Who God is, who we are: an introduction to Eberhard Jungel - II

WE SHOULD BE human and not God. That is the summa." So Luther in a famous letter to Spalatin in 1530. The aphorism is a favorite of Eberhard Jungel's, pointing to the heart of his understanding of the gospel. "In the last analysis," he writes, "the revelation of God which it is the concern of Christian theology to understand means just this: for the good of humanity God himself intends the proper distinction between himself and humanity." Behind Jungel's critical reading of modem intellectual and political culture, and behind his own presentation of Christian faith, lies a sense that responsible Christian theology arises in faith's conviction that "God became human to differentiate savingly between God and humanity."

Why is this theme of such cardinal importance for Jungel's theology? One reason lies in his reading of modern culture. Modernity, he believes, is largely predicated upon the failure of philosophy (and of dependent theistic theologies) to grasp the real character of God's relation to the world. From the early modem period onward, and especially since Descartes, the idea of God has been expounded in terms of absolute subjectivity; God is a transcendental "I," defined in terms of his otherness from humanity.

As he unfolds the argument in God as the Mystery of the World, Jungel identifies at least three problems in this philosophic tradition. First, it is inadequate as a Christian doctrine of God. It assumes that Christian beliefs can be coordinated with or subsumed under philosophical theism. And so, of necessity, it sits light on the trinitarian content of Christian talk of God, since such language, properly understood, is a way of articulating God's relatedness to the creation. Second, it is seriously weak in Christology. God's becoming human in Jesus plays little or no formative role in theistic accounts of who God is or how God relates to the world, and Jesus' humanity is not understood as constitutive of our own.

Finally, the modem philosophic perspective is anthropologically deficient. By defining God as absolute subject, it prepares the way for protest atheism in which God is criticized as that which blocks the full flowering of human autonomy. Theism thereby encouraged its own decline, and also generated an understanding of human persons as self-realizing subjects, a mirror image of theism's god. In essence, then, philosophical theism almost inevitably pushed Christian theology to think of God and humanity in contrasting terms, self-assertive subjects vying for the same space.

For his counterexamples, Jungel turns to Luther and Barth. In both, the interpretative key to a proper ordering of the relation of God to the world is to be found in God's humanity in Christ. In the case of Luther, Jungel regards the Reformer's teaching on justification as an exemplary instance of "the proper distinction between God and humanity." In combating works-righteousness and replacing it with the passivity of faith before the God who condemns and justifies, Luther is struggling to secure two things: a specifically Christian doctrine of God focused on his gracious and passionate self-giving in Christ, and a specifically Christian anthropology in which to be human is to receive rather than to create one's human worth. In the case of Barth, Jungel is particularly interested in what the later Barth called his "theanthropology"--a doctrine of God and humanity in mutual relation--as it finds expression in the ethical and dogmatic writings from Barth's final years. In both cases the doctrine of the incarnation furnishes the primary motif: God's becoming human enables humanity to abandon self-divinization and become truly human alongside God in a relation of "unsurpassable nearness."

Essentially, then, there are three constituents to Jungel's account of the God-world relation: a nontheistic understanding of God as triune; an understanding of humanity as liberated by grace from self-assertion in order to live a life "in correspondence to God"; and a Christology in which Jesus defines what it is for God to be God and for us to be human.

THE CHRISTOLOGICAL concentration is everywhere apparent. Christological beliefs are not fitted into some prior view of reality generated out of philosophical first principles: they are that from which a Christian apprehension of reality is formed. It is thus from Christology that "theological thinking has to let it be said what may properly be called God and man."

Jungel lays stress on Jesus as revelation, in a couple of senses. First, the core of Jesus' ministry is his proclamation of the kingdom, understood as an eschatological utterance, a speech-act of decisive authority which "interrupts" and remakes the structures of the world to which he comes. As in Bultmann's Jesus and the Word, so here: Jesus is proclaimer rather than agent in a sociohistorical world. Second, Jesus' passion and death are important above all for what they manifest. Jesus' work on the cross--for Jungel, the heart of the gospel--is interpreted in ontological terms, disclosing who God is as be identifies himself with the crucified.