Born Before All Time: The Dispute over Christ’s Origin by Karl-Josef Kuschel

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 699 Born Before All Time: The Dispute over Christ's Origin. By KARL· JosEF KUSCHEL. Translated by John Bowden, with a Foreword by Hans Kiing. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Pp. 664. $50.00 (cloth). The question of the pre-existence of Christ is crucial for Kuschel (Professor of theological aesthetics and ecumenical theology at Tiibingen ) because it reflects the perennial human attempt to ask " about the beginning of all beginnings, about the foundation of all foundations , about the origin of all origins" (22). This substantial and erudite work on the theology of pre-existence is an attempt to " make a critical re-examination of the dogmatic statements of faith in the light of biblical knowledge " (33) by narrating " the history of the rediscovery of the pre-existence of Christ as a ' problem ' which is reflected in the theology of the twentieth century" (31). The narration takes place in three stages. Part I (140 pp.) is concerned with those three thinkers who Kuschel believes set the parameters for the contemporary discussions on pre-existence: Harnack, Barth, and Bultmann. He writes that the gulf between critical biblical exegesis and dogmatics which has plagued post-Enlightenment theology is reflected in the positions of these men: the conflict between them was essentially one between history (Harnack), exegesis (Bultmann), and dogmatics (Barth). As a result of penetrating analyses of their theologies (and of their cultural/political/social contexts), Kuschel concludes by noting (1) what they had in common, (2) how they differed, and (3) their lasting contributions to contemporary theology. It would be well to summarize the first and third, as they are particularly crucial to the argument of the rest of the book. Each of these men shared the common conviction that the early Church (especially Paul and John) had taken over a mythological understanding of pre-existence from a hellenistic-syncretistic religious milieu (Harnack understood this as bad, Bultmann as good, Barth as irrelevant). (Part II of the present work is a careful attempt to demonstrate that this was emphatically not the case, but that the (few) pre-existence statements in the New Testament were in the tradition of Hellenistic Judaism (particularly the Wisdom tradition), that they did not imply a 'high' christology, and that they were essentially eschatological and soteriological in character ) . Concerning their lasting theological contributions, Kuschel thinks that we have learned from Harnack the truth that " the history of the idea of pre-existence [is] its own criticism" and that "the message of Jesus himself and the original proclamation of Jesus as the Christ remain the critical standard for later dogmatic statements " 700 BOOK REVIEWS (487). Barth teaches us that " christology has decisive priority over anthropology " (487), and that time and history themselves must he rethought in Christological terms. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Kuschel, we learn from Bultmann that " there can be no christology without demythologizing, no talk of the ' eternal Christ ' without seeing through the opportunities and dangers of mythical talk; no christology without existential, soteriological relevance " (488) . Harnack and Bultmann especially will wield decisive influence on Kuschel's own position as he elaborates it in the Epilogue. Part II (220 pp.) begins with a remark of Ernst Fuchs which very much reflects the author's own attitude toward the relationship of exegesis to dogma: "'If there were no biblical text, Barth's outline would be preferable'" (179). Kuschel has several purposes in this section: to demonstrate in detail how wrong Harnack, Barth, and Bultmann were in their understandings of the biblical notion of pre·exist· ence, and to develop a firm and critical exegetical basis for systematic discussions of pre-existence. In fulfilling these aims, he considers all of the relevant Old and New Testament texts in chronological order, and stresses (as he also did in Part I) the "political, psychological and sociological " contexts of the biblical writings (180) . Indeed, one of his major theses is that the genuine pre-existence statements of the New Testament are put forward in response to very particular social, political, and religious crises. They emerge, he feels, only " when human trust in reason, wisdom, and the ordering of the world begins to crumble," and that they are both...