: David Ford, Bruce McCormack and John Webster (whose essays are written in English).

The papers collected here span several disciplines – Old and New Testament, church history, philosophy, dogmatics, practical theology, hermeneutics, world religions – but they are united by their focus on “God and the thinking of God.” Moreover, alongside the most rigorous forms of academic theology, there are essays here on preaching (together with a sermon by Rudolf Smend). This is especially fitting, since much of Jüngel’s thought has turned around the concrete situation of preaching. And while it is customary for German theologians to cap off their careers with a multi-volume work of dogmatics, it’s no accident that Jüngel’s career has culminated in several volumes of sermons – sermons which demonstrate vividly Jüngel’s underlying conviction that the God of advent truly “comes to speech” (i.e. becomes an actual event in our world) in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In sum, this volume is not only a superb tribute to one of our greatest living thinkers; it is also a profound and important contribution in its own right to contemporary reflection on the doctrine of God.

A note on Eberhard Jüngel

According to this news report, Eberhard Schmidt-Aßmann will succeed Eberhard Jüngel as the new director of the Forschungsstätte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft (FEST). Jüngel, who turned 72 last week, had been directing this Heidelberg research centre since his retirement in 2003.

And speaking of Jüngel, this new book by Christopher Holmes sounds interesting – a study representing three theological generations: Barth, Jüngel and Krötke.

Eberhard Jüngel on peace war

“Can the church ... insist that every use of military force is against God’s will and therefore that even the threat of military force, institutionalised in the form of armies, is also to be condemned absolutely? ... Only by describing every war as an offence against God’s gracious and – precisely in its graciousness – holy will, can the church formulate the urgent demand on all states worldwide to condemn solemnly and together the mere threat of military force.... The institution of war can only be abolished if the institution of the potential for war is abolished....

“[I]t is important to ask whether the church can credibly proclaim the Gospel, the glorification of those who make peace, without at the same time rejecting every threat and use of military force. And how can it do this more convincingly than by working for the laying aside of weapons not only by Christians, but by all people around the world? ... [T]he question forces itself inexorably on the church, whether the time has not come in which Christians can only be credible witnesses to Jesus Christ as conscientious objectors.”

—Eberhard Jüngel, Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen Declaration (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), pp. 84-92.

Jesus as God and human

“God’s identification with Jesus can only be understood in the tension of Jesus’ death and resurrection and thus in the tension between Jesus Christ’s Easter exaltation and his earthly humiliation. Only this historical tension in the being of Jesus Christ constitutes the unity of his being as true God and true human.”

—Eberhard Jüngel, “Thesen zur Grundlegung der Christologie,” in Unterwegs zur Sache: Theologische Bemerkungen (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1988), p. 278.

On heresy

At the group-blog God as the Mystery of Theology I’ve posted some theses by Eberhard Jüngel on heresy and superstition. Here’s an example:

“A mere recitation of confessions of Jesus Christ does not preserve theology from becoming heretical, but makes it all the more heretical. The mere recitation of confessions is christological superstition.”

Kurt Anders Richardson: Reading Karl Barth

Many thanks to Baker Academic for sending me a review copy of Kurt Anders Richardson’s recent book, Reading Karl Barth: New Directions for North American Theology.

In this book, Richardson brings Barth’s theology into dialogue with various aspects of contemporary theology, and he seeks to take up Barth’s thought as an instrument of theological and ecclesial reform. Although it is an uneven book, and although it is not structured as clearly as it might have been, Richardson has a fine instinct for interpreting Barth, and he understands clearly what is involved in reading the Church Dogmatics: “To read the CD is more than a literary act or even a philosophical one; it is a religious act because Barth’s work is so fundamentally shaped by his testimony to the Word of God” (p. 12). To read Barth correctly, then, we must read him as a “witness”—and this will always mean to read him in relation to our own theological questions, “to read him and then to move on” (p. 23).

At the heart of Richardson’s own reading of Barth is the conviction that we should begin at the end of the CD, reading the whole work “back to front.” The little fragment on baptism (CD IV/4) thus becomes a “lens” for interpreting Barth’s theology. Although this exciting approach is announced at the beginning of the book, Richardson only develops such a reading in detail in Chapter 6. This is by far the best and richest part of the book—and it’s worth the admission fee for this chapter alone (pp. 161-208).

Here, following Eberhard Jüngel, Richardson explores the (anti-) sacramental theology of CD IV/4 as the hermeneutical key to the whole of Barth’s dogmatics. The triadic structure which Barth develops in IV/4—Deus extra nos, Deus pro nobis, Deus in nobis: “God outside us, God for us, God in us”—is taken up as the underlying logic of the entire CD, and as the most refined expression of Barth’s doctrine of election.

No one has written more acutely and extensively on Barth’s doctrine of baptism than Eberhard Jüngel. And in a lengthy engagement with Jüngel (pp. 176-208), Richardson defends Jüngel’s interpretation of Barth and sharply critiques George Hunsinger and John Webster for muting or dismissing this radical, reforming doctrine of baptism.

Just as Jüngel makes IV/4 the true test of Barth-reception—“whoever wishes to baptise infants should not proclaim his closeness to Barth’s doctrine of predestination!”—so too Richardson critiques all readings of the CD that privilege the sacramental language which Barth was still using in I/1.

Only with the development of his doctrine of election (II/2) did Barth wholly overcome the notion that human action can in any way be “analogous to divine action” (p. 193). Here, Barth’s “analogy of faith” (analogia fidei) achieves its full depth and systematic expression. And it is finally in the doctrine of baptism (IV/4) that “the trajectory of the entire CD achieves a striking degree of clarity” through its expression of the central themes of “correspondence, election, and the distinction between divine and human action” (p. 206).

The history of Jesus

“The history of Jesus was so determined by the power of God’s near reign that, trusting in the power of love, he would dare to bring God’s being to expression as an event of love to the very end.”

—Eberhard Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1962), p. 163.

Prayer as the justification of God-talk

I’m thinking of writing an article about prayer as the justification of human speech about God. I’ve been deeply impressed by the way this concept has been articulated among some of Bultmann’s followers (e.g. Heinrich Ott, Gerhard Ebeling, Eberhard Jüngel)—the hermeneutical problem of speech about God is resolved into the givenness and the demand of prayer as speech to God. So if anyone has any reading suggestions relating to this topic, I’d be most grateful.

In the meantime, here’s a quote from Jüngel that sums up this whole approach:

“Who then is God, that we must speak of him? God is he whom we must thank. To be more precise: God is he whom we cannot thank enough” (Jüngel, “Gott—als Wort unserer Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sache, p. 103).

Eberhard Jüngel: seven theses on the freedom of theology

1. The freedom of theology is the exercise of theology’s right to be exclusively theology.
2. The freedom of theology is the freedom of Christian existence perceived in the responsibility of thinking.
3. The freedom of theology has its possibility in the place of theology [i.e., its position over against the Word of God].
4. The freedom of theology has its reality in the word of theology.
5. The freedom of theology has its necessity in the necessity of theology.
6. The freedom of theology is carried out in the controversy over the freedom of theology.
7. The freedom of theology becomes concrete in the demands of freedom.

[Jüngel goes on to develop each of these theses with a series of sub-theses, resulting in a total of no fewer than 166 theses on the freedom of theology!]

—Eberhard Jüngel, “Die Freiheit der Theologie,” in Entsprechungen: Gott, Wahrheit, Mensch (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1986), p. 29.

Eberhard Jüngel: seven theses on the being of Jesus Christ

[I have selected and translated these theses from the long list of theses presented in Jüngel’s article on “the being of Jesus Christ”]

1. The death of Jesus has constitutive meaning for the being of Jesus Christ as true man and true God. The present work of the being of Jesus Christ is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, understood as God’s identification with the crucified, dead and buried man Jesus.

3. The Christian tradition about the death of Jesus is shaped not so much by Jesus’ earthly life as by the interpretations of the end of his life which were based on faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

10. In the judgement and self-understanding of the Easter disciples and the first Christian communities, the resurrection of Jesus was not viewed primarily as a confirmation of the claim of the earthly Jesus, but was rather experienced as the soteriological qualification of Jesus’ death, and only in this way was his earthly claim also proved right.

11. The meaning of the death of Jesus, revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, comes to speech in faith in God’s identification with the crucified man Jesus.

12. In the death of Jesus Christ, God’s judgment over the life of sinners is executed, as God takes the consequences of this judgment upon himself and so reconciles the world to himself.

13. In the abandonment of Jesus Christ unto death, the relationship of the Son to the Father takes place as trust in God amidst Godforsakenness (Gottvertrauen in Gottverlassenheit).

15. In the death of Jesus Christ, God has come nearer to humanity than it could ever be to itself.

—Eberhard Jüngel, “Das Sein Jesu Christi als Ereignis der Versöhnung Gottes mit einer gottlosen Welt,” in Entsprechungen: Gott, Wahrheit, Mensch (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1986), pp. 276-84.

Eberhard Jüngel online

Since we’re talking about Eberhard Jüngel at the moment, you might be interested in Marc Batko’s website, which offers his own English translations of some of Jüngel’s essays and sermons. Batko is the translator of Dorothee Soelle’s On Earth as in Heaven (1993), and he has an online translation of Jüngel’s sermon on the “Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard”. (He has translated many other theological essays as well, including several by Moltmann.)

Also, be sure to check out David Congdon’s blog, God as the Mystery of Theology—an entire blog devoted to the theology of Eberhard Jüngel!

For the love of God (18): Why I love Eberhard Jüngel

A guest-post by Thomas Adams

In a world where faith is usually on the defensive, confidence is an essential quality for a theologian. And Eberhard Jüngel has confidence in spades. Indeed, it seems to me that the expression “no apologies” (or “no apologetics”) could serve as the overarching motto for his entire theological program. Whereas others try to ground Christian theology in philosophical principles or human nature, Jüngel asserts (again and again) that “God has spoken”—in Christ, on the cross, once and for all. Despite the complexity of his thought, Jüngel is first and foremost a listener to the Word of the gospel as revealed in Scripture, and his theological method is therefore a daring “chasing after” the Word.

Unlike others who have contributed to this series, I do not have an interesting story about how I came to love and admire Jüngel. I have never met him, or heard him speak, or taken a class on his theology. But on the recommendation of this blog, I naively requested a copy of God as the Mystery of the World (1977) via inter-library loan. The experience of reading this sprawling masterpiece, so dense and so rich, was both frustrating and exhilarating. I learned quickly that Jüngel does not accommodate himself to the reader; instead, the reader must accommodate himself to Jüngel (again, “no apologies”!).

But the theological workout paid sizable dividends, as reading God as the Mystery of the World triggered a seismic shift in my theological perspective. Here I found a thinker whose brilliance was so enormous that his theology could somehow encompass the great minds of the past, both theological and philosophical. Barth and Bultmann, Luther and Aquinas, Hegel and Nietzsche, Descartes and Heidegger—all contribute in different ways to Jüngel’s symphonic theology.

Jüngel also has a polemical side—another admirable trait, in my opinion—that was on display during the controversy surrounding the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. His desire to bring “clarity” to the debate resulted in the book Justification (1999), a masterly presentation of the essence of Lutheran theology. In keeping with the spirit of his entire career, Jüngel declared that Justification “is not a book that takes pleasure in compromise. An ordered theology makes no compromises.” For Jüngel, the gospel needs no apologies.

Your favourite Lutheran theologian

Thanks to all those who voted in the latest poll. A remarkable 47% said that Bonhoeffer was their favourite modern Lutheran theologian, compared to only 5% who voted for Bultmann (even though Bultmann was, of course, a far greater theologian!).

But I was surprised above all by the fact that Eberhard Jüngel—one of the most agonisingly difficult theologians ever to walk God’s good earth—came second with 17%, ahead of Robert Jenson (16%) and Wolfhart Pannenberg (15%). Nothing could have delighted me more, since Jüngel is my own favourite living theologian!

Stay tuned shortly for a poll on your favourite Reformed theologian....

Eberhard Jüngel: God for us

Over at The Fire and the Rose, David Congdon has been doing a lot of excellent posting on Eberhard Jüngel. Here’s one of the quotes from Jüngel that he posted recently:

“I believe, therefore I am astonished. And how! Believing, one experiences God as the inexhaustible mystery of oneself and of all things; as the one who is absolutely surprising, who nevertheless is or should be self-evident; as an absolutely singular event that nevertheless is of unsurpassable generality; as eternal being and yet full of becoming; as the most concrete, who as such is the most concrete universal; as the Father in heaven who reveals himself on earth in the brother of humanity.... In believing, the human person experiences the mystery of the triune God who takes the relationlessness of death upon himself, in order to be the being rich in relations, the being of love in the unity of life and death to the benefit of life.... I believe, therefore I am astonished at the trinitarian mystery as the sum of the gospel: God from eternity and thus in and of himself is God for us.”

Eberhard Jüngel bibliography

Some time ago David Congdon, a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary, posted a comprehensive bibliography of books and essays by Eberhard Jüngel that have been translated into English. If you’ve never read any Jüngel, then you might like to start by trying one of his shorter essays. He is a uniquely rich and stimulating contemporary thinker.