Crucified and Resurrected: Restructuring the Grammar of Christology

Originally published as Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte

© 1994 by J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen. All rights reserved.

English translation © 2015 by Ingolf U. Dalferth

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

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Ebook edition created 2015

Ebook corrections 02.09.2023

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ISBN 978-1-4934-0011-9

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

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To Eberhard Jüngel

Contents

Cover    i

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Dedication    v

Translator’s Preface    ix

Preface to the 2015 English Edition    xi

Preface to the 1993 German Edition    xxi

Abbreviations    xxv

1. Incarnation: The Myth of God Incarnate    1

2. Cross and Resurrection: The Word of the Cross    39

3. Jesus Christ: Fundamental Problems in Constructing a Christology    83

4. Trinity: The Theological Relevance of the Cross for the Idea of God    157

5. Atoning Sacrifice: The Salvific Significance of the Death of Jesus    235

Modern Author Index    315

Subject Index    321

Back Cover    326

Translator’s Preface

The task of translating a German theological work is never quite straightforward, wrote Sir Edwin Hoskyns in the preface to his 1933 translation of Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Perhaps I may be allowed to echo his magnificent understatement.

Despite the complexity of the task, it has been a privilege to have been invited to translate Professor Dalferth’s scholarly, carefully argued, and deeply interesting work. I have gained much personal benefit from dealing with his theological thinking on a daily basis and am convinced that this text fully merits introduction to a wider, English-reading audience. In undertaking the task, I have sought to retain a balance between conscientious translation of Dalferth’s argumentation and the need for the English version to be read with fluency and enjoyment.

The issue of gender is one that may not have confronted Hoskyns but is inevitable for today’s writers and translators. Wherever possible I have used humans or human beings for der Mensch and thus have been able to avail myself of the plural pronoun they, resorting only where absolutely necessary to the gender-specific he or the slightly clumsy he or she.

Another issue faced by German-to-English theological translators in any era is the translation of Glaube. In agreement with Professor Dalferth, I have used belief whenever the object is a doctrinal proposition or doctrine, and faith whenever Glaube expresses an attitude toward or a relationship of trust in a person.

Biblical quotations are taken chiefly from the New American Standard Bible, except where a direct English translation gives the sense of the German quotation more accurately and therefore better supports the point the author is making.

Aware that some potential readers of the English text may not have Professor Dalferth’s thorough acquaintance with classical languages, I have provided, within the limits of my abilities and subject to his review, translations of the Latin and Greek terms that occur fairly frequently within the text.

My use of italics follows the original, except for a very few instances where I felt that the introduction of italics in the English translation was the best way to enhance the reader’s understanding of the text.

I would like to express my gratitude both to Bishop Michael Bourke, assistant bishop in the Anglican Diocese of Hereford and former cochair of the Meissen Commission, for his reading of my draft translation and his very helpful comments and suggestions; and of course to Professor Dalferth himself, whose thorough knowledge of the English language greatly simplified our discussions of various aspects of the translation process.

Jo Bennett

January 15, 2015

Preface to the 2015 English Edition

1. Beyond Mythos and Logos

Every book has a history, and this book is no exception. Originally I did not plan to publish it separately but wrote it as the second part of a large study of the European strategy of orienting oneself in mental space by the contrast between mythos and logos, the mythical (narrative, temporal, meaning-constituting) and the rational (argumentative, atemporal, reason-giving), and the impact of this orienting strategy on Christian theology. The distinction between these different types of rationalities, experiences, and ways of thinking—variously conceived and contrasted and continuously reinterpreted since the beginnings of European philosophy, science, and theology in ancient Greece—is deeply entrenched in the history of European thought and has held a particular grip on philosophy and theology. My idea was to show that the mode and character of Christian theology can be understood neither in terms of this mental orienting strategy nor without reference to it. In antiquity Christian theology contrasted with both the mythos and the logos traditions by developing into a hybrid third that was different from both; in medieval Europe it tried to synthesize the mythical and the rational into a unity that transcended both, but this unity was always on the brink of breaking apart; and in modernity it redefined itself by reference to the mythical and rational strands within itself without completely identifying with either of them.

Christian theology emerged in a cultural setting in which it had no choice but to relate to the traditional orienting pattern of mythos and logos without ever fitting into it: because of its eschatological and soteriological orientation, and the christological and trinitarian ways of thinking that resulted from it, Christian theology became the other of both traditions by using modes of thinking derived from both of them. Later the contrast between Christian theology, on the one hand, and the ancient mythos and logos traditions, on the other, was turned into an internal distinction within Christian theology itself, which thereby became all-encompassing but at the same time precariously unstable, always in danger of losing its balance between the mythical and the rational by overemphasizing the one at the expense of the other. Enlightenment thinkers forced theology to rethink this internalizing strategy by insisting that it had to choose between either the one or the other: Christian theology is either an outdated mythology or an unfounded theism or—and most likely—both at the same time in different respects. Many critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries agreed with the first or the third view, or with both, and turned their back on Christianity and Christian theology. Others opted for the second horn of the dilemma but tried to show that it was not an unfounded but rather a well-founded theism. However, neither the skeptical atheist’s nor the rational theist’s way out is convincing. Both wrongly accept the alternative posed by the Enlightenment against the backdrop of the medieval synthesis of the mythical and the rational. But this alternative offers a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. Christian theology cannot identify with either the mythos or the logos strand, or simply combine them into some higher but inconsistent unity, without losing its characteristic identity as the unique thought form of the Christian faith. It is neither the mythology of a particular historical faith, nor a general philosophical theism unrelated to any particular faith, nor an inconsistent combination of both, but rather an intellectual endeavor sui generis. As Augustine made clear with reference to the Stoic pattern of theologies:1 Christian theology is neither a form of natural theology (philosophical theism or theologia naturalis), nor a form of poetic or mythical theology (mythology or theologia fabulosa), nor a form of political theology (civil religion or theologia civilis), but a fundamental critique of all three. If anything, Christian theology bears a faint similarity to natural theology because it seeks knowledge and truth and is not merely a matter of human invention and social convention. But it would be best not to call it theology in any of three Stoic senses at all. It is neither a case of mythos nor of logos, nor a combination of both, but something sui generis.

It took a huge effort for Christian theology to recover this insight at the end of modernity, and it never completely achieved it in a way that left a noticeable imprint on contemporary culture. Where it succumbed to the lure of the Enlightenment alternative, it became rationalist, liberal, and modernist; and where theology rejected modern rationalism, it restated the classical synthesis or became radically orthodox. However, neither is a way forward. In the light of the Enlightenment criticism, the precarious synthesis of the mythical and the rational cannot simply be continued, not even in a radically orthodox way; yet in the light of the origin of Christian faith and the beginnings of Christian theology, the Enlightenment alternative should not be accepted. Christian faith is not merely one religious belief among others (as Enlightenment rationality has it); by its own account, it is the awareness and acknowledgment that Christ’s cross and resurrection mark the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. By unfolding, exploring, and thinking through this faith from its own point of view, Christian theology is neither a case of mythos or logos nor a combination of both, but something unique and sui generis.

It was only when Christian theology rediscovered its eschatological roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it became aware again of the uniqueness of its intellectual project and managed to posit itself in contrast to both the mythos and the logos strands within its own tradition. It did so—without turning into something different by trying to be both or by choosing between them—by becoming theological through and through. In order to meet the challenge to be true to the eschatological reality of faith in God’s creative and renewing presence in creation through Christ and the Spirit, it had to avoid three dead ends: (1) the classical aporia of a metaphysical both-and, of constructing itself as an incoherent metadiscipline of the rational and the mythical; (2) the Enlightenment aporia of a dogmatic either-or, of allowing itself to be forced into the Procrustean bed of choosing between rationalism and obscurantism; and (3) the self-defeating aporia of a neither-nor, of cutting all constructive ties to the surrounding culture by relating in a merely negative way to it. Theology is neither a both-and nor an either-or nor a neither-nor of the mythical and the rational; rather, it is a sustained intellectual effort to understand everything in a new way from the point of view of the eschatological breaking in of God’s creative presence in the human reality of this life and world in and through God’s Word and Spirit. By orienting itself toward this life- and world-changing event, theology distances itself from both the mythos and the logos strands in European culture, freely using aspects of both without being reducible to either of them in creating and elaborating its own christological, trinitarian, and pneumatological thought forms. Only in this way can it be true to what makes it unique: the eschatological event of faith in the creative, saving, and perfecting presence of God, the poet of the possible, as it becomes disclosed in Christ when humans are changed by the Spirit from their God-ignoring lives of nonfaith and unfaith to a life of faith, trust, hope, and love of God and God’s neighbors.

This is no more than a rough sketch whose details need to be filled in before it will be convincing. But even so, it will be obvious why the test case for this view of Christian theology and its history is Christology, the distinctive form of Christian thinking about God, human existence, and the world. From the beginning, Christian theology had to face up to a threefold challenge. It had to define itself in contrast not only to the mythologies of the Greco-Roman world but also to the natural theology of Hellenistic philosophies and the prophetic theology of the Jewish tradition. It had to conceive God in personal terms, and as acting in history, without relapsing into myth; it had to conceive him as creator and ruler of the universe without reducing him to a metaphysical principle of the cosmos; and it had to conceive him as the eschatological Savior who had acted in Jesus Christ in a definite way, universally valid and relevant not only for the Jews but for everyone. None of the contemporary theological paradigms could combine all this in a convincing and consistent way. Thus Christian thinkers were forced to develop a new theological paradigm: Christology.2

The term Christology is understood here not in a narrow and specific sense but in a broad and foundational sense. It does not merely signify the doctrine of the person of Christ, or of the person and work of Christ, as distinct from the doctrine of the salvation achieved by Christ and appropriated through faith in Christ in the sacramental life of the church (soteriology and ecclesiology). Rather, it signifies the fundamental thought form of the Christian faith that has foundational import for all Christian theology. It informs its trinitarian thought about God as Father, Word, and Spirit; its soteriological accounts of human life in terms of sin, justification, and the church; and its eschatological views of world, life, and history as God’s creation. All the characteristic teachings of Christian theology are manifestations of thinking about God, human existence, and the world in christological terms. These terms did not fit into the traditional pattern of mythos and logos in antiquity, and they do not fall prey to the criticism of both forms of rationality in modernity. It is true that the christological thought form did not develop independently of the orienting strategy of mythos and logos, and neither was it ever practiced completely unrelated to it. But it cannot be coherently stated or sufficiently understood in terms of it. It became something sui generis by using the pattern of mythos and logos to distinguish itself from both mythos and logos, thereby going beyond the whole European pattern of orientation and becoming something distinctly different and new.

2. From Confession to Grammar

The first part of the book was published in 1993 under the title Jenseits von Mythos und Logos: Die christologische Transformation der Theologie (Freiburg: Herder). It traced the orienting strategy of mythos and logos through the European history of thought from Greek antiquity through the beginnings of Christian theology (Logos-Christology and trinitarian thought) to the medieval synthesis and its breakdown in modernity. I then analyzed in detail three attempts to turn this strategy on itself and thereby critically reenforce or overcome it: the hermeneutics of myths, from the late eighteenth-century to the twentieth-century attempts of demythologizing Christian theology; the structuralist efforts to understand the functioning of myths and rituals in strictly rational terms of logos; and the philosophical and theological attempts to spell out the sui generis character of the christological form of Christian thought in terms of grammar—Newman’s grammar of assent, Wittgenstein’s idea of theology as grammar, Austin Farrer’s reconstruction of a grammar of revelation from the Rebirth of Images in the biblical tradition, and Luther’s insistence on a grammatica theologica as the proper mode of a theologia crucis. The study ended with an outline of Christian dogmatics as a grammar of Christian life and the practice of faith. It restated the old (but controversial) insight that theology is best understood and practiced not as a theoretical or speculative discipline that aims at knowledge of God and of everything in relation to God (scientia speculativa) but as a practical discipline that studies actions, acts, and activities that change human life (scientia practica)—not, however, merely human actions (de rebus operabilibus ab homine, as Aquinas rightly insisted) or primarily the religious activities of humans (as nineteenth-century neo-Protestantism maintained), but the divine activity that changes human life from sin to salvation, from disregarding God’s presence to orienting itself toward God’s presence, from ignoring God to loving God and one’s neighbor, from death to life.

The second part was meant to ground this conception of theology as a grammar of the life of faith in a detailed reconstruction of the beginnings of the christological thought form of Christian theology. Combining analytic and hermeneutical approaches and paying close attention to exegetical and historical findings, I explored and discussed the issues of incarnation, cross, and resurrection; the basic doctrinal problems of classical Christology and trinitarian thought; and the soteriological issue of understanding the salvific significance of the death of Jesus in terms of sacrifice and atonement. In the end the book was published independently and with a different publisher under the title Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte: Zur Grammatik der Christologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994). But the overall argument stayed untouched. I attempted to substantiate in Crucified and Resurrected what I had outlined in Jenseits von Mythos und Logos. And I did so by tracing the genesis of the fundamental pattern of christological thought from (1) the resurrection confessions through (2) the gospel account of the cross and the life and message of Jesus to (3) his understanding of God that (4) reworked, intensified, and sharpened the heritage of Israel in which Jesus grew up and (5) grounded the resurrection experience of his Jewish followers who became the first Christians. The rationale of this account is twofold: If, as I argue, the confession that Jesus has been raised by God is the starting point of christological reflection in the New Testament, then Christian theology stands or falls with the clear and careful conceptual exposition of this confession. Second, the method I use to do this is the hermeneutical strategy of asking for the question or questions to which a given text, idea, or view seeks to provide an answer; of exploring to whom this answer may be, has been, or may have been given; and of identifying the question or questions that either were raised or may and perhaps should have been raised, by the answers given: What is the problem posed by the resurrection confession of the first Christians that is answered by reference to the cross? What is the problem posed by the Gospel account of the cross that is answered by the New Testament narratives of the life and message of Jesus? What is the problem to which Jesus’s proclamation of the coming of God’s kingdom seeks to give an answer? What is the problem posed by understanding the references to God in the Gospel accounts of the cross in terms of Jesus’s message of God’s coming? What is the problem posed by Jesus’s death on the cross that is answered by the resurrection confession of (some of) his followers? What is the problem posed by the Christian accounts of Jesus’s death and resurrection for those who did not or do not see Jesus’s life and death in this way? And what is the problem posed for Christians by the fact that most don’t see or understand it in this way? In short, if we try to understand the emergence of the christological thought form, we have to interpret the resurrection confessions with respect to the cross; the cross with respect to the life and message of Jesus; the life and message of Jesus with respect to God; Jesus’s message of God with respect to the cross, the life of those who confess God to have raised Jesus from death, the world that they confess to be God’s creation, and the life of those who live in God’s creation but ignore or deny all this. The result of this dynamic interpretative process is the emergence of a christological thought form about God, human life, and the world that is never finished but permanently in the making, driven forward by the life and practice of faith and the inquiring intellect that seeks to understand the life and practice of faith in the light of the self-presenting and self-communicating activity of God. Because of its christological thought form, Christian theology is essentially about the creative activity of God in creation and new creation, and about the creative passivity of human life as the locus where God’s prior activity in creation becomes manifest in a way that transforms human life from a life of ignoring or denying God’s presence to a life of faith in the love of God and all others as God’s neighbors.

The book concentrates on reconstructing the grammar of this christological thought form, not on applying it to the complex and wide-ranging issues of Christian life and practice in a globalizing world. All this is no doubt important, but unless we are clear about the christological grammar enacted in Christian life, we cannot ensure that what we claim to be Christian is in fact so. The problems of our world are not solved in or by theology, but Christian theology aims at helping Christians to engage in identifying and solving the problems of our time by providing guidelines and signposts for orientation. A grammar book is not to be confused with a discourse or a practice that enacts that grammar, and while Christian theology seeks to outline the grammar of a Christian life of faith, it is in the actual practice of this faith in the manifold areas of human life in our contemporary world that this grammar is enacted. We must not expect theology to do what can only be done in the life and practice of faith. Theologies come and go, and no theological view ought to be confused with the eschatological reality that it seeks to unfold. In theology, there is always room for improvement and deeper insight, and there is always a chance of being wrong whereas others may be right. What is decisive about human life from a Christian point of view is not what we think and do but that this life is the locus of God’s creative and transforming presence, whether we believe it or not. Accordingly, the crucial question is not about our theologies but rather the question of whether our life is actually transformed from a life of unfaith and self-love to a life of faith and the love of God and neighbor. If we are justified, then we are justified by faith and not by how we experience or think about faith or practice it. Faith is not something we can achieve by what we do or think ourselves, but a gift for which we may pray and give thanks but which we cannot give to ourselves or to anybody else. The christological thought form is the thought form of this gift, and Christian theology is unique and sui generis precisely by being christological through and through.

3. Further Reflections

The book left its mark on debates in Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, but it was not the last thing I wrote on Christology. In the following years I deepened, defended, and elaborated what I had written in a number of areas, concentrating in particular on the following: the significance of the life and person of Jesus for the Christian faith (Jesus Christus—Zeichen für Gottes Zuwendung: Die Bedeutung der Person Jesu für den christlichen Glauben, in Theologie zwischen Pragmatismus und Existenzdenken: Festschrift für Hermann Deuser zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. G. Linde, R. Purkarthofer, H. Schulze, and P. Steinacker [Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 2006], 231–44), the debate about Jesus’s death and the empty grave (Volles Grab, leerer Glaube? Zum Streit um die Auferweckung des Gekreuzigten, ZThK 95 [1998]: 379–402), the hermeneutics of the resurrection (The Resurrection: The Grammar of ‘Raised,’ in Biblical Concepts and Our World, ed. D. Z. Phillips and M. van der Ruhr [New York: Palgrave, 2004], 190–208), the importance of the christological dogma for Christian theology (Gott für uns: Die Bedeutung des christologischen Dogmas für die christliche Theologie, in Denkwürdiges Geheimnis: Beiträge zur Gotteslehre; Festschrift für Eberhard Jüngel zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. I. U. Dalferth, J. Fischer, and H. P. Großhans [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004], 51–75), and the outline of a critical Christology (Weder Mythos noch Metaphysik: Grundlinien einer kritischen Christologie, in En in een Heer Jezus Christus: Het Dogma van Chalcedon als Leesregel en Spreekregel, ed. H. Rikhof [Utrecht: Najaarsconferentie Samenwerkingsverband voor theologisch onderzoek, 2002], 14–30). These writings should be taken into account when discussing the issues of this book. They are further stepping-stones toward a Christian theology that takes the christological thought form seriously and does not shy away from emphasizing that Christian theology, as deeply contextual and context dependent as it always is, has its beauty and significance precisely in being unique and sui generis: it explores something new that cannot sufficiently be understood in terms of something familiar, and although we have to make use of our available cognitive, emotive, and conceptual resources to understand it at all, we are well advised to use the christological thought form in theology in the way outlined: not as a definitive doctrinal statement of a truth that we cannot understand but only accept or reject, but as a hermeneutical guideline that inducts us into a process of reorienting our life toward the creative presence of God and helps us to move through the questions and answers posed and provoked by the gift structure of Christian faith again and again in our own way and at our particular place in history. It is not theory but practice that counts, and the practice of faith is not an economic exchange of goods in a relationship of mutual rights and duties but a free gift that exceeds anything we can receive and that creates its own recipients by making more of them than they could ever become by themselves.

Acknowledgments

Grateful thanks are due to the original publisher, Mohr Siebeck (Tübingen), for permission to translate this book.

It is a pleasure to thank Jo Bennett, who has done an excellent job of translating the book into English. Without her the book would not have appeared in English at all.

I also thank David Chao, who put me in contact with Baker Academic, and Dave Nelson for his painstaking help in editing the manuscript and seeing it through to press. Without them the book would not have been published now.

The index was prepared by Sean Callaghan, and my research assistant Marlene Block has been of invaluable help in getting everything ready for print. Without them I would still be reading the proofs.

The book was originally dedicated to Eberhard Jüngel on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Twenty years later the English translation is now being published shortly after his eightieth birthday. If there is one thing I do not want to change in this book, then it is this dedication: Ad multos annos!

Ingolf U. Dalferth

1. Civ. VIII, 1 and 5.

2. I. U. Dalferth, Theology and Philosophy (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 36–37.

Preface to the 1993 German Edition

Christian theology finds its proper thought form in dogmatics. Beyond the boundaries of religious myth and philosophical logos, but in constant reference to faith imageries, life experiences, and the conceptualizing efforts of the thought process, dogmatics describes the inner rationality of the Christian way of life in the form of a christological grammar of the Christian life of faith. It re-creates the structures of faith imageries by undertaking a critical examination of the identity of faith in the multiplicity of its articulations. It clarifies the conditions of the identity of faith and the rationality of the Christian life of faith by establishing rules to govern its practice and the focus of its content. It unfolds this focus systematically by using argumentative discourse to analyze the Christian eschatological understanding of reality and by presenting its main features coherently. And it examines the reliability of this understanding of reality by shedding light on its grounds for validity in comparison with other concepts of reality and life orientations, and by testing whether its claims to truth and validity are justified in the light of those grounds. Dogmatic thought thus makes plain what it means to have reasons for advocating the Christian faith, by illuminating the ground of faith as the rationality of the life of faith and the validity of the confession of faith. In itself it is neither the ground nor the foundation for faith; instead, it shows that a reasoned faith is not impossible, because faith in Jesus Christ has a unique ground, so that the Christian life of faith, too, has its own rationality.

As the grammar of the Christian life of faith, dogmatics seeks to illuminate this rationality in a systematic way by reference to the ground of faith, the triune God. So it unfolds the specificity of the content of faith in christological terms by affirming God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ as the basis of faith and as the foundation and criterion for true knowledge of God; it apprehends the existence and practice of the Christian life of faith pneumatologically, by tracing it back to God himself, who has revealed himself and allowed himself to be known in Jesus Christ as all-transforming, creative love; and it conceives of the ground of faith in trinitarian terms, since it is only on this basis that the rationality of the Christian life of faith can be disclosed and illuminated theologically in its christological specificity and its pneumatological basis.

This trinitarian approach means that the thought form of dogmatics is far from being an irrelevant, abstract theory. As a christological grammar, it is not just externally related to practical experience but is in fact practical in itself. It is not simply the theory of a specific religious practice in Schleiermacher’s sense; it aims to be practical in the soteriological sense emphasized by Luther: that its theme is the presence of God in Jesus Christ, whose death is appropriated by faith.1 Dogmatic theology itself can never be or accomplish this appropriation of faith; it is thus no substitute for faith. But it can lead to the appropriation of faith by using its tools of argumentation to guide thought and life onto the foundation to which faith, and everything else along with it, owes its existence. Hence, dogmatic theology is not only unequivocally distinct from faith but also intrinsically related to it, in that it distinguishes the ground of faith from faith itself and affirms this ground as the point of reference for the life of faith and for all else. It cannot formulate this ground apart from faith, but the dogmatic formulation of this ground of faith is no more the ground of faith itself than theology is a substitute for faith. Hence, theology must apply to itself the differentiation that it claims theologically for faith; this has always been the case, and is so now more than ever. This preserves it from the danger of a fundamentalism that takes itself too seriously, but at the same time underlines the realism with which it counts on the effective presence of God. By systematically differentiating faith from the ground of faith, and itself from both, it resists the temptation to make its fallible theological insights into a yardstick for the Christian life of faith; it is able, instead, as a christological grammar of the Christian life of faith, to guide this lifetime and again to orient itself anew toward what constitutes it: God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ.

This present work sets out to do what I outlined last year in Jenseits von Mythos und Logos2 as the task of Christian dogmatics. Guided by the question of the proper argumentational structure for dogmatic thought, it seeks to unfold the main features of a grammar of Christology so as to state, clearly and systematically, the consequences of the christological transformation of theology. It does not claim to offer the only possible representation of even the main features of such a grammar. But it does seek to show that a dogmatic unfolding of the Christian faith has to follow a path of thought that leads from the resurrection to the cross, from the cross to the life of Jesus, and from there to the understanding of God, which, when given a new and remodeled form, leads to the understanding of salvation. Every attempt to curtail or avoid this christological line of argument leads down a side alley and, in neglecting the understanding of God, bypasses the Christian understanding of salvation and of reality as well.

Once again I would like to thank my friends and colleagues for a great deal of help of various kinds. Just before the start of the examination period, Philipp Stoellger, with some assistance from Franziska Mihram, undertook the time-consuming task of creating the index. He had already provided critical comments on the manuscript at many points, prompting me time and again to reconsider the positions I had adopted. I am inclined to doubt that I have convinced him. But I hope that I may be successful where other readers are concerned, at any rate.

This book is dedicated to Eberhard Jüngel on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As he once said, he was never in favor of theology based on the rotary-fan principle, in which everything is thrown into the air and given a vigorous whirl, producing the impression of a theological departure for new shores, although in the end it is impossible to identify any genuine advancement of knowledge. As a theological teacher, he always insisted that theology should never be negligently allowed to fall short of its proper intellectual level, and that the mere grouping together of fashionable buzzwords should be kept for formulating theological brainteasers. As its fruits attest, theology accomplishes its real task when, with eyes and ears open to the concerns of its age, it follows its course unwaveringly and is practiced in accordance with its true purpose: to be an introduction to the logic of the gospel.

Frankfurt, November 1993

Ingolf U. Dalferth

1. WATR 1, no. 153.

2. I. U. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos: Die christologische Transformation der Theologie (Freiburg: Herder, 1993), 6.

Abbreviations

1 

Incarnation

The Myth of God Incarnate

1. The Myth Debate

In July 1977 a relatively slim volume appeared in England under the title The Myth of God Incarnate. It was published, after three years of discussion, by a group of seven theologians from various denominations under the direction of John Hick.1 The book triggered a shock wave. The first edition was already sold out before the release date. Over thirty thousand copies were sold within the first eight months. It gave rise to the stormiest discussion in ecclesiastical and theological circles since the publication of J. A. T. Robinson’s book Honest to God fifteen years earlier. Conservative evangelical circles made just as little secret of their unanimous rejection of the ideas it set forth as did neoorthodox Roman Catholic theologians—who invoked Barth—or their even more traditionally minded Anglican cousins. The Church of England Evangelical Council called on the five Anglican authors to resign from their positions within the church. In the press, letters to the editor questioned whether the five could even be considered Christians. The book ignited a public scandal. A few short weeks later an apparently very hastily written rebuttal edited by Michael Green and titled The Truth of God Incarnate was rushed onto the market.2 A heated theological debate ensued, which precipitated an avalanche of literature.3 What was the furor about?

In the first keynote chapter of the Myth book, Oxford patristic scholar Maurice Wiles formulated the problem as follows: Could there be a Christianity without . . . incarnation? or—to phrase it a little more precisely—without the belief that Jesus of Nazareth is unique in the precise sense that, while being fully man, it is true of him, and of him alone, that he is also fully God, the Second Person of the coequal Trinity?4

One might be tempted to reject this question as self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. Isn’t belief in Jesus Christ by definition belief that the Second Person of the Trinity has taken human form? But this semantic gambit—fairly popular among theologians—doesn’t yield us any progress if Christianity can exist, or indeed has existed, without it. Admittedly, we could insist that any such faith is not worthy of the name Christianity, that we have here a heresy, a faith that is no longer—or, it might rather be said, not yet—Christianity. However, in order to arrive at such a judgment, it is theological arguments of substance that are called for, rather than semantic assertions. For the point at issue is no longer simply whether a supposedly Christian tenet, or one that calls itself Christian, falls within a predefined concept of what is Christian. The point at issue is rather our very concept of what is Christian, in other words, our understanding of what is essentially Christian. So we can rephrase Wiles’s question thus: Does belief in the incarnation belong to the essence of Christianity? If so, then Christianity cannot exist without this tenet. But if Christianity can exist without it, then belief in the incarnation is not an essential constituent of Christianity. Precisely this thesis is put forward, using various arguments, by Wiles and the other authors of the Myth book: belief in Jesus Christ is not necessarily belief in the incarnation; Christology (the theological self-interpretation of belief in Jesus Christ) is therefore not necessarily incarnational Christology.

There is nothing new in that. Years before the Myth book was published, Wolfhart Pannenberg had stated, In contrast to classical incarnational Christology, which took the idea of incarnation as its starting point and assigned the incarnation process a place in the sequence of factors for discussion, a practice of starting from the historical figure of the human Jesus of Nazareth seems to be gaining increasing acceptance today.5 The outcry that greeted the thesis put forward by the Myth authors can therefore be correctly understood only against the background of the previous 150 years of Anglican theology. Since the Oxford Movement for restoration in the middle of the nineteenth century had focused Anglican spirituality and theology so rigorously on the mystery of the incarnation, the concept of incarnation had become something of a neo-Anglican shibboleth, exempt from reasoned scrutiny and treated with unquestioning literalness.6 Across the entire theological spectrum there was an environmental shift to a religion of incarnation,7 with the concept of incarnation as the all-encompassing paradigm of theological thinking. This paradigm has four main structural elements:

1. The doctrine of the incarnation, as the most concentrated expression of the gospel, holds the dominant theological position among the articles of Christology.8 In that God’s Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, entered our human existence, God took on himself the human condition in such a way that we humans are now in touch with God through the human nature of Jesus Christ. It is therefore not the cross and the resurrection but the fact that Christ became human that is the decisive soteriological message of the Christian faith.

2. This has ecclesiological consequences. The incarnation is not simply a past event, but Christ is continuously incarnated in his church.9 If Jesus of Nazareth was the locus of God’s becoming human, then the church is the locus for the continuous presence of the incarnate one. It becomes this locus by virtue of being a sacramental system, within which believers are incorporated into the mystical body of Christ through the sacraments, the instruments whereby grace is appropriated. To be united with the church and to be united with Christ are therefore identical processes.10

3. In the course of the debate with Darwinism, this incarnational-sacramental approach was expanded, by the Lux Mundi group in particular,11 into a theology of creation immanentism.12 The incarnation is not only the foundation of the church; it is also the key to understanding the world. God is to be sought in the world, not above the world. As the incarnate Logos he is at work in the whole of creation, in nature as well as in human culture and science. Contemporary phenomena such as socialism and the theory of evolution are therefore to be viewed as allies, not opponents, of the Christian faith, so that, in the light of the incarnational concept, there will eventually be a relationship of unbroken harmony between modern culture and Christian faith.

4. If we had accentuated God instead of the world in this relationship of immanence, then, taking the same premises as our starting point, we could have arrived at propositions concerning the doctrine of God that would take aspects of the Christian tradition that had hovered at the edges thus far and draw them into a central position. This becomes evident especially in the Anglican theology of the suffering of God,13 out of which there emerged a series of significant works in the period during and after the First World War, and which was later recalled to mind by Jürgen Moltmann.14 This theology, too, is indissolubly linked with the basic incarnational approach. If Christ is God made man, then his earthly life provides insight into God’s being. The suffering of the Son on the cross, which the church commemorates in the eucharistic offering, is to be understood as the temporal realization of that which is done by God the Father in eternity: he is a suffering God, who suffers with us, for us, and because of us, and who, by his loving commitment to the affairs of the world, transforms the process of evolution into a process of redemption.

These brief comments give sufficient indication that the concept of incarnation characterizes neo-Anglican Christology and equally its ecclesiology and its doctrines of creation and of God.15 It constitutes the foundation of its entire theological system and is itself grounded on a belief in the incarnation that is held to be fundamental. Since the Myth authors’ thesis takes precisely this foundation as its point of reference, they remain unaffected by theological matters of dispute, such as those that might come up for discussion under this paradigm. Rather, it argues openly for a theological paradigm shift that was certain to have a considerable effect on the theological self-understanding of the new Anglicanism. The frenzied and acrimonious tone of the debate is therefore hardly surprising. What is more surprising is that it was conducted in such an ill-defined and superficial manner and was very quickly pressured into apparent contradictions.

For academic theology in England, however, this debate did not come as a total surprise. For years there had been increasing signs that the center of the theological debate was beginning to shift away from the question of God toward Christology. Since the end of the 1960s, there had been certain milestones on this path, such as the publications of the Cambridge Christology Seminar16 and Don Cupitt’s Stanton Lectures of 1969, which expressly endeavored to initiate a philosophical debate on Christology and were published in 1971 under the title Christ and the Hiddenness of God.17 Then in 1974 there appeared, under the title The Remaking of Christian Doctrine, Maurice Wiles’s Hulsean Lectures, given in Cambridge the previous year. These set out, in view of the difficulty of achieving a truly viable historical knowledge of Jesus using the sources available to us, to conduct a fundamental inquiry into incarnational Christology.18 In 1977 the publication of Geoffrey Lampe’s God as Spirit completed the shift from criticism to constructive counterproposal.19 On the basis of a rigorously developed Spirit Christology, Lampe decisively opposes the idea of the preexistence and postexistence of the person of Jesus Christ, thereby pulling the rug out from under the traditional doctrine of the incarnation. This doctrine, however, is not simply discarded but reinterpreted as a continuous incarnation of God the Spirit in the human spirit. There is no dispute that this, God’s incarnate presence, is uniquely represented in Jesus Christ. But this unique expression comes about not by simple virtue of the incarnation but by virtue of the manner and quality of this incarnation. Put briefly, Lampe’s attempt no longer sets out to unfold the doctrine of incarnation christologically; now it does so pneumatologically. It is no longer to be restricted to one locus within the field of Christology; instead, Lampe locates Christology, in its entirety, within the context of a comprehensive pneumatological concept of incarnation that thematizes the self-mediation of the Spirit of God with the human spirit. This means that, whatever theological objections may be raised against Lampe’s attempt, the metaphysical20 misunderstanding, at any rate—that the doctrine of the incarnation and its unfolding in the classical two-natures doctrine is a theory of the persona privata [private person] of Jesus Christ—is overcome. Jesus Christ may be treated as a theological topic only when viewed in his specific relationships with God and with human beings—never abstractly, as an individual regarded in isolation. It is through these relationships that he is what he is, and he can therefore never be considered as a christological topic apart from them.

The Origin of Christology, a thoughtful and carefully argued book by Cambridge New Testament scholar emeritus Charles Moule that appeared in the same year as Lampe’s work, demonstrates that the individualistic misunderstanding of Christology can be overcome in quite another way.21 Against the thesis that Christology had, as it were, developed in an evolutionary manner, by mutation and selection, from simple New Testament beginnings to ever