Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed

R. David Nelson

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780567660039
• eBook ISBN: 9780567660046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This volume offers an up-to-date introduction to Eberhard Jüngel's intellectual formation, publications and influence. Jüngel is one of the most original and influential Protestant theologians to emerge after Karl Barth, and his theology has received fresh interest of late from systematic theologians, biblical scholars and historians of modern Christian thought. R. David Nelson guides the reader through the figures, movements and conceptual developments in the background of Jüngel's thought. By introducing Jüngel's four major monographs and eleven of his key essays, Nelson is able to assess a number of themes prominent in Jüngel's theology, and to summarize the achievements, challenges, and prospects of his theological contribution. This comprehensive introduction will help the inquisitive student to engage with Jüngel's thought.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This T&T Clark Guide for the Perplexed is designed to serve as a companion for readers exploring the theology of Eberhard Jüngel, one of the most significant Protestant theologians of the period after Barth. Over the course of an academic career spanning nearly five decades, Jüngel produced several highly influential monographs and hundreds of carefully crafted short pieces. Although he never attempted a comprehensive and systematic exposition of the Christian faith, the occasional writings filling out his literary oeuvre span the entire range of the theological topics. The goal of this guide is to help both the casual reader and the serious student of Jüngel’s theological writings grasp a sense of the lay of the land. Attention is devoted to Jüngel’s location along the trajectory of modern Protestant thought, to the origins of his theology and his intellectual formation, to minor adjustments and changes of mind within the development of his written work and to the abiding significance of his thought and the questions his writings continue to pose to his readers. At all points along the way, we will pay close heed to the primary sources. In two of the three chapters at the heart of the book, I comment upon the content and structure of Jüngel’s key monographs (Chapter 3) and analyse eleven of Jüngel’s most important theological essays (Chapter 4). Especially now, as English renderings of previously untranslated works from Jüngel’s pen are in preparation, and dissertations and short essays on Jüngel’s thought are appearing with some regularity, it is my hope that this guide will find use as a companion and primer to Jüngel’s thought and his legacy. Of course, a book such as this cannot take the place of careful and critical engagement with the original texts. On the contrary, the extent to which this book succeeds in accomplishing its task depends upon whether it leads readers further into Jüngel’s own theological works. Let the discerning reader be the judge.

On the cover of the print edition of this book is a stock photograph of clockwork. When I was shown a selection of images for the cover early on in the life of the book, I chose the clockwork theme sheerly for its aesthetic value, as I found it more visually striking than the other designs on offer. But I have come to regard it as an appropriate illustration for the book at least in two senses. First, Jüngel’s written contributions to Christian theology often are described using adjectives such as complex, involved, circuitous and even, as our title has it, perplexing. The gears, ratchets and other mechanisms powering a clockwork device are evocative of intricacy, and for this reason the imagery is well suited for an introductory volume on a notoriously difficult theologian. One of my goals in this guide is to dispel the notion that Jüngel is too hard to understand and in any case hardly worth the effort. Of course, to figure out how a watch works, one must carefully examine the movement and get a feel for the engineering. Likewise, having a sense of the whole engenders an appreciation for the delicate parts. This guide will introduce the reader to particular texts while simultaneously providing a broad orientation for appreciating Jüngel’s career and written work.

Second, clockwork also serves as an apt metaphor for capturing one of Jüngel’s key theological commitments. Ironically, however, as a metaphor it conveys precisely the opposite decision about God and God’s relation to creatures from that which Jüngel urges us to see at the heart of the New Testament witness and the theology emerging from it. Ever since the European Enlightenment and the rise of modern science and philosophy, appeals to the idea of God as the cosmic watchmaker have become commonplace, both in scholarly discourse and in popular parlance. Perhaps most famously, in his Natural Theology, William Paley invokes the watchmaker analogy in support of his teleological argument for the existence of God.¹ For Paley, the complexity, order, mechanism and motion of the watch are signatures of the watch’s designer. Likewise, Paley insists, when we by natural reason observe the intricacies of the world, and the good order and sublime movement of heavenly bodies, and the scientific laws according to which all material things operate, and so on, we are able to arrive by way of inference at the idea of God as Creator. As the cosmic watchmaker, so the analogy goes, God designs and creates the world and sets its mechanism in motion.

Jüngel has no interest in the conception of God as the cosmic watchmaker, nor does he wish to commit himself to any understanding of the world as a closed system of laws, mechanisms and processes originating in God’s design and prime directive and evolving naturally over the course of time. Indeed, as we shall discover throughout this guide, Jüngel frequently describes God as the one who interrupts the world, whose coming to the world in events of self-disclosure profoundly upsets the world and its actualities. The attention Jüngel has devoted throughout his career to this way of conceiving God – that is, to the idea of God as the one who interrupts the world in the word – puts him at odds with numerous alternative visions for theology emerging since the Enlightenment. He is fiercely opposed to naturalistic readings of theological problems. He is a stout enemy, moreover, of the natural theologies of modernity, which, to his mind, far too easily and wilfully neutralize the distinction between God and creatures. For Jüngel, theological naturalism and natural theology alike jeopardize the New Testament witness of God as the one who freely determines to be God only as God-for-us. If clockwork imagery is appropriate for a book on Jüngel, it is so just because it is suggestive of the watchmaker god – for Jüngel, an imaginary god of human making against which the Christian gospel is marshalled.

Eberhard Jüngel – theologian of Christian freedom: A brief intellectual biography

Jüngel’s childhood and adolescence

Eberhard Jüngel was born on 5 December 1934 in Magdeburg. He was born a twin to a sister named Hannelore. ‘I am a twin’, he quips in a late retrospective interview, ‘so actually I am only half a person’ (Jüngel, Leidenschaft, 9). Eberhard and Hannelore had an older brother named Rainer and, much later, a younger sister named Margarete. His comments on the other men of the family betray the tensions marking the Jüngel household during Eberhard’s childhood and adolescence. His father was ‘very smart but not very kind, and his temper often troubled us children – and my mother as well’. Eberhard and his brother Rainer did not see eye to eye about much of anything, with the latter growing into adulthood as a Marxist and an avowed atheist. On the other hand, Jüngel remembers his mother with great fondness. She was ‘an extremely kind and intelligent woman’ who possessed a ‘natural’ piety, even though the family was only nominally religious. His mother’s latent faith and strength of character came through during the chaos of the war. A sizeable and strategic city on the Elbe, Magdeburg was heavily and repeatedly bombed by the Allies. The Jüngels converted an old ice cellar in the garden into an air raid shelter, and the sturdy structure became a refuge for the entire neighbourhood when the klaxons blared. On one occasion, Allied bombs fell close nearby, and the bunker began to shake and threatened to collapse. Jüngel recalls that everyone in the shelter came unglued. ‘But it was, above all, the men among us who performed rather miserably that day’, he remarks. ‘I’ll never forget how grown men cried’ as the bombs exploded just outside. But Jüngel’s mother was unfazed. She ‘prayed in a loud voice the Lord’s Prayer and the room went still’ (Leidenshaft, 9–10).

The Jüngels, though, were not active churchgoers, and religion rarely was discussed in the home. ‘My father never went to church unless we were being confirmed’, Jüngel comments. ‘And even then the only thing in the service he really liked was when the pastor railed against the socialist government.’ His mother’s private piety never translated into an eager interest in the religious formation of her children beyond ensuring that they received basic catechetical instruction in their confirmation classes. As a rule of thumb, Jüngel explains, ‘my parents were business people who had little time for their children’. Fortunately, an ‘honorary aunt’ (Wahltante), a friend of the family given charge over the Jüngel children, took Rainer and Eberhard under her wing and endeavoured to give them an informal education, teaching them the basics of religion, grammar, art and poetry. In time Jüngel developed a passion particularly for theatre and opera. The pastor of the local parish was a writer before pursuing a call to the ministry, and he worked hard to engender in the children of the congregation a love for drama and performance (Leidenschaft, 10–11). In school Jüngel read classics and memorized poetry (in 2005 he recalled reciting by heart Schiller’s 430-line ‘Song of the Bell’ from start to finish!); in confirmation classes he committed to memory the catechism and some traditional hymns (Leidenschaft, 11).

In due course the young Jüngel decided to follow the academic and vocational path which would lead to ordination and, eventually, his career in theology. In his retrospective comments on his adolescence, he never mentions any particular moment of conversion precipitating this decision. Ongoing tensions with his father appear to have played a minor role: ‘I wanted to annoy my father’, Jüngel writes, perhaps with tongue in cheek. ‘My brother also wanted to annoy our father, and so became a Marxist. But I became a theologian, and this too annoyed our father. “You should become a lawyer,” he said, “but not a theologian.”’ The more significant motivation, however, was ‘a far deeper experience’,² namely, Jüngel’s discovery of the church as a haven for the truth in the midst of the communist authoritarianism and state atheism descending upon East Germany in the wake of the war. ‘As a student’, Jüngel reflects, ‘and in the context of an increasingly despotic “socialist” school, I came to know the church as the only place where one could speak the truth freely. I learned that the “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32) long before I ever read that verse in the Gospel of John’ (Leidenschaft, 12). Jüngel’s encounter with the truth as a word of freedom had a profound and immediate impact. He comments at length about this encounter:

What a liberating experience this was by comparison with the ideological and political tyranny which prevailed at school! Friends were arrested; I myself was interrogated several times by the security services and taken to court – simply because we dared to say what we thought. One day before my … examination, directly before the workers’ revolt in 1953, I was removed from my school as an ‘enemy of the republic.’ My fellow pupils were required immediately to break all contact with us. As I left the hall of the Humboldt School in Magdeburg … the honest men and women among the teachers there turned away in helpless silence. This was a symbolic scene in which the truth of the sentence from Cicero which these same teachers had instilled in us dawned on me like a flash. Cum tacent, clamant: by keeping silent, they cry out. However, in the Christian church one was free to break through that oppressive silence and the pressure to lie, which was becoming increasingly marked. Here people dared to witness to the truth of the gospel, and to do so in the political situation in such a way that the liberating power of this truth could also be experienced in a very secular, indeed a very political, way.³

Theological studies in Naumburg (Saale), Berlin and Switzerland

This conviction that the word of truth must speak forth in a world of lies and tyranny provoked Jüngel to pursue theological studies and, eventually, a career in public ministry as a theologian and preacher. ‘I was eager to get to know the liberating truth [of the gospel] and the place where it thrives’, he writes in one place, reflecting on his vocational origins. ‘I believed, and therefore I wanted to understand what I believed.’⁴ He enrolled in the newly established Kirchliche Proseminar programme at the Katechetische Oberseminar in Naumburg (Saale). Because he was expelled from the public Humboldt School in Magdeburg the day before taking his graduation exam, Jüngel was not awarded a high school diploma and for this reason was prohibited from matriculating at any of the state universities of the DDR. The Proseminar offered ‘emergency’ exams for public school students who had been disqualified by the state for political reasons. Jüngel passed the surrogate exam and advanced into the theological curriculum at the Oberseminar. Oddly enough, but squarely in line with the surreal political conditions marking the DDR in the 1950s, Jüngel eventually got the chance to take the standard state exam, which he passed with ease (‘the church examiners graded us much more strictly than the state examiners!’, he recalls in Leidenschaft, 15). Due to widespread protests against the policy, the government had revoked its decision to withhold diplomas from high school students deemed ‘enemies of the state’. Years later, and as he handed out exams to his own students in Tübingen, Jüngel would relate this anecdote, ending with the remark: ‘In this world there are no fair exams. Only the final exam on the day of judgement – the iudicium extremum – will be a fair exam!’ (Leidenschaft, 16).Jüngel studied in Naumburg from 1953 to 1955 and then at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Berlin from 1955 to 1959. While at the first institution, he came under the influence of the philosopher Gerhard Stammler (1889–1971), who impressed upon Jüngel the importance of strict logic (‘the stricter the better!’⁵) in theological and philosophical discourse. He also crossed paths with the controversial New Testament theologian Walter Grundmann (1906–1976), an ardent anti-Semite and member of the Nazi party from its rise to power to the end of the war. In spite of his serious misgivings concerning his professor’s notoriety and objectionable viewpoints, it was from Grundmann that Jüngel first learned the ropes of New Testament exegesis. Jüngel especially was drawn to the patristic scholar and church historian Rudolf Lorenz (1914–2003), an expert in Augustine’s theology who went on to have a long career as professor of church history at Mainz. Jüngel remembers Lorenz as a gifted teacher whose informative lectures helped students see the connections between the early church and the challenges facing Christianity in modernity. For Lorenz, Jüngel wrote a paper on the theme of doubt in Augustine and Descartes, two figures with whom he would continue to wrestle once his theological career was under way (Leidenschaft, 33).

It is difficult to measure with any accuracy the impact these early teachers had on Jüngel’s mature theology. On one hand, Jüngel’s time in Naumburg laid a foundation in the disciplines of biblical exegesis, Christian dogmatics, church history and practical theology. His courses in these and related subjects were his first encounters with the academic study of the Christian faith. Jüngel assuredly was formed, both theologically and vocationally, while a student at the Oberseminar, and with good reason we may conclude that many of the lessons he learned during these first years of formal academic work in theology tarried with him as his education moved forward. Interestingly, however, in the various retrospective pieces in which he mentions (always briefly) his years in Naumburg, Jüngel never indicates that his teachers exposed the seminarians to contemporaneous trends in German Protestant thought. It was only later, after Jüngel transitioned to the Kirchliche Hochschule in Berlin, that he began to read Barth, Bultmann, Luther and others in earnest, and to confront the challenges of modern theology and philosophy.

Two of Jüngel’s teachers from his time in Berlin deserve special mention in this regard. Heinrich Vogel (1902–1989) was a systematic theologian, Lutheran pastor and composer of sacred music who had been teaching theology in Berlin for several decades when Jüngel arrived in 1955. Vogel had joined the Confessing Church soon after its founding in 1934 and during the early years of Nazi rule earned a reputation as a fiery opponent of the German Christians. In 1935 he joined the faculty of the newly established Kirchliche Hochschule für reformatorische Theologie in Berlin, serving as principal from 1937 to 1941. The war years were especially difficult for Vogel, who was arrested and jailed on several occasions and, from 1941, censored by the Nazi regime. Vogel and Barth had become good friends after years of fighting a common enemy. Barth affectionately dubbed Vogel ‘that special little Lutheran bird’ (‘Vogel’ is the German word for ‘bird’) and in one spot comments with characteristic warmth and good humour about Vogel’s penchant for getting agitated while attempting to arouse pastors to withstand the tide of Nazism. ‘Wizened and worked up’, Barth writes, ‘there [Vogel] is all the time, waving his arms like a windmill and shouting “Confess! Confess!” And in his own way, this is just what he does’.⁶

Unfortunately, the bulk of Vogel’s works, including Gott in Christo, his massive text on Christian dogmatics,⁷ remain untranslated. Anglophone readers can, however, get a good sense of Vogel’s contribution in the form of the little book Consider Your Calling,⁸ a primer to the study of theology he wrote for his students in Berlin in 1957, the year prior to when Jüngel commenced his coursework at the Kirchliche Hochschule. Vogel covers the theme of theology as a vocation in the church, the scientific conditions of theological work, the significance of truth in theology and five characteristics of theology – theology as exegetical, dogmatic, historical, practical and doxological. The book is marked by a pastoral tone, and three of the four main sections of the text end with short, personal letters to his student readers. In several passages – notably, throughout the unit on truth and in the section on the dialogical character of theology – we encounter hints of Vogel’s fondness for the use of paradox in theological discourse. Since, for Vogel, the truth of the gospel is contrary to all human or worldly truths, we can be said to lay hold of it only as it subverts human knowledge and intelligence. For all he learned otherwise from Vogel, Jüngel never quite could accommodate paradoxical reasoning in his approach to theological epistemology. Looking back on his time in Berlin, he refers to Vogel’s theology as ‘paradoxically sealed’ and states that ‘he could not at that time nor later on adopt the view’ of his teacher. And yet, in the course of the same reflection, Jüngel acknowledges the genuine insight of Vogel’s appeal to paradox: namely, that theology, when understood as an instantiation of paradoxical reasoning, poses a crisis to ‘one-dimensional thinking’.⁹ We might say that in his early studies with Vogel, Jüngel encountered an understanding of the truth of the Christian message as alien and interruptive, and antagonistic to the normal course of human knowledge. This understanding of the basic structure of theological truth obtains throughout Jüngel’s writings, even as he discovers a (to his mind) better conceptual framework for nuancing the problem in the doctrine of analogy.

During his years in Berlin, Jüngel also came under the wing of Ernst Fuchs (1903–1983), an ‘Old Marbur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Jüngel’s intellectual and theological formation
• 3 Reading Jüngel I – the four major monographs
• 4 Reading Jüngel II – eleven essential theological essays
• Conclusion: Jüngel’s theology – achievements, challenges and prospects
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index
• Imprint