David Bruner’s Eberhard Jüngel on God, Truth, and History, a concise volume in the Mohr Siebeck series Dogmatik in der Moderne, addresses a twofold lacunae in contemporary systematic theology. Firstly, there was a dearth of engagement with the theology of Eberhard Jüngel in North America until the last decade. Bruner adds to the expanding literature through a close reading of Jüngel’s alethiology across his oeuvre. As an analysis of Jüngel’s theological construal of truth, the text secondly devotes attention to a topic warranting further theological scrutiny. Whereas truth claims are common in theological discourse, their status and nature have received insufficient attention. For both reasons, Bruner’s analysis is a welcome addition to our understanding of a significant thinker and an important topic in Christian theology.
Starting from the central biblical confession that Jesus is truth according to John 14:6, Bruner explores how Jüngel appropriates and explicates this audacious confession. Chapter 1 notes the historical context of Jüngel, as well his influences, particularly Rudolph Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, and the New Hermeneutic represented by Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between a traditional construct of truth (veritas est adequatio intellectus et rei, “truth is the correspondence between the intellect and the thing”) and how Jüngel reformulates truth as an event (Ereignis) brought to fruition by God. Bruner then analyzes Jüngel’s conception of truth as revelation and as response to theological reflection (chapter 3), and as the trinitarian conception of God (chapter 4). Unfortunately, the understanding of truth becomes a secondary consideration in the final two chapters.
Building on John 14:6’s confession, Bruner contends that Jüngel’s primary concern is to explicate how the historical particularity of a first-century Jewish male is claimed to embody not merely a truth about God and humanity (one among the many possible interpretations of humanity and the world) but the truth of God and humanity’s existence. Jüngel ties his confession of Jesus as the truth to a divine-human encounter, an Ereignis (“event,” especially a “word-event” [Sprachereignis]), in which God incorporates the human hearer into the divine self-knowledge enacted and manifest in Jesus Christ through the working of the Holy Spirit. (This account of Jüngel’s project emerges in chapters 1 and 4.) Thus, as Bruner notes, “Jüngel’s understanding of truth is essentially ‘historical,’ that is, temporal and timely,” and on this basis Bruner extrapolates his thesis: Jüngel’s alethiology is best understood as “schatological historicism” (4). Since humans exist corporally in time and space, truth is a historical event in which the Word of God comes to a person at a specific time and place. It is, furthermore, eschatological because it opens up new possibilities in which the newness of life is provisionally given and enacted in anticipation of its fullness in the eschaton. Theological truth thus is never a general principle of human existence that may be comprehended by humans from their own experiences, for the ascription of truth always refers to an enacted event between God and humankind (50).
Bruner traces the genealogy of Jüngel’s understanding of truth’s historical reality most explicitly to the New Hermeneutic movement championed by and associated with the students of Bultmann, in particular Fuchs and Ebeling (under whom Jüngel studied), and its eschatological nature to Bultmann. Bruner accordingly contends that Jüngel is indebted most to Bultmann, and previous works identifying Barth as the primary influence upon Jüngel are too narrow and misleading (15). Bultmann himself was influenced by Martin Heidegger’s understanding of Being in his existentialist work Being and Time (State University of New York Press, 2010), in which truth identifies the decision each human must face: every human must take responsibility for herself to enact her true humanity. While Bultmann incorporates this conception of truth into an understanding of revelation as an event in which God confronts the human (a Heilsereignis) and calls one into a new form of life in Christ (so referring to the human apart from any historically accessible reality open to human understanding), Fuchs and Ebeling introduce the terminology most characteristic of Jüngel’s usage, the word-event (the Sprachereignis). This does not mean Jüngel rejects the objectivity of reality as perceived outside of oneself, but it does stress its inadequacy as a tool by which humans may come to comprehend both God and themselves through their own powers. The knowledge of reality’s truth depends on God’s self-manifestation in the word-event. In this way Jüngel expands beyond the previous Western paradigm of veritas, which he modifies since it is God’s self-revelation that frees the creature (John 8:32; Jüngel, “Metaphorical Truth,” Theological Essays II, T & T Clark, 1995).
As an analysis of Jüngel’s understanding of truth, Bruner’s arguments are cogent and offer insights in Jüngel’s wider theology. However, two weaknesses are found in his description. First, Bruner’s analysis of the Heideggerian influence stops with Being and Time and the theology of Bultmann. However, in the later Heidegger one finds further parallels as well. For instance, the later Heidegger identifies truth as the unveiling of reality (from the Greek a-lētheia, in which the stem lēth, a “being concealed” or “escaping notice,” is joined with the alpha-privative), for reality’s truth makes itself known to humans through language (see Heidegger, On the way to Language and Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row Publishers, 1971). Furthermore, one finds in the later Heidegger the contention that truth is essentially metaphorical, which again is paralleled in Jüngel, though for Jüngel the rationale is that this means that truth is never a given reality through which humans may come to understanding apart from the Sprachereignis. Second, Bruner never identifies what he himself means by the category of truth. Truth in Western thought has been primarily deemed to be a descriptor of propositions, and at points this appears to be Bruner’s assessment as well, even though such a perception is challenged by Jüngel’s broadening of the language around truth. This lack of definition leaves one wondering about the few critiques proffered, such as Bruner’s desire for a general theory of truth that Jüngel, as a church theologian, does not develop.
Gregory Robertson is an independent scholar.
Gregory Alan Robertson
Date Of Review:
November 28, 2023
