When God is silent: a reflection by Wolf Krötke

Marc Batko has been translating some essays by the leading German theologian, Wolf Krötke. Here’s a short piece that he has just sent me: “When God Is Silent” (also available in German on Krötke’s website).

“Our God comes, he does not keep silence” (Psalm 50,3). That is a core sentence of the Bible. God can only be God for us because God is not silent. A speechless God is not God in the sense of the Bible. Contemporary atheists confirm this in their own way. Since they no longer hear God, God does not exist any more for them.

But God’s silence is not entirely harmless. Whoever does not hear God is not simply free of God. Even atheists become irritated when they are called “godless.” “Godless” sounds so contemptuous. If I call someone who does not believe in God a “godless soul,” that sounds like a condemnation in his ears. “You dubious person,” he hears, “your life lacks any good reason.” No one likes to hear this.

That “godless” has this sound for real blasphemers is strange. Our language presumably transports something owed to a biblical experience. The God who by nature is not silent is silent! When this happens, people are spit out, left without any goodness, hopelessly alone and miserable. “O God, do not keep silence; do not hold thy peace or be still,” implores another biblical praying person (Psalm 83,2). When God is silent, the power supply of his spirit and life is missing from our life. Other voices and other powers then fill the empty spaces of God’s silence.

All people do not regard this as terrible. The godless type is repeatedly encountered in the psalms as a careless person who likes God’s silence. “Nothing is lacking to me,” exclaims the confessionless person of today who shuts the door on visitors from the community. Since he never hears God speak, he does not notice when God is silent. Isn’t he better off than those tormented by God’s silence since they have good experiences of God speaking?

We must take this question seriously in a time when God means nothing for so many people. Whoever would open ears and hearts for God’s speaking tells them the reason for deaf ears and closed hearts. God is silent. All who believe have this experience. In faith in Jesus, it is engraved with the cry of the dying Jesus. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” – this is the desperate complaint of the person through whom God’s love spoke like no other. With the words of Psalm 22, he joined with all the complaints of people about God’s silence. He anticipated something that could not be ignored. To many after him, that was the ultimate question in their life.

God is silent – that is the experience of persons open for God in the discipleship of Jesus. We may not misunderstand this as insensitiveness for God to which people become accustomed in voluntarily chosen distance from God. In such distance from God, people can be concrete walls for God. The Christian community with its testimony of God’s speaking can and should shake these walls. But if God is really silent though people long for his presence, that is shattering. This can put in question faith and trust in God. Doubt and despair begin to settle in our soul.

God’s silence hurts. It sets in like a mysterious wall before us and in us when God’s speaking is necessary. Hope and vigor are taken from persons handed over to the hatred and rage of others. Victims of the elements refuse answers. Gratitude that they are alive is driven out of persons tormented by sickness. Here there isn’t atheist or Christian, religious or not religious. Everyone knows the experience “when we are in extreme distress” and God is silent. Can persons still speak of God in such situations?

When God is silent, God is uncommunicative or closed for us. This can only result in our growing silent. Whoever is struck with suffering or tries to help other sufferers experiences this directly. The word “God” becomes like lead in our mouths. We have the feeling of assaulting God and humankind when we begin explaining his silence. “Be quiet at last,” we’d like to shout to someone who promotes himself when God is silent. There are times when we can only be silent with God. Communities that rediscover the old practice of Easter night have this experience.

On this night, something else comes into play than the mysterious abyss of God’s silence. In the experience of the Easter light, we notice something like God’s own deep affliction from the pain of Jesus Christ and from the suffering of his creatures. Far away from Golgotha, it is nearly impossible to understand God’s silence as enduring pains that make us speechless. The chasm between God and us is too great. Then the Bible speaks of God’s anger and God’s punishment for our misdeeds. We cannot cross out all this. When God is silent, we always discover what cannot be pleasing to him in our life.

Good Friday teaches us that God is with us even in his silence. As he touches us with his silence, he bears the heavy experiences we make when he is silent. In all their gravity, such experiences can stop being ultimate experiences that imprison people in distance from God. They do not prevent us from hearing the words of God’s love in his silence.

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.

Karl Barth Society meeting

Philip Ziegler has sent me the updated programme for this week’s meeting (in Washington, DC) of the Karl Barth Society of North America. I’m very disappointed that I won’t be there myself – it looks like an excellent programme. For those of you who are be able to go, here are the full details:

SESSION I: Friday 17 November, 4.00–6.30 pm (this session is listed as AM17-109 in the AAR Program and will be held in CC-101)

• Philip G. Ziegler: “Taken Out of Context – Freedom and Concreteness in the Theology of Wolf Krötke”
• Wolf Krötke: “Barth on the Theology of the Religions”

SESSION II: Saturday 18 November, 9.00–11.30 am (this session is listed as AM18-39 in the AAR Program and will be held in RW-Renaissance West B)

• Walter Lowe: “Apocalyptic and Discipleship – Explaining Christianity”
• George Hunsinger and Archie Spencer, with a response by David Bentley Hart: “The Analogia Entis Makes a Come-Back – David Bentley Hart”

Wolf Krötke, nothingness, and Karl Barth

Princeton Theological Seminary publishes a superb series which unfortunately is not very widely known: Studies in Reformed Theology and History. The latest volume in the series is an English translation of Wolf Krötke’s brilliant study Sünde und Nichtiges bei Karl Barth (1970). Here are the details:

Wolf Krötke, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Philip G. Ziegler (Studies in Reformed Theology and History NS10; Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005); xv, 132pp.

As Krötke says, there is only one important account of evil in modern theology, and that is the account of Karl Barth. And without too much exaggeration we might add that there is only one important account of Barth’s doctrine of evil, and that is Wolf Krötke’s study.

If you’re a poor student who can’t afford to pay for the book, then the good people at Princeton will even let you have a copy free of charge. The contact address is:

Studies in Reformed Theology and History
PO Box 821
Princeton, NJ 08542-0803
USA