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God's Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth

Currents in Theology and Mission, April, 2008 by Mark C. Mattes

God's Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. By Eberhard Jungel. Translated by John Webster. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001. 142 pages. $31.95.

This volume is a retranslation of Tubingen theologian Eberhard Jungel's little classic of Barth-interpretation by Oxford professor John Webster, foremost spokesperson for Jungel in the English-speaking world. Originally published in the early 1960s, the book continues to be relevant today because it is a pivotal text from German Protestantism that presented the notion of God as suffering and even, in the history of the second person of the Trinity, capable of dying, a view that continues to influence both contemporary theology and piety.

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In the introduction, Webster notes that Jungel's treatise can be understood as a "sustained essay" in what might be termed "philosophical dogmatics" (p. x). The point of Jungel's work is to argue that fidelity to Barth's view of God entails the position that a real relation between God's being-for-self and for us entails a radical historicity of God by means of God's identification with Jesus Christ. Hence, we cannot posit or assume an abstract, static deity anterior to God's action in Jesus Christ.

The external occasion for Jungel's work here was to move beyond a debate between the radical Bultmannian Herbert Braun, who stressed Christian existence free of an objectivist ontology of the divine, and Helmut Gollwitzer, who argued for a critical realism with regard to God's being. Jungel's point, in Webster's words, is that if "God's immanent being is inseparable from his economic being, then theology is not required to choose between an objective and a subjective orientation, or between dogmatics and hermeneutics. God is the event of his radical historical presence in Jesus Christ" (p. xii).

From this perspective, Jungel's work offers helpful outlooks on language, history, and ontology. Seeking to safeguard the autonomy of revelation, Jungel as a Barthian sees language as offering interpretations, not illustrations, of revelation. Since God's external acts and inner life are one, God "corresponds" to himself (pp. 36, 103, 111). Furthermore, God's unity is best seen as established in trinitarian perichoresis, the mutual interpenetration of the persons of the trinity. God is God's act--not a reality behind or anterior to the economic action of God. In historical events in which God acts to save, God's inner trinitarian being is "reiterated" (p. 110).

While Jungel is not as widely known to a North American audience as he deserves to be, this book helps further establish his credentials. This work obviously will appeal to Barth experts and those interested in trinitarian theology. Thoughtful pastors and other theologically trained parish leaders will find it helpful as well.

Mark C. Mattes

Grand View College

Des Moines, Iowa

God's Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth

Currents in Theology and Mission, April, 2008 by Mark C. Mattes

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