Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed by R. David Nelson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed by R. David Nelson Mark Mattes Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed. By R. David Nelson. London: T & T Clark, 2020. xviii + 159 pp. Unquestionably, Eberhard Jüngel is an important contemporary Protestant theologian, but he is not known for his accessibility. He wrote no comprehensive systematic textbook. His German can come across as unwieldy. Nelson opens up Jüngel's theology for a wider audience, including beginners, pastors, and seasoned theologians. Nelson is stellar in his ability elegantly to distill Jüngel's complex theological ideas, present them in their context, and show their relevance for those Protestant theologians eager to be ecumenically minded and desirous to address contemporary secularism. In four chapters, Nelson gives a general overview of Jüngel's theology by traversing four of his most important monographs and eleven of his most essential essays, and summarizing his achievements, challenges, and prospects. Unlike so many mid- to late-twentieth-century thinkers, Jüngel offers no political theology schooled by Karl Marx or his disciple Herbert Marcuse. Jüngel hails from communist East Germany. He experienced firsthand its repression of free speech. Jüngel discovered the church to be a "haven for truth" where one could "speak the truth freely" (4). Reacting against such oppression, Jüngel highlights freedom as the appropriate expression of theology and the gospel as empowering courage (12). Jüngel is indebted to Luther but is no narrow Lutheran confessionalist. Instead he seeks a "constructive Protestant theology" (18), albeit one primarily formulated not like a standard dogmatic textbook but instead through provisional, exploratory essays (21). Nelson eschews the tendency of Jüngel commentators to offer a genealogy outlining intellectual trends which influenced Jüngel. Instead, Jüngel speaks with his "own voice" (27), and therefore we should acknowledge that his thinking arises within a "nexus of discourse" and not "lines of direct intellectual lineage" (29). With this caveat in place, Nelson does an admirable job indicating the impact that the thinking of Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Ernst Fuchs, and Martin Heidegger (among others) had on Jüngel. Nelson highlights Jüngel as a critic of the modern tendency of the human to establish its humanity through self-actualization, whether through thought, [End Page 484] action, or feeling. Jüngel retrieves the classical Lutheran stance that humans are fundamentally passive in the hands of their Creator. Famous for his appropriation of the concepts Sprachereignis (speech events) or Wortgeschehen (word happenings), Jüngel contends that God appropriates human language in order to verify his proximity to humankind, expressing himself through various analogies that convey his nearness to the world (48). Theology is accountable to God's word which interrupts daily routine by means of addressing sinners. Most important for Christian witness is the death of Jesus Christ. Jüngel accords much significance—as all Christian theologians should—to this event. At the conceptual level, Jesus' death, as an event within the life of God, shows that metaphysical approaches to God, indebted to Aristotle, are unfounded because they establish a view of God independent of the crucifixion. Hence, Jesus' death means that the metaphysical conception of God must be rejected and that metaphysical assumptions should be revised (40). Salvifically, Jesus' crucifixion also shows, as Karl Barth also understood, that God's being as such (in se) is tantamount to his being for us (pro nobis) (67). With respect to the doctrine of God, Jesus' death entails that God is the "unity of life and death for the sake of life" (73). Nelson points out that, prima facie, Jüngel does not seem to be able to see Jesus as a living, active subject who presently works on our behalf (96), since having died Jesus is absent from us, "withdrawn into the past" (94). Nelson however thinks that Jüngel's contention that the word as an event which accomplishes the advent of God would be a fine way to counter this concern and so restore Christ's present agency, since Christ is risen from the dead. Overall, this is a superb introduction to a profound and challenging contemporary Lutheran theologian. Mark Mattes Grand View University Des...