The Interruptive Word: Eberhard Jüngel on the Sacramental Structure of God’s Relation to the World 9781472551368, 9780567402950

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Acknowledgments The researching, writing, and revising of the present volume took place over the course of eight years and in the context of four rather different locales: Aberdeen, Scotland; Strasbourg, France; Birmingham, Alabama; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Mentors, colleagues, friends, and family members in these four cities and beyond fed the impetus to keep the project moving forward toward its completion, defense, and publication. While I am grateful to everyone who travelled with me during this adventurous and oftentimes arduous intellectual journey, even if for only part of the way, a few individuals deserve special recognition in these prefatory pages. The Department of Divinity and Religious Studies at King’s College, University of Aberdeen, was the setting of the initial two years of this project. I gained much from my dialogues with Department faculty members Brian Brock, Simon Gathercole, Ian McFarland, Francesca Murphy, and Nick Thompson. Collegial conversations proved pivotal for making a number of material judgments on the topic at hand, and, more generally, on Jüngel’s theology as a whole. I am especially indebted to Aberdonian colleagues Jake Andrews, Chris Asprey, Rich Cornell, David Gilland, Tim Harvey, Tom Holsinger-Friesen, Brian Lugioyo, Jonathan Norgate, Ben Reynolds, Darren Sarisky, Andrew Stobart, Ethan Worthington, Jeremy Wynne, and Alfred Yuen. An extra bit of thanks goes to Justin Stratis for providing some much needed levity on my defense day. I sincerely thank the faculty and staff of the Institut für Ökumenische Forschung in Strasbourg, France, for the hospitality and generous advice during my fellowship year of 2007–08. This thesis would not be possible without the numerous exchanges with Institut faculty members André Birmelé and Theodore Dieter. Ken Appold, Elke Leypold, Herbert Moyo, Elisabeth Parmentier, and Matthäus Wassermann helped to make our time in France memorable. Additional conversations at the Institut with Peter DeMay, Niels Gregersen, Hans-Peter Großhans, Jeremy Morris, Bp. Ragnar Persenius, Risto Saarinen, Nicholas Sagovsky, Aud Tønnessen, Fr. Matthias Türk, and Timothy

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Wengert served to shape my thinking concerning the complexities of Jüngel’s theology. I am grateful to Shawn O’Brien, Jason Pavey, Davey Pavey, and James Sheffield of Charter Fire Systems, Inc., for a bit of relief from Jüngel following the rough transition to Birmingham. Pete Bradburn, Andy Byers, Pr. Chris DeGreen, Joe Dentici, the Ferrier clan, Ryan Hankins, Mike Murphy, and Nate Slabaugh all offered invaluable advice and support during those days. Much deserved thanks go to Ken Roxburgh for the opportunity to teach at Samford, beginning in 2010. The outstanding faculty, staff, and student body of the Department of Religion made my first teaching experience an unforgettable one. Garland Vance of the WinShape Foundation kindly made arrangements for my write-up retreat on the beautiful campus of Berry College in Rome, Georgia. I am indebted to Carl Beckwith, Dennis Bielfeldt, Carl Braaten, Gerald Bray, David Chao, Paul DeHart, Michael Delashmutt, John Drury, Paul Hinlicky, Stephen Hultgren, Fisher Humphreys, Peter Kline, Joeseph Mangina, Mark Mattes, Bruce McCormack, Paul Molnar, Piotr Małysz, Adam Neder, Chad Pecknold, Chad Raith, Michael Root, William Rusch, Daniel Treier, and Kevin Vanhoozer for pivotal conversations along the way. Alan Torrance and Phil Ziegler made for an ideal examination committee, and many of our exchanges from that day have been worked into the present publication. Wilton Bunch deserves special recognition for his constant support and encouragement throughout the years. I am grateful as well to Eddie Wilson and Tom Nelson for their generosity. I also thank the entire family of Baker Publishing Group, and particularly the team at Baker Academic and Brazos Press, for the warm welcome following our transition to West Michigan. John Webster, my erstwhile Doktorvater, has been a mentor and friend during these many long years of bringing this research on Jüngel’s theology to light. John has championed my course of research from the very start, carefully commented upon hundreds of pages of draft materials, encouraged me during many dark nights of the soul along the way, and fought for my academic existence in the face of university bureaucratic pressure. The present volume would not be possible without John’s mentorship and enthusiasm. Finally, I am more grateful than I can ever fully express in words to my family for being unhesitatingly encouraging, supportive, and generous during

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this journey with Jüngel. My father and mother never (visibly!) balked, even when my academic pursuits entailed distance and sacrifice. Our extended family, particularly my grandmother, have always shown support, even in those days in which the end of the path was nowhere in sight. I dedicate this volume to Dacia, who has truly been my chief source of strength and joy throughout this long, challenging period of research and writing. You have borne this project with much patience and charitability, and never once stopped believing in me, even during those times when I began to doubt myself. And you brought our three beautiful children—Robert, Reace, and Liam—into the world along the way, bearing the bulk of the parental load while I did my best to contend with the Grand Old Man of Tübingen. Indeed, while there are many women who do noble things, you, to my mind at least, surpass them all.

A Note on Translation All English quotations with references to German, French, and Spanish sources are my own translations. Any quotation that references an English edition is from that edition unless otherwise stated.

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Introduction

Eberhard Jüngel’s theology of sacrament is a topic that has been largely ignored by interpreters of his thought. In the late 1980s, Swiss theologian Henry Mottu published an interesting article comparing Jüngel’s earliest statement on the problem of sacrament, the important essay “Das Sakrament—was ist das? Versuch einer Antwort,”1 to Karl Barth’s fragment on water baptism in CD IV/4.2 Several years later, and in the English language Festschrift published on the occasion of Jüngel’s sixtieth birthday, Geoffrey Wainwright contributed an insightful, though highly critical, analysis of “Church and Sacrament(s)” in Jüngel’s theology.3 Roland Spujth’s doctoral dissertation on Jüngel and Thomas Torrance, published as Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel,4 contains some extensive reflections comparing the two theologians on the concept of sacramental presence.5 Apart from these three texts, however, Jüngel’s contribution to contemporary sacramental theology is, at most, mentioned only in passing in Eberhard Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” EvTh 26 (1966), pp. 320–36. Throughout our analysis we will be citing from the revised and expanded edition of this essay published in Eberhard Jüngel and Karl Rahner, Was ist ein Sakrament? Verstöße zur Verständigung, Ökumenische Forschungen. Ergänzende Abteilung. Kleine ökumenische Schriften 6 (Freiburg: Herder, 1971), pp. 11–40. 2 Henry Mottu, “Les Sacrements selon Karl Barth et Eberhard Jüngel,” FV 88.2 (1989), pp. 33–55. 3 Geoffrey Wainwright, “Church and Sacrament(s),” in John B. Webster (ed.), The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in his Sixtieth Year, pp. 90–105 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 4 Roland Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel, Studia Theologica Ludensia 51 (Lund: Lund University Press, 1995). 5 See ibid., pp. 121–65. 1

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analyses of his thought.6 And to date no scholar has undertaken an exhaustive investigation of his approach to the problem of sacrament. The present study contributes to the field of research into Jüngel’s theology by attempting just such an investigation. Our intention in the following analysis is to summarize and to evaluate the sacramental theology that emerges in Jüngel’s writings. Over the course of our study, we bring to light the different aspects of Jüngel’s approach to the theology of sacrament, and raise questions concerning its coherence and tenability. Our method for this undertaking is a close, careful reading of pertinent texts, supported by appeals to relevant primary and secondary source materials.

A. Some comments on Jüngel as a Lutheran theologian At the outset of this study, it is necessary to at least briefly address the question of Jüngel’s theological identity. A common approach to this issue found primarily in Anglo-American studies of Jüngel’s thought is the attempt to identify the extent of his indebtedness to his influences. Paul Dehart, for example, begins his examination of Jüngel’s doctrine of God by describing a “theological ‘grand tour’” that Jüngel took in the Winter Semester of 1957–58, in the course of which he visited Zürich, Basel, and Freiburg, home to Ebeling, Barth, and Heidegger, respectively.7 He argues that these figures, together also with Bultmann, Fuchs, Hegel, and Luther, are Jüngel’s “dominant intellectual influences,” whose work decisively impacts Jüngel’s theology.8 Spjuth makes a similar proposal, identifying Jüngel’s “theological mentors [as] Luther, Bultmann, and Barth,” the analysis of whose thought is “help(ed)” by “Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and the hermeneutics of Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling.”9 Somewhat differently, but moving in the same general direction, Mark Mattes suggests that Jüngel’s indebtedness to Bultmann, Heidegger, See, for example, John B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 107–08; idem, “Justification, Analogy and Action,” in John B. Webster (ed.), The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in his Sixtieth Year, pp. 123–24 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994); and Roland Daniel Zimany, Vehicle for God: The Metaphorical Theology of Eberhard Jüngel (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1994), pp. 54, 68. 7 Paul J. Dehart, Beyond the Necessary God: Trinitarian Faith and Philosophy in the Thought of Eberhard Jüngel, American Academy of Religion: Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, ed. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, no. 15 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), p. 5. 8 Ibid. See the entirety of Dehart’s sketch of Jüngel’s relation to these influences on pp. 5–8. 9 Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence, p. 42. 6

Introduction

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Hegel, the New Hermeneutic theologians (Fuchs and Ebeling), and especially Barth, inevitably distorts his reading of Luther.10 A less persuasive case than these is presented by Zimany in Vehicle for God. Zimany begins his study by stating rather baldly that, “fundamentally, Jüngel’s theology combines the thought of Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger . . . by uniting Heidegger’s approach to language and thought with the content of Barth’s theology.”11 By so doing, Zimany asserts, Jüngel successfully overcomes “the half-century-old debate between the dialectical (Barthian) and existentialist (Bultmann/early Heideggerian) poles of kerygmatic theology, by incorporating both of them into his own perspective.”12 This putative confluence of the “dialectical” and the “existentialist” becomes the lens through which Zimany examines some particular aspects of Jüngel’s thought. Moreover, he proposes that Jüngel, read in just this way, has “cultivated a fertile environment for sound theological thought in the future.”13 While we certainly acknowledge the important roles played by Barth, Bultmann, Heidegger, Hegel, Fuchs, Ebeling, and Luther in the development of Jüngel’s thought, we are hesitant to suggest that the broad contours of his theology can be neatly traced to some or all of these influences. First of all, such a model of Jüngel’s theological identity, perhaps inadvertently, implies that his thought owes more to his teachers and literary mentors than to his own formidable critical capacities. We see this tendency, for example, in Zimany’s thesis that Jüngel’s theology is a simple admixture of Barth and Heidegger, and also in Mattes’s assertion that Jüngel misreads Luther due to the overwhelming sway of post-Hegelian philosophy and post-Barthian theology. Second, while in no way wishing to diminish the importance of these particular theologians and philosophers for Jüngel’s constructive theology, we are concerned that narrowly limiting his thought to some or all of these thinkers fails to take into account his extensive and favorable engagements with other interlocutors. Bonhoeffer, for example, is featured in Jüngel’s approach to the problem of “death of God” theology.14 And, as we shall demonstrate in the course of our Mark C. Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology (Lutheran Quarterly Books; ed. Paul Rorem; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 25, 33–39, 50–53. 11 Zimany, Vehicle for God, p. vii. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 See, in particular, 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), pp. 57–63. 10

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analysis, Schleiermacher plays an important role in Jüngel’s examinations of the phenomenology of worship.15 Webster, we contend, offers a clue toward a more tenable reading of Jüngel’s relation to his influences when he comments, speaking in particular of Jüngel’s relation to his Doktorvater, Fuchs, that the New Hermeneutic theologian by no means “merely furnishe(s) Jüngel with a set of hermeneutical principles woodenly copied.”16 Rather, Webster suggests that Fuchs “has provided a fertile stimulus to (Jüngel’s) own theological creativity.”17 Webster thus mitigates the language of “influence” by asserting that Jüngel is a creative theologian in his own right, an original thinker whose thought exhibits an inventive engagement with, in the present instance, Fuchs. We propose that these comments on Jüngel and Fuchs are applicable to the question of Jüngel’s indebtedness to his other interlocutors. Jüngel’s original and critically rigorous theology resists categorization according to one or more of his teachers and literary mentors. In order to do justice to the acuity of his thought, it is therefore necessary to find a different way to frame the question of his theological identity. Our model for this task is to consider Jüngel as a Lutheran theologian,18 and to situate his contribution to contemporary theology within a particular variety of post-Ritschlian Lutheran dogmatics. As we shall see, this approach to Jüngel’s theological identity is particularly well-suited for our analysis of his sacramental theology, as it highlights an aspect of his thought that is especially pertinent to his description of sacramental being. It is neither necessary nor even possible for us to present in the following comments an exhaustive account of trends in modern Lutheran theology. Nor will we attempt to articulate any alternative varieties of contemporary Lutheran thought. Instead, we set out with the modest goal of identifying the character of Jüngel’s Lutheran theology according to a divergence among modern Lutheran theologians concerning the problem of God’s relation to the world, and particularly to the church and its visible structures. See Eberhard Jüngel, “Der Gottesdienst als Fest der Freiheit—Der theologische Ort des Gottesdienstes nach Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in Indikative der Gnade—Imperative der Freiheit. Theologische Erörterungen IV, pp. 330–50 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); and idem, “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” in Wertlose Wahrheit—Zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens. Theologische Erörterungen III, 2. Auflage, pp. 283–310 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 16 Webster, Eberhard Jüngel, p. 7. 17 Ibid. 18 On Jüngel’s self-identification as a Lutheran theologian, see, for example, his comments in the essay, “The Church as Sacrament?” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, pp. 189–91 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 15

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An important essay by American Lutheran theologian David Yeago is critical to our purposes here.19 Yeago traces the divergence in question to two very different ecclesiologies that emerged among German Lutheran theologians in the 1930s and during the Kirchenkampf. On the one hand, Yeago argues, Hirsch, Althaus, and Elert stress the invisibility of the church to the exclusion of the church’s organization and institutional form(s).20 Concomitantly, this entails that, for the believer, the encounter with the justifying grace of God is a sheer existential event that takes place apart from the church’s visible structures. Consequently, baptism “does not initiate one into any distinctively ordered communal space . . . but only into an ahistorical place ‘before God,’ which is to be marked off carefully from any location within earthly historical common life.”21 Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, argues for precisely the opposite ecclesial ontology; namely, that the church, “in its eschatological newness as the body of Christ, claims for itself a distinct public presence, a structured social space of its own.”22 As Yeago points out, Bonhoeffer proposes that this “ecclesial space” takes shape both in the gathered assembly and in the institutional, and therefore visible, order and offices of the church.23 Moreover, for Bonhoeffer, conversion calls the believer into a participatory life in fellowship with others in the context of the church’s public sphere.24 We see, then, that, according to Yeago’s reading, these prominent Lutheran theologians of the Kirchenkampf period diverge over the question of the relation between conversion and the visible and structured church. Yeago demonstrates that, in postwar Lutheran theology, this divergence reappeared in the very different ecclesiologies of Ebeling and Peter Brunner. Ebeling, Yeago contends, asserts that “the eschatological breakthrough accomplished once and for all in Christ is present in the world only in ‘the word,’” and thus that the presence of God in this word is “an inward presence, a presence located in the conscience of the individual.”25 Consequently, Ebeling’s David S. Yeago, “The Church as Polity? The Lutheran Context of Robert W. Jenson’s Ecclesiology,” in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson, pp. 201–37 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). We will focus on Section III on “Lutheran Ecclesiology in the German Church Struggle” (pp. 214–26). 20 See ibid., pp. 216–18. 21 Ibid., p. 218. 22 Ibid., pp. 218–19. 23 Ibid., p. 219. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 221. 19

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theology makes little room for the public aspects of converted life in the visible community of the church. Salvation, rather, is reduced to the word-event that takes place in the conscience in an existential encounter.26 By contrast, Brunner, Yeago shows, identifies “the sacrificed body of Christ with the Spirit-worked body of the church,” and thus “implies that the eschatological presence [of God] is located precisely in the Spirit’s gathering of a community centered in the eucharistic anamnesis.”27 For Brunner, therefore, the converted life is oriented to the visible, embodied, and political existence of the church.28 While we in no way suggest that Yeago’s hermeneutic for reading these few theologians can be unilaterally applied to the story of modern Lutheran theology, we do believe that he has correctly identified at least one aspect of a broad distinction that appears in recent Lutheran dogmatics. For additional proof of this distinction, we may briefly cite the research of the Finnish school of Luther research,29 the conclusions of which concerning justification and theosis we need not embrace in order to acknowledge some insights concerning the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Lutheranism. In his important study on the “presence-of-Christ” motif in Luther research,30 Risto Saarinen traces the existentialist variety of Lutheran theology, represented in Yeago’s survey chiefly by Ebeling, back to the ontological program of Lotze,31 the anti-metaphysical epistemology of Ritschl,32 the Neo-Kantian transcendentalism of the Marburg Philosopher Cohen,33 and the ethics of Hermann.34 According to Saarinen, the historians and dogmaticians of the Luther Renaissance period, whose work had a decisive impact especially on subsequent German Lutheran theology, adopted from their predecessors an ontology of relations, an aversion to classical metaphysics, and an exclusively forensic interpretation of the event 28 29 26 27



30

33 34 31 32

See ibid., pp. 220–22. Ibid., p. 223. See ibid., pp. 222–26. For introductions to the Finnish school, see the essays in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds), Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); and the monograph, Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005). Risto Saarinen, Gottes Wirken auf uns. Die transzendentale Deutung des Gegenwart-Christi-Motivs in der Lutherforschung (Wiesbaden: Steiner Franz Verlag, 1989). Ibid., pp. 9–25. Ibid., pp. 25–42. Ibid., pp. 43–51. Ibid., pp. 51–85.

Introduction

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of justification.35 Saarinen’s analysis, then, suggests that the tendency of certain Lutheran theologians to locate the encounter with God in his word apart from the visible and structural aspects of the church belongs to a larger nexus of issues that derives from a particular philosophical background. Without in any way fully endorsing Saarinen’s reading of Lutheran existentialism, we propose that Jüngel’s theology fits neatly into this broad strand of modern Lutheran dogmatics. This is not to suggest that Jüngel’s thought is simply a repackaging of that of his predecessors, as, again, we consider Jüngel to be a constructive theologian of considerable originality and critical acumen. However, as we shall see, Jüngel’s constructive proposals on the theology of sacrament are exhibitive of the emphasis on existential encounter that we find also, for example, in Ebeling, Fuchs, and Bultmann. Similar to such theologians, Jüngel locates this existential encounter externally to the self and in the event of the word of God, and is wary of drawing concrete connections between this word-event and the visible and temporal continuities of the world. Indeed, we will discover throughout our analysis that Jüngel’s most frequent way of describing sacramental being is through the employment of the category of “interruption,” which encapsulates this invisible, existential character of the encounter with the word. And one of the principal goals of our investigation is to test whether Jüngel’s insistence upon the interruptive character of the sacrament vis-àvis visible and temporal actualities in fact results in a tenable and coherent agenda for sacramental theology.

B. Sacrament and the ontology of justification An additional issue upon which we must at least briefly comment in this introduction is Jüngel’s approach to the ontological entailments of the event of justification, and the implications of this issue for his sacramental theology. We covered some of this ground in the previous section and will now make the connections explicit. We do not need to review the entirety of Jüngel’s doctrine See the entirety of his argument in ibid., pp. 86–177.

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of justification, but may concentrate our comments on the theme which is most pertinent to our study, namely, that which Jüngel calls “the justifying event.”36 Jüngel conceives that the normal course of human existence is characterized by a compulsive drive toward “reckless self-actualization,” the result of which is that “the fundamental relationships of life, instead of being mutually encouraging, start to compete and damage each other and bring about mutual destruction.”37 This sinful course of existence, he argues, is a bitter lie, a “deadly sham existence”38 that is the very opposite of what God originally intended for his creatures. Ensnared by the compulsion to actualize the self through works, the individual becomes the homo faber, and “being human is reduced to being [a] manufacturer.”39 But the end of this course of life is not the establishment of the self through works, but rather the death that is “at work wherever relationships breakdown and are replaced by a relational void.”40 Concomitantly, Jüngel contends that the biblical concept of “righteousness” is a “relational concept”41 that refers to the reconciliation of the relationships to God, to others, and to the self, that have broken down because of the sinful compulsion toward self-actualization. Moreover, the homo faber, he asserts, cannot achieve or acquire this righteousness through works, and thus not on the basis of the law.42 Rather, righteousness is God’s alone to give, and it is revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ.43 That is to say, for Jüngel, the event of justification, which is the declaration by God of the sinner as righteous, turns the believer from a doer into a receiver, from an actor into a hearer.44 This, he argues, is because the righteousness of justification is revealed in and as a See Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 51–88. For this survey of the implications of the doctrine of justification for Jüngel’s sacramental theology, we will limit our comments to his analysis in Justification. The reader is directed to additional examples of Jüngel’s doctrine of justification in Jüngel, “Freiheitsrechte und Gerechtigkeit,” in Unterwegs zur Sache. Theologische Erörterungen I, 3. Auflage, pp. 60–79 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); idem, “The World as Possibility and Actuality: The Ontology of the Doctrine of Justification,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, pp. 95–123 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989); and idem, “Living Out of Righteousness: God’s Action—Human Agency,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays II, pp. 241–63 (trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and John B. Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). 37 Jüngel, Justification, p. 54. 38 Ibid., p. 1. 39 Ibid., p. 54. 40 Ibid., p. 55. 41 Ibid., pp. 62–63. 42 Ibid., p. 55. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 36

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word, “the eschatological Time-Word of God,” which “says something new, which makes other things new . . . for it is the power of God for salvation.”45 The justifying word of the gospel is thus “a creative address, an eschatological announcement”46 that “introduces a new age” and “discloses the nature of the old world age, which is now totally obsolete.”47 It is precisely in order to secure this tension between the new time of the word and the old time of the world that Jüngel invokes the category of interruption to describe the phenomenon of the “word of the cross.” His description is worth quoting in full: The real life context of the world is redefined in the power of God the Holy Spirit. This occurs by God’s righteousness fundamentally interrupting the real life context of the world by the cross of Jesus, and by its continuing to interrupt it over and over by “the message about the cross.” The interruption is at so fundamental a level that the ungodliness of the world is condemned to and caused to die. The justification of the ungodly is anything but the justification of what exists, and certainly not the justification of existing ungodliness. Rather, it means the removal of all that. It is the most far-reaching attack imaginable on the real life context of an ungodly world.48

We see, then, that, for Jüngel, the word of the gospel must interrupt the actual because its message of justifying grace exceeds the limits of a world ensnared in the sham existence of sin. As he puts it elsewhere, employing terminology to which we will return on numerous occasions throughout this study, the interrupting word of justification brings with it possibilities that indeed relate to worldly actualities, though without arising from or being conditioned by those actualities.49 As far as the individual is concerned, this interruptive word relates externally to the self, as it shatters the sinful, sham continuity of the compulsion to self-actualization and, in justifying the believer in the forum coram deo, allows the believer to, in faith, return to the self anew.50 Throughout his writings, Jüngel invokes the category of interruption to describe the word of God, and in the background of such usage is this ontological structure of the event of justification. As we have mentioned, our 48 49 50 45 46 47

Ibid. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 81. See Jüngel, “The World as Possibility and Actuality,” pp. 116–18. See Jüngel, Justification, pp. 211–14.

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analysis, below, demonstrates that this interruptive ontological structure also recurs in Jüngel’s theology of sacrament. We will discover that the category of interruption is a critical component of his understanding of the sacramentality of the word, plays an interesting and important role in his Christological determination of the category of sacrament, qualifies his hesitations concerning the sacramentality of the visible and structured church, and marks the majority of his descriptions of the phenomena of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. And, while we express our appreciation of the insight, highlighted by his employment of the category of interruption, concerning the relation of the word and the sacrament to the sinfulness of the world, we question whether Jüngel’s persistent appeal to this category in his sacramental theology gives way to some subtle, but significant, difficulties.

Part One

The Sacramental Character of the Word of God

The first step in our analysis of Jüngel’s sacramental theology is to examine the claim, ubiquitous in his writings, that God comes to the world by coming-to-speech (kommen zur Sprache). According to Jüngel, in the event of his word God makes human language capable of bearing his self-disclosure. In this event “human words do not come too close to God, but rather God as the word comes close to man in human words.”1 The word of God is thus, for Jüngel, the location of God in the world, the place where God allows himself to be grasped by faith.2 And in precisely this sense the event of the word of God has an ineluctably sacramental character. As he explains in God’s Being is in Becoming, “God’s being-as-object is . . . sacramental reality in that, in the reality which surrounds us, God brings himself to speech through this reality. God’s being-as-object as sacrament means: God speaks of himself in a worldly manner, that is, God speaks with us in a human way.”3 The theme of language and the specific problem of the word of God are prominent particularly in Jüngel’s writings during the first decade of his career 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 288. 2 See the discussion in ibid., pp. 197–99. 3 Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase (trans. John B. Webster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 66. See also his discussion in God as the Mystery of the World, p. 309, on the “sacramental function” of the word as the story of Jesus Christ. 1

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and up to the publication in 1977 of the first German edition of God as the Mystery of the World. While it is certainly the case that these issues recur in Jüngel’s later writings, in the earlier years of his career he appears especially preoccupied with developing a robust dogmatic account of the language of faith. It is possible to trace this preoccupation to his creative engagements with his most immediate influences; namely, to Ebeling, Fuchs, Barth, Bultmann, and Heidegger, all of whom made substantial contributions to twentieth-century theological and/or philosophical approaches to the problem of language. Jüngel frequently cites each of these teachers in the most important texts from this period in which he addresses the theme of the language of faith; namely, Paulus und Jesus4 (1962), “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes”5 (1966), “God—as a Word of our Language”6 (1969), “Metaphorical Truth”7 (1974), and God as the Mystery of the World. And in each of these texts we discover a strong emphasis on the word of God as the location of the encounter between God and humanity; that is, on the sacramental character of the word of God. This idea that the word of God is sacramental is pivotal for our analysis of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament for at least two reasons. First, Jüngel consistently returns to the doctrine of the word of God when describing other aspects of sacramental theology. Indeed, as we proceed through our analyses in Parts Two, Three, and Four, we will continue to observe the importance of the word of God for some of Jüngel’s basic positions on the problem of sacrament. We will see, for example, that Jesus Christ, who Jüngel identifies as, strictly speaking, the one sacrament of God for the world, is sacramental precisely because he is the word of God spoken for the salvation of the world. Additionally, the thesis that the word of God is free vis-à-vis the continuous structures of the church (i.e. its ministries, offices, liturgies, etc.) contributes to Jüngel’s hesitations concerning the idea that the church itself is sacramental. Eberhard Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus—Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie, 6. unveränderte Auflage, Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie 2, hgs. Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Fuchs, and Manfred Mezger (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986). 5 Eberhard Jüngel, “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes: Ein hermeneutischer Beitrag zum christologischen Problem,” in Unterwegs zur Sache, Theologische Erörterungen I, 3. Auflage, pp. 126–144 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 6 Eberhard Jüngel, “God—as a Word of our Language: For Helmut Gollwitzer on His Sixtieth Birthday,” in Fredrick Herzog (ed.), Theology of the Liberating Word, pp. 25–45 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971). 7 Eberhard Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth: Reflections on the theological relevance of metaphor as a contribution to the hermeneutics of narrative theology,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, pp. 16–71 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 4

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And a key component of his approach to baptism and the Lord’s Supper is the concept of verbum visibile, according to which the word of God is added to a physical element in order to make a sacrament. It thus behooves us to have in mind a firm grasp of Jüngel’s doctrine of the word of God as we proceed. Second and more importantly, we will see that, for Jüngel, the sacramental word of God and “the reality which surrounds us,” to follow his idiom in the passage cited above, relate to each other in a specific and very complex manner. We briefly encountered this issue in our introductory comments on the relation between Jüngel’s employment of the category of sacrament and his understanding of the ontology of justification. We may here summarize those comments by saying that, according to Jüngel, the relation between word and world is characterized by an ineluctably interruptive structure. This structure is a dominant feature of Jüngel’s theology of the word of God, recurs in his Christology, ecclesiology, and doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and, in turn, has enormous implications for his descriptions of “sacrament” beneath these headings. We thus attempt in Part One to uncover the components of this structure through an examination of some particular aspects of his understanding of language. Additionally, we will identify the critical questions concerning this structure to which we will continue to return as our analysis moves forward.

2

Language of Address as the Location of the Encounter between God and Humanity

The first concern in our analysis of Jüngel’s description of the sacramental word of God is to examine one of the central motifs that appear in his writings on language; namely, the category of language of address. Jüngel’s general concern in these writings is to answer the question of what type of human speech is capable of mediating God’s self-communication. His consistent proposal in reply to this question is that language of address is the basic anthropological situation into which God interruptedly comes to speech, and is therefore the theological location of the encounter between God and the human person. Jüngel’s approach to this issue is of particular importance to our study because it lucidly exhibits the aforementioned structure of word and world that marks his theology of sacrament. In what follows we uncover some features of this structure by working through Jüngel’s comments on the anthropological and theological aspects of language of address.

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A. The basic anthropological function of language of address1 One of the noteworthy characteristics of his writings on language is the fact that Jüngel, like Ebeling2 and Fuchs3 also, is interested not only in the theological concept of the word of God but also in the basic anthropological significance of human language, and thus additionally in the various functions that language plays in the existence of the human person. On several occasions, for example, he describes the human person by means of the Aristotelian concept of ζώον λόγον έχον, employing it not to identify the human person as an animal rationale, but as a “being endowed with language.”4 It is clear from his analysis, though, that, for Jüngel, this endowment of language is no mere gift, as if human persons were simply bestowed with a capacity for communication. Rather, Jüngel proposes that the act of language, the very phenomenon of speaking and hearing, is the event that constitutes human being. As he expresses it in “Metaphorical Truth,” human persons “exist as a passing over from being into On the scope and content of Jüngel’s theological anthropology, see the excellent study by Piotr J. Małysz titled Trinity, Freedom, and Love: An Engagement with the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology 18, (ed. John Webster, Ian A. McFarland, and Ivor Davidson; London: T&T Clark International, 2012), which was published just prior to the submission of the manuscript of the present study. Małysz takes a very different and more extensive approach to issues in Jüngel’s theological anthropology than what we will attempt in this chapter. See especially his insightful reading of Jüngel’s analysis of the ontological entailments of human relationality, language, and knowledge on pages 17–60. 2 Ebeling’s most comprehensive analysis is found in Gerhard Ebeling, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language (trans. R. A. Wilson; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). 3 See especially Ernst Fuchs, Hermeneutik, 4. Auflage (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1960), pp. 91–140; and idem, “Das Problem der theologischen Hermeneutik,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze 1. Zum hermeneutische Problem in der Theologie. Die existentiale Interpretation, pp. 116–37 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1959). 4 See, for example, Jüngel, “God—as a Word of Our Language: For Helmut Gollwitzer on His Sixtieth Birthday,” in Fredrick Herzog (ed.), Theology of the Liberating Word, p. 37 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971); idem, “Anthropomorphism,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, p. 92 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989); and idem, “Humanity in Correspondence to God. Remarks on the image of God as a basic concept in theological anthropology,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, p. 146 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). The Greek has commonly been translated otherwise as “being endowed with (or ‘having’) reason.” Jüngel’s particular interpretation and employment of the phrase echoes Ebeling’s usage for describing the Sprachlichsein of human being. According to Ebeling, true human being is “being-together,” and being-together occurs when speech is both received and given. Thus, the human person is ζώον λόγον έχον insofar as he or she participates in this ontic reception and giving of language. See Gerhard Ebeling, Wort und Glaube, Bd. 1, 3. Auflage (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1967), pp. 368–71, 440. 1

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language, a passing over which itself belongs to being as a gain to being.”5 Later in the text he declares that, in the event of language, “we exist as those who have been addressed, as those who, on this basis, let ourselves be addressed by that which is . . . as world. Along with this world which addresses us, we transfer ourselves into language, and within language transfer one into the other.”6 These rather obscure statements nevertheless point to at least three important characteristics of Jüngel’s anthropological-linguistic project. First, we note that Jüngel conceives human being according to an ontology of event. The being of the human person, he asserts, is a “passing over,” a “transfer,” a movement from being to language. While such terminology is characteristically idiomatic, it is clear from our citations that, for Jüngel, human being is not a static, posited, and commonly held substance. Being, rather, happens; or better, being is a happening that occurs as language occurs. Such claims echo Heidegger’s assertions that language is “the house of being”7 and “the foundation of human being,” and that, as such, “we are . . . within language and with language before all else.”8 Similarly, Jüngel says elsewhere in “Metaphorical Truth” that human persons have their “ontological locus” in the movement from being to language.9 In short, for Jüngel human being is located linguistically; it occurs in events of speech. Second, the assertion that human being occurs in the event of language makes clear that we are dealing in Jüngel’s thought with an anthropological ontology of relations, for language is something that necessarily takes place between persons, even if we grant that one of these persons only passively, Eberhard Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth: Reflections on the theological relevance of metaphor as a contribution to the hermeneutics of narrative theology,” in Theological Essays I, ed. John B. Webster 52, 16–71. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989. For similarities between such statements and the “New Hermeneutic” agenda, see, for example, Gerhard Ebeling, “Word of God and Hermeneutics,” in James W. Leitch (trans.), Word and Faith, p. 327 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963); and Ernst Fuchs, “The Essence of Language Event and Christology,” in Andrew Scobie (trans.), Studies of the Historical Jesus, p. 222 (London: SCM Press, 1964). 6 Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth,” p. 69. 7 Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” in Peter D. Hertz (trans.), On the Way to Language, p. 63 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1971). 8 Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in Peter D. Hertz (trans.), On the Way to Language, p. 112 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1971). 9 Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth,” p. 53. 5

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as hearer, receives the word of the other.10 In the context of his work on the concept of the coram-relation, Ebeling develops a complex relational ontology that locates the being of the human person in the relationships to God, to others, and to the self.11 We find a similar ontological pattern in Jüngel’s theology; for instance, in his work on the “limits to humanity,” in which he describes human finitude as corresponding to the relationships between the human person and God, others, and the self.12 Jüngel makes additional comments along such lines in his later essay entitled “On Becoming Truly Human,” in this case echoing the forums language of Ebeling: Human persons . . . exist in a web of relations through which they are manifest with other beings and in which they come to themselves outside of themselves. It is essential to the human person to exist in relation to others and in relation to God . . . The human person is essentially a person in the presence of ___, that is, human in relation to ___. One is essentially human before God (coram Deo) and human before the form of the world (coram mundo).13

And in Death: The Riddle and the Mystery, Jüngel explicitly ties this relational approach to anthropological ontology to the theme of language, identifying the “linguistic character of [human] existence” as “one of the best indications” of the basic human capacity to exist outside of the self in the presence of God and the other. “We relate to the world,” he comments, “by listening to it. We open ourselves beyond the world and ourselves through speech.”14 Third, we observe that the event of movement from being into language does not simply constitute being, but, for Jüngel, increases being. As Jüngel Jüngel has clarified this relational ontology in the following way: “Being always primarily means being together with . . . Being is thus a concept of relationships (Beziehungsbegriff), a concept of relations (Relationsbegriff). It is being only in connection to and as connection to relationships.” Eberhard Jüngel, “Böse—was ist das? Versuch einer theologischen Begriffsbestimmung,” in Erfahrungen mit der Erfahrung: Unterwegs bemerkt, p. 66 (Stuttgart: RADIUS-Verlag, 2008). 11 See especially Gerhard Ebeling, Dogmatik des christlichen Glaubens, Bd.. I, Prolegomena, Teil 1, Der Glaube an Gott den Schöpfer der Welt, 3. Auflage (Tübingen: J.C.B. Moher [Paul Siebeck], 1987), pp. 346–55. 12 See the entire argument in Jüngel, “Grenzen des Menschseins,” in Entsprechungen: Gott—Wahrheit— Mensch. Theologische Erörtungen II. 3. Auflage um Register erweitert, pp. 355–61 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), especially Theses 0.1 through 3.21. 13 Eberhard Jüngel, “On Becoming Truly Human: The Significance of the Reformation Distinction Between Person and Works for the Self-Understanding of Modern Humanity,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays II, p. 221 (trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and John B. Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). 14 Eberhard Jüngel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery (trans. Iain & Ute Nicol; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), p. 63. 10

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asserts in our first quotation from “Metaphorical Truth,” language “belongs to being as a gain to being.” What Jüngel has in mind by this opaque statement becomes a bit more transparent when we consider the theme of the ontological priority of possibility over actuality. As we commented in the Introduction, Jüngel contends that the word brings to its hearers ontological possibilities that indeed relate to worldly actualities, but that do not themselves arise from such actualities. In this way, he distances his own ontology of justification from his reading of the Aristotelian metaphysical tradition, which, he argues, imprisons being in act and actuality and consequently gives way to a static ontology of works.15 Over against this tradition he suggests that being is set free from act and actuality by the ontic possibilities that emerge in events of language of address. Were being ontically fixed in actuality, there would be no movement or increase to being, for being, so defined, would be actual and just so static. On the contrary, Jüngel insists that being is liberated from the tyranny of the actual by the coming-to-speech of eschatological possibilities. As Webster puts it, “possibility ‘comes to speech’ in language which breaks the pattern of reference to actuality.”16 And this, we should note, does not occur to the complete dissolution of actuality, but rather, “language of address . . . establish(es) the power of the possible over against, though not without, the actual.”17 It “brings to expression more than the actual and yet equally engages with actuality,” and, in just this sense, it “makes a gain to being become an event.”18 In events of speech, therefore, being not only moves but also increases, for in language alone new, alien, and unprecedented ontic possibilities emerge and add to being.19 Human being, therefore, is eschatological being, being that is always in becoming. Jüngel’s anthropology thus consists of an ontology of the human person that is oriented to the event, to relations, and to becoming. And we see that human language plays the pivotal role in all three of these ontological orientations. But On this point, see the entirety of his argument in Jüngel, “The World as Possibility and Actuality: The Ontology of the Doctrine of Justification,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, pp. 95–123 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 16 John B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 46. 17 Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth,” p. 48. 18 Ibid., p. 70. 19 See also Fuchs’ brief, but similar discussion of the ontological priority of possibility over actuality in “What is a ‘Language-event’?—A Letter,” in Andrew Scobie (trans.), Studies of the Historical Jesus, p. 207 (London: SCM Press, 1964). 15

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we have yet to consider why it is particularly language of address that preserves this ontological structure. What is perhaps Jüngel’s most incisive answer to this question appears in an important passage from God as the Mystery of the World in which he attempts to identify the “general anthropological content”20 of a hermeneutics of language of address.21 For our purposes it is not necessary to completely unpack this passage, nor do we here need to tackle the thorny question of the extent of Jüngel’s indebtedness to Heidegger, whose analysis of Da-sein in Being and Time lies in the background of Jüngel’s comments. It is, however, crucial for our argument to observe Jüngel’s insights here into the relation between language of address and the human ego. Jüngel begins by proposing that “words of address qualify the situation of the presence of an ego in a fundamentally different way from things which are present.”22 He draws a distinction, that is, between, on one hand, the relation between the word of address and the ego, and, on the other, the correspondence between the ego and the external object (“thing”). He proceeds in his examination by briefly commenting upon the latter relation. According to the normal hermeneutical and epistemological processes of signification and objectification (processes that, as we shall continue to see, together play an pivotal role in Jüngel’s theology of language and doctrine of sacrament), every object of knowledge has an external place, a here-and-now-point or a there-and-now-point, vis-à-vis the ego and its apperception. Thus, at any given instant, the object of knowledge is either here-and-now if it is present to the ego, or there-and-now if it is absent to the ego. Consequently, the presence of an object to the ego consists of the “identity of Here and Now,”23 and the absence of an object, by implication, of the disunity of here and now. Jüngel notes that Heidegger, in commenting upon this structure of ego and object, identifies the existence of the ego as Da-sein (“being-there”) and the “here-and-now-being of things” their Vorhandensein (“being-present”).24 While Jüngel appears to largely concur with Heidegger’s analysis of Da-sein in Being and Time, he nevertheless takes Heidegger to task for situating 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 174. 21 Ibid., pp. 170–74. 22 Ibid., p. 170. Emphasis added. 23 Ibid., p. 171. 24 Ibid. 20

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language after the correspondence of the ego and the object that takes place via the mind’s faculty of understanding. This is a crucial component of Jüngel’s argument: “By contrast (to Heidegger’s analysis), theology understands listening on the basis of being addressed, out of which understanding then emerges. The state of ‘being there’ understands because it hears. And it hears because it ‘is there’ (exists) as one who is addressed.”25 For Jüngel, then, language of address determines the being-there of the ego and, subsequently, the ego’s capacity for comprehension. Language of address and its reception is therefore ontologically prior to the correspondence of thought and object and also of the lingual sign and the thing signified, since words of address establish the ego’s faculty of understanding, which, in turn, facilitates the correspondence of the mind and the external world. In just this sense, the ego is “constituted by language” and the human person exists as a ζώον λόγον έχον.26 The priority of language of address over knowledge is thus, for Jüngel, crucial for anthropological ontology. Additionally, according to Jüngel, the structure of language of address transcends the “dull identity of here and how” that occurs as the ego, via the faculty of understanding, perceives the presence of the external object. Jüngel explains: The addressing word, like the present thing, is here now. But it is here now in such a way that it relates the Here and Now to each other in a specific way. It is now here, and at the same time it is beyond the identity of Here and Now. It gives the Now, so to speak, space beyond the point of Here and it gives the Here time beyond the point of Now.27

The sheer correspondence of knowledge and object conflates space and time to the fixed point of here and now. The present object is here and now, while the absent object is not here now. Jüngel proposes that the word of address shatters this structure by opening up the spatial and temporal continuums beyond the mere identity of here and now necessary for the correspondence of knowledge and object. This expansion of space and time occurs because the word of address is not the correspondence of the mind and an external object, or of a signum and a res significata, but is rather the “coming near” of “another being” Ibid., p. 173, fn. 2. Emphasis added. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 174. 27 Ibid., p. 172. 25 26

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in such a way that existence itself draws near to the hearer.28 However, Jüngel points out that the intimacy of the “coming near” of language of address also requires a necessary absence between speaker and hearer.29 The speaker is not present to the ego in the same way that an object is present to the ego’s faculty of understanding, for otherwise the hearer would be able to objectify the speaker and the word spoken. But, according to Jüngel, such objectification is precisely that which is shattered by the word of address. Jüngel thus proposes, in contrast to the presence of the object in the knowledge/object relation, that the speaker of addressing language is present to the ego of the hearer only as one who is also absent from the ego. Our brief exposition of this general anthropological approach to addressing language is sufficient to reveal several significant aspects of Jüngel’s understanding of the structure of language of address. We see that, for Jüngel, language of address is an event in which human being is increased precisely as the actuality of the ego is interrupted by the voice of the other. Language of address shatters the simple correspondence of mind and object that constitutes the existence of the homo faber, the human maker that dominates the world through the use of intelligible concepts and linguistic signa. Language of address turns the human person into a hearer, a passive recipient of relational possibilities that are necessarily external to the ego and come to speech only in the event of address. And language of address involves the intimate drawing near of the speaker to the hearer, though in this event the speaker remains also absent from the hearer. As we shall now see, for Jüngel, this same structure that marks the general human mode of language of address corresponds to the structure of the sacramental, addressing speech of the word of God.

B. The word of God as language of address Since we will continue to analyze some critical aspects of Jüngel’s conception of the addressing word of God throughout the remaining chapters of Part One, it is unnecessary to present an exhaustive reproduction of this topic as it appears in his writings here. Instead, what we wish to do in the following is Ibid., pp. 172–73. On this problem, ibid., p. 172.

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to introduce, through a condensed analysis of a handful of passages, a series of issues concerning the interruptive structure of the word of God that will become increasingly important for our study as we move forward. In particular, we are interested in how, for Jüngel, the addressing word of God relates to its human hearer. In the passage from God as the Mystery of the World that we examined in the preceding section, Jüngel concludes his examination of the general anthropological approach to language of address by proposing that the word of God is precisely that mode of addressing language that interrupts the being-there of the ego and, in so doing, creates “a completely new qualification of man’s state of being present.”30 The word of God does this by interrupting the sheer self-correspondence of the ego as it is ensconced in its worldly, sinful continuities and by placing the ego instead before God (coram Deo). Jüngel calls this the “eschatological outdistancing” of the ego.31 He asserts: The word which addresses man about God surpasses the entirety of the ego’s worldly context. But in that way, it directly encounters the ego. And thus it discloses to the ego a new way of being present, it discloses to it worldly presence as presence defined by God, as eschatological presence.32

The word of God establishes this eschatological presence because, in the event of his word, God himself is present, though not “like the wine in the barrel or the foot in the shoe,” but as one who is also absent.33 The word of God does not follow the hermeneutical process of signification, for, if so, God, “as its content . . . would be in principle separable from (the) ‘vessel’”34 of the word, just as the res significata is necessarily separable from the signum.35 Rather, for Jüngel, the word of God is that peculiar mode of language of address in the event of which God presents himself in such a way that he also remains ineluctably absent. In his word, “God is near to us as the one who has withdrawn himself.”36 This necessary withdrawal of God that takes place just as he draws intimately near to humanity in the interruptive event of his addressing word is critical 32 33 34 35 36 30 31

Ibid., p. 174. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 174–75. Ibid., pp. 165–66. Ibid., p. 165. See our extensive comments on Jüngel’s evaluation of the hermeneutics of signification in Chapter 5. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 184.

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for understanding Jüngel’s analysis of what he calls the “ecstatic structure” of Christian faith. This concept and the course of argument that he follows in order to establish it are, in turn, extraordinarily illuminating for our concerns in the present chapter. First, in an insightful paragraph that is worth quoting at length, Jüngel identifies the Cartesian “I think” as the culmination of the ancient trajectory of human attempts to actualize the self through the self. He comments: In the Cartesian “I think” this utopia [of seeking to actualize the self through the self] appeared to be palpably close to its full realization. At least at the moment of “thought” (cogitare) the ego appeared to have come so close to itself that man as the “thinking thing” (res cogitans) became his own neighbor in the process of carrying out the “I think” . . . “I think myself thinking” means “I think myself being” (cogito me cogitare; cogito me esse). “I think” meant “I am.” The ego was, as the place of the identity of thought and being, the identity event in an absolute sense. In the egocentric identity of thought and being, the ego had become its own neighbor.37

According to Jüngel’s analysis, then, the Cartesian establishment of the identity of thought and being—“‘I think’ meant ‘I am’”—led to a dangerous and indeed spurious brand of egocentricity. The ego, ensnared by the compulsion to actualize itself through thought, turned in on itself and became “its own neighbor.” Jüngel assails this Cartesian egocentricity by drawing an important distinction between the false self-nearness of the Cartesian “I think” and what he calls the “eschatological nearness” to the self that occurs in the event of the word of God. He explains that “the word of God creates this eschatological nearness of man to himself in that it relates man to the God who addresses him in such a way that God comes nearer to man than man could ever come to himself.”38 Whereas, in the Cartesian “I think,” the ego seeks to establish itself through thought as its own neighbor, in the event of the word “God is my neighbor.” “He comes nearer to me than I am to myself,”39 and in doing so allows me to return to myself anew. Ibid., pp. 181–82. Ibid., p. 182. 39 Ibid. 37 38

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For Jüngel, faith, as the only proper human response to the event of the addressing word of God, secures this ecstatic structure. He explains: In the word, God is present as the absent one. Faith allows God as the absent one to be present. It lets God be so near that man in the midst of his being-here and being-now moves into that radical distancing from this “here and now” without which our presentness is not disclosed to be God’s presentness. God does not come near to us without moving us out of our self-realized nearness to ourselves: “he puts us outside of ourselves” (ponit nos extra nos).40

This is an extraordinary passage, not least because it exhibits a vision of Christian faith that radically contradicts the egocentricity of the “Cartesian approach to modern metaphysics.”41 Jüngel shrewdly traces the flowering of the Cartesian “I think” into the “I act” of the later Aufklärung and the consequent grounding of human self-actualization, first in moral action and later in industrial productivity; that is, the “mastering of the world, guided by man’s thinking and planning.”42 In sharp contrast to this egocentric anthropology oriented toward works, Jüngel proposes here that the establishment of the self must occur outside of the self and thus apart from works. The addressing word of God shatters the sham continuity of ego-centeredness by lifting us outside of ourselves—outside of the sinful, compulsive drive to justify and to actualize ourselves through our own thinking and acting. The justification and actualization of the human person are, for Jüngel, entirely God’s prerogatives and take place extra nos in the encounter in which God addresses the self with his interruptive word. We may further elaborate these points by pausing briefly to consider some comments from an important essay by Jüngel on Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian.43 Jüngel’s particular preoccupation in the essay is the “basic anthropological distinction” that Luther draws between “two natures in one Ibid. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 178. See Jüngel extensive comments on this theme in God as the Mystery of the World, pp. 177–84, and also in the insightful essay, idem, “Der Schritt des Glaubens im Rhythmus der Welt,” in Unterwegs zur Sache Theologische Erörterungen I, 3. Auflage, pp. 257–73 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 43 Eberhard Jüngel, The Freedom of a Christian: Luther’s Significance for Contemporary Theology (trans. Roy A. Harrisville; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), pp. 47–92. 40 41

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and the same person,” that is, between the “inner and outer man.”44 Language of address, specifically the addressing word of God, plays a critical role in this ontological distinction. Echoing a phrase from Luther, Jüngel proposes that the addressing word of God, the word “by which one is rendered human,” is the “‘portal’ of existence” in and through which the unity of the inner and outer man is established. But this occurs only as the word, “by turning one inward[,] also brings one out of oneself.”45 In a later passage that is worth quoting at length, he explains: The Word of God . . . is not a word which the soul speaks to itself, but a word which addresses it and—so we must conclude—by this means distinguishes inner from outer, the new from the old man. It is God’s Word entering from without which first turns one inward and in so doing distinguishes that one as inner man from himself or herself as the outer man. But this also means that the inner man is constituted from outside the self . . . It is essential to one whom God’s Word has turned inward to come to himself or herself. For it is essential to react to the Word of God which addresses one and in this way to relate to oneself—whether believing the Word of God or not believing it. Faith is thus the human relation to self which corresponds to the Word of God.46

Here we discover important clues for Jüngel’s conception of the ecstatic structure of the relation between the word of God and its human hearer. According to Jüngel, as an event of address, the word of God “turns one inward” and thus distinguishes the inner, new man from the outer, old man. Because the word of God “enters from without” as “alien” speech that in no way inheres in the human self, “the inner man is constituted from outside the self.” But the inner man does not remain outside the self, but rather “comes to himself or herself.” The word of God thus facilitates true self-relation by allowing the self to come to itself from the outside. But why is it that the inner man must come outside the self in order to return to the self in a proper mode of self-relation? In order to see what Jüngel is up to here we must observe that, by the phrase “outside the self,” he is not at this point referring to the outer man (i.e. he is not suggesting that the inner, new man must come to and thus is constituted by the outer, old man), but Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 56. 46 Ibid., p. 61. 44 45

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rather to the idea that the inner, new man is ontologically external to the self prior to its turning inward to the self. He thus explains that “what is outer is not the dimension of the outer man, but rather the external existence of the inward.”47 The problem is that, if left uninterrupted, the inward man becomes “a homo incurvatus in se, a man curved in upon himself, so totally fixed upon himself ‘that he uses not only physical but even spiritual goods for his own purposes and in all things seek only himself.’”48 This total fixation on the self, this sham self-relation of the inward man, this “self-incurred corruption,”49 must be interrupted in order for the inward man to be made new. This, then, is the force of ecstatic structure, the movement to “outside the self ” and back to the self, that characterizes the word of God as it addresses the inner man. The continuity of the sham self-correspondence of the ego is broken in the event of address, and the inner man, having been liberated from fixation upon the self, can properly relate to the self, to God, and to the other. As Jüngel remarks: “The inner man, in total contrast to an ‘I’ shut up in its ‘inwardness,’ can allow himself to be called out of himself and can actually come out of himself as to become a new man.” God, through his self-communicative addressing word, is the one who summons the inner man to “come out and away from yourself.”50

49 50 47 48

Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 64. The quotation is from Luther, Commentary on Romans, in LW 25, p. 345. Jüngel, The Freedom of a Christian, p. 63. Ibid.

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Analogy of Advent

The upshot of Jüngel’s description of the interruptive structure of the addressing word of God is that it situates the doctrine of the word within a trenchant campaign waged against the hegemony of the modern Western intellectual tradition and its egocentric emphasis on human self-actualization through thinking and working. For Jüngel, the ego existing in an uninterrupted continuity of self-relation is mired in a sinful, self-incurred corruption and needs liberation. The word of God addresses the inner man, shattering the sham existence of sheer self-correspondence and summoning the inner man outside the self, into the forum coram Deo. In the presence of God, who is also necessarily absent from the hearer in the event of the word, the inner man receives a surplus of ontological possibilities and is made capable of returning to the self anew. This being said, Jüngel’s employment of the dialectic of presence and absence to explain the character of God’s self-disclosure in the word, his persistent emphasis on the word as the interruption of the existence of the human hearer, his description of the ecstatic structure of the faith that corresponds to the word, etc., raise some significant questions concerning the relation between God, his word, the hearer of the word, and creaturely reality. Such problems will become transparent in the course of our analysis, below, of Jüngel’s interpretation of Jesus’ parabolic discourses. First, though, we must set the stage for such analysis by pausing to consider his contribution to the contemporary debates on the problem of analogy, that is, the so-called analogy

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of advent, the most thorough explanation of which is found in the pivotal seventeenth and eighteenth sections of God as the Mystery of the World.1 Jüngel’s elucidation of the analogy of advent is the climax of a lengthy exposition of the problem of the speakability of God.2 The question to which Jüngel turns his attention in this exposition is nearly identical to that which we encountered in the preceding chapter; namely, the question of “responsible” human talk of God, of human speech, that is, that “corresponds to God [and] allows God to speak in such a way that it permits him to be the subject of the speaking, the one who speaks.”3 Jüngel makes clear in the course of the passage that such talk must be a mode of human language, for otherwise God would remain outside the limits of our language and just so beyond the limits of speakability and conceivability. At the same time, such talk “does not necessarily belong to human language,” since “the fundamental distinction between God and man threatens to be lost if God’s word is not basically differentiated from all the words of human language.”4 We are dealing here, then, with the complex hermeneutical dilemma of “the relationship of God to human language, or better, the relationship of  human language to a God who can be thought only as one who speaks out of himself.”5 Jüngel is convinced that the analogy of advent is particularly suited for resolving this dilemma. As he makes his case for this proposal, he 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), pp. 261–98. Jüngel’s “analogy of advent” has been well-covered elsewhere. See, for example, Paolo Gamberini, Nei legami del vangelo: L’analogia nel pensiero di Eberhard Jüngel (Morcelliana: Gregorian University Press, 1994); Gérard Remy, “L’Analogie selon E. Jüngel: Remarques critiques l’enjeu d’un débat,” RHPhR 66 (1986), pp. 147–77; Joseph Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological Discourse: An Investigation in Ecumenical Perspective (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1995), pp. 163–224; Philip A. Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 191–298; Roland Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel (Studia Theologica Ludensia, no. 51; Lund: Lund University Press, 1995); and the essay, Ry O. Siggelkow, “The Importance of Eberhard Jüngel for the analogia entis Debate,” PTR 15.1 (2009), pp. 61–74. Our purpose in the compressed account of the analogy of advent, below, is not to present an exhaustive analysis of Jüngel’s approach to the problem of analogy. Rather, by following his presentation of the analogy of advent in God as the Mystery of the World (pp. 261–98) we will continue to uncover his understanding of the basic structural characteristics of the word of God. 2 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, pp. 226–98. 3 Ibid., p. 227. 4 Ibid., p. 230. 5 Ibid. 1

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surveys, in a roundabout way, the approaches of Aristotle, Thomas, Kant, and (briefly) Przywara to the problem of analogous talk of God. For our purposes his critical remarks on Kant and Przywara are most crucial. Jüngel concedes the point that responsible human talk of God is ineluctably analogical. Human talk of God in general, after all, at least presupposes some sort of relation of correspondence between the speaking person and the God spoken. Analogy, as it has typically been employed in Christian theology, qualifies this relation of correspondence by situating it at some location between the extremes of univocity and equivocity. Analogical talk of God is accordingly neither univocal nor equivocal speech, but rather that use of language that presupposes both God’s concrete difference from the world and his immanent presence in the world. But which model of analogy most appropriately describes this necessary tension between the theses of divine otherness and divine nearness, and, in doing so, leads to a mode of speech that avoids both the Scylla of univocity and the Charybdis of equivocity? For Jüngel, an analogia fidei, as opposed to the Catholic formulation of the analogia entis as explicated by Erich Przywara,6 must be the basis for a Protestant concept of analogy. However, recent Protestant imprecision on analogy, particularly as manifested in the ongoing debate over the analogia entis, suggests that one must proceed toward the deployment of an analogia fidei with extreme caution. According to Jüngel, in the aforementioned debate, Przywara’s Protestant interlocutors have directed their criticism “against the very thing against which this doctrine itself is directed.”7 He explains that the objection is made to . . . the analogia entis that, on the basis of this presupposition, God, world, and man . . . are drawn together into a structure

In the essay titled “God’s mystery in Christ: Reflections on Erich Przywara and Eberhard Jüngel,” Communio 12 (1985), pp. 158–72, James V. Zeitz argues that Jüngel in fact defends Przywara’s doctrine of analogy and its proportionality between analogical similarity and dissimilarity. On this basis, he concludes that “Jüngel’s work on analogy and the Gospel is a contemporary example of what Przywara was already doing in the 1950s” (p. 161). As we demonstrate below, while it is true that Jüngel does defend Przywara’s thesis against the misinterpretations of certain Protestant interlocutors, he does so precisely in order to identify what he believes is the real problem with Przywara’s synthesis; namely, the eclipsing of analogical similarity by the putative radical dissimilarity between God and the world. 7 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, pp. 281–82. 6

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of being which then makes it possible to understand God on the basis of the ordering of the created world under him.8

This epistemological possibility, however, is precisely what the analogia entis does not secure, at least according to Jüngel’s reading of the history of the problem of analogy.9 Rather, Jüngel suggests that the analogia entis depends upon two mutually exclusive metaphysical axioms that inevitably give way to the twin theses of God’s unthinkability and ineffability; namely, (1) as human speech, talk of God is necessarily limited to the human experience of the world, and (2) God necessarily transcends human experience of the world and therefore transcends human speech.10 The Protestant fear of the “horrible phantom” looming at the apex of the grand edifice of being, the God, that is, who can be grasped by thought and concept by reflecting upon the world and worldly being, is, for Jüngel, based upon a thorough misinterpretation of the significance of the analogia entis for theological discourse.11 A correct interpretation of the analogia entis, Jüngel asserts, demonstrates it to be in fact “the most thorough hindrance to a closed system which forces together God, man, and the world.”12 Indeed, the actual problem that emerges from the analogia entis when it is correctly understood is that it “protects the holy grail of 10 11

Ibid., p. 282. Emphasis added. On this reading, see ibid., pp. 261–81. See ibid., p. 279. On this supposed Protestant misreading of the analogia entis, see ibid., 281–82. Jüngel suggests that Protestant misinterpreters of Przywara have been stimulated by Barth’s statement, “I regard the analogia entis as the invention of Antichrist, and think that because of it one cannot be Catholic” (CD, I/1, p. xiii). In Jüngel’s reading of this issue in God as the Mystery of the World, he betrays his indebtedness to the seminal work of Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). Accordingly, Barth is claimed to have changed views on the problem of analogy, with the “late” Barth arriving at an analysis similar to what Jüngel proposes in God as the Mystery of the World. The “early” Barth was concerned that “with the help of the so-called analogia entis one would try to overcome in Promethean fashion the qualitatively infinite chasm between God and man.” By contrast, after Barth’s “transformation,” he recognized that in fact “the so-called analogia entis would not do justice to the difference between God and man by overlooking the nearness of God” (Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 282).Interestingly, in a later piece on the role of analogy in Barth’s theological development, Jüngel modifies his position by softening the distinction between the “early” and “late” Barth. He argues that the single turning point in Barth’s theology occurred with his break from liberal Protestantism and can be detected in the second edition of the Romans commentary. Barth’s theology after Romans, Jüngel suggests, exhibits a broad continuity, and the “turn from dialectic to analogy” occurred gradually as a natural development of Barth’s thought. See Jüngel, “Die Möglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem Grunde der Analogie,” in Barth-Studien, Ökumenische Theologie 9, ed. Eberhard Jüngel, Walter Kasper, Hans Küng, and Jürgen Moltmann (Zürich-Köln: Benziger Verlag, 1982), pp. 210–32. For an exhaustive though by no means uncontroversial account of Barth’s development that frequently engages Jüngel’s insights on this issue, see Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 12 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 284. 8 9

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the mystery”13 of God’s relation to humanity and to the world by subordinating any similarity in this relation to the putatively greater and more fundamental dissimilarity between God and creature. Kant’s doctrine of analogy plays a crucial role in Jüngel’s analysis of this problem.14 Kant formulates the basic structure of analogy as follows: x:a=b:c, where some worldly relation (b:c) relates analogically (=) to the relation of God to the world (x:a).15 What is of pivotal importance in this formula is the identity (or lack thereof) of God—“x.” Kant establishes in his first critique that, while, on one hand, the idea of God, as a transcendental Idea, is indispensable for thought, on the other, thought can secure itself only within the limits of experience, and, therefore, can in no way truly conceive God. Then, in the second critique, Kant asserts that the moral agency of human persons requires the idea of God in unity with the two other transcendental Ideas (immortality and freedom). However, God here is still assumed to be outside of the limits of experience and is therefore unknowable as such. Jüngel summarizes the resulting aporia: for Kant “we need the idea of a God who is distinct from the world without being able to say on the basis of our experience as what the essence of this God is to be defined.”16 According to Kant according to Jüngel, analogy resolves the dilemma. Since, on the one hand, we need the idea of God, but, on the other, God is necessarily outside of and just so distinct from the world, “in our talk of God ‘we limit our judgment merely to the relation which the world may have to a Being whose very concept lies beyond all the knowledge which we can attain within the world.’”17 For Kant, language takes on a “hermeneutically decisive function” in Ibid. For Jüngel’s critical engagement with Kant’s doctrine of analogy, see God as the Mystery of the World, pp. 263–66, 278–81, and 282–83, and also his brief but insightful commentary on Kant’s distinction, in connection to the problem of analogy, between dogmatic and symbolic forms anthropomorphism in idem, “Anthropomorphism,” pp. 89–91.Remy, we should note, takes Jüngel to task for “arbitrarily assimilating” the Kantian and Thomistic accounts of analogy into a single doctrinal tradition, since Kant and Thomas based their respective accounts upon radically different metaphysical presuppositions. See Remy, “L’Analogie selon E. Jüngel,” pp. 155–56. However, one of Jüngel’s principal concerns in our passage is to demonstrate that, in spite of otherwise divergent metaphysics, Kant, Thomas, and also Aristotle each arrive at an employment of analogy that inevitably places great stress on the metaphysical otherness of God. It is precisely this aspect of the “traditional doctrine of analogy” (Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 276) against which Jüngel contends in the passage. 15 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science: With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason (trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 109. 16 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 263. 17 Ibid., p. 264. The quote, with added emphasis, is from Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, p. 108. 13 14

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defining and describing this relation. Accordingly, “language is differentiated from the object (of speech). On the other hand, language . . . makes God first thinkable as God, so that we can then formulate a concept of God.”18 Language, then, because it differentiates between speech and object, allows the speaker to conceive that which is in essence beyond conceptualization. This is especially critical for understanding the formula x:a=b:c. The relation b:c is apprehended by experience and is therefore known. By way of analogy (=) we can conceive of the relation x:a on the basis of the relation b:c, even though God, as the “x” in the relation x:a, is beyond experience and therefore beyond cognitive apprehension. What is known about God is that God relates to the world in a relation of absolute dependence and as supreme being. Says Kant: By means of . . . analogy there still remains a concept of the supreme being sufficiently determinate for us, though we have omitted everything that could have determined this concept unconditionally or in itself; for we determine the concept only with respect to the world and hence with respect to us, and we have need of no more.19

B:c, then, as some worldly relation of dependency (“a watch, a ship, a regiment . . . to an artisan, a builder, and a commander” are Kant’s examples20), is the analogans to the relation between the “sensible” and the “unknown,”21 that is, between the world and God. Thought, pursuing the course of analogy, can conceive of God, not in and of himself, but only “with respect to the world of which I am a part.”22 And, just so, Jüngel observes, Kant’s doctrine of analogy describes the similarity of the relation x:a to some relation b:c, but does so in order to in fact emphasize the fundamental dissimilarity between God and the world of experience. According to Jüngel, Kant’s approach to analogy in the context of the problem of theological knowledge accentuates the true and generally overlooked aporia at the heart of Przywara’s description of the analogia entis. Przywara appeals to the second constitution of the Fourth Lateran Council for the basic axiom Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 264. We do well to note that, according to Kant according to Jüngel, language, at least as it is employed in the context of the present set of problems, is referential insofar as it allows a gap between speech and the object of speech. 19 Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, pp. 108–09. 20 Ibid., p. 108. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 18

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of the analogia entis: “for between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.”23 In such a reading of analogy, the a priori decision that God is fundamentally dissimilar to the world qualifies any putative similarity between God and the world. As such, far from making God accessible to thought by uniting God and the world in a shared ontological structure, the analogia entis in fact secures God’s conceptual inaccessibility and ontological alterity. Perhaps the most significant remonstration that Jüngel articulates against the analogia entis concerns the relation of speech to speech’s object(s). We observed above that, for Kant, language must be differentiated from its object, such that God is conceptualized even though he remains beyond the grasp of language’s concepts. God, that is, remains ineffable in human talk of God. Here the relation of the word “God” to the object denominated by the word follows the hermeneutical structure of signification: as a signum, the word “God” refers to a res that is ineluctably external both to the process of naming and to the name itself. This structure, then, safeguards God’s inaccessibility to speech, while allowing God to be spoken. Jüngel argues, therefore, that the analogia entis entails a pure analogia nominum in which “meaning exhausts itself in designation.”24 By contrast, Jüngel asserts that an “understanding of analogy in light of the gospel”25 requires supplanting the hermeneutical structure of signification with a new hermeneutic. We have mentioned and will continue to observe Jüngel’s unease with the Augustinian tradition of hermeneutics, and in particular its Aristotelian axiom that the form of speech can and must be differentiated from speech’s content.26 Consequently, Jüngel’s correction of the doctrine of analogy pivots on the hermeneutical decision that there is a word in the speaking of which that which is spoken arrives in speech. 25 26 23 24

DEC, vol. 1, p. 232. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 284. Ibid., p. 285. Phillip Cary has published an extensive investigation of the Augustinian theology of signs, the conclusions of which both concur with and diverge from the concerns we find in Jüngel’s brief interactions with Augustine. We note here Cary’s proposal that, in Augustine’s thought, words become signs that cannot themselves impart immediate knowledge of the things they signify. The word is thus conceived by Augustine as an empty signifier that refers beyond itself to a thing that is ungraspable by the word. Cary shows that, as such, words cannot function sacramentally according to the Augustinian semiotics, since “no sign can effectually give what it signifies.” In this basic form, Cary’s proposal for reading Augustine’s semiotics has affinities with that which we find in Jüngel’s theology of language. See Phillip Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The cited quotation is from page x.

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Jüngel designates this arrival in speech as the analogy of advent. He is satisfied that he has proven that, in the analogia entis, God is inert, inaccessible, and silent, and the world remains imprisoned in the continuity of its actualities. In the analogy of advent, however, God comes to the world and makes himself accessible in the world by disclosing himself in speech, and, in this event of address, interrupts the actualities of the world and grants the world the possibility to come to itself anew. Jüngel elaborates: One must understand analogy as an event which allows the One (x) to come to the Other (a) with the help of the relationship of a further Other (b) to even one more Other (c). The issue is an analogy of advent, which expresses God’s arrival among men as a definitive event. But when the analogy contains God as one of its members . . . then, on the basis of the relation of God (x) to the world (a), the world-relationship (b:c) which corresponds to that relation appears in a completely new light, in a light which makes this world-relationship new . . .27

The first sentence articulates the formula of the analogy of advent: x→a=b:c, where x→a expresses the movement that occurs when God comes to the world in coming-to-speech, and b:c is some worldly relation in the narration of which God comes to the world through human language. We see here that Jüngel reverses the hermeneutical priority of the relations that relate to one another analogically. That is, in the analogia entis, thought perceives a relation b:c and on the basis of the knowledge of this relation conceives the relation x:a, while, on the other hand, in the analogy of advent, God comes to the world by coming-to-speech (x→a), and in doing so “conquers” the worldly obvious relation b:c such that “b:c is talked about in such a way that it corresponds to the relation between God and the world (x→a), and God ceases to be the unknown (x).”28 The analogy of advent, then, conceptualizes an event of divine self-revelation in the occurrence of which God makes use of a worldly relation in order to disclose his identity to humanity. There is one additional aspect of this relation of correspondence between the relations x→a and b:c that is important for our analysis of Jüngel’s doctrine of the word of God. Jüngel proposes that Przywara’s basic axiom of the concept Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 285. Ibid., p. 286.

27 28

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of analogy, the Lateran IV decree, is correct only if the superlatives in the formula are rearranged. Hence: In that . . . God comes close to men, he carries out his divinity’s own humanity, in order to make concrete the difference between his divinity’s own humanity and the humanity of man. The difference between God and man, which is constitutive of the Christian faith, is thus not the difference of a still greater dissimilarity, but rather, conversely, the difference of a still greater similarity between God and man in the midst of a great dissimilarity.29

The fundamental dissimilarity between God and humanity is subordinated here to the similarity that takes place as God comes close to man by coming-to-speech in his word. To be more precise, God’s divinity includes humanity, and this coinherence of divinity and humanity is an event of speech in the occurrence of which God makes concrete the difference between God and humanity, and God and the world. The analogy of advent, then, conceptualizes the relation of God to the world as an indirect relation. Analogical talk of God is therefore neither univocal nor equivocal. God relates to the world, but is in no way identical to the world. He remains different from the world in the event of his coming; absent from the world even as he draws intimately near.30 Jüngel summarizes: “The mystery of the God who identifies with the man Jesus is the increase of similarity and nearness between God and man which is more than mere identity and which reveals the concrete difference between God and man in its surpassing mere identical being.”31 *  *  * As stated, one of the main objectives of our analysis of Jüngel’s reflections on human and divine speech is to examine what we have called the structure that emerges in his writings between the word of God and “the reality which surrounds us.”32 In our chapter on language of address, we observed that, for Jüngel, the word of God is a mode of language of address in the event of which God interrupts the sheer self-correspondence of the ego and brings to speech new ontological possibilities. God is intimately present in his word but is also Ibid., p. 288. On the indirectness of God’s relation to the world, conceptualized by Jüngel in the analogy of advent, see John B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 48. 31 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 288. 32 Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase (trans. John B. Webster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 66. 29 30

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absent, he draws near and at the same time withdraws himself. Additionally, the event of the word of address precedes knowledge, both in a general anthropological sense (as Jüngel claims, in opposition to Heidegger, that Da-sein understands because it hears) and in a specific theological sense (as he puts it in God’s Being is in Becoming, “God’s being goes before the theological question about God’s being,”33 i.e., God’s self-disclosure is the a priori to all theological knowledge). What is interesting is that, in our examination in the present chapter, we discover that Jüngel’s elucidation of the analogy of advent in God as the Mystery of the World exhibits these very features. “The analogy . . . is in an eminent sense a language event,”34 in which God discloses himself to the world in human speech. According to the analogy of advent, God comes to the world in a word of address by interrupting the actualities of the world, and in doing so grants the world the possibility to come to itself anew. God is indeed present in the analogical relation described in the analogy of advent, but in the same event is also absent. And, as our exposition of Jüngel’s formula for the analogy of advent (x→a=b:c) demonstrates, in coming to the world in his addressing word, God ceases to be the unknown (x) since he “introduces himself” in his “arrival-in-language.”35 We will continue to investigate this interruptive structure of word and world in the remainder of Part One and in the subsequent units on Christology, ecclesiology, and the doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We are particularly interested in the implications of this way of describing God’s relation to the world through his word for the problem of sacrament. We have seen that, for Jüngel, the word of God, since it is the event of God’s self-disclosure to the world, has a necessary sacramental character. But we have also observed that this same word interrupts the continuities and actualities of the world, presents God in such a way that he is also absent, and forces the hearer to come outside of himself or herself in order to be made new in the existential forum coram Deo. At stake in all of this is the question of what Jüngel means by the term “sacrament.” We will demonstrate throughout this study that, for Jüngel, a sacrament, in fact, is interruptive, presents God as the absent one, and entails an ecstatic structure between the recipient and the reality of the world. Ibid., p. 9. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 289. Ibid., p. 286. Emphasis added.

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4

The Parable as Sacramental Speech

Thus far we have demonstrated that a particular structure materializes in Jüngel’s writings on the problem of language between the word of God and the reality of the world. In the present chapter we will continue to evaluate this structure by examining Jüngel’s comments on the concept of parable.1 In the exposition below, we are interested not only in the material claims that Jüngel makes concerning this concept but also in the insights and problems that emerge in his analyses. As we shall see, the issues that we uncover in our examination are critical for understanding Jüngel’s approach both to the specific question of the sacramentality of the word of God and to the theology of sacrament in general.

A. The structure of parabolic language Jüngel argues in God as the Mystery of the World2 that parabolic language is particularly suited for expressing the analogical structure of the “still greater Jüngel has also devoted a good bit of attention to the problems of metaphor and anthropomorphism, and in his writings on these problems we find the same structure of word and world that is of particular interest to our analysis in this Part One. For brevity’s sake we will not attempt an exposition of this material but instead refer the reader to pertinent sources. See especially the two important essays “Metaphorical Truth” and “Anthropomorphism” and also his brief comments on Luther’s theology of metaphor in The Freedom of a Christian: Luther’s Significance for Contemporary Theology (trans. Roy A. Harrisville; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), pp. 42–44. 2 We do well at the outset of our analysis to briefly mention Jüngel’s comparison of metaphor and parable as modes of analogical speech in God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), pp. 289–90. He asserts that both are forms of analogical speech that “depart from customary language usage and represent a lingual renewal,” by “mak(ing) what exists 1

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similarity between God and man in the midst of a great dissimilarity.”3 In the parable, “the God who comes to the world (x→a) makes use of the obvious in this world in such a way that he proves himself to be that which is even more obvious over against it.”4 Though God is indeed differentiated from the world in parabolic speech, in the parable this difference is narrated as a worldly obvious relation such that God is spoken as the one who is, in fact, intimately near and “even more obvious” to the world. For Jüngel, it is crucial that the parable is an event of addressing speech in which a “linguistic renewal” takes place. Language in general, he observes, constitutes “an absolutely new usage of existence over against the non-language activity with what exists,” such that “to be able to say what a ‘hammer’ is or what is ‘just’ signifies a new way of dealing with the world and each other.”5 What Jüngel is describing here is the customary semantic procedure of signification, according to which the catalogue of linguistic names and signs used to denominate reality furnishes humanity with the means of encountering and conceptualizing reality. As we have already remarked, for Jüngel this general capacity language has to assimilate and linguistically reproduce reality through signs grants the human speaker a degree of control over reality, insofar as the “I speak” and its signs and concepts enables the “I think” to at least attempt to master the world through thought.6 He contends, therefore, that the idea of speech as sheer human activity, that is, as an inhering human capacity to communicable in a qualitatively new way” (p. 290). The suitability of parable and metaphor for such lingual renewal is due to the fact that they are events of address, in which the content of speech comes to the hearer as the form of speech. Parable and metaphor differ insofar as the former “narrates,” while the latter “coalesces the narrative in a single word” (p. 289, emphasis added). Explains Jüngel: “Whereas metaphor implies narrative in the form of naming and thus is directed toward a certain word, the parable always presupposes language’s process of naming and is rather directed toward portraying a process, an event through the movement of language” (p. 290). In this sense the parable is an “extended metaphor,” while the metaphor is an “abbreviated parable.”   This way of describing the difference between parable and metaphor is, to a certain extent, overstated, as some of the New Testament parables (e.g. the parable of the leaven (Matt. 13.33), the parable of the treasure (13.44), and the parable of the pearl (13.45–46)) display a contracted or even nonexistent narrative structure. Snodgrass goes so far as to suggest that these three pericopes are similitudinal, rather than parabolic, precisely because they contain no recognizable formal plot structure. See the analysis in Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 228–53, and also the introductory comments in the same volume on pages 7–9. 3 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 288. For the explicit discussion of the relation of the concept of parable to the analogy of advent, see ibid., 288–98. On this issue see also Remy’s analysis in, “L’Analogy selon E. Jüngel: Remarques critiques l’enjeu d’un débat,” RHPhR 66 (1986), pp. 152–54. 4 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 285. 5 Ibid., p. 290. 6 See again the sustained critique of the Cartesian “self-security” in ibid., pp. 169–84.

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master the world through referential signs and their corresponding concepts, inevitably results in human self-justification and self-actualization. We have seen that, for precisely this reason, Jüngel stresses the passive character of language of address. The parable preserves this passive character, and it does this, Jüngel argues, by “renew(ing)” the customary, referential function of language.7 To be more precise, in the parable language acquires an additional function that surpasses the sheer activity of correspondence between the lingual signum and its res, between the speaker and the object of speech. Jüngel argues that this second function of language takes place in the space between speaker and hearer, rather than between speaker and object. In the parable, he proposes, the speaker and hearer are both present in the event of language in such a way that “the attention (of the hearer) is awakened and directed to what is the concern of the speaker.”8 The successful parable draws the speaker and hearer together into the existential space created by the spoken word, and in this space meaning becomes a bonus, an explosion into life of new and superfluous possibilities.9 Of critical importance here is the correspondence in the parable between what is already known, that is, the worldly obvious relation, and the new thing that becomes known analogically in the event of parabolic speech. Jüngel writes: It is obviously presupposed that the new thing moves in the direction of what is already known, so that the spoken innovation can be combined with what is known. That is the case when an analogy is at work between the new and the accustomed. Something absolutely alien would not grip one. What grips us is that correspondence which mediates between the unknown and the already known, the foreign and the customary, the far away and the near, the new and the old. Analogy grips us. It causes the character of address found in metaphor and parable.10

Here again we see that Jüngel’s approach to the parable secures the analogical priority of similarity over dissimilarity. Jüngel observes that an absolute difference between the known and the unknown could not in any real sense mediate through language. But neither is the relation between the known 9 10 7 8

Ibid., p. 290. Emphasis added. Ibid. On possibility as a gift granted through language, see Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth,” p. 17. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 290.

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and the unknown a relation of identity in the event of language, for, were this the case, the cognitive capacity of the “I think” would be allowed direct access to the whole of reality through the relation of objects of knowledge and their corresponding concepts and signs. The analogy of advent, Jüngel argues, resolves the dilemma, for in the analogical mediation between “the foreign and the customary, the far away and the near, the new and the old,” the unknown acquires the capacity to “grip” the hearer. Knowledge is therefore by no means the mere knowledge of the object by way of the mind’s categories and concepts. Rather, knowledge is the surplus of meaning that occurs when what is unknown corresponds analogically with what is already known. Jüngel describes this analogical capacity of parabolic language as discovery, which metaphorically encapsulates the sense of surprise that results when something utterly new and unknown is understood in the parable through that which is mundane and familiar.11 The crafter of the successful parable “must be gripped by the same proportion which later will grip the hearers of his speech. What distinguishes him from them is that he first of all discovers the engaging correspondence and then expresses it.” In the event of this expression the hearers of the parable are “drawn into the process of discovery.”12 Precisely on this basis Jüngel can assert that parabolic language is an “eminently socializing phenomenon.” The parable: . . . binds together in a fellowship not only the addressed hearers but also the speaker engaged by the analogy with his hearers. This is a fellowship in which the process of discovery on the part of the one who formulates can be recapitulated through his metaphorical language. The discovery shares itself as an event of discovery. As discovering language, metaphors and parables are social.13

Hearer is brought together with hearer, and hearers together with speaker, in the event of discovery that occurs as parable. In the context of his exposition of this theme of discovery, Jüngel is careful to reiterate the superfluity of meaning that occurs in the parable. Unlike other forms of speech, such as the command, the parable is characterized by a sense of “playfulness,” insofar as the language used is “really not necessary, but is Ibid., p. 291. See his similar comments concerning metaphor in “Metaphorical Truth,” pp. 51–53, 60. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 291. 13 Ibid. 11

12

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forceful in its nonnecessity.”14 Jüngel offers as an example Jesus’ parables of the kingdom of God: “It was . . . unnecessary to tell about the kingdom of God and to say that it is like a treasure buried in a field or like a very precious pearl or like an unjust steward.”15 Jesus potentially could have spoken of the kingdom in other ways, but chose instead to narrate familiar, worldly situations in such a way that the new dimension of the kingdom opened up for his hearers through the events of parabolic speech. And the analogy that occurs in the parable impregnates the familiar, worldly narrations with new meaning. In the parable, the unknown grasps the hearer through the known. The already known becomes newly meaningful, that is, it becomes, in a certain sense, re-known, through the discovery of its relation to the unknown. As such, parables “express more in language than was real until now.”16 This, though, raises the question of the concreteness of that which is brought to speech through the event of the parable. Jüngel’s answer to this question deserves careful scrutiny. First, he distances himself from hermeneutical programs that understand the parable “as a kind of veiling which is supposed to make something ‘more mysterious’ than it already is.”17 Such an approach to the problem of the parables keeps the ineluctably unknown analogans locked behind the veil of mystery that supposedly is preserved in the parabolic narrative; indeed, it exacerbates the mysteriousness of the analogans, its ineffability and unknowability. Here, once again, Jüngel has in mind a hermeneutical approach that restrictively follows the process of signification. Since, in the hermeneutics of signification, the form of speech is differentiated from speech’s object, the naming of an unknowable object by a linguistic sign reinforces the inability of speech or thought to grasp it.18 16 17 18 14 15

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 292. This again demonstrates that, in Jüngel’s analysis, the hermeneutics of signification are very closely related to his reading of the analogia entis. According to Jüngel, in both procedures, language that is used to promote the similarity between knowledge and the object presupposed as unknown in fact exacerbates their dissimilarity. So, as an example of this outcome from hermeneutical parsing of sign and object, when God is presupposed to be unknowable and ineffable, the designation “God” necessarily includes an unbridgeable chasm between the linguistic sign and the reality putatively signified. On this nexus of issues, see the entire discussion in Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, pp. 261–98.

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Jüngel likewise expresses his unease concerning models of interpretation that conscript the distinction between direct and indirect forms of discourse for use in describing the function of parabolic language. Instead, Jüngel suggests, parabolic language obtains a “higher level of directness, which surpasses the ‘normality’ of direct discourse.”19 He designates this elevated level of language achieved in the parable concreteness. He explains: The concreteness of the parable really does not have primarily to do with the representative or naming function of language, although this function clearly cannot be excluded. The higher level of directness which surpasses the “normality” of direct discourse, which is what we are calling concreteness, is rather the turning of what is being talked about into the speech which then reaches the hearer in such a way that he is drawn into the relation of word and thing. An event results in which the subject of the discourse, the discourse itself, and the ones addressed are represented in a differentiated unity. In a parable, language is so focused that the subject of the discourse becomes concrete in language itself and thus defines anew the people addressed in their own existence.20

This idea of concreteness is a critical move that accentuates a central feature of Jüngel’s approach to parabolic language. The alternative to a pure hermeneutics of signification in which meaning is exhausted in the “representative or naming function of language” is a hermeneutic according to which “what is being talked about” is “turn(ed) . . . into the speech which then reaches the hearer.” The hermeneutical distinction between the form of speech and speech’s content ceases to apply, for the very event of speech includes the presentation of that which is spoken. For Jüngel, this necessarily entails that the parabolic word is a relational word that draws together “the subject of the discourse, the discourse itself, and the ones addressed” into a “differentiated unity.” Thus the partners in this unity retain their unique identities, even as they are brought together into a relation of unsurpassable nearness in this perichoretic event of speech. Ibid., p. 292. Ibid.

19 20

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B. Jesus’ parables of the kingdom of God21 We see this structure of parabolic discourse very clearly in Jüngel’s writings on the New Testament witnesses to Jesus’ parables of the kingdom of God. Jüngel’s approach to the parables of Jesus betrays his indebtedness to a particular variety of mid-twentieth-century Protestant New Testament criticism and interpretation.22 The chief concern that occupied those interpreters of this period who set out on the “new quest for the historical Jesus” was a question that had already been the subject of intense debate among New Testament scholars for well over a century and a half; namely, the question of the relation between the man Jesus of Nazareth and the Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed by faith.23 Jüngel’s doctoral dissertation, Paulus und Jesus,24 supervised by Fuchs, is an attempt to establish this relation by situating Jesus’ parabolic discourses and “Son of Man” statements, together with Paul’s proclamation of the gospel of justification by faith, beneath the general hermeneutical category of “speech-event” (Sprachereignis).25 Jüngel contends that Jesus’ parables, claims to the title of “Son of Man,” and Paul’s doctrine of justification were speech-events in the occurrences of which what was spoken (the kingdom of God and God’s justifying righteousness) came to the hearer as the event of speech. Hence For an exhaustive study of Jüngel’s parable interpretation that brings out many of the points that we make in the following analysis, see Lode Aerts Gottersherrschaft als Gleichnis? Eine Untersuchung zur Auslegung der Gleichnisse Jesu nach Eberhard Jüngel, Europäische Hochschulschriften 403 (Fankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990). See especially Aerts’s comments on the relation of the parable to time on pp. 233–45. 22 For concise overviews of this period of German New Testament studies, see Charles C. Anderson, Critical Quests of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969); Peter Stuhlmacher, Jesus of Nazareth— Christ of Faith (trans. Siegfried S. Schatzmann; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993), pp. 1–38; and Reinhart Schelert, “The Continuing Quest for the Historical Jesus,” Restoration Quarterly 19.4 (1976), pp. 229–49. Two important studies from this period that outline the critical issues and methodological agendas of the “New Quest” are Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (trans. Irene and Fraser McLuskey; New York: Harper & Row, 1960); and James M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1959). Robert W. Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God: The Problem of Language in the New Testament and Contemporary Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), remains the most comprehensive English language presentation of the “new quest” approach to the problems of language and the interpretation of the parables. 23 See the whole of our Chapter 7 for an extensive analysis of Jüngel’s contribution to the contemporaneous discussion of this problem. 24 See particularly Chapter 7.B.1 for additional commentary on Paulus und Jesus. 25 As we have already noted, the concept of Sprachereignis is also favored by Fuchs. See his analysis in Zur Frage nach dem historischen Jesus (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960), pp. 424–30, and Jesus: Wort und Tat (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1971), pp. 88–91. The terms speech-event (Sprachereignis) and word-event (Wortgeschehen) are essentially interchangeable and are both found throughout Jüngel’s writings in reference to a singular phenomenon. We have typically employed “word-event” in the course of our analysis. In this present subsection we will follow Jüngel’s favored usage in Paulus und Jesus of “speech-event.” 21

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the “guiding principle” of Jüngel’s interpretation of Jesus’ parables in Paulus und Jesus: “The Kingdom comes in parable as parable (comes) to speech. The parables of Jesus bring to speech the Kingdom as parable.”26 We once again observe here Jüngel’s aversion to hermeneutical programs that allow for the differentiation between the form and content of the language of faith. As words of divine address, the parables of Jesus are not linguistic signa that point beyond themselves to something external to the event of language. For Jüngel, to understand the parables on the basis of such a hermeneutical decision is to see them as mere “literary constructions.”27 In sharp contrast to this way of reading the parables, Jüngel argues in Paulus und Jesus that, in the event of the proclamation of the parables, the kingdom of God arrives. Jüngel thus refuses “from the very beginning to separate the ‘content’ of Jesus’s proclamation from . . . the bare ‘form’ of it.”28 Consequently, “the relationship between the parables and the kingdom is quasi-sacramental: Jesus’s parables are the real presence of the kingdom.”29 Jüngel revisits this line of argument in God as the Mystery of the World in order to develop his general hermeneutic of parabolic language beneath the heading of the analogy of advent.30 Importantly, he locates the problem of Jesus’ parables within the broader conceptual context of the relation of the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith.31 “Jesus’s parables of the kingdom of God,” he writes, “are the hermeneutical preparation for kerygmatic talk about Jesus as the Son of God.”32 What Jüngel appears to have in mind is an eschatology of speech-events according to which God comes to the world by coming-to-speech first in the parables of Jesus and subsequently and repeatedly in the preaching of the gospel. “Hermeneutical preparation” denotes that, as the first of the species, Jesus’ parabolic discourses provide “model(s) . . . for the Eberhard Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus—Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie, 6. unveränderte Auflage. Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie, hgs. Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Fuchs, and Manfred Mezger, no 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986), p. 135. 27 Ibid., p. 136. 28 Ibid., p. 135. 29 John B. Webster, “Eberhard Jüngel on the Language of Faith,” MoTh 1 (1985), p. 257. 30 On the parables of Jesus as exhibitive of the structure of the analogy of advent, see Aerts, Gottersherrschaft als Gleichnis? pp. 115–27. 31 See our comments on the appearance of this Christological issue in God as the Mystery of the world in Chapter 7.B.3. 32 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 293. 26

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still greater nearness which will be expressed in the confession that the word of God has become flesh and has dwelt among us.”33 We do well at this point to at least pose the question of how these exclusively New Testament events of parabolic speech relate to Old Testament narrations of God’s faithful, and generally thoroughly linguistic acts for and among the chosen nation of Israel. Unfortunately Jüngel’s expositions of the problem of the correspondence of human speech and the word of God are essentially shorn of exegesis of Old Testament passages. In a later section of God as the Mystery of the World,34 he does at least grant that the narrative of Israel relates in a preparatory sense to the crucifixion of Jesus. However, he leaves this argument undeveloped and does not probe any implications that it might have for the more general use of the concept of speech-event. This lacuna in Jüngel’s hermeneutical program points to the reductive character of his concept of Sprachereignis: only Jesus’ parables of the kingdom and the post-resurrection word-events of the gospel are identified as the events through which God draws intimately near to humanity by inhabiting human language.35 After dealing with the relation of the parables to Christian proclamation, Jüngel next turns to the putative distinction between form and content in Jesus’ parables, a theme that, as we have seen thus far, plays a pivotal role in his doctrine of the word of God. He begins by asserting that, because we are dealing with analogical relations in the parable, the relation between God and the world or some worldly object(s) is in no way an equation. There are two issues of critical significance that Jüngel has in mind here. First, a relation of equation between God and the world in the parable would divest parabolic language of its event character. If the world were equated with God in the parable, then “the world would remain in its old state, God would remain as he was: nothing would happen.”36 On the contrary and as we have already observed, for Jüngel, Jesus’ parables of the kingdom were successful insofar as they “ignite(d)”37 their points in their hearers. The telos of Jesus’ parables, then, was to make “that about which the parable (was) spoken,” the kingdom of God, “concrete in the hearer.”38 And Jesus’ hearers were “drawn into the talk 36 37 38 33 34 35

Ibid. Ibid., pp. 302–03. On this point, see the similar analysis of Aerts in Gottersherrschaft als Gleichnis?, pp. 242–45. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 293. Emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid.

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in such a way that (they were) taken along by the word event.”39 The thesis that the parable is an equation occludes this motion of drawing and bearing that, according to Jüngel at least, is a necessary mark of parabolic speech. Second and more pertinent, if the point of the parable is communicated in parabolic language only in such a way that it becomes concrete through the event of speech, then it becomes impossible to abstract the point from the words used to communicate it. Jüngel elaborates: “A parable is not a thesis and has no theme at all. Rather, it is an event which then makes something else happen.”40 In just this way, he observes, the parable is like a successful joke that evokes a response—laughter—in the event of its telling. Earlier in the text he colorfully illustrates this event character of language by pointing to use of the invective: “If one Swabian says to another ‘Halbdackel’ (‘half a dachshund’ or ‘stupider than a dog’), then he is impugning the being of that individual . . . If the word were only a sign, a denominating, then the person who was cursed could respond ‘Wrong signification!’”41 In a successful joke and an invective barb, and thus especially in Jesus’ parables, the point of speech is inextricably tied to the capacity of the language used to bring the hearer into the event of speech. “While (the parable) is being told,” Jüngel asserts, “the listener is being focused on its point . . . And with the point, the kingdom of God itself in the parable arrives in the hearer.”42 This thesis of the nondifferentiability of parabolic form and content helps to explain Jüngel’s objection to the rhetorical tradition of parable interpretation,43 and in particular to its chief exponent Adolf Jülicher. In an effort to deallegorize parable interpretation, Jülicher had proposed that each of Jesus’ parables is neatly divisible into an “image-half ” (Bildhälfte) and a “thing-half ” (Sachhälfte) that relate to one another at a third point of comparison (tertium comparationis). Consequently, the point of the parable is singular, self-evident, and readable from the relation of the relations.44 Jüngel perceives that such a move “destroys the event of the parable” insofar as it presupposes that the analogical relation 41 42 43

Ibid. Ibid., p. 294. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 294. Jüngel also refers to this as the “Aristotelian approach” to the parables due to the predominance of Aristotelian categories of rhetoric. See Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, pp. 88–102. 44 See Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, vol. 1 (Freiburg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988), pp. 44–81. Klyne Snodgrass offers a brief, helpful overview in Stories with Intent, pp. 4–7. For Jüngel’s refutation of Jülicher’s thesis, see Paulus und Jesus, pp. 135–39; and idem, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 294. 39 40

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encapsulated by the parable is “a comparison of firmly established things (a:b=c:d).”45 It is thus assumed that “the content half is already known . . . as a relation (c:d) which remains completely different from the narrated relation (a:b).”46 But this assumption leads directly back to the insight at the heart of Jüngel’s analysis of the problem of analogia entis; namely, the failure of analogy, so construed, to overcome the difference between the relations. Jüngel elaborates this point by returning to the problem of the hermeneutics of signification. He comments: If we want to express what happens (in the parable) by using the difference between signum and res significata (“signified thing” and “signifying thing”), a difference which is hermeneutically totally inappropriate for Jesus’s parables, then we would have to work with the sacramental relation of signum and res significata, so that the signum would be understood as signum efficax (“efficacious sign”). The sign would be used up in what it signifies, just as the wine and bread are consumed in the communion in that they announce the presence of Christ. In being used up, in the destruction of the sign, the res significata happens. But (this) is too encumbered to be applied here appropriately. Ultimately it cannot free itself from the structure of analogy as the “still greater dissimilarity in so great similarity.”47

The structure of the hermeneutics of signification requires an ontological differentiation of signum and res significata, and this differentiation is “hermeneutically totally inappropriate” for the interpretation of the parables of the kingdom, precisely because it results in the eclipse of signum by the res significata. Jüngel’s reading of a sacramental doctrine of the Lord’s Supper is critical here.48 In the praxis of the Lord’s Supper, the wine and bread are the signa that signify the presence in the meal of the blood and body of Jesus Christ. But these signa “announce the presence of Jesus Christ” precisely as they are consumed (drunk and eaten), and therefore, Jüngel observes, the things signified are available in the meal only as the signs are destroyed. To follow Jüngel’s comparison, a “sacramental” reading of Jesus’ parables would exacerbate the dissimilarity between the narrated, worldly obvious relations and 47 48 45 46

Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 294. Ibid. Ibid. Interestingly, Jüngel here plays the role of devil’s advocate in order to establish his argument against the hermeneutics of the sign. As we shall see, it is precisely this same nexus of problems that compels Jüngel to reject signification as an appropriate way for describing sacramental action.

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the coming of the kingdom of God. Since the absolute ontological difference between any worldly obvious relation and the kingdom of God is presupposed in such a reading, the narrated worldly situation becomes “used up” in the analogy; that is, the dissimilarity between worldly narration and heavenly kingdom so eclipses any similarity between them that the narration slips its capacity to serve as a genuine analogatum to the analogans of the kingdom. Jüngel counters this reading of the problem by insisting that a responsible interpretation of Jesus’ parables must eschew the hermeneutics of signification and its thesis that things are ineluctably differentiable from their signifiers. While he does concede that language in general has a necessary referential semantic sense, he argues that the speech-events of the word of God are instantiations of an additional and even altogether different function of language; namely, the capacity of words to bring to speech as speech the presence of God. Consequently, in describing the analogical event of the parable, Jüngel replaces the formula a:b=c:d with the more suitable x→a=b:c, which we observed previously in our chapter on the analogy of advent. The kingdom of God comes to the world by coming-to-speech in the parable (x→a), and in doing so conscripts a worldly relation (b:c) such that the familiar situation now corresponds to the arriving kingdom in the very event of its being told.49 Accordingly, Jesus’ parables “do presuppose the dissimilarity of the kingdom of God and the world in the sense of a fundamental difference, but they only emphasize this difference so that the great dissimilarity in a still greater similarity is emphasized.”50

C. Evaluation We see, then, that Jüngel, in accordance with the structure of the analogy of advent, prioritizes analogical similarity over dissimilarity in his account of the parables of Jesus. The parables are construed as language events that interrupt the hermeneutical act of signification by bringing to speech as speech a kingdom that cannot be objectified. The upshot of describing the parables in this manner is that Jüngel is able to preserve a degree of tension between the kingdom of God and the world See Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 295. Ibid., p. 294.

49 50

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to which the kingdom comes in the word-events of the parables. According to Jüngel, in the parables the kingdom draws intimately near to the world, even though it remains ineluctably absent from the world. The analogical structure of parabolic language secures this dialectic of presence and absence, and thus prevents the doctrine of the kingdom from falling prey to the twin dangers of immanence and transcendence. As Webster suggests, commenting on Paulus und Jesus, “the fact that the Kingdom comes ‘as parable’ is for Jüngel of significance in establishing at a dogmatic level how the Kingdom relates to man and his history. For to say that the Kingdom comes ‘as parable’ is to say that its relation to the world is tangential, and, in one sense, indirect.”51 The description of the parable beneath the heading of analogy of advent in God as the Mystery of the World qualifies this indirectness. Hence, for Jüngel, the necessary distinction between God and the world and, likewise, the kingdom and the world, must be seen in light of the even greater similarity between them. The parable is particularly suited for expressing this analogical structure. At the same time, the sharp distinction that Jüngel draws between the “customary” referential function of language and the special analogical capacity that words acquire in the parable raises some important questions concerning the coherence and tenability of his hermeneutical program.52 Webster, “Eberhard Jüngel on the Language of Faith,” p. 257. In his review essay, “Eberhard Jüngel’s Gott als Geheimnis der Welt—An Interpretation” (EeT 15 (1984), pp. 321–46), James R. Panbrun proposes an alternate reading of this issue. Panbrun appears to contend that Jüngel considers “the movement of the word addressed to someone” (p. 336) as in fact constitutive of the basic referential or signifying structure of language. Language, he argues, acquires its referential capacity by interrupting the hearer through an event of address. Panbrun therefore summarizes Jüngel: “Language by its very nature interrupts the structure of here and now by which an object lays claim to its status of here and now. This occurs in so far as the word which is addressed to me, summons me intersubjectively beyond the region of the here and now” (p. 337).   Our suggestion is that Panbrun here fails to consider Jüngel’s assertion, clearly delineated, among other places, in the important essay “Humanity in Correspondence to God,” that the hermeneutical capacity of referential language to produce a correspondence of knowledge and object poses a significant threat to humanity, at least insofar as humanity uninterruptedly persists within the continuity of sin. Jüngel compares the referential capacity of language to “counting” and argues that referential, indicative speech “contains a tendency to manufacture the world through . . . signs, so that language becomes the totality of signs for a corresponding totality of things signified.” Just so, “there occurs a certain use of the world (in referential language) which makes it possible for us subsequently to use the world in a different way from before” (Jüngel, “Humanity in Correspondence to God,” p. 146). This “use of the world” inherent in the apophantic structure of language corresponds to the homo faber, and thus to human work. the problem emerges precisely here because, according to Jüngel’s interpretation of the ontological entailments of justification, the uninterrupted continuity of works leads invariably to the tyranny of the human drive toward self-actualization. Hence the threat of referential language: the unbroken process of correspondence between thing and sign is a subtle form of works righteousness. 51 52

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We have observed that Jüngel is willing to grant that words have a necessary referential semantic function, and that this function is somehow related to the new significance that words gain in relation to Christ.53 However, in the course of Jüngel’s argument in God as the Mystery of the World, we discover that this default capacity of language is overcome by the word of God; it is interrupted in order that the kingdom of God or God himself can come to the world by coming-to-speech. Jüngel considers this emphasis on interruption to be conceptually necessary because, as we observed throughout this first part of our analysis, he consistently asserts that the referential function of words is an implement used by the self-justifying and self-actualizing “I” to dominate the world through thought and concept. But again, the overwhelming stress placed on the interruptive character of the language of the parable vis-à-vis ordinary human language points to a basic aporia embedded in Jüngel’s hermeneutical program. We can get at this problem from two different directions. First, in spite of Jüngel’s proposal that the parable situates the dissimilarity of God and the world within the context of an even greater similarity between them, his persistent appeal to the interruptive character of parabolic speech tends to emphasize the radical discontinuity between the word-event of the parable and the ordinary course of human speech. Indeed, it appears that, for Jüngel, it is precisely the ordinariness and naturalness of human speech that must be overcome in order for the parable to “grip,” “gather up,” and “take See Luther’s twentieth thesis of Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi: “all words take on new meaning in Christ, though they describe the same thing” (LW 39/II, p. 94.17f.). Jüngel analyzes this statement by Luther in The Freedom of a Christian, pp. 40–41. He explains: “In Christ the words of our language gain new meaning alongside the old, a meaning which allows us to assign a new essence to one and the same existing thing” (p. 40). This acquisition of new essence occurs as metaphorical language: “The metaphor represents the event of innovative freedom in language. As a result, it discloses new meaning over against the lexical meaning, and represents something more than a mere equivocation” (p. 41). This “absolutely new sphere of meaning” (p. 43) is thus related analogically to the old use of the word.In the important essay “Luther, Metaphor, and Theological Language” (MoTh 6.2 (1990), pp. 121–35), Dennis Bielfeldt challenges this reading of Luther by suggesting that Jüngel and others impose contemporary literary and linguistic theories on the Luther texts. According to Bielfeldt’s reading of Luther and in opposition to Jüngel, “the ground of metaphor is not ontological, for there is no ‘underlying’ similarity between the infinite and finite by which the ‘fittingness’ of the metaphor is established. Rather, the metaphor grounds itself on the radical discontinuity between the earthly and heavenly” (p. 127). This discontinuity necessitates a hermeneutical gap between the heavenly things and the words used to signify them. For this reason Bielfeldt makes a strong case elsewhere for the necessary referential semantic sense of theological language. See Bielfeldt, “Luther’s Late Trinitarian Disputations,” in Paul R. Hinlicky, Mickey L. Mattox, and Dennis Bielfeldt, The Substance of the Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology for Today, pp. 80–99 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).

53

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along” the hearer by bringing to speech the surplus of meaning that belongs strictly to the possible and in no way to the actual.54 Webster’s comments on this same problem in God’s Being is Becoming are appropriate here: Jüngel is close to suggesting that only language commandeered by God is “true” language: “The Word of God brings language to its true essence.” It is difficult to see how this process can be a “gain to language” when the corollary is that language which has not been taken captive by revelation has failed to attain its essence. For all Jüngel’s concern to validate human speech from the prevenient divine Word, there is a real threat of absorption of our language into the divine speech-act, or at least of the implication that a purely “natural” language is a bastard form of speech.55

Likewise, in our passage from God as the Mystery of the World, the sheer analogical potency of the parable threatens to dissolve the humanness of the human language of the parable. Our second point is similar. Turning to the interpretation of Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, we observe that the sharp distinction that Jüngel draws between the hermeneutics of signification and the hermeneutic of the analogy of advent raises questions concerning the familiar character of Jesus’ stories.56 To be sure, Jüngel goes to certain lengths to mitigate the problem at stake here by identifying the analogatum of the parable as an “obvious” relation that becomes even more obvious in the linguistic event of its relation to the analogans.57 But such abstract conceptualizations fail to elaborate the extent to which Jesus’ parables were received by his original hearers as stories; that is, as narratives of rather mundane, familiar, and often political or economic situations that had referents in the day-to-day activities of his hearers. By constructing a theology of parable “from above,” Jüngel tends to detach Jesus’ parables of the kingdom from their Sitz im Leben in first-century Palestine, and this presses the issue of how the parables were originally received. Along these same lines, Eta Linnemann concludes that Jüngel “does not consider how the hearers of the parable (of the Prodigal Son) could deduce On this point, see also Webster, “Eberhard Jüngel on the Language of Faith,” p. 258. Ibid., p. 259. The quotation in the passage is from Jüngel, Gottes Sein ist im Werden: Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bei Karl Barth—Eine Paraphrase, 4., durchgesehene Auflage (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1986), p. 26; ET: idem, God’s Being is in Becoming, p. 26. 56 See Webster’s similar analysis of this issue in “Jesus in Modernity: Reflections on Jüngel’s Christology,” in Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, pp. 157–59 (Edinburgh and New York: T&T Clark, 2001). 57 See again Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 285. 54 55

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from the story of the love of the father towards both his sons . . . that they have been found by the love of God, nor how the kingdom of God acquires linguistic expression for them through the parable.”58 Linnemann’s criticism is perhaps misstated, for, in fact, Jüngel “does not consider” the hermeneutical process of deduction precisely because his approach to the parables essentially invalidates deductive reasoning, at least as a means for Jesus’ hearers to understand the point(s) of his stories. Deductive reasoning both requires a hermeneutical gap between lingual sign and the thing signified and prioritizes the mind’s capacity to make judgments against the backdrop of its categories and concepts. Both of these aspects of deductive reasoning point to the referential function of language that, Jüngel argues, must be interrupted by parabolic speech. Therefore, the point of parable is not gained through deductive reflection on the story. But this rejection of hermeneutical deduction raises the question of whether Jüngel can coherently describe the relationship between Jesus’ stories and his hearers. If the capacity of a hearer of the parable to understand it by following the story back to its familiar referent is exactly the process that must be interrupted by the parable as event, then the familiarity of the parable, its referential connection to the concrete reality of the hearer, is rendered superfluous. All that the successfulness of the parable requires is that the kingdom commandeers language, turning it into a self-communicative event. Anthony Thiselton shrewdly compares this idea of self-communicative word-event to “word magic.”59 Shorn of its referential character, the parable loses its location within the course of the mundane and appears instead as ecstatic, alien, and supernatural.

Eta Linnemann, Parables of Jesus: Introduction and Exposition (London: S.P.C.K., 1966), p. 154, fn. 26. Emphasis added. 59 Anthony Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 337. 58

Conclusion to Part One

We began our analysis in Part One by asserting that, for Jüngel, the word of God takes on a sacramental character as it addresses the human hearer. According to Jüngel, the word of God, as the “Christological story,” “bursts apart everything which is obvious and matter of course” and “draw(s) [the hearer] existentially into this story.” Precisely by doing so, “the word . . . becomes a ‘sacrament.’”1 To be sure, there is much to commend in this approach to the language of faith. In particular, we suggest that a major strength of Jüngel’s program is his situation of the doctrine of the word of God within a blistering critique of the narcissistic compulsion toward self-actualization that characterizes the culture(s) of the contemporary West. He traces this narcissistic orientation from its origins in the Cartesian and Kantian “I think” and up through its inevitable transformation into the Nietzschean “I will” and the Marxist and capitalist “I work.”2 “The thinker,” Jüngel thus observes, “has become the producer, the maker. And this has happened, not although but because he thinks.” Consequently, “the world now is only the pure object of the human subject.”3 The homo faber is thus self-assured that the world can be mastered through human thought, will, and action, and, consequently, that the human self can be actualized through works. While progress, the “rhythm of the world,” appears 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 309. 2 See Eberhard Jüngel, “The Truth of Life: Observations on Truth as the Interruption of the Continuity of Life,” in ed. R. W. A. Mackinney, Creation, Christ, and Culture: Studies in Honor of T.F. Torrance, pp. 234–35 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1976). 3 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 178. 1

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to be marching forward and into humanity’s self-made future, it is, Jüngel argues, in fact a regression, a constant stepping backwards into the vacuous actuality of the self-justifying human worker.4 Jüngel very cogently proposes that it is precisely this narcissistic, self-actualizing, and self-justifying “I” that must be liberated from its deadly, sinful, sham existence by the coming of God to the world in the event of his word. The addressing word of God summons the self outside of itself and liberates it from its ensnarement to itself. This, once again, is the force of the interruptive, ecstatic structure of the word as it addresses its hearer. The human person is justified solus Christus, sola gratia, solo verbo, and sola fide,5 and only in the existential forum coram Deo. On the basis of this event of justification that comes to speech in the addressing word of God, the justified sinner comes to the self anew, and the relationships to God, to self, and to the other that were formally shadowed by the pall of sin and death are set upon a new pathway toward life. However, while appreciating the acuity of such insights, we have also uncovered an aporia that is extraordinarily pertinent both to the immediate concern of the sacramental character of the word of God and to the more general question of what, for Jüngel, constitutes a sacrament. We may express this aporia in the following way: while Jüngel insists that the analogical structure of the language of faith subordinates the dissimilarity between God and the world beneath the even greater similarity between them, his consistent appeals to the concept of interruption, to the ontological distinction between possibility and actuality, to the ideas of “word-event” (or “speech-event”) and “coming-to-speech,” to the ecstatic shape of human existence in the event of the word, etc., tend to stress the radical dissimilarity between, on the one hand, God and his coming to the world in the event of his word, and, on the other, the worldly realities of the human hearer of the word. Likewise, we have observed that particular aspects of Jüngel’s understanding of parabolic language accentuate this dissimilarity, for instance, his failure to explicitly relate Jesus’ parables to the normality and familiarity of human discourse. We do well to note that contemporary scholarship on Jüngel’s theology is divided On this point, see especially Eberhard Jüngel, “Der Schritt des Glaubens im Rhythmus der Welt,” in Unterwegs zur Sache, Theologische Erörterungen I, 3. Auflage, pp. 257–73 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 5 See the discussion in Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 147ff., and also our own comments in the Introduction, above. 4

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on this matter, with some commentators arguing that Jüngel indeed secures the analogical prioritization of similarity over dissimilarity6 and others suggesting that his emphasis on the fundamental distinction between God and the world entails that the dissimilarity between them in fact eclipses their similarity.7 Our analysis agrees with the latter reading. This issue, again, is particularly important for discerning how Jüngel conceives the problem of sacrament. We have shown that, for Jüngel, the word of God is sacramental precisely because God discloses himself in the event of his word. But, as we have observed throughout our analysis in this unit, the word of God is not sacramental in the sense of the hermeneutics of signification. That is, the word is not sacramental as a linguistic sign that points beyond itself to God. For Jüngel, God is present in his sacramental word not as some content simply encapsulated by an external vessel, or form (“like the wine in the barrel or the foot in the shoe”8), for, were this the case, we would then be able to draw a distinction between the self-presentation of God (content) and the word in which he is supposedly present (form). Jüngel is wary that this distinction between form and content, itself a fundamental component of the hermeneutics of the sign, entails that we might receive the form of the word without at the same time encountering God as the word’s referent. For Jüngel the point is decisive: there can be no “wordless, dumb and perfectly abstract divine majesty” existing over against and apart from his word, for such a God is “terrible and in his terribleness ultimately a boring God,”9 a “featureless Sabellian deity, aloof from history and human suffering.”10 As we have seen, Jüngel conceives that this problem at the heart of the hermeneutics of signification leads directly back to the ineffable and unknowable God of the analogia entis. The differentiation of the form of the word from God as See especially Alessandra Cislaghi, Interruzione e corrispondenza: Il pensiero theologico di Eberhard Jüngel, Giornale di teologia 225 (ed. Rosino Gibellini; Brescia: Queriniana, 1994), pp. 215–20; Paolo Gamberini, Nei legami del vangelo: L’analogia nel pensiero di Eberhard Jüngel (Morcelliana: Gregorian University Press, 1994), pp. 201–06; and Roland Daniel Zimany, Vehicle for God: The Metaphorical Theology of Eberhard Jüngel (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1994), pp. 60–64. 7 See the whole of Webster’s argument in “Eberhard Jüngel on the Language of Faith”; and idem, “Jesus in Modernity.” Similar arguments may be found in Roland Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel (Studia Theologica Ludensia, no. 51; Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), pp. 144–48; and Joseph Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological Discourse: An Investigation in Ecumenical Perspective (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1995), p. 320. 8 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 165. 9 Ibid., p. 198. 10 Joseph Mangina, review of God’s Being is in Becoming, by Eberhard Jüngel, IJST 5.1 (2003), p. 89. 6

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its content, that is, “protects the holy grail of the mystery”11 by locating God utterly beyond the human words that we use to signify him. Only when we assert that God is present in and as his word are we ensured that we are dealing with the real God in all his fullness when we encounter his presence in the event of his sacramental word. At the same time, while the being of God is not exterior to his word (i.e. when we encounter him in his word we encounter him as he really is), according to Jüngel the being of God is necessarily ontologically exterior to the world and thus to the hearer in the event of the word (i.e. in his coming-to-speech, God remains distinct from the world and from humanity). It is precisely to establish this point that Jüngel turns to those particular conceptual components of his doctrine of the word that, as we argue, inevitably shift the emphasis from the similarity between God and the world and onto the dissimilarity between them. Jüngel’s hermeneutic, to point to a recurring example, brings together presence and absence into a dialectical relation: “the presence and absence of God are no longer to be thought of as alternative in the word of God. Rather, God is present as the one absent in the word.”12 We have likewise observed that he draws a sharp differentiation between possibility and actuality and identifies the word of God as the coming-to-speech of alien and therefore altogether new and unprecedented possibilities that only analogically relate to the interrupted actualities of the world. We are left to infer that the sacramental word of God, the proclaimed “Christological story” that has its antecedent in Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, is sheer interruptive event. And God, who is present in the world only in his word,13 is thus located in this event that relates to the normal, the familiar, the historical, the continuous, the actual, etc. as the crisis of the world. What we will see in the subsequent parts of our analysis is that this same interruptive character of God’s relation to the world also marks Jüngel’s discussions of sacrament beneath the headings of Christology, ecclesiology, and doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We should not be surprised by his proposal that “that which deserves to be called sacramental is always an elementary interruption of the worldly continuity of life. Moreover, it is Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 284. Ibid., p. 166. 13 See again the discussion in ibid., pp. 164–66, 197–98. 11 12

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determined that this interruption is a revolution . . . The event of elementary interruption is always a crisis for that actuality against which it occurs.”14 As we proceed in our examination, we will test the strengths and weaknesses of this way of describing sacramental phenomena. We have observed thus far that Jüngel’s conception of the sacramental word of God secures that word’s ontological uniqueness vis-à-vis the ordinary words that constitute human discourse. But the disadvantage of stressing this uniqueness through the use of the category of interruption is that God and his word appear extraordinary, alien, and only tenuously related to the world.

Eberhard Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” in Ganz werden. Theologische Erörterungen V, p. 277 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

14

Part Two

Jesus Christ—The One Sacrament of God for the World

According to Jüngel, the word of God as self-disclosing divine speech interrupts the continuities and actualities of the world as it comes to address its hearer. Precisely because he persistently describes the word of God in this manner, we have questioned whether his conception of the language of Christian faith as being analogical in fact succeeds in prioritizing the similarity between God and the world over the dissimilarity between them. In Part One, we concluded preliminarily that the main thrust of Jüngel’s theology of the sacramental word points to the extraordinary and alien character of the word vis-à-vis creaturely reality, and thus tends to stress the radical ontological dissimilarity between God and his creatures. In this present unit of material, we turn to a second major theme of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament; namely, to the thesis that Jesus Christ is the unique and preeminently significant event of God’s self-disclosure to humanity and is therefore himself the one sacrament of God for the world. In the following chapters we will work carefully through several aspects of this important claim. The central, critical question for our analysis is whether Jüngel’s emphasis on the interruptive structure of the sacramental word is repeated in his understanding of the sacramental being of Jesus Christ. We will indeed find some striking parallels between these two themes of Jüngel’s sacramental theology. And we will conclude this present unit with an assessment that is similar to that with which we ended Part One.

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Our analysis unfolds in the following manner. First, in Chapters 5 and 6 we examine the two lines of argument that Jüngel follows in order to establish the claim that Jesus Christ is the one sacrament of God for the world. These two chapters are pivotal for our analysis, not only because they expose a number of Jüngel’s basic decisions concerning the theological category of sacrament but also and more importantly because they demonstrate that Jüngel’s definition of sacrament beneath the heading of Christology reflects many of the judgments that we encountered in our unit on the sacramentality of the word of God. Crucially, what we observe in the course of Chapters 5 and 6 is that, for Jüngel, the fundamental sacramentality of Jesus Christ points both to the public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and to those word-events through which the resurrected and ascended Christ is sacramentally mediated to the church. Thus, according to Jüngel, the claim that Jesus Christ is the unique and preeminent sacrament of God for the world involves both the historical figure of Jesus and the Christ of Christian faith, and, moreover, sheds insight into the relation between the two. It behooves us, then, to pay careful attention to how Jüngel resolves this post-Enlightenment Christological aporia. For this reason, in our seventh chapter we evaluate a handful of texts in which Jüngel attempts to identify the nature of the relation between the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the resurrected and ascended Christ of faith. While this course will initially steer us away from the explicit problem of the category of sacrament, we will very quickly discover that Jüngel’s insights concerning this material are highly significant for the claim that Jesus Christ is the one sacrament of God for the world. In particular, our analysis in Chapter 7 will show that the interruptive, discontinuous character of God’s self-disclosure in events of speech is conspicuous as well in Jüngel’s understanding of the sacramentality of the being of Jesus Christ.

5

Sacrament as Sign and Event

While Jüngel on a number of occasions asserts the claim that Jesus Christ is himself the one sacrament of God for the world, he provides extensive commentary on this theme in only two places: in the important early text “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” (1966) and in the set of lectures translated into Spanish and published as El Ser Sacramental1 (2007). These texts are extraordinarily important for our analysis in this and the following chapters. We will follow Jüngel’s arguments very closely, paying careful attention to the decisions he makes in order to establish the uniqueness of Christ’s sacramental being. In both of these texts we find Jüngel preoccupied with two concepts that are central to historic Christian sacramental theology. First, he dedicates significant portions of both texts to critiquing the Augustinian thesis that the sacrament is a sign.2 In the course of both arguments, he concisely summarizes Augustine’s location of the problem of sacrament within a “universal hermeneutical doctrine of signs,”3 and then explains how different employments of the Augustinian semiotics among Western theological traditions inevitably led to sharp divergences in sacramental theology.4 Interestingly, while in the Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007). This volume is the Spanish translation of the Vaggagini Lectures presented in German to the Catholic Faculty at Saint Anselmo in March of 2005. 2 See Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” EvTh 26 (1966), pp. 13–36, and idem, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), pp. 29–61. 3 Jüngel, “Das Sakrament – was ist das?” p. 18. 4 For a broadly similar and more rigorously detailed assessment of the divergences in Augustinian traditions of sacramental theology, see Phillip Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 221–52. 1

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earlier essay he is quick to distance his own theology of sacrament from the Augustinian hermeneutics, claiming that it has given way to the “equivocal” and “altogether unclear”5 versions of Catholic and Protestant sacramental theology, respectively, in El Ser Sacramental he is able to make positive use of some of Augustine’s insights by examining the amended versions of the hermeneutics of signification in Luther’s theology of sacrament.6 In this present chapter our concern is to demonstrate how Jüngel’s reading of this trajectory of the Augustinian hermeneutics leads to his identification of Jesus Christ as the one sacrament. The second critical sacramental concept, which we examine in detail in Chapter 6 but is at least worth mentioning here, is the idea of mystery, which etymologically derives from the Greek μυστήριον, the Latin translation of which is sacramentum.7 In both the Second Lecture of “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” and El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel argues that the basic New Testament understanding of mystery is inextricably tied to the gospel claim that God reveals and mediates himself in the humanity of the man Jesus of Nazareth.8 As we shall see, since Jüngel is convinced that the category of sacrament must make full use of the New Testament meaning of μυστήριον, he insists that the humanity of Jesus is sacramental being in a unique and preeminent sense. Since these two texts cover much common ground, we do well to briefly outline our itinerary for explicating Jüngel’s approaches to the concepts of sacramental sign and mystery in this and the following chapter. Because in El Ser Sacramental Jüngel enhances his critical engagement with the Augustinian hermeneutics by incorporating into his argument the insights of Luther, we regard this text as more indispensible for our analysis than “Das Sakrament . . .” and will concentrate our explication in the present chapter on Jüngel’s comments in El Ser Sacramental on “Sacrament as Sign (signo) and Event (acontecimiento).” On the other hand, while much of the material on the Jüngel, “Das Sakrament – was ist das?” p. 13. See Cary, Outward Signs, pp. 221–52. Identifying Luther as an amender of Augustine reflects Jüngel’s idiomatic reading of this line of the tradition. Cary’s suggests, alternatively, that Luther, following a line of interpretation that emerged in Scholasticism, considerably revised Augustine’s sacramental theology by overturning its central conviction; namely, the claim that visible, outward, creaturely signs are not in fact capable of efficaciously communicating the res significata of the sacrament, viz. divine grace. We are, however, hesitant to completely agree with Cary’s analysis, since, as we shall see, his reading of the Augustinian semiotics corresponds to a debatable interpretation of the whole of Augustine’s thought. 7 See Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” pp. 41–59, and idem, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 11–28. 8 See “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” pp. 53–55, and also our analysis in Chapter 6. 5 6

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concept of mystery is identical in the two texts, in “Das Sakrament . . .” we find a more extensive and compelling presentation of the Christological definition of the New Testament μυστήριον than what is evident in Jüngel’s abbreviated comments in El Ser Sacramental. Jüngel dedicates several pages to this topic in the earlier text,9 while summarizing his argument in only a few short paragraphs in the 2007 volume.10 For this reason, in Chapter 6 we will focus our exposition on the Second Lecture of “Das Sakrament . . .” and will refer to El Ser Sacramental when necessary.

A. Jüngel’s dispute with the Augustinian hermeneutics of signification At several locations throughout the first part of our analysis, we examined Jüngel’s hesitancy concerning the appropriateness of the Augustinian concept of signa for describing the peculiar character of the word of God. Jüngel, we observed, insists that the language of the gospel does not reduce to the semantic structure of reference. While he indeed concedes that, in an ordinary, familiar sense, words function as signs that refer beyond themselves to exterior things, he persistently argues that such a hermeneutical description cannot apply to the word of God, for otherwise as content God would be differentiable from the form of his word. We saw that, for Jüngel, there are two interrelated issues at stake in this hermeneutical decision. First, the referential capacity of language, with its differentiation of signa and res significata, corresponds to the agency of the homo faber, who is driven by the sinful compulsion toward domination of the world through thought, will, and work. The homo faber employs referential language in order to master things through their signs, and Jüngel argues that, for precisely this reason, the hermeneutics of signification, when applied to the word of God, situate the word and its putative content(s) as objects at the disposal of the thinking, willing, and working “I.” In sharp contrast to this, Jüngel proposes that the word of God is an event of addressing language that shatters the false continuity of self-actualization of the homo faber, and thus See Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” pp. 50–55. Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 19–20.

9 10

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liberates the justified person for reconciled relationships to God, to others, to the self, and, indeed, to the world. Second, and more importantly, Jüngel questions whether God is truly known and encountered in the hearing of the word of God if this word is identified according to the hermeneutics of signification as a signum that points beyond itself to God as its res.11 The Augustinian semiotics posits an ontological gap between the form of the word and its content, between signum and res significata. Jüngel observes that, when applied to the word of God, this gap exacerbates both the difference and distance between, on the one hand, the speaking God, and, on the other, the spoken word and the world in and to which the word is spoken.12 Consequently, God is conceived, though perhaps unwittingly, as a “wordless, dumb and perfectly abstract divine majesty” who exists apart from his word, and is thus a “terrible and in his terribleness ultimately a boring We should note here an additional difference between Jüngel’s reading of Augustine and the presentation of Cary. In Outward Signs, Cary proposes that the Augustinian supposition of an ontological gap between sign and thing is the result of Augustine’s a priori decision that creaturely realities cannot mediate the divine. To summarize Cary: Augustine was to some extent indebted to a baptized Platonism that included a dualistic tendency to differentiate between external and internal, materia and spirit, temporality and eternity, humanity and divinity, etc. The latter components of these parings cannot be reached through the former, that is, God cannot be reached through the creaturely. The signs, as ineluctably creaturely, are therefore ontologically incapable of granting what they ultimately signify. And therefore, as signs, the sacraments, as Cary puts it, are “powerless.” On this point, see the entirety of Cary’s discussion in Outward Signs, particularly pp. 155–252.Cary’s reading of Augustine is by no means unassailable (see, for example, the insightful survey in John Peter Kenney, review of Phillip Cary, Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul and Outward signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought, JR 89.4 (2009), pp. 603–06). But whether or not we agree with the basic thrust of his reading of Augustine, we do well to observe that Cary, who more than any other contemporary Augustine scholar has labored to make explicit the connections between the Augustinian semiotics and Augustine’s theology of the sacraments, provides a reading of these issues that is, in this respect, different from that of Jüngel in both form and content. Concerning the matter at hand, Jüngel, in marked contrast to Cary, writes as if the ontological structure of sign and thing is a flaw in the Augustinian semiotics, rather than a conviction of pivotal importance that emerges from an a priori metaphysical commitment. Also, Jüngel presents only a thin reading of a few lines from the Augustinian corpus, and thus does not wrestle with the question of Augustine’s indebtedness to a Platonic cosmology, the Aristotelian distinction between forma and materia, etc. 12 We should recall that this observation concerning the hermeneutics of signification plays a pivotal role in Jüngel’s rejection of the analogia entis as a theologically incoherent way of describing the relation between God and his creatures. According to Jüngel’s reading of the problem, the analogia entis assumes the separation of language and object, of signum and res significata, that serves as the hermeneutical basis for Augustine’s theory of signs. We saw that Jüngel points to Kant’s doctrine of analogy to illustrate the consequence of this assumption. Jüngel demonstrates that Kant differentiates theological language from its object, and precisely in doing so is able to conceptualize the God who nevertheless remains beyond the grasp of language’s concepts. God, that is, remains ineffable in Kant’s definition of human talk of God; the ontological difference between God and the world is secured in theological language, so construed. 11

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God.”13 Jüngel therefore counters the hermeneutics of signification, at least its application to the peculiar speech of the word of God, with an alternate hermeneutical model according to which the word of God is understood as an event in the occurrence of which God, who is ontologically undifferentiable from his word, comes to the world as speech. God is known and encountered in the event of his word precisely because, according to Jüngel’s hermeneutical program, there can be no hiatus between God and his word. Whether by so theologizing Jüngel actually succeeds in establishing the proximity of God to the world in the event of his word is a question that we will continue to ponder throughout our analysis. Again, our preliminary conclusion from Part One is that Jüngel’s overwhelming stress on the interruptive character of God’s self-disclosing word may in fact attenuate his stated purpose of subordinating the dissimilarity of God and the world beneath the even greater similarity between them. In any case, what is crucial in all of this for our purposes in this present unit is Jüngel’s proposal that, concerning the theological description of the word of God, the hermeneutics of event correct the problems that emerge from a pure hermeneutics of signification. What we will now see by following Jüngel’s argumentation in El Sel Sacramental is that he makes a similar assessment in his analysis of Augustine’s application of the hermeneutics of signification to the problem of sacrament. The identification of Jesus Christ as the unique sacramental being is a critical component of this assessment, and thus we will demonstrate in the following analysis the connection between Jüngel’s reading of the Augustinian hermeneutics and his Christocentric definition of the category of sacrament.14 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 198. It may appear in the following pages that our analysis of Jüngel’s argument in El Ser Sacramental carries us too far away from the specific problem of the Christological orientation of the concept of sacrament. However, we have chosen to follow the path that Jüngel himself takes in order to establish the claim that Jesus Christ is himself the unique sacrament of God for the world. In our passage in El Ser Sacramental, it is the identification of a specific problem at the heart of the Augustinian sacramental semiotics that leads Jüngel to the Christological claim. We do well, then, to follow his course in its entirety.

13 14

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B. Jüngel on the Augustine of the Tractatus Jüngel begins his exposition of Augustine in El Ser Sacramental by making the incontrovertible observation that Augustine occupies a uniquely prominent position in the history of Western sacramental theology. He notes that the most frequently referenced statement of Augustine on the problem of sacrament comes from In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus. Augustine, commenting on John 15.3, asserts: “Accedit verbum ad elementum, et fit sacramentum, etiam ipsum tamquam visibile verbum”15 (“The word is added to the elemental substance, and it becomes a sacrament, also itself, as it were, a visible word”16). The verse to which Augustine responds with his oft-cited statement is the affirmation of the Johannine Christ that, “you have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.” Augustine, Jüngel notes, immediately acknowledges one obvious objection that might be raised against this Johannine claim. In the church’s language and practice, the cleansing or purification of sin occurs by virtue of the baptismal water. Accordingly, Augustine gives voice to the interlocution: “Quare non ait, mundi estis propter baptismum quo loti estis?”17 (“Why does he [Christ] not say, ‘you are clean by reason of the baptism by which you were washed’?”18) Augustine proposes in response to this question that, in the sacrament of baptism, it is the word, and specifically the word of Jesus Christ, that confers to the element its sacramental efficacy. Consequently he asks: “Detrahe verbum, et quid est aqua nisi aqua?”19 (“Take away the word, and what is the water except water?”20). And, as if to answer this rhetorical question, he concludes that “accedit verbum ad elementum, et fit sacramentum, etiam ipsum tamquam visibile verbum.”

As we shall see, Jüngel’s analysis of Augustine includes extensive engagements with the classic Latin sacramental concepts. It is perhaps for this reason that, in the text of El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel quotes both Augustine and Thomas in the original Latin and translates quotations into the contemporary vernacular. We will follow suit in the present chapter. For the Latin quotations of Augustine, we refer the reader first to the page(s) in El Ser Sacramental on which the Latin is cited, and then to the location of the quote in the standard series of Latin Patristic and medieval texts, Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina (CCSL). For the immediate quote, see Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 30, and Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus, LXXX.3, CCSL 36, p. 529. 16 For English citations of the Tractatus, we will follow John W. Rettig’s translation in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (FC). For the present quote, see Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3, FC 90, p. 117. 17 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 31; see Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus, LXXX.3, CCSL 36, p. 529. 18 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3, FC 90, p. 117. 19 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 31; see Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus, LXXX.3, CCSL 36, p. 529. 20 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3, FC 90, p. 117. 15

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But what type of word is it that makes a sacrament when it is added to the element and, as such, is to be comprehended as a visible word which, at least in the case of baptism, possesses the power to purify from sin? According to Jüngel’s reading, Augustine makes the crucial move toward an answer to this question by asserting that “the word in the sacrament does not acquire its purifying force by virtue of its being pronounced, but rather as a result of its being believed: Non quia dicitur, sed quia creditur.”21 We shall see that, in Jüngel’s estimation, this emphasis on faith in the word becomes the critical component of Luther’s appropriation of Augustine’s understanding of sacrament. In the present location in his analysis, Jüngel considers it significant that the distinction between the pronunciation of the word and the reception of the word in faith leads Augustine to make a corresponding distinction between the sonus transiens (passing sound) and virtus manens (abiding power22) of the sacrament. The pronunciation of the word makes only the sonus transiens, but the same word added to the element and received “in and only in faith,”23 the word as verbum fidei, deploys its virtus manens through the sacrament in order to purify from sin.24

C. The aporia at the heart of the Augustinian hermeneutics—Jüngel’s reading of De Doctrina Christiana In the text of El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel proposes that this distinction between sonus and virtus offers a pathway into the hermeneutics of signification,25 a theme that Augustine does not discuss directly in the Tractatus on John, but Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 32. On this point, see the whole of Augustine’s argument in Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3, FC 90, pp. 117–19. 22 We have followed Rettig’s translations of these terms. See Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3, FC 90, p. 118. 23 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 32. 24 Interestingly, this distinction between sonus transiens and virtus manens, which Jüngel points to in order to accentuate the problems that he discovers in Augustine’s concept of sacramental efficacy, is left out of Cary’s presentation of the powerlessness of the sacraments in Augustine’s theology. Jüngel conceives that Augustine promotes a concept of sacramental efficacy within a semiotics that ultimately undercuts it. Cary contends that Augustine’s Christian Platonic ontology precludes the idea of sacramental efficacy. We are left to wonder how, within the context of his argument against a genuinely Augustinian theory of sacrificial efficacy, Cary might tackle the problem of the abiding power of the sacrament. See, again, the entire argument in Cary, Outward Signs, pp. 155–252, for his refutation of the notion that, for Augustine, the sacraments are capable of mediating the grace that they visibly signify. 25 See Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 32–33. 21

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rather chiefly in the first three books of De Doctrina Christiana. Augustine, Jüngel observes, argues that the distinction between sonus and virtus is “indispensable . . . not only in a specific theological sense, but also in a general hermeneutical sense.”26 The distinction, that is, points to “a general hermeneutical structure of the word,”27 namely, to the Augustinian thesis that words are semantically structured according to the division of signa and res significata.28 We now see that this differentiation at the heart of the structure of the word is, in turn, highly important for Jüngel’s reading of the Augustinian theology of sacrament, since, according to Augustine according to Jüngel, a sacrament is what it is by virtue of the fact that the verbum fidei is added to an elementum. Precisely how does the general structure of the word, with its differentiation of signum and res significata, apply to this verbum fidei? Jüngel explains in El Ser Sacramental that Augustine’s hermeneutics of the sign yields an answer to this question that, in certain respects at least, Jüngel finds necessary to challenge. For our analysis we may narrow our inquiry to the two major themes of Augustine’s hermeneutics of signification that Jüngel considers to be most important and interesting. These are: (1) the world as an irreducible nexus of referential relations;29 and, (2) the faith that receives the verbum fidei as assensione cogitare (assent of thought).30 (1) Augustine famously states at the beginning of De Doctrina Christiana that “Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum”31 (“All teaching is either about things or signs”32). Moreover, Jüngel reports that, for Augustine, reality “consists of beings that signify or refer to other things (signum and/or res significans) and of beings that are signified or are objects of reference (res significata).”33 On the basis of this “ontological arrangement” of signs and things,34 Augustine Ibid., p. 32. Ibid. It is worth noting that the distinction between sonus transiens and virtus manens is not explicitly stated in De Doctrina Christiana, nor does Jüngel elaborate which passages he has in mind concerning the reference. It is thus not self-evident how Jüngel conceives the transition between the Tractatus and De Doctrina Christiana. 29 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 33–35. 30 Ibid., pp. 37–42. 31 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, I.ii, CCSL 32, p. 7. 32 For English quotations from De Doctrina Christiana, we will cite Edmund Hill’s translation in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (WSA). The citation for the present passage is Augustine, Teaching Christianity, I.2, WSA I/11, p. 106. 33 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 34 34 See Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” p. 17. 26 27 28

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describes the difference between eternity and the world. The res aeternae (eternal things) are pure res significata insofar as they are signified by the res significans but do not themselves signify other things. On the other hand, while some worldly things are res significata that correspond to worldly signa, all worldly things, even the world itself, are signs that inevitably refer beyond the time and space of the world in order to signify the res aeternae. Augustine’s world, observes Jüngel, is thus “one infinite connection of relations of reference and signification . . . The world itself is a unique event of signification.”35 It is interesting to see how Augustine, according to Jüngel at least, conceives the correspondence between this structure of signification and the temporality of the world. Jüngel points out that Augustine defines creaturely time as uninterrupted restlessness, as the deadly disquietude of worldly existence that is due to our failure to grasp the res aeternae through the worldly signa. Indeed, for Augustine it is only in eternity that the nexus of signifying relations terminates, and thus our arrival in eternity to the res aeternae is conceived as rest from the pursuit of God through signs; that is, as the end of worldly time. Jüngel argues that this same conception of time is in the background of Augustine’s well-known assertion from the first book of the Confessions that, “inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te”36 (“Our heart is unquiet until it rests in you [God]”37). Augustine’s situation of the sacraments within this temporal nexus of signification is crucial for Jüngel’s analysis. On one hand, Jüngel argues that, for Augustine, the sacraments are signs that, like all worldly signa, point beyond themselves and even beyond the world to the res aeternae. In precisely this sense, the sacraments, as verba visibilia, share with all other human words the general hermeneutical function of signification. However, Jüngel observes that Augustine also holds that, by virtue of the conjunction of the verbum fidei and the elementum, the sacrament in fact communicates the grace, proper only to God, that purifies the sinner. Accordingly, “the sacrament is not just a sign that refers to the res aeternae, but is also a mediating event between time and eternity, earth and heaven.”38 Again, though, Jüngel discerns that Augustine emphasizes 38 35 36 37

Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 34. See ibid., p. 35; see Augustine, Confessionum, 1.1, CCSL 27, p. 1. Augustine, The Confessions, 1.1, trans. Maria Boulding, WSA I/1, p. 39. Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 40.

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the sign function of the sacrament at the expense of the mediating function.39 The force of Jüngel’s rhetoric suggests that the ontological gap between the worldly sign and the eternal thing40 in fact precludes the notion that the res significata can mediate itself through its signum. We shall shortly observe that Jüngel praises Luther for amending Augustine’s sacramental theology at just this point, and thus for accentuating the insight that the sacrament must be more than a sign of an ontologically absent thing. (2) Jüngel argues that, for Augustine, the world of signs is inherently textual and therefore interpretable. To explain this determination, Jüngel introduces a distinction that is critical for Augustine’s hermeneutics of signification; namely, the distinction between the signa naturalia (natural signs) and the signa data (conventional signs41). In an important passage, Jüngel summarizes the distinction as it appears in De Doctrina Christiana: When an animal leaves its tracks, it leaves a natural sign. This occurs without a specific intention. On the other hand, when living beings signal in order to communicate certain thoughts or feelings through the sign, such occurrence is a signum datum . . . In sum it is common to all of the signs that they are things that, apart from the form in which they are offered, cause upon their arrival some different thing to come to the conscience, that is to say, they are intended to impart understanding. The signs given by man almost always refer to the sensus aurium, and sometimes to the sensus oculorum, but rarely to the other senses. Therefore, the words spoken inter homines that affect the sense of the ear posses a principatus significandi, such that the word is, properly speaking, the signum datum. For good reason the word is used exclusively as sign and loses all meaning apart from its sign function. All other signa data are also words. Insofar as they affect the sensus oculorum they can be designated, according to their This is the general thrust of our chapter from El Ser Sacramental; namely, that Luther augments Augustine’s theology of sacrament and in doing so corrects the problems that emerge when the general hermeneutical category of signification is applied without qualification to the sacraments. To this, the reader is once again directed to the very different reading of this specific issue offered by Phillip Cary, who proposes that the mediating function of the sacrament, that is, the conception of the sacrament as a means of grace, cannot in reality be found in Augustine’s writings at all. Rather, for Augustine, Cary argues, the granting of grace is the prerogative of God alone, who performs this work independently of the visible “means” of the sacraments. See in particular the presentation in Cary, Outward Signs, pp. 161–64. 40 This gap, we again note, is, in Cary’s reading, the residue of a Platonic cosmology. 41 We have followed Hill’s translations of these terms. See Augustine, Teaching Christianity, II.2, WSA I/11, p. 129. 39

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visibility, as verba visibilia. To these verba visibilia also belongs, according to Augustine, the sacrament. Therefore, in the Augustinian definition of the sacrament as visible word, a specifically theological concept of the word is not initially presupposed. Rather, we are dealing with a general category of fundamental ontology when the sacrament is understood as a verbum visibile—that is to say, a signum datum that speaks in its visibility.42

The world is interpretable, that is, it is readable and for this reason understandable, by virtue of the fact that the signs that constitute the world either unintentionally (as signa naturalia) or intentionally (as signa data) point the conscience beyond the signs to the things signified. Signs are thus the media by which we grasp meaning, and, consequently, by which we grasp the world.43 The signa data mediate chiefly by addressing the sense of hearing and sometimes sight, but rarely the other senses. However, in all cases, the signa data are words, whether audible words or visible words. The sacrament belongs to the latter category of the signa data. The sacraments are verba visibilia.44 Jüngel labors to establish this point precisely because it anticipates a subsequent move that Augustine makes that, as Jüngel will eventually show, is later countered by Luther, who is otherwise genuinely sympathetic to the Augustinian theology. In the statement from the Tractatus on John, Augustine asserts that a sacrament can be found wherever the word is added to the element: Accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum. The sacrament itself becomes a visible word (. . . etiam ipsum tamquam visibile verbum), a signum datum that, in its visibility, signifies something else. Thus, in the case of baptism, the word is added to the baptismal water such that the resulting sacrament signifies the grace that purifies. As we have already observed, for Jüngel’s Augustine, when the word that is added to the water is received in faith and thus becomes a verbum fidei, the sacrament efficaciously communicates the Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 38–39. At the risk of laboring the point, we note again that Cary’s analysis of similar themes in the Augustinian corpus leads him to a very different conclusion; namely, that Augustine’s skepticism concerning the mediating capacity of sensible signs precludes the notion that we can in fact learn from the world and its objects. The reader is directed to the chapter on Augustine’s epistemology in Cary, Outward Signs, pp. 87–120, with the caveat that the author does not directly engage with our present passage from De Doctrina Christiana. 44 See the similar comments on this point in Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” pp. 18–19. 42 43

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grace that it signifies.45 But what is the nature of the faith that makes the word added to the water a verbum fidei? According to Jüngel, Augustine proposes that faith necessarily involves “an assent, that is, an act of will. And this act of will is an act of obedience before an authority.”46 Furthermore, Jüngel notes that, for Augustine, the assent of faith, its concession to the authority of God, occurs in the cogitatio. As he puts it in De praedestinatione sanctorum, “credere est cum assensione cogitare”47 (“to believe is . . . to think with assent”48).49 Faith, therefore, occurs only when thought acknowledges the authority of God and concedes that what the sacrament signifies is in fact realized through the sacrament. It is at just this determination of the verbum fidei that Jüngel departs from Augustine, and he presents his case against Augustine’s course of argument later in the text of El Ser Sacramental and in dialogue with Luther.50 To summarize Augustine according to Jüngel, the word that is added to the element, (1) as a signum datum maintains the structure of signification, that is, its form signifies a content that is ontologically differentiable from the word itself; (2) becomes a verbum fidei only as it is received in faith, which itself is an act of assent of the will; and, (3) becomes efficacious when it arrives as a verbum fidei at the cogitatio. Jüngel proposes that Luther, who is by all accounts deeply indebted to the Augustinian tradition of theology, dissents from Augustine on all three counts. First, “the hermeneutical function of signification of the verbum that is added to the element, which is dominant in Augustine and also in Thomas, in Though there remains the question of whether the basic ontological structure of the Augustinian semiotics in fact undercuts this claim concerning sacramental efficacy. Does not the ontological gap between sign and thing signified suggest that the sacrament, as visible word, signifies something that it cannot mediate? At this point in the argument of El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel is content to allow Augustine to give voice to a strong conception of sacramental efficacy without parsing the problem. But, as we shall shortly see, it is clear from his appeal to Luther’s alternate reading of the problem of sacramental efficacy that the hermeneutics of the sign are a, if not the, aporia that must be overcome in the Augustinian sacramental theology. 46 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 39–40. 47 Ibid., p. 40; see Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum, 2.5, CCSL 44, p. 963. 48 Augustine, Predestination of the Saints, 2.5, FC 86, p. 222. 49 It is worth noting that Thomas spends a few paragraphs working through this definition of faith from De praedestinatione sanctorum, eventually concluding that, in a qualified sense, faith is indeed the act of thinking with willful assent. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Complete English Edition in Five Volumes, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Provence (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, Ave Maria Press, 1948), II, q. 2, a. 1 (vol. 3, pp. 1173–74). 50 Jüngel turns to Luther later in the text of the chapter, after he has concluded his analysis of Augustine and discussed the development of the Augustinian sacramental theology by Thomas in the Summa. It is clear from the section of the chapter on Luther that Jüngel terminates his analysis of Augustine at a particular point in order to set up Luther as a counterpoint. See Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 55–58. 45

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Luther . . . plays a role that is, at most, subordinated.”51 Luther, by marked contrast to Augustine, is not interested in the principatus significandi of the verbum that is added to the elementum. Instead, Luther replaces Augustine’s emphasis on the sacrament as a sign with the assertion that the sacramental word is in fact the verbum promittentis Dei, the “word of power which accomplishes what it expresses, Psalm 33 [:9], ‘He spoke, and it came to be.’”52 For Luther, the word of the sacrament is efficacious ex verbo Dei dicto.53 This understanding of the word of God fits nicely with what we have already examined in the first unit concerning Jüngel’s concept of the sacramental word. Accordingly, God’s word is not a sign that, as such, is ontologically divisible from its content. On the contrary, the word of God is the advent of God in speech, his creative self-disclosure in the event of language. In short, the word of God is Jesus Christ, himself the God who speaks. Second, because the word attached to the element is the verbum promittentis Dei, faith does not need an additional act of assent of the will, but instead takes the form of “warm confidence” in the truth of the creative word.54 Indeed, “the event of the word of God evokes faith, such that the word achieves its purpose.”55 And third, the warm confidence of faith locates the seat of the word in the heart, rather than in the cogitatio. Faith is created when the verbum fidei arrives at the heart, and thus only as the event of the word occurs in the heart does the sacrament truly become efficacious. From this three-fold divergence of Luther from the Augustinian sacramental theology, Jüngel thus concludes that the sacrament is in no way a sign that points beyond itself to God, but is rather the event in which God draws near to his creatures in an unsurpassably intimate way. God determines to be God only as God pro nobis, and the sacrament is the place in the world at which location this determination is actualized. Precisely so, Jesus Christ is “the unique sacrament, and indeed the mystery that reveals the eternal and original decision of God.”56 For Jüngel, Luther’s shift from Augustine’s hermeneutics of the sign and onto the event character of sacrament clears the ground for the Christological determination of the category of “sacrament.” Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 55. Emphasis added. Ibid.; see Luther, Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, LW 37, p. 181. Note that in El Ser Sacramental, Psalm 33 is incorrectly referenced as Psalm 3. 53 See Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 56. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p. 56. 56 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 60–61. 51 52

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D. Excursus—An additional interlocution with Luther on the way toward the Christological determination of “sacrament” We may further illuminate Jüngel’s readings of Augustine and Luther by taking a brief excursion into one of his additional interlocutions with the theology of the Reformer. In the important essay “The Church as Sacrament?” Jüngel demonstrates that, for Luther, if the “constitutive function” of the word of God is “neglected” in the sacrament, “the sacramental event comes to be dominated by the signum as human action.”57 Accordingly, for Luther, the claim that the sacrament is efficacious ex verbo Dei dicto shifts the emphasis of the sacramental action off of the role of human agency in the sacramental event, and onto “the decisive point . . . that in the sacrament, the gracious God himself is the one who acts.”58 Hence, “Luther wishes to ensure that the sacrament is understood and celebrated as God acting upon us, and is not perverted into our handling of God in the form of a work of piety.”59 As we have repeatedly observed, Jüngel is wary that the Augustinian differentiation of signs and things corresponds to the sinful compulsion of the homo faber toward the domination of the world through thought, will, and work. According to Luther according to Jüngel, the eclipse of the verbum by the emphasis on the sacramental signum situates the human agent as the actor in the sacramental events. How, though, does the rehabilitation of the “constitutive function” of the word resolve the aporia? Crucially, Jüngel argues that the prioritization of divine agency over the human act in the sacrament is secured only when the verbum of the sacramental event is conceived as a word of address that turns the human participants in the sacrament into creatively passive recipients of the salvific activity of God that was enacted in history in the sacrificial death of Christ.60 From this we see, once again, that Jüngel rejects the hermeneutical approach of signification for the description of the sacramental verbum, opting instead for a hermeneutics of event that identifies the verbum as the addressing and self-disclosing word of God. And, moreover, since he contends that Jesus Eberhard Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, p. 195 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 196. 60 On this point, see ibid., pp. 204–06. 57

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Christ himself is the word of God spoken to the world and thus in the event of the sacrament, in the essay Jüngel posits a distinction between the unique sacramentality of the being of Jesus Christ and the sacramentality of the church and the celebrations of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.61 He thus concludes, following Luther’s language: By living from Jesus Christ as the one and really unique sacrament, the church celebrates the sacramentality of his being. And only insofar as it celebrates his sacramentality, that is, the history of Jesus Christ as the declaration and impartation of God’s gracious presence, can the church be called, not a basic sacrament but rather the great sacramental sign which represents Jesus Christ.62

We will examine the implications of this line of argument for ecclesiology and for the doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the final two units of our analysis. Here we need to see that Jüngel’s replacement of the hermeneutics of signification with the hermeneutics of word-events, in this instance in dialogue with Luther, establishes the claim that Jesus Christ himself is the unique and preeminent sacrament of God for the world. Jüngel insists that the verbum that is attached to the worldly element in order to make the verbum visibile of the sacrament is not, as Augustine had proposed, a mediating sign that points beyond its form to a God who is ontically exterior to the sign-word. Rather, following his reading of Luther, for Jüngel the verbum of the sacrament is nothing other than the word of the gospel, the verbum promittentis Dei, the powerful event of God’s gracious self-disclosure that occurs in the world in human language. Moreover, according to Jüngel, Jesus Christ is not separable from this word as a res is from its signum, but, as we have seen repeatedly in our analysis, is himself present as absent to the hearer of the word. That is to say, Jesus Christ is fully present in the word, while remaining ontologically We should note that, in the course of his argument in “The Church as Sacrament?” this strict distinction drawn between, on the one hand, the unique sacramentality of Jesus, and, on the other hand, the sacramentality of the church, corresponds to Jüngel’s hesitancy concerning designating baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments. Here he only refers to these practices as celebrations. It is not until several years later, and in the context of his interlocutions with Schleiermacher’s theology of worship, that Jüngel refers to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacramental celebrations. See our extensive commentary on Jüngel’s varying employment of sacramental terminology in Chapter 10, below. 62 Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 206. “Sign,” not in the sense of a tool that points beyond itself to an anterior object, but rather, in accordance with the hermeneutics of event, the bearer of a presence that remains also absent. 61

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differentiable from the world.63 Consequently, anything worthy of the designation “sacrament” (e.g. the church and/or the sacramental practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper) is not so by virtue of its referential capacity to point beyond itself to the res aeternae. Rather, such worldly phenomena are “sacramental” precisely because the verbum that makes the visible word of the sacrament is the gracious self-presentation of Christ in the gospel. God acts, or, to be more precise, God speaks, and ex verbo Dei dicto occurs the sacrament. Jesus Christ is thus the one sacrament; the church, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper can be conceived as sacramental only according to the category of word-event as it is structured along the lines of the analogy of advent.

See, again, our discussion in Chapter 2, above, of this dynamic of presence and absence in the event of language of address.

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The Humanity of Jesus Christ as Mystery

In the present chapter we now turn our analysis to the second pivotal component of Jüngel’s Christological determination of the category of sacrament, which is his persistent assertion that sacramental theology must take seriously the exegetical study of the New Testament term μυστήριον, the Latin translation of which is sacramentum. As we mentioned in the introduction to Chapter 5, this theme is presented in an extensive and compelling manner in the Second Lecture of the essay “Das Sakrament—was ist das?”1 We will therefore follow his argument in this lecture closely, paying careful attention to how he employs his analysis of μυστήριον to support the thesis that Jesus Christ is a sacramental being in a unique and preeminent sense. After initiating the lecture with a broad survey of the history of the diverging Protestant interpretations of the concept of sacrament,2 Jüngel proposes that contemporary Protestant dogmatics will not arrive at an unambiguous description of sacrament unless it follows “the exegetical insight that the word ‘sacrament’ can be determined only from the New Testament concept of mysterion.”3 Jüngel’s reading of the usage of mysterion in the New Testament emerges over the course of six muscular paragraphs which are introduced by the third of the five theses that compose the lecture. In this third thesis Jüngel summarizes his exegetical position: “According to the New Testament concept of mysterion, the nature of sacrament should be defined as the mediation, occurring through the humanity of Jesus, of the human God exactly in his Eberhard Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” EvTh 26 (1966), pp. 41–61. See ibid., pp. 41–50. 3 Ibid., p. 50. 1 2

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divinity, which is, as such, not necessarily a component of the continuity of the world.”4 At least three things are worth mentioning concerning this introductory axiom. First, it is interesting that both here and elsewhere in the text Jüngel employs the idea of mediation in order to explain the nature of the sacrament.5 Importantly, we discover throughout the lecture that Jüngel’s approach to the problem of sacramental mediation parallels his description of the structure of the addressing word of God in at least one critical respect. In the first of the lecture’s theses, Jüngel asserts that “sacrament is the theological concept of a mediation in which not just anything is mediated, but rather the mediation itself is mediated.”6 And later we find the similar claim that “the sacrament cannot be a mediation of just anything . . . but mediates itself. Accordingly, one can and must say that the sacrament is . . . the theological concept of a mediation mediating itself.”7 These rather opaque statements point back to Jüngel’s reading of the Augustinian hermeneutics, and particularly to his rejection of any concept of mediation according to which the form of the medium can be neatly differentiated from the content that is mediated. We recall from the previous chapter Jüngel’s assessment that Augustine jeopardizes the claim that the sacrament is an event of mediation by overemphasizing the sign character of the verbum visibile of the sacrament. Augustine, we might say, attempts to uphold two apparently mutually exclusive options for understanding the sacrament, viz. the sacrament as signifier and as sanctifier. In “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” and in opposition to this Augustinian incongruity, Jüngel charts out an approach to mediation according to which the mediating sacrament has a structure similar to that of the analogical speech of the addressing word of God. And he takes this course precisely because, as we will make transparent in our analysis, he conceives that the mediation mediated in the sacrament is the self-disclosing event of the word of God, specifically Jesus Christ himself, who is the divine “Yes” spoken in and for the world. Ibid. It is worth noting that the concept of mediation does not appear in El Ser Sacramental, even though, as we have already noted, the basic thrust of Jüngel’s argument is virtually identical in the later text to what we find in “Das Sakrament . . .” Unfortunately, Jüngel refrains from explaining his avoidance of this concept in El Ser Sacrament. 6 Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” p. 41. 7 Ibid., p. 43. 4 5

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Second, Jüngel’s third thesis of the lecture declares that the sacrament is the mediation of “the human God exactly in his divinity” occurring through “the humanity of Jesus.” We will discover precisely what he means by this during the course of our analysis. But it is important for us to see at the outset that, for Jüngel, God himself is, (1) as the human God in his divinity, mediated in the sacrament; and, (2) as the humanity of Jesus, the very event of mediation. That is to say, in the sacrament God mediates God. Third, we should not be surprised to discover in this thesis from “Das Sakrament . . .” that the mediation of God through the humanity of Jesus is, by Jüngel’s account, “not necessarily a component of the continuity of the world.” The ontological distinctions that Jüngel consistently draws throughout his writings both between interruption and continuity and between possibility and actuality play a significant role in his understanding of the relation of the humanity of Jesus to the world. Jüngel thus proposes later in the text that the self-mediation of God that occurs in the humanity of Jesus “strikes man in his worldly situation, but does not itself arise from out of this worldly situation.”8 This is because, in the mediating event of Jesus’ humanity, “nothing of the actuality of our world is, as such, a genuine mediation of God.”9 Jüngel, by contrast, suggests that Jesus’ humanity is the hiatus of the world’s actualities. As he puts it elsewhere, the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth on the scene of late Second Temple Judaism is an event in which “something comes to the world which absolutely does not belong to it, but which can only be experienced as an intrusion upon or interruption of the coherence of the world.”10 Moreover, for Jüngel, the post-resurrection existence of Jesus Christ continues to be present in the world only through the interrupting event of the addressing word of God. This apparent discontinuity drawn between the humanity of Jesus and the actuality of the world raises some significant questions, to which we will soon return, concerning both the tenability of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament and the coherence of his Christology. In “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” we encounter the theme of discontinuity immediately in the first full paragraph of our passage, during the course of Ibid., p. 57. Ibid. 10 Jüngel, “The Dogmatic Significance of the Question of the Historical Jesus,” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays II, pp. 241–63 (trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and John B. Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), pp. 89–90. 8 9

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which Jüngel commences his exegetical analysis of the New Testament term μυστήριον. Jüngel’s writes: The meaning of μυστήριον in the New Testament must be determined according to its apocalyptic usage. When defined formally according to its apocalyptic usage, a μυστήριον “is hidden from human eyes, [disclosed] only through revelation and according to the counsel of God.” In this sense Mark 4:11 (cf. Mt 13:11; Luke 8:10) says that it is given to the disciples to know the mystery (or mysteries) of the kingdom of God. From [the use of] δέδοται it is clear that the mystery of the kingdom of God is not a riddle of this world that one can solve. The mystery already distinguishes itself from a riddle due to the fact that it remains mysterious even after it is discovered, whereas a riddle that is solved accordingly ceases to be puzzling. But the mystery of the kingdom of God is also peculiar in that it cannot be clarified from the continuity of this world, even though it is encountered only in the continuity of this world. It follows that one must talk particularly of this μυστήριον. As proclamation, such talk itself belongs, in a constitutive way, to the event of the mystery and to the history of its revelation. The systematic consequence of this fact is that the mysterion belongs neither to the continuity of necessity of worldly existents, nor also to humanity. The mystery of God does not show itself to be necessary in the continuity of the world and of humanity. It is obviously more than necessary.11

According to Jüngel, and with a nod to Bornkamm’s article on μυστήριον, the “apocalyptic usage” of the term in the New Testament emphasizes the ineluctable hiddenness of the mystery in the world.12 The mystery is disclosed exclusively through the self-revelation of God, and, as such, is imperceptible to human reason and sensory cognition. Rather, Jüngel contends that the mystery of God is “encountered” and “discovered” in the world only in such a way that it remains “hidden” and “mysterious” in the world. The μυστήριον is not self-evident in any worldly sense; that is, it is not a phenomenon that is capable of being grasped by the human faculties. On the contrary, the mystery is something that is only “revealed” to the human person. The mystery of God Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” pp. 50–51. The quotation in the second sentence is cited from Günther Bornkamm, “Artikel μυστήριον,” in ThWB, Bd. 2, p. 825. 12 Jüngel also makes this point in El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), pp. 17–18, though interestingly he does not point to this idea of “more than necessary” that is prominent in our passage from “Das Sakrament— was ist das?” 11

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is “given,” as the cited passage from Mark indicates, and, as such, precedes human thinking, willing, and working. In the passage Jüngel draws a comparison between the mystery and a riddle in order to illuminate the point. A riddle, he observes, is something that can be solved by human reason and/or sensory perception and, precisely in the event of this solution, ceases to be puzzling. Its being as a riddle, as it were, terminates as soon as it is understood. On the other hand, and speaking generally, Jüngel proposes that a mystery does not cease to be mysterious once it is given and received.13 And what is true of a mystery in general is even more so the case with the mystery of God, since, he argues, such a mystery does not at any time or in any way belong to the world. The mystery of God is a possibility that never becomes a component of the world’s actuality, even though it comes to the world. It is of course unavoidable that we encounter the mystery within the context of the continuity or actuality of the world, for we ourselves belong to that continuity. However, the mystery is not a piece of worldly continuity such that it might be ascertained or clarified from that continuity. This is the sense behind Jüngel’s statement in the paragraph that the mystery of God does not belong to the “continuity of necessity,” but rather is “more than necessary.”14 As he later explains, “God is not necessary insofar as nothing in this world . . . can compel us to perceive him.”15 Significantly, we also see in this passage that, for Jüngel, it is the talk (specifically the proclamation) of the mystery that determines the structure of the relation between the μυστήριον and the continuity of the world. For this point, the claim that the proclamation in fact “belongs, in a constitutive way, to the event of the mystery and to the history of its revelation” is crucial, for here we observe a pivotal aspect of Jüngel’s approach to the word of God that we have encountered at many points in our analysis thus far. According to Jüngel, the proclamation of the mystery is not a series of lingual signa that point beyond the event of speech to the mystery as a res significata. As we have repeatedly observed, for Jüngel, the hermeneutics of signification do not Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 17–18. On the relation between God and worldly necessity, see the lengthy discussion in the chapter entitled “Is God Necessary?” in 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, pp. 14–35 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983). 15 Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” p. 56. 13 14

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apply to the word of God in any of its modes. Rather, Jüngel contends that the proclamation is itself identical to the mystery. The mystery, we might say in following Jüngel’s frequently employed vernacular, comes to speech as speech. And since such speech is ineluctably analogical (in the sense of the analogy of advent), the proclamation of the mystery preserves the tension between the similarity and dissimilarity of the mystery and the world. The μυστήριον is “encountered only in the continuity of this world” even though “it cannot be clarified from the continuity of this world.” In Jüngel’s theology, language alone, and specifically the word of God, secures this structure of difference in identity, apartness in nearness, etc. But what precisely is this mystery that comes to speech as speech in the event of its proclamation, and is, as such, the interruption of the world’s actuality? Jüngel contends in the next paragraph that the New Testament texts provide the critical clue toward the answer to this question. He observes that, in the New Testament, “μυστήριον almost without exception acquires a firm conceptual connection with the Christ kerygma.”16 The Gospel writers employ μυστήριον to demonstrate that Jesus as Christ proclaimed the immanent arrival of the kingdom of God as parable, while Paul and the deutero-Pauline authors utilize the term as “a concept that brings to speech the being of Jesus Christ as he belongs to God and to the world.”17 Moreover, Jüngel proposes that because, as a rule, the New Testament texts “locate” the relation of the being of Jesus Christ both to God and to the world sub specie crucis, the death of Jesus is acutely important for our interpretation of μυστήριον, and thus in turn for the category of sacrament. He explains that the death of Jesus “intensifies the above observation that the mystery of God cannot be shown as necessary in any worldly sense. For the death of Jesus is in no way an event that is necessary, in any worldly sense, for the continuity of the world. And the glorification of all death through God is superfluous Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 52. We should at this point note Geoffrey Wainwright’s observation that Jüngel mentions the Pauline and deutero-Pauline texts only in passing, and for this reason misses a critical insight concerning μυστήριον that emerges in such passages; namely, that “it is clear, especially in the letters to the Colossians and to the Ephesians, that the ‘inclusion’ of believers into the mystery of God or into Christ is of such an intimate kind that Christ and the church can be spoken of in the organic language of head and body.” See Geoffrey Wainwright, “Church and Sacrament(s),” in John B. Webster (ed.), The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in his Sixtieth Year, p. 94 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994).

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rather than necessary.”18 Since it is especially the cross that determines the meaning of the concept of μυστήριον, this mystery, though proclaimed in the world, must at the same time be conceived apart from all worldly necessities and actualities. Jüngel proceeds to explain that the Christ kerygma is mysterious and therefore scandalous to all that is self-evident and necessary in a worldly sense precisely because the kerygma’s central declaration confounds that form of knowledge that is bound to the world and its continuities. Specifically, that which the revealed mystery declares and rational knowledge cannot comprehend “is the humanity of God which occurs as worldly non-necessity in the being of Jesus Christ.”19 For Jüngel the humanity of God, revealed in history in the human lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth and particularly in the death of this man, is the mystery of God that is proclaimed as the word of God and received in faith. And, just so, Jesus Christ himself is the μυστήριον, and, in turn, is the one sacrament of God for the world. Jüngel elaborates the point in the next paragraph, which is worth citing in full: It is according to this understanding of the New Testament concept of mysterion that the nature of the sacraments will be determined in the following [line of argument]. In so doing it is already decided that there is absolutely only one sacrament: the being of Jesus Christ. “For there is one God, and also one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who has given himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given to its proper time” (1 Timothy 2:5f). The man Jesus mediates God in his humanity and by the freedom of his humanity, such that we are able to define the sacramentality of his being on the basis of the historical Jesus and through the unity of his proclamation and behavior. The Easter faith subsequently claimed, in view of the interruption that occurred in the death of Jesus, that through the human existence of Jesus the mediation of God had already been accomplished. It did this by now saying of God, in turn, that he—God—had for his part freely mediated himself to the world through Jesus, and would continue to mediate himself only through Jesus. This Easter claim therefore gives the death of Jesus on the cross a unique function. For if the humanity of the historical Jesus which mediates God Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” p. 52. Ibid., p. 53.

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should, according to the Easter claim (österlich dadurch), make valid the fact that God claims in divine freedom to mediate himself once for all through Jesus in human freedom, then the Easter faith returns precisely to the death of the man Jesus and in this horrifying end recognizes the completion of God’s mediation through a human life. The Easter faith thus very pointedly brings to expression that God in his freedom has so indentified himself with the murdered man Jesus that this human life was the true mediation of God, not only in its positivity, but also in its negativity—in the selflessness of that life. The belief that God himself, by identifying himself with the Crucified, participates in the pain, misery, and death of the human life, is therefore, to apply the briefest formula, belief in a God who is human precisely in his divinity. In this respect one must say that the humanity of Jesus can mediate the divinity of God, because God’s divinity is profoundly human.20

This passage is extremely important for our analysis of Jüngel’s Christological determination of sacrament primarily because of the significance he attributes to the cross for the claim that Jesus is the one mediator and therefore the one sacrament. In the present passage the argument is couched in the language of the hermeneutical problem of the relation of the man Jesus of Nazareth to the Christ proclaimed by faith, and, accordingly, Jüngel attempts to demonstrate the ways that the “Easter faith” interprets the events of the historical Jesus. Jüngel here identifies two reasons why the cross is pivotal for the Easter faith and its claims. First and perhaps most importantly for our analysis, according to Jüngel the death of Jesus signifies for the Easter faith that the mediation of God that occurred through the humanity of Jesus “had already been accomplished.” Consequently, the Easter faith recognizes the cross as the “horrifying end” of Jesus’ life and thus the “completion of God’s mediation through a human life.” This is an interesting move not least because, on the surface, it appears to restrict the mediation of God that occurs in Jesus Christ to only the lifetime of Jesus the Nazarene. But this is not quite the case, since Jüngel proposes in the passage that the Easter faith claims that God “mediated himself to the world through Jesus, and would continue to mediate himself only through Jesus.” So what is the nature of this ongoing mediation that, like the mediation completed in the cross and thus enclosed in the lifetime of Jesus, occurs through Jesus? He answers this question at a later point in the essay, asserting that this continual Ibid., pp. 53–55.

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mediation occurs in “that particular word through which Jesus Christ, for his part, mediates himself ”;21 that is, in the word of God, in the word of the gospel in which it is proclaimed that Jesus the crucified one is indeed Christ the Lord. According to Jüngel, then, God mediated himself through the human life of Jesus until that lifetime terminated on the cross, and now continues to mediate himself through the word of the cross. As we will observe in the remaining portions of this second unit, this conception of God’s sacramental self-mediation raises some significant questions concerning the post-resurrection existence of Jesus. Jüngel’s argument in this essay appears to suggest that, after the event of the resurrection, the word of God acquires the function that, during the earthly life of Jesus, was proper to Jesus’ human embodiment as the Nazarene and was exhibited in his proclamation and behavior. Jesus’ death brought to a decisive end the latter mode of his sacramental availability; the resurrection initiates his ongoing availability as the word alone. Among other things, in our subsequent analysis we will need to pay careful attention to the structure of this word of the cross that mediates Jesus’ post-resurrection existence. The second entailment of the cross for the Easter faith identified by Jüngel in our passage from “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” concerns the relation of the death of Jesus to the being of God, which, as we see, is quite important for Jüngel’s concept of sacramental mediation. In what sense is it the case that, as we observed above, in the event of the mystery God mediates God? According to Jüngel, God mediates himself in the humanity of Jesus insofar as he has “identified himself with the murdered man Jesus” such that he himself “participates in the pain, misery, and death of the human life” of Jesus. Jüngel argues that this event of identification and participation demonstrates that God “is human precisely in his divinity”; that is, that his divinity does not exclude but rather includes his humanity, and vice versa. And, because God has determined to disclose his identity only in the life and death of this man, Jüngel proposes that, properly speaking, it is the humanity of Jesus Christ and thus the humanity of God that is the mystery of the world and therefore the one sacrament. He thus concludes the section by asserting that: If the mystery of God is materially his humanity, and, likewise, the μυστήριον θεοῦ is formally God’s eternal and just so divine decision, then the nature of Ibid., p. 57.

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the sacrament conceptualized as mystery is now identified as the humanity of God, which, as such, mediates and therefore reveals the divinity of God, so that the believer, by participating in the humanity of God, experiences and knows that God is human in his divinity.22

We should note that he later adds that this participation in the humanity of God in no way entails that the believer acquires divinity through the reception of the mystery. On the contrary, because the mystery of God and thus also the one sacrament is the humanity of God, “God and man have been definitively differentiated [in the event of this mystery]: God as the God who is human in his divinity and man as the man who is now in no way divine, but exclusively human in his humanity.” And therefore, “the humanity of God in no way corresponds to the divinity of man, but rather only to the humanity of man.”23

Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 58.

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Jesus of Nazareth, Christ of Faith— A Christological Dilemma at the Heart of Jüngel’s Theology of Sacrament

In the preceding chapters in this second unit, we undertook detailed analyses of the passages in El Ser Sacramental and “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” in which Jüngel explains the conceptual and exegetical bases of his oft-asserted claim that Jesus Christ is himself the one sacrament of God for the world. We discovered that Jüngel’s Christological determination of the category of sacrament is inextricably tied to the hermeneutical decision that God’s self-revealing word is no empty signifier, or lingual referent, but is rather an event in which God comes to the world by coming-to-speech. For Jüngel, moreover, the being of Jesus Christ, the mystery of God’s gracious pro nobis, is this event, the “Yes” of the gospel, the powerful word of God spoken in and for the world. Jüngel’s examination of a theology of sacrament through the lens of the hermeneutics of event, coupled with his exegesis of the New Testament μυστήριον, thus establishes for him the thesis that Jesus Christ is a sacramental being in a unique and preeminent sense. Crucially, a particular picture of Jesus Christ emerges from the passages from Jüngel’s writings on sacrament that we have exposited thus far in this unit. We have seen that Jüngel describes the man Jesus of Nazareth, whose humanity, he claims, is itself the mystery of God, as an interruptive figure who shattered the life-continuities of his first-century Palestinian contemporaries

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through his public proclamation and corresponding behavior. While the crucifixion of this man brought to an end the initial mode of his interruptive, sacramental availability, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead inaugurated his ongoing1 sacramentality in the word-events of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.2 We observe, then, that Jesus, both in his public ministry during the historical existence of the Nazarene and in his post-resurrection existence, is conceived according to the category of word-event.3 In the present chapter, our concern is to demonstrate that this Christology of word-events is a recurrent theme in Jüngel’s theology that reflects a set of fundamental commitments concerning the intersection of revelation and history. While there are undoubtedly a number of different trajectories that we could pursue in order to elucidate this nexus of issues, for the following analysis we have chosen to chart a course that leads directly into an aporia that Jüngel, particularly in texts published during the first two decades of his career, confronts with a high degree of insightfulness and critical rigor; namely, the relation between the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the Lord Jesus Christ confessed in the Christian faith. While this course initially leads us away from explicitly addressing the question of the sacramental being of Jesus Christ, we will discover that Jüngel’s approach to this aporia is of the highest possible significance for his Christological determination of the category of sacrament. We use the qualifier “ongoing” cautiously and for lack of a better term. We are not suggesting by use of the term that Jüngel conceives the post-resurrection availability of Jesus to be located in some temporally and/or spatially continuous phenomenon (e.g. the church). On the contrary, our analysis demonstrates that, for Jüngel, the sacramental presence of God is also his absence, precisely because it occurs as the interruption of the temporally and spatially continuous. As we will further elaborate in the present chapter, this interruptive character is especially prominent in Jüngel’s description of Jesus’ post-resurrection sacramental presence in word-events.In the above sentence, rather, “ongoing” expresses Jüngel’s implied position that, in the trajectory of time that extends from the resurrection forward, Jesus Christ, in his post-resurrection existence, is sacramentally available in a particular mode (i.e. as interruptive word-event) and not otherwise. 2 We have already established in this present unit and will continue to observe, particularly in our analysis of Jüngel’s doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, below, that he conceives these sacramental practices as interruptive word-events in the occurrences of which the participant encounters the presence-as-absence of God. However, this categorization of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as word-events is principally found in those texts in which Jüngel explicitly addressed the problem of sacrament. In the texts that we examine in the present chapter on the Jesus of Nazareth/ Christ of faith dilemma, Jüngel is concerned with Jesus’ self-presentation in Christian proclamation (i.e. in preaching), and baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not mentioned. 3 See the similar analysis in John B. Webster, “Jesus in Modernity: Reflections on Jüngel’s Christology,” Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh and New York: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 151–90. 1

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A. Locating Jüngel’s approach to the problem In order for us to properly appreciate Jüngel’s contribution to modern research into the Jesus of history, it is necessary for us to at least briefly survey the second quest for the historical Jesus, of which Jüngel’s Christology is paradigmatic.4 In October of 1953, one of Bultmann’s former pupils, Ernst Käsemann, then of Göttingen, who had grown uncomfortable with his erstwhile teacher’s persistent rejection of the pursuit of the historical Jesus, presented an important and, as it would turn out, highly influential paper entitled, “Das Problem des historischen Jesus.”5 Käsemann’s essay is generally acknowledged as the inaugurating document of the “second,” or, as it was then called, “new” quest for the historical Jesus.6 In the essay, Käsemann concedes Bultmann’s proposal that the New Testament consists of a mixture of myth and history, and that, consequently, the Gospels confront the historian with the problem of a distorted depiction of the man Jesus of Nazareth.7 At the same time, he urges that the Gospels “clearly point to the contingency with which the saving event is tied to a particular person, place, and time.”8 The aporia, then, is that “the exalted Lord has almost entirely swallowed up the image of the earthly Lord, and yet the community [of the church] maintains the identity of the exalted Lord with the earthly.”9 Furthermore, “the solution to this problem cannot . . . be approached with For surveys of the modern quests for the historical Jesus, see Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (ed. John Bowden, in Fortress Classics in Biblical Studies, ed. K. C. Hanson; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001); Charles C. Anderson, Critical Quests of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969); Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs (2nd edn; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); Ben Witherington III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995); Carl E. Braaten, History and Hermeneutics (New Directions in Theology Today 2; ed. William Hordern; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966); and Walter P. Weaver, The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century, 1900–1950 (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press Intl., 1999). 5 Ernst Käsemann, “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,” in trans. W. J. Montague, Essays on New Testament Themes, pp. 15–47 (London: SCM Press, 1964). 6 On Käsemann’s contribution to the second quest, see Harrisville and Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, pp. 249–70. 7 We may cite Bultmann’s oft-quoted assertion in Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), p. 14: “I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist.” For a succinct elaboration of his program of demythologization, see “New Testament and Mythology,” in ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, pp. 1–44 (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). 8 Harrisville and Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, p. 253. 9 Käsemann, “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,” p. 46. 4

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any hope of success along the line of supposed historical bruta facta but only along the line of the connection and tension between the preaching of Jesus and that of his community.”10 That is, the continuity and discontinuity between the proclaimed Christ and the proclamation of Jesus suggests that faith must take an active interest in the question of the historical Jesus, while bearing in mind the caveat that the brute facts of history cannot in any final sense be used to establish the claims of faith. In the decade and half following the presentation of Käsemann’s paper, a number of New Testament theologians contributed to the new quest for the Jesus of history by attempting to determine the extent to which the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ of Christian proclamation are continuous.11 The new quest was relatively short-lived, not least because, like Käsemann, the majority of the proponents of the quest sought to correct certain tendencies in Bultmann’s hermeneutics from within a largely Bultmannian methodology for New Testament studies.12 The influence of Bultmann’s theology was on the wane in the 1970s, and scholarly confidence in the tenability of the new quest declined concomitantly.13 Interestingly, this rather brief period of the history of modern New Testament interpretation played a significant role in Jüngel’s theological formation, especially as it was mediated through the “New Hermeneutic” of his teachers Fuchs and Ebeling. It is crucial for our analysis that Fuchs and Ebeling, whose work, as one commentator has proposed, exhibits a “material unity of position” such that it constitutes a “single school of thought with a shared leadership,”14 attempt to establish the continuity between the Christ of the kerygma and the Jesus of history through a hermeneutical decision concerning the natures Ibid. Emphasis added. In addition to the texts of Fuchs and Ebeling, which we discuss below, examples of the second quest for the historical Jesus that are worth mentioning are James M. Robinson, A New Quest for the Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1959); Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (trans. Irene and Fraser McLuskey; New York: Harper & Row, 1960); and Ethelbert Stauffer, Jesus and His Story (trans. Richard and Clara Winston; New York: Knopf, 1960). 12 See Paul Rhodes Eddy and James K. Beilby, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus: An Introduction,” in The Historical Jesus: Five Views (ed. James K. Bielby and Paul Rhodes Eddy; Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), pp. 27–28. 13 Ibid. 14 James M. Robinson, Language, Hermeneutic, and History: Theology after Barth and Bultmann (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008), p. 126. We concur with Robinson’s analysis and will thus refer in the following to Fuchs and Ebeling as proponents of a shared program of New Testament hermeneutics. Hence, while we cite mainly from Fuchs in this survey, we assume that his position is roughly representative of Ebeling’s as well. 10 11

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of divine and human language.15 Indeed, Fuchs and Ebeling conceive that the relation between the kerygmatic Christ and the man Jesus of Nazareth is a thoroughly linguistic relation. While sharing Käsemann’s hesitations concerning Bultmann’s approach to myth and history, Fuchs and Ebeling move into an altogether different direction than Käsemann by suggesting that Bultmann has also insufficiently described the relation between language and being. Specifically, Fuchs and Ebeling challenge Bultmann’s assertion that “understanding [is] prior to, and more authentic than . . . language.”16 That is, Bultmann is accused of situating authentic existence as ontologically prior to the event of language, such that the goal of interpretation (particularly demythologization) is to go, as it were, behind the word in order to uncover the mode of existence signified by it.17 Fuchs and Ebeling counter Bultmann with what is known in the literature as the “New Hermeneutic,” to which we repeatedly referred in the first unit of our analysis. Fuchs charts a course for the program of the New Hermeneutic in an open letter written to address the conflict with Bultmann entitled, “What is a Language Event?—A Letter.” In a critical passage, he poses and answers the question at the heart of the conflict: What does language do? It justifies being. How does it do this? It permits being to be “present” in time; it makes being into an event. If language were to be content with just an entity, if it were without ado to assign being to thought and so render being “significant” only as an entity, then Bultmann would be right. But language does more. It makes not just the entity but being itself into an event . . . Language assumes the essential characteristic of being—that is, it gathers together. This requires language, in order to be. Only in language is being by its nature necessarily an event, as a “path.”18

This description of the relation of language to being, which is both formally and materially similar to statements from Jüngel’s writings that we examined On the following see penetrating analysis of Robinson in Language, Hermeneutic, and History, pp. 103–37. 16 Fuchs, “What is a Language Event?—A Letter,” in trans. Andrew Scobie, Studies of the Historical Jesus, p. 102 (London: SCM Press, 1964). 17 Ibid. While Fuchs and Ebeling do not mention Augustine in their analyses of Bultmann, the rejection of this particular aspect of demythologization implies a concomitant rejection of the hermeneutics of signification. This will become increasingly clear in the following.On the priority of language for existence, see our comments on Jüngel’s brief interlocution with Heidegger in God as the Mystery of the World in Section 2.A. 18 Ibid., pp. 207–08. 15

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in Part One, is, in spite of the abstruseness of Fuchs’s prose, extraordinarily illuminating for understanding the New Hermeneutic. Being, Fuchs proposes, is not related to language as an ontological a priori. Being, rather, happens in language; it becomes event and therefore takes its time as the word is spoken.19 The ingenuity of the New Hermeneutic lies in the application of this ontological arrangement of language and being to the problem of the historical Jesus. Robinson’s summary of the insight, framed in terms of the conflict between Bultmann and Fuchs and Ebeling, is worth quoting at length: The nub of Bultmann’s opposition to the new quest of the historical Jesus is formulated in his two rhetorical questions: “Does Jesus’s eschatological consciousness mediate an eschatological self-understanding to him who perceives it as a historical phenomenon? . . . Does Jesus’s claim of authority, perceived as a historical phenomenon, reach beyond the time of his earthly activity?” These rhetorical questions anticipating a negative answer are posed in terms of the method of the original quest, so that the historical Jesus and the proclaimed kerygma are incommensurable. But when (Bultmann’s) questions are heard in terms of the language event of the new hermeneutic, they are subject to a positive answer. Fuchs and Ebeling would argue that Jesus’s word—not just the Easter kerygma—happens as recurring word today and thus mediates an eschatological self-understanding to him who hears it; that Jesus’s claim of authority, heard as the word of love, reaches beyond the time of his earthly activity to speak to us today . . . Fuchs and Ebeling would say that the word-event inaugurated by Jesus’s word happens today in the church’s proclamation.20

According to Robinson’s acute reading of this conflict of interpretations, Bultmann shares with the biographers of the first quest for the historical Jesus the methodological presupposition “that the historical Jesus and the proclaimed kerygma are incommensurable.” For the first quest historians, this presupposition leads to the conviction that the proclamation of Christ See our analysis of this issue in Jüngel’s theology in Chapter 2. Robinson, Language, Hermeneutic, and History, p. 123. Emphasis added. The cited quotations are from Rudolf Bultmann, Das Verhältnis der urchristlichen Christusbotschaft zum historischen Jesus (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1960), p. 17. Bultmann’s essay is available in an English edition as “The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus,” in ed. Carl E. Braaten and Roy A. Harrisville, The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ, pp. 15–42 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1964). The reader should note that the latter edition differs slightly from Robinson’s translation citation. See Bultmann, “The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus,” p. 30.

19 20

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in the church is an obstacle that the interpreter must overcome in order to make headway into the historical inquiry into the man Jesus of Nazareth. For Bultmann, however, since Christ is experienced in proclamation and not otherwise, the study of the Jesus of history is superfluous for faith. Moreover, Bultmann lacks confidence in the historian’s capacity to discover the Jesus of history through scientific historical research. Hence, he “anticipat(es) a negative answer” to his rhetorical questions. Fuchs and Ebeling break new ground (though, as we mentioned, their influence proved to be short-lived) by challenging the Bultmannian presupposition, asserting instead that the category of word-event21 can be employed to establish the continuity between Jesus of Nazareth and the church’s proclamation of the Christ of faith. Accordingly, Jesus’ ongoing eschatological self-presentation occurs in “the word-event inaugurated by Jesus’s word [that] happens today in the church’s proclamation.” We must note that here both the past proclamation of the man Jesus of Nazareth (“. . . inaugurated by Jesus’s word . . .”) and the present proclamation of Christ in the church (“. . . happens today in the church’s proclamation.”) are brought together under the category of word-event. As Fuchs explains elsewhere, “Jesus’s proclamation shows us that he understood himself as the one who ‘brought into language’ the call of God in the final hour.”22 This “bringing-to-language” (see Jüngel’s favored locution “coming-to-speech” (kommen zur Sprache)) occurred chiefly in Jesus’ parables,23 which were events of addressing speech in which Jesus “summon(ed) [his hearers] to decision”24 concerning authentic existence before God. Jesus’ death by crucifixion brought an end to his teaching ministry, and thus necessarily also to the mode of his eschatological presence that occurred chiefly in his public proclamation. But the resurrection proved that “he is not to be swallowed up in death, but is to remain present as the word of God.”25 Christian proclamation of the resurrected Jesus thus brings-to-speech Jesus’ eschatological presence to hearers of every age. The proclamation of the Christ While the terminology is essentially interchangeable, we do well to note that Fuchs favors the term speech-event (Sprachereignis), while Ebeling typically invokes the similar word-event (Wortgeschehen). We have remarked, above, that both terms appear in Jüngel’s writings with roughly the same frequency. 22 Ernst Fuchs, “The Essence of the Language-event and Christology,” in trans. Andrew Scobie, Studies of the Historical Jesus, p. 219 (London: SCM Press, 1964). 23 Ibid., pp. 220–22. 24 Ibid., p. 220. 25 Ibid., p. 215. 21

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of the Christian gospel, like the parabolic proclamation of Jesus of Nazareth, is a word-event in the occurrence of which the hearer experiences the presence of God and is confronted with the possibility of new and authentic existence. This overview of the contribution of Fuchs and Ebeling to modern Jesus research brings us back to the material from Jüngel’s theology that we covered in Part One, above, under the heading of “the sacramental character of the word of God.” What we now see is that, in the writings of Fuchs and Ebeling at least, the emphasis on the event character of language and on the relation between being and the word is pregnant with implications for the problem of the historical Jesus. We will now return to Jüngel’s texts in order to explicitly demonstrate the extent to which his discussions of this nexus of issues fit the mold of New Hermeneutic. We have already seen in the first two chapters of this present unit of our analysis that Jüngel’s insistence upon the event character of the word of God is an important constituent feature of his claim that Jesus Christ is the one sacrament of God for the world. In the following sections we expand upon this insight by carefully working through Jüngel’s own contributions to the problem of the relation of Jesus of Nazareth to the Christ proclaimed by faith.

B. The relation of the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith in Jüngel’s Christology While he has never produced anything that might be called an opus on Christology, in several important early texts Jüngel directly addresses the aporia of the historical Jesus from a conceptual vantage point stimulated by his exposure to the New Hermeneutic.26 And an emphasis on the importance of the event character of language for understanding the earthly and post-resurrection modes of Jesus’ existence continues to recur in his later writings on various 26

See principally Eberhard Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus—Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie, 6. unveränderte Auflage. Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie (hgs. Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Fuchs, and Manfred Mezger, no. 2; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986); idem, “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes”; idem, “God—As a Word of our Language”; idem, “The World as Possibility and Actuality”; and idem, “Thesen zur Grundlegung der Christologie,” in Unterwegs zur Sache Theologische Erörterungen I, 3. Auflage, pp. 274–95 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr Siebeck, 2000).

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problems in Christology.27 Webster has correctly noted that the vernacular of the New Hermeneutic, for instance, the “somewhat abstract categories of ‘Word’ and ‘speech-event,’” tends to appear with less frequency in Jüngel’s later writings.28 As we shall see, though, throughout his career, Jüngel’s Christology has consistently exhibited his commitment to the basic theological positions of the New Hermeneutic. This is not to suggest that Fuchs and Ebeling “merely furnished Jüngel with a set of hermeneutical principles woodenly copied.”29 On the contrary, Jüngel employs some of the fundamental insights of the New Hermeneutic in making his own innovative contributions to Christology, to the theology of language, and to other topics in contemporary dogmatics. For our analysis in this section we will observe how Jüngel tackles the dilemma of the historical Jesus in five important texts on Christology from his body of writings. We will move swiftly through these texts, which span the first three decades of Jüngel’s career, in chronological order. In addition to highlighting aspects of Jüngel’s contribution to modern Jesus research, our examination below demonstrates the material continuity of his writings on the Jesus of Nazareth/Christ of faith aporia.30

1.  Paulus und Jesus (1962)31 Originally composed as a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Fuchs in Berlin, the overarching theme of the text is the problem of the continuity 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), especially pp. 226–98; idem, “Das Sein Jesu Christi als Ereignis der Versöhnung Gottes mit einer gottlosen Welt. Die Hingabe des Gekreuzigten,” in Entsprechungen: Gott—Wahrheit—Mensch. Theologische Erörtungen II, 3. Auflage um Register erweitert, pp. 276–84 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002); idem, “The Effectiveness of Christ Withdrawn,” in ed. John B. Webster, Theological Essays I, pp. 214–31 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989); “The Sacrifice of Jesus as Sacrament and Example,” in ed. John B. Webster, trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and John B. Webster, Theological Essays II, pp. 163–90 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995); and “The Dogmatic Significance of the Question of the Historical Jesus,” in ed. John B. Webster, trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and John B. Webster, Theological Essays II, pp. 82–119 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). 28 Webster, Introduction to Theological Essays I, by Eberhard Jüngel, p. 4. 29 So says Webster in Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 7, giving voice to a position at odds with his own reading of Jüngel. He goes on to say that Fuchs, rather, “has provided a fertile stimulus to (Jüngel’s) own theological creativity, a stimulus still fresh beyond the enthusiasm of a young man.” 30 We thus concur with Webster’s analysis that, while there are “refinements and elaborations” evident across the span of Jüngel’s writings on Christology, there are no “serious retractions or changes of directions.” See Webster, “Jesus in Modernity,” p. 162. 31 See the helpful summaries of Paulus und Jesus in Webster, Eberhard Jüngel, pp. 6–15; and idem, “Jesus in Modernity,” pp. 156–62. 27

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between, on the one hand, Jesus’ parabolic discourses and claims to the title of “Son of Man,” and, on the other, the apostolic, in particular Pauline, proclamation of justification. Jüngel, employing terminology and a style of argumentation similar to what we have already encountered in the work of Fuchs,32 proposes that Jesus’ parables and the preaching of Paul can be grouped beneath the general hermeneutical category of “speech-event” (Sprachereignis).33 Jüngel contends that Jesus’ parables, the “Son of Man” statements, and Paul’s doctrine of justification were addressing speech-events in the occurrences of which what was spoken (the kingdom of God and God’s justifying righteousness) came to the hearer as the event of speech. Jüngel establishes this thesis through rigorous exegesis of the biblical texts and thoroughgoing engagements with the works of the major figures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Testament scholarship. One aspect of the argument in Paulus und Jesus that is critical for the relation between the proclamation of Jesus and the preaching of Paul is Jüngel’s interesting approach to eschatology.34 He suggests that a proper appreciation of Jesus’ parables requires the interpreter to abandon a chronological determination of the kingdom’s temporality; that is, a conception of time in which the kingdom “is assigned a place in the space of time which is measured by an ‘I’ existing in time, such that the nearness of the kingdom is conceived as its distance from a temporally existing subject.”35 Jüngel proposes, in contrast to this chronological approach to the time of the kingdom, that the drawing near of the kingdom in Jesus’ parables creates a “distinction in time”36 between time as chronos and time as “moved time,” or “time [as] set in motion by the end of time.”37 In Jesus’ parabolic discourses, this moved time breaks into the continuity of chronological time, bringing with it the eschatological presence of the kingdom.38 It is thus in Jesus’ word—the “new word”39—that “a new time is set against the old time.”40 See, again, Fuchs, “What is a Language Event?” The reader is also directed to Fuchs, Hermeneutik, especially pages 219–30; and idem, “The Essence of Language-Event and Christology.” 33 See Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, especially pages 1–5. 34 On the following, see Webster, Eberhard Jüngel, pp. 12–14. 35 Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, p. 140. 36 Ibid., p. 206. 37 Ibid., p. 141. 38 See ibid., pp. 139–42. 39 Ibid., p. 206. 40 Ibid. 32

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A related issue that we discover in Paulus und Jesus is Jüngel’s assertion that this eschatologically new word does not neatly divide according to the Aristotelian form/content distinction. We do well to note that this important insight into the nature of the word of God, which, as we have argued throughout our analysis in Part Two, is pivotal for understanding Jüngel’s conception of sacrament, if not the whole of his theology, emerges already in his dissertation. Here it is not Augustine that draws Jüngel’s critical reproach, but rather Aristotle as mediated through Jülicher. We discussed in Chapter 4, above, that Jülicher argues that each of Jesus’ parables neatly divides into an “image-half ” (Bildhälfte) and a “thing-half ” (Sachhälfte) that relate to one another at a third point of comparison (tertium comparationis).41 Jüngel proposes in Paulus und Jesus that this approach to the parables turns them into mere “literary constructions,”42 the meanings of which are self-evident and effortlessly readable from the stories that constitute the parabolic “image-halves.” As an alternative to Jülicher’s interpretative method, Jüngel proposes that the kingdom of God arrives in the event of the proclamation of the parables. He rejects the (here) Aristotelian and (elsewhere) Augustinian hermeneutical principle that the interpreter can “separate the ‘content’ of Jesus’s proclamation from . . . the bare ‘form’ of it.”43 On the contrary, “the Kingdom comes in parable as parable (comes) to speech. The parables of Jesus bring to speech the Kingdom as parable.”44 The portrayal of the Jesus of history that emerges in Paulus und Jesus exhibits this theology of speech-events. Jüngel does not appear to be at all interested in a first quest type of inquiry into the historical Jesus; that is, in reconstructing a life of Jesus from those bits of the Gospel narratives that are deemed factual. Nor, for that matter, does he go to any lengths in Paulus und Jesus to situate the man Jesus of Nazareth within the tumultuous political, cultural, and religious Sitz im Leben of first-century Palestinian Judaism. Rather, here Jüngel occupies himself almost exclusively with Jesus’ proclamation of eschatological speech-events in his parables and “Son of man” statements. Narrative details in the Gospels of Jesus’ “behavior”—for instance, his putative miracles—are 43 44 41 42

Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, vol. 1 (Freiburg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988), pp. 44–81. Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, p. 136. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid.

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categorized as “commentary on his proclamation.”45 As Fuchs similarly puts it, “as his conduct shows, Jesus clearly did not want to be understood apart from his proclamation, but rather in it.”46 Jesus’ actions, that is, simply pointed back to and affirmed the authenticity of his eschatological message. On the whole, then, Jesus is presented in Paulus und Jesus as “such a meteoric figure that his occupancy of a determinate historical and social world seems merely accidental or occasional.”47 Finally, it is worth reiterating Jüngel’s position in Paulus und Jesus that the apostolic preaching of justification should be categorized, together with Jesus’ parables and “Son of Man” declarations, as an eschatological speech-event.48 While Jüngel here wastes little effort explaining the significance of the apostolic proclamation for the post-resurrection location and mode of existence of Jesus, in the early pages of the text he provides an important clue that betrays his position on this problem, namely, the assertion that, to some extent, Jesus “in the speech-event of the Pauline doctrine of justification . . . comes to speech anew.”49 Jesus, who brought to speech the kingdom in his public proclamation, now himself comes to speech anew in the apostolic preaching. As we will continue to see, this sort of proposal concerning the ongoing self-presentation of Christ has important implications for the claim that Jesus Christ is the one sacrament.

2.  “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes” (1966) In this important early essay, Jüngel once again tackles the question of the relation between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith, and particularly between Jesus’ public preaching and the proclamation of the kerygmatic Christ. Much of the material that we find in “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes” is quite similar to the range of proposals from Paulus und Jesus that we discussed above. Jüngel, for example, identifies the human Jesus as a “being in the act of the word,”50 an expression which, he comments, encapsulates the thesis that Jesus’ “whole earthly existence is constituted by the fact that this 47 48 49 50 45 46

Ibid., p. 277. Fuchs, “The Essence of Language-event and Christology,” p. 224. Webster, “Jesus in Modernity,” p. 160. Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, pp. 3–5. Ibid., p. 5. Jüngel, “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes,” p. 129.

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man was the proclaimer of the kingdom of God.”51 As in Paulus und Jesus, the overwhelming emphasis on Jesus’ proclamation results in an account of the historical Jesus that is virtually shorn of discussion of historical context or narrative detail. And, like the dissertation, here the category of “speech-event” is employed to establish the continuity between Jesus’ own proclamation and subsequent proclamation of him as Christ.52 Interestingly, Jüngel spends a bit more time in this essay than he does in Paulus und Jesus working out the eschatological implications of his understanding of the time of the speech-events of Jesus’ proclamation. He distances his own theology of the coming kingdom from that found in a contemporaneous essay by Werner Georg Kümmel, who makes the case that Jesus understood the kingdom’s coming in both chronological and eschatological senses.53 In an important passage that is worth citing at length, he comments, in response to Kümmel, that: I was then [at the time of Paulus und Jesus] and now still am of the opinion that we are not permitted to define the “drawing near” of the kingdom of God from our familiar, chronologically oriented understanding of time, because Jesus himself did not exactly comply with this understanding of time. It contradicts Jesus’s understanding of time to assert that the kingdom of God occupies a space within a linear period of time which can be measured by an “I” existing in time as a distance to the present of this “I” . . . The kingdom of God creates its own time. The eschatological concept of the kingdom of God is by no means timeless in the proclamation of Jesus, but rather should be understood as temporally enveloped phenomenon. But in its temporal envelopment the eternal kingdom of God is already temporally near to itself. The temporal envelopment of the kingdom of God must be understood in such a way that the kingdom of God creates its time in our own time. It places itself as an eschatological phenomenon in our time over against our time and, as it creates its own time in our time, it places itself in our time over against our time so that it brings to an end our time.54

We see that here, as in Paulus und Jesus, Jüngel draws a distinction between “our familiar, chronologically oriented understanding of time” and the time Ibid., p. 128. See the similar commentary in Webster, “Jesus in Modernity,” p. 168. 53 Ibid., p. 130. See also the whole of Kümmel’s essay, “Eschatological Expectation in the Proclamation of Jesus,” in ed. James M. Robinson, trans. Charles E. Carlston and Robert P. Scharlemann, The Future of our Religious Past: Essays in Honour of Rudolf Bultmann, pp. 29–48 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 54 Jüngel, “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes,” pp. 130–31. 51 52

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that the kingdom of God “creates” as it comes in the proclamation of Jesus. He suggests in the passage that the relation between the chronological and eschatological modes of time is both continuous and discontinuous, since the coming-to-speech of the kingdom in Jesus’ proclamation is “temporally enveloped” rather than “timeless,” but still occurs “in our time as over against our time” such that “it brings to an end our time.” He thus proposes later that Jesus’ proclamation is an “eschatological declaration of time,” a “declaration of the kingdom of God as the arrival of the future in the now.”55 Jesus, at all points, is conceived as the “eschatological person,”56 whose arrival shattered the temporality of the world. And, while Jüngel only hints at such in the essay, we can infer from the overarching thrust of his argument that this eschatological structure of Jesus’ own speech and being is also attributive of the Christian proclamation of him in the speech-event of the gospel.

3.  God as the Mystery of the World (1977) While the question of the relation between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith is largely tangential to Jüngel’s argument in God as the Mystery of the World, he does make some interesting comments on this topic in his discussion of parable. We have already examined in Chapter 4 Jüngel’s analysis of Jesus’ parabolic discourses that appear in God as the Mystery of the World under the heading of “The Gospel as Analogous Talk about God.”57 For our present inquiry, we will focus briefly on his important claim that the man Jesus is himself the “parable of God,” and that this identification of the Jesus of history reflects an “understanding [of] the being of the man Jesus on the basis of the Easter kerygma.”58 Jüngel later explains the assertion: God’s humanity introduces itself into the world as a story to be told. Jesus told about God in parables before he himself was proclaimed as the parable of God. There is a hermeneutically persuasive reason that the eschatological event of the identification of God with the Crucified One became an integral part of the life of Jesus as it was lived and thus became a rich story which 57 58 55 56

Ibid., p. 130. Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, p. 190. See our Chapter 4 and Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, pp. 289–98. In the course of argument in God as the Mystery of the World, Jüngel introduces this theme on p. 289, just prior to delineating his general hermeneutic of parabolic language. He then returns to a full explication of the theme at the beginning of the following chapter.

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demanded explication. In that sense, no theology of the Crucified One can or may do without the narration of the life and suffering of Jesus, as a life in the act of the word which tells of God’s humanity.59

As in Paulus und Jesus, here the concept of parable is used to establish the continuity between the Jesus of history, that is, his “life and suffering,” and the historically subsequent proclamation of Jesus Christ as “the parable of God.” Jüngel argues that the entire lifetime of Jesus is “a story,” the telling of which occurs as Christian proclamation. The narrative of Jesus of Nazareth, the one who preached in parables, is now itself told as parable. It is critical for us to recall at this point Jüngel’s position in God as the Mystery of the World that parabolic language maintains the structure of the analogy of advent as the event of so great a dissimilarity between God and humanity occurring in the midst of an even greater similarity between them.60 The statement that the humanity of Jesus is the parable of God is, then, principally a claim about the character of God’s relation to the world in Jesus Christ.61 In relating to the world in the humanity of Jesus, God remains ontologically different from the world and its actualities. However, this necessary ontological difference from the world and from humanity is subordinate to the still greater nearness that occurs when he comes to the world in the humanity of Jesus. Jüngel explains this nearness in a number of ways, perhaps most provocatively by invoking the Augustinian deus interior intimo meo: “The analogy of faith brings God into speech in such a way that he comes nearer to humanity and the individual person than they and he are capable of coming near to themselves.”62 In our passage, above, Jüngel employs the concept of parable for the description of this relation of apartness in nearness in order to point to the narrative structure of God’s arrival in the humanity of Jesus. The “life and suffering of Jesus” constitute a plot, and this plot is a “story to be told,” indeed, a “rich story which demand(s) explanation.” This story, once again, is told as parable in Christian proclamation. On the basis of this emphasis on Jesus’ life as a narrative, we might reasonably expect Jüngel to spend some time in this section of God as the Mystery of the Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 302. See ibid., p. 288, for an explicit statement by Jüngel that the idea of Jesus as the parable of God must be read in light of the analogy of advent. 61 On the following, see our analysis of the analogy of advent in Chapter 3. 62 Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 300. 59 60

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World discussing those events narrated in the New Testament Gospels that fill out the plot of the story of Jesus. What we discover, though, is that Jüngel here restricts the plot of the narrative of the life of the Jesus of history to the Nazarene’s identity as a proclaimer of eschatological, parabolic speech-events. He hints at this conception in our passage, above, when he refers to the existence of the historical Jesus as “a life in the act of the word,” a locution similar to what we encountered in our exposition of “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes.” And, later in God as the Mystery of the World, he declares, in language that is essentially identical to what we found in the earlier text, that: One can say that Jesus’s entire humanity was so unlimitedly molded by his proclamation of the kingdom of God that his humanity is virtually defined by it. His human life was a being in the act of the word of the kingdom of God, whose time he proclaimed as coming now.63

In such passages, we are confronted once again with the problem that emerges also in Paulus und Jesus and “Jesu Wort und Jesus als Wort Gottes”; namely, that, in his discussions of the problem of the historical Jesus, Jüngel tends to conflate the earthly life of Jesus to his activity as a proclaimer of parabolic speech-events, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to the behavior that corresponded to and validated his preaching to his original hearers. Accordingly, he does not appear interested in details from the New Testament narratives that fail to directly relate to this aspect of Jesus’ public ministry. Moreover, the identity of Jesus the Nazarene as an itinerate Jewish rabbi whose teaching instigated a political and cultural upheaval in early first-century Palestine (and the fact that Jesus’ death by execution was at least contingently related to this upheaval) is overwhelmed by the special hermeneutical function assigned to his parabolic proclamation. The “narration of the life and suffering of Jesus,”64 reduced by the categorically employed idea of parabolic speech-event, becomes dislodged from its Sitz im Leben in the larger historical narrative of Judaism’s political and cultural development. There is an additional issue here that we must not fail to catch. If, for Jüngel, the identification of Jesus as the parable of God means, essentially, that the story of Jesus is now told in the event of Christian proclamation, then we do well Ibid., p. 353. Ibid., p. 302.

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to take note of which aspects of the story of Jesus Jüngel contends constitute the content of proclamation. What is it about the historical Jesus that must be proclaimed for such proclamation to occur as the speech-event in which the story of Jesus is told as parable? For all of his emphasis on Jesus’ own proclamation for understanding the human life of Jesus, we may be surprised that in no place in God as the Mystery of the World does Jüngel suggest that the contemporary proclaimer of the kerygmatic Christ must concern him- or herself with proclamation of the story of Jesus’ public ministry. Rather, throughout the volume, we discover that, for Jüngel, the narrative content of kerygmatic proclamation is not at all the story of the earthly life of Jesus, but rather is the narrative of the death of this man. He insists, that is, that “proper Christian proclamation”65 is that of “the word of the cross.”66 But this story of the death of Jesus must be proclaimed in light of the Easter confession that Jesus rose from the dead. The resurrection of the dead man Jesus demonstrates the theological significance of the life and death of Jesus, as it “means that God has identified himself with this dead man . . . and . . . that God identified himself with the life lived by this dead man.”67 In sum, then, Christian proclamation focuses on the narrative of Golgotha in the light of Easter morning, and thus recognizes the identification of God with the one who lived, died, and rose again. Finally, for our analysis it is crucial that the proclamation of Jesus Christ “is something like an eschatological declaration of time, which interrupts world history as it proceeds through ‘the course of time’ with the announcement of its end based on the turning point which has taken place in the history of Jesus Christ.”68 Both the speech-event of Christian proclamation and the historical events narrated in proclamation as the parable of God are interruptive, eschatological events that shatter the normal course of chronological time. The events concerning Jesus inaugurated an eschatological turning point that subsequently occurs interruptedly, and again and again as the story of Jesus is proclaimed. We see once again, then, that the interruptive structure of God’s relation to the world, which we analyzed in the first unit as a consistent feature of Jüngel’s sacramental approach to language, also characterizes his 67 68 65 66

Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 363. Ibid., p. 301. The citation is from Friedrich Gogarten, Christ the Crisis (trans. R. A. Wilson; Richmond: John Knox Press, 1970), p. 117.

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conception of “the history of Jesus Christ.” We will shortly delineate some specific implications of this conception for the claim that Jesus Christ is the one sacrament of God for the world.

4.  “The Effectiveness of Christ Withdrawn” (1978)69 This essay, which was published just after the appearance of the first German edition of God as the Mystery of the World, is important for our analysis principally because of the fascinating remarks Jüngel makes concerning the withdrawal of Jesus Christ, or his absence. Jüngel explains that his overriding concern in the text is to comment upon “the question which every Christology has to answer: Who is Jesus Christ?”70 He notes immediately, though, that the historical distance between the events of Jesus of Nazareth and the present raises the additional question of “the meaning of the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘was,’ between ‘being’ and ‘having been.’”71 Jüngel shrewdly detects a two-fold problem behind this question. First, he perceives that there is “a general hermeneutical problem concerning our own relation to the past,”72 that is, a problem that emerges from the fundamental historicalness of human existence. Second, he identifies the specific theological problem that “a truth which is considered divine, a so-called eternal truth [is to] be grasped in the form of an historical event, and thus must be understood wholly within the temporality of history.”73 Jüngel suggests in the essay that we can tackle the second problem by considering the hermeneutical implications of historical consciousness. In order to explain this nexus of issues, he introduces two terms that he believes help to qualify how we relate to the past: “positive effective history” and “private effective history.”74 The first term, which Jüngel borrows from Gadamer, refers generally to the “sense that we feel the effects of a past event long afterwards.”75 See the similar analysis of this text in Luca D’Isanto, “Gianni Vattimo’s Hermeneutics and the Trace of Divinity,” MoTh 10.4 (1994), pp. 374–76. 70 Jüngel, “The Effectiveness of Christ Withdrawn,” p. 214. 71 Ibid., pp. 214–15. 72 Ibid., p. 215. 73 Ibid., p. 216. 74 Ibid., p. 223. 75 Ibid. For Gadamer’s use of the idea of effective history Wirkungsgeschichte, see Truth and Method (2nd rev. edn; trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall; New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 300–07. 69

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But to this rather basic hermeneutical conception Jüngel adds the more subtle second term, which encapsulates the idea that “sometimes a piece of the past (a person, situation, event) is effective only as it recedes further and further into the distance, whether for good or ill. In such a case, it is the withdrawal that has effects.”76 Jüngel argues that Jesus, particularly his death, continues to be effective in the present in the sense of private effective history. His subsequent argument to establish this way of relating the past events of Jesus to the present unfolds in two steps. First, Jüngel introduces to his analysis the ontological distinction between possibility and actuality, an important theme in his theology that we have already encountered on a number of occasions. Here he applies the distinction to the problem of history. He proposes that the historical truth of the death of Jesus must “exceed the actuality of a ‘brute fact,’”77 since otherwise the dead Jesus would recede further and further into the past such that he would cease to be effective in the present. Jüngel suggests, as an alterative to this conception, that “the actual is more than simply actual, more than naked facticity.”78 The actual, rather, contains “possibilities which do not pass away with the actuality of the brute fact . . . It is the possibilities which actuality brings with it and leaves behind which make a fact occurring in time into something like an event.”79 Accordingly, the death of Jesus was no mere actuality in the sense of a brute fact, but, in the event of its actuality, opened up possibilities that continue to be effective in the present. The second step in Jüngel’s argument in favor of an approach to Jesus’ ongoing effectiveness in the sense of positive effective history is a novel interpretation of the question of the genre of the New Testament Gospels.80 Jüngel suggests that the Evangelists were not interested in constructing uninterrupted factual biographies of Jesus, but rather in portraying the whole of Jesus’ existence without delineating the full details of his earthly life. The point of the Gospels, moreover, is to demonstrate that the existence of Jesus was (to his contemporaries and to readers of the Gospels in the past) and is (to readers in the present) salvifically effective. The Evangelists supply narrative 79 80 76 77 78

Jüngel, “The Effectiveness of Christ Withdrawn,” p. 223. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid. See ibid., pp. 227–29 for Jüngel’s understanding of the Gospels.

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details that lend support to this theme of salvific effectiveness, even though such details do not necessarily constitute reports of actual events of the life of Jesus. For instance: In Mk: 2.5 the sins of the paralytic are forgiven; but even though Mark records no other healing which is combined with the forgiveness of sins, this does not mean that Mark 2.5 is about a unique event. Rather in this one particular story, Mark seeks to bring out something which is characteristic of all Jesus’s healings. Jesus’s healing activity is in itself that which forgives sins.

The pericope of the healing of the paralytic in Mark is therefore true without necessarily being factual. The Evangelist, that is, conveys the salvific effectiveness of Jesus’ healings through a story that, in all probability, does not correspond to “a unique event” of Jesus’ public ministry. Jüngel proposes that this relation between narrative and history is generally true of the Gospel pericopes. As such, he argues, the Gospel pericopes serve as synechdoces, in which the “single event(s) stand for the whole.”81 This understanding of the Gospels corresponds to the overarching thesis of the essay that Jesus is effective in the sense of private effective history. Jüngel contends that “the death of Jesus evoked faith in Jesus Christ, and the absence of Jesus gave rise to the New Testament as a testimony to his presence.”82 The Gospels tell the story of one who has passed away, indeed, of one who is ever receding into the past, but do so in such a way that readers in every age can experience his effectiveness, that is, the possibilities, inaugurated by his death, that transcend worldly actualities. Accordingly, “Jesus’s effectiveness consists in his death, in his withdrawal.”83

5.  “The Dogmatic Significance of the Question of the Historical Jesus” (1988) This important work is the most substantial writing on Christology that Jüngel has published in the decades following the appearance of God as the Mystery of the World. As in the other four texts that we have surveyed in this section, in the present essay, Jüngel’s primary concern is to test the relation between Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 231. 83 Ibid. 81 82

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the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith. His comments on the temporal character of the events of Jesus are especially pertinent to our analysis. We recall from our survey of the second quest for the historical Jesus that, according to Käsemann, Ebeling, and Fuchs, Christian faith must take an active interest in the question of the Jesus of history, while bearing in mind the caveat that the brute facts of history cannot in any final sense be used to establish the claims of faith. In the first section of “The Dogmatic Significance . . .,” Jüngel makes a series of similar assertions, a fact that demonstrates that his interest in the hermeneutical agenda of the second quest stretches well into his career. He comments that “faith in the risen one necessitates inquiry back into the earthly Jesus and into that which we can know historically about him.”84 Faith, that is, “must . . . have a support” in the historical Jesus, although it can in no way “be grounded in” the brute facts uncovered by historical inquiry.85 Accordingly, the type of Jesus research that Jüngel proposes in the essay begins with faith’s confession that “God has made this human being—and not just any human being—to be the Christ,” and on this basis proceeds “to know what can be known about this person.”86 Thus, by inquiring into the Jesus of history, faith guards itself “from a docetic self-misunderstanding,”87 insofar as it identifies the Christ of faith with a particular historical figure. Significantly, when Jüngel drafts a summary of “what can be known about” the historical Jesus from the New Testament witnesses, he turns to the concept of interruption in order to explain the man Jesus’ relation to his own historical time and contemporaries. He thus comments that: The most general thing that could be said about the self-understanding of the historical Jesus and about his impact on his contemporaries is this: he represents an elemental interruption of the continuity of life in his world. In various aspects the synoptic traditions present Jesus in his earthly history as one who falls, as it were, outside the brackets of that which tends to be held appropriate and normal, not only in the context of a political system of values or way of life, but also in the context of the value systems and ways of life of religious reality.88 86 87 88 84 85

Jüngel, “The Dogmatic Significance of the Question of the Historical Jesus,” p. 88. Ibid. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid. Ibid., p. 89.

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On the basis of such assertions, we might expect Jüngel to develop in the essay an account of the historical Jesus in which he highlights the dissimilarities between the public ministry of Jesus and that which was “appropriate and normal” in late Second Temple Judaism. However, in the subsequent sections of his argument, Jüngel does not in fact go on to identify any particular features of the “political system of values,” “way of life,” or “value systems and ways of life of religious reality” that Jesus of Nazareth supposedly interrupted. Instead, Jüngel appears chiefly concerned in the essay to establish the difference between Jesus’ understanding of time and that of his contemporaries. Jesus fell “outside the brackets” of “the continuity of life in his world” precisely insofar as his message announced a distinction between the “time for . . .” of the kingdom of God and the ordinary, chronological experience of time as the series of past, present, and future.89 Jüngel proposes that the “individual logia of Jesus,” particularly his parables, exhibit this interruptive temporal structure.90 The approach that Jüngel takes to the parables in the essay is similar to what we have already examined in Paulus und Jesus and God as the Mystery of the World. The parable, as told by Jesus, was a word-event in which God and his kingdom came to the world by coming-to-speech.91 On the relation between this word-event and chronological time, Jüngel comments that: The historical Jesus saw the coherence of the reality of the present world to be called into question by the coming kingdom of God, especially by the kingdom which through his own activity is immediately related to the present. The kingdom comes now and in its coming is directly bound up with the one who proclaims its coming . . . The nearness of the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus so changes the reality of the world, that it would seem that what is demanded is not a development of the continuity of reality but rather its reversal . . . Something comes to the world which absolutely does not belong to it, but which can only be experienced as an intrusion upon or interruption of the coherence of the world.92

This fascinating passage does much to confirm our preceding analysis in these first two units concerning the structure of Jesus’ interruptive, parabolic 91 92 89 90

See ibid., p. 105, and our analysis, below. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., pp. 89–90.

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utterances. The logia of Jesus were events in which “something . . . which absolutely does not belong to” the world, and is therefore inconceivable as “a development of the continuity” of the world, came to the world as an interruptive “now” in which the kingdom was “immediately related to the present.”93 Jüngel thus proposes that the original hearers of Jesus’ parables experienced the arrival of the Nazarene on the scene of first-century Palestine as “an elemental interruption of the continuity of their lives thus far.”94 Consequently, “the synoptic tradition has passed on reports . . . which express the fact that one could not categorize this man, his message, and his conduct. ‘The descriptions of his appearance resemble those of the effects of an earthquake or some other natural catastrophe.’”95 In the penultimate section of the essay, Jüngel brings this understanding of Jesus’ parabolic logia to bear upon modern Jesus research, and accuses the guild of suffering from “an inappropriate concept of time of which both sides [of the contemporary debate over the historical Jesus] make use.”96 He summarizes this inappropriate concept of time as: . . . time as a period of time, as a patial length of time, with which one can and must measure distances from the presently existing “I” and its here and now—distance which either date the past by measuring from the here and now backwards or date the future by measuring forwards.97

And later comments that: The relation between God and humanity does not allow itself to be gauged as a length of time which can be measured through a movement . . . Certainly one can also say by analogy that God is always present in a “now.” But this “now” of God is no “now” of the world’s time, insofar as the latter is conceived as the measure of movement in the space of the world. And in this respect the relation between the “now” in which God exists and the “now” in which humanity exists cannot be measured as a distance. God’s “now” and our “here and now” are incommensurable.98 This, among other things, raises the question of the relation between the parable and ordinary human discourse, which is especially problematic when one considers the fact that the parables are stories that would have, in some way or another, been familiar to Jesus’ original hearers. Jüngel does not in any way tackle this question in the essay. Since we have already addressed this, above, we refer the reader to our comments in Chapter 4. 94 Jüngel, “The Dogmatic Significance of the Question of the Historical Jesus,” p. 91. 95 Ibid., p. 100. The citation is from Barth, CD IV/2, p. 157. 96 Jüngel, “The Dogmatic Significance of the Question of the Historical Jesus,” p. 104. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., pp. 105–06. 93

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Among other things, such comments demonstrate that Jüngel remains committed to the conception of God’s relation to time that he delineated as early as in Paulus und Jesus, according to which the coming of God and his kingdom can in no way be “assigned a place in the space of time which is measured by an ‘I’ existing in time, such that the nearness of the kingdom is conceived as its distance from a temporally existing subject.”99 Rather, as he puts it in our last passage from “The Dogmatic Significance . . .,” the “now” of God’s coming to the world is “incommensurable” with the chronological time of human existence, and, precisely so, “does not allow itself to be gauged as a length of time.” The parable is essentially timeless in that, as sheer event, it does not occur as one of the series of “nows” that constitutes the trajectory of past, present, and future. It is rather, the interruption of that series.

C. Some preliminary conclusions We have commented that the second quest for the historical Jesus was relatively short-lived, not least because its principal exponents took Bultmann to task for certain tendencies in his hermeneutical program without themselves fully escaping the sway of Bultmann’s methodology for New Testament studies. Bultmann expresses a high degree of interest in the existential encounter, the decision of the “now,” that takes place in Christian proclamation.100 This emphasis on the abiding existential significance of Jesus Christ, combined with his lack of confidence in the ability of the historian to ascertain the facts of Jesus of Nazareth, results in Bultmann’s criticism of the historical Jesus enterprise. As a general rule, the theologians and exegetes of the second quest attempt to rescue the Jesus of history for faith, while remaining indebted to many aspects of Bultmann’s understanding of the existential potency of the word. Fuchs and Ebeling exhibit this tendency in their assertion that the category of word- or speech-event can be employed to establish the continuity between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith. As we have demonstrated, Jüngel betrays his commitment to this feature of the New Hermeneutic in his major writings on Christology. Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, p. 140. On this aspect of the hermeneutics of demythologization, see Robinson, Language, Hermeneutic, and History, pp. 94–98.

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For our purposes in this unit, we may conclude the present chapter by suggesting that Jüngel’s solution to the Jesus of Nazareth/Christ of faith aporia through the category of word-event gives way to a somewhat problematic account of the relation between Jesus Christ and the continuity of chronological time. We certainly agree with Jüngel’s abiding theological concern that God’s self-revelation is not something that can in any way be objectified by the thinking, willing, and working “I.” We may legitimately ask, however, whether Jüngel’s securing of the priority of revelation through a theology of word-event in fact turns revelation into something that is utterly different, even alien from the world. This tendency, to which we raised similar objections in the conclusion to Part One, above, is especially problematic in Jüngel’s writings on Christology, since, as we have seen, he conceives both the human Jesus and the risen Christ as the interruption of the life-continuity of the hearer of the parabolic word. Consequently, Jesus of Nazareth becomes detached both from the contingent historical details of the Gospel narratives, and from the socioeconomical, political, cultural, and religious contexts of his contemporaneous Judaism. And, likewise, the Christ of faith becomes reduced to the event of the word, to the interruptive encounter that takes place when God draws near to the hearer through the addressing speech of the gospel, which itself is Jesus existing as parable.

Conclusion to Part Two

Jüngel’s assertion that Jesus Christ is sacramental being in a unique and preeminent sense is by no means anomalous in modern dogmatics. In volume II/1 of the Church Dogmatics, Barth argues that “revelation means sacrament, i.e., the self-witness of God, the representation of His truth . . . in the form of creaturely objectivity and therefore in a form which is adapted to our creaturely knowledge.” Consequently, “the basic reality and substance of the sacramental reality of His revelation is the existence of the human nature of Jesus Christ.”1 And, while Barth comes short of explicitly identifying Jesus Christ as the one sacrament in the IV/4 fragment, he does insist that the category of sacrament, particularly the problem of its applicability to the rite of water baptism, must be read in light of the unique salvific event of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ.2 Interestingly, in the decades following the Second Vatican Council, a handful of Catholic theologians proposed, in varying ways, that Jesus Christ is the first sacrament; that is, as Rahner puts it, “the primordial and historical sacrament in whom God’s pledge of himself as forgiveness and deification achieves historical manifestation and irreversible accomplish-ment.”3 Similarly to Rahner, dogmatic theologian Johann Auer suggests that the Latin Karl Barth, CD II/1, pp. 52, 53. See Jüngel’s favorably interlocution with this passage in God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase (trans. John B. Webster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 65–69. We should note the interesting fact that, aside from a citation in “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” Jüngel does not interact with this passage from the Church Dogmatics in his writings on sacrament. 2 See principally Barth, CD IV/4, pp. 100–28. 3 Karl Rahner, “What is a Sacrament?” Worship 47 (1973), p. 279. We should note that this is the English language translation of the essay, “Was ist ein Sakrament?” published in tandem with Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” in the volume Was ist ein Sakrament? Verstöße zur Verständigung. 1

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sacramentum applies “first . . . to the mystery of God’s history of salvation, which has found its center and fulfillment in this human history in Christ.”4 And Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx has composed an entire monograph to explain the sense in which Jesus Christ is “the sacrament of the encounter with God.”5 Importantly, all three of these theologians proceed from the statement that Jesus Christ is uniquely sacramental to assert that the church is the sacrament of God for the world,6 a claim that, as we shall see in Part Three, Jüngel is extremely hesitant to make. In this present part of our analysis, we have observed Jüngel’s interesting approach to the claim that Jesus Christ is the one sacrament. There is indeed much to commend in the material that we have covered here. First, it is clear that Jüngel, as with Barth, is concerned to secure the unique salvific effectiveness of the self-revelation of God that has occurred in history in the humanity of Jesus. This concern emerges most illuminatingly in his assertion that sacramental theology must begin with the exegetical analysis of the New Testament term μυστήριον. Jüngel puts forth a cogent argument that the deutero-Pauline employment of μυστήριον, particularly in the Epistles of Ephesians and Colossians, points primarily to the Christological mystery, that is, to the primal decision of God’s gracious “Yes” to humanity that unfolded historically in the events relating to Jesus. He is surely correct to suggest that a sacramental theology that fails to engage this exegetical insight might also miss the centrality of Christology to the category of sacrament. Second, Jüngel makes a strong case that the concept of sacramental mediation must be delineated in such a way as to ensure that the one who is mediated is in fact encountered in the event of mediation. Along such lines, he raises some extremely insightful objections against the application of the Augustinian semiotics to the problem of sacrament. He shrewdly recognizes that the hiatus posited between the signum and the res significata entails that one might receive the sacrament as a sign without experiencing the God who is signified. Johann Auer, The Church: The Universal Sacrament of Salvation (trans. Michael Waldstein; ed. Hugh M. Riley; Vol. 8, Johann Auer and Joseph Ratzinger, Dogmatic Theology; Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), p. 91. 5 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Mission, KA: Sheed & Ward, 1963). 6 See Rahner, “What is a Sacrament?” pp. 279–81; and idem, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (trans. William V. Dych; New York: Crossroad, 1978), pp.  411–13; the entirety of Auer, The Church; and Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, pp. 47–89. 4

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His alternative hermeneutics of event collapses the distinction between sign and thing signified, and form and content, by identifying God’s coming to the world as his coming-to-speech. In the context of this hermeneutical program, the statement that Christ is the one sacrament means that Jesus Christ himself speaks in the word-events of preaching (verbum audibile) and the sacraments (verba visibile), and, precisely as such, can be encountered in the world. Just here, however, the problem emerges that came into view in Chapters 5 and 6 and received our direct critical attention in Chapter 7; namely, that Jüngel exhibits a troubling tendency to reduce the being of Jesus Christ, both his historical existence as Jesus of Nazareth and his post-resurrection existence as the Christ of faith, to the event of the word. We have argued on a number of occasions that, as a consequence of this tendency, Jüngel pays insufficient attention to the details of the historical Sitz im Leben of the Jesus events. Additionally, in Jüngel’s Christology the plot of the narrative of the Jesus of history appears to contain only his interruptive parabolic utterances, the behavior that validated his proclamation, his death by crucifixion, and his resurrection, which itself serves the narrative principally by demonstrating that God had all along identified Himself with this particular human life. While it is undoubtedly the case that these are indeed the most significant events of the plot of the Jesus narrative, Jüngel’s overwhelming emphasis on the category of word-event gives way to a strangely docetic impression of Jesus as an utterly unworldly sort of figure who said and did things that are simply out of step with the normal course of human existence. Though such an account of Jesus is a welcome remedy to trends in contemporary New Testament interpretation that tend to overemphasize Jesus’ humanity and historical context(s),7 we assert that the category of word-event so rigorously applied in fact raises more questions about the life of Jesus than it answers. And, similarly, Jüngel’s consistent application of the theology of word-event to the post-resurrection existence of Jesus prompts questions concerning the embodiment and location of the resurrected and ascended Christ. Jüngel simply does not address such complex theological problems, but instead appears satisfied that the hermeneutics of event can establish the For examples of such trends, see the somewhat outdated, but nevertheless exhaustive survey of the “third quest for the historical Jesus” in Ben Witherington III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995).

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manner of Christ’s ongoing sacramental presence in the world. Our response is that, as with the human Jesus, here the risen Christ is conceived troublingly as existing over and against the world and its continuities. At the heart of such problems is an important aspect of Jüngel’s theology that we have discussed throughout the first two parts of our analysis. Jesus’ parables, his existence as parable in Christian proclamation, the verbum visibile that attaches itself to the element in order to make a sacrament, etc., are word-events that follow the structure of the analogy of advent, and precisely so relate to the world and its continuities interruptedly. Jüngel proposes that his hermeneutical program situates the difference between God and the world beneath the even greater similarity between them. But, as we argued at the conclusion of Part One, the overwhelming emphasis on the interruptive structure of the event of the word results in a concept of the word as sheer alien speech, a word that relates to worldly continuities only as it interrupts them. We have seen in this present part that Jesus Christ himself, as the word of God and thus also as the one sacrament of God for the world, relates to the world, as both the human Jesus and the risen Christ, as the world’s crisis. Since Jüngel declares on one occasion that “that which deserves to be called sacramental is always an elementary interruption of the worldly continuity of life,”8 we can surmise that we have correctly identified an insight that drives his sacramental theology. But our analysis thus far has posed some significant questions concerning the tenability of Jüngel’s agenda.

8

Eberhard Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” in Ganz werden. Theologische Erörterungen V, p. 277 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

Part Three

The Problem of the Sacramentality of the Church

Thus far in our analysis we have examined two important aspects of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament. We have observed, first of all, that, for Jüngel, the word of God, the gracious “Yes” of God in favor of humanity that is announced as the gospel of Jesus Christ, functions sacramentally as it addresses its human hearer. The word of God “bursts apart everything which is obvious and matter of course” and “draw(s) [the hearer] existentially into (the) story” of Jesus Christ. Precisely by doing so, “the word . . . becomes a ‘sacrament.’”1 Second, we have addressed Jüngel’s claim that Jesus Christ himself is sacramental being in a unique and preeminent sense. The humanity of Jesus Christ, he argues, is the revelation, mediation, and actualization in history of the mystery of God’s primal decision to be divine only as the human God. Jüngel therefore insists that anything deserving of the designation “sacramental” must be read in light of this Christological mystery. In the present and final units of our analysis, we will investigate Jüngel’s conception of the sacramentality of the church and of the liturgical sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We will discover that Jüngel is indeed willing to refer to the church, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper as “sacramental,” so long as this sacramentality is qualified by reflection upon the uniqueness 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 309.

1

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and supremacy of the sacramental mystery of Jesus Christ, who comes to the world by coming-to-speech in interruptive, analogical word-events. The church is therefore sacramental, not as the sacrament of God for the world, but only insofar as it “testifies to and celebrates” Jesus Christ in preaching and in the sacramental events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Jüngel insists that any theology that conceives the church, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments without this Christological qualification endangers the gospel’s claim that, in the humanity of Jesus Christ, God has disclosed himself to the world in an extraordinary and unsurpassable way.2 Our purpose in the present unit is to carefully parse Jüngel’s conception of the church’s sacramentality. We are especially interested in the implications of Jüngel’s consistent appeal to the event character of the sacrament, which we examined extensively in Parts One and Two, for his ecclesiology. We thus intend to identify the extent to which the interruptive structure of God’s sacramental relation to the world and its actualities recurs in Jüngel’s doctrine of the church. We therefore dedicate considerable attention to the particular question of the relation of the “sacramental being”3 of the church to time, and by doing so continue to establish the broad continuity that marks Jüngel’s sacramental theology. Additionally, because the majority of Jüngel’s essays explicitly dedicated to the problem of the church were written as contributions to contemporaneous ecumenical discussions of ecclesiology, in the course of our analysis we test some of the ecumenical prospects of his doctrine of the church and compare a number of his specific proposals to those of his contemporaries. Our foray into Jüngel’s ecclesiology runs up against the difficulty posed by the relative paucity of explicitly ecclesiological texts in Jüngel’s body of writings. While Jüngel has examined a variety of ecclesiological themes in several essays and published lectures, he has never produced any sort of definitive statement on the doctrine of the church. Nor does ecclesiology play a substantial role in any of the major monographs. The church does appear in an important passage in Justification,4 but as a theme it is virtually absent On this concern, see especially Jüngel’s entire argument in “The Church as Sacrament?” Eberhard Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), p. 76. 4 Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 221–24. In this passage Jüngel returns to some remarks made in “The Church as Sacrament?” concerning the idea of the church as peccator maximus. See Eberhard Jüngel, “The 2 3

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from the texts of Paulus und Jesus, God’s Being is in Becoming, Death, and God as the Mystery of the World. Moreover, a chronological survey of Jüngel’s writings suggests that he was well into the third decade of his career before regularly devoting his critical energies to the doctrine of the church. The first text in which Jüngel explicitly addresses ecclesiological problems (the two lectures published as Anfechtung und Gewißheit des Glaubens oder wie die Kirche wieder zu ihrer Sache kommt. Zwei Vorträge5) appears only in 1976, almost 15 years after the publication of Paulus und Jesus. Between the appearance of these lectures and the presentationof the important paper translated into English as “The Church as Sacrament?” in 1983 we find only two writings wholly devoted to questions of ecclesiology; namely, the Tübingen lecture theses published in 1978 as “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,”6 and the pamphlet Reden für die Stadt,7 which is notable not least for the interesting comments Jüngel makes concerning the relation of church and state. From the middle of the 1980s up to the present, Jüngel has addressed ecclesiology with increased frequency, focusing primarily on the themes of worship,8 church and state,9 order and office,10 and ecumenical theology,11 as Church as Sacrament?” in John B. Webster (ed.), Theological Essays I, pp. 189–213 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), pp. 209–12, and our comments in 9.B, below. 5 Presented in May of 1976 in West Berlin at a synodical meeting of the Evangelischen Kirche der Union, and first published as Eberhard Jüngel, Anfechtung und Gewißheit des Glaubens oder wie die Kirche wieder zu ihrer Sache kommt. Zwei Vorträge, Kaiser-Traktate 23 (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1976). 6 Eberhard Jüngel, “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,” in Zukunft aus dem Wort, Helmut Claß zum 65. Geburststag, hg. G. Metzger (Stuttgart: Calwer-Verlag, 1978), pp. 113–17. 7 Eberhard Jüngel, Reden für die Stadt. Zum Verhältnis von Christengemeinde und Bürgergemeinde, Kaiser-Traktate 38 (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1979). 8 Jüngel, “Der Gottesdienst als Fest der Freiheit,” and idem, “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst.” 9 For example, Jüngel, Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen Declaration (trans. D.Bruce Hamill and Alan J. Torrance; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992); idem, “The Gospel and the Protestant Churches of Europe: Christian Responsibility for Europe from a Protestant perspective,” Religion, State and Society 21.2 (1993), pp. 137–49; and idem, “Kirche und Staat in der pluralistischen Gesellschaft,” in Indikative der Gnade—Imperative der Freiheit, pp. 296–311 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 10 For example, Jüngel, “Ordnung gibt der Freiheit Raum,” in Evangelische Freiheit—kirchliche Ordnung: Beiträge zum Selbstverständnis der Kirche, hg. Evangelische Landessynode in Württemberg (Stuttgart: Quell Verlag, 1997), pp. 105–19; idem, “Was ist die theologische Aufgabe evangelischer Kirchenleitung?” ZThK 91 (1994), pp. 189–209; and idem, “Thesen zum Amt der Kirche nach evangelischem Verständnis,” in Indikative der Gnade—Imperative der Freiheit, pp.  373–80 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 11 For example, Jüngel, “Einheit der Kirche—konkret,” in Wertlose Wahrheit—Zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens. Theologische Erörterungen III, 2. Auflage, pp. 335–45 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); idem, “Paradoxe Ökumene: Ende der Höflichkeiten bei wachsender Nähe,” zeitzeichen 11 (2000), pp. 1–6; idem, “Kardinale Probleme,” StZ 217.11 (1999), pp. 727–35; and idem, “Gemeinsamkeiten und Differenzen. Ein Brief von Eberhard Jüngel zum Rechtertigungsstreit,” HerKorr 53.3 (1999), pp. 154–57.

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well as on the more basic question of the ontology of the church.12 But again, while what is perhaps the most important of the texts from these past two decades (“Credere in ecclesiam: Eine ökumenische Besinnung” (2002)) brings together a number of these themes to form a coherent argument, there does not appear during this period a definitive publication on ecclesiology. If nothing else, this short survey of ecclesiological themes in Jüngel’s writings demonstrates that our analysis of his approach to the question of the sacramentality of the church must proceed without the benefit of a single text that might, as it were, serve as the final word on his ecclesiology. We are thereby forced to piece together our commentary on Jüngel’s doctrine of the church from unevenly distributed source materials. Since it is propitious for our investigation to have in mind some sense of the broad sweep of Jüngel’s doctrine of the church, we must settle upon an arrangement that will enable us to present the major ecclesiological themes in a coherent manner, even though these are otherwise widely and irregularly disseminated. To this end, in Chapter 8, immediately below, we will summarize the basic themes of Jüngel’s ecclesiology beneath headings that correspond to the four Wesenattribute of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed—unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. While there are undoubtedly many alternate ways that we might present this material, arranging our summary according to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan attributes nicely matches Jüngel’s own compressed presentation of his ecclesiology in “Credere in ecclesiam,”13 which, again, while in no way an opus, is his most important and extensive treatment of ecclesiology published during the last two decades. Indeed, in our chapter on the attributes, below, we will expand upon Jüngel’s condensed comments in that important essay to show how his approach to the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church corresponds to the whole of his ecclesiology. Then, in Chapter 9 we will carefully review the text of “The Church as Sacrament?” which is Jüngel’s most significant and lucid contribution to contemporary ecumenical discussions on the question of the sacramentality of the church. Finally, in our conclusion to this unit, we will test the implications of Jüngel’s central ecclesiological claims for the problem of the relation between the church and chronological time. “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist: Zur pneumatologischen Begründung der christlichen Kirche,” in A. Raffelt (ed.), Weg und Weite. Festschrift für Karl Lehmann, pp. 549–62 (Freiburg: Herder, 2001); and idem, “Credere in ecclesiam,” ZThK 99 (2002), pp. 177–95. 13 Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” pp. 184–90. 12

8

Jüngel on the Attributes of the Church

Jüngel’s comments on the attributes of the church are found in three texts: the aforementioned theses on ecclesiology published as “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,” a subsequent series of theses on the relation of the Holy Spirit to the church entitled “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,”1 and the essay “Credere in ecclesiam.”2 The third of these three texts contains the most substantial treatment of the attributes of the church and will therefore play a considerable role in our analysis. We should note here that, because Jüngel contends in “Credere in ecclesiam” that unity “is the basic attribute that not only can qualify but must qualify the other three attributes,”3 he reverses the order of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan formula and thus treats the attribute of unity in the final, preeminent position. In the reading of Jüngel that follows, we will retain the creedal ordering, not least because the issues that emerge especially in his interpretation of the attribute of apostolicity (which we will thus treat in the final of our four sections on the attributes) pose some critical questions that will carry over into our analysis of “The Church as Sacrament?” in Chapter 9. In this text Jüngel expands upon themes previously covered in the Tübingen lecture theses on the doctrine of faith, published in the early 1980s as “Zur Lehre vom heiligen Geist,” in Die Mitte des Neuen Testaments. Einheit und Viefalt neutestamentlicher Theologie. Festschrift für Eduard Schweizer zum 70. Geburtstag, hgs. U. Luz and H. Weder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), pp. 97–118. We should note that Jüngel does not discuss the church in the original series of theses. 2 “Credere in ecclesiam” appears in abbreviated form as “Ökumenische Anläufe,” StZ 10.10 (2002), pp. 662–70. 3 Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 187. 1

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A. The Wesenattribute of the church and the notae ecclesiae Before proceeding to our analysis of Jüngel’s comments on each of the four Niceno-Constantinopolitan attributes, we need to make a few introductory remarks on his approach to the terminological distinction between the Wesenattribute of the church and the idea of notae ecclesiae. Jüngel abides by the standard Protestant dogmatic procedure of identifying unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity as qualities of the church that must be distinguished from the ecclesial marks, or notes, of pure gospel proclamation and right administration of the sacraments.4 This distinction between attributes and marks reflects long-standing Protestant hesitations concerning the Catholic suggestion that the essence of the church is visibly perceptible in the church’s structures. We may cite Lumen gentium to give voice to the disputed Catholic position: Christ . . . set up his holy church here on earth as a visible structure, a community of faith hope and love . . . This society, however, equipped with hierarchical structures, and the mystical body of Christ, a visible assembly and spiritual community, an earthly church and a church enriched with heavenly gifts, must not be considered as two things, but as forming one complex reality comprising a human and a divine element . . . This is the unique church of Christ, which in the creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.5

According to Lumen gentium, the one church consists of the invisible spiritual and visible earthly church, the mystical body of Christ and the hierarchical structures of office and ministry. And, since the marks of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity qualify the one church, the marks themselves are necessarily empirically visible in the church’s ministries, offices, liturgies, and traditions. In this vein, Catholic theologian Ola Tjørhom identifies the church On the Protestant differentiation between attributes and marks, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol. 3 (trans. Geoffrey Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 409–11; Wilfried Härle, Dogmatik, 3. Auflage (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 574–76; Hans-Peter Großhans, Die Kirche—irdischer Raum der Wahrheit Evangeliums (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2003), pp. 161–63; and Charles Westphal, “The Marks of the Church,” ATR 42.2 (1960), pp. 173–82. Hans Küng, The Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), pp. 265–69, provides a helpful summary of the dispute over the marks between Catholics and Protestants and offers critical commentary on the claims of both parties. 5 LG 8, DEC, vol. 2, p. 854. 4

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as “an object of faith,” the attributes of which are “key visible manifestations” that “describe the essence of the true church.”6 Similarly, Auer identifies unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity as external “manifestations” of the church’s inner “being, life, and activity.”7 Since the time of the Reformation, Protestant polemicists have consistently objected to this visible determination of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan attributes. At stake in such polemics is the question of whether the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church can in fact be visibly and empirically perceived, given the “crass and blatant . . . contradiction between the nature of the church as it is believed and the actual state of Christianity.”8 Pannenberg summarizes the commonly held Protestant answer: The church’s catholicity, like its apostolicity, holiness, and unity, is . . . an essential characteristic, but not at once a note of the church by which we know it. As the body of Christ the church is indeed an unbreakable fellowship of believers that is sanctified by Jesus Christ, that continues the mission of the apostles, and in the liturgical life of which the eschatological fullness of Christ is already present. All of this is of its essence, as faith perceives. Nevertheless, we cannot establish it all empirically as an unambiguous fact.9

According to the standard Protestant interpretation, then, unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are qualities of the church’s invisible essence, and by virtue of this determination are conceived as perceptible to faith, rather than to the senses. Consequently, theologians from the different trajectories of Protestantism distinguish between these invisible qualities and the audible and visible marks of the pure preaching of the gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments. Word and sacrament “give the Church its visible being, its voice and its signs . . . The Church therefore recognizes itself by these two signs.”10 As Edmund Schlink explains, quoting Melanchthon’s Apology to the Augsburg Confession: The one, holy, apostolic, catholic church is not an idea of which the churches on earth are merely imperfect copies, but it exists really and truly on earth . . . Ola Tjørhom, Visible Church—Visible Unity: Ecumenical Ecclesiology and “The Great Tradition of the Church” (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004), p. 64. Emphasis added. 7 Johann Auer, The Church: The Universal Sacrament of Salvation (trans. Michael Waldstein; Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), p. 345. See also the entire discussion on pages 345–471. 8 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 411. 9 Ibid., p. 408. Emphasis added. 10 Westphal, “The Marks of the Church,” pp. 179, 180. 6

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Moreover, the true church which is Christ’s kingdom does not merely exist on earth, but it is also to be found on earth . . . “To make it recognizable [the church] has outward marks, the pure preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments in harmony with the gospel of Christ.”11

Along these same lines, in “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,” Jüngel posits a strict differentiation between the ecclesia visibilis and the ecclesia invisibilis, and thus between the visible marks and the hidden presence of the church.12 Catholic ecclesiology, he contends, “understand(s) the invisibility of the church from its visibility,” and thus “equate(s) the visible traits of the church with the marks of the church.”13 According to such a reading of the Catholic doctrine of the church, the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church are conceived as visible traits that “are characteristic of the church and only of the church, are known themselves as the church, are accessible to all men, (and) are inseparably connected to the nature of the church, so that where these signs are, the church actually is also, and where the church is, these signs are also.”14 Similarly, Jüngel asserts in “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist” that the Catholic emphasis on the visibility of the Wesenattribute of the church “leads necessarily to the misunderstanding of the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church as institutional and juridical marks.”15 Jüngel proposes that Protestant ecclesiology, in contrast to the dominant Catholic synthesis, “understand(s) the visibility of the church from its invisibility.” Accordingly, “only those events . . . in which the invisible (hidden) church is made visible as invisible (hidden), can be called marks of the church.”16 While such language is characteristically opaque, the meaning of Jüngel’s proposal becomes a bit more transparent in the subsequent theses of the essay. First, he argues that “it is not possible for [the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Edmund Schlink, Theology of the Lutheran Confessions (trans. Paul F. Koehneke and Herbert J. A. Bouman; St. Louis: Concordia, 1961), pp. 217–18. The citation quotes Melanchthon, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article VII, p. 5, BC, p. 174. 12 Jüngel, “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,” in Zukunft aus dem Wort, Helmut Claß zum 65. Geburststag, hg. G. Metzger, p. 113, Theses 4 and p. 114, Theses 8.1 and 8.2 (Stuttgart: Calwer-Verlag, 1978). 13 Ibid., p. 113, Thesis 4. 14 Ibid., p. 113, Theses 5.1–5.4. 15 Jüngel, “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist: Zur pneumatologischen Begründung der christlichen Kirche,” in Weg und Weite. Festschrift für Karl Lehmann, hg. A. Raffelt, p. 560, Thesis 3.1. Emphasis added (Freiburg: Herder, 2001). 16 Jüngel, “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,” p. 113, Thesis 4. Emphasis added. 11

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attributes] to be regarded as marks of the church,”17 since, as opposed to the Catholic concept of ecclesial visibility, Protestant theology identifies these as attributes only of the ecclesia invisibilis. As he puts it in “Credere in ecclesiam,” unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are “attributes of the invisible church that stand in antithetical relation to the visible church,”18 and therefore point to the eschatological tension between the ecclesia triumphans and the “deeply afflicted church”19 that currently exists in the world. The true marks of the church, on the other hand, make visible what is hidden; they “indicate the church present . . . as hidden beneath its opposite (sub contrario).”20 That is, while the Niceno-Constantinopolitan attributes are invisible qualities of the invisible church; the notae ecclesiae are visible marks of the invisible church.21 And, for Jüngel, following the typical Protestant interpretation of this ecclesiological dilemma, only “the pure preaching of the gospel and the correct handling of the so-called sacraments [can be] considered as marks of the church,”22 since such creatively passive actions make visible as event the ecclesia triumphans that remains hidden in the world.23 This review of Jüngel’s differentiation of the invisible attributes and visible (and audible) marks of the church is acutely important for our analysis in this present unit insofar as it exhibits a central feature of his ecclesiology, the implications of which will become increasingly pertinent to us as we move forward. We observe that Jüngel identifies the marks of the church with the events of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. To be sure, as a bald claim this identification is uncontroversial as a statement of standard Protestant ecclesiology. After all, Article VII of the Augsburg Confession locates the presence of the hidden church in the events of word and sacrament 19 20 21

Ibid., p. 114, Thesis 7. Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 184. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 185. Jüngel, “Zur Lehre von dem Zeichen der Kirche,” p. 114, Theses 8 and 8.1. Roland Spjuth offers a similar assessment in Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel (Studia Theologica Ludensia, no. 51; Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), p. 151. 22 Jüngel, “Zur Lehre von dem Zeichen der Kirche,” p. 114, Thesis 9. Since this is one of the few locations in his writings in which Jüngel explicitly identifies preaching alongside baptism and the Lord’s Supper as an event of Christ’s self-representation, in the present analysis we will refer to all three as interruptive, sacramental word-events. 23 We recall at this point a similar issue raised in the introductory chapter to this study in our interlocution with David Yeago; namely, the tendency among Lutheran theologians of a particular philosophical persuasion to locate the saving event in the word alone, and thus over against the visible structures of the church. See Section 1.A. Our comments in the present section help to situate Jüngel among the existentialist varieties of modern Lutheran dogmatics. 17 18

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and, precisely so, in the gathered assembly of believers.24 Most subsequent Protestant doctrines of the church accordingly emphasize the actions of the worshipping assembly as being, in some way or another, visible manifestations of the church’s hidden essence. In Jüngel’s ecclesiology, however, the event character of the gathered and worshipping assembly is especially pronounced and is described throughout his writings according to the hermeneutics of event. For instance, he proposes later in “Zur Lehre von dem Zeichen der Kirche” that “Jesus Christ can only be represented through the word and in faith,” and on this basis Christ “is represented in the marks of the church [of preaching and sacrament] such that he is present [in the marks] as the absent one.”25 The fact that this text was delivered in lecture form during the same year of the publication of God as the Mystery of the World suggests that Jüngel may have had the analogy of advent in mind when proposing this conception of Christ’s presence as absence in the church’s actions of preaching and sacrament.26 We may thus infer that, for Jüngel, in preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, the audible and visible word-events of the proclamation of the gospel, Jesus Christ, who is absolutely different from the church, draws intimately near to the church—nearer, in fact, than the church is capable of being to itself. Christ and His church are dissimilar, such that they can in no way be directly identified. But this dissimilarity must be seen in the light of the even greater similarity, or intimacy, that occurs as event when Christ draws near in the church’s representative actions. Consequently, and in harmony with the main thrust of our analysis thus far, we may further surmise that preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper are not empty signifiers that, in the sense of Jüngel’s reading of the Augustinian semiotics, simply refer to Jesus Christ as res significata. Rather, the marks of the church are interruptive word-events that bring to speech as speech the presence as absence of Jesus Christ, and likewise bring to speech ontic possibilities that exceed the world’s actualities. While Jüngel does not explicitly discuss the analogy of advent in the later texts on ecclesiology, this idea that the events of preaching and sacrament, CA VII, ¶ 1, BC, pp. 42, 43. See also Schlink’s commentary in Theology of the Lutheran Confessions, pp. 198–203. 25 Jüngel, “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,” pp. 116–17, Theses 29–30. Emphasis added. 26 See the sections on analogy in 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), pp. 261–98, and also our commentary in Chapter 3. 24

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and even worship itself, are interruptions of the continuity of life remains one of the dominant conceptual motifs of his doctrine of the church. Before proceeding to our analysis of Jüngel’s comments on the four Niceno-Constantinopolitan Wesenattribute, we do well to at least briefly pause to identify a critically important question that emerges in this ecclesiology of word-events, namely, the question of the relation of the church to diachronic continuities. In Part One, we observed that Jüngel’s general hermeneutical use of the category of word-event entails that ordinary human discourse and, indeed, even the entire continuity of human existence, is shattered by the word as it comes-to-speech. In Part Two, we discovered that Jüngel’s Christology of sacramental word-events comprises the notion that Jesus Christ, both as the earthly Jesus and as the risen Christ, relates to the diachronic continuities of the world precisely as the interruption of worldly time. From this present section, we see that a similar pattern exhibits itself in Jüngel’s ecclesiology, as the word-events that constitute the true notae ecclesiae are set over against the church’s temporally distending offices, ministries, liturgies, traditions, etc. As we shall see as our analysis proceeds, this pattern holds throughout Jüngel’s writings on ecclesiology and qualifies the sense in which Jüngel understands the church’s “sacramental being.”27

B. Unity Credo in unam . . . ecclesiam: Among the essential characteristics of the church, unity is the basic attribute that not only can qualify but must qualify the other three attributes of holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. The unity of the church is first and foremost the oneness of the communion of the saints which corresponds to the oneness of the Trinitarian communion of reciprocal otherness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit . . . To be sure, the unity to be grasped as the oneness of the church rules out difference just as little as the oneness of the unity of the triune God excludes the difference of Father, Son and Spirit. The oneness of the church is rather its identity in difference, and in particular the identity in difference of: (1) of the many members of the one body of Christ; (2) the visible and invisible church; (3) the community Eberhard Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), p. 76.

27

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of the living and that of the dead and/or the ecclesia militans and the ecclesia triumphans; (4) the locally divided communities; and finally (5) Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians. The church is one only in these differences . . . However, in these differences the church is not merely one, but in fact is united with itself and/or in itself. Therefore, these differences .  . . show that the church is marked by a tension-filled richness. The church—like the triune God, whose life it represents and presents—is a communion of reciprocal otherness.28

Though he does not state so explicitly in this text or elsewhere, the first two sentences of our passage suggest that we can identify the model of the church that Jüngel has in mind as an ecclesiology of communion.29 The pivotal common characteristic of the communion ecclesiologies that have emerged from across the ecumene since the Second Vatican Council, the documents of which place considerable emphasis on the idea of the church as communio,30 is the thesis that the communion between Christians that constitutes the church is, to one extent or another, an image of the perichoresis of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We observe in our passage that the basis of Jüngel’s prioritization of the attribute of unity over the other three Niceno-Constantinopolitan attributes31 is a form of communion ecclesiology’s central axiom, namely, that the oneness of the church “corresponds to” the oneness of the triune God. Consequently, Jüngel’s Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 187. On the development and varieties of communion ecclesiology, see the exhaustive analysis of Dennis M. Doyle in Communion Ecclesiology: Vision and Versions (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000). Two significant and influential contributions to the ecclesiology of communion are J. M. R. Tillard, Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992), and John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985). Like Jüngel, Tillard and Zizioulas argue that the communion among Christians that constitutes the church is an image of the Triune perichoresis. 30 See Doyle’s survey in Communion Ecclesiology, especially pages 168–80. 31 Pannenberg also prioritizes unity over the remaining attributes, proposing that holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are “implications of the church’s unity as one that is grounded in Jesus Christ.” Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol. 3, p. 406. We should note, however, that, unlike Jüngel, Pannenberg does not address the relation between the unity of the church and the unity of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.Interestingly, Hans-Peter Großhans, whose ecclesiology is in many ways strikingly similar to Jüngel’s doctrine of the church, suggests in Die Kirche that “apostolicity is the fundamental attribute of the church which lives in the truth of the gospel. The other three patristic attributes of the church (unity, holiness, catholicity) obtain their determination from the apostolicity of the church.” Großhans then defines apostolicity as the hearing, receiving, and believing of the truth of the word of the gospel. Großhans, Die Kirche, p. 296, Theses 2.3 and 2.3.1. See also the discussion in the same volume on page 172. Edmund Schlink makes a similar, though less substantiated argument in Schriften zu Ökumene und Bekenntnis, bd. 2, Ökumensiche Dogmatik: Grundzüge, 3. Auflage, hg. Michael Plathow (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), pp. 588–89. 28 29

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conception of the life of God as a “communion of reciprocal otherness” determines his understanding of the church’s essential unity. While Jüngel does not elaborate upon his understanding of the divine perichoresis in Credere in ecclesiam, the idea that the triune God is a being in communion is a major recurring theme in his theology that receives expression in a number of texts.32 One example of such expression that is useful for our analysis in this chapter is found in an interesting paper on church order entitled, “Ordnung gibt der Freiheit einen Raum,” presented in 1986 at a conference of the Württembergischen Evangelischen Landessynode. Jüngel comments: God’s own life is a life of peace. But do we know what we are saying when we make such a claim? I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Three persons and yet each one completely different [from the others]. The Father: origin and creator of all life. The Son: the one who suffers death. In God there thus exists a contrast: life and cross, origin of all life together with death for us all. And yet the being of God does not fall apart, but [is held together] by the power of the Holy Spirit, who Augustine once very beautifully called the bond of love and peace between the Father and the Son. In this way the Father, and the Son, and also the Spirit is the communion of reciprocal otherness.33

We do well to see from this passage that, for Jüngel, the unity of the triune God is a unity of mutually exclusive opposites, that is, the unfathomable union of life and death, of being and nonbeing. This idea of divine unity reappears throughout Jüngel’s writings in his description of the being of God as “the unity of life and death on behalf of life.”34 The crucifixion of Jesus, he argues, “is not a contradiction of the divinity of the God who is himself light and in whom there is no darkness.” Rather, “even in the contradiction of eternal life and earthly death, God corresponds to himself. The being of God is capable See, for examples, Jüngel, “The Revelation of the Hiddenness of God,” in ed. John B. Webster, trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and John B. Webster, Theological Essays II, p. 130 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995); idem, “Living Out of Righteousness,” pp. 249–50; and idem, Justification, pp. 83–84. 33 Jüngel, “Ordnung gibt der Freiheit einen Raum,” in Evangelische Freiheit  – kirkliche Ordnung: Beiträge zum Selbstverständnis der Kirche (Hg. Evangelische Landessynode in Württemberg; Stuttgart: Quell Verlag, 1997), p. 118. 34 This description of the being of God is ubiquitous in Jüngel’s writings. For the reader’s sake we may cite several appearances of the phrase from the translated texts: Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 344; idem, “The Revelation of the Hiddenness of God,” p. 130; and idem, Justification, p. 83. 32

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of this contradiction. Indeed, God’s being is realized in this contradiction without being destroyed by it.”35 Our passage from “Credere in ecclesiam” demonstrates that, according to Jüngel, the idea that the being of God is a unity of life and death on behalf of life is of the highest possible significance for our understanding of the ecclesial attribute of unity. Because the unity of the divine being is a unity of diametric opposites, the unity of the church is also an “identity in difference,” a differentiated unity.36 Jüngel identifies five united pairings of otherwise divergent ecclesial actualities in order to explain this differentiated unity: the individual members of the church and the one body of Christ; the ecclesia visibilis and the ecclesia invisibilis; the community of the living and that of the dead, that is, the ecclesia militans and the ecclesia triumphans; the locally divided congregations and the one communion of the church; and Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians. Unfortunately, Jüngel does not expand upon any of these pairings in the text, apart from commenting that the relation of Gentiles and Jews and thus the church and the synagogue (which, we should note, is an entirely different issue from the listed identity in difference of Gentile and Jewish Christians) “is one of the most difficult theological problems,” particularly for eschatology.37 He does comment elsewhere in the text of “Credere in ecclesiam” on the relation of the visible church to the invisible church,38 but this somewhat abstruse passage39 does not clarify the extent to which the Jüngel, “The Revelation of the Hiddenness of God,” p. 130. Jüngel offers the same proposal in “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 560, Theses 3.21–3.215. 37 Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 187. See also “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 560, Thesis 3.24. We should note that Jüngel in no place in his writings expands upon this interesting topic. 38 See Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” pp. 182–84. 39 The confusion perhaps results from the unwieldiness of the distinction. Jenson comments that “the concept of the invisible church has occasioned little but trouble through theological history,” and on this basis refuses to discuss the distinction between ecclesial visibility and invisibility in his doctrine of the church. See Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford, 1999), p. 174. Similarly, Gustaf Aulén insists that ecclesiologies that accentuate the ontological priority of the ecclesia visibilis over the ecclesia invisibilis “have had baneful results. They have served not to clarify but rather to obscure the problem of the church. But the most serious result of this division has been the dissolution and destruction of the consciousness of the church. The more ‘important’ church, the invisible church of the essence, became nothing more than a pale and flimsy ideal, an abstraction; and the so-called visible church, the historical denominations, came to be regarded more and more as human institutions and organizations.” Aulén, The Faith of the Christian Church (trans. Eric H. Wahlstron; Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960), p. 299. 35 36

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ecclesia visibilis and the ecclesia invisibilis are in fact one church. Still, Jüngel’s list of pairings, while left undeveloped in the text, nevertheless gives us an idea of what he has concretely in mind with the notion of unity in difference. And we note as well that the reconciliation of these variegated realities into the being of the one church means that the church is characterized “by a tension-filled richness,” just as the being of God is the identity in difference of life and death. Jüngel’s description of the church’s unity in light of the unity of life and death that constitutes the being of God bears additional implications for ecumenical methodology. His conception that the being of the church necessarily includes the “tension-filled richness” of unified diverseness challenges the idea, widely discussed by contemporary ecumenists,40 that currently confessionally and politically distinct churches must strive for “full visible unity.” Especially for many Lutheran theologians, the notion that, to cite one example, “the one church is to be envisioned as a conciliar fellowship of local churches which are themselves united,”41 and the corollary that such a fellowship entails the dissolution of confessional distinctions, charts a dangerous course for ecumenical engagement.42 For this reason, during most of the past three decades, many Lutheran ecumenists have promoted a “unity in reconciled diversity” model for ecumenical convergence, according to which two distinct churches receive each other into full visible communion precisely by recognizing the validity and autonomy of each church’s organizational structure and confessional For example, Tjørhom, “The Goal of Visible Unity: Reaffirming Our Commitment,” ER 54.1 (2002), pp. 162–71; Anne P. Hardiment (ed.), “The Goal of Visible Unity: Ecumenical Hopes,” One in Christ 28.3 (1992), pp. 195–202; and Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds), In One Body through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity—A Call to the Churches from an Ecumenical Study Group (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). 41 David M. Paton (ed.), Breaking Barriers: Nairobi 1975. The Official Report of the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (London: SPCK, and Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), p. 60. 42 On the history of Lutheran hesitations concerning the “full visible unity” model for ecumenical convergence, see two essays by Michael Root: “‘Reconciled Diversity’ and the Visible Unity of the Church,” in ed. C. Podmore, Community—Unity—Communion: Essays in Honour of Mary Tanner, pp. 237–51 (London: Church House Publishing, 1998); and idem, “Once More on the Unity We Seek: Testing Ecumenical Models,” in eds Jeremy Morris and Nicholas Sagovsky, The Unity We Have & The Unity We Seek, pp. 167–77 (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003). See also Tjørhom, Visible Church—Visible Unity, pp. 80–83. 40

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identity.43 Jüngel suggests that the idea of convergence in reconciled diversity has its theological basis in the conception of the triune God as a communion of reciprocal otherness. Along these lines, when he turns at the end of “Credere in ecclesiam” to discuss the souring of ecumenical relations between Protestant bodies and the Catholic Church in the wake of the publication of the Curial decree Dominus Iesus,44 he defends the notion that, “not every difference in substance [between the confessions] results in a contradiction. There are indeed some differences that enhance the richness of Christianity.”45 Thus, the “tension-filled richness” of the one church that corresponds to the life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is, for Jüngel at least, paradigmatic also for ecumenical theology and method. A final and indeed very important aspect of Jüngel’s understanding of the essential ecclesial attribute of unity is his thesis that “the unity of the church is experienced in the sacramental celebrations of baptism and the Lord’s Supper,”46 that is, in the gathering of the community for worship. As he explains in “Credere in ecclesiam”: The church occurs first and foremost in the form of worship. In worship the triune God is found just as he was revealed in the history of Jesus Christ, which is the earthly counterpart [to his eternal being]. Where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus Christ, he is there in their midst and unites them to his body. The one invisible body of Christ thus finds its visible correspondence or representation in worship. And with the body of Christ comes also the representation of its unity. This occurs every time that the See Root, “Once More on the Unity We Seek: Testing Ecumenical Models,” in eds Jeremy Morris and Nicholas Sagovsky, The Unity We Have & The Unity We Seek, pp. 169–71 (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003). The most thorough defense of this model from the period is Oscar Cullmann’s study, Unity Through Diversity: Its Foundation, and a Contribution to the Discussion Concerning the Possibility of its Actualization (trans. M. Eugene Boring; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). See also Gunther Gassmann and Harding Meyer, “Requirements and Structures of Church Unity,” in eds Gunther Gassmann and Harding Meyer, The Unity of the Church: Requirements and Structures, pp. 33–39, 50–54 (LWF Report, no. 15; Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1983). We should also note that this model of ecumenical engagement is the stated position of the Lutheran participants in the fourth phase of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity. See The Apostolicity of the Church: Study Document of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2006), pp. 63–64, ¶s 135–38. 44 Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” pp. 190–95. See also his extended commentary on Dominus Iesus in “Paradoxe Ökumene,” pp. 1–6. 45 Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 194. 46 Jüngel, “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 561, Thesis 3.25. Emphasis added. 43

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gospel is purely preached and the sacraments are celebrated according to the gospel.47

We may leave aside for eventual analysis our already stated hesitations concerning the event-character of Jüngel’s ecclesial ontology that appears in this passage, and will focus instead on what may in fact be a genuine ecumenical opportunity present, at least in latent form, in Jüngel’s comments. Even though his remarks on the attribute of unity are in need of expansion and clarification, it is possible to read Jüngel’s coordination of the attribute of unity according to the events of worship as a step toward the resolution of perhaps the most pressing aporia related to the concept of church unity; namely, the tension between the “already” of the divided church and the “not yet” of the fully reconciled church of the eschaton. Jüngel’s proposal in the above passage suggests that the unity of the eschatologically reconciled church is palpably experienced and visibly represented in the present in the events of worship. That is, while the one church necessarily remains invisible in an eschatological sense (i.e. it is self-evidently “not yet” one church), in Christian worship its unity is apprehended in hidden form in the audible and visible events of preaching and the celebrations of the sacraments. From the perspective of ecumenism, this correspondence between essential unity and events of worship implies that realistic expressions of the fully reconciled church of the eschaton can be established among the distinct churches of today, not so much through the mutual acceptance of a common polity or hierarchy of offices, but rather through ecumenical services of worship, shared table fellowship, reciprocal exchanges of ministers and ministries, cross-confessional models of liturgy and catechesis, etc. Jüngel, we should note, does not explicitly promote any of these expressions either in “Credere in ecclesiam” or elsewhere, nor does he speculate how his understanding of the relation of church unity and worship might concretely Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” pp. 189–90. Ingolf Dalferth makes a similar claim in “Ministry and the Office of Bishop according to Meissen and Porvoo: Protestant Remarks about Several Unanswered Questions,” in Visible Unity and the Ministry of Oversight: The Second Theological Conference held under the Meissen Agreement between the Church of England and the Evangelical Church of Germany, eds Rupert Hoare and Ingolf Dalferth (London: Church House Publishing, 1997), pp. 9–48.

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impact the contemporary ecumenical quest for visible unity among the divided churches. Indeed, Jüngel’s comments in this text and in the two larger essays, cited above, on Gottesdienst are best categorized as explorations of the phenomenology of worship, rather than as exercises in ecumenical theology or method. And, additionally, Jüngel’s eschatology of event may not in fact support the kind of ecumenical engagements that we have proposed, since, as we shall continue to see, it stresses the interruptive character of the word at the expense of the temporally continuous. Still, such concerns need not prevent us from appreciating the insight that emerges from Jüngel’s assertion that the essential unity of the church is inextricably bound to the worship of the gathered assembly.

C. Holiness Credo in . . . sanctum . . . ecclesiam: The holiness of the church is its differentiation from the very unconverted world which it must prophetically serve through its spiritual, charitable, and political diaconate. The church serves the unconverted world in order to correspond to the holiness of the Lamb of God who bears the sin of the world . . . The church, however, is holy because and to the extent that even its sins are forgiven; it is therefore holy non sua sed aliena, non activa sed passiva sanctitate. To the church’s holiness belongs the knowledge of its on sinfulness and the desire to be liberated from its sinful past. The unholy person knows nothing of his sin nor wishes to know anything of it. The church, however, believes in the forgiveness of the sins and asks: Forgive us our trespasses! Whoever says that is holy in truth. In this sense, both the individual Christian and the Christian church are justified sinners.48

We observe that Jüngel begins his comments on the essential holiness of the church by addressing the relation between the church and the world. The pivotal thesis is that the relation between the church and the world corresponds to the relation of Jesus Christ to the world. Accordingly, just as Jesus Christ is necessarily ontologically different from the world the sins of which he bore, so also the church must be differentiated from the world that it is called and Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 186.

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equipped to serve. The essential holiness of the church is thus not the sheer separation of the church from the world, but rather the sanctification of the church for the sake of the world’s salvation.49 While Jüngel unfortunately does not further explain such claims in the text of “Credere in ecclesiam,” we do find some interesting related statements along such lines in “Thèses dogmatiques sur l’ecclésiologie.”50 Here, Jüngel objects to the severe “‘religious’ contradistinction of sacred and profane, by which the church claims to be a holier piece of the world than the world is itself.”51 In such a model of the relation of church and world, the church, self-conceived as sacred vis-à-vis the world’s profaneness, elevates itself above the world to the extent that it becomes “abstractly contradistinguished” from the world.52 But Jüngel observes that this misguided self-conception, which derives from religion’s demand for sacred spaces set apart from the world, in fact unwittingly makes the church “mundane; more worldly,”53 since the church defines itself according to a worldly conception of the sacred. He asserts, moreover, that this strict opposition of church and world masks a dangerously short-sighted soteriology, as it fails to recognize that the world in its entirety, and thus not just the church, must be saved and sanctified.54 A church that, on the basis of the distinction between sacred and profane, limits the saving and sanctifying actions of God to its own sphere, “runs the risk of demonizing the world.”55 By contrast, the church, properly conceived, “demonstrates to the entire world that it is intended for sanctification and thus for God,” and, in doing so, “liberates the world and offers to the world a correct understanding of society.”56 In our passage from “Credere in ecclesiam,” Jüngel suggests that the apparatus by means of which the holy church serves the world is the “spiritual, charitable, and political diaconate.” He goes on to explain that: The church is (1) holy because and to the extent that, in reflection to the holiness of Christ, it measures the weight of sin and its own guilt and names On this point, see the entirety of Jüngel’s argument in, “To Tell the World about God: The Task for the Mission of the Church on the Threshold of the Third Millennium,” IRM 89.353 (2000), pp. 203–14. 50 Jüngel, “Thèses dogmatiques sur l’ecclésiologie,” FV 88.2 (1989), pp. 5–11. 51 Ibid., p. 8, Thesis 2.2. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., p. 8, Thesis 2.21. 54 Ibid., p. 8, Thesis 2.22. 55 Ibid., pp. 8–9, Thesis 2.24. 56 Ibid., p. 8, Thesis 2.23. 49

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by name (beim Namen nennt) the guilt of the individual and of all humanity: this is the ecclesiological diaconate of truth. The church is (2) holy because and to the extent that, in reflection to the holiness of Jesus Christ, it resists injustice in all of its forms and seeks to anticipate the repetition of Christ’s holiness through deeds of love: this is the ecclesiological diaconate of love. The church is (3) holy because and to the extent that, in reflection to the holiness of Jesus Christ, it attests to the superiority of the grace of God over sin and thus encourages work for the coming kingdom of God: this is the ecclesiological diaconate of hope.57

We should note that Jüngel does not appear in this passage to directly associate the diaconate with any specific office or series of offices within the church’s polity,58 a position which falls squarely in line with his consistent hesitations concerning the ontology of the church’s structures of ministry.59 Instead, Jüngel employs the concept of the “triple diaconate”60 in order to encapsulate the variety of responsibilities to which the church must tend as it carries out its mission in the world. The church serves the world through its spiritual diaconate, that is, its diaconate of truth, by speaking the truth of the word of God in such a way that the sinful and guilty world is exposed for what it truly is. The charitable diaconate, the diaconate of love, is the church’s militancy against injustice, which it combats both through active resistance and in good deeds. The church’s service to the world through its political diaconate, its diaconate of hope, consists of its work for the coming of the kingdom of God, and thus its demonstration of the eschatological overcoming of sin by the grace of God. It is not entirely clear from the passage why, for Jüngel, the diaconate of hope is also the political diaconate. However, we shall Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 187. See also Jüngel, “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 561, Theses 3.32–3.34. 58 We are cautious in drawing such a conclusion, especially since the very brief passages in “Credere in ecclesiam” and “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist” are the only two locations in Jüngel’s writings in which he addresses the concept of diakonia. Still, in both of these texts the diaconal ministry of the church appears to be the prerogative of the whole church (and thus of the universal priesthood) rather than of a particular office or offices. If these texts are indeed indicative of Jüngel’s mature ecclesiology, then we must conclude that he stands outside of the broad academic and ecumenical consensus that the diaconal ministry belongs to a specific office within the church. See the classic treatment of this issue in John N. Collins, Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Source (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also the overview of Lutheran approaches to the ecumenical discussions of diakonia in Reinhard Boettcher, “Toward Lutheran Theological Understandings of the Diaconal Ministry,” in LWF Studies no. 01/2006, The Diaconal Ministry in the Mission of the Church, pp. 11–23 (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 2006). 59 See the comments in the conclusion to this part. 60 Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 187. 57

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later see beneath the attribute of catholicity that Jüngel conceives the church’s parabolic relation to the kingdom as having some critical implications for Christian political engagement. The last few sentences of our main passage from “Credere in ecclesiam” demonstrate that, according to Jüngel’s interpretation, the church’s essential holiness consists primarily both of God’s gracious action in forgiving the church’s sins and of the responses of the church to God’s action that take the forms of confession and repentance.61 The church is holy, not because it is without sin, but instead precisely because the church’s Savior and Lord perpetually forgives, justifies, and sanctifies his people.62 Jüngel thus argues in “Thèses dogmatiques sur l’ecclésiologie” that the principal danger that results from the confusion of Christ and the church is “the conception (which is not only Roman Catholic) according to which the holiness of the church by definition excludes from the church sins and errors.”63 He goes on to assert that, since the church is chief of sinners (peccatrix maxima), “it belongs to the holiness of the church to confess its sin.”64 The idea of the church as peccatrix maxima is critical for understanding Jüngel’s conception of the church as the signum sacramentalis that receives its sacramental character from the preeminent sacramentality of Jesus Christ. For example, he comments in “The Church as Sacrament?” that: It is precisely through the church’s understanding of itself as peccatrix maxima that the intimate relation between the church and Jesus Christ is expressed . . . His holiness, because it is holiness which takes pity on sinners, makes him into the peccator peccatorum (sinner of sinners) in their place; the holiness of the church, on the other hand, leads it to recognize itself as peccatrix maxima. As the peccator peccatorum, Christ is holy because he wipes away our sins, whereas as the peccatrix maxima the holy church Pannenberg describes the church’s essential holiness in much the same way. However, unlike Jüngel, Pannenberg explicitly connects the sacrament of baptism to the ascended Christ’s actions of sanctifying the church. See Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol. 3, p. 406. Wainwright, whose argument as a whole is very different from Jüngel’s, also discusses at length the significance of baptism for the concept of the church’s holiness. See Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life—A Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 127–32. 62 For a surprisingly similar, though not altogether coherent account of the essential sinfulness of the church from a Catholic perspective, see Karl Rahner, “Church of Sinners,” CrCu 3 (1951), pp. 64–74. 63 Jüngel, “Thèses dogmatiques sur l’ecclésiologie,” p. 6, Thesis 2.11. 64 Ibid., 7, Thesis 2.12. See also Jüngel, Justification, pp. 221–24, and our comments in Section 9.B. 61

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remains ever dependent upon the fact that its sins have been wiped away. He is the sacrament which the church receives, to which the church can only testify and which the church must hand on as recipient. And so prayer for forgiveness of its own sins is the criterion by which we decide whether, in representing and presenting the sacramental event, “mother church” understands itself secundum dicentum deum or whether it misunderstands itself as self-representation.65

We will comment further on this passage in our analysis of “The Church as Sacrament?” below. What we need to see at this point is that, for Jüngel, the church as peccatrix maxima and thus as holy is structured ontologically according to the event of justification. That is, the church, like the justified sinner, is simul iustus et peccatorum,66 the hearing church67 that receives only passively the grace of justification; the exocentric church68 that exists only on the basis of sanctitas aliena.69 And this conception of the church is perfectly consistent with Jüngel’s emphasis on the event character of the church, since what occurs in the verbum audibile of preaching and in the verbum visibile of the sacrament is the coming of God to the world in the interruptive coming-to-speech of the justifying word. Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 211. Wainwright is perhaps correct to worry that the concept of the simul “is better not taken in the form in which it is found in some Lutheran theologians, i.e. as an extreme and continuing paradox, as though the believer became one hundred percent justified while remaining one hundred percent sinner.” See Wainwright, Doxology, p. 132. This statement is found beneath the heading of the church’s holiness, so we may take the point as also applicable to the ontological status of the church as the assembly of justified believers, and not just to the individual. Wainwright goes on in the passage to counter the sheerly paradoxical concept of the simul by emphasizing the “process of . . . transformation” that marks the Spirit’s work of sanctification (p. 132). When applied to the problem of the church’s holiness, this means that sanctification is an ongoing history of God’s work of cleansing his people of their sins.Wainwright states elsewhere that “Jüngel takes the simul iustus et peccator in a thoroughly paradoxical sense: totaliter iustus, totaliter peccator” and later suggests that Jüngel “transposes” the simul as it is applied to the individual believer “into an ecclesiological key.” See Wainwright, “Church and Sacrament(s),” in ed. John B. Webster, The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in his Sixtieth Year, pp. 98, 102 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). It is possible, then, that Jüngel is one of the Lutheran theologians that Wainwright has in mind in the passage from Doxology. In any event, the point is valid and well taken: In describing the work of God in justification and sanctification, Jüngel eschews any notion that such work takes place as a process. Rather, God’s justifying and sanctifying action occurs as the sheer event of the interruptive word. The crucial problem, once again, is a purely punctiliar conception of the relation of the word to time. We will return to this matter throughout the present part. 67 As we shall see in our analysis below, the idea of the church as hearer is crucial for Jüngel’s argument in “The Church as Sacrament?” See this same essay, page 205. See also Jüngel’s comments on the distinction between ecclesia audiens and ecclesia docens in “Thesen zum Amt der Kirche nach evangelischem Verständnis,” p. 376, Theses 4–6. 68 See his comments in “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” pp. 557–58, Theses 2.544–2.563. 69 Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 187. 65 66

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Finally, in this section on the church’s essential holiness, we must briefly investigate Jüngel’s understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church. As a starting point for such an investigation, we might consider the assertion from “Thèses dogmatiques sur l’ecclésiologie” that “God, by his Holy Spirit of love, sanctifies human persons with Jesus Christ so that they might participate in the communion of the saints.”70 Surprisingly, this otherwise incontrovertible claim appears to encompass the full extent of Jüngel’s appeal to pneumatology for describing the being of the church. Accordingly, in “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist” he constructs a lengthy series of theses to explain how the Holy Spirit sanctifies the individual for participation in the life of the church,71 but never once considers how the Holy Spirit might or might not be active as sanctifier in the already gathered assembly of believers, and this in spite of his warning in the same text that “soteriology is not interested in the holiness of the individual, but rather in the holy community.”72 Similarly, there is remarkably little discussion of the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the two texts on Christian worship, “Der Gottesdienst als Fest der Freiheit” and “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst.” Throughout his writings, Jüngel shows little interest in such questions as the charisms of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, the role of the Spirit in the sacraments, the relation of the Spirit to ordained ministers and ministries, etc. He asserts in two places, with reference to John 16.13, that the Spirit leads the church into all truth.73 However, as we shall observe in our section on apostolicity, such leading appears to occur only in the events of Christian proclamation. Wainwright is therefore correct to chide Jüngel for developing an ecclesiology based upon a pneumatology that lacks any notion of the Holy Spirit’s “indwelling and transforming” power.74 Indeed, in Jüngel’s ecclesiology the Holy Spirit appears only to perform the purely punctiliar functions of gathering believers into the assembly and of preparing them for participation in the events of worship.75 72 73

Jüngel, “Thèses dogmatiques sur l’ecclésiologie,” p. 5, Thesis 1. See Jüngel, “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” pp. 550–58, Theses 1.4–2.564. Ibid., p. 554, Thesis 2.1. Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 185, and “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 562, Thesis 3.52. 74 Wainwright, “Church and Sacrament(s),” p. 102. 75 See, for example, Jüngel “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 553, Thesis 1.6: “In that the Spirit of love purifies the life of the justified sinner and makes it into a worshipping life, he accomplishes the construction of the church.” 70 71

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One critical problem at stake in this pneumatological issue is the relation to time of the Holy Spirit’s work in the church. Jüngel’s punctiliar pneumatology oriented to events of worship suggests that the Holy Spirit’s work does not involve those realities of the church that extend through time. Reinhard Hütter neatly summarizes what might serve as a counterexample to Jüngel’s description of the Holy Spirit’s role in the church: The church . . . remains a being in invocation of the Holy Spirit—epicletic being, being that is completely the work of the Spiritus Creator. At the same time, as the work of the Holy Spirit [in the church] is also characterized by duration, concreteness, and visibility, and as such is identical with distinct practices or activities, institutions, offices, and doctrines.76

In sharp contrast to this conception, Jüngel’s pneumatology lacks any such notion that the work of the Holy Spirit in the church “is . . . characterized by duration, concreteness, and visibility.” And he would almost certainly balk at Hütter’s assertion that, “as the work of the Holy Spirit,” the church “is identical with distinct practices or activities, offices, and doctrines.” Indeed, Jüngel’s emphasis on the event character of the Holy Spirit’s work in the church appears to situate the Spirit’s actions over against any ongoing practices, activities, offices, doctrines, liturgies, etc. In short, while we can agree with Jüngel that the Spirit plays a necessary role in the gathering and preparing of the aggregation of the community for each service of worship, at the same time we suggest that his emphasis on the interruptive character of the relation of the Spirit’s work to the church’s continuities raises more questions than it answers. We will see in subsequent sections that forms of this very problem are evident in his interpretations of the church’s essential apostolicity and in his approach to the problem of the church’s sacramentality.

D. Catholicity Credo in . . . catholicam . . . ecclesiam: The catholicity of the church is the universal extensity of its unity by virtue of which the one and only church Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (trans. Doug Stott; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 119.

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exists in all the world and thus, as true ecumene, testifies to the world of the gracious dominion of Jesus Christ over the entire world (cf. Matt. 28.20; Acts 1.8). In its catholicity the church is always and everywhere . . . the sacramental sign for the hidden presence of Jesus Christ. The church, however, is also catholic in that, by penetratingly serving . . . the whole world, it exists as a spiritual parable of the kingdom of God, and to this extent also has an indirect political significance. As a spiritual parable of the coming kingdom of God, the church in its catholicity evangelically imposes upon the state that it must become by way of legislation a worldly parable of the coming kingdom of God. Moreover, as a spiritual parable of the coming kingdom of God, the church in its catholicity evangelically imposes upon the political world that it must become one world common to all and must give its unity a form that emphasizes this unity as having universal extensity.77

Our passage demonstrates that, for Jüngel, the church is essentially catholic in two important senses. First, the church is catholic insofar as it universally extends throughout the whole world, and, by doing so, declares to the whole world the message that Jesus Christ is the one lord over all.78 This implies that the church’s essential catholicity is in some way related to its missionary activity.79 While Jüngel does not explicitly make this connection in the text,80 the biblical references to the commissioning of the apostles indicate the likelihood that he had the church’s mission in mind when commenting here upon its catholicity. Moreover, according to the passage, the church catholic carries into the whole world not only the message of the lordship of Jesus Christ but also the hidden presence of Christ, of which the church is the “sacramental sign.”81 The extensity of the church’s catholicity, then, points to the universal scope of the church’s task of witnessing to and bearing the presence of Jesus Christ to the world. Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 186. Jüngel makes the same point in “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 561, Thesis 3.4. 79 For statements explicitly linking the catholicity of the church to the church’s missionary activity, see Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics, vol. 2 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 561; Gordon Spykman, Reformational Theology: A New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 446–47; and Carl Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology (2nd edn; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), pp. 64–66. 80 Indeed, his only extensive comments on the church’s missionary imperative are found in “To Tell the World about God.” 81 On the idea of the church as the sacramental sign of Jesus Christ, see “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 206, and also our analysis in Chapter 9. 77 78

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This conception of the church’s universal extensity, especially Jüngel’s remark that “in its catholicity the church is always and everywhere . . .,” is interesting and even somewhat surprising, given what we have observed thus far concerning the interruptive character of his ecclesiology. While, unfortunately, his comments here are left undeveloped, we do well to note that he appears to acknowledge that the church, in its catholicity, in some sense positively relates to the whole world, in all times and at all places. As a bare statement, this is by no means an anomalous approach to the church’s catholicity. Braaten, for instance, understands the church’s essential catholicity as “an eschatological concept” that “points to the movement of the church’s universal mission ‘to the ends of the earth’ and ‘to the close of the age.’”82 Similarly, Auer argues that the church’s essential catholicity “points to the church’s universality as a community intended for the whole of humanity. This universality must be realized in time through God’s grace.”83 Jüngel’s idea of catholicity as extensity, though shorn of elaboration, fits nicely with these contemporaneous ecclesiologies. Again, it is unfortunate that Jüngel fails to expand upon his comments in “Credere in ecclesiam,” as it would be fascinating to see how he might situate a developed conception of catholicity as extensity within an ecclesiological that stresses the interruptive, punctiliar character of the church. Fortunately, Jüngel does offer more expansive remarks in our passage and elsewhere on the second identified aspect of his understanding of the church’s catholicity, namely, his interesting thesis that the church catholic, as the “spiritual parable of the kingdom of God . . . has an indirect political significance.” Because the church in its catholicity extends out into the whole world, it necessarily comes in contact with the state and its political structures and institutions. According to Jüngel, in this contact with the state, the church expresses its essential catholicity by “evangelically imposing” upon the state the claim that, both through legislation and international diplomacy, the world of politics should come to mirror the catholicity of the coming kingdom of God. The church, that is, earnestly demands that the state itself should become the “worldly parable of the coming kingdom of God” through Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology, p. 65. Emphasis added. Auer, The Church, p. 348.

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the political establishment of justice and unity. As he elaborates in the essay “Das Salz der Erde”: The Christian faith understands the political community precisely as the model of the “lasting city” which cannot yet be found on earth since it lies in the future . . . The Christian community can do the civilian community no greater service than to remind it . . . that, in the entirety of its profaneness and transitoriness, it is a parable of the coming kingdom.84

We observe from the second sentence that, in Jüngel’s conception, the state is ineluctably an imperfect parable of the kingdom since it remains profane and transitory. But Jüngel insists that, even in its profaneness and transitoriness, the state can be called upon to anticipate, in its political policies and processes, the eschatological lordship of Jesus Christ over all things. The church becomes the true “salt of the earth” whenever it so pleads with the state to acknowledge and to actualize this responsibility to anticipate the coming kingdom.85 As we have thus far observed Jüngel’s persistent emphasis on the centrality of worship for ecclesiology, it should come as no surprise that, in “Das Salz der Erde,” Jüngel argues that the necessary political character of the church catholic finds its chief expression in the event of the community gathered in public worship, and particularly in the proclamation of the justification of the sinner that occurs in preaching as the “center of worship.”86 The church is the true salt of the earth as it publically proclaims the gospel. The preached gospel of justification “declares that no person may be identified by the sum of his or her deeds or misdeeds, but instead that every person should be addressed as a person and apart from his or her works.”87 Public worship that occurs around the central word-event of the preaching of the justification of the sinner is thus both a “call to the freedom [of the gospel] and an encouragement of a language of freedom.”88 Public worship that occurs “in the midst of the civilian community” is a reminder to the state of the “intimate connection between freedom and the ‘service of the word.’”89 That is to say, for Jüngel, the preaching

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Eberhard Jüngel, “Das Salz der Erde,” in Reden für die Stadt. Zum Verhältnis von Christengemeinde und Bürgergemeinde, Kaiser-Traktate, no. 38, pp. 27–28 (München: Kaiser Verlag, 1979). On this issue, see the whole of Jüngel’s argument in “Das Salz der Erde.” Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

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of the gospel of the justification of the sinner that takes place as the center of Christian worship is a public demonstration of the language of freedom that considers all individuals and people groups apart from the burden of works and thus as equals before the presence of the justifying God. Precisely as such, it is primarily in the public event of worship that the church catholic calls the state to reflect the coming kingdom of God as a worldly parable of the lordship of the one who justified sinners by his death on the cross. As in our comments on Jüngel’s interpretation of the church’s essential unity, we can temporarily set aside our hesitations concerning his insistence upon the event character of worship in order to observe the genuine insight in his explanation of the political and public aspects of the worship of the church catholic.90 While we will not concede that worship is the only context of the church’s publicity, visibility, and audibility, we can agree with Jüngel that preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper are events in which the word of the gospel takes its public, visible, and audible forms. Worship, so defined, is not only a matrix of experience for those who already believe but also a public declaration before unbelievers of the liberating truth of the gospel. Along these lines, we can appreciate Jüngel’s thesis that the preached language of justification challenges the political language of the state. This is especially pertinent when we consider the worldly hegemony of works over person, since the new language of the gospel that prioritizes person over works might challenge the state to reconsider certain economic policies and penal codes.91 Again, conceding this point does not necessitate that we wholly endorse Jüngel’s interpretation of the political and public implications of the church’s essential catholicity. Rather, we simply acknowledge here that Jüngel makes a number of insightful claims that might be appropriated in developing a theology of worship that can be creatively employed to tackle the thorny issue of the relation of church and state.

E. Apostolicity In our analyses of Jüngel’s interpretations of the church’s essential attributes of unity and catholicity, above, we were willing to temporarily set aside our

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For a sustained and exhaustive examination of the public and political aspects of Christian worship, see Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (trans. Margaret Kohl; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See Jüngel’s fascinating commentary on the political and legal ramifications of the primacy of persons over works in Justification, pp. 269–77.

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hesitations concerning the interruptive, punctiliar, or event character of the church in Jüngel’s ecclesiology in order not to miss some insights for ecumenism and for the theology of worship. However, in our examination of Jüngel’s approach to the church’s essential holiness, we were not able to ignore the ecclesiological implications of his unyielding emphasis on the word of God that interrupts all worldly continuities. We observed that Jüngel’s restriction of the Holy Spirit’s work in the life of the church to the preparation and gathering of believers for the interruptive word-events of Christian worship raises some critical questions concerning the relation of the Spirit, the church, and time. To be specific, what is missing from Jüngel’s account is any notion that the Holy Spirit is at work in those aspects of the life of the church that extend through time. As we shall now see, this emphasis on the interruptive character of word-events at the expense of the temporally continuous is especially pronounced in Jüngel’s interpretation of the church’s essential apostolicity. The issues that emerge as we work through this problem are highly significant for our subsequent analysis of Jüngel’s approach to the question of the church’s sacramentality and for our concluding remarks on his ecclesiology. In “Credere in ecclesiam” Jüngel summarizes his interpretation of the essential apostolicity of the church as follows: Credo in . . . apostolicam ecclesiam: By the apostolicity of the church we are to understand the faithfulness of the church to the mission and task (expressed in an original way in the primitive Christian apostolate) of proclaiming the gospel in thought, word, and deed. And since the successor of the apostles is the New Testament canon (and not the bishop) . . . the church exists in apostolic succession because and to the extent that it thinks, speaks, and acts according to the scriptures. The church existing in apostolic succession is the church existing in the power of the Holy Spirit and to this extent led into all truth. To be sure, the church is not maintained by virtue of its own decree, but only by virtue of the power of the truth of the gospel which overcomes the church’s errors . . . The claim of infallibility associated with the apostolicity of the church consists of the promise communicated to the church that God himself will receive the church in truth. God, however, receives the church in the truth only insofar as he accentuates the truth of the gospel and affirms and receives the church as an earthly space for this truth. Every speech and

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action of the visible church that exists under the conditions of the world is therefore always to be measured by the truth of the gospel.92

Our passage makes clear that, for Jüngel, the church’s essential apostolicity is chiefly related to its ongoing responsibility to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ “in thought, word, and deed.” The model of such responsibility, he asserts, is the “primitive Christian apostolate,” which, from the context of the passage (e.g. “successor of the apostles”), obviously refers to those followers of Jesus who were commissioned by the resurrected and ascended (at least in the case of Paul) Lord to bear witness to the gospel “even to the ends of the earth” (Acts 2.8). Apostolicity, then, is the church’s diligence in proclaiming the gospel according to the pattern of mission and ministry set by the original apostles and recorded in the New Testament. This basic claim explains Jüngel’s proposal that the first apostles were succeeded, not by a uniform way of life, structure of organization, or series of officers, but by the “New Testament canon.” That is, the New Testament (and, surprisingly, not here in conjunction with the Old Testament as the two testament biblical canon93) is the written record, preserved by the church in perpetuity, of the pattern of gospel mission and ministry established by the apostles. The canon is a “successio doctrinalis appearing in a form of writing that is appropriate for proclamation,”94 that guides the church’s kerygmatic thinking, speaking, and acting. This conception of apostolic succession qualifies Jüngel’s subsequent claim that “the church existing in apostolic succession is the church existing in the power of the Holy Spirit and to this extent led into all truth.” The flow of the passage suggests that Jüngel does not conceive the apostolic succession as a continuity that extends through time from the historical commissioning of the first apostles and on through to the eschaton. Rather, apostolicity occurs every time the church proclaims the gospel in events of thinking, speaking, and acting that correspond to the New Testament witnesses. Therefore, the

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Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam,” p. 185. See also Jüngel, “Der Geist der Liebe als Gemeinschaftsgeist,” p. 562, Theses 3.5–3.531. Elsewhere Jüngel does assert that the apostolic succession of the church is located in the full biblical canon of Old and New Testaments. See Jüngel, Justification, p. 254, and “Thesen zum Amt der Kirche nach evangelischem Verständnis,” p. 379, Thesis 9. It is not self-evident from the text of “Credere in ecclesiam” why Jüngel here identifies the apostolic succession only with the New Testament. Jüngel, “Thesen zum Amt der Kirche nach evangelischem Verständnis,” p. 379, Thesis 9. See also his similar comments in, “To Tell the World about God,” p. 208.

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role of the Holy Spirit in the church’s essential apostolicity is to ensure that each event of gospel proclamation corresponds to the truth, or to the canon.95 The attribute of apostolicity is thus actualized in the life of the church as the church, by the power of the Holy Spirit, measures its proclamation against the truth of the gospel as recorded in the New Testament. And, moreover, the apostolic church, as the “earthly space” for the truth of the gospel,96 is not free from error, but is rather kept by the power of God for the promised future infallibility that will overcome the errors that mark it in the present. The most important feature of Jüngel’s argument in this passage for our purposes in this chapter is his claim that the “successor of the apostles is the . . . canon.”97 This is an interesting assertion, not least because the complicated and controversial process of the canonization of the New Testament did not completely terminate until over three centuries after the apostolic period had ended.98 Jüngel does not in any place address this gap between the composition of the different texts of the New Testament and their eventual assimilation as one canon, so it is unclear how he conceives that the canon putatively succeeded the apostles.99 At any rate, Jüngel proposes that the church now “exists” in apostolic succession only insofar as, by the power of the Holy Spirit, it grounds its proclamation according to the witness recorded in the canon. Consequently, church offices and polities result from strictly human efforts to ensure through organization

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Similarly, Großhans argues that “the church stands under the judgment of Jesus Christ through the holy Scriptures.” Consequently, self-criticism according to the scriptures belongs to the ­essence of the apostolic church. Großhans, Die Kirche, p. 296, Thesis 2.4. See the similar conception of the church as the earthly “space for truth” in Großhans, Die Kirche, p. 183ff. We do well to note that Ebeling also makes the case that the church’s apostolicity must be defined according to the reformation sola scriptura. Says Ebeling: “Therefore the church has not access to its basis of life apart from the holy scriptures, through which the word of Christ is delivered ever and ever anew . . . This sola scriptura is the guarantor of the ongoing apostolicity of the church.” Ebeling, Dogmatik, Bd. 3, p. 376. See the surveys of this process in John N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (rev. edn; Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 2004), pp. 56–60; F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988); and Lee M. McDonald, The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority, (rev. edn; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007). Barth, who argues similarly that the church’s apostolicity corresponds to its faithfulness to the canon, goes to some lengths to explain how the canon succeeded the apostles. “The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the church . . . As far as the idea of a living succession is concerned everything depends on the antecessor being regarded as alive and having free power over against the successor. But if, as here, the antecessor has long since died, this can happen only if his proclamation has been fixed in writing and if it is ­acknowledged that he still has life and free power over the Church to-day in this written word of his.” Barth, CD I/1, p. 104.

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and order that the ministry of the gospel discharges its responsibilities according to scripture.100 And, for just this reason, the idea, which is pivotal for Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox ecclesiologies, that the church’s essential apostolicity is passed along by persons “standing in the alleged succession of the bishops” “must be resisted as a heresy.”101 To be sure, such an interpretation of the church’s essential apostolicity echoes typical non-Anglican Protestant hesitations concerning the office of the bishop and the concept of episcopal succession. Jüngel summarizes the concern in Justification: The institutionalization of the apostolate in the form of the apostolic succession of bishops, and from there to the Apostolic Seat, shows a failure to understand what is rightly granted the church when it is called a holy, catholic, and apostolic church . . . True apostolic succession is to follow in witnessing to the truth of the gospel as it is in the canon of the Holy Scriptures. The apostles have not been replaced by bishops, but by the canon.102

This passage is housed within a lengthy exposition of the concept of the universal priesthood of all believers, which, Jüngel contends, is “an essential implication of [the] article” of justification.103 According to Jüngel, Jesus Christ, having “completed his priestly work of self-sacrifice for our salvation without any human co-operation,”104 has now replaced his own priesthood with the priesthood of all believers. The work that was once proper to Jesus alone is now the prerogative of all who believe in him for their eternal salvation. This universal priesthood is not exercised in cultic sacrifice, since Jesus’ self-sacrifice “put an end to priesthood seen from the cultic point of view.”105 This is precisely Jüngel’s argument in “Das Amt in der Kirche nach evangelischem Verständnis.” See also “Church Unity is Already Happening: The Path Towards Eucharistic Community” trans. Richard P. Schenk, dialog 44.1 (2005), p. 35, where he claims that office in the church “intends to guide the spiritual riches of the common priesthood of all the faithful into orderly channels and by that to make it publicly communicable.” 101 Jüngel, “Das Amt in der Kirche nach evangelischem Verständnis,” in Ökumene vor neuen Zeiten. Festschrift für Theodor Schneider zum 70. Geburtstag, hg. Konrad Reiser (Freiburg: Herder, 2000), p. 273, Thesis 10. Emphasis added. We should note that Jüngel does not use the word “heresy” in the reprint of these theses as “Thesen zum Amt der Kirche nach evangelischem Verständnis.” 102 Jüngel, Justification, p. 254. See also “Church Unity is Already Happening,” p. 35. 103 Jüngel, Justification, p. 251. On the following, see the entire discussion of the general priesthood in Justification, pp. 251–55. Dalferth makes a similar connection between the apostolicity of the church and the universal priesthood in “Ministry and the Office of Bishop According to Meissen and Porvoo,” pp. 35ff. 104 Jüngel, Justification, p. 252. Emphasis added. 105 Ibid. 100

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Rather, the universal priesthood is exercised in the church’s ministries of the word, that is, in the preaching of the verbum audibile and the administration of the verba visibile. “All believers are basically qualified to do this,”106 which means that, “in regard to all other believers, those called to [the office of the word] have no special authority (potestas) or an irrevocable standing (character indelebilis).”107 And this, in turn, entails that ordination into the succession of bishops does not in any way confer sacramental grace.108 We see, then, that Jüngel’s rejection of the succession of bishops in favor of the successio doctrinalis of the canon is based upon an understanding of the universal priesthood that emerges from his approach to the doctrine of justification. In critiquing his thesis that the apostolicity of the church is located in the canon, we need neither repudiate the idea of the universal priesthood, nor argue in favor of the concept of episcopal succession. Still, since one of our central agendas in this present unit is to demonstrate that, in his doctrine of the church, Jüngel’s persistent emphasis on the interruptive character of the event of the word gives way to a problematic account of ecclesial continuities, it may be worth considering some alternate interpretations of the church’s apostolicity in order to exhibit what is missing in his proposal in “Credere in ecclesiam.” Catholic ecclesiologies in particular tend to describe the church’s essential attribute of apostolicity as the temporal continuity between the incipient church of the age of the apostles and the church as it exists today.109 As J. M. R. Tillard demonstrates, this continuity is marked by much more than the apostolic succession of bishops: The expression “apostolic continuity” should be noted very carefully. What we include here is certainly “apostolic succession,” but understood in a much broader context: “continuity” of teaching of the faith, “continuity” of Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 255. For a very different reading of the sacramentality of ordination from a Lutheran perspective, see Carl E. Braaten, “The Special Ministry of the Ordained,” in ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Marks of the Body of Christ, pp. 130–33 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). 109 See, for instance, Paul Lakeland, Church: Living Communion, Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives, ed. Tatha Wiley (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996), pp. 51–52. “To say that the Church is apostolic in the first instance connects the community today with the apostolic Church of the first century. It points to the unbroken continuity of orthodox belief and practice over two thousand years, stretching back to those first followers of Jesus whom the church— and perhaps Jesus himself—called ‘apostles.’” Tjørhom makes a similar argument in, Visible Church—Visible Unity, pp. 67–68, and throws in the offhand, though perhaps true remark that “apostolicity often appears to have been reduced in some Lutheran circles to a rather abstract and invisible concern” (pp. 67–68). 106 107 108

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sacramental life, “continuity” of the inspiration of its mission, “continuity” of the preservation of the community in the preferential option for the poor (testified to throughout Tradition), “continuity” of solidarity with the other Churches, “continuity” in the faithful transmission of what “has been received from the apostles.”110

We need not agree with Tillard’s proposal in its entirety to appreciate the variegated concept of continuity that marks his approach to the church’s essential apostolicity. Tillard comes very close in this passage to Yves Congar’s definition of tradition as “the communication of the entire heritage of the apostles,”111 which is expressed in the church by such “monuments” of tradition as holy scripture, the conciliar decrees, the creeds, and the liturgies.112 Congar’s point is that the apostolicity of the church tarries through time in concrete forms such as texts and practices that can be passed along from one generation to the next. This notion of the diachronicity of the apostolic church is not unique to Catholic ecclesiologies. In fact, a number of Lutheran theologians have made strong arguments that the church’s essential apostolicity has a necessary temporally continuous character. Braaten, for example, proposes that the apostolicity of the church is marked by an “eschatological dynamic,” such that continuity with the apostles consists of “lay(ing) hold of the original eschatological drive of the early Christian apostolate and . . . trac(ing) its trajectory through the discontinuities of time and history.”113 Pannenberg speaks of the apostolicity of the church as the continuation through time of the original mission of the apostles. Apostolicity, so conceived, is the trajectory of the church’s mission from the apostolic age to the eschaton.114 The Lutheran participants in the fourth phase of the Lutheran-Catholic international dialogue on the apostolicity of the church define apostolicity as “a gift and calling which shapes the whole life of the church as a community in history.”115 Consequently, “the continuity of the Spirit’s saving action, taking form in the church’s continuous reception and handing-on of the gospel, amid Tillard, Church of Churches, p. 188. Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition (trans. A. N. Woodrow; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 22. 112 See ibid., p. 129ff. 113 Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology, p. 51. Emphasis added. 114 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, pp. 406–07. 115 The Apostolicity of the Church, p. 62, ¶130. 110 111

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a manifold ecclesial practice centered on the gospel, is thus seen today as the depth-dimension of the apostolicity of the church.”116 In addition to this acknowledgment of the necessary temporality of the church, some Lutheran theologians are even willing to concede that “the ministry of oversight is . . . a ministry in service of the church’s continuity” through time.117 Jenson identifies the office of bishop or presbyter as “a charism of diachronic concord with the apostles.”118 Braaten likewise argues that Protestants should be able to see that the point of the ecclesiastical offices . . . in the Catholic tradition is to continue the apostolic mission to the ends of the world and to the end of time, thus making the ordering of the church a derived criterion of apostolicity which Protestants need not refuse.119

Along these same lines, after acknowledging ministry as a “contingent form” of the substance of the gospel, the Lutheran participants in the aforementioned dialogue on apostolicity “recognize today that the church needs, in various degrees, particular forms of apostolic continuity which are not in themselves intrinsic to the substance of the gospel.”120 Such forms “while not necessary in a strict sense for the gospel to be expressed with saving efficacy, are still needed in the church for its mission and broader unity. Their use . . . must be continually reformed, to enable them to serve better the continuity of the church with its apostolic origin.”121 We have labored through such examples to demonstrate that Jüngel’s definition of the apostolic succession and thus of the church’s essential apostolicity according to the sola scriptura principle of the Reformation stands in stark contrast to models of apostolicity in which the idea of ecclesial continuity plays a significant role. For Jüngel, the apostolic church of today is continuous with the incipient church of the apostles only insofar as present Ibid., p. 61, ¶126. Michael J. Root, “Bishops as Points of Unity and Continuity,” in ed. Jack M. Tuell and Roger W. Fjeld, Episcopacy: Lutheran-United Methodist Dialogue II, p. 122 (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1991). See also Root’s comments on pages 122–25 in their entirety. 118 Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 229. 119 Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology, p. 53. Emphasis added. See also his comments in Carl E. Braaten, “The Episcopate and the Petrine Office as Expressions of Unity,” in Wolfhart Pannenberg, Avery Dulles, S. J., and Carl E. Braaten, Spirit, Faith, and Church, pp. 89–107 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970). 120 The Apostolicity of the Church, pp. 62–63, ¶132. Emphasis added. 121 Ibid., p. 63, ¶133. 116 117

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proclamation measures up to the original model of proclamation that is recorded in the New Testament. Such a conception resists all notions that the church passes along its apostolic essence from generation to generation through offices, ministries, creeds, confessions, liturgies, sacraments, etc. Indeed, as Jüngel insists in an interview from 2005, “if one wishes to add anything else” to the definition of “the true apostolic succession [as] thinking, teaching, and living according to the scriptures,” this “would not be a plus, but rather a minus.”122 Jüngel appears to perceive that such “additions” encroach upon the unique and preeminent authority of Christian scripture in the life of the church. But by positing scripture—the preaching of which, we must remember, is, for Jüngel, an interruptive word-event in which God comes to the world by coming-to-speech, over against the continuities of office, doctrine—and praxis that give temporal shape to the church’s life, Jüngel essentially divests the apostolic church of its diachronicity. *  *  * Our analysis of Jüngel’s interpretation of the essential unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church in this chapter has yielded mixed results. On the one hand, we have appreciated some genuine insights for ecumenism, the theology of worship, and the church-state relation that emerge in his discussions of unity and catholicity. While we are not prepared in the present work to test the implications of this axiom for trinitarian theology, we reiterate our appreciation of Jüngel’s assertion that the unity in difference of the one God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit suggests that we not rule out “reconciled diversity” as a model of ecumenical engagement. Additionally, for all its potential problems, Jüngel’s location of the being of the one church in events of worship sustains the idea that currently divided churches promote the one church’s essential unity primarily through ecumenical services of worship, shared table fellowship, common prayer, cross-confessional models of liturgy and catechesis, etc. Jüngel’s comments, though very brief, may warrant consideration in the context of the current ecumenical climate, especially in light of Walter Cardinal Kasper’s call for a renewal of “spiritual ecumenism.”123 “Man reibt sich die Augen: Ökumene in Deutschland—ein Gespräch mit dem Tübinger Theologen Eberhard Jüngel,” zeitzeichen 1 (2005), p. 41. He even goes on in this same interview to compare the required historic episcopate to cancer—“a dangerous proliferation of tissue” in the body (pp. 41–42). 123 See Walter Kasper, A Handbook of Spiritual Ecumenism (New York: New City Press, 2007). 122

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Finally, we repeat our commendation that Jüngel’s interesting claim that the church is catholic in public worship may contain some important implications for the relation between church and state. In particular, we concur with his insistence that the gospel, which is publically preached in events of the church’s worship, challenges the state to evaluate its economic policies and penal codes. To be sure, this insight, as with the others mentioned above, receives only minimal treatment in Jüngel’s writings on ecclesiology. But we should not let this fact prevent us from catching sight of the far-reaching entailments of such comments. On the other hand, Jüngel’s comments on all four of the NicenoConstantinopolitan attributes, and particularly his surveys of holiness and apostolicity, demonstrate the event character of his ecclesiology and, in turn, raise some significant questions concerning the relation of the church to time. While we appreciate his emphasis on the importance of worship for understanding the being of the church, his persistent employment of the hermeneutics of event in his ecclesiological writings situates the events of worship over against the temporally continuous polities, doctrines, and practices of the church. We therefore see that the interruptive structure of God’s relation to the world, which we examined in Parts One and Two in the contexts of Jüngel’s theology of language and Christology, respectively, also plays a substantial role in his ecclesiology. We cite again his assertion that “that which deserves to be called sacramental is always an elementary interruption of the worldly continuity of life”124 in order to demonstrate that our analysis of his ecclesiology in this chapter has moved us close to Jüngel’s conception of the sacramental being of the church.

Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” p. 277.

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Is or is not the church a sacrament? We can anticipate Jüngel’s answer to this question from what we have observed thus far in our analysis. On the one hand, Jüngel’s consistent emphasis on God’s sacramental arrival in word-events suggests that he does not conceive the church as a sacrament in its diachronically extending offices, ministries, traditions, doctrines, and practices. Indeed, God’s coming-to-speech in the event of the word interrupts all such temporal continuities, insofar as it brings to speech ontic possibilities that surpass the world’s temporal and spatial actualities. That is, the sacramental being of Jesus Christ that arrives in the word ontologically exceeds the whole of what can be contained or transmitted in the church’s temporal structures. The church, therefore, does not have its sacramentality in its diachronic continuities. On the other hand, God does in fact come to speech in the audible and visible marks of the ecclesia invisibilis; that is, in the pure preaching of the gospel and in the correct administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These representative actions are the events of the word that constitute Christian worship and in the occurrences of which Christ, the one sacrament of God for the world, comes to speech among his assembled people. For Jüngel, the church can be conceived as a “sacramental sign” and even a “sacramental being” if and only if the church’s sacramentality is situated as subsequent to the unique and preeminent sacrament, Jesus Christ, who sacramentally comes to speech in the events of the word. The church is therefore not a continuation or extension of Jesus Christ or of his salvific action, but is rather the place where Christ

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presents and represents his person and work through creatively passive human actions.1 All this to say that the church is sacramental, not diachronically, as located in its structures, but interruptedly, as located in the word-events that constitute Christian worship. We find in the text of “The Church as Sacrament?” a model of the church’s sacramentality that more or less matches our preliminary sketch. We need not exposit this model in its entirety in order to demonstrate the implications of Jüngel’s conception of the sacramentality of the church in light of the preeminent sacramental being of Jesus Christ. Indeed, we have already covered large portions of the material found in the essay in our units on the word and Christology, above. For this reason, we will concentrate our engagement with the text upon two lines of argument that lucidly illustrate what Jüngel has in mind with the claim that the church is the “sacramental sign” of Jesus Christ. Still, we do well to begin with some introductory remarks on the context and scope of the essay, since it behooves us to have some grasp of the entirety of Jüngel’s position at hand during our exposition of particular passages. “The Church as Sacrament?” originated as “a paper given at the LutheranRoman Catholic congress on questions of the ecclesiology and theology of Martin Luther, at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, 27 September, 1983.”2 Jüngel seized upon the occasion of the congress to address, in light of Luther’s theology, the question of the church’s sacramentality, itself a central debating point in the Grunddifferenz discussions that marked many national and international ecumenical engagements during the late 1970s and much of the 1980s.3 On the basis of the substantial progress made toward a common On this concept of representative action, see our analyses in Section A of the present chapter and also Chapter 11. 2 Eberhard Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” in ed. John B. Webster, Theological Essays I, p. 189, fn. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 3 On the origins and development of the Grunddifferenz debate, see Jenson, Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); Harding Meyer, “Fundamental Difference—Fundamental Consensus,” Mid-Stream 25.3 (1986), pp. 247–59; Gerhard L. Müller, “Die Grenze der Ökumene als ihre Chance. Zur Frage nach der katholisch-reformatorischen Grunddifferenz,” HerKorr 39 (1985), pp. 570–75, and Richard Schlüter, “Die ‘Grunddifferenz’ zwischen den Konfessionen. Zur bischerigen römisch-katholischen Diskussion als Frage nach möglichen Motiven und Zielen,” ÖkR 36.3 (1987), pp. 302–20. 1

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understanding of the doctrine of justification in the decade following the close of the Second Vatican Council,4 some members of the various Catholic-Protestant bilateral and multilateral dialogues anticipated subsequent consensuses on additional church-dividing doctrines. This anticipation, however, proved to be “a brief flame, quickly extinguished,”5 as the second wave of dialogues and working groups proved largely unsuccessful in overcoming the divisions that had separated the churches since the time of the Reformation. During this period of ecumenical malaise, a number of notable ecumenists aroused suspicion that a basic difference, or series of basic differences, lay behind the ongoing dissensions between the churches. Especially prominent among such proposals was the idea that “the evident stagnation of the process of ecumenical understanding between the Roman Catholic church and the churches of the reformation is rooted in a different understanding of the church which has not so far been overcome.”6 Accordingly, the Catholic and Protestant churches remain divided by a fundamentally different way of understanding the instrumentality of the church in the mediation of salvation.7 And, at the heart of this putative difference is the question of whether or not the church is a sacrament. Jüngel’s essay on this question should thus be read as a thoroughgoing Protestant contribution to the ecclesiological form of the ecumenical discussion of basic differences. Jüngel’s stated objective in the essay is “to make some proposals about how we might correctly define the relation between church and sacrament.”8 He is concerned that both Catholic and Protestant ecclesiologists have approached this relation from faulty understandings of the concept of sacrament.9 His call for a correct doctrine of sacrament covers ground that is already familiar to us. The true “‘sacrament of unity’ . . . is not the church but Christ himself,” since, “in the New Testament, sacramentum is nothing other than the eschatological mystery of the saving divine decree in favor On this progress, see the survey in John A. Radano, Lutheran & Catholic Reconciliation on Justification: A Chronology of the Holy See’s Contributions, 1961–1999, to a New Relationship between Lutherans & Catholics and to Steps Leading to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), particularly pages 31–52. 5 Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 189. 6 Ibid. See also Jenson’s discussion in Unbaptized God, pp. 90–94. 7 André Birmelé provides an exhaustive treatment of this theme in Le salut en Jésus Christ dans les dialogues œcuméniques (Paris: Le Cerf, 1986). 8 Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 191. Emphasis added. 9 See his comments in ibid., p. 190, fn. 5, and p. 191. 4

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of sinners which was enacted in the history of Jesus Christ.”10 This New Testament definition of sacramentum, he argues, is the “criterion from which alone we [must] orient our handling of the question of the sacramental character of the being and activity of the church.”11 On the basis of this Christological determination of the conception of sacrament, in the second section of the text,12 Jüngel counters the characteristically Catholic axiom that the church is the fundamental sacrament (Ursakrament) by appealing to Luther’s exposition of the Lord’s Supper. He asserts that the Catholic position on the church’s fundamental sacramentality is “a bold usurpation—an apparently typical Catholic identification of the church with its Lord,”13 since it appears to equate the sacramentality of the church with the sacramentality of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, he observes, citing support from the odd sextet of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Karlstadt, Schleiermacher, and Barth, that Protestant theologians have historically been hesitant to apply sacramental terminology to the church and its practices.14 Jüngel next gives place of prominence to Luther for combining “a desire to use the notion of ‘sacrament’ in an exclusively Christological way with a high regard for what ought to be called a sacrament.”15 Jüngel suggests that Luther highly valued the Lord’s Supper because he conceived the sacrament as “the self-presentation of Jesus Christ in bread and wine, enacted through the creative power of his word of promise, which provokes and strengthens faith.”16 For Luther, then, “the decisive point is that in the sacrament, the gracious God himself is the one who acts.”17 Consequently, in the event of the Lord’s Supper, the human person is the fundamentally passive recipient of Christ’s 12 13 10 11

17 14 15 16

Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 191. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 192–99. Ibid., p. 193. For examples of the Catholic tendency to identify Christ and the church, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 1, Prolegomena (trans. Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), pp. 434–35; Michael Schmaus, Dogma, vol. 5, The Church as Sacrament (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1975), pp. 7–12; and Johann Auer and Joseph Ratzinger, The Church (ed. Hugh M. Riley. Vol. 8, The Church: The Universal Sacrament of Salvation; trans. Michael Waldstein; Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), pp.  94–96. We should note that Walter Kasper appears to be aware of the danger and goes to some lengths to carefully distinguish between the preeminent sacramentality of Christ and the secondary sacramentality of the church. See Kasper, Theology and Church, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 115–19. Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 195. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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gracious self-presentation through the word added to the element. And it is just this notion, Jüngel argues, that fails to square with “the Roman Catholic understanding of sacramentality as symbolic representation”;18 that is, the idea that the church, through its liturgical actions, repeats, extends, and thus makes effectual the salvific being and action of Jesus Christ.19

A. The liturgical action of the church as word-event20 In the third section of the essay,21 Jüngel delineates what he believes is a distinctively Protestant contribution to the ecumenical problem of liturgical action. He begins by asserting that the fundamental problem with Catholic sacramental theology (at least as he defines it in the essay) is a failure to properly distinguish between divine and human agency in the sacramental  event. He suggests that, consequently, Catholic theology contains a “synergistic misunderstanding” of sacramental action.22 He interprets the Tridentine ecclesiology as positing an “identity of action” between Jesus Christ, the “primary acting subject,” and the priest, the “secondary acting subject.” The actions of both subjects thus together constitute the sacramental event of the mass.23 Moreover, Jüngel points out that even the more ecumenically promising documents of Vatican II interpret the salvific and self-sacrificial action of Christ on the cross as “an opus perficiendum (a work to be perfected)”24 that must be completed by the church. The church’s liturgical action consequently becomes the extension, reiteration, and perfection of the action of Christ. This conception, Jüngel conceives, confuses divine and human action by dissolving the necessary distinction between Christ’s already finished work and the testimony to and celebration of that work in Christian worship. Ibid., p. 198. See the summary of Jüngel’s reading of the Catholic doctrine of sacrament in ibid., pp. 197–99. 20 In the present section, our concern is to highlight some aspects of liturgical action that illuminate the general thrust of Jüngel’s ecclesiology. We will return to the theme of liturgical action in Chapter 11, and will pay particular attention to the importance of Jüngel’s theory to the doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. 21 Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” pp. 199–206. 22 Ibid., p. 199. 23 Ibid., p. 200. 24 Ibid., p. 201. 18 19

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Once again, Luther is put forth as having provided the quintessential Protestant counterargument to the Catholic synthesis. For Luther, it is absolutely imperative to distinguish between God as the sacramental giver and the human participant—whether presiding clergy or lay celebrant—as the sacramental receiver. This distinction, Jüngel argues, corresponds to Luther’s ontology of justification, according to which the human person is a receiver before he is a worker, a hearer before a speaker, etc. There is thus a necessary “soteriological distinction within the concept of action” that applies both to the believer before God and to the assembly gathered for worship.25 Moreover, Jüngel observes that Luther insisted, over against the medieval concept of the mass, that “the meritorious work of Jesus Christ in his suffering and death is definitely accomplished. It is not an opus perficiendum but, one might say, an opus operatum (a work performed).”26 Luther therefore rejects any notion that the church completes the work of Christ in its sacramental or liturgical actions. Jüngel next turns to construct, still in dialogue with Luther, an ontology of the church’s liturgical action that narrows down the sense in which the church can be properly called the “sacramental sign” of Jesus Christ. We will subject his proposals here to careful scrutiny, since they are extremely pertinent to our purposes in the present chapter. Jüngel begins with the following claim: In order to ensure that in the liturgical action of the church God himself is experienced as the real acting subject, with whom neither the priest nor the congregation in their activities can be brought into union, the reformers strongly opposed any understanding of the church’s action as an opus (work) and of the mass as a sacrificium (sacrifice) which of itself acts upon God, setting against it an interpretation of the liturgical action of the church as a word-event (Wortgeschehens): “the chief worship of God is the preaching of the gospel.” The same is true for the sacraments, which should be “administered according to the Gospel, and only then really are sacraments.”27

According to Jüngel’s reading, the Reformers countered the Catholic axiom that the church’s action is an opus with “an interpretation of the liturgical See ibid., pp. 201–02. Ibid., p. 201. 27 Ibid., p. 203. Both quotes are from Melanchthon; the first is from Apology of the Augsburg Confession XV, BC, p. 221; the second is from idem, CA VII, BC, pp. 42, 43. 25 26

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action of the church as word-event.”28 For Jüngel, the idea of word-event secures the fact that “in the worship and hence the sacramental existence of the church it is a matter of God’s action alone.”29 This is because the word “makes use of a divine work which has already been accomplished, and so does not need to be repeated.”30 The word-event, that is, represents in the gathered assembly what took place beforehand in the concrete history of Jesus Christ. It is clear from the passage that this occurs in worship both in the preaching of the word and “in the sacramental action, in which a verbum is joined by a signum.”31 Moreover, the word-event not only represents “but also presents the represented event in such a way that it can be received in faith.” Christ himself is present in the church in the event of the word, and thus is there to be received in the fundamental passivity of faith. And, we do well to note from the first sentence quoted above, that Jüngel does indeed claim that the church is sacramental being, at least insofar as it is Christ the one sacrament who represents and presents himself in the church’s liturgical actions. For Jüngel, the church, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper can be conceived as sacramental only in such a way that the fundamental differentiation of divine and human action is preserved. He proposes that the concept of word-event secures this structure, since “to describe the action of the church as a word-event rather than an opus allows us to make a more appropriate distinction between the divine acting subject and the human acting subject.”32 This is due to the fact that, for Jüngel, “it is God himself who wishes to come to speech through the act of human speaking,”33 and thus in the liturgical word-events of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 203. We do well to note that the locution “word-event” is not found in the writings of Luther or of the other Lutheran Reformers. Rather, it is, as we have seen, a common expression found in the works of Fuchs and Ebeling that encapsulates the theology of language of the New Hermeneutic. The extent to which this theology of language corresponds to the Reformers conception(s) of the word of God is a complicated question that is largely beyond the scope of the present work. The reader is directed to Bielfeldt’s work on Luther’s semantics in “Luther’s Late Trinitarian Disputations,” in Paul R. Hinlicky, Mickey L. Mattox, and Dennis Bielfeldt, The Substance of the Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology for Today, pp. 80–99 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). Bielfeldt convincingly argues that to attribute to Luther an understanding of the word according to the agenda of the New Hermeneutic is anachronistic and promotes a misreading of the Reformer’s approach to semantics. See especially his comments on Ebeling on pages 89–93. 29 Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 204. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 205. 33 Ibid. 28

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What, though, does this employment of the concept of word-event entail for the ontology of the church? We have already anticipated the answer in the observation that, for Jüngel, the self-presentation of Jesus Christ in the liturgical word-events of the church is received in the fundamental passivity of faith. The church, because it is constituted by the word-events of the gospel, “is primordially defined as the hearing church.” Moreover: Only as the hearing church is it also the speaking church. As the ecclesia audiens it preserves the place of God as the primary acting subject. As the ecclesia audiens it makes possible to conceive of God’s Word secundum dicentem deum (according to God’s speaking) even when spoken by the ecclesia docens. Since the church comes into being as the hearing church and only by hearing becomes what it is, an appropriate representation of the work and word of God becomes possible. In its—very lively— passivity, the church represents in a fundamental way the activity of God.34

As the passage makes clear, the church’s action, and indeed its speaking, is activity. But the acting church, the ecclesia docens, is so fundamentally ground in God’s speaking that its activities can only be conceived as creatively passive, representative actions. This guards the church’s liturgical actions “from being misunderstood as in some way effecting our salvation.”35 The church, rather, recognizes, represents, and celebrates the fact that God alone has worked to accomplish salvation for his people. And precisely in this sense can the church be conceived as the signum sacramentalis of Jesus Christ. Jüngel thus concludes that: By living from Jesus Christ as the one and really unique sacrament, the church celebrates the sacramentality of his being. And only insofar as it celebrates his sacramentality, that is, the history of Jesus Christ as the declaration and impartation of God’s gracious presence, can the church be called, not a basic sacrament, but rather the great sacramental sign which represents Jesus Christ. The church is the analogate which points to Jesus Christ as the analogue.36 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 205–06. 36 Ibid., p. 206. 34 35

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Before moving on to our analysis of the next section “The Church as Sacrament?” we do well to briefly note again that Jüngel is here employing the concept of “sacramental sign” in a manner that is considerably different from the usage of the same term in the Augustinian hermeneutics of signification (at least as Jüngel reads this tradition of interpretation). The church and its liturgical actions, that is, are not lingual signs that refer beyond themselves to Jesus Christ. Rather, it is clear from our analysis that, for Jüngel, Jesus Christ is both present and represented in the midst of the gathered assembly in the celebratory word-events of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. While Christ indeed remains distinct from the church, in these word-events he draws intimately near to the church and to the believers gathered for worship. Jesus Christ is the one sacrament. The church is “the great sacramental sign” according to the hermeneutics of event, insofar as it is in the context of the worshipping church that Jesus Christ comes to the world by coming-to-speech in interruptive word-events.

B. The church as mater ecclesia or peccatrix maxima? The final section of “The Church as Sacrament?” on the relation of the church to sin is largely tangential to our concern in this chapter. However, in one particular and rather interesting passage in the section, the temporal implications of Jüngel’s emphasis on word-event emerge in a way that is highly illustrative for our argument. We will therefore work our way through Jüngel’s analysis up to the point in question and will then summarize the remainder of the section. Jüngel is concerned at this juncture in the essay to “test the relation between the church which represents Jesus Christ and the church’s Lord which it represents.”37 That is, having consistently argued, principally against the putative Catholic position, that the church must always differentiate between itself and Jesus Christ, he now identifies a criterion from the life of the church that, he believes, secures this differentiation. He chooses for this purpose “the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer . . . How can and must the Ibid.

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church pray for the forgiveness of sins?”38 He begins his investigation of the answer to this question by considering the “deeply rooted”39 claim, which is perhaps most vividly expressed in Cyprian’s assertion that no one can “have God as a Father who does not have the church as a mother,”40 that the church can be conceived as mater ecclesia. Jüngel cites the papal encyclical Mystici Corporis at length as an example of the employment of the concept of mater ecclesia to answer the question of the relation of the church and sin: Pius XII . . . explained unmistakably: “if at times there appears in the Church something that indicates the weakness of our human nature, it should not be attributed to her juridical constitution” (i.e. to her mystical essence) “but to that regrettable inclination to evil found in each individual.” The church itself is not really touched by that weakness. Rather: “the loving Mother is spotless in the Sacraments . . . in the faith . . . in the sacred laws . . . in the evangelical councils . . . in [the] heavenly gifts and extraordinary graces . . . But it cannot be laid to her charge if some members fall, weak or wounded. In their name she prays to God daily: ‘Forgive us our trespasses’; and with a brave heart of a mother she applies herself at once to the work of nursing them back to spiritual health.”41

By contrast, the Reformers, Jüngel observes, employed the traditional concept of mater ecclesia in an altogether different sense. Once again, he points to Luther to illustrate the Protestant conception. Luther refers to the church as “mother of us all,” “our free mother,” “mother church,” and “the bride of Christ who gives birth to us all.”42 However, according to Jüngel, Luther differs from the Catholic understanding of mater ecclesia by locating, as it were, the motherhood of the church in the event of the word of God. The passage in question is worth quoting at length: It is the ministerium verbi . . . that generates Christians. More precisely, it is not the ministry of the word but the Word of God itself by which Christians are begotten and born. “Mother church” does not stand over 40 41

Ibid. Ibid., p. 207. Cyprian, The Unity of The Church, FC 36, p. 100. Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” pp. 206–07. The quotations are from Pius XII, Mystici Corporis §66, in Foundations of Renewal. Four Great Encyclicals of Pope Pius XII (Glen Rock, NY: Paulist, 1961), pp. 31–32. 42 See Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 207. 38 39

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the individual Christian; rather “mother church” is Christians as they belong together through the Word of God and derive from the Word of God. In the same context in which Luther speaks of “mother church” he declares unmistakably: “In this way we are all fathers and children, for we are born of one another. I was born of others through the Gospel, and now I am father to still others, who will be fathers to still others; and so this giving birth will endure to the end of the world.” Christians are generated by other human beings only by the proclamation of the gospel, which is the real generative power. Even the church possesses that generative power only because and insofar as it proclaims the gospel. As “our dear mother” in whose lap Christ lays those who become Christians “by means of baptism and the Word of God,” the church is nothing other than the congregation of believers which always precedes the individual Christian, in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly.43

This passage is highly significant for our analysis insofar as it illustrates, as Jenson shrewdly points out, a critical difference between Jüngel’s conception of the relation of the word of God to time and that which is in fact espoused by Luther in the Lectures on Galatians (1535). It is clear from the whole of Jüngel’s argument that he locates the motherhood of the church in the word-events of preaching and the sacraments as they occur in the gathered congregation of believers. But Jenson observes that the very passage from Luther that Jüngel cites in support of the idea of word-event lucidly indicates that, for the Reformer, the word’s generative power over the individual is in fact a diachronically actualized form of generatio. Jenson thus states that “we discover [from the Luther quotation] that what Luther in fact asserts is not [as Jüngel suggests] a synchronically mutual begetting among individual believers but the dependence upon each and all believers from a diachronic generatio that temporally transcends them all.”44 This is precisely the opposite of what Jüngel argues in the passage, as his emphasis singularly falls upon the generative power of the word in the gathered assembly, and in no way in the church as it extends through time. Indeed, in the sentence which follows our extended quotation, Jüngel suggests that, “if we are here to speak of an opposition, it is not between ‘mother church’ and the Christians but between the Word of Ibid., p. 208. The quotations are from Luther, Lectures on Galatians 1535, LW 26, p. 441. Jenson, Unbaptized God, p. 93.

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God and the church.”45 What is implied in the second clause is that the word of God stands in contrast to the church’s ministries, structures, traditions, etc. As we have consistently observed, in Jüngel’s theology the word of God always interrupts and thus stands over against the continuities of creaturely actuality, including the continuities of the church. Jüngel goes on in this section of “The Church as Sacrament?” to argue that peccatrix maxima is, as a metaphor, superior to the idea of mater ecclesia for describing the being of the church.46 The thrust of his argument here is quite similar to what we have already covered in the previous chapter beneath the heading of “holiness,” and for this reason we will not reproduce it here in its entirety. Rather, we will simply summarize that Jüngel, in correspondence to his reading of the simul of the Lutheran doctrine of justification, asserts that the church is the greatest sinner that is yet made holy and ever renewed by its Lord. And this, in turn, points directly to the fundamental ontological passivity of the church in relation to Christ, the one sacrament, who is also always peccator peccatorum (sinner of sinners). As Jüngel concludes: As the peccator peccatorum, Christ is holy because he wipes away our sins, whereas as the peccatrix maxima, the holy church remains ever dependent upon the fact that its sins have been wiped away. He is the sacrament which the church receives, to which the church can only testify and which the church must hand on as recipient.47

*  *  * If we have interpreted Jüngel’s ecclesiology correctly, he in fact proposes a two-fold answer to the question of the church’s sacramentality. We can summarize this answer by recalling, from Chapter 8, a particular distinction that he posits between Catholic and Protestant ecclesiologies; namely, his suggestion that Catholic theology “understands the invisibility of the church from its visibility (thus the ecclesia invisibilis as a predicate of the ecclesia visibilis),” while Protestant theology “understands the visibility of the church from its invisibility (thus the ecclesia visibilis as a predicate of the ecclesia Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” p. 208. See again our comments on Yeago’s analysis of trends in modern Lutheran dogmatics in Section 1.B. 46 Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” pp. 210–12. 47 Ibid., p. 211. 45

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invisibilis).”48 Jüngel strenuously rejects the notion that the church can be claimed as a sacrament according to the (by his definition) Catholic assertion that the visible church predicates the church’s essence. That is, the church is in no way a temporally and spatially extending sacramental structure, through the visible orders, offices, ministries, teachings, traditions, liturgies, practices, etc. of which the invisible grace of Jesus Christ is mediated. On the other hand, Jüngel does indeed concede that the church is sacramental in the (again, by his definition) Protestant sense that the invisible church precedes and predicates the occurrence of the church’s visibility in the events of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. In other words, the church’s sacramentality, its sacramental being, does not extend diachronically as embodied in some continuous structure or office. Rather, the church’s sacramentality occurs in worship in word-events, in which the resurrected and ascended Christ draws intimately near to the church by interrupting the life continuities of those who have gathered to receive his word.49 The church is sacramental as peccatrix maxima, and not as mater ecclesia (at least as Luther, properly understood, interprets the metaphor); its sacramental being is disruptive and punctiliar, rather than continuous. And this is precisely how he describes the sacramentality of the word of God and the sacramental being of Jesus Christ, as we observed in Parts One and Two of our analysis. We can therefore encapsulate our findings thus far as follows: The idea of the interruptive word-event is—at least as far as his descriptions of the word, Jesus Christ, and the church are concerned—the dominant and determinative conceptual feature of Jüngel’s description of sacramental being.

See, again, the discussion in the introduction to the sections on the attributes of the church, above. The citation is from Jüngel, “Zur Lehre von den Zeichen der Kirche,” in Zukunft aus dem Wort, Helmut Claß zum 65. Geburststag, hg. G. Metzger, p. 113, Thesis 4 (Stuttgart: Calwer-Verlag, 1978). 49 We note here an important difference between our presentation of Jüngel’s ecclesiology and that of Spjuth in Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence, pp. 148–54. Spjuth argues that Jüngel’s emphasis on the interruptive word corresponds to a “de-sacramental” understanding of the church (pp. 148, 153). By contrast, we have demonstrated that, for Jüngel, the church is sacramental precisely in the interruptive word-events that occur in Christian worship. The difference, we suggest, results from Spjuth’s failure to explicitly identify what, for Jüngel, constitutes a sacrament. He identifies the position that he believes Jüngel rejects; namely, that the visible events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are sacraments (p. 123). But he does not consider the extent to which, for Jüngel, the word-event itself is a sacrament. See the whole of his discussion on pages 121–65. 48

Conclusion to Part Three

We may begin our concluding remarks on this part by returning to an issue that has been at the center of our analysis; namely, the question of the relation between, on the one hand, Jesus Christ, his word, and the word about him, and, on the other, the visible and diachronically extending structures, ministries, and practices of the church. In many types of ecclesiology, Jesus Christ and the church in its visibility and temporality are conceived as identical. This is especially true of Catholic ecclesiologies. Lumen gentium, for instance, declares that the hierarchically structured church and the body of Christ form “one complex reality comprising a human and a divine element.”1 Similarly, Tillard comments that the “flesh of the church” and the “flesh of Christ” together constitute a “circumincessio (a true mutual inhabiting).”2 And Rahner defines the church as “the historical continuation of Christ in and through the community of those who believe in him.”3 In addition to these examples from Catholic theology, a handful of Lutheran theologians have argued that Christ and the church are in some way identical. Jenson, for example, proposes that ecclesiology must recover the Augustinian image of the totus Christus; that is, the conception that the resurrected Christ exists together with his redeemed people as one body, and that this form of embodiment includes the church’s structures, ministries, and practices.4 LG 8, DEC, vol. 2, p. 854. J. M. R. Tillard, Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ: At the Source of the Ecclesiology of Communion (Collegeville, MN: Pueblo Press, 2001), p. 135. 3 Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (trans. William V. Dych; New York: Crossroad, 1978), p. 322. 4 See his comments throughout the unit on ecclesiology in Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 167–305. 1 2

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And David Yeago has suggested that, for Luther, the invisible grace of Jesus Christ is present and available “only in and through the public, bodily, and sacramental practice of the church,” such that the church is the location at which we are “united with God in his deity.”5 We have observed in this unit that Jüngel’s ecclesiology follows a different course on this important issue. For Jüngel, Jesus Christ and the church must not be confused or conflated into a common ontological structure. But this in no way means that he posits an absolute difference between Christ and the church. Rather, we have seen that Jüngel conceives the relation between Christ and the church as one of similarity and difference and according to the analogy of advent. Consequently, he argues that, while Christ and the church are fundamentally different in an ontological sense, in the event of his coming to the church in coming-to-speech in the word-events of worship, Christ draws intimately near to the church, nearer indeed than the church can be to itself. The analogy of advent, so applied, therefore goes some distance toward securing ecclesiology from the twin dangers of, on the one hand, the Scylla of the collapsing of Christ and the church into one being, and, on the other, the Charybdis of the drawing of an absolute distinction between Christ and the church. Still, our analysis in this unit has demonstrated that this relation of dissimilarity in the midst of an even greater similarity occurs as Christ comes to the church by coming-to-speech in interruptive word-events. Such a conception of the church’s sacramental being raises the ecclesiological form of the same question that we asked in the previous units concerning the sacramental effectiveness of parabolic word-events and the unique sacramental being of Jesus Christ, namely, the question of the relation of the church to creaturely actualities, and particularly to chronological time. As in the conclusions to Parts One and Two, in the following remarks we suggest that the hegemony of the concept of interruptive word-event in Jüngel’s theology of sacrament yields a problematic account of the diachronic continuities of the church. We can get at this problem by following several different avenues. (1) We can certainly appreciate some aspects of Jüngel’s phenomenological claim that worship is an event. With a nod to Schleiermacher, he asserts that David S. Yeago, “The Catholic Luther,” in ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, The Catholicity of the Reformation, pp. 31, 32 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).

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Christian worship is a fundamentally Sabbath-shaped event, an interruption of the continuities that compose the everyday, work-oriented existence of contemporary humanity. This interruption occurs when Christians, pausing from their labors in the assembly of the church, receive the gospel in both its audible form in the sermon and its visible form in the sacraments. To be sure, the events of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper are actions of the church. However, as we have observed at several points, for Jüngel, such events are celebrations, receptive actions, and creative representations of the events of the Christ narrative that indeed present Jesus Christ in their performance. And this is because preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper are events of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. As Jüngel comments in “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” “The revelation of the mystery of the divine primal decision comes to speech in the gospel, which in turn comes to representation in the sacramental celebrations of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”6 What occurs in the creatively passive events of worship is the arrival of God’s unique and preeminent self-disclosure in Jesus Christ. Such an account of worship is interesting, not least because of Jüngel’s creative description of the analogical relation of divine and human action, and also of human passivity and activity. Jüngel manages to strictly differentiate between the word of God, the ecclesia audiens, and the ecclesia docens without losing their fundamental interrelatedness. Additionally, the employment of the concept of interruptive word-event enables Jüngel to identify how Christ is present to and in the church without collapsing the being of the church into the being of its Lord. To express the matter according to the formula of the analogy of advent, while Christ, as the word of God, and the church are indeed fundamentally dissimilar, this dissimilarity must be seen in light of the even greater similarity between them that occurs as Christ comes to speech in representative liturgical actions. Still, the prominence of the concept of interruptive word-event in Jüngel’s theology of worship raises some critically important questions. First, as we have observed throughout this unit, Jüngel appears to conflate the existence of the church to the interruptive events of worship. This narrow restriction of Eberhard Jüngel, “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” in Wertlose Wahrheit—Zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens. Theologische Erörterungen III, 2. Auflage, pp. 301, Thesis 4.1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

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the church is problematic in at least two senses. On the one hand, there must certainly be much more to the existence of the church than those events that comprise the worship service. We have observed, however, that Jüngel is largely disinterested in the structures and practices of the church that necessarily transcend the events of preaching and sacrament. His conflation of the church to these events thus exhibits an extraordinarily narrow ecclesiology that is virtually shorn of anything apart from Christian worship. On the other hand, since the events of worship are generally conceived by Jüngel as interruptions of the continuities of the world, the location of the existence of the church in such events appears, strangely, to restrict the church to gaps in temporal actuality.7 This is perhaps more of a formal rather than material concern, for surely Jüngel would be reluctant to say that the church has no being, or that the church’s being is fundamentally atemporal and occurs only in the breaks in time opened up by the interruptive word. At the very least our mentioning of this issue demonstrates that the concept of interruption may be too unwieldy for defining the events of the church with any sensible precision. Second, Jüngel also fails to take into account the fact that there is much that occurs in Christian worship that connects the gathered assembly to the church as it exists through time. Liturgies, creeds, hymns, gestures, icons, and, indeed, the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments, point the worshipper beyond the here and now of the immediate moment of the service and toward the historical trajectory of Christian faith and praxis. But again, Jüngel places such an overwhelming emphasis on the gathering of the assembly now in the actualizing events of preaching and sacrament that his account is largely divested of any discussion of these practices and symbols, and of their hermeneutical function of accentuating the historicity and transmission of the faith. (2) Throughout our analysis in the first three parts of this study, we have expressed the concern that Jüngel’s persistent emphasis on the interruptive character of the word of God raises the question of the relation between the word and time. In the present unit this question has assumed an explicitly Spjuth has offered a similar assessment in Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel (Studia Theologica Ludensia, no. 51; Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), pp. 148–54. Again, however, we are hesitant concerning his use of the concept of “sacramental” in this passage.

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ecclesiological form; namely, how does the word of God relate to the ministries, offices, documents, language, etc. that are at least contingently necessary for its communication? We observed in our exposition of “The Church as Sacrament?” that, for Jüngel, “it is not the ministry of the word but the Word of God itself by which Christians are begotten and born.” This very distinction between the word itself and the ministry of the word later leads Jüngel to at least ponder the possibility that the word of God stands “over against” the church and in “opposition” to it.8 While we may certainly appreciate and agree with Jüngel’s concern to secure the freedom of the word of God vis-à-vis the church’s actualities, we still wonder whether this contrastive account of word and church leads to an untenable, if not incoherent ecclesiology. Among Anglo-American Lutheran theologies, we find a similar model of the relation of word and church in the writings of Gerhard Forde, who served for many years as a member of the American Lutheran-Catholic national dialogue.9 Forde’s comments on this theme are worth mentioning, as they neatly accentuate the problems that emerge when the being of the church is restricted to the events of the interruptive word. Forde concedes that the word of the gospel “absolutely requires a proclaimer,”10 and on just this basis acknowledges that the office of proclamation is necessary for the mediation of the word to its hearers. But Forde goes on to suggest that this office possesses a purely punctiliar being that is located only in the interruptive events of the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. The office, therefore, does not temporally extend either before or after the word-event, but rather exists, as it were, on the razor’s edge of the community assembled around the verbum audibile of preaching and the verbum visibile of the sacrament. Once the community disassembles, the office ceases to exist. Forde thus colorfully remarks: “I am tempted to use an image from the See Eberhard Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” in ed. John B. Webster, Theological Essays I, p. 210 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 9 See in particular the essay entitled, “The Catholic Impasse: Reflections on Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue Today,” in ed. Mark C. Mattes and Steven D. Paulson, A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, pp. 196–99 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). See also Jenson’s analysis in Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), pp. 113–15. 10 Gerhard Forde, “The Catholic Impasse: Reflections on Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue Today,” in ed. Mark C. Mattes and Steven D. Paulson, A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, pp. 196 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). 8

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television show ‘Mission Impossible’ where the ‘team’ receives its instructions via a tape or record that then announces that it will self-destruct in a number of seconds. The mediation is such that it seeks to remove itself once it has done the mediation.”11 Forde claims that such a model of mediation establishes the supremacy of the word of the gospel vis-à-vis the action of the mediator.12 But this type of description of ecclesial office also raises significant questions concerning the relation of the church to chronological time. In this vein, Jenson rightly contends that Forde’s drastic and clarifying evocation of Protestant sensibility (that the proclamation confronts hearers with the immediacy of the kingdom and so terminates their old time) must also mean the termination of the church’s time, must demand the ever-repeated dialectical cancellation of the church’s structures of historical perpetuity.13

Forde situates word-event and ecclesial office in a relation of dialectical antithesis, and this move, in turn, dislodges the church’s offices, ministries, liturgies, traditions, etc.—its “structures of historical perpetuity”—from the trajectory of chronological time. And we do well to ask in light of such comments the question that we have continually posed concerning Jüngel’s strikingly similar account of church, office, and time, namely, whether the necessary diachronicity of the church is overshadowed, if not entirely lost, when the being of the church is so restrictively located in events of the word. (3) As we commented above in our survey of his account of the church’s essential holiness, Jüngel’s circumscription of the work of the Holy Spirit to the gathering and preparing of individuals for worship may exhibit an inadequate pneumatology. There are two aspects of this difficulty that are worth mentioning in this conclusion. First, we do not wish to dispute Jüngel’s basic claim that the Holy Spirit is active in Christian worship in gathering and preparing believers for the assembly. But again, we question whether this is the only way that the Spirit is at work in worship. We noted, above, that Jüngel pays little attention to how the Spirit acts in the already gathered assembly. On the contrary, his Ibid., p. 199. Emphasis added. See Ibid., p. 199. 13 Jenson, Unbaptized God, p. 115. 11 12

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comments on the Spirit’s work are generally restricted to what happens, as it were, leading up to the assembly’s gathering and in the life of the individual believer. According to the New Testament, however, the Spirit is quite active in a variety of capacities within the midst of the assembly and during worship. The Spirit bestows charisms on individual believers for the edification of the whole assembly (e.g. 1 Cor. 14.20–33), participates in some capacity in the event of baptism (1 Cor. 12.12–13), grants the assembly “unity . . . in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4.3), etc. A perhaps more pressing concern is the relation of the Holy Spirit and his work to those aspects of the life of the church that extend diachronically. We recall Hütter’s assertion that “the work of the Holy Spirit [in the church] is also characterized by duration, concreteness, and visibility, and, as such, is identical with distinct practices or activities, institutions, offices, and doctrines.”14 We have repeatedly observed, however, that Jüngel’s persistent emphasis on the interruptive character of the word of God eclipses any notion that the church “is . . . characterized by duration, concreteness, and visibility.” Nor does he in any place appear interested in the Spirit’s instrumentality in the “distinct practices or activities, offices, and doctrines” that provide the church an ineluctably temporal form. Indeed, Jüngel’s emphasis on the event character of the Holy Spirit’s work in the church appears to situate the Spirit’s actions over against any ongoing ecclesial continuities. (4) A final and highly significant aspect of the question of the relation of the church to time that emerges in our reading of Jüngel’s ecclesiology is Christological in scope. We have seen that, for Jüngel, the church has its sacramental being in and as the assembly of believers in worship, and this conception corresponds to the claim that Jesus Christ presents and represents himself in the church’s liturgical actions. However, if the church so exists on the interruptive razor’s edge of public worship and thus neither temporally nor spatially elsewhere, then so also must the risen Christ. We thus return to the same Christological problem with which we concluded the third part, namely, that, for Jüngel, Christ’s post-resurrection existence is located in the word-events that constitute the sacramental sign of the church and, as such, does not distend diachronically. Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (trans. Doug Stott; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 119.

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It is neither necessary nor even possible to put forth a detailed proposal to counter Jüngel’s apparent location of the post-resurrected Christ in interruptive word-events. We may note, however, that such a proposal would require constructing a metaphysically acceptable account of Jesus’ post-resurrection being and its relation to the church as it extends through chronological time that nevertheless secures the being of Jesus Christ from identification with the church. For this reason, we are wary of ecclesiologies that appear to jeopardize the necessary discontinuity between Christ and the church. We do not, for example, agree with Jenson that the church and the resurrected Christ now exist as one undifferentiated body, a totus Christus. Surely Jüngel is correct to contend that, “if the church is required in order to make Jesus Christ a ‘whole Christ,’ it seems that it is less the church which needs him as an essential constitutive element than the other way around . . . It is very important . . . that the bride is not to be confused with the bridegroom.”15 At the same time, as we have stated throughout this thesis, we are convinced that Jüngel’s theology of word-events, while at least conceptually prohibiting the confusion of Christ and the world, Christ and the sinner, Christ and the church, etc., tends in the opposite direction, namely, the abstraction of Jesus Christ and his word from concrete, diachronic continuities.

Eberhard Jüngel, “Paradoxe Ökumene: Ende der Höflichkeiten bei wachsender Nähe,” zeitzeichen 11 (2000), p. 4.

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Part Four

The Sacramental Celebrations of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper

We have now examined three of the four major themes of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament. We have observed at all points along the way that Jüngel conceives sacramental being as related disruptively and punctiliarly to the continuities and actualities that constitute the world. This is because, for Jüngel, a sacrament is nothing other than the event of the gracious and unsurpassably intimate drawing near of God to his creatures. The world in its entirety is ensnared in the deadly sham existence of sin and is therefore always in need of God’s justifying self-disclosure. But the world that receives God cannot in any way contain him, since in sacramentally coming to the world he brings with him possibilities that exceed the world’s actualities. “That which deserves to be called sacramental,” Jüngel thus comments, “is always an elementary interruption of the worldly continuity of life. Moreover, it is determined that this interruption is a revolution . . . The event of elementary interruption is always a crisis for that actuality against which it occurs. Accordingly, the world is no longer the same as it was.”1 This interruptive character of sacramental being also marks the majority of Jüngel’s writings on the liturgical practices of water baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In our unit on ecclesiology, we discovered that, according to Jüngel, the church’s Wesenattribute of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are not Eberhard Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” in Ganz werden. Theologische Erörterungen V, p. 277 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

1

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actualized in the visible and temporally extensive structures of the church; that is, in ministries, offices and officers, traditions, liturgies, etc. Rather, for Jüngel, the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic primarily in the word-events that occur in Christian worship, namely, in preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. The ontological structure of God’s relation to the church in these word-events follows the analogy of advent, as God, Jüngel argues, remains fundamentally different from the church while drawing intimately near to it—nearer, indeed, than the church is capable of being to itself. Moreover, as we observed in our unit on Christology, Jüngel proposes, in stark contrast to the Augustinian hermeneutics of signification, that the word that attaches to the element in order to make a sacrament is in no way an empty signifier, but is rather the very word in which Jesus Christ, who himself is the living word of God, comes to the world by coming-to-speech. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, then, are ineluctably interruptive in character, and worship relates to the ordinary and sinful course of human existence as a Sabbath, in the events of which the gathered assembly is addressed by the God who draws intimately near in their midst. Interestingly, we discover in his most recent and in fact most comprehensive analysis to date of the problem of sacrament, El Ser Sacramental, that Jüngel deemphasizes the interruptive character of sacramental action in order to draw a more positive relation between, on the one hand, the sacramental celebrations of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and, on the other, the temporal continuities of the church and the world. The chapter in El Ser Sacramental on water baptism and the Lord’s Supper is, in this respect, different enough in comparison to Jüngel’s other writings on sacrament that it raises questions concerning the continuity of his theology of sacrament. This picture becomes even more complicated when we consider divergences in a particular set of Jüngel’s positions on baptism and the Lord’s Supper that become evident when we compare his earliest publications on the sacraments to other texts composed during the latter decades of his career. We propose in Chapter 10, that, while the differences that emerge in Jüngel’s writings on the sacraments must not be allowed to obscure the broad thematic continuity that characterizes his sacramental theology, such differences nevertheless require us to carefully outline some hermeneutical guidelines for reading these texts.

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In Chapter 11, we undertake an analysis of Jüngel’s concept of sacramental action, which we mentioned briefly in our discussion of “The Church as Sacrament?” in Chapter 9, through a close reading of the important text “Sakrament und Repräsentation.” From his very first writings on the sacraments, Jüngel has been preoccupied with the question of the nature of sacramental action. In the 1980s, and in the context of his research into Schleiermacher’s theology of worship, Jüngel discovered a conceptual key for his description of the relation of divine and human agency in baptism and the Lord’s Supper; namely, the concept of representative liturgical action. “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” which appeared in 2001, is Jüngel’s most exhaustive examination of this theme. In the final chapter of this unit we carefully work through the comments on baptism and the Lord’s Supper that are found in the fourth chapter of El Ser Sacramental. Our analysis demonstrates that this text is critical for research into Jüngel’s theology of the sacraments, not least because it contains the aforementioned surprising remarks concerning the relation of the sacrament to time. Finally, in our conclusion to Part Four, we will consider the implications of Jüngel’s approach to baptism and the Lord’s Supper found in El Ser Sacramental for the whole of his theology of sacrament.

10

Testing the Continuity of Jüngel’s Descriptions of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper

As we mentioned in the introduction to this unit, several differences emerge over the course of Jüngel’s writings on sacrament that raise questions concerning the continuity of his sacramental theology. We have refrained from scrutinizing this problem of continuity upto this point because it primarily involves his approach to baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and thus not to his proposals concerning the sacramentality of language, of Jesus Christ, and of the church, among the writings concerning which we discover a thoroughgoing consistency. For our purposes in Part Four, we must now address this problem of continuity and test its implications for Jüngel’s doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We may begin by summarizing the dilemma. At least at first glance, Jüngel’s early essays on Barth’s late doctrine of baptism from CD IV/4 appear to exhibit an approach to sacramental agency that is considerably different from what we find in his other writings on sacrament. Additionally, while these other writings are marked by a broadly consistent theory of divine and human action, from this theory Jüngel constructs two different and even opposing answers to the question of whether baptism and the Lord’s Supper deserve to be called sacraments. And, furthermore, in El Ser Sacramental, his most recent and exhaustive work to date on sacrament, Jüngel constructs an unprecedented approach (at least when compared to his other writings on sacrament) to the question of how baptism and especially the Lord’s Supper are related to chronological time. We do well, then, to carefully consider a hermeneutic for

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reading the texts on baptism and the Lord’s Supper that will help us account for the apparent divergences in Jüngel’s sacramental theology.

A. A survey of the texts For aid in the development of our hermeneutic, we can very roughly divide Jüngel’s writings on baptism and the Lord’s Supper into five groups. The first group, which we will designate (a), consists of Jüngel’s thorough examination of Barth’s fragment on baptism in Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe. Ein Hinweis auf ihre Probleme (1968),1 and the abridged versions of this text that were published as “Thesen zu Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe” (1971)2 and the short review of the fragment in German in Lutherische Rundschau (1969),3 which was translated into English and appeared the same year in Literature Survey.4 Group (b) comprises two texts written during the same period as those on the Barth fragment: the oft-mentioned “Das Sakrament—was ist das? Versuch einer Antwort,” which was originally published in 1966 in Evangelische Theologie and later appeared in revised and expanded form in Jüngel and Rahner, Was ist ein Sakrament? Vorstöße zur Verständigung (1971); and the essay “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” which was delivered in 1969 at an assembly of the Landessynode der Evangelischen Landeskirche in Baden, published the same year with other texts from the synod,5 and appeared later in expanded form with the 1971 “Thesen . . .” in a volume of critical engagements with Barth’s fragment.6 For reasons identified below, we can also group “The Church as Sacrament?” (1983), which, as we have already observed, contains a number of comments on baptism and the Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe. Ein Hinweis auf ihre Probleme (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1968). In the following analysis, quotations will be cited from the reprint of this pamphlet in idem, Barth-Studien (Zürich, Köln: Benziger; and Mohn: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1982), pp. 246–88. 2 Eberhard Jüngel, “Thesen zu Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe,” in ed. F. Viering, Zu Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe, pp. 161–64 (Mohn: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1971). Quotations below are cited from the reprint of these theses in idem, Barth-Studien, pp. 291–94. 3 Eberhard Jüngel, “Rezension: Karl Barth, KD IV/4 Fragment (Zürich: EVZ, 1967),” LR 19.1 (1969), pp. 100–06. 4 Eberhard Jüngel, Rev. of Karl Barth, CD IV/4 Fragment, Literature Survey 1 (1969), pp. 78–83. 5 Eberhard Jüngel, “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” in Verhandlungen der Landessynode der Evagelischen Landeskirch in Baden, Ordentliche Tagung vom April 1969, pp. 34–45 (Karlsruhe: Evangelischen Oberkirchenrat, 1969). 6 Jüngel, “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” pp. 25–43. Quotations from this text are cited from the reprint in idem, Barth-Studien, pp. 295–331. 1

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Lord’s Supper, with these earlier texts. In group (c) we have the two texts that we have previously cited on the phenomenology of worship in which Jüngel makes some interesting remarks on the relation of divine and human agency in baptism and the Lord’s Supper: “Der Gottesdienst als Fest der Freiheit. Der theologische Ort des Gottesdienstes nach Friedrich Schleiermacher” (1984), and “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst” (1990). The fourth group (d) consists of the two texts that we analyze below, both of which, we must note, appeared in the wake of the intense controversy that erupted in Germany over the JDDJ: “Auf dem Weg zur Eucharistiegemeinschaft” (1999),7 which has been reprinted and/or slightly altered on numerous occasions,8 and “Sakrament und Repräsentation: Wesen und Funktion der sakramentalen Handlung” (2001), which is the German edition of an essay originally delivered and published in Spanish.9 Finally, what we will call group (e) is the series of lectures, originally the Vaggagini Lectures presented in German in 2005 at Saint Anselmo, the translations of which compose the volume El Ser Sacramental. In this chapter we are particularly interested in the lecture on “Baptism and the Eucharist as the two celebrations of Jesus Christ the one sacrament.”10 The three versions of Jüngel’s analysis of CD IV/4 that constitute our group (a) consist of generally appreciative engagements with Barth’s late doctrine of baptism. Jüngel spends a good bit of each of these texts restating and summarizing Barth’s proposals. While it is not necessary to reproduce his exposition in its entirety here, it is worth noting what aspects of Barth’s approach to the problem of baptism Jüngel finds to be the most interesting. He reports that Barth’s central axiom in the fragment is “the tenet that in Jesus Christ God Eberhard Jüngel, “Auf dem Weg zur Eucharistiegemeinschaft,” in ed. Zentralkommitee der Deutschen Katholiken, “Gebt Zeugnis von eurer Hoffnung.” 93. Katholikentag 10.-14.6.1998 in Mainz. Dokumentation,” pp. 83–93 (Kevelear: Butzon & Brecker, 1999). 8 Eberhard Jüngel, “Alle sollen eins sein. Die Kirchen auf dem Weg zur Eucharistiegemeinschaft,” in ed. S. Pauly, Kirche in unserer Zeit, pp. 79–93 (Stuttgart, Berlin, and Köln: Kohlhammer, 1999). Idem, “Auf dem Weg zur Abendmahlsgemeinschaft,” in Evangelischen Kirchengemeinden Ulm, Texte zum Neujahrsempfang (Ulm: Evangelischen Kirchengemeinden, 2001), pp. 13–25. Idem, “Esultanza eucaristica. In cammino verso la communione nella Cena del Signore,” Protestantismo 59.1 (2004), pp. 3–16. Idem, “Church Unity is Already Happening.” In the following analysis we take our citations from the English translation of this text. 9 Eberhard Jüngel, “Sacramento e rappresentazione. Essenza e funzione dell’azione sacramentale,” in ed. N. Reali, Il mondo del sacramento. Teologia e filosofia a confronto, pp. 223–38 (Mailand: Paoline, 2001). 10 Eberhard Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), pp. 77–97. 7

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is man,” which does not make “the distinction . . . between God and man untrue, but rather all the more true.” According to Jüngel’s reading, Barth’s thesis of the humanity of God in Jesus Christ posits a “correspondence between God and man which distinguishes them in relating them to one another.” Moreover, and critical for the theology of baptism, this “correspondence-distinction between God and man manifests itself as a correspondence-distinction between divine and human action.”11 The doctrine of baptism that follows from this analogical relation of divine and human agency, which itself emerges as an entailment of the ontological claim that “‘God is God’ and ‘man is man,’” includes a strict distinction drawn between the divine action of baptism with the Holy Spirit and the human action of baptism with water. These correspond to one another insofar as they are both baptisms. They differ insofar as the former is an exclusively divine act carried out by a divine actor, while the latter is an exclusively human act carried out by human actors.12 Baptism with water and also the Lord’s Supper (though the latter is mentioned only briefly in the fragment and in Jüngel’s analysis) are therefore “understood ethically,” that is, “as a human action-answer to God’s act of grace and word of grace.”13 In baptism with the Holy Spirit, “Jesus Christ is at work as the one and only sacrament of the church.” Whereas, on the contrary, “baptism with water corresponding to baptism with the Spirit is anything but a sacrament,” since “it exercises no divine functions at all, but ‘exhausts’ itself in being a human action.”14 Consequently, “infant baptism can only be rejected as ‘a profoundly confused baptismal practice.’ For in baptism man with his own decision concedes to God that he (God) is right.”15 As we have already mentioned, Jüngel expresses in all three texts of group (a) his appreciation for the fragment, suggesting that Barth’s late doctrine of baptism “has the incomparable advantage of at last presenting an evangelical theology of baptism which is worth disputing about in place of mere theologoumena on baptism.”16 However, it is critical to note that, while Jüngel does continue beyond these texts to maintain with Barth both the strict differentiation between divine and human action in baptism and the thesis that 13 14 15 16 11 12

Jüngel, Rev. of Karl Barth, CD IV/4 Fragment, p. 79. Ibid. On this theme see also the extended discussion in Jüngel, “Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe.” Jüngel, Rev. of Karl Barth, CD IV/4 Fragment, p. 79. Ibid. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid.

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Jesus Christ himself is the one sacrament of God for the world, he does not in any of his other texts on sacrament, including those written during the same period as his reviews of the fragment, retain Barth’s heavy investment in the distinction of Spirit and water baptisms.17 More significantly, these are the only examples of his texts on the problem of sacrament in which Jüngel refrains from discussing, potentially as a Lutheran alternative to Barth, the fundamental passivity of the human actor in baptism and the Lord’s Supper. That is, while Jüngel clearly agrees with Barth that sacramental agency is ineluctably human action that corresponds to God’s gracious self-giving action in the gospel, he elsewhere describes this as receptive action, action that is ontologically ground in the passive human reception of God’s justifying and self-presenting act. We see this theme already in the texts of group (b), two of which, it is important to observe, were published during the same period as the Barth analyses. In “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” which is in fact Jüngel’s earliest writing on the problem of sacrament, he concludes his generally skeptical reading of the divergent traditions of sacramental theology with two axioms that he believes are crucial for a correct concept of sacrament, namely, that “Jesus Christ is the one sacrament of the church” and that “baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the two celebrations of the one sacrament of the church.”18 Interestingly, in spite of his refusal here to identify water baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments (at one point in the text he refers to them as the “so-called sacraments”19), it is clear that he conceives Jesus Christ as the primary actor in the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper whose self-presentation is passively received in faith by the believer. Jesus Christ, Jüngel thus argues, “in his self-activity as the word of God that effects faith . . . publically interrupts the world in baptism [and] secretly interrupts the world in the Lord’s Supper,” and by doing so “calls and gathers the world”20 to himself through these actions. What the church passively “celebrates” in the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper is that Jesus Christ is active and effective in these events,21 and that his action and effectiveness is the ontological basis of the church’s corresponding actions. As he later specifies, water baptism and the Lord’s Supper “impart 19 20 21 17 18

Though, as we shall see, he does briefly discuss this distinction in El Ser Sacramental, p. 82. Eberhard Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—Was ist das?” EvTh 26 (1966), p. 36. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 37, Thesis 10. Ibid., p. 38, Theses 14 and 15

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the being of Jesus Christ” to the believer and thus “open” the believer to participate in the life of faith and to hope for the eschatological table.22 We therefore discover in this text, which, we must keep in mind, was written in the same period as the interlocutions with CD IV/4, an account of baptism and the Lord’s Supper that maintains Barth’s Christological determination of the concept of sacrament, but differs from the fragment insofar as the description of the human action in the celebrations of water baptism and the Lord’s Supper here includes the passive reception of the effective action of God that occurs interruptedly through these celebrations. This account of receptive sacramental action recurs in more or less the same conceptual form in “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” and much later in “The Church as Sacrament?” The title of the former essay suggests that Jüngel intends to distance his own position from a “sacramental understanding” of the sacraments. Unfortunately, in the course of the essay Jüngel neither identifies nor describes the perspective on baptism that he is critiquing. As in “Das Sakrament . . .” he is hesitant to identify baptism as a sacrament. Additionally, in one of the only instances in his writings, he explicitly argues that baptism should be reserved for believers alone.23 And yet he contends that: While man commits himself in baptism, he yet remains passive. The active subject is the one in whose name we are baptized: Jesus Christ. But the man who commits himself (in baptism) is also the subject of baptism under the sign of passivity. Man is indeed already passive insofar as he believes. But his faith makes him active as one who is passive. Baptism corresponds structurally to the event of faith—but only under the prerequisite of this event, that is, so to speak, chiastically: the believer commits himself in baptism to the passivity of faith in such a way that this passivity must be directly the origin of the Christian act.24

Jesus Christ is here conceived as the “active subject” of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and the believer as the passive recipient of Jesus Christ, who then acts in these celebrations only on the ontological basis of the fundamental passivity of faith. But why, we must ask, is this not a sacramental understanding of Ibid., p. 61. Jüngel, “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” p. 309. 24 Ibid., p. 311. 22 23

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baptism? Or better, if this is not a sacramental understanding of baptism, what is? Jüngel, unfortunately, never clarifies his position in “Zur Kritik . . .” The reasons behind Jüngel’s hesitancy concerning sacramental language for baptism and the Lord’s Supper do become a bit more transparent in “The Church as Sacrament?” As we have already seen, in this text Jüngel retains the strict distinction between the sacramental being of Jesus Christ and the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, such that these events are not conceived as sacraments alongside Christ, but rather as celebrations of Christ the one sacrament. As in the earlier texts, Jüngel proposes that the distinction between sacrament and celebration does not entail that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are mere human actions evacuated of salvific efficacy. On the contrary, he asserts that “Jesus Christ represents and presents himself in human words and in the celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper,” and in doing so “unites us to his body.”25 The efficacy of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, therefore, is strictly consequential to the acting subjectivity of Jesus Christ in these events. To be precise, Jesus Christ efficaciously speaks in the celebrations, and, as such, they are word-events in the occurrences of which the resurrected and ascended Christ draws near to the church, the great “sacramental sign.”26 In baptism and the Lord’s Supper, then, the church remains the hearing church that creatively receives the action-in-speech of Jesus Christ.27 Jüngel therefore employs the distinction of sacrament and celebration to secure the uniqueness and preeminence of Jesus Christ in effecting salvation. Although he does contend that Christ communicates and effects salvation in preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper and not elsewhere, he nevertheless appears wary in “The Church as Sacrament?” of explicitly attributing sacramentality to these liturgical actions, lest by doing so the unique sacramentality of Jesus Christ might be compromised. The two texts in our group (c) on the phenomenology of worship suggest that Jüngel discovered, through a close reading of Schleiermacher’s theology of Christian practice, a conceptual key for describing the difference between opus dei and opus hominum in the actions of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; Jüngel, “The Church as Sacrament?” in ed. John B. Webster, Theological Essays I, p. 212, Thesis 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). See our analyses of this essay in Section 5.A.3 and Chapter 9. 27 On this point, see Jüngel’s discussion in “The Church as Sacrament?” pp. 204–06. 25

26

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namely, the differentiation of effective actions and representative actions. Since we will examine this distinction in some detail below, we may summarize the same here.28 First, according to Jüngel’s reading, Schleiermacher draws the distinction between two types of human action, and thus his concern is to demonstrate what type of human action occurs in Christian worship. Effective human actions are purposeful actions that are carried out in order to cause or to produce some effect. These actions, that is, are what characterize the ordinary, work-oriented existence of the homo faber. On the other hand, representative human actions are spontaneous actions in the occurrences of which participants act out that which they can by no means produce themselves. As Jüngel says elsewhere, representative actions are actions “of the Sabbath, by which we are unburdened of ourselves.”29 Schleiermacher’s distinction, then, furnishes Jüngel a way to conceptualize the difference between the productive actions of ordinary human existence and the creatively passive actions of Christian worship. As actors in the events of worship, believers do not produce anything themselves, but rather represent, or act out, that which has been done once and for all in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We thus see that, by employing the idea of representative action, Jüngel is able to craft a strongly sacramental reading of baptism and the Lord’s Supper without compromising the thesis that Jesus Christ himself is, strictly speaking, the one sacrament of God for the world.30 Accordingly, in the second of these two texts on the phenomenology of worship, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which Jüngel describes as representative liturgical actions, are explicitly designated as “sacramental celebrations.”31 So, while, in the texts of group (b), Jüngel draws a sharp distinction between the concepts of sacrament and celebration, here he identifies the celebrations as sacramental. Baptism is the “sacrament” in the event of which “the new breaks into the world of the old On what follows, see “Der Gottesdienst als Fest der Freiheit,” pp. 341–46, and also our analysis of “Sakrament und Repräsentation” in Chapter 11. 29 Eberhard Jüngel, “Church Unity is Already Happening: The Path Towards Eucharistic Community,” trans. Richard P. Schenk, dialog 44.1 (2005), pp. 33. 30 Spjuth, we should note, does not include the two texts on the phenomenology of worship in his analysis of Jüngel’s concept of sacramental presence. His reading of Jüngel stops at “The Church as Sacrament?” and, consequently, he contends that, for Jüngel, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are in no way sacramental. See the whole of his commentary in Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel (Studia Theologica Ludensia, no. 51; Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), pp. 121–65. 31 Jüngel, “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” in Wertlose Wahrheit—Zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens. Theologische Erörterungen III, 2. Auflage, p. 309, Thesis 6.1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). Emphasis added. 28

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age and the old man commits himself to his new being,” and through which “Jesus Christ puts away for us the future so that we can put away (ἐν Χριστώ) the past.”32 The Lord’s Supper is the “sacrament of provisions for the journey,” in the event of which “the way breaks into the world of the old age and the assembly of believers becomes the body of Christ,” and through which “the wandering people of God visually represent the salvific past of Jesus Christ and proclaim his death until he comes.”33 This text marks the first occasion in Jüngel’s writings on the problem of sacrament in which he employs explicitly sacramental language for describing baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Here Jesus Christ is still conceived as the one sacrament of God for the world.34 Additionally, we find the same emphasis on receptive liturgical action that appeared in latent form in the texts from group (b) and which received conceptual clarification in “Der Gottesdienst als Fest der Freiheit.” Why, though, does Jüngel now appear so willing to refer to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments, when earlier he strongly objected to this designation on the basis of a strict differentiation drawn between the concepts of sacrament and celebration? We will return to this question shortly. We may survey our last two groups, (d) and (e), more succinctly. The texts from the former group, which we will examine in some detail, below, contain extensive reflections on the idea of representative action that are oriented specifically to the problem of the phenomenology of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. As elsewhere, Jüngel asserts that Jesus Christ is the one sacrament, and that the agency of Christ in the sacramental celebrations must be strictly differentiated from the fundamentally passive actions of the hearing church. With a nod to Schleiermacher, Jüngel proposes that the sacramental events of worship are interruptive word-events in the occurrences of which Christ represents and presents himself to his believing people. And, as in “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” he is not at all uncomfortable with identifying baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments, so long as Jesus Christ is conceived as “the primary actor . . . the actual agent in the sacramental events.”35 34 35 32 33

Ibid., p. 309, Thesis 6.11. Ibid., p. 309, Thesis 6.12. Ibid., p. 307, Thesis 4; see p. 309, Thesis 6. Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” in Ganz werden. Theologische Erörterungen V, p. 283 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

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In El Ser Sacramental, the lectures of which we have called group (e), Jüngel retains the emphases on the sacramental primacy of Jesus Christ and on the receptivity of the representative actions of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. However, and as we shall observe in detail in Chapter 12, Jüngel employs here an especially robust sacramental terminology for describing baptism and the Lord’s Supper, claiming, for instance, that the former event communicates grace and seals the believer for God in the truth of the gospel36 and “unites the one who is baptized with Jesus Christ and intensifies that union,”37 and that the latter event “produces an unsurpassable proximity in which Jesus, who makes himself present in bread and wine, is nearer to the believer than her or she can be to his or herself.”38 He even proposes an appreciative conception of infant baptism, with the qualification that: . . . parents and godparents [of the baptized infant], in the same way as the community, assume responsibility for the Christian life that is opened up to the one who receives baptism, and . . . provide the presuppositions for the growth of faith, for the freedom of a personal confession of faith, for the joy of life in the church and in the community, and for participation in the same.39

And, perhaps most important for our purposes here, throughout El Ser Sacramental Jüngel largely abandons his customary emphasis on the interruptive character of the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper vis-à-vis creaturely time in order to develop a more robust account of the temporality of the eschatological time of the sacraments. In particular, he invokes the image of the “wandering people of God,” which he mentions only in passing in the earlier text, “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” in order to explain how the sacraments relate to the lifetime of the believer and to the church’s journey through time to the coming city of God. As we shall see in our analysis below, this feature of El Ser Sacramental puts the text into sharp relief from Jüngel’s earlier writings on sacrament. 38 39 36 37

Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 80. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., pp. 83–84.

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B. Some hermeneutical proposals What emerges from our survey of the texts on sacrament is a threefold question of continuity. (1) The texts in group (a), which consist of Jüngel’s appreciative descriptive accounts of Barth’s late doctrine of baptism, differ from all of the other texts insofar as here we do not find the emphasis, which plays a significant role elsewhere, on the fundamental passivity of the human person in the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. (2) While groups (b) though (e) have in common both the emphasis on human passivity and the identification of Jesus Christ as the unique and preeminent sacramental being who acts in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the earlier texts in group (b) exhibit a hesitancy, if not an outright refusal, to designate baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments, while, in the later texts (groups (c) through (e)), Jüngel appears quite comfortable with employing traditional sacramental terminology for describing baptism and the Lord’s Supper, provided that certain qualifications are met in the course of argumentation that serve to secure the uniqueness and preeminence of the sacramentality of Jesus Christ. (3) In groups (b), (c), and (d) Jüngel describes the character of sacramental time by persistently appealing to the category of interruption. On the other hand, while he does mention this category on a few occasions in El Ser Sacramental, in the chapter from this volume on baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we discover an unprecedented emphasis on the chronological aspects of sacramental time. In what follows we tackle, in turn, this threefold question of the continuity of Jüngel’s theology of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. (1) We propose that the apparent discontinuity between the texts on Barth’s fragment and the other writings on baptism and the Lord’s Supper is rather easy to rectify. We must remember that these texts are, generally speaking, descriptive analyses of the doctrine of baptism published in Church Dogmatics IV/4. As we mentioned above, in these texts we find Jüngel expressing his appreciation of certain aspects of Barth’s late account of baptism (particularly Barth’s thesis that a responsible doctrine of baptism will clarify the necessary differentiation of divine and human agency in the church’s action of baptism).

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But he in no place claims or even suggests that the fragment is paradigmatic for his own understanding either of baptism or of the category of sacrament in general.40 It is especially important here to observe, once again, that two of the texts from group (b) were published during the same period as the Barth analyses, and these demonstrate that Jüngel’s earliest attempts to construct a theology of sacrament diverge from Barth’s late doctrine in a number of important ways.41 Most significantly, in these texts that appeared roughly contemporaneously to the Barth reviews, Jüngel emphasizes the primary agency of Jesus Christ in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and thus charts a set of proposals that is considerably different from Barth’s thesis that water baptism is an exclusively human act. A matter of additional importance is that we do not find even a quotation from the fragment in any of the texts in our groups (b) through (e). All of this suggests that we should not read the texts from group (a) as indicative of Jüngel’s emerging theology of sacrament. They We should note the difference between our interpretation of these texts and that of Webster, who contends that, in his reviews of the fragment, Jüngel wholly affirms “Barth’s firm distinction between Spirit- and water-baptism as paradigmatic of a proper relation between God and the Christian in which human action does not usurp the divine and divine action does not obliterate the authentically human.” John B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 107. See the entirety of Webster’s analysis on pages 106–09. While fully appreciating the similarities between Jüngel and Barth on divine and human action, we assert, once again, that all of Jüngel’s other writings on the sacraments establish that human sacramental agency is fundamentally passive, receptive action. Consequently, aside from these reviews of the fragment, Jüngel describes water baptism and also the Lord’s Supper as events in which God acts and the celebrant receives. Webster has written on this creatively passive human action in “Justification, Analogy and Action,” pp. 122–24. Spjuth also reads the reviews of CD IV/4 as paradigmatic of the whole of Jüngel’s sacramental theology. Consequently, he argues that, for Jüngel, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are strictly human actions that correspond to, but in no way mediate, God’s prior salvific action in Christ. See his discussion in Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence, pp. 132–36. By contrast, we have shown that, in the texts published in the same period as the reviews, “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” and “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” Jüngel clearly articulates a doctrine of baptism and the Lord’s Supper according to which Jesus Christ, the one sacrament, is the primary actor, and the human celebrant is the creatively passive recipient. Spjuth, we should note, does go on to discuss Jüngel’s concept of creative passivity (pp. 136–40). However, he fails to clearly articulate that, for Jüngel, it is God’s act, occurring as the event of the word, that is received in the creatively passive actions of worship. In short, Spjuth so stresses the importance of Barth’s fragment on baptism for Jüngel’s own sacramental theology (a position very different from what we establish in this chapter) that he misses some important differences between the reviews and the other texts on sacrament from the period. 41 On this point, see the similar assessment of Mottu, who, in his essay, “Les Sacrements selon Karl Barth et Eberhard Jüngel,” argues that the early Jüngel diverges from the Barth of the fragment in three significant ways, namely, (1) he introduces to his discussion of the sacraments the concept of mediation; (2) goes beyond Barth by attempting to spell out the relation between the sacrament to time, chiefly by means of the concept of interruption; and (3) shows that baptism and the Lord’s Supper “do not compete with the word of God . . . but rather say the same word in a different way” (p. 55). We concur with Mottu’s analysis, but would add that Jüngel also diverges from Barth insofar as he emphasizes the fundamental passivity of the celebrant in the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. 40

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are, rather, best read as generally affirmative presentations of Barth’s challenge to traditional approaches to the problem of sacrament. (2) A more difficult problem to resolve is the apparent discontinuity between the three texts from our group (b) and the essays on sacrament that compose groups (c) through (e). We have observed that Jüngel asserts in all of these texts that Jesus Christ alone is the mystery of God’s gracious “yes” to humanity, and is precisely so the one sacrament of God for the world. Also, in every one of these texts, Jesus Christ is conceived as the primary agent in the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, while the believer who participates in these celebrations acts only on the basis of the fundamental passivity that marks humanity’s ontological situation before the justifying God. Nevertheless, in spite of such consistencies among these texts, there emerges also a sharp divergence between, on the one hand, the essays in group (b), which exhibit a rejection of traditional sacramental terminology for describing baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and, on the other, the essays in groups (c) through (e), in which Jüngel appears quite comfortable referring to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments. The clue to the resolution of this dilemma, we suggest, lies in the fact that the first occasion upon which Jüngel explicitly identifies baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments is the text “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” in which he constructs a phenomenology of worship based at least in part upon Schleiermacher’s distinction of human effective and representative actions. The idea of representative action is absent from the two early texts from group  (b), which, again, are “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” and “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe.” In these essays Jüngel posits a sharp distinction between the category of sacrament and the idea of celebration, asserting that, as Jesus Christ alone deserves to be called the sacrament of God for the world, baptism and the Lord’s Supper can only be conceived as the church’s celebrations of the sacramental being of Christ. While Jesus Christ, the one sacrament, is conceived as in fact acting in these celebrations, Jüngel draws a sharp differentiation between the divine actions of Christ and the human actions of the celebrant that arise from the fundamental passivity of justification. Such proposals serve as evidence that, in these early texts, Jüngel is suspicious that the designation of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments might encroach upon the unique and preeminent

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sacramentality of Jesus Christ. This same suspicion marks Jüngel’s proposals in “The Church as Sacrament?” even though, as we mentioned, we find here at least a latent form of the idea of representative action. The two essays on worship in group (c), however, constitute a turning point of sorts, since here, in conversation with Schleiermacher, Jüngel works out an account of sacramental action that is conceptually more cogent than the bare distinctions of divine and human action and human activity and passivity that we find in the earlier texts. To be precise, what the idea of representative action furnishes for Jüngel is a way to describe the real presence of Christ in baptism and the Lord’s Supper without in doing so blurring the distinction between divine and human action in these events. This becomes clear, as we shall see, in the text of “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” as Jüngel proposes that both Jesus Christ and the church act, though in very different ways, in the representative actions of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Christ is the primary actor and actual agent in these events insofar as he represents and presents himself in the midst of the gathered congregation. The church’s action is secondary to Christ’s self-representative action, as it produces nothing in and of itself, but rather participates in a fundamentally passive way in the salvifically effective death and resurrection of Christ. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, then, are nexuses of Christ’s interruptive self-representation and self-presentation and the church’s creatively passive reception of the interruptive drawing near of Christ. Precisely in this sense they are sacramental celebrations. (3) It is not self-evident why, in the text of the fourth chapter of El Ser Sacramental, we find Jüngel deemphasizing the interruptive character of the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in favor of a more chronologically temporal approach to the problem of sacramental eschatology. Jüngel does not explain this adjustment in the text, nor does he spell out nor even acknowledge his awareness of the differences between this approach and that which marks his earlier writings. Additionally, this strongly continuous description of the relation of the sacrament to time does not mark the other chapters of El Ser Sacramental, but appears only in the chapter on baptism and the Lord’s Supper. By contrast, we have, for instance, observed in Chapter 5 that, in the course of establishing the uniqueness and preeminence of the sacramentality of Jesus Christ, Jüngel distances his understanding of the sacramental verbum from the Augustinian semiotics, arguing that the word that attaches to the element in

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order to make a sacrament is the very word in which Jesus Christ interruptedly draws near to the world by coming-to-speech. And, in the chapter in El Ser Sacramental that contains his exegetical examination of the New Testament μυστήριον, Jüngel draws a connection between the mystery of God and the event of the truth of the gospel, the latter of which “is not to be understood . . . in the sense of the adequatio intellectus ad rem, but . . . is an interruption of a thing in its totality.”42 The mystery, that is, comes to the world as the interruption of the world and its continuities. Moreover, a survey of Jüngel’s theological writings published since the turn of the millennium demonstrates that the remarkably positive account of the relation of God and his actions to creaturely continuities found in the chapter in El Ser Sacrament on baptism and the Lord’s Supper does not reflect a general trend in Jüngel’s recent theology. To be sure, in the past decade, Jüngel no longer appears especially preoccupied with, for instance, the doctrine of the language of faith, or the linguistic implications of the problem of analogy, or the categories of the New Hermeneutic (e.g. parable, word-event, kerygma, etc.), etc., that is, with themes from his earlier writings for the description of which the idea of interruption plays a significant role. Nevertheless, the interruption/ continuity of life (Unterbrechung/Lebenszusammenhang) metaphor for describing God’s relation to the temporality of the world appears in numerous texts throughout the decade,43 and even, as we have mentioned, in a handful of places in El Ser Sacramental.44 All of this suggests that Jüngel’s employment of different metaphors for describing sacramental time in the chapter in El Ser Sacramental on baptism and the Lord’s Supper is anomalous vis-à-vis his other recent theological writings. We propose that the most plausible explanation for this shift in metaphors for sacramental time emerges from the fact that, in our chapter in El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel devotes his attention to a set of issues that is largely tangential to his earlier analyses of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. On the whole, in the texts in our groups (a) and (b) we find Jüngel preoccupied with the problem of sacramentum in genere; that is, with the abstract question of Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 18–19. For example, Jüngel, “Sakrament und Rapräsentation,” idem, “Neu—Alt—Neu: Theologische Aphorismen,” in Erfahrungen mit der Erfahrung, pp. 21–27; and idem, “Das Wunder des Glaubens,” in Beziehungsreich: Perspektiven des Glaubens (Stuttgart: RADIUS-Verlag, 2001), pp. 135–36. 44 See Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 18, 64, 97. 42 43

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what does and does not constitute a sacrament. In the writings in groups (c) and (d), Jüngel analyzes baptism and the Lord’s Supper as phenomena of worship. In these texts he places great emphasis upon the sacraments as events and also upon the related issue of the intersection of divine and human agency in the sacraments. As we shall see, in the chapter in El Ser Sacramental on baptism and the Lord’s Supper, Jüngel is interested primarily in the roles that these sacraments play in the Christian life and in the ongoing existence of the church. While the themes from the earlier texts do recur in El Ser Sacramental, his main purpose in the fourth chapter appears to be to situate baptism and the Lord’s Supper within both the lifetime of the believer and the pilgrimage of the church to the coming city of God. We suggest that this shift in thematic scope compels Jüngel to deviate from his customary emphasis on sacramental time as the interruption of the chronologically continuous. Returning to the question of the continuity of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament, we assert that the employment in El Ser Sacramental of new metaphors for the relation between the sacramental celebrations and time is not exhibitive of a real change of mind concerning this nexus of issues. Indeed, we have noted that the theme of the interruptive structure of God’s relation to creaturely continuities rises to the surface on several occasions during the course of El Ser Sacramental. Moreover, additional themes that appear concomitantly with the category of interruption elsewhere in Jüngel’s writings are in fact found in the Spanish volume (e.g. the definition of mystery as being “an event of the world, but one which surpasses the world and which, precisely in this manner, arrives at the foundation of the world,”45 an emphasis on the event character of Christian worship,46 the description of the church’s “sacramental being”47 in light of the unique and preeminent sacramentality of Jesus Christ,48 etc.). Must we not therefore conclude that El Ser Sacramental exhibits a somewhat incoherent account of the relation between the sacrament and time? That is to say, does not Jüngel’s employment of new metaphors for baptism and the Lord’s Supper that illustrate the implications of these sacramental celebrations for the believer and for the church as they tarry through time undercut his persistent appeal, even in the very same text, to the category of interruption to describe 48 45 46 47

Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 17. See especially ibid., pp. 43–54. Ibid., p. 76. See ibid., pp. 70–76.

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the ontological structure of God’s sacramental relation to the world? As we will demonstrate more extensively in our analysis, below, we are convinced otherwise; namely, that the chapter on baptism and the Lord’s Supper in El Ser Sacramental in fact represents an advance within a generally continuous theology of sacrament. What we find in El Ser Sacramental, particularly in Jüngel’s exposition of the sacramental celebrations, is the groundwork for a theology of sacrament according to which sacramental being is both interruptive of and continuous with the world. For Jüngel, the sacramental celebrations indeed shatter the sham existence of sinful humanity as it tarries through time in sheer self-correspondence. But, as we shall see, these same sacraments initiate, nourish, and equip the believer for a lifetime lived in the course of the world and in harmony with God, the other, and the self. And the church, too, is not just interrupted by the word-events of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, but is also strengthened for a journey, ineluctably carried out in time, toward the eschatological city of God. *  *  * In summary, our hermeneutic for reading these groups of Jüngel’s writings on baptism and the Lord’s Supper suggests, first of all, that we not understand the differences that emerge in the texts as evidence of a fundamental incongruity in his sacramental theology. On the whole, the broad lines of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament have remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, and thus we do not find any fundamental change of mind that underlies the subtle differences between his writings as we have grouped them. Rather, for instance, by reconceptualizing and therefore clarifying the problem of divine and human action in dialogue with Schleiermacher, Jüngel is able to sustain in his later texts a more lucid reading of what occurs and who acts in the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. And, however we might conceive the shift toward the worldly continuous character of sacramental events in the fourth chapter of El Ser Sacramental, in the text this development appears to be completely consonant with the major themes found throughout Jüngel’s sacramental theology. In short, the course of Jüngel’s writings on the problem of sacrament is not marked by sharp changes in thought, but by conceptual adjustments and advances within a generally consistent set of propositions.

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Second, it is important to reiterate that the early analyses of Barth’s fragment on baptism do not appear to be indicative of Jüngel’s emerging sacramental theology.49 While it is certainly the case that Barth and Jüngel share a set of convictions on the concept of sacrament, Jüngel deviates from Barth in numerous ways and does not in his other writings on baptism and the Lord’s Supper find it necessary to critically engage with Barth’s late doctrine. Third, and along similar lines, our hermeneutic suggests that the later texts are more indicative of what we might call Jüngel’s normative approach to the theology of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. This is especially important to keep in mind when considering the question of whether, for Jüngel, baptism and the Eucharist are or are not sacraments. While he appears wary of this designation in the early texts, in later writings and on the basis of a more robust account of liturgical action, he is quite comfortable with the traditional sacramental terms. Also, if our reading of the texts on baptism and the Lord’s Supper is accurate, then we do well to focus a good bit of our attention on El Ser Sacramental, which, again, is Jüngel’s most recent and comprehensive attempt to articulate a theology of sacrament.

This, we again note, sets apart our reading of the theme of sacramental presence in Jüngel’s theology from that put forth by Spjuth in Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence.

49

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Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as Re-presentations and Presentations of Jesus Christ

In the preceding chapter on the question of the continuity of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament, we proposed that a shift in his approach to baptism and the Lord’s Supper occurred when he discovered, in dialogue with Schleiermacher’s theology of worship, a conceptual key that furnishes for him a way to address the problem of sacramental agency while securing the uniqueness of Christ’s sacramental being. This key, again, is the concept of representative liturgical action, which first appears in the aforementioned essays on the phenomenology of worship. In two important texts from the Justification period, “Sakrament und Repräsentation” and “Church Unity Is Already Happening,” Jüngel again takes up the concept of representative action, mainly in order to spell out some of the ontological entailments of the event of justification for the doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The former text is particularly important for our analysis, primarily because Jüngel’s examination comprises many of the themes that we have surveyed in previous chapters. We will therefore concentrate our commentary on this essay and will refer to the latter text when necessary. We are covering much familiar ground here, so we may restrict our comments to the most significant features of Jüngel’s argument in “Sakrament und Repräsentation.”

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In the first part of the essay, entitled “Word and Element in Sacramental Event,”1 Jüngel remarks that his assigned task is to present a “phenomenological description” of that which can be called a sacrament. What this means becomes clear during the course of Jüngel’s argument. Accordingly, his concern in the essay is to describe the relation of the sacrament to the world and its contingencies and continuities.2 Jüngel, however, argues almost immediately that the theological concept of sacrament resists such description. The sacrament, he observes, is a mystery, and, just so, “is in no way immanent in the world, but from the very first comes to the world.”3 For Jüngel, an important clue for this determination of the category of sacrament derives from an exegetical issue that we have already addressed, above; namely, the observation that the Latin sacramentum is, in the Vulgate, the translation of the Greek μυστήριον, a New Testament word which, he insists, “indicates at all times an event which itself cannot in any way be deduced from some connection to worldly being.”4 Jüngel clarifies this point with the help of the ontological differentiation of possibility and actuality. Hence, the mysterium incarnationis “concerns the coming to the world of God, which neither proceeds from the actuality of the world nor can be explained from its possibilities. The mysterium incarnationis brings its own possibilities with it, which are always, as potentia aliena, the opposite of the possibilities of the world.”5 Indeed, “every sacramental event occurs in this same way, in that the arrival of divine grace, which cannot be explained from the context of the reality of the world, manifests itself in such events.”6 But, as we have observed previously, for Jüngel, this does not mean that God is ontologically remote from the world. Rather, in the event of his coming to the world, God “does not merely come close to the world, but comes even closer to the world than the world is capable of being to itself.”7 According to Jüngel, the phenomenological task of describing the sacrament therefore requires a special category that is able to encapsulate this idea of difference in nearness. Eberhard Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” in Ganz werden. Theologische Erörterungen V, 274–87. pp. 274–82 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 2 See, for example, ibid., pp. 276–77. 3 Ibid., p. 275. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 276. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 1

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From what we have seen thus far in our analysis, we should not be surprised to discover that Jüngel selects the category of interruption, which he later qualifies with the conceptual aid of the analogy of advent, to serve this phenomenological function. His definition of interruption so applied, to which we have referred already on a number of occasions, is here worth considering in its entirety: That which deserves to be designated as sacramental is always an elementary interruption of the worldly continuity of life. Moreover it is decisive that this interruption is a revolution. The world cannot interrupt itself in order to grant God entrance. Were this possible, then the world would also be able to pardon itself. But this is out of the question. The world, rather, is interrupted. The human sinner, who is perpetually occupied with himself, cannot interrupt himself in order to be blessed by grace. He or she is interrupted. And this is an event that profoundly calls into question all previous forms of self-understanding. The event of elementary interruption is always a crisis for the actuality that is interrupted. Accordingly, the world is no longer the same as it was heretofore.8

This is a fascinating passage that neatly encapsulates the ontological structure that Jüngel has in mind when he employs the idea of interruption. It is perhaps most important for us to observe for the present stage of our analysis that Jüngel couches the phenomenological question of the relation of the interruptive sacrament to worldly continuity in the language of the justification of the sinner. Accordingly, the reason why the continuity of the world must be interrupted in order for God to arrive sacramentally is that the sinner is ensnared in perpetual self-orientation. A radical break, indeed a “crisis,” is necessary for overcoming this sinful compulsion that characterizes the actuality of the world. And this break occurs in the event of justification, as he later puts it, in “an indicative of grace which interrupts the rule of the continuous and determinative imperative of our world.”9 The law enslaves the sinner to the deadly lie that human self-actualization is possible through works. The interruptive and gracious indicative of the gospel liberates the sinner from the yoke of the law by demonstrating that true humanity begins only outside the self and in the very event of the word of God. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 280.

8 9

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Jüngel is aware, of course, that, when left unqualified, this categorical employment of interruption suggests a sheer discontinuity between the interruptive coming of God and the world. For Jüngel, the analogy of advent serves to mitigate the severity of this discontinuity. In contrast to the analogia entis, which “as a perpetually existing analogy between the being of the Creator and the being of creation . . . is oriented toward the hermeneutically exclusive opposition of Creator and creation,”10 the analogy of advent occurs when God comes to the world in such a way that “certain chosen worldly entities are taken up in the event of worship in order to make the coming of God communicable in a worldly sense.”11 In other words, according to the analogy of advent, the event of God’s interruptive arrival in fact includes at least part of the interrupted actuality, for otherwise the worldly concreteness of God’s coming would be annulled by his sheer otherness. Importantly, it is at just this point that Jüngel shifts his analysis to the theme of sacrament, arguing that the elements of water, bread, and wine are the components of the actuality of the world that are made capable by God to communicate His coming.12 In consonance with what we have already observed throughout our analysis, Jüngel asserts that it is the word of God, the indicative of the gospel, the interruptive self-disclosure of God in an event of language that resists the hermeneutical description of signification, that, when added to the water, bread, or wine, makes a verbum visibile. Hence, “the word which mediates the presence of the gracious God is constitutive for the sacramental events, so that the sacrament can be aptly described as a ‘visible word.’”13 And we must not forget that, for Jüngel, the word of God that is added to the element in such a way that the coming of God becomes communicable through the sacrament is identical to the being of Jesus Christ, who himself is, strictly speaking, the one sacrament of God for the world. Consequently: Jesus Christ must be regarded as the primal sacrament in whom the gracious primal decision of God in favor of sinful man and his world has become revealed and made effective, and this same primal decision promises to become revealed and to be made effective anew by the power of the Holy Spirit in the representing and presenting actions [of the church]. This occurs 12 13 10 11

Ibid., p. 278. Ibid. See the two long paragraphs in ibid., pp. 278–79. Ibid., p. 279.

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in the event of the spoken word of the name of Jesus Christ and in the visible form of this word in the sacraments.14

For Jüngel, then, the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper and the speaking of the gospel in Christian proclamation are conceived as word-events; that is, as visible and audible events in the occurrences of which the one word, Jesus Christ, comes to the world by coming-to-speech. Jüngel labors through this robust line of analysis in order to properly situate his approach to the question of divine and human action as a corollary of a concept of sacrament described in light of the doctrine of justification. In the cited paragraph, above, he claims that the primal decision of God, which was “revealed” and “made effective” in the history of Jesus Christ, continues, by virtue of the promise and the power of the Holy Spirit, “to become revealed and to be made effective . . . in the representing and presenting actions” of the church. He now turns in the second part of the essay, entitled “Act and Actor in Sacramental Event,” to expand upon this model of sacramental action. Significantly, his very first move toward this end is to remind his readers of the priority of the fundamental passivity of justification, commenting that “the sacramental event is intended to present the human person, who is incorporated into the sacramental event by virtue of his faith, with the saving presence of God. In this respect (the sacrament) makes the human person a receiver.”15 That is, since the presence and grace of God can in no way be earned or acquired through human works by the homo faber, in the sacrament God himself interrupts the continuity of human achievement in order to give himself to believers in this event. At the same time, Jüngel continues, it is ineluctable that the human participant in the sacramental event acts in this event. Jüngel succinctly phrases the resulting aporia in “Church Unity Is Already Happening”: It must . . . be explained how two elements correspond to one another (in the concept of sacrament): on the one hand, the exclusion of every human activity that could be understood as achievement or merit; and, on the other hand, the sacramental action as it corresponds to the gospel.16 Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., pp. 282–83. 16 Jüngel, “Church Unity Is Already Happening: The Path towards Eucharistic Community,” trans. Richard P. Schenk, dialog 44.1 (2005), p. 32. 14 15

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In “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” Jüngel suggests that an important clue toward a resolution of this aporia can be found in the claim, itself a matter of broad ecumenical consensus, that “Jesus Christ is not only the sacramental gift, but is also and above all else the sacramental giver.”17 He argues that, on the basis of this claim, we can additionally assert that “Jesus Christ is the primary actor in the action of the sacrament; he is the actual agent in the sacramental event.”18 Consequently, “in the action of baptism he is the subject of the baptizing; in the action of the Eucharist his self-imaging and self-communication occurs in, with, and under wine and bread.”19 As he says elsewhere concerning the Lord’s Supper: “It is Jesus Christ himself who makes himself present in the community celebrating the Lord’s Supper . . . He represents himself whenever the presider at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper speaks the words of institution and in bread and wine offers the body and blood of Christ.”20 We see, then, that here Jüngel is willing to conceive baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacramental, so long as such sacramentality is situated beneath the primary and preeminent sacramentality of the being of Jesus Christ. For Jüngel, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are sacramental precisely because Jesus Christ, the unique sacrament of God, works in and through worldly element and human action in order to present and represent himself. But how should we understand the human action through which Jesus Christ acts to grant his own sacramental being? To answer this question, Jüngel returns to a particular form of the analogy of advent; namely, to the analogy of action between the primary action of Jesus Christ and the corresponding action of the church. It is at this point in the essay that the meaning of the idea of representative action comes to light. Jüngel asserts that, in the actions of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the church represents what occurred historically and definitively in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As such, the church’s actions “do not exist for themselves, but act exclusively to serve that which is represented . . . and to ascribe to what is represented its proper significance.”21 The church, that is, does not produce, but rather reenacts what occurred once and for all in the gospel events. Jüngel thus declares that 20 21 17 18 19

Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” p. 283. Ibid. Ibid. Jüngel, “Church Unity Is Already Happening,” p. 33. Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” p. 284.

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“the sacrament works in nobis that which has already extra nos. And it makes effective the event that has already occurred as it represents it: significando causant.”22 This, Jüngel warns, in no way implies, as it does in certain versions of Catholic sacramental theology, that the representative action of the church somehow completes the salvific action that occurred in the history of Jesus Christ. Even if we should grant that the work of Jesus Christ is, in some sense, an opus perficiendum, that is, a work to be completed, he asserts that we must maintain, in harmony with Sacrosanctum concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, that it is Jesus Christ himself that completes his work through the church’s liturgical actions.23 As we have already mentioned, it is Schleiermacher who provides Jüngel with the categorical distinction necessary for explaining the analogy between the preeminent action of Jesus Christ and the representative action of the church in such a way that Christ remains the singular actor in the church’s sacramental actions. Schleiermacher, again, differentiates between the “effective” action that is carried out in the normal course of working life and the “representative” or “performative” action that is carried out only in events of representation.24 Jüngel elaborates this distinction in “Church Unity Is Already Happening”: As Schleiermacher put it, the action of the community at the Lord’s Supper is an activity of performance and thus to be distinguished from activities that produce or effect something. Activity of performance has nothing to do with the kind of production-oriented activities to which our everyday world forces us. Activity of performance is free of drudgery and toil. Activity of performance is activity of the Sabbath, by which we are unburdened of ourselves. That is precisely what happens whenever we perform the Ibid. See also his comments on sacramental causality in Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), pp. 48–54. 23 See Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” p. 285. The passage briefly cited from Sacrosanctum concilium is worth quoting at length, as it indeed parallels Jüngel’s conception of representative action in some key respects: “Christ is always present to his church, especially during the liturgy, so that this great task [of his salvific work] can be fully accomplished. He is present through the sacrifice which is the mass, at once in the person of the minister . . . and also, most fully, under the Eucharistic elements. He is present through his power in the sacraments; thus, when anyone baptizes, Christ himself is baptizing. He is present through his word, in that he himself is speaking when scripture is read in church. Finally, he is present when the church is praying or singing hymns, he himself who promised, ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them’” (Mt. 18.20). SC 7, DEC, Vol. 2, p. 822. 24 See Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” p. 285. The distinction is found in Schleiermacher, Sämmtliche Werke, Abth. 1, Bd. 13, Die praktische Theologie, nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press Reprints, 2010), pp. 69–71. 22

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representation in the Lord’s Supper of the action of Jesus Christ: we are unburdened of ourselves and so become able to help to carry the burdens of others.25

We thus see that, for Jüngel, representative action is human agency conceived in light of the event of justification. By contrast to the toilsome “production-oriented activities” that characterize existence under the condition of the continuity of the world, the performative actions that take place in the context of the church are “Sabbath” actions that liberate the human person from the compulsion to actualize the self through works. And this is the case precisely because Jesus Christ himself is present and active in baptism and the Lord’s Supper in such a way that the corresponding human action arises from the passivity of reception. For Jüngel, the human action that represents divine action in the sacrament is ineluctably receptive action.26 Indeed, because in the sacrament Jesus Christ is the acting analogans, while, on the other hand, the human person is the acted-upon analogatum, the only genuine human action in baptism and the Lord’s Supper is faith, since, according to Jüngel, faith is the passive human reception of God’s activity of justifying the sinner.27 There is, to be sure, much to commend in this account of sacramental agency. By employing Schleiermacher’s distinction of “effective” (productive) and “representative” (passive) human actions, Jüngel presents a compelling agenda for sacramental theology, according to which baptism and the Lord’s Supper can indeed be conceived as sacraments, without such conception encroaching upon the unique salvific significance of the being and action of Jesus Christ. Moreover, Jüngel makes very explicit the interrelation between this account and the themes of sacramental agency and the ontology of justification. Accordingly, the sacramental celebrations of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are here described as creatively passive actions, in the events of which the justified believer responds in faith to that which has occurred once and for all in the history of Jesus Christ. Our hesitation concerning this approach to the problem of the relation of divine and human agency in the sacraments involves the strong emphasis that Jüngel places on the fundamentally interruptive character of the phenomenon Jüngel, “Church Unity Is Already Happening,” p. 33. See the discussion in ibid. 27 Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” p. 286. 25 26

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of the sacrament. Jüngel is unambiguous in his assertion that the sacrament is a crisis that shatters the continuities of the world. We observed that he appeals, as elsewhere, to the analogy of advent in order to mitigate the severity of the discontinuity between God and the world that is implied in the terminology of interruption. He even suggests, in accord with what we have already examined concerning the analogy of advent, that it is the analogia entis that in fact posits an ontological opposition between God and the world. While we appreciate this insight, we also contend that Jüngel does not proceed in the essay to sufficiently describe in concrete terms how the interruptive sacramental events (here, baptism and the Lord’s Supper) relate positively to the lifetime of the believer. Indeed, it is not until the appearance of El Ser Sacramental that we find Jüngel expanding his comments on baptism and the Lord’s Supper to include the implications of these celebrations for the Christian life.

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Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the Text of El Ser Sacramental

In this final chapter of the present unit, we shift our analysis to the account of baptism and the Lord’s Supper found in the fourth chapter of El Ser Sacramental. As we have mentioned, this text is, for several reasons, pivotal for understanding Jüngel’s theology of sacrament. First, this is the only place in Jüngel’s writings in which he makes, in a single essay, extensive comments on both baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Second, while the whole of Jüngel’s argument is consonant with what we find elsewhere in his writings on the sacraments, here we observe him employing new metaphors for the Christian life that enable him to draw a stronger connection between the events of baptism and the Lord’s Supper and the lifetime of the believer. Consequently, the motif of interruption, which does indeed make an appearance in the chapter, is nevertheless conspicuously absent from the broad course of his argument. Third, as we will point out in our analysis, Jüngel brings to his discussion in El Ser Sacramental a number of themes that do not factor into his previously published remarks on baptism and the Lord’s Supper, for instance, the relation between the sacrament of baptism and the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, the liturgical form of the rite of baptism, the particular effects of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, etc. Jüngel begins the chapter by offering an insightful sketch in which he explains how his remarks on baptism and the Lord’s Supper relate to the preceding chapter in El Ser Sacramental on the sacramentality of the church. Jüngel reiterates an aspect of his doctrine of the church that we examined above

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in our section on the church’s essential holiness, namely, the differentiation of the church and the world. The church, Jüngel asserts, is “the world that has been converted to God,” and, as such, is “the representation of what God did and does for the world, and that to which God has destined the world.”1 The church, then, has in its difference from the world an opportunity to the serve the world by testifying to and representing the salvific history of Jesus Christ. And this service of testimony and representation, Jüngel comments, “expresses itself in a particular way in the sacramental celebrations of baptism and the Eucharist.”2 According to Jüngel, in baptism, the one who is baptized testifies to and represents God’s reconciliation of the world to himself, which occurred concretely and effectively in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Up to the moment of baptism, the one who is baptized belongs “exclusively to the world.”3 Baptism, Jüngel suggests, both signifies and effects the turning point in the event of which the one who is baptized leaves the world to become a member of the community of the church. Each baptism, then, represents “the return of the world to God,”4 the eschatological reconciliation of all things to the Father. Moreover, in baptism, the church celebrates its “liberation from the powers that enslaved it” and from “the perverse compulsion toward relationlessness”5 that characterizes the continuity of the world. Baptism is the celebration “of the liberation from this compulsion, since it represents [liberation] in an action carried out with water in which the old man, who is the object of the compulsion, drowns in the depths and then arises as a new man who is purified of his ‘worldly essence.’”6 Jüngel next argues that the Eucharist testifies to and represents God’s reconciliation of the world to himself insofar as it points to the road that has been opened up within the course of this world and along which the people of God journey toward the coming city of God. To be precise, what the Lord’s Supper testifies to and represents is the presence of Jesus Christ in the church Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), p. 78. 2 Ibid., p. 77. 3 Ibid., p. 78. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 1

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as he “accompanies” the people of God along the way of their journey, and “fortifies and maintains” them for entry into the celestial polis.7 As we shall see, this metaphor of the coming city of God, which he mentions but leaves undeveloped in the earlier text, “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,”8 is a central motif in the more detailed exposition of the Lord’s Supper that Jüngel undertakes later in our chapter from El Ser Sacramental. Here he additionally comments that, in the Lord’s Supper, “the baptized recall the death of Jesus and the communion they now have with God and with others—a communion that they possess thanks to that death, and in which they eat and drink together with gratitude.”9 This occurs, Jüngel asserts, as “the community finds its nourishment in the bread and wine, which are the two elementary foods of humanity.”10 For this reason, he says, the Lord’s Supper represents the consummatio mundi, as the consumption by the community of basic, worldly foods corresponds to the eschatological consummation of the world by the love of God. Jüngel now turns to discuss baptism and the Lord’s Supper in more detail. We will follow his analysis closely, referring to the other sacramental texts where necessary.

A. Baptism as the sacramental celebration of unio cum Christo Upon reading Jüngel’s exposition of baptism in our chapter from El Ser Sacramental, we are immediately struck by the difference in style and tone between this text and the much earlier “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” which, apart from the analyses on the CD IV/4 fragment, is his only other extensive treatment of the doctrine of baptism. The 1969 text is indeed a thoroughgoing critique, as there we find Jüngel intensely engaged with a number of traditional approaches to baptismal theology. In particular, Jüngel appears in “Zur Kritik . . .” to be highly suspicious of Ibid., p. 79. Eberhard Jüngel, “Der evangelisch verstandene Gottesdienst,” in Wertlose Wahrheit—Zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens. Theologische Erörterungen III, 2. Auflage, p. 309, Thesis 6.12 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 9 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 79. 10 Ibid. We should note that, apart from this text and some brief comments in “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” Jüngel has little to say concerning the sacramental elements. 7 8

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commonly used sacramental concepts and rhetoric, even though it is clear from his exposition that he affirms that the one who is baptized is “separated from sin”11 and “irrevocably united to the one body of Christ”12 in the event of baptism. Again, his concern in this early text is the fear that a sacramental understanding of baptism might encroach upon the unique sacramentality of Jesus Christ. By contrast, in our chapter from El Ser Sacramental, we discover many of the same material claims from the earlier text, though here without any polemic against the employment of the category of sacrament to describe the event of baptism. Indeed, here Jüngel appears quite confident in and comfortable with the traditional concepts and categories of sacramental theology. We encounter this almost immediately in the second of the 11 proposals that Jüngel offers concerning baptismal theology. He asserts that: In baptism grace is communicated in the event of baptizing . . . In baptism the individual is sealed for God in the truth of the gospel, which he believes together with all Christians. The individual who is baptized belongs irrevocably to Jesus Christ and is a participant in the freedom of the children of God that was caused by the death and resurrection of the same Jesus. Baptized into the death of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6.3), the old man of sin is crucified together with sin, and by this has become liberated from sin (Rom. 6.6a). This liberty frees us from the past of sin that pursues us and opens for us the future for a life with God (Rom. 6.10ff) and for a life in communion with believers as members of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12.12ff). Therefore, by means of baptism man is received into the church . . .13

The passage is remarkable not least because of Jüngel’s employment of scripture references to support his argument. In fact, he employs Christian scripture similarly throughout El Ser Sacramental, a feature that sets this text in marked contrast to the earlier sacramental writings, in all of which we observe a paucity of engagements with the biblical evidences for particular claims. Jüngel, we should note, does not bolster his references with exegetical analyses or support from ancient or modern commentators.Nevertheless, it is helpful to know what Jüngel, “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” in Barth-Studien, p. 311, Thesis 2.3 (Zürich; Köln: Benziger, and Mohn: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1982). 12 Ibid., p. 310, Thesis 2.2. 13 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, pp. 80–81. 11

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biblical texts he has in mind when making his proposals on baptism. Also, in this present passage it is clear that Jüngel, again, conceives baptism as an event that is effectual for the one who is baptized. Baptism communicates grace, seals the individual for God, binds the one who is baptized to Jesus Christ, makes he or she a participant in the freedom of the gospel, crucifies the old man of sin and liberates the individual from sin, and opens up the one who is baptized to eschatologically reconciled relationships with God and with others. In Jüngel’s third and fourth proposals, he explicitly connects the question of baptism to the doctrine of justification. First, he asserts that since God in Christ does not withdraw justification—which is promised in baptism to all men and in particular to each individual—from the impious, and since the believer has been irrevocably established in the grace of God through baptism, we see that baptism cannot be repeated.14

For Jüngel, baptism, like the forensic declaration of justification, has a lasting validity for the being of the baptized believer, such that its salvific effectiveness is not nullified by ongoing impiety or grievous sin. Baptism, he argues, “has such a fundamental meaning for the one who is baptized that the Christian life in its totality could be defined as a permanent call to return to the communion of life with God and to faith in unconditionally justifying love.”15 Moreover, Jüngel proposes that, because baptism is the church’s celebration of the justifying grace of God, the event of baptism “is a fundamental turning point in life for the one who is baptized.”16 Jüngel does not in the text explicitly claim that the justification of the sinner occurs through baptism. However, the idea that baptism is conceived as a turning point in the life of the believer, together with the assertion that baptism establishes the believer in the justifying grace of God, suggests that the celebration of baptism and the event of justification cannot for Jüngel be neatly distinguished. Nor, for that matter, can the action of baptism be differentiated from faith in the gospel, as he later describes the two as “inseparable.”17 This is an altogether different argument than what we find, for example, in “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” where Jüngel declares 16 17 14 15

Ibid., p. 81. Emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 81–82. Ibid., p. 83.

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unequivocally that faith necessarily precedes baptism, which itself is carried out on the basis of “a gracious commandment (necessitas praecepti), the following of which is possible and meaningful for the believer alone.”18 By contrast, in El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel does not at all describe baptism as an imperative of freedom that corresponds, as a faithful human action, to the indicative of the gospel. Rather, throughout our section, baptism is identified in the strongest possible terms as a sacrament that indeed effects what it signifies. Again, the discrepancy between these essays is best explained as a result of Jüngel’s discovery of the idea of representative action, which furnishes him with a way to address the problem of the relation of divine and human agency in the sacramental events without divesting baptism and the Lord’s Supper of a sacramental character. It is self-evident from the entire thrust of the argument in El Ser Sacramental that, for Jüngel, Jesus Christ is the primary actor, the lone “producer,”19 whose actions in baptism and the Lord’s Supper are passively, but creatively celebrated in faith by the worshipping community.20 Jüngel next turns to the question of the relation between baptism “with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Mt. 3.11) and baptism with water, and, while his comments here are rather brief, we can observe that his account of this issue is considerably different from the approach of Barth as outlined in the CD IV/4 fragment. Barth, we may recall from our synopsis of “Karl Barths Lehre von der Taufe,” draws a strict differentiation between baptism with the Holy Spirit and baptism with water, and does so on the basis of an equally rigorous distinction between divine and human action. Consequently, Barth conceives baptism with the Holy Spirit as an exclusively divine act carried out by a divine actor, and baptism with water as an exclusively human act carried out by human actors. For the Barth of the fragment, baptism with water is a human ethical action shorn of any sacramental character, since to call water Jüngel, “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” p. 309. See the paragraph on pages 309–10 for Jüngel’s explanation of the thesis that faith necessarily precedes the event of baptism. As we have seen, though, Jüngel does not suggest that this way of describing baptism entails that baptism is a purely symbolic, human action. Indeed, on the very next page of the essay Jüngel explains that baptism, though an ineluctably human action, is an event through which “the active subject . . . Jesus Christ” (p. 311) acts upon the one who believes. Again, as we have proposed, this somewhat self-conflicting account of sacramental agency in this and other early texts is later clarified in Jüngel’s discussions of representative liturgical action. 19 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 93. 20 See ibid., p. 88–89, for his reiteration of the idea of representative action, according to which Jesus Christ presents himself in the “purely recept(ive)” celebrations (p. 88) of the church. 18

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baptism a sacrament would confuse divine and human action, and divine and human actors. On the contrary, in our section from El Ser Sacramental, we find that, while Jüngel acknowledges Matthew’s claim that the baptism carried out by Jesus is a baptism “with the Holy Spirit and with fire” and thus not with water, he does not consequently propose that this distinction entails that water baptism is a sheer human action. He asserts, rather, that the element of water, “when it is added to the word of the Gospel, becomes a ‘sacrament’ that effects and represents both the death of the old man and the life, now purified of sins, of the one who has been baptized.”21 Jüngel’s sixth and seventh proposals address the relation of baptism to the community and unity of the church. His sixth point is worth quoting in full, as it exhibits the connection that Jüngel draws between baptism, election, revelation, and church unity: Baptism testifies to and communicates the original decision of God in favor of man, which was carried out in the history of Jesus Christ and is proclaimed in the word of the gospel. It is thus a matter of the revelation of the fullness of the love of God, which is promised to every person, such that the baptized become aware [in baptism] that they are irrevocably united within the community of the faithful. That is, the one who receives this sacrament and affirms in faith the love of God is reconciled to God through Jesus Christ and is, at the same time, united to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. As a bond of unity (Eph. 4.3–8), baptism has a fundamental ecumenical importance, as it obliges the divided churches to reach agreements that give force to the unity of the body of Christ.22

This is a fascinating passage for several reasons. First, we see that, while Jüngel secures the events of Jesus Christ as the actualization in history of the primal decision of election, he identifies baptism as the testimony to, communication of, and even revelation of the “fullness of the love of God” that is displayed in the world in Jesus Christ. From what we have observed thus far in our study concerning the idea of representative action, such claims do not entail that, as a purely human action, baptism testifies to, communicates, and reveals God’s decision to be himself only pro nobis. Rather, Jesus Christ is conceived as the primary actor in the sacramental events, whose action alone produces Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 82. Ibid., pp. 82–83.

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that which is put into effect in and through the receptive human actions of the sacramental celebrations. Hence, “a matter of . . . revelation” does mean that baptism is some secondary mode of God’s self-revelation alongside the primary mode of the person of Christ. Baptism, rather, and also the Lord’s Supper and the proclamation of the gospel, can be called events of revelation because Jesus Christ presents himself in worship in the representative actions of the church. What is also interesting here is Jüngel’s proposal that baptism raises in the baptized the awareness of their irrevocable unity with other believers in the community of the church. This unity among individual believers that constitutes the church means, in turn, that baptism “has a fundamental ecumenical importance,” as it “obliges the divided churches to reach agreements that give force to the unity of the body of Christ.” Unfortunately, we are left to wonder how Jüngel conceives that such agreements might be forged and carried out, since he does not go on in this text or elsewhere to enlarge upon the ecumenical significance of baptism. We next discover the aforementioned positive remarks on infant baptism in which Jüngel declares that parents and godparents are responsible for discipling baptized infants toward a life of faith. As we have cited before, he comments that: The baptism of infants should not conceal the character of faith that baptism possesses. Baptism and faith are inseparable. The parents and godparents [of the baptized infant], in the same way as the community, assume responsibility for the Christian life that is opened up to the one who receives baptism, and they provide the presuppositions for the growth of faith, for the freedom of a personal confession of faith, for the joy of life in church and in the community, and for participation in the same.23

The passage is worth quoting at length again, not only because it contrasts his earlier rejection of infant baptism in “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe” but also because it highlights some of the aspects of the Christian life that, he contends, is initiated in the event of baptism. It is especially important to note that here the Christian life is implicitly identified as a process, a “growth” in the faith that unfolds during the course of a lifetime. Ibid., pp. 83–84.

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For Jüngel, baptism indeed “interrupts the world of the individual and its values,”24 but does so precisely in order to set the believer on a new course in the world. Jüngel now returns to the theme of the union with Christ that occurs in baptism and to the metaphor of the coming city of God. First, he declares that the Spirit of God is at work in baptism both to unite the one who is baptized to Jesus Christ and also to intensify that union. It is important to note that this is the only location in Jüngel’s writings in which he explicitly addresses the Holy Spirit’s role in the sacramental events. To be sure, this anomalous statement is unlikely to allay Wainwright’s justifiable assessment that Jüngel has paid inadequate attention to the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation and in the Christian life.25 Additionally, we can only guess how this claim might or might not reflect Jüngel’s late trinitarian thinking, since he does not explain in the text the nature of the Holy Spirit’s action in baptism, nor, perhaps more importantly, the relation of the Spirit’s action in the economy of salvation to the action of Jesus Christ. Still, it is interesting to observe that Jüngel here refers to the work of the Spirit in baptism, having previously neglected this theme in his writings on sacrament. Jüngel employs the eschatological image of the coming city of God to elaborate the nature of the union with Christ that is effected in baptism through the agency of the Holy Spirit. In the event of baptism, he asserts, “the whole community, together with the one who is baptized, realizes the fact that we do not have in this world a lasting city, but are on the way to the city that is to come (Heb. 13.14).”26 Baptism, as “the starting point of the Christian life,” is “the sacrament of the beginning of the journey” to the coming city of God.27 Additionally, Jüngel proposes that, because baptism is the rite of initiation into the Christian community, it “is fundamental to the mission of Christians and to their service to the world.”28 Jüngel concludes the section of El Ser Sacramental on baptism by making a series of comments on the form of the celebration of baptism. First, he states that baptism with water must be “administered in the name of the one Ibid., 78. See Geoffrey Wainwright, “Church and Sacrament(s),” in ed. John B. Webster, The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in his Sixtieth Year, pp. 98–99 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 26 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 84. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 24 25

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and triune God” and must conclude with the benedictory prayer to the Holy Spirit.29 Baptism, moreover, “should be carried out in such a way that the one who is baptized is either immersed in water or has water poured over him,” as such actions symbolize both the salvific sharing of the individual in the death and burial of Jesus Christ and the purification of the believer from sin that takes place in sanctification.30 Finally, Jüngel once again acknowledges, though does not elaborate upon, the ecumenical significance of baptism by quoting the Lima Report of the Faith and Order Commission on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry: “Therefore, our one baptism into Christ constitutes a call to the churches to overcome their divisions and visibly manifest their fellowship.”31

B. The Lord’s Supper as the sacramental celebration of Christ’s gracious provisions for the road Jüngel’s exposition of the Lord’s Supper in our chapter from El Ser Sacramental is divided into three sections covering the following material: (1) some initial “exegetical questions”32 on the Eucharist; (2) the importance for the theology of the Lord’s Supper of the New Testament images of the church as the body of Christ and as the pilgrim community that is on its way to the coming city of God; and, (3) the implications of the idea of the Lord’s Supper as the sacramentum unitatis. (1) After a brief introduction to the section that contains an interesting exchange with Kasper, Jüngel turns to address the exegetical questions that he considers to be pertinent to the theology of the Lord’s Supper. It is not immediately self-evident from the text what Jüngel in fact has in mind by “exegetical” and “questions,” since in the passage he neither explicitly engages the biblical texts on the Lord’s Supper nor identifies any specific questions concerning the Eucharist that he intends to answer. Instead, what Jüngel attempts to do in the subsection is to reconstruct, interestingly without direct Ibid. Ibid., pp. 84–85. 31 Ibid., p. 85. The citation is from Commission on Faith and Order, Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry: Report of the Faith and Order Commission, World Council of Churches, Lima, Peru 1982, in Growth in Agreement: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level (ed. Harding Meyer and Lukas Vischer; New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 471, ¶ 6. 32 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 86. 29 30

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exegetical support, the early form of the celebration of the supper that emerged “in the primitive times after Easter.”33 Jüngel observes that this early form of the meal “has its roots in the meetings in which the earthly Jesus ate with his disciples, in his farewell supper,” and in those post-resurrection appearances of Jesus during which he dined with some of the 11.34 When read in light of his message concerning the coming Kingdom of God, these meals shared by Jesus and his disciples point to the eschatological character of the primitive form of the supper. Jüngel thus argues that, since “the nucleus of the crystallization of the supper was the departure of Jesus,” the primitive Lord’s Supper had “the character of anticipated participation in the eschatological supper.”35 In other words, because Jesus and his disciples knew that his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension were imminent, they celebrated in their meals the hope that they would again be together once Jesus had returned to establish the kingdom of God. And for Jüngel this anticipatory character remains highly significant for the church’s ongoing celebration of the supper, but only with Paul’s qualification that the church “proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11.26) each time it gathers to eat the bread and drink the cup. The Lord’s Supper, that is, involves both remembrance and anticipation, since “believers, when they celebrate the supper, look retrospectively upon the crucifixion, and, precisely so, anticipatively contemplate in advance the arrival of the Lord who was crucified.”36 It is important to take note of how different the sacramental eschatology that emerges in this passage appears when compared with much of the material that we have covered thus far in our study. Throughout our analysis, we have observed that the central motif of Jüngel’s sacramental eschatology is the interruptive word-event. According to Jüngel’s customary approach, when God comes to the world by coming-to-speech, he interrupts the life-continuity of the hearer of the word and opens the hearer to ontic possibilities that exceed the world’s actualities. The arrival of the “future” or the “new” in events of the word of God is thus oriented to the interruptive now rather than to any fixed event that is temporally future to the present. Jüngel’s writings on the kingdom of God are illustrative of the point, and are worth considering here 36 33 34 35

Ibid., p. 87. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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since he discusses the kingdom in our passage from El Ser Sacramental. As we have observed in preceding chapters, Jüngel proposes in his expositions of Jesus’ parables that the kingdom of God arrived in speech as speech in the events of Jesus’ parabolic proclamation. After the ascension of Jesus, the kingdom continues to interruptedly come to speech, only now in the church’s proclamation of the apostolic kerygma. Jüngel’s emphasis, then, is not on the “already” and “not yet” of the kingdom that was inaugurated by Jesus but is still chronologically future to the present, but rather on the sheer interruptive now of the coming to the world of the kingdom in events of speech. As we have mentioned, in the majority of Jüngel’s writings on sacrament, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are closely connected with if not explicitly categorized as word-events, and, as a result, the sacramental eschatology that we find in these texts retains the emphasis on the interruptive now. Jüngel accordingly states in “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” that “Jesus Christ, in his self-activity as the word of God that effects faith is . . . publicly breaking into the world (baptism) and secretly breaking into the world (Lord’s Supper).”37 Similarly, and as we have mentioned on many occasions, in “Sakrament und Repräsentation” he asserts that “that which deserves to be designated as sacramental is always an elementary interruption of the worldly continuity of life.”38 What is missing from these and most of the other writings on sacrament is the notion that that which interrupts the world in (here specifically) the Lord’s Supper is also somehow temporally future to the present. Aside from our passage in El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel does not appear interested in the eschatological banquet and in the church’s anticipatory celebration of the future meal that occurs in the present in the Lord’s Supper. And, unfortunately, we are not given any clues, neither in this text nor elsewhere, to explain why the eschatological image of the messianic banquet is now pertinent to Jüngel’s description of the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless, this passage highlights one of the most important points of our analysis of El Ser Sacramental, namely, that in this text Jüngel constructs a more nuanced and in fact altogether more cogent account of the relation of the sacraments to time. Jüngel still maintains in the text that God interruptedly relates to the world through the sacramental Eberhard Jüngel, “Das Sakrament—Was ist das?” EvTh 26 (1966), p. 37. Eberhard Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” in Ganz werden. Theologische Erörterungen V, p. 277 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

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events. But he also asserts that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are pregnant with possibilities for the whole of ecclesial existence as the church tarries through the course of the world. We continue to observe this nuanced approach to sacramental time as we move forward in the essay. Jüngel asserts that the significance and effectiveness of the Lord’s Supper result from “the self-presentation [in the sacrament] of the crucified Christ, which was made possible by his resurrection from the dead and his ascension to the right hand of God.”39 This self-presentation “in, with, and under the bread and wine”40 corresponds to the church’s receptive representative actions of anamnesis, anticipation, and epiclesis. While Jesus Christ is the primary actor and producer in the Lord’s Supper, the church, in its creative passivity, celebrates the self-presentation of Jesus Christ in the Lord’s Supper by recalling the salvific actions of his cross and resurrection, anticipating the promise of his second coming, and praying for the immediacy of the Holy Spirit’s presence in the present. We thus see that, for Jüngel, all three modes of creaturely time—past, present, and future—are incorporated into the sacramental celebration. And, he reiterates that the “fundamental disposition” of the church in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is one of “pure reception,” such that the church’s actions of remembering the past, anticipating the future, and praying for the Spirit’s present coming are in no way gifts presented to God (i.e. sacrifices), but are rather creatively passive receptions of God’s self-giving.41 Moreover, Jüngel asserts that the believer, in receiving the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, also “receives himself in a new way: he is able to begin again with himself.”42 (2) Jüngel next turns to the question of the “relation between the Lord’s Supper and the essence of the church.”43 In order to answer this question, he cautiously identifies the sacramental implications of two important images of the church from the New Testament, namely, the church as the body of Christ and as the pilgrim community that is on its way to the coming city of God. According to Jüngel, when the church is understood from the image of the body of Christ, the Lord’s Supper, in turn, signifies “the intensification of the 41 42 43 39 40

Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 88. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid.

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communion—both individual and ‘collective’—that exists between believers that belong to the body of Christ and their Lord: the intensification of the union cum Christo, which is constituted indeed in faith and in baptism.”44 We recall from our analysis of the section of the chapter from El Ser Sacramental on baptism Jüngel’s assertion that, in baptism, the Holy Spirit “unites the one who is baptized with Jesus Christ and intensifies that union.”45 The Lord’s Supper, we may therefore say, further intensifies the union between the believer and Christ that is established and intensified in an original and unrepeatable way in baptism. And the telos of these further intensifications, the “ultimate consequence of the Lord’s Supper,” is “the unio mystica between the Creator and the creature.”46 Given his hesitations expressed on numerous occasions elsewhere concerning the patristic and modern forms of the doctrine of deification,47 we may hazard a guess that Jüngel conceives the unio mystica as a union in which God remains fully divine and humanity remains fully human. In any case, we should note that this is a rare occurrence in Jüngel’s theology of the employment of the concept of unio to describe the ontology of salvation. Jüngel is particularly interested in the sacramental implications of the image of the church as the pilgrim community that is journeying to the coming city of God, an image that is found in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “Here we do not have a lasting city, but we are on the way to the city that is to come” (13.14). Jüngel proposes that: From this perspective [of the image of the church as a community on its way to the city of God], baptism can be conceived as the sacrament of the beginning of the journey. The one who has been baptized . . . begins in baptism the journey toward the city of God. Of course, for the journey toward the goal of the coming city, every individual that belongs to the city needs provisions for the road. In this perspective, the Lord’s Supper is the sacrament of provisions for the road, the sacrament that empowers believers and keeps them on their feet, even as they are beset by weaknesses and hounded by all sorts of temptations.48 46 47

Ibid. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 90. See, for example, the entirety of his argument in Jüngel, “On Becoming Truly Human”; and, also, idem, The Freedom of a Christian, pp. 24–26; and idem, Justification, p. 199f. 48 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 91. 44 45

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Moreover, the Lord’s Supper is the sacrament of provisions precisely because, in and through this event, Jesus Christ is “co-present” with his people as they journey toward the city of God. In the Lord’s Supper, Christ “strengthens the ecclesia pressa and renews the faith of believers who are weak and depressed.”49 Christ allows himself to be “grasped” and “consumed” in the sacramental meal, and, in doing so, draws intimately close to believers, “closer, in fact, than they can be to themselves.”50 We observe here, once again, an atypically robust account of the relation of the sacrament to creaturely time. Whereas Jüngel’s customary employment of the concept of interruption to describe sacramental time tends to stress the difference between the “now” of the sacrament and the chronological continuity of the life of the believer and the existence of the church, here the use of the image of the ecclesia pressa, the church that presses forward toward the coming city of God, and the identification of the Lord’s Supper as the sacrament of provisions emphasize the significance of the Eucharist for the lifetime of the believer and for the “advance in this world”51 of the church. Jüngel’s conception here of the Christian life, and thus also of the church’s existence in the world as a pilgrimage, suggests that the sacraments are meaningful and effectual beyond the liturgical events in which they occur. He does propose in the next paragraph that unsurpassable nearness of Christ in the Lord’s Supper “exceeds the limits of space and time”52—a statement that hints at the ontological distinction of possibility and actuality that marks his doctrine of justification. But while he typically elaborates such language with an emphasis on the interruptive character of God’s presence, in our passage the drawing near of Christ in the sacrament empowers the believer for the course of Christian existence on the way to the city of God. The Lord’s Supper, he therefore asserts, “is a matter of the justification and sanctification of the human person.”53 We simply do not find this explicit connection between the sacraments, the Christian life, and the process of sanctification in the other writings on sacrament. (3) In the final subsection of his argument on the Lord’s Supper, Jüngel tests some of the implications of the idea that the Lord’s Supper is the sacramentum 52 53 49 50 51

Ibid., p. 92. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Emphasis added.

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unitatis. Jüngel initiates his argument by observing that the “unsurpassable proximity” of Jesus in the bread and wine must be formulated both in the singular (i.e. in regard to the individual) and in the plural (i.e. in regard to the church as a “community of believers”54). In other words, just as Jesus Christ draws intimately near to the individual believer in the event of the Supper, so also he draws “nearer to his community and to his church than it can be to itself ”55 in the bread and wine. Jüngel proposes that this sacramental drawing near to the church has two necessary aspects. First, in the Lord’s Supper, Jesus Christ draws near to the community of believers “as they are congregated.”56 The Lord’s Supper, as a phenomenon of Christian worship, occurs in a multiplicity of times and locations. For Jüngel, Jesus Christ draws near during each time and at each location at which the Supper occurs, and therefore to each particular congregation that celebrates the meal. But, second, because Jesus Christ is “the center of all Christian communities” and thus “the center of all Christendom,”57 his intimate drawing near in the Lord’s Supper to the particular congregation must also encompass his drawing near to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. The Lord’s Supper is therefore significant and effectual both congregationally and ecumenically, both in a particular sense and in a universal sense. In precisely these two ways, Jüngel argues, the Lord’s Supper is the sacramentum unitatis. The Supper both signifies and effects the unity of the particular congregation as it gathers around the bread and wine in celebration. Likewise, through the Lord’s Supper, Jesus Christ works to “produce” the unity of all the churches that constitute universal Christendom.58 Jüngel spends the rest of the section expanding upon this idea of the Supper as the sacramentum unitatis, and it is interesting to observe how the two aspects of sacramental unity function in his argument. It is clear from the whole of the passage that Jüngel is persuaded that the Lord’s Supper is what we might call the ecumenical sacrament; that is, the sacramental event through which God heals the breaches between divided churches. At the same time, the thrust of Jüngel’s argument, particularly his conclusion, is oriented toward the unity that occurs in the midst of the gathered congregation as individuals are lifted 57 58 54 55 56

Ibid., p. 93. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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up out of themselves and are elevated toward God, such that the unio cum Christo of the believer is intensified.59 While Jüngel does not explicitly state how these two aspects of unity are related, we get an idea of his conception by following the logic of his analysis. Jüngel begins by pointing out that Lumen gentium identifies the church, rather than the Eucharist, as the sacramentum unitatis. He then offers the interesting observation that the passage of Lumen gentium in question mentions neither the unity of the church (“the church is in Christ . . . a sacrament . . . of the unity of all humanity”60) nor the role of the Eucharist in the church’s universal sacramentality. Jüngel next notes that Kasper, having made some similar observations concerning Lumen gentium, proposes that the Eucharist is the sacrament of the unity of the church and, as such, plays a pivotal role in the church’s function as the sacrament of unity for the world. Jüngel suggests that this subtle difference in interpretation of the idea of sacramentum unitatis between, on the one hand, the conciliar theologians, and, on the other, the influential Catholic theologian Kasper, points to an abiding ambiguity concerning the meaning of the concept. What precisely is the sacrament of unity, and what is unified through the event of the sacrament? Both the text of Lumen gentium and Kasper’s study refer to Cyprian and Augustine in support of their respective views of the concept, and, likewise, Jüngel now turns to some statements from these patristic theologians to explain his own use of sacramentum unitatis. The passage, though somewhat opaque, is nevertheless extremely illuminating. According to Jüngel’s interpretation, Cyprian appears to have restricted his employment of the concept of sacramentum unitatis to the discussion of the unity of the church. That is, for Cyprian the unity of the church is itself sacramental. Cyprian’s use here of the Latin sacramentum is rooted in the word’s etymological origins in the Greek mysterion. Accordingly, “in his writing De catholicae ecclesiae unitate [Cyprian] speaks of the ‘sacramentum unitatis’ as being based upon Ephesians 4:4–6,” in which Paul refers to “the ‘holy mystery of unity’ (sacramentum unitatis) by proclaiming one body, one spirit, one hope and one calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.”61 Ibid., p. 97. LG 1, DEC, p. 849. 61 Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental, p. 95. 59 60

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Moreover, citing Cyprian’s Epistle to his son Magnus, Jüngel suggests that, for the patristic theologian, the sacramental unity of the church is visible and is attached to the sign of the bishop. For just this reason, Cyprian warns in the Epistle that those who disesteem a bishop appointed through proper channels threaten the inseperabile unitatis sacramentum.62 In marked contrast, Augustine reserves the concept of sacramentum unitatis for his discussion of  the Eucharist, and thus not for his doctrine of the church or conception of the church’s unity. Additionally, Augustine is, in general, wary of suggesting that the church in its entirety can be united at any present instance through the event of the sacrament, since “it is not possible for all Christians to gather around one table of the Lord and to participate in one supper of the Lord”63 at any given time and place. Rather, Augustine deemphasizes the notion that the Eucharist is a visible sign of the present visible unity of the one church and instead stresses that it is the Supper itself that effects that unity. This difference between Cyprian and Augustine is extraordinarily important for grasping Jüngel’s concept of sacramental unity that emerges in the present passage. As we remarked in our unit on ecclesiology, Jüngel is suspicious of ecumenical models that call for the full visible and undifferentiated unity of church bodies. Consequently, here he rejects Cyprian’s thesis that the one church, specifically, the church marked by the visible sign of bishops in apostolic succession, is the sacramentum unitatis. Rather, Jüngel picks up Augustine’s conception and claims that the Lord’s Supper is the true sacrament of unity insofar as it effects unity between believers. Again quoting Augustine, he asserts that “God ‘through the bread realizes harmonious agreement in his own household.’”64 It appears from the overall thrust of the passage that, for Jüngel, this relationship of Eucharistic peace happens first between the believer and God as the intensification of the believer’s unio cum Christo, then among the members of the particular congregation gathered around the table, and from there spreads out to the divided congregations and church bodies of Christendom. This harmony is possible because, through the Lord’s Supper, God himself imparts the two ingredients necessary for true Christian unity; Ibid. Ibid., p. 96. 64 Ibid. 62 63

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namely, “Eucharistic joy” and hearts “elevated . . . next to the one and triune God.”65 All of this suggests that, for Jüngel, the Eucharist, as the sacramentum unitatis, is the sacramental means through which God effects unity among divided Christians. And this in turn entails that a vital avenue for ecumenical convergence is Eucharistic hospitality and shared table fellowship. *  *  * We will reserve our comments on the implications of this chapter in El Ser Sacramental for the whole of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament for the conclusion to this part. In the meantime, we do well to summarize the principal observations from our analysis of this material. (1) While Jüngel indeed argues in El Ser Sacramental that Jesus Christ is the unique and preeminent sacrament of God for the world, it is abundantly clear from the fourth chapter that he also conceives baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacramental. The language that Jüngel here employs to describe these liturgical events is exceptionally muscular, especially when we compare this text to the other writings on the sacraments. Although Jüngel has always conceded that Jesus Christ is the primary actor in the sacramental events, in many of the earlier texts we find him hesitant to employ traditional sacramental terminology in his doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In El Ser Sacramental, however, Jüngel declares that water baptism and the Eucharist communicate grace and the presence of Jesus Christ, seal the individual for union with God, permanently bind the one who is baptized to Christ, make the believer into a member of the church and a participant in the freedom of the gospel, set each Christian upon the path of truth, strengthen them for the pilgrimage toward the coming city of God, etc. (2) While Jüngel does not spend too much time in the fourth chapter elaborating a theory of sacramental agency, it is apparent from the whole of his argument in El Ser Sacramental that he conceives that, in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, Jesus Christ is the primary actor, the sacramental “producer,”66 who works in and through these events and, as such, renders them effective for the communication of justifying grace. For Jüngel, the human participants in baptism and the Lord’s Supper indeed act, but do so only according to Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 93.

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the fundamental passivity of justification. The human actors, that is, do not in any way produce that which the sacraments effect, but rather receive the sacramental effects precisely by celebrating, in faith, the uniquely salvific being and actions of Jesus Christ. (3) We observe that Jüngel continues to situate baptism and the Lord’s Supper in relation to justification, though his description of this relation is somewhat different than what we find in the earlier texts on the sacraments. Both in “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe”67 and in Justification,68 he argues that justifying faith precedes baptism, and on this basis suggests that believer’s baptism is the correct liturgical procedure. By contrast, in El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel draws an extremely robust connection between baptism and justification, going so far as to imply that justifying grace is communicated through baptism. And, for just this reason, he is not at all hesitant in the text to promote the practice of paedobaptism, even offering some sage counsel for parents and godparents. Furthermore, the employment of the concept of unio cum Christo in the chapter, to which he appeals to describe the effectualness of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper, is unprecedented in Jüngel’s writings as a way to explain the ontology of justification. Baptism effects and intensifies this union in an original way, while the Lord’s Supper further intensifies this union. And, while Jüngel almost certainly has in mind a union in which God remains fully God and the human person remains fully human, the application of this motif implies a much stronger connection between God and the believer than what we often find in his writings on justification. (4) Finally, of pivotal importance for our analysis is the unprecedented way that Jüngel speaks in El Ser Sacramental of the relation of the sacraments to time. We observed that he conceives the Lord’s Supper as an event that involves the church’s receptive representative actions of anamnesis, anticipation, and epiclesis. The church looks back to the past by remembering the actions of Jesus Christ in the crucifixion and resurrection, looks forward to his second coming to the world in glory, and prayerfully looks in the present for the immediate presence of the Holy Spirit. As such, all three modes of creaturely time are essential to the celebration of the Supper. Additionally, Jüngel employs See Jüngel, “Zur Kritik des sakramentalen Verständnisses der Taufe,” pp. 310–11. See Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 233–34.

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the image of the church as the wandering people of God to suggest that both the Christian life of the individual and the existence of the whole church is a pilgrimage. Sacramentally, this entails that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are pertinent to the entire span of the Christian’s lifetime in the world. Baptism initiates the pilgrimage of the Christian life by opening up for the believer the way in the world that leads to the city of God. The Lord’s Supper supplies the necessary strength for this pilgrimage, insofar as Jesus Christ is always present in the Supper to continually empower His people.

Conclusion to Part Four

In his essay on “Church and Sacrament(s)” in Jüngel’s theology, Wainwright questions the tenability of Jüngel’s ecclesiology and theology of the sacraments. While not wishing in any way to diminish Jüngel’s “positive insistence on the sacramentality of Christ and the sole glory of God,”1 the highly critical tone of Wainwright’s presentation betrays his suspicion that Jüngel’s ecclesiology and sacramental theology to date may lead into a theological cul-de-sac. Accordingly, Wainwright concludes his essay by suggesting that Jüngel might “enhance” his theses on church and sacrament by engaging some of the great confessional traditions of ecclesiology and sacramental theology. Along these lines, Wainwright proposes that Jüngel might do well to “revisit Luther with an eye to the complementary counterpart to his view of Christ as the one Sacrament.”2 He goes on to explain: According to Luther in . . . The Babylonian Captivity, what are traditionally called sacraments appear as “sacramental signs”—and not “signs” only, but precisely “sacramental” signs. The way remains open there for an account of the sacraments that allows them to participate in the reality which they signify.3

Wainwright evidently fears that Jüngel insists upon the unique and preeminent sacramentality of Jesus Christ to the exclusion of the sacramentality of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. By returning to Luther’s definition of the sacraments Geoffrey Wainwright, “Church and Sacrament(s),” in ed. John B. Webster, The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in his Sixtieth Year, p. 104 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 1

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in The Babylonian Captivity, Jüngel, he suggests, might rescue the sacraments from this exclusion. Mottu, writing several years prior to Wainwright, takes an altogether different approach to the problem of the sacraments in Jüngel’s theology. Mottu compares Jüngel’s comments on baptism in “Das Sakrament—was ist das?” to those made by Barth in the CD IV/4 fragment. He concludes that Jüngel, while retaining Barth’s Christological reading of the sacraments, nevertheless advances beyond Barth by insisting that, as the sacramental signs of the church, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper “do not compete with the word of God, nor are they merely appendices to it, but rather say the same word in a different way.”4 For Jüngel, Mottu argues, “the sacrament is more than an attestation . . .; it is a real communication that takes place in the world and is connected to reality.”5 In short, whereas Barth in the fragment implies that the word of God stands over against the putatively visible words of the sacraments, Jüngel, according to Mottu at least, employs a form of the concept of revelation that allows him to draw a closer connection between the word and the sacrament, and thus also between Jesus Christ, the one sacrament, and the sacramental signs of church, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. We concur with Mottu’s analysis, since, as we demonstrated above, even in his earliest writings on the sacraments, Jüngel appears to insist that Jesus Christ is himself the primary agent in the church’s celebrations. Wainwright and Mottu, commenting upon the same text, arrive at very different conclusions concerning Jüngel’s sacramental theology. This interpretive divergence, we suggest, is due primarily to the inconsistencies in Jüngel’s earliest writings on the sacraments between his material claims and certain formal components of his argumentation. We have observed, for example, that, while Jüngel indeed declares in “Das Sakrament . . .” and “Zur Kritik . . .” that Jesus Christ communicates himself in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, he is extremely wary of describing this self-communication with the help of traditional sacramental categories and concepts. In both of these texts, he claims that the celebrant of the sacrament is the passive recipient of divine grace, yet at the same time asserts that he wishes to distance his own reading from a “sacramental understanding” of baptism and the Eucharist. Mottu is surely correct in his observation that the early texts in fact exhibit Henry Mottu, “Les Sacrements selon Karl Barth et Eberhard Jüngel,” FV 88 (1989), p. 55. Ibid., p. 53.

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a strongly sacramental reading of the sacraments. And yet, this reading is largely obfuscated by Jüngel’s refusal in these early texts to employ the term “sacrament” for baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We have demonstrated that, by the mid-1980s, and in the context of his explorations of Schleiermacher’s theology of worship, Jüngel, while retaining a robust emphasis on the unique sacramentality of the being of Jesus Christ, now concedes that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are in fact sacraments. Likewise, a decade later and in his account of “Word and sacrament” in Justification, he asserts that these celebrations are indeed sacraments insofar as, in their occurrences, “the effectual divine Word turns into an action in the world . . . and so becomes a concrete reality.”6 In “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” he explains that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are sacraments precisely because “in the action of baptism [Jesus Christ] is the subject of the baptizing; in the action of the Eucharist his self-imaging and self-communication occurs in, with, and under wine and bread.”7 And, in El Ser Sacramental, he appears completely comfortable with the idea that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are sacraments that mediate the self-communicative presence of Jesus Christ. Returning to Wainwright’s comment that Jüngel might benefit from engaging some of the great traditions of ecclesiology and sacramental theology, it is worth noting that, in El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel provides detailed analyses of Augustine, Thomas, and Luther. Interestingly, in this text it is these three theologians (and, significantly, not the Barth of the CD IV/4 fragment) that provide for Jüngel the conceptual resources for constructing a rigorous theology of the sacraments. And, in his conclusion to El Ser Sacramental, he quotes Melanchthon’s Apology at length in order to demonstrate the congruity of his analysis with the Lutheran confessional tradition. In short, Otto Hermann Pesch’s remark that Jüngel’s early theology of the sacraments “is not representative” of confessional Lutheranism8 does not appear to apply to his most recent work on this topic. In the preceding units, we expressed our hesitations concerning Jüngel’s use of the concept of interruption to describe the nature of sacramental time. However, Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 232. 7 Eberhard Jüngel, “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” in Ganz werden. Theologische Erörterungen V, p. 283 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 8 Otto Hermann Pesch, “Das katholische Sakramentsverständnis im Urteil gegenwärtiger evangelische Theologie,” in hgs., Eberhard Jüngel, Johannes Wallmann, und Wilfred Werbeck Verifikationen. Festschrift für G. Ebeling zum 70. Geburtstag, p. 332 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1982). 6

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and as we noted above, El Ser Sacramental exhibits a more nuanced and coherent approach to this topic than what we find in previously published texts. Although Jüngel does indeed appeal to the concept of interruption to explain certain aspects of the category of sacrament,9 his description of the Christian life and the existence of the church as a pilgrimage, combined with his employment of the concepts of anamnesis, anticipation, and epiclesis to express the temporal modes of the church’s actions, engenders a strikingly robust account of sacramental time. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are thus identified in El Ser Sacramental as both interruptions of the continuities of life and nexuses of the divine presence and the temporal and spatial continuities of the world. All of these remarks suggest that Jüngel’s most developed analyses on baptism and the Lord’s Supper that is found, as we have argued, in El Ser Sacramental, are deserving of a wider audience, as they may in fact serve as an important contribution to the ongoing contemporary discussions of the sacraments. Pesch’s comment is an indication that Jüngel, at least in connection to his early sacramental theology, was at one point perceived as something of a maverick whose thought evades classification according to confession or denomination. However, again we discover Jüngel writing in El Ser Sacramental a theology of the sacraments that fits quite comfortably into the tradition of confessional Lutheranism. We observe, for example, a robust account both of the relation of baptism and the Lord’s Supper to the event of justification and of the nature of the “real presence” of Jesus Christ “in, with, and under” the water, bread, and wine of the sacramental celebrations. Additionally, Jüngel retains in El Ser Sacramental the strong emphasis on the Christological determination of the category of sacrament that marks his earlier work. And, furthermore, Jüngel continues in the recent volume his earlier investigations of the relation of divine and human agency in the sacraments, here explicitly connecting this relation to the course of the Christian life and to the existence of the church that is on its way toward the coming city of God. Jüngel’s situation of these concerns within a conceptually traditional form of argumentation may make his proposals more palpable for his interlocutors.

See Eberhard Jüngel, El Ser Sacramental: En Perspectiva Evangélica (trans. Constantino Ruiz-Garrido; Salamanca: Ediciones Ségueme, 2007), pp. 18, 64, 97.

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Conclusion

Our investigation into Jüngel’s theology has uncovered a fascinating and, in many ways, insightful approach to the problem of sacrament. Along the course of our analysis, we have also highlighted some of the issues that remain unsettled in Jüngel’s writings on sacrament. In this concluding chapter, our task is to summarize the findings of our research and to make some closing remarks on Jüngel’s contribution to contemporary sacramental theology.

A. A summary of our findings We have demonstrated in this study that, on the whole, Jüngel’s explorations of the problem of sacrament exhibit a particular conception of the ontological structure of God’s relation to the world. For Jüngel, God is present and thus locatable in the world in the event of his self-disclosing, addressing, “relational”1 word. According to Jüngel, the event of the word of God always occurs as the interruption of the world and its continuities and actualities. The coming-to-speech of God in the event of his word shatters the worldly continuity of life, and is thus the crisis of the ordinary course of human existence. As we have shown, this interruptive structure of God’s coming to the world in coming-to-speech is a significant feature of Jüngel’s (1) description of the sacramental function of language, (2) Christological determination of the 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 (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 164. On the structure of God’s relation to the world in the event of his word, we direct the reader, once again, to the entirety of the passage in subsection 10 on pages 164–66.

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category of sacrament, (3) approach to the problem of the sacramentality of the church, and (4) phenomenology of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. (1) We considered in Part One Jüngel’s interesting claim that words of address function sacramentally vis-à-vis the hearer. For Jüngel, this sacramental character of the addressing word, which, he suggests, is characteristic of human language in general, is especially pertinent for the theological description of the word of God. We identified several aspects of Jüngel’s doctrine of the word of God that help to illuminate his conception of the word’s sacramentality. We observed that Jüngel rejects the Aristotelian distinction of form and content and, concomitantly, the Augustinian division of the world into signa and res significata as inappropriate hermeneutical agendas for understanding the phenomenon of the word. He argues instead that the presence and kingdom of God are not contents capable of abstraction from the word, but rather occur in the world as the event of the word. Moreover, Jüngel proposes that, in coming to the world in coming-to-speech, God relates to the world analogically as qualified by the analogy of advent. In the addressing word-event, that is, God draws intimately near to the world in such a way that the fundamental ontological difference between God and the world is eclipsed by the even greater similarity between them. For the hearer of this word, who is otherwise ensnared in the deadly, sinful, sham existence of self-correspondence, a new, relationally rich, ecstatic existence opens up in the encounter with God that takes place in the event of the word. In all of this, the interruptive structure of the word of God is pivotal, as it secures the notion that the word, when spoken in the world, brings with it existential possibilities that exceed the world’s actualities. (2) In our second unit, we examined Jüngel’s assertion that Jesus Christ is sacramental being in a unique and preeminent sense. We observed, first of all, that Jüngel’s quarrel with the Augustinian hermeneutics of signification is critical for his Christological determination of the category of sacrament, since, were the resurrected and ascended Christ separable from the word about him that joins to the element in order to make a sacrament, it would then be possible to receive the word, and thus also the sacrament, without actually encountering the one signified by the word. By carefully working through De Doctrina Christiana, Jüngel contends, with some conceptual help from Luther, that the hermeneutics of event correct this ontological hiatus presupposed by the Augustinian semiotics. Accordingly, Jesus Christ, who is

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the word of God, the gracious “Yes” of God to humanity, is the one who acts in the sacramental celebrations of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper precisely by presenting himself in the event of the addressing word. We argued that the interruptive character of this self-presenting word, which we further highlighted in our analysis of Jüngel’s exegetical study of the New Testament μυστήριον, reflects a structural motif that characterizes the whole of his Christology. By examining several of his contributions to the second quest for the historical Jesus, we demonstrated that, for Jüngel, both the earthly, historical Jesus and the resurrected and ascended Christ relate to the world and its continuities interruptedly. Jüngel’s Jesus of Nazareth is an otherworldly figure who burst onto the scene of late Second-Temple Judaism proclaiming eschatological word-events; his Christ of faith is a being in the event of the word who draws near to the world only in the addressing speech of the gospel. (3) In Part Three, our research demonstrated that this interruptive structure is especially prominent in Jüngel’s ecclesiology. We first observed that Jüngel, in his analyses of the church’s Wesenattribute of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, locates the being of the church in the interruptive word-events of worship, and thus over against the ministries, offices and officers, institutions, traditions, liturgies, etc. that mark the church’s existence in time. Our exploration of Jüngel’s identification of the church as the great signum sacramentalis affirmed this reading of his ecclesiology. Accordingly, we showed that Jüngel conceives the sacramentality of the church as located in the representative liturgical actions of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, in the events of which Jesus Christ, the one sacrament of God for the world, draws intimately and interruptedly near to the church by coming-to-speech. We concluded this part by suggesting that Jüngel’s consistent appeal to the concept of interruption for describing the sacramental being of the church raises some significant questions concerning the relation of the church to time. (4) In our final part, we closely inspected Jüngel’s doctrines of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We began by asserting what our analysis later confirmed; namely, that, in El Ser Sacramental, his most recent and comprehensive writing on the theology of sacrament, Jüngel, at least in his chapter on baptism and the Lord’s Supper, largely abandons his customary employment of the category of interruption to describe sacramental action in order to construct an account of baptism and the Lord’s Supper that highlights the importance of these

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celebrations both for the lifetime of the believer and for the church’s pilgrimage to the eschatological city of God. Our proposed reading of the texts on baptism and the Lord’s Supper suggested that this is indeed a rather late development in Jüngel’s sacramental theology, as, in the earlier texts up through the important “Sakrament und Repräsentation,” which we examined carefully in Chapter 11, the interruptive structure dominates his descriptions of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In our conclusion to the unit, we submitted that El Ser Sacramental, with its anomalously robust account of the relation of the sacrament to time housed in traditional sacramental terminology, deserves a broad audience, as it may serve as an important contribution to the contemporary discussions of sacramental theology.

B. Some concluding remarks on “sacrament” as “interruption” Leaving aside Jüngel’s mitigating analysis in the chapter on baptism and the Lord’s Supper in El Ser Sacramental, we may begin our closing comments by considering, once again, the interruptive structure that dominates his theology of sacrament. One advantage of describing God’s relation to the world in this manner is that it highlights the “irreducible newness”2 of the salvific word of God vis-à-vis the continuity of unconverted existence. While he does not always spell this out explicitly when he invokes the category of interruption, it is clear from the whole of his theology that Jüngel conceives the uninterrupted continuity of life as existence beneath the pall of sin, as the deadly, sham existence of self-relationship that results from the compulsive drive to justify the self through works.3 Described in these terms, the interruption is a salvific event; it interrupts not to destroy the continuity of life, but “to heal . . . by making possible and introducing an unbreakable fellowship with God.”4 Along similar lines, Webster comments that “converted existence . . . arises from a complete and radical interruption of the continuities of life . . . which at once John B. Webster, “Eschatology, Ontology and Human Action,” TJT 7.1 (1991), p. 5. See Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 80–81, and idem, “The Truth of Life.” 4 Jüngel, Justification, p. 81. 2 3

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judges and sets aside and also liberates for a truthful existence which entirely transcends the limitations of that which it replaces.”5 What emerges here is that Jüngel, to some extent at least, intends to use the concept of interruption in order to recover the true value of the interrupted continuity. Consider the rather puzzling statements in “The Truth of Life” that “human life occurs . . . when the continuity of earthly life and existence is interrupted”; “human life . . . is the interruption of the continuity of created life by the occurrence of truth”; “human life is understood ontologically as the interruption of the continuity of creaturely life by the occurrence of truth”; etc.6 Such statements leave the impression that Jüngel contrasts the interruptive event of the word with God’s act of creation and thus with human existence in the natural world. But elsewhere he makes clear that the effect of God’s interruptive “Yes” is “the togetherness of the creation with its Creator” and “the togetherness of the creation with the creation.”7 Creation therefore has its “good order,”8 but, because of the relationlessness of sin, is, in the same manner as fallen humanity, regressing along an entropic trajectory toward the terminal self-alienation of death. The word of God thus interrupts the actuality of creation, not in order to annihilate creation, but to perform precisely the opposite function; namely, to rescue creation from the annihilation imposed upon it by sin, and, just so, to introduce new life to that which was perishing by bringing creation into a proper relation to God and to itself. Spjuth can therefore correctly assert that, according to Jüngel, “God’s new-creating light does not mean the annihilation of actuality but rather that the true light of our actuality must be constituted in relationship to a possibility beyond its own potentials.”9 For precisely this reason, Catholic theologian Lieven Boeve, who has dedicated several short pieces and two monographs to unpacking the category 8

Webster, “Eschatology, Ontology and Human Action,” p. 5. Jüngel, “The Truth of Life,” p. 233. Jüngel, Justification, p. 105. Jüngel, “The Emergence of the New,” in ed. John B. Webster, trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and John B. Webster, Theological Essays II, p. 58 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 9 Roland Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel (Studia Theologica Ludensia, no. 51; Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), p. 82. Spjuth’s entire study is instructive for this positive use of interruption. 5 6 7

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of interruption,10 proposes that “a theology of ‘interruption’ paradoxically will consider the relation between Christian faith and contemporary context in terms of both continuity and discontinuity.”11 We likewise recall that, for Jüngel, the interruptive structure of God’s relation to the world is the structure of the analogy of advent, according to which the difference between God and the world must be seen in the light of the even greater similarity between them. Accordingly, Jüngel evidently does not intend for the category of interruption to posit an absolute hiatus between God and the world, nor between the saving word and the continuity of life. Still, our research has demonstrated that Jüngel’s application of the category of interruption to his description of sacramental being tends to emphasize the punctiliar and alien character of the sacrament (e.g. the word of God, Jesus’ parables or Jesus as parable, the church as sacramental sign, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper) to the exclusion of the concrete connection between the sacrament and the actuality of the world. The problem becomes especially acute when we consider Jüngel’s ubiquitous theologoumenon that God’s sacramental presence occurs in interruptive, self-disclosing word-events. Francis Watson argues that such a description of God’s revelatory presence as event necessitates “a radical disjunction between the disclosure situation and normal communicative speech”12 and “emphasizes the initial disruption at the expense of the subsequent integration.”13 Spjuth, slightly differently, contends that, in Jüngel’s ontology, the “divine newness and determination” of the interruptive word-event leaves “the actuality of the ordinary too much as it is.”14 All of this suggests that a theology of interruptive word-events ineluctably raises the question of the concreteness of the relation between the event of Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context (Louvain Theological & Pastoral Monographs 30; Louvain: Peeters Press, 2003); idem, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007); idem “The Shortest Definition of Religion: Interruption,” CV 66.3 (2004), pp. 299–322; and idem, “The Sacramental Interruption of Rituals of Life,” HeyJ 44.4 (2003), pp. 401–17. We should note that Boeve does not cite Jüngel in any of these writings. 11 Boeve, “The Sacramental Interruption of Rituals of Life,” p. 401. 12 Francis Watson, “Is Revelation an ‘Event’?” MoTh 10.4 (1994), p. 387. Watson, we should note, does not engage Jüngel’s theology in the essay, but instead remarks generally on the application of the category of event to the description of revelation. 13 Ibid., 389. 14 Roland Spjuth, “Redemption without Actuality: A Critical Interrelation between Eberhard Jüngel’s and John Milbank’s Ontological Endeavors,” MoTh 14.4 (1998), p. 514. 10

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the word and the interrupted continuity.15 We contend that, even though he makes a significant advance toward this end in El Ser Sacramental, Jüngel, on the whole, has not sufficiently answered this question. The result, as we have demonstrated, is a somewhat incoherent theology of sacrament. As we have argued, this unresolved question emerges in all four of the major headings of Jüngel’s theology of sacrament. In our analysis of his description of the sacramentality of the word, we proposed that Jüngel fails to clearly expound the character of the relation between the interrupting word and the ordinary discourse of the interrupted hearer. In our second part, we expressed our hesitations concerning Jüngel’s Christological application of the category of interruption, precisely because, in the course of doing so, he identifies both the earthly Jesus of history and the living Christ of faith as relating to the world only in the sheer event of the word. In our unit on the sacramentality of the church, we showed that Jüngel’s interruptive approach to ecclesiology raises questions concerning those aspects of the church that extend through time. And finally, while our exposition of El Ser Sacramental revealed that Jüngel, at least at a late stage in his career, is willing to turn to new metaphors in order to draw a more concrete connection between the sacramental celebrations and chronological time, our entire analysis in Part Four demonstrated that, in general, Jüngel conceives baptism and the Lord’s Supper as interruptive word-events, in the occurrences of which God draws near to the world, and to the church, precisely by coming-to-speech. We thus conclude that Jüngel has proposed an interesting and often insightful agenda for sacramental theology that is nevertheless burdened by the weight of its conceptual opacity.

See Dalferth’s incisive comments on this question in “God and the Mystery of Words,” JAAR 60.1 (1992), p. 92.

15

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Index Aerts, Lode   44n. 21, 45n. 30, 46n. 35 analogy,  analogia entis  30–6, 31n. 11, 48, 56–7, 64n. 11, 200, 205 analogia fidei  30, 101 analogy of action  202–5 analogy of advent  23–37, 38–9, 41, 45, 49, 82, 101, 115, 126, 168, 169, 200, 205 Anderson, Charles   44n. 22, 89n. 4 anthropomorphism  38n. 1 apostolic succession  145–52 Auer, Johann  112–13, 123, 142, 157n. 13 Augustine  34, 34n. 26, 61–2, 61n. 4, 62n. 6, 63–73, 64n. 11, 67n. 24, 70n. 39, 71n. 43, 72n. 45, 75, 78, 91n. 17, 223, 229, 232–3 Aulén, Gustaf  130n. 39 baptism  5, 66–7, 75, 75n. 61, 76, 88, 88n. 2, 112, 117–18, 125–6, 125n. 22, 132, 160, 169, 175–7, 179–96, 200–2, 206–8, 208–15, 211n. 18, 219, 224–6, 227–30, 233–4 believer’s baptism  184, 225 paedobaptism  182, 188, 213–14, 225 Barth, Karl  2, 3, 12, 31n. 11, 109n. 95, 112, 112n. 1, 112n. 2, 113, 147n. 99, 157, 179, 180–4, 189–91, 190n. 40, 190n. 41, 196, 208, 211, 228, 229 Bielby, James  90n. 12 Bielfeldt, Dennis  51n. 53, 160n. 28 Birmelé, André  156n. 7 Boettcher, Reinhard  136n. 58 Boeve, Lieven  235–6 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  2, 5 Bornkamm, Günther   44n. 22, 80, 80n. 11, 90n. 11 Braaten, Carl   89n. 4, 131n. 40, 141n. 79, 142, 149n. 108, 150, 151 Bruce, F. F.  147n. 98 Brunner, Peter  5–6 Bultmann, Rudolf  2, 3, 12, 89–94, 89n. 7, 92n. 20, 110 Cartesian ‘I think’  24–5, 54 Cary, Phillip   34n. 26, 61n. 4, 62n. 6, 64n. 11, 67n. 24, 70n. 39, 70n. 40, 71n. 43

Cislaghi, Alessandra  56n. 6 Collins, John  136n. 58 Congar, Yves  150 Cyprian  163, 222–4 Dalferth, Ingolf   133n. 47, 148n. 103, 237n. 15 Da-Sein  20–1 Dehart, Paul  2 D’Isanto, Luca  104n. 69 Doyle, Dennis   128n. 29, 128n. 30 Ebeling, Gerhard  2, 3, 5–6, 12, 16, 16n. 2, 16n. 4, 17n. 5, 18, 18n. 11, 90–4, 91n. 17, 107, 110, 147n. 97, 160n. 28 ecclesiology  5–7, 75, 113, 117–74, 185, 206–7, 212–13, 218–24, 225–6, 227, 233 ecumenism  118, 122–5, 131–4, 152, 155–62, 212–13, 221–4 Eddy, Paul Rhodes  90n. 12 eschatology  9, 23, 24, 87–111, 130, 136, 142, 175–6, 214, 216–18, 219–20 faith  24–5, 67, 71–3 Forde, Gerhard  171–2 Fuchs, Ernst  2, 3, 12, 16, 16n. 3, 17n. 5, 19n. 19, 44, 44n. 25, 90–4, 91n. 17, 95–6, 95n. 29, 96n. 32, 98, 107, 110, 160n. 28 Funk, Robert  44n. 22 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  104–6, 104n. 75 Gamberini, Paolo   29n. 1, 56n. 6 Gassmann, Gunther  132n. 43 Gogarten, Friedrich  103n. 68 Großhans, Hans-Peter   122n. 4, 128n. 31, 147n. 95, 147n. 96 Hardiment, Anne  131n. 40 Harrisville, Roy  89n. 4 Hegel, G. W. F.  2, 3 Heidegger, Martin  2, 3, 12, 17, 20–2, 37 hermeneutic(s),  of event  34, 65, 74–6, 87, 114 New Hermeneutic  87–111, 160n. 28, 193 of signification  20, 21–2, 23, 34, 34n. 26, 39–40, 42, 42n. 18, 43, 45, 46–9, 48n. 48, 53, 56–7, 61–2, 62n. 6, 63–73, 64n. 11,

Index 72n. 45, 74–6, 78, 81–2, 87, 91n. 17, 97, 113–14, 126, 162, 176, 200, 232–3 homo faber  8, 54, 63 homo incurvatus in se  17 humanity,  in becoming  19 creative passivity of  74–6, 158–62, 184–5, 189–90, 191–2, 225 ego of  20–2, 23–7 as hearer  8, 39–41, 46–7, 138, 138n. 67, 159, 161 natures of  25–7 ontology of  16–22, 91–2 relationality of  8, 17–18, 41, 55 self of  24–7 unconverted existence of  8, 55 works of  8, 25, 144, 144n. 91, 159 as ζώον λόγον έχον  16, 16n. 4, 21 Hütter, Reinhard  140, 173 interruption  7, 9–10, 13, 15, 23–7, 35–7, 51, 57–8, 59–60, 79, 83, 87–8, 88n. 1, 100, 103–4, 107–10, 114–15, 118, 126–7, 138, 140, 145, 153, 154, 166, 168–9, 173–4, 175–7, 183, 190n. 41, 192–4, 199–200, 206, 216–17, 220, 229–30, 231–4, 234–7 Jenson, Robert   130n. 39, 131n. 40, 151, 155n. 3, 164, 167, 172 Jesus Christ,  death of  82–6, 93–4, 103–4, 104–6, 114, 129–30, 134 humanity of as the mystery of the world  77–86, 117 post-resurrection existence of  79, 85, 88, 88n. 1, 93–4, 98, 104–6, 114–15 quests for the historical Jesus  44, 44n. 22, 84, 87–111 as sacrament  59–115, 117–18, 137–8, 157, 185, 187, 189, 190n. 40, 202, 228, 232–3 ‘Son of Man’  44–5, 96, 98 Jülicher, Adolf  47–8, 97 justification  5–6, 7–10, 44, 55, 96, 98, 138, 143–4, 148, 159–62, 165, 199, 201, 210–11, 220, 225, 228 Kant, Immanuel  30, 32–4, 32n. 14, 33n. 18, 64n. 11 Karlstadt  157 Käsemann, Ernst  89–91, 107 Kasper, Walter Cardinal  152, 157n. 13, 215, 222 Kelly, J. N. D.  147n. 98 kingdom of God  42, 44–53, 82, 95–8, 99–100, 108, 110, 136, 216, 217

255

Kümmel, Werner Georg  99 Küng, Hans  122n. 4 Lakeland, Paul  149n. 109 language of address  15–27, 39–41, 45 Lateran IV  33–4, 36 Lima Report  215 Linnemann, Eta  52–3 Lord’s Supper  48, 75, 75n. 61, 76, 88, 88n. 2, 117–18, 125–6, 125n. 22, 132, 157, 160, 169, 175–7, 179–96, 200–2, 206–8, 213, 215–26, 227–30, 233–4 Lumen gentium  222 Luther, Martin  2, 3, 25–6, 51n. 53, 62n. 6, 67, 70, 70n. 39, 71, 72–3, 72n. 45, 72n. 50, 74–6, 157, 159–60, 163–5, 227–8, 229, 232 Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity   132n. 43, 150–1 Lutheran theology  2–7, 131–2, 160n. 28, 167–8, 230 McCormack, Bruce  31n. 11 McDonald, Lee  147n. 98 Małysz, Piotr  16n. 1 Mattes, Mark  2–3 Melanchthon  157, 159n. 27, 229 metaphor   38n. 1, 38–9n. 2, 51n. 53 Meyer, Harding   132n. 43, 155n. 38 mission  140–2 Mottu, Henry  1, 190n. 41, 228–9 Müller, Gerhard  155n. 3 μυστήριον  62, 77–86, 113, 193, 197 Nairobi Report  131 Old Testament  46, 146, 146n. 93 Palakeel, Joseph   29n. 1, 56n. 6 Panbrun, James  50n. 52 Pannenberg, Wolfhart   122n. 4, 123, 128n. 31, 137n. 61 parable,  church as parable  142–3 Jesus as parable of God  100–2, 115 parables of Jesus  42, 44–53, 82, 93–4, 95–8, 99–100, 100–4, 108–10, 109n. 93, 114, 115, 217 parabolic structure of language  38–43, 100–2 Pesch, Otto Hermann  229 pneumatology/Holy Spirit  139–40, 145, 146–8, 172–3, 182–3, 206, 211–12, 214–15, 219, 225–6 possibility and actuality  9, 19, 35, 40, 57, 79, 105–6, 175, 216, 220

256

Index

preaching/proclamation  44, 45–6, 57, 81–2, 84–5, 88, 88n. 2, 90, 92–4, 95–8, 98–100, 101–4, 110, 114, 125–6, 125n. 22, 138, 139, 143–4, 147, 160, 169, 171–2, 176, 200–2, 213 Przywara, Erich  30–2, 30n. 6, 31n. 11, 33–4, 35–6 Radano, John  156n. 4 Rahner, Karl  112, 113n. 6, 137n. 62, 167 Remy, Gérard   29n. 1, 32n. 14, 39n. 3 righteousness  8, 44 Robinson, James   44n. 22, 90n. 11, 90n. 14, 91n. 15, 110n. 100 Rolnick, Philip  29n. 1 Root, Michael   131n. 42, 132n. 43, 151 Saarinen, Risto  6–7 Sabbath  176, 203–4 sacramental action  74–6, 155, 158–62, 169, 179–96, 197–205, 211–13, 218, 224–5, 228–9 sacramental mediation  77–9, 78n. 5, 84–5 Sacrosanctum concilium  203 Schelert, Reinhart  44n. 22 Schillebeeckx, Edward  113 Schleiermacher, F. D. E.  4, 157, 181, 185–6, 187, 191–2, 197, 203–4, 203n. 24, 229 Schlink, Edmund  123–4, 126n. 24, 128n. 31 Schlüter, Richard  155n. 3 Schmaus, Michael  157n. 13 Schweitzer, Albert  89n. 4 Siggelkow, Ry  29n. 1 Snodgrass, Klyne   39n. 2, 47n. 44 Spjuth, Roland  1, 2, 29n. 1, 56n. 6, 125n. 21, 166n. 49, 170n. 7, 186n. 30, 190n. 40, 235, 236 Spykman, Gordon  141n. 79 Stauffer, Ethelbert  90n. 11 Stuhlmacher, Peter  44n. 22 Sundberg, Walter  89n. 4 Thiselton, Anthony  53 Thomas Aquinas  72, 72n. 49, 72n. 50, 229 Tillard, J. M. R.   128n. 29, 149–50, 167 time/temporality  9, 69–70, 87–111, 88n. 1, 127, 145–52, 166, 167–74, 216–18, 219–20, 225–6, 229–30, 234–7

Tjørhom, Ola  122–3, 131n. 40, 149n. 109 Trinitarian theology  128–30 universal priesthood  148–9 visible/invisible church  122–7, 130, 130n. 39, 165–6 von Balthasar, Hans Urs   31n. 11, 157n. 13 Wainwright, Geoffrey  1, 82n. 17, 137n. 61, 138n. 66, 139, 214, 227–8, 229 Wannenwetsch, Bernd  144n. 90 Watson, Francis  236 Weaver, Walter  89n. 4 Weber, Otto  141n. 79 Webster, John   2n. 6, 4, 19, 45, 50, 52, 52n. 56, 56n. 6, 88n. 3, 95, 95n. 29, 95n. 30, 98, 99n. 52, 190n. 40, 234–5 Westphal, Charles  122n. 4 Witherington, Ben   89n. 4, 114n. 7 word-event  6, 7, 44n. 25, 46, 50, 51, 53, 55, 60, 75, 88, 88n1, 88n. 2, 92, 93, 93n. 21, 94, 96, 99, 102, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115, 118, 125n. 22, 126, 127, 143, 145, 152, 154, 155, 158–62, 160n. 28, 164, 166, 166n. 49, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 185, 187, 193, 195, 201, 216, 217, 232, 233, 236, 237 word of God,  as alien speech  26, 115 human language and  11, 29–37, 90–4, 232 interruptive structure of  23–7, 35–7, 231–2 kommen zur Sprache of God  11, 35–6, 45, 57, 93, 127, 138, 176, 231, 233 as language of address  22–7, 34–7, 74, 96–7 presence and absence of God in  23–4, 37, 57, 75–6, 126, 232 sacramentality of  9, 11–13, 45, 54, 56, 73, 78, 117, 232 worship  132–4, 139, 143–4, 168–70, 172–3, 185–7, 191–2, 221 Yeago, David  5–6, 125n. 23, 167–8 Zeitz, James  30n. 6 Zimany, Roland   2n. 6, 3, 56n. 6 Zizioulas, John  128n. 29 Zwingli  157