Table Of ContentEberhard Jüngel and Existence
This book interrogates the contemporary Lutheran theologian Eberhard
Jüngel’s theological anthropology, arguing that Jüngel’s thought can pro-
vide a model for theological engagement with philosophical accounts of
existence. Focusing on Jüngel’s theology of existence, the author explores
the thought of philosophers, including Heidegger and Hegel, their influence
on and application to his theology, and argues that Jüngel’s account of
humanity should be seen as a response to atheistic existentialist accounts
of existence.
In showing how Jüngel’s theology is informed by and dependent on phil-
osophical thought, this book provides a new lens on the interplay between
philosophy, theology, and religion in twentieth-century German thought.
It will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, and
philosophy of religion.
Deborah Casewell is a Humboldt Research Fellow in Philosophy at the
University of Bonn.
Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Series Editors:
Martin Warner, University of Warwick, UK
Kevin Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical School, USA
Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology is an interdisciplinary
series exploring new opportunities in the dialogue between philosophy and
theology that go beyond more traditional ‘faith and reason’ debates and take
account of the contemporary reshaping of intellectual boundaries. For much
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ceived in terms of antagonism or subordination, but recent intellectual devel-
opments hold out considerable potential for a renewed dialogue in which
philosophy and theology have common cause for revisioning their respective
identities, reconceiving their relationship, and combining their resources.
This series explores constructively for the 21st century the resources availa-
ble for engaging with those forms of enquiry, experience, and sensibility that
theology has historically sought to address. Drawing together new writing
and research from leading international scholars in the field, this high profile
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across the interdisciplinary perspectives relating theology and philosophy.
Wonder, Value, and God
Robin Attfield
Slavoj Žižek and Christianity
Edited by Sotiris Mitralexis and Dionysios Skliris
Transcendence, Creation, and Incarnation
Anthony O’Hear
Eberhard Jüngel and Existence
Being Before the Cross
Deborah Casewell
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/religion/series/APHILTHEO
Eberhard Jüngel and Existence
Being Before the Cross
Deborah Casewell
First published 2021
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
PART I
Sourcing the self 37
1 The problem of philosophy 39
2 The problem of being 55
3 The problem of theology 77
PART II
Theology from the cross 93
Introduction: Theology out of the cross 95
4 Sin, death, and nothingness 117
5 The call and response of faith 133
6 Community and love 143
Conclusion 161
Bibliography 173
Index 186
Acknowledgements
It is a dreary night in November, and here I am beholding the accomplish-
ment of my toils. The act of writing, and the creation of a book, is ever
Frankensteinian: both in that it is something you patch together from
pre-existing materials that necessarily alter, shift, and become other than
what you envisioned, and in that they take on a life of their own and haunt
you until your dying day.
Yet unlike the example above, this has in no way been a solitary act,
and I owe many people thanks for this book and how it has turned out. It
began as a dissertation, supervised by Paul Nimmo and David Fergusson,
and indirectly by Christoph Schwöbel, and I am grateful for their contin-
ued guidance, support, and tolerance, as well as that of George Pattison.
Thanks is also due to former colleagues at King’s College, London and
Liverpool Hope University.
For their comments and guidance on this text, I owe Martin Warner
and Kevin Vanhoozer a debt of gratitude, and I am grateful to the editorial
staff at Routledge for their quick work and encouragement. Any errors that
remain are the product of my fallen nature.
Returning to the initial theme, it is true that we are ‘unfashioned crea-
tures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves – such a
friend ought to be – do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty
natures’. For me, that is ever a work in progress, and I am grateful for those
friends who are thus, and who continue to be deeply valued partners: in
conversation, in work, and in my existence, authentic or not.
Introduction
I am inclined to describe the 20th century philosophical and theological
scene in Germany as contrary to the Chalcedonian definition: always con-
fused and interchangeable, at times divisible and separable. This is due to
the sheer concentration of ideas and figures, each drawing on the legacy of
German philosophy, religion, and culture, on the revolutions, wars, and
societal changes that occurred. This confluence of innovation and creativ-
ity in education and culture entails that any straightforward designation of
a thinker as a philosopher or a theologian is deeply fraught. And, unlike the
person of Christ, no thinker or concept is pure and untainted.
This has not stopped attempts to draw up boundaries and clearly define
and delineate philosophers from theologians, from both thinkers and their
interpreters. A textbook example of this is Karl Barth, who lambasts that
cultural and philosophical inheritance for creating the conditions for the-
ological endorsements of the First World War and insists, initially depend-
ent methodologically on Kierkegaard, on the God that is Wholly Other
than human thought and strivings. Yet, as aspects of this work will show,
Barth’s rejection of human thought and striving is not as straightforward
as one might hope. Such complexity also applies to the main subject of this
book: Eberhard Jüngel.
Jüngel’s thought tends to be unjustly neglected, first in favour of the great
systematisers that were his immediate predecessors such as Barth, Hans urs
von Balthasar, and Karl Rahner, and then his more radical contemporaries
and colleagues, who include Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Küng, and Dorothee
Sölle. Yet a number of the reasons for his neglect are reasons for interest in
his thought. First, due to his reluctance to be identified with any particular
trend or school in philosophy or theology, his work can stand as a critique
and a foil to the philosophies and theologies of the time. Second, his rela-
tionship to philosophy and existentialism, especially the thought of Martin
Heidegger, is not straightforward embrace or rejection. There is a particu-
lar shape to it, where there is an acceptance of it up to a point and to a par-
ticular end, and then a fundamental rejection and recasting of it. It is this
movement, this shift, that will be key to exploring how Jüngel’s thought
remains philosophically and theologically useful. Finally, combining these
2 Introduction
two aspects, Jüngel’s use of the cross and the death of God to develop a
particular stance towards the world and its relation to God incorporates a
critique and an account of existence that is of relevance to contemporary
debates on the relationship of philosophy, theology, and religion.
Thus, whilst Jüngel may object quite vociferously to being placed into con-
versation with thinkers such as Sartre and Derrida, he himself has always
been insistent that ‘the truth of theology is richer than that of its schools of
thought’.1 Furthermore, in adopting the account of existence that he does, and
in making it a method and a stance, his thought can be a lens through which
to explore how philosophy and theology have interacted with each other, and
continue to interact with each other. In doing so, alliances and similarities
and challenges can be discovered that may not have been intended.
With regard to Jüngel, I am interested in excavating the theology of exist-
ence in his work. No thinker exists in isolation, and whilst the history
of philosophy and theology is replete with revolutions and rejections, the
process of revolutionising and rejecting at times incorporates more of what
came before than intended. This book will explore the philosophical inher-
itance and potential existential use of a thinker who is considered to be
resoundingly theological. The book intends to use him as a microcosm of
20th century philosophy and theology, and to explore the question of how
they relate to each other. This is aided in particular by Eberhard Jüngel’s
own background, and whilst I have noted that the intellectual climate was
particularly thick, Jüngel’s own upbringing and context provided him with
a distinctive outlook, which informs how he places himself methodologi-
cally and theologically. The originality that results from this entails that his
work can trouble those already unstable boundaries between philosophy
and theology in the 20th century.
Whilst these 20th century debates illuminate Jüngel’s particular contribu-
tion, the scope of this book is wider than that. Whilst unable to even begin
to explore the history of the interrelation of philosophy and theology, there
have been particular paradigms around how they are seen to relate to each
other. The first half of this book aims to explore three particular engage-
ments of philosophy and theology and argue that they are fundamentally
linked by a particular paradigm: that of the cross. It is a logic, a method that
Luther instantiates, Hegel sublates, and Heidegger appropriates. It involves
an element of destruction, a rejection, and a revolution of thought, and each
thinker uses this logic to set their own thought apart from the philosophy,
theology, or intermingling of the two that precedes it. In the latter two think-
ers, there is also an element of atheism in the logic of the cross.
This element of atheism is essential to understanding Jüngel’s own use
of the logic of the cross, where he sees atheistic accounts of existence as
something to be taken seriously. It is worth, at this point, noting Jüngel’s
own biography, intellectual and otherwise. Eberhard Jüngel was born in
1934 in Magdeburg into a home in which his mother was quietly pious
and his father intensely sceptical: both of religion and the government.2
Introduction 3
This effectively irreligious familial setting was expanded into a societally
atheistic one with the demarcation of Germany post World War II, and
whilst Jüngel’s path brought him contrary to that society into theology and
Lutheranism, his elder brother Rainer developed into a Marxist atheist.
Jüngel glosses this ironically, writing that they both wanted to annoy their
father, but Jüngel locates his turn to the church and theology in his search
for the truth and free expression thereof.3
For Jüngel, the church was an oasis, a haven, in which truth, even about
the DDR (Deutsche Democratische Republik), could be spoken in the midst
of the authoritarianism of state communism and atheism. Despite the refresh-
ing nature of the church, the place it occupied in society did not come with-
out consequences for those who were associated with it. Friends of his were
arrested and he was interrogated several times by the security services and
taken to court ‘simply because we dared to say what we thought’. Before he
could complete his final school examination, he was removed from his school
as an ‘enemy of the republic’. His fellow students were required to break all
contact with him and others designated thus. Jüngel relates that
As I left the hall named after the Humboldt brothers – but dominated
by a completely different spirit! – the upright among my teachers
turned away in helpless silence. It was a scene pregnant with symbol-
ism, in which the truth of the Ciceronian maxim (a maxim that had
been pounded into us by the very same teachers) suddenly dawned on
me: cum tacent, clamant (“when they are silent they cry loudest”).
In the Christian church, however, one was free to break through the
silence and the pressure to lie that was growing stronger all the time.
Here one dared to bear witness to the truth of the gospel in such a way
that its liberating power could also be experienced in very worldly, very
political terms.4
Thus, Jüngel’s theological stance is one that is centred on truth and free-
dom, and on the ways in which truth is obscured, deliberately or not, in
human societies, structures, and existence. Having been prevented from
completing his schooling and thus from enrolling in the state universities
of the DDR, he enrolled in the Kirchlichen Proseminar programme at the
Katechetische Oberseminar in Naumberg as they offered emergency exam-
inations for students who had been disqualified for political reasons. There
he came under the influence of Gerhard Stammler’s stress on strict logic and
Kant, Walter Grundmann’s New Testament exegesis, and Rudolf Lorenz’s
lectures on patristics and modernity.5 The key pivots on which Jüngel’s
theological engagement turns came through his study at the Kirchliche
Hochschule in Berlin, where he read Barth, Bultmann, and Luther and
studied under Heinrich Vogel and Ernst Fuchs. During this period, Jüngel
left for an illegal semester to Zürich, which he managed through following
the letter rather than the spirit of the law in the DDR (he purchased a ticket
