Law and Gospel in Emil Brunner's Earlier Dialectical Theology

David Andrew Gilland

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780567663139
• eBook ISBN: 9780567520791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The Swiss Reformed Theologian Emil Brunner was one of the key figures in the early 20th century theological movement of Dialectical Theology. In this monograph David Gilland offers an account of Bruner's earlier theology in relation to one of the central themes of the Protestant Reformation: Law and Gospel.He examines Brunner's early relationship with fellow Swiss Reformed theologian, Karl Barth and provides a detailed reading of a variety of Brunner's essays from the early to mid-1920s, centering on Brunner's efforts to use the law-gospel relationship to establish a basis for Christian theology. After analyzing the influence this has on Brunner's theological method, Gilland examines Brunner's earliest text on Christology, The Mediator (1927). In light of the preceding analysis, the fourth chapter provides a careful reading of Brunner's controversial polemic against Karl Barth, Nature and Grace (1934).The monograph concludes with reflections on Brunner's earlier theological work and his turbulent relationship with Karl Barth.

Chapter 1

Critically Idealistic Dialectical Theology?

This chapter charts the development of several key elements in Brunner’s earliest theological thinking from 1914 up to his stringent critique of Schleiermacher in 1924 and the early stages of his engagement with Barth during the same period. In accord with J. Edward Humphrey, the analysis to follow demonstrates that ‘the basic direction of Brunner’s theology had already been determined before he encountered Karl Barth’¹, in addition to showing that Brunner’s earliest writings betray neither an entirely liberal² nor even a wholly pre-dialectical theology,³ but rather a nascent critically idealistic dialectical theology steeped in a theologically determined dialectic of law and gospel. In other words, Brunner attempts to formalize a theological system presupposing a Kantian critical philosophy or critical idealism, which acknowledges and adheres to the laws and limits of theoretical and moral reason. From this standpoint, it will be possible to assess Brunner’s initial concerns with Barth’s theology in relation to his own development and therefore, to properly gauge the impact of Brunner’s critique of Barth on his subsequent theological formulations.

I. Setting Out

The following two sections examine some of Brunner’s basic concerns as a religious socialist and early ‘dialectical’ theologian. In the first section, the sketch of a figure who is attempting to connect contemporary culture and current events directly to his society’s flawed moral and intellectual presuppositions emerges. The second section, first examining an essay entitled ‘Geist’ penned for a church newsletter, demonstrates Brunner’s expansive understanding of the spiritual and intellectual categories in relation to capitalism, materialism and money and then continues with Brunner drawing the foregoing thoughts together into several attempts to offer a theological response to World War I and existing social ills.

a. Brunner and Religious Socialism in Switzerland

Brunner’s earliest writings are laced with contextual commentary and pronounce a prophetic call for change in both the ‘practical’ spheres of economics and politics, as well as in their ‘theoretical’ foundations. Significantly, Brunner’s attack on these practical and theoretical institutions is not exclusively due to either a personal or general reaction to the events of World War I, but is rather constituent of a larger cultural critique well underway prior to the onset of open hostilities.⁴ In this regard, the text that became virtually synonymous with the early twentieth century and is mentioned frequently in Brunner’s writings, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, was begun in 1912 and completed at the same time as the outbreak of violence in 1914 – although the initial publication was delayed because of the war.⁵ This is a single but substantial indicator that much of the intellectual activity of the time was part of an ongoing social and cultural critique, not merely a reaction to the war.⁶

Like Spengler, Brunner’s earliest extant writings show him to be a young intellectual who views current events, particularly the social-cultural malaise and later, the war, as confirmation of an already well-established critical world view. In contrast to Spengler, Brunner views the imbalanced socio-economic structures and violence as a direct result of systemic problems caused by the overwhelming influence of materialist thinking at the ‘intellectual and spiritual’⁷ centre of Western society, instead of as the necessary by-products of a cyclical move from culture to civilization.⁸ Nonetheless, Brunner indeed saw an affirmation of some of his own central convictions in Spengler’s thesis that the decline of the West was imminent, due to its transition from culture to civilization, mirroring the transition from the aesthetic-culture of ancient Greece to the legalized-civilization-structure of ancient Rome.⁹

Years later, referring again to Spengler in his St Andrews Gifford lectures of 1947, Brunner indicates that the trend has little changed since the time of his youth: ‘The time is past when spiritual forces and values determine the face and character of the Western world. A new epoch has begun, in which the scholar, the artist, the seer and the saint are replaced by the soldier, the engineer and the man of political power; an epoch which is no more capable of producing a real culture, but merely an outward technical civilization’.¹⁰ Despite the immense growth in the breadth of Brunner’s thought and the dynamic changes in his social and political context, he never strayed far from these initial concerns and his lifelong consistency in this regard is striking.

Another area where Brunner remains strikingly consistent is the overall form of his intellectual methodology. Likely in accord with his training at Gymnasium and the University of Zurich, Brunner styled his initial approach to the critique of modern ‘technical’ civilization in the form of classic dialectical method: the Socratic contrast of opposing viewpoints, concluding with a synthesis of the contrasting perspectives. However, to make this dialectic work for his theology, Brunner would rely heavily on generalization, reduction and analogy. Of these, reduction figures most prominently, and in Brunner’s hands consists in trimming opposing modes of thought down to their least common denominators and basic presuppositions, equating them to each other and finally contrasting them with the gospel.

In his doctoral dissertation, completed mid-year 1913, Brunner virtually sets the tone for the entirety of his career, beginning with a sharply reductive claim: ‘Scholasticism is a phenomenon that did not merely belong to the Middle Ages; in all times, even in the present, the progress of thought becomes inhibited by an intellectual law of inertia, through a natural tendency to adduce unquestioned views as incontrovertible, axiomatic truths and to build the structure of a worldview on such dogma’.¹¹ Perhaps betraying the moderate pietism of his upbringing¹² and the tempered liberalism of his education¹³, Brunner places the weight of his critique on modes of thought similar to philosophical and theological scholasticism, rendering a generalized critique of a ‘natural tendency’ towards scholastic rigidity expressing itself in the terminology of ‘incontrovertible, axiomatic truth’. Not incidentally, this is precisely the same terminology Brunner applies to law and legalistic modes of thought throughout his career. ‘Scholasticism’, however, is not the only genre Brunner equates with static legalism, and his reductive anti-legalistic rubric proves useful as he reckons with other problems.

On the one hand, Brunner seeks and finds legalism in the spiritual and intellectual realms in the form of scholastic dogmatism and orthodoxy; on the other hand, he finds a similar form of legalism in liberal theology. With the former, his targets include medieval Catholic scholasticism and Post-Reformation Protestant scholasticism, due particularly to their comprehensive metaphysics and the rigidity of their methodology. Despite his Swiss Reformed background, Brunner even criticizes Calvin on occasion for being too ‘systematic’ and frequently turns to Luther instead.¹⁴ However, the Romantic reaction to Protestant Scholasticism and particularly the Liberal Protestant theology of the nineteenth century typified by Schleiermacher, Ritschl and Troeltsch committed errors comparable to those of the orthodox and were also hit by the attack coming from Brunner’s reductive polemic. If scholasticism was guilty of trying to systematize or codify the transcendent, liberalism was guilty of rejecting and ignoring the transcendent for the immanent. In the ‘practical’ realm, then, Brunner attacks ‘legalistic’ thinking in the form of classic liberal economics, specifically free-market capitalism, which he sees as an extreme form of naturalism writ economically; that is, an economic system whose principles are determined by the given, self-standing and independent laws of nature, not the conscious intellectual mediation of personal agency.¹⁵

Underlying Brunner’s earlier thought is a comprehensive critical view of the liberal tradition in theology and philosophy, and of liberalism in politics and economics, with the occasional jab at Protestant orthodoxy: liberal theology is the theology of the market economy and vice versa; both advocate immanent, self-contained and comprehensive systems, which in the last resort are monistic.¹⁶ Their primary emphases stem from their either causal or developmental ontologies, and their epistemologies are empirical. Brunner believes these liberal thought systems (along with the contribution from certain conservative factions) have brought about the war with its power politics, as well as the economic and social collapse, and further, are concordant wit...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Translation
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Critically Idealistic Dialectical Theology?
• 2. Law and Revelation
• 3. The Two Tasks of Theology
• 4. Nature and Grace
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Unpublished and Archival Materials
• Index
• Copyright