The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology

Mark C. Mattes

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506427270
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506427287
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this significant book Mark C. Mattes critically evaluates the role of justification in the theologies of five leading Protestant thinkersEberhard Jungel, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jurgen Moltmann, Robert W. Jenson, and Oswald Bayer -- pointing out their respective strengths and weaknesses and showing how each matches up with Luther's own views. Offering both an excellent review of recent trends in Christian theology and a powerful analysis of these trends, Mattes points readers to the various ways in which the doctrine of justification has been applied today. Despite the greatness of their thought, Jungel, Pannenberg, and Moltmann each accommodate the doctrine of justification to goals aligned with secular modernity. Both Jenson and Bayer, on the other hand, construe the doctrine of justification in a nonaccommodating way, thus challenging the secularity of the modern academy. In the end, Mattes argues that Bayer's position is to be preferred as closest to Luther's own, and he shows why it offers the greatest potential for confronting current attempts at self-justification before God.

THE ROLE OF JUSTIFICATION IN THEOLOGICAL STRATEGIES OF ACCOMMODATION

Chapter Two

Eberhard Jüngel: Justification in the Theology of the Speech Event

Few contemporary Protestant theologians of international stature have sought to employ the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone for their constructive work as rigorously as has the Tübingen systematician Eberhard Jüngel.^[1] His work grows out of expertise developed in a number of theological fields.^[2] His lifelong theological commitment to this doctrine was quite evident in his initial response, a challenge, to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification^[3] made by the Roman Catholic Church and member churches of the Lutheran World Federation. Of greatest concern to Jüngel was his perception that the Joint Declaration failed to honor the doctrine of justification as the criterion that identifies Christian faith,^[4] as well as the simul iustus et peccator doctrine, the view that the human coram deo is always fundamentally passive, and that through faith we live extra nos in Christ.^[5]

Although he helped to initiate the draft of the first Position Statement of German Academics in response to the Joint Declaration, it is significant that Jüngel signed neither the first^[6] nor the second^[7] Position Statements. His final response to the Joint Declaration is that it allows Protestants and Catholics to move beyond traditional doctrinal condemnations^[8] for further study, guided by the principle that it is not we who own the truth, but the truth that owns us.^[9] His own recent book on justification,^[10] written during the height of the conflict over the Joint Declaration, is far less a polemic against the Joint Declaration than a thorough statement of his own understanding of justification as it has directed his thinking throughout his career, particularly as a critique of certain aspects of modernity.

While deeply indebted to Luther’s theology, Jüngel has always distanced himself from what he would perceive to be a narrow, parochial Lutheran confessionalism (and this is, perhaps, a significant factor in his decision not to join the 251 German academics who signed the second Position Statement protesting the Joint Declaration). Jüngel’s thinking interweaves his own initial work among the champions of the New Hermeneutic, Gerhard Ebeling^[11] (1912-2001) and Ernst Fuchs^[12] (1903-1983), with the theologies of Barth (1886-1968) and Bultmann (1884-1976) and the philosophies of Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). His view of the doctrine of justification is forged in an intense engagement with these thinkers, although Barth has, for Jüngel, the strongest say by far in matters theological. While Luther’s views are to be honored and upheld, they are best read through the lens of Barth’s configuration of theology’s proper agenda. Over the last three decades, Jüngel has been the closest and arguably the most authoritative voice for the Barthian “Word of God” theology, while Barth’s overall influence has declined, at least in the academy.

Jüngel maintains that the doctrine of justification requires a responsible contemporary restatement precisely because it “is in every way the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae . . . which can only be disavowed by a ‘church’ which does not wish to stand and which ignores its own foundation.”^[13] Given that the doctrine of justification has not been the central focus of contemporary systematic theologies that tend to emphasize issues of apologetics, why is it so central in Jüngel’s thinking? Jüngel gives a clear answer. Protestantism has failed to mine this doctrine for its resources and energies, particularly with regard to ontology. The doctrine of justification by faith^[14] is definitive of God’s being^[15] and humanity’s being.^[16] Jüngel appeals to aspects of the doctrine of justification which were not obvious to the Reformers but which are consistent with their intentions. He draws out the ontological implications ever implicit in the doctrine of justification in order to correct those intellectual traditions that misunderstand these ontologies and their proper relationships.^[17] This chapter will analyze and critically assess Jüngel’s view of justification, particularly as it has been defined from the experiential theology of the “word event” (Sprachereignis, Wortgeschehen) with respect to Luther’s theology, and its importance for contemporary proclamation.

For Jüngel, God is properly a happening (Ereignis), motivated by love for a creation threatened by the extinction of chaos. God is “Going-out-of-Himself into nothingness” (a se in nihilum ek-sistere),^[18] which nevertheless permits him to “correspond” to himself, and also allows humans to “correspond” (Entsprechen) both to God and to themselves. God then is not properly being-itself, but its source. God affirms being by means of excluding and limiting threats to being: chaos, death, and nothingness. The doctrine of justification relates the divine and the human by properly ordering them such that the human is expanded through a relationship with God, who is a freely offered “plus”^[19] to human experience. Thereby, Jüngel avoids the problems associated with ancient metaphysics, “Platonism,” in which God is ordered to the world as its super-sensible double whose truth, beauty, and goodness are instantiated in the world but for whom the world offers no life-altering agency. He also avoids the problems associated with modern metaphysics, “Spinozism,” in which God and the world are virtually identified, though distinguished in two modes as an active, mental, rational “naturing nature” and a passive, physical, though intelligible “natured nature.”^[20] In Jüngel’s vision, God does not need the world (God is “not necessary but more than necessary” [mehr als notwendig]),^[21] and, surprisingly, the world does not need God (an insight of secularism to be appropriated by Christianity). The advantage here for theology, he thinks, is that God can freely love the world, and the world can freely respond to God’s love.

Luther’s views of justification were forged in an entrenched polemic against medieval Roman Catholic theories of merit (the Indulgence Controversy) and Renaissance Humanism’s affirmation of human power (the polemic against Erasmus [1466-1536] over “free will”). While clearly addressing the doctrine of justification to the former view, Jüngel also skillfully applies it to Erasmus’s contemporary heir, modern secularism, with which he has a deeply ambiguous relationship. He applauds contemporary critiques of ancient metaphysics, while rejecting modernity’s reduction of humans to their “works.” Secularism as mediated through philosophical atheism can, ironically, offer important insights about the God who justifies. The ancient metaphysics of substance is unable to portray the drama of the biblical God’s engagement in human history. Atheism has appropriately criticized the false theology grounded in the metaphysics of substance. A metaphysics of subjectivity which views the subject as a free self-defining agent — even a social ontology in which one’s being is established via relationships — accords far better with the being of God as justifying the ungodly. God is knowable — indeed, even thinkable^[22] — through faith, which is itself grounded in a meta-experience, an “experience with experience”^[23] mediated through an encounter with “nothingness”^[24] and for which the believer properly responds with gratitude and not anxiety. However, with regard to anthropology, Jüngel’s insight, based on Reformation thinking, is that the modern world fails to distinguish one’s “person” from one’s “works.”^[25] Modernity consistently seeks to have humans ground themselves within themselves — in their ability to think, feel, or do — and thus reduces the dignity of the human to merit, the ability to contribute to modernity’s own agenda. These agendas tend to be that of conquest or expansion. Modernity is unable to ground humanity in Another outside of humanity itself.

For Jüngel, we cannot turn our backs on the technologies that we have developed to harness nature. Nevertheless, the modern world can quickly dehumanize the very humanity it seeks to serve. The doctrine of justification by faith acknowledges the fundamental passivity of the human coram deo and its worth, independent of merit, in the sight of God. It offers the possibility of a rehumanization of the human. Humans dehumanize themselves in the process of attempting to map^[26] or wholly objectify both the physical and the social environments, and even themselves, thereby potentially extinguishing their own dignity. While the secular world as offering freedom of conscience and basic human rights needs to be affirmed,^[27] its tendency to ground humanity in either human thinking or doing, particularly the agency of conquest and control, needs appropriate boundaries. Jüngel seemingly wants to accept modernity’s configuration of faith as fundamentally private, while rejecting modernity’s quest for control as what Luther would call ambitio divinitatis, asserting oneself as one’s own deity, both legislator and judge. While clearly Jüngel offers great insights into the latter perspective, justification quickly becomes connected to a unique meta-experience or feeling, echoing Schleiermacher’s “feeling of absolute dependence,”^[28] and less connected to a linguistically mediated promise. Undoubtedly, with the concept of “experience with experience” Jüngel intends a meta-experience determined by the extra nos of the word. However, with this as a central focus for understanding the consequences of faith, he risks structuring theology within the horizon of experience. Thereby, his loyalty to Barth is potentially subverted by the very Schleiermacherian concerns that Barth opposed. It is here that Jüngel’s attempt to bring together Bultmann’s concern for experience with Barth’s theology of the word is problematic. His view makes faith vulnerable to being grounded in an experience that constitutes language, instead of language constituting faith. Nevertheless, Jüngel is right to contend that our intellectual journeys to map both the world and the human experience need to recognize their boundaries, particularly in the face of the potential dehumanization of children, the vulnerable, the disabled, and the aged. Where and how such human intellectual and technological quests should or should not be limited is an important concern with respect to fidelity to the doctrine of justification.

In Jüngel’s intellectualizing (the “thinkability” of God) and personalistic approach to faith (an “I-Thou” dialectic between God and the human), the gospel is presented as an “event of correspondence”^[29] in which God, as defining himself as Trinity, corresponds to himself and allows humans to correspond both to God and to themselves, since in faith humans are healed from self-alienation. We passively correspond to God in faith and actively correspond to our humanity in love to the neighbor opened by faith. Jüngel clearly rejects modernity’s tendency to look to ethics or politics as salvific.^[30] Raised in the former East Germany, he is highly skeptical of the “promise” of politics to save! However, he has great faith in human reason’s ability to “think” God, since he affirms that God allows himself t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• THE ROLE OF JUSTIFICATION IN THEOLOGICAL STRATEGIES OF ACCOMMODATION
• THE ROLE OF JUSTIFICATION IN NON-ACCOMMODATING THEOLOGICAL STRATEGIES
• CONCLUSION
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References