Eberhard Jüngel and Existence

Being Before the Cross

Deborah Casewell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367637170
• eBook ISBN: 9781000385090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

This book interrogates the contemporary Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel's theological anthropology, arguing that Jüngel's thought can provide a model for theological engagement with philosophical accounts of existence. Focusing on Jüngel's theology of existence, the author explores the thought of philosophers, including Heidegger and Hegel, their influence on and application to his theology, and argues that Jüngel's account of humanity should be seen as a response to atheistic existentialist accounts of existence.

In showing how Jüngel's theology is informed by and dependent on philosophical thought, this book provides a new lens on the interplay between philosophy, theology, and religion in twentieth-century German thought. It will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, and philosophy of religion.

Part I

Sourcing the self

1 The problem of philosophy

Whilst journeying back to Erfurt early in July 1505, the young Martin Luther was caught in a violent thunderstorm, violent enough for him to cry out in fear ‘Help me, St. Anne; I will become a monk’.¹ A year later, Luther had taken vows in the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, and from there the familiar story of the Reformation commences. His conscience tormented by his inability to fulfil the ‘counsels of perfection’, Luther relates that ‘though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that He was placated by my satisfaction’.² Unable to find peace or rest within a theology that emphasised the pursuit and possibility of perfect virtue, Luther experienced instead that the will was captive, and that humanity would thus always fall short of the ethical demands of religion.³ In developing his account of justification through faith alone, rather than works, where ‘the law says, “do this,” and it is never done. Grace says, “believe in this,” and everything is already done’,⁴ Luther came to associate scholastic theology and its reliance on the work and philosophical programme of Aristotle with the church's abuse of indulgences.

In developing and promulgating an account of salvation through works, it opened up a theology in which salvation could not only be earned but also bought. For Luther, not only was this understanding of human existence as perfectible divorced from the reality of the life; he flatly rejected it as a method of theologising at all. Luther states instead that it is ‘vivendo inmo moriendo et damnando fir theologus, non intelligendo, legendo aut speculando’ (Living, nay dying and being damned, is what makes a theologian, not knowing, reading, or speculating.).⁵

This damning indictment of contemporary theology sets the tone for Luther's highly experiential theology, one that focuses on the Anfechtung that characterises human life in contrast to the virtuous, moderated vision of life that philosophy espouses.⁶ Instead of being able to work one's way up to salvation, life is characterised by being before the cross, and before God, coram deo. As a result of this, what is emphasised instead is the existence that you live and the experience of God.

The cross and existence in Luther

It is in this context that Luther's theology of the cross originates, both as an experiential step in knowledge of God and as a reaction to knowledge of God and humanity from scholastic theology and its reliance on philosophical accounts of human existence. Luther's theology is in many ways a reactive theology: the theology of the cross is tied up in the establishment of justification through faith alone against the backdrop of the break with Rome; his account of the Eucharistic presence of Christ is developed in conflict with Zwingli; and the disputation on the humanity and divinity of Christ is a polemic against Schwenkfeld. However, as the focus in this chapter is on Luther's theology of the cross and his account of human existence in the world that results from it, the pertinent issue here is that it is against a particular way of knowing God that Luther reacts, one he sees as reliant on philosophy and its stress on the power of human reason.

If God cannot be known philosophically, then Luther sees that God must be experienced. Hence, Luther's theology of the cross is an argument first and foremost concerned with knowledge of a God that must be hidden to human reason. The hiddenness of God is an early and consistent concern for Luther, occurring in his 1513 lectures on the Psalms, and it is because God is hidden from human reasoning that Luther is able to posit that what we desire and glorify and what God desires and how God is glorious oppose each other. The glory of God is what humanity fully despises, weakness and debasement shown in the figure of the crucified Christ.

Focusing on the scandal of the cross, Luther's position is that ‘although the works of God always seem unattractive and appear evil, they are nevertheless really eternal merits’.⁷ Thus, in seeing the revelation of God in the terrible event of the suffering and death of Christ Luther challenges both the human desire for the comfort and the aforementioned logic of Aristotelian philosophy with its concept of facere quod in se est, to do what lies within you. Nothing that lies within us can attain salvation, and in Luther's theses in the Heidelberg Disputation, the theology of the cross reveals the futility of human works in attaining salvation because human glory, which is the goal of human works, stands in opposition to the weakness and suffering of God on the cross. Thus

A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.⁸

The theology of the cross is a statement of theological anthropology, based as it is on an understanding of the privations of human will and human intellect, where ‘free will, after the fall, has power to do good only in a passive capacity, but it can always do evil in an active capacity’.⁹ It is only God who can differentiate between good and evil, only God who can create, only God who loves without reserve or differentiation, which stands in contrast to human love in that it ‘does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it’.¹⁰

The attendant statement on theological anthropology emphasises the experiential, existential aspect of Luther's thought. To move from the certainty of human reason and glory to knowledge of God on the cross, we have to experience Anfechtung, where ‘the Lord humbles and frightens us by means of the law and the sight of our sins so that we seem in the eyes of men, as in our own, as nothing, foolish, and wicked, for we are in truth that’.¹¹ This fear produces humility as in order to approach God we need these two checks against human reason and pride.¹² It is only through this experience that we can know God, as ‘he who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and in general, good to evil’.¹³ The cross is not only a statement on our inability to reason concerning God, the cross is a purgative experience that enables us to come before God and know God:

Through the cross works are destroyed and the old Adam, who is especially edified by works, is crucified. It is impossible for a person not to be puffed up by his good works unless he has first been deflated and destroyed by suffering and evil until he knows that he is worthless and that his works are not his but God's.¹⁴

This is part of the alien work of God where at first the works of God appear evil (opus alienum) in order that they may be truly right and comforting (opus proprium).¹⁵ This particular hiddenness of God is, as Hinkson notes for Luther ‘the sine qua non of faith’.¹⁶ The hiddenness of God means that

You exalt us when you humble us. You make us righteous when you make us sinners. You lead us to heaven when you cast us into hell. You grant us the victory when you cause us to be defended. You give us life when you permit us to be killed.¹⁷

This experience guards against the evils of philosophy and speculative theology.¹⁸ There is a fundamental acceptance in Luther of Anfechtung as an essential characteristic of human existence, and as the first step to knowledge of God. The godly can now conceive of God in suffering and death.¹⁹ Although the doctrine of justification by faith alone does stand as a comfort, especially as recent work on the affective nature of Luther's thought shows, this alien work of God never goes away and is there as a constant check on human nature.²⁰

Justification, as Luther understands it, further emphasises the impotence of human action and the appropriate response of passivity. It is Christ who lives in us through faith and does our good works in us, and we are made righteous through the substitutionary action of Christ.²¹ Our righteousness is not our own, it is the righteousness of Christ.²² Humanity, in response to God, is only able to accept the righteousness of Christ: God acts in all things and the human receives in faith as we no longer live under the law but in Christ.²³ In ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, justification is understood as freedom from the law, and freedom is not the ability then to do as we will, but to be subject to God and neighbour; to serve them in light of the gift of justification through Christ, and it is in this sense that ‘a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all’.²⁴ There is the new life in Christ, in the ‘inner man’ ruled by faith, which stands over and against our old, outer life.²⁵ Through this, we are free to live in obedience and love.

This is Luther's particular theological account of existence in the world. We stand before God, convicted, humbled, and lifted up by God, but we still live in a fallen world, in our fallen state, amongst other fallen people. Luther's theology is relational and because we relate to God in a particular manner, from that encounter we are able to relate to other people in the best manner: ‘a man does not live for himself alone in this mortal body to work for it alone, but he lives also for all men on earth; rather, he lives only for others and not for himself’.²⁶ Our new humanity is constituted by this act of justification in the person of Christ, as we are always coram deo. If not, we are enmeshed in our human nature which ‘corrupt and blinded by the blemish of original sin, is not able to imagine or conceive of any justification above and beyond works’.²⁷ This imputation of being is also the means by which we attain knowledge of God.

It is only through the experience of suffering, of Anfechtung, that we are able to get here. This leads to another legacy of Luther's: that of the awakening of authentic existence through encountering and experiencing despair, anxiety, and Anfechtung. It is in this sense that Johannes Zachhuber notes, ‘as much as Descartes introduced the subject as the foundation of metaphysics, Luther established it as the basis of all religious faith’.²⁸ Due to Luther's insistence on the individual as existing coram deo, the self is defined and known authentically only by that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Sourcing the self
• PART II Theology from the cross
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index