EVANGEL. Spring 1984
THEOLOGY
4
EberhardJiingel:TheHumanityofGodand the Humanity of Man TheRevdDrJohnWebster Lecturer in Theology, StJohn's College, Durham Eberhard Jilngel is Professor of Systematic Theology and the Philosophy of Religion in the University of Tilbingen, and one of the most prominent of contemporary Protestant systematic theologians in Germany. A pupil of both Karl Barth and the New Testament theologian Ernst Fuchs, his work so far has straddled several different theological fields. In a publishing career ofjust over two decades. he has produced major studies in New Testament exegesis. classical philosophy. the work of Luther and Barth, the philosophy of religion and the theory oj language, as well as substantial dogmatic studies and a good number of more popular works. His prowess as preacher and lecturer has won him acclaim from audiences wider than those of professional theologians. In the English-speaking world, however, his work remains relatively little known and is onlyjust beginning to be translated. This is partly because his style and method of approach are often quite sharply divergent from those more favoured in English-language theology at present; partly it is because his writing presupposes familiarity with debates and specialist literatures little attended to beyond Germany; and partly because Jilngel's own engagement with those schools of German theology which have been easily assimilated by English readers- such as the theology of liberation- has been tangential and critical. His work. indeed, represents a massive attempt to shift the theological agenda back to substantive issues in dogmatics, and awayfrom what he feels to be an urifruitjul preoccupation with practical or political relevance. To this end, his work is often severely professional. making heavy demands of the reader who would master long passages of complex and nuanced argument. Jilngel's work so jar has been particularly broadranging in its elected themes. But if a larger trend is to be discerned throughout his theology, it is a concern to develop an account of the relationship between God and the world in which the divine and the human are complementary. God and man form two mutually imprescriptible and not antithetical or mutually exclusive realities. This theme, which Jilngel usually labels that of "distinguishing between God and man", could be said to form the pivot of the whole of his theological programme. As we review his doctrines of God and man, we shall see that he is above all else anxious to avoid a reduction of the twojoldness of God and man to a single, self-consistent stratum. He urges the rejection of any doctrine in which God is the only significant reality and which reduces man to a mere function of the divine, not possessed offreedom and authenticity. And similarly. he resists any anthropocentrism in which the divine is a merefunction or projection of the human world.
1. Christology Jung•. is widely regarded as one of the most astute living interp 'ters of Barth. His very profound engagement with Barth's theology, from his early study The Doctrine of the Trinity (Tubingen, 1964) to his latest collection of BarthStudien (Gutersloh, 1982), has given his work a resolute Christocentrism, in which the source and norm of all theological discourse are to be found in God's self-disclosure in the person of Jesus Christ. Jungel's work is thus pervaded by the conviction that Christological assertions lie at the heart of authentically
Not all EVANGEL readers have found Dr Webster's survey of recent Continental theology easy to assimilate, but many have written of their appreciation. This quarter he discusses the thought of Jungel, about whom he is particularly expert. Christian doctrines of God and Man. "Out of this Chtistological event theological thinking has to state what may properly be called God and man" (Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (Tubingen, 1977) 315). Jungel, in other words, does not envisage Christology as simply one doctrine alongside others: rather, it provides the basis upon which all other doctrines are built, and it is normative and regulative of the whole corpus of Christian teaching. It has this function because in Jungel's theology, the doctrine of the person of Christ has come to occupy the place of the doctrine of revelation. As another eminent Barth scholar has written, "there is a structural and essentially Christological pattern running throughout the whole body of our theological knowledge, which can be studied and used as a norm or criterion for helping to shape the true form of each doctrine, for testing and proving the different doctrines to see whether they fit into the essential structure of the whole" (T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (London, 1965) 148f). In view of this Christological colouring of the whole of Jungers theology, it may seem surprising that he has not so far published any detailed exploration of familiar areas in the doctrines of the person of Christ, and particularly of patristic and credal interpretations of the Christological dogma. His emphasis has fallen more on the issues in theological method just referred to, and on the hermeneutical questions raised by the Christology of the New Testament. This latter theme provided one of the main thrusts of his doctoral thesis Paulus und Jesus (Tubingen, 1962), written at the time of intense interest in questions concerning our knowledge of the history of Jesus and the significance of such knowledge for dogmatic Christology. More recently, Jungel's Christology has concentrated on the death of Christ as the focal event for our understanding both of his person and of the nature of God and man. "Christian faith in the crucified Jesus Christ leads to the heart of Christian belief. Christian theology is thus essentially theologia crucifixi" (Entsprechungen (Munich, 1980) 278). Before turning to examine the implications of this staurocentric Christology for the doctrines of God and man, it is perhaps worth noting how the position which Junge! adopts depends on a particular interpretation of the resurrection of Christ. He insists that the resurrection is not to be seen as a continuation of the career of Jesus, as a subsequent stage in his story. Rather, it is the interpretation of the meaning of the event of Calvary, the declaration that God has identified himself with the crucified. "On the basis of faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the death of Jesus comes to have formal meaning as an integral of his earthly existence" (ibid, 282). In other