God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism

441 Pages·2014·54.857 MB·English

by  Eberhard Jüngel

GOD
A3 THE
MYSTERY
OF THE
WORLD
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GOD
AST HE
MYSTERY
OF THE
WORLD
On the Foundation of the Theology
of the Crucified One
in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism
by
EBERHARD JUNGEL
Foreword by
R. DAVID NELSON
translated by
DARRELL L. GUDER
B L O O M S B U RY
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English translation first published 1983
Reprinted with a new foreword in 2014
© Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014
Darrell L. Guder has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
Translated from the Third Revised German Edtion
of Gott als Geheimnis der Welt,
© Eberhard Jimgel, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tubingen, 1977
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ISBN: PB: 978-0-5672-6544-9
ePDF: 978-0-5676-5983-5
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Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Foreword to the First and Second Editions vii
Foreword to the Third Edition xiii
Foreword to the English Text xv
Translator's Preface xxv
Abbreviations xxvi
I. Introduction 3
1. The Definition of the Problem 3
2. Is God Necessary? 14
3. The Basic Theological Uncertainty (Aporia) of Christian Talk
about God 35
II. Talk about the Death of God as an Expression of the
Uncertainty of Modern Thinking about God 43
4. The Significance and the Absurdity of Talk about the Death of
God 43
5. The Twofold Source of Talk about the Death of God 45
6. Where Is God? 49
a. The Biblical Question 50
b. The Modern Question 51
7. Talk about the Death of God as the Theological Answer to the
Question: Where Is God? 55
a. Bonhoeffer's Contribution to the Return of "Death of God" Talk to
Theology 57
b. Hegel's Mediation between the Atheistic Modern Feeling and the
Christian Truth of the Death of God 63
c. The Significance of Talk about the Death of God: The Problem of the
Essence of God 100
III. On the Possibility of Thinking God 105
8. The Position of Thought between God and God:
On the Problematic of the Modern Concept of God 105
9. The Self-Establishment of Modern Thought in the Cartesian "I
Think" as the Premise for the Destruction of the Metaphysically
Established Certainty of God 111
V
vi CONTENTS
a. The Power of Doubt: Methodological Doubt as the Premise for the
Establishment of the Necessity of God 112
b. The Securing of God as the Disintegration of the Certainty
of God 122
10. The Metaphysical Concept of God in the Modern Disputation of the
Possibility of Thinking God 126
a. Fichte's Demand: God "should...not be thought at all" 128
b. Feuerbach's Assertion: "Only when thy thought is God dost thou truly
think, rigorously speaking" 141
c. Nietzsche's Question: "Could you conceive a God?" 146
d. The Actual Inconceivability of the Metaphysical Concept of God for
Thought Which Establishes Itself on "I Think" 150
11. The Word as the Place of the Conceivability of God 152
12. The Certainty of Faith as the Deprivation of Security 169
13. God's Unity with Perishability as the Basis for Thinking
God 184
a. The Double Necessity of Thinking God's Unity with Perishability 185
b. The Double Possibility of Thinking God's Unity with Perishability:
The Ontological Significance of Christological Talk about the Death
of God 199
IV. On the Speakability of God 226
14. The Statement of the Problem 226
15. The Classic Thesis: "The Deity, therefore, is ineffable and
incomprehensible" 232
16. The Disputed Mystery 246
a. The Question about God 246
b. God as Mystery 250
c. Silencing God through the Exaggeration of Language 255
17. The Problem of Analogous Talk about God 261
18. The Gospel as Analogous Talk about God 281
V. On the Humanity of God 299
19. The Humanity of God as a Story to be Told; Hermeneutical
Preface 299
20. The God Who Is Love; On the Identity of God and Love 314
21. Faith in the Humanity of God; On the Distinction between Faith and
Love 331
22. The Crucified Jesus Christ as * Vestige of the Trinity' 343
23. God's Being in the Differentiation between Father and Son 368
24. God as Event of the Spirit 374
25. The Triune God as the Mystery of the World 376
Index of Names 397
Index of Subjects 401
Foreword to the First
and Second Editions
Whether what is obvious will be understood is anything but obvious. Theology
is obviously talk about God. But does it understand what it is talking about?
The studies in this book are intended in their way to aid us so that we can
say what we are actually talking about when we talk about God. Who or what
is God? Such a question may seem estranging in the context of what is obvious
for theology. It interrupts the normal course of talk about God. One normally
feels that he knows very well what he is talking about here, so that such an
interruption appears at least superfluous. Why should yet another statement be
made about what we are talking about?
It must and should be done so that our talk about God does not end up
silencing him. Compared to atheistic thoughtlessness, this is the much greater
danger for theology and for the Christian faith: that God will be talked to death,
that he is silenced by the very words that seek to talk about him. Both what is
conscious and what is unconscious, both the dumb and the garrulous silencing
of God, are the result of the fact that we no longer dare to think God. Both the
atheism and the theology of the modern day stand equally overshadowed by the
dark clouds of the unthinkability of God. Both faith and unbelief seem to regard
these shadows as their destiny. At the end of the history of metaphysics, God
appears to have become unthinkable.
The attempts to think in this book are directed against that appearance.
Their goal is to illumine the possibility of talk about God based on the experience
of the humanity of God, and to learn to think God again on the basis of un-
ambiguous talk about God. Clearly this is impossible without clarifying the
appearance of the unthinkability of God as it has evolved in history. The sys-
tematic discussions are thus always linked with historical remembrances. Beyond
that, the connection of systematic thinking and historical analysis should express
the hermeneutical insight presupposed in this book that the perceiving and under-
standing reason is thoroughly historical in its depth structure. Historical re-
membrances are, however, not ends in themselves in theology. They have at least
the function of protecting us from being tyrannized by the past. Thus they serve
to interrupt the flow of tradition with the truth question about who or what God
vn
vill FOREWORD TO THE FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS
actually is. Whoever will permit himself this interruption will come closer to
the truth.
There are two approaches in contemporary theology by which the attempt
is being made to learn to think God again. The one way, pursued by Wolfhart
Pannenberg with impressive consequentiality, is to think God 'God having been
removed' (remoto deo) in order to arrive at the disclosure of the thought of God
which then functions as the framework for the Christian faith's own understand-
ing of God. The studies in this book will take the opposite approach. The thinking
here pursues a path which, one might say, goes from the inside toward the
outside, from the specifically Christian faith experience to a concept of God
which claims universal validity. The goal of the intellectual route adopted in this
book is not to demonstrate the thinkability of God on the basis of general
anthropological definitions, but rather to think God and also man on the basis
of the event of God's self-disclosure which leads to the experience of God, and
thus to demonstrate that the Christian truth is universally valid on the basis of
its inner power.
It is inherent in the nature of this content that one can go this way only
by means of rather complicated thought processes—but how much more com-
plicated were the thoughts of the great theologians of past ages! I have not shied
away from this, gaining encouragement on occasion by looking at the other
sciences with quite different levels of complexity, since there is certainly no lack
today of popular theological books. In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I
would like expressly to state that I regard this literary genre to be extremely
important. The best minds are good enough for it. But since the difference from
the genre of scientific theological literature is so often and apparently intention-
ally blurred, there is certainly reason to fear that it will only seldom be the best
minds which make themselves known beyond the boundaries of their guild. A
characteristic of this blurring is a certain haste with which "opus after opus is
thrown at the paper"—as von Korf said of his famous "Nieswurz- und andere
Sonaten" ('Sneezing Powder and Other Sonatas'). Von Korf did this while "sit-
ting at his secure desk," whereas we recently read as the recommendation for
one theological book that it had not been written at the desk! Be that as it may,
what is beneficial for genius is probably more of a hindrance for professional
and professorial work. In contemporary theology there is too much written too
hastily, but there is not enough thought.
By contrast, "In thinking all things become solitary and slow,"1 That is
certainly true when the goal is to expose God's thinkability out of the experience
of the worthwhileness of thinking God. In this undertaking, I am conscious of
my bonds to theologians of such varying approaches as Hans-Georg Geyer,
Gerhard Ebeling, and Wolfhart Pannenberg, as well as not a few Catholic col-
leagues, although the intellectual routes taken may be different. If we, while
walking those routes, would only learn to say what we are talking about when
we are talking about God! Only then will we experience the dimensions of what
is lost if God is silenced.
Karl Barth once critically remarked that an entire dimension, that of mys-
1. Martin Heidegger, "The Thinker as Poet," Poetry, Language, Thought, tr.
A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 9.
FOREWORD TO THE FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS ix
tery, had been lost to recent Protestantism, and also to the newer philosophy
related to it.2 But it can be gained back only through experiences with God,
which when once made demand that they be told and grasped as "public mys-
tery*'—something we should not really have to hear first from Goethe as he was
observing nature. The experience which is characteristic for Christian faith, that
experience which allows one to think and to tell of God as the mystery of the
world, is an experience with experience which is made possible by the word of
the cross. Its particular hallmark is that in it all experiences with reality, both
those past and those yet to happen, even experience itself, is to be experienced
once more, because it is now encountered within the context of the possiblity
of nonbeing, a possibility conquered on the cross of Jesus Christ but made
thinkable by that very event. Whoever feels that he must complain about attempts
to understand reality within the context of its possible nonbeing, and thus com-
plain about speculation, mysticism, or even worse, is referred critically both to
his own life experience and certainly to the neither speculative nor mystical
statement of Paul according to which the God who identifies himself with the
crucified Christ calls into existence what does not exist (Rom. 4:17). There is
a specifically theological problem level for the discussion of the question, Why
is there anything at all rather than nothing? The systematic neglect or even
allegedly critical disregard of this problem level ultimately affects the concept
of God. And in the end, one thinks of nothing at all when one talks about God.
One finds the substitute then in the form of more or less pitiful borrowings from
that oriental wisdom which does in fact have some notion of what to do with
"nothingness."3 What was once the Christian world flees now to so-called tran-
scendental meditation instead of preparing itself, by returning to what is most
authentic in it, for the composure with which a life is lived which will dare to
subject itself to the mystery of nothingness.
In contrast with that, I have allowed myself to take seriously the fact that
the Christian faith lives out of that particular proclamation which identifies God
with the crucified man Jesus and thus differentiates between God and God.
Nietzsche's polemic remark that such a God would be a 'negation of God' (del
negatio) has been taken up in a positive way in order to advance to a fruitful
stage the controversy, now made necessary by dialectical theology, with the
metaphysical tradition which dominates both theology and philosophy. Fruitful
controversy is, however, something other than sweeping rejection or even defa-
mation, as has become common in the school of dialectical theology where too
easy reference is made to Pascal's (quite correct) differentiation between the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers. It is quite
obvious that when this is done over a long period of time, the result is sterility.
Sweeping criticism, moreover, does not change the criticized traditions, but
rather permits them to expand even further under a minimally altered surface.
A differentiated appreciation of our historical sources will lead, on the other
hand, to an ultimately radical controversy with it.
It is to be hoped that the new treatment of the analogy problem in this
2. Karl Earth, CD, I/I, p. xii.
3. See, for example, the impressive book by Hoseki Shinichi Hisamatsu, Die Fillle
des Nichts; Vom Wesen des Zen; Eine systematische Erlautemng, trs. T. Hirata and
J. Fischer, ed. E. Cold (n.p., n.d.).