Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age: Løgstrup, Prenter, Wingren, and the Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology [1 ed.] 9783666604584, 9783525604588

Citation preview

Niels Henrik Gregersen / Bengt Kristensson Uggla / Trygve Wyller (eds.)

Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age: Løgstrup, Prenter, Wingren, and the Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology

Research in Contemporary Religion

Edited by Hans-Günter Heimbrock, Stefanie Knauss, Jens Kreinath Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati, Hans-Joachim Sander and Trygve Wyller In co-operation with Hanan Alexander (Haifa), Carla Danani (Macerata), Wanda Deifelt (Decorah), Siebren Miedema (Amsterdam), Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Nashville), Garbi Schmidt (Roskilde), Claire Wolfteich (Boston) Volume 24

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Niels Henrik Gregersen / Bengt Kristensson Uggla / Trygve Wyller (eds.)

Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age: Løgstrup, Prenter, Wingren, and the Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2197-1145 ISBN 978-3-666-60458-4

You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our Website: www.v-r.de  2017, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Gçttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Typesetting by Konrad Triltsch GmbH, Ochsenfurt

Contents

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Niels Henrik Gregersen, Bengt Kristensson Uggla and Trygve Wyller 1. Reconfiguring Reformation Theology : The Program of Scandinavian Creation Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Preface

PART I: FOUNDING FIGURES

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Niels Henrik Gregersen 2. K.E. Løgstrup and Scandinavian Creation Theology

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37

Christine Svinth-Værge Plder 3. Regin Prenter and Scandinavian Creation Theology . . . . . . . . . .

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Bengt Kristensson Uggla 4. Gustaf Wingren and Scandinavian Creation Theology

91

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PART II: SEMINAL SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Allen G. Jorgenson 5. Martin Luther in Scandinavian Creation Theology

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A.M. Allchin 6. N.F.S. Grundtvig: The Earth Made in God’s Image

. . . . . . . . . . 127

PART III: CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS AND CHALLENGES . . 145 Ole Jensen 7. Creation Theology and the Confrontation with Speciecism: Memories and Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Jakob Wolf 8. Phenomenology in Løgstrup’s Creation Theology . . . . . . . . . . . 157

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Pia Søltoft 9. C.S. Lewis, K.E. Løgstrup and Kierkegaard on Love’s Erotic Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Elisabeth Gerle 10. Human Rights: Revisiting the Political Program of Scandinavian Creation Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Benedicte Hammer Præstholm 11. The Theology of the Unchangeable Gender and the Challenge from Scandinavian Creation Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Trond Skard Dokka 12. Universal and Particular : Creation Theology and Ecclesiology in a Fragmented World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Jakob Wir8n 13. Wingren and the Theology of Religions: Inter-Religious Hermeneutics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

PART IV: THEOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXTS . . . . . . . 227 Jan-Olav Henriksen 14. The Economic Trinity and Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Derek R. Nelson 15. Scandinavian Creation Theology in American Perspective

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Trygve Wyller 16. The Discovery of the Secular-Religious Other in the Scandinavian Creation Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 About the authors Index

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Preface

The aim of the present volume is to offer a concise and multifaceted introduction to the Scandinavian creation theology movement. International Luther scholars and systematic theologians alike will know the names K.E. Løgstrup, Regin Prenter and Gustaf Wingren, if not by having read some of their works themselves, then by having heard others talk about them. In this book, we present their distinctive theologies for an international audience, and in so doing, we hope we will have accomplished three interdependent goals. The first aim is to offer intellectual portraits and detailed theological interpretations of the three founding figures of Scandinavian creation theology : Løgstrup, Prenter and Wingren. Here, we have focused on their individual contributions to the emergence of Scandinavian creation theology. This movement came about in the mid-twentieth century, was developed in the latter half of that century, and has continued to influence the cultural climate of Scandinavian theology since then. In their own life times, Løgstrup, Prenter, and Wingren were recognized names in Scandinavia as well as in Germany. Due to new American editions, K.E. Løgstrup and Gustaf Wingren are becoming familiar names through the English-speaking world too. The second aim is to argue that Scandinavian creation theology offers a model for reconfiguring Reformation theology for a post-secular age. “Postsecularity,” in our interpretation, does not mean taking leave of secularity. Rather, a post-secular age is a cultural climate in which the boundaries between what is secular and what is religious have become more porous, so that secular mind-sets and religious affirmations of everyday life may co-exist both in public discourse, and at the level of individual secular-religious commitments. In the context of the 2017 commemorations of the 500 years since the Reformation, we argue that the program of Scandinavian creation theology offers a unique resource for rethinking the Reformation heritage. Scandinavian creation theology combines seminal insights from the creation theology of Martin Luther (1483–1546) with central aspects of the so-called “Mosaic-Christian view of life” proposed by the Danish theologian N. F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). In contrast to Luther, Grundtvig argued that human beings never lost the positive traces of being “created in the image and likeness of God.” Accordingly, the Christian triad of faith, hope and love, can be recognized, appreciated, and to some extent also exercised by non-believers.

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With his principle, “human first, then Christian,” Grundtvig argued that a broader understanding and appreciation of naturally lived human experience should be the underlying condition for the Christian way of life, serving as the horizon for understanding the Christian church, its confessions and the sacraments. Christian faith has to be lived in a humane way, in accordance with a shared sense of humanity. Thus, for proponents of Scandinavian creation theology, Grundtvig serves as the mediator and bridge-builder between a premodern Lutheranism and a contemporary secular-religious age. This combination of Luther and Grundtvig, however, does raise a set of significant theological questions. Exactly how is the relationship between humanity and the Christian message to be understood? To what extent are philosophical arguments viable within Christian theology? And, finally, how does Grundtvig’s motto, “Human first, …” square with Luther’s principle of simul justus et peccator? The third aim of the present volume is to reconsider the future of Scandinavian creation theology in the light of other contemporary Christian theological trends. In their own time, Løgstrup, Prenter, and Wingren took issue with both the expansiveness of Karl Barth’s church theology, and with Rudolf Bultmann’s more restrictive existentialist theology. We argue that Scandinavian creation theology takes a similar stance vis-/-vis the more expansionist programs of Radical Orthodoxy, and the more internalist views of what it means to be a Christian characteristic of Postliberal Theology and strands similar to it in contemporary theology. Indeed, Scandinavian creation theology stands and falls with the claim that there are shared aspects of human life that offer room for open-minded discussions of how to live the human condition alongside people of other faiths, and with people of no professed faith at all. Scandinavian creation theology leaves ample room for common sense and common commitments, even where worldviews differ or even drift apart. Everyday life constitutes a third realm between a purely political realm, and a purely religious domain. Accordingly, the role of Christian theology is to keep open the shared horizons of human co-existence, whilst being acutely aware of the particularity of the gospel, which is likewise aimed at all people. Today, new questions challenge Scandinavian creation theology. Needless to say, Scandinavian creation theology is not interested in establishing an ethnic theology for Scandinavians. To the contrary, Scandinavian creation theology is not centered on identity politics, and is sharply critical of self-profiling attitudes within churches or other religious communities wanting to bolster themselves over and against their surrounding cultures. Put simply, we need to examine the relationship between “common sense” and the legitimate concerns expressed in the form of particular communities, where each brings their own visions of “communal sense” into the public discussions. Here, the Scandinavian program raises a new set of questions with respect to its place in the larger theological whole. For example, what are the relationships between Scandinavian creation theology and contemporary trends such as ecotheology, gender theology,

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interreligious dialogue, the human rights movements, and so on? All these questions will be considered at length throughout the book. We have many to thank for making this publication possible. The idea for the book itself came from the Grundtvig Research Centre, Aarhus University. In collaboration with the three editors, the Director of the Grundtvig Research Centre, Dr. Michael Schelde organized an explorative conference on “The Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology : Martin Luther and N. F.S. Grundtvig Revisited,” which took place at Vartov in the centre of Copenhagen, August 24–26, 2014. The conference hosted both the authors and other attendants, and produced a very fruitful conference, pointing forward to this publication. Our deep gratitude goes to Dr. Schelde, who has generously supported the present project, both in its initial and later phases, and both in terms of commitment and resources. Also, we gratefully acknowledge the excellent work done by Dr. Harris Wiseman, Cambridge, in improving the language for those of us who are not native English speakers. Dr. Wiseman understood our project, and was able to make our texts more fluid than they might otherwise have been. Any remaining errors lie entirely on the shoulders of the editors. We also thank the Grundtvig Research Centre for the permission to reprint an important chapter of A.M. Allchin, N. F.S. Grundtvig: An Introduction to his Life and Work (Aarhus University Press 2015), printed here as Chapter 6. The editors also wish to thank the authors of this book for their patience and attentiveness to all our many requests during the publication process. They have provided excellent and original work, both in analyzing the situation and in their constructive proposals. Warm thanks also go to Søren Frank Jensen, student of theology, who (again) has done a very meticulous job as the copy editor of the book, also providing the book with an index. We are grateful to the editors of the series “Research in Contemporary Religion” at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, who have kindly included this book in the RCR series. Particularly, we thank Professor Hans-Günter Heimbrock who has been in charge of the peer review process, and who has offered substantial inputs and guidelines for the book. Finally, we thank Jörg Persch and Moritz Reissing at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht who have served as editorial directors for the field of theology and religion. A final practical note: All references to the works of Martin Luther are either to D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe 1–80 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus und Nachfolger), abbreviated as WA, or to Luther’s Works 1–78 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press/Saint Loius: Concordia Publishing House), abbreviated as LW. Copenhagen–Stockholm–Oslo

September 12, 2016

Niels Henrik Gregersen, Bengt Kristensson Uggla, and Trygve Wyller

Niels Henrik Gregersen, Bengt Kristensson Uggla, and Trygve Wyller

1. Reconfiguring Reformation Theology : The Program of Scandinavian Creation Theology 1. Introducing the Contexts and Core Topics 2017 marks the passing of 500 years since the Reformation. We find ourselves in a new and radically changed theological landscape as compared to the early years of the Reformation. At that time, the reformers accused the Roman church of sidelining the gospel of grace by faith alone while burdening ordinary Christians with over-complex ecclesiastical regulations. Instead of a common Christian faith founded on grace alone, and a theology interested in caring for the universal aspects of society, the reformers found in the religious situation of their day a narcissistic faith, and a theology focused, above all, on maintaining the hegemony of church rule. Today, the situation is different. For example, the present Pope, Pope Francis, is widely respected for addressing the concerns of all people, such as the global spread of poverty, structures of injustice, migration and climate change. During the time of the Reformation, by contrast, it was the reformers that were proclaiming, against the papacy, that theology had to take leave of the “prisons of Babylon” by attending to the core concerns of Christian faith, whilst tackling the important issues related to ordinary social life. The central thrust of the present book concerns the argument that any reliable contemporary Reformation theology needs to leave its own Babylon, so to speak, and to enjoy a this-worldly engagement in God’s creation with the best conscience. There is no need for theology to “Christianize” the world. The world is already God’s creation, a reality which should be cared for and enjoyed, for its own sake, by believers and non-believers alike. Thus, if salvation is taken to mean becoming human again, then there can be no sharp opposition between a commitment to the Christian faith, on the one hand, and our embeddedness in the world together with other living creatures, on the other. Arguments and theological thinking in favor of an affirmation of everyday life are to be considered as distinct contributions of Scandinavian creation theology. Beginning in the 1940s, Lutheran theologians such as K.E. Løgstrup (1905–1981), Regin Prenter (1907–1990), and Gustaf Wingren (1910–2000), criticized both Pietists and Barthians for neglecting the theological significance of creation, whilst arguing, in contrast, that the necessary horizon for understanding the gospel is the human condition shared by all. They fiercely

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opposed all theological conceptions of Christian faith that did not take seriously the intrinsic value of the world of creation (often decrying such theologies as Gnostic). As such, contemporary Reformation theology is confronted with a challenge: how is it possible to proclaim, on the one hand, that embodied existence does not need to be Christianized, whilst simultaneously holding to the basic insights of sola gratia and solo Christo? The founding figures of Scandinavian creation theology (Løgstrup, Prenter, and Wingren) were convinced that this challenge should be confronted in a manner that preserves both the specific message of the gospel, and the universal horizon of Christian faith. The relation between gospel and creation is not to be comprehended as a zero-sum game. Rather, the particularity of the gospel and the universal aspects of creation are to be seen as interlinked, and are to be mutually defined with respect to each other. For this reason, we find it appropriate, and important also, to present the program of Scandinavian creation theology as integral to the body of theological reflection on the future shape of reformation theology in commemorating the Reformation’s 500 years. Indeed, we are convinced that the impulses from this original interpretation of the Christian faith, developed in a Lutheran context in Scandinavia during half a decennium starting from the 1940s, can still inspire and provide resources for a more courageous Reformation theology in the present. In times of religious fragmentation, there is a strong tendency to neglect and distrust the universality of God’s presence in the world of creation, hidden though it may be. Accordingly, there is a tendency to withdraw into spiritual catacombs, focusing solely on what is distinctively Christian, and how that contrasts to a society alien to it. In this situation, a theology of creation, developed through rigorous critical reflection, is very much needed, and today more than ever. The Scandinavian creation theologians claimed that the world is not a strange and alien place–this world is God’s own creation, and it is our home. The program of Scandinavian creation theology involves more than a naive call for an additive theology, as if to merely say : “we need more creation.” Nor does it represent a creation theology linked to a theology of the orders of creation, nor even linked to the idea of particular divine revelations given to particular people (as in the Third Reich). Rather, the Scandinavian critique of the theologies of their day concerned the very core of Christian theology, and articulated itself through the following question: is the language and practice of theology concerned with the Christian church only—or is the theological understanding of the gospel inextricably intertwined with the life worlds and experiences of all human beings? Scandinavian creation theology takes the latter perspective by claiming that a theological interpretation of our lives, as part of a shared humanity in God’s creation, is to be considered a prerequisite for any interpretation of the Christian faith, and thus for any viable Reformation theology. Løgstrup, Prenter, and Wingren found this concern

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to be at the very heart of Martin Luther’s understanding of the Christian faith, and all three of them were inspired by the Danish theologian N. F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), who was the creative mediator of this interpretation of Luther.

2. Religion in a Post-Secular Age In the 21st century, there seems to be a fairly general agreement about a change in the cultural climate often referred to as “the new visibility of religion,” or the “return of religion,” also known as “the re-emergence model.” From the perspective of Scandinavian creation theology, this return is a rather ambiguous return. Too often, the word “return” indicates a disregard for the present world, implying that the world should be “more” Christian, “more” Muslim, “more” spiritual, and so on. This is a negative interpretation of what the return of religion indicates, one based on a world-denying attitude. Within the framework of Christian theology, Scandinavian creation theology represents an early model for how to cope with religion and theology as public phenomena, whilst being oriented within a more world-affirmative approach. Or, to remain within the discourse of the Reformation: the return of religion should be interpreted as a rediscovery of the aspects of faith, hope, and love inherent in all life, regardless of whether they belong to a religious sector, or not. Thus, according to this interpretation, the return of religion may be considered as proffering a new assessment of the relationship between religion and the public realm, based in the recognition of shared aspects of humanity. We see this tendency in the recent debates surrounding the post-secular. Just as the concept “secular” is ambiguous, so too is the term post-secular. And, in his critical review of this concept, sociologist of religion James A. Beckford has rightly pointed out that the term is used in different ways throughout the relevant literature, ranging from an outright denial of secularization processes, to views recognizing the post-secular as a phenomenon built upon a previous process of secularization. Likewise, the postsecular can be used as an analytic concept referring to the re-enchantment of culture and to the resurgence of religion in the public realm, or as a philosophical interpretation of larger societal trends (Beckford 2012).1 In the present book, the term post-secular is used to indicate a socio-cultural condition, in which strong secular sectors continue to exist and thrive (state, economy, law, etc.), and in which a secular attitude to many aspects of human 1 Beckford points to six different uses of the term “post-secular”: (1) The post-secular as denying or doubting secularization, (2) post-secularity as building upon the secular, (3) post-secularity as referring to a re-enchantment of culture, (4) and to the public resurgence of religion, (5) postsecularity as referring to the fact that religion re-enters the public sphere, while the state itself remains secular (Habermas), and (6) those who deny that the term post-secular is of any use at all.

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life is prevailing, whilst, at the same time, the boundaries between what is secular and what is religious are becoming more porous (especially in public discussions of the values and norms of society, as well as in institutional settings such as governmentally recognized faith-based organizations). In the shared citizenship of (post)secular societies, discussions on what matters in human life do not always presuppose a clear wedge between the secular and the religious. What is of particular interest to Scandinavian creation theology is the awareness of the way in which the secular and the religious are interlaced and overlapping both historically and in everyday life. When carrying and giving birth to a child, for example, taking advice from “secular” medical doctors and other caretakers is interlaced with the “ethical” caring for this particular child as a divine gift, appreciated as part of the larger framework of creation, and received in a “religious” gratitude to God as creator and sustainer of life. In practical life, therefore, these perspectives are overlapping and intertwined, and not to be seen as a “paradoxical unity,” as claimed by the existentialist theologian Rudolf Bultmann and other modernist theologians. Discussion of the post-secular has been prompted not least by the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who has developed new, and less rigid, positions on religion and the secular over the last ten years.2 Habermas continues to develop these positions, and when he claims, for example, that religious people can participate in public discourse only by translating their specific language into the common discourse of everyone (2007, 114ff), we can see that he is tacitly presupposing that ordinary language, and the sense of a shared life world, are located outside the area of God. Furthermore, he insists on a prior division between religious and secular people, whilst not realizing that one and the same person may be both religious and secular. Indeed, these two categories may not only co-exist, but often presuppose each other. The “secular” is itself to be considered as a theological construct, a phenomenon produced by late modern religion itself.3 According to Scandinavian creation theology, Christians are not to be considered as aliens in the world, nor as pilgrims on their way to another world—and they do not move into a foreign land when speaking the common language of everyone. The world is God’s creation. This is where God has placed us and wants us to be. To live an ordinary human life among other living creatures involves participating in God’s life. Thus, when we speak in religious terms, we use one kind of the God-language dialect, and when speaking in secular terms, we use another. Habermas seems to be on the right track. In accordance with his own German Lutheran tradition, he has re-opened the discussion regarding the public and everyday life, and he considers religion more seriously now than he did in his earlier work, where religion was 2 A helpful overview can be found in Jürgen Habermas’ “Notes on Post-Secular Society” (2008). 3 See R. van den Breemer, J. Casanova J., and T. Wyller (eds.), Secular and Sacred? The Scandinavian Case of Religion, Human Rights and Space (2014).

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relegated to questions about how to cope with existential contingencies. In this way, he is quite close to the core commitments of Scandinavian creation theology, and acts with a similar ambition as the founding figures of this theological tradition. The same might be said about Charles Taylor (2007), when he invites religious people to rediscover the hidden spirituality of everyday life. Considering this appeal, Scandinavian creation theologians may respond: “We fully agree, and this is what we have tried to do for a long time!” In the old Lutheran dialect, this is what the larvae dei (the masks of God) has always pointed towards: the idea of God acting in the ordinary life shared by all in, between, and behind the face of other human persons. Taylor’s arguments very much echo those made by Scandinavian creation theologians. There is more to divine presence in life, and more life in the world, than a pure atheism or a pure secularism would admit. Accordingly, Taylor criticizes what he calls “the subtraction theory” (Taylor 2007, 26–29), which comes out of the claim of some sociologists that, for example, Scandinavian countries are among the most secular on the globe (in terms of the actual numbers of persons practicing religion), just because few people are regular churchgoers, and few also present themselves as traditional confessors when asked by one-sided polls. Scandinavian creation theology would reject the subtraction theory with similar reflections citing the divine presence in life, but with a stronger theological commitment. From the perspective of Scandinavian creation theology, the human condition in relation to God is not only a question of available resources for language, personal faith, or personal spirituality, but is the common realm in which God relates and connects to human beings, nature and the social realm. The facts that human beings are living in relations of meaning ; and that God creates, sustains, and transforms the world ; are to be considered as two sides of the same coin. Yet, Scandinavian creation theology has also elaborated extensively a paradoxical interpretation of life, one that also includes negative life experiences of suffering and loss of meaning, guilt and death, as exemplified in Gustaf Wingren’s “grain of wheat” theology (see Chapter 3). In this way, Scandinavian creation theology reconfirms basic aspects of Reformation theology. The world outside the churches is not God-less. The world is God-given and imbued with a divine presence, therefore it is religiously valid to approach it from a secular perspective, and one is free to do so. This leads to a reflection on how contemporary religiosity is closely linked to the human awareness of meaning (as well as meaninglessness), and to an inter-human connectedness in a life of creation shared with others. As such, there have always been important connections between phenomenology and Scandinavian creation theology. The social connectedness of all life features centrally in the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz, Maurice MerleauPonty, and Paul Ricoeur, too.

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This affirmation of the secular represents a common ground for Løgstrup and Wingren. Løgstrup famously argued that the mutual ethical responsibility inherent in the everyday life world entails an understanding of life as a gift. Helping the neighbor is not part of a barter deal, in which the helper is to be reciprocated by the helped. The same view is also present in Wingren’s theological focus on becoming human again, as a joint process for God as well as humans. According to his investigations of Luther, every human being lives in relations of vocation (vocatio), a calling that is present in the workshops, in family life, and is true for neighbors as well as among farmers, sailors, and miners. According to this understanding of Reformation theology, to be called from the silent needs of the other, and the way God reaches out to all people behind the masks of other human persons, are to be considered as two dimensions of one and the same reality. Of course, this theme of creation theology connects Christian faith with other world religions, and offers an important bridge-building concept for inter-religious dialogue as well. Grundtvig, for example, had already spoken of the “Mosaic-Christian” view of life as common to Judaism and Christianity. Also, he identified deep-seated similarities between Christianity, the old Norse religion, and Hinduism, based on a shared understanding of humanity as an “experiment of dust and spirit” created by God within the wider context of a world likewise created, maintained, and continuously transformed by the Spirit of God. In the religious context of the present day, it should also be noted that creation faith is a religious commitment shared by Muslims and Christians alike. Here, Scandinavian creation theology may offer a fertile framework for Muslim-Christian dialogues that do not bypass the fact that such dialogue takes place between religiously committed proponents of distinct and distinctive faith traditions—proponents who meet one another, as such, with the understanding that their dialogue partner is a religious Other, whilst at the same time sharing seminal viewpoints concerning the relation between God the creator and the multifarious forms of the world of creation (see Chapter 13). At the same time, such dialogue would presuppose a common acknowledgment of the fact that no Christian is merely Christian, and no Muslim is merely Muslim. Religious communities are always culturally conditioned, just as human persons have multiple identities. Scandinavian creation theology may bring in perspectives of relevance for prospering such interreligious dialogue. The first is the concept of the ethical demand to help others, which (as argued by Løgstrup) is not restricted to the persons with whom we happen to agree with in religious and societal matters. A second avenue for common discussion is the notion of vocation (developed by Wingren), which points beyond the individual sphere towards the social context, in which there are common tasks to be dealt with, say, in the work market, or in the education of citizens. Here, “universal features” of belonging to a common humanity come to the fore, though the ethical demand and the

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sense of vocation is always refracted by present-day social conditions, and the values and norms that religious proponents bring into the common discussion (see Chapter 2). Interestingly, the issue of secularity faces important challenges when Islam becomes part of the discussion, and this needs to be addressed by Scandinavian creation theology. The anthropologist Talal Asad (2003) has claimed that the whole concept of the secular is a Western concept in the sense that Western scholars tend to view the Orient as strange because it is not thoroughly secular. There is much to learn from these discussions. By its non-binary view of the secular-sacred distinction, Scandinavian creation theology may strike a middle chord between an aggressive secularism (following the French model of la"cit8), and the tendency in particular strands of contemporary Islam that work for a reconstruction of a classical binary position by arguing that all social institutions should be shaped with an emphatic Islamic profile. How to develop a non-binary view of the secular/ sacred distinction in this context remains one of the future challenges for a Reformation theology shaped by Scandinavian creation theology.

3. Reformation theology, the welfare state, and political critique This non-binary approach to the secular/sacred distinction also impacts what we would today call political theology. The catastrophe of the German theology of the orders of creation (Ordnungstheologie) of the 1930s and 1940s was never part of the Scandinavian experience. In post-World War II Scandinavia, the possibility of developing a non-Christocentric theology of the political realm remained open, and also in the 1960s, when theological radicalism often took a strong Christocentric strand. None of the three leading figures were involved in any kind of political activism (the late Wingren being an exception, but this was not the case before he retired from the university), and they took divergent political positions in response to their contemporary political landscape. In the setting of the discussions in the Western European context, formed by the dialectical theology of the 1920s and 1930s, Scandinavian creation theology appeared to many German theologians as a strange cousin. The main project of their theology was neither to Christianize nor to “churchify” the world. The responsibility of theology was considered to be part of the common public discourse and practice in order to improve society, as one among many partners, motivated by the conviction that creation and law point to realities shared by all human beings. Taking a longer historical perspective, Scandinavian creation theology must be viewed as an interpretation of the Christian view of faith and life, which originates from almost five hundred years of continued Lutheranism in the Scandinavian countries. Considering the Reformation from a political

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point of view, one can hardly overestimate the impact coming from the shift of political power from the ecclesial to the monarchical, especially in the kingdom of Denmark-Norway. It is possible to acknowledge the Reformation as a theologically motivated secularization process, where a wide spectrum of operations were gradually separated from the church and yet still comprehended as part of God’s work and life. Martin Luther’s Wittenberger colleagues, such as Johannes Bugenhagen, travelled to all cities and nations that wanted to be part of the Reformation by forming so-called Church Ordinances. These ordinances dealt with social, educational, and political issues no less than with issues of faith. Hereby, religious and societal questions belonged to the same theological discourse, thus avoiding standard dichotomies between the religious and the secular. The tasks of a genuinely Lutheran-evangelical church could not be fulfilled apart from the political context. And the opposite was true also: the political did not have an independent status, but was part of a non-binary theology. This historical context may, in part, explain why it is not convincing to pursue the secular/sacred binary in the context of Reformation theology. The non-binary is thus an important part of Scandinavian creation theology, but the roots of its basic concerns originate into the first years of the Reformation itself. One of the core elements in the Lutheran tradition is the teaching on the two Kingdoms of God (Zweireiche-Lehre). God reigns in both these areas, the spiritual/ecclesial and the terrestrial/political. In the ecclesial realm, the gospel is offered to the believers, in the terrestrial/political sphere we have a political sense of justice and order (usus politicus legis), which is open for all and everyone, since it is based on considerations of fairness and natural law (lex naturalis). Certainly, this view may have paved the road to secularism by disconnecting the spiritual/ecclesial and the terrestrial sectors. However, an ideological secularism (presupposing that it is only secular in nature), differs from a positive view of secularity, which uses human resources to deal with ethical reasoning. Over the last decades, however, prominent Luther scholars have presented a more nuanced picture than the dichotomy of the secular versus the religious (Honecker 1999, Bayer 2007). Honecker argues, for example, that the so called Ständelehre, the teaching of the three estates (status economicus, politicus, ecclesiasticus), was more prominent in Reformation times than was the teaching of the two kingdoms. The social doctrine of the three estates was aimed at distinguishing between the ecclesial and the non-ecclesial parts of human social life, such as family and education. In this manner, the political and the civil realms are not disconnected from the Christian message of love. As stated in the Augsburg Confession Article 16, “In the meantime the gospel does not overthrow secular government, public order, and marriage but instead intends that a person keep all this as a true order of God and demonstrate in these walks of life Christian love and true good works according to each person’s calling” (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 49–50).

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According to Luther, the political and the civil are considered as two areas of God‘s creation, but they are always mediated by the third space of the civil realm of everyday life, or the “household” (oikonomia, or status economicus). This civil realm contains the universal aspect of Christianity, to use Løgstrup’s terminology. The care for creation and the love of God is part of all these three life orders. To describe two of them (the worldly government and the household) as being purely secular, or rather, as God-less, is not accurate, and fails to adequately describe the intentions of the Reformers. In the program of Scandinavian creation theology we find elaborated an argument for a strong and affirmative view of everyday life as the third space of society, mediating between the political government and the particular life of the church.

4. An Alternative Program for a Reformation Theology for the 21st Century Due to their interest being focused on what it means to be human, the founding figures of Scandinavian creation theology have sometimes been critically termed “humanists.” Moreover, Scandinavian creation theology has also been accused of being just another kind of “liberal theology,” due to their critical stance towards Barthian theology. Others regard them as “conservatives,” due to their focus on creation and their “orthodox” interest in traditional theological issues. How can we, from this variety of opinions, determine the genuine and distinctive status of Scandinavian creation theology? In order to understand the historical preconditions for the founding figures, we need to remind ourselves that Scandinavian creation theology emerged in the context of the breakdown of the grand liberal theological paradigm of the 19th century. This was concurrent with the breakdown of the foundations of modern humanism. In this sense, the general conditions for doing theology during the last century may be termed “post-liberal” (in the broad sense of this term). In contemporary theology, we find new attempts to respond to this state of affairs in those various theologies profiling the Christian faith and church in opposition to its surrounding cultures. In the wake of Karl Barth, the emergence of theological schools such as postliberal theology (Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, and others), and radical orthodoxy (John Millbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and others). This has, in many ways, aggravated the anthropological deficit of contemporary theology, and exacerbated the risk of losing sight of human concerns that are shared, more or less, by all people, regardless of their particular stance vis-/-vis the Christian tradition. We claim that the self-profiling attitude in postliberal theologies (in

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the narrower sense of the term) makes it difficult for theology to become partners with other seekers of truth and justice in contemporary societies, and unnecessarily so. In this context, Scandinavian creation theology constitutes an attempt to talk about a shared citizenship in communication with other believers as well as unbelievers. In a post liberal and post-humanist context, Scandinavian creation theology promotes a kind of humanism of the other person, elaborating on what it means to be human from a decentered self, attentive to the other person.4 In Reformation theology, the experience of the gospel as a liberating message of joy from an external Word of God “outside myself” is inextricably connected to the interpretation of life as a gift, and to the universal aspects of the law, understood as a radical calling from the other. In this view, all the most important things are located outside myself, and all human effort is founded in a gift. In this sense, Scandinavian creation theology opens up the possibility of a theology on post-secular conditions. Yet, in contrast to (American) postliberals and (British) radical orthodox theologians, this theological enterprise offers an alternative strategy to cope with the post-secular conditions of theology by resisting a separation from the society, and claiming never to speak ill about the human life that we all share. The founding figures, for example, speak of the vulnerability of the other person in terms of an experience of holding “something of the other’s life in my hand” (Løgstrup). Accordingly, salvation is interpreted as “regeneration” (Prenter), or in terms of “becoming human again” (Wingren).

5. What does it mean to say that there are universal aspects of creation? It should go without saying that the search for universality cannot fit together with any claim that creation theology is an “ethnic” theology particular to Scandinavians. Indeed, from the perspective of Scandinavian creation theology, there can only be a secondary interest in promoting any particular “identity theology.” Certainly, all human beings come from different cultural and linguistic horizons. We belong to a particular country (or combinations thereof); each of us has a particular sexual orientation (or combinations thereof). Likewise, human beings pursue particular goals and identities (or combinations thereof), and they do so in allegiance to, or against, inherited norms and values. All this being so, according to the three founding figures, there are also shared aspects of human existence, and these need to be taken seriously. 4 In this respect, there are similarities between Scandinavian creation theology and the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel L8vinas, Humanism of the Other (2003). See also Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (1993).

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Yet, just as Scandinavian creation theologians are not interested in describing Scandinavia in particular, they are not interested only in generic features of humanity either. Rather, their theological concern is the shared conditions of human life. We are all born, and we will all die. We all need food for nourishment, and the company of others. Though there are unfortunate exceptions, parents do care for their children, and all children continue to play, wherever they can. Likewise, teenagers and grown-ups alike continue to long for recognition, and prefer to be welcomed rather than to be expelled. Human beings—of whatever religious or non-religious orientation—know about the pains of being ashamed and being found guilty, even if cultural codes differ. Likewise all grown-ups confronting labor markets know the social in-fighting for power, influence, and status, regardless of what counts as status. We are all embodied persons, even if our bodies look different. We always live together with other persons, who appeal to us for help, and whom we ourselves seek help from. According to Scandinavian creation theology, we always live in networks of deep interdependence. Therefore, we also know what it means to transgress the “zone of inviolability” (Løgstrup) of another person (and to our own violations too). We share the same planet, and therefore unavoidably live at the expense of other life-forms, and repeatedly do so at the expense of others. These are universal aspects of all human life, and these aspects are religiously significant in their own right even though these phenomena have a secular status. On the prior assumption that God is present in the multifarious world of creation, there is no need necessarily to translate common concerns into a highly loaded religious language. Paradoxically, any forced religious language leads to the emptying of the religious importance of such shared terms, because the importance is connected to the everyday expressions of experienced meaning.

6. What, then, is Scandinavian Creation Theology? Let us now review the principal resources of Scandinavian creation theology : the roots in Martin Luther ; the mediation of these thoughts through N.F.S Grundtvig; and the main representatives of this tradition in 20th century Scandinavian theology : K.E. Løgstrup, Regin Prenter, and Gustaf Wingren. Scandinavian creation theologians hold the view that the doctrine of creation is not just another theological locus to be followed by other loci, such as justification and fulfillment. Rather, creation constitutes the universal horizon for any Christian theologizing regarding Christ and church, baptism and salvation. For this reason, Scandinavian creation theologians are sometimes polemically (and wrongly) called “first-article theologians”–even though none of them have ever argued that Christian thinking is about the first

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article only. Their main driving force was to contribute to what they thought to be the core issue of Christian faith from a Reformation perspective. That is, bringing theology and faith out of its “Babylonic imprisonment,” while recognizing the full impact of what the reformers once called the priesthood of all believers. Salvation means becoming human again, and not becoming something more than or different from being human. This view reflects the strong influence from the theology of Irenaeus that can be discerned in this Scandinavian branch of Reformation theology. As such, Reformation theology aspires towards carrying out a re-conquest of the body, of neighborhoods, and of social commitments, interpreted as spaces where God’s action is inherently present—even if traditional religious discourse is absent. When the reformers proclaimed sola fide and sola gratia in relation to God, one could say, metaphorically, that the Scandinavian creation theologians walk the same road, but adding “sola everyday” and “sola vocation” in worldly affairs. Even before encountering the grace of God in the Word and forgiveness of sins, God is already present in the gift of life and in the vocation to human coexistence. In this view, you don’t go to church in order to meet God for the first time, but to be released, forgiven and restored as a human being among other human beings. For this reason, there is no contradiction in the idea that the founding figures of Scandinavian creation theology also considered themselves to be kerygmatic theologians. Following the common pathways of the kerygmatic theology of their day, they emphasized that the preaching of the gospel inevitably goes beyond human experience and expectation, but insisted that even in the world of creation God continues to contravene the painful experiences of death and evil. Faith concerns what cannot be seen by the naked eye, while recognizing the intrinsic value of any human experience of overcoming evil, if only sporadically. Similarly, the tension between the beautiful, but also cruel, world of creation and the kingdom of God cannot be overcome by pure speculation. No easy mediation is possible here. Accordingly, a profound theology of creation does not mean being committed to a program of natural theology in the sense of offering intellectual proofs for the existence and the nature of God. Both Prenter and Wingren were fully-fledged systematic theologians and unwavering as trinitarian thinkers. Working dialectically with the fundamental Lutheran distinction between law and gospel, they both emphasized that creation does not only speak of law, just as the preaching of the gospel story of Jesus does not concern eternal salvation only. Instead, what is temporal and what is spiritual are entangled in one another. Neither can be reduced to the other. There is indeed, as argued by Prenter in his dogmatics, Creation and Redemption (1967), a gospel of divine benevolence in the midst of the ambivalent world of creation (Prenter 1967, 208–216). But also hardship, injustice, and guilt are inevitable parts of the human condition. Therefore, the preaching of the gospel is necessary to elicit faith and trust in God’s love, and to restore God’s creation.

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Moreover, the gospel has something to say about what it means to live together in everyday life. Accordingly, law and gospel are not two different domains, and neither are creation and new creation. As pointed out by Wingren: “The life which Christ gives to the world through His victory (Rom 5:15.17) is the life which Adam lost (Gen 2:17; 3:7–9)” (Wingren 1958/1961, 34–35). Here, it should become obvious that our relationship to God is not something that starts when we enter the church or a presumed religious territory, but a reality always already given in and with life itself, which can only be lived in fellowship with God: To live means to receive life from outside oneself. As soon as we are cut off from these external sources, life is extinguished. The resurrection life is the receiving of life from an external source, from which even now in faith man draws his sustenance. But the same thing holds good even now of the bodily life, and not just that of believers, but of all bodily life (Wingren 1958/1961, 18).

In contrast to Prenter and Wingren, Løgstrup was an ethicist and philosopher of religion, who never used trinitarian language, and generally eschewed any reference to inherited doctrinal categories. Working as a phenomenological philosopher, he appears to be the most secular of the three founding figures, arguing that the ethical demand, expressed in the religious teaching of Jesus, can be given “a definition in strictly human terms” (Løgstrup 1997, 1). This view, set forward in The Ethical Demand (in Danish 1956), also influenced Wingren and contributed to a demythologization and secularization of his own “later” systematic theology (Wingren 1974/1981). Human ethics are neither a social construction nor dependent on religious values, but are founded in the experience of the call from the other as a given reality. Thus, the ethical demand is based on the prior fact that human beings are social beings that always live in asymmetrical relations of interdependence. Hence, we are called to take care of what is laid in our hands by vulnerable other persons. Løgstrup, however, increasingly came to emphasize the need for a religious interpretation of everyday life. As such, he followed a double track in his theological thinking. In a response to Prenter, he pointed to the two tasks for theology in a secular age. First, we have the task of translating the central concerns of the Christian message into a proto-religious language. Second, we have the task of explicating the contents of Christian beliefs within an understanding of human existence that makes a religious interpretation of reality a live option, a reasonable decision of faith (Løgstrup 1963, 165). In his later work, especially in Creation and Annihilation from 1978 (Løgstrup 1995, vol. 1), Løgstrup even argued that a religious interpretation of reality is a preferable option to a nihilistic view that understands social existence merely as a social construction of reality. Obviously, there are differences in style and the modes of reasoning used by these three founding figures of Scandinavian creation theology. Nonetheless, Løgstrup, Prenter, and Wingren were all distinctly Lutheran theologians.

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Løgstrup continuously taught Luther’s social ethics, and Luther features prominently in his philosophical work too. Prenter and Wingren were internationally well-known Luther scholars. Wingren’s Luthers lära om kallelsen written in 1942 (published in four editions, the latest in 1993), was translated into English as Luther on Vocation (1957), but also appeared in German and Finnish. Prenter’s Spiritus Creator from 1944 was subsequently translated into German, English, and Japanese. Both doctoral dissertations dealt with Luther’s creation theology from a historical and textual perspective. Yet, soon it became clear that Wingren and Prenter did not study Luther’s theology for solely historical reasons, but used his texts to present a theology that could speak to their contemporaries too. In Scandinavia, the general expectation for theologians has been, and remains, that theology should be able to mediate between the living Christian tradition of the church and the contemporary culture in all its facets: philosophy, arts, political and natural. Thus, theology is expected to have relevance for both believers and sceptics, the sceptics often designated as “cultural Christians.” This model presupposes what may be termed a “loose coupling” between theology and church, but it also presupposes an ecclesiology characterized by openness and inclusiveness. In Scandinavia, no institutional or confessional ties are placed on theologians working at theological faculties. Yet, one must take seriously the facts that Christianity is a lived religion (in which the majority of the population contribute financially to the Lutheran majority churches), and that academic theologians learn and teach in countries with a high degree of cultural belonging, a lower degree of believing (ca. 40–50 %), and an even lower degree of practicing (in Denmark, about 2–3 % go to church on Sundays).5 This pattern is no doubt specific to Scandinavian countries. The particular Scandinavian context of national churches, the so-called folk churches, has provided “the context of discovery,” to use Karl Popper’s term, for Scandinavian creation theology. But in no way does this particular Scandinavian context provide the “context of justification” for developing the concerns of a creation theology for today. The epithet “Scandinavian” should therefore not be seen as a geographical orientation, but rather as an indication of the importance of a mediation of the Lutheran heritage (via Grundtvig) and the variety of perspectives among the founding figures–thus, as a startingpoint for moving forward in terms of developing new means for recontextualizing the core matters.

5 From January 1, 2016, between 63.2 % (Sweden) and 76.9 % (Denmark) of the respective populations were tax-paying members of the Lutheran majority churches.

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7. The Influence from Martin Luther’s Theology of Creation There can be no doubt that the topos of what the Reformers called “the doctrine of the justification by faith alone” expresses a central tenet of Martin Luther’s theology, and the other Reformers too. What recent historical scholarship has shown, however, is that Martin Luther’s early theology was not only about finding a new “doctrine” of divine justice for the justification of the sinner, but also a new emphasis on what it means to be a Christian in terms of spiritual and social life. Luther began his reform of the church with a call to penitence. He soon gained the insight, however, that penitence is not something to be exercised only in the secluded lives of monks and nuns, but rather it is to be done through the variety of callings given in everyday life. As Luther asserted in the very first of his Explanations of the Ninety Five Theses on indulgence from October 31, 1517: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [Matt. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” A Christian is one called by the Word of the gospel, but a Christian is also one called to live an everyday life in God’s grand world of creation. The grandeur of the universe is only one aspect of Luther’s creation theology. Similarly important is the life world of human beings, filled, as it is, with reciprocal ties and obligations to other human beings (and non-human creatures). To be a human means to belong to God’s own world, being sensitive to the needs of other people in God’s creation, whilst also discovering other persons as “masks” (larvae) of divine callings. This insight is much more than being raw material for moral or religious speculation. In brief, the world of creation is a divine gift and a constant source of surprise–it is not just something only given as “out there.” Every Reformation scholar knows about the central place of creation in the theology of Martin Luther. For him, creation was not primarily a question of the remote beginnings of the universe, nor about maintaining a status quo in the social order. Indeed, for Luther the vast universe is created by God from its beginnings, and society is constituted as a living network of creatures to be guarded from the chaos of selfishness, and continuously maintained and upheld. But at its deepest level, creation is taking place at every moment, and is much more about newness than maintenance: creare est semper novum facere—to create is always to make something new (WA 1, 563). Moreover, since God is creatively present in this world of creation, God is continuously addressing his creatures and Luther termed his creatures “words of God.” In his Lectures on Genesis, Luther states this point very clearly. God does not speak grammatical words like professors, pastors and other speakers do. God is rather speaking with sounds of silence so that eventually new beings and relations come forth: “sun, moon, heaven, earth, Peter, Paul, I, you etc.— we are all words of God, in fact only a single syllable or letter by comparison with the entire creation” (LW 1,22–23; WA 42, 17).

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According to this view, God is not someone “up there,” as assumed in the later discourse of early modern theism. Rather, divine creativity is so intimately interwoven with the fabric of creation that Luther could say unreservedly what only few twentieth century Reformation theologians dared to say openly : “the whole world is full of Bible” (WA 49, 434).

8. N. F.S Grundtvig: The Mediator of Reformation Theology The other principal source of Scandinavian creation theology—and the primary mediator of Luther’s heritage—is the Danish theologian, poet, historian, educator, and politician N. F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872).6 Grundtvig, a central figure in the nation-building of Denmark in the 19th century, was a Lutheran. Throughout his life he continued to relate to Luther’s theology, both critically and affirmatively. Grundtvig saw Luther as the one who centered ordinary Christian life in the primary expressions of the church (baptism, prayer, and Eucharist), whilst also paving the way for a modern understanding of Christianity. In his Basic Christian Teachings, Grundtvig applies a distinction between: (1) inherited Christendom in all its cultural and social formations; (2) the elementary expressions of Christianity ; such elementary expressions are visible in baptism, the Lord’s Prayer, the Eucharist, and so on. Finally, (3), there are also the inner, or invisible, aspects of a Christianness (faith, hope and love) followed by joy, justice and peace in the external life of the Christian.7 Like Luther, Grundtvig argued that “the Christian life begins for us with faith, it grows in hope, and is fulfilled by and in love” (Grundtvig 1944, 139). More precisely, Christian life begins with the faith in the Apostolic Confession in baptism. It is then nourished by prayer and preaching in the community, and fulfilled in the Eucharist as the sacrament of love. In contrast to Luther, however, Grundtvig emphasized that there remain aspects of faith, hope, and love even among fallen human beings, and among the heathens too (Grundtvig 1944, 126). In the incarnation, the Son of God shared the conditions of humanity, so that the same humanity was shared by 6 Grundtvig has been extensively translated into German in N. F.S. Grundtvig, Schriften in Auswahl (2010). A major four-volume translation of Grundtvig into English is in publication. The first two volumes have appeared as The School for Life. N. F.S. Grundtvig on Education for the People (2011), and Living Wellsprings. The Hymns, Songs, and Poems of N. F.S. Grundtvig (2015). By the same publisher a third volume will appear as Human Comes First: The Theology of N. F.S. Grundtvig, followed by a fourth volume under the title For the Common Good: The Political Thinking of N. F.S. Grundtvig. 7 We find the same distinction between Christendom, Christianity, and Christianness in Pannikar’s theology of the religions, see Raimundo Panikkar, “The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges” (1997).

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Jesus and the robbers on Calvary. Likewise, inter-human love is “fully homologous” (aldeles eensartet) with the love between Christ and his community (1944, 131). Here, Grundtvig points to experiences of marital love as expressing human love in ordinary life, and this is what the Lutheran tradition refers to as the “life in the household” (oikonomia). Despite his insistence on the power of original sin, Luther also acknowledged the human capacity for discerning ethical demands (lex naturalis) in a fallen world, just as he emphasized the positive role of a worldly government following principles of justice and reasonableness (the doctrine of the two regiments). In his Disputation Concerning Man (1536), he even went so far as to praise human reason as “the most important and the highest in rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine. It is the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life” (LW 34,137). He did, however, qualify this by adding that human insights are of no avail when it comes to faith and theology proper. In contrast, Grundtvig expressed a more positive view of the cognitive and experiential capacities of human beings. For Grundtvig, faith, hope and love are basically the same phenomena within as well as outside church and Christianity. Moreover, for Grundtvig, the major enemy of human life is death rather than sin. The same applies to K.E. Løgstrup, as indicated in the title of his philosophy of religion, Creation and Annihilation (Løgstrup 1995, vol. 1). In Wingren’s later work, we also detect a marked shift from legal to biological theological metaphors, which indicated a shift of emphasis from Luther to Grundtvig (Uggla 2016, 247–254, 290–296). Grundtvig’s so-called Church View, centered on the sacraments (formulated in 1825), was followed by a highly positive account of humanity beyond the life of Christians and outside the Christian church. In his introduction to Norse Mythology from 1832, Grundtvig states his view of humanity as follows: “For humankind is no ape … but is a unique, wonderful creation in whom divine powers make themselves known, shall develop and clarify themselves through a thousand generations, as a divine experiment, which reveals how spirit and dust can interpenetrate and be clarified in a common divine consciousness” (Grundtvig 1907, 408). This view differs from that of Luther, who taught that the human race ceased to be an image of God after the fall, until finally being renewed in Christ. For Grundtvig, however, it is the interaction between the dust and spirit that defines human uniqueness. Indeed, in some places Grundtvig even speaks of God creating “the earth in your image after your likeness.”8 Grundtvig’s view of the resurrection of the body was defined, too, by his view of the divine experiment of spirit and dust interpenetrating one another. 8 See A.M. Allchin, N. F.S. Grundtvig (2015, 150). See also chapter 6.

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9. The Influence of Scandinavian Creation Theology Scandinavian creation theology has become an umbrella term used for a specific theological movement in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, filtered through and creatively developed by the common concerns of its three main proponents: K.E. Løgstrup, Regin Prenter, and Gustaf Wingren.9 Set forward in the latter half of the twentieth century, it was, for decades, one of the major manifestations of Reformation theology in this region. Scandinavian creation theology remains influential in the life of the Scandinavian churches, and continues to be discussed in the wider cultural realm too. One also finds resonances and echoes among German and North American theologians and philosophers, especially among Lutherans and Roman Catholics.10 Scandinavian creation theology combines central insights coming from Martin Luther with central aspects of the so-called “Mosaic-Christian view of life” given by N. F.S. Grundtvig. Luther takes, as we have seen, a positive view of creation, but combines the sense of the beauty and usefulness of creation with a pessimistic view of human capacities, when taken on their own, apart from faith. Certainly, Luther has a positive view of ordinary life, the family, various other earthly callings, and of the role of human reasoning within the worldly regiment. But, in contrast to Luther, Grundtvig argued that human beings never lost the positive traces of being created in the image and likeness of God.11 Accordingly, the Christian triad of faith, hope and love can be recognized, appreciated, and even exercised by non-believers. With his principle, Human first, then Christian, Grundtvig argued that a broader understanding and appreciation of ordinary lived human experience is the underlying condition for a Christian way of life. Christian faith has to be lived in a humane way, in accordance with a shared sense of humanity. K.E. Løgstrup, Regin Prenter, and Gustaf Wingren—the three founding figures, usually associated with the emergence of Scandinavian creation theology—continue to have a considerable readership and continue to be received beyond the generation of students that they themselves taught. While Prenter and Wingren are mostly read among theologians (though Wingren is also read by lay people), Løgstrup’s writings have reached a larger cultural 9 Scandinavian creation theology is a colloquial term that also occasionally comes up in print. See Jan-Olav Henriksen, “Creation Theology in Scandinavia” (2010); Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Skandinavisk skabelsesteologi: Gustaf Wingren og Luther” (2012). 10 In Germany, we have a strong tradition of hermeneutical theology, such as the work of Gerhard Ebeling, whose “Die Evidenz des Etischen und die Theology” (1969) builds on Løgstrup. In the US, the Lutheran ethicist James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective (1981/1992), and the Roman Catholic philosopher Alasdair McIntyre, “Human Nature and Human Dependence” (2007) express ideas consonant with Scandinavian creation theology. 11 See the comparative analysis of the anthropology of Luther and Grundtvig in Anja Stockholm (2003).

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audience. Both Wingren’s and Løgstrup’s books continue to be re-published and discussed in the public realm. This is due, also, to the publication of new American translations. While Scandinavian creation theology does not constitute a unified movement, with an organizational body and clear theoretical boundaries, the commonly shared view is that God’s creation has an independent value and meaning, and is more than a mere foil for human redemption. The beauty of creation exemplifies divine benevolence, a benevolence also encompassing the non-human nature (a view shared by Luther and Grundtvig). In general, Scandinavian creation theology reads Luther through the optic of the nineteenth century mediator Grundtvig. It is probably a distinguishing consequence of Scandinavian theology that, today, very few Scandinavian theologians find it meaningful, or possible at all, to go back to Luther without making reference to mediating figures. In Denmark, for example, Luther scholars of the stature of Regin Prenter and Leif Grane are acutely aware of the fact one cannot do contemporary theology based solely on Luther’s theological writings. Grundtvig, in particular (but Søren Kierkegaard too), serve the function as mediators and shapers of contemporary Lutheran theology in the Scandinavian countries. This is a point also generally understood amongst educated lay people. The gap spanning Luther and ourselves is simply too large. Between Luther and ourselves we find not only theological figures such as Grundtvig and Kierkegaard, but also a new scientific worldview far beyond Luther’s imagination. “Darwin lies between Luther and us,” as Løgstrup pointedly asserted (1995, vol. 1, 336). According to today’s worldview, starving and death cannot be traced back to a primordial fall, for death and decay was in the world before the first hominids came about. However, there are remaining tensions between the two main sources of Scandinavian creation theology, which raises a set of very important questions: exactly what is the relationship between being human and being Christian? And, to what extent are philosophical arguments viable in the domain of theology? Or, put more simply : how does Grundtvig’s motto, Human first, then Christian, square with Luther’s principle of simul justus et peccator (especially if we consider Luther’s view that people without faith in Christ are nothing but sinners)? These questions will be returned to throughout the book. It is important to understand, however, that universality with respect to human experience, in the sense that it will be used throughout the book, is not the same as attempting to provide a “totalizing view” of human existence, nor does it mean merely providing a series of generalizations. Gravity applies everywhere, for example, but children are not everywhere, and there may only be one child of mine in the whole universe. Yet, in relation to this particular child, all the universal features come up: the particular demand to take care of this child, and my endless grief in losing this child. Care for the child and grief are, in this terminology, “universal features,” even if they are not found

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everywhere in the universe. Løgstrup, Prenter, and Wingren all emphasized the importance of the concrete situation and the fluidity of social relations. Politically, the three figures diverged (Prenter was the more conservative of the three, whilst Løgstrup and Wingren appeared to be oriented more to the left). But the kind of universality that Scandinavian creation theology speaks of concerns recognizable aspects of everyday existence. Here and now, and always singular, but never general in the same sense as gravity prevails everywhere. Certainly, the world of creation is not only a sunny place but has built-in zones of failure and shortcoming, shortage and sickness, imperfection and tragedy. Theologians can speak of human beings as images of God, but they must also speak about suffering and sin. None of the Scandinavian creation theologians are utopian optimists when speaking about creation. They speak about the power of death, illness, and decay, no less than about hope, human flourishing, and regeneration. As Wingren repeatedly argued, no moving forward is possible for life unless grains of wheat are put into the ground, and die, in order to give manifold fruit (John 12:24).

10. The Structure of the Book The aim of this book is twofold. Its first purpose is to investigate the common contours and the various commitments of the Scandinavian creation theology, and to delineate the different ramifications and emphases amongst its representatives. The contributions to Part I and II serve this purpose by presenting the three founding figures—Løgstrup, Prenter and Wingren— against the background of their two main sources, Luther and Grundtvig. The second goal of this volume is to identify challenges to the program of Scandinavian creation theology emerging from contemporary philosophy and theology, whilst presenting strong and constructive responses to such criticism. The contributions of Part III and IV serve to identify the social contexts underlying the present theological situation, and to identify thereby some contemporary concerns and challenges in light of these pressing social contexts. Contexts change. Today, Pietism and Barthianism may no longer be the most influential voices in contemporary theology. However, basic debates remain in today’s theology concerning the divine presence in all human beings and creatures, and whether theology should take common life experiences as its point of departure, or not. In the present book, a number of theologians explore how the most prominent Scandinavian creation theologians have reinterpreted Reformation theology by acknowledging how the universal dimensions of Christian faith are integral parts of theological reflection and practice.

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As already indicated, Part I presents the theological programs of K.E. Løgstrup and Regin Prenter, from Denmark, and Gustaf Wingren, from Sweden. Now they belong to a previous generation, and to a past century also. Yet, our intention is to articulate their arguments and impress upon the readers the actual impact they have had, and still do have, in reshaping Lutheran theology in contemporary contexts. We are convinced that the theology of Løgstrup, Prenter, and Wingren do not only belong to the history of Reformation theology, but also provide important resources for its future reconfigurations. In Part II, we incorporate a more profound historical perspective on these founding figures by engaging with the basic inspirations they drew from Martin Luther and N. F.S Grundtvig. Grundtvig was a ceaselessly active contributor to a non-Pietistic theology, which has impacted Denmark (dominantly), Norway (partly), and Sweden (sometimes!), ever since. Going further back into Reformation history, we find Martin Luther himself, whose thinking has influenced Scandinavian creation theology in profound ways. Since all the Scandinavian countries are shaped by national churches that have been overwhelmingly Lutheran up until recently, the importance of Luther for theological reflection has been decisive. From Grundtvig as the great mediator, onwards to the founding figures Wingren, Prenter and Løgstrup, Luther is interpreted as the theologian who rediscovered the spoken Word of God “for us,” and the importance of the external evangelical signs of the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. But, of equal importance, Luther is seen as a theological witness to the embodied nature of all human and creaturely life–the social world of callings, the concrete embodiment of the human senses, and of the universe as God’s grand world of creation. In Scandinavian creation theology, the Word of God and the life worlds of human beings are always seen in tandem, never the one without the other. According to Scandinavian creation theology, wrestling with both the similarities and tensions between Word and world, is what the legacy of Reformation is all about. God is intimately present in the intersubjectivity of life in God’s creation. However, even if God is omnipresent in the world of creation, God is not omni-manifest in a world which is continuously plagued by human selfishness, and by the powers of death. Hence, the distinction remains between the Word of God and the world of human beings. In Part III, the authors have been invited to explore the wider and broader significance of creation theology by engaging with a set of contemporary issues, such as ecology, phenomenology, love and the erotic, human rights, gender, church, and interreligious dialogue. The authors of Part IV will elaborate on the potentials of Scandinavian creation theology with respect to other paradigms within current theology, particularly trinitarian theology, North American theology, and concepts of the secular and the post-secular. Given all this, what are the limitations then, and what are the contributions of Scandinavian creation theology today? For example, how does Scandina-

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vian creation theology fare in relation to postmodern developments within contemporary philosophy? To what extent must common sense give way to communal sense? How does Scandinavian creation theology respond in light of contemporary theological proposals within, for example, trinitarian theology, gender theology, and interreligious theology? On the one hand, Scandinavian creation theology seems to be challenged by a new emphasis on the profiling of church life and ritual practices, on the other hand by more legal approaches to human rights and welfare societies. In brief, how is one to rearticulate the concerns of Scandinavian creation theology with respect to contemporary contexts? Inevitably, such questions and many more will confront us as we attempt to explore the legacy of Scandinavian creation theology in this, the 500th year, since the Reformation that provided its initial trajectory and the main impetus for its departure.

Bibliography ALLCHIN, A.M. (2015). N. F.S. Grundtvig. An Introduction to his Life and Work. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. ASAD, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. BAUMAN, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. BECKFORD, J. A. (2012). “Public Religions and the Postsecular : Critical Reflections.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51:1, 1–19. EBELING, G. (1969). “Die Evidenz des Ethischen und die Theologie”, Wort und Glaube. Vol 2, Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1–41. FREI, H. (1992). Types of Christian Theology. New Haven: Yale University Press GREGERSEN, N.H. (2012). “Skandinavisk skabelsesteologi: Gustaf Wingren og Luther.” In Lutherbilleder i dansk teologi 1800–2000. Niels Henrik Gregersen (ed.). Copenhagen: ANIS, 319–334. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1907). “Nordens Mythologi 1832”, N. F.S. Grundtvigs Udvalgte Skrifter V, Holger Begtrup (ed.). København: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 376–737. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1944). “Den christelige Børnelærdom”, N. F.S. Grundtvig. Værker i Udvalg, Georg Christensen og Hal Koch (eds.). København: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1–273. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (2010). Schriften in Auswahl. Knud Eyvin Bugge, Theodor Jørgensen, and Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen (eds.). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (2011). The School for Life. N. F.S. Grundtvig on Education for the People. Edward Broadbridge, Clay Warren, and Uffe Jonas (eds.), Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (2015). Living Wellsprings. The Hymns, Songs, and Poems of N. F.S. Grundtvig. Edward Broadbridge (ed.), Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

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GUSTAFSON, J. (1981/1992). Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. HABERMAS, J. (2007). Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Polity Press. HABERMAS, J. (2008). “Notes on Post-Secular Society.” New Perspectives Quarterly 2008: Secularism’s Crisis of Faith, 17–29 HAUERWAS, S. (1998). Wilderness Wanderings. Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy. Colorado: Westview Press. HENRIKSEN, J-O. (2010). “Creation Theology in Scandinavia”. In The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. Daniel Patte (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KRISTENSSON UGGLA, B. (2016). Becoming Human Again: The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. LPVINAS, E. (2003). Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. LINDBECK, G. (1984). The Nature of Doctrine, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1963). “Svar til Professor Prenter”, Dansk Teologisk Tidskrift 26, 161–166. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1995). Metaphysics. Volume I–II (1976–1984). Translation and with an Introduction by Russell L. Dees, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1997). The Ethical Demand [Den etiske fordring, 1956]. Introduction by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. MACINTYRE, A. (1981). After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. MACINTYRE, A. (2007). “Human Nature and Human Dependence: What Might a Thomist Learn from reading Løgstrup?” In Concern for the Other : Perspectives on the Ethics of K.E. Løgstrup. S. ANDERSEN AND K. VAN KOOTEN NIEKERK (eds.). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 147–166. MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1962/2012). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. MILBANK, J. / PICKSTOCK, C. eds. (1998). Radical Orthodoxy : A New Theology. London: Routledge. LUTHER, M. (LW) Luther’s Works 1–78, Jaroslav Pelikan a.o. (eds.). Minneapolis: Fortress Press/Saint Loius: Concordia Publishing House. LUTHER, M. (WA): D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe 1–80. Weimar : Hermann Böhlaus und Nachfolger. PANIKKAR, R., (1997), “The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges”, in: The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter (eds). New York: Orbis Books, 89–116 PRENTER, R. (1967). Creation and Redemption. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. SCHÜTZ, A. (1973/1989). The Structures of the Lifeworld, Vol 1/II. Noyes. IL: Northwestern University Press

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STOCKHOLM, A. (2003), “Om forholdet mellem skabelse og syndefald hos Grundtvig og Luther”, in: Grundtvig Studier 2003, 88–125. TAYLOR, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. VAN DEN BREEMER, R., J. CASANOVA, and T. WYLLER eds. (2014). Secular and Sacred? The Scandinavian Case of Religion, Human Rights and Space. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. WARD, G. (2000). Cities of God. London: Routledge. WINGREN, G. (1961). Creation and Law [Skapelsen och lagen, 1958], trans. Ross Mackenzie. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. Reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003.

PART I: FOUNDING FIGURES

Niels Henrik Gregersen

2. K.E. Løgstrup and Scandinavian Creation Theology Eternity is incarnated in the demand it imposes upon us through the interpersonal situation and in the sovereign expressions of life that correspond to it. Eternity incarnates itself not, in the first instance, in Jesus of Nazareth, but is already so in creation and the universality of the demand (Løgstrup [1967] 2007, 71; trans. corr.).

1. Introduction The philosopher-theologian K.E. Løgstrup (1905–1981) is often compared to his compatriot Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). Both were theologians speaking to their contemporaries using a concise everyday language rather than technical terminology, and both made their appeals to their readers by showing rather than telling. Moreover, they both used secular modes of reasoning—philosophy, psychology, literature, art, and music—to explore vital theological concerns. In Løgstrup’s case, this is seen particularly clearly with respect to the doctrine of creation, the teaching and person of Jesus, and eschatology. This chapter aims to identify Løgstrup’s particular voice within the movement of Scandinavian creation theology. My overall hypothesis is that Løgstrup played a unique role in the formation of the movement of Scandinavian creation theology by virtue of the originality of his work. The creative tensions between his phenomenological analyses and Christian theology helped facilitate a broad reception of his ideas both within and outside theology. In this respect, Løgstrup’s voice was more secular in tone and content than that of Regin Prenter and Gustaf Wingren. Moreover, one can observe a certain asymmetry among these three main figures of the movement. Prenter and Wingren, for example, related their own work extensively (and increasingly so over the years) to Løgstrup’s work, whereas Løgstrup only seldom discussed their writings, unless their questions and criticisms compelled him to do so. In this sense, Løgstrup’s work offered a founding inspiration for Scandinavian creation theology. In fairness, it should

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be noted that this asymmetry should not necessarily be taken to mean that Løgstrup’s work is superior to Prenter and Wingren’s. Løgstrup was more an independent philosopher and theologian than a comprehensive scholar in the classic sense of the term. For example, he eschewed conceptual expositions of Christian theology, including the fields of dogmatics and systematic theology, to which both Prenter and Wingren were committed. Moreover, Løgstrup read and absorbed far more philosophy and literature than theology proper. Hence, without the systematizing minds of Prenter and Wingren filling out the broader substance, there would hardly be any discernible Scandinavian creation theology. The shape of the movement is therefore indebted to its three founding figures, taken together, and also to the scholars and pastors they attracted in the younger generation. As for the structure of this chapter, after this brief introduction, section 2 will offer a brief overview of Løgstrup’s intellectual biography and of the development and influence of his work. Section 3 will introduce Løgstrup’s philosophical inspirations, specifically from the existential phenomenology of Hans Lipps and Martin Heidegger ; his theological indebtedness to Martin Luther and N. F.S. Grundtvig; and his corresponding criticism of Kant and Kierkegaard. Section 4 and 5 will focus on Løgstrup’s ethics, in particular his reinterpretation of the natural law tradition and the development of his ethics in The Ethical Demand from 1956, up to his later works. From 1967, Løgstrup argued that the ethical demand was only the second-best—a substitute for living in an immediacy in which trust, mercy and the openness of speech are effortlessly enacted despite the fact that human beings remain largely selfconcerned. Section 6 will discuss his philosophy of religion with its central idea that experience itself is open to a comprehensive religious interpretation of reality, developed in his later “metaphysical considerations.” Metaphysics are to be understood here as “descriptive metaphysics,” in which piecemeal experiences reveal universal aspects of the human condition, in contrast to a “speculative metaphysics” that aims to offer a totalizing view of reality.1 The final section 7 will discuss Løgstrup’s view of the tensions and continuities between a theology of creation, on the one hand, and Christology and the Kingdom of God, on the other hand. In this context, Løgstrup develops his well-known distinction between the universal and the particular aspects of the Christian faith.

2. K. E. Løgstrup: A brief intellectual biography Løgstrup was a pastor on the island of Funen (Fyn) from 1936–1943, until he took up the position of Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the 1 For the concise meaning of “universality,” see the Introduction, Chapter 1.

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newly-established Faculty of Theology at Aarhus University 1943–1975. Even though Løgstrup was part of the Tidehverv movement (a Danish variety of dialectical theology) until 1964, and continued to lecture and publish on Martin Luther’s ethics and theology, many saw him as a thinker on the margins of the church. He was a member of the Danish Academy, a society of artists and philosophers, but never held any official positions within the Danish church. Some of his contemporaries viewed him as much too secular ; others saw him as too deeply enmeshed in the Christian tradition. Løgstrup’s doctoral work carries (in English translation) the monstrous title: The Epistemological Conflict between Transcendental-Philosophical Idealism and Theology (Løgstrup 1942). Therein, Løgstrup argues that Immanuel Kant and Neo-Kantianism express an anthropocentric and culturally-biased ideology at odds with the understanding of life as a gift of creation. Human beings do not construct meaning, but rather discover sources of meaning emerging in the midst of personal relations, each with their own character, intrinsic value, and demand. Already in this context, Løgstrup points to the “pre-cultural” conditions of human existence. Later, in Art and Ethics (Kunst og etik) written in 1962, he formulated the insight that: “all culture lives on what is not culture” (1962a, 10). During the 1950s, Løgstrup enjoyed a great deal of respect among German theologians, at that time representing the forefront of international theology. Løgstrup was aware of his indebtedness to German philosophy and theology. From his youth he belonged to the circle of Alte Marburger around Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and he was a co-editor of the prestigious six volumes of Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart3 (1957–1962). Only after his premature death, was his work rediscovered in the Anglo-Saxon world among philosophers and social thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Brenda Almond, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Immediately after the publication of The Ethical Demand in 1956 (Løgstrup 1997), Løgstrup became a cultural household name in Scandinavia. In this seminal work, he developed his interpretation of the religious and ethical teaching of Jesus “in strictly human terms” (1997, 1), based on an original analysis of the phenomenon of trust. Moreover, Løgstrup argued that the factvalue dichotomy, so prevalent in the British philosophy of his day, is untenable since human relations are so structured that morality is grounded in the prior fact of human interdependence.This book received no less than 72 reviews in the broader public realm of Denmark, and received many responses, not only from philosophers and theologians, but also from the wider academy, including artists. In the years following The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup became an inescapable dialogical partner for critics and followers alike.2 At present, 2 In Art and Ethics (Løgstrup 1962a, 228–280), translated as “Rejoinder” in Beyond the Ethical Demand (Løgstrup 2007, 1–49), Løgstrup carefully responded to his critics, including the criticisms of Gustaf Wingren (2007, 34–39).

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the book has received 19 prints in Danish, two German editions, and two translations into English. Løgstrup’s later works helped to nourish the public interest in his work. Particularly influential in Scandinavia was his book Controverting Kierkegaard from 1967 (German translation 1968), in which he critiqued Kierkegaard’s presentation of Christianity as an absolute paradox, and of Christian existence as a self-chosen martyrdom. Thereby, he also took issue with the existentialist strand of Tidehverv, where he had been a regular speaker and writer until he left the group in frustration. Løgstrup was now developing his view of the “sovereign expressions of life,” such as trust, openness of speech, and hope, seeing them as positive expressions of a divine creativity that continues to cut through human egocentricity. In this phase of his work, Løgstrup gradually distanced himself from Rudolf Bultmann. While he continued to share Bultmann’s view that the Christian message must be understandable from a human point of view, Løgstrup was increasingly critical of what he considered a fundamental delusion in Bultmann’s thought: the view that human agency is based in individual decisions (Løgstrup 1966). Also, while he agreed that the New Testament had to be de-mythologized to be understood today, he thought it mistaken to believe that the Christian message could be understood apart from any worldview at all (Løgstrup 1995, I, 331). Human beings are not self-secluded beings detached from universal conditions such as flourishing and decay, sexuality and death. Accordingly, a description of human “existentials” cannot be explicated in abstraction from nature.3 During a very fruitful working phase, up to and after his retirement, Løgstrup began an ambitious philosophical work in four volumes under the subtitle “Metaphysical considerations, I–IV.” His ambition was now to show in more detail how human existence rests on its intertwinement with the wider universe. Sensation is as fundamental for human existence as language: humans cannot exist without the sense of colors, sounds, and bodily touch. Human life is continuously structured in personal relations, between parents and children, friends, strangers, and colleagues, just as human work-life is shaped by particular tasks handed over to each person in social life. Likewise, the world of nature is pre-shaped in organic forms and types, recurring in individual existents and exemplars, characterized by self-regulation. All this takes place both ante nos and in nobis, so that no fixed boundary exists between humanity and nature. Moreover, the world of creation is also pro nobis insofar as human beings live and thrive on fundamental aspects of reality that they have not themselves created. In this way, Løgstrup became one of the

3 Regin Prenter and Gustaf Wingren, both of whom had already, by the 1950s, taken issue with existentialist theology (see Uggla, Chapter 3, and Plder, Chapter 4), strongly endorsed this development of Løgstrup’s thinking during the 1960s.

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forerunners of what was later termed ecotheology—a concern developed in no small part by Ole Jensen in a Scandinavian context (see Chapter 7). Løgstrup’s Metaphysics, volumes I (philosophy of language) and IV (philosophy of religion), were published in 1976 and 1978, while volumes II (philosophy of art) and III (philosophy of nature and history) came out posthumously (edited by four of his closest students in collaboration with his wife, Rosemarie Løgstrup, who was also a philosopher by training).4 To this day, numerous Scandinavian theologians either self-describe, or are labelled by others, as “creation theologians,” or even as “Løgstrupians.” Also, “the Løgstrup school” was coined as a term, and regularly used to describe a group of scholars around the universities in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Lund, and Oslo.5

3. Luther and Grundtvig controverting Kant and Kierkegaard Løgstrup studied the two outstanding philosophers that he spent his life critiquing intensively : Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard. While Kant developed a deontological ethics based on the categorical imperative of duty, Løgstrup developed an “ontological ethics.” In a major article in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche (Løgstrup 1960; in English 1997, 265–293), Løgstrup clarified the principal contours of an ontological ethics as distinct, both from Kant’s deontology (speaking of duty in a formalistic and disembodied manner), and from varieties of a teleological ethics (which tend to refrain from using the language of duty). Ethics, according to Løgstrup, derives its content from the embeddedness of the human being in the prior fact of human coexistence with other human beings. In this view, the ethical phenomenon is neither a separate human faculty (as in Kant), nor an optional choice (as in existentialism), nor dependent on a calculus of the long-range effects of one’s ethical judgments (as in teleological ethics). Note that “ontology” here does not refer to anything static. Ontology means that the ethical demand is rooted in the prior social fact of human conviviality. 4 The editorial group working on Løgstrup’s posthumous writings consisted of Svend Andersen (Aarhus), Karsten M. Hansen (Oslo), Ole Jensen (Copenhagen), and Viggo Mortensen (Aarhus). Being part of this group, Rosemarie Løgstrup also translated the four volumes of metaphysics into German (Løgstrup 1990; 1991; 1994; 1996). Substantial parts of Løgstrup’s metaphysics are available also in English (Løgstrup 1995, I–II). 5 While some Løgstrupians use Løgstrup as their primary theological resource, others are deeply influenced by Løgstrup but combine (as the present author does) his influence with other theological and philosophical resources. Among the theological Løgstrupians should be mentioned Ole Jensen (see Chapter 7), whose book on Løgstrup has recently been translated into German (Jensen 2015), as well as Jakob Wolf at Copenhagen University (see Chapter 8). At Aarhus University, the Løgstrup Archives were established in 1995. Here, a significant group of scholars has been active in re-publishing Løgstrup’s works in Danish, while also bringing Løgstrup’s work into the realm of international philosophical discussion (Andersen & Niekerk 2007).

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The content of the ethical demand derives from the fluid situations, in which we are actually entangled with other persons. The ethical point of view, therefore, does not derive from an a priori consciousness but emerges in the a posteriori conditions of the always changing and muddled experiences of human intertwinement. A person never has anything to do with another person without holding something of the other person’s life in his or her hand. Løgstrup knows well that the metaphor of having something of the other person’s life “in our hands” is a metaphor (Løgstrup 1997, 25–26). Yet it is a metaphor showing the extent to which the flourishing of the life of any human person is delivered over to other persons, who thereby become responsible for taking care of the persons addressing them. Thus, relations of power and vulnerability constitute the source of the ethical demand. Yet, it is always up to human agents to discern actively what is the right thing to do in a given situation and context. Løgstrup criticized Kant for basing his ethical thinking on special human capacities (a “capacity-oriented psychology”). He levelled a similar criticism against Kierkegaard, even though Kierkegaard understood the ethical demand as a divine command to be preached, extraneous to human beings. In Kierkegaard, it is only by virtue of the human decision to follow the divine command that the ethical situation comes into existence. Løgstrup found in Martin Luther’s anthropology a far more realistic and down-to-earth set of resources through which his insights were developed. In the vein of Luther, Løgstrup reformulated the natural law tradition that goes back to Paul (Romans 2), and that is also found in the work of Thomas Aquinas, amongst others. What Luther did, according to Løgstrup’s interpretation, was to derive the sense of divine law not from human conscience in isolation, but from the inter-human situations within which human beings are always engaged. The contrast between Luther and Kierkegaard can already be discerned in Løgstrup’s early work: In Kierkegaard nothing defines (stellt) a human person within the finite realm. Nothing creates the ethical and religious relevant situation in which a human being is called upon to decide. Instead, the finite is downgraded (nivelliert) to nothing but relative goals and immanence. In Luther, on the other hand, the finite realm itself occasions a definition of the human person. The finite realm constitutes the ethical situation and the choice, as a finitude ordered in offices (Ämter). To him, finite life is life in offices, as child, father and mother, as spouse, master and servant, authority and subject, and so on. In Luther finitude is by no means merely immanent. In the finite realm, God places his demand (Forderung) upon the individual; God contradicts the individual’s search for him- or herself, forcing the neighbor upon the individual through the offices into which God has ordered finite life (Løgstrup 1949, 268; my translation).

In a similar vein, Løgstrup contrasted Heidegger’s phenomenology of being in-the-world (Dasein) as a being-with-others (Mitsein) with Kierkegaard’s

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individualism. In his post-war Berlin-lectures, given at Freie Universität and subsequently published in the book Kierkegaard’s und Heidegger’s Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung (Løgstrup 1950), Løgstrup consistently follows Heidegger in contradistinction from Kierkegaard. In Controverting Kierkegaard (published in Danish 1967, translated into German 1968), Løgstrup came to see Kierkegaard’s one-sided emphasis on the individual’s choice as having paved the way for the individualist philosophy in all forms of existentialism, in theology as well as in philosophy. Thereby he obscured the sense of the given structures of human life, each having their own definite character : Kierkegaard’s capital error, which the existentialists, both philosophical and theological, have perpetuated, is that he, and they with him, make the individual’s choice, decision, and freedom alone that which renders life definitive—as though our existence were not already and antecedently something definitive in each of its, as it were, anonymous expressions of life. That which is alone subject to the individual’s choice, determination and freedom is whether to fulfil the definiteness which, already and antecedently, attaches to the sovereign expression of life through which the individual realizes himself—or to be guilty of its dereliction (Løgstrup 2007, 59).

It should not be forgotten, however, that Løgstrup continued to be informed by Kierkegaard’s work. Not only did he share Kierkegaard’s criticism of “living in the crowd,” but, arguably, his entire work is indebted to the concreteness of Kierkegaard’s analysis of human existence. However, while Kierkegaard developed penetrating psychological analyses of human existence, Løgstrup eschewed the realm of individual psychology. Developing his own version of a social phenomenology, he offered a sustained series of phenomenological analyses of how human lives are interdependent—even in an age of excessive individualism—while continuously emphasizing the role of responsible individuals. At its most fundamental level, he argued, human existence constitutes a shared field of living. Trust, for example, is not first and foremost a psychological attitude; it is a moral phenomenon based on the prior social fact that we always have “some degree of control” over the trusting person (1997, 15–16). The trusting person is always vulnerable. Any person speaking out openly, addressing another person, expects to be cared for by the listener and respondent. Such expectations also entail the risk not only of being neglected or harmed but also of being disappointed in one’s trust. Here we notice the “humanism of the other person” that can be identified as a common concern of the three founding figures of Scandinavian creation theology (see Chapter 1, Introduction). In his phenomenological analyses, Løgstrup used the resources of the existential phenomenology in Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and also in the work of the less known Hans Lipps (1889–1941). Løgstrup studied with both German philosophers, in particular with Lipps in 1931–32, whose phenomenological descriptions (of embarrassment and shame, for example) he found

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deep and circumspective. Løgstrup maintained some relationship with Martin Heidegger—for example, in 1949 Heidegger sent Løgstrup a copy of Was ist Metaphysik? Sharing Heidegger’s criticism of Edmund Husserl for subjectivizing the self and following Heidegger’s analyses of human existence as a being-with-others, Løgstrup found the ethical concern for the other strikingly absent from Heidegger’s phenomenology. In Løgstrup’s view, one cannot properly describe human existence without being attentive to the ethical phenomenon in human co-existence. Though we have no records of Løgstrup’s personal relation to Lipps, it must have been a shock to him if he ever realized that Lipps had by 1934 already enrolled with the SS and stayed loyal to Nazism until his death at war in 1941. We do know, however, that Løgstrup detected Heidegger’s political leanings towards Nazism early on. Once back in Denmark, Løgstrup criticized Heidegger’s political stance vigorously, calling him “the philosopher of Nazism.”6 In a later analysis of Nazism, Løgstrup follows the Norwegian philosopher Harald Ofstad in the view that Nazism builds on a fundamental “contempt for weakness” (1987, 54–55)—in Løgstrup’s view a contemptible contempt that eliminates the possibility of any sort of humanism, or humaneness, towards the other person. By not allowing phenomenology to include the moral perspective, Heidegger’s thinking became distorted to the point of being inhuman. While Løgstrup shared Heidegger’s view of the decentred self, and applied it in his criticism of Kant and Husserl, and also in his criticism of anthropocentrism, he never followed Heidegger in his principal criticism of humanism. In 1947 Heidegger published his Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’ in which he distanced himself from the humanism in Christian thought, in Marx, and in Sartre. In 1950 Løgstrup published the article “Humanisme og Kristendom” (“Humanism and Christianity,” Løgstrup 1950b). The Danish writer and poet Ole Wivel called this article “the lecture of the century” (“arhundredets foredrag”). Indeed, it entails the germs of Løgstrup’s later argument in The Ethical Demand. Løgstrup’s stance to Heidegger was similar to that of Rudolf Bultmann. Both continued to use Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses from Being and Time (1927), while distancing themselves from his political philosophy and his emphatic criticism of modernity. Løgstrup and Bultmann were modernists in the sense that they wanted to address human beings in their own selfdesignated secularity, even though both knew that modernity could not, on its own, address the inner conflicts of human existence. Bultmann argued that only the gospel could free human beings such that they would be able to make an authentic self-decision (Entscheidung), while Løgstrup held that a carefully developed phenomenology is already able to explicate structures of meaning 6 By 1936 Løgstrup had already written critical analyses of Heidegger in a Danish newspaper decrying him as “The philosopher of Nazism” (Dagens Nyheder 14. 4. 1936), and of the relationship between “Being Fuehrer and Dictatorship” (Dagens Nyheder 24.–25. 4. 1936).

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in human life despite the accompanying threat of tragedy and meaninglessness. Thus, for Løgstrup one is not compelled to make a choice between a nihilistic philosophy, on the one hand, and the decision of faith in relation to the kerygma, on the other hand. Rather, we find open roads for seeking a common understanding of central features of human existence, including its ethical aspects (the dimension of law) and the aspects of grace in human existence (the dimension of the gospel). Theologically speaking, God the creator is already present in the shared world of creation. God continues to address human beings in and through the networks of creation, even if that is in an ambiguous manner. Similarly, a social phenomenology, based on a broad variety of human experiences, shows how human beings are not just producers of meaning but ceaselessly encounter meaning in the co-dependent relationships of human life-together. In his Controverting Kierkegaard, written in 1967, Løgstrup coined the notion of “the sovereign expressions of life” such as trust, the openness of speech, and mercy—the idea here is that life-manifestations such as these take hold of us prior to our mental reflection and the composed determinations of our will. Here, Løgstrup set himself up against the theological view that human life is fully absorbed in sin. Løgstrup was enough of a Lutheran theologian to argue that human beings are intrinsically selfish, but by establishing a distinction between the life-manifestations steadily created and re-created by God, on the one hand, and the selfish interventions of human sin, on the other, he argued for an intensive rather than extensive understanding of what theologians call original sin. Human sinning is intensive by neglecting the ethical demand and distorting the intrinsic goodness of the manifestations of these core life-expressions. However, this does not imply that human life, as constituted by interdependence, is intrinsically evil, or a mere reflex of selfish love. It is worth exploring this important distinction between an intensive rather than extensive understanding of human evil: Kierkegaard’s understanding of evil becomes extensive, and not intensive. The alternative to Kierkegaard is the following: Erotic love and friendship, to mention two phenomena to which Kierkegaard repeatedly returns and circles around, are granted to human beings by God […] Intensively understood, a goodness belongs to the human relation to God, a goodness that God has implanted into the world and human life, which evil then eats up. Extensively understood [as in Kierkegaard], there are only two aspects, a civil and a religious. What is good from a civil point of view, is religiously mean and vile. Only evil is of religious importance (Løgstrup 1967, 60–61; my trans.).

The general thrust of the argument is that Kierkegaard is downgrading ordinary life to the point of demeaning it. It has been argued that Løgstrup’s criticism of Kierkegaard misses the mark here (see Pia Søltoft, Chapter 9). This counter-criticism likely has merit. It seems that Løgstrup’s Kierkegaard serves as a foil for Løgstrup’s real target, the Kierkegaardians in the Danish

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Tidehverv movement—most prominently K. Olesen Larsen, who in the 1960s increasingly came to define the orthodoxy within that group. Target could also be the pessimistic view of human capacities that one finds in Martin Luther, written large in contemporary Lutheranism influenced by dialectical theology. Løgstrup’s own stance, however, can also be interpreted as a re-articulation of central motives in Luther’s theology of creation, in which divine benevolence is ingrained in human life, despite the perversions of human sin. In Luther’s brief interpretation of the first article of faith in Small Catechism from 1529, he points to the daily abundance of ordinary life: “spouse and children, fields, livestock and all property” reflect the presence of divine love in the midst of human social life and natural existence. “And all this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all” (Kolb and Wengert 2000).7 In the later phase of his work, Løgstrup developed his “cosmo-phenomenology” in which he argued that not only existentialism but also Heidegger’s ontology is restricted to a “regional ontology of historicity” (Løgstrup 1984, 223). Heidegger, and the prevailing view of modern philosophy, eliminates the importance of sensation, colors, sounds, and bodies in its exclusive focus on the historicity of human existence. In this phase, the Danish theologian, poet, and educator N. F.S. Grundtvig becomes ever more important to Løgstrup. Though Løgstrup never studied Grundtvig to the same extent that he studied Luther and Kierkegaard, he frequently refers to Grundtvig, and always with praise.8 Indeed, in The Ethical Demand he had already argued that while most Protestants decry the process of secularization, not all Protestant churches follow this view, “thanks to Luther (and in my own country to Grundtvig)” (Løgstrup 1997, 110n). Luther and Grundtvig are taken together here. Løgstrup’s positive view of secularization rests on the assumption that Christians and non-Christians are on a par with respect to questions of ethics and philosophy. In his later work, however, Løgstrup questions the view that the history of humankind consists “in a single, forward-moving process of rationalization.” Now he points to the self-forgetfulness of modernity regarding all “those phenomena which are too fundamental to allow themselves to be assimilated by our 7 For an interpretation of Luther along this lines, see Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Grace in Nature and History : Luther’s Doctrine of Creation Revisited” (2005a). 8 The Løgstrup Archieves at Aarhus University contain substantial parts of Løgstrup’s library. Here one finds the works of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger intensively studied and annotated, whereas Løgstrup has only scarcely consulted Grundtvig’s collected works. From 1937, however, Løgstrup belonged to the so-called Tidehverv-Grundtvigian circle within Tidehverv along with the Grundtvig-scholar Kaj Thaning, whose secularizing interpretation of Grundtvig Løgstrup shared. In Løgstrup’s entry on “Tidehverv” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart3, he writes: “Dass sich der Christ mit den Nichtchristen in den Fragen des bürgerlichen und kulturellen Lebens auf gleicher Ebene trifft, wie es Grundtvigs Auffassung war, wird zwar durch K. Thaning in T[idehverv] betont, freilich in latenter Spannung zu der vorherrschenden Ausrichtung auf Kierkegaard” (Løgstrup 1962b).

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knowledge or to let themselves be made into objects for our domination” (1995, I, 1–2). Løgstrup mentions phenomena such as meaning, color, language, sensation, the sense of types that underlie and recur throughout history, the unconditional expressions of life, and also negative features such as death, disease and suffering. These are the phenomena that “suggest a religious interpretation” (1995, I, 2). Now, “creation and annihilation” became the overarching theme of Løgstrup’s philosophy of religion. The sheer fact of the extinction of species and the irrevocable loss of individual life points to the radical contingency of all that exists. Accordingly, Løgstrup points to a metaphysical triad between (1) what actually exists (if only in passing), (2) the fact of annihilation, (3) and “an eternal power existing in everything that exists,” which keeps annihilation at arms length in existing beings—as long as they lasts (Løgstrup 1995; I, 52; 204–206). Here, Grundtvig was right in his claim that “my antithesis is the antithesis of life and death” (quoted in Løgstrup 1995, I, 48). The conflict between life and death is deeper than the antithesis of soul and body (in ancient Greek philosophy), or that of humanity versus nature (in modernity). In other words, religion relates to phenomena that are pre-modern, modern as well as postmodern, because they are important across all historical epochs. Historical conditions may differ, but the universal phenomena that underlie all history are history-resistant. As formulated by Løgstrup, the universe does not simply refer to the natural surroundings of human culture; the universe is also the source of human life, underlying human flourishing as well as human decay. In the process of developing these insights, Grundtvig becomes a new ally for Løgstrup’s religious interpretation of reality (Løgstrup 1995, I, 297–299; 336–338). To the Grundtvigian emphasis on the shared life of Christians and non-Christians (part of Løgstrup’s positive view of secularization), Løgstrup now adds a new emphasis on Grundtvig as a “realist,” who takes seriously both the joys and the woes of human existence in God’s grand world of creation. The secular and the religious no longer constitute two separate domains. Rather, they are concurrent aspects of the one and undivided world of creation (see Trygve Wyller, Chapter 16). Løgstrup was a contrarian thinker, criticized by many. The contemporary theological milieu, shaped alternately by the influence of Karl Barth’s revelation theology or Bultmann’s kerygmatic existentialism, saw Løgstrup’s creation theology as nothing but natural theology in a new dress. Indeed, Løgstrup wanted to pursue a more “natural” way of doing theology, but his point is neither to infer nor to deduce the reality of God from human observations.9 His aim, rather, was to develop a comprehensive religious 9 Løgstrup criticized a fideism that takes faith to be at odds with reality but also a classic-style natural theology that takes faith to be a matter of an argument by reason alone. There is, indeed, a leap between metaphysics and religion: While metaphysics shows that the universe conditions

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interpretation of commonly known phenomena, while recognizing that such religious interpretation always has to be accepted in the freedom of faith (albeit a faith guided by an understanding of what is important in life). Likewise, in his home country, theologians within the Tidehverv-movement called him “the theologian of the welfare state,” allegedly reflecting the feelgood atmosphere of humanism, while Marxists saw him as a bourgeois theologian who abstracted the face-to-face encounters between human beings from their economic power relations. And Løgstrup did indeed develop a humanism of the other person. Moreover, Løgstrup did explicate first-hand experiences of personal communication in situations of ordinary life. However, central to his analysis is the recognition of the asymmetry between human persons, based on the phenomena of power relations of vulnerability and control.

4. The ethical demand and its refractions In The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup takes as his point of departure the goings on of everyday communication: Regardless of how varied the communication between persons may be, it always involves the risk of one person daring to lay him or herself open to the other in the hope of a response. This is the essence of communication and it is the fundamental phenomenon of ethical life. Therefore, a consciousness of the resultant demand is not dependent upon a revelation, in the theological sense of the word, nor is the demand based on a more and less conscious agreement between the persons with respect to what would be mutually beneficial (1997, 17–18).

Communication does not constitute an ethics-free zone, but rather a field of reciprocal interactions in which unspoken demands appear, rooted in the expectation of being taken seriously. Certainly, there are many sorts of communication: a brief colloquial “hello,” a formal address to colleagues, or a child addressing his or her mother or father. But regardless of cultural codes of respect and reticence, all conversation presupposes such an expectation, if only nodding in a friendly way to the one saying hello. Not responding means de-valuing the one who approached you, downgrading the importance of this person, who is then likely to close down his or her eyes, and withdraw. In communication there is no clean divide between what is and what ought to be. human existence for good and worse, there is a further step from metaphysics to religion, which suggests that we ourselves are “relevant to the universe,” that is, to the divine power holding ourselves in existence (Løgstrup 1995, I, 248). Thus, even though Løgstrup argues that a range of phenomena, when construed metaphysically, are “open to a religious interpretation,” and even sometimes (as in the case of the sovereign expressions of life) “suggest a religious interpretation” (ibid.), he nowhere argues for a theoretical proof of the existence of God.

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And, in his “Rejoinder” from 1962 to the criticisms levelled at The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup clarifies this crucial point further : We must accept that we cannot merely describe and theorize, leaving it at that. We cannot exist without taking a position and intervening. We are, first and last, enterprising and emotional beings who therefore live through goals, actions, and decisions. It is therefore impossible in a given situation to recognize that the other person’s life has been surrendered to one without taking a position in respect of that circumstance. Between fact and demand there is the most intimate connection. The demand arises directly out of the fact (Løgstrup 2007, 8).

Thus, any conversation is given as ethical in its orientation. Below the level of conscious awareness, the truster trusts the trustee. Hereby the trustee has gained a certain power over the truster, a power to be used in a moral manner that furthers the life of the truster rather than demeaning it. This also shows that communication is never a power-free zone.10 From this fact of power also follows the requirement for sensitivity towards the vulnerability of the other : In its basic sense, trust is essential to every conversation. In conversation as such we deliver ourselves over into the hands of another. This is evident in the fact that in the very act of addressing a person we make a certain demand of him (Løgtrup 1997, 14).

Thus, there is an element of risk-taking involved in any utterance in the sense of the speaker making him- or herself vulnerable to the acceptance or nonacceptance of the conversation partner. As Løgstrup argued, the moral phenomenon is not to be construed as something abstract, as a divinely imposed external command (as in Kierkegaard and his followers). But neither is the ethical demand the result of a social contract between two independent partners, nor is the concern for the other dependent on an arbitrary decision: Trust is not of our own making; it is given. Our life is so constituted that it cannot be lived except as one person lays him or herself open to another person and puts her- or himself into that person’s hands either by showing or claiming trust (Løgstrup 1997, 18).11

Løgstrup further characterizes four defining features of the ethical demand: (1) The ethical demand is “radical,” insofar as it is based in the elementary root (radix) of human interdependence, and insofar as it demands that we help 10 As presupposed by Jürgen Habermas in his theory of communicative action in the 1980s. 11 Observe that Løgstrup does not claim that trust is equally present in all epochs and all societies. In oppressive societies, only few people dare to speak up, and wisely so, because of the danger of punishment. Also, trusting another person is not always the right thing to do (2007, 132–33). Rosemarie Løgstrup recalls that during the German occupation in Denmark, two polite German officers paid her a visit asking about the whereabouts of her husband (who was in the underground). She had to be careful not to trust the German gentlemen, since trust, in informal communication, is so much easier. In an anonymous form, Løgstrup uses this case in Løgstrup (1987).

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the other person wholeheartedly and unconditionally, without any ulterior selfish motives. (2) The ethical demand is “silent,” since it needs no verbal explication, and does not tell the agent exactly what to do in the given situation. It is the very phenomenon of trust that calls forth the demand of taking care of the other person in his or her vulnerability. (3) The ethical demand is “one-sided,” or unilateral, since the ethical demand is lost from sight if we help the other person while expecting later counterfeit benefits: “a protest in the name of reciprocity” (1997, 116) is unethical. (4) Finally, the ethical demand is “unfulfillable,” since human beings continue to be selfish and self-concerned creatures, always negotiating the concern for others with the concern for themselves, hereby compromising the radical nature of the ethical demand. We have already seen that, according to Løgstrup’s argument, the fact-value distinction is untenable. Neither can a clear demarcation be upheld between fact and religious interpretation. The description of interdependence and trust rests on ordinary language, its elucidative features, and inherent perspectives. But there is also a wider “understanding of life” involved in the description of the ethical demand, related to a religious understanding of the human situation as a gift: According to this particular understanding, life and all that it contains has been given us, and there is nothing in our life to justify our making a counterdemand upon another person; in view of the fact that we possess nothing which we have not received, we cannot make counterdemands. A person is a debtor not because he or she has committed some wrong but simply because he or she exists and has received his or her life as a gift. The demand that he or she take care of the other person’s life is rooted in the very fact of his or her indebtedness for all the different potentialities he or she has him- or herself received: intelligence, speech, experience, loved, and many others (Løgstrup 1997,116).

Here, we encounter one of the many places where the secular-sacred dichotomy is too simplistic. The ethical demand presupposes the structure of human interdependence, as we have seen. Yet, the fact that we are one another’s world, a world in which we are delivering ourselves to one another, is also “at the same time the blessing of our life” (1997, 207). We are, in the language of the Lord’s Prayer, “daily bread” for one another, and cannot live and flourish without other persons, even if they appear to be overly demanding. The demand to shelter the other from the consequences of his or her self-delivery in conversation, and further his or her life, requires that we understand for ourselves what it means to be dependent on the help and actions of other people. Just as no one can require a particular ethical action (which would be claiming a position to formulate the silent demand), no one can morally resist the demand to help by referring to one’s own need for help

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in the future. This would destroy the radicality of the demand, and also be at odds with the one-sidedness of the demand that rests on the understanding of life as a fundamental gift. This does not mean, however, that the trustee should simply do what the truster asks him or her to do. This would lead to naivity in the (ideally rare) cases where a person approaching another person has an ulterior motive for exploiting the good will of the trustee. But even under normal circumstances, simply doing what another person asks you to do, means conflating the concern for the other with complacency, or mere conformism. Meeting the trust of the truster requires an ethical discernment on behalf of the trustee. As Løgstrup puts it: “The radical demand does not bypass a person’s insight, experience, judgment, and imagination” (1997, 112). Being called to take care of the other always means taking the situation and the circumstances into account: “the demand is, as it were, refracted through a prism in a variety of ways” (1997, 106–07). Since ethical discernment always takes place in the fluid situations of life, the prisms, or refractions, of the ethical demand are to be considered. Løgstrup points to four such refractions. First, the refraction is based on our particular relations with others. Just as Løgstrup earlier spoke of the different “offices” in the social network, in which we are placed, he now refers to the prism given with our “various unique relationships with one another—as husband and wife, parents and children, employer and employee, teacher and student” (1997, 107). Raising one’s own children does not imply that we should raise the children of our colleagues as well, and being committed to one’s wife does not mean that we should be committed in the same way to the wife of a friend. Second, ethical theory should be alert to the varieties of different cultures and epochs: “Care of one’s spouse is different in monogamy than in polygamy, just as child care calls for different actions within patriarchal social structures than in family and social life today” (ibid.). Third, the demand is refracted by the concrete situation at hand, depending on our discernment of “the other person’s concrete situation, an understanding which is shaped not least of all by imagination” (ibid.). The ethical demand calls for an active discernment on the part of the trustee. Fourth, and finally, “the demand is also refracted by a person’s own nature” (ibid.). It so happens that human beings are more or less imaginative, more or less empathetic, and more or less self-assertive. “Briefly stated, while the radical demand is furthered when it is refracted by the unique relationships in which we live our lives, it is hindered in its course when it is refracted by our nature” (1997, 108). More often than not, human beings replace broad-mindedness with narrow-mindedness, and the lack of ethical imagination is, unfortunately, more widespread than an ethical imagination which understands the other from his or her point of view. Thus, there is no guarantee that the ethical demand is heard and fulfilled. Likewise, there can never be a certainty about whether we have responded to other

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people in the proper way, or not. The moral landscape is plagued with failures and uncertainties. At this point, Løgstrup makes clear that one should not presuppose that the Christian possesses any ethical superiority to people of no faith or other faith. For example, it was the religiously problematic Samaritan who became the Good Samaritan, not the religiously orthodox Levite (Luke 10). Moreover, Løgstrup takes the uncompromising position that there is not, and cannot exist, any privileged Christian view of, say, marriage, child rearing, politics and economics: “Christianity does not endow a person with superior political or ethical knowledge.” Hence, “the Christian must make decisions on exactly the same bases as those upon which anyone else decides” (1997, 111). Nonetheless, Løgstrup is using elementary aspects of Christian thought as resources for his philosophical analyses. Christian thought is here, in the terminology of Karl Popper, used as a heuristic context of discovery but not as a self-sufficient context of justification. The description of the ethical demand and its sources in human interdependence is, in Løgstrup’s own words, a philosophical rendering of the ethical content of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (1997, 209). Also two other insights from the Christian tradition are formative for Løgstrup’s argument. The first is the understanding that life is a pervasive gift that gives no room for a calculation of a later reciprocation by the one helped. The second is the assumption that selfishness is so deeply ingrained in human nature that the radical demand will never be fully realized in the world of human sinners.

5. The self-incarnation of eternity : the sovereign expressions of life On this last point, Løgstrup changed his mind in 1967. In Controverting Kierkegaard, he introduced the important distinction between an extensive versus an intensive understanding of human evil (see above p. 45). This was part of his critique of Kierkegaard, but it also brings into question some of Løgstrup’s own arguments in The Ethical Demand. There, Løgstrup argued that nothing can be exempted from the wickedness of the human will, and that the demand to love is therefore “an impossible demand” (1997, 141). Challenged by Ole Jensen on this point (Jensen 1967),12 Løgstrup corrected himself, now admitting that natural love actually does take place in the midst of human lives–and importantly, it takes place not because of the cultivations of human wills but also because of the sovereign expressions of life that realize 12 Ole Jensen’s article (Jensen 1967) is available in English translation on the homepage of Robert Stern, “‘Created Possibilities of Life’ – ‘Sovereign Expressions of Life’: Remarks on a Fundamental Theme in K. E. Løgstrup,” see https://ethicaldemand.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/jen sen-sovereign-expression-of-life-translation.pdf

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themselves despite our selfishness. Now Løgstrup’s view of ethics becomes more complex: The demand is unfulfillable, the sovereign expression of life is not produced by the will’s exerting itself to obey the demand. The sovereign expression of life is indeed realized, but spontaneously, without being demanded. The demand makes itself felt when the sovereign expression of life fails, but without endangering the latter ; the demand demands that it be itself superfluous. The demand is the correlate of sin; the sovereign expression of life is that of freedom (Løgstrup 2007, 69).

This argument, here presented in a theological framework, alludes to both Luther and Grundtvig. The ethical demand correlates with sin, since it confronts us with what we should do, yet have failed to do (lex naturalis). However, even if we do the best we can for the other person (through all the aforementioned refractions), what we cannot achieve by human resolution is acting wholeheartedly and unreservedly for the benefit of others. As long as our wicked nature is ruling (sin as incurvatus in se), the unfillable character of the demand still applies. Here, however, the sovereign life-expressions come to our help, contravening and preventing human sin, and bringing with them effortless actions so that we do not even need the ethical demand. Indeed, the demand “demands to be superfluous.” As a “grace of existence” (Løgstrup 2007, 69), the life-manifestation fills up our personal identity, even if only for a moment, thus freeing us from ourselves in self-forgetfulness, and freeing ourselves to give full attention to the life in front of us. The notion of the sovereign life-manifestations shows how Løgstrup further developed his de-centered view of the human self without deleting the self. As he had already pointed out in Art and Ethics written in 1962: “My life has made me its own before I made it mine” (2007, 6). Put in theological terms (not used by Løgstrup), the hidden presence of God in the midst of creation is not only about law and accusation, but also about grace and fulfilment. In Grundtvigian terms (not used by Løgstrup, either), human beings—also “after the fall” and despite human sin—remain beholders of the image of God. What Løgstrup does say, however, is that eternity (God) incarnates itself not only in the person of Jesus of Nazareth but also in the midst of creation, in the sovereign manifestations of life (2007, 71). In The Ethical Demand Løgstrup has already spoken of the blessings of mundane existence in the tasks of everyday life. Now, in Controverting Kierkegaard, we find that an even more dynamic view of divine creativity and self-incarnation comes to the fore. Based on the fundamental structure of interdependence, we have the historically developed estates of being a father, mother, child, colleague, etc.13 However, in whatever place we live, we 13 I owe the distinction between the ‘transcendental’ level of interdependence, and the historically concrete life-worlds from the analysis in Johann-Christian Plder, Evidenz des Ethichen: Knud E. Løgstrup’s Fundamentalethik (2011, 318–19).

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sometimes experience being captured by events of fulfilment that make natural love both a possibility and a momentary reality in God’s world of creation. The expression of life, whether it takes place in the form of speech, action, or conduct, or all of these at once, is transmutable in a trice, quick as lightning: its fluidity, mutability, is eminent and yet it is definitive at every moment. It is no less definitive for being spontaneous: spontaneity does not figure in human existence as an indeterminate surge of life. In the most elemental manner conceivable, claims are imposed on human beings: they are implicit already in the definitiveness of the sovereign expression of life (Løgstrup 2007, 54).

The Danish term suveræne livsytringer is translated in German as souveräne Daseinsäußerungen, and in English as “sovereign expressions of life,” or “lifemanifestations.”14 On closer inspection, however, this represents an umbrella term for very different phenomena. Some of these may have a more enduring quality, other are bound to the moment. “Trust” is not everywhere, since dangerous conditions and bad experiences with other persons may constrain our immediate trust, wherein trust is replaced by mistrust. Yet trust is an undercurrent of normal inter-human communication. Also, the “openness of speech” is widespread but not everywhere, and is internally related to trust. The openness of speech, according to Løgstrup, neither derives from social conventions nor from a high degree of personal sincerity. Rather it comes out of speech as a “pre-individual expression of life” (Løgstrup 2007, 137) in which one word takes the other, usually below the threshold of conscious control. In conditions of mistrust, however, the open source of speech is restrained and replaced by control. Other life-manifestations, however, are more ephemeral and rare. Compassion and mercy, for example, belong to particular situations and moments, and are easily susceptible to elimination. Having second thoughts about showing mercy already implies that this life expression has disappeared as suddenly as it emerged. Similarly with hope. Hope may be a latent undercurrent in a forwards-oriented way of life, but in difficult lifesituations, hope can still arise out from a source beyond the life lived by standard expectations. Hope is, in such a case, a hope even against the tide of very dark prognoses (Romans 4:3 speaks of a “hope against hope”). Hope, like mercy, is “transmutable in a trice, quick as lightning,” because it comes and goes, and is not controllable by human resolution. In all cases, the sovereign life-manifestations are contrasted with “self-encircling” or “obsessive” phenomena, in which the individual imprisons him- or herself by taking 14 Read with hindsight, one is surprised to find aspects of the concept of spontaneous life-manifestations already in The Ethical Demand: “Spontaneity is therefore not destroyed by the mutual claims which we ourselves make on others and which they make upon us. Spontaneity is therefore not destroyed by the mutual claims we make upon one another. If spontaneity and claim were mutually exclusive, it would be impossible to speak of spontaneity in connection with human existence” (1997, 68).

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offense, being jealous, envious, comparing him or herself to others, and so on. (Løgstrup 2007, 50–52). Generally, then, the sovereign life-manifestations have the following features: 1. They are sovereign (rather than reactive) such that human beings are able to actively shape and change their situation. 2. They are spontaneous insofar they realize themselves in us beyond the capacities of human will and resolution. 3. They are definitive in the sense that they are not human inventions (but anonymous), even though human persons are wholeheartedly present in them, without having second thoughts or ulterior motives. 4. They are bound to the concrete situation and its moments, hence cannot be transformed into general principles of conduct. 5. As long as they last, they fill the person up insofar as they take hold of a person, while giving him or her a realization of his or her fullest identity. 6. They are always susceptible to disappearance, since even the slightest mistrust destroys the undivided lifemanifestation. 7. They are deeper than ethics, because they effortlessly realize what the ethical demand demands. 8. They are both factual and normative, insofar as they take place in human life, and still function as identifying what a realized morality is all about, and what genuine humanity means.15 So far, we have seen the interaction between what we may see as two analytical levels of Løgstrup’s ethical view : the lack-oriented view of the ethical demand, and the fulfilment-oriented view of the sovereign lifemanifestation.16 To these two levels we should now briefly indicate a third level of Løgstrup’s ethical theory, the level of ethical norms to be used for ethical orientation in the wider society. This relationship is the focus of Løgstrup’s work written in 1972, Norm and Spontaneity. Herein, Løgstrup’s view is that there is a tremendous gap between the primary ethical phenomena themselves given in strictly personal interactions, and the formulation of social norms for use in the wider society. Similarly with sovereign life-manifestations: “The expression of life is not something to be applied. Principles, precepts, and maxims are applied” (2007, 54). Yet, moral norms guiding societal practices still need the inspiration from experiences of a fulfilled life. Life-utterances such as trust and compassion need no justification, since they are the yardstick by which to measure political initiatives and cultural values. What is unconditionally good is the benchmark for what is conditional. However, the spontaneous expressions of life mostly surface in silent and preconscious ways. Thus, it is only in face of crisis and conflicts, and in collisions between duties, that manifestations of life may be formulated into ethical norms that can be of some orientational value for society (Løgstrup 2007, 129). One cannot expect much more, since social problems require political solutions, 15 Here, I have re-used my (anonymous) entry, “suveræne livsytringer,” in Kirke og kristendom. Leksikon (2001, 386). 16 For further study, I refer the reader to the excellent analysis in Kees van Kooten Niekerk, “The Genesis of K.E. Løgstrup’s View of Morality as a Substitute” (2007).

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which cannot be derived in a simple way from the ethical demand and the lifemanifestations that facilitate a piecemeal realization of the intention of the ethical demand.

6. The comprehensive illusion and the comprehensive religious interpretation In the later phases of his work, Løgstrup developed what he called a “descriptive metaphysics” (Løgstrup 1995, I, 138–140). Based in phenomenological analyses “from below,” Løgstrup’s method differs from a metaphysics based on scientific methods. Løgstrup maintains his earlier view that there are “phenomena we can only describe and distinctions we can only express using natural language,” while admitting that there are law-like processes behind the phenomena that the exact sciences attempt to track down (Løgstrup 2007, 9). The program of a descriptive metaphysics, however, is also distinct from a speculative metaphysics of a Hegelian type that aims to offer a totalizing view of reality. Metaphysics is about features of reality that we cannot think away without thinking the world away, as we know it. Many causes are responsible for natural processes of life and death. But if we see death from a purely physical perspective, one observes that there is no annihilation in the universe (but only transformations from one state of energy to another). Nothing really perishes. Staying with the phenomena, however, means being attentive to the hiatus between life and death in the world of organic forms. Losing a child or a spouse means that a beloved person is irrevocably gone. Mourning over the death of a beloved is thus a natural attitude, hence it is open to phenomenological analysis. As such, death, sadness and mourning are part of a descriptive metaphysics that does not allow for any scientific or speculative mediation between life and death. What, then, is the relation between metaphysics and religion? Løgstrup’s answer is that metaphysics is the attempt to understand the universe as significant to us, whereas religion presupposes that we are significant to the universe as well. There is a difference between metaphysics and religion, but also a connection between them. Løgstrup is convinced that the Christian faith includes a relation to the world as a whole, since the Christian faith presupposes God as the omnipresent power-to-be in all-that-is. The awareness of faith that God is “closer to ourselves than we are to ourselves” (Luther), presupposes an understanding of existence according to which God is present in the world as the life-sustaining and renewing power. This does not mean, however, that we have access to God in whatever happens in the world. God is concealed in his creation. We cannot map out God’s being and reality by looking at the world,

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but faith presupposes that God makes Godself known to us through his word and the sacraments: “Revelation means that God makes his omnipresence visible in a concrete place. In revelation, his pre-existing reality emerges” (Løgstrup 1995, I, 55). On the one hand, God is the all-permeating creator and giver of life. On the other hand, divine omnipresence does not imply that God is omni-manifest. God is close to us, but not close for us in all places. God’s concealment is unavoidable for several reasons. Firstly, God conceals Godself, since the source of all-that-exists cannot itself be a piece in the inventory of creation. Secondly, creation is an ambiguous universe wherein creation and annihilation, life and death, good and evil are weaved together closely. Looking only at nature as it is, one cannot conclude that God is simply good and loving. Thirdly, God’s concealment is a result of what Løgstrup calls the comprehensive illusion of human existence. We live on the self-evident premise that we are the masters of our lives and that we will be successful in our revolt against the annihilation of time. The comprehensive illusion “consists of thinking, feeling and acting as if we ourselves were the power to exist in our existence” (Løgstrup 1995, I, 72). Paradoxically, we cannot survive without this illusion. Nonetheless, it is an illusion: We know that we shall die and that everything must perish, but we think, feel and act as if we should not die and as if everything should exist forever and always. Since annihilation gets the last word, the revolt is in vain. Thus, we live on the basis of an allembracing illusion. And since the incentive for all cultural creation is not only a rebellion against death and annihilation but a rebellion based upon a consciousness of victory, we create culture on the basis of an illusion which is always and everywhere present. However, if we give no thought to the fact that annihilation gets the last word, neither do we give the power which keeps annihilation at arm’s length for us a single thought. What makes us forget annihilation makes us forget this power (Løgstrup 1995, I, 70–71).

Løgstup’s concept of the comprehensive illusion is a philosophical reformulation of the Christian understanding of original sin. We are endogenously self-helping beings, and we would be paralyzed if we were constantly unsure of ourselves and unsure of the day after tomorrow. The only alternative to the illusion is a philosophical reflection that makes us aware of the illusion. This is what Løgstrup offers in Creation and annihilation written in 1978 (Løgstrup 1995, I). The point of departure for Løgstrup’s philosophy of religion is a specific religious doctrine in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but he expresses this religious doctrine in general philosophical terms. Løgstrup’s concept of the “religious comprehensive interpretation” gives exactly such an account. “Faith without understanding and some accounting of what we believe is not faith but obscurantism” (Løgstrup 1995, I, 251). This concept of the comprehensive religious interpretation contains, obviously enough, three elements: “comprehensive,” “religious,” and “inter-

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pretation.”17 The comprehensive aspect of the religious interpretation concerns the reality of the power-to-be-and-let-be at work in all domains of creation, no less in social and psychological life than in natural conditions. As encompassing as the threat of annihilation is, the eternal power is at work keeping nothingness at arm’s length. Thus, we have what Løgstrup calls “the metaphysical triad”: being, annihilation, and the power to be in everything that exists (Løgstrup 1995, I, 204–217). Next we have interpretation. Interpretation is first and foremost about comprehending the world beyond that which we can register empirically. The wink of an eye can be registered, but its meaning has to be interpreted. Is it a private sign, an appeal, or just a mechanic tic? A smile on a face can be registered, but is it a facade, a know-all attitude, a sign of kindness, or irony? At any rate, such interpretation goes beyond that which is verifiable (though that does not mean it is unconnected to reality). Interpretation is an act of interpreting something as something. This means that we relate to something in the world (the smile, the wink) as something with significance—a significance we try to articulate in language. Moreover, the interpretation is self-involving. We can only interpret nature and the world with respect to our own existence, just as it is impossible to extricate ourselves from the social nexus that we are interpreting. Subject, object, and situation constitute an undivided whole, which cannot be separated into its components without leaving the common world of co-existence. Such a stepping outside of life into a purely observational attitude, “a view from nowhere,” is not possible. Løgstrup’s thesis is in agreement with those of the existentialists in holding that it is impossible to live a life without interpreting the world around us. Finally, what is the significance of the religious element here? According to Løgstrup, religious interpretation shares its subject field with metaphysics in general because both religion and metaphysics relate to universal aspects of reality that we cannot consider apart from the world without disregarding the world as it actually is. Sorrow and mourning belong to reality no less than suns and moons. Løgstrup characterizes the transition from metaphysics to religion with the assertion that, if we move “from the ascertainment that the universe is relevant to us to the question of whether we are relevant to the universe, we have gone from metaphysics to religion” (Løgstrup, 1995 I, 248). Why bother with this transition? Is there any rationality in the religious interpretation? Løgstrup’s first answer is that human beings happen to deal with existence religiously. In our “familiarity with the existing” we cannot but understand the occurrences of existence as containing significance, even eternal significance: “we attribute meaning to everything” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 176). The choice between belief and unbelief is whether “everything is meaningless or everything holds an eternal significance” (Løgstrup 1978, 53; 17 I here build on a previous analysis of Løgstrup’s philosophy of religion (Gregersen 2005b, 162–65).

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my trans.). The task of a philosophy of religion is therefore not to figure out a new religious position from scratch, but to relate reflectively to the religious interpretations that are already part of human culture. Explicitly or implicitly, religious interpretation interprets something as something. For example, the sovereign expressions of life are seen as instantiations of the goodness of the power-to-be-in-everything-that-exists. The imaginativeness of language is seen as an expression of continuous divine creativity, and so on. But it is never possible to conclude from phenomena to the reality of God. “There is a break between the phenomena and the comprehensive interpretation” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 252). Thus, the idea of God does not spring from a rational cognitive process. To Løgstrup, this is the common mistake underlying the so-called proofs of God’s existence of the Middle Ages, a mistake also present in Kant’s rejection of natural theology. As Løgstrup writes: “Kant’s discussion of the cosmological and physicotheological proofs of God is concerned with the God of the sciences” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 95). Løgstrup now submits religious interpretation to a test of dispensability. Løgstrup proposes a thought experiment here: what vanishes from our field of attention if the religious interpretation disappears? As we have seen, Løgstrup does not think that the phenomena we interpret religiously will disappear along with the religious interpretation. They are universal and much too powerful for that. He writes: “No religious knowledge is necessary to give the life-manifestation free range. The created life goes its way, whether the individual believes he is created or not” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 254). Rather, Løgstrup claims that without religious interpretation the world tends to be seen as banal. The sovereign expressions of life would be interpreted as either down to our own personal merit, or to the merit of our social constructions of reality. Then unconditional phenomena would become contingent on our cultural efforts. Moreover, trust, compassion, or the openness of speech would not be seen as good per se, until a society judges so. Trust would be redefined as naivety, compassion as sentimentality, the openness of speech as persons simply being talkative. Similarly, we would rapidly lose our sense of the world as significant. Nor would we be able to be grateful for what happens to us–we might at best be able to feel content or happy, for a while. Gratitude presupposes the aforementioned interpretation that what happens to us is not a matter of course, but a gift, a blessing. As such, the test of dispensability entails a highly practical aspect (a point often overlooked in Løgstrup research). There is, however, a more theoretical aspect to religious interpretation, too. The strength of the comprehensive interpretation is to show that even very different phenomena are open to a religious interpretation: creation and annihilation, colors and shapes, sense-perception, the imaginativeness of language, the expressions of life, and the intrinsic meaning of human coexistence. The religious interpretation thus builds up a cumulative argument.

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Yet, Løgstrup makes clear that the religious interpretation will still have to be “accepted voluntarily, which is to say that along with our existence, there is a decision in the acceptance” (Løgstrup 1995, I, 52). Løgstrup does not shy away from saying that the religious interpretation is closer to a nuanced description of the phenomena than its alternatives, such as nihilism, naturalism, and a narrow humanism. Nihilism and naturalism cannot explain the unmotivated kindness and significance by which we live. The humanist cannot explain why we cannot, merely by human regulations and social norms, create and uphold the life-supporting phenomena. All this being said, however, there are also challenges to such religious interpretation, not least from the pervasive experience of pain and suffering in the universe. Thus, to the problem of “nihilodicy” (1995, I, 267), there is a corresponding problem of theodicy : If we undertake a religious comprehensive interpretation of existence and the universe as created, we must face the fact that there is suffering and pain in the world and in the world of human beings that comes from the Creator, just as it also comes from the Creator that they strike indiscriminately and that the Creator has coupled development and decay together in His creation, a coupling we ascertain biologically […] God’s act of creation is terrifying in its splendor and annihilation; it exceeds our intellectual and emotional apprehension (Løgstrup 1995, I, 271–2).

7. Løgstrups’ Christology and the Kingdom of God We now move from what Løgstrup terms “the universal aspects” of Christianity (related to ethics and the doctrine of creation) to what he calls the “particular aspects” of Christianity (related to Christology and eschatology). Let us take stock of Løgstrup’s arguments so far, beginning with the development of his ethics from The Ethical Demand forward to Controverting Kierkegaard and Norm and Spontaneity. We have followed the complexity of Løgstrup’s ethical view, which works at three levels: the life-manifestations, the ethical demand, and the norms and values of society. The ethical demand is always refracted by the situation at hand, just as the ethical discernment requires an awareness of the epochs and cultures in which the ethical demand emerges. Yet the ethical demand is also refracted by the limitations of human persons who are called upon to respond to the vulnerability of the other person in a responsible way. Due to the human self-concern (sin), the ethical demand is not fulfillable by human persons out of free will. Here, Løgstrup points to the sovereign expressions of life as the qualitative presence of a creative God who takes hold of a human person, and does so thoroughly that the ethical demand is actually fulfilled by the captivating power of the life-manifestations. Yet the

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life-manifestation does not replace the activity of the human person either, since it takes place in and with the human person whose identity is filled by the outwards-oriented task of trusting, hoping, having compassion, and so on. We have also noticed that, even though Løgstrup avoids using technical theological language, his analysis is undergirded by a range of theological commitments derived from Martin Luther and N. F.S. Grundtvig. What is original in Løgstrup, in relation to both Luther and Grundtvig, is his use of incarnational language about the spontaneous expressions of life. We saw Løgstrup arguing that the eternal God “incarnates itself” in time and space both prior to and after the incarnation in Jesus. One already finds in Løgstrup’s interpretation of Jesus in his dissertation (habilitation) written 1942 that Jesus is presented as the arch-example of what it means to live thoroughly in immediacy, apparently without feeling a need to protect himself. As such, Jesus was not only teaching the ethical demand, but he lived what he taught. Moreover, as Løgstrup argued in The Ethical Demand, Jesus was preaching the unconditional forgiveness of sin to his contemporaries, implicitly claiming to speak out of God’s generosity. This proclamation confronted its hearers with a decision of faith. Whence came the authority by which he spoke and acted? Was Jesus only a teacher or prophet, perhaps even an exotic teacher of unconditional forgiveness? Or, was the heavenly Father the source of Jesus’ mundane life in such self-identifying manner that “God counts the word and work, the life and death of Jesus as his own” (Løgstrup 1997, 212). Løgstrup himself never used the theological term “christology” in his work. Therefore Regin Prenter (1962), Løgstrup’s colleague in dogmatics at Aarhus University, challenged him to clarify his theological interpretation of Jesus in The Ethical Demand. Was Løgstrup proposing a picture of a humanized ethical Jesus, or did he endorse a classic, extant incarnational Christology? Løgstrup responded in the affirmative to the latter, saying that he was expressing a view of Jesus in line with classic Christian theology, insofar as “God acts and speaks in and through him, his life and death” (1963, 164). Apparently, God was in him and with him in all his undertakings. Hence, Jesus both spoke and acted on God’s behalf, so that God “accepts the word of Jesus as his own unforeseen word, and the work of Jesus as his own unforeseen work” (Løgstrup 1997, 211). In light of Løgstrup’s later use of incarnational language about the sovereign expressions, this raises a further question. Does Løgstrup represent a first-article Christianity, in which Jesus is only the arch-example of living in the immediacy under the spell of the life-manifestations, within which God the creator is present and reigning? The answer must be “no.” As he already made clear in Controverting Kierkegaard, “the grace of existence” exemplified in the expressions of life, does not “render the grace of the gospel superfluous” (Løgstrup 2007, 69). There are several reasons for Løgtrup’s argument that the grace of the gospel substantially exceeds the grace of creation. First, Jesus did not only

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teach the radical demand in a sharpened form, he also proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God and the forgiveness of sins. Thus, Jesus’ message of unconditional forgiveness addresses human sinners, who exactly are those not able to live thoroughly under the influence of the life-manifestations. The proclamation of forgiveness, in other words, presupposes that God forgives even those who continue to destroy the lives of others in unforgivable ways. “This is again the paradox of everyday language that we can speak of forgiveness only when a so-called unpardonable wrong has been committed, inasmuch as only unpardonable wrongs break the relationship—and forgiveness means precisely the restoration of a broken relationship” (1997, 210). The second argument as to why a first-article Christianity cannot stand on its own is that it would be utterly unethical, if God unconditionally forgives those that have destroyed the life of others without restoring the life of their victims. This is a central argument in part 6 of Creation and Annihilation. Here we encounter a new paradox: the generosity in forgiving those who have destroyed the life of others becomes unethical if the life of the victims is not restored in the kingdom of God. All this also applies to Jesus’s own actions: issuing a forgiveness to perpetrators without restoring the life of the victims would be cruel, like laughing at the suffering of the victims. Only by appealing to God’s eternal power of resurrection, victims and perpetrators will be able to restore their broken relationships. Thus, the ethical teaching of Jesus presupposes his eschatological proclamation of the coming kingdom of God. A similar argument, by the way, can be made regarding the lifemanifestations themselves. These are, as we have seen, inherently volatile. For example, the life-manifestation of hope would be rendered meaningless if hope were to be seen as a self-sufficient gift of life, regardless of whether there is any future to hope for. In this context, the preaching of the gospel presupposes that God is not a cheater who occasionally appears as the source of hope in order later to disappear, leaving human beings to their own despair. In other words, the ephemeral nature of the manifestation does not have the enduring quality needed for the fulfilment of hope. Without the kingdom of God, all hope would be in vain–a malicious joke. The third argument as to why the gospel must exceed what can be said within a theology of creation relates to the inherent ambivalence of God’s creation itself. Quite apart from the human destruction of creaturely existence, there is pain and death in the world of creation for which human beings are not responsible. Løgstrup is here insistent on staying with the core problem: “Seen in human terms, God in the creation is extravagant with splendor, cruel with suffering, unjust with accident” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 272). At this point, Løgstrup also took issue with Gustaf Wingren, with whom he otherwise had so much in common. Wingren’s challenge to Løgstrup (Wingren 1977) was that he and Ole Jensen had too strictly separated creation and gospel, so that the gospel lost its critical ethical function in society. The

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gospel was minimized to a proclamation of an otherworldly kingdom of God after death. Løgstrup did not really address Wingren’s question of the critical function of gospel and church in society—probably because he felt he had already done so earlier (Løgstrup 2007, 34–39). Løgstrup stayed with his earlier view that Christians have to operate in society fully on par with other citizens, without claiming to possess additional resources for moral and political judgment. But now Løgstrup poses a counter-challenge to Wingren. It seemed to Løgstrup that Wingren continued to presuppose the world-picture of Christian antiquity, and of Martin Luther, for whom biological death and pain is a divine punishment for human sin. But, as Løgstrup rejoins, biological death and the pains of natural selection cannot be sufficiently explained this way. “Darwin lies between Luther and us” (Løgstrup 1995, I, 336). Theology is therefore placed in a new situation since we, in our time, can no longer disregard the fact that cruelty is not only a result of human sin, but is, as it were, an inextricable part of the package-deal of creation: For there is a suffering both in the animal world and in the human world that has nothing to do with the human world. And this suffering is not peripheral. Almost no species, nor the human species, can continue its life except at the expense of other species. There must be cruelty in order for species to survive. It is a condition for life (Løgstrup 1995, I, 334).

This is a harsh and uncompromising statement. In order to think through this problem (which was unknown by Luther), Løgstrup eventually makes two theological proposals. First, in our time it is necessary to present a nonsentimental view of creation that takes seriously the insight that creation is not a space of unqualified goodness, but a mixed bag of good and evil, and that the sins of humanity cannot be held responsible for the pain and suffering that is part of the way God’s world of creation proceeds. Accordingly, it is theologically necessary to say that God in creation acts amorally, beyond good and evil, as judged by human standards. Secondly, and most importantly, it is necessary to say that in the proclamation of the kingdom of God to come, God is not only acting against human sin but is acting also against his own Godself. God must do something new (in Luther’s term, an opus proprium), which substantially exceeds the work of creation since the world of creation entails built-in elements of a work foreign (in Luther’s terms, opus alienum) to the love that God is, according to the gospel. There are several positive bridges leading from creaturely experience to the Christian belief that the future kingdom of God will not annihilate God’s own creation, but will, simultaneously, bring it into a new form of flourishing beyond our imagination. These bridges are given in the life-manifestations such as trust, hope, and experiences of natural love becoming real in the midst of human co-existence. For example, Løgstrup writes: “Sovereign hope is the horizon of understanding for Christian hope” (Løgstrup 1995, I, 300). But

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there is also a breach, if not a deep hiatus, between the world of creation and the kingdom of God. The gospel, according to Løgstrup, speaks of a cosmic turn in the conditions of creaturely being in the kingdom, as opposed to the rules of creation. God will have to act in a new manner, if the gospel is not itself an illusion: The coming of God’s Kingdom means that the work of creation and annihilation, its splendors, suffering and haphazardness is not God’s last word or act. Something new happens. In spite of His creative and annihilative essence (væsen), God makes Himself personal, human, but on His own god/human terms, not on our moral/ human terms […] If we insist on our morality, we hand ourselves over to blasphemy. Christianity does not turn on our morality but on hope and the promise of faith (Løgstrup 1995, I, 273).

Since a fundamental tension remains between the world of creation and the kingdom of God, there is no room for a transformation of Christianity into moral solutions to political problems, nor is there any room for a speculative theology that mediates between good and evil. Staying with the problems is essential for Løgstrup’s theological reasoning.18

Bibliography ANDERSEN, SVEND & KEES VAN KOOTEN NIEKERK eds. (2007). Concern for the Other : Perspectives on the Ethics of K.E. Løgstrup. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. GREGERSEN, NIELS HENRIK (2001). “Suveræne livsytringer,” in Carsten BachNielsen & Jan Lindhardt (eds.), Kirke og kristendom. Leksikon. København: Rosinante, 386. GREGERSEN, NIELS HENRIK (2005a). “Grace in Nature and History : Luther’s Doctrine of Creation Revisited,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 44:1, 19–29. GREGERSEN, NIELS HENRIK (2005b). “Helheden i fragmenterne: Løgstrup og religionsfilosofien,” in DAVID BUGGE, PIA ROSE BÖWADT & PETER AABOE SØRENSEN (eds.), Løgstrups mange ansigter. København: Anis. JENSEN, OLE (1967). “‘Skabte livsmuligheder’ – ‘Suveræne livsytringer’: Bemærkninger til et grundtema hos K. E. Løgstrup,” Studenterkredsen A˚rhus-København. Jubilæumsnummer 1–2, 33–43. JENSEN, OLE (2015). Knud Ejler Løgstrup. Philosoph und Theologe. Trans. Dietrich Gottlieb Harbsmeier. Stuttgart: Radius-Verlag. KOLB, ROBERT & TIMOTHY J. WENGERT eds. (2000). The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. 18 The author wishes to thank Mikkel Gabriel Christoffersen, Ole Jensen, Johann-Christian Plder, and Jakob Wolf for their critical input to earlier drafts of this chapter.

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LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1942). Den erkendelsesteoretiske konflikt mellem den transcendental-filosofiske idealism og teologien. København: Samleren. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1949). “Die Kategorie und das Amt der Verkündigung im Hinblick auf Luther und Kierkegaard,” Evangelische Theologie 9 (1949), 249–269. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1950a). Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Existenzanalyse und ihr V[rhältnis zur Verkündigung. Berlin: Brevarium Litterarum. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1950b). “Humanisme og kristendom,” Heretica 3, 456–474. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1960). “Ethik und Ontologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 1960, 357–391. English translation in LØGSTRUP (1997), 265–293. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1962a). Kunst og etik. København: Gyldendal. Partly translated in LØGSTRUP (2007), 1–49. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1962b). “Tidehverv,” Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart3. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, vol. 6, cols. 885–86. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1963). “Svar til Professor Prenter,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 26:3, 161–166. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1966). “The Doctrines of God and Man in the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann,” in Charles W. Kegley (ed.), The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann. London: SCM Press, 83–103. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1967). Opgør med Kierkegaard. København: Gyldendal. Translated into German in LØGSTRUP (1968). Partly translated into English in LØGSTRUP (2007), 49–82. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1968). Auseindersetzung mit Kierkegaard. Trans. Rosemarie Løgstrup. München: Christian Kaiser Verlag LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1978). Skabelse og tilintetgørelse. Religionsfilosofiske betragtninger. Metafysik IV. København: Gyldendal. Translated in LØGSTRUP (1990). Almost fully translated in LØGSTRUP (1995), I. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1984). Ophav og omgivelse. Betragtninger over historie og natur. Metafysik III. København: Gyldendal. Translated in LØGSTRUP (1994). Partly translated as Source and Surroundings in LØGSTRUP (1995), II, 1–145. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1987). Solidaritet og Kærlighed og andre essays (“Solidarity and Love, and other Essays”), Copenhagen: Gyldendal. LØGSTRUP, KNUD E. (1990). Schöpfung und Vernichtung. Religionsphilosophische Betrachtungen. Metaphysik IV (1978). Trans. Rosemarie Løgstrup. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. LØGSTRUP, KNUD E. (1991). Weite und Prägnanz. Sprachphilosophische Betrachtungen. Metaphysik I (1976). Trans. Rosemarie Løgstrup. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. LØGSTRUP, KNUD E. (1994). Ursprung und Umgebung. Betrachtungen über Geschichte und Natur. Metaphysik III (1984). Trans. Rosemarie Løgstrup. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. LØGSTRUP, KNUD E. (1995). Metaphysics. Volume I–II (1976–1984). Translation and with an introduction by Russell L. Dees, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. LØGSTRUP, KNUD E. (1996). Kunst und Erkenntnis. Kunstphilosophische Betrachtungen. Metaphysik II (1983). Trans. Rosemarie Løgstrup. Tübingen: MohrSiebeck.

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LØGSTRUP, KNUD EJLER (1997). The Ethical Demand. Introduction by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (2007). Beyond the Ethical Demand. Introduction by Kees van Kooten Niekerk. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. NIEKERK, KEES VAN KOOTEN (2007). “The Genesis of K.E. Løgstrup’s View of Morality as a Substitute,” in ANDERSEN & NIEKERK (eds.), Concern for Creation (2007), 55–84. ˜ DER, JOHANN-CHRISTIAN (2011), Evidenz des Ethichen: Knud E. LøgstrPO up’s Fundamentalethik, Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. PRENTER, REGIN (1962). “Nogle bemærkninger vedrørende kristologien i K.E. Løgstrup: Den etiske Fordring,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 25:3, 219–227. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1977). ”Skapelse och evangelium. Ett problem i modern dansk teologi,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalsskrift 53:1, 1–11.

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3. Regin Prenter and Scandinavian Creation Theology

How positive or how negative a view on creation and the lives of human beings should theology take? This question is often used as a yardstick for characterising a given Christian theology, and we can see the differences between such views expressed, for example, through the divergent emphases of Luther and Grundtvig. On the one side, we have a Grundtvigian optimism with respect to created humanity, on the other side we have a Lutheran awareness that the justified is also a sinner (this is popularly perceived as representing a pessimistic anthropology). Nevertheless, as shown in the Introduction to this book, Scandinavian creation theology combines central insights from both Luther and Grundtvig’s theologies. And, one might add, several unique combinations of these two heritages can be identified. After an introductory section providing the context of this chapter, I will turn to the particular combination or varieties of these heritages that one comes across in the work of Regin Prenter (1907–1990), who was professor of systematic theology in Aarhus from 1945–1972. Despite Prenter’s assertive style, that might seem to indicate a static theology, he was constantly developing his theology, and quite a few of these developments can be seen as an effect of the inherent tension between the influences of Luther and Grundtvig in his theology. In what follows, I am going to explore how, in the words of the Preface (p. 8), Grundtvig’s motto Human first, then Christian, “square[s] with Luther’s principle of simul justus et peccator” within Prenter’s creation theology, as it developed over the years. I will focus, in particular, on two recurrent lines of thought that underlie this development. The first is a creation theological emphasis on reality (expressed, interestingly, in his sacramental realism), combining the notion of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament by Luther, with Grundtvig’s so-called church view, “den kirkelige anskuelse.”1 The second line is that of negativity inspired by Luther’s theology of the cross (see also Jorgenson, Chapter 5). The working hypothesis of this chapter is that these two lines of thought— realism and negativity—taken together, are significant for Prenter’s particular 1 I use the terms ”sacramental realism” or just “realism” as designating the real presence of Christ, both in the sacrament, and in events of faith that are likewise understood sacramentally. It should be noted that this line of thought in Prenter’s work does not necessarily entail an explicit ontology, but is rather to be thought of in terms of an implicit personalistic-relational ontology.

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contribution to Scandinavian creation theology. And I will end the account by tying these threads together through a reading of both his remarkable article from 1963, “Worship and Creation,” and the equally significant article from 1971,“Der Gott, der Liebe ist.” These readings will be used as a vehicle for reflecting upon the potential for Prenter’s work with respect to a future creation theology. Prenter’s passion for the reality of creation in terms of its corporate and physical qualities is promising for a contemporary theological discourse (e. g., regarding ecology and the body). His acute awareness of the vulnerability of the creature is also promising, and this awareness makes him a significant dialogue partner relevant to the theology of the cross discussions that have been erupting once more since the turn of the millennium.2 What we need to consider here is how theology of the cross and theology of creation are interwoven in the works of Prenter. First, however, I will begin with some reflections on the broader context of Scandinavian creation theology in the following section in order to account for its historical significance and influence within the horizon of 20th century Protestant theology. In addition, I will touch upon some of the common threads between Prenter, Løgstrup and Wingren, in light of their awareness of creation as a central theological topic, including the question of created human life in redemption, the location of non-human nature in theology, and the question of universality. The shared objections of the Scandinavian creation theologians against leading revelation theologies of the 20th century will be addressed here.

1. Common concerns of Prenter, Wingren and Løgstrup: A contextualisation Scandinavian creation theology (which began in the middle of the 20th century) did encounter a need in the Lutheran tradition for a new conceptualisation of creation theology. The problem arose in the beginning of the 1930s with the misconceptions of creation within the movement of the German Christians incorporating ideas of static “orders of creation,” Schöpfungsordnungen. Such misconceptions were used to justify the totalitarian regime of the Nazis, undergirding it with the concept of Eigengesetzlichkeit (drawing upon the doctrine of the two kingdoms), and leaving the Gospel to be something of concern only for the inner life of individual Christians. The church historian Jens Holger Schjørring characterized Nordic Luther2 See, for instance, M. Korthaus, Kreuzestheologie. Geschichte und Gehalt eines Programmbegriffs in der evangelischen Theologie (2007) and T.-A. Plder, Solidarische Toleranz. Kreuzestheologie und Sozialethik bei Alexander von Oettingen (2016).

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anism as a phoenix rising over the ruins of the burdened and damaged Lutheranism of the 30s and 40s, supporting it with critical solidarity (cf. Schjørring 1996, 199). That image might apply even more so to Scandinavian creation theology. In light of the Kirchenkampf, Lutheran creation theology was seen as having been compromised through its political abuse. However, in Wingren, Løgstrup and Prenter’s assessments, the very response of the Confessing Church to the German Christians became a part of the problem— in post-war Protestant theology, especially through the dominant position of Karl Barth, who drew the notorious line from Luther over Bismarck to Hitler (and, actually, Barth could place Grundtvig, the second “church father” of Scandinavian creation theology, on the same line as a forerunner of the German Christian Volkstheologie because of his concern for folkelighed).3 From the perspective of the Scandinavian creation theologians, the use of Luther by the German Christians relied on a misunderstanding of Lutheran creation theology. And paradoxically, the theology of the Barmen Declaration, rightly opposing this abuse, would regenerate the misunderstanding. Gustaf Wingren reconsiders this opposition in 1972, in his book Växling och Kontinuitet, in a striking way : A fatal variation is constituted by the “Deutsche Christen” in Germany in the 1930s, who abused the biblical concept of “Schöpfung” for the sake of a nationalistic racial theory. What is theologically strange is that these theories were not, by the Confessing Church, dismissed as being wrong types of creation faith. The dismissal happened exclusively and radically with merely christological arguments (Wingren 1972, 75).4

As such, Wingren appeals to Biblical creation faith as the proper response to the German Christians. Indeed the Biblical witness of creation is something quite different from the nationalist Blut-und-Boden-theology, and something which, according to Wingren, Barth had overlooked though his focus on the traditions of exodus and covenant. Wingren, in contrast, points to the prophetic literature as the universalization of the conception of God for the exiled Israel, thus broadening the scope beyond the ethnic religion of Davidic Israel. As God cannot be confined to a single nation, so God is acting not only in the church but in the whole creation (Wingren 1972, 73–74)—a point that Wingren develops with reference to Løgstrup (1972, 78–79). Similarly, redemption cannot be confined to cognitive notions of salvation. Here Wingren refers to Grundtvig for a concept of salvation that overcomes the destruction of biological life (96 f), a concept also concerning bodily dimensions. Obviously, these clarifications—with which Prenter would agree—are 3 Cf. Barth: Kirchliche Dogmatik III/4, 346. Cf. also Bent Flemming Nielsen: “Ordet, troen og kritikken: N.H. Søe mellem Barth og Luther” in Niels Henrik Gregersen (2012), 235. 4 My translation. The same will be the case with the quotations, where no English translation of the source exists.

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critical of both German Christians and the theology of Barth who opposed the German Christians. Prenter and Wingren generally accused Barth (overlooking the actualistic character of his theology) of giving priority to noetic dimensions over and against the ontological dimensions of a creation theology. Additionally, Løgstrup criticized the exclusion of a philosophical approach towards universal contexts (Løgstrup 2015, 345ff; 1995, 321ff). Prenter, and to some extent Wingren, were originally inspired by Barth, but over the course of time moved closer to the theological neighbourhood of Løgstrup.5 Prenter and Løgstrup, who became colleagues at Aarhus University, were not actually the antagonists they are sometimes presented as being. Prenter in 1982, looking back, wrote in an article commemorating Løgstrup: Rather, in the course of years an increasing mutual respect developed, which on my behalf implied that I could not avoid engagement with Løgstrup’s ethical and philosophical productions and that I must take it as a necessary corrective and incitement to my own engagement reflecting on doctrine. Løgstrup sent me the books and always with the same dedication: To Regin Prenter from your devoted Knud E. Løgstrup (Prenter 1982, 100–101; cit. Nj, 2008, 256; my trans.).6

In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, however, Prenter and Løgstrup were in a heated debate about questions of method and biblical hermeneutics.7 In 1941 Prenter wrote a letter to Løgstrup, dated September 4, which until recently was unknown to the public and the Løgstrup archive, as apparently the original was lost and there is no evidence that Løgstrup ever answered back.8 In contrast to his usual polemic tone from this period Prenter writes humorously, responding to an article that Løgstrup had just published, wherein he criticised the tendency he saw among some contemporary theologians, for instance Prenter, to regard theology as a function of the church, whilst ignoring important philosophical problems connected thereto (Løgstrup 1941, 143; cit. Nj, 2008, 191). Prenter responded to this article: …not only because I’d challenge you to answer this privately, but because sometimes one feels like doing this. That is, writing a letter, just about theology. I was happy to read your article, not because I agree with what is written in it, nor because it is particularly friendly towards Asmund, Seidelin and me, but because I find that in this article you are speaking, I’d almost say directly and frankly, expressing your points of view clearly and, above all, free of unnecessary philosophical so-called reasoning. 5 This may have been due to the three of them increasingly turning to Grundtvig as shown respectively by Gregersen, Chapter 2, and by Kristensson Uggla, Chapter 4. 6 Nj, observes that Prenter and Løgstrup were clearly not on familiar enough terms for Løgstrup to have signed with his nickname “Koste” (“Broom”). 7 Løgstrup, Prædikenen og dens tekst (1999), Prenter et al., Kirkeaarets tekster (1941). adne Nj, has investigated the relation and discussions between Prenter and Løgstrup in his dissertation “Det ,nder himmelsk over støvet” (2008) at different stages. 8 A carbon copy of the letter was found in Prenter’s copy of Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik, which is now owned by the Elsinore bishop Lise-Lotte Rebel.

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Consequently your speech is more clear-cut than that which you said in our discussion in Randers, for example (Nj, 2008, 195).9

Prenter proceeds to develop his own theological points, which in the early 1940s are still shaped by his earlier Barthian theology, insisting on understanding creation from the point of view of the church and criticising in Løgstrup’s theology a Christology that is influenced by idealistic anthropology (cf. Nj, 2007, 196–207). However, after Prenter’s Lutheran turn (and after becoming colleagues with Løgstrup in Aarhus from 1945) he becomes increasingly positive towards Løgstrup’s work, particularly from the 50s when he begins to focus more specifically on creation theology in connection to his dogmatics. Admittedly, he is still critical of Løgstrup on some central points: his response to Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand (which was first published in Danish in 1956), questioning it for its allegedly Christological deficit, is well-known (Prenter 1957a10). However, in 1943, Løgstrup too signs Prenter’s “Kirken og Retten i den aktuelle Situation,” the document that was the Danish parallel to the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church in Germany. While this hardly makes them congruent, of course, they increasingly come to appreciate one another as discussion partners. For example, adne Nj, shows their affinity in the 40s–50s in connection with their respective criticisms of Gogarten’s theology. Interestingly, one important aspect that Prenter (in 1955) criticizes in Gogarten, namely the absence of a creation theological notion of interhuman love, was true of his own theology until that point. Therein (and also in Creation and Redemption), love is exclusively understood as the “love of God, the communion and the love to the brethren in the congregation” (and thus not as encompassing a concept of love applicable to unredeemed creation, where humans seemingly meet only the unachievable demand of love) (cf. Nj, 2007, 277). Prenter, making an ontological turn from the 1960s, roundly approves of Løgstrup’s metaphysics, though interpreters agree that he is reading it—in a friendly spirit—as being more christologically founded than may actually be the case (cf. Nj, 2007, 344ff). If we are to include the Lutheran elements characteristic of Prenter’s 1940s–50s work (which I mean to do, as it is the point of this contribution to examine the fields of tension between Luther and Grundtvig) what, then, is the common concern of the three Scandinavian creation theologians? In his memoires, Wingren, writing an account of how he met Løgstrup during his stay in Basel as a substitute for Barth in 1946, exclaims, “This was the beginning: two theologians of creation in the town, where the first article of faith was denied!” (Wingren 1991, 133; cit. Gregersen 2012, 320). The debate can in retrospect seem like playing out the first and second articles of faith against one another with regards to which should be the 9 Prenter in “Kære Løgstrup,” a private letter to Løgstrup. 10 The objection was later published in Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, see Gregersen, Chapter 2.

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starting point of theology—or, at least this is the common classroom simplification of the debate. However, this is in fact what Wingren and Prenter accuse Barth of doing. They may not be fair in making this accusation, but it expresses a concern of fundamental significance: that there is such a thing as creation faith. This is also Prenter’s concern—to him redemption and salvation are fundamentally about how creatures are situated before the creator. As Wingren points out in his book Credo, the concern for creation faith is not supposed to isolate the first article of faith from the others, but it means that the entire content of Christian faith is explicable within the horizon both of the first article of faith and of each of the two others (Wingren 1974, 17–23). This could also be a way to understand Prenter’s Spiritus Creator, describing the presence of Christ to faith in terms of creation. I will begin the account of Prenter’s development as a creation theologian along his main works by considering the significance of this book.

2. Real presence vs. signification and the stages of Prenter’s creation theology adne Nj, has argued that Prenter’s work developed in three stages, and I will refer to his arguments here. Prenter, inspired by his studies in Bonn in 1933–34, goes first through a Barthian phase, which is succeeded by the phase of his Lutheran theology where he becomes increasingly critical towards Barth. This phase is manifest in the two internationally known works, Spiritus Creator, his doctoral thesis, published in 1944; and his dogmatics, Creation and Redemption (1951–55), which is still part of the curriculum of Lutheran theological seminaries outside Denmark. However, a second turn in Prenter’s theological development can be observed from the early 60s. The theology of Grundtvig, which had been part of Prenter’s theological luggage from the beginning and subject to his changing Barthian and Lutheran readings, now becomes the primary source of inspiration for Prenter, meaning a stronger emphasis on created human nature, which is particularly noticeable in his French lectures from 1966, “Connaitre Christ.” It should be noticed, however, that a slightly different emphasis is seen in Michael Root’s reading of Prenter, speaking of a perennial combination of Barth, Luther and Grundtvig, rather than of stages—seeing, on a general level, “a kind of noetic Christocentricity” as indicating a Barthian imprint (Root, 2000, 51). When one compares it to Prenter’s later theology, Spiritus Creator may seem like a preliminary stage of creation theology—in the sense that there is no other continuity between creation and new creation than that the creator Spirit is working in both. This relation between creation and redemption is characteristic of Prenter’s Lutheran phase (including also Creation and

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Redemption). Whereas Prenter’s view on creation and redemption in his Barthian phase resembles concentric circles (with the redemption in the middle, and creation at the periphery), the relation between the two is, with respect to the Lutheran view, like an ellipse, with creation and redemption constituting the two poles (Nj, 2008, 156; 212). However, adne Nj, shows that the turn to Luther, which in Nj,’s view bears resemblance to a conversion, is more complex. In the Barthian phase, Prenter’s creation theology is optimistic regarding universalism: creation is redeemed, and the church is a sign of this (cf. Nj, 2008, 181 f). This universal optimism disappears in the Lutheran phase where creation, though having its own inherent value independent of redemption, is disrupted by sin and, in consequence, the relation between creation and redemption is dialectically conceived as discontinuity as well as continuity. Hence the title of the book, Spiritus Creator : in the center stands redemption as a new creation and, yet again, ex nihilo (Prenter 1944, 215)— and the same goes for Creation and Redemption. Because of the Lutheran sacramental realism, salvation remains strictly particular. However, with the Grundtvigian turn from the 1960s the discontinuity is softened as Prenter, now more in line with Grundtvig, begins to speak of a grace in creation, and of an interaction between humanity and Christianity. Thus, Prenter’s late theology might again be seen as universal, though now in light of the grace of creation and the positive continuity between creation and redemption (cf. Nj, 2008, 183). What is at stake with Spiritus Creator and the shift to Luther is nonetheless significant for Prenter’s particular variety of creation theology (indeed, the later changes may be considered less fundamental). Nj,, for instance, does not speak of a Grundtvigian phase in a strict sense, but rather of a turn, indicating that the Lutheran accent remains, whilst being simply nuanced, or balanced out, through engagement with Grundtvigian views on creation. Above all, an important aspect for Prenter remains his sacramental realism, which, according to Nj,, in the beginning of the 1940s overrules the Barthian hermeneutics of the sign, and the view of the church as signifying grace and salvation. From Spiritus Creator and onwards, church is seen as the place of grace and salvation at work, expressed through a Lutheran sacramental realism, and of course this is congruent with Grundtvig’s “kirkelige anskuelse” as well (which is Grundtvig’s view on the liturgy as the center of Christian life and of the covenant history between the congregation and God) as well.11 Bearing in mind again the question we began with—how does “Grundtvig’s 11 The concept of realism raises the question of Prenter’s view on ontology. In his late texts, Prenter begins to reflect more systematically on ontology in connection to his trinitarian thought. Yet, until the mid-fifties (with the exception of an interest towards the ontology of the philosophy of existence of Karl Jaspers in Creation and Redemption, which Nj, has described) he is unspecific on ontology, being generally skeptical towards the possibilities of philosophy and metaphysics. His ontological turn in the 1960s and 70s can be seen in connection with his increasing approval of the thinking of Løgstrup.

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motto, ‘Human first..,’ fare with Luther’s principle of simul justus et peccator?”—the answer might be, with regards to Spiritus Creator, that its congruence between Grundtvig and Luther is an indirect and latent one. While Spiritus Creator is not creation theology in the Grundtvigian sense of an unambiguous continuity between creation and redemption, its sacramental realism does play a role in relation to this—dialectically conceived— continuity. Moreover, the realism is accompanied by the negativity or theology of the cross, as previously mentioned. I will try to show, how they are both shaped in Spiritus Creator, and how they continue in a more explicit creation theological frame. Thereby, the cross stands for the ongoing tension of created life—meaning that for Prenter, in Root’s words, “Grundtvig is no less a theologian of the cross than Luther” (Root 2000, 53).

3. Spiritus Creator : Sacramental realism and theology of the cross as the foundation of Prenter’s creation theology Contrary, though it may seem, to all creation theological intentions, the main targets of the polemics in Spiritus Creator are notions of created human potentials and abilities as conceived with the imitatio-Christi idea. When persons strive to imitate Christ, their striving does not bring them nearer to Christ. On the contrary, Christ is present to the believer in the conformitas with Christ, which Prenter opposes to imitatio. Where imitatio seeks to realize the potentialities of humanity, conformitas is the negation of all such. This negation takes place, as the believer realizes his or her own sinfulness and inability to get nearer to Christ (Prenter 1953, 51). Such negation, which is a parallel to the concept of Anfechtung by Luther, has the character even of dying, of suffering, and the judgement of God (Prenter 1953, 11 f, 18). Precisely in this descending to Hell, in the Anfechtung conceived of as resignatio ad infernum, the Holy Spirit enacts the presence of Christ to the believer who is thus nearer to Christ, the more distant Christ seems to be. To develop this notion of the real presence of Christ in the Spirit, Prenter refers to Luther’s interpretation of Romans 8: 26 in his lectures on Romans in 1516. He identifies this place as a key to Luther’s concept of the Holy Spirit, showing how Christ is even present—and most truly so—in the “Anfechtung,” in the groaning despair of the troubled human existence. These unutterable groanings are not the final effort of humans to get closer to a distant God but the present Spirit acting, interceding for the despairing person throughout all human deficiencies. Neither in despair, nor in the troubled conscience, is the human being alone, though it might seem so, but in the self-relying aspiration to realize ideals of his or her imagination. But the Spirit is present in despair in the sense, that:

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… he carries the crucified and resurrected Christ out of the distance of history and heavenly glory and places him as a living and redeeming reality in the midst of our life with its suffering, temptation and death…. The unutterable groanings … are therefore also an expression for the nearness of Christ. These unutterable groanings are the most elementary life-utterances of the fides Christi that flees away from its own to God, that is Christ in whom God alone graciously has met us (Prenter 1953, 53–54).

This is the foundational core of Prenter’s Lutheran theology of the cross, a core that remains throughout his work. That is, the vulnerability and affliction of earthly life is found at the core of Christology and soteriology. The point is not deliverance from the affliction of created life, but on the contrary, the integration of that real created life in an incarnational and sacramental realism. Though this realism (and this negative aspect) remains important, Prenter also develops the idea of the real presence of Christ in the Holy Spirit in more positive terms: in terms of communication and new creation, as Christ calling forth both faith and love. Here, Prenter uses the double meaning of the Danish verb “fremkalde” meaning literally “to call forth” but referring normally to the technique of photographic processing (exposing negatives to make ‘positive’ images—which might thus be understood as an analogy to the transformation of the distress to new life in Christ). In spite of the discontinuity between created and recreated existence, Spiritus Creator marks a positive stage in the development of a creation theology because of the emphasis on the Holy Spirit working in creation as well as in the new creation. Over against post-pietistic tendencies to confine the activity of the Holy Spirit to the sphere of inner religious life, Prenter emphasizes that creation in Luther’s work is trinitarian, so that the Holy Spirit is thought to be active in keeping and sustaining creation: The Bible and Luther, who inhabited the Bible’s cosmology, do not have a world existing independently of the Triune God. To biblical—and Lutheran—Christianity the visible world is a creation of the Spirit of God, the same Spirit who gives us new birth in baptism, who comforts us in inner conflict so that by the Holy Spirit we constantly live and breathe (physically!), so that we can break the bread and drink the wine which gladden the heart of man. Yes, in the Holy Spirit we use God’s good gifts for our enjoyment and we do not think only of repenting and going to church (Prenter 1944, 224; 1953, 193).

Prenter uses the emphasis of the creative activity of the Spirit in Spiritus Creator to make an important point, namely that Luther’s later polemics against the Schwärmer are consistent with his early theology of the Holy Spirit. The paragraph on the Spirit as Creator Spirit is thus placed at the end of the first part of the book (on Luther’s early pneumatology), leading on to the second part of the book, on pneumatology in the writings against the Schwärmer. It should be noted that here Prenter is not driven merely by

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historical interest, but has surely also the ‘Schwärmer’ of his age in mind, seen everywhere by Prenter in the common uneasiness over rituals and over visible forms of church government. Here, the presence of Christ through the Spirit is accordingly developed through the frame of a sacramental realism, emphasising the ‘EST,’ the ‘is’ (1953, 290; cf. 1944, 325). Prenter opposes both a spiritualistic notion, that the Spirit could not be manifest in “eusserlich Ding,” i. e. the external sign (1944, 289; cf. 1953, 254), and the Thomistic conception of a metaphysical connection between Spirit and sacrament. He suspects both of thinking of the Spirit in a detached anthropocentric way as a moment in the striving towards piety (the only difference between those two positions is in the means chosen for this striving), rather than thinking of the Spirit as of the living God acting in creation (1953, 255–58). We should note that the reality of sacramental realism has (potentially) a double component here. It consists both of a notion of the real presence of Christ to faith, and a sense of the reality and the solidity of the created world, including a high opinion of the “eusserlich Ding.” In other words, the bodily presence of Christ and the elements of the sacrament are both important. However, the emphasis on the “eusserlich Ding” serves at this stage chiefly to emphasize the negativity, in casu his polemics against the idealism of the spiritualist enthusiasts and their bodiless notion of sacraments and salvation. For the enthusiasts, external signs are much too visible and external for their idealistic, inner striving towards higher ends; the external signs are humble, public, earthly and thus only a hindrance for the private heavenly flight of the spiritual striver. Indeed, in their entire inadequacy, they can be means of God’s freely willed, descending presence by humans (1953, 261 f).

Here, it is clear how realism and negativity go together in Prenter’s sacramental theology, which, as such, constitutes a parallel to the interpretation of Romans 8:26 about the Spirit interceding for the despairing person. For Prenter, as for Luther, sacramental reality corresponds to Christology. As God reveals Godself in the bodily human nature of Christ, so humans must afterwards seek another bodily presence of God. Thus the emphasis on sacramental realism, the ‘EST,’ goes for both the Lord’s Supper and for the Incarnation. This concern for realism is certainly at stake later, as Prenter writes his almost hundred pages long critical article on Barth’s Christology (“Karl Barths Umbildung der traditionellen Zweinaturenlehre in lutherischer Beleuchtung”), wherein the Lutheran ‘EST’ is played out against the reformed ‘SIGNIFICAT’ (Prenter 1957b, 43).

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4. Continuity and discontinuity between creation and redemption Prenter’s concern for realism had already been the central nerve of his somewhat more balanced article on Barth’s doctrine of creation 11 years earlier, shortly after writing Spiritus Creator : “Die Einheit von Schöpfung und Erlösung: Zur Schöpfungslehre Karl Barths” (“The Unity of Creation and Redemption: On the Doctrine of Creation in Karl Barth”) in 1946. According to adne Nj,’s thesis on the stages in Prenter’s theology, this article marks the ultimate shift from the Barthian to the Lutheran paradigm, as this is the first time Prenter explicitly criticizes his old teacher from a Lutheran point of view (Prenter 1946b, 10)—a criticism that is helpful to understand Prenter’s own particular concerns for creation theology. He protests that, apparently, creation in Barth’s first volume of Church Dogmatics III merely functions as analogy to redemption. In the light of the faith in Jesus Christ, the believer knows of his or her created existence before God—an existence that now, in this light, unfolds itself as a parable of the covenant between God and human beings that is the purpose of creation in Barth’s dogmatics. In short, creation is not only understood in the light of redemption (a point with which Prenter would agree), but it is, according to Prenter, to be understood as something which has only, platonically, to illustrate and mirror redemption (and this is Prenter’s objection).12 Thus, Prenter’s criticism of Barth seems to revolve around material dogmatic topics, so that this trait, together with his assertive style (occasionally accusing his opponents of various heresies), creates the impression of a rather dogmatic polemic. Actually, the criticism works on a more fundamental level, reflecting upon the logic of faith. Similar to Wingren’s criticism mentioned earlier, Prenter expresses here his concerns about the Creation faith (though perhaps with a bit more stress on the “faith” part than was the case with Wingren). Prenter is concerned about the meaningfulness of creation independent of its significance as the horizon of redemption. Moreover, he is also troubled over the meaningfulness of creation being comprehended through a cognitive disclosure and not through the act of faith. Prenter asks: “The creed uses the same word, Credo, in all of its three articles. Why is it only here, in the first article, that the Credo is conjured into an Intelligo?” (Prenter 1946b, 12). In his discussion of Barth’s doctrine of creation it becomes clear what Prenter has in mind when he speaks of creation faith. It is not about believing in creation independently from revelation in Christ. Rather, it is about two things. First, creation faith cannot be the same as looking through the realities and ambiguities of creation to redemption, to the 12 In this critique, Prenter probably presumes that Barth is thinking in a metaphysical and essentialist framework, which is not the case. Interestingly, Prenter’s allegation tells us more of his own developing idea of creation than of Barth’s.

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reconciliation of all the conflicts and suffering of created existence. Second, creation cannot be seen to signify this reconciled existence. For faith—and faith in the goodness of creation and the benevolence of the creator too— believes in the midst and in spite of the oppositions and the ambiguities. While Prenter does not refer directly to Luther’s Heidelberg theses, their distinction between a theology of glory, looking through the created things at God’s invisible being, and a theology of the cross, seeing God revealed in suffering, shimmers throughout his argument. It does so when he states that the everyday world in all its ambiguity was the place of the cross of Christ too, and any “looking through” to a unified creation and redemption would be a flight from this existence. The Lutheran EST is spelled out here in capital letters over and against the SIGNIFICAT, which he criticized in his reading of Barth. Thus we see how the sacramental realism from Spiritus Creator is now widened in scope to designate also the created world in its identity with the suffering humanity of Christ. Thereby the negativity, also observed in Spiritus Creator, is located within the framework of a theology of the cross encompassing also a creation faith. Later, Prenter becomes more explicit about this in the article “Luther’s Theology of the Cross,” but before I turn to that text, we will have to briefly follow this thread through Prenter’s main work, Creation and Redemption. The tension between creation and redemption continues in Creation and Redemption. On the one hand, he accentuates the continuity in much the same way as in Spiritus Creator, and (far more than in Spiritus Creator) he develops there a fully-fledged doctrine of creation. As with Wingren13, Prenter’s favourite heretic would be Marcion, as, in opposition to all dualist conceptions of salvation, Prenter stresses that the same Creator and the same intention is behind creation and redemption, and that redemption is not a deliverance from creation but of the creation. Referring to the mythical narratives of God fighting the powers of chaos, he does not draw a strict line between creatio continua and redemption, which are both being fought against the same adversary. Prenter even states a mutual acknowledgment between creation and redemption. For the proclamation of redemption contains a “yes” to creation. However, more indirectly, the creature also acknowledges its longing for redemption, a point that reveals the scope of the significance of the theology of the cross to creation. However, the salvific purpose of creation revealed in the Gospel of Christ stands in tension not only against the suffering of the creature, but above all with respect to the human rebellion against the law of creation. Sin is quite radically conceived by Prenter, who stresses that sin cannot be explained, only presupposed as evident. The tension between law and Gospel is thus fundamental to the dogmatics as a tension between the wrath and the grace of God and, respectively, the experience of both to humans. Prenter rejects 13 Wingren (1972), see also Kristensson Uggla, Chapter 4.

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speculation on the possible intentions behind the wrath of God, but, occupied as he is with wrath in the perception of the rebel human’s mind, he is concerned that the reality of God’s wrath in human experience should not be overlooked. Thus, in Prenter’s view, suffering and anguish might also be understood as God acting wrathfully against human persons. Isolated from faith, this opposition between the wrath and the good will of God remains irreconcilable. Only in faith—in the conformity with Christ, as described above—is the human receptive to the gospel of creation, proclaiming that all tribulations serve the restitution of creation and persuading us that all the goodness of creation testifies to this purpose (Prenter1967, 211). The gospel of creation is Prenter’s notion of providence, and it may be mistaken for a good (or maybe not so good) old-fashioned idea of providence, preaching that all that happens, happens with a purpose. However, what Prenter is actually doing here, is not so much speculating on the purposes of God, but reflecting on the perception and receptivity of faith versus despair. Nevertheless, he is by no means tempted to take out the tension by reducing the existence under law or Gospel to its noetic dimension and thus softening the tension. To Prenter this would mean getting out of touch with reality. The turning point between despair and faith, the conformity with Christ (1967, 212 f), cannot be merely noetically conceived. For, there is an ontological quality to it (although Prenter’s realism is too focused in actuality for him to understand this in metaphysical terms). The encounter between God and human happens due to divine trinitarian activity. Still, it does not happen in a spiritual, disembodied way, without regard to the physical situation of human beings relating to one another in time and space. Its solidity is in a certain sense due to its created reality. This stress on reality—for example, concerning the idea of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament—is not thinkable without the perceptive and receptive human being, and, therefore finally, not without the negativity of the theology of the cross. This point is further developed in the article “Luther’s Theology of the Cross” in 1959/60 (the English version from 1971 is cited). Here, Prenter, reflecting further on the lines of the conformity concept, ventures to explicate the perception of faith in terms of activity. He is elaborating the thesis that, first, the love of God is only recognized in the death of Christ on the cross; and, second, persons only appropriate this love as far as they take up their own cross. Developing this thought at length, he takes great care to distinguish as sharply as in Spiritus Creator between faith and self-chosen piety. However, his main point is what he calls a trinitarian theology of the cross, meaning that creation, providence, redemption and salvation are all thought together under the sign of the cross (Prenter, 1971b, 13). By extension, Prenter rejects the common divisions between sacred and secular, between salvation history and world history. In this his ongoing concern that theology should not be a flight from reality can be discerned, a concern which involves the insight gained from the concept of providence in Creation and Redemption (that everyday

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occurrences, good and bad, should be experienced as gift and judgement from God). This is accordingly a way of taking daily life seriously, and a precondition of understanding substitutionary atonement. Prenter’s sense of realism is somewhat sombre in its expression here. Nevertheless, what is remarkable is the explicitly trinitarian thinking about the interaction between created and redeemed existence given in 1959. In Creation and Redemption, this is not yet the case. Ultimately, sacramental realism means a particularistic view on salvation: redemption happens here and now, when humans encounter the really present Christ in the real circumstances (church) of their real ordinary lives. Whereas this view combines Lutheran sacramental realism with Grundtvig’s “view of the church” (his kirkelige anskuelse), the question remains, what becomes of Grundtvig’s positive view on the continuity of humanity in the undisrupted image of God, and of the interaction (vekselvirkning) between humanity and Christianity. For instance: How does a sentence from Prenter’s dogmatics like “… man whose innermost being is evil possesses no life in himself” (Prenter 1967, 210, my italics) fit in the Grundtvigian framework of affirming creation? One answer to this is to be found in § 23. For Grundtvig’s motto “human first— then a Christian” matches the dual concept of status originalis and status gratiae that are equally connected in Prenter’s thought. And, wedged in between, is the status corruptionis (§21). Whereas Prenter rejects the notion of a corruption of the created human nature, he insists on maintaining the notion of the states of existence in order to diminish neither the sense of reality of sin, nor the integrity of creation (Prenter 1967, 253). Over and against the disruption of the original state by sin, the original state—the imago Dei— pertains to human persons when and insofar as they hear the word of God, and thus realize the true humanity which is the preordained situatedness before God (Prenter 1967, 252–255). Another question to raise regarding Prenter’s further development after Creation and Redemption is the following: for all the continuity between creation and redemption, for all the concern about the reality and the bodily character of the new creation, and to its “yes!” regarding the created life, how can Prenter then insist on this very particularized mediation of redemption that is the case with his sacramental realism? Rather, how can he do this without raising more insistently the issue of the interaction between created and redeemed existence (that has to be there in the light of the continuity between both) too? We will have to look further than Creation and Redemption for an answer to this question.

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5. Creation as sacrament: Prenter’s late Grundtvigian-Lutheran theology The objection has been raised against Prenter that he, unlike Løgstrup, does not reach out beyond the church walls to the common humanity (Pedersen 2010, 192; 211). However, in his late theology of the 1960s he does reflect on the interaction between what goes on in church and in daily life—within a trinitarian framework. This is already the case in the above mentioned article, “Luther’s Theology of the Cross,” where he develops a trinitarian theology of the cross. The aim is an interaction between the history of salvation and human existence, against the division between the holy and the secular—and that is part of his protest against both the existential theology and the revelation theology of the time (noticing to the disadvantage of the latter, that it has difficulties in reaching people in today’s world). This disapproval is theologically underscored with reference to creation. The critical comment against the German theology after the Kirchenkampf, that I cited from Wingren in the beginning of this chapter, appears here in Prenter’s text too. For Prenter also discerns in this theology a one-sided concentration on the second article of faith. Out of fear of a false theology of creation this theology neglects creation theology and causes a split between sacred and secular into two distinct “rooms.” Prenter uses Luther as an analytic tool here and notices—perhaps even to his own astonishment—that: “It is simply astounding how radically Luther rejects the two realm way of thinking” (Prenter 1971b, 16). This loss of contact with daily life leads to sacred isolation of the church and its message. However, the necessary interaction between humanity and Christianity must go both ways. This is the core of his argument against Kaj Thaning’s book on Grundtvig written in 1963, Menneske først (“Man First –”). Prenter writes a critique of the book, arguing against its unidirectional relation from humanity to Christianity by pointing out that Grundtvig also imagined the influence going the other way, that is, from Christianity to humanity too. So that, for instance, Grundtvig considered it a precondition for cooperation that the “naturalists” should recognize creation and fall (Prenter 1964, 207). If would thus be mistaken to assume that Prenter’s love for sacramental realism would lead him to isolate the ritual sphere from the worldly. He discusses this issue in the article “Worship and Creation” in 1963. Here he highlights the significance of the real presence in the sacrament for creation and for Christian existence within it. It is quite a remarkable article, as Prenter there connects human religious experience with cosmic-ontological dimensions. Indeed, it could be seen as a parallel to Løgstrup’s notion of perception in Ophav og omgivelse, 1976 (Source and Surroundings 1995). However,

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Prenter uses this connection with a mythical-cultic worldview as a springboard, without doing much to clarify the procedure (thus leaving the reader a bit at a loss). Still, this is typical of Prenter, in terms of his content, tying together, as I mentioned above, the lines of sacramental realism and the theology of the cross in a quite programmatic way. As such, it seems appropriate to reflect on its potential for contributing to a future creation theology. Prenter sets out to show how redemption in Christ pertains to the whole universe—put differently, the whole universe is in need of salvation—and this is realized precisely in Christian worship. He elaborates this claim in three steps. The first is the prefiguration of Christian cult in the cult of ancient Israel; secondly, the Christian cult is also prefigured in prophetic cult criticism; and thirdly the synthesis of both happens in the Holy Communion, in Christians receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ in bread and wine. 1. The cult of Old Testament Israel represents a prefiguration of Christian worship “cooperating with Yahweh in his work of creation” (Prenter 1963, 154)—that is, it contains elements which the Christian cult must contain in order not to be empty metaphysics and private devotion. This element is the experience of and witness to creation as constitutive of the faith in God. Creation is a fight against chaos: it is the defeat of an enemy, a drama that is repeated in atonement and redemption. Consequently it is not surprising that Prenter says: “If the belief in creation is to be more than a theoretical idea, there must be a ‘Christian’ cult which reconciles man and his world with God” (155). 2. The second step—the antithesis—is the prophetic criticism of the cult. Prenter emphasizes that such criticism is not against the cult as cult, but against a cult that is not accompanied by the right mind towards God. Prenter stresses here the interconnection between creation and a personal God-andhuman-relation, of which creation is both the horizon and the content. The relation of human beings to God determines their position in and towards the universe. The harmonious state of the cosmos in relation to humankind is the bliss sought after through ritual. But, wanting to obtain it without restoring the relation to the creator would be impossible. 3. Last of all comes Prenter’s main thesis: Christian worship fulfils the expectation of any cult (cf. 159). Here we meet again the concern from Spiritus Creator and its polemic against the Schwärmer : the Spirit does not join divine and human in a purely ‘spiritual’ way—that is, disconnected from any material form, the “eusserlich Ding.” However, unlike in Spiritus Creator this concern is expressed here in a form that actually indirectly questions the Lutheran stress on the word, and on the faith that comes from hearing. This is a new and very remarkable accent for Prenter, so it is quite right to speak of a ‘bodily turn’ in Prenter in the beginning of the 1960s, as Nj, has done (Nj, 2008, 326). It is bodiliness that for the most part connects and communicates, and makes the appropriation of salvation to the human possible. The word

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alone does not—in this very strict sense—build the bridge to the person. Rather, it remains remote from the person. And justification pertains to the whole person, including the body : our whole humanity including our bodily nature and our whole universe of ‘things’ and ‘substances’ is ‘justified,’ is united with God our creator in the moment when we are reconciled with him through the universal sacrifice of Jesus Christ (Prenter 1963, 162 f).

Thus, sacramental realism means not only the real bodily presence of Jesus Christ in and through the bread and wine, but also the real presence of bread and wine—and of the water in baptism—as a bridge to creation. And, this is so in a very comprehensive sense, making the everyday life and its water, bread and wine holy thereby (cf. 163). In other words, there is no separation between profane and sacred. Through Christian worship, the world—both the human and non-human—becomes a sacrament to the participants. This transformation also incorporates the prophetic cult criticism, thus combining sacramental realism with the negativity of a theology of the cross. The central meaning of the sacrament is the appropriation of the atoning sacrifice of Christ, which, conferred to the human world, makes the whole of life a sacrifice—not in the sense of a repeated atonement for sins, but as a self-giving (a similar point as the one made in the article “Luther’s Theology of the Cross”). This is the blessing transmitted through the cult—and not the blessing of getting what we want. Thus, creation and reconciliation are closely connected. For, the creature is reunified with its creator through the reconciliation. Accordingly, appropriating the sacrifice of Christ in the sacrament and participating in the unification of the world with God become two interrelated and mutually integrating aspects of the same sacramental event.

6. God as being and as love: The tension between trinitarian theology and creation theology With his sacramental realism, as shown above, Prenter seems to focus on a common line of thought in Luther and Grundtvig that bridges the tension between their influences on his work. His mature sacramental theology enables us to hold together the realism and the negativity presented as the main lines of his work in this chapter. Prenter takes up the tension between realism and negativity once again in one of his later articles, “Der Gott der Liebe ist” in 1971 (“The God Who is Love”) where he addresses the dilemma arising from this fundamental tension, reflecting also on the relation between theology and philosophy.

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Moreover, the article demonstrates Prenter’s increasing affinity to a Løgstrupian ontology from the 1960s, as is also observed by adne Nj, (2008, 336 f) through analysis of Prenter’s French lectures on Christology, “Conna%tre Christ,” given at the beginning of the 1960s. There, Prenter criticises the substantial ontology in the traditional doctrine of the two natures of Christ, arguing instead for a relational ontology. Thus, Prenter in his late thought gets closer to Løgstrup, arguing for an ontology that is inherent in theology (though not the foundation of it). According to Nj,, “there is little doubt that he has here [i. e. in Løgstrup’s late theology] found a metaphysical approach that…, using one of his favourite terms, correlates with his own Lutheran dogmatics” (Nj, 2008, 34414). The interaction between humanity and Christianity, and the criticism of the separation between sacred and profane in the articles “Luther’s Theology of the Cross” and “Worship and Creation” are to be seen in light of this decisive development. The latter article with its cultic understanding of religion, however, demonstrates that Prenter and Løgstrup, in spite of this affinity, remain rather different as theologians. Prenter presents a consistent trinitarian foundation of this understanding in “Der Gott, der Liebe ist.” The Trinitarian thesis of this article is the following: the assertion of 1 John 4:8–16 that God is love (and not only ‘has love’) is trinitarian in its logic, and encompasses an idea of human participation in God. God is love in the act of incarnation and the self-giving of the Son of God. But God is love also in the event of the mutual love of his believers, and their acknowledging of their faith in him (which are both the work of the holy Spirit and the sign that God, according to 1 John 4 “dwells in them”). With the assertion that “God is love” it becomes clear—as Prenter has come to realise in the 1960s—that Christian assertions of faith presuppose an ontology, but that they are at the same time critical towards ontology. This tension resembles the dialectic between cult and cult criticism given in “Worship and Creation.” The most potent question of this chapter concerns, then, how God is to be thought of as the ground of all being, as Being itself, and at the same time as love, which radically brings into question all other ontologically founded predicates of God (like eternity, omnipotence, ubiquity)? Prenter thoroughly develops the dilemma implied herein. On the one hand, if the theologian would eliminate all ontology from the doctrine of God, the result would be reducing the concept of the trinitarian God to mythology, that is, to a narrative (that might logically function without assertions). Indeed, no assertions would be possible without an implicit ontology. On the other hand the paradox of the traditional doctrine of the two natures of Christ (which Prenter criticizes) shows the aporia of a theology developed entirely on the 14 Cf. also Regin Prenter, ”Skjulte og ,benbare forudsætninger i KE. Løgstrups metafysik” (1978/ 79), 368.

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premises of ontology. Consequently for Prenter, the assertion “God is love” seems itself to eliminate all ontological approaches, as this assertion cannot be understood on the premises of ontology (at least not without assuming a paradoxical figure of speech, as the assertion otherwise defies all grammatical and logical rules). On the contrary, it can only be understood in the light of participation, that is, through the events of mutual loving and confessing the faith in the congregation. The assertion of faith itself thus rejects the ontology that it implies.15 It is a mark of Prenter’s way of thinking that he not only endures this tension but also makes a point of emphasizing it. In incarnation, God who is Being (Sein) becomes a being, or an entity (ein Seiendes), taking upon himself the non-beingness of the entities. Taking the assertion “God is love” seriously, there is no way to escape the “contradiction between the creator of all being and the crucified redeemer” (Prenter 1971a, 288). As in “Luther’s Theology of the Cross” and “Worship and Creation,” the only way to comprehend the connection is through participation. Thus, we might say, the thesis of this chapter holds together the two main themes of realism and negativity (which I have followed throughout this contribution) together in their tension. This has consequences for the relation between philosophical ontology and theology. As theology implies and incorporates ontology, it needs philosophy to reflect upon the question of the ground of being—a question that philosophy and theology have in common. However, not philosophy but trinitarian faith constitutes the prerequisite in the search for an answer, comprehending both God as being and God as love.16 Finally, the two cannot be harmoniously reconciled, and as is often the case with Prenter, this involves not just an academic discussion of methods but also a reflection on the lived and challenged existence of believers in the world. To be sure, thinking of God in terms of ontology on its own—that is, solely based on the experience of the world—would never, according to Prenter, lead to confessing God as being love. However, holding the Biblical assertion that God is love together in tension with the ontological quest for the ground of being becomes the mark of a theologia crucis refusing to rule out the contradictions between Christian faith and the ambiguities of experience. As given in “Worship and Creation,” Prenter thereby elaborates the interaction between the spheres of church and world, faith and experience— both theology and philosophy—in a much more consistent way than in his earlier theology. In line with Grundtvig, he is incorporating insights of the ‘naturalists’ (thus affirming to some extent Grundtvig’s “human first…”— 15 This dialectic between ontology and event explains how Prenter can see the orthodox doctrine of theopoiesis and the Protestant doctrine of justification as expressions of the same intention, cf. Prenter (1971a), 289. 16 The fact that Prenter more or less reads this premise into the metaphysics of Løgstrup probably says more about Prenter than Løgstrup.

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though not in the Thaning way). For, trinitarian faith that, without ontology, cannot express itself in assertions, nevertheless retains joyous tidings for the ontological ‘naturalists,’ telling of something that ontology cannot itself tell. To be sure, their interaction is equipped with a Lutheran theologia crucis-twist at the end, but this does not change the basic idea that theology depends on ontology, which implies a new and sharpened sense of the inherent value of created life.

7. Conclusion The sense of the inherent value of created life was implicit, though only indirectly present, at the Lutheran stage of Prenter’s theology in the 1940s and 1950s. For instance, it is present in Prenter’s emphasis on the significance of the physical sign of the sacrament. There we find it in the tension between sacramental realism and negativity as demonstrated above. Justification and participation do not happen as spiritually isolated from the external things—bread, wine, water, bodies—but rather connect with all these things. Thus, precisely these external things become means of negating and criticizing isolating tendencies in fallen humanity. This is where Prenter’s concern for creation faith is located and this gives his theology its peculiar common thread throughout the various ‘turns’ of his thought. The centre of his attention is the situatedness of human beings in created life and before their creator—a relation exposed to the sinfulness of human beings and dependent on God meeting them in the vulnerability of their createdness. With this constant attention in mind, what, then, is new in Prenter’s late theology (represented here by “Worship and Creation” and “Der Gott, der Liebe ist”) with its bodily, worldly and ontological turn? We find there a far more explicit connection between creation and new creation, than in the earlier theology. Liturgically, this connection is visible in the extension of a sacramental quality to the life of creation. Fundamentally, it is visible in the recognition of the dependence of assertions of faith on ontology, which might make “Der Gott, der Liebe ist” into a kind of dogmatic equivalent of Løgstrup’s Creation and Annihilation (except for the fact that Prenter insists on the assertion of faith as the foundational basis of theology and, also, as the point of departure for speaking of an inherent ontology in theology). Thus in both articles, the liturgy (which is the location of the assertion of faith) is crucial to Prenter, qualifying also the otherwise strict particularism of Prenter’s soteriology. More specifically, not soteriological particularism but created, experienced life revolving around worship, represents the vital centre of Prenter’s thought. And this relation is not something more or less external to what goes on in worship. Rather, reconciliation of the self-isolating creature

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with its creator means their reunification.17 More precisely, appropriating this reconciliation in sacrament and worship means participating in the reunification of the whole creation and the created life with the creator. And, this is how Prenter can speak of a sacramentality of the physical world. This is no triumphalistic glorification of the world overlooking its vulnerability, but means, to the contrary, integrating and acknowledging the vulnerability of the creaturely. Prenter’s contribution to the contemporary discussion regarding the cross (mentioned in the introduction of this chapter) is this particular connection between creation theology and theology of the cross, where participation integrates created, experienced life. Here, the issue is not how to balance a Lutheran “pessimism” with Grundtvigian “optimism.” Rather (and in a way that continues to inspire us today), Prenter uses insights from both Luther and Grundtvig when envisioning this connection between creation and the cross.

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Prenter, R. (1946a). Spiritus Creator: Studier i Luthers Theologi. 2nd edition. Copenhagen: Samlerens Forlag. Prenter, R. (1946b). “Die Einheit von Schöpfung und Erlösung: Zur Schöpfungslehre Karl Barths,” Theologie und Gottesdienst: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Theology and Liturgy : Collected Essays. Aarhus: Forlaget Aros/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (1977), 9–28. Prenter, R. (1953). Spiritus Creator: Luther’s Concept of the Holy Spirit. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. Prenter, R. (1955). Skabelse og genløsning. 2nd edition. Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1967. Prenter, R. (1956). Den unge Luthers Theologi. Forelæsninger ved Aarhus Universitet i for,rssemestret 1956. Aarhus. Unpublished stencil print. Prenter, R. (1957a). ”Professor Løgstrup om ‘Den etiske Fordring’.” Aarhus Stiftstidende, Sunday March 10, Løgstrup Archive, 644. Prenter, R. (1957b). “Karl Barths Umbildung der traditionellen Zweinaturenlehre in lutherischer Beleuchtung,” Theologie und Gottesdienst: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Theology and Liturgy : Collected Essays. Aarhus: Forlaget Aros/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977, 28–116. Prenter, R. (1963). “Worship and Creation,” Theologie und Gottesdienst: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Theology and Liturgy : Collected Essays. Aarhus: Forlaget Aros/ Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 152–165. Prenter, R. (1964). “Kaj Thanings Grundtvigbog,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 27, 193–210. Prenter, R. (1967). Creation and Redemption. Trans. Theodor I. Jensen. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Prenter, R. (1971a). “Der Gott der Liebe ist. Das Verhältnis der Gotteslehre zur Christologie,” Theologie und Gottesdienst: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Theology and Liturgy : Collected Essays. Aarhus: Forlaget Aros/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 275–291. Prenter, R. (1971b). Luther’s Theology of the Cross. Charles S. Anderson (ed.), Historical Series 17. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Prenter, R. (1978/79). ”Skjulte og ,benbare forudsætninger i K. E. Løgstrups metafysik,” Fønix 3/4, 354–370. Prenter, R. (1982). ”Løgstrup som jeg kendte ham,” in Sigfred Pedersen et al. (eds.), Dansk Kirkeliv 1982–1983. Aarhus. Prenter, R. (1985). Erindringer. arhus: Aros. Plder, T.-A. (2016). Solidarische Toleranz. Kreuzestheologie und Sozialethik bei Alexander von Oettingen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Root, M. (2000). “Generous Orthodoxy : Regin Prenter’s Appropriation of Grundtvig,” in A.M. Allchin et al. (eds), Grundtvig in International Perspective. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Schjørring, J. H. (1996). ”Nordisk lutherdom. Et teologihistorisk perspektiv,” in Theodor Jørgensen & Peter Widmann (eds.), Verbum Dei—verba ecclesiae. Festskrift til Erik Kyndal. Aarhus: Faculty of Theology, 187–206.

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Wingren, G. (1972). Växling och Kontinuitet. Teologiska kriterier. Lund: CWK Gleerup. Wingren, G (1974). Credo. Lund: CWK Gleerup. Wingren, G (1991). Mina fem universiteter. Stockholm: Proprius.

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4. Gustaf Wingren and Scandinavian Creation Theology

Gustaf Wingren (1910–2000) was one of the most notable and influential twentieth century theologians in Sweden, who has also had a profound influence in the other Scandinavian countries. He was exceptional in many ways, not only in the sense that he worked in all fields of theology (except philosophy and the history of religion), but also in the sense that, as a systematic theologian, his main sources for theological reasoning were biblical texts–there is no equivalent in contemporary Swedish theology. Wingren devoted his life to theology, nothing was more important to him. Doing theology meant much more than a study of theological ideas. Theology embodied life and death to him–it presupposed personal involvement in systematic investigations to be performed with the greatest rigor. Without neglecting how much Wingren was influenced by Danish theology, his work may be recognized, in some respects, as the most comprehensive version of Scandinavian creation theology, and as having great potential for a creative reception by a broad school of creation theologians. Gustaf Wingren was born in 1910 in a small manufacturing town on the East coast of Sweden. In contrast to most contemporary theologians, who for the most part had spent their childhood in rectories, Wingren’s father worked in a tannery, and so he had grown up far from the academic world. Gustaf was born with only three and a half fingers on his right hand and was therefore incapable of working in a factory. From early on in his life, it was clear that he was a gifted and aspiring young man. However, without this disability he would probably not have been sent to Lund to study at university in 1927. Wingren started his theological journey in the intellectual climate of the Lundensian school of theology, which in the early 1930s had a growing international reputation. Both his characteristic focus on historical research, and the particular selection of sources for investigation during his first twelve years as a researcher, were determined by theologians associated with Lund University : Gustaf Aul8n (1879–1977), Anders Nygren (1890–1978), and Ragnar Bring (1895–1988). However, even from his earliest investigations— his doctoral thesis on Luther (Wingren 1942/1957) and his book on Irenaeus (Wingren 1947/1959)—he started distancing himself from his teachers. In a consistent systematic way, these works, as a matter of fact, gradually undermined the historical foundations of the grand narrative about Christianity represented by pure and exclusive Christian love, according to

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Nygren’s theology of agape. In contrast to this exclusively Christocentric paradigm, and Nygren’s equally exclusive ecclesiocentric perspective, where the basic motif agape was manifested at only one single point in history—in Christ—and then disseminated through the church, Wingren disclosed the universal presence of God’s life and love, creation and law, in ordinary human conditions—in the fields, in workshops, and on the seas. God’s creation was confessed as something shared by all human creatures, far beyond the life of the church and its ministers. Christ is, according to Wingren, not recognized as the beginning of God’s relationship with the world, but the continuation of this love affair. The human life which is restored in Christ, is the same human life which Adam lost. Wingren recognized God’s love as a force of life present in the concrete community of manual laborers in Valdemarsvik, from which Wingren was excluded due to his disability–and he hailed these acts of love in ordinary human life as a divine gift, though also (when such good deeds have to be forced in order to appear), as a true calling by God. Thus, in his academic works on Luther and Irenaeus, Wingren disclosed the universal presence of God’s love—and that love means much more than pure agapeic love. Even though Wingren had, in terms of content and methodology, distanced himself from Nygren, not just in his first historical works, but even more so in his first systematic work, The Living Word (Wingren 1949/1960), Nygren strongly supported Wingren and acted to obtain him as his successor when he himself left the University in the late 1940s to become bishop of Lund. There were no visible signs of any serious conflict between them until an explicit confrontation exploded publicly during Wingren’s apostasy in his inaugural address in 1951, when he – to everyone’s surprise – strongly criticized and distanced himself from his former teacher. This was followed up in a systematic attack three years later, in Theology in Conflict (Wingren 1954/ 1958). Finally, their conflict reached its peak in a fierce public debate in 1956 (Kristensson Uggla 2016, 61–69). Wingren’s break with Nygren was spectacular, and his behavior may be explained by social and political, as well as personal reasons. But these explanations cannot hide the fact that there were also profound theological differences at play, and a conflict on real issues between these two Lundensian theologians. Wingren broke away from his predecessor Nygren by criticizing his theological method and the disastrous consequences of unequivocally focusing on the distinctive exceptionality of the Christian faith, and what separated it from the human conditions shared by all. Wingren claimed that this way of doing theology constituted a deformation of the Christian faith. Did Wingren leave the Lundensian school of theology? Yes, and no. I prefer to recognize his break with Nygren as the opening of an alternative orientation of the Lundensian school, reconfigured by the foundations of creation theology. Furthermore, the heart of the conflict with his former teacher is exactly the strategic point where Wingren emerges as a distinct representative of Scandinavian creation theology.

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The missing link: Theological anthropology Wingren’s theological program in general was determined by what he understood to be a significant, if not disastrous, lacuna in contemporary theology. Namely, how the concepts of creation and law, as expressions of God’s universal presence in everyday life, in all living creatures and human beings (regardless of faith or church context), had become relegated to a such a inferior position. Wingren’s claim, that the decline of the theological concept of the law is to be considered as the major cause behind most of the problems in contemporary theology, was an integral part of his critique against the predominant anti-liberal paradigm of 20th century theology. Wingren articulated a theological defense of the universal presence of God’s creation and law in all human life as an integral part of a trinitarian systematic theology. This approach to the then contemporary post-liberal challenges, which may also today be recognized as an alternative to the post-liberal theological school and radical orthodoxy, is linked to what I dare to name a post-Constantinian Lutheran theology educated by the pre-Constantinian theology of Irenaeus. This made it possible for Wingren to argue that the doctrine of creation, God’s universal presence in all creatures, should not be considered as an exclusive part of a Christian majority culture. Originally, this doctrine was most strongly articulated by Irenaeus in a church that was still just a tiny little minority of martyrs. Wingren also strongly emphasized the body (creation is associated with life, which comes before information and knowledge), and gift (God’s action comes before human action, as an impulse to a dialectics which eventually comes to make human and divine action into two perspectives on the same reality). Thus, without a proper theological anthropology, the meaning of salvation as restoration of a damaged humanity becomes incomprehensible. Wingren developed a concrete systematic theology, an anti-speculative approach informed by a pre-Constantinian theological reflection grounded in biblical exegesis and the theology of Irenaeus. From this perspective, Luther was refigured in order to speak clearly on postConstantinian conditions.

The Danish connection Denmark always occupied a privileged place in Wingren’s life and theology. Sometimes he even spoke of himself as a disciple of Danish theology, in order to distance himself from Nygren (Wingren 1979/1979, 34). However, this refers to a configuration of Danish theology characterized by a few special criteria. First, it had to be theology from Aarhus (and not Copenhagen). Second, it had to be part of the tradition of Grundtvig (and not Kierkegaard), which for a long

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time primarily meant the theology of Løgstrup (and not his colleague Johannes Sløk). In his later years, Wingren became profoundly influenced by Ole Jensen, who became his most important inspiration for the extension of creation theology beyond what was originally limited to a theological anthropology towards a broader ecological theology. In many of his controversies, Wingren used Denmark–to him, the promised land of theology in general and Scandinavian creation theology in particular–as a role model and an argumentative tool against his Swedish colleagues. He often returned to the importance of Løgstrup as the main provider of philosophical resources which he himself lacked. Yet, over time Grundtvig became much more important to him than Løgstrup. Yet, Wingren himself never performed any autonomous systematic investigation of Grundtvig, but instead learned a lot from other scholars, such as one of his doctoral students (and later his associate professor), Harry Aronson, who wrote his dissertation on the Danish theologian: Mänskligt och kristet (Aronsson 1960). Grundtvig may also be considered as one of the important links to the theology of Irenaeus (but to Wingren this was perhaps, in reality, mostly a retrospective consideration). More importantly, in Wingren’s own theological development we may detect a marked shift from his earlier focus on Luther (whose theology was configured by legal metaphors combined with metaphors of battle), towards a tremendous increase in the use of biological metaphors (life, death, health) in Wingren’s later writings. The legal metaphors came to disappear from his writing, due to the growing inspiration from Irenaeus and Grundtvig (Kristensson Uggla 2016, 247–54, 290–96). Thus, to Wingren, as well as to the other founding figures, Grundtvig can really be recognized as a mediating figure of Scandinavian creation theology, apprehended as a reconfigured theology of the Reformation.

Limitations Wingren had a profound impact on Swedish theology, society, and church life during the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, from having been a household name among theologians in academia and the church for nearly half a century, it is quite remarkable that, just fifteen years after Wingren’s death, hardly any of his texts are used in current Swedish theological instruction. This is ironic, because in his work we find some of the most profound resources for theological reasoning when confronted with similar kinds of post- and anti-liberal challenges in today’s context, as Wingren had to cope with in his time. On a personal level, this snubbing of Wingren’s work can be explained, in part, by the fact that he was a complicated colleague to deal with. His love of confrontation and conflict, which nurtured his intellectual productivity, made his life and relationships complicated (Kristensson Uggla 2016, 14–18).

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Furthermore, he was not capable of creating a cohesive scholary organization around his ideas, and was not able—or probably did not intend—to establish a school of his own. One can suggest without exaggeration that Wingren became marginalized in the academic world as well as in Church of Sweden during the last two or three decades of his life. But, equally, this was a result of his own voluntary self-marginalization. Considering his deep repugnance of the events of 1968, the radical transformation of his life and thinking (which eventually took place in the 1970s) seemed quite improbable. The metamorphosis of Wingren’s personal life in the 1970s was manifested by three defining events: a) he resigned as an ordained minister in Church of Sweden (1974); b) he divorced his first wife Signhild and remarried a leading figure of the political left, Greta Hofsten (1976); and, finally, c) he retired from the University (1977). These defining events were concurrent with the appearance of a new lifestyle, and closely connected to a profound theological transformation. Considering the impressive intellectual enterprise that aimed to accomplish a profound re-contextualization of his entire theology from the academic public, where he fought against theologians, to society as a whole, where theology became a critique of civilization, makes it appropriate to speak about a “later” Wingren, only poorly recognized outside Scandinavia. Voluntarily leaving his old context and power position was a relief for him, and he experienced it as a kind of homecoming. This kenotic – and “selfproletarianizational” – move offered him the opportunity to return to his place on the margin, where he had originated, and where he thought he belonged. However, this erasure of Wingren from contemporary Swedish theology may also be explained by some of the limitations of his own theological project. As a matter of fact, that Wingren was a homo theologicus became, in a sense, yet another disability for him. He did not undertake any significant cross-disciplinary initiatives. He himself was not a philosopher in any sense of the word, and he made no attempts to connect with philosophers. Løgstrup was the one exception to this. All the same, phenomenology was never really integrated into his way of thinking, and this was reinforced by his blindness to forming possible connections with Swedish colleagues that had similar philosophical profiles to Løgstrup: John Cullberg, Torsten Bohlin, Arvid Runestam, and others. Wingren’s lack of philosophical interest was slightly associated with a weak meta-theoretical consciousness, which is problematic if we consider the strong philosophical turn in contemporary systematic theology, in Sweden and elsewhere. However, the lack of philosophical terminology and reflexive horizon does not mean that Wingren’s theology is philosophically irrelevant. To the contrary, I would claim that the opposite is true, because there are profound philosophical implications in his reflections on anthropology and hermeneutics. Wingren was not a philosopher, but he was certainly capable of reasoning. And if we consider the major philosophical resources that were

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actually available in the academic context of his time—with Axel Hägerström and Ingemar Hedenius as analytical figures, whose nihilistic perspective dominated the mainly positivistic philosophical scene—it might even be considered an advantage that he resisted becoming philosophically influenced.

Misconceptions The eclipse of Wingren is also associated with a number of obstinate misunderstandings concerning the particular content and profile of his theological project. One of these misunderstandings suggests that Wingren’s theology should be comprehended as a sort of unilateral creation theology containing only a doctrine on creation, and nothing else. A second suggests that Wingren attempted to establish a harmonious balance between creation and gospel, the first and the second article of faith, a kind of in-between stage of more or less poor compromises between the distinctive individuality of the Christian faith and the openness of this faith towards that which we all share as humans in general. Still others have held that Wingren’s theological project should be regarded as a kerygmatic theology, which he had simply learned from Karl Barth–a misconception to which Wingren himself may have contributed by often proudly repeating that he, as a young scholar, was asked to replace Barth for a semester in 1947 (Kristensson Uggla 2016, 96–106). An associated, fourth, misconception describes him as a church-centered theologian who just sought to edify local congregations: a theologian without scientific claims and who was merely occupied with sermonizing. Finally (for our purposes, for the list of such misunderstandings that could be much expanded), Wingren’s creation theology has been characterized as a romantic anthropocentrism in which an elevated experience of life promotes a na"ve, optimistic belief in human capabilities, or just a re-mastered liberal theology. These misconceptions have been quite influential, and have contributed to a problematic reception of his thoughts. This is so, despite Wingren’s life-long interest in the challenge of how to understand Jesus, and his constant elaborations on the meaning of Christian faith; despite his profoundly dialectical way of thinking, stating that the continuity in the Christian faith can only be maintained through change and not by any balancing act; despite his radical criticism and explicit rejection of Karl Barth; despite the fact that no other major contemporary theologian has articulated a more fierce critique of Church of Sweden, and his clear scientific claims, including his claims of the fundamental importance of science also within the Church; and despite the fact that he developed his theological anthropology starting from an initial decentering of the subject, foreign to the tradition of liberal theology. Some of these misconceptions may originate from the fact that the word “creation” invites misunderstanding, and this has not lessened with the

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passing of time. What Wingren is definitely not talking about when he speaks of creation is some sort of fundamentalist creationism that considers the creation story as a historical description of the formation of the earth. Neither does creation theology form a basis for a theology of orders of creation, according to a reactionary defense of the status quo, or in accordance with the racial ideologies of the twentieth century. Instead, creation, like his understanding of the law, is first and foremost a matter of change. And, in contrast to that which he considered as “a curious anti-liberal mania” (Wingren 1958/ 1961, 12), due to the theological obsession with Revelation among his contemporary theologians, Wingren proclaimed God’s universal presence and work in creation and law in the ordinary world, regardless of religion and faith. When Wingren spoke about creation, his point of departure was not the Old Testament creation story, but rather the fact that God creates now. As with Luther, Wingren maintained that our birth means that God is creating us. In other words, we cannot live our lives without constantly being in relationship with God: “Man bears his relationship to God about with him wherever he goes” (Wingren 1958/1961, 89). The idea of creation means reception to humans, or rather, it is something continually received, and should thus not be comprehended as part of an anthropocentric humanism that places an autonomous human subject at the center of the universe. Instead, the notion of creation serves as an initial decentering through which we may discover life as a gift, yet which also then provides the recentering resources for a more robust theological anthropology as prerequisite for responsible human action in God’s world. Considering Wingren’s creation theology in our contemporary intellectual situation also invites the misunderstanding that we are automatically dealing with an ecological theology. But, as a matter of fact, the basic contents of Wingren’s creation theology are mainly related to his understanding of the human condition–theological anthropology. Here, Wingren distanced himself both from the anthropocentrism and self-glorification of liberal theology, as well as Barth’s anthropoclasm and rejection of human achievement. In terms of theological anthropology, the gift of creation primarily means a decentering of the subject, which, in keeping with Lutheran and Løgstrupian ethics, places the factual tacit demands of the other at the center of our lives and interests. To draw from Emmanuel L8vinas, it is a kind of humanism of the other human being (L8vinas 1972/2005). Yet, as mentioned, this notion of creation brings a recentering of the subject within the framework of a recognition of the capable human being. Furthermore, in Wingren’s systematic theology, the face of the Other and the face of Christ merge and eventually become identical. At the heart of Wingren’s interpretation of Christian faith we find the simultaneous movement of God and each of us becoming human according to the same scheme of a “grain of wheat” eschatology (Wingren 1974/1981, 21; Kristensson Uggla 2016, 153–166). Wingren, consequently, uses the death and resurrection of Christ, along with baptism, as a pattern of interpretation of the everyday

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“death in work.” In other words, baptism is never considered as a baptism into churchliness, but rather as a baptism into true human life, which is lived in thousands of variations in professions and homes. The dynamics of his theological reasoning is expressed in this way in an article on the meaning of work from the late 1940s: If we flee from our neighbor to God, we come not to God but to ourselves, to our own selves. When the other is pushed from the center of our lives, Christ is also pushed from the center. For Christ is given to the world, he is human, in the form of a servant. The journey outward toward the people of the earth is a journey in the direction in which the cross stands and in which death occurs; that is, a journey in the direction toward where He is, and where there is hope, the hope of resurrection (Wingren 1949b, 286).

For Wingren, the secret of the grain of wheat is a matter of being for others, a decentering of ourselves, in accordance with nos pose extra nos, where we posit ourselves outside ourselves (Jüngel 1977/1983, 182). The same composite logic of identification that is implicit in this grain of wheat theology also occurs in Wingren’s understanding of the hermeneutical theology that he develops in his book The Living Word, where he states: We are talking about him [man] when we talk about Christ. We do not first speak of the objective event and then try to find a way of applying it to man, for in the kerygma concerning Christ’s death and resurrection man is already present; the hearer is there in the passage when the minister opens the New Testament (Wingren 1949/1960, 28).

This quote may be better understood if we consider Wingren’s constantly recurring criticism against what he identified as a strong monophysitic tendency in contemporary theology, claiming Christ’s divinity at the cost of his humanity. Wingren’s own conviction on this point is clear : But he who lives and gives us eternal life is a human being, the only completely healthy human being in existence. He is not supernatural. Without him, however, we are unnatural and dead (Wingren 1983, 18).

In this way, Wingren, from the very beginning of his theological project, consciously inscribed his thoughts in his contemporary theological context by emphasizing that the dominant anti-liberal sentiment has given rise to a situation in which there is a crucial need for “a positive doctrine of man, a theological anthropology” (Wingren 1947/1959, xi). Wingren therefore constantly tried to come to terms with what he saw as a tendency to depict man as a competitor of God, so that “[p]ositive statements which are made about man then become limitations on the sovereignty of God, and positive statements about the omnipotence of God are seen to be limitations on man’s freedom” (ibid., xii). For Wingren, this is a matter of recovering the theological anthropology assumed in both the Bible and the Reformation, and which the early Church was forced to articulate more clearly due to the confrontation

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with powers that wished to negate the idea of creation (Marcion and others). Wingren encapsulates everything that Irenaeus understands by salvation in the concept of recapitulatio (restored creation, becoming human again), which presumes an original affirmation of creation-given human life and an understanding of humanity as something to be restored. However, Wingren is careful to emphasize that for Irenaeus, this restoration is not a matter of a static reinstatement, but a completion, a fulfillment, and as such a matter of something which becomes “even more and richer.” Human growth and God’s creation are considered as “the exact same reality viewed from a special perspective” (ibid., 7). What humankind is allowed to participate in through salvation is, in other words, not a supernatural addition to humanity but rather a regaining of lost humanity. To move against all these potentially divergent views and misconceptions of Wingren, it must be understood, first and foremost, that what occupied his interest throughout his entire career was the issue of the contents of Christian faith. Only when this has clearly been stated, can we understand the radical nature and originality of Wingren’s position in rejecting every attempt to identify the unique and distinctive nature of Christianity at the cost of its openness and positive relation to the world of creation. Wingren takes his specific place in twentieth-century theology as a critic of the dominant antiliberal movements that took isolating “the distinctly Christian” as their theological methodology. There are of course unique elements within the Christian faith, but a prerequisite for embracing these elements is that the universally human be articulated and taken seriously first. The relation of the Christian faith to God’s creation is not a matter of an external relationship that must be established outwardly to something outside this faith, but rather of an integral part of Christian faith itself. Against this background, Wingren claimed that any attempt to identify opposite pairs of human versus Christian, anthropology versus Christology, creation versus salvation, the world versus the Church, will obscure, if not outright eliminate and destroy, a Christian view of faith and life. According to Wingren, in order to correctly depict the Christian faith it is necessary to include that which unites the Christian view of life with basic realities shared by all human beings. In other words, with parts of the Christian faith that are not at all original or unique. The hoped-for clarity that might be achieved concerning “what Christian faith is” by attempting to isolate something distinctively unique about it has had devastating consequences for our understanding of the faith.

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The two hidden sources When considering the literature on Wingren, there are two understated sources and hidden inspirations, that are seldom or never recognized in conjunction with Wingren’s theological project: the heretic of the first century, Marcion, and his second wife, Greta Hofsten. Both Marcion and Greta Hofsten were of crucial importance to Wingren. It is a matter of fact that, before Wingren studied Luther, he was occupied by Irenaeus. And it is an overlooked fact that, even before this, his research was focused (for four years) on the primary heretic of the early church: Marcion. The young Wingren spent years of research on this arch-heretic–in fact double the time that he had spent on Luther when preparing his doctoral dissertation. These investigations made a lasting impact on him, and served again and again as a powerful narrative device in his authorship, a weapon with which he was able to disarm his opponents. What made this device so effective to Wingren, was that he configured Marcion’s theological position in a way that made it easy to recognize its striking resemblance with much of the antiliberal polemics which dominated the new theological movements of Wingren’s time (as well as in our own time, I might add). This is how Wingren characterized the position of the great heretic of the early church: Marcion’s theology […] can be summed up with this thesis: God has revealed himself in Christ and only in Christ. Against just this view of life the Apostolic Creed with its threefold structure was built. The fact that the Church Fathers considered this theology to be a greater threat to faith than atheism bears witness to their good judgment (Wingren 1974/1981, 31; 1979/1979, 79).

Here, we see an example of how the story of Marcion served as a powerful instrument with which Wingren was able to trap his contemporary theological opponents and neutralize their arguments. Note the provocative use of typically Barthian terminology that he attributes to Marcion. Given the positive role Marcion played in the framework of Nygren’s narrative of pure Christian love, it is not surprising that even Nygren is included in Wingren’s anti-Marcionite polemic. If Irenaeus, and later Luther, serve as positive representatives of a Christian interpretation of life, then Marcion has at least as important a function as a representative of a too narrow, heretic and nonChristian interpretation of human life, in which everything that unites Christian faith with a general human position is expunged. Thus, the strategic importance that Wingren’s Marcionite narrative held for his theological orientations, and its use as a negative contrast (to Barth and Nygren) against which he was able to formulate his own position, cannot be exaggerated. Among these unique and essential sources of inspiration standing behind Wingren’s theological development, there is a second person entirely overlooked in all of the literature about Wingren and his theological project.

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Actually, the major inspiration behind the critical theology focused on society (that Wingren began to develop from the age of sixty onward), and which became the theological program of the remaining decades of his life, emanated from a source outside both academia and theology. That is, his new life partner, Greta Hofsten (1927–1996). Thus, Wingren counted among his most important sources of inspiration a person, whose main institutional basis and competence were neither academic nor theological. At the time of their most intensive collaboration, Hofsten was working for the postal service sorting mail. It is extraordinarily remarkable that, in all previous literature on Wingren, her influence on his theological thinking has been totally neglected. Yet, I maintain that it is not possible to gain an understanding of Wingren’s theology in its entirety if we ignore the vital role Hofsten played in the second half of his authorship (which is one of my main arguments in Kristensson Uggla 2016). Long before anyone else, it was Greta Hofsten alone who recognized the social criticism latent in Wingren’s earlier investigations. Consequently, she also recognized the possibility of transferring and rewriting the theological texts he had originally developed within the academic sphere, so that they could be applied in a new context – i. e. society. Hofsten was furthermore the one who further encouraged Wingren, as a professional, to reconnect with his background and life experience in a small manufacturing town on the east coast of Sweden, Valdemarsvik, where he grew up, as a resource for theological reasoning.

The grand recontextualization When viewed in toto, Wingren’s authorship may be divided into two major sequences. After his book Gospel and Church (Wingren 1960/1964) was released on his fiftieth birthday, Wingren’s system of theology seems to have been more or less complete. Gospel and Church, which served as the second volume of his dogmatics (the first volume, Creation and Law, was released in 1958/1961), may in retrospect be seen as the grandiose conclusion of an extraordinarily productive period in the career of this Lundensian theologian, a period which included historical works on Luther (Wingren 1942/1957); and Irenaeus (Wingren 1947/1959); his hermeneutical turn (Wingren 1949/1960); his attack on the most important contemporary theologians, Nygren, Barth and Bultmann (Wingren 1954/1958); and then, finally, his two volumes on dogmatics (Wingren 1958/1961; 1960/1964). Although he seemed to surge forward on a wave of success, the following decade saw no decisive innovations in Wingren’s writings. Suddenly, Wingren’s thinking underwent a dramatic change and a new productivity emerged from the 1970s onward. He experienced a personal metamorphosis and simultaneously recontextualized his entire system of

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theology. At first glance, it may appear that the books that followed, which Wingren published during the 1970s, 80s and the early 90s, were mere repetitions of the content of his early publications. However, a closer examination reveals that his works from those later decades were the result of the new theological direction he had begun to pursue. After having worked primarily in the academic sphere for decades, he now redirected his theological path toward a critique of civilization by placing his theological reflection mainly in a social context. This second wave of books may be recognized as creative revisitations and recontextualizations of the entirety of his theological path, transforming systematic theology into a critique of society. The grand recontextualization that Wingren presented in his works during the 1970s and 80s are much more than repetitions. Rather, they are creative “repetitions” that add central elements to the unique character and strength of his theological project. His book Theology in Conflict: Nygren, Barth, Bultmann from 1954/1958 may be considered as a corresponding successor to his two later works, Växling och kontinuitet: Teologiska kriterier [“Change and Continuity : Theological Criteria,” 1972] and Tolken som tiger : Vad teologin är och vad den borde vara [“The Silent Interpreter : What Theology Is and What It Ought to Be,” 1982]. His work Luther on Vocation (1942/1957) was followed by En liten katekes [“A Little Catechism,” 1983]; and in a similar way Man and the Incarnation: A Study in the Biblical Theology of Irenaeus (1947/1959) was followed by Människa och Kristen: En bok om Irenaeus [“Human and Christian: A Book about Irenaeus,” 1983]. None of these later works were simple repetitions of his earlier writings. Instead they were creative reinterpretations actively generating new meanings from the same sources and texts, but this time transformed and refigured by the challenges of his contemporary social context and with the purpose of generating social criticism. The core of the social criticism that emerged from his systematic theology was a critique of the dominant ideology of growth, the one-sided focus on achievements that result from exploitation of human beings and nature. I maintain that we may view the later Wingren as a parallel and theological variant of the critique of modern civilization that Georg von Wright in Finland, as well as K.E. Løgstrup in Denmark, developed in the latter parts of their lives. The power and intensity of the process of transformation that characterized Wingren’s reconfigured theological project from the 1970s onward can hardly be exaggerated. His obvious ambition and ability to recontextualize his earlier sources resulted in a kind of political theology. The hermeneutical model of argumentation, which Wingren now used again and again in order to maintain theological continuity through change and variation, was based on theological analogies over time. Thus, he often returned to the fact that Martin Luther was unable to find any references in the Bible that touched on life in the monastery, enforced celibacy, or the selling of indulgences. So, what did this biblical

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theology have to say in the era of the Reformation? In this situation, what Luther did was to re-interpret, re-direct, and re-address what Paul wrote about the Sabbath, unclean food or the requirement of circumcision, such that it could be used to forge the then contemporary idea of justification through acts and deeds, which prevailed in Europe in the early sixteenth century. The implication then is that one cannot remain Lutheran by simply repeating the positions that Luther held then. Instead, Wingren posited that people living in the late twentieth century must read Luther through the lens of the contemporary issues that weigh upon them. Continuity can only be maintained through change. As a result, Luther must be recontextualized in a post-Constantinian, post-Christian, and post-secular world, a context where both theology and church have a lot to learn from the pre-Constantinian theologian Irenaeus. How did Wingren achieve this? What were the intellectual resources that made this transformation and recontextualization possible? The catalyst for change must have lain dormant along with the potential resources. And, the impulse seems to have escalated gradually over a long period of time. I would like to suggest that, in addition to the direct and obvious influence from his encounter with Greta Hofsten—who disclosed an implicit social criticism in Wingren’s earlier work, and who had personally inspired him to take this turn—the major prerequisite for the systematic recontextualization is Wingren’s most arcane and controversial book, The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church (1949/1960). I, like Wingren, ascribe to this book a unique, decisive role in his later authorship. But I do so for reasons other than those Wingren himself indicated. In order to cope with this remarkable book, one should take note of the Swedish subtitle, which reveals that it is “a fundamental study” of issues, and thus ought to be related to the general field of systematic theology. The book, despite the expectations that its (Swedish) title may elicit—Predikan [“The Sermon”]—is neither a textbook in homiletics (although it has in fact been used as a textbook in this respect), nor a collection of sermons. Instead, it is a rather fragmentary, nearly aphoristic rough draft of a treatise on theological hermeneutics—and on hermeneutical theology as well. Within this framework, preaching is to Wingren only an example–though, for Lutherans the arch-example—of the many practices of interpretation that maintain continuity in the phenomenon we name Christianity. I hold that it is in this particular book that we may identify the roots of the two paradoxical lines of thought, which are of profound importance for Wingren’s interpretation of Christianity, and which were the driving forces behind his extensive process of recontextualization during the 1970s and 80s. First, the insight that the continuity of the Christian faith can only be maintained through change (a theological hermeneutics). And second, the idea that the distinctive and unique character of this faith is inextricably bound to the capacity to manifest its universal openness toward all of God’s creation (a hermeneutic creation

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theology). For this reason, it is no coincidence that the very concepts of change and continuity, together with the concepts of openness and distinctness, served as fundamental themes in the two books which manifested his process of theological recontextualization: “Continuity and Change” (1972) and “Openness and Distinctiveness” (published the same year in English translation as Creation and Gospel, 1979/1979). Moreover, use of these concepts was not a matter of compromise nor was it a balancing act. Instead we are confronted with a profoundly dialectic shape of thought: the continuity of what we refer to as Christian faith can only be maintained through change, and the distinctness of this faith can only be upheld through openness. Therein, we may also learn that Wingren’s work is characterized by a distinctly practical perspective. The Living Word (1949/1960) is rife with verbs and references to things that occur and happen. He speaks of things that “emerge,” “spring forth” and “continue to this day,” people who “are created,” “recover,” and he talks about “wandering” and “listening,” and so on. Actually, the central theme of the book is that there is something that actually occurs in the meeting between human beings and the word. Thus, the sermon, as an event, may be considered as a link in the chain of events between the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. In this context, according to Wingren, the sermon is to be considered as a practice—“preaching is a continuing function in the actual life of the church today” (Wingren 1949/1960, 24)—which maintains the continuity of the phenomenon we refer to as Christianity only by new interpretations: “In this way the Bible finds its unity when it preaches and is preached. If preaching is suppressed, then the book of God’s acts falls apart as into disjecta membra” (ibid., 39). Using Paul Ricoeur’s terminology, we could say that the phenomenon we name Christianity does not exist in or behind a collection of texts, but rather is something that is constituted in “the world in front of the text” (Ricoeur 1986/2008). Here, it is interesting to note that Wingren chose to use the final chapter of The Living Word, where he summarizes the book’s many perspectives, to deal with communicatio idiomatum, an incarnational concept which originates from Lutheran theology, in order to explain how the two natures (human and divine) are united in one person, Jesus Christ. This is, once again, tied to the polemic, which Wingren for decades directed against monophysitism, a theological position that emphasized the divine at the expense of the human, which amounts, de facto, to the notion that Christ had only a single, divine nature. According to Wingren, this position experienced a boost in the general post-liberal theological situation during most of the twentieth century. However, because Christ is a human being, and because his divinity is poured out into his humanity, humanity can never be downplayed and placed in conflict with his divinity. According to Wingren’s antimonophysitistic polemic, the divinity of Christ exists exactly in his humanity and cannot be placed above it. For this reason, preaching cannot evade or avoid Jesus’ humanity, his hunger and thirst, uncertainty and anxiety over

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death, his ultimate fate, nor his interaction with flesh and blood human beings. To attempt to escape from any of this is equivalent to fleeing from the living God. Wingren ties all of this together by emphasizing the need to recognize the preacher’s own humanity : “The communicatio idiomatum means that the priest may venture to belong to his own age and mix in the ordinary life of society without thereby losing the divine life” (Wingren 1949/1960, 211). Once again, in Wingren’s work, divine and human are united in the action of selfgiving. Thus, the divine contents of the message are not lost through moving outwards. Quite the contrary, they are actually lost when the message does not move outward, “when it keeps within the temple walls and fears being in the world, in the depths, among the doubters, prisoners and sinners” (Wingren 1949/1960, 211). Rather than tying the interpretation of communicatio idiomatum and the dual nature of the person of Christ to metaphysical speculations, he moves in the opposite direction, and attempts to connect the processes in question to the kenotic narrative, in which a unity with God through faith, together with a unity with the other through love, are constitutive, in themselves, of the connection between the divine and the human. Everything is brought together in the figure of Christ, who comes down to Earth and makes himself destitute for others: “Christ is changed into us, and therefore we are changed into each other” (Wingren 1949/1960, 213). Furthermore, all this takes place in a world that is God’s creation, a world imbued with divine presence and action. At this particular point, we may also recognize the pattern of baptism, the motif of death and life, which characterizes Wingren’s entire theology, including his theological anthropology and the grain of wheat eschatology (Wingren 1949/1960, 21).

The future of Scandinavian creation theology – ten contributions from Wingren What kind of contribution can we expect, and what kind of theological resources does Wingren provide, for a future development of Lutheran theology in general and Scandinavian creation theology in particular? Let me conclude my presentation with ten short points: (1) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, is a theology about the creation. This word does not refer to the biblical creation story regarding a historical origin: creation is to be considered as something that goes on now. Moreover, there is nothing mystical with creation: to live is to be created, to be created is to receive life—and thus to participate in God’s continuing creation. The facts that God creates, and that we are alive, constitute exactly the same thing—only considered from two different angles. Scandinavian creation theology according to Wingren does not intend to

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Christianize the world, but rather to humanize the church. This is also one of the reasons why the dominant narrative of secularization has difficulty coping with a Scandinavia influenced by creation theology. A Lutheran perspective, according to the tradition of Scandinavian creation theology, means a secularization of the Church and a simultaneous sacralization of the world (von den Bremen et al. 2013). (2) Scandinavian creation theology according to Wingren is a defense of the universal dimension of the Christian faith in a post-Constantinian and postChristian age. The conviction that God is always already there, makes it necessary to elaborate on a theological interpretation of the ordinary human life that we all share in terms of creation. Thus, Scandinavian creation theology does not presume a monolithic Lutheran majority culture, instead it provides a relevant theology for a pluralistic society where Christians might even be in the minority (Wingren 1968/1969). In his patristic investigations, Wingren emphasized the fact that Irenaeus developed his creation theology in a situation where Christians were not only a tiny minority, but also hounded and killed. Creation and law are thus not primarily concepts for a religious monoculture, but inevitable elements for maintaining the Christian faith in a situation where Christians have to coexist with people of other faiths (or without faith) in a post-Christian society. Wingren reminds us about the devastating consequences of not taking this seriously : ”For where it is denied that the world is God’s world, the attempt is soon made to regulate it by some other ‘religious’ standard” (Wingren 1958/1961, 160). Thus, Wingren uses the pre-Constantinian theology of Irenaeus in order to reinterpret Luther as a post-Constantinian theologian—liberated from historical determinations, and able to speak to us today. (3) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, does not provide a defense for the status quo, but instead presents creation as a driving force for change. In his studies on Luther, Wingren stresses dynamics and “the time” (Stundelein). The law is thus considered as something dynamic and changeable, because it is only when old laws are abolished and new ones are enacted that they are able to serve as expressions of God’s work in creation. In addition, the capacity for recontextualization–in particular manifested in Wingren’s work during the 70s and 80s, not to mention the dynamics of The Living Word (Wingren 1949/1960), with its focus on the ever changing “meeting”–points to the fact that creation theology has to do, above all, with change. (4) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, is biblical theology. In almost all of Wingren’s major works from 1949 onwards, we find three registers, including an extensive register of Bible reference. This may elicit questions concerning the theoretical status and argumentative value that these Bible references may hold. Yet, it must be made absolutely clear that Wingren’s work does not thus constitute some sort of na"ve fundamentalism or biblical literalism. He was a well-informed scholar for his day, who in the

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spirit of Einar Billing and Nathan Söderblom, affirmed all the achievements of biblical criticism–and did so with great enthusiasm. He wrote: “The Bible is a literary product with a simple account of human origins, the investigation of which requires no more than accepted rules of procedure” (Wingren 1949/ 1960, 136). Wingren also provides strong theological justifications for accepting the critical methods of science with arguments based on the idea of creation as well as incarnational theology. Here, his critical standpoint against monophysitism is linked to a wholehearted acceptance of the breakthrough of the historical view of the Bible: Those who make the humanity of Christ a living reality for the people to whom they speak are able to incorporate the findings of biblical criticism into the ministerial acts of the Church. To support that this will make us lose sight of the divinity of Christ indicates that we have failed to accept that the incarnation ever took place at all. (Ibid., 136)

(5) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, encourages us to extend our sources for theological reasoning. Besides his great interest in the Bible, Wingren gradually opened up his perspective to a variety of sources, in particular to literary fiction. More and more, Wingren also made use of his own life experience as a source of theological thinking, as with, for example, his childhood experiences from Valdemarsvik. (6) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, focuses on the need to defend the profoundly human dimension of the Christian faith. The fact that Wingren focused on theological anthropology in a post-liberal theological situation, is of profound importance in a post-humanist situation which tends to generate anti-humanism. If salvation means a restored humanity (recapitulatio), theology cannot conceptualize the Christian faith as the opposite of the human life that we all share. As Wingren wrote in Berlin in 1938: “Anthropology is terribly neglected in all of modern theology.” (Wingren 1938, 179) These words could just as easily have been written in our own time. As such, Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, provides a productive alternative to an anthropocentric approach, as well as to the predominant decentered subject in contemporary science influenced by naturalism and poststructuralism. Wingren’s approach implies a strong initial decentering move, which functions as the beginning of a dialectical relationship between decentering and centering moves. In this theological anthropology, the human condition appears embedded within the creation and the law. As stated before, Wingren’s theology of creation is first and foremost focused on the elaboration of a theological anthropology—and I claim that this is also a special entrance for a theological contribution to other disciplines and spheres of society. (7) Scandinavian creation theology according to Wingren is eschatological theology. If salvation means restored humanity, an eschatological dimension is a necessary element always present in all theology of creation. The profound

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presence of an eschatological tension between the “already now” and the “not yet” in all of Wingren’s creation theology provides a constant dynamic in his understanding of what it means to be both human and Christian. As a result, the kenotic element (constituted in the tension between life and death) and the eschatological element (constituted in the tension between already now and not yet) join together and form the fundamental structures of his grain of wheat eschatology. (8) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, is a theology for and about the church. The fact that Wingren criticized every attempt to develop a church-centered theology does not mean that Scandinavian creation theology has no ecclesiology. But, considering that Christ only lived for others, theology needs to make a demarcation against all kinds of churchification and egocentric tendencies (Kristensson Uggla 2016, 297–365). The second volume of Wingren’s dogmatics, Gospel and Church (1960/1964), strengthens the impression that his ecclesiology, and his theology in general, may, to a great extent, be characterized as a baptismal theology, that integrates the refigurative process by which the individual becomes human into the inner structure configured by the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. As mentioned, Wingren clearly sought to distance himself from any form of Marcionite theology, including its modern guises which hold that God’s work with an individual does not begin until he or she comes into contact with the Bible or the church (and which thus transforms the life of the Church into a community superior to everyday human life). Instead, the proclamation of the church through the viva vox of the gospel is presented as part of God’s restoration of humanity, a process with the healing of every individual as its primary aim. Baptism makes us human (Wingren 1960/1964, 11). Wingren’s main interest is the question of how the theological meaning of the territorial Church may be saved in a post-Constantinian age when Christians might be in minority (Wingren 1968/1969). Salvation does not separate Christians from the world, but connects them with the world, i. e. the common life that we all share. According to Wingren, it is only possible to describe the positive relationship between the church and Christ if we simultaneously consider the positive relationship between the church and the world (Wingren 1960/1964). (9) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, teaches us about the need for creativity and dynamics to be present in the theologian’s toolbox. Considering Wingren’s profoundly dialectical way of thinking, it perhaps unsurprising that many of the misconceptions about his theology originate from an inability to cope with dialectics. And, this is enforced by the profound eschatological dimension in his conceptualization of Scandinavian creation theology. Therefore, the heart of Wingren’s theological reflections is never just a balancing act between creation and gospel, or a better or worse compromise between human and Christian, but rather a dialectical process of emerging realities. Nothing is finished in creation, neither in Christianity, recognized as an event, constituted as a “meeting”

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between word and man, text and interpreter. Christian faith is to be considered as an adventure and ongoing occurrence–with Christ encountering the creation from the future. The ever-new events in “the world in front of the text,” and the paradoxical interpretation of life starting from an interpretation of death, is part of this dialectical way of thinking in accordance with a grain of wheat eschatology. (10) Scandinavian creation theology, according to Wingren, is trinitarian theology. Wingren presented two dogmatic “attempts,” where he struggled with the task to make a comprehensive presentation of the Christian faith: the dogmatics issued in two volumes in 1958/1958 and 1960/1964, and his book Credo from 1974/1981. There are some major differences between these works (for example, the doxological framework of the later presentation and its effort to enter into a dialogue with other worldviews). Still, the theological reasoning in both these dogmatics is fundamentally trinitarian in its structure. The original governing principle for Wingren’s presentation of the Christian faith using four structuring concepts—creation, law, gospel, and church—is founded on a trinitarian grammar, always present in his systematic theology. Finally, in the prolongation of Scandinavian creation theology,we are, according to Wingren, confronted with something other than theology. Wingren mentioned this paradoxical outcome of creation theology when he spoke about the future not only being about more theology. Indeed, in order to maintain that the meaning of Wingren’s theology remains an open quest, I will conclude my presentation with the enigmatic dimension of his work associated with the fact that his theological project opens up for transdisciplinary as well as intellectual projects transcending the boundaries of academia (even though he himself travelled these routes himself only in a very limited sense). The goal of this kind of theology is not more theology. Christian faith is not aiming for a purely spiritual life, but humanity. It’s all about becoming human again.

Bibliography ARONSON, H. (1960). Mänskligt och kristet: En studie i Grundtvigs teologi [Human and Christian: An investigation in the Theology of Grundtvig]. Stockholm: Scandinavian University Books/Bonniers. JÜNGEL, E. (1977/1983). 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. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. English translation of Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, 1977. KRISTENSSON UGGLA, B. (2010/2016). Becoming Human Again: The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren. Trans. Daniel M. Olson. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. English translation of Gustaf Wingren : människan och theologian, 2010.

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LPVINAS, E. (1972/2005). Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Urbana and Chicago: Indiana University Press. English translation of Humanisme de l’autre homme, 1972. RICOEUR, P. (1986/2008). From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. London/New York: Continuum. English translation of Du Texte # l’action : Essais d’herm8neutique II, 1986. VAN DEN BREMER. R. et al eds. (2013). Secular and Sacred: The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law and Public Space. Research in Contemporary Religion, Vol 15. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. WINGREN, G. (1936). “Marcions kristendomstolkning” [Marcion’s Interpretation of Christian Faith], Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 12, 318–338. WINGREN, G. (1938). ”The Johanneum Journal” [Johanneumboken]. Unpublished notebook from Wingren’s research period in Berlin in 1938 and thereafter after his return to Sweden. Lund University Library. WINGREN, G. (1939). Marcion och Irenaeus—studier över skapelsetanken [Marcion and Irenaeus: Studies on the Idea of Creation]. Unpublished copy of Wingren’s licentiate dissertation owned by the author. WINGREN, G. (1942/1957). Luther on Vocation. Trans. Carl C. Rasmussen. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004. English translation of Luthers lära om kallelsen, 1942. WINGREN, G. (1947/1959). Man and the Incarnation: A Study in the Biblical Theology of Irenaeus. Trans. Ross Mackenzie. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. English translation of Människan och inkarnationen enligt Irenaeus, 1947. WINGREN, G. (1949b). “Arbetets mening” [The meaning of work], Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 25, 278–86. WINGREN, G. (1949/1960). The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church. Trans. Victor C. Pogue. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002. English translation of Predikan: En principiell studie, 1949. WINGREN, G. (1954/1958). Theology in Conflict: Nygren, Barth, Bultmann. Trans. Eric H. Wahlstrom. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. English translation of Teologiens metodfr,ga, 1954. WINGREN, G. (1958/1961). Creation and Law. Trans. Ross Mackenzie. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003. English translation of Skapelsen och lagen, 1958. WINGREN, G. (1960/1964). Gospel and Church. Trans. Ross Mackenzie. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006. English translation of Evangeliet och kyrkan, 1960. WINGREN, G. (1968/1969). An Exodus Theology : Einar Billing and the Development of Modern Swedish Theology. Trans. Eric Wahlstrom. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. English translation of Einar Billing: En studie i svensk teologi före 1920, 1968. WINGREN, G. (1971). The Flight from Creation. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House. WINGREN, G. (1972). Växling och kontinuitet: Teologiska kriterier [Change and Continuity : Theological Criteria]. Lund: Liber.

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WINGREN, G. (1974/1981). Credo: The Christian View of Faith and Life. Trans. Edgar M. Carlson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House. English translation of Credo: Den kristna tros- och livs,sk,dningen, 1974. WINGREN, G. (1979/1979). Creation and Gospel: The New Situation in European Theology. Introduction and bibliography by Henry Vander Goot. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004. English translation of Öppenhet och egenart: Evangeliet i världen, 1979. WINGREN, G. (1982). Tolken som tiger : Vad teologin är och vad den borde vara [The Silent Interpreter: What Theology Is and What It Ought to Be]. Stockholm: Verbum. WINGREN, G. (1983a). Människa och kristen: En bok om Irenaeus [Human and Christian: A Book on Irenaeus]. Stockholm: Verbum. WINGREN, G. (1983b). En liten katekes [A Little Catechism]. Stockholm: Verbum. WINGREN, G. (1991). Mina fem universitet: Minnen [My Five Universities: Memories]. Stockholm: Proprius.

PART II: SEMINAL SOURCES

Allen G. Jorgenson

5. Martin Luther in Scandinavian Creation Theology

1. Introduction Frederick Buechner has written that “all theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography” (Buechner 1991, 1). Insofar as autobiography presumes context, some orientation to mine will help in what follows. I am becoming increasingly aware of the degree to which my context informs my reading of other theologians, most notably Martin Luther. So I begin with some comments about my milieu in preparation for the topic “Martin Luther in Scandinavian Creation Theology”. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized to our First Nations for their mistreatment at Indian Residential Schools. These schools were established in the late 19th century, and continued up to 1994 with the clear aim of the assimilation of Indigenous peoples: to “civilize” the natives.1 The history of these schools is one of abuse, neglect and pain. Children were forcibly taken from their homes and experienced horrific suffering. After the apology, a number of events where held in which former students of these schools would relate their experiences. I attended one of these, and heard a former student relate that he was not allowed to speak his native tongue, nor practice his beliefs. In religion classes he was especially bothered by the teaching of original sin and the belief that that children were born with an impaired, image of God. This is not, nor has never been, a teaching attributed to our First Nations. He invited his hearers to imagine a baby, and to consider it as perfectly innocent, rather than as a sinner. Lutheran theologians respond to such a critique in terms of its function vis-/-vis the law/gospel hermeneutic. Yet, I realized that because this doctrine was introduced at the same time as these children were told that their culture was primitive and dangerous, and their religion false, if not demonic, it functioned differently. It not only functioned to explain the human condition but to condition the human hearing it. This incident invited me to consider not only what we believe, teach and confess but how we do the same. In what follows, this will be continually in the back of my mind as I think through what it means to be human, attentive to what Luther says about this 1 Further information can be found at http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=3. Accessed September 29, 2015.

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and in conversation with Scandinavian Creation Theology (SCT). In so doing, I will propose that some of the work of SCT thinkers will open up vistas for new ways of reading Luther that are attentive both to him in his context and in our own as well. In so doing, I will be especially attentive to creation’s continuity, end and means as I explore Luther in conversation with Gustaf Wingren, Regin Prenter and Knud Ejler Løgstrup.

2. Creation’s continuity : Luther, the image of God and Wingren My first extensive engagement with Wingren occurred some years ago while preparing an article on vocation. His Luther on Vocation was of immense aid to me (Wingren 1957). This important work is still read, and perhaps one of the more common citations of Wingren in North America, even while it sometimes was and is received contentiously (Nelson). This erudite and extensive exploration of Luther’s theme of vocation is an important entr8e into Luther, but an equally important point of entry into Wingren. Vocation, in a fashion, might be identified as what the image of God comes to mean for Wingren when he notes that “God’s complete work is set in motion through vocation: he changes the world and he sheds his mercy on hard-pressed humanity” (Wingren 1957, 33).2 In our vocation, we image God’s work in the world. These are words of high praise for vocation and of a piece with his life-long interest in a theology of creation. At the heart of this passion is his assertion that the creedal order precludes both beginning with and a preoccupation with redemption (Wingren 1981, 9). This, he famously asserts, is the problem with the Barthian project. This attention to creation is, of course, also found in Luther. We turn, now, to consider Luther on creation: first in general, and then regarding the creation of the human more specifically. As Wingren notes, Luther has a robust theology of creation. The lectures on Genesis present a thinker who is fascinated and captured by the gift of creation. In commenting on God’s blessing the living creatures and the winged birds Luther notes: The hen lays an egg; this she keeps warm while a living body comes into being in the egg, which the mother later on hatches. The philosophers advance the reason that 2 Moreover, vocation is that place in the identity of the human wherein the two reigns intersect (Wingren 1957, 28). Further, here we begin to see something of an emerging interest in Wingren as he notes that vocation links law and gospel via command on the side of law and spontaneity on the side of gospel (Wingren 1957, 66). Yet, while spontaneity applies to the gospel, he also notes, in concert with Luther, that law as command comes with an ad hoc ethic (Wingren 1957, 49). Law, then, is not only to be understood in its second use, but an opening is held forth for a fulsome explication of law in the first use, and its significance for a richer understanding of creation.

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these events take place through the working of the sun and her belly. I grant this. But the theologians say, far more reliably, that these events take place through the working of the Word […] (LW 1, 53).

Even now when the hen lays an egg, the Word is at work. Creation is continuous (LW 2, 148; LW 21, 299).3 Following Luther, Wingren asserts that because God still works, goodness continues (Wingren 2003, 48). Moreover, this continuous working of God’s goodness in the natural life parallels God’s working at the spiritual level – even universally. Wingren asserts that faith exists in every person, albeit deformed in some (Wingren 2003, 63, 64), presupposing that the spiritual and natural (and/or secular) are not subject to the calculus of a zero-sum game (Wyller). This is not so very far removed from Luther’s definition of a God as that to which we cling. The human, who is ever being created, is marked by an especial affinity for heaven. Luther notes: But here the immortality of the soul begins to unfold and reveal itself to us, inasmuch as no creature apart from [the human] can either understand the motion of the heaven or measure heavenly bodies. […] And so here there gleams a spark of eternal life, in that the human busies himself by nature with this knowledge of nature (LW 1, 45, 46).

A passage like this helps us to understand better why Wingren asserts that to preach the gospel without the law is to leave the body behind (Wingren 1960, 146). The body instantiates creation because it is in the world, of the world, and is, in fact, world. The body is world. Genesis is not merely a historic text, but narrates the phenomenon of our body.4 What then of that bit of Genesis wherein we are described as being made in the image of God? Lutherans live with a somewhat conflicted relationship to the theme of the image of God.5 Wingren helpfully draws upon Luther’s notion of continuing creation to counter attempts to identify the imago dei as something, or perhaps some faculty such as reason or the will (Wingren 2003, 46). The 3 Cf. also Gustaf Wingren, The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church (1960), 110. 4 And so contemporary theologians following Luther are invited to apprehend the body and creation as fitly subject to change in a fashion that need not imply decay. See Præstholm, Chapter 11, on the subject of re-thinking the nature of the body in light of SCT. 5 Cf. The Book of Concord, eds. Timothy J. Wengert and Robert Kolb (2000) where the confessors are concerned to distinguish the corruption from the nature it corrupts, maintaining that even after the fall human nature remains a creation of God (EP I.4, 488). God alone will be able to separate the corruption from the nature on the last day, and original sin is identified with a complete lack of original righteousness, which is identified with the image of God (SD I.10, 533). Further, this image is replaced by an “indescribable corruption,” even while it is admitted that in natural or external matters the original powers are retained albeit weakly (SD I.12, 534). The complication, of course, is that after the fall the human is rarely viewed holistically, and so the Confessions restrict the description of the imago to attributes dealing with spiritual, while Luther’s description of them in Genesis included both the spiritual and the earthly, which was addressed under the theme of the dominion, or care of the earth.

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ongoing creation of God in each person mitigates a fixation with identifying the image with a missing this or that. Here we seem to have an instance of Wingren using Luther against Luther. But is this really the case? Did Luther really believe that nothing of the image of God endures in the human? This is a difficult question to answer. But first we need to define the imago dei. Luther describes the image of God as being without fear of death and confident in God’s favour (LW 1, 63). In his Genesis lectures he sometimes adds to this the description the role of dominion, or being stewards of creation. At times he speaks of the image of God as utterly lost. And so he writes of moral failings “which truly demonstrate that the image of God was lost. Therefore when we speak about that image, we are speaking about something unknown” (LW 1, 63). On the other hand, he also speaks of the image as restored by the gospel (LW 1, 64). This understanding, however, is eschatologically qualified (LW 1, 65). Moreover, on some occasions he speaks of the image as healed, which would presume something present to heal as opposed to something utterly lost. In fact sometimes Luther, in the same passage, will speak of the image as on the one hand utterly lost and on the other as marred (LW 1, 90).6 It is also described as “obscured and corrupted,” which seems to admit something other than utter obliteration (LW 1, 65).7 It seems to me that Luther is either undecided, or coy, or perhaps paradoxical on this question. In sum, I pose my own question: can we imagine human nature aside from Luther’s two principle markers of living without fear of death and being content with God’s favor? Or to locate the problem more precisely : is not awareness of the lack of these two simply a recognition of their slipping away, and so present in a precarious mode?

3. Creation’s end: Luther, eschatology and Prenter I recall first reading Regin Prenter’s Spiritus Creator as a student of theology many years ago. I continue to find Prenter’s mastery of Luther’s material both impressive and instructive as he demonstrates how Luther marries the work of the Spirit in creation and redemption and so illustrates how the concept of the Spirit dominates Luther’s thought. Spiritus Creator is thus a name which expresses the type of the Spirit’s work in its different forms. … And all the time this work means that as the living One descends into our death, he, there, by his own living presence creates something out of nothing. 6 Cf. WA (DB) 42:68, 33–36 “Imagem Dei in homine ita post peccatum perisse, sicut originalis mundi et Paradisus perierunt. … Haec omnia post peccatum deformata sunt.” 7 Note also that he identifies the human act of stewardship of creation (dominion) with the image, which is described as a perdurable category in even the fallen human (LW 1, 66–67; 133).

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Anything which the Spirit does in us and with us is a creation out of nothing (Prenter 2001, 190).

At first glance, a passage such as this seems to locate Prenter in the world of a theologian such as Barth, his former teacher from 1933–34, with this sharp accent on revelation as an incursion of the divine in human affairs. One might ask, then, whether this relationship between the old and the new is primarily one of replacement or restoration? Michael Root responds: Redemption is restoration and not replacement. Replacement would presuppose only sin, which it would eliminate and replace with a new humanity. Restoration must presuppose both sin and creation (Root 2000, 53).

Root notes that “restoration” accords with Prenter’s affirmation of Grundtvig’s well know aphorism: “human first, then a Christian” (Root 2000, 52). But what does it mean to be human? We turn, now, to Luther’s treatise “Disputation Concerning the Human (1536) (LW 34, 133–144)” where he defines the human as “justified by faith” (LW 34, 139). This is not an altogether surprising definition of the human, coming from Luther. What is more unusual, however, is his treatment of the quality of reason in this short treatise. We read, “And it is certainly true that reason is the most important and the highest in rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine” (LW 34, 137). Moreover, reason is confirmed rather than removed after the fall by God (LW 34, 137). Nonetheless, the faculty of reason, which distinguishes us from animals, is limited to knowledge a posteriori and so is of less utility when it comes to knowing things divine (LW 34, 138). This theology alone can communicate, in the same way that it alone can make sense of our fallen nature, of which we learn the following from The Disputation Concerning the Human: 35. Therefore, [the human] in this life is the simple [pura] material of God for the form of his future life. 36. Just as the whole creation which is now subject to vanity [Rom. 8:20] is for God the material for its future glorious form (LW 34, 139, WA 39.1:177.3–6).

Created reality, human and otherwise, then has a provisional capacity. Luther calls it pura materia Dei. God is rendered the artisan who will work this reality into a more glorious form. Luther’s comparison of this truth regarding the human with that truth regarding the cosmos reminds readers of his assertion in the Genesis lecture that even had the human not sinned, a kind of translation would have been needed for the human to achieve her or his telos (LW 1, 56). Creation, while good, is not yet complete. He also notes that this need for a translation can be likened to the manner in which the tohu wa bohu, the earth and heaven in principio were matter for the form beheld at the end of

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the period of creation. He goes on to say : “So is [the human] in this life for his future form, when the image of God has been remolded and perfected” (LW 34, 140). Prenter identifies this image as conscience, and as an echo of the Word of God rather than some ability or faculty (Prenter 1967, 256 n 4). For both Luther and Prenter, to be human is finally to be a creature of faith: “Through faith [the human] is made one with Christ’s humanity, conformed to him in his sacrificial death, so that through faith in the crucified and risen one, [the human] is together with Christ” (Prenter 1967, 385–386). By invoking the theme of faith as participation in Christ, Prenter weds continuity and rupture since the self of our discontinuity is the condition for the possibility of final and full continuity with life in Christ, which is the life we anticipate in even sin. Yet this movement is not a one-time event but an existential of life. Creation is always occurring, as is redemption.8 I turn now to consider the means by which the image of God operates insofar as it echoes the modus operandi of the creating God.

4. Creation’s means: Luther, imagination and Løgstrup Gustaf Wingren makes use of Løgstrup’s notion of the “Sovereign Expressions of Life” to identify the image of God. He writes in Credo: Human beings are created in God’s image. In our spontaneous expressions of life – which we do not control but which empower us – there is expressed both that which gives life meaning, and also that which is constantly lost in the destruction that is encountered in the world (Wingren 1981, 72).

Løgstrup variously identifies the Sovereign Expressions of Life: trust, openness and mercy are but examples (Løgstrup 2007, 72, 88). Insofar as they are spontaneous reactions, they cannot be listed exhaustively, but speak instead to being human at its most fundamental level as we encounter the other. Our failure to react spontaneously in trust etc. elicits duty. Løgstrup writes that once “an action is declared to be a duty, the separation of motive and effect, mental disposition and outcome, has begun” (Løgstrup 2007, 77). We can easily imagine this to be a description of the fall: a move from tending the garden to one in which self-doubt, self-interest and self-gratification begin to battle our more primordial identity. Moreover, it is clear that for Løgstrup this is an existential of the human condition, rather than a simple historical event on a neatly constructed timeline called my life, or even the history of humankind. One finds here, echoes of Luther’s description of the life of the baptized, in which the old Adam and Eve need to be daily drowned so that the 8 Of course, this is true for Wingren as well, who remarks that the resurrection of Christ is not yet complete (Wingren 1957, 22).

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self emerges anew. For both thinkers, the given-ness of life is primordial. This given-ness is manifest supremely for Løgstrup as openness, which is tied to speech, and language.9 The religious overtones of Løgstrup’s phenomenology are apparent when he writes, for example, that the “sovereign expression of life is indeed realized, but spontaneously, without being demanded” (Løgstrup 2007, 69). This echoes Luther’s description of a truly good work. Faith does this work without our being aware of it. Løgstrup does not understand his phenomenological description of these spontaneous expressions of life to be translation of the gospel without remainder – his is more than a first article Christianity (Gregersen). There is a difference between his description of life at a natural level and at a Christian level. He notes, for example, that Christian hope is unlike human hope in that it precludes disappointment, and yet we cannot know what Christian hope is aside from human hope (Løgstrup 1970, 20). In sum, the gospel without human experiences is an empty word, even while human experience cannot exhaust the content of the gospel (Løgstrup 1970, 10). Reflections on human experiences, then, open us to understand better what it means to be before God (Løgstrup 1970, 9). The natural provides, for Løgstrup, a vantage point from which to examine the Christian. This is also true for Luther, but more common is his using the Christian – and more specifically Christ – as the vantage point from which to examine the human. These two methods need not be in opposition, and I turn now to consider a few comments from Luther’s treatment of Psalm 8 in his explication of what it means to be human. At first glance, Luther’s exegesis of Psalm 8 is troubling. The psalm clearly seems to be an articulation of the vaulted nature of the human, but Luther has turned it into a Christological discourse. He identifies the Lord of the inscription with Christ and the text is read as if the psalmist was discussing the two natures of Christ (LW 12, 101). But the exegesis is not restricted to Christ since Christ reveals what it means to be human. Luther uses the psalm to advance the view that we already live in heaven according to the soul (LW 12, 106). There is a hidden character to this existence. Others may not know that our true citizenship is in heaven. Indeed, this fact may sometimes be lost to us! One is amiss, however, to imagine that this attention to our heavenly abode is done at the expense of the earthly in Luther’s reading of this psalm. He notes that our bodily needs are not the worry of Christ because God has made other provisions for these needs, a clear allusion to his robust theology of creation (LW 12, 105). It is important to underscore that God’s caring for these needs is under the domain of God’s sovereign care of the cosmos, passed on to the human in the divine mandate to have dominion over the cosmos, and so to exercise our image of God (LW 1, 64). Moreover, Luther does not divorce the 9 Note especially the manner in which openness is tied to speech (Løgstrup 2007, 137), and language itself construes the world (Løgstrup 2007, 102)

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duties of the Creator from that of the Redeemer, nor are our earthly and heavenly duties severed since the “Christian must still live in the world” (LW 12, 135). And so in both our living in the world and Christ’s reign in the same, the Redeemer exercises dominion over all realms yet in a manner peculiar to the crucified one. Luther writes that Christ “is much stronger than the devil, pope and world. He knows the art of being strongest when He looks weak” (LW 12, 114). We read here the theology of the cross at work in Luther’s Christology. But more appears in this phrase. Note how Luther describes this appearing weak in strength as an art. Luther, from time to time, uses themes of art to underscore God’s modus operandi.10 This brings us back to Løgstrup. In The Ethical Demand Luther addresses the theme of poetry, a particular form of art. He notes that it is a kind of third mode of discourse, different from denotive and expressive (Løgstrup 1997, 198). Poetry discloses, rather than informs, and it does so by indirect means (Løgstrup 1997, 197–198). Sometimes poetry contradicts our experience; it jars us to the end that we see things differently, perhaps clearly for the first time. Some experiences are so large that they have need of poetic expression (Løgstrup 1997, 194). Løgstrup’s appeal to poetry in his work is not surprising given his preference for openness as a kind of primordial sovereign expression of life. Openness is, in his work, often tied to speech. But we know that poetry is but one form of art. What Løgstrup has so helpfully articulated regarding poetry can be further explored regarding other art forms – albeit each with their own peculiar possibilities. Luther, too, knew of this so was especially entranced by the powers of music.11 The turn to art at this point is especially significant in that it correlates the theme of spontaneity resident in the sovereign expressions of life with the freedom and impulse evident in the best of art. Art advances by way of discipline and mastery of skills, but also speaks to our human capacity to transcend our state.12 The human in the mode of creativity speaks, in some fashion, to the image of God as a perdurable, if fractured and eschatologically qualified, characteristic of being human. The imago dei is present to us as people who are both saints and sinners (simul iustus et peccator). But is the fractured character of this imago the only image to be advanced regarding it as an existential of the human condition? Lutherans, and students of Luther, might well revisit this formula, asking if there might be a way forward as we consider how to faithfully express the imago dei.

10 Cf. LW 13, 351 where the Holy Spirit is described as the greatest artist of all. 11 Cf. especially Miikka E. Anttila, “Music” (2010), 210–222. 12 Cf. also Luther’s comments on the use of math by humans to transcend our condition (LW 1, 46).

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Conclusion In his Genesis lectures, Luther comments on Aristotle’s ruminations about the nature of the heaven and the four elements. He notes that it “would be boorish to pay no attention to them or to regard them with contempt, especially since in some respect they are in agreement with experience” (LW 1, 27). SCT has a solid history of paying attention to other disciplines, points of view and wisdom traditions as useful sources. It has a long history of reading Luther sideways; of reading Luther with different questions, and so experiencing different answers. I have benefited from this approach. I have also learned from SCT the importance of attention to context. So I return now, at the end, to my beginning. What do we do with this theme of the image of God, and the question of its loss, or not in light of the teaching of original sin? In pondering creation’s continuity, end and means in conversation with Wingren, Prenter, Løgstrup and Luther certain themes have come to the fore. First we have learned that creation, like redemption, is best understood under the species of eternity. Secondly, we have learned that the human is made for the eschatos, but the path to this telos is marked by the cross, which admits both continuity and rupture. Third we have pondered how God’s modus operandi in creation involves creativity, imagination and spontaneity. We have been invited to think artistically about theology. This is what I have learned from these texts. But I have learned much from my context, and so do not want to ignore that either. Per Lønning invites us to consider, in Creation – An Ecumenical Challenge?, if Indigenous religious traditions might help to awaken in us a sense of awe before the created order (Lønning 1990, 71). In my studies of the Indigenous traditions in North America, I have learned of a deep respect for the Creator and the gift of the land. I have also learned much about the differences that set apart traditional native beliefs from those of the Settler traditions. The Osage Nation theologian George “Tink” Tinker lists four in his book American Indian Liberation. He calls them “four fundamental, deep structure cultural differences,” and describes them as the following: attention to spatiality over temporality, attachment to particular lands, priority of the community over the individual, and a “consistent notion of the interrelatedness of humans and the rest of creation” (Tink 2008, 7). Other thinkers will add other themes. It is interesting, all the same, how these four are closer to the Christianity of Luther’s day than ours – especially when you consider Luther’s theology of creation. As I think about these four, and my learnings from adherents to SCT, I am especially intrigued both by the Native American interest in space over time, and the accompanying portrayal of time as cyclical in their worldview. Løgstrup noted that one of the legacies of Christianity was that it turned cyclical time into linear time (Løgstrup 1970, 21). As we look at things like the

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church year, and its connection to the rotation of the earth, we understand that remnants of cyclic thought and practice remain in the church. In fact, it seems to me that the very notion of creation and redemption as ongoing affirm this recurring attention to the cyclical. Clearly, however, this is cyclical with a difference since time seems, in a fashion, to be moving towards a telos. Yet our anticipation of this telos implies that we experience it in some fashion even now, as certainly as we experience time’s arche even now. Life’s cyclical character invites us to view the world differently from those who see time marching forward. This ending brings me back to my beginning: what of the comment of the gentleman at the “Truth and Reconciliation” event? What of that original innocence? Is it really lost, forever? If we can imagine that creation and redemption are existentials of our existence; deep seated recurring phenomena rather than discrete and completed historical units externally related, then it is possible for us to speak of an original innocence; an original innocence that is a part of our being human even now, just like original sin and the redemption provided by our loving God are ever occurring events rather than completed past experiences. In short, perhaps now is the time to begin to talk about a broader simul: not only simul iustus et peccator, but simul iustus et peccator et innocens. This third simul, in my estimation, rings true to our experience in creation. Many of us, from time to time, experience an evaporation of ignorance, or nescience, and with that loss the realization of an innocence revealed as it slips away in the moment of knowing. Novel experiences reveal a previously unknown naivety. Experiences of learning new ideas or talents, or encountering new people or even evils are often accompanied with an unfamiliarity that can be frightening and/or liberating. A new me attends a new knowing. Such experiences are both a leaving and an arriving. And with each learning, we have an incipient feeling of vertigo, or a dizziness. We cannot yet makes sense of this experience or that, and yet our having them makes us accountable for them in some way and so liable to guilt. The broadening horizon of our experience and knowing and willing hints at a leaving behind something that was; leaving us wistful and perhaps a little bit sentimental about simpler times. Innocence here is not a moral category ; it is not something to aspire toward, but it is rather a way of being in the world that is ever only known in hindsight, or observed from an edge as a limit is being crossed. As surely as I am ever being created, and being redeemed, I am also falling from an innocence ever generated anew. And so, it is not the infant alone who is innocent, but we are all simultaneously innocent and not, which might broaden our understanding of the phenomenon of sin. It would be my hope that such a re-visioning of the theme of sin – as understood by a reading of Luther enriched by SCT – might provide some entry points for Lutheran Christians (and perhaps others) to engage the religious other – such as the Indigenous tradition I engaged above – in a mode that enables us to recognize that others see us as the “religious other”. This

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allows us to begin to see something of “other” in ourselves (Wiren). As we engage Luther using different lenses, then, we begin to understand how the various lines we draw and borders we construct (Christian/not, religious/ secular, male/female, etc.) are subject to permeability, and so can be conducive to conversation rather than simply demanding of conversion. In this chapter I have put both Luther and proponents of SCT in conversation to explore what it means to be human. By attending to the theme of a continuing creation as an existential of life, I have proposed that we are simul iustus et peccator et innocens. To affirm this is to celebrate the human as a mystery, who reflects the glory of creation and grace of redemption as well as the tensions that make and mark both us and our contexts. This demands of us an imaginative accounting of whom we are and who made us. Perhaps, then, we may say that all theology, like all good fiction, is at its heart poetic.

Bibliography ANTTILA, MIIKKA E. (2010). “Music,” in Ollit-Pekka Vaino (ed.), Engaging Luther : A (New) Theological Assessment. Eugene OR: Cascade Books (2010), 210–222. BUECHNER, FREDERICK (1991). The Sacred Journey : A Memoir of Early Days. New York: Harper Collins. KOLB, ROBERT AND TIMOTHY J. WENGERTeds. (2000). The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. LØGSTRUP, KNUD EJLER (1970). “Die Humanen Erfahrungen als Verständnishorizont für das Evangelium,” in Knud Ejler Løgstrup and Ernst Wolf (eds.), Dem Menschen Zugute: Christliche Existenz und humane Erfahrung Theologische und literarische Anstöße. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 9–21. LØGSTRUP, KNUD EJLER (1977). The Ethical Demand. Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds.). Notre Dame; IN: University of Notre Dame Press. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (2007). Beyond the Ethical Demand. Trans. Susan Drew and Heidi Flegal. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. LØNNING, PER (1990). Creation – An Ecumenical Challenge?: Reflections issuing from a study by the Institute for Ecumenical Research, Strasbourg, France. Mason, Georgia: Mercer University Press. LUTHER, M. (LW) Luther’s Works 1–78. Jaroslav Pelikan a.o (eds.). Minneapolis: Fortress Press Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House. LUTHER, M. (WA). Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe 1–80. Weimar : Hermann Böhlaus und Nachfolger. PRENTER, REGIN (1967). Creation and Redemption. Trans. Theodor I. Jensen. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. PRENTER, REGIN (2001). Spiritus Creator. Trans. John M. Jensen. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers.

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ROOT, MICHAEL (2000). “Generous Orthodoxy : Regin Penter’s Appropriation of Grundtvig,” in A.M. Allchin, S.A.J. Bradley, N.A. Hjelm & J.H. Schørring (eds.), Grundtivig in International Perspective: Studies of the Creativity of Interaction. Gylling: Narayana Press, 45–58. TINKER, GEORGE E. (2008). American Indian Liberation: ATheology of Sovereignty. New York: Orbis Books. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1957). Luther on Vocation. Trans. Carl C. Rasmussen. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1960). The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church. Trans. Victor DC. Progue, Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1979). Creation and Gospel. Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1981). Credo: The Christian View of Faith and Life. Trans. Edgar M Carlson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House. WINGREN, GUSTAF (2003). Creation and Law. Trans. Ross McKenzie. Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock.

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6. N.F.S. Grundtvig: The Earth Made in God’s Image

Even a first acquaintance with Grundtvig’s theology reveals that the doctrine of creation, of the world in general and of humankind in particular, has a peculiar importance for him. Only in the light of our understanding of God’s work in creation can the divine work of redemption be properly understood. No less important than the doctrine of creation, in his vision of Christian faith, is the doctrine of the person and work of the Holy Spirit, in the life of each believer, but still more in the life of the whole Christian fellowship, the Church through the ages. Just as the work of redemption is for him a matter of universal import which has its effects backwards in time as well as forwards, so the work of the Spirit is not confined to the specific history which begins at Pentecost. In the beginning, the Spirit presided over creation, throughout history the Spirit is seen as the giver of life and growth to all things, moving towards the day of fulfilment in God’s kingdom. The work of the Spirit is allencompassing; it touches the realms both of history and nature. As we have seen in many places, as a theologian, Grundtvig was constantly fighting a double battle. On the one side he was combatting a new German theology being developed in his own day. This was a theology which he regarded as speculative and insubstantial, for which the doctrines both of the Trinity and of creation in God’s image and likeness were of little or no significance, often considered, then and indeed throughout the history of liberal Protestantism, as unhelpful and mistaken lines of thought taken up by the early Church. On the other side he was distancing himself from major aspects of the older Lutheran orthodoxy, in particular the radical pessimism of its view of the fall and its understanding of the death of Christ in strictly forensic and sacrificial terms. But while there were elements in the classical Lutheran position of which he was highly critical, there were large parts of it which he took for granted, notably its powerful reaffirmation of the classical doctrine of the Trinity and of the Chalcedonian teaching about the union of human and divine natures in the person of Christ. In his preaching and in his hymns Grundtvig was seeking to build up a middle way in which he would be able to affirm afresh the meaning both of creation and redemption by the Word and the Spirit, ‘the two hands of God’ to use Irenaeus’ phrase. This way centres on the understanding that men and women are made in God’s image and likeness with a calling to share in the divine nature and life, but it extends to the work of the Word and the Spirit,

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throughout the natural order, in bringing the divine plan to fulfilment, in the ultimate transfiguration (forklarelse) of all things. This forklarelse involves both their clarification and their transformation into the glory of the kingdom. This is a theology at once trinitarian and incarnational; affirmative of creation and humanity ; seeing the goal of all things in the marriage of heaven and earth; the real participation of the divine in what is human and of the human in what is divine. For Grundtvig, humanity is, from the beginning, a great and unparalleled wonder, riddle, mystery, experiment. All the words are necessary to express his attitude towards our common humanity. There is wonder and amazement at the mixture of littleness and immensity in the human calling. We are earth clods, we are fashioned out of dust, yet we aspire to the divine. Humanity’s life is a riddle, never fully explained, never immune from conflict and tension. The intermingling of wisdom and foolishness, of self-sacrifice and destructive selfseeking, of ardour and coldness in human history, personal and universal, these are not things which human beings can in themselves explain, clarify, let alone transfigure. For this we must wait upon God. Yet humanity is not only a riddle but also a mystery, because at the heart of the conflict and confusion there is also a deep and often deeply buried longing for the divine, an intuition about the universal power of love, a reflection in the created order of the love which is at the heart of the godhead. Women, and men too, have a heart which can respond to the heart of God and in this response things can come together into unity.

1. Life as a divine experiment of dust and spirit Perhaps it is in his view of human life as an experiment that Grundtvig reveals himself as most original. This term is used in his famous description of humankind, in the introduction to the Norse Mythology of 1832, For humankind is no ape … but is a unique, wonderful creation in whom divine powers shall make themselves known, shall develop and clarify themselves through a thousand generations, as a divine experiment, which reveals how spirit and dust can interpenetrate and be clarified in a common divine consciousness (Grundtvig 1907, 408; my trans.).

In these words we see something of Grundtvig’s constantly repeated conviction about the interpenetration and interaction of flesh and spirit in human history. This is something working itself out in ways both personal and universal, something in which we are taking part. There is nothing static in this view of human nature. He sees humanity developing through the vicissitudes of history, he is aware that he himself is living through a time when not only

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external factors but also deep internal elements of the human situation, are altering radically. But the development and flux of human affairs are not only the result of the inherent movements of human history. They are that, and as time went on Grundtvig was more willing to allow these movements their own autonomous existence. Still more, however, they are the result of the fact that God has breathed his own life into humanity from the beginning, has made for himself an image and likeness in the dust of the earth. If humanity cannot understand itself, finds itself unable to achieve its own ends, is constantly baffled in its attempts to reach completion and fulfilment, that is because the purpose for which human persons were made is in the end beyond our ends, nothing less than the union of heaven and earth, the gathering together of all things into a new and hitherto unexpected harmony and life. This is an end which only God can reveal and accomplish. For this end to be fulfilled humankind has again to wait upon God, to wait upon the divine action, already revealed and made present in the world of space and time, in the presence of the Word made flesh and in the work of the life-giving Spirit. The events of the Gospel mark a turning point in the human story and these events point us to the end of all things. In the worship of the Church we celebrate in joyful anticipation that end, in riddles and symbols. But the end is not yet; already towards that end we, and all things, find our way through struggle and disaster, through achievement and gift. This view of humanity carries closely with it a view of the whole material creation as itself being apt for God, in its own way capable of God. One can see this in Grundtvig’s use of natural imagery in the hymns, which is far more than a simple matter of literary convention. It is a way of asserting the essential God-relatedness of the whole living world. Such a view of things has its roots in the Old Testament, not only in the psalms, but in many places where God’s covenant with all creation is celebrated (e. g. Jeremiah 31:35–36, 35:25–26, Hosea 2:18). It finds expression in the liturgical texts of East and West, many of which Grundtvig himself translated. We might think, for instance, of the Easter hymns of John of Damascus, in the eighth century in the East, or in the Alleluia sequence of Notker Balbulus, in the tenth century, in the West. The whole creation praises God, for the whole creation is full of God. In the great dictum of Maximus the Confessor, ‘The Word of God who is God wills in all things to work the mystery of his embodiment.’1 This sense of the participation of the whole creation in the praise of God and the activity of God, is expressed by Grundtvig in a number of sermons preached on the fourth Sunday after Trinity, an occasion when he takes the opportunity, not only to expound the gospel for the day but also to preach on the epistle which comes from Romans 8. It is interesting that no less than three 1 For this subject, especially in its Old Testament development see Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant (1992).

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of these occasions occur during the eighteen sixties. This is a theme which Grundtvig developed more and more strongly in his last decades. His basic convictions about it come out clearly in the sermon for 1866 when he insists that the whole scheme of the divine action, from the beginning to the end, needs to be seen in the light of the original creative will and purpose of God, which provides the essential line of coherence and continuity in the whole. Having spoken of the reality of the resurrection of the body and of the incorporation of our bodies into the body of Christ, he goes on, So, Christian friends, although this is certainly enough, as the apostle writes, a great and for us here below an incomprehensible mystery, yet it is also evident that it is only a part of that great mystery which is God’s whole marvellous creation both of heaven and earth, a creation which will grow old and be worn out as a garment, but will yet be renewed to last forever, because the all-good, the all-powerful, the all-knowing God, who will rejoice over all his works, neither could nor would create the visible from the invisible, the temporal from the eternal, for its sorrowful destruction and ruin, but only for its transfiguration and the full revelation of his glory and his salvation in the perfect love, which would rather give than take; it follows of itself, of the depth of the riches in the wisdom and knowledge of the living God that his unfathomable counsel for the world and for humankind could not be frustrated by sin and death, but that they must also serve to glorify him and to set his wisdom as well as his love in the clearest light (Grundtvig 1880a, 588–89; my trans.).

All, from the beginning to the end, is held in the purposes of a God who sees all that he has made and sees that it is very good. He will not let his creation come to nothing. Life, not death and destruction, is his ultimate goal. He will draw all things to their conclusion in the fulfilment of wisdom and love. This theme had been expounded at greater length in a sermon preached almost thirty years earlier in 1838 on the same Sunday. Here he begins by saying that the text from Romans 8, “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth …” is often regarded as very obscure and difficult. In part he says this comes from the obscurity of the old Danish translation, but when we understand that the translation should read ‘Nature waits with longing for the revelation of God’s children’, then we find that there is nothing obscure in it, apart from what is inherent in the nature of things, in our body’s obscure but certain connectedness with the whole of nature; for so long as this connectedness or solidarity has not become clear to us we can have no clear idea of what it is to say that the whole of nature shares our distress and sighs with us over the law of death and decay, to which all bodily things are subject, from the flower which is born today and dies tomorrow, to the shining heavenly bodies which seem incorruptible and were therefore worshipped as gods by the heathens in their blindness, but which according to our prophets and apostles are to grow old as a garment and fall to pieces, just as our bodies decay and just as metal is dissolved and smelted in the fire (Grundtvig 1986, 254; my trans.).

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This paragraph is at once very remarkable and very characteristic of Grundtvig. It is characteristic in that the language used is full of reminiscences of Scripture; it is very biblical both in its content and in its manner of presentation. Yet at the same time it speaks from an experience of bodiliness and of the coherence and connectedness of our bodiliness with that of nature as a whole, which seems of a somewhat exceptional kind. Grundtvig feels in his flesh and his bones that he belongs together in this universe with the most ephemeral forms of life on the one side and with the shining heavenly bodies on the other, which though they seem permanent are also changing and in the end moving towards decay. He has, as it were, a bodily awareness of his relationship with all creation. Perhaps this is a particularly poetic gift. We may think, for instance, of same of the expressions of John Keats or in a traditional Christian context, of the awareness which is expressed in St. Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures, implying a particular gift of solidarity and fellow feeling for the creatures. This being so it is not strange that for Grundtvig it is simply self-evident that our bodily resurrection which follows on from our solidarity in Christ’s resurrection, implies the resurrection of the whole creation. When we see that the law of nature, under which we sigh, is not, as the wise of this world think, eternal and unchangeable, but only a temporary slavery which will be taken away, and which will set the whole of nature free together with ourselves, when we see that, then in a wonderful way light comes over the grave and over all death and decay ; although a complete clarity about these things is impossible in our dust (Grundtvig 1986, 255; my trans.)

Often we are troubled and frightened by the world’s proclamation of the unchangeable laws of nature. But this will frighten us no more when we become confident in the apostle’s way of thought, in which there is certainly a law of nature, which stands in the way of the redemption, liberation and immortality of our body, but that law of nature, to the eternal joy of the whole of nature, will certainly be taken away by his power, who proved both that he could and that he would, when he raised up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, and gave us his Spirit, as witness with our spirit, that we are his children and heirs, fellow heirs with Jesus Christ to the divine fullness, which according to the Father’s good will dwells bodily in him (Grundtvig 1986, 255–56; my trans.).

All this is part of Grundtvig’s fully developed understanding, both of our faith and of the creation. It means that we should not, like our fathers, consider nature in us and around us, as the property of the Enemy, but as the work of God, which never fell from his hand or slipped from his care … [at this point a phrase in the original manuscript is unclear) however much it was spoilt by sin and put to shame by death as the wages of sin. Yes, we shall consider nature as God’s work, in us and around us, which shall in no way be

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hated, mistreated and destroyed, but loved, cleansed, healed and sanctified, yes, which should share in that same glory, which in the Spirit we already rejoice in, in that liberty and blessed incorruptibility, for which, as the apostle says, the whole of nature, as well as our hearts, sigh, for which the whole of nature longs with a wonderful hope. In no way then should we set nature and revelation in opposition to one another, as things incompatible with each other ; rather, we should call revelation nature’s light and salvation, as our Lord Jesus Christ calls himself the light and saviour of the world, without troubling ourselves that unbelievers misuse our expressions just as they misuse our Lord’s and twist them according to their own false conceptions, as if we either said or meant that nature could enlighten, heal and save itself (Grundtvig 1986, 256–57; my trans.).

So Grundtvig maintains clearly that while revelation and salvation are always God’s free gift, they are in no way opposed to God’s work in sustaining and giving life to creation. Revelation and nature go together. We must respect and love the nature which is God’s gift, both within us and around us. Here is a basis, alike for a Christian understanding of the inner life of the spirit and of the outer life of the world around us with which we are called to live in solidarity. Psychological and ecological consequences very evidently flow from these insights. We have here a very interesting point about Grundtvig which needs to be explored further, i. e. the similarity which is evident between major aspects of his vision of Christianity and some of the characteristic features shared by many of the primal religions, which we find in different cultural and ethnic contexts across the globe. Grundtvig is so assured of the specificity and uniqueness of the Christian faith that he has no anxiety in recognising the features which it has in common with other and earlier religious traditions. Amongst others, for instance, we observe the feelings of respect and wonder before the creation, a sense of oneness with all living things, a sharp awareness of our human interrelatedness and an awareness that our life now is supported and sustained by the presence of former generations; above all he sees the need to take what has been called ‘the sacred journey from the head to the heart’. Since in Grundtvig’s theology there is no pressure to set God and humankind, revelation and nature, in opposition to one another, it becomes possible not only to see but to welcome correspondences and complementary qualities in a great variety of places.2 2 See for instance Catherine Thick (ed.), The Right to Hope (1995). This work contains a collection of the work of artists and writers from many different cultures and backgrounds which seeks to show ways in which the human heart and imagination may be opened to the plight of our world and to the inner resources latent within people which can promote healing and new life. In a characteristic opening contribution to the volume, Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes, ”Africans have a thing called umbuntu; it is about the essence of being human, … it embraces hospitality, caring about others … We believe that a person is a person through other persons; that my humanity is inextricably caught up, bound up, in yours … We are made for interdependence. The

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2. Grace in nature: The Earth created in God’s Image What is here stated in general about the relationship of grace to nature can be seen in one particular instance in a sermon preached at Septuagesima in 1834. Again here we have a beautiful example of the consistency and coherence of Grundtvig’s vision. His theology is not, in a formal sense, systematic. It is too free and too living to be fitted into a total system. But when we examine it in detail in any particular place we are often astonished at the way in which what he says in one context confirms or illustrates what he says in another. What he says in general about the relationship of flesh and spirit, of nature and revelation, in his preaching whether in the 1830s or the 1860s, is here worked out in detail in one particular aspect of the eucharist. The text for the sermon is taken from Psalm 104, the Old Testament psalm of creation which Grundtvig particularly loved; ‘Wine which maketh glad the heart of man so that his countenance becomes joyful.’ The prayer before the text is announced, already plunges us into the midst of our subject, We thank you, great master of the vineyard, who existed before the mountains were and before you created the earth in your image after your likeness, we thank you in Jesus’ name for the wonderful vineyard which you created and hedged in, cultivated and guarded in the midst of the desert, and for your call in grace to us, who for long stood by idle, but who then had a share in your holy day’s work (Grundtvig 1984b, 103; my trans.).

The earth itself is created in God’s image; God himself has planted his vineyard in its midst. He summons his human creatures to share in the work of his vineyard. In order to exemplify this faith the preacher turns at once to the subject of the eucharist and in particular to the place of wine, the fruit of the vine, in the eucharist. In Western Christendom theology has not reflected much on the particular significance of the use of wine in the sacrament. Because in the middle ages, in the West, the laity ceased to receive communion from the chalice, traditional theologians as a consequence found it necessary to work out a doctrine of concomitance; to urge that because Christ was fully present in either kind, therefore there was no pressing need for the wine to be used in the communion of the people. This development which was used in the sixteenth century to defend the Roman side of the argument discouraged positive reflection on the matter, and while the controversies over the question in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gave a great deal of attention to the question of the authority by which the Church either used or did not use both bread and wine law of our being is the law of complementarity” (p. 1). It is interesting to note that Danida (The Danish International Development Agency) is a primary supporter of this book.

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in the communion of the people, little time was spent on the particular sacramental significance of the wine as an inherent part of the whole action. The situation had of course been different in the East. Here the laity continued to receive communion in both kinds and the fact that in the Eastern middle ages the practice grew up of giving communion to the laity from the chalice (the fragments of consecrated bread being put into the wine and the people receiving both from a spoon) has made the thought of the chalice and its contents the source of more devotional and theological reflection than in the West. Moreover in the theology and practice of the Christian East the role of the Holy Spirit in the celebration of the eucharist and in particular in the consecration of the holy gifts, was also affirmed more strongly than in the West. The eucharist has been thought of, not only as the presence of the Christ’s death and resurrection, but also as the constant renewal of Pentecost. Naturally enough this has led to reflection on the image of fire as present in the eucharist, descending on the altar, filling the chalice. The fire of Pentecost crowns the Church’s prayer and offering. The words which are said in the Eastern liturgy at the moment, just before communion, when hot water is poured into the chalice, whatever the origin of the practice may be, are also highly significant, “the fervor of faith, full of the Holy Spirit”. If the broken bread of the sacrament naturally suggests the broken body and our solidarity in that body, so the wine in the chalice naturally suggests the joy and ecstasy which the Spirit brings to the Church and to each of its members. We need not suppose that Grundtvig was much aware of these developments in the East. As in so many places his mind seems to have developed on its own in surprisingly similar directions. ‘Wine makes glad the heart of man, so that his countenance becomes joyful.’ So says the psalmist, and although drinking songs say the same thing that does not mean that psalms become drinking songs nor that drinking songs become psalms. It only shows that the Spirit, who inspired the psalmist and all the prophets and apostles of the Lord, understands how to speak gracefully and how to choose images for himself and his divine activity where they are rightly to be found and where they are foreordained for this purpose from the beginning of the world. Yes, my friends, we do well to give heed to this as to the lamp of God shining in the darkness of night, that it is not just the psalmist who praises him who created wine which gladdens man’s heart, and not just the prophets, who liken God’s planting in Israel to a vineyard, no, nor is it only that the Lord himself in today’s gospel continues the prophetic comparison so that it lasts until the end of time, nor that on another occasion he compares himself with the vine, and his father with the vine-dresser, no, just as he really changed the water into wine at the marriage at Cana in Galilee, so he has really consecrated and blessed wine together with bread on his table, so that the cup of blessing which we bless is the communion of the blood of Christ. Although therefore we ought, as Christians, always to remember the apostle’s warning not to be drunk with wine wherein is

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excess, but to be full of the Spirit, so it is also true that at the Lord’s table both bodily and spiritual realities are at work. It is true both in a bodily and a spiritual way – as the psalmist sings – that wine rejoices man’s heart and bread strengthens it, because there the bread and wine are not just images of the Lord’s body and blood, in which we share spiritually ; rather they are incorporated and taken up into them by his word which says ‘take this and eat it, drink ye all of this’. Therefore, one of the early fathers rightly said, that the Lord in the eucharist took to himself the first creation and put the seal to his word, that he had come, not to destroy, but to fulfil, just as he sent out his servants not to break down but to build up (Grundtvig 1984b, 104; my trans.).3

Thus from the beginning the sermon contains a remarkable statement about the interaction and reciprocity of sacred and secular, human and divine. Drinking songs are not hymns; nor are hymns drinking songs. They must not be confused, but the two worlds are often surprisingly interrelated. In actual fact secular songs have often been adapted (words as well as music) to sacred use and the reverse also has happened and happens. The Spirit uses imagery from nature to speak of the things of God, because nature itself comes from the hand of God. In this case the imagery used is not only a matter of natural metaphor. It corresponds to a more than natural Gospel pattern. Just as at Cana the water really became wine, so here the bread and wine are really blessed and consecrated so as to be the communion of Christ’s body and blood. This happens, not because Christ’s body and blood as it were come down to the earthly elements and are embodied in them, but because the earthly gifts are taken up and incorporated into the heavenly reality of Christ’s body and blood. Grundtvig, in his earlier writings, reacts strongly against the classical Lutheran teaching about the real presence of Christ in, with and under the consecrated bread and wine. To him it seemed to imply some kind of restriction and limitation of God’s action. For him the mystery involves the elements being taken up and incorporated into the heavenly reality which they have always themselves foreshadowed. For him it is clear that the Christian doctrine of the sacraments and the practice of using material elements to represent divine realities presupposes in those material elements a sacramental and divine potential which is there from the beginning. ‘God puts his seal to his word’, the word of creation, in which the final goal of the whole creation is already foreshadowed. In the moment of worship, which is the moment of the real presence, that which was at the beginning and that which shall be at the end come together and are fused into one. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century in the famous collection of essays, Lux Mundi, Francis Paget too quotes Irenaeus, As bread from the earth receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist consisting of two things, an earthly and a heavenly ; so our bodies 3 In particular, Grundtvig refers here to the theology of Irenaeus.

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also receiving the Eucharist are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection.

Paget goes on, Alike in us and in the Sacrament the powers of the world to come invade the present and already move towards the victory which shall be hereafter (Paget 1890, 429).4

Such teaching was not easily received in a century like the nineteenth, when a gulf was set between spirit and matter, and the word spirit was commonly taken to mean what is abstract or immaterial. Here, as in other places, Grundtvig finds himself impelled to protest against what he regards as the wholly inadequate and misleading character of these contemporary ideas of the spiritual. The world, I suppose, can certainly not bear to hear this, for its conceptions of spirit are so fine and empty that for even the least evident reality to be linked with the spirit seems to the wise of the world something coarse or crass, as they say, something which not only weighs down and dishonours the spirit but scares it off and drives it away. This, however, only follows from the fact that the world, as the Lord says, in no way knows the Spirit of truth and cannot receive him, but is deceived and blinded by its own spirit, which is the spirit of the air, i. e. the spirit of delusion and deep emptiness. We Christians however, who are baptised in the name of the Holy Spirit, that is to say plunged into and rooted in his divine personhood, as well as in that of the Father and the Son, should naturally only smile at the world’s superstitious faith in a ghost under the name of Spirit (Grundtvig 1984b, 104–05; my trans.).

Thus in the course of this sermon we can see Grundtvig’s conviction that the purpose and the economy of God is basically one and the same through all the vicissitudes of his relationship with the world which he has made. From the moment of creation and through all that follows from it, the final consummation of all things in God’s kingdom is never lost to view. And this is the work of God the Holy Trinity, and in its fulfilment the activity of the Holy Spirit is particularly evident. On the other hand we also see something of the consequences of this for human life here and now. The resurrection of the body and the transfiguration of the world are not only mysteries to be revealed at the end of all things. They are at least in part already at work and making themselves known. Just as the meals which Jesus, during his ministry in Galilee and Judea, shared with unlikely and disreputable people, were themselves anticipations of the feast in the kingdom of God, so our meals now, not only our sacramental celebrations, but our ordinary sharing with each other round the table, can afford glimpses of a future glory. Even here and now we find that wine rejoices the human heart and mind. 4 It is interesting that in this essay Paget quotes Hans Martensen’s Dogmatics.

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This present, this-worldly significance of the eucharist, as an anticipation of a feast which will be known in its fullness only beyond this world of space and time, is beautifully set forth in a hymn from the first volume of the Sang-Værk. In it Grundtvig brings together sacramental themes with thoughts about the work of agriculture and the distribution of human resources, in ways which seem strangely relevant to the world we are living in, with its anxieties about the environment and its sense of baffled impotence before the problems involved in a just sharing of the material resources of our planet. As in other places, so here, Grundtvig’s vocabulary covers a very wide range of registers. The word translated “bread for life” is in Danish levebrød, a common expression which refers to the bread and butter of our existence, our job, our livelihood. The first three lines of the hymn could therefore be taken perfectly literally as a statement about people’s working life. Work in the fields, in the factory, in the office, gives us the things we live on. It is this which is then brought into the tents of the Word, placed on an eternal and heavenly table. Even in his choice of words Grundtvig underlines the paradoxical mixture of strangeness and earthiness which the poem conveys. Yet this same hymn with its evocation of the work of ploughing and the cultivation of vines, also looks to the fulfilment of all things in the end. It is at once ecological and eschatological. Twice Grundtvig uses the word sammensmelte (fuse together) – a term which, for him, nearly always brings with it the thought of the final coming together into one of flesh and spirit, earth and heaven, the gift of the human heart and hand and tongue, and the gift of the life-giving Spirit of God. 1. The care of vineyards and the tilling of fields Makes for men upon earth Bread for life and the strength of the heart, Above all on the Lord’s Table; For there, in the tents of the Word Earth and heaven are fused together. He who takes the Lord At his word, as it sounds out here, Rejoices in nectar and ambrosia. 2. ‘Wheat corn’ and ‘vine-stock’ My Lord calls himself, So deliberately leading our minds To the bread and wine of the Table, Where the heavenly in the Spirit And the earthly in the hand Fuse together, basically one As in the word, so in the mouth, To the benefit of soul and body. 3. Wheat cake and the juice of the grape Are found on every king’s table, But only on the Lord’s do they have the strength Which is in God’s Spirit and God’s Word. Only there, in the Church’s gathering Does daily bread become eternal. Only there does the wine’s fruit Have the taste of heaven and the power of God, And create with blessing the joy of the heart (Grundtvig 1982, 325–26; my trans.).

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3. The marriage of heaven and earth In his later preaching Grundtvig comes more and more to dwell on the thought of the final marriage of heaven and earth, the union and communion of divine and human as the end for which in the beginning all things were made. These were not new themes in his preaching. Already, in 1832, in his sermon for the feast of the annunciation, he had said that the fathers made the mistake of thinking more about how the divine and human natures were united in Christ than about what for us as Christians follows on from this just as joyful as wonderful union – something which we can and shall realize (Grundtvig 1984a, 121–22; my trans.)

how also in us and for us God and humankind should be joined together, in just as joyful and as wonderful a union, should fuse together and be united by the Spirit of Christ, who gives us new birth and new life as branches of the true vine and limbs in the body of the only-begotten. But as the decades pass these themes receive new emphasis. In a very characteristic way Grundtvig sees that the union of human and divine in Christ which takes place in the life of Jesus in Galilee and Judea is only the beginning of a history which will go from now into the end times, a history in which again and again human and divine are brought together by the power and presence of the Holy and life-giving Spirit. To describe the final consummation of history, Grundtvig as an old man does not hesitate to draw on pre-Christian mythology in order to find the images for what he wants to say. Here too what is to come takes up and clarifies what was there from the beginning. So, preaching on the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity in 1862, he declares So, when the Greeks would tell us of their poets’ most splendid visions, in which the first divine wedding was the wedding of heaven and earth, then we would answer ; that indeed is so, for this divine marriage is both the first and the last; but what you do not know is something which we, the children of Sion, can teach you; that is how this divine marriage band was first joined, then broken and in the end restored again for time and for eternity. For this divine marriage between heaven and earth was established when God, by his Word, created humankind out of the dust of the earth in his image, and breathed his heavenly Spirit into dust; and it necessarily followed on the fall that there was a divorce between heaven and earth as between Spirit and flesh, as it is written, ‘You take away your Spirit and they die and turn again to dust.’ But when God took mercy on sinful man, then the divine marriage was renewed, as it is written, ‘You send out your Spirit and they are made, and you renew the face of the earth’. Thus God the Father has now sent out his Spirit in the name of his only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to his believing people, who are therefore with right spiritually called his bride and his body (Grundtvig 1880a, 207–08; my trans.).

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It is very striking that Grundtvig again uses here, to enforce his message about the fall and restoration of humankind, two verses from Psalm 104. It is a psalm which is above all devoted to God’s care for the whole of creation, and in which the calling of humanity is seen in the context of the whole living world. In such a vision the restoration of humanity by the coming of the Spirit is understood as the central element in the radical renewal of the creation as a whole, a renewal which in fact carries the first creation to a fulfilment beyond that which it had already attained. Again Grundtvig sees, in this consummation of all things, two aspects, one which is eschatological, deep and unfathomable to us while we live within the world of time, but another which he says is already clear and evident to us now. This second aspect concerns the interaction of divine and human, of eternity and time, which we see portrayed in the gospels and which we know as a reality of our own life and experience. Already now, amidst all the imperfection and fragmentariness of our life in time, through the work of the Holy Spirit the life of God is present among us. Yes, Christian friends, this divine marriage between heaven and earth, between the Lord and his people, as between the Word and faith, that is the deep mystery of eternal life and love and blessedness which we should not demand to be clear and evident to us here below. However, in faith in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God the Father, our Lord, conceived by the Holy Spirit and horn of the Virgin Mary, the mystery has a clear aspect from which to be considered. For the Holy Spirit has proved that he who came forth from the Father and came into the world, as one of us in all things, save without sin, and who left the world and returned to heaven with a body of flesh and bone—in him has the Holy Spirit proved that he, in man, both can and will make all that is heavenly earthly and all that is earthly heavenly ; not so that in a popish way the one is changed into the other, but so that they are fused together with one another in the heart, in love, as soul and body in our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man. In him the heavenly indeed became earthly and the earthly heavenly, the eternal temporal and the temporal eternal, as it has happened and shall happen in the whole of the community of faith, which on earth in time carries eternal life within itself and in heaven shall eternally carry its temporal life within it (Grundtvig 1880a, 208; my trans.).5

Grundtvig does not hesitate to spell out more clearly the meaning of these affirmations in speaking of the ministry of Jesus in Galilee and Judea. In a sermon for the fifth Sunday after Trinity from 1841 he had declared, and when we now believe that this Jesus of Nazareth was the only begotten Son of God the Father, to whom all power was given in heaven and on earth, then we cannot possibly consider this his wonderful humility and friendliness, his way of being with the simplest of people, his concern for their physical nourishment and his share in 5 I am much indebted to Harry Aronsson’s fine work Mänskligt och kristet (1960) here and in other places.

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their poor cares, without seeing a glimpse of paradise, where God speaks with man face to face, and treats him as his neighbor (Grundtvig 2003, 287; my trans.).

In this human simplicity and accessibility of Jesus, God himself draws near. In it we see an image of the divine-human community which was in the beginning, which shall be in the end. The gospel narratives, when read with the eye of faith, tell us more of this nearness of God to his creation, which is for Grundtvig the heart of the gospel, than many volumes of theology. Yes my friends, one can read many learned works and pander for many years over the union of the divine and human natures in Jesus Christ, without getting so clear and living an impression of it, as comes from considering him in today ‘s gospel by the sea of Galilee, where he speaks God’s word, which is life and breath for heart and soul and speaks a word of almighty power when he says to the fishermen ‘let out your nets’, but for the rest is not just as human as any one of us, but simpler, more natural, more plain than any of us. In such moments we truly feel that it is not the distance between earth and heaven, nor the great difference between flesh and Spirit, creature and creator, but, as it is written, only our sins, which make a division between God and us and prevent him from doing what otherwise he could and gladly would do, setting up his tabernacle among the children of men, and when they truly desired it, taking them up with him into the everlasting habitations (Grundtvig 2003, 287–88; my trans.).

This sense of the intimacy and simplicity of the relationship between divine and human, heaven and earth, was not only something which Grundtvig conveyed by his preaching. His whole way of being spoke of it. It was something which touched the whole Grundtvigian movement and made very simple practical projects, the reclaiming of heathland, the planting of fruit trees, the improvement of methods of farming, the development of education for those who had not formerly had it, in particular for women and for peasants, the celebration of anniversaries with singing and dancing – all these things seemed full of an eternal presence. Heaven and earth were not far apart. Here too in the later sermons the figure of Mary is never altogether forgotten. She again is present in an eschatological perspective but also as a constant reminder both of the facts of the Gospel and of the faet that woman, no less than man, has a vitally active part in the whole divine-human process. In an 1865 annunciation sermon Grundtvig says, Adam called his wife’s name Eve, i.e. life, since she became the bodily mother of all living and our forefather evidently called his wife by her right name, for despite all the disturbance which sin has placed in the original order of human nature, it was in a daughter of Eve, the Virgin Mary, that God’s only begotten Son sought and found the earthly human life when he humbled himself to bear the image of the earthly so that we could be raised to bear the image of the heavenly (Grundtvig 1880a, 431; my trans.).

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So, in another even later sermon for the same day from 1868, Grundtvig expresses, in striking images, his faith that something of paradise has remained at the very heart of human life throughout human history. Although fallen humankind was chased out of paradise so that they should not eat from the tree of life and live forever, yet there was a way of escape, so that the tree af life could spiritually blossom and bear fruit on earth for the benefit of humankind, because a handful of paradise-earth was preserved in the heart of humanity wherein the tree of life could put down its roots.

Even at the darkest times when the tree of life was, as it seemed, hopelessly lost, the garden of God was not altogether forgotten, but here and there the rose of paradise grew up wild, betraying through its sweet scent the motherly soil from which it grew (Grundtvig 1880b, 85–86; my trans.)

Even at the darkest times of the history of our race, same inexplicable potential for goodness, same totally unlooked for manifestation of beauty reveals itself and proclaims that there is still hidden in the human heart a handful of the earth of paradise, the earth which carries in itself God’s image and likeness. This is, Grundtvig says, a motherly soil, our mother earth, a phrase which reminds us that it was in the heart of the woman of faith and love, the mother of all living, above all others, that the tree of life put down its roots. The Christian tradition, in the course of its history, has not always been notably generous in recognising the gifts of goodness and beauty which have been manifest in the world beyond its own borders. Too often the virtues of the heathen have been seen as ‘splendid sins’. Here, in the image language of the Old Testament and the earliest Christian centuries, Grundtvig seeks to redress this niggardliness. Even when the situation seems most helpless, when God has seemed most definitively estranged, the deeply planted yearning to turn towards goodness reasserts itself. We may think in our own century of the accounts of many writers, perhaps above all in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, of the way in which in the desert of the concentration camp suddenly, growing wild, acts of kindness, moments of relief, can be discovered. We may think of a poem like Edwin Muir’s vision of ‘The Good Man in Hell’, the good man who has been doomed to damnation by reason of a bureaucratic error in the heavenly places, yet who, by his patience kindles a spark of hope even in the pit of hell and begins to undermine the frozen immobility of evil. One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace, Open such a gate, all Eden would enterin, Hell be a place like any other place And love and hate and life and death begin (Muir 1960, 104).

It is above all, as Grundtvig has said, in the heart that the handful of paradiseearth is found. We have seen enough of Grundtvig’s use of language to know

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that for him to speak of the good earth of the heart is more than a matter of rhetoric. His view of humanity centred in the heart is also rooted in the earth. The interrelatedness of the whole of creation is affirmed yet again. But there is more that needs to be said about this image of the handful of paradise-earth preserved in the human heart. In it Grundtvig shows at the end of his life the extraordinary esemplastic capacity of his mind and imagination, its capacity to bring together into one and restore life and meaning in places where there had been forgetfulness and death. In this passage Grundtvig recapitulates and makes new a theme which had its place in the thought and prayer of the early Christian centuries, particularly in the Syriac East. In these centuries, in the Syriac tradition, the story of the fall, as recounted in the first chapters of Genesis was understood and expounded, not so much as a single catastrophic event, but as a gradual process in which the alienation of humankind from God and from paradise took place bit by bit. One aspect of this gradual fall from grace and glory is the gradual distancing from the earthly paradise itself. Certainly after the fall in Eden the gates of the garden are shut and the angel stands at the entrance with the flaming sword. But all contact is not lost. Adam and Eve continue to live on the lower slopes of the mountain of paradise. Living close to paradise and still being steeped in memories of that place Adam and Eve were still able to continue same sort of paradisiac life. Despite their sin, the transmission of the generation of the righteous was preserved in them and the divine blessing was passed to Seth.

Particularly striking is the expression of Aphrahat, although he [Adam] had sinned, the seed of the righteous had been preserved through him and the blessing had been preserved in Seth and in all his generations (Van Rompay 1993, 560–61).

These stories of the nearness of the human race to paradise in the ages before the flood, move, in the writing of the greatest Syriac theologians, Aphrahat and Ephraim in particular, into a more general reflection on their meaning, as showing the links between God and his creation which continue even after the fall. As a close neighbour of paradise, man still is, despite pain and suffering, God’s intimate … The closeness of paradise, occasioning memories, repentance, longing and comfort may therefore become an important theme in the characterisation of early human history (Van Rompay 1993, 562).

And this applies not only to the very first generations of humanity but more generally. It involves more than a simple nostalgic memory of what is past. Even if it is clear that paradise is not to be regained on earth, yet the neighbourhood of paradise awakes in humankind some desire for movement towards a future paradise.

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This view, that paradise is still in some ways very close to us, is in full accord with the view of God in the writers of this period. For them his justice is always counterbalanced by his grace and there is in the human race not only evidence of fallenness but also some promise of future blessing. It is striking how these passages, from a scientific article written by the Leiden scholar, Lucas Van Rompay, to elucidate the nature of the early Syriac tradition, evoke memories of passages in Grundtvig’s writing. For him also paradise is very near, always about to appear in this world yet never fully realised, always giving birth to an unfulfilled longing. For him some memories of the earthly paradise remain at the heart of human life and experience. In the light of such a theology, expressions about Denmark itself as a little paradise, which can easily seem sentimental, and which frequently embarrass contemporary Danish readers, can be given a new and more serious interpretation. To understand such expressions in Grundtvig we need to think again of the context in which they occur. We need to think, for instance, of the summer landscapes of the painters of the Golden Age, a Peter Christian Skovgaard, or a Johan Thomas Lundbye for instance, with their own particular form of the contemplation of nature. We see in them how the beauty of the world reveals itself to us in many unexpected ways. Still more we think of all those small acts of human generosity of which Grundtvig’s contemporary, William Wordsworth, speaks, That best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love (Wordsworth1994, 115).

In such things something of paradise is glimpsed as close at hand. Already here and now a joy is sometimes given which this world cannot contain and which therefore points us to a world beyond this one. Grundtvig speaks of an interchange of human and divine in the life of the Church ‘which on earth in time carries eternal life within itself and in heaven shall eternally carry its temporal life within it’. In such ways as these the image of God, in which the world is made, is at times transmuted into a shining likeness.

Bibliography ARONSSON, HARRY (1960). Mänskligt och kristet: En studie i Grundtvigs teologi. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1880a). Grundtvigs Sidste Prædikener, vol. 1. C.J. BRANDT (ed.). Copenhagen: Karl Schønbergs Forlag. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1880b). Grundtvigs Sidste Prædikener, vol. 2. C.J. BRANDT (ed.). Copenhagen: Karl Schønbergs Forlag.

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GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1907). Nordens Mythologi 1832, in HOLGER BEGSTRUP (ed.), Udvalgte Skrifter, vol. V. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 394–767. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1982). Sang-Værk til den danske kirke, vol 1. CHRISTIAN THODBERG (ed.). Copenhagen: Gad. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1984a). N. F.S. Grundtvigs Prædikener, vol. 5: 1832. CHRISTIAN THODBERG (ed.). Copenhagen: Gad. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1984b). N. F.S. Grundtvigs Prædikener, vol. 7: 1833–34. CHRISTIAN THODBERG (ed.). Copenhagen: Gad. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1986). N. F.S. Grundtvigs Prædikener, vol. 11: 1837–38. CHRISTIAN THODBERG (ed.). Copenhagen: Gad. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (2003). Prædikener i Vartov, vol. 2: 1840–41. JETTE HOLM ET AL. (eds.). Copenhagen: Vartov. MUIR, EDWIN (1960). Collected Poems 1921–1958. London: Faber & Faber. MURRAY, ROBERT (1992). The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. London: Sheed & Ward. PAGET, FRANCIS (1890). “Sacraments,” in Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi. London: Murray, 403–33. THICK, CATHERINE ed. (1995). The Right to Hope: Global Problems, Global Visions. Creative Responses To Our World In Need. London: Earthscan Publications. VAN ROMPAY, LUCAS (1993). “Memories of paradise, the Greek ‘Life of Adam and Eve’ and early Syriac tradition,” Aram Periodical 5, 555–70. WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM (1994). Selected Poems. D. Walford Davies (ed.). London: Dent.

PART III: CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS AND CHALLENGES

Ole Jensen

7. Creation Theology and the Confrontation with Speciecism: Memories and Reflections

1. The creation theology of K.E. Løgstrup Since around 1955, I have been keeping abreast of the development of Scandinavian creation theology and have participated in the genesis of a variant that might be called the confrontation between cosmo-phenomenology and speciesism in contemporary culture and theology.1 “Cosmo-phenomenology” is a term that K.E. Løgstrup (1905–81) devised late in life, and appeared posthumously in Ophav og omgivelse. Metafysik III [Origin and Surrounding. Metaphysics III] (Løgstrup 1995b, 352–3). The term describes the human relation to nature and the cosmos (as opposed to “anthropo-phenomenology”), which deals with human-to-human relations. Cosmo-phenomenology represents Løgstrup’s attempt to “understand phenomena from the point of view of the universe, independently of the meanings we ourselves produce” (1995b, 351; emphasis added), resulting in a developed sense of the planet’s “singular universals” (the species) and motivating both “regard” and “reticence” (1995a, 133–193; 1995b, 1–10). In connection to this, I will introduce the word speciesism in a theological context (previously, in my 1975 doctorate I referred to it as “human narrow-mindedness”). I use the word “speciesism” to characterize an attitude that takes nature as existing only for the sake of us humans, allowing us to make use of nature exclusively guided by the enlightened self-interest of our own species.2 Løgstrup never called himself a creation theologian. Others have done so – polemically, and based on the mistaken idea that upgrading the idea of creation is in fact proportional to a downgrading of Christology. Admittedly, Løgstrup rejected the use of the word ‘Christ,’ since he regarded it as an incomprehensible mythological concept. Løgstrup went back to the historical Jesus to point out what it was, above all, in his teaching and life (the implicit Christology) that motivated the first Christians to confess their faith in him as the Christ.3 He believed that today’s Christian preaching must take the same step back, if it is to reach out to modern human beings and touch them 1 Cf. Jensen (2013); Jensen (2015b). 2 I am not rejecting anthropocentrism, but pleading for a non-speciesist anthropocentrism. See Jensen (2011), 83 f. 3 The concept stems from the discussions among the disciples of Rudolf Bultmann.

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existentially. Such a move back is precisely for the sake of Christological teaching today. The reason for this is neo-reformatory : since faith is the heart’s free acceptance of the proclamation of the Gospel, it is incompatible with a sacrificium intellectus. For, that would mean a justification by works in the field of cognition. Consequently, the proclamation must“answer to determining features of our existence,” as we read in the introduction to The Ethical Demand (1997, 1) – both with respect to the happy features that make us grateful, and the unhappy features that make us ask for help. It is these features that his creation analyses expose as points of “connection” for the proclamation (1995a, 313; 315). And if this is to convince “the educated among the despisers of religion” (Schleiermacher), and that is his ambition, it must necessarily be done philosophically (in Løgstrups language: phenomenologically), without recourse to the Christian tradition.4 Løgstrup therefore distinguishes sharply between what he calls the universal aspects of Christianity, which refer to the invariable fundamental nature of existence (being and ethics, creation and law), and the particular message of Christianity, which builds on “unpredicted events” (1995a, 58), the unforeseeable Gospel.5 This is a distinction between ontology and historical contingency, where the former is accessible for “creation-philosophical” (ibid.) knowledge and enlightenment, the latter solely for the decision between faith and non-faith.6 Here, Løgstrup refers to Luther : all people in their earthly life stand in a relation to the Creator ; for the sake of their eternal destiny Christians also stand in a relation to God in Christ. The coupling of these two relations is the “second use” (usus paedagogicus) of the law (Luther). In this context, Løgstrup draws on Gustaf Wingren’s criticism of the receptions of Luther in dialectical theology, among others. Løgstrup had a close relationship with Wingren (see Wingren 1991).7 This creation-philosophical enlightenment thus (a) serves a John-theBaptist function “for the sake of Christianity” according to the Lutheran lawgospel schema. This is quite clear in The Ethical Demand, chap. XII. But it also (b) provides a critique of contemporary culture that deepens the understanding of life “for human sake alone.”8 Making this distinction, Løgstrup 4 When it is argued that a concept such as “mercy” owes its centrality in our culture to the Bible, Løgstrup does not of course object, but he contends that Judeo-Christianity is not the ratio essendi of the phenomenon, but only its ratio cognoscendi (my terminology). As a phenomenon it is universal. 5 See further, Niels Henrik Gregersen, Chapter 2. 6 The specifically Christian is “ein Bezirk im Christentum, der einer phänomenologischen Analyse unzugänglich ist,” and which comprises “alles das, was nicht vorauszusehen war“ (Løgstrup 1967, 146). 7 In his doctoral thesis, Antropologi. Problem i K.E. Løgstrups författarskap (1971), Lars-Olle Armgard, a student of Wingren’s, was merited with making the first attempt to systematize Løgstrup’s creation theology. 8 As expressed by the Grundtvig scholar Kaj Thaning.

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adopts N. F.S. Grundtvig’s (1783–1872) concept of the “enlightenment of life” (1995a, 297, 336), which is defined fairly precisely as an enlightenment concerning “the determining features of our existence,” and which has the two-fold function mentioned above. Doing so indicated a clear anti-Pietist motive: by virtue of being created by God, human existence does not need to be Christianized in order to have value. This releases philosophy and the enlightenment of life from a specifically Christian envelopment. The same applies to ethics, with the result being that Løgstrup, in his numerous contributions to the public debate here, never spoke “as a theologian” or “as a Christian,” and categorically rejected the idea that the Church should have “opinions” and “attitudes” (a point on which he differed decisively from Wingren).

2. The cosmo-phenomenological confrontation with the speciesist understanding of nature in contemporary culture and theology Most Protestant theology never goes beyond an “ethical life-enlightenment,” says Løgstrup. It remains in the field of anthropo-phenomenology, in the lawgospel, sin-mercy scheme. If it is to avoid being speciesist, it must move on to a “cosmic life-enlightenment” (1987, 143)—the cosmo-phenomenological region of reality must be included in the pre-understanding for both culturecritical and soteriological-eschatological reasons. I deal with the latter in the third section below, and with the culture-critical aspects first. The human being has ended up being the “only actor on the world stage,” living “on the edge of nature,” “on the margin of the universe.” For that very reason we “come to edge with it,” meaning to be at odds with. That is not surprising, for this “marginal existence is modernity’s most formidable illusion.” These are the words of Ophav og omgivelse (1995b, 5; 9). And the illusion is in no way innocent, for it results in “vandalism and extermination,” says Løgstrup as early as 1962 in his article Kristendom uden skabelsestro [Christianity without Faith in Creation] (1962, 530 = 1995b, 159). Even less is such an illusion theologically innocent! As Løgstrup argued in that 1962-article, the fruitful balance in Christianity between creation and transcendence was lost due to Greek influence. Accordingly, God is understood solely as worldless transcendence, while the material world is viewed as godless (that is, “irreligious”)–life, which is reduced to being a “material for culture” (a motif from Løgstrup’s doctoral thesis in 1942). “Christianity has placed our power, sovereignty and will to form out into the open and given them the entire profane world as an object and raw material without letting them know any limits, without letting them come to a halt anywhere. But this is

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to say that Christianity has been a misfortune for Western culture” (Løgstrup 1962 = 1995a, 342). In my doctoral thesis (Jensen 1975) and in I vækstens vold. Økologi og religion [In the Grip of Growth. Ecology and Religion] (Jensen 1976), I myself have contributed to such diagnosis and critical analysis by perspectivizing the neo-Kantian view of nature as it is reflected in the Marburg-theologians Wilhelm Herrmann and Rudolf Bultmann. I did this also with respect to the political ideologies, structure, economy, and practice of modern society. I did so under the clear inspiration of Løgstrup’s 1962 article. Løgstrup’s 1962 article also outlines an alternative: rediscovering the overlooked idea of creation and restoring the fruitful balance. It is, to be sure, “according to Judaeo-Christian faith beyond human ability and power to know and meet God in the world, but it is not beyond human ability and power to know that the world is God’s world,” that it is God’s creature (1962, 526; emphasis mine).9 It is possible to achieve a cognition of this fact, both anthropo- and cosmo-phenomenologically. God is also the creator of the universe (not just of consciousness, or the soul, or the human being).10 Løgstrup demonstrates this in the article by referring to the Danish poet and literary scholar Thorkild Bjørnvig’s poem “Dag og nat” [Day and Night], which deals with the destruction of species. Later – in Source and Sorrounding (1995b) – Løgstrup includes the idea of species in what he calls “the singular universalia.” But in the 1962-article he had already de facto introduced a concept of cosmo-phenomenology. Bjørnvig and Løgstrup were early risers in the “green” cause.11 Bjørnvig’s poem calls the shameful present-day eradication of species “our blasphemous disdain for creation.” Apropos of this expression, I gave a guest lecture at the Theology Faculty in Oslo in September 1971 on the invitation of Professor Inge Lønning. The title of my talk was “Defending the Thesis that Pollution is Blasphemy” (Jensen 1972). Linking theology to ecology and to society’s attitude towards nature was unheard of at that time, and came almost as a shock to the theological establishment, both here in Oslo and later on in Denmark, if not taken as an (outrageous) joke! On the way downstairs from the auditorium, I could not help hearing Jakob Jervell, the distinguished New Testament scholar, enjoying himself at my expense before an admiring group of students and colleagues. His mockery still rings in my ears. Transgressing

9 In my biography of Løgstrup (Jensen 2007 = Jensen 2015a), I have established that this is to be understood as a “program” for the whole of Løgstrup’s work in philosophy of religion right up to his death. It is a tertium between Neo-Thomism and existentialist theological nihilism. 10 Other early cosmo-phenomenological rudiments are found in Løgstrup (1961) and Løgstrup (1965), and above all in the essays collected in Løgstrup (1983). 11 The poem is from 1959, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, like Løgstrup’s article, is from 1962. The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth did not appear until 1972.

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the anthropo-phenomenological region of reality was involuntarily and unreflectively stamped as a deviant theological behavior!12 The guest lecture was in fact a brief version of my doctoral thesis which was not yet at a final stage. Since then, beginning with the thesis itself (Jensen 1975), I have developed certain important distinctions, for example, that nature is not holy. But neither is it merely a means for humans, even though it is also that. Above all, it calls for wonder and admiration. It is worthy of “respect” (Jensen 2011). When I began my work as a professor at the University of Copenhagen in January 1974, I persuaded Bjørnvig to be deputized for a semester in a vacant associate professorship (in systematic theology)! I promised to perform a handspring in the crowded street of Købmagergade outside if he accepted. He did so, and taught to packed audiences through the autumn term of 1974 on the view of nature in literature. Many came from outside the faculty, for example, students of literature, and even the young pastor and city councillor Margrete Auken, for whom these lectures were a “green” political wake-up call for her work in the Danish Parliament that continues right through to her current third period in the European Parliament. The handspring was duly executed. Since then I worked closely with Bjørnvig in developing our common defence of nature. I conducted his funeral in 2004. In the spring of 1976, Danish TVrecorded a 45-minute interview with me on the themes of my doctoral thesis. This was broadcast during prime time (on the country’s only TV channel!), and by the following day I had become a recognized face in the streets. A publisher persuaded me to write I vækstens vold [In the Grip of Growth], which received widespread attention. The hullabaloo changed my life. Since then, and until this day, the ethics of nature – nowadays actualized with respect to the climate crisis – has remained a decisive matter in my life as a theologian, and as a concerned intellectual. In recent publications, especially Jensen 2011, I have continued to develop and update my views.13 I continue to criticize the belief in exponential GNP growth and its background in an understanding of nature as being there for the sake of humankind only (always made without reference to the possibility that nature might be there for its own sake, too). I point out the roots of this thinking in a onesided interpretation of Gen 1 – in the so-called “mandate of dominion,” which even survives in the definitions of the otherwise attractive word “sustainability.” Also, I emphasize that the corrective to this interpretation, and to its fatal consequenses on to this day, is present in the same Biblical chapter’s tribute to the wonder of being and of creaturely beings, which in Hellenism was displaced by Greek- and Oriental-dualist depreciations of the material world in favor of the spiritual 12 Apropos Jervell: ten years later I was inspired by his engagement with medical ethics, where he was a first mover in Scandianavia. 13 A shorter version is available in German in Jensen 2015c.

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world. Likewise, in the epochs of Nominalism and the Renaissance, the products of human culture and its products were raised above the wonders of nature, seeing the material world as means for human productivity only. By contrast, I propose a “mandate of wonder and admiration,” or “a mandate of care,” as being particularly germane with respect to moderating and selflimiting our exercise of human dominion. In Gen 2:15, cultivation and protection are put in their proper balance.

3. The cosmo-phenomenological confrontation with soteriological and eschatological speciesism Challenged by Wingren, Løgstrup argued that without a cosmo-phenomenological transcendence of the sin-mercy/law-gospel schema, biological cruelty – and thus the problem of theodicy – cannot be taken seriously (Løgstrup 1995a, 313ff). For example, the fight for survival and the insoluble conflict between love and justice are not eliminated by Wingren’s political kingdom of God. To do so, we are forced to work with the idea of an ontological“cosmic turn” (1995a, 317–8; 333). Allow me to sharpen Løgstrup’s objection,that without a “cosmic life-enlightenment” as a pre-understanding for the Gospel, theology remains caught in an untrustworthy soteriological speciesism. His line of argument is as follows: Even though our existence is structured by anxiety and self-concern (Heidegger : cura), whether we want it to be so or not, Jesus asks his audience not to be anxious about tomorrow (Matt. 6). Jesus must therefore be presuming that, as he did himself, all people ought to live in anticipation of a world renewed by God the Father, in which the need for anxiety and concern no longer exists. Likewise, when Jesus forgives the most terrible executioners so long as they repent (like the criminal on the cross, Luke 23), he must be presuming the same anticipation of the coming of the kingdom of God, in which there is a redress for all the victims’ sufferings, for otherwise his unconditional forgiveness would constitute a disdain for the victims. The insoluble conflict between love and justice cannot be ignored.14 Jesus anticipates a genuine “cosmic turn” on the grand scale comparable with the step from the emptiness before creation to the fullness of creation. In 1978, Løgstrup demands an equally cosmic “faith” of himself and all of us! In other words, he seems to demand a genuine sacrificium intellectus. Løgstrup was aware of this problem, and ended by saying that such a “faith” can, at best, consist in consent to a ritual. He ends with a surprising solution: a provisional suspension of understanding (1995a, 291).15 Yet, in another late reflection he 14 Strictly speaking, “reconciliation commissions” are impossible. 15 Presumably, this is what is known in German theology as an “eschatological reservation.”

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adds, “it is not up to us to determine the possibilities implied in reality, nor in cosmic sense either” (2014, 68). A further question comes up: is this renewed world only made for the good of humans? In other words is it still speciesist? Løgstrup had probably not been aware of this question as he was writing such considerations, but he became so very soon afterwards. In an unpublished article Prædiken og filosofi [Sermon and Philosophy] produced in his final years we read that “a renewed preoccupation with the psycho-physical problem gives rise to a phenomenological analysis of sensation,” which involves the breakdown of “the illusion of the existence at the edge,” and entails the insight that “there is no liberation of human beings in Christianity unless there is also a liberation of the universe. Christianity is not a liberation of the human being from the universe, but with the universe” (1987, 142; 143–144; my emphasis). The “cosmic turn” is not limited to the human world but concerns the whole universe! Løgstrup got no further in elucidating this before he was taken away by death. Allow me to guess what he might have had in mind. Like all other living creatures, human beings are embodied and embedded in nature and the universe. Like all higher animals we are subject to physical suffering and death. Consequently, a renewed world free from physical suffering and death cannot be reserved for human beings only, but must necessarily include other living creatures too. Our bodies can only be liberated from suffering and death if suffering and death cease to belong to the conditions of carnal life in the universe. Our physical suffering and death can only be abolished as part of the abolition of all physical suffering and death from the universe. In his non-speciesist eschatology Løgstrup is neither a Platonic dualist nor a neo-nominalist. The cosmic kingdom of God is neither for souls only nor is it only for “existences on the edge.” Here, a follow-up on Løgstrup’s eschatological considerations will have to take its point of departure.16

Bibliography ARMGARD, LARS-OLLE (1971). Antropologi. Problem i K.E. Løgstrups författarskap. Lund: Gleerups. CRISTOFFERSEN, S.A. (2011). “Skapelsesn,de. Om den sansbare verdens erfaringsform,” Norsk Teologisk Tidsskrift 112, 261–277. GREGERSEN, N.H. (2005). “The Unity of Creator and Creation: Martin Luthers Trinitarian Theology of Creation,” in E.M. Wiberg Pedersen and Johs. Nissen 16 Cf. the promising design for a non-speciesist trinitarian theology in Niels Henrik Gregersen’s R.J. Russell Lectures 2013/14 (Gregersen 2013). See also Gregersen (2005) and Christoffersen (2011).

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(eds.), Cracks in the Walls: Essays on Spirituality, Ecumenicity and Ethics. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 43–58. GREGERSEN, N.H. (2013). “Cur deus caro? Jesus and the Cosmos Story,” Theology and Science Vol. 11, No. 4, 370–393. JENSEN, O. (1972). “Teologisk argumentation for tesen: Forurening er blasfemi,” Kirke og kultur 385–396. JENSEN, O. (1975). Theologie zwischen Illusion und Restriktion. Analyse und Kritik der existenz-kritizistischen Theologie bei dem jungen Wilhelm Herrmann und bei Rudolf Bultmann. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. JENSEN, O. (1976). I vækstens vold. Økologi og religion [In the Grip of Growth. Ecology and Religion]. København: Forlaget Fremad. JENSEN, O. (1977). Unter dem Zwang des Wachstums. Ökologie und Religion. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. German translation of JENSEN (1976). JENSEN, O. (2007). Historien om K.E. Løgstrup [The History of Knud E. Løgstrup]. København: Forlaget Anis. German translation in JENSEN (2015a). JENSEN, O. (2011). P, kant med klodens klima. Om behovet for et ændret natursyn [Coming at odds with the Climate of the Earth. On the Need of a Changed View of Nature]. København: Forlaget Anis. JENSEN, O. (2013). “Rezension von Johann-Christian Plder : Evidenz des Ethischen. Die Fundamentalethik K.E. Løgstrup,” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 265, 2011, Heft 3/4, 195–208. JENSEN, O. (2015a). Knud Ejler Løgstrup: Philosoph und Theologe. Stuttgart: RadiusVerlag. German translation of JENSEN (2007). JENSEN, O. (2015b). “Efterskrift til K.E. Løgstrup’s Skabelse og tilintetgørelse,” in K.E. LØGSTRUP, Skabelse og tilintetgørelse, 4th ed.. Aarhus: Forlaget Klim, 373–433. JENSEN, O. (2015c). “Der Mensch am Rande des Universums. Klima – Naturanschauung – Schöpfung” Das Plateau. Die Zeitschrift im RadiusVerlag Dezember 2015, 4–17. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1960). “Ethik und Ontologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 57, 357–391. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1961). “Højskolens nye fronter” [New Frontiers of the Folk High School], in J. Rosendahl (ed.), Højskolen til debat. København: Gyldendal, 203–216. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1962). “Kristendom uden skabelsestro” [Christianity without Faith in Creation], Vindrosen 7, 523–535. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1965). “Kunst og erkendelse” [Arts and Knowledge], Dansk Udsyn 45, 226–238. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1967). “Das Proprium des christlichen Ethos,” Zeitschrift für evangelische Ethik 11, 135–147. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1978). Skabelse og tilintetgørelse. Religionsfilosofiske betragtninger. Metafysik IV. Københvn: Gyldendal/Aarhus: Klim (2015). LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1983). Kunst og erkendelse. Kunstfilosofiske betragtninger. Metafysik II. København: Gyldendal.

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LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1984). Ophav og omgivelse. Betragtninger over historie og natur. Metafysik III. København: Gyldendal/Aarhus: Forlaget Klim (2013). LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1987). Solidaritet og kærlighed. Essays. København: Gyldendal. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1995a). Metaphysics, Vol. I. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. English translation of virtually the entire volume of Skabelse og tilintetgørelse, 1978. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1995b). Metaphysics, Vol. II. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Consists mainly of the English translations of excerpts from Metafysik I, II and III, LØGSTRUP (1978), (1983), (1984). LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1997). The Ethical Demand. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Translation of Den etiske fordring, 1956. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (2007). Beyond the Ethical Demand. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (2014). Det Uomtvistelige. Fem samtaler med Helmut Friis. Aarhus: Forlaget Klim/Kolding: Askov Højskoles Forlag (1984). WINGREN, G. (1977). “Skapelse och evangelium. Et problem i moderne dansk teologi,” Svensk teologisk kvartalsskrift, 1–11. WINGREN, G. (1991). Mina fem universitet. Minnen. Stockholm: Proprius förlag.

Jakob Wolf

8. Phenomenology in Løgstrup’s Creation Theology

1. The immediate experience Phenomenology, understood as philosophical phenomenology, is of the greatest importance in Løgstrups’ creation theology. Philosophical phenomenology describes and understands the world according to our immediate, spontaneous experience of the world. Many are critical of this way of describing and understanding the world. Critics object that there is no such thing as an “immediate” experience of the world, as if it were possible to experience the world in itself, “an sich.” Experience is never “im–mediate.” It is always “mediated.” At the very least, it is mediated by our language, our history, our culture, and so on. An answer to this objection is that “immediate,” in this context, should not be taken to mean that our experience is not mediated by cultural and historical conditions in the first place. Certainly, experience is always somebody’s experience. It is the experience of an individual who speaks a specific language, who lives at a certain time in history, and who is formed by cultural and social conditions. A description and understanding of the world that is based on the immediate experience does not claim that it has some manner of abstract universal validity. Rather, such a description suggests that many people will likely be able to recognize, and identify with, the experience described–across historical, cultural and social barriers. In this context, it is important to be aware of the fact that one’s immediate experience is determined by the language one speaks. But this does not imply that it is only recognizable to people who speak the same language. Everydaylanguage is not just a collection of constructed conceptions that allows the world to be seen only as conditioned by them. Different languages generate different perspectives on the world, but these perspectives are open, not closed. Løgstrup, for example, says that language withdraws in favor of what it refers to, that: “…language wants to be overlooked; because it is a means for transcendent knowledge … language is a mediation or a reference and communication” (Løgstrup 1995 II, 287). So, language is not an end in itself. Rather, it serves as a means through which the things in the world make themselves heard. The achievement of language is not to create a cosmos out of chaos, but to articulate a cosmos that is already there. This last aspect of language is often overlooked in modern philosophies of language because

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such philosophy thematizes language, and therefore often overlooks that language wants to be overlooked. The fact that the recognition of the world through our immediate experience is formed by our mother tongue does not in principle mean that it is not the world in itself we recognize, nor does it mean that people with another mother tongue can recognize the experience. The characterization of the experience as “immediate” signifies in this context that the experience is pre-scientific. Immediate experience precedes the kind of experience scientific knowledge of the world is built on. Scientific data are not “immediate,” rather, it is produced by constructed experiments. Such experience of the world is gained through measuring devices, abstract concepts, and mathematics. Science is based on a reductive, objectifying, quantification of the world. Heidegger, for example, illustrated the difference and relationship between immediate and scientific ways of understanding of the world by exploring the different ways we come to understand a hammer. When we actually use a hammer, we have an immediate, embodied experience and understanding of what a hammer is. But if the hammer breaks, our perspective on that hammer changes to something more scientific-like and analytic. For, then, we have shifted our perspective and started to look at the hammer as an object. We try to figure out how it is put together in order to be able to repair it. If we only had a scientific knowledge of the hammer we would never fully know what a hammer is. It is only through our immediate experience (through its actual embodied use) that we are able to know what a hammer is. This shows that our understanding of the world through our immediate experience is prior to the scientific knowledge of the world.

2. Immediate experience and the ethical demand In The Ethical Demand Løgstrup demonstrates the role of phenomenology in the understanding of the command: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” which Jesus of Nazareth proclaims according to The New Testament. The fundamental question is: why should I love my neighbor? Must I do that only because Jesus says so? If that is the case, then it must be because I believe that God has revealed his will through the preaching of Jesus. If that is not presupposed, then there is no reason why I should listen to Jesus, rather than, say, to any other person who might tell me something quite different. The command, then, is only something that has an authority to those who believe in Jesus. But the command claims to be valid to everybody, no matter what they believe or think. The command must therefore be based on immediate experience and not a specific belief. The authority does not specifically come from Jesus, but from life itself. Løgstrup shows that this is the case through a phenomenological description of our interpersonal lives. A human life is a life with others. A

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human life can only be unfolded and fulfilled in relation to others. It is an immediate experience that we live surrendered to each other. Whether my life succeeds or not depends on my surrendering more or less of my life into the hands of others, trusting they will meet me in my trust. I trust that the other will not abuse my trust. This is the case for all levels of human beings living together. The child surrenders his or her life to others, trusting that they will be good to him or her. I surrender more or less of my life not just to my loved ones, but to anybody I contact in communication. “Precisely what in the other person’s life is in our hands, what of the other person has been delivered over to us, may vary greatly. It may vary all the way from his or her most passing mood to his or her entire destiny” (Løgstrup 1997, 25–26). I have an immediate trust in the other. I do not expect the other to abuse my trust, or use what I say against me, or lie to me, or turn me down. The unfolding, growth and flourishing of our lives are dependent on our surrendering more or less of our lives in the hands of others. The other has more or less power to make my life flourish or wither. This power is in the hand of the other, whether he or she likes it or not. He or she does not have the option to renounce that power. The power to make others’ lives flourish or whither evokes a demand: you must protect and take care of that part of the others’ lives which you hold in your hand. The demand grows out of the fact. This phenomenological description of our interpersonal lives shows that the command to love your neighbor is not just true because Jesus preaches so, but also because we experience it so. Many object to this description and understanding of our interpersonal lives, suggesting that the phenomenological description is flawed, and that it is only recognizable for people who live in a Christian culture. We do not surrender our lives in trust to others. To the contrary, we live in mistrust. It may be true that, if you could measure it, you might find that there is more mistrust than trust in the world, but that fact does not invalidate the assertion that we must fundamentally surrender ourselves in trust to others. No child or anybody else can live fully in mistrust, without thereby losing the possibility of fulfilling his or her life. If a person is so controlled by mistrust that he or she never surrenders anything of his or her life into the hands of others, then his or her life will wither away in cramped loneliness. This shows that trust is ontologically prior to mistrust. Mistrust is a lack of trust. It is a deficient modus of trust. In contrast, trust is not a lack of mistrust. Mistrust presupposes trust like death presupposes life, even though life does not presuppose death. Some also object that you cannot infer from the fact that we live surrendered to each other, to the command that we ought to take care of each other. Løgstrup infers from “is” to “ought” which, as David Hume famously suggested, is a fallacious move. But Løgstrup does not commit the naturalistic fallacy. For, it is only true that you cannot infer from a scientific description of the world to how you ought to act. The scientific description and explanation

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of the world is in principle normatively neutral. This is not the case with phenomenological descriptions, because the immediate experience is not neutral. “Is” and “ought” cannot be separated with respect to immediate experience. The separation of “is” and “ought” is a consequence of the methodological reduction which defines the scientific perspective. If you identify with your immediate experience you cannot be indifferent to the question, whether the life of a child ought to be ruined by the abuse of its trust, or a child’s trust ought to be nourished as a holy flame in order to make its life flourish. It is not an option to demand the abuse of trust. (Løgstrup 1997,18). But what about all those people who abuse the trust of children and thereby ruin their lives? Apparently they do not experience the ethical demand, that you must use the power over other people, which lies in your hands, such that you build up their lives, and not break them down. An answer to that objection is that mental defects can prevent you from recognizing the appeal of such immediate experience. If you lack the ability to put yourself in the place of the other, you lack empathy, then you may not recognize the ethical demand immediately. It is however not correct to regard the lack of empathy as something normal, it is an imperfection or an illness. This shows that the immediate experience is primary. As already mentioned, the phenomenological description does not pretend to be of abstract universal validity, but it does claim that it is likely that other people and cultures, those who live in a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or aboriginal culture, and so on, are also able to recognize this description, that the unfolding of our lives is more or less surrendered into the hands of the people we live with; that nobody lives for himself, and that we are one another’s world. It is the ideology of social constructivism which lies behind the claim that you have to live in a Christian culture to recognize the command to love your neighbor as yourself. It is indeed possible that the ethical demand arises from immediate experience. This does however not exclude the idea that the preaching of Jesus has had an impact on the phenomenological description of our interpersonal lives. The radical proclamation of Jesus, that your neighbor is in principle everybody you meet, the stranger and your enemy, highlighted the phenomenon. A phenomenon may be discovered through a religious proclamation. Before the proclamation highlighted the phenomenon, it was overlooked. The phenomenon is not created and justified by the religious proclamation. It was there beforehand, but it was in the dark.

3. Immediate experience and the linearity of time In Creation and Annihilation, Løgstrup claims that the linearity of time was discovered through the Christian preaching of creation out of nothing, creatio

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ex nihilo. Creation out of nothing is highlighted in the Christian preaching of the contingency of the world, and of the resurrection of the dead (Løgstrup 1995 II, 51–53). Until the breakthrough of the Christian preaching on this matter, the prevailing view in the ancient culture was that time, in essence, is circular. Still, the linearity of time is not dependent on Christianity. We know that time is linear through immediate experience. Death is experienced as annihilation. The death of our loved ones fills us with grief. We are overwhelmed by grief because we experience death as an irrefutable end. Some will object that the linearity of time is a social construction. In ancient Greek culture, people did not see death as annihilation. The philosophy of Plato, for instance, is expressive of this view. The soul does not die, but lives on eternally. Socrates tells his friends not to grieve, even though he is about to be executed. His soul will not die, but will be freed of its imprisonment in the body, and will return to the realm of Ideas where it came from. It is better to be a soul without a body in the realm of the Ideas than to be a soul imprisoned in the body. Socrates’ friends should not grieve, but rejoice. In cultures dominated by ideas of reincarnation you also find this idea that death is not annihilation. The soul lives on in another body. You do not see death as an irrefutable end, and consequently you perceive time as circular. In contrast, the Christian proclamation of the resurrection does not mean that death is not an absolute end. To the contrary, the proclamation of the resurrection of the dead presupposes that death is indeed an absolute end. Nothing survives death. Everything is annihilated, body and soul. The idea of resurrection is that God will create again, ex nihilo. Paul, for instance, connects resurrection with creation out of nothing. He says that God is he “who brings the dead to life and calls into existence what does not yet exist” (Rom 4, 17). When it comes to the theory of the immortality of the soul the question, however, must be whether this theory takes the experience of death seriously. Is it not the case that death is experienced as an end, and as a loss that provokes grief ? The idea of the immortality of the soul is an illusion constructed to mitigate the tragedy of death. The idea of the immortality of the soul is based on a hypothesis, while the perception of the death as an irrefutable end is based on experience. Grief is an immediate experience. We experience immediately that, that which was, is gone forever. Grief and sorrow is experienced in every culture, and it tells us that time is linear, nothing returns. The death of Jesus Christ portrayed in the gospel is so different to the death of Socrates portrayed in Plato’s Apology. The death of Jesus is described as a tragedy filled with passion, grief and sorrow. The passion of Christ may be what highlights the idea that time is linear and not circular. But, of course, time is not linear simply because Christianity proclaims it to be so. It is linear because this is how we actually experience time. Christianity does not create the linearity of time. Rather, it discovers it, and makes us take our immediate experience seriously. If you confer authority to the immediate experience, as phenomenology does, then the realization that time is irreversible, linear and manifests

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inevitably in death and annihilation is an ontological recognition, and not just a recognition that is valid for a certain culture. A theory may be arbitrary, immediate experience is never so. According to Løgstrup the experience that time manifests annihilation spontaneously provokes the thought that, what is, is created by a transcendental power, since it is a mystery how being, which is constantly swallowed by time, can be at all. How is being even possible? The power of being cannot be intrinsic to what is, since it is constantly annihilated. The immediate experience of annihilation and being provokes the thought that a power which transcends everything that exist must sustain being, as long as it is sustained. The power of being delays its annihilation, as long as it is delayed. “As long as something exists, whatever it is, God keeps nothingness at arms length until He delivers it into nothingness” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 52). The relationship between the transcendent power and being must be paradoxical, because it must be simultaneously identical with being and different from it. If it is only different from being (deism), then being disappears, because it cannot sustain by itself. If it is only identical with it (pantheism), then the power of being is annihilated along with the annihilation of being itself. And then nothing would exist. This paradox is expressed by the preposition “in.” God is “the power to exist in everything which exists” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 92) (pan-en-theism). This idea about a transcendental power that is spontaneously provoked Løgstrup calls an “interpretation” (in Danish: “tydning”). We do not experience the power directly. It is impossible since it is omnipresent and distancelessly present in everything. It is “in” everything without being a thing within things. The idea is not a theory or a proof. Theories and proofs are the result of human reasoning. The “interpretation” Løgstrup talks about grows spontaneously out of experience. The idea that the world is created by God is an “interpretation” of immediate experience. The “interpretation” is simultaneously involuntary and voluntary. It is not arbitrary, and it is not objectively compelling as a rational proof. Løgstrup’s creation theology is thus natural theology, but it is not a rational theology of the kind that Kant has so effectively refuted. We do not rationally infer that God has created the world. It is God who makes the idea a possible and obvious interpretation for us, through immediate experience and the “interpretation” that grows out of it.

4. Creation theology is natural theology Niels Henrik Gregersen has argued that Scandinavian creation theology is revelation theology. Gregersen writes: “… also creation theology is revelation theology, as far as it is based on the presupposition that “the whole world is full

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of Bible,” as Luther has formulated it” (Gregersen 2012, 322). He refers to Luther’s statement that: “If you are a craftsman, then you find the Bible in your workshop, in your hand, in your heart, who teaches you and preaches to you about what you should do to your neighbor.” It seems to me that in this statement Luther actually says that the demand to love your neighbor is a natural and not a revealed demand. Our natural environment preaches to us that we should love our neighbor. We do not need the Bible or any specific religious revelation to hear that. The natural environment preaches the same thing that the Bible preaches on this point. This means that what the Bible preaches in this context is universal. The demand to love your neighbor is not specifically based on the belief that God has revealed himself in the preaching of Jesus. It is based on natural experience. Our natural work is not just to our own benefit, it is to the benefit of our neighbor. This becomes clear when we look at Luther’s comments on the Golden Rule: “You have so many preachers, so many things, goods, tools etc. in your house and on your farm; they cry out to you all the time: Dear, do to your neighbor as you want your neighbor to do with his goods to you” (WA 32: 495). That “the whole world is full of Bible” means that you can read in the book of nature the same ethical message that you can read in the Bible. You can of course say that natural theology, as phenomenology, is a kind of revelation theology since God makes himself known through natural phenomena. God lets his command be known through natural things, which outright “cries” the command out. But when one says revelation theology, the more precise meaning for this term refers to that theology which is exclusively based on belief in biblical testimony, that God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. The only way you can know anything authentically about God is through your belief in the biblical testimony about Christ. From that perspective, God has not at all made himself known through natural phenomena. According to that understanding of the term “revelation theology,” then, it is clear that Løgstrup’s creation theology is natural theology.1 Løgstrup’s creation theology is a phenomenological, natural theology, and as such it not some kind of Christian philosophy. The thought that the world is created by a transcendent power belongs to what is universal in the Christian religion. This means that the idea of creation and the command to love your neighbor are not exclusively Christian ideas. These ideas are philosophical ideas, which you can find in other religions and philosophies. On the other hand, the ideas are of course not unchristian either : they are simultaneously universal and Christian. They are an essential part of the Christian religion, 1 When for instance Gustav Wingren uses the term ”phenomenology” he uses it in a broader, less precise manner (Wingren 1954, 205). He does not use the term in the precise meaning of philosophical phenomenology. This makes it difficult to say anything general about the role of phenomenology in Scandinavian creation theology.

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and they serve as background to the specific Christian elements of the Christian religion. Examples of that which is specifically Christian in relation to the idea of creation and the command to love your neighbor are the proclamation of the resurrection of the dead and the forgiveness of sins. These proclamations do not follow spontaneously from immediate experience. They are exclusively based on the life and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and the belief that God has revealed himself in Jesus’ life and preaching. God reveals himself there in a way that is totally unforeseen in relation to any natural experience. According to Løgstrup, Christianity involves both natural theology and revealed theology. Christianity has both universal and specific features. The role of phenomenology in theology is to maintain that there is some level of universal ideas in Christianity. Christian religion is not separated from universal, philosophical ideas as if by an abyss. On the contrary, these universal ideas form a background and a horizon of understanding for the Christian Gospel. Another role of phenomenology in theology is to demythologize the biblical idea that the world is created by God. The Bible expresses the idea of creation through an outdated worldview and through myths. Consequently the belief that God has revealed himself in the Bible is not enough to make the idea of creation relevant to me as far as my contemporary existence goes. The idea can only be of any relevance to me, today, if it can be related to my actual, present experience of the world. The role of phenomenology in creation theology is to make the biblical belief in creation present to me in my experienced world.

5. Critique of revelation theology When revelation theology claims the belief that God has revealed himself in Christ must be the foundation of all theology (including creation theology) this smacks of too sharp a Christian–non-Christian dualism. For Løgstrup, this dualism is a “dead-end street” in theology, because it reduces Christianity to an esoteric religion. In this form Christianity is not open to the natural universal. There is an abyss, then, between the “natural human being” and the “Christian human being.” Christianity presupposes a jump, which only goes in one direction over the abyss into something totally different than the universal and natural. Christians and the Christian church is an absolutely closed community of believers, a closed culture. The reduction of Christianity to an esoteric community of believers has some unfortunate consequences. One such consequence is that theology becomes speculative dogmatics. Universal contexts are inferred from faith. They are not placed “before” faith as in natural theology. But if you do that, how “is it avoidable that they [universal contexts] overpower the Christian

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message, threaten its character as event, so that it becomes such that it only brings a piece of universal knowledge?” (Løgstrup 1995 I, 322).2 Faith is not a general speculative knowledge, but a personal, existential experience. Another consequence is that the church becomes a state within the state. Herein Christians are essentially divorced from the “secular” state. Then Christians have no loyalty to the state, since this community is not created and maintained by God. Criticism of the state is not based on a loyalty to the state, but on a loyalty to the church and to Christian faith. For, Løgstrup Christians are part of the “secular” state and owe loyalty to it, as Luther says. Loyalty to the “secular” state does not mean that you cannot criticize it. An expression of God’s presence in the “secular” state is that the raison d’Þtre of the state is to protect the poor, the sick and the weak. Totalitarian and criminal states must be criticized and fought, not because they are not Christian, but because they do not protect the weak. The created world (and the natural communities living in it) is not just a scene in which redemption takes place, a theatrum gloriae Dei; the world is created and maintained for its own sake. Revelation theology relativizes the value of nature and natural communities. It represents a gnostic-like contempt of the natural.3 In spite of the obvious weaknesses of revelation theology it has been popular among academic theologians throughout the 20th century up into the present. Why is that so? I think it has to do with the fact that Lutheran theology was dramatically compromised during the Nazi regime in Germany. In this situation revelation theology and Bekennende Kirche played a heroic part in the resistance against the regime. Revelation theology was the hero, and Lutheran creation theology the bad guy by accommodating the regime. Another thing that makes revelation theology popular is that it is compatible with the philosophy of social constructivism, which is a dominating modern philosophy. The fact that Lutheran theologians in Germany during the Nazi regime misunderstood the idea of Cristian loyalty with society, as an uncritical solidarity that legitimized a criminal state, does not disqualify the idea as such. And there is no reason why theology must conform to social constructivism. This philosophy is a modish ideology that has no basis in immediate experience. The role of phenomenology in theology is to keep Christian theology open and in dialogue with the natural universal, and to prevent Christianity from turning in to an esoteric religion. 2 This is Gustaf Wingren’s main objection to Barthian theology. He talks about this theology as “Christian gnosis” (Wingren 1958, 50). 3 One finds this opinion on revelation theology among other Scandinavian theologians. Regin Prenter remarks on Barth’s teaching on creation that there is “a peculiar Platonic tone to it” (Prenter 1946, 175), and about Eberhard Jüngel’s Gott als Geheimnis der Welt that it is shrouded in “a peculiar half-gnostic atmosphere” (Prenter 1982, 148).

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Bibliography Gregersen, Niels Henrik (2012). ”Skandinavisk skabelsesteologi: Gustaf Wingren og Luther,” in Niels Henrik Gregersen (ed.), Lutherbilleder i dansk teologi 1800–2000. København: Anis, 319–334. Løgstrup, K.E. (1995). Metaphysics Vol I–II. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Løgstrup, K.E. (1997). The Ethical Demand. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Prenter, Regin (1946). “Die Einheit von Schöpfung und Erlösung,” Theologische Zeitschrift 2:3, 161–82. Prenter, Regin (1982). Guds virklighed. Fredericia: Lohse. Wingren, Gustaf (1954). Teologiens metodfr,ga. Lund: Gleerup, 1954. Wingren, Gustaf (1958). Skapelsen och lagen. Lund: Gleerup 1958.

Pia Søltoft

9. C.S. Lewis, K.E. Løgstrup and Kierkegaard on Love’s Erotic Dimension

In this chapter I will argue for the surprising fact that, due to Søren Kierkegaard’s view on love as an intimate connection between need and gift, desire and surplus, he in fact has a far more positive view on love’s immediate and erotic dimension than both C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) and K.E. Løgstrup (1905–81). He thereby places himself much closer to Scandinavian creation theology than the tradition of this field would normally have it. Ever since Anders Nygren (1890–1978) published his study Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderne in 1933, better known as Agape and Eros (1938), it has been a challenge to combine the naturally lived human experiences of love, such as falling-in–love, friendship, and parental love, with the Christian notion of neighborly love. This is a challenge, however, that is often addressed in Scandinavian creation theology. Both Lewis and Løgstrup have, each in their own way, tried to solve this challenge of love by making room for a bridge between our human experiences of love and the Christian notion of love. In contrast, there is a long and ongoing tradition of interpreting Søren Kierkegaard as a thinker who does not allow for such a bridge between the human and the Christian love.1 In what follows I will address the question of Kierkegaard’s notion of love, and argue for a more nuanced view thereof. In order to make this argument I will contrast the ways in which these two very different thinkers, Løgstrup (who is a central figure in Scandinavian creation theology and thinks of himself as a creation-philosopher), and Søren Kierkegaard (most often seen as a theological thinker that prefers revelation to creation), think of love. I will investigate how these two famous Danish thinkers relate to the notion of love as a gift, and to the notion of love as a need. For both Kierkegaard and Løgstrup it is evident that love is a gift given by God and bestowed on a human person. But what about the notion of love as a need? What about love as something that we seek and long for, something which seems to be the very definition of erotic love? Do both thinkers acknowledge this need as a part of the divinely given love? To shed light on these questions I will begin with a short presentation of Lewis’ double view on love, as a need and as a gift, and therein find a systematic tool that will allow us to look deeper into the notion of love expressed by Kierkegaard and Løgstrup. 1 See Gregersen, Chapter 2 in this volume.

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Need-love or gift-love? In his small book, The Four Loves, from 1960, Lewis contrasts four different forms of love: Affection, friendship, eros and charity. In his study he wants to show which of these forms of love that has a resemblance to Christian love. To do that, he develops two ways of describing a love relation: a relation of “Need,” and a relation of “Gift.” A need relation is one in which we love something that we lack, and therefore long for. A relation of gift, in contrast, is a relation in which we love out of a surplus, and want to give our love to somebody else. Lewis’ thoughts are developed as a critical corrective to Nygren’s very sharp differentiation between eros and agape. Den kristna kärlekstanken became an instant systematic success, and it was quickly translated into all the main languages, and in few years the division between eros and agape became the one and only way to think and talk about love. To Nygren eros is a love that desires something. Nygren finds this notion of love very clearly expressed in Plato’s concept of eros. But Nygren argues that this idea of eros-love existed long before Plato, and continues to have a strong impact on the notion of love long after Plato, as eros in the later history of love affiliates with Christian thinking. This impact can be seen, first and foremost, in the theology of Origen, later in Augustine, two thinkers with whom Nygren has a rather tense relationship. Agape, on the other hand, is a strictly Christian form of love. Agape is a love that does not need anything but gives itself away. To Nygren, Christ is the pure incarnation of agape. This means that to Nygren true Christian love is agapelove, a love that loves out of a surplus and demands nothing in return. One of the great contributions of Martin Luther (1483–1546), according to Nygren, was to see this idea of surplus in the notion of the divine love as pure grace. But this division of love in eros and agape also led Nygren to mistrust any kind of love relation that does not strictly resemble the surplus of agape, or that implies a desire, or a lack, such as a need to be loved. Lewis disagreed with this very shap differentiation between gift and need that lies at the bottom of Nygren’s division of eros and agape. To remedy this, Lewis performed an analysis of the four above mentioned kinds of love, to see what is characteristic of the ways that we love. As a tool for this investigation he invents the terms Need-Love and Gift-Love. Lewis’ point of departure from Nygren is the insight that God’s love is solely Gift-Love. For Nygren, to call human love “true” it would have to “look like” God’s love, and therefore be pure “Gift-Love” (using Lewis’ vocabulary). But that leads Lewis to an important question: does this mean that Need-Love is not love at all? This is the core question Lewis tries to answer in his study of the four loves. But from the outset Lewis makes clear that he cannot deny that Need-Love can indeed be a valid form of love. To substantiate his critique of Nygren’s sharp rejection of

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eros-love (as based on need), Lewis goes on to analyze each of the four above mentioned forms of love to show how need and gift work together in most of them. Affection is the kind of love that human beings share with animals. Affection is the kind of love parents show their children, and in a broad sense it is the love that we show people we are familiar with. Friendship is of course the love among friends. Eros to Lewis is not used as the Greek concept is, but represents his way of naming being-in–love, or the kind of love which lovers are “in.” Charity is Lewis’ notion of neighborly love. It must be understood that in the first three forms of human love there is both a need- and a giftmotive present. Only Charity proves itself to be purely a gift. As such, Lewis will not go as far as Nygren in saying that affection, friendship and eros are not “true” forms of love at all. Instead he stresses that the love of a human being will always be both Need-Love and Gift-Love and only God’s love can be purely Gift-Love. This love is revealed in Christ, and subsequently mediated by the Church. But that, of course, creates a very broad gap between the love of God and the immediate love of man. Let’s see what Kierkegaard and Løgstrup have to say to this challenge.

Human love versus divine love? It is almost a tradition in Kierkegaard-research to view Kierkegaard’s notion of love in the rather anachronistic light of Nygren’s differentiation between eros and agape, which seems to have cast its shadow over all later discussion of the phenomenon of love. In this tradition there seems to be a consensus in interpreting Kierkegaard’s view of “true” love as a straighforward agapistic view, while his relation to erotic love is said to be a bit tense, if not outright unsympathetic. In this line of this interpretation, Kierkegaard is most often accused of denying and disowning “natural” love, as he refuses to confess the fundamental importance of erotic love. In what follows I wish to argue against this widely accepted interpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of erotic love with the help of K. E. Løgstrup’s assertions in The Ethical Demand (Løgstrup 1997). One could of course say that it was precisely Løgstrup, with his polemical epilogue to Den etiske fordring (1956) and later in Opgør med Kierkegaard (1968), who paved the way for the above mentioned agapistic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of love. Likewise, Løgstrup could be said to have established the foundations for any later critique of Kierkegaard as being totally oblivious (if not directly against) all our human experiences of love.2 2 To mention some recent interpretations that follow this line we can put forward Troels Nørager in Hjertets længsel. Nørager directly links Kierkegaard’s notion of love in Philosopical Fragments

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Based on the above reading of Lewis, I wish to argue for a more nuanced view of Kierkegaard’s notion of erotic love and point the reader in the direction of both a possible similarity, and also a rather surprising difference between Løgstrup’s and Kierkegaard’s view thereof. This is a difference that does not stem from the problematic relation between natural or erotic love, on the one side, and Christian love on the other. Rather, it lies in the very notion of what the nature of love is. The following discussion will therefore take place as a discussion of the relation between the notion of need, and of gift, in the definition of immediate and erotic love as an unmistakable part of our created existence. Using Lewis’ terms, one might say that there is a theological tradition interpreting Kierkegaard as favouring only Gift-Love, and that he would think of Christian love as solely defined by this aspect of gift. Therefore he would be negatively oriented towards Need-Love since he, according to this tradition, would see erotic love as solely defined by this need, and therefore he is inclined to try to get rid of it in order to make room for Christian love. The question therefore becomes whether erotic love for Kierkegaard should only be seen as Need-Love? And, by extension, whether his notion of Christian love should be understood only in terms of the notion of Gift-Love? When it comes to Løgstrup the questions are the same, because even if Løgstrup, when talking about the immediate, seems to combine our natural experiences of love with Christian love, he seems to be full of doubt as to whether erotic love in itself can be more than a humanly based need that has nothing to do with divine love. In the following discussion I will make use of Works of Love and Kierkegaard’s other upbuilding writings. In the case of Løgstrup I will only make use of his definitions of love in The Ethical Demand.3

with Anders Nygren (Nørager 2003, 47 n. 22). And Nørager also interprets the topic of love in Works of Love as fully agapistic in opposition to any formulation of erotic love (Nørager 2003, 61). In 2007 Jakob Wolf continues this traditional interpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of love with direct reference to Løgstrup in the study Naturlig kærlighed. Kritik af pligtetik og nytteetik (p. 57–69). In A Theology of Love from 2010 Werner G. Jeanrond, who himself argues for a continuity between love and desire, eros and agape, continues the above mentioned agapistic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of love and concludes his chapter on Kierkegaard with the statement that “Kierkegaard and Nygren denounce human eros in love” (2010, 134). 3 All Kierkegaard quotes are from Kierkegaard’s Writings (KW) edited by Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton University Press, 1979–2000. I also give the corresponding references to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS) edited by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, GAD, Copenhagen, 1997–2012. References to the corresponding volume and page number in KWare given in the text in parentheses, followed by the volume and page number in SKS.

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Love as a gift of creation An old proverb tells us that love is older than everything else. Plato has Phaedrus assert the same thing in Symposium, and Kierkegaard is fond of citing both the proverb and Plato.4 But what does it mean to say that love is older than everything else? It could mean that love is older than everything in the sense of “greater” than the person and her experience with love. It could therefore also mean that love per se transcends human experience, and therefore exists before the person exists as an experiencing subject. Such an interpretation points in the direction of a religious anchoring of love in a divine source which both Kierkegaard and Løgstrup would agree to. Kierkegaard again and again repeats the declaration that “God is Love” from the First Epistle of John, and Paul’s assurance that love is greatest in 1 Corinthians 13, which precisely attempts to place love’s source outside of time, prior to any human experience of love and with love. Both Kierkegaard and Løgstrup seem to share such a religious interpretation of love’s source. This shows itself not just in their diligent quotations of John and Paul. Kierkegaard says explicitly in Works of Love that human love is “grounded enigmatically in God’s love.”5 And, so too, the same religious conception of love’s source applies when, in the discourse “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins” from the Three Upbuilding Discourses of 1843, Kierkegaard emphasizes that a human’s love bears a mark of God’s love.6 The divine anchoring makes love larger than human life, if we wish to speak spatially, and prior to human existence, if we wish to speak temporally. Indeed, the latter is the basis for the declaration, which Kierkegaard comes back to again and again, that it was God who loved first.7 4 Kierkegaard introduces the first of the Three Upbuilding Discourses of 1843, “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins,” with the words: “What is it that is older than everything? It is love. What is it that survives everything? It is love” (KW V, 40; SKS 5, 65), here playing upon both the proverb and Phaedrus’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. 5 “Love’s hidden life is in the innermost, unfathomable, and there again in an unfathomable connection with the whole of existence. Just as the still lake has its source deep in the hidden wellspring, which no eye sees, so the source of a person’s love is yet deeper, in God’s love. If no fount was at the bottom, if God was not love, then there would be no still lake, nor would there be human love. Just as the still lake has its source obliquely in the hidden fount, so is a human’s love grounded enigmatically in God’s. Just as the quiet lake invites you to look at it, but through the darkness’ mirror image forbids you to see through it, so love’s enigmatic origin in God forbids you to see its source; when you think you see it, then it is a mirror image that deceives you, as was the source, that which only covers over the deeper source. Just like the ingenious, which precisely in order to hide what it covers looks like the bottom, so that which deceptively looks like the depths of the source only covers over something deeper still” (KW XVI 10; SKS 9, 17 f.). 6 “For this is the secret of earthly love: that it bears a mark of God’s love on it, without which it would remain something ridiculous, or a stale pandering.” (KW V; SKS 5, 83). 7 In Works of Love Kierkegaard states: ”Let a human, humanly speaking, love God in the sincerity of

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But love is a gift for Løgstrup too. And Kierkegaard and Løgstrup agree with respect to the notion that a person is not the source of her own love: “It is God, the Creator, who must implant love in each human being, he who himself is Love” (KW XVI 10; SKS 9, 18). And insofar as God has created the person with love in her foundation, the person is created with the possibility of being able to love by actualizing this fundamental love as love-for-another, together with the possibility of being able to recognize another person’s love as being an expression of the divinely created foundational love. Here, I think, Kierkegaard and Løgstrup are fully in agreement: our natural experiences of love have their source in God’s love. But Kierkegaard describes love in a double way. He describes it as a deeply felt urge to love and be loved. Moreover, he finds this double-oriented need fundamental for the love in each human being and for the love in God or God as love. It is this double movement, the need to love, to give one’s love to somebody else, and the need to be loved, to gain somebody else’s love, that is characteristic of what is often, somewhat misleadingly, called a person’s natural love, understood as the passionate desire and inclination we are immediately driven by when we love. It is misleading to call this form of love “spontaneous” or “natural” if we thereby mean that love comes over us like an instinct. In fact, Løgstrup and Kierkegaard both stress that in the so-called “natural loves,” like falling in love, parental love and friendship, we relate to our love, when we love. Løgstrup has a very precise description of this matter: When we characterize a person’s passion, feeling, affection, or whatever it may be as ‘spontaneous,’ this must not be construed to mean that his relationship to them is unbroken. A person’s passions, feelings, and affections are always shaped by his attitude – or lack of attitude – toward them, however much he may give way to them (Løgstrup 1997, 67).

Kierkegaard has detected the same structure in the phenomenon of “natural loves.” This is why he calls them preferential loves.

Preferential loves Preferential love serves as an umbrella term for all the forms immediate love can assume when it is consciously directed towards another person. Preferential love arises when we immediately direct our fundamental urge to love towards another person: being in love is preferential love. Marital love is preferential love. Friendship is preferential love. And the same applies to parental love, according to Kierkegaard. By contrast, true self-love and the heart, alas, God has nonetheless loved him first, God is an eternity ahead – so far is a human behind” (KW XVI, 100; SKS 9, 106).

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neighborly love, understood as a Christian duty to love everyone, are not preferential love-relations, because none of these forms of love are directed towards one particular other person. In fact, self-love and neighborly-love mutually determine each other and constitute two sides of the inclusive love that is demanded by the commandment to love thy neighbor.8 As such, preferential love is immediate because it rests upon a divinely given urge. But just because it is immediate, this does not mean that it is unconscious or spontaneous, for it is always directed towards one or very few other persons. Preferential love is always directional. And Kierkegaard understands all our preferential loves as divine gifts. When he argues against erotic love and friendship in Works of Love he is challenging our notion of these forms of love as being self-established, i. e. our notion that we ourselves have created our need to love. But Kierkegaard does not argue against being-in love or friendship as such. Preferential loves are not not-loves – but they are always shaped by our attitudes. Let us concentrate on erotic love as being in love. One is not in love with all and everyone, but with only one person at a time, out of all others, but not against all others either. Being in love must be understood as an ancient, biologically encoded, instinctive, intuitive sense, which goes back further than the history of homo sapiens. Kierkegaard describes being in love as an experience that is characterized by something physically palpable and by a radical transformation of the one who is in love. But for Kierkegaard the universal character of being in love must not be sought exclusively in biology, but has its source in the God-given urge to love that lies within the foundations of every person (KW XVI, 149; SKS 9, 175). For Kierkegaard, the nature of all forms of loves is a unity of freedom and necessity. When a person loves, she feels herself free in this necessity, and feels her own individual energy in the love. The urge to love and to be loved (which constitutes the precondition for being in love) is inherent in human nature and, as such, arises from (natural) necessity. No human lacks this unconscious and undefined desire, which indicates its necessity. Kierkegaard further defines love as an intermediate unity between God and humans, and thereby further stresses that love is a fundamental human condition, which has a divine origin. Again, Løgstrup would agree, and this immediately places both Løgstrup and Kierkegaard outside the traditional theological distinction between two types of love: one human, the other divine. Both Løgstrup and Kierkegaard combine the human and the divine, while taking the latter to be the single source of our human ability to feel the urge to love. To Kierkegaard, as to Plato, love is what bridges the human and the divine.

8 Here Kierkegaard’s views are in a clear opposition to those of K.E. Løgstrup, see Jakob Wolf, Chapter 8.

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Love as a human need If one were to ask Paul Tillich (1886–1965) to speak on such matters, his answer would answer that the above mentioned notion of love as a gift resembles an ontology of love. For Tillich, love is just as old as being itself. Love is thereby understood as ontologically anchored. It is an inalienable part of human nature.9 I suppose that Løgstrup would agree with such an ontological description of love. Love lies in the created nature of a human being. Love is a gift. But even though Løgstrup also thinks of our human love-relations as a gift, he finds that we relate to this gift as if it were our own invention. In spite of the fact that natural love has been recieved as a gift and that here more clearly than anywhere else life is seen to be a gift, we nevertheless regard natural love and its deeds as our own achievement. We try to make ourselves masters of our own lives, and we live and reason as through we ourselves had produced our natural love (Løgstrup1997, 132).

Kierkegaard would fully agree with this statement, saying that even if natural love springs from God-given love, we try to master our love by deciding what is loveable in our beloved ones. This is why Kierkegaard calls erotic love and friendship a hidden form of self-love. It is the self in love that wants to decide what is lovable in the other. This is, in fact, the whole background for Kierkegaard’s very harsh critique of erotic love and friendship in Works of Love. There is nothing wrong with love and friendship as such. It is the way we relate to one another, and our attitudes to the other in love and friendship that constitute the problem. If we ourselves try to create the criteria for the other person’s love-ability this ruins the love-relation. Therefore there is nothing wrong with erotic love and friendship per se. Like Løgstrup, Kierkegaard also stresses that erotic love, as a basic urge, has its source in human nature. Løgstrup talks about biology, and Kierkegaard talks about a “the necessity of nature.” We see this when Kierkegaard poses the question: “Where does love come from, from where does it have its origin and its source, where is the place, which for it is the abode from which it proceeds?” And he answers his question with these words: ”This place is hidden or is in the hidden. It is a place in the person’s innermost recesses; love’s life proceeds from this place, for the life proceeds from the heart” (KW XVI, 9; SKS 9, 16 f.). A person’s interiority is thus the source of love’s life, of its expressions. For this reason, we can even speak of love making itself known in a person on a 9 “Love, power, and justice are metaphysically speaking as old as being itself. They precede everything that is, and they cannot be derived from anything that is. They have ontological dignity” (Tillich 1954, 21).

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purely physical level. This is how we get acquainted with love, how we feel it within us. But for Kierkegaard, the love we feel is given to us by God. As such, both Kierkegaard and Løgstrup think of human love as a love that has its origin in divine love. But such a religious anchoring of love’s ontological source in God raises one question: is this love of God only to be thought of as a gift? If creational love is a gift, how is it that our human forms of love (like affection, friendship and infatuation, as Lewis described them) are also defined by a need to be loved? Is our need to be loved not a part of creation then?

Two ways of being in need In Works of Love the Danish word “Trang” appears again and again. The normal translation for this is “an urge” or “a need.” But for Kierkegaard, love is an urge or a need in a double sense. On the one hand, love is a need in the sense that we need somebody to be loved. We need to have love. In this sense love is a lack. But love is also a need in the sense of a surplus: a need to give shape and direction to one’s love. A need to cast one’s love on another person. A longer quote from Works of Love explains the doubleness in this need: How beautiful it is that the same thing that signifies the utmost misery also signifies the greatest riches! Need, to have need, to be a needy person – how reluctant a person is to have this said about him! Yet we are saying the utmost when we say of the poet, ”He has a need to write;” of the orator, ”He has a need to speak;” and of the young woman, ”She has a need to love”. Ah, how rich was even the neediest person who has ever lived, but who still has had love, compared with him, the only real pauper, who went through life and never felt a need for anything! This is precisely the young woman’s greatest riches that she needs the beloved; and this is the devout man’s greatest and his truest riches, that he needs God (KW XVI, 10; SKS 9, 18).

In Works of Love Kierkegaard again and again calls love a need. The motion of love’s inner life is due simply to this need. It is because we need love that we love. We need it in a double sense, that is: we need to be loved and we need to give away our love. But is it only human love that can be described as this kind of need? Nygren, Lewis, and I suppose Løgstrup would say so. God’s love is purely Gift-Love. But this is not where Kierkegaard differs from these thinkers. For, Kierkegaard sees this double-directed need for human love also in God’s love. God is not only the creater of the need to love in every human being, in Christ we see how deeply this double need is grounded also in the God-Man: How deeply the need of [Trang] love is rooted in human nature… So deeply is this need [Trang] rooted in human nature that since the creation of the first human being there has been no change, no new discovery has been made… So deeply is this need

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rooted in human nature, and so essentially does it belong to being human, that even he who was one with the Father and in the communion of love with the Father and the Spirit, he who loved the whole human race, our Lord Jesus Christ, even he felt this need to love and be loved by an individual human being (KW XVI, 134; SKS 9, 155).

So, the need to be loved, the lack that has to be fulfilled by the love of another, is characteristic not only of our human way of loving (affection, friendship and infatuation, as Lewis would have it). It is also characteristic of the love of Christ. In the continuation of the above passage, Kierkegaard stresses that it is due to this need that Christ has to ask Peter three times: “Do you really love me?” Christ, as truly God and truly human, needs to be loved. Yes, he even needs to be convinced that he is loved, this is why he had to ask Peter three times! Hereby Kierkegaard paves the way for a combination of Need-Love and Gift-Love that Nygren and Lewis would not allow for. But would Løgstrup?

Kierkegaard versus Løgstrup As it is well known Løgstrup is not very fond of Kierkegaard’s view on “natural” or “human” love. In The Ethical Demand Løgstrup engages in a discussion about why people tend to use the word ‘responsibility’ rather than the term ‘love,’ and, as if from nowhere, he states: Perhaps people use the term in order to avoid using the word ‘love’ – which would be quite understandable in view of the sentimental overtones that word has received. But perhaps it is also due at least in part to the fact that Kierkegaard has discredited the spontaneous life (Løgstrup 1997, 67).

Strangely, Løgstrup seems more hesitant when it comes to the relation between need and gift. On the basis of his analysis of the concept of love in D. H. Lawrence’s (1885–1939) work, Løgstrup concludes that, in purely sensual relationships, sensuality proves inadequate; it is gratified but not fulfilled. Instead, “Fulfillment is attained through personal integrity in one’s love for another person” (Løgstrup 1997, 30). It becomes clear, thereby, that Løgstrup defines erotic love by the way the lover relates to the beloved: As a need to be fulfilled by the love of the other. For erotic love to constitute love, rather than being merely ”sensual,” it must relate to its object in a special way, namely to the other as more than just a body, but also as a self. And, what does that mean? In the section entitled ‘Eros and Ethos’ in The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup claims, with direct reference to Lawrence, that the purely erotic relationship is one “of fire, not love” (Løgstrup 1997, 69). The difference between love and the purely erotic relationship is a recurrent theme both in Lawrence’s and Løgstrup’s works. But what does it imply that erotic love is “fire, not love”? It

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seems, at the very least, to presuppose a definition of love. That is, of “real” love as a surplus, as a gift that relates to the other as a Self that is given something, whereas erotic love as erotic is built on a fire that represses or even consumes the other as a distinct Self. For Løgstrup, erotic love seems to be based on a need that only takes something away from the other, it needs him or her, but it gives nothing back in return. This seems to point in the direction that Løgstrup, in line with Lewis’ interpretation, considers erotic love to be built exclusively on a need. Not only is the other not seen as a distinct Self in the erotic relation, the lover herself is also a reduced Self. According to Løgstrup a person in a purely erotic relationship does not love with her total self. A part of the person has, so to speak, not become involved. This leads Løgstrup to the conclusion that falling in love is not real love: In a purely erotic relationship a person does not love with his total self. This does not mean that he or she is not a victim of his or her infatuation; people do not fall in love only to some limited degree or with reservations. What it means is rather that a part of the person has, so to speak, not become involved. The infatuation involved in erotic love, however captivating, is enmeshed in a mood that is second hand and has something artificial about it (Løgstrup 1997, 68).

For Løgstrup, falling in love has something artificial about it. This means that the need that is a part of falling in love is not thought of as original or created, but as contrived or invented, and therefore it cannot be thought of as a presupposition for, nor even a part of, Christian love. For Løgstrup, “real” love is love between two whole selves, whereas erotic love seems to aim at and stem from parts of the self. To Løgstrup falling in love is thereby only a relation of human need, not of divine gift. For Kierkegaard, falling in love is based both on a need and on a surplus. And this is why erotic love is also to be thought of as a divine gift. A gift given in creation that can even be helpful when it comes to the fulfilment of the duty to love one’s neighbor. Of course, Kierkegaard does not think that falling in love and loving one’s neighbor are the same kind of love. He writes: “If anyone thinks that by falling in love or by finding a friend a person has learned Christian love, he is in profound error” (KW XVI, 51; SKS 9, 64). But he is quite sure that you can learn from erotic love when it comes to neighborly love: “If someone is in love and in such a way that the poet would say of him, ‘He is really in love’, well then the love commandment, when it is said to him, can be changed a bit and yet say the same thing. The love commandment can say to him: Love your neighbor as you love your beloved” (KW XVI, 51; SKS 9, 64).

Løgstrup disagrees here also, and seems to reject our experiences of erotic love. He argues that the lover in erotic love loves something specific in the other, and that his or her passion therefore is not concerned with the whole self of the beloved. For Kierkegaard, erotic love is a divinely given force within a

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person, a need that already exists before it is directed towards another person. Erotic love is not determined by its object, the beloved, but it determines the lover and rests within him or her both as a need and a gift, before it is directed towards another human being.

Conclusion Both Kierkegaard and Løgstrup agree in underscoring the creational and ontological aspect of love as a gift. They both stress human love’s religious source. But they seem to disagree when it comes to the notion of love as a need and the notion of erotic love. Ironically, it seems that Løgstrup did not think as highly of erotic love as Kierkegaard did, and that Løgstrup therefore is reluctant to see what he calls “purely erotic love” as a divine gift, but rather thinks of it as a human—much too human—urge to create our own emotion of love. In contrast, Kierkegaard’s Christian notion of love is so inspired by Plato that it allows him to think of love both as a gift and as a need, as eros and agape, and to consider both ways of loving created by God. In this way Kierkegaard overcomes the challenge of love. In fact his reflections here might even be said to constitute a sophisticated (albeit not a very widely acknowledged) part of Scandinavian creation theology, at least insofar as it concerns the relation between erotic and Christian love.

Bibliography JEANROND, WERNER G. (2010). ATheology of Love. London & New York: T&T Clark International. KIERKEGAARD, SØREN (1979–2000). Kierkegaard’s Writings (KW). Howard and Edna Hong (eds.). New Jersey : Princeton University Press. KIERKEGAARD, SØREN (1997–2012). Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS). The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre (ed.). Copenhagen: GAD. LEWIS, C.S. (1960). The Four Loves. London: Harper Collins Publishers. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1997). The Ethical Demand. London: University of Nortre Dame Press. NYGREN, ANDERS (1933). Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderne. Stockholm: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonissestyrelsens Bokförlag. NØRAGER, TROELS (2003). Hjertets længsel. Kærlighed og Gud religionsfilosofisk belyst, København: Anis. TILLICH, PAUL (1954). Love, Power, and Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. WOLF, JACOB, (2007). Naturlig kærlighed. Kritik af pligtetik og nytteetik. København: Anis

Elisabeth Gerle

10. Human Rights: Revisiting the Political Program of Scandinavian Creation Theology

Is there a conflict between human rights and Scandinavian creation theology? In this chapter I will argue that there are clashes as well as convergences. While the human rights discourse has increasingly emphasized the concept of rights and expressed itself in the language of law, Scandinavian creation theology emphasizes life as a gift. Theologically this inspiration comes from the Irenaean insistence on bodily life as God-given. Every human being is seen to have a divine relation just by virtue of have been born, being alive, breathing, and receiving life from the Creator (Wingren 1958/1961, 19). This view was an early inspiration for the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren (1910–2000), who claimed that theology is impossible to understand if it does not take creation as its point of departure. All human life, then, is seen as created life and, hence, as given by the Creator. The body lives now. What does this mean? And, what does it mean to live (Wingren 1958/1961, 18)? These questions are, according to him, fundamental. His answer was that all life is received, not only resurrected life, but bodily life, in the here and now. This is, further, something that relates to the lives of all bodies, and not just to the lives of believers. All human beings breathe and eat; they seek refuge and warmth from the outside; and seek from other created beings contact that gives life and protection for weak lives against death (Wingren 1958/1961, 19).1 This is an outlook that is gaining renewed interest (Kristensson Uggla 2016). If Scandinavian creation theology has its point of departure in an understanding of life as given and created, and in need of protection, so does discourse regarding human rights. Behind the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR, there is an implicit interpretation of human beings as having certain rights, given just by being born: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” (UDHR 1948, Art. 1). The language of creation is, however not used in the UDHR, due to attempts to find an interreligious, global acceptance. A comparison with one of its forerunners, the US Declaration of Independence, adopted in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, further clarifies this emphasis on inborn rights:

1 See also Gregersen, Kristensson Uggla, Wyller, Chapter 1; Kristensson Uggla, Chapter 4.

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The later Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted by the National Constituent Assembly in France in August 1789, is a fundamental document of the French Revolution. It shares the same focus on given, that is, natural and unalienable rights, but emphasizes “liberty, property, safety,” as well as “resistance to oppression.”2 While the American declaration focuses on the right to pursue happiness, the French declaration especially mentions the right to resistance against oppression. Already, one sees that there may be a clash between more conservative Lutheran emphases on the need to accept ones position in life as God-given, and not to pursue happiness as such, as well as a deep reluctance to accept resistance to authority. Scandinavian creation theology tries to interpret life phenomenologically, with the help of the Bible and an Evangelical-Lutheran understanding of life, while both declarations from the American and the French revolutions, as well as the early British forerunner (Magna Carta, from 1214), are usually seen as statements of vision rather than of reality. My question is, however, how it might be possible to navigate between Scandinavian creation theology and human rights discourse in relation to contemporary issues. Scandinavian creation theology sees the human being as “a little lower than the angels––to have dominion over the works of thy hands” (The English Bible, KJV 2012), and as “almost a god” (Bibel 2000, Ps. 8:6). Yet the human being is seen as part of creation, as finite, deadly, precarious, and maybe even contingent. In the Hebrew tradition we do find traces of the human described in terms of being like God and angel, but most of all as a human being. In the Greek tradition humans were understood in relation to an original hierarchy. The longer the Creator, according to Plato in Timaios, stirred in the kettle, the more alienated the creatures became from God (Plato 2001). Hence, the angels were most godlike, man more than woman, humans more than beasts. At the bottom you find demons. Within the neo-Platonic, mystic tradition, man is supposed to reverse this alienation, to climb the ladder upwards, to become unified with God, as part of divinization. Hence, the intellect was often valued more than body, spirit more than matter, man more than woman, and so forth. Theologians of Scandinavian creation theology are inspired by the Hebrew tradition to see all of creation as holy and wonderful. That includes matter, 2 “Article I: Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good. Article II: The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression” (From the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789).

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body, and women. This represents an emphasis on the goodness of creation beyond dualisms. For today’s eyes, some earlier interpretations of how JudeoChristian values meet the Hellenistic worldview might be considered a little too dualistic. And yet! The perspective on all human beings is clear : as a god, yet finite. It is an ambiguous view, but even more, it is simul, a dialectical understanding of being “both-and,” at the same time. My chapter circles around this notion of “yet,” or put in more theological terms, on the simul, on contributions and challenges in the reflexive conversation between the discourse of human rights and Scandinavian creation theology. One underlying question is whether our desire is directed towards becoming divine, or fully human. I will argue that there are contributions as well as challenges emerging out of four different C’s: the first being Creation itself; the second, Calling; the third, Contingency ; and, the fourth Continuity.

1. Creation Life is given, continuously. Further, God lets the sun rise on the evil and on the good alike, sending rain on both the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). This is the egalitarian contribution of creation itself. The gifts of God in creation are for all. They are universal. Every human being is created in the image of God, Christian or not, a perspective that was central for N. F.S. Grundtvig (Gregersen 2012, 321). God-like and human at the same time, simultaneously. To leave sin behind in order to become more godlike, to be divinized, is neither possible, nor necessary. The body does not need to be disciplined in order to liberate the mind, as in many ascetic practices (Gerle 2015; Janzen 1995). God as creator relates directly to humans as bodies and minds. Iustificatio, justification, is an immediate gift, just as the glory of the human being is given in creation, as a gift of life, every day, in every moment, and is as essential as breathing. Simul, at the same time, can thus be read as a statement against hierarchies of higher and lower. Coram Deo, in relation to God, we are all equals, regardless of heritage, social position, skin color, or gender. To allow this egalitarian understanding to permeate social relations is an ongoing vocation. It is a calling from creation, and, from human rights discourse. Martin Luther cannot be read as a human rights activist. Human relationships were asymmetrical to him, something he regarded as natural, even good. Yet his conviction that all humans were equal in relation to God, coram Deo, gradually influenced society towards an egalitarian direction. His emphasis on education led to a mass alphabetization for all, regardless of ancestry, parentages, or gender. This is, in my view, an early contribution to democracy, and to human rights. Grundtvig highlighted the glory of the human being, much more strongly

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than Martin Luther. This glory continued beyond the fall. He thus paved the way for a less conservative reading of Luther. Later, Gustaf Wingren emphasized creation as something ongoing, dynamic and present. His way of invoking Luther’s creatio continua was a reaction against a static reading of creation, where so called god-given structures, or orders, were allowed to give divine legitimacy to hierarchies and inequality. Wingren’s way of understanding creation, as something ongoing, always happening now, has a focus on the future (Wingren 1972). To create is to make something new. As Luther said: creare est semper novum facere (WA 1,563; see also Chapter 1). Such a reading created a theological platform for human dignity, recapitulatio, i. e. restoration, multiplicity and a more egalitarian understanding of human beings, something we today connect with human rights. Human rights can thus be read as related to a Scandinavian creation theology that sees humans as ontologically equal, yet different. Scandinavian creation theology does not, however, use the language of human rights. To some degree there is even a hesitance to apply a notion such as rights. Instead, the focus rests on the dignity of human beings, wherein talk about the gift of life in creation is preferred above representing humans as right holders or as the carriers of rights. I would, therefore, argue that Western interpretations of human rights in particular may be challenged today from the perspective of Scandinavian creation theology. Equally, human rights discourse is challenging traditional notions within Scandinavian creation theology. Below, I will mention three different challenges emerging out of Creation, first in relation to philosophy ; second in relation to theology ; and thirdly in relation to law. The first challenge emerging out of creation is a) against an atomism where human beings are seen as merely individuals, and, simultaneously b) against too narrow communities. For Scandinavian creation theology, human beings always live in relationship, be that to other human beings, to the whole of creation, and to God. To consider the human being in isolation is theologically unthinkable here. (S)he always belongs to a greater narrative than her own. Hence, therein one finds a challenge to all philosophy that neglects the relationality of life. For, no man is an island (Donne 1627). Though it can be noted that women have historically had to emphasize their individuality and autonomy, this is not the same thing as atomism. For, even though women have had to resist agapistic interpretations that expected their self-sacrifice, all human beings today need to rethink what rights mean in a context of relatedness, desire and life. The view that “my rights” are the law, or duty of others, is challenged. From a Lutheran perspective, things are the other way around–that others’ rights become my duty, my law ; which is the perspective permeating The Ethical Demand (Løgstrup 1997/1956). As human beings “we are called to take care of what is laid in our hands by the vulenarbility of other persons” (Gregersen, Kristensson Uggla, Wyller, Chapter 1). Luther described the Christian as the

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freest of all, coram Deo, yet (s)he is a slave to her fellow human being, coram hominibus (WA 7, 12–38). He also claimed that all human beings are holy. To be blessed, i. e. saved, is a gift that only God in Christ can give, but all humans are holy, as they are created by God. And, in Two Kinds of Righteousness (1519) Luther draws the distinction between coram Deo and coram mundo (WA 2, 145–152). The notion “right bearer” in the human rights discourse, in contrast, has to do with you demanding your rights from governments and authorities, rather than from your fellow human beings. In relation to authorities and governments I have rights, but I also have responsibilities as a citizen to do my best. When the language of human rights permeates civil society we need to emphasize mutuality even more, as your rights are my duties, and vice versa. All of this is related to what Luther described as the earthly regime, i. e. among human beings. In relation to Scandinavian creation theology the notion of “right bearer” is, however, a challenge to traditional uncritical acceptance of governments and their authority in relation to humans that once were seen as subjects, not as mature citizens (Gerle 2011, 217–219). Creation, emphasizing the universality of all human beings is also b) a challenge to all closed communities. While creation theology has always seen all humans as created in the image of God, the Lutheran tradition from its earliest stages started to trust princes and kings as “custodians of the Church” custos ecclesiae (Lyby 1990, 29). Consequently, national, or ethnic communities have lived in close relationship with the Reformation that became part of nation-building, especially in the Nordic region (Gerle 2007; 2006). Hence, most human rights have been connected to citizenship (Arendt 1959, 273–277). All over Europe nationalistic, sometimes right wing, interpretations of who has the right to belong and to live in a state or not, are growing. Against an enlightenment understanding of citizenship, independent of religion and ethnicity, a contrasting ethnic, sometimes religiously-defined, citizenship is being advocated for. In Scandinavia, the Reformation and some features of creation theology can be (mis)used for divisions between us and them. In Denmark, Grundtvig, the progressive (yet nationalist) Romantic, could therefore be readily seized upon by nationalistic populism. His emphasis on one language, one people, one faith, which were once liberating features of an inclusive pedagogy in Denmark, is today being misused in a Fichtean romanticism, where the people is seen as “the Danish ethnic people” constructed as homogeneous category against the Other, the barbarians. During the19th century democracy developed. It was also the century of nationalism (Vind 2003, 23). Grundtvig read the Biblical story of the tower in Babel as a story about how God founded different peoples, each with their language. One language, one people, and one history were for him part of the created order. A people was a cultural community. It was organically grown like a family or a tribe, and something one is born into (Sanders 2003, 9; Vind

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2003, 22). Sanders claims that this is why contemporary neo-nationalist reactions against a multi-ethnic society are able to draw on Grundtvig (Sanders 2003, 11). Gruntvigianism as a movement 1860–1940 saw the nation, the people and Church as three sides of the same entity (Vind 2003, 15). Danish nationalism, popular culture and Church were thus created around a romantic and religious worldview (Sanders 2003, 9; Vind 2003, 222). In Sweden, national romantic thinkers, such as E.G. Geijer, also connected with the German philosophers Herder and Fichte, who expressed more national-romantic features, rather than to the French Enlightenment tradition, which, in contrast, highlighted universal, human rights, parliamentary democracy and the right to vote for everyone. Within this French tradition, a people is constituted by citizens participating in a national project within a political frame (Sanders 2003, 9; Vind 2003, 222). If one follows all this, the so-called German or French ways of understanding citizenship have powerful implications with respect to the possibilities of belonging. In the German understanding, only those that are born into a people are able to really belong. Grundtvig, however, emphasised personal experience and life. One feature of his pedagogy was his reflections on enlightenment for life. His pedagogy was against merely literal knowledge. Instead he argued in favour of “life understanding.” As such, common people were the source of enlightenment rather than the learned people. This could be an enormous resource for integration today where both such parties can learn from each other. Also, newcomers to a country do have things to contribute. Here, human rights represent a cosmopolitan challenge from creation rather than from covenants with a special people. Such a perspective seems to have been already present long ago, as the Danish constitution from 1849 guaranteed full citizens’ rights to Jews. Religious background or ethnic belonging was not allowed to influence citizenship at the time of the constitution. In a migrating world, national boundaries, and limitations of human rights based on citizenship, need to be rethought anew. The idea of creation challenges structures that have attempted to draw limits for who is deserving of empathy, compassion and rights through geographic borders and constructed rights of citizens over and against universal, human rights. When Europe becomes Fort Europe, we need the challenge of human rights as a calling to compassion and justice for all, if we do not want to passively accept suffering for those who were born in the “wrong places.” Creation theology emphasizing life as a gift represents more than a reminder here. Rather, it is an invitation to humility in relation to a citizenship that is taken for granted. The universality of creation is a call to rethink such structures in new ways, where the state is no longer seen as the sole guarantor of rights. The second challenge emerging out of creation is related to theology, both traditional and contemporary forms. Proponents of Scandinavian creation

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theology, especially Gustaf Wingren, criticized the German theology of orders associated with, say, Brunner and Thielecke, from the early parts of the 20th century. Instead of God-given static orders of creation, he saw creation as dynamic and ongoing. Vocation was seen as living in a tension between the firm and the dynamic, between force and freedom (Gregersen 2012, 324). Another theological challenge that may be even more relevant today is what I, in the book Passionate Embrace: Luther on Love, Body and Sensual Presence, launch as a critique of “churchification” (Gerle 2015, 20, 38, 61,72, 291, 321). Many contemporary theologians, such as the Roman Catholic William Cavanaugh, and theologians associated with radical orthodoxy, want to see church as contrasting with culture and the world (Cavannaugh 2009). However, as Niels Henrik Gregersen points out, Scandinavian creation theology always seeks to maintain the relationship between culture and Christianity (Gregersen 2012, 320). All humans are seen as created in the image of God, Christian or not. They all, therefore, have access to insights of right and wrong, good and evil. The relationship between Church and Society is thus more reflexive, more so than thinking of the Church as contrast. As Gregersen, Kristensson Uggla and Wyller put it in the Introduction to this book: In their Scandinavian context, the expectation for theologians has been, and continues to be, that theology should be able to mediate between the living Christian tradition of the Church and the contemporary culture in all its facets: philosophy, arts, political and natural. Thus, theology is expected to have relevance for both believers and skeptics, the skeptics often designated as ‘cultural Christians’ (Chapter 1, p. XX).

Cast in a mutual relationship between culture and Christianity, theology and Church may learn from the world, just as the world can learn and be challenged by prophetic theology. The third challenge to human rights from creation theology comes in relation to issues of law, inasmuch as it tends to question all forms of legalism. As noted above, the formulations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR from 1948, have their forerunners in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, and in the Declaration of Human and Civil Rights in the French Revolution in 1789. The theological assumption behind all these formulations was that human beings, or men (women were not really addressed), were seen as God’s creation and therefore seen as having certain rights. Critics of human rights have, however, from a completely different perspective, argued that rights do not become real just because they have been formulated in legal documents. Alasdair MacIntyre holds that human rights do not exist at all, that they are like unicorns: artifacts of language. MacIntyre claims that it is false to think that there is something in human nature that gives her rights and concludes that such “human rights” do not exist (MacIntyre 1984, 69). MacIntyre may be

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correct in the sense that the understanding of rights comes with a worldview that understands human beings in a world with meaning and purpose, even as created. And it is here that creation theology can be an inspiration for contemporary human rights discourse. When the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the “inherent dignity,” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” these formulations vibrate with an ontological sensibility that reads humans as being created and equal, even if the notion “created” was excluded in the final version as a diplomatic gesture, or consession, to the atheist Soviet Union (Roth 2007). For Scandinavian creation theology, creation is more basic than the covenant between God and Abraham, which among many exegetes is seen as primary to the Hebrew Scriptures. The notion “covenant” has, however, been easier to integrate into the discourse on human rights, with its emphasis on law. Life as a phenomenon, not primarily based on creation stories in the Bible, nor related to the covenant, is the central point of reference for creation theology. Hence, the Bible is not seen as a book of rules, but better understood as a love letter. Life, consequently, is a gift of love to be shared in solidarity. It does not come into existence through law but through love. Even if law is seen as necessary for the protection of life, law also needs to be grounded in an experience of life as a gift. For creation theology, this is mainly related to the gifts of creation, but not exclusively so. As I have argued elsewhere, law and love: ethics, eros and agape, need to be oscillating and reflexive (Gerle 2015, 262; Gerle 2014, 232). When the dignity of human beings in our contemporary world is being violated in our very own neighborhoods we need to remind ourselves about the holiness of every human creature, expressed as faith in God’s ongoing creation. It is not enough that the language of human rights is codified in legal documents. It needs to be spoken and referred to, to become a “living word,” in order to become concrete and to materialize, to become body, and to be implemented as such. Hence, to use the language of human rights is important. It must not be silenced. Indeed, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo holds that this is the best language we have so far (Vattimo, 1997). But it needs to be spoken and heard as a complement to the living word of gift and forgiveness. I would argue therefore that there is a dialectic relationship between human rights and creation theology also in relation to law.

2. Calling The second C that we shall consider as a challenge from creation theology is the Calling to become human. This is a calling to solidarity with other humans and with the Earth. It is not a calling to become divine, but to become a true human being. The conviction of creation theology–that God is active through

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human hands, lips, voices, ears and eyes–represents a challenge to avoid collapsing body into church, against what might be called “churchification” (Gerle, 2015, 2017). The challenge is to be sensitive to how God works with and through all humans. To illustrate we might look at how Luther connected the Aristotelian notions of stands, oeconomia, politia and ecclesia, to what I termed “spheres of promise,” where God’s new creation against death is constantly taking place (Gerle 2014, 237). These spheres of promise are not static nor even religious at all necessarily. Wingren warned against constructing vocation as a special, spiritual, Christian Beruf (such as, for instance, a nurse or a teacher). While vocation can mean the calling to become a Christian, the earthly work is done for my neighbor. This is no need therein to please God but rather to serve my neighbor. The instantiation of such vocation represents only the prospect of living in relation to other humans, in everyday life. It is to live humanely, as a human. The calling emerges in the tension between the social position given in the estate or in your social status, and with respect to the constantly new situations one finds oneself in (Gregersen 2012, 324). To be a mother or a child, whose calling it is to care, or to eat, and play ; or to be a dentist, farmer or economist; any of these things provides a calling that is right there before you. It is given, but it does not remain the same, for it is constantly changing (Gregersen 2012, 324). Here God is active behind a veil. All humans, Christian or not, serve God in their duties (Wingren 1942, 9, 92; Wingren 1979/1979, 3), in the “spheres of promise.” This is to live between life and death, where God always restores and creates new life.

3. Contingency The third C represents Contingency. As noted above, creation theology observes the truths that humans are finite, fragile, and often incurvatus in se, self-occupied. In a highly narcissistic culture such self-absorption creates a challenge to realism. Finitude and fragility belong to life. Precariousness is part of being human (Butler 2004). Further, this universally precarious quality of human beings cuts right through categories of identity and multicultural maps (Butler 2009, 38). Is the human being also contingent? For creation theology the basic question about contingency is related to awe over the fact that anything exists at all: the whole of creation, animals, plants, and human beings. Yet, creation theologians do not see creation as contingent, or without purpose. Rather, they see creation as part of providence. Eros theologians today would say that God desired creation into being (Janzten 2006, 286). Human beings are created in the image of God, yet they are human and thus neither perfect nor eternal. Human rights can be read as an ethical challenge to

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become more human. Many of the formulations and declarations of human rights are aspirational, something to work towards, goals to aspire to, as a search for the Kingdom to come. In an age of climate change we are also forced to become much more aware of the ecological dimensions of our continued existence. We are not only interdependent as human beings, in relation to a wider, global community, but in relation to everything created. Here the Lutheran responsibility in relation to the world, coram mundo, is a helpful notion to remember and to inspire oneself by.

4. Continuity The fourth C represents Continuity. As one might guess from the reflections above, continuity for Scandinavian creation theology always means renewal. Hence, to be part of a living tradition is to allow critique and new thoughts. Today we have more of a sound skepticism against authorities. This is part of a democratic sensibility. Universal human rights here may represent a healthy challenge against limiting the rights of citizens. But rights should not be understood as being limited to national citizenship. As Hannah Arendt observed, human rights have too often been tied to citizenship and excluded the rights of minorities and the stateless (Arendt 1959, 273–277). In response, contemporary philosophers, such as Seyla Benhabib, have been seeking new ways for formulating the upholding of rights in a migrating world: We can render the distinctions between ‘citizens’ and ‘aliens,’ ‘us’ and ‘them’, fluid and negotiable through democratic iterations. Only then do we move toward a postmetaphysical and postnational conception of cosmopolitan solidarity which increasingly brings all human beings, by virtue of their humanity alone, under the net of universal rights, while chipping away at the exclusionary privileges of membership (Benhabib 2004, 21).

For theologians this is a prophetic cry against human passivity in relation to the suffering of others. “You must not kill.” For Levinas this was the message from the face of the Other. It was said in a German context, as a Jew, demanding that Christians and others respect the Other, that they not kill. This demand is stronger now than ever, and one hears a cry from Jews, Muslims, and Romani people in our neighborhood: Do not kill! While the face of the Other in ethics tends to be abstract, almost fetishisic, we need to see the Other as concrete: as my sister, as my brother. Such living ethics, as more basic than philosophy, is not far from creation theology where the ethical demand of the Other, as K. E. Løgstrup claims, is given in life and living itself (Løgstrup, 1997).

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Conclusion Life is relational: neither atomistic, nor only related to your own ethnic or religious community ; nor is it purely rational, as perceived in some particular philosophy. These are all insights central to Scandinavian creation theology. While, for many contemporary theologians, incarnation is used to argue for church in contrast to culture, creation theology sees incarnation as an opening towards culture, God, and humanity. The goal is thus not so much to become divine, but rather to restore and expand the human. From Irenaeus comes a vision for this world as a world of goodness, healing, and growth. This is a vision that is today deeply connected to the discourse of human rights.

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11. The Theology of the Unchangeable Gender and the Challenge from Scandinavian Creation Theology

1. Introduction: Gender theologies and cultural change During the past 100 years, gender-related issues have been heavily debated in Danish theology.1 In the beginning of the 19th century, the marriage ritual was discussed because of its commandment that the woman must submit to her husband (expressed with a quotation from Eph 5:22–24). From the beginning of the 19th century until the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, the ordination of women (passed in Denmark in 1947) was a talking point. And, more recently, from the 1970s up to the present a pressing subject has been same-sex marriages (passed in Denmark in 2012). All of the theological debates regarding these issues relate to cultural transformations of previously dominating views on gender.2 Views on women changed in favor of an increasing equality between man and woman, and of women’s possibilities for education, and access to public offices. Views on homosexuality changed in favor of cultural tolerance and public acceptance of homosexuality and samesex couples. Accordingly, a huge number of theological texts not only discuss what gender is, theologically speaking, but also if the traditional theological views on gender can be changed in relation to new cultural understandings of gender. In the theological text material very often the answer is ‘no.’3 The view is that theology cannot learn from culture or be inspired by cultural changes to 1 The chapter is based on my Ph.D. dissertation (Præstholm 2014) which involved the examination of a large number of theological texts from the past 100 years of Danish church history. This chapter presents some of the findings and constructive theological suggestions presented in my dissertation. 2 I understand gender and sexuality as interrelated concepts inasmuch as sexuality, or sexual desire, is traditionally seen as an important parameter for measuring whether a human being is “doing gender” in the right way. Many of the theological texts I have looked into represent a theological heteronormative “intelligible gender” category, to use the term of Judith Butler (Butler 1999, 23), meaning that sex, gender and sexual desire should be connected in “the right way” to be theologically legitimate. This is why both the ordination of women for instance (concerning sex and gender) and church rituals for same-sex couples (concerning sexual desire) have the power to raise questions for the theological heteronormativity. 3 This is not the only gender theology represented in Danish theology from the past 100 years. Other texts argue for a transformation of the Christian view on gender. These texts and the theological method for change are the topic of my article “Human in the Flesh. Gendered Anthropology between Theology and Culture” (Præstholm 2016).

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change its own gender concepts. In the following, I present this type of gender theology as a theology of the unchangeable gender, and put forward its fundamental arguments against change. On the way, I will briefly touch upon some of the weaknesses of the position, which become clear when taking an historical approach. My main criticism, however, of this historically widespread position will be systematic, with a strong inspiration from Scandinavian creation theology (SCT).4 My aim is to answer the following question from a SCT-perspective: is it legitimate for theology to include or to be inspired by new cultural understandings of gender and sexuality? Can human experience of the gendered aspects of human life give way to new theological insights? I will point to some elements of an SCT-inspired Lutheran theology, which can be used to challenge the theology of the unchangeable gender and its insistence on “the traditional” Christian understanding of gender and sexuality. I hope thereby to contribute constructively to a dynamic theological gendered anthropology which is able to include cultural insights about gender, and which may therefore enable inclusion in theology of traditionally left out gender-identities.

2. A theology of the unchangeable gender The theology of the unchangeable gender has played a central part in the theological rejection of a transformation of the theological understanding of gender in several cases over time, and from a historical approach, it becomes clear that the same three arguments are activated repeatedly as the answer to various new gender-related challenges coming from cultural development. For instance, these same arguments are used to found both the theological ‘no’ to the ordination of women as well as the theological ‘no’ to church rituals for same-sex couples. The sources of these arguments are as follows: a) the Bible and biblical social ethics; b) the theology of the orders of creation; and, c) the thesis that change equals decay. The Bible At the core of this position stands the notion that the biblical social-ethical regulations of gender should also regulate gender and sexuality in the present time.5 Thus, as could be seen around 1900, biblical quotations were used to 4 In particular I refer to, and make use of, Regin Prenter’s readings of Luther. On Regin Prenter’s contribution to Scandinavian creation theology, see Christine Svinth-Værge Plder’s chapter in this book “Regin Prenter and Scandinavian Creation Theology”. 5 The biblical social-ethics referred to is patriarchal and heterosexual, and constructed by certain selected biblical texts such as Gen 2:18–24, Gen 3:16, Eph 5:22, 1 Cor 14:34 and 1 Tim 2:11–15.

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argue against the new ideal of equality between man and wife, to argue in favor of women’s subordination to their husbands in marriage, and of their lack of full democratic citizenship. Within the first half of the 20th century, biblical quotations were used against the growing inclusion of women in public life and especially against the ordination of women. In these discussions, it is very often claimed, that taking leave of biblical social-ethics means a fundamental break with the normativity of the Bible as such (Præstholm 2014, 140–144).6 Much the same goes for the discussion about church rituals for same-sex couples where biblical quotations about the creation of heterosexual man and woman, the institution of marriage and sinful homosexuality play a central part. Thus, it is a common central feature of this gender theology that biblical social-ethics can be, and must be, used as a fence against theological change in the understanding of gender and sexuality, because what the Bible says about gender is always normative. From a historical perspective though, it becomes clear that what is referred to as “the” biblical stance about gender is not always the same. Rather, it seems that context plays a part in defining which particular aspects of biblical gender-related social-ethics should be followed. In the current Danish theological debate therefore it is possible to see how supporters of women’s ordination, in their emphasis of the idea that the traditional biblical understanding of gender is not normative for today’s Christians, may at the same time reject church rituals for same-sex couples based on the argument that the biblical understanding of sexuality is indeed.7 Here the eternally normative biblical stance regarding gender has been reduced to a concern about sexuality only, and the quotations about the subordination and silence of women are seen as applicable only for biblical times (Præstholm 2014, 146–164). The orders of creation The second argument connects closely to the first and concerns the so-called ‘theology of the orders of creation.’ This type of theology, which is basically a This understanding of the gender-regulating biblical social-ethics had become the dominating understanding in Danish theology after the Reformation (cf. Præstholm 2016). 6 In the official journal of the Danish Pastor’s Association, Præsteforeningens Blad, the ordination of women was much debated in 1946. For instance, Chr. Bartholdy from Inner Mission stated that the ordination of women would make the entire biblical testimony a lie (1946, 1018), and the editor of Præsteforeningens Blad, Poul Nedergaard, wrote that if the biblical statements concerning women (e. g. 1 Tim 2:11 and 1 Cor 14:34) are not treated as normative, the entire Bible might as well be thrown away (1946, 1019). Several writers emphasize contemporary obedience to biblical social-ethics as the necessary consequence of the Lutheran Sola Scriptura. 7 One of the reasons why “the” biblical stance is reduced to concern only sexuality, while the other biblical parameters of a traditional theological intelligible gender are left out, is probably the success of women’s ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark (Præstholm 2014, 167).

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way of thinking about the given conditions for human life, developed in Germany from the late 1800s and was specifically influential between World Wars I and II (Præstholm 2014, 129). Its point of departure is Luther’s understanding of society and the three hierarchies instituted by God: Church, State and oeconomia, the household (Præstholm, 2014, 130). To Luther, oeconomia is a broad term including marriage, the relationship between man and wife, and sexuality, but also the upbringing of children, education, food production and trading (Bayer 2003, 112, 114, 129).8 Luther’s comprehension of the sexes is founded in the Bible and in his positive understanding of God’s vocations in everyday life.9 God created man and woman and gave each of them his or her specific nature in order that they should fulfill their specific tasks or callings in the world. In short, man is rational and physically stronger, and therefore he must lead and be in charge in society and Church, whereas the woman’s vocation is to give birth, to bring up children, and to help her husband. While man and wife are equal in the relationship to God (coram Deo), it is God’s will that man and wife are not equal in the worldly life (coram hominibus) (Præstholm 2014, 59–61; Pedersen 2010). In Denmark, Luther’s teachings about the gendered vocations and the notion of the gendered order of creation, found its way into the theological discussion about the ordination of women. Texts (written by both men and women) argue that God gave the woman a specific nature, and specific characteristics, and childbirth, as well as home life as her special vocation. By nature, we are told, women are sensitive and caring, and these characteristics are not fitting for the teacher and leader of a congregation. As such, a woman as a pastor would be rebellion against God’s order, an unnatural thing. The eternal gendered order instituted by God should not be transgressed. Also in the discussion about church rituals for same-sex couples there are numerous references to a gendered order of creation.10 Here God’s will regarding the sexes is heterosexual marriage. Heterosexuality is part of the God-made, natural gender identity, and heterosexual marriage is the purpose of human life. In this view, homosexuality is a sin, it is unnatural, and it is in opposition to the way God wanted the world to be. It is against God’s order. The wish for church rituals for same sex-couples is seen as a result of the way 8 In the much later use of this theology by the theology of the unchangeable gender, however, oeconomia is reduced to concern only marriage, heterosexuality and the relationship between man and wife. 9 As Lyndal Roper points out (Roper 1994, 18–19; 80), Luther’s refusal of celibacy and his rehabilitation of marriage called for a positive definition of the woman’s call (in opposition to a traditional negative identification of woman with biblical Eve). This call was tied closely to oeconomia. 10 For instance, Jesper Høgenhaven writes against church rituals for same-sex couples using the argument that it is not possible to remove the teaching about the order of creation and its focus on the ordered marriage between man and woman from Lutheran theology and still be Lutheran (cf. Præstholm 2014, 156–157). God’s order is heterosexual and should be kept that way.

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in which the godless, autonomous human being revolts against the conditions given and ordered by God (Præstholm 2014, 102–115; 155–159). A historical approach makes it possible to notice that the content of the concept of the unchangeable gendered order is not the same over time. When “the gendered order of creation” is used by contemporary supporters of women’s ordination as an argument against a church ritual for same-sex couples, the concept of the order differs from the concept used in the discussion about the ordination of women. The binary understanding of sex and the idea, that heterosexual desire follows from biology are still emphasized, but the stress earlier put on gender (gender-specific vocations and characteristics) are absent in the present use. The understanding of what is “natural” has obviously changed, and the historical perspective shows that it is quite problematic to refer to the concept of God’s unchangeable, everlasting gendered order, since “the unchangeable order” actually does change in relation to context.11 Change is decay The third argument claims that theology, if it changes the understanding of gender and sexuality in relationship to cultural change, is “bowing to the Zeitgeist,” is genuflecting to the spirit of the time, to culture. Culture is seen here as the opposite of God, as something purely evil, sinful or godless, as something made up by rebellious and autonomous human beings. Therefore, from this theological position it is unthinkable that theology should learn from culture. On the contrary, theology must reject human experience of the gendered aspects of human life and the new possibilities that these experiences might bring about. Integrating such changes will only make theology less Christian and turn it into culture. Only by maintaining traditional gendered anthropology Christianity is true to itself.12

11 I have presented and criticized this interesting historical transformation of the concept of an eternal gendered order thoroughly in my Ph.D. dissertation (Præstholm 2014). 12 For instance, the theologian Tage Lunn states in Præsteforeningens blad that only men can be pastors, and that the Bible’s clear words on this should not be dismissed just because “times have changed” (1946, 1067). On the same subject matter, the theologian Ernst Kyhn sarcastically derides “the modern attitude” which should not gain influence on church matters (1946, 228). In the debate on same-sex marriages, the theologian Katrine Winkel Holm criticizes what she describes as cultural relativism. For her, the Zeitgeist is in radical opposition to God’s orders and is incapable of understanding the world as created. Therefore theology should not integrate cultural understandings of human existence (cf. Præstholm 2014, 161–163).

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3. Challenges from a SCT-inspired theology In my view, this gender theology and its three central arguments may be challenged by a Lutheran SCT-perspective. In the following, based on Regin Prenter’s readings of Luther,13 I will present some of the theological elements that I find useful, not only as critical remarks, but also as a supportive basis for the kind of gender theology which considers the productive link between theology and culture, and the cultural gathering of human experiences important (and in some regards even necessary).14 Before doing so, it seems appropriate to provide a brief comment on the disagreement between SCTrepresentatives concerning the ordination of women. Whereas both K.E. Løgstrup and Gustaf Wingren supported the ordination of women (and in Wingren’s case even made the fight for female clergy a central theological point (Kristensson Uggla 2016, 310–325), Regin Prenter developed a more and more conservative opposition (Præstholm 2014, 137–139). This may reflect an ambiguity in Prenter’s thinking, since nothing in his Lutheran-Grundtvigian theology prompts such a development. On the contrary, as I will show here, Prenter’s SCT-theology stresses the need for culture-related theological change and a contextual approach to biblical social-ethics.

Scripture, gospel and the law of love The widespread insistence on a present day normativity of gendered biblical social-ethics must be challenged by the basic distinction between law and gospel: To Luther the Bible is the word of God as such because the Bible bears witness to Christ. Luther underlines that the Bible must be read straightforwardly, but this means to read it in the Spirit who testifies to the work of Christ. In Regin Prenter’s words: “it is really only as gospel, that Scripture may rightly be called the word of God” (Prenter 1944, 128–129). Sola Scriptura therefore should never be separated from Solus Christus, Sola Gratia and Sola Fide (cf. Prenter 1967, 55). Christ himself and the Gospel–the good, glad and comforting news about God’s love for us–in Luther’s own words (Luther 1521/22 (WA 10, I), 11–12) is the norm of Scripture. This does not imply, however, that the law is unimportant, but it does call for the distinction between various meanings or uses of the law. Regin Prenter writes that every human being experiences the law through his or her ordinary 13 Translations of quotations from Spiritus Creator are mine, whereas I quote from and refer to Theodor I. Jensen’s English translation of Skabelse og genløsning (Creation and Redemption) from 1967. 14 Several of these elements are mentioned as central aspects of Scandinavian creation theology in Chapter 1.

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life (“the natural experience of the law”) (Prenter 1967, 102). This law is identical with the Double Commandment of Love or The Golden Rule–it is a law of love. God demands that human beings should love their neighbor with undivided love from a free and joyous heart. This law is termed “the natural law” (Prenter 1967, 106; 203). This fundamental law exposes the sinful human being to itself and leads it to Christ (the theological use of the law). But God’s natural law also means something to civil, human life since society should be organized in ways which promote righteousness and the wellbeing of the neighbor. How this is done though, cannot be identified in timeless abstracts. It must take place in a “productive” manner in relation to time and place.15 Thus, the law of God is eternal, but the expressions of the law are always contextual. Regin Prenter combines all of this in his critique of the a-historical understanding of ‘the orders of creation’: The twofold commandment of love expresses that which is the meaning of all the commandments; it expresses the structure of all ethics […] the very order of creation itself […] The love commandment is therefore “the natural law,” the law of creation, in human existence. The concrete content of this commandment, that through which it is to be actualized in individual situations, cannot be expressed once for all in terms of abstract, universal rules […]. The realization of the law is therefore tied up with definite orders and situations over which the Creator alone is Lord: family, nation, state, vocation, work. It is within these definite orders and situations that the encounter between the Creator and the creation and between man and his fellow creatures take place. These orders–or covenants […] –are, however, not timeless, unchangeable, divinely sanctioned institutions, as has often been thought in modern German Lutheran theology with its so-called “orders of creation.” On the contrary, they are historical orders … which the Creator […] causes to develop as part of the forward movement of history… they are not metaphysical necessities, but historical facts. As human covenants, that is, as orders voluntarily structured by men and subject to historical development, the orders of creation are the framework within which the Creator causes his law […] to become concrete (Prenter 1967, 202–203).

Clearly, this quote sets forth several questions, for instance: what is the precise definition of “vocation” versus “order,” “situation,” “framework” or “covenant”? How Grundtvigian is Prenter here in his understanding of historical progression? Certainly, his focus on the necessity of historical changeability and contextualization in combination with the everlasting commandment to 15 Luther is very well aware of the significance of contextualization when it comes to the concrete manifestations of the natural law. Due to the context, there are differences in the legislations of different countries and, due to context, Christians need to be aware that the law of Moses is a law for the Jews (cf. Luther 1515; WA 18, 81).

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love is quite clear. This understanding opens to a much more historical and dynamic understanding of the structures in which human beings live, and it calls for a critical examination of the widespread highlighting of the metaphysical uniqueness of heterosexual marriage in contemporary theology. Moreover, this understanding of the law also implies a break with the perception of biblical social-ethics as being contemporary-normative per se. Referring to the law of Moses, and to the apostolic admonitions, Prenter writes: “They are valid, not directly but in the indirect sense that they are examples of historically conditioned embodiments of the eternally valid love commandment which must be made incarnate by us today in our own particular situation” (Prenter 1967, p 112). That is the task: not to insist on keeping every social-ethical commandment in the Bible, but to incarnate the love commandment under new circumstances. Thus, with inspiration from Prenter, it is indeed possible for Lutheran theology to understand the worldly orders and norms, as well as the interhuman concrete enacting of the law, in a cultural-historical perspective which includes contextualization and change. When it comes to gendered socialethics, change is not necessarily the same as decay. To the contrary : change and context-sensibility are very much needed because biblical social-ethics are not normative for all times, and because the law of love needs a context in order to be concretely expressed. This is a central challenge from Scandinavian creation theology to the widespread theology of the unchangeable gender. Trinitarian creation theology Furthermore, Scandinavian creation theology makes it possible to challenge the negative understanding of culture, which lies behind the idea of a “genuflection to the spirit of the time.” The precondition for the fear of, and the strong rejection of, theological change in the view of gendered social-ethics represented by the theology of the unchangeable gender involves a theological conviction that nothing good can arise from the world, from human beings and culture. Culture is comprehended as something, which is entirely in opposition to God. From a Lutheran perspective, this is certainly true when it comes to matters of salvation, but the question in this context has to be whether it is also true when it comes to human life. Based on insights from Scandinavian creation theology, I suggest that a Lutheran Trinitarian theology of creation can and should be emphasized as a corrective to an unambiguous negative comprehension of culture, cultural change and human agency. In his Spiritus Creator Prenter states that there has been a tendency to overlook or ignore the fact that Luther always thinks in Trinitarian terms about creation (Prenter 1944, 223) (something Oswald Bayer points to much later in his book on Luther’s theology, cf. Bayer 2003, 93). As a result of this, Lutheran theology has undervalued the work of the Spirit in the world. The

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region of the Spirit has been reduced to the Church, and its work reduced to creating faith in Christ. But God’s creation of the world is creatio continua, God creates and sustains the world every minute and this also is the work of the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit is in the world.16 Moreover, Prenter emphasizes that human beings also participate in God’s creatio continua. He refers to Luther’s image of humans as larvae Dei, God’s masks, or of human beings as “pipelines” for God’s love and goodness (Prenter 1967, 204). But Prenter also seems to stress the creative activity of human beings when he uses the image of the human being as God’s co-worker (Prenter 1967, 203–204). Despite human sinfulness, God makes human beings work with him in the construction of society and culture, the framework for human life. In Prenter’s words, what human beings do by the law of God is good (Prenter 1967, 204). As the servant or co-worker of God, the sinful human being can do good things for civil life.17 Perspectives like this from Trinitarian creation theology do not establish a new coherent, unproblematic cultural theology, but they do provide a necessary challenge against holding a too negative understanding of culture and human agency in Lutheran theology generally, and specifically with respect to Lutheran gender theology.

4. Conclusion That it is possible to take a positive view of culture and cultural change does not imply by any means that one should take a completely uncritical approach to culture. A description of the relationship between theology and culture inspired by Scandinavian creation theology does not consist in refusing cultural pessimism in favor of unreflective cultural optimism. However, such a description does make it reasonable to underline that Lutheran theology should not define cultural change as godless, or against God’s will for creation per se. Moreover, if theology changes its view on gender and sexuality related to cultural changes, this should not necessarily be viewed as a sign of theological decline. Culturally extracted experiences of the gendered aspects of human life may very well be relevant for the theological understanding of 16 Luther even claims that the natural law is placed in the hearts of every human being–by the Holy Spirit (Luther 1519, 580). 17 The human being’s capacity for doing good things for the worldly life has to do with reason. In his Excursus on theological anthropology (not part of the English translation), Prenter is very clear in emphasizing that Luther is no anti-rationalist, on the contrary in Luther’s understanding, reason–which is not lost after the fall–was given to the human being as a homo politicus (Prenter 1967 (1951–1953), 300–301). This point has been underlined much later by Oswald Bayer who states that in mainstream theology Luther is thought of as a despiser of reason (Bayer 2003, 146–147). This is not the case with Regin Prenter.

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created and sustained human life, and they may lead to new forms and expressions of the Church. A Lutheran theology cannot end its encounter with culture once and for all by referring to biblical social-ethics or to the orders of creation. Instead, it has to engage continuously in the relationship based on the understanding of God’s law as a law of love.

Bibliography BAYER, O. (2003). Martin Luthers Theologie. Eine Vergegenwärtigung. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. BUTLER, J. (1999 [1990]). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. KRISTENSSON UGGLA, B. (2016). Becoming human again. The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. LUTHER, M. (1519). In epistolam Pauli ad Galatas M Lutheri. WA 2, 436–618. LUTHER, M. (1521/22). Ein klein Unterricht, was man in den Evangeliis suchen und gewarten soll. WA 10/I, 8–18. LUTHER, M. (1525). Wieder den himmlischen Profeten. WA 18, 37–241. PEDERSEN, E. M. W. (2010). “A Man Caught Between Bad Anthropology and Good Theology?,” Dialog. A Journal of Theology vol. 49, no. 3, 190–200. PRENTER, R. (1944). Spiritus Creator. Studier i Luthers Theologi. Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget. PRENTER, R. (1967 [1951–1953]). Skabelse og genløsning. Dogmatik. København: Gads Forlag. PRENTER, R. (1967). Creation and Redemption. Trans. Theodor I. Jensen. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. PRÆSTHOLM, B.H. (2014). “Kønfrontation. Køn, kultur og forandring i nyere dansk teologi,” Ph.D.-dissertation. Aarhus: Aarhus University. PRÆSTHOLM, B.H. (2016). “Human in the Flesh. Gendered Anthropology between Theology and Culture,” in E.M. Becker, J. Dietrich & B.K. Holm (eds.), “What is human?” Theological Encounters with Anthropology. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 293–309. ROPER, L. (1994). Oedipus and the Devil. Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe. London, New York: Routledge.

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12. Universal and Particular : Creation Theology and Ecclesiology in a Fragmented World

A contemporary way of positioning the Church relative to the world can be found in the booklet The Nature and Mission of the Church, published by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches in 2005. The text was meant as a process document on ecclesiology, and was distributed to the member churches for further reflection and comment. In this document, a very commendable responsibility for the world is expressed, in temporal as well as in spiritual matters, and this responsibility is linked to God’s intention for the world. All the same, a quite striking aspect of the document is the distance across which the church is called upon to relate to the world, as if there existed no bonds, no familiarity between church and world, only the calls to evangelize and to mend what is deemed wrong in the world. The boundary presented between church and world is sharp and has no overlaps, wherein the world is theologically indeterminate and there is no worldliness about the church. The two strike the reader as simply unrelated. In this way of situating the church in the world, there are similarities with the early pious pioneers on the US prairie: there they were in a foreign and unknown land, feeling called upon to conquer it, to till the soil, and, according to their own God-given standards, to civilize its primitive inhabitants. In the WCC document, this attitude to the world corresponds to the very scant presence of creation theology. In one short paragraph there is to be found a condensed mention of God’s creation (paragraph 25), albeit only of humanity. Otherwise, when referring to “reality,” the document makes occasional use of conventional phrases like “the created world,” or simply “creation” – but without thereby qualifying or adding any meaning to “reality” or to “the world.” This being said, the creativity of God is quite frequently mentioned with reference to the work of the Spirit in the church, i. e. the church understood as creatura verbi. With this nigh on exclusive channelling of God’s creativity into the church, the professed belief in God the creator of heaven and earth becomes strangely inconsequential. It does not qualify the world in which the church is called to serve as God’s world. And, it has no identifiable impact on how the church is to understand herself in her dealings with the world. One can hardly avoid the conclusion that the creation theology confessed in the WCC document has no meaning beyond that which is believed to happen within the church. The widespread Scandinavian emphasis on creation theology prompts the

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verdict that only a robust and operative theology of creation could have rescued the WWC document from the danger of a certain sectarianism. For, if the world is not valued as created by God with a dignity of its own, there is little to prevent the church from falling prey to an oscillation between quietism and attempts at imposing her own moral point of view on the external world.

1. Church and universal humanity in Henri de Lubac Certainly, ecclesiologically relevant theologies of creation exist also outside of Scandinavia, offering various remedies against parochial near-sightedness. And, also, leading to a variety of distinctly different ecclesiologies. A non-Scandinavian instance of particular interest here is the ecclesiology of the reform-Catholic Henri de Lubac.1 Although seldom noted, de Lubac was, like Grundtvig and Wingren, strongly influenced by Irenaeus and his theology of recapitulatio. As with the Scandinavian “Irenaeans,” de Lubac not only emphasised the theology of creation, but insisted on a positive relationship between creation and salvation. Three themes in particular highlight de Lubac’s way of understanding this relationship. The first concerns the dignitas of humans as created, the second the destinatio humans are created for, and the third the unitas of humanity. As to the first: the unsurpassable dignity which one is accorded in baptism, presupposes and ennobles one’s natural dignity, i. e. the dignity which comes with being born/created (De Lubac 1988, 25). As regards the second theme: man is born with a destiny which he or she is meant to reach, just as an infant is “destined” to grow into full adulthood. Sin has disturbed this growth, but not invalidated its aim, and it is this natural destiny which is attained in recapitulatio. And as to the third: humanity is not created as a set of isolated individuals, but as a unity, a unity whose essential attributes are the common dignitas and destinatio. What makes de Lubac interesting in this context, and in certain respects different from most Scandinavian theology, is the way in which he brings this to bear on ecclesiology. In effect he lets his theology of creation define his understanding of the catholicity of the church. Because humanity is created as one, the church, for which humanity is created, must also be one. To de Lubac this means, on the one hand, that a certain “churchiness” belongs to the hidden nature of humanity, and, on the other hand, that the one universal humanity somehow inheres in the invisible nature of the Church. For the Church this means that when she arrives in a new place and meets a new 1 The following is based on de Lubac (1988). In Scandinavia, de Lubac’s ecclesiology has been thoroughly investigated in Bexell (1997). For a general introduction to de Lubac, see Grummett (2007).

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people, what she comes to is not foreign, but her own, just like Logos at the incarnation came to his own. This does not, however, warrant labeling de Lubac as a folk-church theologian. His theology entails a humanity-church, rather than a folk-church. But in this, his thought is strikingly different from the WCC document. For, he unabashedly claims that it belongs to the nature of the Church to be co-extensive with humanity as a whole. An important proviso here is de Lubac’s insistence that the Catholic, humanity-comprising nature of the Church is an invisible mystery, and not fully actualized in the realm of the visible. As the actual size of the Church is thus smaller than her nature, reflection on the relationship between the invisible nature of the Church and the more limited reach of the actual Church becomes necessary. Essential to de Lubac in this respect is his insight that the universal nature of the Church, which is based on the natural unitas, dignitas and destinatio of humanity, is not annulled, and cannot be annulled by limited membership, not even by massive apostasy (De Lubac 1988, 49). In a mysterious way, the Church still comprises all. In this respect there is a kind of independence between the humble actuality of the Church and her grand invisible nature. This, however, is balanced by the doctrine of the mysterious presence of the invisible Catholic Church in the empirical. De Lubac was opposed to any talk of an invisible church, there is no church unless it is visible. As such, invisibility applies to an aspect of her nature. And here, the idea of unitas again comes to the fore. The one Catholic Church, with her invisible traits, is present in one empirical Church. So, there is a distinctly monopolizing tendency in de Lubac here. Only in the Roman-Catholic Church, with its universal and unitary organisation, is the invisible catholicity of Church fully present, albeit in an invisible way (cf. Lumen Gentium, 8). The ecumenical challenges this entails are considerable and well known. Since the Roman-Catholic Church claims exclusive rights to the hidden catholicity of the Church in its fullness, other churches are seen as more or less deficient.2 This surfaces as a peculiar kind of asymmetry in dialogues between other churches and the Roman-Catholic Church. There can be no mutual recognition of equality between the parties. While this is an important question in its own right, here it serves primarily as a stepping stone to an even more wide-ranging complex of problems. Given that the Church understands herself as a humanity-church, how are we to conceive of the relationship between the actual church(es) with her (their) limited membership and the actual totality of humankind? With what right and in which way can a church claim for herself a nature which includes all – possibly with the additional claim of being the only entity to comprise all? With what self-understanding and with what sort of ambitions can she partake in negotiating “the common good” with other groups? What sort of recognition of the rights and interests of those who do not belong to (and 2 See Unitas Redintegratio 3, and Dominus Iesus 17.

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refuse to be spoken for by) any church, can the Church grant or does the Church owe? In short: in what sense is humanity in its universality included in the Church, and in what sense not? A universalising, “Catholic,” self-understanding does not in itself generate conflict with others. Possible problems stem instead from the way in which such a claimed universality is linked to an actual church, and they will be equally serious relative to the humanity of the world as much as to other churches. The linkage opted for by de Lubac and Vatican II, a high level of integration between invisible universality and one actual Church, is universalism on a particular basis, and entails considerable potential for conflict.

2. From humanity to folk – de Lubac and Scandinavian theology In Scandinavian folk-church theology one finds an ecclesial duality akin to that found in de Lubac, i. e. the duality between a widely inclusive nature and a limited actual reality. But where de Lubac relates the Church to humanity, the Scandinavians are more concerned with the relationship between the church and entities like a specific people, or a local community. In Gustaf Wingren, this preference for the local, or national, is combined with an explicit criticism of ecclesial universalism, in short of “Constantinianism” (Wingren 1981, 178 f; 1979, 147 f). Wingren argues that the imperially-based universalism of antiquity by necessity led to uniformity. The diversity which had characterized the early church was then forcefully brought to an end. Wingren, claiming that the then new Constantinian universalism would never have accepted four gospels, and implying that we are still under the spell of uniform universalism, then came to see his objective as the recovery of the acceptance of diversity typical of the early church (Wingren 1979, 154 f.). On the same grounds, he also criticised ecumenism, which was aimed at reaching agreement between denominations (Wingren 1986, 121–127). This cannot be taken to mean a rejection of all kinds of universalism, however. To Wingren, true universalism means unlimited diversity, and is thus the opposite of uniformity. In his view, the duality between inclusive nature and limited reality repeats itself on the local or national level, and is of greater practical interest there than on the global. This is evident from his praising the idea of organizing the church into geographically defined parishes. For, the coextensiveness between local community and local church implies that whatever diversity exists in the local populace be reflected in the local church (ibid., 134). While this openness might not always be practised fully, the organizational principle remains a memento of what the nature of the church really implies. When Wingren contends that any kind of apartheid is theologically indefensible in a parish, he in reality moves “universality” from the global to the local level, and redefines it to mean openness to everybody

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who already, on account of their being humans and being there, belong in the area with which the parish overlaps. It follows from this logic that there should be no gaps between parishes. Different as they might be, due to demographical variety, they combine in forming a “wall-to-wall” national church with the same characteristic openness to diversity (ibid., 113–127). Behind the prevalent Scandinavian preference for the local and national over the universal, as exemplified by Wingren, one finds impulses from Luther’s theology of creation.3 In his expositions of the first article of faith, several relevant features are striking. Faith in God the creator concerns the present being of a “me,” and posits this as a result of God’s creative activity day by day. Even if this “me” includes every confessing “me,” there is a marked individualizing tendency here. Humanity consists of specific individuals. These individuals are further conceived of as bodily existents. As such, they are embedded in nature and in social structures. The life, sustenance and identity they receive from God are mediated by the specifics of this embeddedness. de Lubac’s theology of creation, such as it appears in Catholicism, differs strikingly from this. He is in the first place exclusively concerned with the creation of humanity.4 Other parts of God’s creation are hardly mentioned, and the consequence is an understanding of humans as fundamentally unrelated to nature and matter. This tendency is strengthened by a marked preference for our “higher” mental or spiritual faculties. In the end, there is something aloof and abstract about his “humanity.” In Scandinavia, Luther’s more down to earth theology of creation has resulted in endeavours to develop this part of theology as, in effect, a phenomenology of ordinary human life (most extensively by K. E. Løgstrup,5 but widely endorsed by Wingren and others). Their interest in the ordinary is also paired with strictly ordinary methods.6 Revelation and Christian tradition, which informed de Lubac’s procedure, have no essential role to play in determining what ordinary human life is like. This does not, however, lead to a strictly descriptive theory, devoid of normative elements. For example, in Grundtvig it is already clear that the term “folk” represents an ideal concept, pointing to what the actual folk would be like if they were being true to the concerns and values embedded in its actual culture (Christoffersen 1988, 74). One of Løgstrup’s lasting contributions is his analysis of the mutual obligations that simply come with human co-existence, whether they are met in actual life, or not (Løgstrup 1972a, 17–23). The result is a theory which, based on the actual, is both normative and descriptive, a theory of humaneness as well as human-ness. This theory is taken to have general validity, 3 Cf. Luther’s Small and Large catechism. 4 So also Bexell (1997), 564. 5 See for instance Løgstrup (1987). This everyday phenomenology was later developed in a more cosmological vein, cf. his four volume metaphysics. Some critics regard this cosmological supplement as too speculative to be called phenomenology, see Pahuus (2005), 117–127. 6 Cf. Løgstrup’s repeated formula “in strictly human terms,” Løgstrup (1997), 1.

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regardless of faith or church-membership. Such a theory can, of course, be contested–but as the criteria for validity will be ordinary human life, the church and her theologians can claim no privileged position in an ensuing debate. The best argument according to common reason wins. From this focus on things, and people nearby, as determining what it means to be a human being, there seems to be a fairly direct connection between the interests of the local community and the local church. Where de Lubac’s theology of creation led to developing (this aspect of) his ecclesiology “from above,” from the universal “humanity,” the Scandinavian tendency has been to develop ecclesiology “from below,” from the local to the national, and ending with various kinds of folk-church ecclesiology.

3. Folk as a cultural concept “Folk,” such as this concept was developed in Romanticism, is an eminently cultural entity. As such, it lends a high degree of specificity to each folk, a specificity which comes to nigh on universal expression within a folk, be that expression through language, music, folk-tales, values, foundational narratives, symbol systems, behavioural mores, ritualised practices, and so on. Culture is always specific. It defines the identity of a people, and distinguishes it from other peoples. It is also inescapable. This was one of Grundtvig’s major insights: life is always formed life, and each life-form rests on diachronic as well as synchronic determinants. Every individual is situated between forbears and expected off-spring on the one hand, and among contemporary relatives and neighbours on the other. From a specific social past and present come equally specific cultural means to cope with life’s fundamental challenges, and, in the final analysis, the challenge of life and death.7 As applied to ecclesiology, culture is clearly a differentiating, not a unifying principle. The difference between de Lubac and the Scandinavians can thus be described as differing views on what role actual human culture should be accorded. De Lubac, on the one hand, accepts a certain looseness in the organisation of the universal church according to time and place (de Lubac 1988, 62), but “folk” or “local community” remain insignificant categories. The fact that uniform universality dominates, and the actual global church limits diversity, shows that there is little room for actual culture in his understanding of “humanity” (perhaps even showing that the oneness of his humanity is devoid of actuality, apart from its piecemeal and proleptic realization in the one universal church). De Lubac upholds the universal oneness of the church by minimizing the significance of cultural variation. 7 See Løgstrup (1978–81), 54ff; Wingren (1981), 173ff; and Christoffersen (1988), 74.

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In stark contrast, the Scandinavians see the surrounding human folkculture as co–constitutive for any given actual church, and they openly see this as establishing differences between churches. Each people should have a right to their own folk-church, each deeply impacted by their folk-culture, and therefore different from each other.8 Only if clad in the culture of the folk, can the church fulfill her God-given task. So, from a global perspective this outlook entails a far greater acceptance of diversity than de Lubac’s theology would allow. However, in a national (and perhaps also local) perspective, one might wonder whether this might not make possible a re-occurrence of a conformist pressure akin to, if not more radical than, that found in de Lubac’s universal church.

4. Nation and folk The problem of cultural uniformity is highlighted by the traditional national organization of the Scandinavian churches. There is of course no timeless theological reason for this way of organizing churches, not even if cultural identity is counted among the constituents of an actual church. However much of the modern shape and ideology of our churches might have been influenced by folk-church theologies, the precedence of historical events and political expediency in establishing them is evident. The logic of cuius regio eius religio paved the way for a royal or princely organization of churches with mandatory membership by all the King’s subjects and with doctrinal homogeneity. The unity of the church resided in a king who was, in effect, summus episcopus. A king often ruled over several principalities, and always over several quite different ethnic and linguistic groups.9 In tandem with the Romantic discovery of the folk, our countries experienced numerous homogenizing endeavours. Repression, often brutal, of languages and customs belonging to minorities or to people in occupied countries characterized the entire 19th century. Only gradually, as the folk became more standardized, did the unifying function gradually shift from king to folk. Now the long established ecclesial uniformity merged with the new uniformity of the people and became an integral part of the folk-culture. From the Danish-German war to the Finnish and Norwegian struggle for independence, any cause of nation and folk was eo ipso the cause of the church. In all the Scandinavian countries we find strong expressions of ecclesial nationalism in the 19th and early 20th century, sometimes (though far 8 See Grundtvig (1955), an 833 stanza poem celebrating seven different church types, the Jewish, Greek, Latin, English, German, Nordic, and the Last, all shaped by the specific cultural contexts in which they were set. 9 En kirkeforfatning anno 2011 (2011), 13–16, gives a precise description of how Lutheran doctrines and historical development led to this construction under the period of absolute monarchy. See also Wingren (1986), 77–83.

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from always), with Scandinavianist overtones (Thorkildsen and Österlin 1998, 59–98). Indeed, the complete social overlap of church and civil society was characteristic of the period of absolute monarchy. There was no Christian social life apart from communal life expressed in the local parish. Religion was not a separate sphere, but rather an aspect of life in general. This aspect was nurtured in the Sunday mass, and practised on weekdays in whatever position one happened to occupy. Much the same overlap characterized the level of state officials. The clergy needed for celebrating mass and other rituals were fully integrated in the King’s civil administration. The church had no separate social communities and neither staff nor governing bodies “of her own.” If anything deserved the designation “specifically Christian,” it would have to be the acts of proclaiming the word and celebrating the sacraments. Though challenged by revivals, and by a gradually more secular society, some essentials in this pre-modern model continued to profoundly influence church doctrine, as well as church politics and church life, throughout the 19th and 20th century. One effect of this has been a widespread and lasting skepticism against the establishment of specifically Christian social entities and institutional structures. One example of a person worth condsidering on this point is Einar Billing (1871–1939), the leading Swedish folk-church proponent in the early twentieth century, and a bishop in Väster,s from 1920. For Billing, the task of the church is to proclaim the Gospel to a people which already, through God’s prevenient grace in creation, has been prepared for it. In essence, the Swedish church is the forgiveness of the sins of the people of Sweden. This focus on how the church is to serve the people entailed for Billing a distinct preference for institutional over social aspects of the church. Primarily she is not a community of believers, but a set of ordained activities in a given territory, performed, as it were, by a state employed member of the clergy. In this model the continuity between the states of createdness and forgiveness is as striking as the harmony between church and society at large (Billing 1963).10 Already out of sync with modes of thought in the cultural elite of the time, this harmonious model soon became untenable. Wingren, who in many respects belongs to the Billing tradition,11 was acutely aware of the breakup of the traditional monoculture. Society was an arena for conflict, and an uncritical attitude to society in general no longer made sense. The church should part with the state, and was now called upon, principally at the level of parishes, to engage with society in critical ways (Wingren 1986, 113–120). The late Wingren’s ecclesiology was clearly coloured by his political awakening in the early 70s. His collation of an open folk-church theology and 10 See also Eckerdal (2010), 117–126. 11 Wingren published a book on Billing, Einar Billing: en studie i svensk teologi före 1920 (1968), and in addition several essays on his significance.

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political activism led to a challenging, and perhaps unstable, combination of ecclesial elitism and inclusivism. Wingren’s understanding of church and society as being in a more conflicting relationship is not without similarities in Danish 20th century theology. There are, however, significant differences, partly due to a stronger and more enduring integration of national culture (Danishness) and Christianity, and partly due to another mix of theological influences. Though Wingren felt alone in Sweden as a Grundtvigian, Grundtvig’s influence in Denmark was much more widespread. This explains the far more positive reception of dialectical and existential theology, hence also of Kierkegaard. Much of this came together in the Tidehverv movement, a uniquely Danish amalgam of Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, Barth, Bultmann, and Gogarten, which was hugely influential during the latter half of the 20th century (Iversen 2008, 133–145). Løgstrup started out as a Tidehvervian, and although he later parted with the movement on several counts (Christoffersen 2013, 181ff, 205 f), his understanding of the church retained traits typical of Tidehverv. There is in Løgstrup’s ouevre no developed ecclesiology. In fact, Løgstrup’s ideas about the church are found scattered here and there, in sermons, interviews, and snippets found in newspapers. Even then, such thoughts exist only as brief comments and asides in his scholarly texts. As dogmatics was not part of his chair, this scarcity is perhaps not very telling in itself. However, what can be found corresponds with the tenets of Tidehverv all the same. One finds the idea that it was neither necessary nor welcome for the church to expand upon the understanding expressed in CA 7. The upshot, then, in Løgstrup is a focus on the combined nature and task of the church, i. e., the preaching of the Gospel.12 Ecclesiology beyond this is restricted to reflection on the institutional and practical prerequisites for celebrating services. If the social body of the church was relegated to second place in Billing, in Løgstrup and Tidehverv it has no place at all.13 Behind this view lies a peculiar interpretation of the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms: that all (legitimate) sociality belongs to the worldly realm. In one respect, this does entail a theological acceptance of the world, and there is ample evidence in Løgstrup to support such an accepting stance. His entire phenomenology of life (argued, as it is, on strictly secular premises), is a preamble to faith in God the creator of heaven and earth. This positive view of the world and of worldly logic is incorporated in his theology when he claims that Christianity comprises universal (essentially creation, fall, and “law”) as well as specific aspects (Løgstrup 1961, 238 f). At points he also explicitly included the (non-human) universe in his soteriology : “Christianity is not

12 En kirkeforfatning anno 2011, 24. 13 Løgstrup (1972a), 65–88, exemplifies his polemic against seeing the church as a political or social agent.

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liberation of man from the universe, but with the universe” (Løgstrup 1987, 144; my trans.). When it comes to the nature and task of the church, however, this universal aspect of Christianity seems to have been left aside, or rather, to have no other function than making the Gospel understandable. In contrast to Wingren, Løgstrup now seems to regard Christianity as set apart from and with no collective consequences for ordinary human life (Pedersen 1992, 111). It is not the task of the church or her priests to present any universal aspect of Christianity, only the Gospel in all its specificity is to be preached. Here, Løgstrup portrays the relationship between church and world in mostly conflicting terms (Ole Jensen 2015). The world is under judgement, in particular when she dresses herself up as “religion.” Hence, for the church to preach the Gospel is to go against the world. One might perhaps have expected that this contradiction would aim at correcting the world, for instance by developing what the universal aspect of Christianity might mean for the way people lived their life, or for the ways in which they organized society. This, however, is not on Løgstrup’s agenda for the church (Løgstrup 1995, 9 f, 105–114).14 The result is an “otherworldly” understanding of Christian faith, an understanding which fits well with the now outdated state-church arrangement, and with the Christian mono-culture that once supported it. It is difficult to understand this turn to otherworldliness in Løgstrup without assuming a certain doubleness in his understanding of the world. The “world” which is to be gainsaid cannot have exactly the same referent as the “world” of God’s good creation. In addition to this duality, there also appears to be a sliding in his thought along a nature/culture continuum. It would, for instance, seem that in his ecclesiology, certain aspects of the world as culture (first and foremost the world as illusory religion), have come to dominate over more bodily or “natural” aspects of worldliness (i. e. such aspects as come with being born/created). Any distinction between nature and culture is of course fraught with difficulties, and no aspect of the material world can ever be grasped without the use of cultural tools which in effect operate as co–constituents of what we take to be natural. In understanding Løgstrup, it can nevertheless be helpful to distinguish between levels of cultural specificity, ranging from those factors minimally impinged upon by cultural judgements, (for example, those closest to bodily experience and materiality), to the more developed specificity of higher-order interpretation typical of “religion.” An interpretation along these lines could facilitate a shift of balance in favour of the “natural.” This would contribute to making Løgstrup’s positive creation theology15 more operative in his ecclesiology, and thus lead to a more truly Grundtvigian understanding of the church.16 14 See also Niels Henrik Gregersen, Chapter 2, on the disagreement between Wingren and Løgstrup on this issue. 15 See for instance Løgstrup (1972a), 103–110.

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5. Created universality and church The creation theologies of both de Lubac and the Scandinavians lead to ecclesiologies where the totality of creation somehow is thought to inhere in the nature of the church. Since all churches have a limited membership, both positions also necessitate a distinction between this all-encompassing aspect of the church and the actual church, typically between the invisible (nature of) and the visible church. In doing this, de Lubac consistently retains his universal perspective and holds the invisible oneness of the church to subsist in the actual church. Although invisible, this aspect of the universal church is real, a reality which tends to materialize itself ever more fully. With this view come difficult challenges pertaining to those who do not belong to the actual church. As we have noted, how can a church with limited actual enrolment still represent and speak for all, and even claim exclusive rights to do so? On the Scandinavian side, a fear of uniformity has typically entailed a radical spiritualizing of the one universal church, sometimes combined with a low ecumenical profile, but always with a strong emphasis on the national and local church. Here, the problem of uniformity has, however, tended to reoccur, and, with the ongoing decline in membership amidst a fragmented culture, so has the “Catholic” challenge of how a numerically limited church can represent all, be it in the nation or the local community. What these different ecclesiological challenges show to be at stake for the churches is precisely the relevance of a theology of creation. Given that a meaningful theology of creation establishes positive links between a created totality and the church, how is this totality more precisely to be conceived? In de Lubac’s case the totality is a hidden, idealized unitary humanity, and for the Scandinavians it is the empirical world in its cultural manifestation, locally or nationally. Both positions have difficulties with plurality. On the one hand, the ideal understanding of creation lends itself to authoritarian measures for achieving uniformity. On the other hand, since culture is always specific, cultural conceptions of the created universe will by necessity entail elements of particularism, and the more one emphasizes developed culture in one’s construal of the world, the greater is the danger of becoming captive to whatever specifics it might obtain to, be that in the folk or in some subculture, local and/or religious. There will, in radical versions of this position, be few means left for building bridges to outside cultures, and inclusion of others will be hampered by potentially insurmountable cultural obstacles. Can one

16 To Grundtvig and his Tidehvervian misappropriation, see Iversen (2008), 133–145; Pedersen (1992).

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combine faith in the universal oneness of God’s creation with respect for and appreciation of its actual plurality? A way forward might lie in the interpretive continuum ranging from a position next to material nature towards highly developed culture. Even though we have no direct access to natural phenomena, there remains at the bottom of our cultural construals a series of bodily a priori: sense perceptions of the sun rising and setting, of heat and cold, of seasons, hunger and satisfaction, of taste and smell, beauty and ugliness, of growth and decay, of older and younger generations, of being with other bodies, of laughter, pain and joy, attraction and distancing, of freedom and dependence, ambitions, lust, coercion, of the satisfaction of expanding the world and of the skills one masters, of sharing these things with others through narratives and rituals. The increasing cultural specificity of the ways in which all this is perceived, processed and understood, of the languages used, cannot annul all commonality. Luther and Grundtvig would certainly concur in claiming that the universal meaning of being created should be sought in these bodilybased commonalities, rather than in our thoughts and statements about them.17 And, here one finds the only possible actual basis for the universality claimed by an actual church, be she ever so small. Her discourse on creation should, in dialogue with other particular discourses, be seen as a particular interpretation of, and witness to, the material universality of being human.

Bibliography BEXELL, P. (1997). Kyrkan som sakrament. Henri de Lubacs fundamentalecklesiologi. Stockholm: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion. BILLING, E. (1963). Den svenska folkkyrkan. 2nd edition. Stockholm: Svenska diakonistyrelsens bokförlag. CHRISTOFFERSEN, S. AA. (1988). “En hermeneutikk for folkekirken?,” in Bjørn Sandvik (ed.), Folkekirken – status og strategier. Oslo: Presteforeningens studiebibliotek. CHRISTOFFERSEN, S. AA. (2013). “Efterskrift,” in K. E. Løgstrup, Opgør med Kierkegaard. Aarhus: Forlaget Klim, 181–219. Dominus Iesus (2000). http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/ index.htm ECKERDAL, J. (2010). “Nation och folkkyrka,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 86, 117–126.

17 With respect to Wingren, see Bengt Kristensson Uggla, Chapter 4, who offers similar remarks on the priority of the body.

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En kirkeforfatning anno 2011 (2011), Rapport fra en arbeidsgruppe nedsat af Selskab for Kirkeret, Selskab for Kirkeret, www.kirkeret.dk/files/2011_Kirkeforfatning1.pdf FAITH AND ORDER COMMISION, WCC (2005). The Nature and Mission of the Church. https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/commissions/ faith-and-order/i-unity-the-church-and-its-mission/the-nature-and-mission-ofthe-church-a-stage-on-the-way-to-a-common-statement. GRUMMETT, D. (2007). De Lubac. A Guide for the Perplexed. London : T. & T. Clark. GRUNDTVIG, N. F.S. (1955). Christenhedens Syvstjerne. København: Kirkeligt Samfunds Forlag. HOLBERG, S. E. & BROTTVEIT, a. (2014). Tilstandsrapport for Den norske kirke 2014. KIFO Notat nr 2/2014. IVERSEN, H. R. (2008). Grundtvig, folkekirke og mission. København: Forlaget Anis. JENSEN, O. (2015). “Efterskrift til Løgstrup,” in Skabelse og tilintetgørelse. arhus: Forlaget Klim. DE LUBAC, H. (1988). Catholicism. Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. French original 1948. Lumen Gentium (1964). http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_ council/index.htm. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1961). Kunst og etik. København: Gyldendal. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1972a). Norm og spontanitet. København: Gyldendal. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1972b). “Hjælp og hersk,” in O. JENSEN, P. WIDMAN and K. E. LØGSTRUP, De store ords teologi. København: Gyldendal. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (2015). Skabelse og tilintetgørelse. Aarhus: Forlaget Klim. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1987). “Fænomenologi og psykologi,” in Solidaritet og kærlighed. København: Gyldendal. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1978–81). Prædiken og filosofi. Unpublished, Løgstruparkivet, Privat-Arkivet II.27.22.1. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1997). The Ethical Demand. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Danish original 1956, Den etiske fordring, København: Gyldendal. PAHUUS, M. (2005). “K.E. Løgstrups eksistentielle fænomenologi,” Slagmark 42, 117–127. PEDERSEN, K. A. (1992). “Treenighed og gudbilledlighed,” Grundtvigstudier 43/I, 106–115. THORKILDSEN, D. & ÖSTERLIN, L. (1998). “Kulturell, politisk og kirkelig skandinavisme,” in INGMAR BROHED (ed.), Kyrka och nationalism i Norden. Nationalism och skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800-talet. Lund: Lund University Press. Unitas Redintegratio (1964). http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vati can_council/index.htm WINGREN, G. (1968). Einar Billing: en studie i svensk teologi före 1920. Lund: Gleerups.

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WINGREN, G. (1979). Creation and Gospel. The New Situation in European Theology. New York, The Edwin Mellen Press. A revised Swedish version, Öppenhet och Egenart, published the same year, Lund: Liber Läromdel. WINGREN, G. (1981). Credo. The Christian View of Faith and Life. Trans. Edgar M. Carlson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House. Swedish original 1974, Credo. Lund: Gleerups. WINGREN, G. (1986). Gamla vägar fram,t. Älvsjö: Verbum.

Jakob Wir8n

13. Wingren and the Theology of Religions: Inter-Religious Hermeneutics

Introduction The juxtaposition may sound strange: the religious Other and Scandinavian creation theology! What does religious otherness has to do with this particular kind of 20th century theology? The Swedish creation theologian Gustaf Wingren was born before the First World War, and hence long before the religiously plural situation we face today. Furthermore, his theology is deeply inspired by the notion of folk church from the Swedish theologian and bishop Einar Billing (1871–1939), who took a monolithic society for granted.1 From this point of view, few theological traditions, if any, seem less suitable for dealing with religious plurality and the theology of religions than Wingren’s creation theology. What could creation theology have to say in a context where the Christian is one amongst many others and perhaps no longer even constitutes the majority? It is true that Wingren’s ecclesiology is influenced by the folk church theology of Billing. However, this does not imply that Wingren was insensitive to people’s personal conceptions of life, nor that he favors a state church where everyone by default is seen as a member. Rather, the individual plays an important role in his ecclesiology. Already in the opening statements of The Living Word, Wingren asserts that preaching necessarily relates two fundamental instances: the bible and the people gathered (Wingren 1949/ 1960, 13). In other words, the proclamation of Christian faith is always carried out in the tension between Christian tradition and the present context. Needless to say, one of the central features of our context today is religious plurality. Therefore, it is interesting to raise the issue of how Wingren’s own thinking meets the questions of today. As this book shows, Scandinavian creation theology has contributed to many areas of theology. Yet, admittedly, creation theology in general is not known for any significant work on interreligious issues. While the secular Other is present in the sense that the secular/sacred binary is critically challenged, as Trygve Wyller discusses in chapter 16 of this book, the religious Other is rarely addressed. This is true also of Gustaf Wingren. As, Bengt 1 For a discussion, see Bengt Kristensson Uggla, Becoming Human Again: The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren (2016), 303 ff.

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Kristensson Uggla remarks: theology of religions is one of Wingren’s very few lacunae.2 From this fact, we must not draw the conclusion that creation theology is irrelevant when it comes to questions of religious otherness. On the contrary, and as I intend to show, there are some characteristic features of creation theology that are highly interesting when reflecting on religious otherness today. Moreover, I would argue that creation theology may contribute to a fresh path beyond the deadlock of the threefold paradigm – exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Additionally, I consider it a task for Christian theologians to reflect, not only on the religious Other in Christian theology, but also to engage in theologies where Christians are the religious Other. This is a reason why a few perspectives from a Jewish and a Muslim theologian are discussed in this article. As we shall see, there are notions and lines of thought that resemble creation theology in these traditions too. Any theology of religions has to grapple with the relationship between universality and particularity in the faith tradition at hand. In the Christian tradition the correlation between universality and particularity presents itself in the relationship between the first and the second articles of faith: between God who is the creator of heaven and earth, and God who becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. In theological debate these two are often presented as opposite paths wherein more of the one leads to less of the other. A strong focus on universality may give the impression of a tolerant and open theology of religions where all people are included and embraced. Yet, as we know, this kind of inclusion may prove paternalistic or imperialistic, inviting the religious Other only on the condition that he or she “becomes like me.” In contrast, a strong focus on particularity may give an impression of exclusion, of rejecting the religious Other, and hence is sometimes assumed to be a focus that makes interreligious coexistence impossible. Yet, an emphasis on particularity may also be an expression of fidelity towards one’s own tradition and of admitting that one’s own perspective is one among many others. As Wingren clearly realized, the relationship between universality and particularity in any faith tradition is not a zero-sum game where more of the one leads to less of the other. One misconception regarding Wingren, as Bengt Kristensson Uggla points at in this book’s fourth chapter, is that Wingren sought to find a balance between particularity and universality. To the contrary : Wingren insists on a Christian theology that strongly emphasizes both universality and particularity. According to Wingren, it is from a strong particularity – focus on Jesus Christ – that a likewise strong universality may 2 See Bengt Kristensson Uggla “Introduction,” in Gustaf Wingren Skapelsen och lagen; evangeliet och kyrkan (2013), xxxix.

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be derived. There is a ‘dialectical approach’ in the sense that universality and particularity are reduced to an either-or. Yet for Wingren, the one is already present in the other (Wingren 1964/2001, 85; 1954/1958, 161–164).

Creation theology and a contemporary deadlock For some time, we have seen how an order of dichotomy has prevented many attempts to develop the theology of religions. When universalism is put up and against particularism, or when inclusivism is put up and against exclusivism, we often find ourselves in a deadlock where few insights are made and no real encounters take place. This situation can be illustrated in several ways, and in the 12th chapter of this volume Trond Skard Dokka makes several important remarks in an ecclesiological context. One may also recall the well-known critique from many scholars of theology of religions against the threefold paradigm of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. The paradigm was originally presented by Alan Race in the 1980s (Race 1983/1993) and still no alternative position has been widely accepted. In relation to this, I would argue that creation theology offers some important insights. The critique against the threefold paradigm could briefly be sketched in terms of universalism and particularism. A problem with exclusivism and inclusivism is that their emphasis on particularity is made at the cost of their universality. To the exclusivist, other religious traditions are dead alleys, far away from truth and salvation. To the inclusivist, there may be traces of truth in other religious traditions and there is hope for the salvation of people of other faiths, but this is only based on what is similar to my own tradition. The rays of truth lie in that which is similar, not in the differences. Hence, the religious Other is not interesting precisely as other. A problem with pluralism is that its emphasis on universality is made at the cost of religious particularity. Similarities are emphasized and the particular differences are played down. Hence, not only one’s own, but also others’ religious traditions run the risk of not being taken seriously.

A path beyond the threefold paradigm A central claim in this article is that anyone interested in the theology of religions does well to visit (or revisit) creation theology and its promising work of overcoming the traditional dichotomies of, for instance, particularism and universalism. This may seem surprising, given that the issue of religious

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otherness is not developed by Gustaf Wingren. However, I shall now further explain the reasons for this claim by looking closer at the aspects of Wingren’s creation theology that I argue have implications for theology of religions today. In the following, three of these reasons will be explored.

Wingren’s dialectical approach First, Wingren’s dialectical approach combines creation theology with a kerygmatic emphasis, a strong universality with a likewise strong particularity. The universality is actually derived from the particularity, from the focus on Jesus Christ. This orientation resists attempts at polarization. A recurring pattern of his theology is an approach where pairs of notions, such as law and gospel; God and human; or freedom and coercion; remain in a dialectic tension. The one part can never replace or defeat the other. Wingren recalls the term communicatio idiomatum, communication of properties, which is a christological notion that refers to the interaction of deity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ – herein, his human experiences and attributes can be rightly referred to his divine nature and vice versa. In Wingren’s writing, the christological communicatio idiomatum is the primary example of a fundamental pattern of life. In his own words: Now, the reality expressed in the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum is by no means restricted to Christology. Wherever one turns in Luther’s theology, one comes upon the same theme. And the theme in question is nothing other than the Gospel itself (Wingren 1949/1960, 205).

The reluctance to establish dichotomies, but rather to acknowledge dialectic tensions is a hallmark in Wingren’s theology and it applies to many notions. It is for instance expressed in his view of what is sacred and profane. According to Wingren the world must not be seen as profane or god-abandoned. Rather, through the Spirit, God is already present, creating and recreating the world in unselfish love. Here, in Wingren’s pneumatology, we find traces of another aspect of his creation theology with implications for the theology of religions: the relationship between universality and particularity (Wingren 1949/1960, 213).

The universal approach Second, the universal approach of Wingren’s creation theology. God is the God of all time and all people, and God’s work is oriented forwards, eschatologically. Sin, struggle and law all existed before the birth in Bethlehem. The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is something extraordinary and truly new.

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Still it does not stand in opposition to God’s presence in all times (Wingren 1949/1960, 140). In this regard, Wingren is critical of both liberal and antiliberal approaches to theology. The liberal theologian tends to emphasize the human being at the cost of God whereas the antiliberal theologian (Karl Barth is Wingren’s main example) risks emphasizing God at the cost of human beings. To Wingren, it must not be either/or, but both/and. Bengt Kristensson Uggla explains this very well: To Gustaf Wingren it is therefore never about only balancing openness and identity against one another. On the contrary, the identity of the Christian faith can only be found in and through openness. It is also not about establishing a balance of change and continuity. Rather, the idea is that it is only possible to maintain continuity in the phenomenon we call Christianity through change (Kristensson Uggla 2013, xxxiv).

According to Wingren, people who want the church to become more open often adapt according to something that already exists outside the church – the political. Others, who turn to the bible and the creed often do so in order to ‘close the gates’ and tighten the borders around the church. What the church needs, though, is to go so deep into the word of God that the church is thereby opened (Wingren 1986, 163). Again, the radical openness lies precisely within the particularity of the Christian tradition. From this approach follows Wingren’s unwillingness to distinguish between people. According to Wingren, it is not possible to make a clear distinction between believers and non-believers, betweeen the church and the world. Rather, ‘openness is a necessary part of true stability’ (Wingren 1949/ 1960, 183). In Wingren’s view, these are categories that must be viewed eschatologically. The church is on a journey towards fulfillment and therefore neither walls nor borders apply. The Christian community, according to Wingren, must include one’s neighbor and leave the question of belonging aside. It is important to point out that this view does not suggest that all human being are anonymously included within the Church. That would imply the sort of well-known inclusivism where other people are ‘anonymous Christians.’ If I understand his position correctly (he never discusses the terms exclusivism and inclusivism), Wingren is critical of both the exclusivistic position, where only one’s own group are included, and the inclusivistic position, where all are included without knowing so. A Christian church ought to be open and welcoming and theologians have to leave the question of belonging unanswered – or even not raised at all (Wingren 1949/1960, 186).

The central role of eschatology Third, the central role of eschatology in Wingren’s creation theology. Karl Barth famously stated that Christian faith is eschatological by necessity. On

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this particular matter, it is most likely that Wingren would agree. It is not possible to understand his theological method and his creation theology without his eschatology. It is in this light that sin and redemption, freedom and coercion, gospel and law, life and death, and many other notions are assessed (Wingren 1958/1961, 43–49). Interestingly, the New Testament does not change this world or the Christian people. There are lawful and good people in every age and in every culture and religion. The dialectic tension between universality and particularity is not in any way solved or balanced in this world. Rather it remains and awaits an eschatological ‘solution’ above all. In Wingren’s words: ‘the word of resurrection does not improve this world, but opens heaven’ (Wingren 1949/ 1960, 141). This eschatological postponement, I would argue, is a helpful perspective in interreligious relations. To Wingren, eschatology is not the already written keys at the end of the book of life. Rather, it is the ongoing and not yet finished continuation of a book series. With people of other faiths, Christians share the future, open and unknown. Wingren resists the dichotomies and his dialectical approach opens up for a different kind of relationship between universality and particularity. To a large extent, the theology of religions has reflected on a ‘religious Other’ from the perspective of one’s own tradition. This is indeed a necessary perspective, and it leads to important questions. However, there are two obvious shortcomings when such a procedure is the only one: it pays little attention to who this ‘Other’ is, thereby ignoring the diversity of religious traditions, and it pays no interest to the voice of these others. I am convinced that the question of religious otherness is most effectively addressed from more than one perspective. Thereby, the Christian tradition is not only focused on ‘the Other,’ but is also forced to ponder the fact that Christians are ‘the Others’ to the Other. In a way, this is trivial as a fact. Yet, as a hermeneutical and theological task it remains an issue for further reflection.3 Moreover, I hold it likely that the Christian tradition can learn from other religious traditions. As a consequence, the ways in which Muslim and Jewish theologies approach universality and particularity for Christian creation theology today. In a chapter like this, it is not possible to offer any comprehensive analyses of such matters. Still, I find it important to provide at least some room for the ‘religious Other,’ and to show that creation theology is not restricted to Christian thought. More specifically, I shall discuss the relationship between universality and particularity and its consequences for religious otherness in the theologies of the Jewish thinker David Hartmann and the Muslim scholar Fazlur Rahman. The perspectives from these two eminent scholars may offer a

3 For a longer methodological reflection, see Jakob Wir8n, Hope and Otherness: Christian Eschatology in an Interreligious Context (2013), 36–45 and 173–175.

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few pieces of advice for a Christian creation theology that is interreligiously informed.

Creation theology and the Jewish thinker David Hartman The American Jewish theologian David Hartman’s covenantal theology focuses on the relationship between the universality and particularity of the Jewish faith. His way of reasoning builds on a distinction between creation and history. Hartman writes: ‘The universal God is the God of creation. But it is God as the Lord of history who enters into specific relationships’ (Hartman 1999, 164). He emphasises the universality of creation and the freedom and responsibility of each human being. The universality is accounted for in the Noah covenant. Hartman writes: “God announces the covenant to Noah, but on closer examination the covenant appears to be addressed to all of nature. Noah’s presence appears to be relevant solely by virtue of being a member of the class ‘living things on earth’ (Hartman 2002, 27). However, Hartman also emphasizes the particularity of revelation and the self-delimitation of God, manifested in the covenants of Abraham and Moses. According to Hartman, Abraham represents the shift from God as the solitary Creator of Nature, to God as the self-limiting covenantal Lord of History (Hartman 2002, 29). I would argue that Hartman’s covenantal theology is a ‘Jewish creation theology’ inasmuch as that it is centred on the greatness of God’s creation and love of all human beings, but also in its emphasizing universality and particularity ; Noah and Moses. Hartman’s position is not pluralistic in the same way as, for instance, John Hick’s theology (Hick 1997, 163), but it leaves theological space for the religious Other by acknowledging the possibility of other covenants with other people. Hartman considers each revelation as limited and particular, since it is part of history. It is because of this inherent particularity that it does not invalidate the faith experience of other religious communities (Hartman 2002, 29). The emphasis on creation in Hartman’s theology does not result in a ‘meta-perspective,’ nor does it make any universalizing attempts to explain the condition and destiny of the religious Other and the validity of his or her tradition. Moreover, he does not see the Torah as a necessary means of relating to God. The Swedish (Christian) theologian Jesper Svartvik observes an interesting comparison between the Jewish and the Christian tradition which applies to David Hartman’s work. According to Svartvik, Christian theologians read Genesis 1–3 as a story about a universal creation which is corrupted by a fall that is also universal – Adam and Eve represent all human beings (Svartvik 2012, 32–38). The fall regards all living things, and the universe is in need of a

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rescue plan, which is delivered through revelation. Thus, the ‘fall’ precedes revelation. However, as Svartvik points out, the ‘fall’ in the Jewish tradition is not primarily Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, but Exodus 32 and the story of the golden calf. The fall in Jewish thought, according to Jewish thinkers, such as Hartman, is when the Jewish people do not stick to the covenants of Abraham and Moses. Interestingly, in this understanding, revelation precedes the fall. As a consequence, it is the Jewish people who fail and it is the Jewish people who repent. This observation is important from a theology of religions point of view. Even though the difference between before and after may seem harmless, it actually has substantial consequences. When the description of the ‘fall’ precedes revelation, this fall is presented as universal, just like creation. Revelation, then, is the necessary antidote to a ‘disease’ that inflicts everyone. In Hartman’s theology, the narrative of fall and repentance regards the Jewish people only. Without slipping into relativism, this leaves theological space for other religious traditions, and it leaves room for Jewish theologians to accept that other religious traditions have their own epistemology, their own stories of – for instance – fall and redemption (Hartman 1999, 164).

Creation theology and the Muslim thinker Fazlur Rahman Fazlur Rahman was a Sunni theologian born in Pakistan, who studied at Oxford and taught at Chicago University for more than two decades (Rahman died 1988). Like Wingren, he has not written explicitly on the theology of religions and religious otherness. Still, his theology contains seeds of what we could call a ‘Muslim creation theology’. First, he emphasizes the universality of God’s creation and the integrity of every human being. Second, he refuses to delimit God’s work and human efforts to Muslims only. Third, like Wingren and Hartman, Rahman is also not a pluralist when it comes to the theology of religions. Indeed, his way of arguing leaves room for a strong universality and a strong particularity. According to Rahman, one of the goals of human life is to develop taqwa, a capacity to know what is right and to act accordingly. Taqwa is similar to—but not identical with—notions such as ‘conscience’ and ‘fear of God.’ It involves the moral feeling of what is right, but it is not limited to that feeling, for it is also about choosing whose voice to obey. Thus, taqwa involves not only moral instincts, but an active choice of letting God guide one’s conscience. Thus, the real problem lies within man himself, for he is a blend of good and evil, ignorance and knowledge, power and impotence […] The key to man’s defence is taqwa, which literally means defence but which […] is a kind of inner light, a spiritual

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spark which man must light within himself to distinguish between right and wrong, seeming and real, immediate and lasting, etc. (Rahman 2009, 127–128).

Rahman follows the established Muslim view when he argues that each human being is personally responsible for his or her deeds and that there is no original sin. There is no need for a general reconciliation nor for intercession, and certainly not for any savior, according to Rahman (1982, 154; 1980/2009, 19). He refers to a passage in the Qur’an where taqwa is praised as a key to paradise. This passage states that those who have developed taqwa towards God are granted a place in the Garden (Rahman 1980/2009, 110).4 This means that, according to Rahman, taqwa is not a gift reserved for Muslims alone. Rather, the fundamental essence of taqwa is the human capacity to resist evil and to seek the truth. The task of the Umma—the Muslim community— is primarily to encourage taqwa: commanding good, forbidding evil, establishing prayer and alms-giving (Rahman 1980/2009, 62). As a matter of fact, Rahman ties the notion of religious diversity to his theology of creation. Religious diversity is in concordance with the will of God and the divine mystery : Humankind had been a unity, but this unity was split up because of the advent of divine messages at the hands of the prophets. The fact that the prophets’ messages act as watersheds and divisive forces is rooted in some divine mystery, for if God so willed, He could surely bring them to one path (Rahman 1980/2009, 164).

No one community and no single individual can claim to be the unique guide to paradise. Rahman also considers the Umma to be but one community among others, arguing that a valid purpose of different religious communities is to compete with each other in terms of goodness (Rahman 1980/2009, 165–167). Again, in Rahman’s theology we meet a strong universality and a strong particularity where the Umma’s task of fostering taqwa is of central importance, although this task is not restricted to Muslim communities.

Conclusion We have seen that some of the characteristics of Wingren’s creation theology find counterparts in Jewish and Muslim theologies: an emphasis on the universality of God; the integrity of every human being; a rejection of any attempt to delimit God’s work and human efforts to one’s own tradition; and, a twofold theological approach emphasizing both particularity and universality. As I argued above, a problem with the threefold paradigm and its positions 4 See also Q. 39:73: ‘Then those that feared their Lord shall be driven in companies into Paradise, till, when they have come thither, and its gates are opened, and its keepers will say to them, “Peace be upon you! Well you have fared; enter in, to dwell forever.”’ [Italics added].

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exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism lies in the ways that the relationships between universality and particularity have been negotiated. In the ‘creation theologies’ discussed in this chapter, the relationships between universality and particularity are different. Wingren, Hartman and Rahman all combine a strong particularity with a strong universality. Hartman’s covenantal theology in particular shows how a theology of religions can be deeply anchored within one’s own tradition and still open towards the other in a way that the sketched stereotypes of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism fail to allow or encourage. The eschatological perspective of Wingren, but also of Hartman and Rahman, encourages a postponement of the comparative questions of belonging and salvation. Not only to the extent that ‘in the end, we will know that we were right.’ Rather, even the question as such should be avoided, according to Wingren. I would argue that an eschatological postponment is an important tool that challenges the established categories as we have encountered them. The eschatological perspective shows that many dichotomies no longer apply, thus calling for new categories. As we have seen, the strong emphasis on universality—combined with a similarly strong emphasis on particularity—in creation theology is an important element when these new categories are developed. We do not have to walk around considering each other alternately ‘unsaved’ or ‘anonymous Christians,’ but are able to preserve the dialectical tension between universality and particularity, between ‘Other’ and ‘self ’. By way of summary, I would suggest that a creation theology of the religious Other—or indeed any theology of religions that seeks to articulate theological space for the religious Other—honor the dialectical approach of Wingren. That would mean following David Hartman’s rules about keeping the theology of creation universal and the theology of ‘revelation’ particular. Or, one could learn from Fazlur Rahman’s notion of taqwa, and its way of acknowledging the universality and particularity in one’s own tradition. It is my conviction that the need for having both a strong universality and a strong particularity is a necessary for advancing a theology of religions for our time. And in this regard, Scandinavian creation theologies provide a suitable point of departure.

Bibliography HARTMAN, D (1999). A Heart of Many Rooms: Celebrating the Many Voices within Judaism. Woodstock: Jewish Lights. HARTMAN, D. (2002). A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism. Woodstock: Jewish Lights. HICK, J. (1997). “The Possibility of Religious Pluralism: A Reply to Gavin D’Costa,” Religious Studies 33, no. 2.

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KRISTENSSON UGGLA, B. (2016). Becoming Human Again. The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren. Translation Daniel M. Olson. Eugene: Cascade Books. KRISTENSSON UGGLA, B. (2013). “Introduktion,” in Gustaf Wingren, Skapelsen och lagen; evangeliet och kyrkan. Skellefte,: Artos. RACE, A. (1983/1993). Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions. 2nd edition, 1993. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. RAHMAN, F (1982). Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. RAHMAN, F (1980/2009). Major Themes of the Qur’an. 2nd edition, 2009. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. SVARTVIK, J. (2012). “Contemporary Christian Self-Understanding: Populus Dei or Corpus Christi?,” Current Dialogue, no. 53. WINGREN, G. (1949/1960). The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church. Trans. Victor C. Pogue. Eugene: Wipf & Stock. English translation of Predikan: En principiell studie, 1949. WINGREN, G. (1954/1958). Theology in Conflict: Nygren, Barth, Bultmann. Trans. Eric H. Wahlstrom. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. English translation of Teologiens metodfr,ga, 1954. WINGREN, G. (1958–1960/2013). Skapelsen och lagen; evangeliet och kyrkan. Skellefte,: Artos. WINGREN, G. (1960/1964). Gospel and Church. Trans. Ross Mackenzie. Eugene: Wipf & Stock. English translation of Evangeliet och kyrkan, 1960. WINGREN, G. (1986). Gamla vägar fram,t: Kyrkans uppgift i Sverige. Stockholm: Verbum. WIRPN, J. (2013). Hope and Otherness: Christian Eschatology in an Interreligious Context. Lund: Lund University Diss.

PART IV: THEOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Jan-Olav Henriksen

14. The Economic Trinity and Creation

1. Introduction From the point of view of a quite different theological context than the one that is the basis of the present book, Colin Gunton has aptly pointed out that “The advantage of a Trinitarian approach to the theology of creation is that it enables us to say a number of important things, chief among them that the world is ‘good’, a distinct reality with its own being, and yet only so by virtue of its dependence upon, and directedness towards God.” Furthermore, Gunton points to the manner in which the basis of a Trinitarian theology of creation was already established by Irenaeus in his engagement with the world-denying theologies of his opponents (Gunton 1995, 97). Gunton sees the doctrine of the Trinity as “derived from the involvement of God in creation, reconciliation and redemption. But what it also enables us to say is that far from being dependent upon the world, God is free to create a world which can be itself, that is to say, free according to its own order of being. It is the relation-inotherness between God and the world that is conceived with the help of the doctrine of the Trinity, and probably cannot adequately be conceived in any other way” (1995, 97). Despite its quite different context of origin, this comment articulates profoundly the main impetus behind Scandinavian creation theology : this theology is developed in order to address and overcome world-negating trends that still exist in Western theology. Thus, Scandinavian creation theology has a continued relevance that extends far beyond its geographical origin. Among the the basic organizing principles in Scandinavian creation theology is the distinction between the “specifically Christian,” on the one hand, and the “universally human,” on the other hand (det kristelige og det allmennmenneskelige) (cf. Sigurdson 1996, 85ff). Furthermore, the emphasis is not on knowing God, but on how God is manifested in the concrete instances of human life. Life in this context is not to be understood as “life in the church,” “religious life” or “the life of faith,” but in terms of the common and universal conditions that all humanity share.1 It is against this backdrop that the present chapter’s purpose has to be understood: it aims at a selection of central 1 This point is developed in various other contributions to this volume as well. See, in particular, the introduction, Chapter 1, and Bengt Kristensson Uggla’s article on Gustaf Wingren, Chapter 3.

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sources in Wingren, Løgstrup and Prenter, in order to demonstrate how they contribute resources for a trinitarian theology. Although there are considerable differences between these three sources, they all articulate reflections that are important for the development of an understanding of the Trinity that works within the framework that Scandinavian creation theology offers. From a distance, one can discern a common theological concern behind many of the arguments we find in Wingren, Prenter and Løgstrup: they all have an interest in maintaining a close, intrinsic connection and interrelation between God as creator and the kingdom revealed with, and in, Christ. There can be no dichotomy between God as Creator and as Redeemer. Consequently, trinitarian faith cannot be articulated in isolation from the universal conditions of human life.

2. Emphasis on continuation: The recapitulation of creation (Wingren) In the introduction to his textbook on dogmatics, Credo, Wingren underscores how the three articles of faith are not about different or separate issues. In principle, he says, one could describe the fullness of Christian faith as a faith in the creator, without having excluded anything: even the cross of Christ and the resurrection from the dead would have a place within such frame, because all of these are actions that can be seen as the work of the Father. Correspondingly, one could also name Christian faith as faith in Jesus, since creation is also included in his work and ministry. The Son renews creation since the Creator is also in him (Wingren 1974/1981, 18). Similarly, one could also say that the works of the Spirit include all aspects of Christian faith (1974/1981, 18, cf. 192). Thus, belief in creation is not an isolated part of a Christian’s faith, but integral to all the elements of faith (cf. Wingren 1972, 73). One of the implications of the belief in creation is that God is at work even where there is no Christian faith. God’s work is not dependent on any prior belief or knowledge on the side of humans (Wingren 1972, 88). In the Creed’s formulation, the works of the Creator extend to all parts of creation’s story. This is the case even for those who do not know that it is the works of God that make creation and redemption possible. Creation takes place, even if we do not know the name of God (Wingren 1974/1981, 19). One can experience life given as a gift, even without having faith in God. When people in a contemporary context speak of “what life offers,” etc., they speak of the one whom Christian faith speaks of as “God,” that is, of “the Creator”. Despite the fact that modern culture is often shaped by a lack of faith, the basic experiences to which faith refers cannot be eliminated: everyone confronts the reality that she is not able to master or control all situations. She knows that this is the case, and cannot

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avoid the elementary experience of hope or fear (1974/1981, 19 f.). Human life is always evolving and always under threat, and the basic events of life in which these features are articulated come to the forefront in the liturgy (1974/1981, 20). These very features flavor the biblical language about how the Creator gives, births, and awakens life, in opposition to the destruction and perversion of life. From a quantitative point of view, the New Testament gives these features vivid expression through its description of Jesus’ works against the powers and threats of destruction. In this context, Jesus’ healings and his resurrection are concrete manifestations of the creative power of God against destruction, as is his resurrection. Wingren speaks out against the tendency to neglect this dimension of Jesus work in favor of a message about guilt and forgiveness. Even the center of the gospel, Jesus’ death on the cross and the resurrection are interpreted by Jesus as a parallel to God’s work in nature (John 12:24) (1974/1981, 20). That the Creator is at work in the ministry of Christ is already apparent in the incarnation. Thereby Christ is the manifestation the decision of God from the beginning of creation (1974/1981, 21–23). Jesus, as the one who is pure of heart, and therefore not under the powers of destruction that fill the hearts of other humans, realizes fully what it means to be created in the image of God, and thereby shows how creation and the Gospel are internally linked (ibid., 22–23). The historical essence of both creation and the Gospel places God’s action in the midst of human reality. Wingren holds that there are human situations that can be analyzed by phenomenology without making reference to “God” or “the devil.” In these situations, God works as creator against the forces of destruction, which makes it possible to understand the implications of a biblical view of human life even without or outside of faith (remoto deo) (1974/1981, 27). This approach is important for several reasons, but in this context, one reason is especially significant: one does not need faith in order to see or realize what Christian faith is about. Simply put, it is about the powers of life fighting the powers of destruction. In this way, the Christian faith represents a specific way of interpreting historical phenomena and the basic conditions of reality. Human hope and human prayers are about how to cope with our conditions, and thus, the works of God are not outside the sphere in which humans find themselves. Faith is the openness directed towards what God can do in this life with the concrete conditions for life (1974/1981, 40–41). Therefore God’s work is not finished, but is continuously under development in order to make sure that what was once good, continues to be so (1974/1981, 42–43). Wingren’s Irenean take on theology comes to the fore in his understanding of the life of Jesus. This life represents, he says, a reclaiming of the created, a disruption of its destruction (Wingren 1974/1981, 81). Jesus’ life must be seen as an integrated whole. It recapitulates the created world, it points forward to a full realization of creation in the future, and it contains small incidents and services with short-term effects towards people in need.

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However, one cannot categorize these elements as pointing backwards in history, forwards, or only to the present moment. Instead, these dimensions are united and cannot be separated (1974/1981, 85–86, cf. 90). Creation and redemption belong inseparably together. Against this backdrop, the Trinitarian dogma is not some merely abstract doctrine that is irrelevant for the human being. Instead it is deeply rooted in concrete phenomena that are experienced even outside of faith. Wingren uses Irenaeus’ understanding of the Son and the Spirit as the “hands of God” to interpret how God works in creation: the hands are not separate from the one who has them. Through God’s hands, God makes it possible to experience who God is. These experiences of God are also articulated in the congregation’s celebration and liturgy : “We see the hands and the fingers of God in the life, ministry, and death of Jesus and because of what he has done there has been a Christian congregation in the world” (1974/1981, 136). God’s hands were also active in the creation of human life and made it possible. God’s work is thus an embodied work in the world, and that faith is related to human reality as concrete and embodied. It is through this embodiment that it becomes possible to work against the powers of destruction (Cf. 1974/1981 146, cf. 156). Thus, the works of the Spirit are embodied works. By overcoming death and destruction, the work of the Son and the Spirit liberates creation and recapitulates it (cf. 1974/1981, 178). To be saved is, as Irenaeus stated, to become human2.

3. The works of God – phenomenologically analyzed (Løgstrup) If we now turn to Løgstrup, we see that he can be interpreted as further developing the potential phenomenological aspects that Wingren also presupposes, and which are suggested above.3 For Løgstrup, God, as the power to be (that is, Creator) makes it possible for all things to exist. Among the conditions for something to exist we must also count destruction, annihilation (tilintetgørelse) and suffering–conditions that also have to do with the biological constitution of human life (Løgstrup 1978, 228 f.). At this level, the created world is ambiguous: creation is generous and cruel alike. This makes the creator-God seem impersonal and indifferent – or cruel as well as generous. Because of the inherent destruction and annihilation 2 See Gustaf Wingren, Människa och kristen: En bok om Ireneus (1983), 82 ff. Here we can see a link between Scandinavian creation theology and the position in W. Pannenberg, who also increasingly moves in an Irenean direction due to his work on Herder. Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective (1985). 3 For an introduction to the overall features of Løgstrup’s thought, see Niels Henrik Gregersen, Chapter 2.

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built into creation, we cannot then infer from our experience that God is only good. The relationship between creation and the advent of the Kingdom of God in Jesus must be seen against the backdrop of the ambiguity, or tension, intrinsic to creation. Løgstrup insists that Jesus does not try to resolve or eliminate this tension, and offers no justification for human suffering (cf. 1978, 229). However, the advent of Jesus and the Kingdom means that God’s last word and work are not what God does in creation, its glory, and its inbuilt destruction. Instead, something new happens: “God makes Godself personal in spite of his creative and destructive being, makes Godself human, but on divine-human conditions, and not on our moral-human conditions.” According to Løgstrup, Christianity is not about morality but about the offer of faith and hope (1978, 230). Løgstrup thus interprets the relationship between creation and redemption by means of Luther’s distinction between God’s opus alienum and opus proprium, and sees the latter manifested in the Kingdom as the instance in which God relates to the inhumane suffering that humans cause each other (1978, 231). Prenter, in a nuanced interpretation of this point in Løgstrup, argues that it is not possible to fully understand these statements without presupposing a resurrection from the dead. His interpretation implies that the third person in the Trinity, the Spirit, as the giver of life, is also at work here (Prenter 1979, 369). The difference between creation and the Kingdom is that there is no cruelty and no destruction in the latter (Løgstrup 1978, 234). However, the goodness and generosity of the Kingdom are qualities that we nevertheless know already as part of creation. Furthermore, we can experience the carefree mode of life despite the conditions of creation – but given these conditions, we cannot assume that such experiences will last forever, nor can we always take them for granted (1978, 234). Although Løgstrup sees the rejection of Jesus as the main cause of his suffering, and thereby as a cause of suffering that can be considered from a moral point of view, the theological significance of the proclamation of the kingdom is not to be identified with any moral content. This point in particular distinguishes Scandinavian creation theology from classical liberal theologies. God’s being does not primarily orient human morality, but directs their faith and hope. This means that the relationship between creation and the Kingdom of God is developed in a manner that integrates the two without eliminating the tension between them. Such an approach does not attempt to explain all problems in human life from a theological perspective. Moreover, this approach addresses all of creation without restricting theological content to what can be coined in moral terms. Instead of a liberal, moral-oriented theology, Løgstrup’s considerations focus on how the work of the Father and the Son alike represents a struggle to liberate humans from a merely moral orientation towards a reality grounded in human activity. It allows for an

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attitude towards life that sees it as a gift. This integration between the work of the Father and the Son also redirects any tendency toward modern modalism: the creator God makes Jesus’ works his own. The dynamic interrelation between the two divine persons is of chief importance for understanding the work of both persons in creation and redemption.

4. Criticism of the Barthian understanding of the sources for trinitarian thought (Løgstrup and Wingren) The position that the underlying, universal religious conditions and interconnections of the Christian message are accessible for philosophical analysis is not an opinion shared by all theologians. Interestingly, those who are most strongly opposed to it are the Barthians, i. e., the group of theologians who have been among the strongest advocates for the trinitarian renewal in contemporary theology. There are, nevertheless, few extensive critical discussions of the Barthian position in Scandinavian creation theology. Wingren developed one in the 1950s, (Wingren 1954/1958, 23–44), but it does not relate to trinitarian thinking deeply (any minor points will be included below). Wingren gives a rather harsh criticism of what he takes to be the main problem, when he states: “This fact, that God is not conceived as working in anything human, using the human as an instrument or means for his own divine acts on earth, this negative relationship is of tremendous importance in Barth’s theology” (Wingren 1954/1958, 33). Another notable exception is Løgstrup’s polemical epilogue in Creation and Annihilation. Here, he problematizes the Barthian position’s denial of the possibility that these universal interconnections can be analyzed from a philosophical point of view. From a Barthian perspective, these interconnections are only accessible from a theological position that takes its point of departure in the specific historic event of Jesus from Nazareth. Løgstrup’s argument is here worth quoting in full: It means that one deduces the preexistence of Christ from the advent of the kingdom of God, and from the preexistence of Christ, one deduces the notion of Christ’s cooperation in the creation of the universe and all notions about the inner-trinitarian essence of God. As the doctrine about God and humanity, about the universe, about nature and history, about the human reality, about time and eternity are all deduced from the advent of the kingdom of God in Jesus of Nazareth, this makes the doctrine inaccessible for philosophical reasoning. The universal interconnections become a closed area for philosophy and instead become christological in character (Løgstrup 1978, 267; my trans.).

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Løgstrup’s distinctive take on these issues has to do with the relationship between the unique historic event of Jesus on the one hand, and the universal interconnections of reality on the other hand. He agrees with the Barthians that the coming of the kingdom of God is outside philosophy’s interest, and the reason is exactly its unique historical character. He further agrees with them in claiming that this presupposes universal interconnections. He nevertheless objects to the position that an understanding of these interconnections is inaccessible to any human, unless the proclamation of the Christian message is fulfilled (1978, 267 f.). He also objects to the Barthian understanding of philosophy as not only irreligious but fundamentally non-theological in the sense that sin blinds it from understanding what theology is all about. The Barthian approach sees all that is relevant for theology as needing to be addressed from the point of view of Christology, the Word of God, and the assumption that God exists, even when it comes to what Løgstrup calls the “universal interrelations.” Here, Løgstrup sides with Wingren in critiquing this approach for using the interrelations to shape the Christian message into a specific ontology, and thereby diminishing the historical uniqueness of the Christian message (1978, 268). When everything is seen from the vantage point of revelation, this approach becomes an exclusive, inner-Christian thinking about God’s relationship to and work in creation. If the creation of everything that exists can be understood only through the lens of revelation and incarnation, it generates a severe restriction of both creation and redemption. Løgstrup’s positive concern is that creation is not only created for the sake of redemption, but for its own sake, just as redemption also happens for the sake of the created world (1978, 269). Against this backdrop, we can see how Scandinavian creation theology and Barthianism part ways in their understanding of God’s work as well as in their understanding of revelation. Although Løgstrup agrees with Barth and Jüngel in claiming that it is due to God that we can know God, he also says that this can be said about how God reveals Godself in all that is. God does not only reveal Godself in, or based on the proclamation of the gospel (1978, 269). The reality of God and the reality of the universe cannot be separated, but they nevertheless require that we distinguish between revelation and creation, between Christian faith (in the historically unique person of Jesus) and the religious-philosophical faith (which concerns the interpretation of the universal interconnections) (1978, 270). He concludes: There is a difference between how God presents Godself in revelation and in creation. In revelation, the content of the Word consists of the fact that it is God’s word. If the content of faith is not God’s, it becomes meaningless. But within the realm of creation the life-expressions and the phenomena do not become meaningless if it is denied that God’s power is at work in them. God has not set up as a condition for keeping us alive that we have to recognize that he does so. God has left the interpretation of this

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fact to us, and he works in the life-expressions and the phenomena independent of our interpretation (1978, 271; my trans.).

In conclusion, Løgstrup, along with Wingren, insists on a close connection between the work of God as creator and God’s work in Jesus. This theological stance has both hermeneutical and Trinitarian implications. Hermeneutically, theology must relate to philosophical interpretations of the universal interconnections and the conditions of our existence in order to make the preaching of the Gospel relevant, meaningful and trustworthy (1978, 276). A trinitarian understanding of God makes sense of these different layers of God’s work as the co-operation of the three persons in the trinity. It does so in a way that ties together the works of the economic trinity with the concrete experiences of human life, and of the relevance of the gospel for human life. This should be seen as a lasting contribution that has validity for contemporary discourse on the Trinity as well (see further on this, Henriksen 2014).

5. A Christian ontology on God as love (Prenter) Regin Prenter shared the main concern of Scandinavian creation theology, but was more heavily influenced by Barth and dialectical theology than was Løgstrup.4 In his discussion of how Løgstrup develops his interpretation of the ethical demand, Prenter teases out some of the original elements in Løgstrup’s Christology, which is based on the fact that in Jesus’ life we meet God. Since the divine and absolute command cannot be preached by everyone, but only by the one who has given humans their life, Jesus’ authority to do so is conditioned by his specific relationship with God (Prenter, 1962, 221). Although he has some queries as to how Løgstrup understands Jesus’ proclamation of the ethical demand in relation to his preaching of the Kingdom, Prenter nevertheless acknowledges that there is a specific Christology already present in Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand. Løgstrup responds by saying that Jesus is the historic event that identifies the creator God as the source of the demand that has always been there. So with regard to ethics, there is no new content revealed in Christ (Løgstrup 1963, 161). He also affirms that his own Christology should be recognized as orthodox incarnation theology, in the sense that “the determinative is not what Jesus says and does, but what God does and says through him, his life and death” (Løgstrup 1963, 164). Thus Løgstrup establishes a close link between these two divine persons in the trinity. Prenter contributes an additional element to Scandinavian creation theology when he develops the Spirit as a basis for understanding God as 4 For an overall presentation of Prenter, see Christine Svindt-Plder, Chapter 4.

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love. In an article from 1970, “Der Gott der Liebe ist” (“The God who is Love,” Prenter 1971) he shows how this “definition” of God is linked to a pneumatological context (1971, 402). Faith in Jesus as Christ and love for one’s neighbor are both to be seen as works of the Spirit (1971, 403). Furthermore, to say that God is love is, according to Prenter, a christological sentence. Jesus brings with him the kingdom of God – the kingdom in which love is manifested (cf. 1971, 406). There are two important features in Prenter’s analysis here: first, that love is the basic definition of God and it is this love that unites the Son in his obedience with the Father ; second, the experience of love in the kingdom is what makes it possible for humans to understand the deeper meaning of the christological dogma vere Deus – vere homo, as well as the trinitarian dogma (cf. 1971, 406). It is only possible to understand that God is love within the context of the trinitarian dogma and from the relations between the trinitarian persons (1971, 406). Furthermore, this unity in love between Father and Son must be understood as the unity in the Spirit (1971, 407). In this way, Prenter contributes significantly to a full development of the trinitarian dogma while emphasizing the work of the Spirit. This becomes especially apparent in how God as Trinity is at work in the life, death and resurrection of Christ (Prenter 1971, 408). Furthermore, Prenter’s connection to Løgstrup becomes clear when he states that a Christian doctrine of God cannot be developed without any ontological elements. And unlike Bultmann, he also holds that we need a mythological understanding of God in order to address how God is revealed as trinitarian and as love in our world (1971, 409). However, an anthropomorphic presentation of God is only meaningful when we also acknowledge its insufficiency (1971, 409). Therefore, he also argues for the need to abandon the two-nature doctrine: to understand God as love cannot be developed on such an ontological basis (1971, 211). Prenter links the philosophical (God is being) and trinitarian (God is love) components of his theology by claiming that the latter is in fact an ontological sentence. Only in this way can he see how it is possible to relate the trinitarian understanding of God to the experience articulated in philosophical ontology (1971, 412). Apart from this connection, God can be experienced only as the one who puts the human under judgment. However, both Prenter and Løgstrup will hold that to experience God as love implies a relationship to God as God has revealed Godself in Christ. Hence, a fully Trinitarian ontology is only possible on the basis of revelation, and cannot be developed fully on the basis of a natural theology (cf. 1971, 413).

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6. Conclusion A trinitarian perspective on Scandinavian creation theology perceives trinitarian faith as an articulation of the conditions through which human live by partaking in creation in a wide sense, and relates these conditions to the proclamation of the kingdom of God. It thus considers common human conditions to be a positive resource for relating to God, alongside the main insights from the theological tradition. Thereby, it also nuances the theological description of the human condition in order to overcome a merely negative view of it. It sees creation as included in the Gospel, and not as rejected, negated or overcome by it. Thus, creation itself testifies to the integrity of the works of the triune God.

Bibliography GUNTON, C. (1995). “Relation and Relativity : The Trinity and the Created World,” in C. Schwçbel (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. HENRIKSEN, J.-O. (2014). Life, Love and Hope. God and Human Experience. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. JØRGENSEN, T. (1976). “Kristologi og religiøs livstydning med særlig henblik p, forkyndelsen” [Christology and a religous interpreation of life, with special reference to preaching], in Sigfred Pedersen/Knud T,gholt (eds.), Dansk Kirkeliv 1976/1977. arhus: Forlaget Aros, 60–79. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1963). “Svar til professor Prenter” [Reply to Professor Prenter], in Dansk teologisk tidsskrift, 161–166. LØGSTRUP, K. E. (1956/1971). The Ethical Demand. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. English translation of Den etiske fordring, 1956. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1978). Skabelse og tilintetgørelse. Metafysik IV. København: Gyldendal. English translation in Metaphysics I, 1995. PANNENBERG, WOLFHART (1985). Anthropology in Theological Perspective. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. PRENTER, R. (1962). “Nogle bemærkninger vedrørende kristologien i K.E. Løgstrups: Den etiske fordring” [Some remarks concerning the Christology in The Ethical Demand], Dansk teologisk tidsskrift, 219–227. PRENTER, R. (1971). “Der Gott der Liebe ist” [The God who is love], Theologische Literaturzeitung 96, 401–413. PRENTER, R. (1979). “Skjulte og ,benbare kristologiske forudsætninger i K.E. Løgstrups metafysik” [Hidden and obvious christological suppositions in K.E. Løgstrup’s metaphysics], Fønix 3, 1979, 354–370. PRENTER, R. (1967). Creation and Redemption. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967. English translation of Skabelse og genløsning. Dogmatik, 1967.

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SIGURDSON, O. (1996). Karl Barth som Den Andre: En studie i den svenska teologins Barth-reception [Karl Barth as the Other : A study in the reception of Barth in Swedish theology]. Stockholm: B. Östlings bokförlag. SLOT NIELSEN, K. (2014). “Gud som værensmagt og Gud som person i K.E. Løgstrups sene tænkning og i nyere trinitarisk teologi”. Unpublished dissertation, Aarhus University : Faculty of Arts. WINGREN, G. (1954/1958). Theology in conflict: Nygren, Barth, Bultmann. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. English translation of Teologiens metodfr,ga, 1954. WINGREN, G. (1947/1959). Man and the Incarnation: A study in the Biblical theology of Irenaeus. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. English translation of Ma¨ nniskan och inkarnationen enligt Irenaeus, 1947. WINGREN, G. (1981). Credo, the Christian view of faith and life [Credo: Den kristna tros-och livs,sk,dningen]. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House. WINGREN, G. (1958/1961). Creation and law. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. English translation of Skapelsen och Lagen, 1958. WINGREN, G. (1960/1964). Gospel and church. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. English translation of Evangeliet och Kyrkan, 1960. WINGREN, G. (1972). Va¨ xling och kontinuitet: Teologiska kriterier [Change and continuity : Theological criteria]. Lund: Gleerup. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1983). Människa och kristen: En bok om Ireneus. Arlöv : Verbum.

Derek R. Nelson

15. Scandinavian Creation Theology in American Perspective

In writing about the theology that dominated academic circles in the United States in the middle third of the 20th century, H. Richard Niebuhr worried about its supposed “Unitarianism of the second article” (Niebuhr 1946, 371–84). Whether one thought that was a good thing or a bad thing, most people thought it pointed to something that was true. The distinctiveness of Jesus Christ, and God’s revelation in him, was the stuff of Christian theology. Therefore it might seem unlikely that a Scandinavian Creation Theology that, as Wingren puts it, is a “first article Christianity” would have much of a reception in such a Christocentric context (Wingren 1981; 1984).1 In a certain way of thinking, the reception and influence of this research program in fact has been rather limited, despite the avowed scholarly integrity the project possesses and the influence it has manifested elsewhere. Yet what I want to argue in this essay is that it is precisely because Protestant Christian theology in America has been, at its center, dominated by Christology and German disputes thereon, that Scandinavian Creation Theology has found ways of being appropriated. It has been developed by relatively unlikely conversation partners who have operated at the periphery of theological movements in America. But many figures in those kinds of projects which might have seemed marginal in the 1950s and 1960s (SCT’s heyday in Europe) have in fact now come to the center, and are no longer peripheral. Therefore I venture to say that American theology is perhaps only just now beginning to be fertile soil for the flourishing of the seeds of first-article Christianity. If that is true, then the time is right for renewed attention to be given to thinkers like Løgstrup, Wingren and Prenter. In what follows I want to first reflect on the reasons that America would not have been ready for SCT in the middle third of the 20th century, then look at the early reception of each of its three major theorists, and conclude with thoughts on the benefits of still further appropriation and development in the American context. Of course it is simultaneously a grand honor to speak on behalf of an entire continent on this matter, but also rather impossible to do so conclusively! And so what I offer here can in truth only be a gesture to a much richer and more nuanced reception history, and many more 1 This term does not mean “first-article-only,” but rather that creation be given primacy.

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voices must be marshaled to determine the promise that continued development and appropriation might convey.

The American Protestant theological scene, 1960–1980 During the days when Prenter, Wingren and Løgstrup were producing their significant monographs and helping shape theological discourse, Barth, Bultmann and Tillich were the theological imports that North Americans were talking about. Tillich’s arrival in New York and teaching at Union, Harvard and Chicago meant that his version of existentialist Christian theology – in its own way Christocentric – set many theological agendas in North America. Barth’s various champions in postliberal and evangelical circles took up more slices of the theological pie in North America, and Bultmann’s influence, mediated through major figures like Schubert Ogden, Van Harvey and John Cobb was felt less strongly than it was in Europe but was still required reading for theological students and scholars. Couple these influences with the growing number of relatively indigenous theological plants being raised on American soils, and one would probably conclude that there was simply not enough room for any more imported species of Christian theology, such as those from Nordic circles. Still other factors complicated the appropriation of SCT in the United States at this time. The rise of various identity theologies was dominant in its own way. Feminism and its creative research programs caused people to ask “what does it mean to be a woman and a Christian?” and “What resources does Christianity have to resist sexism?” African-American theologies asked similar questions about black identity and the legacy of slavery, and Latin American theologies in the United States were identifying ways that South and Central American reflection illuminated experience not just of Latinos but also of all of us in the very pluralistic United States.2 Therefore, given the needs of American society, theologians naturally sought out social science and philosophies of human identity to be their chief interlocutors. Doctrinal theology was beginning to be regarded as pass8 or, worse, as part of the problem. Occasionally identity theologians would attempt a kind of systematization of their views, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Sexism and God-talk (Ruether 1983) or Jon Sobrino’s and Ignacio Ellacuria’s Systematic Theology (Ellacuria & Sobrino 19933). But those were exceptions, and were not generally iterated in subsequent waves of identity 2 One Nordic thinker whose work should be considered more seriously in the American context is Nathan Söderblom. I myself have suggested some ways he would help American make sense of religious diversity and pluralism in Nelson (2007). 3 The essays that compose the volume were written much earlier, however.

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theology. To the extent that America was ready for more influence from Europe, the likelier candidates to win a receptive audience were “political theologies” like those of Dorothee Sölle, Johann Baptist Metz or Jürgen Moltmann. Of course there are some exceptions to this rule, such as Pannenberg, Jüngel and Emil Brunner (whose works were translated into English this time and were regarded as non-controversial “textbooks” of Protestant theology), but they are notable as exceptions. And attempts to think SCT and liberation or identity theologies into each other produced minimal and rather bizarre results, such as one essay by an American Catholic theologian that tried to paint Wingren as a closeted liberation theologian (Reilly 1975). The place one might have expected SCT to influence the American theological scene would be through Lutheran theological schools. Yet even here precious little appropriation happened. There are several reasons for this. The Missouri Synod Lutheran church was, in the 1960s through the 1980s, undergoing the upheaval caused by the banishment of its supposedly “liberal” professors from the Concordia Seminary. This had the effect of making the Missouri Synod far more conservative than it had been, and thus was an unlikely place for SCT to take root. The church bodies (and their theological institutions) who were preparing to form the ELCA in the 1980s were, sometimes to a degree of consciousness, sometimes not, trying to say “no” to linking Lutheranism with any immigrant identity or ethnicity. For that reason, among others, interest in more theology coming from the Nordic countries was low. In fact that was seen as part of the problem. Lutheran divisions in the US were seen to stem from old rivalries and arguments about which language to worship in, whether church leadership would be like the bishops from the church of Sweden or the egalitarianism of Norwegian Pietists, and so on. And yet the influence of Knud Løgstrup, Gustaf Wingren and Regin Prenter have not gone unnoticed west of the Atlantic Ocean. A few major players in university theology in the United States, alert to developments in Europe, helped pave the way to bring SCT to the minds of their students. And there were enough “minority voices” within the rather more church-conscious setting of Lutheran theological education to win a place at the table for some of the questions SCT was raising.

Initial reception and transformation of Løgstrup The one person who, more than any other American, championed the agenda for theological ethics set by Løgstrup was James Gustafson. Gustafson, the dean of American ethicists, spent a career’s worth of time at not just one or two but actually three of the major centers for the study of religion in the United States. Stints at Yale University (1955 to 1972), the University of Chicago

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(1972–1988) and Emory University (1988 to 2000) saw him in leadership positions as senior professor, and thus as mentor to hundreds of aspiring ethicists. He helped set their reading lists, tested them on familiarity with contemporary options in ethics and shaped their academic commitments. His affiliation at private, relatively secular universities is significant; unlike the rather parochial orientation of seminary education at denominational institutions, Yale and Chicago, especially, placed theology in direct conversation with the rest of the university disciplines. Thus the general features of Løgstrup’s ethics – a phenomenological approach which did not emphasize the distinctiveness of Christianity, a secularized view of Christianity in which ample room was allowed for engagement with natural science and social science, among others, were naturally complementary to Gustafson’s approach. Some have called Gustafson a “Christian Stoic4” and in fact Gustafson himself has embraced explicitly the promise of Stoic philosophy to criticize the anthropocentric tendencies of Christian ethics (Gustafson 1981, 190). The realities of history and the relativity of revelation are simply facts that Christianity must accept. It must then do its best to respond to those facts on the basis of faith. Gustafson’s ethics are nicely typified by his enthusiasm for a fascinating letter from Jonathan Edwards to a friend in Scotland, where Edwards recounts the terrifying spectacle of the collapse of a balcony at his church in New England. With remarkable scientific precision, Edwards describes the failure of the purlins, which caused the bracing to give way, which caused the balcony to fall upon the people seated below. Then, after a full scientific-mechanical account of the event had been offered, Edwards ascribes the incredible fact that no one was killed or injured in the accident to the providence of God. Science gives its explanations for states of affairs, social science interprets states of affairs according to its logic, and then theology makes its interpretations within the limits circumscribed by the other disciplines, but nonetheless with its own integrity (Gustafson 2004, 1–4). Such an approach is not exactly the same as Løgstrup’s but the two are certainly kindred spirits in taking non-theological disciplines with absolute seriousness. Gustafson encouraged the translation of Den Etiske Fordring, and when it was published in English he supplied a significant foreword highlighting some of its major claims. He appreciatively cited a chapter title on “The Impossibility of ‘Christian’ Ethics” as a step in the right direction to move American ethicists away from the Christendom-affirming commitments of the influential Paul Ramsey and his colleagues (Gustafson 1971, ix). Gustafson situates Løgstrup not in the history of phenomenology (which did not take root in America until later) but rather grafts Løgstrup’s vine into the flourishing tradition of personalist philosophy. Josiah Royce and the 4 He calls himself this in An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt (2004), 106.

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American epigones of Martin Buber are the ones Gustafson has in mind who most resonate with Løgstrup’s project, and he encourages their inheritors to consider this exciting Danish import. Perhaps in a critique of American ethical reflection, Gustafson also notes that Americans are not especially good at limiting themselves to serious philosophical argumentation, and thus suggests that Løgstrup’s use of literature, such as novels of E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence, might be attractive to fuzzy-thinking Christians west of the Atlantic (Ibid., x). Some of Gustafson’s students have continued this reception of Løgstrup. For instance, his successor at Chicago, William Schweiker, has called on Løgstrup as an ally in developing his program of “religious humanism” (cf. Schweiker 2010, 178–91). The sovereign life utterances are especially significant for Schweiker. Humanism as Schweiker understands it means a richer engagement with non-theological discourses about human flourishing and the enhancement of “life,” including a deeper examination of the category of “life” for theology (Schweiker 2009). Gustafson and Schweiker have placed Løgstrup in the canon of required reading for American theological ethicists, Protestant and Catholic.5 Even though there are relatively few articles or books written by Americans about Løgstrup, he frequently is cited as a kind of theorist for secularized Christianity. Other major voices in American ethics have adopted Løgstrup as a companion, or else shaped their ethics in contrast to views ascribed to Løgstrup. James Childress of the University of Virginia is an example of the former, while Alasdair MacIntyre of Notre Dame is an example of the second. Childress’s general approach to ethics has been to maintain traditional Christian commitments (such as to just-war theory or on certain aspects of biomedical ethics) but to offer newer rationales for those perspectives drawn not from revelation or authority but from philosophical argument. He sees Løgstrup as an ally in this program. He writes, Løgstrup starts from the “that” of interdependence not merely because of conscious decisions to trust but primarily because life is so constituted. From this “that” of interdependence, from the fact that others are in our hands, just as we are in their hands, emerges the “what” of the ethical demand: We are to care for the life placed in our hands. This what is silent, radical, one-sided, and impossible (Childress 1973, 288).

MacIntyre’s use of Løgstrup in his own writings is perhaps subtler and less overt than is Gustafson’s. However, MacIntyre, along with Hans Fink, also wrote a preface to the revised (and much improved) second edition of The Ethical Demand (MacIntyre and Fink 1997). He has penned other interpretive essays seeking to move Løgstrup’s program forward, more by appreciative 5 Lisa Sowle Cahill discusses this legacy in the article “James Gustafson’s Influence on Catholic Moral Theology” (2012).

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challenge than by endorsement. For instance he has been critical of Løgstrup’s notion that spontaneity is an integral part of responding to the ethical demand. For a Thomist like MacIntyre, such virtues have to be learned and practiced. Yet he is quick to couch such disagreements in the language of appreciation for a still-greater continuity of his thought with Løgstrup’s (MacIntyre 2007). The foregoing is far too brief to be a full picture of the appropriation of Løgstrup in American circles.6 Yet it should be clear that, with Gustafson, Schweiker, Childress and MacIntyre leading the way, graduate students trained at Yale, Chicago, Emory, Virginia, Notre Dame and the other top research universities in the US would have come to read and begin to appreciate Løgstrup. He was not read in the rather more parochial Lutheran seminaries, nor even very much by Lutherans. In fact, none of the abovementioned ethicists is Lutheran.

Appropriating Wingren Gustaf Wingren’s reception in American circles has been perhaps slighter than has Løgstrup’s. But it is probably also the case that there has been less reaction against his writings than Løgstrup’s because the claims that Wingren makes are not drawn quite as contrastively as Løgstrup’s. That is, partly Americans have not seen Wingren as controversial. An Irenaean “recapitulation” as a soteriological option, for instance, has been appreciatively discussed in American circles. And his influence in mediating the Swedish Luther Renaissance to American Lutherans is well-documented.7 Yet certain parts of Wingren’s corpus in fact directly challenge widely held assumptions in American theology, particularly Lutheran theology. This is particularly true with his perspective on vocation. As readers of this book will well know, the thesis of Wingren’s influential work on Luther’s theology of vocation is that one’s vocation is one’s concrete response to the law of God in the world (Wingren 1957). It has nothing to do with the determination of one’s religious life, because that determination is the work of the gospel, not the law. Fanciful American interpretations of Luther on vocation have missed the point that the work of the gospel is disjointed from one’s work in the world. Instead, vocation has suffered under the fuzzy reasoning that goes something like this: the gospel saves anxious people who fret about their eternal life. So grateful are those people for such deliverance that they feel emboldened to show their gratitude to God by trying to do some 6 I have written on the utility of Løgstrup for a doctrine of sin in contemporary theology in Derek R. Nelson, Sin: A Guide for the Perplexed (2011), 88–97. 7 See Mary Elizabeth Anderson, Gustaf Wingren and the Swedish Luther Renaissance (2006).

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good in the world, whether as a taxi driver, construction worker or nurse. And so vocation is integrally related to salvation. We are “freed” to serve by the power of the gospel, as though we would be terrified to do so otherwise. There has therefore been deep resistance to grant Wingren’s reading of Luther more credibility. I argue that this is due to the unique perspective on the “law” taken by many if not most American Lutheran theologians in the two decades following Wingren’s publication of Luther on Vocation. And that perspective is one that overwhelmingly ascribes to the law solely negative functions. “Lex semper accusat;” the law always accuses, we read in the Apology to the Augsburg Confession.8 Gerhard Forde, arguably the most influential of Lutheran theologians during the 1970s and 1980s within Lutheran circles, championed this approach. His controlling binary was death and life. The law killed and the gospel re-animated. In dramatic images Forde painted the law as tortuous terrifier of consciences, fearsome enough to drive sinners to the consolations of the gospel. Even on the law’s civil use, where one might have expected a deeper appreciation of its positive contributions to safe, just society, the focus is on the negative character of the law. It restrains sinners so that they are less awful than they might have been to each other.9 A better sociologist and analyst of Lutheran preaching than I would likely be able to examine thousands of twenty-minute Lutheran sermons and find eighteen minutes of accusation from the law, followed by two minutes of “Whew, it’s not so bad after all.” This is painting with a broad brush, surely, but I want to evoke the kind of climate that Wingren’s book on vocation would have encountered. David Yeago called this theology a kind of Gnosticism, to say nothing of being Antinomian (Yeago 1993). And so to see so beloved a concept as the Christian’s vocation subsumed under the heading of “law” meant that it would go nowhere. Even non-Lutheran theologians, who might have been able to mediate Wingren’s take on Luther to Americans, panned the book. John Dillenberger, editor of an influential compendium of Luther’s theology, wrote of Luther on Vocation, “It is to be regretted that a book so worthy of being read should be as exceedingly wordy and repetitious as this one is” (Dillenberger 1958, 146). Other Americans who have significantly engaged Wingren’s thought have been critical of his dismissal of Barth,10 or have accused him of “naturalizing evil” in his doctrine of creation.11 Then there is the large class of Americans who associate Wingren with Aul8n and Nygren, who generally have 8 Apology of the Augsburg Confession, IV.38, IV.179, XII.34, and elsewhere. 9 For an extended, if oblique, critique of this approach to the law, see Gary M. Simpson, “Toward a Lutheran ‘Delight in the Law of the Lord’: Church and State in the Context of Civil Society” (2003). 10 For instance S. Paul Schilling, “Gustaf Wingren,” in Contemporary Continental Theologians (1966). 11 For instance Ronald F. Thiemann, “Toward a Theology of Creation: A Response to Gustaf Wingren” (1981).

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been regarded to have been wrong in supremely helpful ways: the typologies of Christus Victor and Agape and Eros are so easy to criticize and refute that they are also favorites to cite.

Prenter’s absence from American theology While Regin Prenter’s name is known by American theologians familiar with mid-twentieth century debates, his appropriation in American circles is remarkably limited. Reviews of Spiritus Creator and Creation and Redemption penned by Americans were numerous, largely positive and appreciative. Yet standard works on pneumatology in the United States ignore Prenter’s take on the Spirit, and Creation and Redemption is not discussed at all, it seems.12 Some significant American theologians wrote dissertations on Prenter, such as Michael Root and Mark Ellingsen at Yale under the direction of Hans Frei. Concerns over the conflation of creation with redemption, or at least of the subsuming of the former into the latter in Barth’s theology ran deep within theological circles in the 1960’s, but largely Prenter’s medicine for this ill was not prescribed by American doctors of the church. His work as an ecumenist in official capacities with the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation was appreciated by Americans of an ecumenical stripe, but this made him suspect in the eyes of “confessional” Lutherans such as those in the Missouri Synod. One Missouri theologian accused Prenter of “Romanizing” the Lord’s Supper as a sacrifice (Evanson 2002). Another viewed Prenter’s presentation of the inherent goodness of creation as a betrayal of the legacy of Luther (Hayas 1970). Yet these are momentary glimpses into Prenter’s theology, as continued attention has been mostly lacking in the United States.

Scandinavian creation theology in North America’s future There are several reasons why the time may be ripe for a continued, and intensified, appropriation of SCT themes and commitments in the North American context. I want to briefly touch on four data of the theological situation in North America that, taken together, signal a seismic shift in the openness here to a kind of “first article” Christianity. First there is the failure of previous models of religious pluralism. The US in particular has been lacking significant theorists for how Christian theology 12 Creation and Redemption is an exception in that it was used in some seminaries, but mostly to make use of its non-controversial (and exceedingly clearly-written) summaries of basic Christian teachings, not the positions that are idiosyncratically Prenter’s own.

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can take seriously the religious commitments of others without thereby selling its intellectual birthright for a mess of pottage. Serious theological reflection on this theme is usually subjugated to civil strategies for how to “get along” or vague overtures toward the need for “tolerance of the other.” Secularity is viewed as the enemy of the gospel, rather than as a kind of fulfilment. In Nordic theology (and even Nordic society) this is simply not the case. The church is not asked to do things that are better done in the left hand kingdom: hospitals, schools, orphanages, etc. are state institutions for which the church should give thanks, not encroachments into the church’s domain. This is simply not the view of Americans who still insist on Christian prayer in public schools. Yet the rapid rate of change in American demographics will soon make dodging this question as a theological question impossible.13 A second reason SCTseems promising in my own theological context is that interest is high in a doctrine of creation due to contemporary environmental movements.14 This development does not only mean that people crave to find God “in nature,” though they certainly do, nor that we desire theological justifications for policy decisions aimed at preserving creation, though many desire that, too. What American Christianity could profitably adopt from SCT, however, is not just an ecological theology, but a doctrine of creation that has a theological anthropology rooted in it. This would mean a creation theology with a doctrine of sin, not just an account of the beauty, glory and fragility of the material world. A critique of works righteousness in the ecological movement is also needed, which a theological anthropology like Wingren’s could supply. As Al Gore remarked, in observing the responses to global climate change prevalent among American Christians, we move from ignorance to despair with alarming speed. Third, there is great interest in the theology of Martin Luther in the United States, but relatively little in Lutheranism. That is, much of the packaging of Lutheran faith and life seems to be counter-cultural, but appreciation for Luther himself as a critic of abuse, champion of freedom and preacher of the gospel runs deep. I convened a conference last year, for instance, on the theme of Luther as a teacher of non-Lutheran communions. The result was fascinating.15 A Baptist theologian saw Luther as a hero of lay ministry. A Congregationalist upheld Luther’s view of the Christian facing death in trusting the promises of God. David Tracy wondered at Luther’s doctrine of the “Deus Theologicus.” Therefore there is reason to believe that interpretations of Luther that are not drawn on primarily confessional lines, but rather 13 Trygve Wyller’s Chapter 16 in this book supplies an excellent starting point for a better approach to a theology of secularity and pluralism. 14 If anthropocentrism is a critical element in overcoming human destruction of the natural world, Ole Jensen is right in seeing the helpfulness of Løgstrup’s thought in Chapter 7 in this book. 15 See Piotr Małysz and Derek R. Nelson, Luther Refracted: The Reformer’s Ecumenical Legacy (2015).

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like those of Grundtvig and SCTmay be the best way to bring Luther across the America in conversation with the dizzying theological plurality there is here. Fourth and finally there is a demographic reason to think that SCT may yet flourish in the US. This is the rise of the religious “nones.” This moniker refers to the fastest growing religious group in America: those who check “none” when asked to state their religious preference. This is especially true in the Pacific Northwest of the US, which is beginning to look a lot like northern Europe. In fact the demographics of Seattle, cultural bellwether for the US, are much like Copenhagen and Stockholm. We are coming to terms with secularity, with the end of “Christendom” as a genuine goal for churchly Christianity. I detect generally little desire to continue to view such movements as the enemy to be resisted with a Radical-Orthodoxy-like aversion to secular society.16 In thinking new thoughts on this front, however, we will need help, and SCT is a logical and indeed fruitful place to turn for inspiration, critique and wisdom.

Bibliography ANDERSON, MARY ELIZABETH (2006). Gustaf Wingren and the Swedish Luther Renaissance. New York: Peter Lang. CAHILL, LISA SOWLE (2012). “James Gustafson’s Influence on Catholic Moral Theology” Journal of Catholic Moral Theology 1:1, 92–115. CHILDRESS, JAMES F. (1973). “Review of The Ethical Demand,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41:2, 288. DILLENBERGER, JOHN (1958). “Review of Luther on Vocation,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 23. ELLACURIA, IGNACIO & SOBRINO, JON (1993). Systematic Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. EVANSON, CHARLES (2002). “Regin Prenter’s Understanding of Eucharistic Sacrifice,” in John T. Pless, et al. (eds.), Shepherd the Church. Fort Wayne, IN: Concordia Seminary Press, 25–44. GUSTAFSON, JAMES M. (1971). “Foreword,” in Knud Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand. Trans. Theodor I. Jensen. Philadelphia: Fortress, ix. GUSTAFSON, JAMES M. (1981). Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. GUSTAFSON, JAMES M. (2004). An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt. Minneapolis: Fortress.

16 See the introduction, Chapter 1, to the present volume for a subtle presentation of the antinomy of radical orthodoxy to Scandinavian creation theology.

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HAYAS, DONALD M. (1970). An Analysis and Comparison of the Concept of Grace in the Theology of Regin Prenter with the Concept of God’s Goodness in Creation in the Theology of Martin Luther. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. MACINTYRE, ALASDAIR (2007). “Human Nature and Human Dependence,” in Concern for the Other : Perspectives on the Ethics of Knud Løgstrup. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 147–66. MACINTYRE, ALASDAIR and FINK, HANS (1997). “Introduction,” in Knud Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand. 2nd edition. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, xv–xxxviii. MAŁYSZ, PIOTR and NELSON, DEREK R. eds. (2015). Luther Refracted: The Reformer’s Ecumenical Legacy. Minneapolis: Fortress. NELSON, DEREK R. (2007). “Encountering the World’s Religions: Nathan Söderblom and the Concept of Revelation,” Dialog 46:4, 363–70. NELSON, DEREK R. (2011). Sin: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: T&T Clark. NIEBUHR, H. RICHARD (1946). “The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Unity of the Church,” Theology Today 3, 371–84. REILLY, FRANCIS J. (1975). “Liberation Theology in the Thought of Gustaf Wingren,” in Thomas M. McFadden (ed.), Liberation, Revolution and Freedom. New York: Seabury, 192–202. RUETHER, ROSEMARY RADFORD (1983). Sexism and God-talk. Boston: Seabury. SCHILLING, S. PAUL (1966). “Gustaf Wingren,” in Contemporary Continental Theologians. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 161–82. SCHWEIKER, WILLIAM (2009). “Religious Humanism,” Journal of Religion 89:2, 214–35. SCHWEIKER, WILLIAM (2010). Dust That Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanisms. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. SIMPSON, GARY M. (2003). “Toward a Lutheran ‘Delight in the Law of the Lord’: Church and State in the Context of Civil Society,” in John Stumme & Robert Tuttle (eds.), Church and State: Lutheran Perspectives. Minneapolis: Fortress, 20–50. THIEMANN, RONALD F. (1981). “Toward a Theology of Creation: A Response to Gustaf Wingren,” in Henry Vander Groot (ed.), Creation and Method. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 119–36. WINGREN GUSTAF (1984). “The Doctrine of Creation: Not Appendix, but the First Article,” Word and World 4, 353–71. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1957). Luther on Vocation. Trans. Carl C. Rasmussen. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1981). Credo: The Christian View of Faith and Life. Minneapolis: Augsburg. YEAGO, DAVID S. (1993). “Gnosticism, Antinomianism, and Reformation Theology : Reflections on the Cost of a Construal,” Pro Ecclesia 2, 37–49.

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16. The Discovery of the Secular-Religious Other in the Scandinavian Creation Theology

The restoration of the religious Other The core argument in this chapter is that Scandinavian creation theology is about restoring the dignity and significance of the secular-religious Other. In this context the secular-religious Other means all people who do not think their life experience is rightly classified as religious, especially not as Christian. The big issue in Scandinavian creation theology is to argue that all people belong to God’s world and love, and that, whether you have a so-called personal faith or not, this does not change or dissolve God’s love as the foundation of all life, all people, and all nature. As such, the traditional binary opposition between the secular and the sacred is not really appropriate in Scandinavian creation theology. International discussion of the secular is, of course, both complex and broad. But, from the perspective of Scandinavian creation theology it is not meaningful to call parts of the world, or of the mankind, purely secular, in the sense of being void of God. Indeed, that is the exact opposite of Scandinavian creation theological thinking, which involves the conviction that God is in the world, not outside of it. So, one important product of Scandinavian creation theology is an overcoming of the supposed secular/sacred contradiction. The spirituality of Scandinavian creation theology is a spirituality wherein all secular, all the othered, share what Løgstrup calls the universal aspects of Christianity. This chapter shall first present some of the classical Christian theological profile, shaping this core tenet in Scandinavian creation theology, and it will then make the claim that this tradition might have a greater potential for being brought into dialogue with current positions like critical post-colonial theology and the critical phenomenology of today. From a more pietistic perspective, one sometimes constructs a less generous interpretation of what faith is. Such a construction of faith often gives ordinary people a lack of confidence in the matters of faith, the sense that they do not belong. In contrast, Scandinavian creation theology offers a different construct of faith. As such, it could be said to restore the dignity of the secular-religious Other. The secular is respected, but what Scandinavian creation theology offers is a spirituality of the fullness of everyday life.

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Dissolving the secular/ sacred binary In the book Secular and Sacred? The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law and Public Space (Van den Breemer, Casanova, Wyller 2014), the editors connect with the concept of intertwinement for interpreting the secular-religious in Scandinavia. The term intertwinement was coined by the Danish professor Lisbeth Christoffersen (Christoffersen 2006) and is designed to highlight the interconnectedness between the religious and the secular in the Scandinavian tradition. The book discusses this concept and finds it rather appropriate for capturing the Scandinavian tradition. From the point of view of sociology or political science, explicit religious concerns and issues like secular law and value-making are very much intertwined in our part of the world. France, in stark contrast, at least from the point of view of their principles, makes a very sharp distinction between the secular and the religious. In the reception of the book, Bryan Turner (Turner 2015) launched another concept for grasping the Scandinavian secular. He proposes to use the term “entanglement” instead of “intertwinement,” because the stronger tensions and much more complicated relations between the secular and religious are better captured with the idea of entanglement than with the idea of intertwinement. It should be obvious that both intertwinement and the sharper entanglement ideas both cover important aspects of the Scandinavian tradition, at least from the perspective of the social sciences (sociology/ political science). In the context of Scandinavian creation theology, however, it is not obvious that either entanglement or intertwinement can cover what it means to restore the religious Other. Both metaphors allude to interpretations suggesting that some are more inside and some more outside, entangled or intertwined. But the “universal” claim of Christianity, as we hear it from Løgstrup, or, the calling involving all men, as it is formulated in Wingren, or, the “Human first, then Christian,” articulated by Grundtvig, are not positions developed within the contexts of social science. All three parallel positions are distinctly theological. This implies that the relations between all kinds of secularity and Scandinavian creation theology are not simple at all. Those theories located in social science miss the point about universality. Even if interviews and fieldwork tell us that not “all” people “believe” in God or participate in the services, this does not mean that the universality ambition fails. Indeed, Scandinavian creation theology responds to that kind of secularity theories in two ways. The first aspect of this response comes from the human dimension: life experiences of joy, compassion, belonging, guilt and hope are – from the perspective of God – not divinely irrelevant. To the contrary, these experiences are parts of human life through which God communicates.

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This leads to the second aspect of the theological response: the recognition of religious others, even those that are not aware of being others in the sense given above. Of course, one has to be aware of paternalistic / maternalistic versions of such kinds of universality. People’s free choice regarding belief and religion have to be respected. But the basic point is that one cannot talk about God without recognizing God’s connectedness to all of mankind and not just to a part of it. Therefore one needs to say that the theories, which Charles Taylor calls the subtraction theories (see Chapter 1, Introduction), do not survive Scandinavian creation theological analysis. The subtraction theory claims that the secular is expanding and the religious sphere is decreasing. One problem with this view is that religion is returning. Indeed, every first semester student of Scandinavian creation theology knows that the subtraction theory is theologically meaningless. From the position of Christian theology, the secular is the place where the religious is still always present, but implicitly so. And this implicitness is the source of the theology. For this reason, too crude descriptions of the world, either in terms of intertwinement or entanglement, as both secular and religious, is misleading from the point of view of Scandinavian creation theology. Scandinavian creation theology leads to and presupposes another kind of spirituality : it is a spirituality of the everyday, restoring the spiritual significance of the secular-religious Other. Modest, implicit, and without boasting, this is still very much a spirituality recognizing the experience of God’s rootedness in all life. We are secular-religious Others.

The everyday Other in Lutheran theology As is well known, Gustaf Wingren has contributed decisively to creation theology in Scandinavia. When we talk about the world God relates to, we need to present it as something more than Revelation. This was a strong position in Wingren’s theology, and we need to understand it in the context of Wingren’s polemic against Karl Barth. In Wingren’s classical Lutheran terminology, he presents his theology inside the Law and Gospel trajectory. The question is whether we can experience our condition of being sinners and living in ambiguity outside the Gospel. Translated into non-theological language, the question is whether we can experience God in the everyday : If you connect to the very simple formula ‘gospel and law’ and by this concentrate on the issue of knowledge, then the law is not something which produces actions. Then the law does not become something which God uses to enhance actions, but a

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knowledge, only given to them, who has received the gospel. Then you think that the guilt only can be understood after the preaching of the gospel (Wingren 1957, 192).

In contrast to this “knowledge-based” interpretation of the law, Wingren presents what he thinks is the Lutheran alternative. To strengthen his argument he also refers to the Danish theologian Prenter to defend his position: Guilt is not something unknown to human being, something, which suddenly appears through the preaching of the gospel. The law is not at all some unknown entity in the world, something which the human being calculates to discover when the gospel has been proclaimed. The law is continuously present in the world and expects humans to be imitated by humans (Wingren 1957, 195).

Against this background Wingren concludes: This is why theology needs not to be afraid of any connection to normal human experience of guilt. Theology shall not fear any connection to the human experience of guilt. One can understand the anti-liberal reaction to earlier generations’ apologetic search for numerous ways of discovering different kind of connections. One should, however, take care of the dangers following the anti-liberal reaction. These are reactions, which in the last end could lead to a false Christology : The human nature of Christ has been lost and the docetic divine Christ is proclaimed instead (Wingren 1957, 198).

Scandinavian creation theology, as I see it, is primarily a theology to convince us that we are free to believe in the God because this Christian God speaks to all humans and all nature. Wingren is, of course, primarily occupied with the rediscovery of creation and vocation. But the significance of a universal experience of guilt outside of and before the Gospel indicates what this theology is all about: rediscovering the secular-religious Other that relates to God even if the current discourse does not allow him/her to think they are doing it. Scandinavian creation theology is a hermeneutical theology because it argues that we cannot trust the Gospel if we do not at the same time trust that God is present in all human relations and in nature. K.E. Løgstrup formulated this in a famous passage (Løgstrup 2008) about the need for an ontology of faith. At the time of Luther there was no contradiction between the ontology of the time and faith. The faith of Reformation presupposed an ontology. This is not so today. Ontology is a contested issue, and therefore theologians have to reconstruct the ontology that faith presupposes today. Faith by necessity implies an ontology. This is one of the most important parts of Scandinavian creation theology, both from the perspective of dogmatics and of philosophy. No persons are alone in this sense. We already live in a context we did not construct ourselves. For Løgstrup, it is decisive that Christian faith always connects to a specific

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ontology, a specific “pre-ethical” context preceding the individual tales of his or her Christian life. The reason why Løgstrup puts so much force into this argument is not primarily because of his interest in the philosophy of religion. Rather, Løgstrup is interested in ontology because it is only when faith presumes an ontology that we can really believe. Scandinavian creation theology is therefore, in my view, first of all, essentially Lutheran, meaning that there is an experience of God in all creation and this is the presupposition for experiencing what the Gospel is. Løgstrup follows Wingren in his critique that both Barthian Reformed theology and their contemporary “modernity” are the same: they both reject that there is an ontology before the Gospel. Løgstrup’s alternative, in contrast, goes like this: one cannot “trust the Gospel” if we cannot trust that God is present in the world and in the nature. Discussion about what Løgstrup intended with this claim, and the background for developing it, has been going on since it first appeared in the book Skabelse og tilintetgørelse in 1978. In the context of Scandinavian creation theology I think there is still a need to focus further on what Løgstrup understands as ontology. Løgstrup elaborates what he calls “considerations” from the point of view of philosophy of religion, or (and this is his concept) the philosophy of creation: These are not about the revelation, they do not concern the unforeseen in the Christian world-view. They are a religious interpretation of the universe, the existence of man and the world, they are about the universal in Christendom, about the experiences and insights, with which we understand the Christian message (Løgstrup 2008, 79).

More than Scandinavian: Lutheran It is widely acknowledged that the claim of universality is at the core of Scandinavian creation theology. Though this has been the case since Grundtvig in the nineteenth century, the content of such interpretation is definitely not “ethnic,” in the sense of belonging to some kind of exotic Scandinavian ethnography. Wingren himself was very clear about his Lutheran profile and launched much of his theology as a contribution to a contemporary interpretation of Luther. This is also a reason why the tradition is disputed. Indeed, the interpretation of Luther is a contested area, and some of the most contested topics are exactly those relating to the universal aspects of theology. Wingren connected the meaning of the universal to creation and law. Løgstrup expanded that into the life worlds and life’s many various

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expressions. The same interest for the universal is also present in the theology of Gerhard Ebeling. In many ways, Ebeling’s work runs very much parallel to Wingren, with respect to both the explicit Luther studies, and to the more specific articles on systematic theology. One of these works is the still important text “Existenz zwischen Gott und Gott. Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach der Existenz Gottes.” The article was published for first time in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche in 1965, but it was also made available in the Wort und Glaube vol. 2 from 1969. The important point of departure for Ebeling is the critical stance taken towards the analysis developed by Friedrich Gogarten concerning the life “zwischen Gott und Welt.” Ebeling’s aim is to argue that life in the world (in der Welt) is not a life outside God, when you look at it from a Lutheran point view. One needs to develop a perspective so that ”… the experience of being in the world becomes a way of experiencing God,” (Ebeling 1969, 259; my trans.). On this point one sees that Ebeling is on the same (Lutheran) track as Wingren. But then Ebeling takes things some important steps further by making the same argument as Løgstrup, as presented above. Two perspectives in particular take the discussion further. One is the argument that man meets God as contested in the world. This leads to an important discussion concerning the presence and absence of God (abwesend und anwesend). The crucial point here is that absence is not the same as there being no God present at all. “Absence is one specific way of being present,” (Ebeling 1969, 284; my trans). This leads to the radical conclusion: “Faith means to believe in God against God,” (Ebeling 1969, 284; my trans). Or, translated into more everyday language: there is a tension in all life. But this tension should not be taken to mean that God is only to be found in those parts of that tension expressive of love. God is everywhere, in the creation, in the tensions, and also in the evil contradictions: it is God against God. And, this is another way of restoring the religious Other. One is never not experiencing God, even if the name for such experiences are sometimes given with no reference to God’s name. This is common point for both Wingren, Løgstrup, and Ebeling. Even though they argue it in different ways, the focus is the same nonetheless. And, the core motive is very precisely elaborated in Gerhard Ebeling‘s interpretation of Luther’s famous exegesis of the first commandment in his Large Catechism from 1529. Ebeling argues that Luther changes the issue about who God is to the question about who man is connected to. “What does it mean to have a God, or what is God? Answer : We call God the one from whom we can expect everything good and to whom we escape in all darkness” (Luther 1982, 245). Ebeling’s point is important, and has obvious significance in our context. For, Luther develops here the argument that the basic experience of being connected must be a decisive part of any Christian discourse about God. The experience of being connected to something else or to someone else is essential if we are to understand who God is: It seems to me that Ebeling here

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summarizes the core of both Scandinavian and Lutheran theology of Creation: we need to explicate the complexities of all our life experiences and in so doing we find ourselves speaking about God. Theology will be extremely impoverished if we are not able to unite life experiences and God. In fact, this unity is really what theology as discipline is about.

The secular-religious Other and the othered Other Now, it is one thing to locate Scandinavian creation theology in relation to core issues in Lutheran theology, and, to argue why a binary religious/secular schism cannot cope with the basic issue in Scandinavian creation theology. The next challenge is to continue the same argument (that the secularreligious others belong to God and can claim him in their life experiences if they want to do so) with respect to some of the most significant contemporary positions in theology and critical thinking. It is remarkable that, when traditions like critical theory, post-colonial theology and other traditions are discussed, one often hears the same argument raised as a critique of Wingren and Løgstrup. That is, Scandinavian creation theology claims universality, but if there is something lost in postmodernity, it is universality. Therefore, so the argument goes, we cannot follow Scandinavian creation theology. In my view, there is a tendency to forget, or to want to forget, that Scandinavian creation theology position is a theological and religious position. One cannot claim God as anything else but “taking the whole world in his hands.” This is why we need to read positions in critical theology, post-colonial theology and the latest development in phenomenology within the same trajectory. These traditions are compatible with Scandinavian creation theology in several respects. In the last decades the most common critique to phenomenology and universalism is that these traditions share the responsibility for the othering of the poor and heteronormative approaches. However, there is more common ground for a dialogue between current discourses and Scandinavian creation theology. If one looks outside the garden of Scandinavian creation theology, one suddenly discovers that ontology itself is one of the most contested issues in contemporary philosophy. Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, Butler, and nearly all other feminists agree on one thing: classical ontology is totalitarian (Levinas). Any summary of ontology leads to sameness. The Other is not recognized in universal ontology. The faces and traces of the other, the subaltern (Spivak), the homo sacer, the bodies that matter–they are all colonized in the sameness of ontology. This is a well-known and well-established critique. Originally it was of

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course not developed as a critique of Scandinavian creation theology per se, but in the last decades it has also become one of the most prominent inspirations for developing a new critical theology. And in the wake of this development, Scandinavian creation theology is losing both its significance and its creativity. The breakthroughs are happening elsewhere, and the most important contributions come when the philosophy of otherness is translated into theology. The problem is this: most, if not all, of these critics lack the fundamental universal/hermeneutical approach, so openly expressed by Løgstrup and his generation. Let me start with one typical case (amongst innumerable examples that could be chosen) from the book After the Death of God. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo (Robbins 2007). In one of the articles Caputo presents Vattimo’s theology in this way : Vattimo undertakes a two-pronged process of weakening. The first process is the weakening of the Being, from an objective metaphysical structure into interpretation (‘event’ in the Heideggerian sense) … which means the historical process in which objectivistic pretentions of metaphysics … have emptied or weakened and been replaced by ‘perspectives’ or interpretive schemata. The second process is the weakening of God into the world, which is described in the Pauline language of emptying (kenosis), which is paradigmatically expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the birth, but also the death of Jesus (Robbins 2007, 74).

Here we find two important elements: first, classical ontology is transformed into a “weak” ontology ; second, the ontology, when theologically reflected upon, becomes part of the “kenotic” event. This kenosis explicitly expands from soteriology to creation. This is different from the ontology elaborated by Løgstrup, who kept the sharp distinction between creation and soteriology. For Caputo and Vattimo, however, the weakening/emptying of Being is parallel to the kenosis of God, the death of God. “The two processes of weakening, of Being and of God, are the correlates of what Vattimo calls the weak thought (pensiero debole). Kenosis, as the transcription, translation, or transmission of God into the world, means establishing the kingdom of God on earth” (Robbins, 2007, 75). Caputo and Vattimo seem to indicate that we are now experiencing an ontology quite different from traditional metaphysics. It is the ontology of Nietzsche, “which means the historical process in which the objectivistic pretentions of metaphysics … have become incredible (or ‘nothing’)” (Robbins 2007, 74). From the position of classical Scandinavian creation theology the problem raised by Caputo and Vattimo is first of all a theological one: the identification of creation and soteriology. But their interest in the social othered and the “weak” does not need this kind of identification. If Scandinavian creation theology is a theology of the secular-religious Other, it is, of course, also a theology of the socially othered. Underlining the universal means to give a hand to the othered and the “weak,” who could, and indeed

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should, receive more in life than just being othered and excluded. You do not need a soteriological creation to achieve that, from the point of view of theology.

The postcolonial challenge The same kind of challenge for Scandinavian creation theology comes from current postcolonial philosophy and politics. In this short chapter I cannot hope to go into too much depth about such a massive and very influential position in international, contemporary theology. Many postcolonial thinkers mistrust, from a political perspective (and with good reasons), the ontology of the universal. One typical scholar is Vivienne Jabri, who in her recent and very stimulating book The Postcolonial Subject. Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity (London 2013), is inspired by the French-Caribbean thinker Franz Fanon (1926–1961). Fanon remains one of the important sources for current postcolonial discussion, which focuses on how to overcome and become a subject after centuries of oppression. Jabbri writes about Fanon: Questioning in equal measure the universality of ‘Man,’ and a general category of the ‘negro,’ Fanon at once disturbs the juxtaposition of Europe with Enlightenment, and with the idea that Europe is the birthplace of ‘Man,’ while also challenging Europe‘s construct of the ‘other,’ and the ‘automatic’ manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him. (Fanon 1986, 20; Jabbri 2013, 72)

Postcolonial critique does not substitute classical ontology with that of Nietzsche, but interprets colonial ontology as the root of the problem itself, from whence comes the hegemony of masculinity, the labelling of the Negro, and all that follows. These general, philosophical important positions in postcolonial scholarship are then often echoed in theological critique of Scandinavian creation theology. Fanon and his followers show that ontology is behind the exclusion of the others as being outside “Man.” But from the position of Scandinavian creation theology, one could look at this from exactly the opposite perspective. For, there is a family resemblance between the postcolonial ambition and Scandinavian creation theology. Both want to restore the othered, the secular-religious, and the Orientalized. And the reason why they are similar is also parallel. For, what is needed is to restore the significance and recognition of the traditions among the Orientalized, be it in a secular-religious or in a social/cultural/political way. There are obvious differences between the two traditions, of course, but the analogy between the two is still remarkable. One last case can be given to illustrate this, this time from the very influential feminist theologian Kwok Pui-Lan and her book Postcolonial Imagination & Feminist Theology (2007). One very paradigmatic position is reached when Pui-Lan presents Asian political theology :

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To counteract Christian imperialism, Mananzan and other feminist theologians in Asia rediscovered the subversive and revolutionary power of the Christ symbol. While the Spaniards used Jesus’ suffering as a tool for oppression, the Fillipino people combined passion narrative with their own millennial beliefs to construct a language of anticolonialism in the nineteenth century … Filipino feminists reinterpret Jesus as a fully liberated human being, who confronts the wrongs of society and stands up for justice to bring about the reign of God (Pui-Lan 2007, 157).

Pui-Lan shows herself to be at the core of the postcolonial view, as stated above, when she addresses the main issue: that one needs to restore the religious significance of the oppressed. The restoration is the post-colonial project. Pui-Lan, however, explicitly chooses soteriology to argue in favor of the restoration. But this is not necessary, the trajectory of Scandinavian creation theology could have contributed with as much strength and without the reformed/Barthian theology, which she inadvertently applies.

The challenge from destruction and the evil One important perspective to bring into the discussion is connected to evil and sin. Reflection on the experience of evil and destruction is one of the core issues in Scandinavian creation theology. Some people seem to think that this theology is only connected to the “bright side of life.” This is absolutely wrong. To the contrary, one could claim that Løgstrup’s discussion of the pagan God represents a strong argument in favor of the possibility that God can be experienced even in evil and destruction. Put differently, experiencing evil is not the same as not experiencing God, the question relates to which God one experiences. In the arguments above, Løgstrup’s central point that ontology is different from revelation was addressed. But, even if an experience does not relate to revelation, that does not mean one removes God from the matter. For, one experiences God outside the revelation when the experience is about the universe, the existence of man and the world, or in Løgstrup’s terminology : the ontology inherent in Christian thinking and in Christendom. When Løgstrup discusses ontology and the universal, he does it in the context of the hidden God. Løgstrup himself is very clear that the ontology he is excavating is not revelation, but that ontology is ambiguous, and this ambiguity should be interpreted in dogmatic terminology. “God’s act of creation is terrible in its glory and in its destruction. It supersedes both our intellectual and emotional imagination. It led Jakob Knudsen to talk about the pagan essence in God” (Løgstrup 1978, 78). My point is that one can interpret Scandinavian creation theology as a quest

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for the restoration of the secular-religious other. Yet one will need a good argument to convince anyone coming from outside the “close family,” as it were, especially those coming from all the various positions focusing on otherness and opposing sameness. Can the secular-religious Other be restored when one first of all experiences destruction and exclusion? Løgstrup does not raise this question himself, but it is obviously possible to interpret his position in favor of the restoration of the secular-religious Other. The basic point of the argument is to open up room for an experience of God outside revelation. On this basis, one could say that the othered Other and the excluded Other are not outside God because of this experience. Experiencing the pagan God is also part of the ontology : God against God. The postcolonial is a recent phenomenon and comes from traditions that are very different from the ones supporting Luther, Grundtvig, Wingren and Løgstrup. But in my view, the post-colonial and Scandinavian creation theology have even more similarity than we have seen so far. The postcolonial is also, above all, about restoring dignity and significance of the (religiously/ culturally/politically/socially) Orientalized Other.

Defending the other from the position of phenomenology The last position, which is also having a philosophical impact on contemporary theology, is contemporary phenomenology and the critical reception of it. Influenced by thinkers like Foucault and Levinas, a new generation of theologians and philosophers have come to ask: is it possible to keep up the original thinking of ontology, intersubejctivity, and intentionality, and at the same time let the subaltern speak? The Copenhagen phenomenologist Dan Zahavi opposes the mainstream critique of phenomenology, which is that this tradition cannot include Otherness because it to focused on consciousness. Zahavi is a philosopher and not a theologian, but his way of arguing could obviously be taken into theology in the same way as the arguments concerning the postcolonial reponse above. This is not the place for a detailed presentation of Zahavi’s arguments, but the main point is his claim, supported by others, that it is false to suggest phenomenology is a priori incapable of coping with difference and the Other. For example, Zahavi argues that any meeting between two persons presumes a fundamental intersubjectivity, founded in the subjects’ being-in the-world. The Other is standing there before me as an other and as a stranger, and it is against this background that I meet that person empirically. Being Other is therefore part of the subject’s constant meeting of the Other, which comprises the basis for their existing intersubjectivity (Galagher & Zahavi 2012, 77). This is Zahavi’s position, which implies that the subject does not necessarily colonize the other into sameness. An ontology built on the

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phenomenological interpretation of such a meeting implies difference. In other words: Løgstrup’s position that we always keep the Other’s life in our hands can be maintained without being suspected of transforming the Other into an icon of myself. Zahavi’s argument is also parallel to what we find in the books coming from the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels. Waldenfels is a thinker influenced by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but also by the generation of Derrida, Levinas, etc. (he does not seem to have read Løgstrup, even if there are some reflections in Waldenfels that seem like comments on Løgstrup). Waldenfels belongs to the same tradition as that more generally presented by Zahavi, but he is more concerned with the ethical than is Zahawi. Waldenfels develops a theory of the alien. The alien is out there, distinctly another and not only part of my consciousness. The relationship between the subject and the alien lies at the core of humanity. Waldenfels claims that the human condition serves to develop what he calls “responsivity” when we meet the alien. He calls this responsivity pathos: “In order to designate those events which are not at our disposal, as if merely waiting for a prompt or command, but rather happen to us, overcome, stir, surprise, attack us, the old term ‘pathos’ appears appropriate which, … announces a learning through suffering!,” (Waldenfels 2011, 15).

Conclusion The main point in this article is that Scandinavian creation theology takes the position of the secular-religious Other. This is why the secular/religious distinction misses the point of Scandinavian creation theology. There is a specific contribution from Scandinavian creation theology to the international discussion on the secular. The Lutheran contribution is that it is not a problem to be both secular and religious. It is more or less the content of faith. There is, however, also a third and so far hidden point in this paper. For, the dominant part of this paper has been very cognitive and very rational (dogmatic discourses very often are). But both the postcolonial and phenomenologists like Waldenfels, Zahavi and Løgstrup claim that there can really only be an embodied experience of the given world, both as creation and as destruction. So the future of Scandinavian creation theology, after having developed an updated foundation for its dogmatics, is in the creativity of an embodied language of experience. Then we might probably start speaking of the embodied secular-religious secular, and no longer speaking of something being both secular and religious merely in the abstract.

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Bibliography CAPUTO, JOHN & VATTIMO, GIANNI (2008). After the Death of God. New York: Columbia University Press. CHRISTOFFERSEN, LISBET (2006). “Intertwinement: A New Concept for Understanding Religion-Law,” Nordic Journal of religion and Society 19:2, 109–128. EBELING, GERHARD (1969). Wort und Glaube 2. Tübingen: Mohr & Siebeck. FANON, FRANZ (1986). Black Skins, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. GALAGHER, S. & D. ZAHAVI (2012). The Phenomenological Mind. London: Taylor & Francis. HJELDE, S., LØNNING, I. & RASMUSSEN, T. (1982). Martin Luther. Verker i utvalg V. Oslo: Gyldendal. JABRI, VIVIENNE (2014). The Postcolonial Subject. Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity. London: Routledge. LØGSTRUP, K.E. (1978). Skabelse og tilintetgørelse: Religionsfilosofiske betragtninger. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. PUI-LAN, KWOK (2007). Postcolonial Imagination & Feminist Theology. Louisville: John Knox Press. TURNER, BRYAN (2015). “Review essay,” European Journal of Social Theory vol. 17:4, 534–543. VAN DEN BREEMER, R., CASANOVA, J. & WYLLER, T. (2014). Secular and Sacred? The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law and Public Space. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. WALDENFELS, BERNHARD (2011). Phenomenology of the Alien. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. WINGREN, GUSTAF (1942/2007). Luther on Vocation. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press.

About the authors

Trond Skard Dokka is Professor emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Oslo, Norway. His main interests are hermeneutics, and the interdisciplinary study of theology and literature. These interests have led to numerous articles on authors such as T. Morrison, Christina Rossetti, and Henrik Ibsen. His most significant book is a primer on Dogmatics, Som det var i begynnelsen (2000). Elisabeth Gerle is Professor of Ethics at Lund University and at the Research Department of Church of Sweden, Uppsala. Her latest books are Farlig förenkling. Om Religion och politik (2010), and Sinnlighetens närvaro. Luther mellan kroppskult och kroppsförakt (2015), forthcoming as Passionate Embrace. Luther on Love, Body and Sensual Presence (2017). Niels Henrik Gregersen is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the founder and director of the Løgstrup Archives at Aarhus University 1995–2000, and he specializes in contemporary Protestant theology and the field of science-and-religion. His latest books include Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology (2015) and Den generøse ortodoksi: Konflikt og kontinuitet i den kristne tradition (2015, 4th ed. 2016). Ole Jensen is Professor emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of Theologie zwischen Illusion und Restriktion. Analyse und Kritik der existenz-kritizistischen Theologie bei dem jungen Wilhelm Herrmann und bei Rudolf Bultmann (1975), Unter dem Zwang des Wachstums. Ökologie und Religion (1977), and Knud Ejler Løgstrup: Philosoph und Theologe (2015). Jan-Olav Henriksen is Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the Norwegian School of Theology, Oslo, and Professor of Contemporary Religion at Agder University, Kristiansand. He writes theology with an outlook to contemporary trends in other scientific and scholarly disciplines. Among his recent books are Relating God and the Self: Dynamic Interplay (2013), Life, Love and Hope: God and Human Experience (2014), and Jesus as Healer (with Karl Olav Sandnes, 2016).

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Allen G. Jorgenson is Assistant Dean and Professor of Systematic Theology at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His recent publications include Strangers in this World: Multireligious Reflections on Immigration (co-edited with Hussam S. Timani and Alexander Y. Hwang, 2015) as well as chapters in Lutherrenaissance Past and Present (2015) and On the Apocalyptic and Human Agency : Conversations with Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther (2014). Derek Nelson is Associate Professor of Religion at Wabash College, in Indiana, USA, where he also directs the Wabash Pastoral Leadership Program. He is the author or editor of ten books, including the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Martin Luther (2017) and Resilient Reformer : The Life and Thought of Martin Luther (2015). Christine Svinth-Værge Plder is Professor with special responsibilities in Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is the author of Doxologische Entzogenheit. Die fundamentaltheologische Bedeutung des Gebets bei Karl Barth (2009), and editor of Mellem Tiderne. Fem dialektiske teologer (2015). Currently she is working on a research project investigating the reception of Luther’s Lectures on Romans. Benedicte Hammer Præstholm, Ph.D., is Lecturer at the Center for Pastoral Education and Research in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark. Her research centers on Lutheran anthropology, gender, and sexuality, and she recently published articles such as “From Breaking News to Old News. Homosexual Pastors in Denmark and the Pfarrhaustheologie” (Studia Theologica 2013) and “Human in the Flesh. Gendered Anthropology between Theology and Culture” (2016), in ‘What is human?’ Theological Encounters with Anthropology (2016). Pia Søltoft is pastor and former Associate Professor in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at The University of Copenhagen. She was the director of Søren Kierkegaard Research Center 2010–2013 and is the author of Svimmelhedens etik: Om forholdet mellem den enkelte og den anden hos Buber, L8vinas og Kirkegaard (2000), Kierkegaard og kærlighedens skikkelser (2015), and Kunsten at vælge sig selv: Om Kierkegaard, coaching og ledelse (2016). Bengt Kristensson Uggla is Amos Anderson Professor of Philosophy, Culture, and Management at the Swedish-speaking abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. The author of Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, and Globalization (2010) and Becoming Human Again: The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren (2016), he lives in Stockholm, where he also teaches at Stockholm School of Theology, Sweden.

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Jakob Wir8n is doctor of systematic theology and specializes in the theology of religions. He serves as the theological secretary for Archbishop Antje Jackel8n, Church of Sweden. In his current research, he studies churches’ approaches to education and mission in post-Christian societies. His latest work includes Religious Stereotyping and Interreligious Relations (co-edited with Jesper Svartvik, 2013) and “Nathan Söderblom and Our Own Time” (with Antje Jackel8n, Dialog 2015). Jakob Wolf is D.D, Associate Professor in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Copenhagen. His habilitation, Den farvede verden [A World of Colours] (1990) is on the phenomenological tradition from J.W.Goethe, Hans Lipps and K.E.Løgstrup. He has published several books on phenomenology, natural theology, and nature and ethics. His last published book is about Rudolf Otto’s phenomenology of the divine. Trygve Wyller is professor of Christian Social Practice and Systematic theology at the Faculty of Theology University and Honorary professor at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. His dissertation concerned fundamental theology from the point of view of D. Bonhoeffer, O. Bayer and K.E. Løgstrup. Recent publications include Secular and Sacred? The Scandinavian Case of Religion, Human Rights and Space (co-edited with Rosemarie van den Breemer and Jose Casanova, 2014), and The Spaces of Others – Heterotopic Spaces (co-edited with Hans-Joachim Sander and Kaspar Villadsen, 2016).

Index

Allchin, A.M., 9, 27, 32, 88, 126–146 Almond, Brenda, 39 Andersen, Svend, 33, 41, 64, 66 Anderson, Mary Elizabeth, 246, 250 Anttila, Miikka E., 122, 125 Arendt, Hannah, 183, 188 Armgard, Lars-Olle, 148, 153 Aronson, Harry, 94, 109 Asad, Talal, 17, 32 Augustine, 168, 268 Aul8n, Gustaf, 91, 247 Balbulus, Notker, 129 Barth, Karl, 8, 47, 69–70, 72, 76–78, 87, 96–97, 101–02, 110, 119, 209, 225, 236, 239, 242, 248, 255, 268 Bartholdy, Christian, 193 Bauman, Zygmunt, 20, 32, 39 Bayer, Oswald, 18, 194, 198–200, 269 Beckford, James A., 13, 32 Benhabib, Sayla, 188–89 Bexell, P., 202, 205, 212 Billing, Einar, 106, 110, 208–09, 212–213, 215 Bjørnvig, Thorkild, 150–51 Bohlin, Torsten, 95 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 269 Bring, Ragnar, 91 Brottveit, a., 213 Brunner, Emil, 185, 243 Buber, Martin, 245, 268 Buechner, Frederick, 115, 125 Bugenhagen, Johannes, 18 Bultmann, Rudolf, 8, 14, 39–40, 44, 47,

65, 101–02, 110, 147, 150, 154, 209, 225, 237, 239, 242, 267 Butler, Judith, 187, 189, 191, 200, 259 Cahill, Lisa Sowle, 245, 250 Caputo, John, 260, 265 Carson, Rachel, 150 Casanova, J., 14, 34, 254, 265, 269 Cavanaugh, William, 185, 189 Childress, James, 245–46, 250 Christoffersen, Lisbet, 254, 265 Christoffersen, Svein Aage, 153, 205–06, 212 Cobb, John, 242 Cullberg, John, 95 de Lubac, Henri, 202–07, 211–13 Derrida, Jacques, 259 Dillenberger, John, 247, 250 Dokka, Trond Skard, 201–214, 217, 267 Donne, John, 182, 189 Ebeling, Gerhard, 28, 32, 258, 265 Eckerdal, J., 208 Edwards, Jonathan, 244 Ellacuria, Ignacio, 242, 250 Ellingsen, Mark, 248 Evanson, Charles, 248, 250 Fanon, Franz, 261, 265 Forde, Gerhard, 247 Foucault, Michel, 259, 263 Frei, Hans, 19, 32, 248

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Gerle, Elisabeth, 179–190, 267 Gogarten, Friedrich, 71, 209, 258 Gregersen, Niels Henrik, 7–9, 11–34, 37–66, 69, 71, 87, 121, 148, 153–54, 162–63, 166–67, 179, 182, 185, 187, 190, 210, 232, 267 Grummet, D., 202, 213 Grundtvig, N. F.S., 7–9, 13, 16, 21, 24, 26–32, 34, 38, 41, 46–47, 53, 61, 67, 69–74, 80–81, 83, 85, 87–88, 93–94, 109, 126–144, 148–49, 181, 183–84, 190, 196–97, 202, 205–07, 209–13, 250, 254, 257, 263 Gunton, Colin, 229, 238 Gustafson, James, 33, 243–46, 250 Habermas, Jürgen, 14, 33, 49 Hansen, Karsen M., 41 Hartman, David, 220–22, 224 Harvey, Van, 242 Hauerwas, Stanley, 19, 33 Hayas, Donald M., 248, 251 Hedenius, Ingemar, 96 Heidegger, Martin, 38, 42–44, 46, 65, 152, 158, 260 Heimbrock, Hans-Günter, 9 Henriksen, Jan-Olav, 28, 33, 229–39, 267 Herrmann, Wilhelm, 150, 154, 267 Hick, John, 33, 221, 224 Hjelde, S., 265 Hofsten, Greta, 95, 100–01, 103 Holberg, S.E., 213 Holm, Bo Kristian, 87, 189, 200 Holm, Katrine Winkel, 195 Hume, David, 159 Hägerström, Axel, 95 Høgenhaven, Jesper, 194 Irenaeus, 22, 91–94, 99–103, 106, 110–11, 127, 135, 189, 202, 229, 232, 239 Iversen, Hans Raun 209, 211, 213 Jabri, Vivienne, 261, 265 Jacobsen, Anders-Christian, 87

Jantzen, G., 181, 190 Jeanrond, Werner G., 170, 178 Jensen, Ole, 41, 52, 62, 64, 94, 125, 147–156, 210, 213, 249, 267 Jervell, Jakob, 150–51 Jesus, 22–23, 25, 27, 37, 39, 52–53, 61–62, 77, 82–83, 96, 104, 108, 131–33, 136, 138–40, 147, 152, 154, 158–61, 163–64, 176, 216, 218, 230–37, 241, 260, 262, 267 John of Damascus, 129 Jorgenson, Allen G., 67, 87, 115–126, 268 Jüngel, Eberhard, 98, 109, 165, 235, 243 Jørgensen, Theodor, 32, 88, 238 Kant, Immanuel, 38–39, 41–42, 44, 46, 59, 150, 162 Keats, John, 131 Kierkegaard, Søren 29, 37–38, 41–43, 45–46, 49, 52–53, 60–61, 65, 93, 167–178, 209, 212, 268 Knudsen, Jakob, 262 Kolb, Robert, 18, 46, 64, 117, 125 Korthaus, M., 68, 87 Kyhn, Ernst, 195 Lawrence, D.H., 176, 245 L8vinas, Emmanuel, 20, 33, 97, 109, 188, 259, 263–64 Lewis, C.S., 167–70, 175–78 Lindbeck, George, 19, 33 Lipps, Hans, 38, 43–44, 269 Lunn, Tage, 195 Luther, Martin, 7–9, 11–34, 38–39, 41–42, 45–46, 53, 56, 61, 63–65, 67–69, 71–88, 91–94, 97, 100–06, 110, 115–127, 135, 148, 153, 163, 165–66, 168, 180–83, 185, 187–90, 192–94, 196–200, 205, 207, 209, 212, 218, 233, 243, 246–51, 255–59, 263–65, 267–68 Lyby, T., 183, 190 Løgstrup K.E., 7–8, 11–12, 16, 19–21, 23–24, 27–31, 33, 37–66, 68–71, 73, 81, 84–88, 94–95, 97, 102, 116, 120–23,

Index 125, 147–155, 157–66, 167–78, 182, 188, 196, 205–06, 209–10, 212–13, 230, 232–39, 241–46, 249–51, 253–54, 256–60, 262–65, 267, 269 Løgstrup, Rosemarie, 41, 49, 65, 269 Lønning, Inge, 150, 265 Lønning, Per, 123, 125 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 28, 33, 39, 66, 125, 185, 190, 245–46, 251 Marcion, 78, 98, 100, 108, 110 Martensen, Hans, 136 Marx, Karl, 44 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15, 33, 264 Metz, Johann Baptist, 243 Millbank, John, 19, 33 Moltmann, Jürgen, 243 Mortensen, Viggo, 41 Muir, Edwin, 141 Murray, Robert, 129, 144 Nedergaard, Poul, 193 Nelson, Derek R., 116, 241–252, 268 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 241, 251 Niekerk, K. van Kooten, 33, 41, 55, 64, 66 Nielsen, Bent Flemming, 69, 87 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 261 Nj,, adne, 70–73, 77, 82, 84, 87 Nygren, Anders, 91–93, 100–02, 110, 167–70, 175–76, 178, 225, 249, 247 Nørager, Troels, 169–70, 178

Österlin, L., 208 Ogden, Schubert, 242 Olesen Larsen, Kristoffer, 46 Origen, 168 Paget, Francis, 135–36, 144 Panikkar, Raimundo, 26, 33 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 232, 238, 243 Paul, 25, 42, 102, 161, 171, Pedersen, Else Marie Wiberg, 87, 153, 200 Pedersen, K.A., 210–11, 213

273

Persch, Jörg, 9 Pickstock, Catherine, 19, 33 Plato, 161, 168, 171, 173, 178, 180, 190 Plder, Christine Svinth-Værge, 40, 53, 64, 67–90, 192, 236, 268 Plder, Johann-Christian, 53, 64, 66, 154 Plder, T.-A., 68, 88 Pope Francis, 11 Popper, Karl, 24, 52 Prenter, Regin, 7–8, 11–12, 20–24, 28–31, 33, 37–38, 40, 61, 65, 66–90, 118–20, 123, 125, 165–66, 192, 196–200, 230, 233, 236–38, 241–43, 248, 250–51, 256 Præstholm, Benedicte Hammer, 117, 191–200, 268 Pui-Lan, Kwok, 261–62, 265 Race, A., 217, 225 Rahman, Fazlur, 220, 222–25 Ramsey, Paul, 244 Rebel, Lise-Lotte, 70 Reilly, Francis J., 243, 251 Reissing, Moritz, 9 Ricoeur, Paul, 15, 104, 109, 268 Robbins, 260 Root, Michael, 72, 74, 88, 119, 126, 248 Rooth, H.I., 186, 190 Roper, Lyndal, 194, 200 Royce, Josiah, 244 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 242, 251 Runestam, Arvid, 95 Sanders, Hanne, 183, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 44 Schelde, Michael, 9 Schilling, S. Paul, 247, 251 Schjørring, Jens Holger, 68–69, 88 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 148 Schweiker, William, 245, 251 Schütz, Alfred, 15, 33 Sigurdson, Ola, 229, 239 Simpson, Gary M., 247, 251 Sløk, Johannes, 94 Sobrino, Jon, 242, 250

274

Index

Socrates, 161 St. Francis, 131 Stockholm, Anja, 28, 34 Svartvik, Jesper, 221–22, 225, 269 Söderblom, Nathan, 106, 242, 269 Sölle, Dorothee, 243 Søltoft, Pia, 45, 167–178, 268 Taylor, Charles, 15, 34, 255 Thaning, Kaj, 46, 81, 86, 88, 148 Thick, Catherine, 132, 144 Thiemann, Ronald F., 247, 251 Thorkildsen, D., 208 Tillich, Paul, 174, 178, 242 Tinker, George, 123, 126 Tracy, David, 249 Turner, Bryan, 254, 265 Tutu, Desmond, 132 Uggla, Bengt Kristensson, 7–9, 11–34, 70, 78, 91–114, 179, 182, 185, 190, 196, 200, 212, 215–16, 219, 225, 229, 268 Van den Breemer, R., 14, 34, 110, 254, 265, 269 Van Rompay, Lucas, 142–44 Vattimo, Gianni, 186, 190, 260, 265 Vind, Ole, 183, 190

Waldenfels, Bernhard, 264–65 Ward, Graham, 19, 34 Wengert, Timothy J., 18, 46, 64, 117, 125 Widmann, Peter, 87–88 Wingren, Gustaf, 7–8, 11–12, 15–17, 20–24, 27–34, 37–40, 61–63, 66, 68–72, 77–78, 81, 87, 89, 91–111, 116–18, 120, 123, 126, 148–49, 152, 155, 163, 165–66, 179, 182, 185, 187, 190, 196, 200, 202, 204–10, 212–14, 215–228, 229–32, 234–36, 239, 241–43, 246–47, 249–51, 254–59, 263, 265, 268 Wir8n, Jacob, 215–225, 269 Wiseman, Harris, 9 Wivel, Ole, 44 Wolf, Jakob, 41, 64, 157–166, 170, 173, 178, 269 Wordsworth, William, 143–44 Wyller, Trygve, 7–9, 11–34, 47, 117, 179, 182, 185, 215, 249, 253–266, 269 Yeago, David S., 247, 251 Zahavi, Dan, 263–65