Against relevance

One more quote from Michael Korthaus’ new book, Kreuzestheologie: Geschichte und Gehalt eines Programmbegriffs in der evangelischen Theologie (Mohr Siebeck, 2007) – this is from his chapter on Gerhard Ebeling:

“The believer who in the confidence of the word of the cross confesses the death of the sinless Christ as her own death…, no longer requires any worldly assurance, nor any display of faith’s ‘relevance’. To put it another way: the one who asks about the ‘relevance’ of faith, about its supposedly necessary authentication in experience or some other life-praxis, has not yet really believed” (p. 218).

Take that, Moltmann.

The necessity of theology

“Theology is necessary in order to make preaching as hard for the preacher as it has to be.”

—Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith (London: SCM, 1963), p. 424.

The possibility of knowing God

“The linguistic event which is constitutive of the knowledge of God is, rightly understood, not a word about God, but Word of God. For it is only as one who himself speaks that God can reveal himself as God…. Knowledge of God as word-event implies knowledge of God as Person. For that reason, what is called knowledge of God stands or falls with the possibility of prayer. Prayer is the most direct expression of the knowledge of God, in so far as it is answer to God’s Word.”

—Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith (London: SCM, 1963), p. 352.

God's Yes in the No of the cross

“Although the Crucified One is abandoned by people and by God, he is nevertheless not isolated or turned away from God and the world. On the contrary, in this death God and humanity are involved together in a singular way, as God’s Yes is hidden under his No to the sinner.... Therefore the death of the Crucified One in abandonedness is not only his own death, but also the death of God and the death of all.”

—Gerhard Ebeling, Dogmatik des christlichen Glaubens, Vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1982), p. 202.

Does prayer change God?

Joe Cathey raises the question: does prayer change God, or does it only change us?

It seems to me that the only way to take the biblical witness seriously is to say that prayer really does “change God.” If we approach the concept of prayer via a philosophical or theological analysis of “the divine nature,” we may well end up concluding that prayer cannot “change God.” But nothing could be plainer about the God of the Bible: he hears prayer, he is moved by prayer, he responds to prayer, he changes his mind when people pray. Nothing is more characteristic of the God of the Bible than his attentiveness and responsiveness to prayer.

We’ll always get into trouble if we start out with a prior concept of what the “divine nature” must be like (e.g. that God must be transcendent, or immutable) and then try to understand prayer. Instead, as Gerhard Ebeling has pointed out, we should start with the reality of prayer, and we should allow prayer itself to determine the way we think about who God is and what he is like.

One of the best discussions of this topic is Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/4, pp. 87-115. Barth writes: “If ever there was a miserable anthropomorphism, it is the hallucination of a divine immutability which rules out the possibility that God can let himself be conditioned in this or that way by his creature. God is certainly immutable. But he is immutable as the living God and in the mercy in which he espouses the cause of the creature. In distinction from the immovability of a supreme idol, his majesty, the glory of his omnipotence and sovereignty, consists in the fact that he can give to the requests of this creature a place in his will.... God cannot be greater than he is in Jesus Christ, the Mediator between him and man.... For this God is not only occasionally but essentially, not only possibly and in extraordinary cases but always, the God who hears the prayers of his own” (p. 109).

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).

Hans Hübner: God and faith

Chris Tilling and Jim West have both been talking with great enthusiasm about Hans Hübner’s new book, Evangelische Fundamentaltheologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); and Jim has written a very insightful and sympathetic review of the book for the next issue of RBL.

If you appreciate Gerhard Ebeling’s hermeneutical approach to theology, then you’ll no doubt want to read this book as well. For Hübner, the “principle of all theological hermeneutics” is that “only the one who believes in God can understand God” (p. 99). Faith and God belong together: “Where God is, there is faith. And where faith is, there is God” (p. 210). It seems to me that the whole of theology is summed up in these words.

What does resurrection mean?

“[W]hat does ‘resurrection of the dead’ mean? The best help for understanding this is to abandon any effort to form an image or idea of it. That Jesus is risen from the dead does not mean that he returned to this earthly life as one who has death ahead of him once again. But it means that he, the dead one, has death (not just dying, but death) finally behind him, and is finally with God, and for this reason is present in this earthly life. What resurrection from the dead means can only be understood when we begin to apprehend what ‘God’ means.”

—Gerhard Ebeling, The Nature of Faith (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), p. 71.

The worst theological illusion

“The worst illusion to which the theologian can fall prey is imaginary certainty.”

—Gerhard Ebeling, The Study of Theology (London: Collins, 1979), p. 131.

Interdisciplinary theology

Interdisciplinary dialogue is important in theology. But the point of such dialogue is not simply to become an intellectual jack-of-all-trades. Rather, the presupposition of interdisciplinary dialogue is always that one has first of all mastered one’s own field. Thus I think Gerhard Ebeling is right when he makes this humorous observation:

“In general one could only wish that theologians were better masters of their craft, instead of hankering after things that seem more interesting to them, with the consequence that they have a dilettante knowledge of everything, including theology.”

—Gerhard Ebeling, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), p. 206.

Gerhard Ebeling and the problem of history

There has been some discussion of the problem of faith and history over at the Jürgen Moltmann List. I sent in the following comment on Gerhard Ebeling’s approach to the problem of history:

Gerhard Ebeling’s The Problem of Historicity in the Church and Its Proclamation (1967) is one of my favourite little books. Ebeling was one of Rudolf Bultmann’s pupils, and his conception of faith and history is essentially Bultmannian, with the added refinement of Ebeling’s concept of the “word-event.”

Ebeling views the problem of history as a problem of understanding, and so he sees the solution in hermeneutical terms: the church’s task is to interpret and translate the kerygma. But his main emphasis is not on the “content” of the Christian kerygma, but on the “word-character” of the kerygma, i.e., on the “word-event” which takes place through this message. Thus for Ebeling the task of Christian faith is to translate the primitive Christian message in such a way that the original word-event takes place afresh in each new historical situation.

Pannenberg and Ebeling on the Word of God

The latest issue of the online journal Ars Disputandi includes an excellent paper on Wolfhart Pannenberg:

Wesley Scott Biddy, “Wolfhart Pannenberg on Human Linguisticality and the Word of God” Ars Disputandi 5 (2005).

Best of all, the article includes extensive engagement with Gerhard Ebeling’s theology of the “word-event.” This is great to see, since Ebeling (one of my favourite theologians) tends to be unduly neglected these days.

Believing in God and believing in Christ

“Is there any sense—even if it were possible—in bringing man first to a belief in God, as a condition of bringing him to belief in Jesus Christ? Would not this imply that Jesus did not come to the ungodly after all?”

—Gerhard Ebeling, Theology and Proclamation: A Discussion with Rudolf Bultmann (London: Collins, 1966), p. 35.

The Bible and history

Some of my fellow bloggers—Jim West, Joe Cathey and Mike Bird, among others—have been debating the relationship between the Bible and “history.”

This is an important and highly complex cluster of problems. Although I can’t enter into the discussion in any detail at the moment, let me just offer a theological comment (with particular reference to the New Testament).

In my post on the trustworthiness of Scripture, I said that the Bible “is trustworthy in the way that preaching is trustworthy.” I realise that this is a rather risky way of putting it, and some alert readers might have detected the influence of Bultmann behind the word “preaching.”

But in spite of the risks, I think this is an accurate description which does justice to the kerygmatic character of the biblical writings. I would add, though, that precisely in order to be kerygmatic the Bible must also have a definite historical core, just as preaching itself must have some historical core in order to be true “kerygma” and true “gospel.” (At least in principle, this entails only a minimal historical requirement, even though it does not necessarily limit the scope of historical inquiry.)

Thus at exactly this point I would side with Käsemann and Ebeling against Bultmann. In particular, I would consider historical Jesus research to be not merely legitimate, but theologically indispensable as an attempt to identify the historical core of the Christian kerygma.

The christology of Peter C. Hodgson

Peter C. Hodgson’s book on christology has never really received much attention: Jesus—Word and Presence: An Essay in Christology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971). But on the whole I think it’s a creative and noteworthy attempt at christological construction. The book is completely devoted to the conceptuality of the later Heidegger and to the “new hermeneutic” (as it was then called!) of Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling. And in spite of its philosophical commitments, it is also a deeply exegetical book in which research into the historical Jesus plays a decisive role.

At the heart of Hodgson’s christology is the dialectic of “presence” and “absence.” He takes the experience of atheism as his point of departure—i.e., the experience of the “absence of God”—and he then constructs an entire christology around the concept of God’s “presence.”