Daily Archives: January 28, 2008

Love Alone can Involve itself with Death

Posted by on January 28, 2008 1 comment

“Resurrection means the overcoming of death.  But death will cease only when it no longer consumes the life which excludes it, but when life has absorbed death into itself.  The victory over death, which is the object of faith’s hope on the basis of God’s identification with the dead Jesus which took place in the death of Jesus, is the transformation of death through its reception into that life which is called eternal life.  For that reason the death which was turned around on the cross of Christ is called a ‘Phenomenon of God.’  It is only short-circuited criticism which wants to see here a final triumph of death.  Rather, what happens here is that turning around of death into life which is the very essence of love.  The issue here is the truth in the profound statement (1 John 3:14): ‘He who does not love abides in death.’  Death is not turned around apart from love, because love alone is able to involve itself with the complete harshness of death.”

–Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 364.

Reclaiming Christ’s Time

Posted by on January 28, 2008 20 comments

Throughout the history of the Christian church, one of the crucial ways in which the church has fostered is particular ethos and distinctive identity has been through the rhythms and celebrations of a particular calendar.  The Christian liturgical year embodies a way of ordering time which is distinctively shaped by the Christian narrative.  The seasons of the Christian year offer a way of ordering time which reflect a distinctively Christocentric and Trinitarian shaping of ecclesial life.  Through a narrative-Christological ordering the celebrations and festivities of its people, the church constructed a powerful mode of ecclesial formation that orients its members toward an explicitly theological and ecclesial understanding of their identity and the practice of everyday life.  An analysis of the social and political lives of nations and other socio-political bodies bears out that the way in which a society structures time (and particularly festivities and holidays) distinctively shapes its members into a certain kind of polity, both politically and economically. 

However, the distinctively Christian way of shaping time offered by the Christian liturgical year has been largely lost in the contemporary evangelical church, the life of which has rather become dominated and determined by the calendar of the nation-state and market (which tell us, above all, when we must shop).  The fragmentary nature of evangelical identity testifies to the need for a recovering of the church’s liturgical year as a powerful tool of ecclesial formation and Christian education.  Through a recovery of the liturgical year, Christian churches have an opportunity to reclaim a holistic and missionally oriented ecclesial self-consciousness which is vital to the faithful witness of the church in the culture of late-modern capitalism. 

Karl Barth Blog Conference 2008: Update

Posted by on January 28, 2008 Comments Off

As it turns out my own proposal for a plenary paper for this year’s Karl Barth Blog Conference will be published on day three of the conference.  The title for my piece is “A Still Greater Historicity:  Hegel, Jüngel, and the Historicization of God’s Being”.  This paper will exmine  the role of Hegel in Jüngel’s trinitarianism (with special reference to God’s Being is in Becoming) in dialogue with recent discussions about the relationship between the economic and immanent trinities, particularly the question of how Jesus is indispensable to an account of the immanent Trinity.

Here is one of the important quotes from Jüngel’s God’s Being is in Becoming on this issue:

“God’s being in person is in a spcifict way a free event in so far as it is not only ‘being . . . moved in itself and therefore motivating being’, but ‘being which is self-moved’.  That means that, as event, the being of God posesses the freedom of decision.  Decision does not belong to the being of God as somthing supplementary to this being; rather as event, God’s being is his own decision. ‘The fact that God’s being is event, the event of God’s act, necessarily . . . means that it is His own consicous, willed, and executed decision.’  What was already worked out in the doctrine of the Trinity is now confirmed from working out a concept of being apprpriate to God: God’s being is constuted through historicality.  For in its ‘decision, and therefore personal being’ God’s being ‘is the being of God in the nature of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’ in which ‘God live from and by Himself’.” (p. 80-81)

One of the things that his quote shows very well is, not only Jüngel’s superb exposition of Barth’s actualistic and historicist doctrine of God, but the way in which Barth’s doctrine of God establishes a properly theological construal of being.  In contrast to John Milbank’s accusation, that Barth’s work ultimately fails “to redefine being and knowledge theologically” (Radical Orthodoxy, p. 22), Jüngel shows how Barth’s Christocentric theology of election grounds and is grounded in a properly theological ontology.  For Barth and Jüngel, to be is to be included in God’s primal decision to be God-for-humanity.  And, as revealed in Christ, this decision is not something extraneous to God, but is rather identical with God’s very being (for Jesus is “very God of very God”).  God’s decision to be God for us is the very decision by which God is God.  As Jüngel points out, “the decision about God’s being is not to be understood only as a decision for God, but also – precisly as a decision for God – as a decision for humanity” (p. 81).  Therefore, being is theologically defined as that which is included in the event of the triune God’s election of the world in Jesus, which includes all things, leaving nothing out.  In contrast to Milbank and others who see the triumph of a sort of post-Kantian philosophy in Barth’s thought, when he is read rightly, as Jüngel exemplfies, his theology offers a profoundly robust theological ontology that is at once Christological, historical, actualistic, and participatory.  It is this ontology that I will be exploring in the upcoming Karl Barth conference, with special reference to the doctrine of the Trinity. 

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