Law and Gospel in Emil Brunner's Earlier Dialectical Theology 9781472551245

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Acknowledgements

This book would never have been possible without the support of my ­parents, which did not begin in 2005 but in 1977 and has been consistent throughout. To them, I owe more than I can even begin to express in words, and I can only humbly say, ‘Thank you’. Many thanks and good wishes go to Laura, my awesome sister and Caleb, as well as Lina, Steve, Sarah and Mark. A very special mention is reserved for Antje, who has never stopped believing in me, who has supported me with love and caring and who is always sweet. Without Antje’s patient help many of the translations and my resultant understanding of Brunner’s theology would certainly have remained inadequate. A hearty word of thanks also goes to Prof Dr Markus Mühling, for finding a place for me at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg and providing support and unending encouragement for my research interests and career at a time when many young academics are facing uncertainty. A warm word also to Dr Anke Mühling, for enduring one too many a theological debates with inadequate biblical and pastoral consideration, and, along with University President Sascha Spoun, the Präsidium, the Fakultät Bildung and especially, Prof Dr Hanna Roose and Heide Klose-Alpers, for making my transition to Germany and the University as smooth and as welcoming as possible. Endless thanks also go to many close friends and colleagues who are or have been in and around the University of Aberdeen: Aaron and Louise Denlinger, Ken Oakes and Irene Garcia Losquino, Scott and Molly Prather, Graham McFarlane, Justin Stratis, Jeremy Wynne, Dave Nelson, David Gibson, Mark McDowell, Brian Brock, Phil Ziegler, Don Wood and many others. Additional thanks go to the Aberdeen Mountaineering Club, without whose contribution this book would have been produced to a much higher standard and completed in a much timelier manner. Even with these many friendships, this research would not have been possible without generous financial support, and especial thanks goes again to my parents, Mountain View United Methodist Church in Kingsport, TN,

Acknowledgements

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A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE), The Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORS) and The College of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. For their friendship and support a word of thanks goes to The Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and the Barth translation group, especially Clifford Anderson, Darrell Guder, Karlfried Froehlich and Bruce McCormack. Additional thanks are reserved for Paul Nimmo, for his help in the early stages of the arduous process of learning to translate (and understand) Barth. In direct connection to my research, I need to mention Frau Lilo-Brunner Gutekunst, Dr Barabara Stadler and the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, Dr Frank Jehle, Prof Dr Johannes Fischer and the Emil Brunner-Stiftung for their support during my stay in Zurich and granting access to Brunner’s archives and the other documents that made this research possible. Very special thanks go to my research supervisor, Prof John Webster, who allowed me freedom in developing the topic, all the while providing encouragement and asking all the right questions about Brunner. Special thanks also go to Prof Francesca Murphy and Prof Christophe Chalamet for agreeing to examine this work, pointing out both its achievements and shortcomings and therefore greatly improving it. I also need to mention the editors of the Studies in Systematic Theology series for T&T Clark: John Webster, Ian MacFarland and Ivor Davidson, who provided a tremendous amount of encouragement in their responses to the initial draft and whose comments have clearly contributed to the improvement of the final one. It would also be impossible not to mention Thomas Kraft for helping this book find its way into print and especially to Anna Turton for her patience when it did not arrive as quickly as promised. In this book, I reproduce a number of extracts from Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, ‘Nature and Grace: A Contribution to the Discussion with Karl Barth’, in Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” By Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth (trans. Peter Fraenkel; Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002). Permission to use these extracts is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, an acknowledgement of my debt to many friends at The Wesley Theological Seminary, especially Dr John D. Godsey (d. 2010) and Dr James C. Logan (d. 2009), who are responsible both for introducing me to the theology of Karl Barth and failing to keep me from becoming ‘too enthusiastic’ about what I was reading. Dr Logan, already emeritus faculty for a number of years when I began to study theology, took extra time to read and work through Barth and Schleiermacher with me and made the decisive suggestion that I consider writing on ‘the other Swiss theologian’. It is to the memory of Dr James C. Logan that this book is dedicated.

Abbreviations

The following list contains the titles of Emil Brunner’s writings shortened for the footnotes. Absoluheit

Die Absolutheit Jesu (Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 2nd edn, 1926).

‘Anknüpfungspunkt’

‘Die Frage nach dem “Anknüpfungspunkt” als Problem der Theologie’, in Rudolf Wehrli (ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917-1962 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 239–67.

‘Aufgabe’

Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’, in Rudolf Wehrli (ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917-1962 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 171–93.

‘Christlicher Glaube’

‘Christlicher Glaube nach reformierter Lehre’, in G. Schenkel (ed.), Der Protestantismus der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Verlag Friedr. Bohnenberger, 1926), 235–69.

‘Denken’

‘Denken und Erleben’, in Vorträge an der Aarauer Studentenkonferenz 1919 (Basel: Spittler, 1919), 5–34.

Dogmatics I

The Christian Doctrine of God: Dogmatics: Vol. I (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1950).

Dogmatics II

The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption: Dogmatics: Vol. II (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1952).

Dogmatics III

The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation: Dogmatics: Vol. III (trans David Cairns and T. H. L. Parker; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962).

‘Einmalige’

‘Das Einmalige und der Existenzcharakter’, Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie 34, 3 (1929), 265–82.

Erlebnis

Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2nd and 3rd edn, 1923).

Das Gebot

Das Gebot und die Ordnungen: Entwurf einer protestantisch-theologischen Ethik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1932).

‘Gesetz II’

‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, Typ. Eines Referatsvordem Pfarrkapitel Aarau, 11 January 1925., (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81).

‘Gesetz 1941’

‘Gesetz und Evangelium’, Referatsskizze Typ. ThAG (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), 10. Febrary 1941., (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 84).

Abbreviations

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‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’

‘Gesetz und Offenbarung: Ein theologische Grundlegung’, in Jürgen Moltmann (ed.), Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie: Karl Barth, Heinrich Barth, Emil Brunner (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1962), 290–98.

‘Grenzen’

‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’, in Rudolf Wehrli (ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917–1962 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 76–97.

‘Grundproblem’

‘Das Grundproblem der Philosophie bei Kant und Kierkegaard’, Zwischen den Zeiten 6 (1924), 30–46.

Man

Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947).

Mensch

Der Mensch im Widerspruch: Die christliche Lehre vom Wahren und vom wirklichen Menschen (Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1937).

‘Menschenfrage’

‘Die Menschenfrage im Humanismus und Protestantismus’. Typ. eines Vortrages in Giessen und Marburg, 22. und 23 January 1925 (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81).

Nature

‘Nature and Grace: A Contribution to the Discussion with Karl Barth’, in Natural Theology: Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Dr. Karl Barth (trans. Peter Fraenkel; Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002).

Natur

Natur und Gnade: Zum Gespräch mit Karl Barth’, in Rudolf Wehrli (ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917–1962 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 333–75.

‘Offenbarung’

‘Die Offenbarung als Grund und Gegenstand der Theologie’, in Rudolf Wehrli (ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 19171962 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 98–122.

Ordnung Gottes

Von den Ordnung Gottes: Vortrag im Berner Münster am 2. März 1929 (Berlin: Gotthelf-Verlag, 1929).

Philosophy

The Philosophy of Religion from the Standpoint of Protestant Theology (trans A. J. D. Farrar and Betram Lee Woolf; New York: Scribner’s, 1937).

Symbolische

Das Symbolische in der religiösen Erkenntnis: Beiträge zu einer Theorie des Religiösen Erkennens (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1914).

Truth

Truth as Encounter (trans Amandus Loos, David Cairns and T. H. L. Parker; London: SCM Press, 1964).

‘Unbedingt’

‘Das Unbedingte und die Wirklichkeit, unser Problem’, in Rudolf Wehrli (ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917-1934 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 46–67.

‘Unentbehrlichkeit’

‘Die Unentbehrlichkeit des alten Testamentes für die missionierende Kirche’, in Rudolf Wehrli (ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917–1962 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 376–93.

‘Was heißt?’

‘Was Heißt: Erbaut auf dem Grunde der Apostel und Propheten?’, in Verhandlungen der Schweizerischen reformierten Predigergesellschaft (1925), 34–53.

Wort I

Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917-1962 (ed. Rudolf Wehrli; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981).

A Note on Translation

Reference to the German title in the footnotes indicates that the translation is my own. In the case of Der Mittler (The Mediator), Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (The Divine Imperative) and Der Mensch im Widerspruch (Man in Revolt), I have provided both my own translations and page numbers to the corresponding English editions.

Preface

Despite his prominence during the early part of the twentieth century, which in some places lasted well into the 1970s and beyond, Emil Brunner has not recently received the credit he deserves either for his role as one of Karl Barth’s early theological comrades or as a theologian in his own right. In setting out to explore Brunner’s work – naturally with Barth standing prominently in the background – I assumed to some degree at the outset that I would be able to dispense quickly with Brunner’s arguments and show how Barth was, and always will be, right about the perils of natural theology. In working on Brunner’s published writings, his correspondence with Barth, as well as his unpublished papers and lectures notes, I discovered that understanding Brunner’s own system of theology, motivations and concerns on their own terms and in their systematic context constituted a far more interesting project than once again belabouring the debate with Barth about natural theology. Of course, the following work is very much indeed about natural theology and what Emil Brunner thought about it, but it does not attempt to take a position on the debate and/or resolve the debate itself. What it does do, if I am able to take a step back and summarize my own efforts correctly, is attempt to uncover the systematic core of Brunner’s theology, what is virtually the inexpressible centre of thought for any truly systematic theological mind, which in Brunner’s case I suggest turns precisely around the issue of the relationship between law and gospel and leads directly to the position he takes on nature and grace as if a matter of course. Brunner was one of the great theologians of the twentieth century because he managed to construct a system of theological thinking, which, at least in intent, touched all thinking. Although it is mentioned in the Introduction, it is worth saying here first that Brunner was not only Professor of Systematic Theology in Zurich, but also of Practical Theology – and, we might as well say, of Christian Ethics. For there is virtually no point in Brunner’s theology that is not thoroughly imbued with the kind of ‘actualism’ that so many

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Preface

thinkers in his time were attempting to discover in – or recover from – their Christian heritage. Indeed, despite all possible clarity and accuracy in rendering the German, many of the otherwise excellent published translations of Brunner’s works into English very subtly translate out or attenuate this actualism, this emphasis on movement, event and divine action in time and space, and they do this on behalf of other concerns present in Brunner’s early work such as divine objectivity. I do not in any way intend to imply here that Brunner’s actualism shares either the form or content of that of Karl Barth – however that case may be –, but I do want to suggest that Brunner is still worth reading and may even still have something to offer us today. In my mind this would apply not only to those who want to understand aspects of the earlier Barth and his context – although I’m afraid Brunner is not even read often enough in this case –, but also in his own right as a theologian and churchman whose concerns were impassioned and serious, who worked towards forging the conceptual reunification of the Person and Work of Christ and thus dogmatics and ethics, who tried to make theology relevant to world events by actually doing theology, who saw theological anthropology as his epoch’s decisive battleground and who depicted revelation as encounter and disclosure in contrast to the divine deposit of a heavenly fact on earth. Indeed, Brunner will always be a more minor player in the history of twentieth-century theology in comparison to his ‘friend’ in Basel, but he was a key player nonetheless, and we would not be where we are today without him. If this present work were to garner Emil Brunner a few more readers – critical or otherwise – then I would be pleased. It is my hope that I have interpreted him rightly and done justice to his efforts, because it is clear to me that he loved the church, proclamation of the gospel and his life and work as a theologian, and that he saw all this as opportunity, obligation and blessing, despite the personal and professional challenges he faced throughout. Gründonnerstag Lüneburg, 2013

Introduction

The Theme In his definitive contribution to Christian anthropology, Der Mensch im Widerspruch, twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian Emil Brunner embraces the following emphatic lines on law and gospel from Martin Luther: It is St. Paul’s opinion that in Christianity a certain distinction should both be taught and understood between the law and faith, between the command and the gospel . . . . Because this is the highest art in Christianity, one which we ought to know, and where one does not know this you cannot be certain of the difference between a Christian, a pagan or a Jew. Everything hangs upon this difference.1 Readers of Brunner’s works quickly become familiar with this and other classic lines from Luther scattered throughout the Zurich theologian’s immense body of writings. These sayings, however, are not used for mere rhetorical flourish or simplistic theological precedence, but rather exemplify Brunner’s long-time and passionate commitment to Luther’s decisive insights on law and gospel, not only on behalf of the demands of Scripture and tradition, but also for the sake of church and society. As the passage noted above continues, Brunner acknowledges the grounding of his own position on Luther’s: ‘Even today no less than everything hangs upon our skill in making this distinction; this entire book should be a witness to this. But even today, as it was at the time Luther had to struggle against the Antinomians, this distinction is still of the “highest art”, and the confusion is great’.2 Emil Brunner, Der Mensch im Widerspruch: Die christliche Lehre vom wahren und vom wirklichen Menschen (Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1937), 501; ET: Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: 1947), 516, citing Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe) vol. 36 (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1909), 9. Brunner’s name is omitted from subsequent references to his works and the titles of all works are shortened in subsequent references to an easily identifiable form. 2  Mensch, 501 (ET: 516). 1 

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Law and Gospel in Emil Brunner’s Earlier Dialectical Theology

Brunner published Der Mensch im Widerspruch in  1937, roughly in the middle of his long and dynamic career as a student, pastor, theologian and missionary. If asked, Brunner would likely have said his commitment to the dialectic of law and gospel, deriving not only from Luther but the Reformation as a whole, was present in his earliest theological thought. Oddly, however, some of Brunner’s most pronounced statements on law and gospel are relegated to appendices and excurses, while it was his turbulent relationship with fellow Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth that prompted him to develop and clarify his position on law and gospel, turning what might have otherwise been a ‘given’ into a primary methodological guide for nearly every point in his theological system. In this regard, Brunner views Barth’s controversial modification of the traditional formula ‘law and gospel’ to ‘gospel and law’ to be at best a misunderstanding and at worst an attack on certain basic elements inherent to the Christian faith. Continuing his excursus on ‘The Dialectic of the Law’, Brunner writes: ‘Karl Barth has ventured to reverse the traditional order and say: gospel and law. For in the gospel the law is “hidden and locked up as in the Ark”. We must, “if we are going to find out what the law is, first of all know about the gospel and not vice versa” (‘Gospel and Law’, 3). Then were the Reformers in error when they so persistently and unambiguously insisted on the other order?’3 Not only at the time of Der Mensch im Widerspruch in 1937, but from the inception of their relationship in 1916, through to Der Mittler 4 in 1927, and on to Nature and Grace5 and Barth’s famous Nein! 6 in 1934, Brunner viewed his comrade’s treatment of the relationship between law and gospel to entail not only a devaluation of divinely created nature, particularly humanity and human activity, but also a dangerous flirtation with the theological system of the nineteenth century, which they were both fighting to overcome. The following study argues that Brunner’s early and sustained commitment to a dialectic of law and gospel not only determines his critique of modern theology and the development of his own theological system, but also characterizes his long-time engagement with Barth that comes to a head in their famous public debate over nature and grace in 1934. Ibid. See Karl Barth, ‘Gospel and Law’, in God, Grace and Gospel (trans. James Strathearn McNabb; Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1959). 4  Emil Brunner, Der Mittler: Zur Besinnung über den Christusglauben (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1st edn, 1927); ET: The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1947). 5  Emil Brunner, ‘Nature and Grace: A Contribution to the Discussion with Karl Barth’, in Natural Theology: Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the reply ‘No!’ by Dr. Karl Barth (trans. Peter Frankel; Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 15–60. 6  Karl Barth, ‘No!’, in Natural Theology, 67–128. 3 

Introduction

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Biographical Sketch Emil Brunner was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, outside Zurich, in 1889.7 Brunner’s father, though descending ‘from a family of nonbelievers’, was a primary school teacher ‘who understood his work as a calling and a service to God’.8 Brunner’s mother, who gave him instruction in Bible and prayer, helped to lay the foundations for his mature faith. Another key figure in Brunner’s development was Hermann Kutter9, who confirmed him in 190510, and, along with Brunner’s schooling at the Zurich Gymnasium11, was essential in helping supplement ‘the pietism of his parents’ house’ with a ‘humanistic openness’.12 In  1908, Brunner began his studies at the University of Zurich, including one semester away in Berlin.13 He was then ordained at Zurich Fraumünster on 27 October 191214 and completed his doctoral work in 1913 under Leonhard Ragaz15, who along with Kutter was a leader in Swiss religious socialism. Prior to World War I, Brunner spent a year teaching Latin and French at a secondary school in Leeds, England16, but returned to Switzerland to serve on the border as the hostilities intensified.17 After his military service, and a failed attempt to produce an acceptable Habilitation on Henri Bergson for the theological faculty at  Zurich in  191518, Brunner served briefly as vicar under Kutter at A small but rich selection of biographical material on Brunner is available. First is Brunner’s own ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, in Charles Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (eds.), The Theology of Emil Brunner (trans. Keith Chamberlain; New York: Macmillan, 1962), 3–20 (originally printed as ‘Autobiographische Skizze’, Reformatio 12 (1963), 630–46). J. Edward Humphrey’s Emil Brunner (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1976) also provides a short biography and summary of Brunner’s theology. Frank Jehle’s excellent Emil Brunner: Theologe im 20. Jahrhundert (Theologischer Verlag: Zurich, 2006), now the standard account of Brunner’s life, offers a sympathetic, but evaluative and intelligent account of Brunner’s life and work helpfully grounded within its context and in connection to the most significant of Brunner’s personal relationships. Prior to Jehle’s biography were the personal reflections of Emil Brunner’s oldest son, Hans Heinrich Brunner, Mein Vater und sein Ältester: Emil Brunner in seiner und meiner Zeit (Theologischer Verlag: Zurich, 1986). Finally, John W. Hart’s significant book, Karl Barth Vs. Emil Brunner: The Formation and Dissolution of a Theological Alliance, 1916–1936 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), is a helpful addition to this category in terms of its characterization of Brunner’s intellectual development set specifically in the context of his personal relationship with Barth. 8  ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 4. 9  Jehle, 90–8. 10  Ibid., 30–2. 11  Ibid., 28–30. 12  Jehle, 33. Cf. Jehle, 28 and ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 5–6. 13  Ibid., 33–47. 14  Ibid., 49. 15  Ibid., 49–52 and 98–107. 16  Ibid., 55–8. 17  Ibid., 58–62. 18  Ibid., 62–7. 7 

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Law and Gospel in Emil Brunner’s Earlier Dialectical Theology

Neumünster in Zurich before finally beginning his pastorate in the remote mountain village of Obstalden in 1916.19 Despite his geographical and personal isolation20, Brunner’s 8  years in Obstalden served as one of the most exciting and productive phases of his life. It was during this time that he engaged and married Magrit Lauterburg, one of Hermann Kutter’s nieces21, and then saw the birth of three of his four sons. Though already close to Eduard Thurneysen through Swiss religious socialism22, Brunner presumably met Karl Barth sometime around 1916, the point at which their regular correspondence also began.23 The next few years witnessed the emergence of the dialectical theology movement, in which Brunner played an essential role, although at a slight distance from the inner circle of Barth, Thurneysen and Gogarten.24 In 1919–20, Brunner spent a year as a fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he encountered the newest developments in American liberal theology and philosophy of religion25 and also began compiling ideas for his second attempt to produce a Habilitation.26 This work was completed successfully the following year, earning Brunner the unsalaried lecturer’s position of Privatdozent at the University of Zurich.27 From this point, he was rather quickly appointed Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology in  192428, largely on the merits of his polemical treatment of Schleiermacher in Die Mystik und das Wort and his renown as one of the leading dialectical theologians.29 Whereas Brunner indeed achieved his fame as a systematic theologian, his theology was always thoroughly and carefully imbued with a profound practical emphasis. Not only were pedagogy and mission key themes in all of Brunner’s work, a foundational concern for the nature and purpose of communication, missionary and otherwise, also took an early and central role in his academic writing. As Brunner wrote summarily in 1963: ‘Scholarly work in theological and philosophical areas was and still is strictly subordinated to the proclamation of the Gospel’.30 Brunner considered his 19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30 

Ibid., 69–85. ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 9. Ibid., 7. Jehle, 107–14. Ibid., 114–21. ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 8–9. Ibid., 8. Jehle, 123–44. Ibid., 170–8. Ibid., 203–35. ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 9. Ibid., 8.

Introduction

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work on Truth as Encounter in  1937 a Christian epistemology specifically indebted to dialogical I-Thou philosophy, to be his own most significant theological achievement.31 In relation to this communicative and missionary impetus, Brunner became heavily involved for a time (1932–38) with Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group Movement32, to which he also unsuccessfully tried to introduce Barth in the 1930s33 and ultimately left due to certain organizational changes after World War II.34 It was in the midst of Brunner’s involvement with the Oxford Group Movement that he wrote Nature and Grace in 1934 and received Barth’s No!, effectively ending the public phase of their theological ‘partnership’, although they remained in occasional private correspondence and infrequent public debate for the rest of their lives.35 Brunner was again overseas prior to the next major European conflict, serving as guest professor during 1938–39 at Princeton Seminary, where he strongly considered accepting a permanent position and was finally dissuaded only by the intensification of hostilities in Europe, for which he returned home as before.36 Like Barth, Brunner was active during the war as a theologian, continuing his teaching and writing, always abreast of current events. At this time, Brunner returned not only to one of his previous wartime concerns – the relationship between revelation and reason37 – he also turned to the notion of justice in  1943, offering a constructive response to what had already become the inevitable necessity of rebuilding the European political system at the end of the war.38 In direct connection to these concerns, Brunner was always particularly outspoken against totalitarian regimes in any form, both fascist and communist, and openly criticized Barth for failing to join him in forcefully condemning the Stalinist Soviet Union.39 Brunner travelled widely in the years following the 31  ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 12. Originally, Emil Brunner, Wahrheit als Begegnung (Berlin: 1938), the text was unfortunately titled The Divine-Human Encounter (trans. Amandus W. Loos; Westport: Greenwood, 1980) in the first English edition, then correctly retitled with supplemental sections in the second English edition as Truth as Encounter (trans. Amandus Loos et al.; London: SCM, 1964). 32  Jehle, 273–91. 33  Hart, 182–91. 34  Ibid., 182. 35  Jehle, 293–321. 36  ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 20. 37  Ibid., 16. 38  ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 13–14. See Emil Brunner, Justice and the Social Order (trans. Mary Hottinger; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), originally printed in German as Gerechtigkeit: Eine Lehre von den Grundgesetzen der Gesellschaftsordung (Zurich: Zwingli, 1943). 39  See for example Emil Brunner, ‘An Open Letter to Karl Barth’ (trans. Stanley Godman), in Karl Barth (ed.), Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946-1952 (trans. E. M. Decalour; London: SCM, 1954).

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Law and Gospel in Emil Brunner’s Earlier Dialectical Theology

war, lecturing not only in Europe and North America, but also in Asia and Japan, in addition to being particularly active in various strands of post-war global ecumenism.40 Significantly, Brunner gave the Gifford Lectures on natural theology, entitled Christianity and Civilisation, at St Andrews in Scotland in 1947 and 1948.41 Brunner then served as guest professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, from 1953 to 1955, a move he often considered to be the pinnacle of his career as a theologian and missionary, supported by the ‘conviction that this had been a call of God’.42 Upon his return to Switzerland in 1955, Brunner suffered a series of brain haemorrhages and strokes, but managed to remain productive by completing his multi-volume Dogmatics, along with several other works. Brunner died in Zurich, on 6 April 1966, leaving behind one of the most compelling literary and personal legacies of any twentieth-century theologian.

Impressions Similar to that of Barth, the earliest reception of Brunner’s theological output by church and academy was varied and often steeped in a broader interpretation of the meaning of ‘the theology of crisis’, ‘dialectical theology’ or ‘neo-orthodoxy’ as a whole. Despite the pervasive nature of these impressions, Brunner was frequently singled out for his status in the movement as well as for his abilities. H. R. Mackintosh writes in 1924 that ‘Professor Brunner holds a chair in theology in Zürich and is probably the ablest of the Swiss group, including Kutter, Barth, and Gogarten, whose provocative work is arousing so much interest on the Continent’.43 Similarly, American philosopher of religion Julius Bixler comments, Brunner is ‘one of the most prolific and at the same time systematic writers of this movement’44 and ‘one of its ablest thinkers’.45 Elsewhere, Brunner is ‘the most massive and systematic theologian in the movement’46 or ‘the most massive protagonist of “the theology of crisis”’47, as well as ‘a highly trained See for example Jehle, 499–514. ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 17–18. See Emil Brunner, Christianity and Civilisation (London: Nisbet, 1948), 1. 42  ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 19. See Jehle, 515–45. 43  H. R. Mackintosh, ‘The Swiss Group’, The Expository Times 36 (1924), 73. 44  Julius Seelye Bixler, ‘Emil Brunner as a Representative of the Theology of Crisis’, Journal of Religion 9, 3 (1929), 446–7. 45  Bixler, ‘Emil Brunner’, 447. 46  J. Arundel Chapman, An Introduction to Schleiermacher (London: Epworth, 1932), 127. 47  [H. R. Mackintosh], ‘Notes of Recent Exposition’, The Expository Times 43 (1932), 533. 40  41 

Introduction

7

and competent Professor of Theology’.48 Even into the 1950s and 1960s, at least to some, Brunner remained dialectical theology’s ‘most central and representative writer’.49 As Henri Bouillard says, this is because ‘he exerted a considerable influence in the English speaking countries from the beginning’.50 In fact, American theologian I. John Hesselink comments that ‘students in most mainline seminaries and university divinity schools read more works of Brunner than of any other single theologian’, possibly because ‘he was easier than Barth to translate, not only grammatically’.51 Likewise, Bixler mentions that ‘Brunner is gifted with a style unusually lucid for a German or Swiss theologian. He is a born expositor and has found his appropriate niche as the systematizer of this crisis or dialectic theology’.52 It was perhaps for these reasons, among others, that Brunner’s works were still standard fare in some American seminaries into the 1970s. Such impressions, of course, invite a range of both formal and material comparisons to Barth. With reference to the accessible nature of Brunner’s writing, Mozley writes, while his ‘theology may be more academical in style than Barth’s; it is not so in substance’.53 Similarly, Bouillard suggests that Brunner ‘has neither the prophetic gift, nor the creative power, nor the enthusiasm, nor the eloquence of Barth, but a manner of thinking that is more logical, more ordered, more nuanced and a remarkable clarity of exposition’.54 Thus, in comparison to Barth, ‘Brunner communicates better’55 and is even ‘essentially the preachers’ theologian’.56 This, despite the fact that Brunner ‘tends to explain and systematize biblical truths by means of philosophical notions’57, and even though ‘his thinking is less “actualist”, less “dynamic”, less eschatological than Barth’s’.58 Positively J. K. Mozley, ‘The Barthian School V. Emil Brunner’, The Expository Times 43 (1932), 534. David Cairns, ‘Theologians of our Time XVIII. The Theology of Emil Brunner’, The Expository Times 76 (1964), 55. 50  Henri Bouillard, Karl Barth: Genèse et Évolution de la Théologie Dialectique (Aubier: Éditions Montaigne, 1957), 175. Cf. Gerhard Sauter, ‘Theologisch Miteinander Streiten – Karl Barths Auseinandersetzungmit Emil Brunner’, in Michael Beintker, Christian Link and Michael Trowitzsch(eds.), Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921-1935): Aufbruch-Klärung-Widerstand (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2005), 272: ‘Brunner had found much more appeal in England and in the USA than Karl Barth’. 51  I. John Hesselink, ‘Emil Brunner: A Centennial Perspective’, Christian Century, 13 December 1989, 1171. 52  Julius Seelye Bixler, ‘A Sketch of Barthian Theology’, review of Gott und Mensch by Emil Brunner, Journal of Religion 11, 2 (April 1931), 287. 53  Mozley, 534. 54  Bouillard, 175. 55  Brand Blanshard, Reason and Belief (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1974), 250. 56  Vincent Taylor, ‘Creation and Redemption’, The Expository Times 64 (1953), 232. 57  Bouillard, 180. 58  Ibid., 181. 48  49 

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then, Bixler writes, ‘Brunner is unquestionably an excellent spokesman for the crisis theology. He indulges less than does Barth in dark and paradoxical sayings, his interests are not so largely exegetical as are those of Bultmann, and he is less given to extravagances of statement than is Gogarten’.59 In terms of a material comparison between Barth and Brunner’s earlier theology, one of the most significant and enduring impressions concerns Brunner’s supposed earlier interest in theological ethics. Consequently, even in the 1970s, Yale philosopher and Gifford Lecturer Brand Blanshard could write that ‘Brunner was more interested than Barth in ethics and social movements’.60 While Barth’s substantial early reckoning with moral theology is now well-established61, these characterizations still persist due to Brunner’s early publication of a ‘Protestant theological ethic’, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, in 193262 and the explicit practical focus in his essays on ‘the other task of theology’63 and ‘the point of contact’64 in 1929 and 1932. On this basis, Mozley writes in 1932 that ‘for Brunner the religious problem and the “social ethical problem” are one’65, and Blanshard, in  1974, suggests ‘ethics, for Brunner, is inseparable from theology’.66 In  2005 then, Matthias Zeindler states unequivocally: ‘In principle, the question itself of whether Emil Brunner is a dogmatician or an ethicist is an incorrect one’.67 For perhaps a combination of all these reasons, Brunner’s theology is also notable and noted for its wide appeal. In this regard, David Cairns remarks, ‘self-confessed liberal Wilhelm Pauck and leading conservative evangelical theologian Carl F. Henry found much that was challenging and admirable in Brunner’s theology’.68 It is also noteworthy that Brunner maintained a Bixler, ‘A Sketch of Barthian Theology’, 287. Blanshard, 250. The chapter is entitled ‘Reason and Revelation for Emil Brunner’. 61  See especially John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), and Denis Müller, Karl Barth (Paris: Cerf, 2005). 62  Emil Brunner, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen: Entwurf einer protestantisch-theologischen Ethik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1932); ET: The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1947). 63  Emil Brunner, ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’, in Rudolf Wehrli(ed.), Ein Offenes Wort 1: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917-1962, Vol. I (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), 171–93. This volume is subsequently cited as Wort 1. 64  Emil Brunner, ‘Die Frage nach dem “Anknüpfungspunkt” als Problem der Theologie’, in Wort 1, 239–67. 65  Mozley, 534. Cf. Harold Kuhn, ‘The Problem of Human Self-Transcendence in the Dialectical Theology’, Harvard Theological Review 40, 1 (1947), 54. 66  Blanshard, 250. 67  Matthias Zeindler, ‘Emil Brunner’, in Wolfgang Lienemann and Frank Mathwig (eds.), Schweizer Ethiker 20. Jahrhundert: Der Beitrag theologischer Denker (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2005), 89. 68  Hesselink, 1171. 59  60 

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close relationship with leading Southern Baptist theologian Dale Moody69 and many other church leaders from diverse backgrounds. However, among the compliments, there is the typical disdain and misunderstanding, in addition to competent critical engagement. While Cornelius Van Til’s vehement critique of Brunner’s supposed anti-Christian philosophical allegiance is hardly worth mentioning70, by contrast Julius Bixler comments: ‘In spite of his professed dislike for philosophy, Brunner is himself primarily a philosopher. He hopes that his readers will not become philosophical but he tries to give them philosophical reasons for not doing so. Since he is willing and able to develop his position intellectually he has come nearer than have any of his colleagues to making the theology of crisis intelligible’.71 In this vein, Brunner’s employment of Kierkegaard’s infinite qualitative distinction, while commonly misunderstood, is a common point of critique. Whereas Barth could chastise Brunner for his interest in anthropology, a commentator like Melville Channing-Pearce could decry Brunner’s Mittler for presenting a ‘theology of eclipse’ instead of a ‘theology of crisis’.72 Similarly, Paul Jewett, though acknowledging the limitations of his methodology73, abstracts the Kierkegaardian philosophical concepts from Brunner’s writings, treating them as if they were points to which Brunner maintained independent philosophical commitment. Jewett’s otherwise useful analysis misses Brunner’s explicit attempts to qualify the infinite qualitative distinction by ensuring that the distinction between God and humanity is grounded primarily on sin, not human finitude. In another case, the reader is even warned, because ‘as a dialectician, Brunner may be expected to present many logical contradictions to his readers’.74 Philosophers writing on Brunner tend to find an irreconcilable dualism in his work – even those willing to be sympathetic. Brand Blanshard, while picking up on many of the nuances in Brunner’s thought, completely misses his eristic theology, his notion of the point of contact and his principle of See Dale Moody, ‘The Church in Theology’, in The Theology of Emil Brunner, 227–44. Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (London: James Clarke, 1946), xv: ‘It appears that Brunner’s real enemy is not the “modern Protestantism” of Schleiermacher and his followers, but the historic Christian faith’. 71  Julius Seelye Bixler, ‘A Sketch of Barthian Theology’, 287. 72  Melville Chaning-Pearce, The Terrible Crystal: Studies in Kierkegaard and Modern Christianity (London: Kegan Paul, 1940), 95. 73  Paul King Jewett, Emil Brunner’s Doctrine of Revelation (London: James Clarke & Co., 1954), 12. 74  Charles N. Gibbs, A Comparative Study of Existential Anxiety and its Solution in the Works of Emil Brunner and Robert Assagioli (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Claremont School of Theology, 1969), VIII. 69  70 

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contiguity, thereby concluding that Brunner’s system ends up in an irreconcilable dualism between the realms of nature and the supernatural, reason and revelation: ‘Sometimes he begins with points of identity between the two realms, but it soon transpires that those identities are really differences masked by identical names. Sometimes he begins with the differences, but then the differences prove so great that the chasm between them is unbridgeable’.75 Ultimately, Blanshard finds the complete lack of compatibility between human notions of the Good and the divine Good leads Brunner to moral nihilism: ‘This discontinuity of the two moral orders we considered and had to reject when we met it in Kierkegaard, and we must reject it as unequivocally now’.76 Likewise, Julius Bixler suggests: ‘The argument of Der Mittler (The Mediator) rests upon the fundamental opposition which all the writers of this group find between eternity and time, Creator and creature, salvation and sin, with the consequent need for completely self-effacing humanity on man’s part before the wrath of God, the need for revelation and salvation, and the fulfilment of this need in the person of Christ’.77 Thus, ‘Brunner’s whole position develops out of his original assumption of an infinite chasm between God and man and the need for an act of God before reconciliation can be made. Like the other members of this group of theologians, Brunner is a complete pessimist regarding human nature’.78 Ironically then, while it is Barth who is frequently criticized for the polemic in his earlier theology, it is Brunner who wrote a stunning indictment of Schleiermacher in 1924’s Die Mystik und das Wort (Mysticism and the Word)79 and then officially ordained a modified form of theological polemic as one of the two tasks of theology in 1929 – a move that guaranteed a continuation of Brunner’s sharp polemical standpoint until the end of his career. Reviewing The Divine-Human Encounter in 1938, J. K. Mozley expresses serious concern about this: But this positive teaching, deeply expository of truth in which all Christians can and largely do stand together, is proclaimed with an accompaniment of controversy, of negations and condemnations, which take charge of the book to such an extent that one might well close it Blanshard, 272. Ibid., 279. 77  Bixler, ‘Emil Brunner’, 447. 78  Ibid., 453. 79  Emil Brunner, Die Mystik und das Wort: Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und christlichem Glauben dargestellt an der Theologie Schleiermachers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1924). 75  76 

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with the feeling that nothing has been made so clear as the error on which a fundamental matter, bringing various ills in its train, which from the second century onwards, has invaded and largely possessed itself of the Christian Church, and, despite a check at the Reformation which merely availed slightly for a time, continues to this day. . . . The pessimism of Dr. Brunner’s outlook on eighteen hundred years of Church history makes me distrustful of the soundness of his foundations.80 With regard to Die Mystik und das Wort, Hugh Mackintosh wryly comments: ‘It may be that Brunner felt he could only get a hearing for certain truths by uttering them at the top of his voice’.81 Further, Brunner’s one-time teacher, A. C. McGiffert, concludes even less charitably: ‘Undoubtedly Brunner often gives the impression of being intoxicated by his own loquacity and self-hypnotized by the repetition of his several theses’.82 These and many other scattered impressions offer a brief glimpse into what might be in store for the unsuspecting reader. As the overall breadth and availability of Brunner’s earlier works, correspondence and archival materials have improved dramatically within the past 15 years, at least for those able and willing to travel to Zurich, many of these impressions, both positive and negative, are undergoing revision. For this reason, a few words are necessary concerning the overall state and availability of Brunner’s writings.

Brunner’s Writings In 1974, Peter Anthon estimated Brunner’s published works as containing over 9000 pages in around 400 separate pieces, including 15 primary works, 20 larger writings and over 130 published essays, papers and talks.83 While there is no critical edition of Brunner’s writings, a two-volume collection of Brunner’s essays, generally representative of his thinking and concerns at every stage of his career appeared in 1981, entitled Ein Offenes Wort: Vorträge 80  J. K. Mozley, review of The Divine-Human Encounter, by Emil Brunner, Journal of Theological Studies 46 (1945), 241–2. 81  Mackintosh, 75. 82  A. C. McGiffert, ‘The Theology of Crisis in the Light of Schleiermacher’, Journal of Religion 10, 3 (1930), 377. Brunner studied with McGiffert at Union Seminary in  1919–20. See ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 8. 83  Peter Anthon, Person und Verantwortung: Emil Brunners dialektische Theologie in pädagogischer Sicht (Zurich: Juris Druck, 1974), 1. See also Humphrey, 21. Cf. Roman Roessler, Person und Glaube: Der Personalismus der Gottesbeziehung bei Emil Brunner (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1965), 19.

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Law and Gospel in Emil Brunner’s Earlier Dialectical Theology

und Aufsätze 1917-1962.84 Further, the publication of the Barth-Brunner correspondence in 2000 has been significant for both Barth and Brunner studies.85 The first two researchers to make ready use of this correspondence, J. Bruce McCallum86 and John W. Hart87, immediately revised the common understanding of the Barth-Brunner relationship and certain aspects of their earlier theology, not to mention the received understanding of the nature-grace debate. The correspondence provides substantial inroads to interpreting Brunner’s earliest published work, especially as he was being pushed by and interacting with Barth’s own development. In addition, the correspondence explicitly indicates that many of Brunner’s earlier essays appear in direct connection to his ongoing conversation with Barth and also warrants reading Brunner’s earlier theology in direct relationship to his understanding of Barth at the time. Finally, the availability of other Brunner materials since 1995 at the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich has already been of substantial benefit to a number of researchers. Carefully arranged by Dr Barbara Stadler, the archival materials include previously unavailable resources such as course lectures, conference papers and talks, as well as letters, sermons and Brunner’s personal notes.88 Regarding English translations, most of Brunner’s primary published works from Der Mittler in 1927 onwards are readily available and generally of good quality. Several of Brunner’s significant earlier works, however, particularly his two doctoral theses, Das Symbolische in der religiösen Erkenntnis in  191489 and Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube in  192190, have not been translated, along with 1924’s Die Mystik und das Wort. This also applies to virtually all of Brunner’s most important earlier essays, particularly ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’ (The Other Task of Theology) and ‘Die Frage nach dem “Anknüpfungspunkt” als Problem der Theologie’ (The Question of the Point of Contact as a Problem in Theology), both of Emil Brunner, Ein Offenes Wort: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917-1962 (ed. Rudolf Wehrli; 2 vols; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981). 85  Karl Barth-Emil Brunner Briefwechsel (ed. Eberhard Busch; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2000). 86  J. Bruce McCallum, Modernity and the Dilemma of Natural Theology: The Barth-Brunner Debate, 1934 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Marquette University, 1994). 87  John W. Hart, Karl Barth Vs. Emil Brunner: The Formation and Dissolution of a Theological Alliance, 1916-1936 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 88  All of the archival materials used below are cited in nearly identical format to that used by the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (  StAZ). For a comprehensive list of archival materials, see Nachlass Emil Brunner (Zurich: Staatsarchiv, 1995), also available in Zurich’s Zentralbibliothek. ‘WI 55’ indicates the Brunner archival collection in its entirety, and ‘Sch. __’ refers to the particular box in which the material is held. 89  Emil Brunner, Das Symbolische in der religiösen Erkenntnis: Beiträge zu einer Theorie des religiösen Erkenntnis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1914). 90  Emil Brunner, Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2nd and 3rd edn, 1923). 84 

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which were essential in the run up to Nature and Grace. In short, for Anglophone scholars, the situation is somewhat comparable to that of a Barth studies without translations of the 1921 Epistle to the Romans91 and The Word of God and Theology.92 This obviously creates a number of difficulties in forming a comprehensive understanding of Brunner’s earlier theology, especially as a glance at a comprehensive publication list reveals that Brunner tended to write preparatory articles and lectures as test runs in advance of his major publications, most of which were directed towards a broad audience of non-academic, educated Christian laity.93 Inclusion of the earlier untranslated materials not only affords the reader a more technical understanding of the early Brunner, but also first makes viewing Brunner’s entire career with an eye towards continuity possible – a change in perspective that has immensely impacted Barth studies. This study prioritizes Brunner’s primary earlier publications, including both books and essays, along with his correspondence with Barth. The unpublished materials, while significant, are generally used for purposes of clarification and support. Given Brunner’s long and distinguished list of publications, any research claiming to delineate and expound a major theme in his theology while not relying principally on his primary published works would be immediately suspect. Although also ‘unofficial’ in this sense, Brunner’s letters to Barth do receive priority in this study because they consistently demonstrate a direct conceptual relation between Brunner’s publications and his ongoing conversation with Barth. It is particularly in the relationship between the published writings and the letters that the significance of the dialectic of law and gospel in Brunner’s earlier theology becomes especially clear.

A Brief Note on Scholarship The secondary literature on Brunner, though varied, does generally indicate an awareness of the overall importance of law and gospel for Brunner’s theological programme, although there is no single work devoted exclusively to this topic. Recently, however, several commentators have identified the significance of the dialectic of law and gospel for Brunner’s earlier theology and the nature-grace debate with Barth. For example, in Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford, 1933). See Karl Barth, The Word of God and Theology (trans. Amy Marga; London: T&T Clark, 2011). The first English version of the same text was The Word of God and The Word of Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928). 93  Cf. Mittler, VIII (ET: 16); Das Gebot, VIII (ET: 12); Mensch, 15–16 (ET: 11–12). 91  92 

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their works on Barth’s earlier theology, both Bruce McCormack94 and Christophe Chalamet95 explicitly identify Brunner’s affinity for a theology of law and gospel. Likewise, in his examination of Barth and Brunner’s early relationship, which focuses on their correspondence and earlier writings, John W. Hart also identifies law and gospel as one of Brunner’s primary earlier concerns96, a key point in his analysis of the Barth-Brunner debate that Dan Migliore also affirms.97 Beyond this, there are a number of helpful, but infrequent comments scattered throughout Barth studies, as well as a number of longer works devoted exclusively to specific aspects of Brunner’s theology. Especially noteworthy is Samuel Enoch Stumpf’s 1948 doctoral thesis, which despite lacking a number of Brunner’s significant works, nonetheless correctly assesses: ‘There is no sharp discontinuity between Brunner’s earlier and later works on law. . . . When, therefore, Brunner seeks to bring theological principles to bear upon the fact of the totalitarian state, he is working out of his earlier presuppositions in a thoroughly consistent manner’.98 Several other writers also identify the significance of Brunner’s understanding of law or law and gospel, but either do not develop the theme99, or treat it only in subordination to other concerns.100

Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development (London: Clarendon, 1995), 397–9. 95  Christophe Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians: Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2005), 239. 96  See especially John W. Hart, Karl Barth Vs. Emil Brunner, 71–80 and John W. Hart, ‘The Barth-Brunner Correspondence’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 26–30. 97  Daniel L. Migliore, ‘Response to The Barth Brunner Correspondence’, in Hunsinger, For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology: ‘I think this section of Hart’s paper may well bring us to the crux of the divergence between Brunner and Barth, viz. their different understandings of the relation between law and gospel’. 98  Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Emil Brunner’s Doctrine of the Law: A Study in the Theology of Law (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1948), 8. 99  Lorenz Volken, Der Glaube bei Emil Brunner (Freiburg in der Schweiz: Paulus Verlag, 1947), esp. 101–3 and 145–8, focuses largely on Brunner’ later theology and identifies Brunner’s dialectic of law in relation to his doctrine of faith, but does not further elaborate. 100  E.g. Hermann Volk, Emil Brunners Lehre von dem Sünder (Regensberg: Regensburgsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1950), 69–87, assesses Brunner’s treatment of law and divine wrath, as well as his identification of sin and legalism in the context of his doctrine of sin; Ivar Hans Pöhl, Das Problem des Naturrechts bei Emil Brunner (Zurich: Zwingli Verlag, 1963), 79–87, focusing on natural rights and justice, briefly accounts for Brunner’s doctrine law and gospel primarily in Der Mensch im Widerspruch, also emphasizing Brunner’s appropriation of Luther; Dietmar Lütz, Der Weg zum Glauben: Emil Brunner und das unerledigte Kapitel protestantischer Dogmatik (Berlin: WDL-Verlag, 2000), offers a compelling analysis of the missional character of Brunner’s theology, with particular reference to the believer’s path to faith (Glaubenswerdung). Lütz does find that the dialectic of law and gospel plays an essential role in Brunner’s work, although he does not single it out for extensive treatment. Cf. also Ulrich Ghisler, Die Lehre von der Imago Dei bei Emil Brunner (Rome: Pontifica Studiorum Universitas a St. Thoma Aq., 1976). 94 

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Dutch scholar Hubertus Hubbeling, however, strongly emphasizes Brunner’s doctrine of law both generally and in connection to Nature and Grace. Fortunately, Hubbeling’s published Dutch text also includes a German Zusammenhang101, in which the author suggests: Many overlook the correct relationship of law and gospel, which according to Brunner’s own indication serves as the key for a correct understanding of his theology. They consider it possible to reproach Brunner for maintaining a notion of continuity and Brunner’s doctrine of the point of contact has given rise to this critique. I have pointed out the dialectical nature of this contact in the appropriate passages. In Brunner there is absolutely no continuity between law and gospel, consciousness of sin and forgiveness of sin, nature and grace.102 Similarly, Paul Schrotenboer, who originally produced a volume on the apologetic considerations in Brunner’s theology103, names ‘the gospel-law motif’ as one of the primary characteristics running ‘through the full spectrum of Brunner’s theology’104, even suggesting that it ‘is built around a framework that partitions reality into two realms or dimensions of existence, namely law and Gospel or, the impersonal and the personal, world-truths and God-truths. . . . This may also be called nature and grace’.105 Heinrich Leipold, in giving one of the most detailed analyses of Brunner’s earlier theology up to Nature and Grace, also clearly sees the overall importance of the dialectic of the law in Brunner’s thought and the debate with Barth.106 A number of authors focus on the more philosophical aspects of Brunner’s work. Of particular note is Finnish writer Yrjö Salakka, who indicates that several before him had ‘underscored the significance of the law in Brunner’s theology, without however showing in a closer analysis Hubertus Gezinus Hubbeling, Natuur en Genade bij Emil Brunner (Groningen: Van Gorcum, 1956), 158-63. See also Hubertus G. Hubbeling, ‘Emil Brunner’, in Herbert Vorgrimler and Robert Vander Gucht (eds.), Bilanz der Theologieim 20. Jahrhundert: Bahnbrechende Theologen (Freiberg: Herder, 1970), 69–81. 102  Hubbeling, Natuur en Genade, 158. 103  Paul Schrotenboer, A New Apologetics: An Analysis and Appraisal of the Eristic Theology of Emil Brunner (Kampen: Kok, 1955). 104  Paul Schrotenboer, ‘Emil Brunner’, in Philip Edgecumbe Hughes (ed.), Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), 103. 105  Schrotenboer, ‘Emil Brunner’, 119. Schrotenboer somewhat over-interprets Brunner’s polemic against law and legalism, thereby missing the essential role of the law in Brunner’s theology as the ‘point of contact’ for the gospel. 106  Heinrich Leipold, Missionarische Theologie: Emil Brunners Weg zur theologischen Anthropologie (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), 92–101, 261. 101 

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where and how its significance is apparent’.107 Salakka holds that Brunner’s ‘doctrine of humanity as spiritual personality is tightly bound with his metaphysics of the spirit, on which all his thoughts are built extending from the philosophy of religion’.108 In other words, while noting the importance of the doctrine of law, Salakka finds Brunner’s philosophicalmetaphysical presuppositions are the key to his thought, that is, ‘Brunner deduces the law from his metaphysics of spirit’.109 In addition to Salakka’s work, several others develop Brunner’s dialogical I-Thou personalism for extended treatment in relation to various other concerns.110

Plan of Study With regard to Brunner’s early published writings, his correspondence with Barth and an overview of the relevant secondary literature, it quickly becomes clear that a systematic appraisal of the dialectic of law and gospel in Brunner’s earlier theology will fill an obvious gap in the scholarship and enrich the general understanding of some of the theological presuppositions to the nature-grace debate of 1934. While later works such as Truth as Encounter, Revelation and Reason111 and the three-volume Dogmatics112 could easily be included within an appraisal of law and gospel in Brunner’s theology as a whole, the constraints imposed by the time and space designated for the present research, as well as the subject matter itself, indicate that Nature and Grace in  1934 forms a natural stopping point. 107  Yrjö Salakka, Person und Offenbarung in der Theologie Emil Brunners während der Jahre 1914–1937 (trans. Ellen Aulo und Friedrich Ege; Helsinki: Luther-Agricola Gesellschaft, 1960), 171. 108  Salakka, 7–8, 40–52, 186. 109  Ibid., 182. 110  For example, Bernhard Langemeyer, Der dialogische Personalismus in der evangelischen und katholischen Theologie (Paderborn: Verlag Bonifacius-Druckerei, 1963), focuses on Brunner’s appropriation of dialogical Catholic thinker Ferdinand Ebner and concludes with a comparison of Protestant and Catholic theology in relation to I and Thou. Further, Roman Roessler, Person und Glaube: Der Personalismus der Gottesbeziehung bei Emil Brunner (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1965), frequently cited in the secondary literature, gives a general account of Brunner’s personalism but does not develop an account of Brunner’s doctrine of law. More recently, Martin Leiner, Gottes Gegenwart: Martin Bubers Philosophie des Dialogs und der Ansatz ihrer theologischen Rezeption bei Friedrich Gogarten und Emil Brunner (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 2000), gives a helpful account of the development of Brunner’s dialogical personalism in relation to Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. 111  Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason: The Christian Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge (trans. Olive Wyon Philadelphia: Westminster, 1946). 112  Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God: Dogmatics Vol. I (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1950); The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption: Dogmatics Vol. II (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1952); The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith and the Consummation: Dogmatics Vol. III (trans. David Cairns and T. H. L. Parker; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962).

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Additionally, in view of the correspondence, Nature and Grace clearly appears as one of Brunner’s final and most pronounced conceptual attempts to convince not only Barth, but also the public, of his long-time position on nature and grace. While a number of Brunner’s texts beyond 1934 are indeed consulted for clarification, the primary aim of the present study is to formulate a coherent account of the development and significance of Brunner’s thinking on law and gospel in his own terms, in order to clarify the concerns presented in Nature and Grace and his other significant writings of the same time period. The first chapter sets the stage for the later analysis by examining Brunner’s explicit efforts to reckon with both his theoretical and practical concerns in their mutual and direct relationship to current events, particularly the pervasive social and economic problems of early twentiethcentury Europe and World War I. Whereas previous Brunner research has focused predominantly on discontinuity and change in Brunner’s thought between 1914 and 1919, the present analysis finds profound continuity in his theological appropriation of Kantian critical idealism as a tool for establishing the limits of human knowledge and action. In relation to the theoretical and moral laws of reason, Brunner emphasizes the importance of ‘Geist’, (i.e. mind and/or spirit) because ‘Geist’ characterizes the distinctive and theologically relevant qualities of human being, specifically in both communicative and moral terms. This theme is then expanded into one of Brunner’s first major public lectures as part of the group of theologians surrounding Karl Barth in the late teens. Grounded on these general commitments and especially his appropriation of Kant, a review of Brunner’s critical assessment of modern theology follows, looking specifically at his two doctoral theses published in 1914 and 1921 and Die Mystik und das Wort, published in 1924. In relation to prominent themes identified in these works, especially the role of the law, the final section makes the interesting discovery that Brunner’s criticism of modern theology and his solution to the problem of modern theology – a dialectical account of law and gospel – also constitutes the theological basis for his criticism of Barth between 1916 and 1922. Moving from the conceptual groundwork established in relation to Brunner’s critique of both modern theology and Barth in the first chapter, the second chapter demonstrates Brunner’s explicit efforts to develop a single standpoint aimed at addressing both concerns. The solution is expressed dialectically in terms of law and revelation, and worked out in varying accounts of the relationships between philosophy and theology, and reason and revelation. Analysing a series of related essays during the

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period between 1922 and 1925, the analysis uncovers a conceptual pattern in Brunner’s writings formally representing his understanding of the ordo cognoscendi running between law and gospel – a pattern that will reappear in Brunner’s later works. The chapter concludes by noting four particular implications of the dialectic of law and revelation that are decisive in Brunner’s later theological formulations, especially Nature and Grace. The third chapter examines Brunner’s 1929 account of ‘the other task of theology’, that is, eristic theology, in relation to the dialectic of law and gospel established in the early to mid-1920s, as well as in Brunner’s conversations with Barth on the same topic. In relation to the published essay, the chapter then examines a variety of texts from the late 1920s to early 1930s in order to summarize Brunner’s employment of the law-gospel paradigm in his eristic treatments of religion, philosophy, ethics and history, including his account of revelation in the Old Testament. The chapter closes by exploring the explicit, but entirely overlooked role of law and gospel in Brunner’s treatment of the work of Christ in Der Mittler – a significant feature of Brunner’s earlier christology that demonstrates his appropriation of the law and gospel dialectic to mediate between natural and revealed knowledge of God. The fourth and final chapter, after a brief introduction to the naturegrace debate and its reception, examines one of Barth and Brunner’s early exchanges on law and gospel, highlighting specific issues arising in a 1924 letter that explicitly reappear in Nature and Grace in  1934. After this exchange, the focus turns to a variety of Brunner’s attempts to determine the meaning of the law in relation to nature and natural knowledge of God. The remainder of the chapter then examines Brunner’s Nature and Grace, charting both his explicit and implicit uses of the dialectic of law and gospel to unfold his plan for a theologically determined account of nature and grace in pointed contradistinction from his understanding of Barth’s outright rejection of natural theology. The conclusion, in lieu of a step-by-step review, begins with Brunner’s concerns about Barth’s reversal of law and gospel in 1935 and then highlights the most significant points to be taken from the foregoing account of the dialectic of law and gospel in Brunner’s earlier theology.

Chapter 1

Critically Idealistic Dialectical Theology?

This chapter charts the development of several key elements in Brunner’s earliest theological thinking from 1914 up to his stringent critique of Schleiermacher in 1924 and the early stages of his engagement with Barth during the same period. In accord with J. Edward Humphrey, the analysis to follow demonstrates that ‘the basic direction of Brunner’s theology had already been determined before he encountered Karl Barth’1, in addition to showing that Brunner’s earliest writings betray neither an entirely liberal2 nor even a wholly pre-dialectical theology,3 but rather a nascent critically idealistic dialectical theology steeped in a theologically determined dialectic of law and gospel. In other words, Brunner attempts to formalize a theological system presupposing a Kantian critical philosophy or critical idealism, which acknowledges and adheres to the laws and limits of theoretical and moral reason. From this standpoint, it will be possible to assess Brunner’s initial concerns with Barth’s theology in relation to his own development and therefore, to properly gauge the impact of Brunner’s critique of Barth on his subsequent theological formulations.

I.  Setting Out The following two sections examine some of Brunner’s basic concerns as a religious socialist and early ‘dialectical’ theologian. In the first section, the James Edward Humphrey, Emil Brunner (Waco: Word, 1976), 18. See Christoph Gestrich, Neuzeitliches Denken und die Spaltung der dialektischen Theologie. Zur Frage der natürlichen Theologie (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 1977), 28: ‘He was never a committed “liberal theologian”’. However, See Mackintosh, 73: ‘There are stronger ties of agreement, for example, between Brunner and Herrmann than the former seems willing to recognize’. Salakka, 54, wonders how Herrmann’s work could have gone unnoticed to Brunner, given their similarities. Cf. Hans Graß. ‘Emil Brunner’, in Martin Greschat (ed.), Theologen des Protestantismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Vol. II (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978), 355, 361. 3  A number of commentators refer to Brunner’s work between 1914 and 1919–20 as liberal, ‘pre-critical’ or ‘pre-dialectical’. See, for example, Wendell Johnson Gordon, ‘Soteriology as a Function of Epistemology in the Thought of Emil Brunner’ (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rice University, 1989), i; Leipold, 22; Leiner, 257–60 and Roessler, 19. 1  2 

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sketch of a figure who is attempting to connect contemporary culture and current events directly to his society’s flawed moral and intellectual presuppositions emerges. The second section, first examining an essay entitled ‘Geist’ penned for a church newsletter, demonstrates Brunner’s expansive understanding of the spiritual and intellectual categories in relation to capitalism, materialism and money and then continues with Brunner drawing the foregoing thoughts together into several attempts to offer a theological response to World War I and existing social ills. a.  Brunner and Religious Socialism in Switzerland Brunner’s earliest writings are laced with contextual commentary and pronounce a prophetic call for change in both the ‘practical’ spheres of economics and politics, as well as in their ‘theoretical’ foundations. Significantly, Brunner’s attack on these practical and theoretical institutions is not exclusively due to either a personal or general reaction to the events of World War I, but is rather constituent of a larger cultural critique well underway prior to the onset of open hostilities.4 In this regard, the text that became virtually synonymous with the early twentieth century and is mentioned frequently in Brunner’s writings, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, was begun in 1912 and completed at the same time as the outbreak of violence in 1914 – although the initial publication was delayed because of the war.5 This is a single but substantial indicator that much of the intellectual activity of the time was part of an ongoing social and cultural critique, not merely a reaction to the war.6 Like Spengler, Brunner’s earliest extant writings show him to be a young intellectual who views current events, particularly the social-cultural malaise and later, the war, as confirmation of an already well-established critical world view. In contrast to Spengler, Brunner views the imbalanced socioeconomic structures and violence as a direct result of systemic problems caused by the overwhelming influence of materialist thinking at the ‘intellectual and spiritual’7 centre of Western society, instead of as the McCormack, 32–3, 103, identifies this trend of established cultural criticism in relation to Barth’s early development. 5  Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, Vol. 1 (trans. Charles Francis Atkinson; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), xv. The ‘Preface to the First Edition’ reads: ‘The complete manuscript of this book—the outcome of three years’ work—was ready when the Great War broke out. . .. Events have justified much and refuted nothing’. 6  Cf. Peter Vogelsanger, Dank an Emil Brunner (Zurich: Zwingli Verlag, 1966), 11. 7  Brunner frequently uses the German noun ‘Geist’ and its derivatives in their full range of meaning as ‘mind’, ‘intellect’ and ‘spirit’. Where necessitated by the context, ‘Geist’ is translated so as to encompass this broad meaning. 4 

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necessary by-products of a cyclical move from culture to civilization.8 Nonetheless, Brunner indeed saw an affirmation of some of his own central convictions in Spengler’s thesis that the decline of the West was imminent, due to its transition from culture to civilization, mirroring the transition from the aesthetic-culture of ancient Greece to the legalized-civilizationstructure of ancient Rome.9 Years later, referring again to Spengler in his St Andrews Gifford lectures of 1947, Brunner indicates that the trend has little changed since the time of his youth: ‘The time is past when spiritual forces and values determine the face and character of the Western world. A new epoch has begun, in which the scholar, the artist, the seer and the saint are replaced by the soldier, the engineer and the man of political power; an epoch which is no more capable of producing a real culture, but merely an outward technical civilization’.10 Despite the immense growth in the breadth of Brunner’s thought and the dynamic changes in his social and political context, he never strayed far from these initial concerns and his lifelong consistency in this regard is striking. Another area where Brunner remains strikingly consistent is the overall form of his intellectual methodology. Likely in accord with his training at Gymnasium and the University of Zurich, Brunner styled his initial approach to the critique of modern ‘technical’ civilization in the form of classic dialectical method: the Socratic contrast of opposing viewpoints, concluding with a synthesis of the contrasting perspectives. However, to make this dialectic work for his theology, Brunner would rely heavily on generalization, reduction and analogy. Of these, reduction figures most prominently, and in Brunner’s hands consists in trimming opposing modes of thought down to their least common denominators and basic presuppositions, equating them to each other and finally contrasting them with the gospel. In his doctoral dissertation, completed mid-year 1913, Brunner virtually sets the tone for the entirety of his career, beginning with a sharply reductive claim: ‘Scholasticism is a phenomenon that did not merely belong to the Middle Ages; in  all times, even in the present, the progress of thought becomes inhibited by an intellectual law of inertia, through a natural tendency to adduce unquestioned views as incontrovertible, axiomatic truths and to build the structure of a worldview on such dogma’.11 Perhaps ­betraying Cf. Emil Brunner, ‘Die Krisis der Religion’, Kirchenblatt für die reformierte Schweiz 37, 17 (27 April 1922), 65–6. 9  Cf. Christianity and Civilisation, 1. Cf. Emil Brunner, Die Absolutheit Jesu (Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1926), 5, where Brunner is highly critical of Spengler’s relativism. 10  Christianity and Civilisation, 1. 11  Symbolische, V. 8 

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the moderate pietism of his upbringing12 and the tempered liberalism of his education13, Brunner places the weight of his critique on modes of thought similar to philosophical and theological scholasticism, rendering a generalized critique of a ‘natural tendency’ towards scholastic rigidity expressing itself in the terminology of ‘incontrovertible, axiomatic truth’. Not incidentally, this is precisely the same terminology Brunner applies to law and legalistic modes of thought throughout his career. ‘Scholasticism’, however, is not the only genre Brunner equates with static legalism, and his reductive ­anti-legalistic rubric proves useful as he reckons with other problems. On the one hand, Brunner seeks and finds legalism in the spiritual and intellectual realms in the form of scholastic dogmatism and orthodoxy; on the other hand, he finds a similar form of legalism in liberal theology. With the former, his targets include medieval Catholic scholasticism and PostReformation Protestant scholasticism, due particularly to their compre­ hensive metaphysics and the rigidity of their methodology. Despite his Swiss Reformed background, Brunner even criticizes Calvin on occasion for being too ‘systematic’ and frequently turns to Luther instead.14 However, the Romantic reaction to Protestant Scholasticism and particularly the Liberal Protestant theology of the nineteenth century typified by Schleiermacher, Ritschl and Troeltsch committed errors comparable to those of the orthodox and were also hit by the attack coming from Brunner’s reductive polemic. If scholasticism was guilty of trying to systematize or codify the transcendent, liberalism was guilty of rejecting and ignoring the transcendent for the immanent. In the ‘practical’ realm, then, Brunner attacks ‘legalistic’ thinking in the form of classic liberal economics, specifically free-market capitalism, which he sees as an extreme form of naturalism writ economically; that is, an economic system whose principles are determined by the given, self-standing and independent laws of nature, not the conscious intellectual mediation of personal agency.15 12  Jehle, 19–32. Cf. Hans Wildberger, ‘Emil Brunner – sein Leben und sein Werk’, Reformatio 31 (1982), 204. In contrast to what he sees as Barth’s deeper roots in liberal theology and focus on revelation and history, Gestrich, 28, poignantly notes that Brunner, coming from the Swiss religious socialists, was primarily concerned with revelation and reason, and wanted ‘to reclaim Christianity as a vital power’. 13  Jehle, 28–40 and 45. 14  Cf. Douglas John Hall, Remembered Voices: Reclaiming the Legacy of Neo-Orthodoxy (Louisville: Westminster, 1998), 76: ‘[Brunner] shares with Barth the formative foundation of a biblical theology deeply informed by the Reformation – though in Brunner’s case it was Luther and not Calvin, Barth’s more prominent historical mentor, who shaped his attitude toward Holy Scripture’. 15  See Emil Brunner, ‘Geist’, Gemeinde-Blatt für die Reformierten Kirchengemeinden des Kantons Glarus 3, 6 (1916), 31. Karl H. Rest casts Brunner’s later critique of capitalism in terms of order vs. disorder, in ‘The Theology of Crisis and the Crisis of Capitalism’, The Journal of Religion 14, 2 (April 1934), 190–1.

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Underlying Brunner’s earlier thought is a comprehensive critical view of the liberal tradition in theology and philosophy, and of liberalism in politics and economics, with the occasional jab at Protestant orthodoxy: liberal theology is the theology of the market economy and vice versa; both advocate immanent, self-contained and comprehensive systems, which in the last resort are monistic.16 Their primary emphases stem from their either causal or developmental ontologies, and their epistemologies are empirical. Brunner believes these liberal thought systems (along with the contribution from certain conservative factions) have brought about the war with its power politics, as well as the economic and social collapse, and further, are concordant with either individualistic or philosophical theologies that could not legitimately object to and even support the disastrous materialist mentality causing the chaos. The stringency of Brunner’s polemic and the reductive nature of his method would frequently garner strong criticism, even from those who shared his critical world view among the Swiss religious socialists. In particular, Brunner’s doctoral supervisor, Leonhard Ragaz, frequently accused him of an intellectualist bias, a charge he fought against in their private correspondence.17 Furthermore, like Barth in the same period, Brunner was also accused of ‘Bolshevism’ and seeks to clear his name of these charges as well.18 Thus, as an aspiring Swiss pastor and academic, Brunner carefully indicates in his early writings that his polemic against intellectual rigidity and liberal theology is not driven by a pious antiintellectualism, (the sheer philosophical complexity of Brunner’s first doctoral dissertation is telling in this regard), but rather his desire to see a restoration of the proper character to the intellectual disciplines through a return of the primacy of practical reason in the approach to theoretical problems. As Brunner writes in his doctoral dissertation, ‘the harmful effect of intellectual schematism, especially for the religious life, cannot be neutralized through contempt of knowledge, but only through the proof of a more deeply laying source of knowledge’.19 With this in mind, it will be fruitful to turn to some of Brunner’s earliest writings to explore more thoroughly this revised understanding of knowledge. 16  See Emil Brunner, Von den Ordnung Gottes: Vortrag in Berner Münster am 2. März 1929 (Bern: Gotthelf-Verlag, 1929), 12: ‘So-called capitalism is nothing other than a system that does not recognize such solidarity (of community), but in its place sets the economic autonomy of every individual. Capitalism is the economic form of liberalism’. On Ordnung Gottes, 13, Brunner also calls ‘modern socialism upside down capitalism, the same, with the signs reversed’. 17  Brunner-Ragaz, EB: 3 July 1924. Brunner’s correspondence was transcribed and made available by Frank Jehle. The Ragaz letters were copied and transcribed by Hans Ulrich JägerWerth from Ragaz’ German script and also made available by Frank Jehle. 18  Brunner-Ragaz, EB: 14 December 1918. 19  Symbolische, V.

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b.  Early Essays In a brief sermon-essay published in June 1916 and entitled ‘Geist’, printed in the Gemeinde-Blatt für die Reformierten Kirchengemeinden des Kantons Glarus, Brunner defines what he means by ‘a more deeply laying source of knowledge’.20 Here, Brunner sets up a highly generalized account of ‘Geist’ (spirit, mind, intellect) to stand over-against ‘Geld’ (money), the latter being Brunner’s rendition of the materialistic compound reduced to a single element. The gist of the critique is simple: ‘Geist is power. That is why we are a powerless, distracted and unhappy race today, because we are not in service to Geist, but to Ungeist, to mammon, to things’.21 To demonstrate the height of the contrast between Geist and Geld, Brunner uses theological terminology to ironically ascribe a salvific function to profit and a damning function to profitlessness: ‘“It is profitable” – with this everything is resolved, justified, excused; “it is not profitable” – with this everything is condemned’.22 Brunner draws a straight line of contrast from the individual all the way to the overarching political structure: ‘Ungeist, death, is being divided, being apart; Geist, life, is holding together and reciprocal participation’.23 The comparison between Geld and Geist bears the contrast between the isolated individualism of capitalism, profit and money and inter-personal community and socialism based on mind and spirit. Brunner concludes the essay by connecting his generalized conception of Geist to the presence of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ as ‘God in humanity clear and evident’.24 However, the terminology has little theological specificity, and the argument proceeds from a very general account of something like ‘the human spirit’ in the first paragraph – the essay begins with a discussion of lazy children as the youngest victims of materialism – and progresses to a discussion of the Holy Spirit (Heilige Geist) in the final paragraph. Ultimately, Brunner wants to demonstrate that an absence of Geist is the result of a profound flaw in a society’s mental and spiritual foundations, resulting in the embrace of dead, individualistic materialism and neglect of the organic, personal and communitarian elements implicit in the spiritual and intellectual aspects of human life. Despite what might initially appear to be a simple explication of the New Testament teaching on the love of money, Brunner’s essay is also a ‘Geist’, 31. Fittingly, Peter Vogelsanger preached on ‘Geist’ at Brunner’s funeral in Zurich Fraumünster. See Vogelsanger, 21–5. 21  ‘Geist’, 31. 22  Ibid. 23  Ibid., 32. 24  Ibid. 20 

Critically Idealistic Dialectical Theology?

25

philosophical commentary hinging on a strong contrast between a crude materialism and a spiritual-intellectual ethical idealism. At the essay’s end, the message is clear: society’s spiritual and intellectual foundations are flawed; this is the reason for the present disturbance, and these foundations must be changed for the disturbance to be resolved. In relation to Brunner’s academic writing, ‘Geist’ is an important signpost for his continuing effort to unify the theoretical, mental and spiritual aspects of life with the social, political and economic realms. In another early essay entitled ‘Das Unbedingte und die Wirklichkeit, unser Problem’ (The Unconditioned and Reality, our Problem), penned in 1917 for the Swiss religious socialist journal, Neue Wege, Brunner begins by acknowledging the same problem, now explicitly using the terms ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’. Continuing the charge from the 1916 essay, Brunner writes, ‘it appears bold to speak of “our” problem in the singular’, acknowledging the audacity of laying the blame for an intellectual problem on an entire culture.25 However, he asks, ‘is not our time in chaos?’, fully acknowledging his choice to speak on ‘an abstract-philosophical theme, a pure thought problem, while a thousand burning practical questions demand urgent solution!’26 Similarly, ‘Denken und Erleben’ (Thought and Experience), Brunner’s paper from the Aarau Student Conference of 1919, acknowledges his attempt to address a philosophical problem in a time immediately desperate for practical solutions: ‘Some think it well that no one feels compelled to discuss such philosophical problems in a time when no less than the existence or non-existence of our entire culture and the reconstruction of human life stands in question’.27 Indeed, despite the immense ‘practical’ problems facing his audiences in the late teens, Brunner repeatedly asserts that theoretical problems cannot simply be brushed aside, because ‘an inhibiting element in the center of life expresses itself in numerous symptoms of sickness in the individual members’.28 One of Brunner’s primary concerns, then, is the separation of theoretical and practical reason he finds particularly egregious in liberalism. In ‘Denken und Erleben’, Brunner thoroughly interweaves his develop­ ing critical and constructive thinking as he attempts to spiral towards a Emil Brunner, ‘Das Unbedingte und die Wirklichkeit, unser Problem’, in Wort 1, 46. Emphasis original. 26  ‘Unbedingt’, 46. 27  Emil Brunner, ‘Denken und Erleben’, in Vorträge an der Aarauer Studentenkonferenz 1919 (Basel: Spittler, 1919), 5. 28  ‘Unbedingt’, 46. 25 

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coherent statement on the connection between the theoretical and practical aspects of human life, ultimately grounding their unity in faith. Proceeding by way of a lengthy critique of modern thought with intermittent constructive suggestions, the form of the argument is a rough precursor to Brunner’s law-gospel methodology of the mid-1920s. After again justifying his attempt to tackle a philosophical question in the midst of so many ‘burning’ practical problems29, Brunner briefly characterizes some of the main perspectives on the relationship between thought (Denken) and experience (Erleben) in modern philosophy.30 Deeming his own context largely anti-intellectualist in intention, Brunner counters by strongly affirming the role of the understanding (Verstand) in human life.31 On the other side, however, he demonstrates in graphic detail how modernity’s problems are actually largely the result of an overbearing intellectualist reliance on the understanding, the most problematic result being capitalism and its direct consequences, such as war, alcoholism and prostitution.32 Characterizing the response to this intellectualism, Brunner then runs through several counter arguments, referring in particular to the American pragmatist school of William James. Like his treatment of intellectualism, Brunner highlights pragmatism’s primary errors, ultimately reckoning that instead of attempting to answer the question of truth, pragmatism rejects the question altogether.33 Now, facing both the contradictory positions of intellectualism and pragmatism, Brunner suggests that neither is entirely correct and ultimately lands on the deeper question of whether truth and life (i.e. Denken und Erleben) can actually contradict each other.34 In other words, is such a sharp opposition between theoretical and practical reason satisfactory?35 Typically, Brunner turns to Kant for the answer: ‘Above all Kant returned moral certainty to the intellect (Geist) and secured it from the encroachment of the understanding through his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason. Conscience, not the understanding, adjudicates over the ultimate questions’.36 Kant’s position rightly orders the emphases of intellectual and practical concerns, whereas a one-sided focus, as found in both intellectualism and pragmatism, results in distortion. 29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36 

‘Denken’, 5. Ibid., 7–14. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 14–17. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 18. Ibid.

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27

Returning to the understanding, Brunner now suggests that the understanding has limits and projects these limits on the things it encounters, forcing them into its own paradigm. While this is not a critique per se, it does mean the understanding is not simply a neutral, disinterested descriptive function – it actually becomes prescriptive when allowed control over the thought process: ‘Identity, the basic law of the entirety of logic, is nothing other than the dictum, “You should no longer change, be dead”’.37 In this guise, the understanding is rigid, rejecting qualitative thinking in favour of quantitative and analytical thinking.38 In contrast to analysis and dissection, Brunner counters that when dealing with human life, one must also take a view extending from the whole to the parts, a point he derives from Kant and makes three times in ‘Denken und Erleben’.39 Whereas Brunner’s critical emphases are the limits of the understanding and the individualizing tendency in modern anthropology and materialist thinking, his constructive point, based on his reading of Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of practical reason and the unity of theoretical and practical reason, is a unified conception of the human person. The latter theme abounds in Brunner’s writing at the time, explicitly tied to his rejection of a rift between theoretical and practical implicit in the materialistic world view, because ‘human life is not assembled out of pieces but is a single organism’.40 Brunner’s 1919 review of Barth’s first Romans commentary also reflects a unified conception of life wrecked by sin: ‘Even the organic nature of humanity is destroyed through the disappearance of the spirit of life that made it a unity; the parts now fall apart as separated “individuals”, and the organism has become a heap’.41 Likewise, in an article published in The American Journal of Theology during his year at Union Theological Seminary in  1920, Brunner writes that the roots of Swiss religious socialism itself are found ‘in the sphere where man is a totality, thought, feeling, and will being undivided as yet, and where he faces the problem of life in its integral totality beyond the artificial distinctions of “religious”, “moral”, “social”, or “political” questions’.42 At the heart of this Ibid., 20–1. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 23, 26. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason in Practical Philosophy (trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor; Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996), 144. 40  ‘Unbedingt’, 46. 41  Emil Brunner, ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth: An Up-to-date, Unmodern Paraphrase’, in James M. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology (Richmond: John Knox, 1968), 66. Originally printed as ‘Der Römerbrief von Karl Barth: Eine zeitgemaßunmoderne Paraphrase’. Kirchenblatt für die reformierte Schweiz 34, 8 (1919), 29–32, 36–40. 42  Emil Brunner, ‘The New Religious Movement in Switzerland’, The American Journal of Theology 24, 3 (1920), 424. Cf. Hart, 26–31. 37  38  39 

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Law and Gospel in Emil Brunner’s Earlier Dialectical Theology

false dichotomizing is the misconstrued relationship between theoretical and practical reason, and in ‘Denken’, Brunner points to various holistic attempts to resolve this problem, such as Bergson’s emphasis on intuition or Fichte’s ‘I’ – though neither ‘strikes at the heart of the personal life’.43 Next, Brunner extols the virtues and necessities of the role of the personality in resolving the theoretical-practical rift, but concludes by demonstrating even its insufficiency: ‘The truth is not personal, but suprapersonal, and the total value of the preferably treated personality consists, emptily, in being the most empty vessel possible for this “objectivity” [Sachliche].We cannot contrast the subjectivism of experience, of Roman­ ticism, with this dead objectivism of the understanding’.44 ‘On the contrary’, maintains Brunner, ‘we must attempt to come out of the false objectivity and into the right objectivity [Sachlichkeit]’.45 Whereas the turn inwards has its merits, Brunner wants to demonstrate that this turn, as in Kant, should be a turn towards the transcendental, not the immanent. This is what constitutes ‘richtige Sachlichkeit’ or ‘right objectivity’. ‘Richtige Sachlichkeit’, which later becomes the conceptual centrepiece of the constructive section of Brunner’s Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube 46, is difficult to render in concise English because of its range of meaning. On the one hand, it does refer to subjectivity in terms of ‘the look inward’ that Brunner wants to establish in contrast to the cold, dispassionate, impersonal understanding – the isolated theoretical reason, which treats everything it encounters as a thing to be quantified. In this regard, ‘richtige Sachlichkeit’ is wholly oriented by the I and unity of the personality in direct contrast to modern dichotomizing which splits theoretical and practical reason, destroying the unity of the person. On the other hand, the term signifies transcendental objectivity, because it means a (re)turn to the ‘origin’ (Ursprung), the unknowable centre of the human person originating in God.47 It is therefore a kind of ‘disinterested subjectivity’, in the sense that it does not imply self-reliance, but reliance on God. Brunner also calls this ‘unmediated viewing’, in contrast to the rational mediation of the understanding.48 At this point, ‘Denken’ becomes especially interesting as Brunner attempts to place his notion of ‘richtige Sachlichkeit’ in relationship to the ‘Denken’, 26. Ibid., 28–9. 45  Ibid., 29. 46  Cf. Erlebnis, 89–126. 47  ‘Denken’, 30. Cf. Erlebnis, 95: ‘Every interpretation of life that is not advanced into the ultimate unity of meaning, to God, leaves the spirit in an unsatisfying half-darkness’. 48  ‘Denken’, 29. 43  44 

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gospel, ultimately uniting Moses and Plato together in a reductive account of ‘law’. To do this, Brunner identifies a religious a priori, describing ‘a shaft in every human spirit’ that leads to the location of ‘our origin [Ursprung] and our destination, God’, eventually stating, ‘the mind [Geist] that wants self-understanding ultimately does not find itself, but God’.49 At this depth, however, the issue is no longer ‘conceptual’ or theoretical thinking but reception of the moral command: ‘On one step of this descent – the penultimate – we find the “Thou shalt”’.50 This step remains penultimate, however, and true knowledge of God is not given: ‘It is God, the holy will over me, which I have known and have known myself in the light of this knowledge of God. But both initially come from afar, like the hidden God of Sinai’.51 ‘A final step still remains’, therefore, the acknowledgment that ‘God is love; you are God’.52 Such personal knowledge of God corresponds with a personal reception of the divine command, bearing a change in the emphasis of the law: ‘We do not understand the meaning of “thou shalt” if it has not at the same time become an “I ought”’.53 In this way, neither true love nor true command can be externally conceptualized in accordance with the designs of the limited and individualizing understanding – the true divine will does not stand over and above as an external law, rather, ‘here, cognition [Erkennen] and recognition [Anerkennen] are one’.54 Furthermore, this unified knowledge of God collapses the Schleier­ macherian trichotomy, so ‘one can only know what God is, if one loves God with reverence. Knowing, feeling, willing are all here one and the same’.55 Whereas this ‘cognition’ or knowledge involves our innermost person, it comes to humanity externally, and ‘in this occurrence our knowing as well as our living is fulfilled’.56 Thus, suggests Brunner, this ‘right objectivity’ brings about precisely what intellectualism and pragmatism are both seeking: ‘In this living universality, in God, the longing of thinkers for liberation from subjective arbitrariness and of the romantics for release from the vacuity and rigor mortis of concepts, comes the fullness of ‘Denken’, 30. Salakka, 66, indicates that for Brunner, the Ursprung is both the ground of every mental-spiritual (geistlich) act, as well as the goal of all knowing – this corresponds directly to Brunner’s statements on law in the early 1920s. 50  ‘Denken’, 30. 51  Ibid. 52  Ibid. 53  Ibid. 54  ‘Denken’, 31. Cf. Erlebnis, 86. 55  ‘Denken’, 31. 56  Ibid. 49 

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life’, whereas ‘the coldness of the understanding . . . is the antithesis of the knowledge of God’.57 Now, following his deconstruction of intellectualism and pragmatism, Brunner makes his final reductive move by deeming these conflicting worldviews equally ‘mechanistic. . . . Not otherwise does theoretical mate­ rialism go hand in hand with practical materialism. They mutually engender each other; they are the two sides of one process, the turn from the original source of life to the dead sphere of things [Dinglichkeit]’.58 While the strongly Platonic nature of the argument is clear, Brunner identifies the limits of idealism by asserting that truth comes ‘not in an idea of God, but in God himself, who is the living epitome of all true, beautiful and good’.59 This, suggests Brunner, is an ancient notion – true knowledge cannot be attained by external observation, but only by the look inwards: ‘The All cannot be understood on the basis of things, but only on the basis of spirit [Geist], and indeed from creative spirit [schöpferischen Geist], from God, not from derivative spirit [abgeleiteten Geist]’.60 Platonic idealism, therefore, stands in a penultimate, yet infinitely distinct relationship to the gospel: ‘Socrates was right: all knowledge is self-knowledge . . . however, not the self-knowledge of humanity, but the self-knowledge that – as Paul says – the Spirit of God has of itself, which is given to humanity’.61 On this ground, Brunner establishes a link between Plato and Moses, constructing an analogical relation between Platonic ‘critical’ idealism and law: ‘But whereas a Plato, like Moses, first saw the promised land from afar, and while he indeed recognized such a view of God as the highest possible thing even though he was not successful in achieving this view himself, this indescribable [view] has actually “become event” in Jesus Christ. The unity of knowledge and life is there, in him’.62 It is the gospel that forges the proper relationship between thought (Denken) and experience (Erleben). Not only do Plato and Moses share penultimate relationships to the gospel, but in what they lack both gesture towards Jesus Christ, in whose vision and being, ‘the deepest longing of humanity is fulfilled: The spirit has found its home and the human his fullness of life’.63 Here, the Platonic ‘idea’ and 57  58  59  60  61  62  63 

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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the Mosaic Law serve virtually identical functions in relation to what is revealed and fulfilled in Christ: they are both penultimate to and fulfilled by the gospel. Again, Brunner reaffirms a properly ‘critical’ idealism’s penultimate relationship to the gospel in terms of the service it renders and the questions it answers: ‘Plato is still only the forerunner of Jesus. He knows only abstractly who Jesus is and what he does. [Plato] draws up the program of the fullest life and the best community, which is present in Jesus and emerges out of the community. Not Plato’s idealism, but the life of God in Jesus has brought a saving, healing power of life to humanity’.64 Brunner summarizes critical idealism’s relation to the gospel in terms of ‘seeing through a glass darkly’: it is therefore ‘not theological thinking, not even the spirited championing of the particular points of a program for the Kingdom of God, not the act of setting about the task for some other end in moral enthusiasm that can bring the sick world healing, but solely the life of God breaking out of the depths of the soul’.65 Despite Brunner’s emphasis on ‘the life of God’ in ‘the depths of the soul’, his goal is to delineate a transcendent occurrence that is ultimately not abstract to the human person: This life consists precisely in the disregard of everything personal, in pure objectivity, in denying the importance of everything psychological. Considering nothing to be important apart from God, neither ideas nor humanity; refusing to accept anything that is not ultimate – even the penultimate, but trusting, even that in the truly ultimate all penultimate truths are “set aside” [aufgehoben], and that precisely in this, humanity gains its highest personal power.66 This means that idealism properly conceived is related to the gospel as a presupposition or in penultimate manner that is ‘set aside’, just as the law is set aside by the gospel. In this regard, Brunner does not intend to establish a philosophy existing in a continuous, developmental or foundational relationship to the gospel, but rather a critical philosophy that ends the possibility of continuity and development in the same way that the law is both related to and yet infinitely disconnected from the gospel. The fact Ibid., 33. Ibid. Cf. Der Mittler, 373 (ET: 413): ‘The old theory that Plato was a preliminary stage (Vorstufe) for Christianity or that Plato drew his wisdom from Moses is just as historically false as it is actually true to say that it was Christ whom he saw from afar, so to speak’. 66  ‘Denken’, 34. 64  65 

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that this critically idealistic philosophy becomes a requisite presupposition of the gospel is one of the identifying marks of Brunner’s earlier theology, and one that would cause him trouble later.

II. Reckoning with Modern Theology The first section of this chapter identifies Brunner’s earliest assessment of the crisis of modernity, focusing on his identification of the problems caused by liberal theology, politics and economics, especially materialism and its immanent, evolutionary-developmental tendencies. In face of these perils, as noted in the second section, Brunner suggests a restoration of the role of the intellect/mind/spirit (Geist) to its proper place in the realm of human thought and action. This is followed by a glance at one of Brunner’s early attempts to solve the problem of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ in modernity by re-­ asserting the unity of theoretical and practical reason on Kantian grounds. In both sections, the increasingly ‘critical’ nature of Brunner’s thought process becomes evident as he attempts to establish a pattern for working out these relationships based on a dialectical contrast between law and gospel. The present section examines Brunner’s early critique of modern theology, charting his developing position on law and gospel by focusing on the necessity, purpose and role of a doctrine of law to serve as a critical limit and dialectical counterpart to revelation. Here, Brunner is found to be on guard against abuses of the law such as legalism, as well as any potential antinomian abandonment or rejection of law. As detailed in the previous section, Brunner understands law to govern not only moral and practical affairs, but also the realm of theory and ideas, thereby extending the range of the law-gospel dialectic to theological epistemology. In this regard, Brunner sees that abuses of the law occurring in the form of either a speculative-intellectual work-righteousness or an antinomian denial of the law as a limit of thought ultimately produce the same disastrous results for humanity. Brunner first outlines the implications of these errors in his analysis of the relationship between philosophy and theology in modern theology generally, and then later, in Schleiermacher specifically. With these guidelines in mind, the following section deals primarily with three texts, all milestones in Brunner’s development, all remaining un-translated and therefore all rarely examined in detail in Anglophone research on Brunner. First is Das Symbolische in der religiösen Erkenntnis: Beiträge zu einer Theorie des religiösen Erkennens (The Symbolic in Religious Knowledge: Contributions to a Theory of Religious Epistemology), Brunner’s doctoral

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dissertation produced under the supervision of Leonhard Ragaz at the University of Zurich and published in  1914.67 Second is Brunner’s Habilitationsschrift, Erlebnis, Erkenntnis, und Glaube (Experience, Knowledge and Faith), also completed for the University of Zurich and earning him the title of Privatdozent (unsalaried Lecturer).68 Third is Die Mystik und das Wort (Mysticism and the Word), Brunner’s first extensive monograph, which originally appeared in 192469 and helped earn him the role of Ordinarius (Full Professor) in Systematic and Practical Theology at the University of Zurich, a post he held until his teaching mission to Japan in 1953.70 Despite their differing occasions, the three texts are remarkably unified as to their primary concern, particularly modern philosophical and theological epistemology.71 Whereas Das Symbolische features the ambitious attempt to forge an epistemology of religion with reference to ‘religious symbols’72, Erlebnis and Die Mystik further develop statements on christology and faith aiming at a deconstruction of modern theology’s basic concepts and presuppositions. Though frequently identified with a pre-dialectical ‘liberal phase’73, Das Symbolische provides crucial insight into some of the foundational concerns Brunner carries into his later writings and is significant for identifying the law-gospel dialectic in his earliest published theology, especially as it deals with the formal structures of human knowing that eventually find a substantial place in subsequent writings. Erlebnis, Erkenntnis, und Glaube also shares similar concerns. In the Foreword to the second edition, Brunner admits to having learnt more since the first, and while confessing the impossibility of entirely ‘reworking’ the book, he does note two essential elements in need of revision. First, ‘it is that the concept Jehle, 49–52. Jehle, 174–8. The lightly revised second edition of 1923 is used here, as it provides a more explicit presentation of Brunner’s thoughts on law and gospel than the first edition of 1921. 69  The first edition, examined here in order to retain the tightest possible frame around Brunner’s development in the early 1920s, was followed by a moderately revised edition in 1928. Cf. Emil Brunner, Die Mystik und das Wort: Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und christlichem Glauben dargestellt an der Theologie Schleiermachers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2nd edn, 1928). 70  Jehle, 190–8. 71  Cf. Peter Anthon, 21; Salakka, 34. 72  Symbolische, V–VI: Symbol is ‘one of the phenomena, by which the inadequacy of intellectualism becomes especially visible, and at the same time a key for the knowledge of the formation of religious ideas’. This text is particularly useful as a first example of Brunner’s early commitment to navigating between extremes in religious epistemology before finally anchoring his own epistemology to the dialogical I-Thou program of Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber. 73  However, see Jehle, 45: ‘Here it is clear that the young Zurich theologian was at the time more influenced by liberal theology . . . than he was actually aware himself’. Salakka, 52–3, finds in Brunner’s dissertation a ‘mixture . . . of mystical-subjective experience (Schleiermacher’s inclination) and ethical-objectivism (Kant’s inclination)’. Cf. Salakka, 54–6. 67  68 

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of the Word as the properly central problem of the mind ought to stand out even more here in the center of all the questions being handled’, and second, it is that ‘an even more definite determination of the boundary between immanence and revelation  .  .  .  would have required a different distribution of weight’.74 Despite what Brunner would later consider to be its ‘shortcomings’75, Erlebnis is a perfect example of his earlier efforts to develop a law and gospel framework to deal with the relationship between philosophy, modern theology and revelation, here reckoned with in terms of immanence and revelation. Finally, there is Brunner’s infamous Die Mystik und das Wort, with its sights set on the ‘Church Father of the 19th century’, Friedrich Schleiermacher.76 This text provides another prime example of how Brunner attempts to reckon with  philosophy, modern theology and revelation by reintroducing a philosophically astute version of the Reformation dialectic of law and gospel. The subtitle of the book ‘Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und christlichen Glauben dargestellt an der Theologie Schleiermachers’ (The opposition between the modern conception of religion and the Christian faith as represented in the theology of Schleiermacher) indicates the text’s effort to strike modern theology at what Brunner believes to be its weakest point, its epistemological foundations, and specifically its understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology. The analysis to follow, insofar as it pays especial attention to statements on law and gospel, demonstrates a strong line of conceptual continuity between Brunner’s 1914 doctoral dissertation and his first full-length book as a ‘dialectical’ theologian in  1924. During this period, Brunner places consistent emphasis on both the philosophical and the theological role of the law as what constitutes the proper limitation of human knowing and doing, and increasingly, as a necessary presupposition to gospel, revelation and faith. Brunner then carries this specific element forward into the texts discussed in the next chapter, typical of which is ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’ (Law and Revelation)77, and further through to the early rounds of his longrunning debate with Barth and his famously polemical piece, Nature and Grace, in 1934. 74  Erlebnis, V. Here, Brunner uses both ‘Wort’ and ‘Geist’ in the full range of their meaning. On the surface, Brunner means word (ῥῆμα) and its relation to the intellect (Geist), but he intends this relationship to be recognized as analogical to the relation between the human reception of the Word (λογος) and its relation to the spirit (Geist). 75  Erlebnis, V. 76  Mystik, 7. 77  Emil Brunner, ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung: Eine theologische Grundlegung’, in Jürgen Moltmann (ed.), Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1962), 290–8.

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a.  The Problem As noted above, Das Symbolische, published in  1914, reckons with the problem of religious epistemology, expressing discontent with the ‘traditional methods’, for example, scholasticism, while also refusing to accept modern solutions. Brunner finds the traditional objective-theoretical model is ultimately either sensualistic (i.e. empirical) or rationalistic, its success dependent on whether ‘religious objects’, particularly God, are actually perceptible or not.78 In this form, religious epistemology is indistinguishable from other forms of empirical knowing, ultimately leading to the ad hoc equation of faith and reason. Kant, however, makes such an identification impossible: first, by demonstrating the impossibility of a rational metaphysics (Verstandesmetaphysik), and second, by demon­ strating the foundational role and primacy of moral or practical reason in relation to theoretical reason.79 While Brunner asserts that Schleiermacher reaches the same conclusion by different means, that ‘religion is in principle independent from knowledge’, ‘for Kant’, by contrast, ‘the decisive interest of rationality, that is, the normative validity of religion, is to turn to: practical reason. He seeks and finds a replacement for the validity scientific statements possess in the moral norm’.80 Brunner consequently holds the moral norm, moral law or categorical imperative to be the centrepiece of Kant’s moral philosophy as well as the goal of his theoretical philosophy.81 The foundational primacy of the moral norm in relation to theoretical reason also means that theoretical reason cannot attain religious knowledge on its own. Whereas Brunner finds that the ‘psychologizing’ Schleiermacher agrees with this critique, he cautions that Schleiermacher then goes a step too far, trying to secure the independence of religion ‘even counter the moral’.82 This leads Brunner to conclude that religious knowledge in Schleiermacher is not only gained in independence from knowing (theoretical) and willing (moral), it is also gained, ‘in part, in contradiction to them’.83 By contrast, on Kantian grounds, Brunner states that the notion of truth cannot exist without some kind of pre-established criteria for truth.84 Whereas Schleiermacher rejects any such external criteria by tracing religious consciousness to a source altogether independent of thinking and 78  79  80  81  82  83  84 

Symbolische, 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid. Symbolische, 5: ‘There can be no knowledge without there also being a criterion of truth’.

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willing – the feeling of absolute dependence, Kant derives religious knowledge from the ‘moral proto-phenomenon of the categorical imperative’ in order to discover the ‘cognitively necessary presuppositions’85, that is, the proper criteria for religious knowledge. Since, for Kant, this knowledge ultimately derives from moral reason, ‘there can be no talk of an independent religious consciousness’.86 Although this means religious knowledge must remain an ‘appendix to ethics’, Brunner says this is to Kant’s credit, because he remains faithful to his epistemological commitments.87 As a result, Kant ‘had no room for anything that did not arise by necessity out of ethical thinking’88, and his rigorously ethical grounding for religious knowledge evinces ‘the fact  .  .  .  that he had no appreciation for the true heart of religion, mysticism – and in general no appreciation for humanity having a relationship to God determined by feeling – and condemned it as gross enthusiasm [Ueberschwenglichkeit]’.89 Leaning on Kant (and Luther), Brunner labels this independent religious faculty free from all given limitation as enthusiastic, insofar as it is reckoned to be free from the laws of reason and implies that humans inherently possess the ability to reach God on their own. For Brunner, Kant denies such enthusiasm in theoretical reason with his rejection of rational metaphysics and proofs for the existence of God, as well as in his elucidation of the antinomies of pure reason and the doctrine of the primacy of practical reason. Kant is further guarded against enthusiasm in his moral philosophy because of his emphasis on moral law and the philosophically controversial notion of radical evil. It is precisely this concern about the ‘enthusiastic’ basis of modern theology that leads Brunner to reassert an essentially Kantian ‘No’ against all modern attempts to develop a religious epistemology grounded in experience or feeling, even if this feeling is described as ‘unmediated’ (Schleiermacher). Whereas Brunner clearly finds the epitome of enthusiastic feeling in Schleiermacher, an enthusiastic use of theoretical reason also comes in the form of the ‘theologies leaning on Kant’, such as the neo-Kantian philosophies of religion developed by the Marburg school: ‘However, with their religious statements, the theologies leaning on Kant stand to an extent outside of the Kantian proofs of truth, as these are more abundant, more intimate, and more religious than the Kantian concept of God; as in 85  86  87  88  89 

Symbolische, 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 5. Emphasis Original. Ibid., 5–6.

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religious relationships more is intended than merely the “conception of the moral law as the divine command”’.90 Brunner’s adoption of this Kantian moral-legal element is determinative for the critically idealistic and eventually dialectical nature of his early thought, in particular serving as a basis for his law and gospel approach to modern theology. Remarkably, the initial pages of Brunner’s doctoral dissertation contain some of the very concerns he would air over 10  years later as a leader in the dialectical theology movement. Coming several years later, Erlebnis, Erkenntnis, und Glaube hits modern theology even harder: Brunner is now part of a school of thought and has gained confidence from his association with Barth and Thurneysen. He is confident they share a common vision, although he is already aware they have profoundly differing opinions on some key theological issues.91 Brunner also believes his work provides a valuable service for the movement because of his efforts to spar directly with their ‘opponents’, as well as his efforts to explore the philosophical implications of their theological formulations. Thus, the strands of concern with the limits of subjectivism found in Das Symbolische are recast into a full-blown attack on what Brunner sees as the foundational presupposition of modern theology: ‘The religious and theological thought of the last ten years stands under the sign of Historicism and Psychologism. These are the last offshoots of that movement which the Renaissance began and the Enlightenment brought to a breakthrough, and which in a word we can name subjective-anthropological, a series of worldly-historical variations on the theme: Man is the measure of all things’.92 The anthropological turn in modern theology means ‘the interpretation of current events through the myth of the tower of Babel – the idea of humanity’s self-idolization, of subjectivism, is indeed today normal’.93 Accordingly, the greatest problems for theology do not arise from its philosophical or scientific critics, but from those within its own sphere: ‘Coming forth out of the New Testament, we cannot begin the criticism with the irreligion of the modern heathens, but only with the corruption of religion, of modern piety itself’.94 This is ‘religious subjectivism, the psychological-romantic reinterpretation of faith, the humanization of the certainty of God’95, and it is the modern equivalent of the corruption of 90  91  92  93  94  95 

Ibid., 6. See Chapter 1, section III below. Erlebnis, 1. Cf. Salakka, 95; Bouillard, 176–8. Erlebnis, 1. Cf. ‘Die Krisis der Religion’, 66; Volken, 10. Erlebnis, 1. Ibid., 1.

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religion by legalistic moralism; modern theology ‘has completely delivered the gospel to history and psychology’.96 As Brunner writes in his review of Barth’s first Romans commentary, ‘the way we speak of faith today as the “personal experience”, of a “powerful” or “ingenious” or “living” religious “personality”, would be plainly appraised by both Paul and Luther as worksrighteousness. It is dependence on inner works  .  .  .  on the intensity, force,  warmth and persistence of inner experience’.97 This subjectiveanthropological turn, elsewhere referred to as ‘enthusiasm’, can be reduced to a classic religious term: mysticism. Whereas Brunner’s first attempt to draw an analogy between modern theological epistemology and mysticism comes in his 1914 thesis, Das Symbolische, he continues strengthening and developing this claim throughout Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube and incorporates it into the title and thesis of Die Mystik und das Wort, now aiming directly at Schleiermacher. The term is clearly defined at the outset, in what Gustav Krüger calls Brunner’s ‘paradoxical antithesis’98: ‘Mysticism – that is our antithesis, is the finest, most sublime form of the deification of nature, of heathenism, of reifying spiritual things’.99 While the framework of the problem is remarkably similar, Brunner no longer frets over Spencerian materialism as in his 1916 essay ‘Geist’: ‘The great danger is now no longer this crass denial of the mind, spirit and soul, but rather the secret, unconscious, unknown reification of the divine: mysticism and its offshoots’.100 Brunner thus asserts that mysticism and aestheticism are ‘twin sisters’: ‘Their common confession: experience. Their common viewpoint: the inner occurrences of the soul. Their highest worth: intensity of feeling’.101 Further, these modern subjective-anthropological systems hide a monistic ontology because their ‘most basic element is boundless, unlimited feeling, restricted by no law and contained by no form, surging and breaking like the sea, immeasurable, mysterious, unconscious and uncontrolled’.102 At issue is ‘the union of the finite with the Absolute, of God and of the soul.  .  .  .  This conception is the common origin of mysticism and panaestheticism’103, and as before, Brunner labels it with what signifies the Erlebnis, 2. ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth’, 69. 98  Gustav Krüger, ‘The “Theology of Crisis”: Remarks on a Recent Movement in German Theology’, The Harvard Theological Review 19, 3 (1926), 244. 99  Mystik, 2. 100  Ibid., 2–3. A few years later, on Absolutheit, 5, relativism is the primary concern. 101  Ibid., 3. Cf. Krüger, 244; McGiffert, 365. 102  Ibid., 3. Cf. Krüger, 244. 103  Ibid., 3. 96  97 

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quintessence of boundless speculation: ‘“enthusiasm”’ or ‘Being-in-God’.104 Again, the appearance of the term ‘enthusiasm’ is a significant indicator that the limits of reason and doctrine of law – along with the ‘critical distance’ they imply between the knower and the known – are missing. As in the other two works, Brunner uses his negations to clear ground for his constructive proposal. In contrast to mysticism, Brunner asserts that the Word is ‘clarity as bright as day’.105 Humanity is oriented towards reception of the Word, whereas mysticism is ranged in direct opposition to explicit and personal divine communication.106 In fact, ‘the most dreadful devastation that mysticism causes is that it destroys the understanding of the Word107, that it sets “musical” revelation, borne out of a frenzy of feeling, in the place of the clear, bright revelation of God in the Word’.108 Now, using the combined line of his critical and constructive formulations, Brunner reckons that most modern theology is built on a shaky compromise between faith and mysticism. As for Schleiermacher himself, Brunner praises him with sincerity hinting at irony, concluding ‘he had the courage to draw out the consequences of his premises, while the majority of his disciples remained standing at the half-way point. Therefore his system is not only the most significant, but the only one out of which we can perceive what are given as possibilities for a Christian mysticism’.109 On this basis, Brunner acknowledges his dispute is not so much with Schleiermacher himself as with his followers in modern theology: those who have constructed systematic compromises composing elements of both faith and mysticism.110 Of the book as a whole, then, Brunner says its intention is to ‘expose the conflicting nature of “what Schleiermacher intended” and the faith of the Apostles and Reformers; to directly prove by use of this example the inner impossibility of an alliance between every mystical philosophy of immanence and the Christianity of the Bible – which after all is the content of Schleiermacher’s life work –, and to place theology before the decision: either Christ or modern religion’.111 The title, Die Mystik und das Wort, is therefore better understood to imply an ‘or’ in its ‘and’. As Brunner notes on the fifth page, the argument leads to what is both a conclusion and point of decision: ‘Either mysticism, or the Word’.112 104  105  106  107  108  109  110  111  112 

Ibid. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 5. Brunner is employing the German Wort as comprehensively as possible: ῥῆμα and λογος. Mystik, 6. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Mystik, 5. Cf. Mystik, 89; Salakka, 94; Chapman, 130.

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Brunner thus brings the Introduction to a close by attempting to reassure his readers that although his intentions are not limited to polemic, he will nonetheless drive them to a choice: But this negation, should it have absolutely repulsive power, presupposes a position: knowledge of the essence of faith, next to which this humanisticmystical reinterpretation first proves itself to be non-knowledge and misunderstanding. This knowledge – according to its ideal – is identical with the understanding of the divine Word, and therefore can make a claim neither on the basis of profundity, nor originality. Either it is thus: verbum est principium primum, the principle of all truth, even of scientific thinking or: “Name is nothing” –, what would it then mean for a science to undertake a Logia, which according to its essence is Alogon?’113 Given that the concern in Die Mystik und das Wort is not simply Schleiermacher, but virtually the whole of modern theology, it will now be helpful to preface Brunner’s developed critique of the former with an examination of his take on modern theology as presented in Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube. b.  ‘Provisional Half-Truths’ In the first section of Erlebnis, Brunner attempts to render an uncritical characterization of modern theology on its own terms, or as he says a few pages later, ‘at first without criticism, in terms of its own purposes’.114 ‘Modernity’, therefore, ‘is characterized by emancipation of the intellectual and spiritual [geistlich] life from external bonds’; it brings the individual to the fore.115 This description includes not only those with whom Brunner contends, but also those he favours: ‘All the great leaders of the time, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, fight for the liberation and the independence of the individual, for the independence and self-certainty of his proper interiority in contrast to the chained and false laws and patterns, which want to master his life from the outside’.116 That ‘laws and patterns’ are the antithesis of most modern experiential thinking is not coincidental for Brunner’s analysis, but precisely the point; where it ignores and rejects these boundaries, modern thought becomes a limitless, 113  114  115  116 

Ibid., 12. Logia refers to the –ology of a specific branch of knowledge, as in the-ology. Erlebnis, VI and 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid.

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antinomian individualism leading ultimately to mystical religion and a monistic ontology. However, there is nothing new in this trend, because ‘in this conflict of the “moderns” against the bonds of older times, it is often forgotten that this movement towards inwardness is neither so specifically modern, nor even a specifically Christian phenomenon’.117 The least common denominator, despite the broad variety of religious experience, is that ‘in it everyone has his experiences, his revelation’.118 Monism consequently comes quickly on the heels of this individualizing, or mystical notion of experiential revelation, because ‘the goal is unmediatedness, the flowing together of divinity and humanity in the soul. All mediation, all objective conditions and universals are pushed to the side. There, there are no objective barriers, no more bonds’.119 As a result, the limiting categories particularly important to Kant, such as time and space in theoretical reason and moral law for practical reason – virtually the entire concept of law or limit altogether – must be abandoned for the modern perspective to take root and flourish: ‘Indeed, precisely this moment of full freedom, of abandon, of the infinite, it is the limitless possibility that is interpreted to be the divine ground of experience. Here the infinite becomes event and there everything that distinguishes human existence from the divine falls away: limitedness, being bound by time and space, number and law’.120 It is from this anti-legal standpoint that ‘the last traces of limitedness are wiped out: meaning, word, the limiting thought and the particular will, the I and the Thou, the subject-object relation – everything goes into the recondite depth of the 𝖤ν χαι Παν’.121 Extending, therefore, from this critique of modern experientialism is Brunner’s reduction of all Romanticism, pietism and experiential religion to mysticism. Brunner also comfortably connects the modern experiential religious understanding to ancient pagan mysticism, as he will later do in detail in Die Mystik und das Wort: ‘On pagan grounds, mysticism is identical with the internalization of religion. The dividing line is blurred’.122 Brunner even includes the prophets of Israel within this category because the least common denominator is an emphasis on individual religious experience.123 As Brunner identifies the rejection of law and limits as a cornerstone of experiential religion, he also affirms ‘that in the subjectivists and 117  118  119  120  121  122  123 

Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 9.

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individualists, personal experience can have not only equal, but higher authority than law and tradition’.124 Whereas the pagan form of mysticism sought to free the individual from external binding in the material world, Christian mysticism, which Brunner finds par excellence in Francis of Assisi and early-modern Christian pietism, seeks freedom from dogma – also a mark of modern theology, even in its most Christian form.125 This analysis also applies to modern philosophy, particularly Lessing and Rousseau.126 Schleiermacher, however, constitutes the height of the romantic-experiential trend, ‘philosophically formulated’, with Schelling and Fichte running close seconds with their concepts of the ‘religious genius’ and the I, respectively.127 The ‘heathen’ Goethe, another of Brunner’s favourite targets, also receives a censure for his subjectivity and ‘mental/psychological/spiritual [seelischen] limitlessness’.128 In fact, Brunner judges the entire modern tendency to be under the ‘spell of Romanticism’129, and even Hegel is no exception to this ruling, because ‘his phenomenology is still nothing other than a psychological novel [Seelenroman], so to speak, the autobiography of the human spirit as a whole’.130 On this ground, Brunner rejects the term ‘religious Romanticism’, countering that all Romanticism is thoroughly religious, ‘because it wants to represent the totality of life as “religious” experience’.131 ‘Romanticism’, therefore, ‘is itself a kind of empiricism. Its ultimate concepts are not rational’, that is, ‘not thoughts, but experience’.132 In this vein, Romanticism, betraying its context, is just as empirical as any liberal economics which derives its philosophical grounding from John Locke – but on the other hand, Brunner notes that Romanticism sees itself and its conception of religion as thoroughgoing reactions to the mechanization of modern life and to the ‘world of schemata, formulas and systems’.133 In both cases, Romanticism displays its anti-rational intention to thwart the limitations of the laws of reason, perfectly illustrating Brunner’s antinomian reading of the movement, as well as his critical-reductive methodology. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 12–15. 126  Ibid., 15. 127  Ibid., 16. 128  Ibid. 129  Ibid., 17. 130  Ibid. 131  Ibid. 132  Ibid. See McGiffert, 364: ‘Schleiermacher was an empiricist. To Brunner this is his most objectionable characteristic’. 133  Erlebnis, 18, 19. 124  125 

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In contrast to experiential religion, Brunner next presents what he calls its ‘Antipode’, the ‘religion of knowledge’.134 Whereas previously an equation of religion with knowledge was commonplace, Brunner indicates this is now pejoratively labelled ‘intellectualism’.135 Accordingly, Brunner claims that the bulk of modern religious thought is built on Kant’s rejection of metaphysics and Schleiermacher’s assertion that in religion idea (Vorstellen) and knowledge (Erkenntnis) are secondary to feeling (Gefühl).136 Brunner then runs through several arguments for the primacy of knowledge over experience, more for the sake of demonstrating the plausibility of the argumentation than to make a definitive case. The larger point of the exercise, in direct repudiation of Romanticism’s criticism of the intellect, is to demonstrate that knowledge can be legitimately presented as an essential, if not foundational, aspect of religion.137 Here, Brunner even suggests that intellectual conceptions of religion occasionally strike a ‘similar tone’ to the meditation on the law in Judaism or Augustine’s emphasis on ‘knowing God’.138 Specifically, ‘living’ in the spheres of both science (Wissenschaft) and religion ‘is the humbling knowledge of the proper barriers and the reverent acknowledgement of the same, reverence for the “law” whatever its content, “joy in the law”’.139 Thus, ‘in devoted seeking and obedient acceptance of what is known we come to ourselves; in the truth we find the homeland of the mind and spirit [Geist]; in the “law” we find freedom; in necessity meaning; in what is compelling we find “evidence”, the “vista”, light, clarity’.140 Brunner does not mean intellectual religion always expressly pursues knowledge of the law, but that the very nature of its pursuit determines that it will find something of a legal, systematic or ordered nature: ‘Knowledge wants connection, arrangement’.141 Ultimately, however, this thirst for ‘connection and arrangement’ demands a totalizing picture of life, up to and including God and God’s relation to the world. In the intellectualist frame, then, ‘religion is the knowledge of God and thus knowledge of the place of humanity in the world and its purpose in life. Revelation is therefore the central concept of higher religions. . . . Like all knowledge, religion seeks what is universally valid’.142 Thus, ultimately for the intellectualist model, ‘religion 134  135  136  137  138  139  140  141  142 

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21. Ibid. Ibid., 21–5. Ibid., 26. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 27.

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is worldview, knowledge of the foundations of existence’.143 Yet, it is precisely in pushing for such a totalizing ‘worldview’ which necessarily also includes God that Brunner thinks intellectual religion goes too far: ‘One is seeking to become free from subjectivity. One is seeking freedom in bondage [Gebundenheit]’.144 By bondage, Brunner means the comprehension of one’s place in the larger picture, a worldview – leading neither to ‘dependence’, which ‘is a purely passive relationship’, nor to ‘freedom’, which ‘is content-less arbitrariness’, but to ‘freedom in dependence [Abhängigkeit]’145, an intentionally ironic reformulation of Schleiermacher’s key phrase, ‘absolute dependence’. On this basis, Brunner then demonstrates how intellectual religion, like its experiential counterpart, must eventually mandate the melding of Christianity with other religions and philosophies, because in intellectual religion ‘all higher life is based on knowing: knowledge of the true, the good, and beautiful, – in its perfection, knowledge of God.  .  .  .  In this confession the spires of paganism and Christianity run together into one’.146 Whereas Socrates and Plato defined the human as a ‘Knower’, the gospel, when it is reckoned with in an intellectualist guise, ‘wants nothing other than to be taken literally as the “making known” of a Christian branch of knowledge, “hidden wisdom”, opening of the divine secret’.147 Insofar as experiential religion seeks the divine in immanent experience, Brunner critiques intellectual religion for seeking an immanent unity of knowledge that necessarily encompasses the divine. Ironically, therefore, Brunner sees experiential and intellectual religions as being profoundly similar – both result in totalizing, monistic systems where there is no dialectic, law or limitation to rein in human knowing or experience. Noting, in conclusion, that the psychologizing form of religion would well like to subsume both the experiential and intellectual models into itself, Brunner suggests that ‘manifestly, the decision [between the two] is only made through an impartial, but non-neutral critique, through reflection on the ultimate presupposition of all judgments themselves’.148 It is with this claim in mind that we now turn to Brunner’s treatment of psychologism.

143  144  145  146  147  148 

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 27. Ibid. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Ibid., 31. Parenthetical addition mine.

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1.  Psychologism Having thus characterized modern experiential and intellectual religion ‘on their own terms’ in the first part of the Erlebnis, Brunner now holds a ‘critical engagement’ with both in the next section entitled ‘Abrechnung’ (Reckoning).149 Here, Brunner determines that experiential religion, especially in the forms of pietism, mysticism and Romanticism150, is centred on the soul151 and ultimately reducible to psychologism, a feature evident in the ‘religious biographies’ of the nineteenth century and especially the ‘lives of Jesus’ trend.152 Psychologism, however, ‘as a conception, is a colossal misunderstanding of the spiritual and mental life [Geistesleben] and above all of religion, and produces, as a way of directing life, an inwardness which is just as false as the materialism it opposes produces a false outwardness’.153 In this regard, the similarity between psychologism and materialism is crucial, as Brunner again uses his tools of reduction to suggest the need for a doctrine of law to place a restraint on both, equally monistic in their furthest reaches. Brunner therefore indicates ‘the struggle against religious psychologism is not just an affair of a few modern “rationalists”, but has already – at least twice – taken on the form of something of significance in world history. The first [came] with Paul, the second, perhaps still more consciously, with Luther’.154 Going on to suggest that the real weight in Luther’s fight with Rome was borne in the internal elements of the Christian faith, Brunner writes: ‘Luther was well aware his struggle against the coarse externalization of religion in the Catholic cultus and papacy was a minor point in comparison with the one which he had to lead against the finer forms of worksrighteousness’.155 In a 1920 letter to his doctoral supervisor, Leonhard Ragaz, Brunner directly correlates ‘the struggle against false inwardness’ to the struggle ‘against a false outwardness, against moralistic worksrighteousness’.156 Likewise, Brunner sees his own struggle in this light, Erlebnis, 3. This ‘reckoning’ is remarkably similar to Brunner’s later eristic theology. See Chapter 3, section I below. Brunner treatment of psychologism clearly relies on Edmund Husserl, ‘On the Psychological Grounding of Logic (May 2, 1900, Halle)’, in Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (eds.), Husserl: Shorter Works, (trans. Thomas Sheehan; Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1981), esp. 146–7. 150  Erlebnis, 32, 36. 151  Ibid., 32. 152  Ibid., 34. 153  Ibid., 34–5. 154  Ibid., 35. 155  Ibid. 156  Brunner-Ragaz, EB: 14 December 1918. Cf. Erlebnis, 35, 37. 149 

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evident in his efforts to justify his earlier focus on ‘theoretical’ issues, despite the urgency of ‘practical’ problems.157 This comparison also allows Brunner to adopt Luther’s signature theme in the struggle against psychologism: ‘“Justification by faith alone”, that which God does, that which lies absolutely beyond the human is not some inner occurrence or action, not some psychological dynamic, no escalating interiority, no religious genius of some kind, but the exact opposite of all that psychology, the abandonment of all human psychology, the principled and radical disregard for all inner processes’.158 Here, betraying the influence of Barth’s new take on Overbeck159, Brunner indicates that when faith is turned into a passion or act of the soul, it is made temporal and determined according to temporal intensity. As such, regardless of the intensity of ‘pious experience’, the pendulum always swings back and forth between terror and uncertainty, which ‘is the fate of all pietists, mystics and romantics’.160 By contrast, Brunner insists the assurance of faith does not come in an ‘infusio gratia, an “experience”, but is rather grounded in an actus forensis, in something principally and eternally otherworldly, in a presupposition, in a judgment of God’161, signifying the presence of ‘an absolute irreconcilable chasm’ between faith and ‘inner occurrences’.162 While Brunner indeed acknowledges that Luther focused his efforts on attacking worksrighteousness rather than the ‘inwardness of mysticism’163, his purpose is to demonstrate how these outer and inner aspects correspond, making Luther’s battle against the external usurpation of the distance between God and humanity by works as equally valid as an argument against the internal usurpation of this distance by pietism, mysticism and Romanticism – here, the categories lumped together and ‘reckoned’ with as psychologism.164 It is on this basis that Brunner attributes the nineteenth century’s failure to perceive the two-fold nature of Luther’s attack on Catholicism to its emphasis on the ‘mystical’ elements in Luther’s theology, which he categorically rejects as a misunderstanding.165 See Chapter1, section I.b above. Erlebnis, 35. 159  See Chapter 1, section III.c below. See also Karl Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions for Theology Today’, in Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920–1928 (trans. Louise Pettibone Smith; New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 55–73. 160  Erlebnis, 36. 161  Ibid., 37. 162  Ibid. 163  Ibid. 164  Cf. Emil Brunner, ‘Gnosis und Glaube: Ein Versuch, die Grenze von Philosophie und Theologie zu bestimmen’, in Philosophie und Offenbarung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1925), 37: The ‘antithesis against every Gnosis is just as sharp as against works-righteousness’. 165  Erlebnis, 37–8. 157  158 

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After a few passing shots at Schleiermacher and Ritschl, Brunner continues his charge by launching a critique of the psychology of religion schools, especially the American contribution, ultimately concluding that psycho­logism fails because it separates the parts from the whole, identifying the laws governing individual elements in order to reconstruct the phenomena of religion by empirical means.166 Brunner finds this method not only results in a disjointed understanding of religious life, but that it also constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of ‘Geist’, because: ‘“Empirical” and “Geist” are mutually exclusive concepts. What is fundamental with Geist, the meaning, is never a fact’.167 Indeed, Brunner is even confident that Barth sees eye to eye with him, at least on this point: Religious psychologism is – as Karl Barth above all has shown us – a “religious short circuit”, a binding without safeguarding, an identification of the divine and human, which is not safeguarded by infinite distance. It is a rash combination, which does not contain the dialectical No in itself, fruit that is picked though unripe, a stolen this-worldliness of God, stolen therefore because one has forgotten that the worldliness of God can only be such on the ground of his absolute “otherworldliness”.168 Consequently, a psychologistic explanation of religion constitutes a fallacy or a short-circuit because it assumes that it can obtain an understanding of religion using immanent, empirical means. As such, it bypasses the transcendent altogether, or makes the transcendent immanent and accessible on natural grounds, naturalizing the divine no differently than the most egregious materialism. ‘Religious psychologism’, therefore, ‘is an acquisition of grace by false pretenses’.169 This sharp theological accusation, however, betrays a corresponding and equally profound philosophical concern with which Brunner concludes the section; psychologism is monism: it ‘is not willing to conceive of a source [Sprung] in the beyond’.170 As such, Brunner exhibits the concern with one-sidedness that will trouble him in Nature and Grace over 10  years later, though here, from the other Erlebnis, 42. See Jehle, 135–9. On 135, Jehle indicates that Brunner’s ‘most important academic teacher’ during his 1919–20 year in New York was American philosopher and psychologist of religion George Albert Coe, who along with William James and Edwin Starbuck developed the American ‘psychology of religion’ school. Brunner, on Jehle’s account, had profound respect for Coe, not only intellectually but personally, while nonetheless expressing his disagreement with American ‘psychologism’ in Erlebnis. See also Salakka, 59 n. 27. 167  Erlebnis, 48. 168  Ibid., 56. 169  Ibid., 57. 170  Ibid., 58. 166 

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side: ‘Monism, empiricism, psychologism are only aware of the one surface area of occurrence. They have no deep dimension, they do not know of the primal-contrast between condition and freedom, nature and spirit’.171 Whereas Brunner will later accuse Barth of obliterating the distinction between nature and grace based on a ‘one-sided’ understanding of revelation172, here he accuses modern theology and philosophy of obliterating this distinction from the side of nature: ‘They even turn the spiritual into a natural process, although they want to acknowledge it as independent. Not otherwise do the Romantics, specifically Schleiermacher, have such a strong draw to pantheism’.173 Following this line, Brunner asserts that in this type of thought, nature and spirit are ultimately identical, and as such ‘it never comes to a Yes or a No, never to the seriousness of the spirit, there we never come out of the realm of the human, there ultimately the spiritual religion is a natural religion, and all redemption is self-redemption’.174 On this ground, Brunner begins to make claims that he will later use to justify an explicit turn to a theology of law and gospel, with the law guarding the limits of nature and preserving a sharp distinction between nature and grace, making monism and pantheism impossible. Again, his references to the preeminent struggles of both Paul and Luther are telling in this regard: Luther’s struggle over justification by faith alone is not one struggle among others: it is the spiritual struggle. Because it is the struggle about the otherworldliness of faith, of the Other in contrast to humanity and nature, about the end of the more or less and the merely relative world of experience. It is the struggle of Elijah against the orgiastic cult of Baal, of Paul against the moralism of Judaism, Luther against the mystical cult of the Catholic Church; it is the struggle that resides with us today against the romantic-pragmatic distortion of faith and spirit.175 In this light, Brunner understands one of dialectical theology’s tasks to be the assertion of a Kantian critically idealistic ‘No’ against all humanistic appropriations of the spirit-mind-intellect (Geist) which ultimately produce a monistic world view resulting in pantheism.176 171  172  173  174  175  176 

Ibid., 58. Cf. Mystik, 336–58. Nature, 48–50. Erlebnis, 58. Ibid., 59. Ibid. See Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 44.

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2.  Intellectualism In the next major section, Brunner offers his ‘Abrechnung’ with intellectualism, and like his earlier treatment of intellectual religion, he deals more with Romanticism’s anti-intellectualism than with intellectualism itself. Brunner begins, claiming, ‘we still stand under the sign of an antiintellectualistic movement, which gives the intellectual life of the last decades its character, on the one hand as the one [negative] side of Romanticism, on the other hand as a form of naturalism’.177 Whereas the naturalistic form of anti-intellectualism is the offspring of the ancient protest against rationalist philosophy, in the modern age, Darwinism has opened new pathways for anti-intellectualism because it can interpret intellectual and spiritual functions solely in relation to their capacity to aid survival, for example, ‘the understanding merely reflects our will and instinct, which are aroused by the presence of objects’.178 As such, ‘antiintellectualism in this modern-pragmatic form is at the same time the most consistent naturalism’.179 On the other side is Romantic anti-intellectualism, as ‘the newer Romantics definitely attempt to demonstrate the relativity of the understanding’.180 Whether stated explicitly or not, the axiom of Romantic anti-intellectualism runs: ‘It is impossible for something that is hostile to life to be the truth. The true and the good cannot ultimately contradict each other’.181 As a result, the entire Romantic movement has increasingly directed its polemic towards the role of the understanding in combination with an anti-legal component: ‘The good, the beautiful, the prophetic insight into the holy proves itself again and again in the history of humanity as independent of the laws of logic and their scientific construction of the understanding’.182 Romanticism charges that ‘the essence of the understanding is analysis, dissection’183, meaning it destroys through observation. It complains that the heavy hand of the domineering understanding results in mechanization, that it ‘demands unbroken causal connections and therefore absolute relativity, where every individual essence is only the intersection of many lines of abstraction, of so-called laws’.184 In order to

177  178  179  180  181  182  183  184 

Erlebnis, 59. Ibid., 60. Ibid. Ibid., 61. Ibid. Ibid., 62. Ibid. Ibid., 62–3.

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challenge the dominance of the understanding, Brunner indicates that Romanticism not only challenges the ‘exclusivity’ of the reason, but its ‘validity’ in general.185 Brunner next turns to Bergson’s attempt to develop a non-intellectualist philosophical epistemology, and while the analysis is detailed, it essentially turns on one point; where Bergson sees contradiction, Brunner sees identity and connection: necessity and creativity are not opposed, as Bergson and the pragmatists assert. Rather, ‘the necessary and the creative do not stand simply in a relationship of opposition, but of identity, as with moral, so also in scientific thinking’.186 Thus, true and even ‘creative’ genius consists in determining the nature of this identity: ‘The discovery of what is cognitively necessary is precisely this creative act of thinking.  .  .  .  Creativity is the discovery of connection, – of the word, of meaning’.187 Brunner’s alternative to Bergson is clearly Kantian critical idealism and its ‘re-discovery’ of the laws of thought.188 Brunner holds that intellectualism itself is the treatment of a certain set of principles, such as the laws of reason, as final, that is, switching ‘thinking’ with the ‘means of thinking’.189 The theological ramifications of this error are profound because this switch ultimately turns into a violation of the first commandment, the exchange of God with an idea of God: ‘The idea of God as God, the cognitive system as the truth itself, doctrine as the object of faith, the catechism, mechanical doctrinality, being ready, the dogma, – that is the necessary result of this confusion and hardening’.190 Typically, Brunner applies the strongest possible reduction to bolster his argument: ‘The most primitive expression of Romantic psychologism is orgiastic exhilaration. The crassest and most naive form of intellectualizing, that is, the objectivizing reification of God, is Idolatry’.191 However, the most important point follows: ‘All refinements – from the most sublime mysticism on the one hand to the cognitively forceful orthodox or religious-philosophical doctrinal structure on the other – are negligible in comparison to what is in principle a commonly shared falsity of orientation’.192 Thus, in summarizing Brunner’s position, Lorenz Volken writes that both mysticism and dogmatism are Ibid., 63. Ibid., 73. Cf. Salakka, 64–5. 187  Ibid., 73–4. 188  Cf. Emil Brunner, ‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’, in Wort 1, 76. 189  Erlebnis, 74–5. 190  Ibid., 75. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 3 July1916 (#4), 9; ‘Denken’, 32; Barth-Brunner, EB: 15 May 1921 (#26), 61. 191  Erlebnis, 75. 192  Ibid., 75–6. 185  186 

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guilty of possessing an altogether ‘false orientation. Here humanity is deified [vergöttlicht]; there God is humanized [vermenschlicht]’.193 This dual reduction is crucial for Brunner’s law and gospel approach because it enables him to label any totalizing system of thought as legalistic in preparation for its contrast with the gospel, be it psychological-experiential or intellectual-dogmatic. Despite the seeming ease of Brunner’s reductive account, he is nonetheless treading a fine line with his concerns. Whereas his primary target is psychologism, entailing pietism, mysticism and Romanticism, he also wants to avoid intellectualism without compromising the role of the understanding, because in a critically idealistic sense, it is the understanding that preserves the laws of thought.194 Abandoning these laws altogether would entail an elimination of the critical distance between the knower and the known, collapsing them together into a monistic unity. By contrast, the gospel presupposes a form of knowing communication, because: ‘God is Word, “the Word that was in the beginning”’.195 This means there are formal similarities between law and gospel: ‘Only living thinking has in itself this relation to the Beyond and therefore the consciousness of its own inadequacy. That is the common witness of the correctly understood gospel and correctly understood Plato’.196 In this regard, Plato’s doctrine of ideas (like Kant’s doctrine of law) implies, though incompletely, transcendence and therefore the possibility of communication. While Brunner does not suggest that Plato’s ‘stretching out’ implies an actual ‘arriving’, in a formal sense, transcendental ideas and law cannot be abandoned because they are the structures necessary for communicative knowledge of God. Lacking these structures, a philosophy such as Bergson’s fails to meet the epistemological mark because it merely selects another immanent element of ‘theoretical consciousness’, that is, ‘intuition’, to compete with Hegel’s ‘concept’.197 However, ‘the question is not whether Bergsonian intuition or the Hegelian concept has the last word, but whether true life, true access to the deepest source of being lays beyond the transactions of knowledge’.198 Since it only responds to an ‘inner philosophical question’, the ‘romantic philosophy of intuition’ cannot offer any guarantees against ‘the idealistic form of intellectualism’, that is, 193  194  195  196  197  198 

Volken, 9. Cf. Bouillard, 178. Erlebnis, 76. Ibid. Ibid., 77. Ibid.

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the ‘gnostic-theosophical speculation’ whose preeminent example is Hegel.199 Brunner thus dispenses with the threat of naturalism200, warning instead that ‘idealistic, gnostic-mystic intellectualism’ causes the most problems for faith.201 Significantly then, what separates an immanent intellectualist philosophy from faith and moral-transcendent philosophy is its ‘methodical grounding’202: ‘Philosophy . . . does not want to allow its results to be gained by any way other than its own. It reduces every religion which lays claim to the same insights down to the level of a mere “rational instinct” (Fichte) or mere “idea” (Hegel), if, along with Kant, it does not completely contemptuously make their saints out to be “enthusiasts” [Schwärmerei]’.203 Proper philosophy, however, that is, Kantian critical idealism, does resist the temptation to develop itself into a system, because ‘genuine philosophy does not end in a system, but with a looking to’.204 In this sense, good ‘philosophy is . . . inverted science’205, because it pursues and identifies laws while working within the limits of reason. In other words, it looks to the ‘origin’ and is non-speculative.206 Now, having given his lecture on proper philosophy, Brunner narrows the focus to one of the primary elements in his early thought, the ‘origin’ (Ursprung). Although it constitutes the culmination of the argument, Brunner is remarkably vague about the ‘origin’, preferring, rather, to name it, assert its importance and criticize any philosophy that does not recognize it: ‘All critical or transcendental philosophy, from Plato up to Kant is philosophy of origin’.207 Brunner even pulls Barth in for assistance: ‘It is the idea of the origin, as Karl Barth rightly says, which also forms the identical sense of all true philosophy and religion’.208 In one sense, ‘origin’ is simply another term for law, and here Brunner duly employs it in its limiting capacity: ‘The zeal of thought directed by the origin is: to draw the limit between absolute and relative, between God and humanity, and to remain standing by this limit’.209 The ‘origin’ is therefore something like the gravitational centre of philosophy – the point towards which critically idealistic philosophy (e.g. Plato and Kant) moves, then stops abruptly, able 199  200  201  202  203  204  205  206  207  208  209 

Ibid. Cf. Mystik, 2–3. Erlebnis, 78. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 80–1. Cf. Salakka, 66–7. Erlebnis, 81. Ibid., 82. Ibid.

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to go no further. The ‘origin’ even implies an Absolute, but with respect to the limits (and unity) of theoretical and moral reason, knowledge of this Absolute is not manifested – or, as David Cairns notes, ‘the idea of the Absolute is a limiting concept’.210 Thus, ‘as all psychologism and all metaphysics are in principle irreverent [ehrfurchtlos], the idea of the “origin” and all thinking guided by it is in the reverential posture’211, meaning theoretical reason will not branch out on its own irreverently, in abstraction from the limits placed on it by moral reason, pursuing speculative knowledge of God. Contrary to intellectualism, where ‘form and content are correlatives: Metaphysics and system’, that is, a comprehensive systematization ultimately reifying ‘Geist’, Brunner holds that only a reverent and restrained ‘docta ignorantia’ (learned ignorance) is warranted.212 This, according to Brunner, is the meaning of ‘living thinking’, and the respect for the ‘origin’ this thinking entails ultimately overturns the false opposition between theoretical and practical reason. Whereas the kind of intellectualism that forges this false opposition wrongly seeks to bring everything into a rigidly causal ordering, a confession of the mind and spirit [Geist] to what is meaningful and to the Telos, conceals itself in every act of interpretation, as a task for the mind and spirit behind reality. This “task”, this Telos, is the unifying point of practical and theoretical reason. Plato and the gospel do agree on this point, that they do not acknowledge these oppositions which the modern era has ripped open into an unbridgeable chasm.213 Thus, as Brunner continues summarily, ‘it is no accident, that all idealistic philosophy consolidates the “practical” and the “theoretical” into a unity under the single standpoint “law”’.214 As knowing approaches the ‘origin’, theoretical and practical merge and ‘in the knowledge of God they are one. Because God is at the same time the epitome of Being and of the Good’.215 In this regard, ‘thinking [God’s] thoughts likewise means having know­ ledge contradicting the absolute power of obligation’.216 This contrast is David Cairns, ‘General Revelation in the Theology of Emil Brunner’, The Expository Times 44 (1933), 279. 211  Erlebnis, 82. 212  Ibid., 84–5. 213  Ibid., 85–6.Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 26. 214  Ibid., 86. 215  Ibid. In this case, ‘Being’ and ‘Good’ represent theoretical and moral reason respectively. 216  Erlebnis, 86–7. 210 

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constituent of the fulfilment of the law by the gospel, a recognition of God  as ‘the epitome of Being and of the Good’, instead of as an empty absolute or as a bare moral demand.217 In other words, ‘coming to know [erkennen] God means recognizing [anerkennen] God, and it is the consummation of this unity that we call faith’.218 3.  Law and Dialectic Following his extended critical interaction with psychologism and intellectualism, Brunner further uses an appendix to clarify the point in relation to his doctrine of law, repeating his claim that theoretical and moral reason do not stand in mutually exclusive opposition, but rather represent a ‘transition from impersonal to personal objectivity’.219 Put more expansively, theoretical laws of thought reckoned with on their own are not actually serious – but only hypothetical – they do not speak to the real individual, only to the theoretical person.220 The moral law of reason, however, is both categorical and personal: ‘The Logos no longer reposes as an object of observation (theoria), but it speaks to me. That is the moral demand’.221 The unity of the impersonal-conceptual and the personalexistential in the totality of reason constitutes the first step in the argument against impersonal-conceptual speculative theology. In the next step, Brunner connects his doctrine of the ‘origin’ (Ursprung) to another key theme in his earlier thought, ‘the limits of humanity’: ‘If taken seriously along with the idea of the origin, as it is explained above, then the content of rational knowledge certainly becomes a more intensive indication of the Other, most emphatically – and therefore reverently – recognition of the “limits of humanity”. But no more’.222 As Salakka notes, ‘the “idea of the origin” is not only a theoretical idea, but also a moral, normative idea, which actual, living thinking admits to’.223 Knowledge of this limit therefore arises from moral reason and is identical with consciousness of guilt, which Brunner calls ‘the other side of the Good’.224 If this guilt is fully despairing, and thus incapable of deriving a rational notion of forgiveness on its own, it presents a limit. But, if not recognized as 217  218  219  220  221  222  223  224 

Ibid., 87. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Salakka, 72. Erlebnis, 87.

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a limit, it ‘would basically be a stepping beyond the limit, meaning theoretical metaphysics and practical hubris, curving back around from the idea of the origin to that of immanence’.225 The ‘origin’, therefore, in connection with the unity of theoretical and practical reason, is intended to emphasize both unsurpassable distance and something beyond, similar to a locked door. This reinforces the identity of the ‘origin’ and the law: ‘Seriously considered this is the law which works wrath, i.e. where existentially only despair remains’.226 Here, then, Brunner’s ‘origin’ signifies the laws of reason that bind human life categorically. If the limitation and exclusivity implied by the origin are taken seriously, then resolution of wrath and guilt can only come from outside: ‘Beyond humanity lies the Other, the Logos, the demand, the absolute intention of thinking’.227 Yet, in faith the notion of the Other is not erased, but altered, ‘maintaining that this Other speaks [ansprechen] not merely demandingly, but speaks directly [zusprechen] with promise, that the despairing situation in which the law leaves us is declared to be hopeful through the speech of the divine Other, and it calls this breaking of the eternal into time: revelation’.228 While this statement clearly betrays the influence of the dialogical thought of Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber, which Brunner later develops into his unique theological epistemology under the label of ‘Truth as Encounter’, what is especially evident at this point is the foundational role of the law-gospel dialectic. In particular, Brunner accents the contrast between the general demand of the law and the direct address of revelation, which becomes a mainstay in his thought by the time of Der Mittler in 1927. And yet, quickly on the heels of what becomes one of Brunner’s signature motifs also comes evidence of Barth’s influence. Whereas Brunner has been particularly interested in the contradiction in human life caused by the limits of reason, now, going a step further, Brunner calls for the contradiction of this contradiction: ‘Faith can only occur as a Paradox, that is, as a contradiction against the contradiction of our existence and our experience, as contradiction against the entirety of our thinking’.229 This signals Brunner’s temporary appropriation of what he refers to elsewhere as Ibid., 87–8. See Salakka, 76: ‘Critical philosophy that works with the idea of the origin is proper and consistent, insofar as it points to the transcendent source of all knowledge and truth, that is the theoretical and moral legal nature of the restless questioning of the human spirit’. 226  Erlebnis, 88. 227  Ibid. 228  Ibid. 229  Ibid. 225 

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Barth’s ‘radical dialectic’, meaning that divine revelation contradicts the contradiction caused by the law and perception of divine wrath.230 In essence, this implies not only the negation of all positive natural theology, but also all of negative, or apophatic theology; that is, superficial ‘knowledge’ of guilt is negated by the real knowledge of sin that comes from faith. Brunner’s correspondence with Barth indicates he understands this ‘radical dialectic’ to imply the rejection of all presuppositions to the gospel, including the law.231 Brunner further reveals Barth’s influence as he uses this paradoxical double contradiction to imply the identity of the Deus absconditus and the Deus revelatus, since ‘it is the same God, whom our reason “questions”, whose claim our conscience should obey, and whose promise takes on faith. Everything is encircled by the Word’.232 It is faith that first brings these contradictions to their fullness: ‘Faith takes the risk to deal seriously with the critical knowledge that what we are and what we have is not the truth. Therefore, the full consciousness of sin, of repentance, comes first in faith’.233 Truth does not stand in either a provisionally positive or a negative relation to humanity or human understanding, but rather comes in revelation: ‘The break with immanence is only faithfully carried out . . . where the coming-to-us of the truth itself, revelation, can be believed, where the Instance that originated the Krisis authoritatively sets it aside [aufheben) through justification or forgiveness, by virtue of its freedom which is not our own freedom’.234 This spills over into the Christian life, because ‘its content, the new man, the new world, stands in contradictory opposition to all the contents of our reason, however, fulfilling that which determines all our experience and all our thinking’.235 Although Brunner does not maintain this radical dialectic, eventually returning to what he calls a ‘critical dialectic’236, the basic law-gospel pattern on which he will continually rely is well in place. As such, the setting aside or abrogation of the old by the new signified by the German words aufheben and Aufhebung, and the fulfilment of thought and experience (recalling ‘Denken und Erleben’237) signified by erfüllen and Erfüllung are all clearly expressed in Erlebnis. However, this end (Aufhebung) and fulfilment (Erfüllung) can only be accomplished by Jesus Christ: ‘It is the Logos himself, the real Logos, 230  231  232  233  234  235  236  237 

See Chapter 1, section III.c below. See Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 42–53. Erlebnis, 88. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Chapter 1, section III.c below. ‘Denken’, 32, 34.

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i.e. he who speaks in time, who is the Logos become flesh. . . . It is thus first here that the meaning of the idea of the origin, the holding of critical distance and therefore the opposition against the intellectualism of speculation becomes complete’.238 Along with 1922’s ‘Grenzen der Humanität’, Erlebnis contains some of the most ‘radically’ dialectical statements of Brunner’s career. While these formulations further acquaint him with the notion of dialectic, he eventually reformulates this radical dialectic, which he understands to mandate the contradiction of the contradiction, back into a straightforward ‘critical’ dialectic of law and gospel. Whereas Brunner continues to maintain that humanity cannot truly know sin apart from faith in Christ, he explicitly uses his account of the law and the related notions of wrath, guilt, Krisis and Deus absconditus to construct a negative ‘point of contact’ for the gospel, in explicit contrast to Barth’s radical dialectical negation. However, before moving into the early rounds of his debate with Barth, it will be helpful to examine Brunner’s trenchant critique of Schleiermacher as presented in the most renowned of his earlier writings, Die Mystik und das Wort. c.  Schleiermacher Brunner’s massive frontal assault on Schleiermacher and modern theology in Die Mystik und das Wort in  1924 was frequently attributed to all of the ‘dialectical’ theologians for several decades. This is odd, not least because of Barth’s explicit attempt to rein in his colleague’s severity in his Zwischen den Zeiten review of Die Mystik 239 and his course lectures on Schleiermacher in 1924, but also because Brunner intentionally used the text as a standpoint to develop his own critical response to several of the points he was in debate with Barth about at the same time. While it was clear that both theologians shared a critical standpoint towards the ‘Church Father of the nineteenth century’, Barth could not accept Brunner’s self-confident tone in dispensing with Schleiermacher and Brunner could not accept Barth’s stark refusal to adopt his Kantian ‘critical’ programme by developing both a Yes and a No that Brunner had long seen as far too radical. It is possible, then, that Brunner had in mind what he saw to be Barth’s radically dialectical ‘negation of the negation’ when he set out to demonstrate that the negative presuppositions foundational to Schleiermacher’s general concept of religion are necessary to understanding his theology from the Speeches onwards, even asserting that the antitheses in the Speeches 238  239 

Erlebnis, 88. Karl Barth, ‘Brunners Schleiermacherbuch’, Zwischen den Zeiten 2 (1924), 49–64.

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are sharper and clearer than the thesis.240 Brunner justifies this claim by analyzing Schleiermacher’s methodology, particularly in the Speeches and the famous ‘Introduction’ to The Christian Faith.241 After establishing the centrality of the general concept of religion in Schleiermacher’s thought, Brunner turns to Schleiermacher’s two primary negative presuppositions in sequential sections entitled ‘Anti-intellectualism: Religion is not a Knowing’242 and ‘Anti-moralism: Religion is not a Doing’243, before turning to his assessment of the positive claim, ‘Mysticism: Religion is Feeling’.244 In these three sections, Brunner demonstrates that the antitheses in question ultimately turn on a rejection of the law, indicating that Schleiermacher’s thought does not observe the ‘limits of humanity’, the underlying unity of theoretical and moral reason, and therefore, the border between philo­ sophy and theology established by Kantian critical philosophy.245 This produces a ‘philosophy of identity’ resulting in mysticism, or as Brunner states 10 years later: ‘Beyond question, the thought of Schleiermacher, the most influential and the greatest theologian of the last century, is defined by this monistic conception of the truth’.246 Brunner launches into the critique in his section on Schleiermacher’s Romantic anti-intellectualism by stating that in order to get to the bottom of the Romantic movement, one must shed its historical accidents and look directly on its essence, that ultimately, ‘its historical existence, and its task, is a negative one’.247 Romanticism ‘sees the dangers, the hardening, Mystik, 36. Cf. Mystik, 44: ‘The two-fold opposition is fundamental to his system from the beginning onwards, as it is also the foundation of his entire later system. Religion is just as little metaphysical as it is moral’. 241  Mystik, 36. 242  Ibid. 243  Ibid., 44. 244  Ibid., 49. 245  Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 12 December 1920 (#69), 168. Cf. also Mystik, 2nd edn, IV. 246  Emil Brunner, ‘Continental European Theology’ (trans. Olive Dutcher Doggett), in Samuel McCrea Cavert and Henry Pitney van Dusen (eds.), The Church Through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), 136. See B. A. Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 24: According to Brunner, ‘a speculative philosophy, whatever its exact makeup, determined the content of Schleiermacher’s dogmatics. . .. Brunner’s interpretation of Schleiermacher is thus, in a sense, massively reductionistic’. Cf. B. A. Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), 206. See also Christine Helmer, ‘Mysticism and Metaphysics: Schleiermacher and a HistoricalTheological Trajectory’, Journal of Religion 83, 4 (2003), 526: ‘Brunner’s criticism can be understood only against the backdrop of his own radical insistence on both objectivity and a nature/spirit dualism’, the later of which is a reflection of Brunner’s neo-Kantian philosophical commitments. Whereas Helmer’s reading and critique of Brunner on Schleiermacher is very well done, Brunner’s other writings at the time suggests that it is precisely his recognition of a nature-spirit identity in later ‘neo-Kantianism’ that unites his running criticism of this philosophical school with his criticism of Schleiermacher. See below Chapter 2, section II.a. 247  Mystik, 36. Cf. Emil Brunner, ‘Reformation und Romantik’, in Wort 1, 123–4. 240 

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the school-mastering, the fossilization, the lack of intellectual frivolity, the formalism, mere thought-games, in short, the processes of degeneration in which everything “classical” all too easily turns to the clarity of living and thinking oriented by law and word’.248 Romanticism, therefore, ‘is rightly an opposition movement, a reaction. Its role is the ‘“breaking of the tablets”; loosening, softening, polemic’.249 Despite its polemical character, however, Romanticism is ‘not critical in the properly profound sense’250 because it does not hold to a truly critical principle. Rather, ‘the truly critical, radicallycritical principle is always: the law – the word taken in its full Kantian meaning’.251 As a result, ‘it belongs to the essence of Romanticism that its polemic is only partially critical, and on the other side enthusiastic’.252 Since it refuses to recognize any limits under the law, Romanticism ultimately becomes a philosophy of identity and is by nature critical of anything that disrupts its partially polemical, partially constructive identity-continuity conceptuality. Any criticism undertaken by Romanticism ‘is only directed against the legally determined life, is pitted against the primitive; from Rousseau onwards through the entirety of Romanticism, it is: Ressentiment towards the law’.253 While Brunner does concede that Romanticism arose after 200  years of intellectualism, dogmatism and orthodoxy, and was concurrent with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, he nonetheless stresses that Romanticism could not express ‘sharply enough that faith is not an intellectual relationship to doctrine’.254 Brunner, however, does note a significant alteration in Schleiermacher’s concept of religion when he finally expels ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) altogether from its role as the epistemological companion piece to ‘feeling’ in the second edition of The Christian Faith onwards: ‘Ever more exclusively . . . he emphasized the subjective moment, until finally, in the concept of religion in The Christian Faith, every trace of anything having material content was blotted out: Religion is pure self-consciousness’.255 Of course, this has profound ramifications for Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God, and ‘still in his late works we find the same indifference towards all precision about the doctrine of God’, ensuring that ‘the question of either ­pantheism Ibid., 36. Ibid., 36–7. 250  Ibid., 37. 251  Ibid. 252  Ibid. 253  Ibid. On Erlebnis, 6, Brunner includes Nietzsche, here implied by the term ‘Ressentiment’, within the modern tendency directed towards the liberation of the individual. Cf. Chapman, 135. 254  Mystik, 38. 255  Ibid., 42. 248  249 

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or the personality of God is not a religious one, but philosophical’.256 The Romantic ideal according to the designs of its subjective concept of religion can therefore just as easily be ‘religion without God’257, the achievement of completely transposing the ‘what’ with the ‘how’.258 As a result, Brunner estimates that a dogmatics could never be built on the foundation laid in the Speeches, ‘because, as we have seen, not even the idea of divinity [Gottheit] is necessary to his religion’.259 Despite Schleiermacher’s best efforts, Brunner concludes that it is his total abandonment of all material particularity, law and limit, for a generic concept of religion built on feeling ‘where his concept of religion must break apart’.260 In the subsequent section, ‘Religion is not a Doing’, Brunner investigates Schleiermacher’s rejection of a basis for religion within morality. Apart from a brief period of ‘Kantian moralism’, leading to a speculative reaction on one side and an orthodox reaction on the other, Brunner suggests that intellectualism, not moralism, was the major issue of Schleiermacher’s time.261 Nonetheless, the additional rejection of a moral grounding for religion was also of fundamental importance for Schleiermacher, given the polemical basis of his thought. ‘Religion’, therefore, ‘is just as little moral as is metaphysics’, and religion even ‘stands in the same “decisive contrast” with morality as with speculation’.262 In fact, ‘the “decisive contrast” is first emphasized against this properly Enlightenment theory of Kant, that religion is nothing other than “knowledge of our duties as divine commands”’.263 Implicit within Schleiermacher’s rejection of a foundation for religion in morality, Brunner finds an essential antinomianism.264

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 43. Cf. McGiffert, 365. 258  Ibid, 43. 259  Ibid. 260  Ibid., 44. 261  Ibid., 44–5. Cf. Chapman, 140. 262  Ibid., 43. 263  Ibid., 45. Cf. Chapman, 140. 264  Cf. Chapman, 140: According to Brunner, ‘[Schleiermacher] was utterly opposed to the whole idea of law’. For a brief account of Schleiermacher and his followers thoroughly focused on antinomianism, see Robert C. Schultz, Gesetz und Evangelium in der lutherischen Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Lutherisches Verlaghaus, 1958), 40–61. See especially 40: ‘It was not long until the reaction against Kant’s legalism broke out. Schiller, von Baader, Jacobi and Hegel demanded the liberation of the Spirit from the sovereignty of the law. This movement towards freedom found expression in theology from Romanticism through Schleiermacher and from idealism through the mediating theologians. In Schleiermacher one finds an open antinomianism; in the mediating theologians however every measure is taken to avoid the appearance of antinomianism and to maintain the orthodox form of the doctrine of law and gospel, even with substantial changes to the contents’. 256  257 

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Brunner, however, is not altogether unsympathetic towards Schleiermacher’s intentions, noting that as a complement to his critique of rationalist orthodoxy and metaphysics, Schleiermacher even adopts a strong theology of law and gospel: he ‘rightly expresses the antagonism . . . in which this legalism stands to the true relationship with God’, and furthermore, he ‘believed himself justified in being permitted to utilize for himself this powerful contrast, which controlled the entire New Testament and moreover the largest part of Christian history: the one between legalism and faith in grace’.265 The rub, however, is that Schleiermacher goes too far. He does ‘not repudiate his aversion to all law and imperatives even there in ethics, where one would have not believed it possible to manage without law’.266 In fact, Schleiermacher even finds that ‘the assertory form is to be preferred to the imperatival, because Christian action only assumes worth in actual action, whereas imperatival action results in the Catholic system of reward and punishment. How much more then must everything that recalls law or command be eradicated out of religion itself!’267 The contrast between the assertory and the imperative is fundamental for Brunner, because the assertory, synonymous with the indicative, is essentially descriptive, producing a monistic ethics of ‘the best of all possible worlds’ and standing in sharp contrast to ethics oriented by imperative and decision.268 Here, Brunner’s critique of modern theology overlaps his critique of political and economic liberalism: liberalism, both theoretical and practical, only affirms extant states and immanent processes. By contrast, the moral (imperatival) law, though a priori, is transcendental and does not simply affirm existing states, but demands decision about them. Brunner, however, believes it is this categorical aversion to all things legal, leaving the Pauline and Reformation understanding of law far behind, that seriously damages Schleiermacher’s ability to give an Mystik, 45–6. Ibid., 46. Cf. Chapman, 140. Cf. Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World, 26, who characterizes Brunner’s reading of Schleiermacher on this point as follows: ‘The entire conception of ethics is transformed: since man is not set before the unconditioned will of God, the moral law dissolves into the law of nature, and moral responsibility is lost in a merely descriptive, rather than normative, discipline’. Gerrish also suggests that in Brunner’s reading, ‘Schleiermacher now has lined up against him, not only the Reformers, but Kant as well: Brunner writes of the “evangelical-Kantian” ethic’. 267  Mystik, 46. 268  See Emil Brunner, ‘Das Grundproblem der Philosophie bei Kant und Kierkegaard’,Zwischen den Zeiten 6 (1924), 40 and Emil Brunner, God and Man: Four Essays on the Nature of Personality (trans. David Cairns; London: SCM, 1936), 81–2. 265  266 

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a­ dequate  account of the Christian faith because it entails abandonment of the law as the necessary presupposition to the gospel: The fact that the law is eliminated, not merely out of Christian ethics but also out of philosophical ethics, must arouse in us the suspicion that it is the case here that the opposition to the law is motivated by something essentially other than that of Paul and the Reformers, for whom at any rate the moral command in its entire imperatival strength forms the necessary presupposition to their doctrine of grace, whereas Schleiermacher wants to reserve no place for this, not even the lowliest little spot, in his otherwise quite roomy system.269 Whereas Christian theology and ethics are not to be determined legalistically, they also cannot be determined in complete abstraction from the necessarily dialectical relation to the law. While the consequences of this ‘antinomian’ separation of law and religion are legion, Brunner focuses primarily on what the separation implies for Christian ethics: ‘It goes without saying that such a religion, which sees everything in harmony (The Speeches) or in absolute dependence (The Christian Faith), cannot allow for any compulsion to action’.270 Assertory or descriptive ethics are simply a restatement of the passivity implied in the materialistic-causal ethics of capitalism, where humanity is not capable of free, decisive action. Law and imperative, by contrast, imply that everything is not in harmony; law is an indication of sin, wrath and guilt and is inherently inimical to monistic and descriptive ethics. As such, law provides the necessary critical distance and disrupts all notions of immanence. Religion wholly tied to either formulation, whether harmony or absolute dependence, is therefore ‘passive behavior’271 with a powerless ethics. Finally, Brunner’s assessment of Schleiermacher’s positive assertion, ‘Mysticism: Religion is Feeling’272, completes the argument. In this key section, Brunner directly identifies his opponent’s theology with mysticism, turning Schleiermacher’s previous negations into their positive counterparts. Whereas the two prior negations obviate everything that implies limit or law in mind and morality, Brunner now finds a constructive philosophy of identity in Schleiermacher’s work. To make this point, Brunner offers a litany of quotations intended to demonstrate Schleiermacher’s express 269  270  271  272 

Mystik, 46. Ibid., 47. Ibid. Ibid., 49.

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intention in the Speeches to develop his account of the essence of religion based on intuition, feeling and self-consciousness, culminating in the unity of the individual and the universe, the finite and the infinite, and the temporal and the eternal.273 The goal is to highlight a pervasive limitlessness in Schleiermacher’s religious epistemology, with especial attention to the intended aesthetic implications. However, Brunner’s conclusive characterization of Schleiermacher finds ‘what is properly religious is not aestheticism, the enjoyment of harmony, but rather this becoming one with the All, thus mysticism, stretching out to this “incomprehensible moment  .  .  .  when a holy soul is touched by the universe”’.274 Brunner further determines that this unity is not merely intellectual, as in an aesthetic connection with the eternal where the knower and the known can nonetheless remain distinct, but ontic: ‘This experience of unity is in any case what mystics of all times and peoples have sought’.275 From this standpoint, Brunner draws comparisons between very primitive religious experientialism and Schleiermacher’s concept of religion, rejecting the latter’s express intention to reckon with religion as ‘unmediated’ in his later theology.276 Brunner does not stop here, however, and states that even apart ‘from these extreme consequences’, which could be viewed as merely ‘occasional derailments’277 in the overall project, Schleiermacher’s ‘agreement with mysticism appears in all the important points’.278 Of these, Brunner gives seven: ‘First, the divine  .  .  .  is the unbounded, the unending and the eternal’.279 As such, second, the divine relationship to the world is ‘held between identity and unity lying hidden behind it, it is the “universe”’.280 Third, human relation with the divine is therefore ‘unification, a flowing in together, a return to self’.281 This means, fourth, that ‘the description does not go beyond the expression of: filled, affected, influenced, “the organs are opened to the universe”, mental and spiritual things [geistige] will be unmistakably avoided – because the relation to word and law must be avoided’.282 Brunner even suggests for his fifth point that eradication of the personal consciousness through absorption into the All is not out of the 273  274  275  276  277  278  279  280  281  282 

Ibid., 49–50. Ibid., 52–3. The ellipsis appears in the original. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid., 55. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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question for Schleiermacher.283 Sixth, religion is an a priori aspect of the unconscious.284 The most decisive point, however, the seventh, is that ‘the intensity of experience, where all material determinacy is rejected, is the definitive criterion of religious occurrences’.285 In summary, Brunner concludes on the one hand that the negative antitheses found in every mystical theology are clearly present in Schleiermacher’s thought, and on the other hand, that this same ‘affirmation is just as rarely absent in any of the theoretical mystics, that it is a matter of an “unmediated”, “original”, “creative” act’.286 Yet, Brunner holds that these negations and affirmations are inextricably bound together, for it is only ‘if [this affirmation] were missing, that it would then be possible to give these expressions a meaning different than precisely this negative one: that every conceptual certainty, every instance of being bound by the law, is absent’.287 These interconnected negations and affirmations clearly confirm the significance of law for Brunner’s critical interpretation of Schleiermacher. This is reinforced by Brunner’s demonstration of Schleiermacher’s attempt to remove every instance of reflective capacity from his definition of religion, noting again how from the second edition of The Speeches ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) is dropped altogether from the definition of religion so that it simply reads, ‘Religion is feeling’.288 In this regard, intuition does not fit with Schleiermacher’s trichotomy of knowing, willing and feeling, which is used to determine the particular location of religion. However, as already established in the treatment of Bergson in Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube, Brunner is less concerned about the particularity of intuition than the attempted expulsion of ‘Geist’ from the epistemology of religion. By setting intuition to the side in a philosophical move, Brunner claims that Schleiermacher presumes to have discovered religion’s own province in feeling. Now, directly contradicting Schleiermacher’s express intention to put philosophy and religion on separate grounds, Brunner asserts he has completely interwoven the two.289 In fact, ‘the Speeches show the religion of Schleiermacher the philosopher of identity, and the Dialectic shows the philosophy of Schleiermacher the mystic’.290 Indeed, ‘the religion of the 283  284  285  286  287  288  289  290 

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 57. Ibid. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 13–28. Ibid., 60.

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Speeches is early on “pantheistic mysticism”, and his Dialectic is conceived as “mystical pantheism”’.291 Brunner attempts to assess the situation in very precise language: ‘The Absolute, the unity of the world’s antitheses: Object (Natur)—Subject (Geist), Wollen—Denken, indeed the immanent presuppositions of all knowing and willing, are however both inaccessible’.292 Consequently, Schleiermacher’s mystical pantheism entails the breakdown of the contrast between matter and spirit, a contrast which is overcome because ‘feeling  .  .  .  the place of the indifference between knowing and willing, is also the place where the world’s antitheses are abolished, and where the Absolute comes to the realm of experience’.293 Thus, the philosophical goals of identity and unity are what drive Schleiermacher’s system to its ultimate end in The Speeches. Brunner does not stop here, however, charging that ‘insofar as The Christian Faith works with absolute dependence – and where does it not do that? –, it is dependent on formulations from a philosophical system’.294 Despite its apparent differences with the Dialectic, Brunner alleges that The Christian Faith reaches the same goal by other means, running through several arguments poignantly critiquing the consistency of the concept of absolute dependence. Again, Brunner finds the goal is removal of any kind of standard or barrier and establishing a broad developmental-continuity: Every reminiscence of norm, law, decision would recall too much of the form of objective consciousness. It remains thus only the naturalistic schema of development.  .  .  .  The thought of development as Deus ex machina – development, orientation towards the point-of-indifference between knowing and willing, in this consciousness, where all contrast, and therefore also all becoming is excluded from the outset!295 Without having to follow the full details of Brunner’s analysis of Schleiermacher’s development, the crucial point quickly becomes apparent: there has been a collapse of matter into spirit, of nature into grace. In explicit contrast to a variety of differing accounts of Schleiermacher’s development, Brunner asserts that ‘the concept of religion in The Christian Faith is thus no unfortunate aberration of the Schleiermacher the thinker from an earlier more vigorous conception of religion. On the contrary it is 291  292  293  294  295 

Ibid. Ibid., 60. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 52–3. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 69.

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what is certainly the very peculiar product of a grand attempt to bring into effect, logically and purely, a subjective conception of religion’.296 That is, ‘the unification of the consciousness of God and self-consciousness in religion, identity, mysticism’.297 To review, Brunner’s argument runs thus: there is essential continuity in Schleiermacher’s conception of religion from the Speeches through the Dialectic and all the way to the Ethics and the later editions of The Christian Faith. The significance of this continuity is that the concept of religion is continually controlled by a philosophical claim, built on the antinomian assertion that religion is neither knowing nor doing. The result, instead of the independence of religion that Schleiermacher intended, was the assumption of religion, including Christianity and its historical particularities, into a pantheistic-naturalistic-monistic philosophy of the identity of the knower and the known.298 With this, Brunner thinks that he has clearly and comprehensively demonstrated that at the bottom of Schleiermacher’s basic religious concept, the feeling of absolute dependence, a Romantic antinomian philosophy inherently inimical to Christianity is to be found: ‘As such Schleiermacher’s concept of religion is the key to the understanding of his legacy, and the legacy explains to us the fact of why this conception of religion so carelessly becomes an observer to the discussion about the question of truth’.299 Incidentally, the key role of law in Brunner’s analysis of Schleiermacher has not gone entirely unnoticed. Characterizing Brunner’s treatment of Schleiermacher, Hugh Mackintosh writes, ‘Redemption is tuned down to civilization. Continuity is the watchword throughout; the crises of saving grace are ignored. He has eliminated the conception of the moral law and replaced it by the laws of Nature. He speaks of forces where a Christian thinker must speak of the Holy Spirit and human motives’.300 Likewise, McGiffert summarizes Brunner’s position in this way: Schleiermacher’s ‘principle of relativity prevented him from the acknowledging absolute demands upon himself by the law of God. He was insensitive to the categorical imperative’.301 In this regard, Schleiermacher’s supposed Ibid., 75. Ibid., 76. 298  See McGiffert, 366: ‘Schleiermacher’s system, in Brunner’s opinion, was the result of a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the nature of God and of his relation with the world. It was based on a pantheistic naturalism’, and 367: ‘Schleiermacher is monistic, Brunner’s position is dualistic’. 299  Mystik, 78. 300  Mackintosh, 75. 301  McGiffert, 368. 296  297 

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rejection of the necessarily dialectical position of the law over against the gospel features centrally in Brunner’s critique of his ‘“truthmonistic” thinking’302, and it is this concern which is essential for understanding the earliest stages of Brunner’s critical relationship with Barth.

III. Reckoning with Karl Barth a.  Introducing Barth and Brunner (1916–18) It is likely that Emil Brunner was introduced to Karl Barth by Eduard Thurneysen in the context of their affiliation with religious socialism in Switzerland, sometime in  1916 or in the few years prior.303 Whereas the names of Hermann Kutter and Leonhard Ragaz are known primarily in the Anglophone world through their connection to Barth, Brunner had earlier and more well-established connections to both Swiss religious socialist leaders.304 Brunner wrote his doctoral thesis, Das Symbolische in der religiösen Erkenntnis, under Ragaz’ supervision305, and later served as vicar under Kutter at Neumünster in Zurich.306 Throughout the years, Brunner carried on vigorous and often tense theological debates with both Kutter307 and Ragaz.308 Religious socialism in Switzerland thus provided much of the ground for Brunner’s early theological development as well as the context for his initial association with Barth. When Brunner took up his isolated pastorate in Obstalden in 1916309, his association with religious socialism in Zurich continued to provide occasion for his more academic theological writings310, though as noted above, even the essays published in the various church newsletters were far from intellectually benign. Stemming directly from his concern to develop and maintain the proper relationship between theoretical and practical reason, the nature and communicative strategy of preaching and pedagogy would be of essential import for all of Brunner’s earlier, and later, theological ‘Continental European Theology’, 137. Hart, 11; Jehle, 107–21. For accounts of their personal relationship, see Jehle, 293–321. See also, Wolfgang Schildmann’s chapter entitled ‘Bruderzwist mit Emil Brunner (1936)’, in Karl Barths Träume: Zur Verborgenen Psychodynamik Seines Werkes (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2006), which offers a thought provoking (if not at times disturbing) analysis of Barth and Brunner’s relationship from a psychological perspective. 304  Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 3 July 1916 (#4), 7. 305  Cf. Jehle, 37–8, 42–4, 49–52, 98–107. 306  Ibid., 58–62, 90–8. 307  Jehle, 90–8. 308  Ibid., 98–107. This is best seen in the Brunner-Ragaz correspondence. 309  Ibid., 70–85. 310  Ibid., 87–121. 302  303 

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formulations, in addition to being one of the key elements in his overarching missionary impulse. It is not incidental, therefore, that questions about the nature of preaching form the impetus for his first letter to Barth311, his first explicit criticism of Barth and Thurneysen’s theology312, as well as one of the key concerns in his writings prior to Nature and Grace.313 If, on the one hand, it can be said Brunner never maintained anything but a critical stance towards modernity and modern theology, on the other hand, the material clearly shows that Brunner also never held an uncritical stance towards Karl Barth. That is, Brunner was never either fully liberal or Barthian, but always a critical interlocutor with both. As Hans Wildberger aptly suggests, ‘it is an admirable endeavor to try to get beyond the antithesis between Orthodoxy and that which [Brunner] had previously battled as mysticism. If at the time he had seen Schleiermacher’s subjectivity as the front before him, then later the ‘Neo-Orthodoxy’ of Barth stood in the line of fire’.314 Brunner’s first letter to Barth identifies, inquisitively and respectfully, the same issue that would drive him to pen Nature and Grace 18 years later: the feasibility of Barth’s demand for an ‘instantaneous’315 decision for God, which quickly evolves into concern about Barth’s ‘overwhelming’316 and ‘one-sided’317 portrayal of the gospel. In this regard, many of Brunner’s earliest observations about Barth are simply a reflection of his critique of the monistic tendencies in modern theology, and it quickly becomes clear that Brunner delivers a similarly reductive reading of his new friend’s developing theological work. Referring to one of Barth’s sermons he had happened upon in print318, Brunner first offers sincere praise: ‘A loud Yes speaks out in me because of it. Whether I am in “complete” agreement, I do not yet know, but that is not important – I mean at the outset certainly not for you at least – ’.319 Then, Brunner presents a question/objection to the conclusion of Barth’s sermon, which demands an immediate decision ‘for or against God’: ‘The most Barth-Brunner, EB: 1 April 1916 (#1), 3–4. Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 17–21. 313  See ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’ and ‘Die Anknüpfungspunkt als Problem der Theologie’ in Wort 1, on 171–93 and 239–67 respectively. See also, Nature, 51–60. 314  Wildberger, 212. 315  Barth-Brunner, EB: 1 April 1916 (#1), 3. 316  Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 20. 317  Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 19. Cf. Nature, 16, 59. 318  Karl Barth, ‘Der Pfarrer, der es den Leuten recht macht. Eine Predigt gehalten in der Kirche Safenwil’, in Hermann Schmidt (ed.), Predigten 1916 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1998), 44–63. 319  Barth-Brunner, EB: April 1, 1916 (#1), 3. 311  312 

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important doubt of a material nature is this: Do you hold this deciding for one’s self to be such an instantaneous affaire? Isn’t the sad truth precisely the fact that we really have already decided so many times, but that the strength to give this decision constancy is lacking? The old Adam must literally be drowned anew every day’.320 A few months later, Brunner writes again about the strength of theological conviction and expression in one of Barth’s sermons, eventually confessing that he is also corresponding with Thurneysen on similar matters:321 ‘I cannot dispute with you about it; it simply had me rejoicing and gripped and even plagued’.322 Yet, Brunner again raises the issue of the overall strength of Barth’s statements, now confessing that he personally lacks the same strength of conviction: ‘But yet just as often as I have attempted it – this “accepting God, allowing Him to speak” has not yet helped me forwards; this is my fault of course and I know that Kutter and you are nonetheless right, and because I know this and see it clearly before my inner eye, I also preach just like you in Aarau – if ever so often with only a half-good conscience’.323 Brunner admits that in trying to affirm the statement ‘God shall prevail’ (Gott soll gelten), he can only ultimately affirm the statement, not God.324 ‘Then’, he continues, ‘dejected by this experience, I say to myself: “You must not abide with an abstract “God”, but unfurl what is in this word and spread it out before you in its entire diversity”’.325 Nevertheless, even this fails to bring satisfaction: ‘And then I lapse into the other extreme: the notion that “God shall prevail” dissolves for me through the middle term, “the Good shall prevail”, into the chaotic clutter of the moral-cultural life, a system of ethics, that doubtlessly shines through life up to a certain extent, but naturally – just as little as “the Law” in Paul – it has no power’.326 At this stage, Brunner believes that what he understands to be Barth’s unilateral account of the gospel becomes just as deterministically descriptive and all-pervasive, but yet also as ineffective a means for relationship with God as the law: the theologically totalizing slogan ‘God shall prevail’ becomes indistinguishable from the ethically totalizing slogan, ‘the Good shall prevail’. As Brunner feels there is no longer any room for agency (or decision), the basic distinction between law and gospel disintegrates and he feels thrown back upon his own power to Ibid. Barth-Brunner, EB: 3 July 1916 (#4), 10; Cf. Karl Barth, ‘Das Eine Notwendige (Predigt über Gen 15,6)’, in Predigten 1916, 109–24. 322  Barth-Brunner, EB: 3 July 1916 (#4), 7. 323  Ibid., 8. 324  Ibid., 8–9. 325  Ibid., 9. 326  Ibid. 320  321 

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save himself: ‘Whether I looked upon this “diversity” or concreteness of God more as “Law”, or in the person of Jesus, made no great difference at this point’.327 The result, writes Brunner, is disappointing: ‘I simply always still have the feeling – and my moral experience confirms it to me –, that I  have not yet advanced to God, that my faith has yet to come to anything’.328 Experiencing a breakdown in the law and gospel distinction, reinforced to some extent by what he sees as Barth’s totalizing presentation of the nature of God’s freedom and the supposed instantaneous efficacy of the decision for God, that is, ‘Decide today!’329, Brunner finds himself incapable of distinguishing between descriptive accounts of God’s victory in Christ and deterministic accounts of morality and culture. While conceding his identification of the issue constitutes progress, he still cannot evade the problem: ‘In a theoretical sense I of course naturally know even better than most that everything comes down to faith and how everything else springs forth out of it’.330 Continuing, Brunner goes on to complain of experiencing a Luther-style vicious circle that he is not good enough to have faith, but that he needs faith to be good.331 Although Barth’s powerful account of the gospel is profoundly inspirational, it ultimately leaves Brunner feeling overwhelmed, reinforcing a sense of moral insufficiency and distance from faith. Following these initial exchanges, one of the first occasions for real debate between Barth and Brunner came with Barth and Thurneysen’s joint publication of a collection of sermons in 1917 entitled Suchet Gott, so werdet ihr leben!332 Brunner responds with a circular letter to Thurneysen and Barth, as well as writing a review intended for Neue Wege that was never published.333 Similar to his first letter, Brunner begins with effusive praise,334 but then moves quickly into a stark reformulation of his earlier criticism, now addressing both Barth and Thurneysen:335 ‘[The two of] you are in fact almost dangerously one-sided. Legitimate humanism is treated just as unfairly as Erasmus is by Luther’.336 Significantly, Brunner 327  328  329  330  331  332  333  334  335  336 

Ibid. Ibid. Barth, ‘Der Pfarrer’, in Predigten 1916, 61. Barth-Brunner, EB: 3 July 1916 (#4), 9. Ibid., 9. Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Suchet Gott, so werdet ihr leben! (Bern: Bäschlin, 1917). Cf. Hart, 25 n. 57. Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 17. See Hart, 16. Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 19. On ‘one-sidedness’, see Nature, 16, 59.

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assumes that there is a ‘legitimate’ humanism, but complains that it is altogether lacking or negated in the published collection of sermons: As the final word on the subject it would naturally be false to see humans merely as God’s chess pieces, and thus to pass over all human responsibility and activity as in the sermon on the forgiveness of sins and the one on “the other side” (Barth)337 do. As a singular or final notion, your Reformation-like God-Objectivity, which disparages anything taking on a subjective rendering, would leave me very unsatisfied, or perhaps completely overwhelmed.338 ‘When I preach’, continues Brunner as in the first letter, ‘I cannot speak any differently either. But for myself I still need something else. In preaching I have only to think about laying a foundation, [but] for myself also about raising the building; as for me, I cannot get by with only the Reformers, at that point I need my ‘humanists’ Fichte, Kierkegaard – I even find much of this in Kutter’.339 In the subsequent years, Brunner would continue to accuse his friends of obliterating the proper and necessary humanistic categories, especially after Barth and Thurneysen had begun to reckon more fully with the work of Franz Overbeck.340 However, prior to Overbeck’s triumphant return to Christian theology, Brunner would have to endure the intellectual shock of Barth’s first attempt to produce a commentary on Romans. b.  Brunner on Romans I (November 1918) The next major occasion for Brunner to repeat his concerns came with his various responses to the first edition of Barth’s Römerbrief.341 The published review342, when read in concert with the correspondence, provides a surprising contrast, strongly suggesting that Brunner quite unashamedly used the review as a pedestal from which to air his own ideas. The correspondence, on the other hand, begins with lavish praise As the collection does not identify the author of the individual sermons, Brunner guesses the name of the author as shown in the parentheses. Five out of six are correct. 338  Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 19–20. 339  Ibid., 20. 340  Cf. Hart, 27–30. 341  Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (Erste Fassung), 1919 (ed. Hermann Schmidt; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1985). 342  ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth’, 64. 337 

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and  then  slowly introduces Brunner’s increasingly critical appraisal of Barth’s work.343 In his first letter about Romans I, Brunner states that the book ‘means no less than a revolution of “theological” thought, through the return from modern empirical-psychological-historical individualism to the transcen­ dentalism of the Bible’.344 Likewise, Brunner’s published review, while frequently praising the biblical realism of Romans I 345, stresses the supposed philosophical underpinnings of the commentary, ultimately bypassing Barth’s direct biblical-prophetic language in order to reformulate the argument in an indirect philosophical guise, implicit in the offer to play the role of the ‘chorus’ in the opening paragraph.346 This move is analogous to later statements where Brunner identifies his role in the dialectical theology movement as supplying the philosophical support to Barth’s theological formulations.347 Writing to Barth again about Romans I, Brunner betrays his position by presuming certain shared philosophical assumptions with Barth: ‘I begin to be a little more certain in the differentiation of our transcendental metaphysical thought from this psychological-ethical thought, for which your Romans is not a little to blame’.348 For his part, while responding positively to the review, Barth asks Brunner why he did not actually join in the cause, instead of commenting as if an impartial observer.349 Although Brunner’s letters suggest that it is precisely the overwhelming power of Barth’s transcendentalism that creates a problem in the commentary, surprisingly, the review consistently relativizes many of these concerns. In the correspondence, Brunner trails his usual introductory praise with several paragraphs of concerned criticism, referring to his objections as ‘our old point of contention: your position in relation to everything that I would want to call humanism’.350 Repeating and expanding the charge from the previous letter351, Brunner writes, ‘you pursue . . . in my view, the line of the Reformers too one-sidedly; Eckhart and Fichte Particularly, Barth-Brunner, EB: 18 November 1918 (#9), 21–2; Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 23–8; Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 November 1918 (#12), 28–33; Barth-Brunner, EB: 5 December 1918 (#14), 35; Barth-Brunner, EB: 16 December 1918 (#15), 36–7. 344  Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 24. 345  ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth’, 63–4, 67, 70. 346  Ibid., 63. 347  E.g. Barth-Brunner, EB: 3 March 1925 (#48), 121; Barth-Brunner, EB: 20 October 1930 (#80), 204–5; Barth-Brunner, EB: 7 January 1935 (#110), 286. See also Werner Kramer, ‘“Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie”: Ein bleibendes Anliegen Emil Brunners im Briefwechsel mit Karl Barth’, Theologische Zeitschrift 57 (2001), 376. 348  Barth-Brunner, EB: 16 December 1918 (#15), 36. 349  Ibid., KB: 17 December 1918 (#16), 37–40. 350  Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 25. 351  Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 19. 343 

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fall  by the wayside. And yet they’ve seen just as much truth as the Reformers’.352 Attempting to identify the source of the problem, Brunner suggests Barth’s ‘dancing on eggshells’ with predestination is troublesome, although he also presumes that Barth, like himself, finds predestination to be a fundamentally ‘ungodly thought’.353 The tendency towards predesti­ nation is only one side of the coin, however, and Brunner surmises, ‘on the other hand, you still want to clobber the idealists with their “freedom”, to aggravate them with formulations that simply, despite all your protests, destroy humanity as such and make humans into marionettes’.354 This charge, simply a reformulation of an earlier accusation that Barth risks treating ‘humans merely as God’s chess pieces’355, reveals that Brunner either rejects or misunderstands Barth’s initial attempts to ground human action in divine action, fearing this will lead to determinism and negate human freedom for decision.356 Thus, in the light of what he views as a deterministic tendency on the one hand, and an attack on ‘humanistic’ notions of freedom on the other, Brunner fears Barth’s increasingly predestinarian account of divine freedom and action overwhelms and negates human freedom: ‘Your convoluted statements on pp. 273ff. (especially the chapter entitled ‘Objectivity’) are a signal to me that you want to maintain something that you basically cannot’.357 On this point, Eberhard Busch suggests Brunner is likely referring to a passage in the Romans commentary like the following, instead of the passage indicated in the letter:358 When the wisdom of God elects or rejects humans, it does not accept them on account of anything pertaining to human justice, but neither does it give them anything pertaining to them exclusively according to human justice, but it gives to them and accepts them according to its own justice and thus establishes this justice among them anew, which is the justice of God, as the justice which must be known and acknowledged over all human conceptions of justice.359 Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 25. Ibid. Brunner remains consistent in this concern. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 October 1930 (#80), 200: ‘A theology built on predestination is an impossibility’. 354  Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 25. 355  Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 19. 356  For an account of Barth’s ethical thinking at the time, cf. John Webster, ‘“Life from the Third Dimension”: Human Action in Barth’s Early Ethics’, in Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 11–39. 357  Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 25. 358  Ibid., 25 n. 11. 359  Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief 1919, 377. 352  353 

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Whereas Brunner praises the relativization of ‘our subjective and reflective age’ and the stark critique of speculative thinking in his published review of Barth’s Romans I 360, it is precisely his comrade’s total relativization of ‘all human conceptions of justice’ that Brunner finds so troubling. Here, Brunner believes Barth’s attempt to forge a distinction between God and humanity using both cosmological and moral categories, that is, finitude and sin, entails a violation of the limits of reason and crosses into speculation because it denies the relevance of all human moral concepts in relation to God. Running alongside his critique of modern theology, Brunner’s concern with this development lies deeply seated in his reading of Kant on the possibilities and limits of rational theology, which includes transcendental theology on the one hand and natural theology on the other.361 Thus, following his ‘marionette’ objection aimed at predestination, Brunner writes, ‘One simply must choose between the cosmological and the ontological sequence’362, that is, between the two forms of ‘transcendental theology’ (a choice which presupposes the prior rejection of what Kant refers to as ‘natural theology’ and the physico-theological proof for the existence of God).363 A passage from the Critique of Pure Reason is helpful in breaking down the distinction: ‘Transcendental theology either thinks that the existence of an original being is to be derived from an experience in general. . ., and is called cosmotheology; or it believes that it can cognize that existence through mere concepts, without the aid of even the least experience, and is called ontotheology’.364 Cosmological theology, while given impetus by experience, proceeds by virtue of reason alone and is a ‘cognition of nature’, insofar as it reasons backwards from effect to cause.365 In this regard, Brunner perceives a ‘material’366 distinction between God and humanity (i.e. distance) in Barth’s commentary, based on an improper use of Kant’s negation of the cosmological proof. According to Kant, ‘the ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth’, 63. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allan W. Wood; Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998), 583–4. 362  Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 26. 363  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 584. 364  Ibid. Bold in original. See also, Emil Brunner, ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, Typ. eines Referats vor dem Pfarrkapitel Aarau, 11 January 1925., (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81.), 3. Hereafter, ‘Gesetz II’. 365  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 586: ‘If the empirically valid law of causality is to lead us to an original being, then this would have to belong to the causal chain in objects of experience’. Further, on 586: ‘Now if one refers from the existence of things in the world to their cause, this does not belong to the natural use of reason but to the speculative use of reason’. 366  On Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 26, Brunner refers to this as ‘the materialism of cosmology’. 360  361 

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principles of reason’s natural use do not lead at all to any theology’367, and Brunner concludes that Barth’s cosmological or material negation fails on the same grounds that the cosmological proof fails. The ontological sequence, however, in using ‘mere concepts’ is altogether non-empirical, proceeding exclusively on the basis of pure theoretical or a priori transcendental reason. In this case, Kant states ‘all attempts of a merely speculative use of reason in regard to theology are entirely fruitless and by their internal constitution null and nugatory’.368 Thus, the ontological sequence, in itself, also fails to provide a satisfactory proof for the existence of God, but it does provide a basis for criticism. Accordingly, Kant writes that ontotheology ‘retains an important negative use and is a constant censor of our reason when it has to do merely with pure ideas’369, because ‘the same grounds for considering human reason incapable of asserting the existence of such a being, when laid before our eyes, also suffice to prove the unsuitability of all counter assertions’, that is, ‘atheistic, deistic or anthropomorphic assertions about a divine being’.370 Even though ‘transcendental theology’ is incapable of proving the existence of God, ‘if there should be a moral theology that makes good this lack, then transcendental theology.  .  ., will prove to be indispensible through determining its concept and by ceaselessly censoring a reason that is deceived often enough by sensibility and does not always agree with its own ideas’.371 While Brunner is in full accordance with the rejection of both transcendental proofs (the cosmological and ontological), in contrast to what he sees in Barth, he maintains that only the ontological sequence can be used to critique modern speculative and humanistic theology. In other words, Brunner holds that Barth’s negative and critical use of the cosmological sequence against speculation involves a cognition of nature that is just as ‘material’ and causal as in its positive use in the cosmological proof for the existence of God, therefore also constituting a violation, albeit negatively, of the limits of reason. Put even more simply, Brunner is accusing Barth of doing a kind of negative speculative theology. Helpfully, Brunner again clarifies the point with reference to causality: ‘With Kutter the matter is clear: As a matter of principle, there is an undoubted precedence of the 𝖳έλοϚ over the cause. Only in this way will we lose the materialism of Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 586. Ibid. Here, Kant reminds ‘if one did not ground it on moral laws or use them as guides, there could be no rational theology at all’. 369  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 588. 370  Ibid. 371  Ibid., 589. 367  368 

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cosmology (not of cosmic thinking!) and step firmly onto the ground of mind and spirit [Geist]’.372 With this distinction behind him, Brunner continues his charge: ‘From the same perspective – I would say, from the same basic mistake – follows this overstretching of the dualism between the moral and divine’.373 Whereas Brunner is well ready to drop moralism, he is not ready to drop the notion of morality altogether, as he consistently suggests that Barth is attempting to do. ‘It is definitely’, Brunner comments, ‘a major gain when you do away with this notion of the cult of morality as if it was the final and highest thing. But to tear open this chasm between recognizing God as God and the Good as the Good, that contradicts the spirit of the Bible’.374 Again, however, Brunner demonstrates either a misunderstanding of Barth’s intentions or an all-too-reductive account of his interlocutor’s attempt to reformulate the relationship between God and the Good. Crucially, Brunner continues this line of thought in direct connection with his doctrine of the law, implying that in his attempt to sweep all the foreign elements from theology, Barth fails to make the necessary critical distinctions: ‘The “legalistic” posture is not simply identical with the moral’.375 That is, the law should not be swept away along with the justifiable rejection of legalism. By contrast, Brunner indicates that the rightly conceived version of the law must be retained as a presupposition to the gospel: ‘It is the hardening of the moral that Paul is fighting against, while he thoroughly accepts the moral as preliminary stage and a transition to the final one’.376 In this regard, Brunner believes the key is in observing a critical distinction between good and bad notions of morality: ‘The moral does have this one component directed towards the merely human, to this culture of personality that you detest, to non-objectivity and un-freedom. However it also has one directed towards freedom and objective devotion’.377 In essence, Brunner Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 26. Cf. Erlebnis, 85. Salakka, 69–70, demonstrates this argument as applied to modern theology: ‘Psychological experience is an immanent occurrence in Brunner and as such comparable with the process of nature, which can be explained by means of efficient causes (causae efficientes). By contrast, spirit [Geist] is outside of the range of the psychological. The hallmark of mental-spiritual activity is intentionality, teleology, and it is only to be understood in terms of final causality (causae finales). Therefore the spiritual [Geistlich] and the psychological, as spirit [Geist] and nature, stand in a sharp contrast to one another’. 373  Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 26. Cf. Hart, 16. 374  Ibid., 26. 375  Ibid. 376  Ibid.: for Brunner, the collapse of the distinction between legalism and morality brings about the eclipse of other critical dichotomies: ‘Where then will you make the distinction between awe [Ehrfurcht] and the fear of God [Gottesfurcht]?’ 377  Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 26. 372 

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thinks Barth’s position goes too far, although, in assuming his comrade is ready to drop the notion of morality altogether, his first reading of Romans I is as one-sided as his own accusation. Whereas Brunner is glad to abandon both materialism and outright legalism, he cannot abandon the basal connection between God and the Good, because ‘in this case then the entire moral sphere has no positive relationship to the kingdom of God; it is simply world; and if you nevertheless – needless to say – attribute positive worth to it on occasion; then this has occurred in fortunate caprice, since otherwise your view would basically become unbearably dualistic’.378 This threatens religious socialism in particular, for ‘the whole sphere of culture, of humanism, is wholly relative for you. And it is for this reason that there really is no development of the kingdom of God for you, and everything we can understand as nothing other than the preliminary stages is for you purely “world”’.379 ‘Then’, in the words of John W. Hart, ‘Brunner goes on to make a remarkable statement which casts doubt on whether, in fact, he understands Barth’s theological breakthrough’;380 that Romans I ‘is fundamentally renouncing the idealist view of history’.381 Consequently, ‘for you, state, socialism, Pestalozzi, Beethoven are all merely “world” just as much as cannibalism is, and in fact they are actually even worse because they come with the consciousness of this misery in tow’.382 Given these consequences, Brunner simply cannot abide Barth’s position: ‘I can’t go there with you; this is where I look upon the Bible with much more Platonic eyes. In pure dutifulness, in moral seriousness, indeed in all disinterested objectivity and joy in what is beyond the I, I can see a spark of the unmediated, a seed of this believing objectivity, a little spark of the love of Christ and trust in God’.383 In the following letter, Brunner develops this line of thought further, refusing to recognize Barth’s attempt to ground the Good in God, repeating the earlier charge that Barth has simply destroyed any connection between God and the Good. Further, Brunner implies that this disconnect jeopardizes the necessary contrast between religious socialism’s legitimate notion of ‘progress’ and an altogether faulty notion of the Good: ‘What I have against you there, however, rather coincides with what I said about Kutter and Fichte. I will make it my business to show that Paul represents the completion and 378  379  380  381  382  383 

Ibid., 26–7. Ibid., 27. Hart, 16. Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 27. Ibid. Ibid.

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fulfilment of this “sequence” (Eckhart-Fichte) and could just as well speak in this kind of language as in Luther’s’.384 Whereas Brunner is thoroughly willing to reject causality, determinism and legalism, securing the critical task with the ‘ontological sequence’, he is not willing to abandon moral reason (to which the ontological sequence, as the highest form of theoretical reason, defers), nor is he willing to see both totally relativized by divine predestination. For Brunner, rather, the ‘sequence’ that Paul and Luther ‘complete and fulfill’ in their explication of the gospel is the false, or legalistic notion of the Good found in the depths of human moral reason under sin. In essence, an awareness of this legalistic notion of the Good is necessary for the basic dialectical contrast between law and gospel. Brunner believes his version of critical idealism is not only beneficial, but also even necessary for theology, as the law is necessary as a ‘preliminary stage’ or presupposition to the gospel. While Brunner will work to bring these thoughts to clear expression in the mid-1920s, he must first attempt to digest Barth and Thurneysen’s take on the radical critique of Basel Church Historian Franz Overbeck. c.  Brunner on Overbeck and Romans II (1920–22) For over a year and a half, Barth and Brunner had presumably little contact as Brunner spent a year as a Fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York and travelling in the United States.385 Upon return to his isolated ‘Patmos-Obstalden’386, Brunner received a visit from Barth and Thurneysen he would not soon forget.387 In response to the stringent criticism Barth and Thurneysen levied at his morning sermon (‘cheap, psychological, boring, churchly, without distance, etc’.388) as well as to the afternoon’s ensuing theological debate, Brunner read Barth’s recent review389 of a newly published collection of Overbeck’s papers390 and composed a long letter.391 Therein, Brunner pushes the same basic line from nearly 2  years earlier, although he now specifically engages his friends’ newly found fascination with Franz Overbeck’s radical critique of modern theology and further Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 November 1918 (#12), 33. See Jehle, 123–44; Hart, 30. 386  Barth-Brunner, EB: 9 June 1923 (#19), 73. 387  Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 5 January 1922 (#32), 69–70. 388  Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 43. 389  Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 58. 390  Franz Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur: Gedanken und Anmerkungen zur modernen Theologie (ed. C. A. Bernoulli; Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1919). 391  Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 42 n. 1. Cf. Hart, 27–31. 384  385 

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stresses his own Kantian style understanding of law and gospel.392 Brunner’s comments foreshadow his argument in Nature and Grace with remarkable similarity, and like the later piece, he begins the letter by treating theory,393 then moving to the practical implications by analyzing one of Thurneysen’s sermons.394 The source of Brunner’s ire is Barth and Thurneysen’s approval and re-appropriation of Overbeck’s ‘wisdom of death’ (Todesweisheit) as a tool for the critique of modern theology and as an element in their own constructive formulations.395 Bruce McCormack describes this Todesweisheit as ‘the true knowledge of God which is disclosed in the cross’.396 Similarly, Brunner elsewhere refers to it as ‘das Christus-Nachsterben’.397 This wisdom of death lies beyond the Todeslinie, or ‘line of death’, which separates history from protology or ‘primal-history’ and ‘death’, that is, the end of history or eschatology.398 In Brunner’s understanding, since true knowledge of God, or ‘wisdom of death’, lies only on the other side of the ‘line of death’, and is unknowable apart from the cross, this move mandates the relativization of everything in history in relation to divine truth in such a way that divine truth cannot actually appear in history. In other words, Brunner sees Barth adopting a theology of the cross, but rejecting the necessary presuppositions to the crucifixion, as well as the positive elements of faith, justification and redemption that proceed from it. In essence, Brunner fears a crucifixion without protological or eschatological emphases – simply a No. Brunner accordingly expresses shock as Barth allows Overbeck, without any protest, to relativize all religion, including Christianity, because ‘religion certainly shares with the world its origin from the human world’.399 This point alone entirely obviates the last 10 years of Brunner’s efforts to follow Kant in both grounding and limiting the presupposition to Christian theology in strict relation to ‘transcendental’ moral reason. Brunner is also shocked as Barth applauds Overbeck’s relativization of the entirety of church history, insofar as it is found between ‘primal history’ and ‘death’. While Barth is Cf. Hart, 31. Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 43. 394  Ibid., 46. 395  Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 43. For Barth’s appropriation of Overbeck, see McCormack, 226–35 and Hart, 26–30. 396  McCormack, 232. 397  Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 44. 398  Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 58. The translation of Urgeschichte in ‘Unsettled Questions’ is ‘Super-History’, but ‘Primal History’ is better. Cf. McCormack, 229–30 and Gestrich, 29–30. On Erlebnis, 107 n. 1, Brunner explicitly rejects Urgeschichte, referring to Barth. 399  Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur, 74, cited in Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 58. 392  393 

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clear that ‘the other side’ to Overbeck’s No is Blumhardt’s Yes400, the idealistic elements in Brunner’s thought cannot support this attack. Significantly, Brunner responds by distinguishing his critical, Kantian No from Barth’s radical Overbeckian, dialectical No, which he assails as Hegelian, and simply too uncritical: ‘Dialectic is well known to be Hegelian philosophy, not Kantian. For Kant the No is critical, i.e. the watchdog that barks at everyone except those that belong to the house’401, whereas ‘the dialectical watchdog barks at everyone on principle’.402 This indiscriminate barking goes too far because it destroys the connection between protology, history and eschatology, whereas ‘the Bible’, on the other hand, ‘proceeds critically. It emphasizes the domain where the hunt of the dialectical No ought come to an end, the sphere of the resurrection and its prolepsis, [the sphere] of faith’.403 In contrast to what he sees in Barth as a sheer rejection emanating from the cross, entailing the total negation of everything within history in relation to divine truth, including religion and even ‘historical’ Christianity, Brunner urges again that ‘justifying faith’ is ‘where the dialectical spiral movement stands still’404, where there need be no ‘angst’, and there can be joy ‘despite the lack of distance’.405 In fact, Brunner finds Barth’s sharp Overbeckian No in its procession directly from the judgement on the cross to mandate a form of legalism: ‘This favorite concept of yours, safeguarding, is already strangely reminiscent of late-Jewish ideas. Placing the stress on fear and distance (the correlate of divine fear . . . but in the end simply and absolutely fear) sounds, in this passage, very much like something from Sinai, i.e. as the entrance gate to God. Evaluated more precisely it manifests itself as a republication of the old works-righteousness’.406 Here, Brunner believes the No, as a mode of the ‘last things’407, has become the first and the last word, reintroducing the very same ‘vicious circle’ he complained of experiencing in  1916.408 While Brunner had indeed identified an aspect that many others would also find objectionable in Barth’s early writing, he was also clearly unable to digest Barth’s initial attempts to position both No Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 55–6 and 73. Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 44. Ibid. 403  Ibid. 404  Ibid. 405  Ibid. 406  Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 44; cf. ibid, 44 n. 10. Cf. Karl Barth, ‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’, in The Word of God and the Word of Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), 51–96. 407  Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 58–9, 64. 408  Cf. Hart, 12. 400  401  402 

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and Yes together in dialectic with God’s Yes in Jesus Christ. This dialectic, by always deferring to God’s Yes as the first and last word, and which ultimately overcomes the dialectic of No and Yes that Brunner cherished, would eventually encourage Barth to reverse the traditional ordering of law and gospel to gospel and law. Without this insight, however, Brunner believes Barth’s strong ‘dialectical No’ makes grace impossible and renders the work of Christ ineffective: ‘For you both the death of Christ is no longer first a death for humanity, through which the mandate requiring humans to die is removed on principle (as is considered to have occurred), so that from that point on, despite everything else, Adamic creatureliness may be lived out in pleasure and assurance’.409 ‘Rather’, continues Brunner, ‘(in only apparent dependence on Rom. 6) what comes after the death of Christ is the ground on which God first becomes accessible’.410 ‘That’, exclaims Brunner, ‘is what it means to maintain distance!’411 In contrast to what he identifies as a fait accompli assertion of ‘sheer distance’ in Barth’s writing, Brunner’s concern is precisely an overcoming of the distance inherent in humanity’s false relationship to God, (legalism, moral or intellectual), a distance that is rejected on the cross, bridged in the resurrection and grasped in faith. It is specifically this Kantian or critically idealistic dialectic that Brunner believes has disappeared in modern theology, and it is this dialectic that Brunner believes Barth and Thurneysen are also ready to abandon for a more radical, total dialectic. Whereas Brunner holds that modern theology attempts to surpass or circumvent the limits of reason by moving from humanity outwards to God, he believes Barth and Thurneysen are ready to describe God’s relationship to the world in such a way that God completely overwhelms and nullifies human reason, morality, freedom and responsibility; everything which can be described in a word as the ‘Good’. Where in the previous series of letters, Brunner was concerned with the overwhelming of humanity by divine predestination, here he is concerned with Barth’s opting for the overwhelming divine negation of the Todesweisheit. While Brunner agrees that the cross is indeed the ‘Stop!’ that enforces the necessary critical distance, the cross can be neither the first nor the last word about God without having disastrous consequences for human morality and freedom: ‘This kind of distance is a dynamic and for that an unending principle, 409  410  411 

Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 44. Ibid., 44. Parenthetical aside in original. Ibid., 44–5.

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where there is no stopping, just as little as with the law. The dialectical hunting dog will rip anyone apart who dares come near’.412 The historical implications of this position are also profound, and Brunner’s response here is of particular interest, as he was certainly no historicist.413 However, when Barth writes in concert with Overbeck, ‘whatever is or can be “historical” is by its very nature (eo ipso) part of this world. For “historical” means “subject to time . . . and whatever is subject to time is limited, is relative”’414, Brunner, at least on this point, fears too much has been lost. Particularly, if revelation and faith cannot actually occur in time and space, ‘the dialectical No is established in this case and with it the principle of unending regress – or progress –, the entire curse of legalism’.415 Whereas this ‘regress’ is Brunner’s characterization of the dialectical No, ‘progress’ is Brunner’s characterization of modern theology – and in either case, a critical distinction is needed to prevent a totalizing, single phase, even legalistic system. It is precisely ‘the dialectically absurd notion of the gospel’416 that breaks the force of the law and provides the necessary critical distinction. By means of the gospel, and in specific contrast to the totalizing negation and relativity of everything within the time and space of history, Brunner sees not rejection but an affirmation, because ‘the Word became Flesh (John 1.14). The time is fulfilled; the eternal is now present here, in the flesh, in time’.417 Thus, in contrast to an infinite, unending divine No, the gospel should ultimately mean something positive: But really only ultimately, whereas the gospel knows revelation in time, and therefore the prolepsis of faith. The question is not whether something positive appears at all, but rather in which (logical) place, whether the No is intended critically or dialectically. Whether Christ appears in time, whether the kingdom of God grows in time together with the weeds [Mt. 13.24-30], whether we have a treasure in jars of clay [2 Cor. 4.7], whether faith makes righteous proleptically and forensically.418 After furthering his thoughts along the same lines with a few more examples, Brunner concludes this section of his epistolary discourse with a (now somewhat humorous) warning to Barth and Thurneysen: ‘The two 412  413  414  415  416  417  418 

Ibid., 45. E.g. Erlebnis, 1. Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 59. Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 45. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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of you with your wisdom of death have strayed into a very dubious neighborhood’.419 Next, as promised, Brunner moves into the subsequent section of the letter with the practical implications of Barth and Thurneysen’s new thinking in view, narrowing the focus to one of Thurneysen’s published sermons.420 Again, Brunner’s verdict is the same: ‘The wisdom of death is most certainly self-redemption. This is precisely because it doesn’t presuppose anything positive, because repentance comes before being grasped by God, before everything positive. It is not the image of the homeland, not Christ that has the power to move one towards repentance but misery. This is the result of your spiritual theory of immiseration. . . . The No has creative power’.421 Thus, it is the dichotomies that are essential, and Brunner brings his salvo to a close with: ‘For me this entire development is a splendid proof that I am right with my insistence that content and dynamic, knowledge and experience, the objective-concrete and the subjective-personal, the right and the true, are polarities that we cannot overcome’.422 The next spring, Brunner regroups and fortifies his line along the same front, clearly revealing the connection in his mind between his critique of the dialectical No and his endeavour to relate humanism and Christianity, or Plato to Christ, now including the relation of God as given through reason (idea) and historical divine revelation. Brunner’s comments indicate he has the following passage from Barth’s ‘Unsettled Questions’ in mind: I myself would understand Overbeck’s fundamental doctrine of superhistory [Urgeschichte] and death with the deep sense of the dialectic of creation and redemption which is there expressed . . . as a transcendence of all “ideology”; and I would count the writer, with Socrates and Plato, among those “heathen proclaimers of the resurrection” of whom it is said, “I have not found such faith, no not in Israel”.423 Brunner responds with dismay in the letter almost as if in direct conversation with the above passage: You would not really want to make me believe that the problem which had one such as Kierkegaard worried his entire life, i.e. Socrates-Plato/ 419  420  421  422  423 

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 48. Ibid. Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 52–3. Cf. Mystik, 60. Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 60.

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Christ or idea of God/divine revelation in history, is not even worthy of your consideration. What if not an answer to this question is your gripping onto Overbeck’s ‘Primal-History’, and what other than a clarification of this idea ought my (manifestly awkward) expression mean?424 Whereas Brunner’s critique of Barth and Thurneysen here is consistently strong, it is also clear that he does want to understand his colleagues’ developing thought. On one level, it seems appropriate to say that Brunner never fully digested what they were trying to say, on another level, it is clear that Brunner has an altogether different kind of theology in mind than Barth and Thurneysen. At the very least, Brunner deserves credit at this point for attempting to reconcile Barth’s position into his own, as his initial comments on Romans II, parts of Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube and his essay ‘The Limits of Humanity’, dealt with in the next chapter, clearly show. As evident from the above, when Romans II landed, it did not quite strike Brunner as the bombshell that it was for everyone else; he was already familiar with its underlying thinking and was well aware of the bearing on which Barth and Thurneysen were attempting to navigate. Brunner had even begun his ill-fated attempt to steer in this direction as well, commenting after his first glance at the now famous preface to Romans II, ‘you have said there in much simpler and better terms what I attempted to say in my article in the Kirchenblatt on “critical” theology’.425 Later, after reading the initial proofs, Brunner wrote back to Barth excitedly, echoing his initial praise of Romans I: ‘It is clear to me that this is the most important theological book that has appeared in many decades’.426 Brunner’s compliments thus clearly testify to the powerful critical force of Barth’s work: ‘There is no book known to me (with the exception of perhaps Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death) that has so thoroughly ransacked and broken up the whole well-tended garden of theology (in the broadest sense) that in the end it once more appears possible and necessary to begin entirely from scratch’.427 Further down, Brunner even appears to confess conversion to Barth’s more radical approach: ‘I was happy that I was not entirely unprepared when attacked by this behemoth of thought. The disturbance was certainly

Barth-Brunner, EB: 15 May 1921 (#26), 61. Barth-Brunner, EB: 22 December 1921 (#31), 67. See Emil Brunner, ‘Ist die sogenannte kritische Theologie wirklich kritisch?’, Kirchenblatt für die reformierte Schweiz 36, 26 and 27 (30 June 1921 and 7 July 1921), 101–2 and 104–6. Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube and ‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’ are strongly dialectical in this regard. 426  Barth-Brunner, EB: 5 January 1922 (#32), 68. 427  Ibid., 69. 424  425 

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already forcefully offered to me for the first time in August 1920 on that ever-memorable Sunday in Obstalden. For more than a half-year I kicked against the pricks, without producing any results’.428 Now, Brunner claims that the pieces have begun to come together, aided by Barth’s more expansive treatment of the issues and particularly by his treatment of ethics in Romans II: ‘I had to have Rom. 12-14 in particular interpreted by you, precisely because I felt what you yourself say: that “Dogmatics” must be ethical-existential and that “Ethics” must be one with Dogmatics, except for the fact that I haven’t been able to trace ethics back so radically to their source in a way that satisfies me’.429 Whereas Brunner was previously worried about a legalistic foundation of ethics in dogmatics, inclining him to avoid ‘dogmatic’ theology generally, he now feels able to reckon with ‘dogmatic truths’ without then being required to affix some kind of ethical ‘appendix’ to those truths or to wrongly oppose himself to Kierkegaard’s existential qualifications of truth.430 Nonetheless, while maintaining his uncritical tone, Brunner repeats the same concerns he has expressed repeatedly in previous letters and conversations with Barth and Thurneysen, now foreshadowing some of the particular christological emphases he develops more fully in Der Mittler as a solution to the problem: What does it mean, then, to hope, if we cannot hope on a breaking-up of temporality that is to occur at some point? Just as little as the Parousia can be understood as a part of this world, as a prolongation within it, it must necessarily be thought of as a point of incision, where time and eternity touch each other ἐυ ἀτόμω [I Cor. 15.52], where the final earthly second has struck, and where the tallying of hours ends.431 Thus, as time and space are the boundaries of the realm governed by the immanent laws of reason, these boundaries must be overcome by transcendent revelation. This implies further that revelation is neither governed by time and space, nor entirely abstract to them: ‘Or should we conceive the line of our existence prolonged into the ¥, over and beyond the grave and the millions of years and where we always have to hope for a (never eventuating, but nonetheless to be believed in) redemption, without ever “looking” on “this day”?’432 By this, Brunner means that if revelation is 428  429  430  431  432 

Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 70. Ibid. Ibid., 71. Ibid.

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not understood to come from beyond the realm of temporality, or is understood to totally encompass or include this realm within itself, then modern theology’s problems of evolution, development and monism are not overcome. While Brunner finds hints towards a solution in Barth’s work, he is not yet satisfied he has found the answer.

IV.  Summary This chapter began with some of Brunner’s earliest published writings, focusing on his stringent critique of liberal politics, economics and theology, yielding his emphasis on intellect, mind and spirit (Geist) in explicit contrast to deterministic, materialistic and evolutionary-developmental thinking. The essay ‘Denken and Erleben’ witnesses Brunner’s attempt to unify his earlier concerns by highlighting the limits of reason (critically), and the non-subjective unity of theoretical and moral reason in the human person (constructively). In this regard, Brunner presents faith as transcendental, objective and non-subjectively personal, ending and fulfilling the notions of the origin (Ursprung) and the moral command that constitutes the limits of reason – a clear indication of his initial attempts to work with a dialectical framework of law and gospel. Brunner’s doctoral dissertation, published in 1914, presents his concern with the separation of theoretical and moral reason, and the subsequent violations of reason significantly characterized as enthusiasm and mysticism leading to monism – a critical line he maintains consistently through to his work on Schleiermacher in  1924 and beyond. Throughout this critique, Brunner places increasing emphasis on the role of the law as forming the limits of both experiential conceptions of religion, which reject all external bonds or laws, and intellectual conceptions of religion, which necessarily legalize knowledge and everything within its reach. On this basis, Brunner casts both the experiential and intellectual conceptions of religion in terms of works-righteousness and emphasizes the dialectic of law and gospel, preparing for his explicit treatment of the end and fulfilment of these conceptions, examined in the third chapter below. Likewise, Brunner finds antinomianism at the root of Schleiermacher’s philosophy of identity and concludes that it is precisely this tendency that makes his theology, in the last resort, mystical. Brunner’s disagreements with Barth at this time are especially significant in relation to his critique of modern theology. On the one side, while sincerely praising much that he finds in Barth’s theology, Brunner also

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renders a blunt verdict of ‘one-sidedness’ and accuses his comrade of a tendency towards predestination. On the other side, Brunner argues that Barth’s rejection of humanism violates the limits of reason by positing a cosmological distinction of sheer distance between God and humanity, instead of giving the necessary primacy to humanity’s spoiled relationship with God because of sin. While the tenor of this criticism increases with Barth’s appropriation of Overbeck, Brunner, as will be shown in the next chapter, does attempt to incorporate what he occasionally refers to as the insights of Barth’s ‘radical dialectic’ into his own critically idealistic theological framework. Finally, Brunner’s own constructive thoughts have begun to come to the fore as he attempts to work out a theology that navigates through the errors of modernity while also avoiding what he sees as some of the more radical implications of Barth’s thought, particularly, the sheer disconnect between the notions of God and the Good, and the total incompatibility of human and divine action. However, prior to developing either his critique of Barth or his own constructive programme in full, Brunner devotes several more years to hammering out the specifics of the relationship between law and revelation, with the aim of furthering his well-established critique of modern theology and bolstering his position in his developing conflict with Barth.

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Chapter 2

Law and Revelation

This chapter examines a selection of Brunner’s writings from the early to mid-1920s explicitly dedicated to working out the relationship between reason and revelation using a paradigm provided by a dialectic of law and gospel and generally expressed in terms of law and revelation. On the one hand, these essays continue Brunner’s attempt to formulate a response and provide a solution to what he identifies as modern theology’s problematic account of the relationship between reason and revelation, while on the other hand, his correspondence with Barth indicates this series of essays also relates directly to their ‘old point of contention’.1 With regard to both concerns, Brunner’s nascent critically idealistic dialectical theology shows maturation between 1922 and 1925 as he attempts to develop his own programme in conscious distinction from problems he has already identified in Barth’s theology, while also seeking to convert Barth to his own position and coordinate their respective programmes. In the essays under consideration, the law constitutes the ‘mark’ and ‘the limits of humanity’, as well as the border between philosophy and theology. From this standpoint, Brunner officially endorses critical-idealism as the philosophy most compatible with a dialectical account of Christian faith. Further, using the notions of law and limits in explicit connection to the relationship between theoretical and moral reason, Brunner wrestles with the notion of the ‘origin’, encountered in the previous chapter, along with philosophical and moral notions of the Absolute, imago dei, sin, guilt, wrath and judgement. Of particular importance in these essays is Brunner’s delineation of an objective-subjective two-fold meaning of the law, his equation of revelation and justification and his thoughts on the end and 1  See in particular, Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 25 and Barth-Brunner, EB: likely August 1924 (#44), 101–5.

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fulfilment of the law by revelation. Finally, in relation to his concerns with Barth’s development, Brunner also discusses his notion of the necessary delimitation of divine revelation. In total, this material, reckoning expressly with a dialectical account of law and revelation, sets the conceptual stage for both Brunner’s unique approach to eristic and dogmatic theology, as  well as his position on nature and grace, examined in the following chapters.

I.  Dichotomy or Dialectic? a.  The Theme The preeminent theme in Brunner’s published writings in the early to mid1920s, as well as in his ongoing conversation with Barth, is his attempt to use a law-gospel/revelation rubric to determine the relationship between reason and revelation.2 Consequently, the titles of many of Brunner’s earlier writings indicate a dualistic approach to the subject matter: Erlebnis, Erkenntnis, und Glaube (1921); Die Mystik und das Wort (1924); Philosophie und Offenbarung, a pamphlet  also containing the essay ‘Gnosis und Glaube’ (1925); ‘Reformation und Romantik’ (1925); ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’ (1925); ‘Geschichte oder Offenbarung’ (1925) and ‘Religion oder Glaube’  (1926). Further, Brunner’s writings that do not bear an explicit dualism in their title nonetheless focus on a dualism, two primary examples being ‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’ (1922) and ‘Offenbarung als Grund und Gegenstand der Theologie’ (1925), both of which Brunner gave as inaugural lectures at the University of Zurich for his promotions to Privatdozent and Ordinarius, respectively.3 As Peter Anthon suggests, however, what initially appears to be a strongly dualistic pattern, hides a higher attempt of synthesis: In the title of Brunner’s Habilitation Erlebnis, Erkenntnis, und Glaube from 1921, the position, and respectively, the negation of the dialectical theologian, is summarized: Within the conceptual pair “Erlebnis und Erkenntnis” Brunner subsumes all extreme, half-truth absolutizing attitudes such as Subjectivism and Objectivism, Psychologism and Intellectualism, Romanticism and Rationalism, Moralism and Metaphysics, 2  3 

See Gestrich, 28. See Krüger, 245.

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Pietism and Orthodoxy, and Mysticism and Gnosis, in order to negate them with a decisive “Either-Or” and to unify them in an paradoxically higher “Both-And” in faith.4 Bearing this last point in mind, the mistake of interpreting Brunner as inherently anti-philosophical can be avoided, especially in light of his explicit intention to resolve the philosophical dilemma in terms of the christological pattern of end and fulfilment.5 In keeping with Brunner’s own thinking, this chapter is entitled ‘Law and Revelation’ and not ‘Philosophy and Theology’, because Brunner consistently suggests turning from the relationship between abstract academic disciplines in which humans are merely observers to the innermost realms of the human person, where the real conflict occurs. The elemental relationship between law and revelation is therefore analogical to the more complex relationships between reason and revelation and philosophy and theology. In this regard, Brunner taught courses entitled ‘Reason and Revelation’ in  1930, 1934 and 1940, and another, significantly entitled, ‘Dogmatic Prolegomena: Reason and Revelation’ in  1938 and 1940.6 Notably, after nearly 20 years of dealing with reason and revelation in this order, Brunner reversed the ordering in  1941 to form the title Revelation and Reason: The Christian Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge, which he published as a separate and extended prolegomenon to his three-volume dogmatics.7 There, Brunner writes: The reversal of this order, suggested by the title of this book, is the necessary consequence of a theological outlook which understands even the man who has not been gripped by the Christian message—and his Anthon, 10. A virtually identical sentence appears in Volken, 9. Cf. Nature, 19, where in reference to the title of Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, Brunner writes: ‘It is an “and” denoting a problem, a relation to be investigated, not an “and” of co-ordination’. 5  See, for example, Bixler, ‘A Sketch of Barthian Theology’, 287: ‘In spite of his professed dislike for philosophy, Brunner is himself primarily a philosopher. He hopes that his readers will not become philosophical but he tries to give them philosophical reasons for not doing so’, or Charles Conti, Metaphysical Personalism: An Analysis of Austin Farrer’s Metaphysics of Theism (Clarendon: Oxford, 1995), 61: ‘Crisis theologians’ offered the voice of the radical prophet. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?—Absolutely nothing, came the reply’. However, see Daniel D. ­Williams, ‘Brunner and Barth on Philosophy’, Journal of Religion 27, 4 (1947), 247, who writes: ‘What Brunner has done is to show that the problem of the relation of the law and the gospel is basic to the understanding of the problem of philosophical interpretation of our existence’. 6  See Nachlass Emil Brunner, 126–33. 7  There is no indication that Brunner offered a course entitled ‘Revelation and Reason’ after 1941. 4 

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reason—from the standpoint of the Word of God, as in my book Man in Revolt. We do not begin our inquiry with reason and then work up to revelation, but, as the believing Church, we begin our inquiry with revelation and then work outwards to reason.8 Brunner does not therefore intend this reversal to signify a major upheaval in his own thinking, but rather a fuller reckoning with the direction of his thought from the beginning. Like law and revelation, reason and revelation remain in dialectic, and thus, as Thomas Preston Hudson aptly summarizes Brunner’s efforts: ‘Man’s possibility of truth lies in the relationship of reason and revelation’.9 b.  Variations on a Theme Emil Brunner was extremely productive at virtually every stage of his career, making the range of material available for examination of his thought on any one point or on any particular topic nearly overwhelming. The essays selected below for analysis and interpretation best represent Brunner’s primary theological concerns during the early to mid-1920s and are also his most significant writings of the time in terms of occasion. That Brunner’s variations on the theme of law and gospel are common to both the subject matter and occasion of these writings is not coincidental, and the importance of these essays as expressions of his earlier theology is incontestable. Brunner also affirms the importance of these essays in his correspondence with Barth in terms of both his own theological development and the particularities of their dispute, which turns explicitly to the issue of law and gospel in the mid-1920s.10 The respective occasions and titles of these essays, none of which have been translated into English, are as follows: Brunner’s two inaugural lectures at the University of Zurich, ‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’11 (The Limits of Humanity) in 1922 and ‘Die Offenbarung als Grund und Gegenstand der Revelation and Reason, IX. Thomas Preston Hudson, ‘The Concept of God as Personal in the Thought of John Baillie, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich’(Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New Orleans Baptist Seminary, 1985), 101. 10  E.g. Barth-Brunner, EB: likely August 1924 (#44), 102–5; Barth-Brunner, KB: 13 March 1925 (#47), 114–18; Barth-Brunner, EB: after 13 March 1925 (#48), 118–22. See also Chapter 4, section I.b below. 11  Emil Brunner, ‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’, in Wort 1, 76–97. Cf. Hart, 41, who aptly notes, ‘Grenzen’ is ‘very much a transition work, as all of Brunner’s theological and philosophical influences (old and new) show their impact’. 8  9 

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Theologie’12 (Revelation as the Ground and Object of Theology) in 1925; Brunner’s first article for Zwischen den Zeiten, ‘Das Grundproblem der Philosophie bei Kant und Kierkegaard’ (The Basic Problem of Philosophy in Kant and Kierkegaard)13 in 1924; a provocative lecture given before the theological and philosophical faculties at Marburg in  1925, ‘Die Menschenfrage im Humanismus und Protestantismus’ (The Question of Humanity in Humanism and Protestantism)14; and finally, two attempts to clarify the Marburg lecture in 1925 round out the list: one published and entitled ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung: Ein theologische Grundlegung’ (Law  and Revelation: A Theological Foundation)15, the other being an unpublished lecture and bearing the title ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’ (Law and Revelation)16. It must also be noted that these writings are all attempts to formulate a position. They proceed by trial and error and are directly connected to Brunner’s conversations with Barth and others at the time. In this sense, they are not final products and cannot rightly be used to produce a rigid,

Emil Brunner, ‘Die Offenbarung als Grund und Gegenstand der Theologie’, in Wort 1, 98– 122. Brunner gave ‘Offenbarung’ on 17 January 1925, prior to the Marburg lecture, although it was originally published afterwards, presumably with revisions, in Philosophie und Offenbarung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1925), 5–28. Cf. Hart, 74–6. 13  Emil Brunner, ‘Das Grundproblem der Philosophie bei Kant und Kierkegaard’,Zwischen den Zeiten 6 (1924), 31–46. This essay, which is a slight reworking of a late 1923 lecture given before the Kant Society of Utrecht, focuses on the limits of theoretical reason and the relationship between theoretical and moral reason, specifically emphasizing the contributions of Kant and Kierkegaard. 14  Emil Brunner, ‘Die Menschenfrage im Humanismus und Protestantismus’. Typ. eines Vortrages in Giessen und Marburg, 22. und 23 Jan 1925, (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81). This lecture was originally given in Giessen and Marburg in Germany on 22 and 23 January 1925, a few days after his second inaugural lecture in Zurich. In Marburg, Brunner spoke before several notables, including Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, both of whom sharply criticized the paper, and Rudolf Bultmann, Brunner’s supposed comrade in ‘dialectical theology’, who did not come to his defence. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB 28 January 1925 (#45), 105–6 and Hart, 76. The exemplar used for the present research is presumably the only available copy and was obtained in the Brunner Nachlass in Zurich. 15  Emil Brunner, ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung: Eine theologische Grundlegung’, in Jürgen Moltmann (ed.), Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1962), 290–8. According to Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 January 1925 (#45), 106 and Barth-Brunner, EB: 10 March 1925 (#46), 109, the events in Marburg led Brunner to produce this revised version, originally published under the same title in Theologische Blätter 4 (1925), 53–8, after he had confessed to Barth of having packed to much into the original. Brunner later admitted to Barth (Barth-Brunner, EB: no date, 1925 (#48), 119) that he had only added ‘Eine theologische Grundlegung’ in order to stir up Marburg academics ex post facto. Cf. Hart, 79. 16  Emil Brunner, ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, Typ. eines Referats vor dem Pfarrkapitel Aarau, 11. Jan. 1925., (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81). This lecture, labelled on the top in hand by Brunner as ‘Law and Revelation . . . in essentials  the essay in the theo. Bl.’, was given on 11 January 1925 at the Pfarrkapitel in Aarau. This lecture is cited throughout the present volume as ‘Gesetz II’. 12 

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final statement on Brunner’s thoughts on law and revelation in the mid1920s. On the one hand, these essays all have different entry points, structure and goals. On the other hand, they are all concerned with law and revelation; use a law-gospel format to work out this relation; rely heavily on Kant and critique neo-Kantian philosophy; proceed more or less phenomenologically (i.e. by means of a description of human self-consciousness under the law in distinction to an ontological-developmental phenomenology of spirit)17 in order to locate the law-revelation problematic within anthropology; and are repetitive on several key points. c.  The Method While Brunner renders a phenomenology of the human moral selfconsciousness in the opening chapters of Das Gebot und die Ordnungen in 1932, his first attempt to develop this method determines the content of the essays under consideration, ‘Die Menschenfrage im Humanismus und Protestantismus’ in particular. There, Brunner begins by identifying the three elements under consideration: humanity, humanism and Protest­ antism. He notes that while it is possible to turn to a historical account of the two ‘isms’ in order to determine their perspectives on humanity, this method leads to disappointment, ‘because even history, as an object of our knowledge, is not free from the law of all knowledge’.18 That is, the historical method does not rise above the question of humanity, so to speak, but is rather wrapped up and included within the question itself. In response, Brunner suggests approaching the problem from within the actual experience of life: ‘The essence of humanism or Protestantism will never be found out through historical observation, from the stalls of observers, but only grasped as participation on the stage of life itself’.19 Brunner does not mean here that dealing with the ‘stages of life’ somehow avoids the ‘law of Chapter 3, section I.c below presents Brunner’s phenomenological method in detail as found in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, 3–29 (ET: 21-43). As noted, an important distinction is necessary. See Brunner, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 5: ‘A thorough understanding of Husserl is evident in my first writing, Das Symbolische in der religiösen Erkenntnis. . . . I am still proud of the fact that Husserl then wrote to me, saying that I had understood him better than most of his contemporaries. But in spite of this relationship to Husserl, I have generally held to the critical standards of Kant up to this day’. Cf. Jehle, 52. Brunner’s later usage of a descriptive phenomenological method is therefore to be sharply distinguished from neoKantian phenomenology and Heidegger’s phenomenology, which he strictly rejects. For this, see Barth-Brunner, EB: 10 March 1925 (#46), 109. See also Nature, 25, where Brunner mentions the usefulness of a phenomenological analysis for determining the nature of human ‘consciousness of responsibility’. 18  ‘Menschenfrage’, 1. 19  Ibid. 17 

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all knowledge’ whereas historical method does not, but rather in the move from a historical account of philosophy’s treatment of a problem to the recognition of one’s own participation within the problem, one can deal with the problem occurring in the play on the stage, instead of from the auditorium: ‘We must basically leave the observers’ standpoint, which is always the standpoint of the historian and become participants ourselves, entering into the problems ourselves’.20 This means reckoning with the conflicts between Platonism and Christianity, and humanism and Pro­ testantism as expressions or elements of human thought and experience, analysable with a phenomenology of the human self-consciousness, instead of within the broader scope of a historicist examination of causality and impersonal philosophical trends: ‘We can only understand when this conflict occurs within us’.21 The basis for this determination is the universal presence of the law, whether in a complex philosophical system, or in an individual’s experience of moral inadequacy: ‘The law is the critical point where everything is decided’.22 However, while the law is indeed the basal element, its theological particularity also limits its usage as a concept. Brunner begins ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung II’ with the following: Law and Revelation: these words strike upon a particular dogmatic theme. If we wanted to use the language of Reformed scholasticism, the locus of the foedere would be meant. This locus deals with the relationship of revelatio generalis and revelatio specialis, or rather on the confinium of both, the border zone that lies between the proper Christian revelation and the general revelation in nature. This border zone is determined by the concept law.23 Thus, the law and revelation dialectic serves a particular dogmatic function in determining the limits and boundary between general and special revelation, and this distinction is limited to properly Christian dogmatics. By contrast, a discussion of the law and revelation relationship can have a meaningful role in determining the relationship ‘between Christian faith and the universal Zeitgeist’.24 In this case, ‘instead of law and revelation, we say reason and revelation, thus we have indeed nothing less than one of the 20  21  22  23  24 

Ibid. Ibid., 2. ‘Gesetz II’, 2. Ibid., 1. Ibid.

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two primary themes of Christian theology generally before us, indeed, if one wants only to understand it correctly, the one primary theme’.25 Therefore, with reason and revelation as the two primary themes of the Christian message or their dialectic as the single theme, ‘reason signifies the quintessence of human particularity, that which used to be called the natural human’.26 The anthropological question is not an arbitrarily selected point of comparison, but ‘the common factor of humanism and the evangelical faith is precisely the knowledge that the question about humanity is not one question among others, but rather the question in which all others run together’.27 Although, Brunner frequently deals with philosophy and theology as abstract disciplines and historical entities, he nevertheless holds this basic principle in mind, meaning the deeper and more serious focus will always fall on the issue of reason and revelation, the specifically dogmatic counterpart of which is the dialectic of law and revelation. The result is a great deal of vertical movement within Brunner’s conceptual field; the terms philosophy, reason and law are certainly not identical, but can have identical meanings and functions in particular contexts. Revelation and gospel, on the other hand, are generally interchangeable, although Brunner tends to use revelation in contrast to philosophical reason and gospel more as a summary statement of the Christian message. Whatever terminology is used, Brunner’s phenomenological method demonstrates his conviction that ‘in all of these great battles, from Athanasius up to Calvin and in the present day, it is always a matter of the one theme: reason and revelation, or as you will come to see as an identical theme: law and revelation’.28

II.  Law, Reason and Philosophy The analysis to follow proceeds through the general phenomenological pattern found running through the selected essays; the pattern is derived from a holistic view of these writings and includes the most significant points related to the theme of law/reason and revelation, beginning with Brunner’s scattered comments on Kant and neo-Kantianism. Next, Brunner’s under­ standing of the relationship between law, reason and philosophy is considered, before moving through his understanding of theoretical reason, its limits and ultimately, the turn towards moral reason. The focus then falls 25  26  27  28 

Ibid. Ibid. ‘Menschenfrage’, 2. ‘Gesetz II’, 1.

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onto the nature and limits of moral reason and consequently, Brunner’s understanding of radical evil and sin. Finally, after a brief exploration of the doctrines related to the imago dei, especially the origin and its relation to the law, the chapter moves to a close by examining Brunner’s conclusions on law and revelation, particularly his notion of a two-fold meaning of the law, the unity of revelation and justification, the paradigm of the end and fulfilment of the law, and the delimitation of revelation. The following analysis, by virtue of the amount and consistency of the material, demonstrates that Brunner uses a law-gospel dialectic to structure his approach to Christian theology. While this constitutes a significant theological statement in its own right, it is determinative for Brunner’s particular brand of critical and constructive theology and later, his position on nature and grace. a.  Kant Versus the Kantians In ‘Grenzen der Humanität’, the earliest of the essays under consideration, Brunner begins with an ironic reference to Marburg neo-Kantian Paul Natorp, whose 1894 work, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Humanität 29, had done the necessary duty of reinforcing the conceptual limits of humanity. The irony, however, is that Natorp, a stringently critical Marburg neoKantian at the time of the 1894 text, had by 1914 all but entirely abandoned his earlier critical epistemology for a nearly full blown metaphysics of spirit.30 In Brunner’s view, Natorp’s error, and that of the majority of the 29  Cf. Paul Natorp, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Humanität: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Sozialpädagogik (Freiburg: Mohr, 1894). 30  Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 10 March 1925 (#46), 109: ‘The Marburgers simply regarded my sharp Kantianism as being something from the backwoods, since everyone knows that phenomenology and the turn to metaphysics have come along since Natorp’. Klaus Christian Köhnke’s defiant Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism (trans. R. J. Hollingdale; Cambridge: Cambridge, 1991), refuses to treat the entirety of the Marburg and Baden schools, including Natorp, in its account of the movement and declares neo-Kantianism effectively over by 1881. Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought 1860–1914 (Detroit: Wayne State, 1978), 104, is more inclusive in his outlook, but makes the same point: ‘Cohen, and to a much greater extent Natorp, tended to turn the logical operations of the mind into ontological absolutes and even to make the mind productive of its own reality; thus, they drifted into a metaphysical idealism contrary to Kantian criticism and closer to the neo-Hegelianism of the late nineteenth century’. Further, on 117: ‘Paul Natorp went farthest in this direction, exemplifying the return to metaphysics in the last stages of neo-Kantianism. The dissolution of Marburg philosophy as a critical, antimetaphysical movement can readily be detected in tracing his thought’. Of Natorp’s mentor, Herman Cohen, Willey, 109, comments: ‘Cohen goes beyond the limiting principal in Kant—the thing-in-itself. There is no objective world outside of cognition; therefore, cognition is no longer finite, as it is for Kant. By hypostatizing thought itself, Cohen verges on a form of absolute idealism that neo-Kantian philosophy had originally attempted to refute’.

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later neo-Kantians and other idealists, had been to abandon humanity’s critical limits, re-opening the Kantian floodgates to speculative anthropology and theology. Brunner believed that the war in Europe had assaulted humanity not only physically, but intellectually, resulting in the collapse of modern culture and the encroachment of ‘subhuman coincidence and arbitrariness’ against ‘the dams that the intellectual work of a century had built up’.31 Those dams, built upon the limits of humanity – particularly the laws of reason – were likewise the basis of ‘all higher life. . . . Since Kant we again realize that the limits of humanity are also its foundation’.32 Rightly understood, Kant’s philosophy does not hinder knowledge but strengthens it by putting it within its proper limits and on its proper foundations: ‘It was indeed Kant who interpreted the mental [geistlich] life – humanity – by means of the old Platonic notion of the boundary or legislation of reason, which pushed incredible creative power to realization at that point, and through it first gave this fullness of life solid form and clear self-consciousness’.33 In ‘Grenzen’, Brunner virtually hails Kant as a type of Moses who had returned the laws of reason to humanity, just as Moses had delivered the Decalogue to the people of Israel. However, speculative forms of idealism, claiming their grounding in Kant, had abused and violated these laws Continuing, Brunner indicates the Kantian ‘revolution’, spurred by the rediscovery of the laws of reason, had been twisted into a gross violation of its own principles, clearly paralleling a Pauline styled account of law and boasting: It was first this turn from the things to the laws of thought through which we know them as things, and to the laws of rational, moral action, through which the world receives meaningful coherence; it was first this human self-arrest designated by Kant himself as a Copernican reversal which has justified humanity’s claim to be a world unto itself and secured human pride in its own existence through reason.34 Humanity, having assumed possession of the laws of reason, became prideful as it reckoned with the autonomy and freedom inferred from its ownership of the law. Consequently, Kant’s rediscovery of the laws of reason, ‘Grenzen’, 76–7. Ibid., 76. Cf. Emil Brunner, Das Grundproblem der Ethik (Leipzig: Rascher & Cie., 1931), 10, where Brunner draws an explicit line between rational autonomy and human freedom. 33  ‘Grenzen’, 76. 34  Ibid. 31  32 

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while intending to put up stops against the speculative and arbitrary, unwittingly encouraged prideful attempts to manipulate and master the law, the result of which was the ‘subhuman coincidence and arbitrariness’ referenced at the beginning of the lecture.35 In ‘Das Grundproblem’, Brunner also reaffirms his criticism of neoKantianism for breaching the limits of humanity known to both Kant and Kierkegaard, indicating that this violation had taken two primary courses: ‘Positivistic thinking grounded in Kant’ or absolute idealism leading to mysticism and ‘ontological metaphysics’.36 Despite their differences, ‘mysticism and speculative idealism stand much closer to positivism than to the dualism of faith’.37 The result is that most modern ‘Kantianism’, whether positivistic or idealistic, ‘can be designated as monism’ that disregards the limits of humanity so problematic for absolute idealism.38 b.  ‘The Limits of Humanity’ In order to prevent a monistic abandonment of the limits of humanity, Brunner consistently emphasizes the importance of human freedom and autonomy in relation to the law, and his thinking is essentially drawn out along traditional Kantian lines: humanity understands itself to be both recipient of the law and the lawgiver, and ‘on this foundation of autonomy, on the self-binding freedom, rests the entire edifice of humanity’.39 It is this ‘legislation’ that makes humanity human and forms the standard for knowledge and values: ‘Only through it do we know of truth and personal dignity’.40 These ‘limits’ are the foundations of human knowing and being, apart from which there would be no basis from which to determine values of any kind.41 A few years later, in ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, Brunner’s statement is even stronger: ‘The law is the mark of humanity’.42 Now, the emphasis is a two-fold concept of law, the law of nature and the moral law, which Brunner again embellishes with Kantian language: ‘This law of nature is neither only outside of us, objectively; nor is the moral law only within us, subjectively. It Ibid. ‘Grundproblem’, 33–4. 37  Ibid., 34. 38  Ibid. 39  ‘Grenzen’, 77. Cf. Emil Brunner, ‘Christlicher Glaube nach reformierter Lehre’, in G. Schenkel (ed.), Der Protestantismus der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Verlag Friedr. Bohnenberger, 1926), 238. 40  ‘Grenzen’, 77. 41  Cf. Symbolische, 5. 42  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 291. 35  36 

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is the great success of idealistic philosophy to understand the two laws, that “of the starry skies” and that of the “conscience”, in their tight connection to us and to allow us to suspect a common origin for both’.43 Humanity is defined by law in terms of both its knowing (theoretical reason) and doing (moral reason). Further, theoretical and moral reasons derive from the same ultimate origin and cannot therefore be permanently detached.44 This is not merely a repetition of Kant, but a hint at what will come to be a key emphasis in Brunner’s system: the law is determinative of human nature and the natural world: ‘It is not only that which establishes humanity but also that which limits it’.45 ‘Grenzen’ and similar earlier works indicate that Brunner was confident about the notion of the limits of humanity well before he had fully developed his understanding of law and revelation. The limits of humanity are indicated by a border, boundary or law surrounding and limiting human knowing and doing. Weighted with the common stereotypes of early dialectical theology, this sounds like a wholly negative assertion, and there is a strong possibility that Brunner actually derives the term ‘limits of humanity’ from Overbeck, not Kant.46 However, Brunner tries to work out these limits on solidly Kantian, critical grounds. In ‘Offenbarung’, Brunner further develops his doctrine of law in order to demonstrate the limits of philosophy: ‘If we ask about the truth, what is meant when we call something true according to the ground which grounds everything, then we find no thing as this ultimate ground, no world existing unto itself, but an idea or a law. All branches of knowledge seek connections or laws’.47 This is simply an expression of the basic Kantian epistemological dualism; instead of the thing in itself, there is law. However, law is necessary for human knowing because ‘truth is only knowable in its connections’.48 On the theoretical level, the presence of law is a simple epistemological fact, and has no inherent moral character: ‘The so to speak merely pointlike given is neither true nor false, but material for knowledge. What is known is that which is grasped in connection. The criterion of all scientific knowledge is therefore the severity of the method, necessary connectivity, Ibid. E.g. Brunner’s critique of Natorp. 45  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 292. 46  Barth, ‘Unsettled Questions’, 71, provides a quote from Overbeck with the phrase: ‘Theology, like everything else which exists, will be or has been good for something. Why not, for example, for establishing the limits of humanity, for our final, radical rescue from all demonic superstition and from all transcendental otherworldliness’. On 58, Barth states that Overbeck is rightly read ‘as standing guard “at the threshold of metaphysical possibilities”’. 47  ‘Offenbarung’, 100–1. 48  Ibid., 101. 43  44 

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legality’.49 While philosophy rightly works on and within this law, the law nonetheless limits its scope and it cannot move beyond these limits: ‘Philosophy however seeks the law in the laws. Now that it finds the laws of all knowing, it knows that the laws themselves are all bound with one another through a final, deep connection, through a law of all laws. However, to these laws themselves, this origin [Ursprung] of the law remains hidden. It can no longer suppose [setzen], but merely presuppose [voraussetzen]’.50 Thus, in its search for an Absolute, philosophy finds itself bound by the limits of the epistemological law and discovers that it can only have presuppositions about the unifying ground of knowledge and the origin of the law. In this regard, the presence of the law means the relativity of human knowing. In ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung II’, Brunner demonstrates the relativity of even the most factual sciences: Say we take a so-called exact branch of knowledge, physics or astronomy, as an example. Does it come to absolute knowledge? Never. It is in a process of knowing aimed in a particular direction. But here types of knowledge are not strung on a thread of knowledge, as pearls on a string. Rather through every new bit of knowledge, the previous ones are modified. E.g. Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, Einstein.51 With the final name in the list, Brunner states, ‘indeed in no other way is Einstein’s theory called the theory of general relativity.  .  .  .  Because all knowing that occurs in relation is relative to all other knowledge’.52 As law determines both the limitation and ultimate relativity of human knowing it must also impact the limits of human knowledge of God. Law, therefore, constitutes the boundary between reason and revelation as well as between philosophy and theology. c.  Philosophy and Theology Brunner begins ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’ with precisely this point about the boundary between philosophy and theology in mind, designating two possibilities of connection between humanity and God: simply, from humanity to God and from God to humanity.53 The first is ‘the way humanity 49  50  51  52  53 

Ibid. Ibid. ‘Gesetz II’, 3. Ibid. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 290.

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may go in its thinking and doing’.54 The second way, by contrast, is ‘no human possibility’, and between the two, ‘there is no mediation, no crossing over’, although ‘there is a border where both come together, where they thus, because there is no crossing over, come together as two army columns against each other. This common point, which is precisely the point where the collision occurs, is the law’.55 On this basis, Brunner gives one of his clearest distinctions to date between philosophy and theology: ‘The reflective development of the consciousness of humanity on its way to the absolute, to the eternal, we call Philosophy. The reflective consciousness of faith grounded in revelation is Theology’.56 Both tasks are indeed human enterprises, but while philosophy proceeds from humanity to God (i.e. ‘das durchreflektierte Bewußtwerden’), theology is reflection on God’s coming to humanity grounded in faith (‘das durchreflektierte Bewußtsein’).57 ‘The law’, then, is ‘the border area of philosophy and theology, the point, where they both nearly become one, in order then to run apart even more violently’.58 However, repeating the methodological point in ‘Die Menschenfrage’59, the ultimate concern is not over the ‘conflict of the faculties’60, but with the existential conflict ‘in ourselves’.61 As such, there can be no ‘division of labor’ between philosophy and theology on this point: humanity on its ‘Menschenweg’ is encountered by revelation and revelation stands over against the pervasively limiting and relativizing law.62 As one of his inaugural lectures at the University of Zurich, Brunner begins ‘Offenbarung’ by acknowledging that while a lecture on revelation hardly appears normative in the modern academy, it is precisely this outlandish or strange character that justifies the presence of the theological faculty in the university.63 Brunner continues, noting every science has its particular set of questions and that all these questions have their particular presuppositions. Philosophy, ‘as the basic branch of knowledge or fundamental science, namely as knowledge itself, makes the possibility of Ibid. Ibid. This comment demonstrates Brunner’s understanding of the law as the ‘point of contact for the gospel’, while in development in  1922, is here clearly formulated in  1925, although the essay bearing the proper name did not appear until 1932. Cf. Mensch, 500 (ET: 514), where Brunner states without qualification that the law is the necessary point of contact for the gospel. 56  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 290. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid. Emphasis original. 59  ‘Menschenfrage’, 1–2. 60  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 290. 61  Ibid. 62  Ibid. 63  ‘Offenbarung’, 98. 54  55 

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knowing itself problematic’.64 ‘Theo-logy’, however, ‘for the sake of its object as for its presuppositions, is something fundamentally other than a science of religion’.65 Conflict arises, because, theology’s ‘proper relationship to philosophy is grounded precisely in that theology like philosophy raises the claim to be the basal discipline, which does not owe its ultimate presuppositions and norms and therefore its method to some other science, indeed, precisely like philosophy, theology does not have this in common with any other science, but is sui juris in all of this’.66 Due to these competing claims about the basis of knowledge, Brunner suggests that initially even a relationship of simple tolerance is out of the question, and that philosophy and theology must be engaged in a ‘fight’ on the level of the questions they ask.67 While philosophy claims to place everything in question, Brunner asserts that it cannot actually question its own presuppositions: ‘We cannot place reason in question through reason itself’.68 Reason is limited on its own terms – that is, the law: ‘The laws of reason are – to borrow an expression from physics – the frame of reference, on which we must all draw’.69 As a result, theology must ask philosophy if it has actually pursued its thinking to the very end: ‘Therefore it goes a good bit of the way together with this philosophy . . . critical philosophy makes its life’s work out of the genuine skill of asking the essential questions, as it is most briefly and worthily denoted by the names Plato, Descartes and Kant’.70 In the slightly earlier essay, ‘Das Grundproblem’, Brunner asserts even more explicitly that the problems dealt with in philosophy, while substantial in themselves, ultimately lead to theological questions. Unsurprisingly, Brunner finds Kant to be the best illustration of his thesis: ‘In truth, however, not even Kant is an exception to the general rule that in the end only one problem was important to all the great philosophers: humanity in its relationship to the Absolute, or, likewise, that their deepest interest was ultimately theological. . . . The question about the whence and whither of all things and all life, the question of eternity, the question about God’.71 Brunner concludes that Kant did not pursue such questions speculatively, but kept his philosophy critical, that is, within the laws of reason. Nonetheless, 64  65  66  67  68  69  70  71 

Ibid., 98–9. Ibid., 99. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 100. Ibid. Ibid. Cf. Krüger, 246. ‘Grundproblem’, 33.

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‘the meaning of philosophy is, as we have seen: Krisis; precisely in this way is this Krisis the true foundation of humanity’.72 Resolution of the crisis of knowledge and the theological problem encountered in philosophy can only be an acceptance of the limits of humanity and then faith, because ‘faith is either the end of philosophy, or it is not faith’.73 Thus, ‘the philosopher must, as such, leave it undecided whether the claim of faith is the height of sense or the consummate nonsense’.74 Although the full extent of the relationship between philosophy and theology in Brunner’s thought cannot be determined at this point, it is clear that Brunner is still pushing for a particular kind of philosophy to have a special relationship with theology. d.  Critical Idealism and Theology By now, it is no surprise that Brunner fully and explicitly endorses Kantian critical idealism in all of the essays under consideration.75 In ‘Grenzen’, the larger point of the lecture is that Kantian critical idealism can work hand in hand with religion to guard the limits of humanity, curtailing human autonomy, arrogance, the chaotic and arbitrary, as well as clarifying the distinction between immanent human knowing and doing and transcendent divine revelation.76 ‘Das Grundproblem’ turns on a similar point: ‘As critical philosophy it is obliged to hold watch at this border [Grenze] and to distinguish between what is human and what is not’.77 The results can be positive for both critical idealism and religion, ending the conflict between the faculties of philosophy and theology noted above: ‘Religion, which understands its meaning and wants to be established on its own ground and not on human experience, will not fight critical philosophy as some kind of adversary, but on the contrary will bid it welcome as to a best ally – that philosophy which sees its office as holding watch over the limits of humanity’.78 Critical idealism, therefore, emphasizes the limits placed on humanity by the law in order to establish the presence of the dialectic of the law in philosophy: ‘Genuine critical philosophy thus means the end of all scientific conceit, knowledge of the problematic character of that which we call science’.79 The basic Kantian 72  73  74  75  76  77  78  79 

Ibid., 45–6. Ibid., 46. Ibid. Cf. Absolutheit, 6–7 and ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’, 260. ‘Grenzen’, 88–9. ‘Grundproblem’, 46. ‘Grenzen’, 88. ‘Grundproblem’, 34.

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dualism between subject and object extends necessarily to a dualism of faith,  between the perceiving human subject and God, meaning that critical  idealism ‘has – like the piety of the Old Testament – the absolute pathos of distance. Indeed it is – even as critical – nothing less than the assertion of this distinction, of this Krisis, of this dualism, in the form of conceptual reflection’.80 The doctrine of the Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself) demonstrates ‘the unsurpassable barrier between us and the truth itself’, and if this dualism is ‘removed, we will then be standing in Hegel’s monism, without having noticed’.81 It is the preservation of this boundary that makes critical idealism so compatible with theology; by respecting the laws of reason, it does not interfere with the divine freedom of self-revelation and the necessity of faith for knowledge of revelation. In fact, Brunner calls this Kant’s ‘fear of God, the uncompromising sense for that which Kierkegaard called the qualitative difference between God and man. To see this border,  and to watch this border, that is the proper meaning of critical philosophy’.82 Humanity must therefore accept the relativity of its thinking: ‘Our knowledge is always relative, true in relationship to something else’.83 This relativity means human thought cannot arrive at any real absolutes, a further indication that the failure of the human question for ultimate meaning is constitutive of humanity itself: ‘The tragic is not a coincidence, but the specific mark of its life’.84 In  1922, however, momentarily under the influence of Barth’s ‘radical’ dialectic, Brunner carries this point further than he will just two years later: ‘Thus there are the same limits of humanity, the law of the true and of the good, which give the content of human character and dignity to our thinking and willing – which at the same time create for us the great distress, out of which there is no rescue, the peril of the: Human-All-too-Human, the peril of humanity, in plain speech: being born of the earth’.85 It is precisely this most dialectical statement of the essay, and perhaps in the entirety of Brunner’s writings, that he will modify in the next 2 years in intentional contradistinction to his understanding of Barth’s position. In his attempt here to replicate Barth’s dialectical No, despite indicating the moral element in human limitation, Brunner places his heaviest emphasis on the seemingly natural limitations of humanity, in 80  81  82  83  84  85 

Ibid. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 33. ‘Grenzen’, 82. Cf. Absolutheit, 7. Ibid., 84. Ibid.

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essence an infinite qualitative distinction understood primarily as a finiteinfinite distinction between humanity and God. In 1924 and 1925, however, Brunner returns to his earlier emphasis on the unity of theoretical and moral reason and the primacy of moral reason, thereby re-affirming the notion that the distance between God and humanity must be expressed in terms of sin, not creaturely limitation, that is, ‘born of the earth’. In ‘Grenzen’, Brunner does not appear to have completely lost the former emphasis, but it is indeed less pronounced than in ‘Denken und Erleben’ or his letters to Barth in the late teens.86 As his reliance on the unity of theoretical and moral reason has temporarily weakened in ‘Grenzen’, Brunner ultimately condenses both forms of reason into the bare legal equivalent of Barth’s Todesweisheit, where ‘there is nothing known to us that does not stand under this law of insufficiency, of death’.87

III.  Curbing the Enthusiasm: The Laws of Reason a.  Theoretical Reason It is ‘Das Grundproblem’ from 1924 that offers one of Brunner’s lengthiest excursions into theoretical reason and its limits – coupled, no less, with supporting references to the Reformation used to label any breaching of the basic Kantian dualism as ‘enthusiasm’, for example: ‘All talk about intuition is enthusiasm’.88 In fact, Brunner suggests that ‘it is precisely [Kant’s] sober, narrow-minded, harsh resistance against all mystical temptations, which makes Kant so unpopular in our time’.89 Brunner even labels the Kantian project as not only Protestant, but prophetic: ‘It is this genuine Protestant manfulness, behind which stands the spirit of the Old Testament prophets, for which we cannot thank him enough’.90 Here, Brunner’s reading of Kant requires careful scrutiny to understand the relationship between the law and the limits of theoretical reason, keeping in mind that ‘the principle of criticism is dangerous to all enthusiasm’.91 See Chapter 1, section III. ‘Grenzen’, 84. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB 2 September 1920 (#19), 42–53. 88  ‘Grundproblem’, 35. 89  Ibid. 90  Ibid. In light of his criticism of neo-Kantianism, Brunner’s reference to Kant and the prophets, as well as his ongoing criticism of German cultural idealism is ironically significant. See Willey, Back to Kant, 105: ‘Cohen believed that the Jewish prophetic tradition, Kant’s ethical idealism, and the values of German culture were complementary and compatible’. See Brunner’s 1934 essay, ‘Die Unentbehrlichkeit des Alten Testaments für die missionierende Kirche’, in Wort 1, 382–7, which emphasizes the ‘provisional’ task of the prophet. 91  ‘Grundproblem’, 35. 86  87 

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Whereas Kant’s critical philosophy is frequently considered disastrous for religion as such, Brunner believes Kantian criticism actually solidifies the integrity of special revelation; critical idealism recognizes and reveres the laws of reason, in contrast to ‘mystical’ and metaphysical systems that disregard these laws by positing metaphysical or rational pathways to the Absolute. The result of such ‘speculation’, which critical philosophy prohibits, is not the obviation of divine revelation in general, but of divine self-revelation in particular. For Brunner, the problem with modern theology is that it forsakes the distinction between nature and grace, not that it abandons revelation altogether:92 Hegel and Schleiermacher make divine revelation immanent and natural through thought or feeling, foregoing transcendent and personal revelation, a move that turns everything into either grace or nature, without dialectic. By contrast, Kant’s critical idealism restores the possibility of this distinction because it defines nature and its limits through law, preventing unwarranted speculative leaps to the Absolute. Brunner reinforces this point by naming three primary features of Kant’s theoretical philosophy that demonstrate the limits of human knowing and thereby constitute the basic epistemological effects of the law on human knowing. First, the doctrine of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself (Dingan-sich) means ‘to our knowing, truth is not immanent, but transcendent’.93 Second, Kant’s antinomies show ‘the final necessary abstractions of our thinking end in logically necessary contradictions’ reinforcing the notion that any higher synthesis between subject and object would be ‘enthusiasm’.94 Finally, ‘we come to a third . . . the distinction between the regulative and constitutive use of the highest idea of reason. Concepts without intuitions are empty’.95 That is, concepts in abstraction from experience do not create real knowledge – a strong guard against speculative theism. Thus, Brunner takes the basic Kantian dualism, established by Kant’s doctrine of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself, all the way to its ramifications for the knowability of God; a simple violation of the doctrine of the thing-in-itself in general philosophical epistemology can lead to Cf. Der Mittler, 3–21 (ET: 21–41). ‘Grundproblem’, 36. Ibid. See Hudson, 113: ‘Brunner agrees with Kant’s first Critique in regard to the limitations of reason’s ability. If reason transgresses these limits and works its way towards ultimate truth, it ends in contradiction’. 95  ‘Grundproblem’, 36. Paraphrasing Brunner’s expression in a 1916 Obstalden sermon, Walter Hollenweger, ‘Wurzeln der Theologie Brunners’, Reformatio 12 (1963), 583, writes: ‘For Brunner, truth in [and of] itself is abstract [gegenstandslos]’. See also, Walter Hollenweger, ‘Emil Brunner’, in Hans Jürgen Schultz(ed.), Tendenzen der Theologie im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Geschichte in Porträts (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1966), 364. 92  93  94 

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speculative metaphysics, mysticism and monism.96 In ‘Grenzen’, Brunner pushes through some brief commentary on Kant’s establishment of the problem (dualism), Hegel and Schleiermacher’s attempts to overcome the problem (monistic immanence via thought or feeling) and Feuerbach’s rejection of the entire endeavour (the imago hominis!). In rejecting Hegel and Schleiermacher, Brunner in fact agrees with Feuerbach’s assessment of the situation: ‘Humanity creates gods in its image. Immanent theology is a self-contradiction. Feuerbach rightly characterizes the philosophy of religion as anthropology’.97 For Brunner, all immanent philosophies of religion subordinate revelation to humanity, whether based on Hegel’s speculative thought or Schleiermacher’s feeling, and unwittingly place themselves entirely within ‘the limits of humanity’. In ‘Grenzen’, Brunner responds to this trend by explicitly stating that proper Christian faith is oriented in an entirely different direction: ‘Protestant and Reformed faith however is not oriented towards experience or humanity, but towards God. Not gradual self-realized freedom, but guilt and redemption, not the immanent process of thought, but the sharpest dualism of God and humanity, not the precise, proudly rising line of development, but the broken line of the cross’.98 As such, Brunner assesses the difference between the Schleiermacherian-Hegelian depictions of religion and the Christian faith by contrasting the formal categories that represent each: the former are centred on human thought and experience, not God; on incrementally realized freedom, not guilt and forgiveness; further, Schleiermacher and Hegel’s systems are immanent and developmental but ‘the broken line of the cross’ ensures that Christian faith is dualistic.99 ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung II’ offers an even more poignant assessment of the situation. Following a section where he again emphasizes the relativity of ‘scientific’ knowledge, Brunner relates the stringent Kantian critique of ­theoretical reason to a criticism of natural theology: ‘We have reached the outcome of the Kantian critique: there is no knowledge of supersensory things, there is no natural theology that has value as knowledge’.100 Brunner ‘Grundproblem’, 34. ‘Grenzen’, 81. Cf. Neuenschwander, 41: ‘It is the Feuerbachian argument that Brunner accepts, but turned against all religion apart from the biblical revelation’. 98  ‘Grenzen’, 81 99  Ibid. 100  ‘Gesetz II’, 3. Brunner continues: ‘This criticism [of metaphysics and natural theology] is admittedly challenged from two sides. First, from the Aristotelian metaphysics that today in new Thomism is again being revived, and second, from the new Platonic speculation which plays a role today inside the phenomenological school, apart from the fact that it is always still alive in the Hegelian philosophers. Naturally, we certainly cannot repeat or improve upon Kant’s criticism of these two tendencies here, that is, against the cosmological and ontological proofs for the existence of God’. 96  97 

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then takes this point to re-affirm that theologians need to grasp this ­particular  area of philosophy, because it parallels the confession of faith: ‘Even as theologians we are not completely independent from this philosophical discussion’.101 Thus, ‘we know through the confession of faith in insider’s language what Kant teaches us as a philosopher: there is no real knowledge of God apart from revelation, i.e. through natural means of knowing’.102 This again leads to Brunner’s assertion of correspondence between Kant and the Reformation, particularly concerning the doctrine of law: ‘[Kant] says further that there is something in us that can hardly be interpreted without God and still is not God: namely, the idea, the law. The judgment of faith/the Reformers runs entirely the same way, out of the pure necessity of faith’.103 Again, the limits of humanity are encountered in the law, and as in ‘Grenzen’, this gives an incomplete hint at the possibility of God, but ends in antinomy and contradiction: ‘The natural human’s knowledge of God through reason is uncertain, and moreover, never gets beyond mere idea, and thus, never to the living God. We will only understand this more clearly when we pass from theoretical to moral knowing. Even here we find the same dialectic and Krisis. Here the Krisis is only infinitely aggravated’.104 In ‘Die Menschenfrage’, however, Brunner argues that most humanist thinking is not content to accept this aggravation and halts progress at the limits of humanity, meaning that ‘through reflection on the background of the conviction itself humanism goes beyond itself and becomes a worldview, a universal, knowledge of God, a religion’.105 Here humanism even betrays its own principles, and as in ‘Das Grundproblem’, Brunner again refers to this unwarranted leap to the religious as ‘enthusiasm  .  .  .  the Pathos of idealism’.106 True to his typical pattern of reduction, Brunner continues by demonstrating the inherent similarities between several attempts to reckon with this problem: ‘And therefore finally a form of Pathos: enthusiasm, the consciousness that the deepest in humanity, be it only concept, intuition, or feeling, is at the same time the ground of all truth and reality’.107 Again, Brunner finds the preeminent expression of this ‘enthusiastic idealism or humanism’ in Hegel, whereas Kant brings ‘sober idealism’, adding ‘critical’ above the line in pencil.108 Cf. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 290. ‘Gesetz II’, 3. Cf. Karl Barth, No!, 76: ‘Real rejection of natural theology does not form a part of the creed. Nor does it wish to be an exposition of the creed and of revelation’. 103  ‘Gesetz II’, 3. 104  Ibid. 105  ‘Menschenfrage’, 8. 106  Ibid. Cf. ‘Grundproblem’, 35–6. 107  ‘Menschenfrage’, 8–9. Cf. ‘Gesetz II’, 1–2. 108  Ibid., 9. 101  102 

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On the one hand, Brunner finds that Kant recognizes the truly significant element in idealism because he maintains the foundational and unifying function of the law: ‘No one since Plato has known as he did what idea or law is, and how to ground knowledge, meaningfully free life and true humanity in this idea’.109 On the other hand, Kant also acknowledges the limiting function of the laws of reason: ‘Precisely the same laws also bind our knowing and our hand, however at the same time [Kant] knew to restrict [the law] to the circle of humanity and to obstruct our entrance into the realm of the Absolute’.110 In Brunner’s reading then, it is the law that constitutes the unity of ‘critical’ and ‘idealism’ in Kant’s philosophy; it establishes both the ground and limits of human knowing and doing. The law, therefore, constitutes both a ‘Jasagen’ and a ‘Doch-nicht-Jasagen’ corresponding to its founding and limiting role in relation to reason.111 As mentioned above, however, the limits uncovered in the critique of theoretical reason only betray a deeper problem at an even more basic level. b.  Moral Reason In ‘Grenzen’ in 1922, under the influence of Barth’s Todesweisheit, Brunner reckons largely with theoretical and moral reason together, frequently decorating his treatment of the limits of theoretical reason with moral overtones. However, in ‘Das Grundproblem’, nearly 2 years later, Brunner emphasizes an explicit turn from theoretical to moral reason, a move which foreshadows his later phenomenology of human self-consciousness conceived in ‘Die Menschenfrage’ (1925) and developed in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (1932), along with his general emphasis on the dialectic of theoretical and personal truth.112 In this vein, Brunner suggests that the essential point of The Critique of Pure Reason was to serve as the ‘preparatory work’ for The Critique of Practical Reason, ‘the idea of freedom . . . the idea of humanity’.113 In ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung II’, Brunner writes that ‘knowing is only one-half of human existence. The other is doing. Even here we find an analogous position of the law at the beginning’.114 Despite the similarity of the position of the law in relation to both theoretical and moral knowing, there is also dissimilarity. As Brunner notes Ibid. Ibid. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 294. 112  Cf. ‘Menschenfrage’, 1–2; Das Gebot, 3–29 (ET: 21–43). 113  ‘Grundproblem’, 37. Here Brunner also comments: ‘It is entirely wrong how the C.o.P.R stands in the foreground of the neo-Kantian discussions’. 114  ‘Gesetz II’, 2. 109  110  111 

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in ‘Die Menschenfrage’: ‘Necessity is something other than something external, not behind us but before us, not pushing but pulling, not a Must, but an Ought, not something that imposes itself, but something that urges towards decision, saying yes to free acknowledgement, necessity which therefore at the same time must also mean freedom, compulsion to freedom’.115 In this case, the moral law functions as an inner compulsion to decision that highlights human freedom, rather than as an external limit. In ‘Die Menschenfrage’, Brunner describes the transition as a turn from an external law (theoretical reason) to the inner law (moral reason): ‘This interior truth is indeed the foundation of the exterior truth: we know the necessity of ordering these together as this foundation, which we call law’.116 This entails a movement from facts (quaestio facti) to values (quaestio juris) in the knowing self-consciousness.117 Next, Brunner buttresses his argument by stating that cognition (Erkenntnis) is a mental action (Tun), meaning, therefore, that the moral question stands over all human doing and knowing, even the theoretical.118 To remain here, however, would be to deal with abstractions. In ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, Brunner accordingly stresses the personal nature of moral law: ‘Up to this point we have spoken of the law simply. In relationship to this Krisis, however, theoretical and moral law are not equated, the theologian interjects, because they are not both equally near to the personal realm. The moral is quite obviously closer to this critical border zone than the theoretical’.119 Thus, ‘if the moral is known as the ground of everything theoretical, or, likewise, grasps and acknowledges the living meaning of the word law, then the question of this abstract outcome cannot remain standing’.120 Despite this proximity to what is personal, the I nonetheless remains a mere object at this stage, as evident in the preeminent moral question ‘what should I do?’ By contrast, Brunner intends to push his analysis of the human self-consciousness to the point where ‘the questioner is the one who is placed in question’.121 This entails a shift from asking general moral questions to the state of being questioned about one’s personal moral being and existence, because, as Krüger writes of Brunner’s position: ‘Even practical reason knows only postulates’.122 Consequently, 115  116  117  118  119  120  121  122 

‘Menschenfrage’, 4–5. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid., 5. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 293. ‘Offenbarung’, 103. ‘Menschenfrage’, 5. Krüger, 246.

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the turn from theoretical to moral reason means turning from the abstract and impersonal to the existential and personal. Here, Brunner indicates that evil, sin and guilt can be suggested, but never fully comprehended, because moral reason cannot accept any thinking that would constitute its own upheaval.123 Unsurprisingly, Brunner determines that neo-Kantianism wrongly separates theoretical and moral reason, to the extent of ascribing independent value to theoretical philosophy apart from moral philosophy.124 This means a detachment of the Critique of Pure Reason from the Critique of Practical Reason, resulting in either positivistic or speculative philosophies deriving singularly from theoretical reason – a move Brunner finds ignorant of Kant’s explicit efforts to secure the foundational primacy of moral reason, as well as the limits of theoretical reason. As noted, Brunner responds by demonstrating the dependence of theoretical reason on moral reason: ‘The entire theoretical reason hangs thus on the moral imperative, which is not hypothetical like the theoretical, but rather categorical’.125 Here, Brunner posits the unity of theoretical and moral reason through the categorical breadth of the moral imperative or law, which encompasses human life as a whole, including theoretical thinking: ‘On what does the meaning, justice and truth of human life rest?.  .  .  . On the law, on this meaningful connectivity, on the inner necessity, on the accordance of everything that is meaningful and good with the law’.126 The primacy of moral reason is essential to Kant’s entire philosophical programme because it provides the ‘ratio’, or ‘ground and justification’, for philosophy itself.127 With the reference to ‘justification’, Brunner again turns to his understanding of law: ‘Only that which stands in meaningful connection is justified. That is the critical principle of the λόγον διδόναι, of the law, of the a priori. The question of meaningful connection, of the legal necessity, that is the critical and decisive principle’.128 Theoretical reason, therefore, depends on moral reason because through the law, that is, the categorical imperative, moral reason connects theoretical reason with the totality of human life; theoretical reason only constitutes a part of what is encompassed by moral reason. Things are only meaningful in their systems of relations and connections provided by the categorical law, and this applies equally to ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 292. On ‘Grundproblem’, 38, Brunner targets Wilhelm Windelband of the Baden neo-Kantians in particular. 125  ‘Grundproblem’, 38. 126  ‘Menschenfrage’, 5–6. 127  ‘Grundproblem’, 38. 128  Ibid. 123  124 

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theoretical reason: ‘It is precisely on this basis that theoretical reason hangs on practical reason. Because science itself has no answer to the question of whether the pursuit of science is meaningful’.129 The immanent legal structure or the limits binding theoretical reason mean that it must look beyond itself for its meaning in the sphere of morals; on its own, theoretical reason is ‘purely observational, theory, theatre, an aesthetic form of existence, play’.130 Whereas Brunner previously stated that concepts without intuitions, that is, without the experience of something, are empty131, here he is building up to the notion that ‘there are no independent values. They are all grounded in a law that first qualifies them as values’.132 Pure theoretical reason cannot justify itself on its own terms because it only deals with concepts; to have validity it must be related through the law to moral reason, values and ultimately persons. This is an indication of theoretical reason’s dependence on moral reason because theoretical questions ‘can only be resolved in connection to the question of the meaning of existence’.133 In Brunner’s view, therefore, the newer forms of neoKantianism violate these very basic principles underlying Kant’s philosophy, abandoning the limits of theoretical reason by ignoring its foundational connection to moral reason. The result, specifically in Natorp’s case, is a non-Kantian speculative philosophy of reason, profoundly similar to that of Hegel.134 For Brunner, however, it is only when the focus falls onto the moral reason that thinking can become truly serious, ‘because . . . it is no longer a matter of things, but of me myself’.135 The question of morality cannot therefore be dealt with in abstraction from a real moral agent; it cannot be dealt with theoretically, conceptually or in the abstract.136 While the ‘mysterious Origin [Ursprung]’137 remains in the background of this thinking, Brunner has embellished his concern for the personal since the late teens and early 20s. The turn to moral reason is no longer simply a matter of ‘the moral consciousness, but of me myself, as I am now spoken to by the moral law’.138 Moral reason can no longer be concerned with impersonal observation, but 129  130  131  132  133  134  135  136  137  138 

Ibid. Ibid. Cf. ‘Menschenfrage’, 2–4; Absolutheit, 7. See ‘Grundproblem’, 36. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 38. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 10 March 1925 (#46), 107. ‘Grundproblem’, 38–9. Cf. ‘Die Menschenfrage’, 1–2; ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 290. ‘Menschenfrage’, 6. ‘Offenbarung’, 103. Cf. ‘Offenbarung’, 9; ‘Menschenfrage’, 6.

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only participation, because ‘I as a whole, I myself, am placed under this necessity’.139 This ‘necessity’ is indeed ‘practical’, and it concerns the inherent moral nature of every action, including theoretical thinking. Behind the ‘I, stands the meaning of the I [Ichsinn], on which the realization of the meaningfulness [Sinnvollkeit] of everything hangs’.140 This is not ‘a conditional meaning [Sinn], a conditional law, but an unconditional, an unconditioned, not a rule but a command’.141 This command itself is not abstract or theoretical, but personal: ‘I ought. That is the odd answer to the question of the essence of the I: the I is that which is addressed by the law, commanded to meaningful action, the [notion of the] responsible, being called to something not yet given’.142 Further, this personal call to general responsibility is complemented by the notion of human freedom: ‘It first becomes clear then at this point, that this necessity, which renders meaning, is freedom’.143 Moreover, the law not only implies freedom, but humanity also makes the law, finding itself autonomous: ‘Reflection ends with the knowledge of the I as of the free creator and lawgiver to itself and its world’.144 Humans therefore give  order to the world through the inner law: ‘Freedom in the selfgiven  law, thinking in the necessity of the idea of autonomous action, which the inner sense, the inner ideal order, pours in through the ideal form in the otherwise chaotic reality. That is human life, true humanity’.145 As the ‘end of reflection’, the law nonetheless also means the limit of humanity. Like Kant, however, Brunner is not content to deal with moral reason without reference to divinity, asserting ‘it is quite impossible not to regard the “You ought” that approaches at that point as the divine command. However the same reflection which leads us to that point also drives us away’.146 While perception of law as command in relation to divinity provides additional shading to his understanding of moral reason, Brunner consistently qualifies his assertions to avoid positing a moral proof for the existence of God. Rather, it is precisely this vague notion of the Absolute, first seriously arising in moral reason, that is intended to reinforce the notion of distance between divinity and humanity. 139  140  141  142  143  144  145  146 

‘Menschenfrage’, 6. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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IV. Radical Evil and Sin In all of the essays under consideration, Brunner consistently asserts that Kant’s philosophy, while beginning with the question of knowledge, ends with the question of existence: beyond the difficulties in the farthest reaches of theoretical reason, critical idealism also identifies humanity’s difficulties with the moral law and the Absolute. The moral problem ‘no longer means mere contradiction in thought, but contradiction in existence, guilt’.147 Whereas ‘the theoretical knowledge of reflection already means a painful break with unmediatedness, a turn from the outside to the inside’148, transitioning from theoretical to moral is even more profound: ‘As in the theoretical, the end of the knowledge means antinomy and contradiction; in the practical it means: anti-nomia, anti-legality, revolt against the [moral] demand as the foundational form of my existence’.149 That is, the moral problem means not simply noetic antinomy, but ontic self-contradiction. In this regard, Brunner again suggests that theology should take Kantian critical idealism more seriously relative to other philosophies, because it ‘comes closest to Protestantism with respect to moral thinking, and it does so because it thinks of the law in the strongest terms. Based on this consideration of the law and its absolute rigor, it also comes to an assessment of humanity which stands closest to the biblical view in comparison to all the other philosophical theories’.150 In ‘Das Grundproblem’, Brunner thus labels radical evil as the high point of Kantian philosophy, emphasizing that the moral-ontological problem is more profound than the epistemological problem.151 This absolute contradiction, the infinite gap between the moral command and the human moral will, can only be described by philosophy in Kant’s terms. Here, Brunner notes radical evil does not mean humanity is thoroughly evil with no good at all, but ‘in humanity nothing truly good, nothing purely good, but overall only a mixture of good and evil is to be found; evil is always there and belongs to the basic element of the existence ‘Grundproblem’, 40. Brunner’s addition. Ibid. 149  Ibid. Carlton S. Andersen, ‘Theological Anthropology and Christian Social Ethics: The Imago Dei as Relational Ontology in the Political thought of Emil Brunner and Douglas John Hall’(Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Luther Seminary, 2001), 1–64, sees Brunner’s anthropology as built on a relational ontology of the ‘juridical and structural’ on the one hand, and the ‘agapic and personal’ on the other. While, Andersen, 45, notes Brunner was criticized for isolating ‘the personal from the affairs of the world’ because of his reliance on the Kantian transcendental subject, he helpfully notices that Brunner ‘certainly distinguishes the dimension of the personal from that of the juridical or structural, but he does not separate them’. 150  ‘Gesetz II’, 3. 151  ‘Grundproblem’, 40. 147  148 

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of human life’.152 Now, evil leads to the concept of guilt, signifying the end of moral reason: ‘The end of moral knowledge is this: that I cannot justify myself, the knowledge of guilt’.153 Based on this determination, Brunner affirms that ‘Kant is the sole philosopher who has taken the concept of radical evil completely seriously. Not because he came from a pietistic house, although I do not want to deny this as a cause, but because he was compelled by his concept of the law towards his concept of the good’.154 Still, ‘he did not reach the entire depth of the biblical-Reformation understanding of sin. Sin is invariably only a moral concept to him, it does not mean: “Against you alone have I sinned”’.155 In Kant’s notion of radical evil ‘the human contravenes only the law, but sin is a personal break with the lawgiver himself’.156 Kant, therefore, stands in the middle between most philosophical conceptions of evil and the Christian understanding: ‘Sin is not toned down as in Schleiermacher to mere sensuality, however on the other side it is also not defiance against God as with Paul and the Reformers. Kant’s philosophical concept of sin really stands between the two as the border’.157 For humans, anti-nomia or rejection of the moral law constitutes a Selbstwiderspruch, resulting in ontic selfcontradiction that betrays an even greater problem – human distance from God. In ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, Brunner brings the argument home with a quotation reminding the reader of the theological rubric underlying the argument: ‘Coepi judicare decalogum esse dialecticam Evangelii (Luther). The law stands between us and God’.158 The law is an indication of a discrepancy between Sein and Sollen, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, signifying a disconnect in the relation between the individual and God: ‘That the Divine comes to my consciousness as an imperative instead of as an indicative shows that I am separated from it’.159 Here, everything turns on the distance between the indicative and imperative: ‘Our action is always directed towards an ultimate, substantiating law. However our action never reaches this final, meaningful “ought” implicit within being’.160 Simply put, humans are not able to be what ‘Offenbarung’, 104. This is an early form of his later doctrine of the formal and material imago dei. Cf. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 293: ‘Our good will is never pure . . . we never do God’s will, but we always split the difference between God’s will and our will’. 153  ‘Grundproblem’, 40. 154  ‘Gesetz II’, 3. 155  Ibid. 156  Ibid. 157  Ibid. Cf. Man, 127. 158  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 294. 159  ‘Grundproblem’, 40. Cf. God and Man, 81–2. 160  ‘Offenbarung’, 102. 152 

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they ought according to the law of their being: ‘Thus never at any moment can our action coincide with its law’.161 Whereas theoretical reason reaches its end in the transcendental dialectic, ‘the critical principle reaches its fulfillment in the knowledge of guilt or radical evil. It first becomes entirely serious with critical idealism, at that point, where we can no longer translate the word “Krisis” with anything but the word judgment’.162 Specifically, it is reflection on the moral law that accentuates the Krisis because ‘here, the law creates persons and therefore is itself personal will. Idealistic contemplation becomes religious’.163 In fact, the human selfcontradiction comes to look increasingly like a battle of wills: ‘Reality and law are two points that still coincide in the state of immediacy, then always move apart; at this point becoming opposite poles that repel each other: the divine will, against which the human will revolts’.164 Brunner summarizes the noetic and ontic paradox governing human existence as follows: The deeper the human personality is grasped, the greater its distance from the given conditions of nature, the higher its dignity, the more pronounced its naturally predominant freedom, the more the tension grows between us and all absolutes up to the maximum point where the consciousness of absolutes, with its clarity, threatens to tear apart precisely that same connection with it: in the knowledge that our existence as a whole is culpable, separated from God, sinful – in the knowledge of the divine judgment.165 As noted, Brunner determines that none of the philosophies or theologies of the nineteenth century he is targeting were willing to accept the paradox of self-contradiction and divine judgement, which subsequently leads him to examine their ‘exit strategies’ from the Kantian doctrine of radical evil. Brunner accordingly reckons with the various attempts to find an alternative to radical evil, primarily either in the metaphysical and speculative (e.g. Hegel, mysticism) or in the developmental (e.g. materialism, naturalism). ‘Die Menschenfrage’ indicates that humanism rejects this ‘line of death’ (Todeslinie) implied by radical evil, citing Goethe’s horror at Kant’s doctrine, which decisively disrupts what Brunner calls Goethe’s ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘monism’.166 Brunner further estimates that most forms of humanism 161  162  163  164  165  166 

Ibid. ‘Grundproblem’, 41. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 41. Ibid. ‘Menschenfrage’, 11. Cf. Der Mittler, 104 (ET: 128).

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bridge over any gaps between God and humanity caused by radical evil with ‘culture and education . . . or what is the same thing, through the notion of intellectual [geistig] development’.167 In this vein, Brunner virtually reduces all the non-critical idealists down to a least common denominator in their attempt to resolve the contradiction between the moral law and human activity: ‘Evolutionism as it is presented most powerfully by Hegel, most naturalistically by Schleiermacher and most spiritedly by Herder has become the means to establish the continuity from ought [Sollen] to is [Sein], from the idea to intellectual [geistlich] reality’.168 On this basis, Brunner concludes that in the variety of forms encountered, non-critical idealism always merges humanity and divinity in its attempt to explain away the reality of evil.169 Even the purely historical perspective is wholly aesthetic and fails in this regard.170 ‘In history’, by which Brunner means historicism – the method rejected at the outset in ‘Die Menschenfrage’ – ‘this becoming one takes place, therefore history is redemption, and the historical conscience is the true enthusiasm [Enthusiasmos]’.171 Whereas all the great idealists attempted to deal with the problem of evil, they all tried to solve it through speculation and contemplation, but did not recognize ‘that here such observation, the intellectual aesthetic itself is evil’.172 ‘All these “ways out” are nothing other than an attempt to sneak oneself out of the existential tension, out of the relationship of personal account, withdrawal [from the stage] into the auditorium, giving the impersonal precedence over the personal: frivolity’.173 Brunner then suggests that there can be nothing else behind this contemplative turn inwards than an attempt to find the ‘the ultimate meaning, the final justification’.174 What is found, however, is only the ‘the breaking apart of the actual will and the will insofar as it should be good’.175 The failure of humanism/idealism to achieve a real unity between human Sein and Sollen therefore leads to despair and then guilt. Guilt places humanity itself in question and therefore the entire humanistic project. Instead of finding God, which it seeks, it finds guilt and by implication the separation of the Autos and the Nomos, the Sein and the Sollen: ‘Here it must come to decision. 167  168  169  170  171  172  173  174  175 

Ibid., 12. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 13. Cf. Der Mittler, 98–129 (ET: 122–52). ‘Offenbarung’, 105. Parenthetical addition mine. ‘Menschenfrage’, 13. Ibid.

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It aims first at guilt, then autonomy ends because then the Autos and the Nomos break apart – then the Nomos and the Autos stand over against each other, as another will’.176 With the prideful autonomy banished because of guilt, humanity can no longer identify itself as lawgiver, meaning that it must ultimately acknowledge the law as the will of God.

V.  The Origin, the Law and the Imago Dei Generally, in Brunner’s description of reason, the notion of an Absolute appears first to theoretical reason, although the impersonal incoherence of this notion, further qualified by the limits of theoretical reason and its antinomies, actually serves to reinforce the limits of humanity. In the earlier essay ‘Grenzen’, however, Brunner does not appear content to end the story with the limits of theoretical reason as such and re-engages his own thought process in a way that seemingly negates everything said to that point about the limits of humanity: ‘Where there is a limit, there is a limit-setting. For limits to be known as limits, a position outside of what is limited must be possible. Where a relative is known as relative, there must be an Absolute within sight, by which the relative as such is knowable’.177 Brunner even invokes the dialectical Yes and No language to reinforce his point: ‘Where something is negated, there can only be negation with consideration of something else, which is affirmed’.178 Yet, instead of pushing directly into moral reason, as he will consistently do later, in the earlier essay ‘Grenzen’ Brunner turns to focus on the ‘origin’ (Ursprung) of the limits of humanity, which approximates to his treatment of the primitive state and imago dei in the later essays. Here, the limits of humanity indicate not only finitude and cosmological distance, but also nearness: ‘We have a share in this limitsetting’ because ‘the Absolute, by which we know our affirmations as relative, is for it at the same time its origin’.179 Despite the adjacent emphasis on the limits of humanity, the thrust of Brunner’s notion of ‘origin’ is akin to Platonic anamnesis, another notion he connects directly to the primitive state and the imago dei: ‘It must also be that we stand in an original connection with the truth itself, that we proceed from it, that what is more original [ursprünglicher] than the deviation which we actually know now is the unity, apart from which we could never come to 176  177  178  179 

Ibid., 15. ‘Grenzen’, 84. Ibid. Ibid., 84–5.

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knowledge of a deviation’.180 ‘Our thinking’, furthermore, ‘is determined as a reflection and directed by a fore-thinking that is not our thinking, although we are related to it at every step’.181 Thus, the ‘origin’ stands in an a priori transcendental relationship to humanity, placing human existence into question: ‘The Krisis under which all our action is placed does not rise out of us, but is the self-assertion of an archetypal relationship, which in principle precedes our life and the world of our experience . . . and in the fullest sense of the word, this Krisis is a judgment’.182 The forensic aspect of the argument is also apparent, resulting in the conceptions of responsibility and guilt, the inadequacy of human ‘personal being’, eventually also pointing to the absolute ‘archetype’ of human personal being, God.183 Nonetheless, the resulting concept of God remains empty, only serving to accent the distance between humanity and its divine ‘archetype’, despite the hint of proximity: ‘We gain the standpoint beyond the limits of humanity precisely in that we acknowledge it with absolute awe, with the absolute Pathos of distance’.184 In ‘Das Grundproblem’ as in ‘Grenzen’, Brunner also connects the origin and limits of humanity with the notion of a limit-setter and Absolute: ‘The idea of the origin and the limit came with knowledge of the legality of reason. While its relatedness to the absolute truth becomes clear to the human, it also becomes clear to him that he stands constantly on this side of the Absolute with everything within historical existence that will be the content of his thinking, willing and doing’.185 Although this assertion again appears to breech the limits of humanity, Brunner intends it only to reveal the ‘insurmountable conflict of being’ and ‘the chasm, which separates us from the Absolute’.186 While the limits indeed hint at the possibility of something beyond, it remains completely outside of the possibility of human experience: ‘Seeing a limit is not the same as seeing another land; the limit always indicates a beyond, although knowledge of the one who set the limit is still not given with the knowledge of the limit’.187 Whereas the limits of reason appear to point towards the reality of a limitsetter, it remains an empty concept outside of experience. Kant, instead of speculating to find the ‘limit-setter himself’, remains faithful to the limits 180  181  182  183  184  185  186  187 

Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 87. Cf. ‘Grundproblem’, 34. ‘Grundproblem’, 35. Ibid. Ibid., 36.

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and laws binding human thinking.188 ‘The transcendental dialectic’, therefore, ‘which not only ends, but caps the Critique of Pure Reason, is nothing other than the technical-intellectual, impeccably developed safeguarding of the limit’.189 In fact, the Ding-an-sich, the antinomies and the limits of conceptual thinking, as the greatest question marks on all human knowledge ‘ought to keep alive the troubling reminder, that all our knowledge is relative, in the ambiguous sense: that we are constantly related to an Absolute, a beyond, and in this relation lies the whole meaning of thinking; and that still this Other can never itself become an object of knowledge, but must always remain transcendent to our knowledge’.190 While the law and limits of theoretical reason hint at the possibility of an Absolute, it nonetheless remains an empty concept because it stands not only beyond the limits of reason, but also beyond experience. This, however, is not the end of Brunner’s dealing with the limits of reason and the Absolute. In moral reason, by contrast, it is the increasingly personal character of the moral law that yields a concept of the Absolute. Indeed, ‘in the sphere of morality the Absolute itself comes up to me and grasps me’.191 By emphasizing the paradoxical divine provenance of the moral command, Brunner renders an important formula he frequently uses in his later theology: ‘I am spoken to, and therefore responsible’.192 This personal call to responsibility, while bearing implications for the existence of a personal God, also forms the basis of human dignity. The categorical moral imperative therefore means no longer dealing with an ideal or hypothetical moral agent, but with a real person. It reveals ‘that I am an I, a responsible subject’.193 Further, ‘it is the knowledge of the divine claim, of the divine calling, of my being spoken to by God that brings me to the consciousness of my human dignity’.194 The necessity of transcendence for knowledge in theoretical reason is analogous to the transcendent call to responsible being in moral reason. However, Brunner shrewdly indicates that this call to responsible being is no experience, that is, it is not immanent, rather it is ‘rooted singularly and solely in this claim, and even only becomes known out of it’.195 188  189  190  191  192  193  194  195 

Ibid. Ibid., 37. Ibid. Ibid., 40. ‘Offenbarung’, 103. ‘Grundproblem’, 39. Ibid. Ibid.

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While this transcendent call reveals personal moral responsibility in relation to an Absolute, it also reveals distance from the Absolute because the qualification – humanity’s inability to fulfil the moral command (analogous to the limits of theoretical reason) – shows that the law stands in between the Absolute and humanity, preventing knowledge of the Absolute: ‘Therein lays the foundation of my dignity, but therein – that I merely ought and yet do not stand there where I ought of my own accord – the chasm between me and the Absolute reveals itself’.196 This does not lead to a proper conception of God, but only of divine will as law, instantly problematizing any account of God derived from moral reason. Here, Brunner’s entire line of thought is built on his understanding of the law as a necessary a priori for both human knowing and doing: The presupposition of this entire movement is a Something, in which the human finds himself, something thus, which his questioning and seeking, his earnest willing and his enthusiastic elevation over external conditions, have as a basis: The idea, the law [Gesetz], through which the truth or necessity of all conditions [Setzungen] is justified, out of which all human doing and thinking creates its intellectual and spiritual [geistig] content, that which as the hidden thread in all truth and meaning is precisely that which makes it true and meaningful: The origin [Ursprung] and ground of all ideas that cannot be an idea, because it is itself their origin and ground.197 Building on the idealistic concept of law or idea, Brunner stresses the unifying nature of this ‘origin’ for both the inner and outer worlds, nonetheless equally emphasizing that, as the origin of all ideas, the law cannot transcend itself; the law is the magnet to which everything has been drawn, and the point where idealism comes to rest.198 Brunner accordingly emphasizes that the law is an insurmountable barrier to anything absolute, even in reference to itself: ‘We indeed never find the law, but only laws, never the truth, only truths’ and significantly, ‘always only laws, but never the lawgiver’.199 As such, the law marks the limits of humanity on all sides, both theoretically and morally, meaning that humanity will not be able to attain anything but empty concepts when it pursues the Absolute through reason. However, as hinted above, humanity encounters not only its 196  197  198  199 

Ibid., 40. ‘Menschenfrage’, 7. Ibid., 8. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 292.

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theoretical and moral limits in its pursuit of the Absolute, but also an existential Krisis. It is on this basis that Brunner suggests that the problem with Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, contrary to Goethe, was not that it says too much, but that it says too little.200 In Christian terms, by contrast, the word is sin, signifying no mere deprivation or negation, but a personal act of the human will against the divine will.201 Beyond being merely a moral concept of evil or the bad, sin is only possible where God’s will is known and personally rejected. In order to explore this distinction, Brunner gives an account of humanity’s original relationship with God and the fall, which employs a description of the provenance of the law through the doctrines of the primitive state and the imago dei, the philosophical equivalent of which is the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis. Whereas the divine will is known prior to the fall, ‘this is firstly no law, no imperative, but an indicative, God speaks ‘you are mine, I am your creator, you are created in my image’.202 In ‘Die Menschenfrage’, the will of God in the primitive state is not a command, although Brunner later adopts the term command to highlight a distinction between the pre-legal primitive state and the post-fall law: ‘In the beginning there is not a command, but the self-communication of God to creation. This given will is the first, the ground of everything, even of human being’.203 Nonetheless, humanity rebels against the divine will and claims autonomy, even though ‘autonomy is the lie, ingratitude, arrogance, rebellion’.204 It is therefore ‘in the moment where this lie about autonomy takes place that the law or Nomos appears’.205 Thus, in the model of the primitive state, the law appears because of sinful personal rebellion against the divine will.206 ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, by contrast, places weight on the doctrine of the imago dei, which in this case performs roughly the same service as the primitive state: ‘What then, from the perspective of faith, is the sin to which forgiveness is directed, the sin, which at the same time is the lack of knowledge to which revelation is directed? What else could it be than the defiant-arrogant misjudging of the primal-relationship between creator and creation? The creature is given birth through the self-communication of God. Because humanity is created in this image’.207 Whereas the divine image in humanity 200  201  202  203  204  205  206  207 

‘Menschenfrage’, 16. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 16. Cf. Man, 98, 103. Ibid., 16. Ibid. ‘Menschenfrage’, 16. Cf. Dogmatics II, 119–21. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 296.

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was originally indicative, humanity rejected this gift and treated it instead as an imperative and warrant to autonomy.208 God’s giving and humanity’s receiving constitute the ‘primal-dissimilarity [Urungleichkeit]’ in which ‘the primal-similarity [Urgleichkeit] of God and humanity is grounded’.209 Humanity chooses to turn the passive receiving implied by the imago dei into the basis for autonomous activity, resulting in a self-emancipation from God, seizing upon its ‘gift’ of ‘primal-relationship’ (Urverhältnis) with God, in order to declare its autonomy and independence from God.210 However, instead of falling out of relationship with God entirely, human sin turns an originally gracious relationship into a legal one: ‘He has converted God’s gracious will into his law’.211 Yet, this is not all; the law is also a specific act of God against man: ‘The law is the reproachful self-assertion of God over against the mendacious independence of humanity. Humans now have as a condition what they originally had as unconditioned’.212 This two-fold form, examined in detail below, means that the law is a reformulation of humanity’s original relationship with God: humanity now pursues self-justification autonomously by means of law and God acts against this rebellion by imposing the law on humanity. Consequently, the law is the point at which humanity is both closest and farthest from God213, and Brunner repeats his connection of theoretical and practical reason: ‘The knowledge of the law is both, the knowing and moral reason: memory of God, the Platonic Anamnesis214, on which all dignity, all seriousness, all meaning of human existence rests; the thread which holds it all together, through which there is history’.215 Still, ‘it is at the same time, the more it is actually remembrance, the deeper the reflection goes, remembrance of the fall’.216 In ‘Die Menschenfrage’, Brunner also notes that the closest approximation to this view in philosophy is Plato’s story of the fall of humanity from heaven in the Phaedo.217 In contrast to the Christian doctrines of the primitive state and the imago dei, however, the Platonic fall Ibid. Ibid. 210  Ibid. 211  Ibid. 212  Ibid., 297. 213  Cf. ‘Aufgabe’, 177 and Emil Brunner, ‘Das Einmalige und der Existenzcharacter’, Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie 34, 3 (1929), 277. 214  Cf. Offenbarung, 107: ‘Remembrance of a better world, as Plato says’. 215  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 297. 216  Ibid., 297. See Emil Brunner, ‘Was heißt: Erbaut auf dem Grunde der Apostel und Propheten?’ (Verhandlungen der Schweizerischen reformierten Predigergesellschaft, 1925), 41: ‘Revelatio generalis’ brings ‘remembrance of this God and this relationship to God’. 217  ‘Menschenfrage’, 18. Cf. Mensch, 530 (ET: 554). 208  209 

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is not from a state of personal relationship with God but from divinity in general; it is not caused by defiance, but by weakness; humanity falls on its own and must return on its own.218 Thus, regardless of whether one speaks of anamnesis as a misguided and vague product of philosophical reflection, or the primitive state and imago dei as specifically Christian doctrines, both demonstrate sinful humanity’s distance and separation from God in relation to the beginning. This ambivalence ultimately confirms the fact that humanity under the law knows nothing of its origin: ‘The more remembrance, the greater the unrest; at the same time the consciousness of not-knowing and not-being-on-the-right-way, of sin, is all the more clear with this remembrance’.219

VI.  Law and Revelation a.  The Two-fold Meaning of the Law Following on from the doctrine of humanity’s original, non-legal relationship with God and the presence of the law in between God and humanity because of sin, an ‘enigmatic’, two-fold meaning of the law becomes apparent.220 Humanity experiences the law both objectively and subjectively: it is ‘the way in which God encounters humanity on its way, it is thoroughly the divine in history. And still as that which marks humanity with its sin, that which separates humanity the most from God’.221 In other words, ‘the law is God refraining from humanity because humanity refrains from God.. . .Thus the law is given expression at the same time out of the power of God and out of the power (or powerlessness) of sin’.222 The law is both God’s objective act against sin and humanity’s subjective-sinful perception of God. Brunner affirms this dualism by referencing Luther’s description of the law as the ‘opus alienum of God’.223 ‘The law’, therefore, belongs on his judging side, to the Deus absconditus, to the divinity that we only see darkly through the atmosphere of sin. The God of idea and law is always a far-away God. Even, as it were, an impersonal God. . ., the law is neutral. The law is a rigid necessity, not a living free will. That is the God 218  219  220  221  222  223 

Ibid., 18. Cf. Man, 554. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 297. Cf. ‘Was heißt?’, 41. Ibid., 297. Ibid. ‘Menschenfrage’, 17. ‘Gesetz II’, 5.

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of humanism, of reason. That is the God, who we do not trust with the heart, but before whom we can only fear. And that is not God, as he is in truth.224 It is in this way that ‘the absoluteness of God plays out in the unconditioned nature of the law, according to its form and goal. However at the same time, this relationship to God is a conditioned relation, which humanity only has through the law to the Absolute and to the law [itself]: CommandFulfillment; Cause-Effect’.225 Humanity’s entire relationship to the Absolute is determined by the law, as a legal relationship to a legal Absolute. Stated subjectively, then, ‘the God, who does not communicate himself, God therefore insofar as we must find him is, as we have already seen, the unknowable, the Deus absconditus sive absolutus’.226 Objectively, however, ‘it is God and yet not God, as he wants to be for us, but asserts himself against us, therefore: the wrathful, judging, destructive God’.227 As the objective act of the law is God’s real action against human sin, or ‘the absoluteness of God which holds onto us in this condition’228, the wrath of God is neither a sinful-subjective misunderstanding of divine holiness, nor ‘does it appear to indicate . . . as in Tillich . . . a remnant of a demonic conception of God, but it is actually God himself’.229 The hiddeness and the wrath of God are God’s specific, objective acts in response to sin, but also humanity’s corresponding sinful understanding of God. This two-fold meaning of the law dictates ‘everything that we meaningfully do and rightly know, we know and do by virtue of the law and within the law’230, demanding that true knowledge of sin and judgement and true knowledge of grace are alone revealed apart from the law in Jesus Christ. Put negatively, ‘the turn cannot come from us’.231 Indeed, ‘the Krisis is therefore the turn to this duality: the knowledge of sin, of judgement and the revelation of grace, of eternal life. However even the full knowledge of sin is only possible through revelation. And both are only possible there where God gives himself to make sin and grace manifest to us’.232 This leads Brunner to an additional significant conclusion about the relationship between revelation and justification. 224  225  226  227  228  229  230  231  232 

Ibid. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 297. Ibid., 294. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 297–8. Ibid., 298. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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b.  Revelation and Justification In ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung II’, Brunner follows his statements on the Deus absconditus by emphasizing a theologia crucis. In contrast to the incomplete knowledge of God and self that is conveyed by the Deus absconditus, ‘only in the cross of Christ can humanity know the weight of sin’.233 Traditionally tied to the doctrine of the law, the theology of the cross exemplifies both God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ and revelation of the reality of human sin; it entails the objective removal of the law from between God and humanity, and therefore the possibility and restoration of non-legal human subjectivity. In the other essays, Brunner focuses on the presence of the law ‘in between’ God and humanity. Whereas only a wrathful, hidden God can be known under the law, likewise, ‘sin’ can only be spoken of as an incom­ prehensible radical evil: ‘We cannot know that we are sinners; that we can only believe’.234 The law, therefore, must be removed as a barrier between humanity and God before sin can be known: We know of ourselves as sinful humans only there where we do not stand opposite a law, but we encounter a living self-communicating personal will of God speaking to us in a particular moment; not therefore through a kind of knowledge that can take place always and everywhere, but only there where God himself speaks in time, where the Word of the beginning, the word of grace, breaking through the world of law as the wonder of God’s justification apart from the law, is revealed to us.235 While the law indeed indicates some form of radical evil or provides hints about humanity’s lost origin, it cannot reveal the ultimate truth about the fall and sin. In self-revelation, however, God actually overcomes the law. It is ‘the personal God’s act of breaking through the law. . . . Revelation is this, that nothing stands between us and God’.236 This means that if what we said about sin is the truth and we know that it is the truth, then we cannot know this truth on our own, but it can only come from beyond the limits of everything human, in this way the Word – the original meaning of God that we have lost and to which no anamnesis can lead us back because the law lies between us – speaks to us again, it is in this 233  234  235  236 

‘Gesetz II’, 5. See the treatment of theologia crucis in Der Mittler, 392–410 (ET: 435–54). ‘Menschenfrage’, 18. Ibid. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 294.

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way therefore that we accept communication – law-free communication given by God – through revelation and faith.237 Significantly, Brunner qualifies this by noting that despite the removal of the law, revelation does not mean an immediate connection to God as conceived in mysticism, rather true divine revelation proceeds solely from God to humanity: ‘We therefore refer to Christ as God’s revelation, because there God is God entirely as himself. And conversely, we know that God is there for us, because God reveals himself to us in him’.238 This means that Christ reveals forgiveness from the condemnation of the law and reveals himself personally as God whereas the law previously stood in between God and humanity – a two-fold form of revelation corresponding to the two-fold form of the law: ‘The Mediator of forgiveness is at the same time the turning point from the Deus absconditus to the Deus revelatus, because he is the Mediator of the true knowledge of God. And the cover which here falls from the face of God is that which is everything to idealism: the law’.239 ‘Forgiveness alone’, then, ‘not some ideal soaring, only a repeat of that drastic mercy which establishes the beginning, can clear away that which is come in between, law and sin’.240 The relationship between forgiveness and law, that is, that forgiveness clears away law and sin, leads Brunner to posit the identification of revelation and forgiveness/justification: ‘Therefore it is the same whether we speak of revelation or forgiveness’.241 A footnote in ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’ further clarifies Brunner’s intentions: ‘There `is a “formal” and a “material” version of the revelation of salvation, the formal principle of revelation and the material principle of justification, which nevertheless rightly understood are one’.242 By this, Brunner simply means that special revelation in Christ and Christ’s work of forgiveness cannot stand independently of one another. Rather, for a complete account of special divine revelation, both must be held together as one, with the additional emphasis that one is always incomplete without the other – the same concern reflected in the critique ‘Menschenfrage’, 17–18. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 295. Cf. Nature, 33. 239  ‘Menschenfrage’, 22. 240  Ibid., 19. 241  Ibid., 20. Cf. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 294: ‘Therefore, revelation and forgiveness are the same’. Also, 296: ‘Through revelation is forgiveness’. Cf. ‘Gnosis und Glaube’, 33: ‘Revelation means: God says this. Justification means: God says this. They are both grounded in the Word of God’. Barth expresses concern about this in their correspondence: Barth-Brunner, EB: likely August 1924 (#44), 102–3. 242  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 295 n. 9. Cf. Mystik, 160: ‘The law is the ratio cognoscendi of our freedom, and it is this because the actual will of God within it is its ratio essendi’. 237  238 

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of Barth’s ‘one-sided’ cosmological account of revelation, which to Brunner means that the distinction between God and humanity is based primarily on human finitude and sheer distance from God, not sin.243 Elsewhere, however, not only revelation and justification, but ‘faith and revelation are correlates’244, and in ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung II’, Brunner connects this theme to the problem of law and revelation: Real reflection over the relationship between revelation and law, as we have expected, has led us into the middle of all Christian knowledge, of sin and grace, of forgiveness and reconciliation. The problem of reason and revelation, usually called the problem of apologetics or of the philosophy of religion, is not therefore a problem in its own right and cannot be handled prior the particular central question of dogmatics, but only together with it.245 With this, Brunner defends his assertion of the centrality of the lawrevelation problematic as well as attempting to deflect the criticism that his thinking is apologetic by connecting it to the central dogmatic concern of justification: ‘The Christian theory of knowledge . . . originates in the same moment as faith in justification. Indeed they are the same’.246 Revelation and justification therefore correspond to the law in its twofold meaning: ‘This revelation proves itself to be a reversal of the human way in that it is the highest humiliation for all human pride, the radical disarmament of reason, moral as well as noetic’.247 While the incarnation is ‘foolishness’ to theoretical reason, its ‘humiliation’ of moral reason in relation to justification and the end of the law is even greater. This is also analogous to the unity of theoretical and moral reason: ‘The epistemological answer says: ultimate truth is the revelation of God. However, the final answer to the practical question of salvation also says just as much. The question of truth and the question of salvation do not fall apart from each other but are one. But only here are they one. In  all of philosophy they fall asunder’.248 See Chapter. 1, section III.b above. ‘Offenbarung’, 118. Cf. Cairns, ‘Theologians of our Time XVIII. The Theology of Emil Brunner’, 56. Citing Dogmatics III, 173f., Cairns writes, ‘Brunner makes it quite clear that . . . revelation and faith are exactly correlative in the New Testament, so that Paul can speak of “justification through Christ” and “justification by faith” as synonymous’. 245  ‘Gesetz II’, 5. 246  Ibid. 247  ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 295. 248  ‘Gesetz II’, 5. 243  244 

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Significantly, Brunner’s formulations are intended to show that law and revelation belong in a dialectical relationship: the one special revelation, which entails both God’s self-revelation and justifying work, corresponds directly to Brunner’s two-fold meaning of the law. In terms of a unified (theoretical and moral) conception of revelation, Brunner writes: ‘Revelation is this, that we who are banned to the circle of legalistic knowledge again hear the original word from beyond the law, the word from the beginning in the giving and enfolding grace of God, thus the Word of God itself unblocked by law and sin’.249 However, in explicit connection to theoretical reason, revelation occurs ‘apart from all law, not through our spirit, but through God’s spirit, thus runs the Pauline, the biblical formulation of the “epistemology of revelation”, if we may express ourselves so analogically’.250 Likewise, to moral reason: ‘What else should forgiveness be than just this revelation of justification, of God’s life apart from the law in our legally-determined world?’251 Finally then, God’s revelation in Christ also entails an explicit contrast between personal presence and impersonal distance: ‘Our relationship to him is not like the non-temporal relationship that we have with an idea, but with that of an actual moment in time, with a preterit, with a contingent fact of history, which still, as revelation of eternity, cannot be anything historical’.252 In sharp contrast to God as an impersonal immanent necessity or as a part of the world under the law, in self-revelation God stands as a person, ‘as this free Lord over the law . . . as the free, personal Lord, God is only to be known where he communicates himself as such to us, and that means simply: through revelation’.253 In this vein, Brunner’s understanding of revelation, which corresponds to both theoretical and moral reason, clearly reflects his attempt to incorporate an account of the laws of reason into a dialectic of law and gospel, ultimately setting the stage for his account of the end and fulfilment of the laws of reason by the gospel. c.  The End and Fulfilment of the Law The dialectical relationship between law and revelation is slightly more complex, however, because revelation and justification do not simply replace legalistic thinking about God and self. On the one hand, ‘rational, 249  250  251  252  253 

‘Menschenfrage’, 20. ‘Offenbarung’, 120. ‘Menschenfrage’, 20. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 295. ‘Offenbarung’, 120.

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provable, knowledge means movement within the legality of thought. . . . This method of the law, this legal necessity is what is abolished by revelation’.254 On the other hand, ‘the antirational, which is still at the same time the fulfillment of all rationality  .  .  .  that is the dialectical double position in which the Christian faith stands to reason’.255 Here, the essential law-gospel structure to Brunner’s argument becomes even more pronounced: not only does Christ stand opposite the law as its endpoint, Christ also fulfils the law. God’s revelation ‘is not irrational, but Antirational: the abolition [Aufhebung] of the law, which at the same time is its fulfillment [Erfüllung]. The content of revelation is this inconceivable thing: the forgiveness of sins, the selfrevelation of the hidden God’.256 With specific reference to theoretical reason, the Deus revelatus, or self-revealed living God, replaces the idea of the Deus absconditus, that is, the incarnate Jesus Christ answers the questions about the Absolute formulated in theoretical reason. On a deeper level, in terms of moral reason, the hidden and condemning God of wrath is replaced by the revealed God in Christ who works forgiveness and justification. Revelation, then, can only be a paradox and wonder to human theoretical and moral reason, because ‘it takes the presupposition of all thinking, the law itself, out of power’.257 In other words, the God of revelation completely upends all the legal norms of human thinking, with the result that the law no longer stands in between God and humanity: ‘We only find God there as himself, where he, temporally, but outside of the law, in history and still not in history, speaks his word that contradicts all our thinking, because it abolishes the law’.258 Thus, ‘faith knows this alone, that that which abolishes the law at the same time also fulfills it’.259 d.  The Delimitation of Revelation Finally, another significant feature of Brunner’s dialectic of law and revelation emerges at this point, one which also forms the centrepiece of his criticism of Barth in the mid-1920s: the notion of the ‘delimitation’ (Abgrenzung) of divine revelation.260 While it is frequently supposed that ‘dialectical theology’ radically reintroduced divine revelation to Continental theology in the late teens and early 20s, this characterization is only partially 254  255  256  257  258  259  260 

Ibid., 118. Ibid. Ibid., 115. Ibid. ‘Menschenfrage’, 23. Ibid. See Chapter 4, section 1.b below.

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true. As evident in the analysis to this point, Brunner is far less concerned with the absence of revelation in modern theology than with what he sees as a surplus of revelation traceable to a consistent failure to acknowledge the ‘limits of humanity’. Brunner believes that it is this characteristic of modern theology that leads to a breakdown in the distinction between reason and revelation, philosophy and theology and ultimately, nature and grace. In this regard, Brunner finds the struggles of Paul, the Fathers and the Reformers as essentially focused on the delimitation of divine revelation in the face of other spurious revelatory and ‘enthusiastic’ claims, and he accordingly understands the dialectic of law and revelation to serve this delimiting function because it provides a theologically determined distinction between general and special revelation. As noted above, Brunner begins ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung II’ with precisely this issue: Law and Revelation: These words strike upon a particular dogmatic theme. If we wanted to use the language of Reformed scholasticism, the locus de foedere would be meant. This locus deals with the relationship of revelatio generalis and revelatio specialis, or rather on the confinium of both, the border zone that lies between the proper Christian revelation and the general revelation in nature.261 The law, therefore, draws the line of distinction between general and special revelation: ‘This border zone is determined by the concept law’ and, therefore relevant to the conversation between philosophy and theology. In other words, ‘this theme gains all the more meaning in the interaction between Christian faith and the universal Zeitgeist’.262 Brunner now argues that divine revelation in Jesus Christ leads to two circles of questions and mandates two specific tasks. First, those questions which attempt to come to a more precise understanding of revelation, and second, those questions which ‘demand an account of this faith from the perspective of general consciousness’.263 Thus, in a move foreshadowing ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’ of 1929, Brunner deems that these two questions form ‘theology’s circle of duties’264, which he will later explicitly call the dogmatic and eristic tasks of theology. Brunner further circumscribes both tasks of theology with a statement which, according to his perspective at the time, could have been aimed at either Barth or Schleiermacher: ‘The 261  262  263  264 

‘Gesetz II’, 1. Ibid. ‘Offenbarung’, 108. Ibid.

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delimitation and safeguarding of the Christian concept of revelation is the great theme of Christian thinking’.265 From this standpoint, then, a ‘double theme’ emerges as a further clarification of the two tasks of theology given above: first, ‘what is, what is the meaning of, and what constitutes the limit of the statement: God was in Christ?’, and second, ‘on what is the Christian faith grounded considering the protest of the natural rational consciousness? – these expressions – are all themes derived from the early church, the middle ages, the Reformation and modern theology’.266 This casts the whole of Christian theology and its entire ‘circle of duties’ into a framework corresponding to Brunner’s notions of the end and fulfilment of the twofold meaning of the law, as well as the identification of revelation and justification. As to the first theme concerning the delimitation of revelation, Brunner indicates the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated on precisely these grounds, ‘enclosure against the carelessness of heathen polytheism on the one side, and against the timidity of a revelation-less Jewish monotheism on the other side, as both wanted to be asserted within the Christian church’.267 It meant that ‘God himself actually deals with humanity in Christ, that revelation is really revelation, that in the revelation in Christ, God himself, thus the eternally unknowable and hidden, reveals himself; that is the meaning of the doctrine and the passionate struggle over Triunity’.268 As to the second theme, the safeguarding of revelation, ‘the struggle over the servum arbitrium, justification alone by faith, the singular validity of the Word of God of Scripture means nothing other than the opposition of the Christian faith in revelation against either the humanistic or the churchly salvation of humanity through humanity’.269 In both cases, Brunner understands the task of theology as defining this revelation and distinguishing it from competing conceptions. In this regard, Brunner perceives the early church’s doctrine of the Trinity and the Reformation’s doctrines justification and Scripture to be specifically directed towards the delimitation and safeguarding of revelation:270 ‘Such is the problem in which theology has distinctively moved since the time of the Enlightenment and nothing else; what is meant in particular in the formula “Reason and Revelation” is again Ibid. Ibid., 109. Ibid. Cf. Der Mittler, 243–4 (ET: 276). 268  ‘Offenbarung’, 109. 269  Ibid. 270  Brunner perceives an intimate connection between the Protestant Orthodox Scripture principle and the doctrine of justification. See Barth-Brunner, EB: 23 January 1924 (#41), 88 and Barth-Brunner, EB: after 13 March 1925 (#48), 88. 265  266  267 

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the delimitation of the specific Christian concept and the specific Christian grounding of the content of faith over against the humanistic-rational or romantic-mystical reinterpretation or surrogate concepts’.271 These concerns have a profound impact on what Brunner considers to be the task of theology, both critically and dogmatically, and it is to these tasks the analysis will turn, after a brief summary of the progress made thus far.

VII.  Summary The above review of the theme of ‘Law and Revelation’ examines some of Brunner’s most important occasional writings from the early to mid-1920s, indicating the pre-eminence of the law/reason and gospel/revelation dialectic in Brunner’s early theological thought. This theme, coupled with Brunner’s developing phenomenological method, reveals his view of the necessarily personal nature of the reason-revelation problematic and the corresponding moral-personal approach. Brunner’s stringent criticism, particularly of neo-Kantianism, but also of Hegel and Schleiermacher, as well as his deep admiration for Kant’s critical idealism sets the philosophical stage, where law is found to constitute both the ‘mark’ and ‘limits’ of humanity. The law, presented in terms of the laws of theoretical and moral reason, constitutes the border between philosophy and theology, and reason and revelation. In this regard, critical idealism, as the only philosophy known to Brunner that respects the limits of theoretical and moral reason, can form a partnership with theology and serve a critical function by guarding the limits of human reason.272 Significantly, Brunner labels violations of the limits of reason ‘enthusiasm’, further indicating the Reformation-oriented law-gospel substructure of his system. While the limits of theoretical reason are understood to give vague hints at something beyond, intellectual pursuit of absolutes results in antinomy, ultimately reinforcing the noetic distance between God and humanity. On a deeper level, however, the underlying primacy of moral reason demonstrates that the noetic distinction between God and humanity is based primarily on human sin, not human finitude. In this regard, sinful humanity is understood to be in ontic self-contradiction, expressed in terms of a contradiction between human Sein and Sollen, between what is and what ought to be. The rational inexplicability of this contradiction leads at best to the Kantian

271  272 

‘Offenbarung’, 109. See Krüger, 246.

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doctrine of radical evil, which was unsatisfactory to Romanticism and yet still short of the Christian doctrine of sin as personal rebellion against God. Brunner argues that all immanent attempts to resolve the human moral problem necessarily produce philosophical doctrines of anamnesis and ‘origin’, but again, these only reinforce humanity’s limits and distance from the Absolute. Finally, the dialectic of law and revelation renders four particular emphases, significant for Brunner’s later theology and his debate with Barth. First, there is a two-fold meaning of the law that corresponds to humanity’s wilful rebellion against God and produces a sinful-subjective determination of Deus absconditus on the one hand, and God’s objective response to the rebellion with law and wrath on the other. Second, insofar as Jesus Christ reveals both sin and grace, revelation and justification are bound together in response to this two-fold meaning of the law. Third, the gospel constitutes both the end and fulfilment of human theoretical and moral striving because the gospel is the end and fulfilment of the law that binds all human knowing and doing. Fourth, this means Christian theology must be intently concerned with the delimitation of divine revelation in Jesus Christ in terms of the independent particularity of this revelation itself, and in terms of its particularity in relation to other ‘revelations’, even ‘general revelation’, typically dealt with in the essays on law and revelation within the category of law. These four points are decisive elements in both Brunner’s eristic and dogmatic theology in the late 1920s, as well as in his position on nature and grace.

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Chapter 3

The Two Tasks of Theology

This chapter outlines the determinative influence of Brunner’s law-gospel dialectic on his eristic and dogmatic theology in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The analysis demonstrates not only the repetition of key themes from the slightly earlier writings on law and revelation, such as the underlying primacy of moral reason, the two-fold meaning of the law, the unity of revelation and justification and the pattern of end and fulfilment, but also the explicit application of these themes as tools for reckoning with the theological problems addressed in Der Mittler and ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’ (The Other Task of Theology). By identifying the continuity between Brunner’s earliest theology and his maturing attempt to develop an account of the christological doctrines, this chapter paves the final approach for the recognition and analysis of the role of Brunner’s law-gospel dialectic on his position in the nature-grace debate with Barth in 1934.

I. Eristics as the Other Task of Theology a.  ‘The Other Task of Theology’ Brunner’s long-term effort to develop the relationship between law and revelation culminates in his writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s that begin to mark publically what will lead to a definitive theological break with Barth. The seminal 1929 essay, ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’, uses the law-revelation dialectic to determine an appropriately contextual, or ‘journalistic’, two-fold method for theology. Adjacent to dogmatics proper, the ‘other’, or ‘eristic’ task of theology proceeds from the standpoint of revelation and works to identify the limits of humanity as demonstrated by Kantian critical idealism and the contradictions that arise in every immanent attempt to attain the Absolute, be it religious, philosophical, scientific or historical. Brunner’s renowned book on

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christology from 1927, Der Mittler, is an excellent example of this method in practice, although it precedes the aforementioned essay by nearly 2 years. Der Mittler begins with nearly 200 pages of critical interaction with any and all attempts to achieve contact with God through the immanent means of intellectual theory or moral practice, then demonstrates how these attempts ultimately encounter their limits in the law despite their ability to gain partial truths – a determination that can only made in faith. In this ‘eristic’ section, we see Brunner explicitly focusing on the contrast between general and special revelation. In the constructive section, we then observe Brunner detailing how the Mediator, Jesus Christ, as True God and True Man, ends and fulfils the human search for God spurred on by general revelation under the law by revealing himself as the person of the divine logos and serving as the objective ground of justification through his atoning work. In 1929, Brunner finally published his thoughts on theological method in an article for Zwischen den Zeiten entitled ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’. For decades, this article was viewed as the beginning of the end of the Barth-Brunner alliance and the first skirmish in the battle over nature and grace.1 John W. Hart suggests ‘the point of no return in the Barth-Brunner relationship was reached between the publication of Brunner’s ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ in  1929 and Barth’s visit to Marburg in January 1930’2, when it became manifestly clear to Barth that he also no longer had any substantial connection with Bultmann and Gogarten.3 Barth acknowledges the importance of the essay in his No! Response to Emil Brunner 4, and Brunner indicates the gravity of the situation in a letter to Barth of the same period, writing, ‘I know so much for certain: a critical point has been reached, where either something urgently necessary or fateful is going to have to occur’.5 Coming nearly 13 years into the Barth-Brunner relationship, ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ does not dramatically introduce a new tendency, but rather offers the most explicit formulation to date of what had long been a significant feature of Brunner’s programme. One of the enduring peculiarities of Brunner’s work is the use of intense polemic to preface constructive theology – work which frequently struggles to move beyond its polemical E.g. Volken, 10; Wildberger, 208 and Arthur Rich, ‘Zum Andenken an Emil Brunner’, Reformatio 15 (1963), 433. 2  Hart, 5 n. 5. 3  Ibid., 109. 4  Karl Barth, No!, 71. 5  Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 174. 1 

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standpoint.6 This pattern is already evident in Brunner’s 1914 dissertation and could possibly be written off as classical dialectical method were it not for the fact that it is also integrally connected to his thoughts on the dialectic of law and gospel. In reference to the intensely polemical Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube of 1921, John Hart notes, ‘the book takes a form which will become typical in most of Brunner’s future writings; it constitutes an analysis of and attack on some “provisional half-truths” (“experience” and “knowledge”) followed by a presentation of the resolution of these inadequate positions as found in the Gospel (“faith”)’.7 This ‘analysis and attack’ on ‘provisional half-truths’ prior to constructive thought is also especially clear in ‘Grenzen der Humanität (1922)’, Die Mystik und das Wort (1924), ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung (1925)’ and Der Mittler (1927). In a 1924 letter to Barth, Brunner even indicates the notion of doing dogmatics in connection with Calvin’s Institutes is gaining more traction in his thought, commenting that such a dogmatics ‘would be, so to speak, the counterpart to my book on Schleiermacher’.8 In this regard, Brunner’s official development of a theological methodology that corresponds to his work of the previous 15 years is hardly surprising. Brunner begins ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ with a complex description of theology’s first task: ‘It is the first task of theology to call the church, and in particular the one who proclaims the Word, again and again to new reflection on the Word of God that has been given to it, while it portrays the meaning of the message it has to deliver to the world on all sides and in all its connections’.9 Theology, therefore, will be essentially biblical, as the Bible is the primary witness of the occurrence of revelation. It is also essentially systematic, ‘as it pursues the objective connections of the words testified to in the Bible’.10 However, as biblical theology, it should be ‘existential’ (existentiell) and not historical, because Scripture does not lend itself to interpretation merely by observation, but rather by participation. Finally, notes Brunner, as systematic theology it is also ‘existential’ (existentiell) and not philosophical ‘insofar as the objective connection, which it features, is not grounded in the unity of thought but in the divine Word’.11 As Brunner This is particularly evident in the christology of Dogmatics II, 271–378. See for example Hermann Volk, ‘Die Christologie bei Karl Barth und Emil Brunner’, in Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht (eds.), Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, Vol. III (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1954), 669: ‘Brunner’s christology from The Mediator to the Dogmatics experiences a substantial decline; even a loss of theological substance has occurred’. 7  Hart, 33. 8  Barth-Brunner, EB: 23 January 1924 (#41), 90. 9  ‘Aufgabe’, 171. 10  Ibid. 11  Ibid. 6 

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affirms later in the essay: ‘According to the older usage we label the first task of reflective interpretation dogmatic. In a primarily positive and in an explicative manner it has to develop the right meaning and connection between the individual tenets of faith, without deliberately or expressly responding to those thoughts contrary to this truth’.12 Consequently, dogmatics is a constructive task, located within the church and offering interpretative reflection on the revelation of the Word of God. Again, ‘it is . . . a theory of existential significance, not therefore itself the Word of God, but human reflection on the Word of God, theologia ectypa, not archetypa’.13 The distinction between the revealed Word and theology is essential, having already arisen in his discussions with Barth and destined to reappear in Nature and Grace. Brunner’s insistence on this point would hardly change. Years later, he writes in Dogmatics I: ‘This revelation is the Word of God, towards which faith is directed, which it grasps and by which it is created. But theology, dogmatics, is not this faith itself—otherwise the theologian alone would be a true believer—but theology is faith in reflection by means of critical thought’.14 While the dogmatic task is essential, Brunner notes that because it is wholly oriented to and by the gospel, proceeding solely from the divine Word, it does not expressly consider thinking that contradicts it. Thus, as Brunner writes in Die Absolutheit Jesu 3  years earlier, ‘another, secondary theological task remains open  .  .  .  the debate between faith and other views’.15 Whereas the ‘first and essential’ task of theology involves the ‘reflective interpretation’, described above, such ‘reflection does not occur in an empty room, but in one that is filled within history’.16 That is, ‘the Word of God cannot fill an empty room, but seeks admittance into a house that is already occupied’.17 In this regard, Brunner draws an analogy between the personal existential encounter with the gospel and the theological method: on the personal-existential level, the Word of God must clear a space within the existential self-understanding before it can settle in; faith means not only obedience, but ‘a command to emigrate’.18 Accordingly, ‘Aufgabe’, 176. Compare with Absolutheit, 14, from 1926: ‘Theology . . . has as its task the explanation of faith’. Brunner writes in his opening lecture at Princeton Seminary in 1938, ‘A Theological Program’, The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 32, 3 (1939), 10, that theology has to be ‘biblical’, ‘scientific’ and ‘missionary’. 13  ‘Aufgabe’, 193. 14  Dogmatics I, 62. Cf. Emil Brunner, The Philosophy of Religion from the Standpoint of Protestant Theology (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), 18–19. 15  Absolutheit, 19. Cf. ‘Offenbarung’, 108. See Chapter 2, section VI.d above. 16  ‘Aufgabe’, 171. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid. See Gen. 12. 12 

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‘the proclamation of the Word is a summons to metanoia, to re-thinking, as a call to repentance, polemical. Its arrival is an attack, its establishment occurs in battle’.19 The gospel, therefore, ‘is in such a measure polemical, that its self-assertion means a killing and its acceptance means a dying’.20 As for theological method, this ‘attack’ comes in the form of theology’s critical interaction with philosophical and scientific self-understanding as expressed in the ‘sciences’. Reflection on the Word of God on both the personalexistential and theological levels requires these parallel forms of critical engagement; in this way, theological method follows the proclamation of the Word: ‘Therefore theology can be nothing other than polemical, insofar as it can indeed take place only in the participation of this coming of the Word’.21 Whereas proclamation of the Word of God implies an existential polemic directed at the individual-immanent self-understanding, ‘the theological polemic is directed primarily at the axiom of reason’.22 Revelation’s encounter with reason is analogous to the gospel’s encounter with the law, and in fact, as the law is the presupposition to the gospel23, an ‘understanding of the Divine Word itself presupposes reason’.24 In this vein, ‘the relation of reason and revelation is therefore from the outset no pure antithesis, indeed perhaps – in itself – no antithesis at all’25, and Brunner’s aim is to develop an account of the gospel’s relationship to reason without producing an anti-rational conception of revelation. As a proper account of the gospel cannot be antinomian, a proper account of revelation cannot therefore be anti-rational.26 Similar to the essays from the mid-1920s, Brunner’s solution to the problem of reason and revelation in ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ mirrors Christ’s work in relation to the law in terms of a two-fold task – end and fulfilment. These become the two parts of the ‘other’ task of theology, ‘not only to describe this process, but to concur with it, that is, to uncover reason’s delusion by means of the Word of God and to show reason its fulfillment in the Word of God’.27 In terms of the end of reason, Brunner suggests that

‘Aufgabe’, 171. Cf. ‘A Theological Program’, 8: ‘All Christian teaching and preaching is in a way polemic in so far as it has to fight against a wrong conception of life and a wrong will’. 20  ‘Aufgabe’, 171. 21  Ibid., 171–2. 22  Ibid., 172. 23  E.g. Mystik, 46; Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 26. 24  ‘Aufgabe’, 172. 25  Ibid. 26  However, see ‘Offenbarung’, 115 and 118. Cf. Hart, 75. 27  ‘Aufgabe’, 174. 19 

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the independent autonomous reason or the ‘axiom of reason’ is the proper object of theological polemic, because ‘the Word of God always first butts up against the contradiction of reason’.28 ‘Contradiction’ is a key term, because the problem is not with reason itself, but an abused version of reason set in revolt, opposition and self-contradiction – that is, when reason exceeds its proper limits and ends in antinomy, ‘which does not belong at all to the essence of reason’.29 ‘Still more’, Brunner continues, ‘the Word of  God demonstrates itself  .  .  .  as the fulfillment of reason’s own longing, previously bound and now freed’.30 While Brunner duly notes the similarity between his ‘other task’ and traditional apologetics, he suggests the latter – theology attempting to defend itself before ‘the tribunal of reason’ because it has lost its selfconfidence – has come into discredit.31 Rather, in the way ‘that every appropriate sermon is a wrestling down of hostile thoughts  .  .  .  and a fulfillment of hidden expectations’32, ‘theology can always only be an assault on humanity, never a defense’.33 Brunner even asserts that ‘polemic is the original form of theology’34, further bolstering the categorical distinction introduced above between proclamation of the Word and theology.35 In order to simplify the matter, Brunner combines the two tasks comprising the ‘other task’ of theology, end and fulfillment, emphasizes their unity and refers to them together as ‘“eristic” (erizein  to fight, eristike techne  the art of disputation)’.36 In summary, ‘it would thus be the task of eristic theology to show, through the Word of God, how human reason is partly disclosed as the source of an error that is hostile to life and is partly fulfilled in terms of its own unfulfillable seeking’.37 As the law is incapable of putting humanity in right relationship to God, so reason alone is incapable of giving humanity an adequate understanding of God and itself. Ibid., 173. Ibid. 30  Ibid. 31  Ibid., 174. 32  Ibid., 175. 33  Ibid., 174. Cf. ‘A Theological Program’, 9. 34  ‘Aufgabe’, 174. See Chapter 2, section VI.d below on Brunner’s understanding of the theological function of the doctrine of the Trinity. 35  ‘Aufgabe’, 174. Brunner also makes, a similar point in Der Mittler, 243–4 (ET: 276), by suggesting ‘the doctrine of the Trinity is a theological doctrine, not a scriptural proclamation (kerygma). It should not be preached’. Rather, it ‘is a defensive doctrine [Schutzlehre], which would not have been necessary in any way had the two fundamental tenets of the Christian creed been allowed to stand: God alone can help, and Christ alone is this divine help’. Brunner repeats this statement nearly verbatim in Die christliche Lehre von Gott: Dogmatik I (Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1946), 214 (ET: 206), also using Schutzlehre. 36  ‘Aufgabe’, 176. 37  Ibid. 28  29 

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Further, Brunner’s notion of the distinction between eristic and dogmatic theology is constructed in parallel to his understanding of the personalexistential encounter with law and gospel. Dogmatic theology is neither the gospel nor its proclamation, but rather reflection on the gospel in faith;38 likewise, the ‘other task of theology’ is not the law, but as part of theology properly grounded in the Word of God, it works critically to identify the end and fulfilment of the autonomous human reason by the gospel. In this regard, it is Brunner’s express intention that eristic theology is understood as a companion to dogmatics, grounded christologically and therefore presupposing Christian faith. Despite Brunner’s nearly endless repetition of these same emphases, Barth was dissatisfied and concerned this formulation would lead to a loss of the theological focus for which they had been fighting. b.  Barth and Brunner on Theological Method Meeting once again at the Bergli on the Zürichsee in  1929, the two controversial Swiss theologians engaged in their own controversy about ‘the other task of theology’.39 In typical fashion, Brunner attempts to continue the conversation almost immediately in a follow-up letter, responding to Barth’s critique on several points. First, Brunner suggests that the difference between ‘the Gogarten-Bultmann front’ and Barth’s own thought is only a matter of degree, not of kind.40 Second, Brunner rejects Barth’s accusation that eristic theology is pretentious, ironically asking whether eristics is more or less pretentious than the attempt to elucidate a doctrine of the Trinity.41 For his part, Barth seems to have indicated that critical interaction was clearly necessary for theology, however, as a task within dogmatics proper, not as a separate task, prompting Brunner to respond: ‘If eristics within dogmatics is not pretentious, but is necessary, then it is not invalid because it is pretentious’.42 Judging by Brunner’s letter, Barth also suggested that eristic theology was a distraction from the proper task of theology and therefore, a waste of time. In this vein, Wolfgang Schildmann suggests that Barth likely perceived One of Brunner’s students, J. Robert Nelson, ‘Emil Brunner-Teacher Unsurpassed’, Theology Today 19,4 (1963), 534, comments: ‘In distinguishing between theology and faith, [Brunner] declared that the devil himself could earn a D. Theol. under Karl Barth summa cum laude’. 39  Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 174 n. 1. Cf. Hart, 107 and Werner Kramer, ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie: Ein bleibendes Anliegen Emil Brunners im Briefwechsel mit Karl Barth’, Theologische Zeitschrift 57 (2001), 363–79. 40  Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 175. 41  Ibid. 42  Ibid. 38 

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the topic to constitute a direct threat, because ‘by postulating the “other” task of theology Brunner attacked Barth’s strong concentration on the “Sache” and brought him into the defensive position’.43 In any case, Brunner responds to such a criticism pointedly: ‘Stick to the subject! It’s a pity to lose so much time. . . . After all: we only have to serve the gospel. That is the matter at hand. But that is not identical with dogmatics’.44 For Brunner eristic theology was neither a distraction nor a waste of time, but an essential and necessary task of any complete theology, which moves not from biblical exegesis to dogmatics, but from exegesis to eristics or ‘“theological journalism”, i.e. the dispute of faith with the false alternatives to faith both in and outside the church’.45 Further, Brunner argues in the letter that dogmatics and eristics are not two separate ‘theological procedures’, but ‘the one is only justified by the other, thus again: in connection’, asking further ‘is the connectivity of the dogmatic system the only legitimate one?’46 Here, Brunner buttresses his argument by asserting that the theology of the early church and the Reformation was not dogmatic, but polemical or eristic: ‘That is, it did not develop its theological reflection and close exposition of faith in connection with a dogmatic system, but developed its faith in encounter with the Zeitgeist in its most basic and most dangerous form’.47 In other words, the ‘journalistic’ character of theology will lead it to the decisive issue of the day:48 ‘Therefore today it is anthropology that must be allowed to “bulge out” as, in Calvin’s time, the doctrine of the church’.49 Brunner’s eristic theology is therefore directed primarily towards human self-understanding, and given the focus of his earlier writings, it is hardly surprising that he designates anthropology as the decisive issue: ‘It is the essential task of eristic theology to show that humanity can only understand itself rightly in faith and that it only receives through the Word of God what it otherwise seeks by furtive means: that only in the Christian faith can [humanity] be what it is designated to be as well as that which it seeks to become in perverted ways’.50 Just as the natural human Schildmann, 208. Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 177. 45  Ibid. 46  Ibid., 176. 47  Ibid. 48  Brunner’s frequently changing focus is telling in this regard: scholasticism (1914), materialism (1916), psychologism and historicism (1921), Romanticism (1924–25), relativism (1926). Similarly, in Die Mystik in  1924 Brunner is concerned with Schleiermacher and his heirs, whereas in Der Mittler, Ritschl receives his due, especially as Brunner attempts to reckon with the person and work of Christ in terms of law and gospel. 49  Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 178. 50  ‘Aufgabe’, 177. 43  44 

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self-understanding is determined by the law51, ‘anthropology, the selfunderstanding of humanity, is the common ground of belief and unbelief’.52 The result is that ‘this tapering towards anthropology, which is even presupposed in the Word of God by faith as a presupposition to the answer – “What is your only trust in life and in death?” – is in fact the right question however corrected “theocentrically” in its answer, and is the only possibility to compel the non-believer to existential thinking and to draw the nonbeliever out of the theoretical poise’.53 The movement from a theoretical to an existential posture is multifaceted, however, and John W. Hart succinctly indicates, ‘Brunner demonstrates how eristic theology fights on two fronts: outside the Church against Idealism and Naturalism, and within the Church against an objectivistic dogmatics’.54 As shown above, Brunner has been selfconsciously fighting on both fronts since his student days, and eristic theology’s two general targets fully correspond to his earlier characterization of legalistic thinking both inside and outside of the church. Brunner thus reduces the idealistic or naturalistic rational selfunderstandings down to two basic forms, expressed as ‘abstract, summary formulas’:55 ‘It lies grounded in the conflicting nature of human existence that there are essentially two “natural” ways of understanding being, i.e. on the basis of reason, the idealistic (with its borderline case, mysticism) and the naturalistic or positivistic (with its borderline case, materialism)’.56 These ‘abstract formulas’ culminate in idealism/mysticism and materialism, with both exemplifying humanity’s contradictory attempt to move both towards and away from God at the same time: ‘Therefore, for the sake of this conflict, the divine message is attack and fulfillment, because humanity is always comprehended simultaneously as both fleeing from and seeking God’.57 As mentioned, eristic theology also critiques objectivism, most often found in the form of rigid doctrine, although liberal and orthodox errors hardly differ, as both constitute equally ‘theoretical’ misunderstandings of the gospel.58 In both cases, eristic theology in relation to reason is analogous 51  Cf. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 291: ‘The law is the mark of humanity’. In ‘Gesetz und Evangelium’, Referatsskizze Typ. ThAG (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), 10 February 1941., (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 84), 2, Brunner writes: ‘The law is natural humanity’s understanding of its being (Seinsverständnis), and yet, the theological understanding of being, therefore natural theology’. Hereafter, ‘Gesetz 1941’. See Chapter 2, section II.b above. 52  ‘Aufgabe’, 177. Cf. ‘Einmalige’, 277. 53  ‘Aufgabe’, 177. 54  Hart, 104. 55  ‘Aufgabe’, 183. 56  Ibid., 179. 57  Ibid., 183. 58  Ibid., 188.

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to the work of Christ in relation to the law, here expressed as a ‘battle to wage’ and a ‘service to provide’.59 For John W. Hart, ‘what unites both fights is that eristics is an “existential” task which combats these “theoretical” errors. In order to remain “existential”, eristic theology is above all concerned with anthropology’.60 Thus, in its existential work, eristic theology identifies and critiques corrupting anthropological assertions both within and without the church. That eristics is specifically dedicated to fighting against objectivistic dogmatics within the church is crucial to Brunner’s overall theological programme and a central point in his growing dispute with Barth. Returning to the letter on the ‘other task of theology’, Brunner is now found defending himself against charges of legalism. While acknowledging Barth’s admission that ‘disputation’ does have a place in theology, though within dogmatics itself, instead of as a separate task, Brunner writes: ‘You are right to fear a “preemptive conclusion”, behind which dogmatics can then come in. That would in fact be “Mosaic compulsion” [Mosestreiben]’.61 However, Brunner again attempts to qualify his claim: ‘I mean theological eristics, an uncovering of illusions from the standpoint of the gospel, but certainly not in such a way that the faith of the other is presupposed, but rather accomplishing the removal of what hinders faith’.62 In response to the charge of legalism, Brunner fires a similar shot back at Barth, focusing on the aspect of eristic theology that targets objectivism within the church. In contrast to Barth’s critical interest in Catholicism and internal debates within dogmatics63, Brunner again asserts that the key contemporary theological issue is anthropology. On this basis, Brunner is suspicious of any non-contextual or ‘non-journalistic’ theology, raising further questions about the general validity of a perennial or timeless dogmatics: ‘The timelessness of taking everything in every time as equally important, this systemic totality at all times is the enticement of orthodoxy, which lies as such in the dogmatic system’.64 In other words, orthodoxy is any theology, which is not conscious of the distinction between pure doctrine and the Word of God, which therefore does not know itself, Ibid., 187. Cf. ‘Aufgabe’, 191. Hart, 104. 61  Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 175. See Kramer, 368. 62  Ibid., 175. 63  Ibid., 179. If this were the case for Barth in 1929, this would surely explain the profoundly ironic compliment Barth pays Catholicism by polemicizing against it within dogmatics proper, as a debate within the church itself. Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 October 1930 (#80), 205: ‘Safeguarding is your theological work as it is mine. You safeguard the Protestant against the Catholic, I safeguard the Christian against modernity’. 64  Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 179. 59  60 

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that it, as a theory of faith, stands with one foot in the living realm of existential, struggling humanity, with the other in the observers’ gallery of theoreticians. The more explicit a theology, the more it has a share in timelessness and thus in the non-reality of theory.65 Consequently, the decisive element in Brunner’s concern with dogmatism, evident in his use of the vocabulary he most often associates with the law (timeless, rigid, offhand references to Second Temple Judaism, etc.), is legalism: ‘The system of dogmatics as such means – in distinction from the theological ‘journalism’ of eristics – the act of making things timeless and by that, certainly, a Platonizing of theological thinking. . . . It is precisely the classical theological system as such that is a danger to the church – I am thinking about how Israel became sedentary and of the great stone blocks of the Temple’.66 Again, Brunner attacks Barth’s standpoint with the charge: ‘For you theological reflection and dogmatics coincide. That is, because you do not seem to have noticed the extraordinariness which impacts on theological reflection as it enters the dogmatic system and which separates it from its original form, journalistic eristics’.67 Given Brunner’s formulations here, it quickly becomes clear that he has something altogether different in mind than Barth when it comes to the nature and task of theology: ‘The “matter at hand” [Sache] is not dogmatics, not pure doctrine.  .  .  .  Dogmatics has already become “timeless” theory’.68 These comments therefore offer a stark clarification about Barth and Brunner’s dispute, not only concerning the content of theology, but also its form, especially evident in the connection Brunner draws between dogmatics, ‘timelessness’ and legalism. In summary, the foregoing analysis presents the determinative role played by the dialectic of law and gospel in Brunner’s formulation of ‘the other task of theology’. As part of the unified formal task of theology, eristic theology mirrors the personal-existential encounter between law and gospel and is therefore also grounded in faith corresponding to revelation. Eristic theology does not operate outside of faith, but rather, presupposing the truth of the gospel, engages philosophical, religious, moral and even historical thinking that contradicts it. The gospel, understood existentially, can only be recognized as the answer-fulfilment to these opposing systems of thought upon completion of the eristic task of theology, which 65  66  67  68 

‘Aufgabe’, 193. Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71),179–80. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 177.

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demonstrates the limit and self-contradiction (i.e. antinomy) that befall the various ‘isms’ in their attempt to gain access to absolute theoretical and moral truth on their own terms. c.  Phenomenology and Eristic Theology As evident in the previous chapter on law and revelation and the analysis of eristic theology above, Brunner’s method itself constitutes a significant statement on the relationship between law and gospel. Simply put, Brunner’s early writings on the topic are in part an attempt to develop a phenomenology of the human self-consciousness, that is, a description, intended to characterize the limits and relativity of theoretical and moral reason under the law.69 The process begins with theoretical reflection ending in antinomy, then turns to moral reason but ends with radical evil and guilt, indicating humanity’s separation from its beginning and its (essentially moral) distance from any and all absolutes, not to mention an intentionally vague conception of a wrathful deus absconditus. This belies a two-fold task for the law, subjectively, in terms of humanity’s sinful misunderstanding of the divine will from which it is separated, and objectively, as the actual divine response to sin in the form of law and wrath. Together, revelation and justification correspond to this two-fold understanding of the law, with the real deus revelatus replacing the notion of the deus absconditus, and forgiveness replacing wrath. In this regard, the entire relationship between law and revelation is cast in terms of end and fulfilment, which demonstrates the delimitation of revelation and the overall existential-personal encounter with both law and gospel. With the exception of certain key elements in Brunner’s christology, it is here that Kierkegaard’s influence is most readily evident.70 In ‘Die andere Aufgabe’, Brunner expands the reach of this existentialpersonal phenomenology of human self-consciousness in order to develop the possibility of existential-critical treatments of philosophy, ethics and religion from the standpoint of and in relation to the gospel, revelation and justification by faith. While Brunner is already comfortable with this material, he further hones his thoughts on this phenomenological method in the introductory chapters of his first major treatment of ethics, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (1932).71 Here, in describing the general anthropological presuppositions to moral questioning, Brunner briefly summarizes his 69  70  71 

Cf. Salakka, 62. Cf. ‘Grundproblem’, 41–5. Das Gebot, 6–29 (ET: 21–43).

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understanding of the human self-consciousness, in development since his doctoral dissertation in 1914. After a brief introduction questioning the nature of human moral understanding, Brunner launches into a second chapter entitled ‘The Stages of the Immanent-Moral Understanding of the Self’, before moving into treatments of religion and philosophical ethics that subsequently emerge. Typically, Brunner begins with a statement and a qualification: ‘If in what follows we pursue a few particularly important principles which give human life a certain “direction” or permanency of order, and if we place these one on top of the other as “stages”, then this is not intended to signify a development, however condensed, but these “stages” have a phenomenological sense purely for the means of comparison’.72 Brunner now repeats his longtime concern about developmental theories and qualifies his ‘stages’ (Stufen) by noting that as abstractions they do not exist as such in reality, especially in such an isolated and sequential form: ‘This “phenomenology” is as such not meant to be understood like the Hegelian type, where the stages (Stufen) are always stages of development in the world-process, but rather like that of Kierkegaard’s “stages” (Stadien)’.73 Further, this series of relative stages is specifically consequential in terms of their relation to the Absolute: ‘It is proper that even in a Christian theological ethics the relatively high, though not absolute, significance of such a hierarchy is recognized and acknowledged. . . . Kierkegaard the eristic thinker is to this point an unparalleled example for us, in that despite taking the Absolute and the absolute contradiction seriously, he took the relative and the relative contradictions seriously’.74 Whereas Brunner does in fact give a description of ‘stages’ in the human self-consciousness, there is no development proper Ibid., 6 (ET: 21). Ibid., 554 n. 1 (ET: 570 n. 1). Cf. Lütz, 11, who presents a previously unpublished Brunner text, ‘Der Weg zum Glauben’, originally prepared for Dogmatics III around 1959 but not included in the published version. In this text, Brunner writes: Kierkegaard’s stages are ‘from a basic theological perspective no different than what Luther meant with the law as a presupposition to the gospel. . . . His “stages” are not to be understood psychologically, but in a philosophical-anthropological sense, that is they do not describe psychic processes but they show in a way what, since Husserl, we name phenomenologically as the possibilities of human existence, which, under the point of view of their proximity to faith, are ordered progressively and – in an idealistic-typological manner – portray a pathway to faith’. Here, the stages are the ‘aesthetic’, characterized by ‘observation and theory’ that can know only ‘objective scientific truth’; the ‘ethical’, with its ‘moral imperative’; and finally the ‘“general-religious”. The human being “somehow” knows of the divine, eternal, and recognizes the endlessness of the moral task . . . knowing the moral law as a divine command’. Brunner follows this with an explanation of the two-fold meaning of the law along similar lines as found in ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’ in 1925. This demonstrates strong continuity between Brunner’s earlier and later thought. 74  Das Gebot, 554 n. 1 (ET: 570 n. 1). Cf. ‘Aufgabe’, 189 and Barth-Brunner, EB: 15 May 1921 (#26), 61. 72  73 

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because the stages never culminate or synthesize in an Absolute – rather they increasingly demonstrate humanity’s distance from all absolutes: the point of the closest proximity, ‘the moral idea’, is also the point of greatest distance.75 In Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, the phenomenology moves in and out of the stages of the human moral self-consciousness, which Brunner labels as ‘Immediacy’; ‘Custom’ or ‘Convention’; ‘Intelligible Purpose’; ‘Sensible Infinity, the “daemonic element”’; ‘The Aesthetic as a Form of Life’; ‘The Moral Idea’.76 The descriptions of the individual stages are vague, but unsurprisingly conclude with ‘The Moral Idea’, and all the stages are connected by their development of relative ethical content: ‘The discussion up to this point has centered on ethical decisions, and indeed of those understood in such a way as to be determinative for life as a whole. This is what they all have in common’.77 ‘What makes them different, however, what makes it possible to bring them together as stages in an ascending order, consists in the “internalization”, that is, in how the mind and spirit become independent with respect to what is given [externally] in nature’.78 In other words, ‘the pathway that we have been describing to this point is the spiraling line drawn by the immanent self-consciousness’.79 In the movement from ‘Immediacy’ to ‘The Moral Idea’, humanity finds greater self-awareness, purpose, objectivity and ultimately a form of freedom, not unbridled, but always relative. Nonetheless, prior to ‘The Moral Idea’, human decision is determined by external compulsion and aesthetic influence, and there remains ‘a contradiction between the form and content of the decision’;80 decision is impersonal and deals only with externalities. However, ‘the breaking in of the moral’ means the true beginning of personhood81, of existential decision-making. Thus, Brunner describes a movement in the self-consciousness beginning with the external laws of nature, civilization and culture towards an understanding of a personalinternal moral law. In fact, this is ‘the moment when the νόμοι, which in a disconnected and arbitrary manner section off a bit of life here and there,

Cf. Mensch, 161–2 (ET: 161–2). Das Gebot, 6–14 (ET: 21–8). See Nature, 25: ‘Men have not only responsibility but also consciousness of it—which could be shown by a more detailed phenomenological analysis to be necessarily interconnected’. 77  Das Gebot, 11 (ET: 26). 78  Ibid. 79  Ibid. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 44; Der Mittler, VIII (ET: 16) and Das Gebot, 14 (ET: 28). 80  Das Gebot, 12 (ET: 26). 81  Ibid. 75  76 

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become one law, and the instant in which the muffled “one ought” and the clear “I ought” become one and the same’.82 True to the classical Kantian thought developed in the years prior to Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, Brunner means nothing less than the unity of theoretical and moral reason in the categorical imperative, with the personalistic emphasis that the moral command is a direct address ‘to me’. In other words, ‘the reduction of the many commands to the one command coincides with the internalization of the law as it becomes “my law”, that is, the law that I do not have to receive from without, because it speaks “to me from within”’.83 However, even with its ‘absoluteness’, the categorical imperative yields only more relatives: ‘Then has the spiral movement of internalization found its innermost point? Hardly; because there are questions standing behind this moral idea that no internalizing reflection can resolve’.84 Accordingly, Brunner’s phenomenology now leads into a dialogical address of ‘Thou Shalt’, which is the point at which personhood truly begins and is also the beginning of religious questioning.85 In Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, Brunner expands his phenomenology of moral self-consciousness with phenomenological treatments of ‘Morality and the Religions’ and the ‘Rationalization of the Moral in Philosophical Ethics’, where he reckons with both religion and philosophy as extensions of moral self-consciousness. The remainder of this section follows Brunner in his eristic treatments of religion, philosophy and science, philosophical ethics and history in relation to law and revelation in the Old Testament, observing in each case how Brunner demonstrates a proximity to the truth, self-contradiction and equation with legalism, as well as the set-up for what will be end and fulfilment of these categories by the person and work of Christ. d.  Applied Eristic Theology In Nature and Grace, Brunner states that eristic theology is entirely different from a ‘proof of theology’.86 While the eristic task is indeed ‘preparatory’, it is no longer a ‘foundation’, as its pre-cursor was described in 1925.87 The Ibid., 13 (ET: 27). Ibid. Cf. Der Mittler, 414–15 (ET: 459): ‘The categorical imperative is not rightly personal, because it is not really imperative, because it oscillates between a timeless idea . . . and the will’. 84  Das Gebot, 14 (ET: 28). 85  Ibid. 86  Nature, 35. 87  Nature, 61–2 n. 14. This is clearly recalls the discussion on the subtitle of ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’ as ‘A Theological Foundation’. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: no date, 1925 (#48), 119. 82  83 

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‘journalistic’ nature of eristic theology allows Brunner to reckon critically with a variety of topics as extensions of the anthropological question, including religion, ethics, philosophy/science and history, in direct connection to his explication of the gospel. In pursuit of the eristic task, Brunner treats these anthropological topics in a variety of different combinations and in various orders throughout his writings of the period, as well as subsumed into the category of general revelation for explicit contrast with special revelation, a procedure that also pushes him to render a special account of law and revelation in the Old Testament. In continuity with the essays from the mid1920s and ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’, the eristic task culminates by reckoning explicitly with the aforementioned anthropological questions in terms of their ‘end and fulfillment’ by the person and work of Christ. 1.  Religion Brunner’s treatment of religion during this period follows the same pattern as his treatment of reason – in fact, ‘the solution of this difficulty will be analogous to the one of the problem of reason’.88 Accordingly, ‘revelation does not stand merely related to all religions in the negative relationship of true and false, but at the same time in the positive relationship of fulfillment’.89 As a result, the religions are not entirely false, but contain ‘moments of truth’, though they could never reach the truth of Christ through any combination of their efforts.90 In his 1926 pamphlet on christology entitled Die Absolutheit Jesu, Brunner identifies two particular strands of religion, both of which culminate in forms of immanent legalism. First, ‘on the one side, we have personal gods, or a personal God, and a religiosity that expresses the intention to respect the holy due of these divine persons. It is a religion of legalism – be it cultic or moralistic –’.91 ‘On the other side’, however, ‘we have an entirely different notion–one cannot say God, but divinity, the recognition of an impersonal divine power or sphere of holiness, which as pious conduct corresponds not to respect for a will, but the attempt to enter into this sphere of holiness itself through consecration, mystical practices, states of ecstasy and so forth’.92 On their own, neither of these forms of religion can render an adequate dialectical account of law and grace. For its part, ‘the legalistic 88  89  90  91  92 

Absolutheit, 26. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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religion has a relationship to history and to the end goal in history, but it is dominated by strong thoughts of punishment’93, whereas ‘the mystical religion has blotted out notions of punishment through grace, but knows nothing of judgment, historical revelation and the divine end point of history’.94 Therefore, ‘the only “synthesis” of the religion of law and the religion of grace is the revelation of the holy and merciful God in Jesus Christ. He is the judgment and fulfillment of the history of religion’.95 As noted, ‘the relationship of Christian revelation to the history of religion is thus entirely analogical to that of reason’.96 While Brunner’s clarity on this point has increased, his thoughts were similar in 1922–23. In ‘Grenzen’, he writes, ‘in the first case it must be made clear that the gospel does not mean religion, that religion even belongs to the “legalistic”, to human functions and thus to the realm of sin. Here [the gospel] means: Christ, the end of religion’.97 Similarly, Brunner suggests in Erlebnis: ‘“Whoever seeks his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will gain it”, the sacrifice, the death and becoming, which through the entire history of religion seeks its full-spiritual expression until it finds it in the cross of Christ’.98 Therefore, this ‘being grounded in and directed by the divine’ is the ‘meaning of religion’, but ‘religion itself, as a psychological-historical phenomenon, remains thoroughly on this side of the limit’.99 In fact, ‘religion that rests in itself, which exchanges itself with its Telos, exchanges its meaning with its end and is the highest, finest and most dangerous betrayal of the truth’.100 In ‘Grenzen’, it is precisely this account of religion that Brunner uses to relativize the provisional talk about the Absolute that initially appeared to contradict his notion of the limits of humanity. Thus, ‘religion in itself, when it is self-referential, is the most untenable of all human endeavors’.101 Fifteen years later, Brunner expresses a similar sentiment with a telling reference to Luther, who demonstrates ‘profound insight when he reduces the entirety of paganism – including false Christianity – down to one common denominator: legalistic religion’.102 In Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, Brunner’s reckoning with religion runs hand in hand with his reckoning with ethics as an extension of the Ibid., 27. Ibid. 95  Ibid. Cf. Philosophy, 153. 96  Absolutheit, 27–8. Cf. Emil Brunner, ‘Religion oder Glaube’, in Wort I, 152–5. 97  ‘Grenzen’, 93. 98  Erlebnis, 94. 99  ‘Grenzen’, 87. 100  Ibid. 101  Ibid. 102  Mensch, 169 (ET: 169). 93  94 

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phenomenological account of moral self-consciousness. After confirming that ‘morality . . . never exists apart from religion’, Brunner draws out the relationship between ‘Morality and the Religions’ using the concept of the law: ‘In all religions, in the “most primitive” as well as in the “highest”, there is this “law” issuing from a divine will, these “tables of prohibitions” that protect some object or sphere of life from human invasion, these limits it is forbidden to transgress, limits which, speaking subjectively, one dares not transgress out of holy awe. Nefas! Thou shalt not!’103 While Brunner notes that a concise and universally valid presentation of the relationship between religion and morality is impossible, he affirms in both cases that this ‘limitation of human self-will does not come about through external human compulsion, but through an invisible authority’s enigmatic selfauthentication, efficacious in its hiddenness, and which one obeys out of awe’.104 As this sense is common to both religion and morality, in the same way that ‘it would be wrong to explain religion rationalistically on the basis of the moral consciousness, it would be just as wrong to do the opposite’.105 Consequently, when ‘morality grows beyond its religious bonds, it becomes all the more bound to cultural consciousness’.106 Analogously, ‘where religion spiritualizes itself, that is, where it sheds its numinous-sacral, element of irrationality’, the results run ‘either in the mystical-speculativepantheistic direction, or in the moralistic-deistic-rationalistic direction’.107 In the latter, ‘the idea of God approximates to the notion of an immanent moral law of nature or law of the world. . . . In the “moral religion” of the Enlightenment the moral and the religious are fused into a unity’.108 Mysticism, however, ‘becomes ascetic  .  .  .  distant and indifferent to the world, and distant and indifferent to humanity. The more fully mysticism runs its course, the more fully it sucks up all morality into religious asceticism and isolates the human being both from the surrounding environment and from the rest of humanity’.109 On all counts, the inevitable results are one form of legalism or another: ‘secular’ culture and civilization under the laws of nature and development on the one hand, and the antinomian nontranscendent and individualized legalism of mysticism or the explicit legalism of the religion within the limits of reason on the other. Such is Brunner’s eristic encounter with religion. 103  104  105  106  107  108  109 

Das Gebot, 15 (ET: 29). Ibid. (ET: 29–30). Das Gebot, 16 (ET: 30). Ibid. 17 (ET: 31). Ibid. (ET: 32). Das Gebot, 18 (ET: 32). Ibid.

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2.  Philosophy and the Sciences While a wholesale repetition of Brunner’s treatment of philosophy would be redundant at this point, it is necessary to supplement the account given above by highlighting the explicit connection between thinking that violates the limits of humanity and legalism, a theme already prominent in the late teens and early 1920s. As Brunner writes in his review of Barth’s first Römerbrief : The way we speak of faith today as the “personal experience”, of a “powerful” or “ingenious” or “living” religious “personality”, would be plainly appraised both by Paul and Luther as works-righteousness. It is dependence on inner works (which Luther in his “Sermon on Good Works” distinguishes with marvelous clarity from the timeless work of faith), on the intensity, force, warmth, and persistence of inner experience.110 Similar charges persist in other earlier writings such as ‘Grenzen’, where Brunner unhesitatingly reduces theological liberalism to legalism: ‘No less would the Reformers have condemned Schleiermacher’s fundamental theorem that we have God in feeling, in experience at all, as a papist heresy’.111 Likewise, in ‘Die Menschenfrage’, Brunner indicates that humanism’s version of revelation can be boiled down to mysticism112, because it is nothing other than a ‘human turning to self . . . the natural unmediatedness of sensuality as well as the spiritual unmediatedness of autonomy and mysticism. It is precisely this, the assertion of being able to find God through internalization, which is sin’.113 This marks the end or terminal point of humanism, ‘because all reflective thinking that we know indeed fulfills itself within the idea or the law and has its necessity from the law. We can always think only from within, never from outside the law’.114 Humanism and all other philosophical perspectives that attempt to cross the theoretical and moral divide between humanity and God, a divide demonstrated by despair, guilt and sin, become legalistic because they attempt to use the law that binds them to reach God: ‘If, however, we know of sin, then we therefore know that the law is not the first thing, but a secondary thing to have resulted from sin. Indeed law and sin stand so closely together that one can say: the truly sinful in sin is legalistic 110  111  112  113  114 

‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth’, 69. ‘Grenzen’, 91. ‘Menschenfrage’, 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 17.

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thinking’.115 Philosophical thinking and theological thinking that establish autonomous speculative, mystical or moral pathways to God apart from revelation and faith are therefore legalistic. Brian Gerrish finds this theme clearly present in Brunner’s work: A connection between “speculation” and “works-righteousness” has been noted especially by those scholars who have stressed Luther’s theologia crucis. . . . Brunner also notices the association of the deus nudus and worksrighteousness, and concludes: “Wie sie [die natürliche Gotteserkenntnis] die natürliche Erkenntnis der Vernunft ist, so ist sie auch gesetzliche”. The natural knowledge of God, which is sought by the theologia gloriae, is not merely a product of reason, but also of legalism.116 Thus, as Gerrish rightly notes, Brunner’s intention is not to attack philosophy as such, but rather to use eristic theology to point out when thinking becomes legalistic. Brunner’s understanding of the relationship between the law and the natural sciences furthers the point: ‘Science is the attempt to arrange the chaos of given reality through legal ordering into the cosmos of knowledge’.117 In the alternative version of ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, Brunner records similar thoughts in apparently hasty preparation for his lecture as follows: ‘Science. Natural law. The goal of natural science. The “paralysis of Chaos” through the natural sciences. But not only natural science. Knowing [is] always: point of view, idea, summary, unity, law. “Understanding”    to arrange, connection, meaning, idea, law’.118 However, the ‘gesetzlich’ or legal nature of basic science and its methods are not problematic at all in themselves, and in fact, these methods highlight ‘the difference of human from sub-human: not forming [isolated] points, but connection’.119 Nonetheless, similar to over-extended or speculative philosophies, problems arise when the knowledge of God and the depths of human personhood are subjected to the legal thinking of the natural sciences. In order to maintain a proper balance between the necessarily legal thinking of the natural sciences, while also maintaining space for moral and theological understandings of God and human nature, Brunner introduces his ‘principle of contiguity’. Ibid., 17–18. B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (Clarenden Press: Oxford, 1962), 83 n. 1. Citation from Dogmatik I, 179. 117  ‘Offenbarung’, 119. 118  ‘Gesetz II’, 2. 119  Ibid. 115  116 

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In Revelation and Reason (1941), an extended treatment of the Christian doctrine of revelation preparatory for his three volume Dogmatics120, Brunner gives a concise definition of this ‘principle’, long present in his thought: ‘The nearer anything lies to that centre of existence where we are concerned with the whole – i.e. man’s relation to God and his personal being, the greater is the dislocation of rational knowledge through sin, the further anything lies from this centre, the less this factor makes itself felt, and the smaller, accordingly, is the difference between the knowledge of the believer and the unbeliever’.121 Responding to an essay by David Cairns on his anthropology, Brunner, calling this principle ‘a formal concept’, writes: Many have considered this an expression of relativism, but that is not at all the case. Only the center, but definitely that, is absolute. . . . This also means that I cannot simply juxtapose reason and faith. It is precisely here that the rule applies: inasmuch as an assertion of reason approaches the centre it loses its validity, and the assertion of faith steps into its place. Here the Either/Or is replaced by the Both/And. The absolute given, the true personhood in Christ, renders all things relative, to be sure, but it also renders a simple juxtaposition of reason and faith impossible. From this law of contiguity one can see why there is indeed a Christian understanding of history characteristically different from that of idealism (Hegel) and also from that of naturalistic positivism (Spencer), but there is not Christian chemistry; why there is Christian marriage and family, but not a Christian economy or government.122 From Brunner’s perspective, this principle can allow theology to reclaim its interest in some of the areas taken over by philosophy and the natural sciences (areas which, in some cases, theology had all too willingly given up), such as moral ontology and theological epistemology, while nonetheless respecting the rightful claims of those sciences within their own provinces. Brunner does not intend to say there are areas of human life unaffected by sin, but rather that there are objective and impersonal areas where the presence of sin does not have such a profound effect. As Cairns suggests, ‘if the principle of closeness of relationship holds, Christian belief will not be able to base itself upon any neutral or professedly neutral philosophical anthropology in stating its doctrine of man. There will, in fact, be no such Dogmatics I, 14 n. 1. Revelation and Reason, 383. Cf. Der Mittler, 373 (ET: 414); Mensch, 66 (ET: 62); ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’, 241 and 248; Nature, 37. 122  Emil Brunner, ‘Reply to Interpretation and Criticism’, in The Theology of Emil Brunner, 332. 120  121 

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neutral discipline, since man’s nature lies at the very centre of his existence, and can be regarded as one of the main fields of theology itself’.123 However, when philosophical and scientific thinking are taken beyond their limits, Brunner’s verdict on these modern standpoints mirrors his thoughts on religion: ‘We have however accepted other gods, furtively, indeed without rightly taking note of the matter, just as the people of Israel did in their time. These are the Zeitgeist, or what is otherwise the same, human reason’.124 As Israel should have avoided religious syncretism, theology should avoid intellectual syncretism, a point which Brunner adduces in Der Mensch im Widerspruch with explicit reference to law and gospel: Belief in the division of labor between philosophy and theology, which also heavily burdens the theology of the Reformation, must give way to the view that between theology and philosophy, or better, between thought governed by faith and thought governed by reason, there is a dialectical relation reflecting nothing other than the dialectic of law and gospel, or legalistic and believing understandings of humanity.125 In this regard, both the dialectic of law and gospel and the principle of contiguity, which adheres to this dialectic in refined form, are essential in Brunner’s overall project insofar as they attempt to acknowledge the perversion of reason in relation to the personal elements in understanding God and humanity, while allowing the natural sciences to freely pursue their objects in the impersonal realms where the impact of sin is relatively minimal. 3.  Ethics Along with religion and philosophy, references to moral thought and ethics are rife in Brunner’s writing, though rarely in abstraction from religion, politics, economics, anthropology and other categories. Insofar as Brunner is willing to draw ethics away from these other categories for independent analysis, philosophical ethics and morality receive an eristic treatment analogous to that of religion and philosophy. While indeterminate, the basic unit of ethical thought outside of Christianity is ‘a rationalistic morality common to humanity as such’126, a point which Brunner feels he has little David Cairns, ‘Brunner’s Conception of Man as Responsive, Responsible Being’, in The Theology of Emil Brunner, 77. 124  Ordnung Gottes, 5. 125  Mensch, 524 (ET: 546). 126  God and Man, 71. 123 

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time or need to debate, since the Reformers ‘accepted a natural morality and its principle of lex naturae as a definite fact which we could not call in question’.127 Significantly, ‘all natural ethics or ethics of reason, and also all religious ethics outside the Biblical revelation, attribute to man the power to realize the good, the divine will in his moral action. “Thou oughtest, therefore thou canst”. . . that is Pelagianism, the works-righteousness of all natural ethics’.128 This reduction allows Brunner to reckon with natural and rational ethical systems within the standard eristic law-gospel framework he uses to deal with religion and philosophy; Brunner even labels his eristic treatment of natural morality as ‘the negative side of the doctrine of justification’.129 This negation occurs when humanity ‘is measured by the standard of God’s law’, because ‘where the divine law is taken seriously, the judgment of our moral condition can be nothing but annihilating’.130 In fact, ‘the moral consciousness, therefore, can simply say nothing to us of divine forgiveness. Forgiveness amongst humans occurs in recognition of the validity of the divine law. Forgiveness from God, however, would be the repeal [Aufhebung] of the law. That is absolutely unthinkable, a contradiction against the foundation of all thinking’.131 Such ‘antinomian’ thinking is indeed impossible, because ‘the intervention of God in the divine legal order, i.e. as our own thought, is pure insanity’.132 In God and Man, Brunner gives a succinct account of the implications of reliance on natural morality: First, ‘the thought which governs all natural ethics proves itself to be an illusion, the thought of gradual selfperfection . . . the eritus sicut Deus . . . that is an essential quality of legalistic morality’.133 Second, through the law, ‘man cannot reach a truly personal relation to God and his neighbour. The law interposes itself between God and us, between our neighbour and us’.134 In other words, the law renders only legalistic and impersonal relationships with God and neighbour, impersonal relationships of I-It, instead of personal relationships of I-Thou. Finally, the third implication concerns the contradiction imposed on humanity by the law: ‘The curse of the law is slavery to evil. My duty to do Ibid., 72. Cf. Der Mittler, 3–21 (ET: 21–41). Cf. Nature, 35–50, especially 39 and 43–4. Ibid., 75. Cf. Der Mittler, 377 (ET: 419): ‘“You can because you ought” is a saying of the ancient serpent. It is the saying of Pelagianism, which prunes the law back until it becomes manageable’. 129  God and Man, 76. 130  Ibid. 131  ‘Offenbarung’, 107. Brunner elsewhere mentions a saying he attributes to Voltaire: ‘Dieu pardonnera, c’est son métier’. Cf. Der Mittler, 404 (ET: 447). 132  ‘Offenbarung’, 107. 133  Ibid., 77. 134  Ibid., 78. 127  128 

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the good is precisely the sign that I cannot do it’.135 The law is precisely the point where humanity comes closest to its original relationship to the divine will, and yet is also furthest away: ‘The imperative of obligation is the principle by which I come to know my formal freedom, i.e. my responsibility. But it is at the same time . . . the ground on which I become aware of my lack of real freedom’.136 This ‘is a sign that the immediate unity with the divine will is lost. The law has entered’.137 Brunner accordingly reduces the dialectic to even more basic terms, suggesting, as elsewhere, it is ‘the legalistic relationship to God’, which ‘is itself sin, the root of evil’.138 With this in mind, Paul Schrotenboer tersely, but accurately, characterizes Brunner’s position as: ‘Legalism is the very essence of sin’.139 This determination applies to either Stoic140 or Epicurean141 ethics; both the most indulgent hedonism and the most stringent moralism are ultimately and equally legalistic. This reductive claim, however, is the lynchpin of Brunner’s treatment of philosophical ethics: ‘We can indeed detect something of the curse of the law and learn the evil of sin from its consequences, but its root, which is legalism itself, is invisible to us’.142 In other words, ‘moralism with its legalism and self-righteousness is at all times the worst enemy of true morality’.143 By contrast, biblical moral law, while being law, does imply something different. In Der Mittler, Brunner writes, the moral law of the Bible is different from what is normally human moral law, and only in it is the true meaning of the law fulfilled. The law of the Bible is nothing in itself; it is what it is as an expression of the divine will of the Lord, the will of the one who is creator of the world. From the very beginning, therefore, it is concrete – not abstract like the Kantian moral law – and personal. It cannot be taken for a timeless idea.144 Ibid. God and Man, 78–9. Cf. ‘Menschenfrage’, 17. 137  Ibid., 79. Cf. ‘Grundproblem’, 40; ‘Menschenfrage’, 19; Truth, 121 and 123; Emil Brunner, The Letter to the Romans: A Commentary (London: Lutterworth, 1959), 141. 138  God and Man, 79. 139  Schrotenboer, 113. Cf. Ulrich Neuenschwander, Denker des Glaubens II (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1979), 40: For Brunner, ‘the original sin of humanity [is] the pursuit of autonomy’. 140  Das Gebot, 20 (ET: 34–5) and 253–5 (ET: 269–72): ‘The Stoic doctrine of Natural Justice(Naturrecht) arises from the Stoic view of existence, which is a legal one by nature, having therefore the idea of justice at its highest point’. (253; ET: 272) 141  Das Gebot, 22 (ET: 36): ‘Whoever keeps to these [laws] is not good but “clever”. After its most well-known proponent we call this the ethic of Epicureanism’. 142  God and Man, 80. 143  Das Gebot, 44 (ET: 57). 144  Ibid., 415 (ET: 459–60). 135  136 

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Despite the concrete and personal character of the Old Testament law, only the personal work of Christ can end the legally determined relationship: ‘It can only be brought to our knowledge by God himself in that act wherein he deals with us χωρὶϚ νόμου (Rom. iii. 21), where he reveals himself to us personally, and so removes the law’.145 In this instance, ‘we do not come to God on our legalistic way, but he himself comes on his way to us, in the event of the reconciling self-revelation of God’.146 ‘The change’, therefore, ‘from the legalistic relation to the personal one can only be effected by God’s personal act of revelation, his personal presence in revelation’.147 For humanity, this means a ‘new state of life, that man’s life is no more centered in the “ought”, but in the “is” which God has given. The word of grace is not an imperative like that of the law, but an indicative’.148 For Brunner, it is precisely the dialectic of imperative and indicative that is essential and it cannot be abandoned for the indicative or descriptive accounts of ethics alone, an element Brunner cites in his critique of both Barth and Schleiermacher.149 Theological eristics, therefore, determines that philosophical ethics standing in isolation and abstraction are inherently faulty, especially when they prefer indicative and descriptive accounts of moral action to the imperatival. This is because ‘the human element of life rests on its being bound. The merely inner-worldly, inner-human state of being bound is an appearance; therefore a non-religious ethic is a self-contradiction. Real binding, is being bound to the will of God’.150 With this claim, Brunner uses his eristic treatment of philosophical ethics to drive the focus back towards the eristic treatment of religion. In other words, ‘the question of the meaning of the law is the center of the storm in the struggle of the gospel against the error of the “natural” human being. But the inmost point of this struggle is therefore also the struggle against works righteousness or legalism and the triumph of the gospel: justification by faith alone’.151 4.  History Brunner’s reckoning with history and historical perspectives is signifi­ cant for both his eristic and dogmatic theology, with both the critical and God and Man, 79–80. Ibid., 80. 147  Ibid., 81. 148  Ibid., 81–2. Cf. ‘Grundproblem’, 40. 149  Cf. ‘Grundproblem’, 40: ‘The divine comes to my consciousness as an imperative instead of as an indicative, showing that I am separated from it’. See also Chapter 1, section II.c above. 150  Das Grundproblem der Ethik, 30. 151  Das Gebot, 51 (ET: 64). 145  146 

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constructive perspectives tightly interwoven to produce a unified account of revelation and history. Three facets of this treatment are of particular significance. First, and especially evident in Brunner’s earlier writings, are critical and eristic treatments of historicism. Second is Brunner’s lifelong attempt to reckon with the dialectic of history and revelation, although this concern is generally overshadowed by his attention to the dialectic of revelation and reason, which, in an existential sense, is primary. Here, the general issues of history in relation to law, the Old Testament, promise and gospel arise and are worked out in a form analogous to the basic law-gospel pattern evident in Brunner’s treatment of reason and revelation. It is in this broad framework that Brunner’s eristic treatment of history occurs. As Paul Jewett remarks: ‘Brunner seeks to understand history from the perspective of revelation, rather than to subordinate revelation under the general category of history’.152 Third, extending from the previous is Brunner’s understanding of history in explicit relation to the person and work of Christ. While, the analysis below focuses briefly on the first, and extensively on the second, the third element is sufficiently independent to warrant a separate treatment, although many of its key emphases are established within Brunner’s general eristic account of revelation and history.153 As a philosophical perspective, Brunner determines that historicism is ultimately legalistic, and it frequently receives its eristic due within his broader treatment of philosophy and other intellectual movements. As noted, Brunner mentions historicism and psychologism together on the first page of Erlebnis as two perspectives sharing the presupposition that ‘man is the measure of all things’.154 Later, Brunner asserts that ‘the twin brother of psychologism is historicism, the collective genetic approach to the life of the mind and spirit’.155 There, the page heading reads: ‘The ungeistige monism of historical thinking’156, and Brunner indicates historicism’s keyword is the ‘notion of development’, which as the ‘attempt to derive the present out of the previous . . . is consequential monism in the schema of time, and its current, nearly axiomatic validity corresponds precisely to the general monistic characteristic of our time’.157 Jewett, 20. See Stefan Scheld, Die Christologie Emil Brunners: Beitrag zur Überwindung liberaler Jesulogie und dialektisch-doketischer Christologie im Zuge geschichtlich-dialogischen Denkens (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981). 154  Erlebnis, 1. 155  Ibid., 105. 156  Ibid., 105 and 107. 157  Ibid., 108. 152  153 

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In terms of the broader theme of history and revelation, the overall importance of the role of history in relation to law and gospel is especially prominent in Brunner’s mature works, particularly the second volume of his Dogmatics, where Chapter 8 entitled ‘The Law’ is wrapped by Chapter 7 on ‘History and Saving History’ and Chapter 9 concerning ‘The Fullness of Time’.158 In keeping with the eristic pattern of end and fulfilment, the third volume of Brunner’s Dogmatics also treats ‘The Kingdom of God as the Meaning and Goal of History’.159 Here, Brunner’s sustained focus on the dialectic of reason and revelation does not negate the broader historical concerns, especially in relation to the notions of law, covenant and promise, but fully informs them and helps to determine their overall placement within his system. Throughout his varied commentary on history and revelation, Brunner consistently employs the concept of uniqueness (das Einmalige), and again, his account of this topic (analogous to his treatment of the Absolute in theoretical and moral reason) is difficult to extract from adjacent concerns, particularly those of religion and philosophy, wherein ‘this much is clear. . .“the unique” can only be understood here in a relative sense’.160 Olive Wyon, translator of the published English version of The Mediator, defines the term in a footnote: ‘Einmaligkeit (lit. onceness) is the word used by Brunner to express the exclusiveness of the Christian faith as special revelation, “Uniqueness” is the nearest word in English, but it does not fully express the author’s meaning. “Einmaligkeit” means occupying a unique moment in time. “Unrepeatableness” is the real meaning’.161 Brunner began developing this concept in the mid-teens as evident in his 1917 essay, ‘Das Unbedingt und die Wirklichkeit’. By the late 1920s, Einmaligkeit is a key concept in Brunner’s description of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, taking centre stage in Der Mittler in dialectic with idea (and law): ‘No two things could be more opposite each other than the idea and the unique event’.162 Turning back to ‘Die Menschenfrage’ in  1925, this same conceptual frame is evident, insofar as ‘autonomy or idea and law belong together’ in contrast to ‘the personality of God, God’s Word in time, revelation, sin and faith’ which ‘compose a coherent unity’.163 Revelation, Dogmatics II, 193–238. Ibid., 367–74 160  ‘Einmalige’, 265. 161  Mediator, 25 n. 1. 162  Der Mittler, 460 (ET: 507). See Volk, ‘Die Christologie bei Karl Barth und Emil Brunner’, 645: ‘Word here stands firstly in contrast to Idea’, and 652: ‘Revelation is indeed an act of God insofar as it is an occurrence in contrast to a conceptual system of eternal ideas’. 163  ‘Menschenfrage’, 20. ‘Forgiveness’ is penciled in the typescript above the ‘und’. 158  159 

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therefore, ‘is not semper and ubique, but unique’164, further indicating the noted dialectical contrast between a unique historical event and eternally valid laws and ideas. However, as defined by translator Olive Wyon, Brunner’s term means more than just temporally unique, but also unrepeatable, and in  1929’s ‘Das Einmalige und der Existenzcharakter’, Brunner claims further that historical individualities and personalities, both key concepts in nineteenth-century ‘liberal’ depictions of Jesus, are also not absolutely unique because they are ‘bound by general laws and structures of culture and nature’.165 In ‘Das Einmalige’, coming 2  years after Der Mittler, Brunner turns his eristic method on myth and mythology in general, with the intention of working his way towards an explicit determination of Israel’s interconnected views on law and history as the necessary presuppositions to God’s unique revelation in Jesus Christ. Whereas mythology’s typical theme is ‘the eternal, divinity in time’, most mythological conceptions also emphasize repetition.166 However, Brunner insists that non-repetitive myth can be found in the prophetic religions of Israel and Zarathustra – both assume an absolute beginning and end to history, and outstretched, not repetitive and circling conceptions of time.167 Israel, however, specifically grounds its understanding on creation out of nothing, a direct indication of its faith in the ‘Lord-God as the absolute sovereign power over all being’.168 Further, God’s lordship is directly related to Israel’s law, further distinguishing it from other myths: ‘Here alone the idea that rules over all mythology is broken, that over everything – even over divinity – there stands an irrevocable, eternal law of being, or that the divine will – as the later Stoics taught it – is identical with this law of being. Here alone [in Israel] is law [Gesetz] understood in the original sense of the word as something that is set [Gesetzte]’.169 Thus, Brunner finds Israel’s conception of God’s lordship, even over the laws of nature, distinguishes its faith from all other myths. Israel’s Lord God is the lawgiver and not subject to any higher law: ‘The world is not the other side, the exterior or shadow of divinity. No eternal correlation exists between them’, but the world is rather wholly contingent and God’s work.170 In Ibid., 20. ‘Einmalige’, 265. Cf. Der Mittler, 281–8 (ET: 316–22), where Brunner adopts the doctrine of anhypostasis, asserting contra certain liberal theologies that Jesus’ uniqueness is not identical with his historical personality as such, because his personality is the divine person. See Volk, ‘Die Christologie bei Karl Barth und Emil Brunner’, 649 and McCormack, 399. 166  ‘Einmalige’, 266. 167  Ibid., 268. 168  Ibid., 269. 169  Ibid. My emphasis. 170  Ibid., 269. 164  165 

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contrast to all other conceptions of history, ancient and modern, ‘history in the strong sense of the word is Israel’s notion’.171 This is history with a beginning and end, forward motion and no structural repetition or inherent eternality: ‘History, in the serious sense, is only there where one can say: it is high time’.172 As Israel’s faith in the Lord-God stands in direct connection with its view of the contingence of the world, and God’s lordship over the world and its laws, its concept of history ‘lies outside the sphere of the theoretical reason’.173 This assertion presupposes a fundamental distinction between theoretical and historical knowledge: ‘In fact: theoretical knowing knows nothing and can know nothing of sincere or genuine or serious occurrences. This is because all times are the same for theory’.174 History and even the non-biblical mythologies lie outside the sphere of theoretical reason and are therefore concepts of ‘practical knowing’, belonging to ‘the knowledge of being, not to the objective, that is, objectivizing science’.175 In this regard, Brunner notes that myth (including the Old Testament) implies both timelessness and temporality, that is, elements pertaining to both theoretical and practical knowing: ‘Mythical thinking manifestly transcends itself in both directions: in the direction of becoming utterly timeless that it “still” grasps as temporal – even if improperly temporal, and in the direction of the actual becoming temporal, where history is unique’.176 Thus, even at those points where the Old Testament is poised to become truly historical, it is only able to point towards this possibility, but never to fulfil it: ‘Mythical thinking stands undecidedly in the middle between the playful observation of theory and the decision, which the truly historical thinking, this faith of the prophets of Israel, signals’.177 Although Brunner repeatedly emphasizes that Israel’s faith is uniquely historical in its context by virtue of its notions of contingency and divine freedom, it is nonetheless incomplete. From this vantage point, Brunner pushes further, looking more closely at ‘uniqueness’ in the prophetic traditions of Israel and Zarathustra, now  identifying their mutual discernment of a distinction between God  and world resulting from their conceptions of creation and contingency, conceptions that drive the ground of the knowledge of God 171  172  173  174  175  176  177 

Ibid. Ibid., 270. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 271. Ibid.

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away from laws and ideas present in the worldly order towards revelation and faith: This “What” of faith and the prophetic “That” and “How” belong together. Because God is therefore believed in as the Lord of the World–and not as a neutral ground of being, as an eternal idea, as law or meaning of the world, because this faith does not come into being as reflection over the world, as thought, as the fruit of deeper meditation or mystical experience, but because faith knows itself to be personal encounter with this personal power, this is because the roots of faith are in the divine Word of revelation.178 If Truth as Encounter and dialogical personalism are indeed part of Brunner’s contribution to Christian theology, the roots of these contributions are here in the decisive contrast based on the dialectic of law and gospel, between the impersonal and immanent concepts of a ‘neutral ground of being . . . eternal idea . . . law or meaning of the world’, and faith rooted in personal encounter with the divine word of revelation. On the basis of this distinction, Brunner also indicates a correspondence between ‘being addressed and faith’179, now suggesting his unified conception of revelation and justification in relation to history. This ensures ‘knowledge of the uniqueness of history is grounded in this approaching, because this approaching determines the eschatological character of the occurrence and therefore the directional or outstretched nature of time as a whole’.180 J. K. Mozley summarizes the theme accurately, also hinting towards developments in Brunner’s christology: ‘The Word is the medium between God and man. In the Old Testament, especially in the Prophets, it is the impersonal Word; the Prophet is given the Word that he may speak it. But in the final revelation, where revelation reaches its full reality, the medium is no longer the impersonal Word. For of Christ it is not enough to say that He has the Word: He is the Word. The medium is the Mediator’.181 Despite the increasingly personal and historical aspects of Israel’s view in relation to other traditions, ‘uniqueness is still not fully grasped here’.182 ‘The prophetic religion’, therefore, ‘is in its essence directed by messian178  179  180  181  182 

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 272. Mozley, ‘The Barthian School. V: Emil Brunner’, 535. ‘Einmalige’, 272.

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ism  .  .  .  revelation in the full sense has therefore not yet occurred’.183 Echoing Hebrews 1, Brunner says the God of a prophetic religion is revealed in distinct acts to distinct people, though ultimately illimitably, meaning this revelation is repetitive and not unique, although ‘the uniqueness of complete revelation stands at the end’.184 The notion of ‘progressive revelation’ appears elsewhere in direct connection to the law, which Brunner refers to as a ‘covering’: ‘In terms of our image of the covering, it is here in the Old Testament that this covering begins to become transparent from the side of God by divine action, until the light itself, that announces itself at that place, breaks through in Jesus Christ’.185 Israel’s extended prophetic revelation is therefore superseded by the unique Christian revelation: ‘The unique as a reality, revelation as what is singular according to its nature, because it is complete, revelation as the state of the actual approach of God, that is the category of Christian religion, which at the same time – which goes without saying – creates in this its own possibility’.186 Therefore: ‘The eph hapax, “once and for all”, repeatedly stands in a central, and for its significance, in an overall meaningful place in New Testament literature’.187 This ‘once for all’, ‘inseparably bound’ to the cross of Christ, indicates a cross- or double-ratio (Doppelverhältnis) to the religion of the Old Testament, which ‘is the precursory shadow of what has come in Christ’.188 In other words, in this uniqueness both are proven: that here, it is not a matter of idea and general possibilities (thus, of a correlativity of God and world), but of an approach of God, and that this approach signifies that something is accomplished, an arrival . . . if the chasm between world and God, and humanity and God is bridged – hence the occurrence of reconciliation –, then this occurrence is unrepeatable. The un-repeatability and the decisive validity of this occurrence are one.189 This account of the reunification of God and humanity means an abso­ lutely unique, salvific, unrepeatable and ‘decisively-valid’ event – the work of Christ in relation to history is analogous to the work of Christ in relation 183  184  185  186  187  188  189 

Ibid. Ibid. ‘Was heißt?’, 48. ‘Einmalige’, 272. Ibid., 272–3. Ibid., 273. Ibid.

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to the law: Christ ends and fulfils history as understood by the Old Testament.190 In a 1934 essay, ‘Die Unentbehrlichkeit des Alten Testaments für die missionierende Kirche’, Brunner takes this thought even further: ‘That is, however, also the covenant, that limits not only the people of Israel, but is extended over the entirety of humanity. That is the goal towards which the prophetic proclamation as the proper sense of all of history points’.191 This means Israel’s experience with the law is paradigmatic for humanity as a whole: Every individual person and every individual people must somehow pursue this way that God has gone with Israel. Every human and every people must first be educated through the law and through the provisional prophetic revelation, before they can grasp the gospel of Jesus Christ entirely. This pedagogical view of the Old Testament is represented by the greatest teachers of the church from the most ancient time onwards.192 According to Brunner, then, the Old Testament differs from other forms of general revelation by degree, not by kind. However, the question still arises: ‘What is special about the biblical revelation before Christ? Nothing other than the “prophecy pointing towards Christ”’.193 On Brunner’s account, then, the validity of Old Testament prophecy can only be ascertained from the standpoint of faith in Christ: It is only from Christ that we can understand what is special about Old Testament revelation, precisely in its particularity over against the rest of the history of religion. It is Christ as a fact, as unique, it is the Mediator of the atonement, the event of revelation and atonement as a 190  See ‘Was heißt?’, 48, where Old and New Testaments are related in the sense of prophecy and fulfillment. Cf. Das Gebot, 39–43, 119 (ET: 53–6, 135) and Dogmatics II, 231–2: ‘We are right  .  .  .  to consider the problem of the Law and the temporary character of the Old Testament revelation in the closest connection with one another, because the Apostle does the same . . . the period before the coming of Jesus Christ is a period of minority, of immaturity, and its characteristic principle is precisely: the Law . . . we have already said: The Law, as the principle of man’s relation to God, does not connect the Old and the New Testament, but does connect the Old Testament with paganism’. 191  ‘Unentbehrlichkeit’, 383–4. Cf. Dogmatics II, 237: ‘In this sense not only the Old Testament, but the whole of world history is to be understood as “Messianic”. All that God had allowed to develop before Jesus Christ came, is now fulfilled in Him’. See ‘Unentbehrlichkeit’, 392. 192  ‘Unentbehrlichkeit’, 392. 193  Der Mittler, 460 (ET: 508).

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personal act of God, which in the Old Testament, not merely in the prophets but also in the Mosaic cult, shines forth like the first light of the rising sun.194 Consequently, the New Testament revelation of Christ rests on the Old Testament, which is its presupposition because it recognizes ‘an absolutely impermeable barrier between God as the Lord of the creature and the creature’, though ‘not in the sense, as if God were separated from his creature, but in the sense that a mixture between God and creature can never take place’.195 Again, Brunner qualifies his understanding of ‘barrier’ to prevent misunderstanding: The absolute non-worldliness of God (I intentionally avoid the expression transcendence, which is always misunderstood in the sense of a dynamic separateness of God from the world) is the presupposition of the New Testament belief in revelation. Only because the barrier between God and world is absolutely impermeable, can the event of the Incarnation – the approach of God in the Mediator – be absolutely unique. All mythological ambiguity is excluded at this point.196 This God-world barrier, bolstered by the prior claim that God must actually approach creation, is significant because it furnishes ground for the statement: ‘Christ is no intermediary being [Mittelwesen], but God himself. That is the sense of the doctrine of the Trinity, the fundamental Christian dogma’.197 In this connection, Brunner’s subsequent statements, revealing the closest possible connection between eristics and dogmatics, do so to the extent that it is difficult not to view the eristic task as a ‘foundation’. e.  Summary In bringing this brief account of some of the significant trends in Brunner’s eristic theology to a close, it is worth reviewing several of the key points. The primary theme is the utility of the dialectical position of the law, initially used to develop a phenomenology of human moral self-consciousness culminating with an a priori notion of ‘the moral idea’, which is then used Ibid. ‘Einmalige’, 274. 196  Ibid. Jewett, 14, finds a negation of history implicit in Brunner’s earlier reliance on the infinite qualitative distinction. 197  ‘Einmalige’, 274. 194  195 

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to treat the categories of religion, philosophy, science, ethics and history in their provisional relation to the gospel. This treatment was justified in particular by the existential interconnectedness of these categories, especially their tendency towards ‘the moral idea’ and the underlying primacy of moral reason. However, Brunner’s additional qualifying emphases, such as the principle of contiguity, and his special treatment of law, history and promise in the Old Testament indicate the law-gospel dialectic cannot be statically applied in all branches of eristic theology, but must be adjusted by degree according to context. Despite these helpful adjustments, Brunner’s view leans towards making the whole of history into a presupposition to the gospel, a move that ultimately waters down emphasis on the existential-moral questions and the particularity of the Old Testament. In this regard, echoing certain trends in Reformed dogmatics, Brunner appears to view the written Mosaic law as a republication of the natural law, that is, as a clearer revelation of the divine will already revealed in nature. While Old Testament law and history bear a certain degree of intensity in relation to other similar religious and philosophical conceptions, its law and religion differ only by degree, not by kind. It is therefore the prophetic promise exemplified by the image of the suffering servant that Brunner relies on to emphasize the distinctiveness of Israel’s tradition in relation to the gospel, not the Mosaic law: ‘That this truth was seen in the Old Testament and nowhere else points to the fact that it alone is the promise pointing towards Christ. But the fact that it is only foreshadowed at that point, and only actually takes place in the New Testament, means that the Old Testament is merely the promise pointing towards Christ’.198 Whether or not the term ‘promise’ sufficiently accounts for the Old Testament’s relation to the New, what is certain is that Brunner’s eristic theology has already moved a long way towards determining some of the particularities to be expected in his constructive theology.

II.  Dogmatic Theology in Der Mittler The following section focuses on the unity of the eristic and dogmatic tasks of theology in relation to the person and work of Christ as the end and fulfilment of the law. The key text in this section is Der Mittler, and the analysis demonstrates not only conceptual continuity with Brunner’s earlier writings on law and revelation, but also continuity with Nature and Grace, 198 

Der Mittler, 429 (ET: 474).

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particularly in terms of the emphasis on ‘general revelation’. As Harry Miller Gardner summarizes, ‘Jesus Christ is the special revelation which fulfills the general revelation’199, and therefore, as becomes especially clear in Dogmatics II, but is also appropriate for Nature and Grace: Jesus Christ ‘reveals’ both general and special revelation.200 a.  General and Special Revelation The particularities of Brunner’s earlier christology are developed in direct connection with his eristic treatment of the relationship between general and special revelation201, which is the primary concern of Book One of Der Mittler and the secondary concern in the companion volume, The Philosophy of Religion from the Standpoint of Protestant Theology. In Der Mittler, Book One is entitled ‘Preliminary Considerations’ and its first chapter discusses ‘The Distinction: General and Special Revelation’.202 Following are two chapters entitled ‘The Blurring of this Distinction in Modern Theology’ and ‘The Consequence: The Modern Conception of Christ’203, which suggest that modern theology altogether ignores the distinction between general and special revelation. In response to this ‘modern conception of Christ’, Brunner posits ‘The Reason for the Distinction’ in the face of ‘The Assertion of Unbroken Unity’ (i.e. between general and special revelation) in the Fourth chapter.204 Chapter 5 explores ‘The Depth of the Distinction: Understanding the Problem of Evil’, indicating how thought systems presupposing ‘unbroken unity’ are unable to reckon sufficiently with the problem of evil.205 Book One, therefore, focuses explicitly on the dialectic of general and special revelation, involving the delimitation of special revelation, that is, the proper establishment of its particularity in contrast to general revelation, and consequently, an eristic treatment of general revelation. While implicitly present in his writings for nearly a decade, Brunner begins to reckon directly with the theme of general and special revelation 199  Harry Miller Gardner, ‘The Doctrine of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ in the Thought of Peter Taylor Forsyth and of Emil Brunner’ (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University, 1962), 164. 200  Gardner, 209. 201  While giving an otherwise perceptive account of Brunner’s christology, Volk, ‘Die Christologie bei Karl Barth und Emil Brunner’, 644–53, virtually ignores the eristic introduction to Der Mittler. 202  Der Mittler, IX (ET: 7). 203  Ibid. 204  Ibid. 205  Ibid.

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in the mid-1920s in concert with his treatment of law and revelation. This is especially evident in a March 1925 lecture entitled ‘Was heißt: Erbaut auf dem Grunde der Apostel und Propheten?’ (What is the Meaning of ‘Built on the Foundation of the Apostles and Prophets?’).206 Although the lecture was given to a group of Swiss Reformed pastors, its contents, as well as the related correspondence, indicate that Brunner is thinking specifically about his ongoing debate with Barth.207 Clarifying the previous January’s ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, with its subtitle ‘A Theological Foundation’, Brunner explicitly calls for ‘a theology that does not have its ground in reason, but in revelation arising out of Scripture’.208 This does not, however, entail an abandonment of the dialectic of law and revelation, but rather further clarification of the particularly theological nature of the ‘eristic’ task; it is not theology’s job to justify Christian faith before reason209, because Christian faith ‘has its ground and criterion in itself and not in reason’.210 Christ as attested in Scripture is the ground211, and Brunner sets revelation in Christ in direct contrast to all other ‘norms’.212 Nonetheless, the various attempts to label ‘speculative thinking, . . . moral volition, or . . . mystical feeling’ as ‘revelation’ despite their immanent basis are not altogether ‘fantasy’, because ‘they have seen something, and indeed something, which the Christian theologians of classical times had seen in varying degrees and under the terms: lumen naturale or revelatio generalis’.213 Playing on this distinction 2  years later, Brunner begins Der Mittler by contrasting the revelatory claims of the ‘living popular religions’ on the one hand, and the ‘philosophy of religion’, ‘religious speculation’ and ‘mysticism’ on the other.214 Questions about the reality of revelation do not arise, rather ‘our question is a preliminary one . . . wherever the appeal is made to revelation, does this word occur in the same sense?’215 While indeed noting the stark differences between the contrasting claims of the religions, philosophy, speculation and mysticism, Brunner nonetheless reduces these claims to a least common denominator before setting up a comparison to the Christian understanding of revelation: ‘The so-called special revela­ tions  of the religions ultimately come down to nothing other than what 206  207  208  209  210  211  212  213  214  215 

‘Was heißt?’, 34–53. Barth-Brunner, EB: 10 March 1925 (#46), 111–12. ‘Was heißt?’, 36. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 39. On lumen naturale, see Nature, 46–7. Der Mittler, 3–4 (ET: 21–2). Ibid., 3 (ET: 21).

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speculation, the philosophy of religion and mysticism claim: the merely individual concrete instance of what is universal, the accidental embodiment of that Essence reigning beyond time and space in the realm of eternal being’.216 ‘Das Einmalige’, 2  years after Der Mittler, also pursues this line, though using a generalized concept of law to connect mythology and modernity: ‘There, where we modern, rational humans see timeless regularities [Gesetzmäßigkeiten] and correlations, the mythological man sees events, actions and unique occurrences taking place. To the question ‘Why’ he answers not as we do through demonstrations of legally ordered connections or a chain of causality, but with a story: it has been done by this or that divine power’.217 The philosophical and the mythological viewpoints are both etiological and causal: one looks to mechanism, the other divinity. However, myth also sets its assertions within the context of ‘periodical, continually recurring events of natural occurrence’, and even ‘where it is not directly a matter of such regularities, but a matter of “uniqueness”, myth destroys the form of uniqueness through the suggestion of multiple or unending repetitions’.218 Whereas the individual acts of particular divine entities are recounted in mythology, the endless repetition of these acts and events signify their ultimate relativity. Brunner finds both modern notions of causality and law, as well as primitive conceptions of mythological divine agency, to be laden with both symbolism and repetition, and therefore incompatible with absolute uniqueness. Consequently, whether one speaks of the ‘special’ revelations of the living popular religions or the general revelation of the philosophy of religion, the bottom line is the same: if deity is accessible to humanity through a non-historical manifestation of universal truth, this ultimately means an ‘obliteration’ of the distinction between general and special revelation. This reductive account of the living popular religions, mythologies and philosophies of religion determines the focus of Christianity’s interaction with non-Christian thinking about revelation. As stated in Der Mittler: The genuine distinction is not the one between Christian revelation and these mythological religions, the religions of recurring revelations, but between the Christian faith in the one unique and unrepeatable revelation and this universal religion and universal revelation which is indifferent to everything historical, just like when popular religion is subsumed into either this universal religion or into the Christian religion.219 216  217  218  219 

Ibid., 9 (ET: 27). Cf. ‘Christlicher Glaube’, 238. ‘Einmalige’, 267. Ibid., 267–8. Der Mittler, 9 (ET: 27–8).

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The result is that the ‘distinction’ between general and special revelation can now be understood to culminate at ‘one point: the mystical-idealisticmoral universal religion (in its various forms) – which does not attempt to make any claim about revelation in the concrete sense, but rejects this concept of revelation as “crude”, “unspiritual”, “sensory”, “external” – and the Christian faith in the one unique and unrepeatable revelation, in Jesus Christ’.220 Thus, any serious distinction between general and special revelation outside of Christian thought can be abandoned, with the only genuine distinction remaining between the Christian conception of ‘special’ revelation and the reductive conception of general revelation. Christian faith, then, maintains an altogether different understanding of revelation from all other religions, mythologies and philosophies: as indicated above, the Christian conception of revelation is absolutely unique and, as shown below, it is mediated. In both the general religious and philosophical cases, relationship to the divine is direct, whereas in Christianity, this relationship is indirect: ‘It is because it consists in being bound to an accidental fact of history, to an actual event in time and space that it claims to be the onetime unique and unrepeatable decision for time and eternity and the whole world. It is therefore not primarily an unmediated relation to God, but a mediated one’.221 This is the decisive aspect of Brunner’s characterization of Christ as the Mediator: ‘Between the soul and God, between humanity and God, between the world and God, there stands a third element, or rather a third person, who while separating both parts just as equally binds them together; the one in whom alone this connection comes about, in whom alone God reveals God’s self: the Mediator’.222 While the distinction between general and special revelation frequently appears in Christian dogmatic theology, it is the persistence of this dialectic that is particularly important for Brunner. In the early chapters of Der Mittler, Brunner relates this particular concern in two forms he later uses to determine the basis of his critique of Barth in Nature and Grace: the ­distinction between general and special revelation223, and the imago Ibid. (ET: 28). Der Mittler, 11 (ET: 30). Cf. Erlebnis, 105–6. This applies to special revelation in Jesus Christ  and is the basis for Brunner’s doctrine of incognito. Cf. Der Mittler, 302 (ET: 337): ‘Only because the deity of Christ goes hand in hand with the incognito of his humanity is it possible to have a relation of faith and decision towards him. Full disclosure would not leave any room for faith; it would be sight’. Cf. Der Mittler, 398 (ET: 441): ‘This is the very opposite of a theophany in the sense of what is for paganism “direct knowability”’. Cf. Emil Brunner, The Theology of Crisis (New York: Scribner’s, 1929), 35. Cf. Jewett, 27. 222  Der Mittler, 11 (ET: 30). 223  See Nature, 24–7. 220  221 

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dei.224 Special revelation, therefore, does not simply annihilate general revelation, but rather stands with it in a dialectical relationship: ‘The relationship between the Christian faith and religion without a mediator is therefore characterized by the fact that the Christian faith, for which revelation is a onetime unique and absolutely decisive fact, encloses “general revelation” and “universal religion” as distorted truth within itself as its own presupposition’.225 General revelation functions as the presupposition to special revelation, and this dialectic itself is an integral part of any comprehensive account of Christian revelation. That is, ‘recognition of the indirect (gebrochen) general revelation is the presupposition of the Christian faith in revelation in the sense of its onetime uniqueness’.226 However, because this dialectic of general and special revelation contains such a sharp line of contrast between Christian faith and other notions of revelation, it is precisely the dialectic itself that preserves and delimits the uniqueness of Christian special revelation. If the dialectic is not maintained, a genuine, delimited understanding of the nature of revelation in Christ is inconceivable: ‘It is not possible to believe in the onetime unique revelation, in the Mediator, without also believing in a general revelation of God in creation, in history and particularly in the conscience. But, on the other hand, one who believes in a Christian way in the general revelation and in the Mediator can no longer be an idealist or a mystic’.227 The unquestionable givenness of general revelation therefore mandates a conceptual reorganization. In other words, ‘the question cannot be whether there is any general revelation at all – otherwise there most certainly could not be any question about God at all –, but rather the question is in what sense, whether direct or indirect, whether it is the case that the revelation in Christ is only a highpoint of this general revelation, or whether it is something entirely different, that is, the actual revelation itself’.228 This means that there can be no wholesale rejection of natural theology, and significantly, the dialectic of general and special revelation must be reckoned with in the anthropological doctrines, particularly the imago dei: It is remarkable how many opponents of the so-called dialectical theology have made it easy for themselves by attributing to us the rejection of all general revelation in natural history and in the human spirit. They have 224  225  226  227  228 

Ibid., 22–4. Der Mittler, 14–15 (ET: 33–4). Ibid., 13 (ET: 32). Cf. Philosophy, 15. Ibid., 13 (ET: 32). Ibid., 12 n. 2 (ET: 31 n. 2).

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not understood that the dialectic of faith has its basis precisely in the fact that humanity bears in itself a – completely spoiled – image of God, that the originally good creation is also one that reveals God.229 From this standpoint, Brunner begins to set the stage for the end and fulfilment paradigm he fully unveils in the christology proper. For now, however, he only grants general revelation a provisional position in relation to the truth: ‘However, this twofold point is grounded on the fact that the Christian looks upon general revelation as an indirect (gebrochen) revelation. Insofar as the idealist and the mystic know of its existence, they do have the truth. But insofar as they believe themselves to have the real knowledge of God in this [indirect revelation], they remain in falsehood’.230 Modifying his notion of ‘half-truths’ developed in  1921, Brunner now says ‘what humanity knows apart from Christ, what “natural humanity” knows, is not half of the truth, but distorted truth’.231 As noted, in Der Mittler, Brunner holds the proper treatment of the end and fulfilment of these provisional or partial truths until the constructive section. However, a telling statement in The Philosophy of Religion indicates the direction Brunner will travel: ‘The definite fact of revelation takes the place of what is universal, of truth in general, or of the final criterion of valid assertions; the incarnate logos here occupies the position otherwise held by the loss of reason, the essential idea of truth’.232 b.  The Person and Work of the Mediator As indicated in the above treatment of Brunner’s eristic theology, Christ’s end and fulfilment of the law forms the basic law-gospel pattern for eristic theology. In Der Mittler, following Brunner’s earlier writings on law and revelation, special revelation in the person of Christ ends and fulfils theoretical reason, and the justifying work of Christ (i.e. revelation of the objective act of divine forgiveness) ends and fulfils moral reason; God’s selfrevelation in Christ constitutes the end and fulfilment of human reason, and therefore of religion, ethics, philosophy, history and all other categories treated by eristic theology insofar as these categories in their interrelations Ibid. Der Mittler, 13 (ET: 32). 231  Ibid., 14 (ET: 33). Cf. Erlebnis, VI: Religions of experience and knowledge are ‘provisional half-truths’. The revised formula corresponds to Brunner’s doctrine of the imago dei, where the image of God in humanity is understood to be wholly perverted, rather than lost only in part. However, see Der Mittler, 372–3 (ET: 413). 232  Philosophy, 16. 229  230 

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contain general revelation. While an earlier version of this paradigm is already present in Brunner’s writing in the teens, the contrast between the particularly personal and unique character of special revelation and timeless truth of the law becomes increasingly prominent in his thinking as he begins to develop and employ his unique notion of the Word of God and the dialogical I-Thou formula, both of which are clearly present in the second edition of Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube in 1923.233 That text, as the title implies, focuses on the contrast between experiential and intellectual ‘religion’ and Christian faith. The constructive conclusions in the final section point towards the treatment of the person and work of Christ in Der Mittler, but nonetheless remain focused on faith. This conception of faith, however, is not to be taken in a subjective sense, but as ‘pure objectivity’234 constituting the fulfilment and unity of theoretical and moral reason because in it both ‘knowledge and will are identical’.235 ‘God’, in other words, ‘unveils himself in the Word only to those who believe, and conversely believing and knowing him are one and the same’.236 Faith, therefore, is entirely dependent on revelation and ‘can only be expressed in its relation to God’237, that is, ‘it has something to do with God. That is its objectivity’.238 In fact, ‘it is this pure objectivity of faith that Paul and Luther brought to expression in their doctrine of “justification by faith alone”’, which means the ‘complete devaluation and declaration of the irrelevance of all actions and events originating and proceeding from humanity . . . even the moral consciousness’239, because ‘revelation would not be the Word from beyond if it did not, all the more, ratify and fulfil the judgement which the law pronounces over us’.240 Like justification, forgiveness also implies discontinuity with human knowledge and experience, because ‘if forgiveness is forgiveness, then it can only be the shutdown of our processes of knowing and experiencing, the abrogation of all our experience and conceptuality’.241 It is in this manner, that the Erlebnis, 125. Ibid., 91. 235  Ibid. 236  Ibid., 92. 237  Ibid., 93. 238  Erlebnis, 94. Cf. ‘Gnosis and Glaube’, 36–7: ‘The form of faith and the content of faith are the same. . . . This form: Faith, and this content: Incarnation and expiatory death of Christ, are one’. 239  Erlebnis, 96. Two years later, this radically dialectical pronouncement is qualified on ‘Gnosis und Glaube’, 39: ‘Faith stands in itself not in opposition to knowing, just as little as it does to moral willing. On the contrary: It presupposes both’. However, see 47: ‘Faith is humiliation and remains humiliation. The measure of humiliation is the measure of faith’. 240  Erlebnis, 122. 241  Ibid. 233  234 

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‘revelation of God in Christ is the fulfillment of the law of reason, but precisely therefore in what stands over our legally determined knowledge, the origin itself, the word of all words, that with which we no longer measure, but which measures us, that which we no longer see, but sees us, knows us, and in which we only have the possibility either to believe or to reject’.242 Brunner retains this dialectic in ‘Die Offenbarung als Grund und Gegenstand der Theologie’ of 1925. There, Brunner establishes the limits of humanity, but labels speculative foraging for an immanent notion of forgiveness beyond those limits as ‘pure insanity’, because ‘forgiveness from God would constitute repeal of the law’.243 Nonetheless, Brunner does push further, modifying his earlier treatment and asking, ‘But what happens if this intervention of God is posited not as our thought, but as divine action? Not as an idea, but as an event?’244 He continues, and if this event manifests itself to us as a divine event, that it presents itself to us in the form of a contradiction, to wit, that this law therein is at the same time repealed and ratified? If the divine eternity, which is known to us only as an idea in theoretical and moral knowing, as re-membrance of a better world, as Plato says, – if it steps out of its stillness, if the divine Logos, which we only know as ‘presupposition’, as law, and which therefore still never actually becomes personal, because it is timeless – speaks to us as an actual word in time.245 Whatever the incoherent presuppositions, memory, anamnesis, or attempts stemming from theoretical and moral reason, all autonomous human attempts to overcome the distance between God and humanity fail.246 The only thing that overcomes this distance is the Word of God spoken as an event: ‘The Christian faith is the assertion of this occurrence. It sees this event in Jesus of Nazareth, who we call the Christ’.247 Here time and eternity come together, and Christian faith perceives a response to the two-fold meaning of the law: The most emphatic, unsurpassable assertion of the law and the divine wrath over sin, and at the same time, the abolition of the law and its Ibid., 123. ‘Offenbarung’, 107. 244  Ibid. 245  Ibid. 246  See ‘Christlicher Glaube’, 245–6. 247  ‘Offenbarung’, 107. Here Brunner focuses on the crux of revelation as an event, whereas his later hallmark will be ‘encounter’. 242  243 

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judgment, the answer to the question which humans are unable to answer, the resolution of this deepest conflict in life, which is irreconcilable by human action, namely, the revelation of God, the justification of sinful humanity, the eternal fulfillment of all life as divine promise. That is Christ.248 Thus, Christ both ratifies and repeals the law and the divine wrath in the revelation of his person and in his work of atonement. In ‘Christlicher Glaube nach reformierter Lehre’, Brunner gives another explicit account of revelation and justification using law and gospel, this time supplementing his usual Kantian eristic discourse and some brief statements on the person and work of Christ with allusions to Reformed covenantal theology, a position he later solidifies in his Dogmatics.249 Brunner accordingly renders a brief dialectical account of the covenant of law and the covenant of grace, set up by equating ‘the proclamation of the Kingdom of God’ and ‘justification alone by faith’, and contrasting them with the notion that ‘“under the law”, the human is a self-directed actor . . . “It is up to you, you must do it yourself”’.250 The latter constitutes ‘the arrogance of humanity, that it understands God’s covenant in a two-sided sense, as a covenant of two equal partners. It is this same presumption as is found in  the concept of autonomy’.251 In this autonomous state, knowledge and  relations to God are completely determined by the law, but ‘God is not identical with the law’ and ‘the legalistic relationship to us is not the original one willed by Him’.252 This situation is the result of sin, ‘but God shows himself to us as free and merciful in his revelation . . . He creates a ‘Offenbarung’, 107–8. Dogmatics II, 215. 250  ‘Christlicher Glaube’, 248. 251  Ibid., 249. 252  ‘Christlicher Glaube’, 249. Mensch, 106–7 (ET: 103–4): ‘The “Primitive State”, even if not an historical fact, should be understood primarily as a state of being (Sein) instead of as a state of obligation (Sollen). . . . Thus the original essence of man is Being-in-the-love-of-God, fulfilledresponsible Being, the responsibility coming not from a demand but from a gift, not from the law but from grace, from generous love and consisting in responsive love’. Dogmatics II, 74: ‘This is the truth which lies behind the mythical idea of a Primitive State in Paradise. Jesus Christ, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, replaces this paradise myth by the simple idea that man was originally at “home” with the Father’. Whereas Brunner would definitely not explicitly develop a doctrine of the ‘covenant of works’ and does not make any explicit reference to this doctrine, in Dogmatics II, 119, he approximates roughly to an interpretation of this first covenant as a ‘gracious covenant’: ‘The idea of “Law”.  .  . is foreign to man’s original relationship with God . . . man stands directly over against the generous God who claims His Love. The only duty is this: Let yourself be loved, live in My Love! But this obligation, just because it is the summons to receive love, is not a “law”. Man may eat “of all the trees of the garden”, or as St Paul says later: “All things are yours”. The only tree whose fruit man may not eat is that which grows on the “tree which is in the midst of the garden”’. 248  249 

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new  relationship, a new convent, that is not the covenant of law’.253 This new covenant is ‘not dependent on our conduct – that was the covenant of  law, – but alone dependent on his will, his gift, his speech. That is forgiveness, justification by grace’.254 Brunner repeats this formula in Dogmatics II, though returning a surprising amount of dialectical priority to the gospel, perhaps indicating a slight concession to Barth’s position on gospel and law while also retaining his own distinctive emphasis on end and fulfilment: In the Old Testament the Law certainly appears as an element in the revelation of the covenant. Thus it is not primary but secondary. . . . The Law is embedded in the Gospel; only so is it the true will of God. But this is not the whole truth. The whole truth is only seen fully where God first of all and without conditions, reveals Himself as the loving generous God in Jesus Christ, who is therefore the ‘end of the Law’. But this revelation at the same time breaks through wrath and legalism, and removes guilt by vicarious suffering.255 Evident in this statement, as well as in the earlier formulas, is Brunner’s connection of the person and work of Christ through revelation and justification. In concert with his insistence on the unity of theoretical and moral reason, and revelation and justification, Brunner denies the notion that any serious division can be forced in between the person and the work of Christ, a point which forms the centrepiece to the christology in Dogmatics.256 There, while asserting Christ’s person and work form a unity, Brunner nonetheless treats them separately, beginning with the work of Christ. In Der Mittler, however, Brunner is already unhappy with the traditional separation of the doctrines of the person and work of Christ, although he treats them separately in extended sections comprising a 253  ‘Christlicher Glaube’, 249. Cf. ‘Gesetz II’, 1. See ‘Gnosis und Glaube’, 31–2. In Dogmatics II, 215–17, Brunner explicitly places himself within the Reformed covenantal tradition, with qualification: ‘We must get rid of all those definitions coming from the later Reformed tradition, gathered up under the term “Federal or Covenant Theology”, since their juridical, rationalistic terminology, combined with a rather dangerous theologia naturalis, would create further confusion rather than clarification. . . . Thus we have to understand the Law in the light of this establishment of the Covenant. Zwingli and his friends rendered a great service by their emphasis upon this connection between the Covenant and the Law, over against a onesided, polemical severance of the Law from the Gospel’. 254  ‘Christlicher Glaube’, 249. 255  Dogmatics II, 121. 256  Ibid., 271–4.

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third of the text each, beginning with ‘The Person of the Mediator’. In 1937, Brunner announces a significant modification of his christology in Truth as Encounter, otherwise referred to as changing from a ‘christology from above’ to a ‘christology from below’.257 There, Brunner writes, I must correct at this point certain emphases in my own book The Mediator. It was indubitably an unconditional necessity for the church to defend the unity of God and man in Jesus Christ against all mythological, Gnostic, and moralistic-rationalistic attacks, but the church bogged down (so to say) at that point. It gave the Christian faith a false orientation about the being instead of the work of Christ. In this way it imperiled the fundamental historical character of the evangelical message by means of a static Platonism.258 In this regard, Brunner simply moves further in a direction implied in his thought from the beginning, and despite his concerns about a traditional over-emphasis on the being of Christ and static Platonism, he is not proposing an ‘actualist’ ontology in the sense recently applied to Barth’s theology.259 Rather, Brunner’s intention is to preserve the proper relationship between theoretical considerations of Christ’s being and moral considerations of his work in relation to sin and forgiveness, believing speculation is avoided precisely because the correspondence of justification to revelation, with its moral/practical primacy, gives christology an existential check. While Brunner does not want to ground his christology on this existential element, in addition to the check on speculation, he also wants to delimit the Christian notion of revelation, therefore ensuring its distinction from general revelation (something he believes the ontic standpoint, i.e. the doctrine of the person of Christ, cannot do on its own). 257  See Mark G. McKim, Emil Brunner: A Bibliography (Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996), 56; Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man (trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe; London: SCM, 1968), 33–7; Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics Vol. 2 (trans. Darrell Guder; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 13, 17. See also Edward A. Dowey, Jr., ‘Redeemer and Redeemed as Persons in History’, in The Theology of Emil Brunner, 193–4, and Brunner’s response, ‘Reply to Edward A. Dowey, Jr’., in the same volume, 343. 258  Truth, 156. See Alister E. McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology: From the Enlightenment to Pannenberg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 101: ‘Although his initially resulting Christology, as found in Der Mittler, is unquestionably docetic, Brunner’s developing theological personalism, evident in his rejection of idealism, contains the germs of his later solution to this deficiency’. Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology (London: Collins, 1966), 81. 259  See especially Bruce McCormack, ‘Grace and being: the role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge 2000), 92–110. Brunner is elsewhere labelled actualistic. For example Volk, ‘Die Christologie bei Karl Barth und Emil Brunner’, 653, calls this ‘the turn to pure actualism’.

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Thus, grounded in the unity of theoretical and moral reason, Christ’s being is his act because he is God’s act of forgiveness both in his person and in his work. In other words: ‘The coming of the Son of God is his Work’.260 It is with this emphasis on God’s unique act in Jesus Christ that Brunner writes in the conclusion to the passage above from Truth as Encounter in 1937 that the Person of the Mediator must also be understood as an act of God, namely, as his coming to us in revelation and redemption. It must be understood as the divine act of turning himself toward and giving himself to man. In this sense Melanchthon’s famous word, “To know his acts of kindness is to know Christ”261, signifies a decisive return to the biblical understanding of Christ. . . . Even the Person of the Mediator is comprehended with the verb, if I may so express it, not with the substantive. One could actually say, Jesus Christ, even and especially in his divine-human being as person, is God’s act, just as he is the Word of God. In him – not only through him – does God redeem us. In him, God reveals himself; in him, God reconciles the world unto himself; in him, God redeems us. Consequently, in this connection too, where we are considering the Person – the mystery of the Person of Christ – what is essential is not something as it is in itself [Ansichseiendes], a divinehuman Person as he is himself [Person-an-sich], but the relation of God, the dealing of God with the sinful and lost humanity, the revelatory and redemptive act of God.262 Turning back over 10  years to ‘Was heißt: Erbaut auf dem Grunde der Apostel und Propheten?’ of 1925, the roots of this trend are already apparent. There, general revelation, immanence and law are described as a covering that must be removed externally by Christ: ‘He is the Mediator, the one who breaks through this covering, by breaking through he belongs both to the eternal and the temporal world and is just in that way the one who reveals’.263 This breaking through is both ‘a mighty decree of God and Der Mittler, 359 (ET: 399). ‘Hoc est Christum congnoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere’. 262  Truth, 156. See Thomas A. Indinipolous, ‘Creativity and Christianity: A Polemic Based on Rudolf Bultmann, Emil Brunner, and Nicolas Berdyaev’ (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1965), 44: ‘Since revelation means communication—God’s act and man’s faith—revelation is in essence God’s redeeming work. The self-revelation of God in Christ centres not on who Christ is, but what Christ does; that is, not on the Incarnation, but on the Redeemer. Revelation is thus literally reconciliation’. 263  ‘Was heißt?’, 43. Cf. ‘Christlicher Glaube’, 240. 260  261 

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a mighty action of God’.264 It is ‘the same God, who in Christ, in this wordaction [Tatwort], who breaks through the world, who – just as he breaks through this world – also breaks through the legalism of the psychological life’.265 Here, Brunner even hints towards the personalistic emphasis also developed in Truth as Encounter, stating, ‘God is always personal, that means free and that means something other than the Absolute, or the world-law or the world-idea or the totality of life, personal – distinguished from all being and its laws’.266 From this standpoint, the analysis can move towards Brunner’s explication of the objective, justifying work of Christ, forgoing further commentary on Brunner’s explicit reckoning with the doctrine of the person of Christ due to the already consistent attention to Brunner’s dialectical account of impersonal law and personal revelation. c.  The Mediator and Reconciliation In order to emphasize the unity of the doctrines of the person and work of Christ, Brunner begins his treatment of ‘The Work of the Mediator’ with a section entitled ‘The Revelation’, moving from the ‘Person and Work’ of Christ to the ‘Person and Teaching’ of Christ in subsequent chapters, prior to considering the objective work of atonement in a section entitled ‘Reconciliation’. In the build-up to Der Mittler, Brunner clearly gains an increasing sense for the significance of the objective work of Christ and accordingly develops parallel accounts of reconciliation through ‘The Penal Theory’ and ‘The Expiatory Sacrifice’. Thus, Paul Schrotenboer is correct to suggest that for Brunner ‘Christ is the fulfillment of the law in the sense that He reveals its meaning. He did not destroy the law itself, but the impersonal abstractness of the law and the false direction of legality or works righteousness’.267 However, Brunner also fully explicates Christ’s literal fulfilment of the law by his submission to its demands and acceptance of the punishment it arranges for sin on behalf of humanity. The law must be fulfilled – Brunner outlines this under the heading of ‘The Necessity for Atonement’ in Der Mittler – meaning divine forgiveness of sin is not a given.268 Brunner establishes the objective doctrine of reconciliation by empha­ sizing Luther’s theologia crucis with reference to the end of theoretical and 264  265  266  267  268 

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 43. Schrotenboer, 120. Der Mittler, 392–410 (ET: 435–54).

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moral reason: ‘It is only at the cross that the “offense” and the “folly” of the revelation in Christ become clear. It is only here that the intellectual and moral pride of reason is broken conclusively’.269 Only at this point is a serious distinction between general and special revelation possible, ‘because our attitude towards the cross and the reconciliation finally make clear whether we understand revelation to mean either something general, or something unique and unrepeatable.270 On the one side, because of its offence and folly to reason, ‘the cross, more clearly than anything else, is what separates biblical revelation from everything else in the history of religion and every form of idealism’.271 On the other side, Brunner contrasts what he describes as a christocentric ‘theology of reconciliation’ beginning with Schleiermacher and extending to Ritschl that regards the cross and passion as ‘the ultimate proof of Jesus’ perfect religious or moral union with the divine will’.272 Despite sounding scriptural, these ideas ‘do not go beyond the Idea – the Idea made visible in and to history – of moralreligious fidelity to vocation’, but not ‘the fact that God does something, and indeed something necessary’.273 This ‘necessity’ stands in decisive contradiction to the notion that ‘reconciliation is removal of a religious error’.274 In this regard, Brunner finds a false dichotomy at the bottom of the debate between purely subjective (Abelard) and purely objective (Anselm) notions of reconciliation, suggesting that the Anselmic model is already part of a well-established tradition and needs to be reckoned with in that broader context, instead of as the only acceptable model for objective atonement. At bottom, however, Brunner’s concern lies with the role of law in relation to the atonement, stating ‘it will be necessary to dispel the deep-seated prejudice against the “forensic” elements and the notion of divine  honor found in Anselm’s and all other objective treatments of atonement’.275 In order to highlight the particularly forensic element in atonement, Brunner stresses the primacy of moral reason, similar to his phenomenological build-up to ‘the Moral Idea’: ‘It is foolishness to the Greeks. The Greek spirit is too superficial, too aesthetic, to feel the offense as a whole. It only recognizes the folly, not the offense; it is inconceivable to someone who cannot feel the offense it causes to someone whose moral and religious 269  270  271  272  273  274  275 

Ibid., 394 (ET: 437). Ibid. Ibid., 394–5 (ET: 437). Ibid., 395 (ET: 438). Ibid., 396 (ET: 439). Ibid. Ibid., 397 (ET: 440). Cf. Der Mittler, 407 (ET: 451).

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passion is struck by it as a whole, the offense it causes to the will directed towards the law of God’.276 The offence of the cross, therefore, remains theoretical to the idealist, because it is not preceded by a proper notion of divine moral law, meaning ‘only the Jew can feel the entire weight of the offense, because he has already been brought so close to this point through his divine education’.277 Repeating his concern with Barth from 1918278, Brunner states that the separation between God and humanity, therefore, cannot be understood solely in theoretical or cosmological terms: ‘We are not only far from God, our life is not only unlike God’s, God does not merely have to overcome some distance, some stretch, in order to come to us. It is not merely that we have another way of being or our finitude that separates us from God. That would be merely negative, something that we lack’.279 Rather, sin and guilt lie in between God and humanity and spoil humanity’s relation to God because ‘the core of humanity’s essence is its stance towards God’.280 This attitude is perverted (subjectively) by sin and guilt, but is no mere ‘religious error’ or misunderstanding, because God’s attitude towards humanity has also changed (objectively). For Brunner, the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ bears this personal and moral character; it is not primarily a matter of sheer distance or human finitude. It is in sin, therefore, as a subjective human problematic, ‘that God’s honor . . . is breached281, but to sin corresponds, objectively, the wrath of God, because ‘God would stop being God if he could allow his honor to be breached’.282 This simply reaffirms the two-fold meaning of the law outlined above.283 As a result, on the one hand, the human sense of guilt derives from the presence of ‘divine holiness’, which is the law of God’s divine being on which all the order and law of the world is based, the fundamental ordering of the world, the consistent and reliable character of everything that happens, the validity of all norms, of all intellectual, legal and moral order: the law itself in its deepest sense demands the divine reaction, that God cannot be indifferent to sin, the divine opposition to this rebellion and this disruption of order.284 276  277  278  279  280  281  282  283  284 

Ibid., 399 (ET: 442). Ibid. Cf. Chapter 1, section III.b above. Der Mittler, 399 (ET: 443). Ibid., 400 (ET: 443). Ibid., 401 (ET: 444). Ibid. (ET: 442–3). See Chapter 2, section VI.b above. Der Mittler, 401 (ET: 444).

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Still, on the other hand, ‘this divine reaction is not automatic, it is not natural law – though it is legal in nature; rather, it is thoroughly personal’.285 Consequently, the separation between God and humanity constituted by the law ‘is an objective reality, the twofold reality of sin and the wrath of God’. Thus, the law is not a misunderstanding or mistake.286 Again, ‘the divine law – the world order – requires that sin has its corresponding response from God, punishment. . . . For the laws of nature are laws of the divine creation, peripheral laws’.287 However, ‘the law of penalty is the expression of the personal divine will, of divine holiness itself’.288 This carries a significant conclusion: as the divine response to sin is personal, not simply an expression of natural law and order, any consequent notion of forgiveness derived in abstraction from a specific divine action would itself constitute a violation of the law, a denial of guilt and a denial of the reality of sin. From this standpoint, Brunner forges an explicit correspondence between law and forgiveness, further solidifying his equation of revelation and justification.289 Analogous to knowledge of God, forgiveness of sin cannot be derived naturally (i.e. from moral reason), but must be revealed and actually take place: ‘Knowledge of forgiveness can only come on the basis of an explicit divine declaration that breaks through all intellectual necessity, all legal and a priori necessity, occurring as a fact, as an unprecedented word of promise’.290 Forgiveness cannot be reached rationally, because ‘what is logically necessary can only be part of the necessary interconnection of knowledge, all that is of a legal nature’.291 In other words, ‘all that is legal ultimately rests on the consistency of divine action, in the lawfulness of the divine will. Thus, if something is self-evident, then it is not forgiveness but punishment. This is because punishment is the expression of divine lawfulness, the inviolability of God’s ordering of the world. . . . That is the logic of the legal character of the world’.292 On this basis, Brunner affirms that ‘forgiveness’, like revelation, ‘can only take place as a real divine act’ and ‘would have to be imparted so that the holiness of God, the inviolability of the law, and the consistency of the penal order would not be abrogated’.293 Only forgiveness in this sense maintains the dialectic of law and gospel, as 285  286  287  288  289  290  291  292  293 

Ibid. (ET: 445). Ibid., 402 (ET: 445). Ibid., 403 (ET: 446–7). Ibid. (ET: 447). See Chapter 2, section VI.b. above. Der Mittler, 405 (ET: 448). Ibid. Ibid. (ET: 448–9). Ibid. (ET: 449).

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‘the event in which God makes known his holiness and his love at the same time, in one event, absolutely’ and is therefore also ‘the act of revelation (Tatoffenbarung). . . . That is what is meant by reconciliation, when the word is taken in the biblical objective sense’.294 Consequently, ‘the more serious our conception of guilt, the clearer the awareness of the necessity for an objective – not merely subjective – atonement’295, and yet ‘it was altogether only in Christ that humanity was able to discern the severity of its guilt, the necessity for an objective act of atonement’.296 Throughout the discourse, Brunner repeatedly contrasts objective atonement with any and all subjective conceptions: ‘The doctrine of identity – and the related systems of speculative Idealism and mysticism – maintain that nothing has to happen, it has been like this from eternity’, because in addition to a static, impersonal concept of God, they also do not take sin, guilt and therefore the law, seriously.297 This necessity forms the unity of the knowledge of the person and work of Christ, revelation and justification, theoretical and moral reason: ‘Knowledge of guilt, the personhood of God, and the reality of revelation belong necessarily together’.298 Accordingly, ‘the real God is the One who is holy without condition and merciful without condition’, and this means a revelation of God’s will (rightly understood apart from ‘natural necessity’) and God’s love.299 The binding between Brunner’s theologia crucis and his doctrine of law could not be expressed with greater clarity: the cross is revelation because it is ‘the union of divine freedom and necessity, like it is also the union of God’s holiness and mercy, of the unconditional validity of the law and the unconditioned sovereignty of God as the Lord of the law’.300 From this basis, Brunner moves towards a detailed account of the objective atonement, further solidifying his emphasis on Christ’s work of the end and fulfilment of the law, as well as the unity of the revelation of his person and his objective, justifying work. d.  Atonement and Sacrifice Brunner begins his treatment of the atonement by noting that Scripture gives ‘two series of expressions of a parabolic nature about the event of 294  295  296  297  298  299  300 

Der Mittler, 406 (ET: 450). Ibid., 407–8 (ET: 451). Ibid., 408 (ET: 451). Ibid., 409 (ET: 453). Ibid., 410 (ET: 454). Ibid. Ibid.

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atonement’, both of which turn on the dialectic of law and gospel: first are the legal, moral, and ethical statements, drawn from the law, and second are ritual and religious statements, drawn from cultic religious practice.301 Correctly understood, ‘both merge together into the concept of expiation (Sühne), and indeed of substitutionary and perfect expiation, which is the divine objective foundation of the atonement’.302 Despite the varying contexts in which the two series of ‘forensic’ and ‘religious’ statements appear, ‘the law as power over reality is the tertium comparationis between the forensic and the religious spheres . . . the power of the divine will for the order or law over reality, God the Lord’.303 Whereas both sets of conceptions are legalistic in their ‘natural’ setting, that is, the nonChristian religions, citing Ritschl, Brunner nonetheless concludes ‘it is neither a sign of great fidelity to the Biblical material nor a profound understanding of Christian truth to believe that one is able to decry certain dogmatic formulas by referring to them as “forensic expressions”’.304 Maintaining focus on the notions of moral and cultic law in these formulae, Brunner reduces both to their provisional ‘legal’ character in relation to the gospel, recalling his notion of half-truths from Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube. In fact, Brunner suggests, ‘it is a good question which is closer to the truth: rational moralism or the primitive sacrificial religion, because both have retained one element of truth and lost another. Rational moralism acknowledges the insufficiency of all human means of expiation; sacrificial religion acknowledges the need for expiation, the expiatory sacrifice’.305 Brunner, therefore, treats both models as they appear out with the Christian faith with the pattern of end and fulfilment. The general notions of penalty and expiation, one representing partial moral truth and the  other representing partial religious truth, are ended and fulfilled by Christ. Typically, Brunner seeks conceptual balance as he sets out on his treat­ ment of the penal theory of the atonement, suggesting the traditional ‘onesided’ emphasis on ‘penal suffering’ is ‘to be deplored’ in light of the presence of other useful notions.306 Nonetheless, insofar as the notion of guilt is ‘correlative to the notion of penalty’, it is indeed correct and important because ‘both conceptions are rooted in knowledge of the 301  302  303  304  305  306 

Ibid., 410–11 (ET: 455). Ibid., 411 (ET: 455). Ibid., 421 (ET: 466). Ibid. Ibid., 434 (ET: 479). Ibid., 413 (ET: 458).

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divine law’.307 Gesturing towards what will officially become his doctrine of the ‘point of contact’ in  1932, Brunner continues with a treatise on law, noting that ‘as an objective basis for thought’, the law ‘is the meeting point between rational and the Christian knowledge of God’.308 The law is ‘the backbone, the skeleton, the granite foundation of the intellectual world’309, and significantly, ‘the perception of a reliable order and rule of law, and especially perception of a moral law, is the core of all natural knowledge of God’.310 Summarizing much of what he has done to this point in his career, Brunner conclusively states: ‘The lawful nature of the world culminates altogether in the moral law’, disclosing not only ‘the lawful character of the form of the world, but also the personal will giving the world its form’.311 This personalistic emphasis, however, only applies when the generic ‘moral law’ is understood in relation to ‘the revealed law, without qualification’.312 It is therefore because of ‘the limits of the rational knowledge of the law that it can never become fully personal. It is precisely the notion of accordance to the law that establishes limits to knowledge of the personal God’.313 On this basis, Brunner draws a (long needed) distinction between the ‘Kantian Moral Law’ and the revealed, or biblical conception of law: the ‘biblical moral law’ is ‘concrete, not abstract’, ‘and personal from the very beginning’.314 Further, the moral law of the Bible ‘cannot be confused with a timeless idea’ – and correctly understood, it has an existential bent: ‘The one who speaks to me in the law is the world’s creator and my creator, me, not just the human race, me, here, now. It is therefore from the very beginning that my relation to him cannot be any merely ideal one, exchangeable with that of a mere idea, but it is rather an existential relation’.315 Apart from this personal and existential understanding, the law remains imbued with ‘something of the frivolity of a game, of merely spectating’.316 It is only at this point, according to Brunner, where it is acknowledged to have this personal character that the law can be taken seriously. A transition has taken place from a conception of law which is 307  308  309  310  311  312  313  314  315  316 

Ibid., 414 (ET: 458). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. (ET: 458–9). Ibid. (ET: 459). Ibid. Ibid., 415 (ET: 459–60). Ibid. (ET: 460). Ibid.

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general, abstract and impersonal, to one which, as found in the Old Testament, is personal and existential, culminating in the notion of identity between the divine will and the divine essence.317 This makes violation of the law, or sin, a personal affront to God, not just violation of an abstract moral principle318, moving the entire argument away from the humanistic and even eudaimonistic conception of the Good, and bringing the will of God and the existential character of Biblical law into focus.319 Referring to his discourse, Brunner suggests ‘all the concepts used to this point: law, lord, sovereign, serfdom, property, guilt, penalty, judgment, are from the sphere of law. It is as such that they have always provoked objection from those who see something of lower value in the law, particularly in the nineteenth century’.320 By contrast, Brunner asserts that forensic language and concepts are central to both the Old and New Testament, and simply, the ethical terms cannot be played off against the forensic terms, because an ‘analysis of the “ethical” vocabulary would lead to the perception that “forensic” concepts compose the foundation of every serious ethic’.321 Even with regard to the biological and economic terminology, ‘forensic terms have precedence because in them the law is identified not merely as an idea, as a purely logical-ideal principle of order, but as an ideal vital power’.322 As the ‘tertium comparationis’ between the forensic and religious spheres noted above, the law, ‘as power over reality’, cannot be extracted from either.323 As such, the law is a sine qua non and necessary component of Christianity’s understanding of revelation and atonement: Just as a purely empirical perspective makes it impossible for us to think of the Bible without these expressions, the foregoing investigation has also shown us that without these expressions we cannot express the central notions of the Christian faith, that of law, holiness and guilt, precisely because everywhere the holiness of God is concerned the issue centers directly on this tertium: the power of the divine will for order or of the law over reality, God the Lord.324 Failure to adequately and correctly acknowledge the dialectic of law and gospel results in imbalanced depictions of God, such as Ritschl’s: ‘In reality 317  318  319  320  321  322  323  324 

Ibid., 415–17 (ET: 460–1). Ibid., 417–19 (ET: 462–3). Ibid., 419–20 (ET: 464–5). Ibid., 420 (ET: 465). Ibid., 412 (ET: 465). Ibid. (ET: 466). Ibid., 421 (ET: 466). Ibid., 412 (ET: 466).

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the issue in this opposition to forensic terminology has do with something else, namely, the absorption of the notion of divine holiness into that of the divine love, which means the replacement of the biblical notion of God, most decisive for which is this two-fold emphasis on divine holiness and love, with the modern, unidirectional, monistic understanding of God’.325 Now, Brunner determines it is the modern conception of God that is the real cause of the imbalance, not ‘fear of the forensic elements’, a point he also finds confirmed by the fact that ‘the wholly non-juridical notion of the wrath of God’ is rejected as well.326 In essence, Brunner concludes that modern theology has simply created a God in its own image. By contrast, a serious reckoning with guilt corresponds to the notion of condemnation: ‘If evil is conceived as sin against God and therefore as wholly determinative for humanity, then there can be no question of any kind of self-redemption whatsoever’.327 The debt cannot simply be erased, because this would constitute an abandonment of the seriousness of the divine law and wrath, a compromise of God’s honor; but humanity cannot enunciate such a ‘necessity’: ‘The cross did not “have to” happen. . . the fact that it even “costs God something” to reveal himself in this way means that guilt is something real even for God, not to be ignored, not something shrugged off, that even God knows he is bound by his own law although as “Lord” he stands freely above it’.328 This is an essential aspect of the necessity of the dialectic of law and gospel, because ‘God does not will to reveal himself in any other way than this, that in his freedom from the law he is known to be just as equally bound to his law, or as the One who in the most sovereign act of defiance against the law – in forgiveness – just as equally intensifies the absoluteness of his law’.329 Brunner affirms that while this is not the only view that takes the divine wrath and holiness seriously, it is the only view that can also produce a serious understanding of divine love, because here, in fulfilling his own law, God submits God’s own self in an act of love: ‘The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep – this is divine love. The self-movement of God is not only God’s revelation, but also God’s grace. The one is fulfilled when the other is, in complete lowliness, in complete inadequacy, in the form of the suffering servant, of the suffering servant of God’.330 Thus, as the gospel depends on the law in this way, so God’s love depends on God’s holiness. 325  326  327  328  329  330 

Ibid., 422–3 (ET: 467). Ibid., 423 (ET: 467). Ibid., 424 (ET: 469). Ibid., 426–7 (ET: 472–3). Ibid., 427–8 (ET: 473). Ibid., 429 (ET: 474).

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While Brunner’s subsequent treatment of the ritual element – the expiatory sacrifice – does not explicitly turn on the law like the forensically oriented notion of penal atonement, it does follow the same basic pattern of end and fulfilment, rendering a cultic/religious criticism of legalism. In this regard, expiation adds to the notion of penal atonement and rounds out the overall picture of atonement, in specific contrast to the impersonal legal forensic element. This account accordingly emphasizes the notion that sin is a personal offence to God, and so ‘in the concept of an expiatory sacrifice the purely personal element – in contrast the objective-legal element – comes more clearly into expression’.331 By contrast, in the impersonal legal account, ‘the law of God points the human out into the world as the place where the obedience to God is to be demonstrated. Therefore the law is the “rational” side of the divine revelation’.332 In this account, humanity focuses on the rational independence of the law and forgets God – there is no longer a personal relationship with God’s holy will, but an impersonal relationship with the law. Brunner finds this especially in ‘non-religious humanism, or aesthetic ethics’, as well as ‘all the religion of the Enlightenment’, which ‘possesses the tendency to identify the divine with the ethical – if not the bourgeois’.333 In fact, ‘it is precisely the moral element, consciousness of the moral law, which tends to detach itself from its connection to God, its foundation and origin’.334 This impersonal and isolated character gives ritual or cultic religion the basis of its personalistic protest. As a result, both ‘ethical’ and ‘ritual’ religions have the right of protest against each other, with neither ever gaining total victory. Brunner connects this to the ‘great commandment’ as a two-fold commandment, suggesting that ‘it cannot be reduced to a single formula without being falsified: love to God and love to humanity, service to God and service to humanity’.335 Like the ethical religion oriented towards humanity, the cultic religion oriented towards God is also a halftruth: ‘Just as the secularized moral law still points towards the ultimate divine truth, so also the most savage cultic practice, and indeed to a truth that has gone completely missing on the other side’.336 In this regard, the lawful or ethical life is not enough to restore the human relationship with God, something actually has to happen: ‘Humanity is the personal property 331  332  333  334  335  336 

Ibid., 430 (ET: 475). Ibid. Ibid. (ET: 476). Ibid. Ibid., 431 (ET: 476). Ibid., 431–2 (ET: 477).

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of God. God does not merely want a legally correct life, but personal devotion, as God himself, the creator, promises his creature not only a happy life, salvation, but personal communion with him, the creator. It is therefore precisely because this original relationship is such a personal one that its destruction on both sides is also personal’.337 On the human side, this means sin, ‘but corresponding to personal sin is the personal reaction of God: the wrath of God’338, which results in the death of the sinner; death is the response of the divine will to sin.339 Thus, insists Brunner, ‘something else has to happen in order to bring about a return to God and restoration of the normal relationship. This special occurrence would be expiation’.340 Given this recognition, ‘religion’ attempts to find a way to cope with facts it only partially understands, thereby producing the idea of sacrifice, which Brunner calls an ‘equivalent’: ‘This notion of an equivalent, which is underlying the conception of sacrifice, would not have exercised such an tremendous influence, would not have been so widespread, dominant and tenaciously preserved throughout history if it had not been for the fact that a profound truth lies behind it’.341 ‘Of course’, Brunner writes, the equivalent is not really an equivalent, but ‘a “cheap” solution’.342 Nonetheless, it does express the true idea that ‘continuing on in any way is only possible on the basis of this presupposition. Things cannot go on “without something”’.343 In the New Testament, ‘the cross of Christ is comprehended as a self-offering of God. God does it, God suffers, God takes the burden on himself’, and this ‘comes to expression in the actual sacrifice of the Son of God, not in the idea of the sacrifice’.344 Jesus, therefore, did not abolish Jewish sacrificial practice, but fulfilled it, connecting ‘his own death with the sacrificial cult, with the Passover sacrifice, thus also intentionally and necessarily fulfilling this truth, like that of the law, in himself’.345 However, these notions, implying a break in the theoretical continuity between God and the world, are particularly difficult for ‘Rationalistic theologians’.346 Monistic continuity implies ‘there can be no need for divine intervention in the world order, because this world order would otherwise

337  338  339  340  341  342  343  344  345  346 

Ibid., 432 (ET: 477). Ibid. (ET: 478). Ibid., 434–5 (ET: 480–1). Ibid., 432 (ET: 479). Ibid., 435–6 (ET: 481). Ibid., 436 (ET: 481). Ibid., 435 (ET: 481). Ibid., 437–8 (ET: 482–4). Ibid., 438 (ET: 484). Ibid., 439 (ET: 485).

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be imperfect’, that is, not the best of all possible worlds, therefore rationalism cannot accept ‘such disorder on the deepest level, to the extent that the divine order has almost been completely destroyed’.347 In fact, ‘the seriousness of this disorder, the necessity of a reparatio or restitutio, is the fundamental idea of the Christian faith’.348 This again means divine intervention into both the subjective-epistemological and the objectiveontological: Because the order of our knowing has been impaired, God can no longer be known “without further ado”. An “extra-ordinary” divine institution is needed, a particular divine self-revelation. Because the divine order of life has been impaired, because fellowship with God has been broken and the divine love has been forfeited, an extra-ordinary institution of reattaching the torn thread is required, and thus, a special divine atonement. Both, atonement and revelation, exemplify the same point.349 This unity of revelation and justification also affirms the primacy of moral reason, ‘because the disturbance of life is still more profound than the disturbance of knowledge, the atonement is the final and deepest expression of the entire Christ-event’.350 Finally, analogous to Brunner’s conclusion of his treatment of the forensic model, he uses the religious or cultic model to emphasize divine love. ‘But this negative aspect is really only one side of the story’; the distance and discontinuity between God and the world are not the only significances of Christ’s expiatory work: ‘If the necessity of the expiatory sacrifice reveals to us the greatness of the abyss between God and sinful humanity, then it is only the reality of the sacrifice that first fully reveals what it means to say “God is love”’.351 In this regard, divine love has to be presented in this dialectic with wrath, but ‘because mysticism and rationalism still do not know this, they also do not know the God of love, although they like to use these words. The fact that the Son of God comes to us through the fiery barrier of the divine wrath is the mercy of God, which the gospel and it alone can proclaim’.352 In total then, ‘God’s self-movement to humanity is the theme of the Bible’, and the unity of this self-movement, exemplified in the unity of theoretical 347  348  349  350  351  352 

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 440 (ET: 486). Ibid., 441 (ET: 487).

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and moral reason, means ‘the real revelation and the real atonement are bound up together; indeed, rightly understood, they are one’.353 The unity of the person and work of Christ, then, is well-established in Der Mittler, foreshadowing Brunner’s eventual attempt to reorient the doctrine in his Dogmatics: ‘Therefore the “Person” and the “Work” of the Mediator are one and the same. He is this himself, because he is this, the revelation and the atonement’.354 This unity, as seen in its development since the early 1920s and emphasis especially in 1925, forms both a considerable presupposition, as well as conclusion, of Brunner’s earlier christology in direct relation to his understanding of law and gospel.

III.  Summary This chapter details the strong conceptual continuity between Brunner’s earlier published theology, especially his writings on the dialectic of law and revelation, and his initial attempts to produce his own internally consistent programme of both critical and constructive theology. Brunner’s concern for the unity of theoretical and moral reason continues to maintain a central position, while the related issues of the two-fold meaning of the law, the unity of revelation and justification, the delimitation of revelation and the theme of end and fulfilment reinforce the basic law-gospel substructure of Brunner’s theological system. In this regard, working from the standpoint of the gospel, Brunner’s eristic theology demonstrates the end or limits of religion, philosophy, history, and to a higher degree, the law and history of the Old Testament, ultimately pointing towards their fulfilment by the person and work of Christ. Likewise, Brunner’s dogmatic theology demonstrates both Christ’s person and work as the fulfilment of the law, or, in the words of Der Mittler, general revelation, as it variously appears in mysticism, idealism, historicism, etc. The analysis focuses particularly on the objective, justifying work of Christ on the cross, viewed through the models of both penal substitution and expiation, demonstrating not only Brunner’s commitment to the primacy of moral reason, but his serious attention to the literal fulfilment of the divine law. Brunner’s strong presentation of the law-gospel dialectic, especially in the reaches of christology proper, provides an excellent entry point for examining his critique of Barth in Nature and Grace.

353  354 

Ibid., 442 (ET: 488). Ibid., 444 (ET: 490).

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Chapter 4

Nature and Grace

This final chapter presents the conceptual continuity between Nature and Grace and the variations on the theme of law and gospel as developed in Brunner’s early work and his private correspondence with Barth examined in the first three chapters. After briefly introducing impressions taken from the reception of the debate and offering some pre-emptive qualifiers on the topic of natural theology, the chapter will explore one of Brunner’s first skirmishes with Barth on the topic of law and gospel, in addition to some of Brunner’s published and unpublished attempts to work out his doctrine of law in relation to natural theology. Following this introductory material, the remainder of the chapter will work through the text of Brunner’s Nature and Grace, paying special attention to the manner in which Brunner’s already well-established doctrine of law and gospel determines the structure and content of his position on the relationship between nature and grace.

I. Entering the Fray a.  The Reception of the Debate Even in its own time, the debate over ‘natural theology’ between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner was described as an overly technical dispute among academics, and years later, an academic philosopher could still comment that ‘to the layman the difference as compared to the common ground seemed miniscule’.1 In some cases, the significance of the debate is even downplayed, being described as a ‘skirmish between brothers’2, or ‘a brief flare-up’3, whereas to others it appeared ‘as a continental hewing and stabbing, as a Teutonic clash with Swiss shading’4 and even as ‘one of the 1  2  3  4 

Blanshard, 250. Hans Heinrich Brunner, 134–5. Cf. Schildmann, 190–1. Blanshard, 250. Sauter, 272.

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most living, and most un-English, controversies of the day’.5 It has also been suggested, specifically stemming from comments made by Barth6, that the differences seeming so sharp in the mid-1930s were later recognized to be less crucial, and that perhaps, Barth especially had been too hasty and overstated his position, even as Brunner had described Barth at the time as acting like a ‘loyal soldier on sentry duty at night, who shoots everyone who does not give him the password as he has been commanded, and who therefore from time to time also annihilates at good friend whose password he does not hear or misunderstands in his eagerness’.7 Others conclude that neither theologian was at his best in the affair and that the argumentation demonstrates ‘a capacity for ambiguity’ in the words of Trevor Hart, who has also ably emphasized the particularly political implications of the debate in relation to the rise of National Socialism and the German Church Struggle.8 Along similar, but more conceptual lines, James Barr suggests that the rejection of natural theology is a response to what Barth sees as a long ideological tradition – ‘the evolution of ideas’ – ultimately culminating in the Third Reich.9 From an exegetical perspective, Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann was not satisfied that either of the combatants had adequately reckoned with Scripture. On ‘the concept of theologia naturalis’, Westermann writes, ‘Barth, like Brunner, presupposes this concept, [but] neither one of them questions from where the concept comes, what it means and how it is to be evaluated from the standpoint of the Bible’.10 Consequently, Westermann claims that they should have been surveying ‘Genesis 1-11, the Psalms, Deutero-Isaiah, Job, Jesus’ sayings on the Creator and creation’.11 While this critique does have a degree of merit, Brunner’s overall focus in the debate, as will be shown, was the dialectic of nature and grace, not natural theology as such. In this regard, the appropriate biblical texts are those relating to the dialectics of natural and revealed knowledge of God, and law and gospel (e.g. Rom. 1.19 and 2.15), which, without perhaps perceiving the LWG, ‘Review of God and Man by Emil Brunner’, Journal of Theological Studies 38 (1937), 327. E.g. Karl Barth, ‘The Humanity of God’, in The Humanity of God (trans. John Newton Thomas; Louisville: Westminster, 1960). 7  Nature, 16. 8  Trevor Hart, ‘A Capacity for Ambiguity: The Barth-Brunner Debate Revisited’, Tyndale Bulletin 44, 2 (1993), 289–305. 9  James Barr, ‘La Foi Biblique et la Théologie Naturelle’, Études Théologiques et Religieuses 64 (1989), 356–7. Similar to Claus Westermann, Barr, 357, suspects Barth’s earliest rejection of natural theology is constituent of his initial recognition of the problem itself, in development before he has his own exegetical house in order. 10  Claus Westermann, ‘Karl Barths Nein: Eine Kontroverse um die theologia naturalis’, Evangelische Theologie 47, 5 (1987), 389. 11  Westermann, 390. 5 

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dialectical significance, Westermann does acknowledge to be present in Brunner’s treatise.12 Generally speaking then, not all things are equal in a debate over natural theology.13 Bouillard suggests that for both Barth and Brunner, ‘the term “natural theology” has a more restrained understanding and larger extension than with the philosophers or Catholic theologians’.14 While Barth and Brunner themselves did quarrel over the terminology15, this seems to have had little material impact on the substance of the dispute, although Barth’s overall rhetorical dominance is rightly and consistently flagged in this regard.16 Another frequent point of contention concerns the actual flash point, or beginning of hostilities. Writing prior to the ready availability of the BarthBrunner correspondence, Joan O’Donovan suggests, ‘the path for this exchange had been paved by Barth’s attack on Brunner’s earlier account of the “image” in his epistemological Prolegomena Zur Kirchlichen Dogmatik, the first half-volume of which was published in  1932’.17 Others pinpoint Brunner’s ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ in 1929 as the first sign of trouble18, at least publically, and though seemingly correct, this does seem to pass over the 200-page eristic prolegomena to Der Mittler in which Brunner explicitly argues for a dialectical relationship between general and special revelation, not to mention the earlier essays such as ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’. J. Bruce McCallum, one of the first to engage seriously with the pre-publication Barth-Brunner correspondence, identifies 1924 and Brunner’s book on Schleiermacher as the point at which, at least from the observer’s standpoint, it becomes clear the two were in fundamental disagreement over several significant theological issues19, although he rightly notices the incongruities in their communication as early as 1916.20 In any case, John W. Hart is certainly correct in designating ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ as ‘the point of no Ibid., 386 and 391. See Rodney Holder, ‘Karl Barth and the Legitimacy of Natural Theology’, Themelios 26, 3 (2001), 22–37, and the excellent discussion by John C. McDowell, ‘A Response to Rodney Holder on Barth and Natural Theology’, Themelios 27, 2 (2002), 32–44. 14  Bouillard, 214. 15  See Mensch, 509 (ET: 527) and ‘Zur Auseinandersetzung mit Barth’, published in BarthBrunner, 438–40. See also John C. McDowell, ‘Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and the Subjectivity of the Object of Christian Hope’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, 1, (2006), 29. 16  McDowell, ‘Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and the Subjectivity of the Object of Christian Hope’, 29. 17  Joan O’Donovan, ‘Man in the Image of God: The Disagreement between Barth and Brunner reconsidered’, Scottish Journal of Theology 39 (1986), 434. 18  See Chapter 3, section I.a. 19  See McCallum, 44: ‘By 1924 it is clear to both Barth and Brunner, as well as to the readers of these letters that they are heading in different directions’. 20  See McCallum, 41. 12  13 

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return’21, a point both Barth22 and Brunner identify in their correspondence, with the latter indicating ‘a critical point has been reached’.23 Working from a psychological perspective, Wolfgang Schildmann points to oldest brother Karl’s lifelong quarrelling with his younger brothers as an interpretative guide for his treatment of the slightly younger Brunner.24 Similarly, however, Brunner’s engagement with Barth could be interpreted in terms of his incessant and often severe quarrelling with authority figures, friends and colleagues over theological issues, most notably Ragaz25, Kutter26 and Gogarten.27 Whatever the level of ‘Psychodrama’28 between Barth and Brunner may have contributed, and it most certainly did contribute, the nature-grace debate itself concerns a very specific set of theological issues that had been with the two for nearly 20  years. It is particularly ‘in their private correspondence’, as McCallum writes, where ‘they had thrashed out most of the issues which eventually found their way into the debate’.29 This emphasis, then, supports ‘the contention that their debate was a longstanding theological disagreement and not a response to the political pressures of the Third Reich’.30 Indeed, while ‘the social and psychological pressures were significant’, McCallum rightly concludes, ‘the underlying difference was theological’.31 Eberhard Busch also confirms this point in a 2001 article celebrating the publication of the Barth-Brunner correspondence: It seems to me, the actual difference between the two lay in the fact that although sharing many substantial points of agreement, they had differing theological and ecclesial concerns. They defend their particular Hart, 109. See Karl Barth, No!, 71. 23  Barth-Brunner, EB: 8 June 1929 (#71), 174. 24  See Schildmann, especially 190–6. 25  See Jehle, 98–107. This is especially evident throughout the Brunner-Ragaz correspondence. 26  Ibid., 90–8. 27  See Hermann Götz Göckeritz, ‘Zwei Wege zwischen den Zeiten: Zur Einführung’, in Hermann Götz Göckeritz (ed.), Friedrich Gogartens Briefwechsel mit Karl Barth, Eduard Thurneysen und Emil Brunner (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 52. Despite many similarities in their thought, Brunner and Gogarten exchanged few letters and had an embarrassing public confrontation in 1926. 28  Rudolf Bohren, Prophet und Seelsorge. Eduard Thurneysen (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982), 165. 29  McCallum, 7. See also McCallum, 45: ‘The fact is that the public dispute was merely the resumption of unresolved private differences’. Cf. also 46: ‘The break up of Zwischen den Zeiten in 1933 and the debate in 1934 are only the most noteworthy symptoms of a long-standing incurable disorder’. 30  McCallum, ii. 31  Ibid., 39. 21  22 

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concerns even in those places where they communicated entirely without polemic. And where this difference expresses itself at times in a nearly insupportable severity of contrariety, the question is raised whether we take the two of them seriously as the theologians they were and intended on being, if we attribute this severity merely to their differing dispositions and not primarily to their particular theological concerns. . . . We would trivialize what they wanted . . . if at this point we wanted to rashly psycholo­ gize, instead of thinking theologically along with them.32 Klauspeter Blaser, then, is certainly correct when he argues that ‘the positions that collide in 1934 appear in this regard to be nothing other than the logical consequences of previous positions taking shape according to their new circumstances’.33 Along with the correspondence, in print in German since 2000, a careful examination of Brunner’s earlier work also reveals the deeply ingrained theological commitments that distinguish his earlier theological programme from that of Barth. In this regard, John W. Hart’s seminal study, Karl Barth Vs. Emil Brunner: The Formation and Dissolution of a Theological Alliance, 1916– 1936, while effectively identifying many of the deeply seated theological roots of the debate and providing excellent analysis of Barth and Brunner’s inter-personal relationship through their correspondence, also serves as one of the first widely available sources for essential, yet previously untranslated Brunner materials. The overall strength of Hart’s book is its demonstration, by virtue of the sheer weight of the material, that the naturegrace debate is rooted solidly in theology and that this is verified in both their letters and in the writings from the early 1920s, if not, in some cases, the late teens. While Barth’s earlier writings are now being made available, interpreted and translated at an astonishing pace, many of Brunner’s characteristic earlier efforts, from ‘Denken und Erleben’ and Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube to Die Mystik und das Wort and ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, are not available in translation and are therefore only scantly considered in Anglophone interpretation of the debate, John W. Hart’s work being the notable exception. Likewise, ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ and ‘Die Frage nach dem Anknüpfungspunkt’ are not sufficiently seen as a conceptual bridge to Nature and Grace, spanning from the 1925 treatment of law and revelation Eberhard Busch, ‘“Mit dem Anfang anfangen”: Einbleibendes Anliegen Karl Barthsim Briefwechselmit Emil Brunner’, Theologische Zeitschrift 57 (2001), 349. 33  Klauspeter Blaser, ‘Communiquer L’Incommunicable Révélation: Le Conflit Barth-Brunner Revisité à la Lumière de leur Correspondance’, Études Théologiques et Religieuses 78 (2003), 62. 32 

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and the 1927 treatment of general and special revelation in Der Mittler. This has been the case, at least in Anglophone commentary on Brunner, whereas Continental scholarship, as noted in the introduction, with a few exceptions, has tended to focus largely on Brunner’s doctrine of the person and his dialogical thinking. Both trends betray an overall reckoning with Brunner as a philosophical theologian, a standpoint which, in many cases based on Brunner’s own comments, is not altogether unjust, but does overlook his reckoning and work with many basic dogmatic issues, such as law and gospel or the christological doctrine of anhypostasis34, as guidelines in his attempt to formulate a dogmatic programme. The overall nature of the reception of Brunner’s earlier work has inclined many commentators to regard texts such as ‘Die andere Aufgabe’ and Nature and Grace as the signposts of a new direction for Brunner. In general, this presumption seems to have led to an interpretation of Nature and Grace that is somewhat abstracted from its actual setting in Brunner’s earlier theological development, turning the focus towards natural theology as such, instead of his longstanding and well-recorded efforts to fashion a dialectical account of nature and grace in terms of law and gospel or general and special revelation. Consequently, John C. McDowell is only too right in commenting that ‘Brunner is insistent, too, that he is resisting natural theology, something often missed by commentators who rush in to proclaim him the champion of natural theology in the controversy against the abstracting and dehumanizing theology of Barth’.35 b.  First Skirmishes Given these considerations, it will be helpful to introduce some of the essential parameters of Brunner’s concern. To begin, Brunner’s primary treatise on ‘natural theology’ is called Nature and Grace, and as Trevor Hart rightly notes, ‘the focus of this fierce disagreement was the question concerning the relationship between nature and grace, creation and redemption, state and church’.36 The topic of Nature and Grace is not, therefore, strictly speaking, natural theology, but as the title indicates, the relationship between nature and grace. Whereas in the early 1930s Brunner insists a proper understanding of the dialectic of nature and grace means recognizing a ‘Christian natural theology’, by the second edition of Nature and Grace he retracts this phrase because it has been approximated to Cf. Der Mittler, 281–8 (ET: 316–22). McDowell, ‘Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and the Subjectivity of the Object of Christian Hope’, 28. 36  Trevor Hart, 289. 34  35 

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speculative natural theology, without, however, changing the overall content of the argument.37 In Nature and Grace, Brunner argues Scripture and tradition teach that created nature, that is, the natural world and humanity, bears the objective imprint of God’s creative and preserving activity, and that human subjective appropriation of this objective divine imprint is entirely perverted but not destroyed by sin and is consequently viewed as law. Humanity’s consciousness of law, or what Brunner calls the formal imago dei, is retained and forms the point of contact for divine grace. These formal capacities that make humanity human, particularly its ability to communicate through words and its consciousness of responsibility (i.e. the laws of theoretical and moral reason) mean that God can still communicate with it, though humans perceive this communication as law, and therefore humanity’s original right relationship with God through love (the material imago dei) has been lost. The original non-sinful and non-legal acknowledgement of this divine objective imprint on nature and in humanity, what Brunner means by ‘Christian natural theology’ and should result in worship38, can only be restored by grace, which is God’s justifying self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Grace, however, does not destroy or erase the objective divine imprint in creation for the believer, conceived under sin as law, but rather fosters a new relationship to it. Brunner writes his polemic because he believes that Barth’s theology either wrongly denies or ignores the objective imprint of God’s creative activity in nature and humanity because of a one-sided, that is, nondialectical, emphasis on divine grace, thereby risking the absorption of nature into grace – essentially, a return to the monism of the nineteenth century. The ramifications of this error, in Brunner’s mind, were dogmatic, practical (particularly in the sense of the church’s proclamation of the Word), ethical and political. It is essential, therefore, to recognize that Brunner’s ‘natural theology’, properly speaking, is not an exercise in speculative theology serving as prolegomena to the doctrine of God, but rather an issue of theological anthropology. A recent short account of Brunner’s thought expresses this: According to Brunner, natural theology is not to be identified with the Christian doctrine of God. Rather it is connected “with the doctrine of Man; for ‘natural theology’ is an anthropological fact which no one Mensch, 509 (ET: 527). Brunner echoes Calvin on this point in Nature, 38: ‘God demands of us that we should know and honour him in his works. He has set us into this “theatre” of his glory in order that in it we should know, contemplate and honour him as the Lord of glory’.

37  38 

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can deny” [Revelation and Reason, 65]. The history of religions provides incontrovertible evidence that humans through the millennia have devised conceptions of deity. Brunner has been misunderstood here. He does not mean that Christianity shares “a point of contact” with, for example, Hindu or African tribal theism, in the sense that Christian theism shares with these religions some common belief about God. Rather, the Christian simply acknowledges the fact of this theologia naturalis as inherent in what it means to be a human creature of God, created in God’s image and in possession of self-transcendence, conscience, freedom, and responsibility.39 Nature, therefore, including human nature, bears the objective imprint of God’s creative activity, and this imprint is abused by subjective-sinful human misinterpretation, leading to idolatry and/or religion.40 Whereas Brunner’s earlier theology frequently fails to distinguish adequately between the objective and subjective categories, Brunner makes progress in his clarity on this point in Nature and Grace. Brunner’s effort to formulate a two-fold meaning for the law in 1925 is one of his first explicit attempts to distinguish the objective imprint of the divine will as law in nature and humanity and the subjective-human-sinful legalism that abuses this law.41 In Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, this objective/subjective emphasis persists, insofar as ‘the “natural” being of humanity – that is, its existence outside of faith, just like its natural understanding of God and itself – must be understood from the two standpoints of creation and sin’.42 There, as in Nature and Grace, this dialectic is essential for Christian ethics, insofar as ‘the discussion with natural morality is thus a part of Christian anthropology, namely, that part in which the natural understanding of the Good as part of the natural being of man in general is understood from the standpoint of faith’.43 Although he consistently denigrates the significance of the subjectivehuman-sinful in Nature and Grace in order to demand that Barth simply acknowledge the objective-divine revelation in nature from the standpoint James C. Livingston, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza with Sarah Coakley and James H. Evans Jr., Modern Christian Thought vol. 2: The Twentieth Century (Fortress: Minneapolis, 2006), 80. Cf. Dogmatics 1, 132–6. 40  Nature, 26. 41  See Chapter 2, section VI.a above and ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 297. 42  Das Gebot, 48 (ET: 62). 43  Ibid. See Nature, 51: ‘Social ethics are therefore always determined as much by the concept of the divine grace of creation and preservation as by that of the redeeming grace of Christ’. 39 

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of grace44, Brunner has focused consistently to this point in his career on the subjective-sinful notions of Krisis, contradiction, Deus absconditus, and divine wrath – all of which became key signifiers for the earlier ‘theology of crisis’ or ‘dialectical theology’. By the time of Brunner’s first reading of Barth’s Nein, however, he can claim: ‘In terms of the relationship of the earlier to the current piece: I have now completely cleaned out every hidden bit of synergism in the essay from 1929 (andere Aufgabe) and I have managed to completely place myself onto the theology of sola gratia’.45 With regard to synergism, the notable lack of any substantive discussion of Deus absconditus, contradiction and divine wrath in Nature and Grace is significant, and it is on this basis that Brunner suggests Barth’s response in No! distorts his argument from A to Z.46 Whereas Brunner does stress the objective-divine revelation in creation in Nature and Grace, it was seemingly hard for Barth to be convinced that this was actually the case, given his comrade’s extensive concern with these subjective-sinful elements in the past. Writing on the role of the imago dei in the nature-grace debate, Joan O’Donovan accurately suggests ‘the terms of the disagreement are themselves enmeshed in the broader and more fundamental issues of grace and nature, Gospel and law, divine love and divine wrath’.47 While these issues are explicit in Brunner’s writing from the early 1920s, a passing glance at Brunner’s Nature and Grace also indicates the significant presence of law and gospel themes – minus, as noted above, an extensive discourse on the subjective-sinful understanding of the law. As will be shown below, the particular issue of the dialectic and ordering of law and gospel, especially in relation to justification, was a longstanding issue between Barth and Brunner, at least as early as 1925. In an undated selection from his personal notes, Brunner writes that the question of the law was the ‘ultimate ground of the Barth-Brunner controversy’.48 Also indicating the seminal importance of the dialectic of law and gospel for the nature-grace relationship, Brunner writes in his preparatory notes for a lecture in  1941: ‘The law is natural humanity’s understanding of its being, and yet, the theological understanding of being, therefore natural theology’.49 Apart from the law-gospel themes 44  See Nature, 36: ‘We shall first treat theologia naturalis in the objective sense, which is by far the more important’, and 43: ‘It is hardly necessary to say that Calvin always treats this theologia naturalis, in the subjective sense of natura as a side issue’. 45  Barth-Brunner, EB: No Date; before 12 November 1934 (#103), 269–70. 46  Ibid., 270. 47  O’Donovan, 435. 48  Emil Brunner, ‘Zur Theologie des Gesetzes’, Skizze eines Referats für die ThAG, Typ. o. D. (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81), 1. 49  ‘Gesetz und Evangelium 1941’, 2.

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present in Nature and Grace, Brunner launched two other noteworthy attacks against Barth explicitly on the theme of law and gospel, the first coming in 1924 in Pany, Switzerland, resulting in several letters and ultimately in the series of essays on the theme of ‘Law and Revelation’ in 1925, and the second coming in Der Mensch im Widerspruch in response to Barth’s essay ‘Gospel and Law’50, including further attempts to clarify Nature and Grace. The first recorded skirmish on law and gospel came after Barth, Thurneysen and Brunner had an apparently heated discussion over dogmatic prolegomena in Pany, Switzerland, in the summer of 1924.51 Brunner’s follow-up letter to Barth is telling about the direction he wants to take his theology, as it not only indicates his thoughts on the dialectic of law and gospel, but also, the related issue of justification and revelation, which was gaining increasing prominence in his thinking. Beginning with less formality than usual, Brunner confirms he has again worked through ‘the three most important of Calvin’s chapters over the Old Testament and New Testament’ (Institutes II, 9–11) and the relevant sections from Luther’s Galatians commentary’, then suggesting, ‘perhaps it would interest you to hear what insights and questions have come to me concerning our dispute’:52 Directing himself at both his interlocutors, Brunner proceeds: The two of you, at least initially, have had strong concerns that I’ve built my propaedeutic on the dialectic of law and gospel and thus, in a seemingly Lutheran manner, placed the gospel, revelation, entirely on justification. I am aware of and thoroughly share these reservations against this threat of constriction (Reformed doctrine) at this point, but I cannot agree that it “is necessary” to speak of a “threat”!53 Brunner continues, explicitly advocating the law-gospel dialectic, understood in terms of a contrast between the Deus dixit on one side, and human autonomy and ideas on the other. This dialectic ensures the Deus dixit is properly delimited, or restrained, preventing it from becoming identical with human thought, will or experience: ‘On the other hand, I cannot see how the gospel could be delimited from the autonomous, semper et ubique See particularly, Mensch: ‘Appendix II: On the Dialectic of the Law’, 501 (ET: 516). McCallum, 43 n. 89, identifies the significance of this debate, as well as Brunner’s concerns in distinguishing between the critical and dialectical No. See Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 42–53 and Chapter 1, section III.c. See also McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 397–9. 52  Barth-Brunner, EB: likely August 1924 (#44), 102. 53  Ibid., 102–3. 50  51 

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occurring knowledge of God through ideas by anything other than the (dialectical) contrast to the law as the necessarily contingent, authoritative, paradoxical communication, as Deus dixit in the strongest sense’.54 It is the explicit presence of this dialectic that marks the necessary distinction between gospel and law, grace and nature, Christianity and mysticism. Next, Brunner makes two related points, one positive and one negative. First, ‘positively: Justification need certainly not be understood anthropocentrically, from the standpoint of humanity seeking salvation. It is after all just as much a matter of emphasizing God’s righteousness over against human righteousness, and just as much the restoration of God’s order as the redemption of humanity’.55 While Brunner does not want the doctrine to be anthropologically driven, he does point out that it nonetheless presupposes a dialectic between human attempts at self-justification (i.e. works-righteousness) and God’s efficacious justification, or between autonomous human order and a ‘restoration of God’s order’.56 Second, the negative point, essentially repeating an earlier claim, is quite simply that justification constitutes the necessary break with ‘natural’ knowledge. If not, Brunner continues, ‘How then can we claim to grasp the Deus dixit, as “foolishness of preaching” [cf. I Cor. 1.21], as a paradox which is to be believed, in distinction to rational, perhaps platonic or stoic knowledge of God – or from mysticism –, if we miss the point where the break with the law – thus also the ratio, is accomplished: In justification “apart from the law” [cf. Rom. 3.21]?’57 In essence, Brunner cannot distinguish between what he sees as Barth’s radically ‘one-sided’ treatment of the Deus dixit and other all-encompassing forms of idealism or mysticism. Thus, Brunner feels he must counter-balance and qualify Barth’s Deus dixit with his own Kantian critical idealism, which, by identifying the limits of humanity, ensures the Deus dixit does not become another limitless and all-encompassing idealist principle. In Nature and Grace, Brunner reaffirms precisely this concern by positing his concept of nature – a concept wholly determined by law in both its objective and subjective senses. It is precisely the negative, delimiting function of the law in nature that safeguards the explicit distinction between justification by faith and an immanent works-righteousness. Interestingly, Brunner notes that the Protestant Orthodox Scripture principle had actually served this delimiting function by distinguishing between special revelation in Scripture and general revelation in nature 54  55  56  57 

Ibid.,102. Brunner’s parenthetical addition. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 103. Ibid.

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and consciousness.58 However, acknowledging that they have both ‘energetically’ rejected this principle, Brunner asks, ‘How will we then distinguish the arrogant Deus dixit of a quilibet from the true Deus dixit?’59 Now turning his focus directly to Barth, Brunner proffers, ‘you merely seem to have another, larger criterion: the unity of the Deus absconditus and the Deus revelatus’.60 Unfortunately, the letter breaks off at this point, but picks up again with a series of quotations from Calvin demonstrating that revelation occurred incrementally up to the point of fullness in Christ and that the prophets’ knowledge of God was little higher than that of children.61 Both examples represent Brunner’s contrast between incomplete and complete knowledge of God, the provisional or incomplete nature of incremental revelation, as well as the fact that the prophets’ knowledge belies ‘the Promissio misericordiae, justification’.62 As such, justification by faith, the fulfilment of the promise, the contrast between incomplete time and the fullness of time, stands over-against all prior revelation as its limiting and qualifying dialectical counterpart. To this point, Brunner adds that he cannot see a substantial difference between Calvin and Luther’s expression of the Deus dixit, leading him to conclude: ‘The incision between revelation in the strongest sense (Christ) and universal “timeless” knowledge of God lies where justititia conditionalis and the justitia sine conditione, that is, where law and grace part ways’.63 This divergence, however, is crucial, for ‘if at some point the law is accepted as revelation in equal measure to the gospel, then the further step of making revelation one with rational knowledge (potentially bound up with evolutionism) is unavoidable’.64 In this regard, the divergence is assured by affirming: ‘In terms of knowledge of the law, we do not need any revelation; it is (as all the Reformers acknowledge) innate, rational’.65 Brunner’s conclusion, then, is decisive: ‘It therefore seems to me that I have no reason to build my prolegomena on anything else. The dialectical Cf. Philosophy, 150. Barth-Brunner, EB: likely August 1924 (#44), 103. 60  Ibid. Cf. Barth-Brunner, EB: 27 January 1927 (#61), 150. See Chalamet, 133–4, 208 and especially 232, where the unity of the Deus absconditus and the Deus revelatus is helpfully described in this manner: ‘God gives himself completely in his revelation. In it, he is fully known. But his unveiling is accompanied by his veiling, which is no less total. God reveals himself and hides himself not partially, but totally. . . . Barth understands the Deus revelatus as the Deus absconditus, namely as the God who gives himself to be known and at the same time as God who is never at our disposal’. 61  Barth-Brunner, EB: likely August 1924 (#44), 104. 62  Ibid. 63  Ibid. 64  Ibid. 65  Ibid., 105. 58  59 

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contrast of law and gospel is not specifically Lutheran, but also Calvinistic, as much as it is from the New Testament’.66 Despite having clearly made up his mind, Brunner goes on to illustrate his concerns: If we seek the criteria elsewhere, perhaps in the commonality of the Deus absconditus and revelatus, we then run the danger of setting the cosmological distinction of finite and infinite, absolute and relative, over the ethical, which (presupposing that Christ in the flesh remains the central focus) would lead at most to a religion of astonishingly contemplative miracle worship, but not to faith in God’s righteousness.67 This brings the argument back to familiar territory: like Schleiermacher68 and the neo-Kantians69, by uniting the Deus absconditus and Deus revelatus Barth also collapses the dialectic of natural and revealed knowledge. In Brunner’s mind, this inadvertently means a failure to grant primacy to moral reason (and therefore primacy to the moral distinction between God and humanity), resulting in either a cosmological negation of humanity’s finitude as Brunner argues in 191870, or, similarly, a cosmological Deus dixit indistinguishable from general revelation, and ultimately the world. While Brunner has indeed identified one-side of Barth’s attempt to reformulate the dialectic of the Deus absconditus and the Deus revelatus, he seemingly refuses to see that Barth’s intention is to ground this distinction theologically, even christologically, so as to deprive an already false notion of Deus absconditus of any legitimate theological force. In this regard, Brunner believes that what he interprets as Barth’s cosmologically determined special revelation also encompasses nature (including general revelation) and results in the melding of grace and nature, gospel and law, revelation and reason. In other words, Brunner fears that Barth, by being ‘radically’ dialectical, is becoming wholly un-dialectical, that is, ‘one-sided’. Where the  special revelation of the Deus dixit does not stand in dialectic with the  generally revealed, ‘innate, rational’ law, a breakdown occurs in the distinction between general and special revelation, law and gospel, nature and grace, ultimately resulting in the collapse of the distinction between justification by faith and self-justification by works. Accordingly, the matter of law and gospel, nature and grace is a matter of the efficacy of what Ibid. Ibid. 68  See Chapter 1, section II.c above. 69  See Chapter 2, section II.a. 70  See especially Chapter 1, section III.b and Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 23–8. 66  67 

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Brunner sees as one of the most basic elements of the Christian confession and the work of Christ. As John W. Hart rightly states, ‘Brunner . . . never swerved from under­ standing humanity’s knowledge of its crisis as being a necessary preparation for the breakthrough to the Absolute. For Brunner, this was simply putting in Kantian terms the Reformation understanding of the knowledge of sin through the Law which prepares for the reception of the Gospel’.71 Hart is absolutely correct on this point, however, we can indeed go further to say that Brunner’s concern hits not only on the existential crisis of sin resolved by the gospel, but also on the dialectic of the immanent but distant and unknown Deus absconditus in contrast to the transcendent but personally present Deus revelatus, justification by works in contrast to justification by faith, and ultimately natural morality and law in contrast to ethics based on justification by faith and the personal divine command. From this standpoint, the dialectic of law and gospel stands at the heart of Brunner’s concern and supplies the fuel for the flame that became the nature-grace debate. In the correspondence, around 1925, nearly 10 years before the publication of Brunner’s Natur und Gnade and Barth’s Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner, one can already see a sharp and explicit disagreement over law and gospel, stemming not merely from their interpretation of the issue itself, but in ­relation to nearly the entire range of theological questions they had been dealing with for the past 8 years: revelation, philosophy and theology, preaching, ecclesiology, Scripture and justification, and dogmatic prolegomena, not to mention natural theology. In this regard, the correspondence illuminates and clarifies the differing and deeply ingrained theological commitments of both theologians as expressed in their published works, allowing deeper insight into the specific theological issues with an openness and clarity of expression often unmatched by the volleys of articles in Zwischen den Zeiten, Theologische Existenz heute! and elsewhere. Whereas most outside ­observers previously tended to characterize the earlier Barth-Brunner relationship according to its unity, expressing shock at the ‘break-up’, the correspondence adds especial nuance, particularly to a reading of the earlier Brunner, allowing the observant reader to see both the points of unity and difference in the nascent movement. In light of this exchange, Barth’s remark to Thurneysen in  1924 is most appropriate: ‘I have a foreboding sense that Emil is running towards destruction with his “law and gospel”, into the arms of Althaus and Holl. He should watch out’.72 71  72 

Hart, 74. Barth-Thurneysen, KB: 26 November 1924, 293.

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c.  The Law and ‘Brunner’s Natural Theology’ In light of this early exchange between Barth and Brunner on law and gospel, it will be helpful to examine some of Brunner’s additional attempts to determine the identity and role of the law. One of Brunner’s most concise definitions of law, found in his Letter to the Romans in 1938, reads: ‘The Law is first of all quite simply the demand of God made known to man. Therefore the Law itself is holy, divine, good (Rom 7.12-14). It comes from God (Rom 7.25)’.73 By contrast, Brunner begins the section ‘The Law’ in Dogmatics II in 1950 with the telling statement: ‘The idea of the law in the Bible – both in the Old and the New Testament – is a very comprehensive idea, not at all easy to grasp’.74 Similarly, an undated piece from Brunner’s personal notes, possibly from the early 1930s, indicates his struggle to come to terms with and clarify the meaning of the law: The word law is ambiguous or has multiple meanings. . . . It means 1.  That which God commands – however, he also commands faith 2. The content of the command of God, which is independent of all historical elements. The law as lex aeterna. 3.  The law as the Mosaic law (by proxy). 4.  The law as the Decalogue. 5.  The law as the second table of the Decalogue. 6.  The law as the moral law, in distinction from ritual and civil laws.75

Elsewhere, Brunner focuses on the law’s role as ‘the negative presupposi­ tion of the gospel’76, specifically in terms of humanity’s sinful-subjective (ab)use of the law: ‘Natural humanity understands God and itself always in terms of the law and not grace. That is all at the same time the least common denominator of natural religion, morals and philosophy’.77 In this regard, as especially found in certain philosophies and religions: ‘The Gestalt law is characterized by impersonality, schematism, universality, timelessness, rigidity, abstractness’.78 In Der Mittler, Brunner makes particular use of this  characterization of the law for the purposes of contrast with divine

Letter to the Romans, 139–40. Dogmatics II, 214. 75  Selection from ‘Gesetz und Evangelium’, Ms und Typoskr. von Buchfragmenten [?] (StAZ WI 55 Sch. 98). This is likely from the 1930s as it demonstrates Brunner working with an issue he had defined clearly to himself by the 1940s. 76  ‘Zur Theologie des Gesetzes’, 2. 77  ‘Gesetz 1941’, 2. 78  ‘Gesetz und Evangelium, das Problem rein theologisch-abstrakt’, Typ. eines Essays. o. D. (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 98), 1. 73  74 

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revelation that is historical, absolutely unique and personal. These categorical classifications are basic to the contrast between law and gospel, and nearly always indicate that Brunner is working with law-gospel categories, even though he may not mention either law or gospel explicitly. Perhaps the most comprehensive definition of the many-faceted law in the entirety of the Brunner corpus is found in Offenbarung und Vernunft (1941): The Biblical doctrine of “law” is very complex. “Law” means, first of all, the whole Mosaic Law, and, indeed, in the New Testament it means the whole revelation in the Old Testament; secondly, it means the sum total of the commandments of God, as they were given in connection with the revelation, as an element of the making of the divine covenant. Law means, thirdly, the law of the cultus and the ceremonial in particular; and fourthly, and especially in the thought of Paul, the abstract, bare demand of God, severed from grace. It is with “law” in this sense that Paul is dealing in his arguments against the “righteousness which is of the law”. This law is the point of contact, and at the same time the point of opposition, between the old and the new righteousness, between the “Law and the Gospel”. This law, however, is also that which is written in the hearts of men, that which we call the “law of conscience”, the “moral law of reason”. The law which is severed from revealing grace and gracious revelation is the “categorical imperative”.79 In this definition, it is significant that ‘the biblical doctrine of law’ does not refer exclusively to ‘biblical law’, but rather to all law that the Bible reckons with or presupposes. Essential is Brunner’s use of the notion of the ‘law written on the heart’ to place the laws of theoretical and moral reason in dialectic with ‘revealing grace and gracious revelation’. As the foundational emphasis in his natural theology, this move allows Brunner to apply the laws of reason more generally to the relationship between natural and revealed knowledge of God, thereby making the dialectic of law and gospel the key paradigm for working out the relationship between nature and grace, as well as philosophy and theology. Revelation and Reason, 332–3. Contra Ernst Troeltsch, Religion in History (trans. James Luther Adams and Walter E. Bense; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), Brunner continues on Revelation and Reason, 333: ‘It is not a doctrine which has been brought in from the outside, from the Stoics, and incorporated into the Christian Church, but it is a fact to which the Scriptures and the best teachers of the Church bear witness with one voice: that man as man knows the law of God – insofar as it is only law – and indeed that this knowledge of the law is the center of the natural human existence and the natural self-understanding of man’. See Das Gebot, 608–9 (ET: 633), for Brunner’s critique of Troeltsch on natural law.

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Keeping this in mind, a quick analysis of Brunner’s thoughts on the doctrine of the law around the time of the nature-grace debate can shed further light on his concern with Barth’s development. In another set of personal notes, labelled ‘Zur Theologie des Gesetzes’ (Towards a Theology of the Law), possibly dating from the late 1920s, Brunner characterizes Barth’s position thus: No meaning at all for natural law. No recognition of the law as a compulsion to repentance.80 Conversely: the law only in its unity with the gospel. The Sermon on the Mount is a matter of Christ alone.81 There is no point of contact in the immanent moral consciousness, thus no dialectic. The dialectic becomes on the contrary a polarity to the demands of grace or the grace-filled demand through Christ. Express rejection of the Lutheran dialectic, and on top of that the assertion that it does not rightly belong to Luther.82 Not only does this passage confirm Brunner’s reading of Luther and Melanchthon’s debate with John of Agricola on the matter of law and gospel, it demonstrates Brunner’s attempt to apply certain elements of their critique of antinomianism to his reading of Barth. In another set of undated personal notes, Brunner works to develop the nature of the divine commands in explicit contradistinction to Barth: ‘There are divine commands for us outside the gospel and special revelation, thus – basically – natural law. That is what Barth rebels against, what he objects to, not only against Luther, but against all the Reformers, and attempts to provide a correction because he senses an underlying “natural theology”’.83 Although in this same set of notes, Brunner indicates confusion about the nature of the divine command outside of the gospel, as well as its provenance84, he is clearly confident of his position alongside of Luther and See Timothy J. Wengert’s excellent book: Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s debate with John  Agricola of Eisleben over poenitentia (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 126: ‘Agricola had constructed a theological system that avoided the law. He derived everything, especially poenitentia, from the gospel promise alone’. Throughout the book Wengert also ably demonstrates the political implications of Agricola’s antinomianism, another of Brunner’s concerns in his critique of Barth, especially in relation to the usus politicus legis. 81  Brunner considers certain portions of the Sermon on the Mount to be commentary on the orders of creation. See Das Gebot, 329 (ET: 345): ‘Even Jesus himself draws on this order when he speaks authoritatively about marriage’. In the corresponding endnote on 622 (ET: 648): ‘Here, with all the desired clarity in a decisive passage, Jesus himself utilizes the concept of the order of creation and simultaneously distinguishes it from the orders related to sin’. 82  ‘Zur Theologie des Gesetzes’, 2. 83  ‘Gesetz und Evangelium, das Problem rein theologisch-abstrakt’, 1. 84  Ibid., 4. 80 

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the Reformation: ‘I, conversely, align myself with the formulation of Luther and the Reformation, because they agree with my doctrine of general revelation’.85 As in Nature and Grace86, Brunner extends this argument into ethics insofar as ‘it then also becomes apparent that it is impossible to derive something such as rights, justice out of the revelation in Christ. Proof: “Justification and Justice”’.87 ‘On the other hand’, Brunner continues, ‘it is wrong to derive natural theology out of natural law. Instead, this [natural theology] is just as impersonal and abstract as the concept of law’.88 Brunner thereby sees a contrast between the concepts of rights and justice and the revelation in Jesus Christ, insofar as the former are derived from natural law.89 Brunner expresses this thought in Nature and Grace by reckoning with the state as one of the orders of creation relative to sin and identifying it with the first use of the law. Generally speaking then, ‘the proposition “Law and Gospel” is predominantly negative: The law is something other than the gospel, as well as (something other than) God’s demand contained within the gospel itself. At this point, what the law is, is not yet said’.90 Turning now to Nature and Grace, Brunner’s express attempts to ‘say what the law is’ in relation to Barth’s theology will become clear.

II.  Nature and Grace The text of Nature and Grace itself is a short one, normally between 40 and 50 pages in the available German and English versions. In addition to a brief preface, it contains five sections: an introduction entitled ‘The Issue between Karl Barth and Myself’; then ‘Barth’s False Conclusions’; followed by Brunner’s responses in ‘My Counter-Theses and their Proof’, which comprises the main body of the argument; this is supplemented by ‘The Reformer’s Doctrine and its Antithesis’, and the argument concludes with ‘The Significance of Theologia Naturalis for Theology and the Church’, spelling out the practical implications. The analysis below follows the text itself, examining other relevant materials from the same time period in conjunction with the argument in Nature and Grace, instead of dealing with a series of whole texts in chronological order throughout the late 1920s and Ibid., 1. Nature, 51–3. 87  ‘Gesetz und Evangelium, das Problem rein theologisch-abstrakt’, 1. ‘Justification and Justice’ refers to Barth’s essay, ‘Rechtfertigung und Recht’, rendered in English as Church and State (trans. Ronald G. Howe; Greenville: Smyth & Helwys, 1991). 88  ‘Gesetz und Evangelium, das Problem rein theologisch-abstrakt’, 1. 89  Ibid.: ‘The World cannot be governed by the gospel’. 90  Ibid., 1. 85  86 

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early 1930s. Reading the debate chronologically, from 1929 to 1934, was perhaps originally seen as necessary to establish the grounds for Brunner’s sudden dramatic public outburst and Barth’s harsh response. However, as evidence from the correspondence demonstrates there was sufficient ground for a public debate between Barth and Brunner as early as 192491, it is also possible to interpret the debate topically, following Brunner’s argument within the text itself in connection to his attempts to develop the same ideas in other writings throughout the period, a process which also facilitates perception of the text’s conceptual continuity with Brunner’s other writings. The preface and introductory sections provide several clues connecting Brunner’s earlier critique of Barth directly to Nature and Grace. As noted above, it is precisely within the context of Brunner’s critique of modern theology that his worries about Barth arise in two-fold form: first, as concern for the strength of Barth’s theological expression, his Yes, and second, as concern for the strength of Barth’s critique itself, his No.92 The Preface hints towards this concern in a mostly formal sense as Brunner indicates the purpose of Nature and Grace is, first, that while he and Barth desire the same thing, Barth, secondly, draws false conclusions, and thirdly, is therefore wrong to accuse Brunner and others of treason for their refusal to join him in his false conclusions.93 Citing his ‘long and honest attempts’ to come to terms with these issues in private, Brunner says he is now compelled to bring their private debate into public view in order to achieve two things: ‘For I am not only concerned to clear my theology of the charge which Barth has preferred against it, but above all to help to overcome the deadlock and the petrifaction in false antitheses which threatens the theological discussion because of Barth’s onesidedness’.94 Moving towards a material statement of the problem in the subsequent section, it is significant that Brunner builds the opening of his critique by attributing to Barth both the restoration of Protestant theology (i.e. the return of ‘its proper theme and subject matter’) and the collapse of Modern theology (i.e. ‘breaking through the front of theological modernism’).95 However, it is precisely in both of these endeavours that Barth also goes too far. The move from ‘religion’ and ‘Deus in nobis’ to the ‘Word of God’ and 91  92  93  94  95 

Cf. McCormack, 399. See Chapter 1, section III.c. Nature, 16. Ibid. Ibid., 17.

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the ‘revelation in Jesus Christ’96 was the right move: ‘To put it briefly: [we struggle] no longer concerning the themes of the Enlightenment, but concerning the theme of the Bible itself’.97 And yet, the Reformation sola98, which Brunner professes to wholeheartedly affirm, does not mean an end to the problematic that the sola was intended to address. In this case, the ‘and’ of Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (lit. The Command and the Orders, ET: The Divine Imperative) is meant to identify a problem, and ‘not even Karl Barth can deny that there is a problem concerning Christianity and Culture, Commandment and Ordinances, Reason and Revelation, and that this problem requires thoroughgoing theological treatment’.99 These ‘problems’, as demonstrated in the previous three chapters of this study, as well as in the analysis to follow, are all united in their relation to the dialectic of law and gospel, and therefore, are different aspects of the problem of nature and grace. The subsequent section follows the theses and counter-theses on nature and grace posited by Brunner against Barth. The topics are: the formal and material imago dei, general and special revelation, preserving and general grace, the orders of creation and preservation, the point of contact, and new creation as restoration-recapitulation, all of which are directly and explicitly connected to Brunner’s dialectic of law in either Nature and Grace, or in other texts of the time period. At every stage, the thrust of Brunner’s critique of Barth is that by rejecting natural theology altogether, Barth has foregone the traditional Reformation dialectic of natural and revealed knowledge of God, thereby risking their merger. a.  Theses and Counter-Theses 1.  Imago Dei As Brunner holds the practical significance of the imago dei until his reckoning with the ‘point of contact’, this section is primarily reserved for setting up the later point by demonstrating that a particular characteristic of humanity’s original created nature, the formal imago dei, is retained after the fall into sin. As Brunner writes in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (1932): ‘The “natural human”, that is, the human outside of faith, does not stop being human because of sin’.100 Structurally consistent with his approach in Ibid. Ibid. 98  Ibid., 18. 99  Ibid., 19. 100  Das Gebot, 140 (ET: 155). 96  97 

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Nature and Grace (1934), Brunner also suggests in Der Mensch im Widerspruch (1937) that the doctrine of the imago dei is the starting point for dealing with the issue of nature and grace. There, citing both Scripture and the examples of human reason, personhood and activity101, Brunner refers to Paul for support, who ‘even summons the heathens as witnesses to this relation with God of all human beings; for in point of fact, the Imago Dei, understood in this sense, is the most important testimony to the revelation of the Creation, and – since, as such, it is not destroyed – is the starting point for a “natural knowledge” of God’.102 The central point of Brunner’s concern with the imago dei is the nature of humanity’s original and present relationship to God. In line with his treatment of the primitive state in ‘Die Menschenfrage’ and the imago dei in ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’103, Brunner writes in Der Mensch im Widerspruch that the doctrine of the imago dei is a ‘parabolic expression of the creation narrative’104 and furthermore, that ‘the real kernel of the Christian doctrine’ of the imago dei is ‘that humanity is understood to exist in a contradiction between its divine origin in creation and its opposite, sin’.105 The return of the notion of ‘origin’ to the conversation is not incidental. In Der Mensch im Widerspruch, Brunner clearly connects his notion of the origin (Ursprung), directly equated with knowledge of the law as early as Denken und Erleben and Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube106, with his doctrine of the imago dei. The original title of the fifth chapter reads: ‘Der Ursprung: Die Gottebenbildlichkeit, imago Dei’107, with the published English translation following suit: ‘The Origin: The Imago Dei’.108 As will become evident in the connection between the first and sixth counter-theses in Nature and Grace, the stakes in dealing correctly with creation also bear on redemption and consummation, as the burden falls on the question of whether or not ‘to put this humanum in relationship with the original Creation, and thus with the divine destiny of man generally’.109 Brunner’s goal, therefore, is to resolve the tension between fallenness and the fact that humanity remains human in distinction from the other Cf. Nature, 22; Mensch, 96–7 (ET: 94). Mensch, 489 (ET: 500–1). 103  See Chapter 2, section IV above. 104  Mensch, 86 (ET: 83). According to Mensch, 91 (ET: 88), this entails an abandonment of the ‘historicizing form’ of the doctrine, that is, the Adam narrative, ‘as a necessary purification of the Christian doctrine for its own sake, not for the sake of science’. 105  Mensch, 90 (ET: 88). My emphasis. 106  See Chapter 1, sections I.b and II.b.3 above. 107  Mensch, 85. 108  Man, 82. 109  Mensch, 97 (ET: 94). 101  102 

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animals after the fall110, a problematic that Brunner fears Barth either rejects or holds to be insignificant. Consequently, Brunner attributes the following polemical thesis to Barth: ‘Since man is a sinner who can be saved only by grace, the image of God in which he was created is obliterated entirely, i.e. without remnant. Man’s rational nature, his capacity for culture and his humanity, none of which can be denied, contain no traces whatever of that lost image of God’.111 In response, Brunner agrees ‘the original image of God in man has been destroyed, that the justitia originalis has been lost and with it the possibility of doing or even of willing to do that which is good in the sight of God, and that therefore free will has been lost’.112 However, reminiscent of his long time concerns with the strength of both Barth’s Yes and No, Brunner affirms that neither the fall nor revelation entirely destroy the humanum of humanity, since it is clear that ‘even sinful and unredeemed humanity is capable of doing and thinking what is reasonable’, and therefore, that ‘humanity and culture are not simply to be dismissed as of no value from the point of view of revelation’.113 It is at this point the question arises, whether or not these evident abilities and attributes should be connected with the ‘original image of God?’114 In both Nature and Grace and Der Mensch im Widerspruch, Brunner presents Scripture’s affirmative answer to this question, citing a variety of biblical texts to show ‘man has not, even as a sinner, ceased to be the central and culminating point of creation’115, likewise justifying the theological task this consideration mandates. As a consequence, Brunner suggests that the imago dei be understood in two ways: ‘one formal and one material’.116 First, the material imago dei is humanity’s justitia originalis117, its original right relationship to God, or what Brunner also calls the quid of personality.118 This material imago dei is completely destroyed by sin and fall, and therefore cannot be conceived quantitatively in terms of a percentage: humanity is not 90 per cent sinful and 10 per cent good, but wholly lost. This loss is entire and qualitative, in other words ‘categorical’.119 The second aspect of Cf. Mensch, 97 (ET: 94). Nature, 20. 112  Ibid., 22. 113  Ibid., 22–3. 114  Ibid., 23. 115  Ibid. 116  Ibid. Cf. ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’, 258 n. 1. 117  For justitia originalis, see for example Mensch, 87,106–7, 114, 495–6 (ET: 85, 104–5, 112, 508–9). On Mensch, 106 (ET: 104), justitia originalis means ‘the original, God created state of life is . . . to be understood as an existence (Sein) in love’. On Das Gebot, 153 (ET: 153), the parallel concept is ‘freedom in dependence on God’. 118  Nature, 24. 119  Ibid., 22–4. 110  111 

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the imago dei, retained despite the total destruction of the material imago, is the formal imago dei, the quod of personality or the humanum of humanity – that which distinguishes humanity from the animals and makes a human being human.120 Within this formal imago, Brunner perceives two key characteristics of human being that persist despite the fall into sin: first, that humans are subjects, that is, capable of words and communication, and second, that humans are therefore conscious of responsibility.121 Although Brunner abandons the terms ‘formal’ and ‘material’ in Der Mensch im Widerspruch, he virtually replicates the earlier distinction122, later returning to the terms in Dogmatics II, now qualified by inverted commas.123 In Der Mensch im Widerspruch, Brunner deals extensively with the fact that humans are capable of communication through words, a point he treats rather lightly in Nature and Grace. The roots of this emphasis lie in Brunner’s earliest account of human mind, spirit and intellect (Geist), which fosters decisive ethical agency in explicit contrast to a system of causal materialism where humans are merely observers.124 In the second stage of this development, Brunner repeatedly emphasizes the Word of God as divine communication to humanity, calling for a responsive personal relation to God based on decision.125 In this regard, humans are created ‘by means of’ and ‘in’ the Word of God126 and are able to use words both before and after the fall. As Brunner says in Nature and Grace, ‘not even as a sinner does he cease to be one with whom one can speak, with whom therefore also God can speak’.127 In fact, speech as an expression of reason is ‘the most significant characteristic of humanity’128, but instead of understanding speech through reason, ‘both reason and speech are to be understood from  perspective of the Word of God as the two most forceful hints about the one lost divine origin in which we still live, though perversely’.129 Ibid., 23–4. Cf. Das Gebot, 140(ET: 155). Ibid. On Nature, 31, responsibility means humans are ‘somehow’ able to perceive God’s law. The notion of responsibility arises in Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 19–20; ‘Grenzen’, 86; ‘Menschenfrage’, 6; ‘Offenbarung’, 103; God and Man, 78–9 and Absolutheit, 8, although the notion does not appear to assume its final, significant role until the early thirties and Das Gebot und die Ordnungen. 122  Mensch, 498 (ET: 512–13): ‘I assume that what I stand for both here and in that work is exactly the same, but here I have tried to say the same truth in different words’. Cf. O’Donovan, 443. 123  Dogmatics II, 57–61. 124  See Chapter 1, section I.b. 125  Cf. Mystik, 5, 6 and ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 296: ‘The creature is given birth through the self-communication of God. Because humanity is created in this image’. 126  Das Gebot, 137(ET: 153). Cf. Mensch, 175–6 (ET: 176). 127  Nature, 23. 128  Mensch, 176 (ET: 176). 129  Ibid. (ET: 176–7). 120  121 

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This perversion affects human understanding of communication across the board – whereas God continues to communicate after the fall, this communication no longer appears as a gracious ‘command’, but as law, which ‘does not connect me to the “Thou” – whether divine or human – but to the abstract entity “reason”’.130 This means that ‘through humanity’s contradiction its attitude to the God calling it is perverted; therefore the call itself has also turned from a call of generous love into a demanding and accusing law’.131 This breakdown in communication means further that ‘humans are not only separated from God and their original nature – meaning they bear this contradiction in themselves – but that the human attitude towards other humans beings and towards the world is also perverted’.132 Consequently, this (now legalistically determined) capacity for words also bears on human social structures. As such, ‘the isolated individual is an abstraction conceived by reason detached from the Word of God’.133 It is the community, not the individual, which is the ‘created’ norm for human activity – a pattern of thought in place for Brunner since his earliest days in religious socialism. Although the original form of human existence is communitarian (now expressed in terms of an I-Thou relationship between God and humans and among humans themselves134), the quality, or ‘lovecontent of this community-existence’ has been destroyed by sin.135 Despite the perversion of these relationships in their material reality, the formal characteristics, humanity’s capacity for words and communal nature do remain: community as ‘this . . . formal structure of the creation of human being has remained as well as formal responsibility. Indeed, both are essentially one, since the community is nothing other than responsibility in concreto’.136 Even in the state of sin, individualism contradicts ‘formal’ human nature. In relation to humanity’s capacity for words, the second aspect of the formal imago dei is human responsibility: ‘Not even as a sinner does he cease to be one with whom one can speak. And this is the very nature of man: to be responsible’.137 In other words, ‘the human being is and remains one whose nature and existence are in the Word of God, and is therefore, and 130  131  132  133  134  135  136  137 

Ibid., 159 (ET: 158). Ibid., 169 (ET: 169). Das Gebot, 138 (ET: 154). Mensch, 141 (ET: 140). Ibid. Ibid., 139 (ET: 138). Cf. Das Gebot, 138–9 (ET: 154). Ibid. (ET: 138). Ibid., 23.

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for this reason alone, responsible’.138 Despite the presence of sin, the human being ‘does not cease being in the Word of God, called by God and summoned to responsibility’.139 This point is essential for Brunner’s anthropology, that is, ‘responsibility is part of the unchangeable structure of man’s being’140, an affirmation repeated in Dogmatics II in express connection to the dialectic of law and gospel: Formal freedom, severed from material freedom, from existence in the love of God, is already a result of sin. Man ought to know nothing of this freedom save in the form of the generous love of God. The fact that he is aware of this freedom of choice is already the effect of sin, and of separation from his connexion with God. We shall be seeing later that this is the origin of the contrast between the Law and Gospel.141 The disjunction between formal and material freedom is the contradiction142, the separation of human Sein and Sollen143, at the bottom of which is humanity’s relationship to the law: ‘This notion of the law wavering between what-is (Sein) and what-ought-to-be (Sollen) is a characteristic expression of the ancient type of cosmology in which God and world, what-ought-to-be (Sollen) and what-is (Sein) are one – a unity, and one that has been blown apart by Christianity’.144 With its recognition of sin, the Christian faith thus demonstrates humanity to be in contradiction with both its divine origin in God and itself, not because of an incompatibility between soul and body or matter and spirit145, or the sheer cosmological distance entailed in human finitude146, but because the law lies in between God and humanity.147 Mensch, 169 (ET: 169). Ibid. 140  Dogmatics II, 57. 141  Ibid., 61. 142  See Erlebnis, 88; ‘Grundproblem’, 40; Das Gebot, 29–38, 137–40 (ET: 44–52, 153–5); Mensch, 116–210 (ET: 114–211). See also Chapter 2, section IV above. 143  See ‘Offenbarung’, 102; ‘Menschenfrage’, 12 and 15. See also Chapter 2, section IV above. 144  Mensch, 532 (ET: 556). 145  Das Gebot, 138 (ET: 154); cf. Mensch, 110–12, 168, 356ff. (ET: 107–12, 168, 362ff.) and Dogmatics II, 61: ‘The Biblical view leaves no room for the dualistic notion that though the “spirit” (or “soul”) is of divine origin and divine in character, the body on the other hand is something lower and inferior’. 146  See Chapter1, section III.b. 147  See e.g. Truth, 121 and 123: ‘The law is that which came in between, an indirectness, an abstraction, something fixed, which undoubtedly indicates God’s will, but in which God is not present as himself. The law is “a truth”, something objective that one can know without in that way becoming essentially changed, an idea about God’s will in which one has not to do with Him as One immediately present’. Also in Brunner’s Letter to the Romans, 140–1: ‘The Law has “come in between” (Rom. 5.20; Gal. 3.19); the Law, we can therefore say, is God’s will as sinful man understands it (Gal. 3.19)’. See also Dogmatics II, 119. 138  139 

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Keeping with his objective-subjective two-fold meaning of the law148, in Der Mensch im Widerspruch, Brunner explicitly identifies the formal imago dei with the law, although his presentation in Nature and Grace is less clear and largely avoids the subjective element. In Der Mensch im Widerspruch, objectively, ‘the law is written inalienably on the human heart; some knowledge of this somehow belongs inalienably to human nature. All human beings know of their responsibility’.149 And yet subjectively, the element Brunner suppresses throughout Nature and Grace, ‘the moralizing-legalistic understanding of responsibility, which turns me back on myself, is the very pinnacle of the misunderstanding of responsibility’.150 The interplay between the objective divine will and the subjective human misunder­standing means that ‘the “natural” and the revealed understanding of responsibility is dialectically interwoven, and thus also of human existence’.151 Conse­ quently, ‘responsibility, severed from the generous grace of the Creator, can only be understood as legal responsibility’.152 In other words, as an original objective element of human being and existence, responsibility as knowledge of the law does not disappear with the fall, but is subjectively perverted into legalism and encapsulated by the term auto-nomos: ‘Legal responsibility is therefore already a result of the false autonomy of man, and has a correlative relation to it’.153 Formal responsibility, corresponding to law, not love (which is material responsibility), betrays the change in humanity’s sinful-subjective understanding of its actual, objective, relation to the divine will. Although, from the side of God . . . this distinction between the “formal” and the “material” does not exist; it is not legally valid. But it does exist—wrongly. This means that when we look at the Imago Dei from our angle, that is, the angle of sinful man, it necessarily appears under this twofold aspect See Chapter 2, section VI.a. Mensch, 157–8 (ET: 157). 150  Ibid., 161 (ET: 161). 151  Ibid. John McDowell in ‘Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and the Subjectivity of the Object of Christian Hope’, 30, suggests Brunner ‘imagines that there is a secular space outwith and untouched by grace’s conditioning and of sin’s impairing distortion, that consequently acts as a preparatio evangelica. Brunner, in other words, has freed a piece of the saeculum from grace, and thereby given it independent ontological status’. One might levy this charge at Nature and Grace where Brunner suppresses the subjective element, but it does not appear that such a charge can apply to either Brunner’s earlier or later formulations. As evident, especially in Brunner’s treatment of Calvin in Nature, 35–50, nature is not a secular but a thoroughly theological concept. 152  Dogmatics II, 61. 153  Ibid. My emphasis. 148  149 

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of the “formal”, that is, the responsibility that cannot be lost and the “material”, lost destiny, lost “existence in the love of God”. This is why, when man meets God in Jesus Christ, he must hear both the Law and the Gospel—the Law which makes him responsible for sin, without, however, making him able to fulfil it, and the Gospel, which gives him existence in the love of God, without law, through faith.154 This reaffirms, first, the strong assertion that sinful human being is fully determined by law – that law is the ‘mark of humanity’ – or, as expressed in Der Mensch im Widerspruch in language surprisingly reminiscent of ‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’: ‘Humans cannot wrench themselves out from under the law of responsibility; this iron ring unbreakably encloses the entirety their existence and as such it preserves a vestige of humanity for human existence’155, a ‘vestige’, meaning human existence is now ‘Beingin-the-wrath-of-God’ and ‘Being-unto-death’.156 Second, this reaffirms that the two-fold meaning of the law and the law-revelation relationship, with its dialectical account of theoretical and moral laws of reason and revelation/justification, are necessary aspects of the relationship between nature and grace as well as the primary structure underlying Brunner’s argument. The sum of this in the context of Nature and Grace is that Brunner’s doctrines of the formal imago dei, as well as general revelation, treated in the next counter thesis, rely directly on his doctrine of the dialectic of the law. Whereas in Nature and Grace, Brunner mostly avoids emphasizing the subjective-sinful aspect of the two-fold meaning of the law so prominent in his earlier theology, the dialectic of law and gospel is nonetheless integral to his doctrine of the formal and material imago dei because it determines not only humanity’s ‘superior position in the whole of creation’ and its ‘function or calling as a bearer of the image’, but it is also ‘the presupposition of the ability to sin and continues within the state of sin’.157 As Brunner affirms later in the text during his treatment of Calvin: ‘Even fallen man still has—thanks to the “portion” of the imago that he has retained—an immortal soul, a conscience, in which the law of God is indelibly and irremovably planted’.158 154  155  156  157  158 

Ibid. Mensch, 157 (ET: 157). Ibid., 163–7 (ET: 163–7). Nature, 23. Ibid., 42.

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2.  General and Special Revelation In the second section, returning to the introductory theme of Der Mittler159, Brunner turns the discussion to general and special revelation, offering this characterization of Barth’s view: Since we acknowledge scriptural revelation as the sole norm of our knowledge of God and the sole source of our salvation, every attempt to assert a “general revelation” of God in nature, in the conscience and in history, is to be rejected outright. There is no sense in acknowledging two kinds of revelation, one general and one special. There is only one kind, namely the one complete revelation in Christ.160 In response, Brunner begins his counter-thesis pointedly: ‘The world is the creation of God’, and as such bears the creator’s ‘imprint’ upon it – per the testimony of Scripture.161 To identify this ‘imprint’, Brunner returns to the categories of theoretical and moral reason, expounding their respective relation to ‘nature’ or the created world, and ‘what is usually called conscience’162, or better, ‘consciousness of responsibility’.163 While Brunner indeed avoids explicit use of key Kantian terms, the argument clearly follows themes prominent in his work since the early teens: ‘The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’.164 Thus, emphasizing ‘the creation of the world is at the same time a revelation, a self-communication of God’, Brunner states this acknowledgement is not ‘heathen’ but ‘fundamentally Christian’.165 According to the Bible, ‘this perceptibility of God in his works’ is not destroyed, ‘although it is adversely affected’ by sin, and in fact, sinful humans refuse to see what God has ‘visibly’ set before them.166 In other words, ‘the reason why men are without excuse is that they will not know God who so clearly manifests himself to them’.167 Similar to the formal imago See Der Mittler, 3–21 (ET: 21–41): ‘The Distinction: General and Special Revelation’. Nature, 20. 161  Ibid., 24–5. 162  Nature, 25. On conscience, see Das Gebot, 140–3 (ET: 155–9): ‘The conscience does indeed speak to us about the law. But it is not as if knowledge of the law arose from the conscience; the law, rather, is “written on the heart” as “practical reason”’. However, ‘conscience and the law, indeed conscience and legalism, are bound inseparably together. . . . In conscience . . . it is the wrathful God who encounters humanity, the Deus absconditus’. (141–2) Cf. also Das Gebot, 587 n. 12 (ET: 607–8 n. 12). 163  Nature, 25. 164  Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 269. Cf. Mensch, 531–2 (ET: 556). 165  Nature, 25. 166  Ibid. 167  Ibid. In the footnote added to the second edition, Brunner accuses Barth of treating the obvious scriptural passages, such as Romans 1:18 as hapax legomena. 159  160 

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dei, the perceptibility of God’s imprint on nature is not destroyed, but wholly perverted. In the next paragraph, Brunner returns to the notion of responsibility, already established as one of the two aspects of the formal imago dei – now expressed in direct connection to ‘knowledge’ of the law. Likely recalling the phenomenology of human moral self-consciousness opening Das Gebot und die Ordnungen168, Brunner suggests ‘men have not only responsibility but also consciousness of it—which could be shown by a more detailed phenomenological analysis to be necessarily interconnected’.169 In fact, ‘only because men somehow know the will of God are they able to sin’.170 Responsibility therefore comes from ‘knowledge’ of the will of God in the law: ‘Responsibility of the sinner and knowledge of the will of God as the source of law (the knowledge also being derived from the law) are one and the same thing’171, and this means general revelation, because ‘Scripture clearly testifies that knowledge of the law of God is somehow also knowledge of God’.172 Brunner advances his position in the footnotes appended to the second edition, explicitly attacking Barth’s failure to account for ‘knowledge’ of the law in this way: ‘As far as I know, Barth has nowhere discussed the question what, according to his view, is the theological significance of the general human ethical consciousness, the consciousness of responsibility towards a holy law or a holy will’.173 Regardless of whether this notion is either a rational or a statutory conception of responsibility as found diversely in the various world religions174, the emphasis is the same: ‘For Luther the significance is quite clear: habent cognitionem legalem. The fact that the cognitio legalis is not saving knowledge of God never means for Luther that it is no knowledge of God at all. The contrary is clearly to be seen from hundreds of passages. On this depends the whole dialectic of Luther’s theology’.175 Brunner accordingly repeats this in Der Mensch im Widerspruch, however, returning to his earlier phrase, ‘law and revelation’: ‘From this it is comprehensible why the question of the relation between law and revelation cannot be answered inconclusively. The law of God is planted on the hearts of all human beings; but, as both historical and everyday experience show, it is at the same time covered over by sin. It must therefore be revealed anew; but this revelation is not the 168  169  170  171  172  173  174  175 

See Das Gebot, 6–14 (ET: 21–8) and above Chapter 3, section I.c. Nature, 25. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 61. Mensch, 159–60 (ET: 158–9). Nature, 61.

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proper revelation’.176 Here, it is evident that Brunner is still working with the same basic set of problems as in the mid-1920s, and in Nature and Grace, he also makes sure the dialectic of law and revelation is understood to apply to theoretical as well as moral problems. Whereas the translation obscures the meaning in the next paragraph177, Brunner reaffirms the dialectic of law and revelation in both its moral and theoretical sense by questioning whether modern (i.e. scientific) knowledge mandates adjustment of the biblically derived attestations of general revelation, not only in the human consciousness of responsibility, but also in nature: ‘Just as we are driven by St. Paul to a more profound grasping of the problems of the knowledge of God from law and from grace’, that is, with regard to moral reason, an analogous eristic ‘theological treatment’ could be done concerning the notion of God as ‘artificer-demiurge’178, that is, with regard to theoretical reason. In other words, Brunner is simply claiming that the eristic work done with regard to moral reason could also be done with regard to theoretical reason, presumably focusing on the presuppositions of modern scientific ‘cosmology’. Whatever the results of such an eristic treatment might be, Brunner nonetheless claims that ‘we cannot doubt that this simple, universal Christian opinion is scriptural’.179 Thus, again setting aside the ‘if’, Brunner repeats the foundational point from Der Mittler suggesting the ‘difficult question’ is not whether there are two kinds of revelation, but how the two kinds of revelation, or ‘double revelation’, that is, in creation (nature-theoretical and consciousness of responsibility-moral) and in Jesus Christ, are related.180 The standpoint for acknowledging this interrelation is ‘the revelation in Jesus Christ’ and only in this ‘bright light’ can the revelation in creation be perceived.181 For ‘sinful men . . . the revelation in creation is not sufficient in order to know God in such a way that this knowledge brings salvation’182, a point Brunner reinforces by introducing his distinction between ‘the subjective and objective factor in this interrelation of knowledge’183, analogous to the objective and subjective two-fold meaning of the law. Understood objectively, the revelation in creation is a fact, and according to Paul, sufficient ‘for every one to know therein the Creator according to Mensch, 162 (ET: 162). Compare ‘Natur und Gnade: Zum Gespräch mit Karl Barth’, in Wort 1, 342 and Nature, 25–6. 178  Nature, 26. 179  Ibid. 180  Ibid., 26. Cf. Der Mittler, 12–14 (ET: 31–2). 181  Ibid., 26–7. 182  Ibid., 26. 183  Ibid. 176  177 

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his majesty and wisdom’.184 Significantly, the objective notion restricts general revelation as revelation to being a specific form of divine revelation and not a human discovery of God in nature or moral consciousness.185 In his preparatory notes for a 1934 course entitled ‘Reason and Revelation’, Brunner writes: ‘There is thus something of a natural theology, a knowledge of God, which is outside of the special revelation in Jesus Christ available in Scripture, and which is not grounded in the particular thought of humanity, but rather in the divine communication through the given world’.186 Subjectively, however, as noted in Nature and Grace, human perception of this general revelation is perverted by sin: ‘Man misrepresents the revelation of God in creation and turns it into idols’.187 This subjective misinterpreta­ tion of general revelation leads to the contradictory views and confusion manifested in the religions and philosophy, as Brunner notes in the lecture, from ‘primitive animism to Spinozan pantheism, to Aristotelian or stoic semi-theism, from polytheistic belief in gods to supposedly scientific materialism’.188 However, seeking to ensure his ‘eristic’ formulation is not considered speculative or synergistic on this point, Brunner confirms that ‘we do not develop our understanding from the religions outwards to general revelation, but rather from general revelation outwards to the religions’.189 On this ground, Brunner brings his counter-thesis to a close by stating that ‘nature’ and ‘natural revelation’ are to be reckoned with in terms of a ‘double concept’.190 One being the ‘objective-divine’, that is, the ‘capacity for revelation’ (Offenbarungsmächtigkeit)191 God has given creation, the second being the subjective-human-sinful, or what sinful humanity makes  of the ‘capacity for revelation’ bestowed on it by God, which typically leads to idolatry and legalism. Both constitute ‘nature’ in their respectively qualified senses and neither, according to Brunner, can be ignored. This two-fold form constitutes an ‘incongruence of divine Ibid. Birgitte Graakjaer Hjört, The Irreversible Sequence: Paul’s Ethics: Their Foundation and Present Relevance (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 145: ‘If we can speak at all of a natural knowledge of God in Brunner, it should be noted . . . that Brunner does not thereby mean a capacity within man, but that God manifests himself’. Hjört refers to Leipold, 245–6, on this point. 186  ‘Vernunft und Offenbarung’, S.S. 1934 (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 106.), 243. 187  Nature, 26. 188  ‘Vernunft und Offenbarung’, 243. 189  Ibid., 240. 190  Nature, 28. 191  Ibid., 27. Cf. Natur, 345. On Mensch, 509 (ET: 527), Brunner denies using the phrase ‘Offenbarungsmächtigkeit des Menschen’, which Barth cites repeatedly in his No!. In Nature and Grace, however, Brunner does use the term ‘Offenbarungsmächtigkeit’ and ‘des Menschen’ is implied, although, Brunner is not intentionally using the term in the sense that Barth imputes to him on polemical grounds. 184  185 

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presence and human distance’192, and ‘only the Christian, i.e. the man who stands within the revelation in Christ, has the true natural knowledge of God’.193 ‘Therefore’, Brunner concludes, ‘even the most perfect theology will in the main be unable to get beyond the double statement that as concerns the heathen, God did not leave himself without witness, but that nevertheless they did not know him in such a way that he became their salvation’.194 As Brunner’s statements about general revelation in 1934 are analogous to his statements on the two-fold meaning of the law in 1925, they are also analogous to his treatment of the issue in 1937: ‘The law of God is written on our hearts; this does not mean that we now actually know the will of God. On the contrary! It is precisely the law that conceals the will of God from us – the same law which reminds us sinners again and again of God’s will and holds us to it’.195 Further, ‘even in its purest form, in the form of the two-fold commandment of love, the law is both the disclosure and the conceal­ ment  of the divine will at the same time’.196 In this regard, both law and general revelation are objectively present and yet subjective misunderstood because of sin. In Der Mensch im Widerspruch, therefore, Brunner maintains his critique of what he understands to be Barth’s position: ‘In the denial of the revelation through creation in the most recent theology, both the biblical notion of creation is emptied of its meaning . . . and humanity’s relationship to God and the responsibility of the godless man are denied’.197 This point is significant because it reaffirms the formal imago dei and functions to establish the context for God’s self-revelation in Christ and the church’s proclamation of the gospel: ‘According to Scripture a distinction must be made between the revelation in creation or nature, which has most certainly not been destroyed by sin, and the actual knowledge of God that is demanded by God but thwarted by sin; that is, between the general (­natural) and special (historical) revelation, and ultimately between what the believer and the unbeliever know of the revelation in nature’.198 General revelation, therefore, indicates immanence, ‘a sharing in the divine, but it is immanence in tatters, a dysfunctional relationship, unity in tatters between creation and Creator, and therefore also muddled and perverse relationships among the 192  193  194  195  196  197  198 

Nature, 28. Ibid., 27. Ibid. Mensch, 160 (ET: 159). Ibid. (ET: 160). Ibid., 511 (ET: 530). Ibid.

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creatures’.199 In the next counter-thesis, Brunner expounds the divine response to this broken relationship by means of preserving grace. 3.  Preserving and General Grace The third and fourth sections, concerning preserving grace and the ordinances/orders of creation, continue the treatment of issues ‘directly connected’ to theologia naturalis200 and are implications of a ‘serious’ reckoning with the dual notions of ‘an omnipotent creator’ and ‘sin’.201 Brunner also argues that preserving grace and the orders are directly grounded in Scripture, as well as the tradition, alluding to connected topics such as justitia civilis and the three-fold use of the law – a decisive point – verifiable by comparison with Das Gebot und die Ordnungen. In this regard, the treatment of ‘The Threefold Meaning of the Law’ in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen serves as a test piece for certain emphases found within the final four theses in Nature and Grace, with the arguments in both texts corresponding on several key points. The ‘Proposition’ introducing the section on law in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen reads: ‘The divine command presupposes law in a three-fold sense: as Lex, understood as simple legal obedience; as the radical law, leading to repentance; and as guidance for faith’.202 The first use of the law, generally referred to as the usus politicus sive civilis or the ‘Lex, understood as simple legal obedience’, corresponds to the orders of creation and preservation such as marriage and the state, along with the related notion of justitia civilis, and is introduced in Brunner’s third counter-thesis and developed more fully in the fourth.203 The second use of the law, the usus elenchticus or the ‘radical law’, corresponds to Brunner’s ‘point of contact’ and is developed in the fifth counter-thesis. Finally, the third use of the law, the usus tertius legis and/or the usus didacticus sive normativus204, which ‘Was heißt?’, 41. Nature, 21. 201  Ibid., 27. 202  Das Gebot, 123 (ET: 140). 203  See William Warren Butler, ‘A Comparison of the Social Ethics of Emil Brunner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer with Special Attention to the Orders of Creation and the Mandates’ (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Emory University, 1970), 137: ‘Natural law is placed consistently within the primus usus legis as the means by which God preserves his fallen creation’. 204  Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms drawn principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1985), 321, writes that the third use ‘pertains to believers in Christ who have been saved through faith apart from works  .  .  .  the law no longer functions to condemn, since it no longer stands elentically over against man as the unreachable basis for salvation, but as the norm of conduct, freely accepted by those in whom the grace of God works the good. This normative use is also didactic inasmuch as the law now teaches, without condemnation, the way of righteousness’. 199  200 

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Brunner refers to in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen as ‘guidance for faith’, informs the treatment of the relationship between the ‘old and new man’ in the sixth counter-thesis, with particular reference to the continuity of the ‘formal personality’ from sin to grace. Although, Brunner’s own ordering and concerns are clearly in charge at this point, he imputes selection of the topic to Barth, insofar as the ‘polemical thesis’ against preserving grace proceeds as a consequence of the rejection of general revelation and the affirmation that ‘there is only one kind [of revelation], namely the one complete revelation in Christ’:205 ‘We have to draw the following conclusion from the acknowledgement of Christ as the sole saving grace of God: there is no grace of creation and preservation active from the creation of the world and apparent to us in God’s preservation of the world. For otherwise we would have to acknowledge two or even three kinds of grace, and this would contradict the oneness of the grace of Christ’.206 By contrast, Brunner defines preserving grace as divine presence in spite of human distance: ‘The manner in which God is present to his fallen creature is his preserving grace’, which ‘for the most part consists in that God does not entirely withdraw his grace of creation from the creature in spite of the latter’s sin’, and is both relative to sin and therefore also a divine ‘check’ against ‘the worst consequences of sin, e.g. the State’.207 While it is only possible to ‘speak correctly’ of preserving grace from the standpoint of God’s revelation in Christ, this means that the Christian must speak of it, and even retrospectively acknowledge the presence of this ‘general grace’ prior to faith in Christ.208 Initially, therefore, Brunner’s doctrine of preserving grace appears to be a continuation of his argument for general revelation in relation to the Christian doctrines of creation and sin. However, when seen against the backdrop of his long-time critique of Barth, the doctrine as expressed in Nature and Grace takes on a new light. The key lies in Brunner’s expansive definition of preservation itself: preserving grace covers ‘the whole of natural life’, ‘also the whole of historical life’ and virtually every aspect of the historical inheritance of humanity.209 In this regard, preserving grace means not only action undertaken by God for preservation of the natural world, but (most) human activities are in fact also the result of preserving grace, that is, ‘all activity of man which the Creator himself uses to preserve 205  206  207  208  209 

Nature, 20. Ibid. Ibid., 28. Ibid. Ibid., 28–9.

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his creation amid the corruptions of sin belongs to this type of activity within preserving grace’.210 This is essentially a doctrinally formulated expression of Brunner’s concern with Barth’s critique of humanism in Romans I    211, which was followed by Barth’s adoption of Overbeck’s radically relativizing dialectic prior to Romans II.212 Brunner repeats this concern in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen: ‘A theological ethic oriented by the Reformation would be ill advised to claim at this point that “all our doings are nothing worth”’.213 When Brunner is finally ready to dispense with humanism in 1925’s ‘Die Menschenfragenach Humanismus und Protestantismus’, he nonetheless also attributes its very impetus to the dialectic of the law in terms of moral consciousness in order to ‘preserve’ it, so to speak, from a totalizing radical negation (i.e. the Overbeckian Todesweisheit).214 Expressed, however, in the doctrinal terminology of Nature and Grace, ‘the only thing possible to unregenerate man is a righteousness which amounts exactly to what is otherwise known as justitia civilis’215, although, theologically, justitia civilis does not convey righteousness or even constitute a good in itself. Brunner makes a similar claim in Der Mensch im Widerspruch: ‘Insofar as the external keeping of the commandments is a fulfillment of the divine law – within the limits of the notion of justitia civilis, of being morally good – fulfillment of the will of God is possible for natural humanity – but admittedly in such a way that this occurs within the sphere of sin, and therefore despite everything else still stands under the wrath of God and does not justify humanity before God’.216 Brunner thus twice indicates in Nature and Grace that preserving grace is analogous to the first use of the law, insofar as God ‘provides new means for checking the worst consequences of sin’217 and ‘it is from this that the doctrine of civil and secular functions and offices is derived’.218 In connection to his nearly 20-year concern with Barth’s treatment of humanism, Brunner’s reasons for emphasizing a doctrine of preserving grace over against Barth become especially clear. Whereas Brunner sees in the doctrine of the formal imago dei a fight for ‘nature’ in terms of elements of the God-given humanum, such as communication and responsibility, Ibid., 29. See Chapter 1, section III.b and Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 17–21; BarthBrunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 23–8. 212  See Chapter 1, section III.b. 213  Das Gebot, 163 (ET: 180). 214  See Chapter 1, section III.c. 215  Nature, 44. 216  Mensch, 512 (ET: 531). 217  Nature, 28. 218  Ibid., 29. 210  211 

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preserving grace is a fight for ‘nature’ in terms of human activity. In one sense, Brunner’s critique of Barth on this point is simply the reverse side of his earliest critique of the monistic ethics of naturalism and materialism as a religious socialist and of Schleiermacher’s derivation of ethics from ‘the divine indicative’, instead of ‘the divine imperative’.219 That is, general and preserving grace foster and protect decisive human agency, instead of obviating it altogether in favour of deterministic natural causality on the one hand or deterministic divine activity on the other. 4.  The Orders of Creation and Preservation The fourth section of Brunner’s argument in Nature and Grace is intimately connected to the third as a further distinction in the doctrine of preserving grace: ‘Within the sphere of this preserving grace belong above all those “ordinances”220 which are the constant factors of historical and social life’.221 Foundational to Brunner’s description of the orders is the law, now specifically understood in its objective-subjective two-fold meaning. Consequently, Brunner’s characterization of Barth’s position presumes a categorical rejection of both the orders of preservation and the lex naturae: ‘There is no such thing as God’s ordinances of preservation, which we could know to be such and in which we could recognize the will of God which is normative of our own action. A lex naturae of this kind which is derived from creation can be introduced into Christian theology only per nefas, as a pagan thought’.222 While Brunner fails to mention lex naturae explicitly in his corresponding counter-thesis, it is clearly implied within the argument, thoroughly treated in the analogous sections of Das Gebot und die Ordnungen and later connected directly to the orders of creation and preservation in his treatment of Calvin in Nature and Grace.223 In total, this counter-thesis continues Brunner’s elucidation of the primus usus legis as nature. Within the sphere of preserving grace, Brunner perceives both ‘orders of creation’ and ‘orders of preservation’, the former instituted in the original creation, whereas the latter are implemented by God relative to sin. Marriage, for example, is one of the orders of creation, whereas the state is one of the orders of preservation.224 Marriage ‘is a “natural” ordinance of Chapter 1, section II.c. On Natur und Gnade, 338 and 347, the German is ‘Ordnungen’. The published translation prefers ‘ordinances’, although ‘orders’ is now common. 221  Nature, 29. 222  Ibid., 20. 223  Ibid., 35–50. 224  Ibid., 29–30. On marriage, see Das Gebot, 324–68 (ET: 340–83), and on the state, 426–69 (ET: 440–82). 219  220 

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the creator because the possibility of and the desire for its realisation lies within human nature and because it is realised to some extent by men who are ignorant of the God revealed in Christ’.225 The state, however, insofar as it is relative to sin, ‘provides means for checking the worst consequences of sin’226 and corresponds directly to the first use of the law, as noted above.227 Both the orders of creation and the orders of preservation are ‘given by God’ and ‘realized naturally’, requiring ‘not only the natural impulse . . . but also the humanum’, that is, the formal imago dei as consciousness of responsibility.228 Reaffirming his long-time concern with Barth’s supposed wholesale rejection of human activity, Brunner’s ‘orders’ also include ‘all human arts by which man, thanks to the divine grace of preservation, maintains himself’.229 In Brunner’s development of the three-fold use of the law in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, the initial portion, covering the ‘Lex, understood as simple legal obedience’230, consists of a brief discourse on Brunner’s expansive understanding of the first use of the law and develops the connection between the orders and the lex naturae in greater detail along the lines of his previously established objective-subjective two-fold meaning of the law.231 Only preceding Nature and Grace by a few years, the earlier text is more developed and again offers helpful guidance. There, Brunner duly begins his treatment of the first use of the law with the orders: It belongs to the divinely created and yet sinful reality of our existence, that it is embedded in orders of the highest diversity . . . these orders, these manifold unconscious legal obligations that have arisen are partly a kind of natural law, which the bodily organism carries out automatically . . . and partly fixed habits . . . they are also partly “social customs”, conventions and practices . . . also partly customs that have come to be like law, codified law and accepted rules for life and morality through which the collective more or less forcibly integrates the individual into itself.232 In Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, both the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of these orders fall under the generic heading of Lex: ‘We can label the Nature, 30. Ibid., 28. 227  See Chapter 4, section II.a.3. 228  Nature, 30. Das Gebot, 275–551 (ET: 291–567), gives an extensive overview of the orders: individual and the community, marriage and family, work, the state, culture and the church. 229  Nature, 30. See Das Gebot, 470–507 (ET: 483–522), where Brunner mentions science, art and education in particular. 230  Das Gebot, 123 (ET: 140). 231  See Chapter 2, section VI.a. 232  Das Gebot, 123–4 (ET: 140). 225  226 

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totality of all these binding aspects of life with a coined term – the Lex – insofar as on the one hand they are under the control of the will and yet on the other hand are primarily effective simply as the present forces of order; the totality of the equally diverse motivations through which they have come to be and are maintained, we can call: legality’.233 In Nature and Grace, preserving grace as found in the lex naturae and orders is understood both subjectively – ‘all these orders, whether they be “orders of creation” or “orders of preservation” in the narrower sense, are created and maintained by instinct and reason’ – and objectively – ‘through the preserving grace of God they are known also to “natural man” as orders that are necessary and somehow holy and are by him respected as such’.234 The orders, however, apply not only to the ‘natural man’, that is, the human outside of faith, because ‘the believer, who by reason of his faith understands their ultimate sense better than the unbeliever, cannot but allow his instinct and his reason to function with regard to these ordinances, just as in the arts’.235 In this regard, revelation and justification, grace and faith do not destroy the orders of creation and preservation implanted within nature and reason. Rather, they are present to believer and unbeliever alike, a point clearly reflecting Brunner’s ‘defense’ of humanism in the face of Barth’s No, and his insistence on the delimitation of revelation vis-à-vis Barth’s Yes. Instead of emphasizing destruction or overwhelming power, Brunner uses his end and fulfillment paradigm: as grace does not destroy nature/the orders, it fulfils them because ‘only by means of faith, i.e. through Christ, their relation to the loving will of God can be rightly understood’.236 In terms of the community, ‘the natural orders of creation, which indicate to us all of the ways that we are bound to the other, only disclose their real meaning in the incarnation of Christ. It is in Christ we are told that life-in-community is neither a duty, nor an addition, nor a particular aspect, but the substance of human life’.237 In this regard, the distinction between the ‘natural’ orders of creation and the orders preservation relative to sin is essential for ‘Christian theologia naturalis.  .  .  . Christian theological thinking which tries to account for the phenomena of natural life’.238 Ibid., 124 (ET: 140–1). Nature, 30–1. 235  Ibid., 30. 236  Ibid., 30–1. 237  Das Gebot, 175 (ET: 191). 238  Nature, 30. Brunner generally reserves the Latin term theologia naturalis for his and the Reformers’ ‘natural theology’. 233  234 

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In Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, Brunner develops the relationship of the believer to the orders in terms of law: ‘Since even the believer is found to be within these orders, the question arises of how the believer is to relate to and think about them’.239 For its part, the Lex ‘is God’s gift and therefore . . . it is the task given by God. The Lex itself is by no means what God wills, but it does stand thoroughly under the divine command. Along with the element of compulsion implicit within it, the Lex belongs to the way in which God presently preserves life in the creation that has become sinful, the way in which God gives us life – especially life with one another’.240 Consequently: ‘A peculiar situation arises, that the believer has to obey the Lex out of obedience to God, despite the fact that it does not in any way express what God wills. Second, the believer has to obey the Lex out of obedience to God legaliter – and in not in any other way! – despite the fact that obedience to God as such excludes mere legality’.241 For the believer, therefore, the Lex is ‘only indirectly the will of God’ and the believer will ‘only have to obey it conditionally’.242 Brunner holds this seemingly ambiguous state of affairs to constitute the relationship between ‘The [Divine] Command and the Orders [of Creation]’ (Das Gebot und die Ordnungen), which he works out in terms of the three uses of the law. While Brunner grounds Christian ethics on justification by faith, this does not mean, for example, the Christian no longer has any relationship to the 239  Das Gebot, 124 (ET: 141). Hjört, 141, expresses confusion about the relationship between the command and the orders in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen: ‘Precisely how the relation between these two corner-stones in G.u.O is to be understood is not immediately clear, and indeed is not the object of any specific treatment in G.u.O. The work as a whole should rather be seen as a reflection on the link between the command and the orders. It is nonetheless a criticism of him that Brunner does not explain the purpose of his title’. The key to the relationship, as demonstrated here, is Brunner’s exposition of the three uses of the law. Insofar as the orders represent the law, they form the natural and historical context in which the divine command is received. The relation between the command and the orders is dialectical, patterned on the relationship of law and gospel. Thus, the orders still apply for the believer, though not as law. See, for example, Das Gebot, 162 (ET: 179): ‘The life of faith . . . is a life beyond the law. But that this does not at all mean the demand of God has expired so that the Christian life is only to be described in the indicative of becoming is most clearly seen from the fact that the law, as we have seen, has not been set aside. On the contrary, the law concerns what the Christian is commanded to be – not merely what the Christian is to do – in a threefold way: as a force for order, as court of judgement and as a guide for the “New Man”’. On the relation between the command and the orders in terms of the believer and society, see Das Gebot, 319–20 (ET: 336): ‘It is therefore the most important task of a Christian ethic of society to achieve clarity on the relationship between the natural existence and understanding of existing forms of community, and the divine will as known in faith’. On the three-fold use of the law, see also Das Gebot, 80 (ET: 92). 240  Das Gebot, 126 (ET: 142). 241  Ibid. Cf. Das Gebot, 188 (ET: 204): ‘The law itself never tells me what God’s will is; my “schedule of duties” tells me just as little’. 242  Das Gebot, 126 (ET: 142).

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state as one of the orders of preservation: that is, ‘that the relation of obedience towards humans – towards human authority brought into effect by compulsion – is set aside’, rather, this relationship ‘is stringently and unconditionally limited’.243 Ultimately, for the believer then, faithful obedience ‘is reserved for God’s “own” command and prohibition’, and yet ‘the divine command can never be heard, God can never be obeyed, if at the same time – for the sake of this command – the Lex is not also regarded as God’s indirect will, as the “framework” for a life in love that God has provided us’244. On this account, the orders must be taken seriously, because ‘as real orders, they are what the Creator uses to preserve the world.  .  .  .  The necessity for these orders therefore ultimately rests on divine will. In them, even if broken, it is God’s will that comes to us. Even someone who does not know God can perceive something of the will of God in them. . . . It is at this point that theologia naturalis becomes immedi­ ately practical’.245 Brunner, like Barth, is indeed concerned with the actual political ramifications of his treatment of the law, ‘for though the Lex in and of itself – because of human sin – is coarse and sinful, God tells us to pay it attention for no reason other than his love. It is for the sake of love because it is for the sake of life that the coarse Lex – and with it legality – is necessary’.246 As Brunner continues his treatment of the first use of the law in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, he now tapers his entire line of thought down to the specific function the Lex serves in the divine economy, now in parallel with the written law: ‘But it is also the case that the commandments of the Bible belong to this Lex insofar as they can be understood as law’.247 This rejection of legalism, ‘as is necessary when the divine command is perceived in the obedience of faith, does not mean skipping over the law, but rather breaking through the law from within from the standpoint of its ultimate meaning’.248 This process is essential, because ‘God wants to lead us through this discipline into the freedom of faith. The law is the “schoolmaster to lead us to Christ”. The older dogmaticians used to describe this function of the law in terms of its two main aspects as the usus politicus and the usus paedagogicus, as the “politically” ordering and the “pedagogically” preparatory function’.249 In 243  244  245  246  247  248  249 

Ibid. (ET: 142–3). Ibid. (ET: 143). Ibid., 204 (ET: 221). Ibid., 126–7 (ET: 143). Ibid., 127 (ET: 143). Cf. Nature, 39. Ibid., 127 (ET: 143). Ibid.

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the corresponding endnote, Brunner indicates that some parts of the Reformed tradition connect the usus paedagogicus to the usus politicus (Brunner’s first use of the law), whereas others connect it to the usus elenchticus (Brunner’s second use).250 Brunner’s connection of the usus politicus as found in the natural order to the usus paedgogicus, in which the law is ‘preparatory’ to the gospel, otherwise serving as the ‘schoolmaster to lead us to Christ’, is significant because it offers a dogmatic basis for applying the dialectic of law and gospel to natural and revealed knowledge of God: ‘The law, both in the sense of the “written law” and in the sense of the law written on our conscience, is the husk in which God means for the fruit of faith to ripen. The breakthrough, when it occurs, is actually a breaking through, as we have previously indicated’.251 This allows Brunner to secure two essential elements of nature, not only in terms of preservation, which comes ‘both by nature acting unconsciously and by the reason of man’252, but also in a preparatory function that sets up his treatment of the point of contact, which he holds as sine qua non for reception of the gospel in faith. In total, then, Brunner’s argument for nature in terms of the orders of creation and preservation serves an essential role in his overall system, not only in his ethics but also in his dogmatics. 5.  The Point of Contact Brunner’s various treatments of the point of contact in the 1932 essay, “Die Frage nach dem ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’ als Problem der Theologie’ (The ‘Point of Contact’ as a Problem of Theology) as well as in Nature and Grace and Der Mensch im Widerspruch all provide opportunity for some of his most characteristic theological expression and are direct products of his long-time controversy with Barth. The thesis to which Brunner will respond is this: ‘It is not permissible to speak of the “point of contact” for the saving action of God. For this would contradict the sole activity of the  saving grace of Christ, which is the centre of the theology of the Bible  and the Reformation’.253 While both the 1932 essay and Nature and Grace only briefly mention the dialectical role of the law in relation 250  Ibid., 584 (ET: 605). Muller, 31, refers to the usus elenchticus, usus paedagogicus together as ‘the use of the law for the confrontation and refutation of sin and for the purpose of pointing the way to Christ’, while noting that some Lutherans strictly distinguish the two and have four uses of the law. 251  Das Gebot, 127 (ET: 143). 252  Nature, 31. 253  Ibid., 21.

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to the point of contact, in other writings Brunner explicitly equates the two.254 In Nature and Grace, the point of contact comes as the first of two issues described as indirectly connected to theologia naturalis, following his treatment of the formal and material imago dei, general and special revelation, preserving grace, and the orders of creation and preservation.255 Whereas these first four emphases directly concern the objective imprint of God’s creative activity on creation, the point of contact relates to the allencompassing sinful-subjective interpretation of this objective imprint and  is the place where natural and revealed knowledge of God, law and gospel, meet.256 Das Gebot und die Ordnungen presents this rubric nearly identically, using only slightly different terminology: This is the diacritical point, the turning point, either away from or towards God. . . . In this insight into the grace of God – which is not possible without the law – it is precisely the legalistic understanding of the will of God that is recognized as sin, as what is truly sin, as what is sinful in sin: the human desire to live of its own accord. This is what is dialectical about the law. It leads immediately to the true knowledge of God, in order that right at that moment when the threshold is crossed it is seen as absolute ignorance of God, as the real enemy of the knowledge of God.257 In this regard, Brunner’s scattered statements on the topic not only betray the determinative influence of the dialectic of law and gospel on the point of contact, but also its basis in the ‘radical law, leading to repentance’258, otherwise known as the usus elenchticus legis. . .‘which Luther mostly has in

E.g. ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, 290 and in  1927, Philosophy, 20: ‘The negative point of contact is a consciousness of vital need which is at the same time a consciousness of guilt . . . any account of faith evoked by revelation should be preceded by another account giving the results of man’s investigation of universal mental characteristics, which investigation would lead up to the aforementioned point of contact’. See also Emil Brunner, ‘Theologie und Ontologie’, in Wort 1, 229 and 237. Salakka, 44, sees the connection between law and the point of contact as early as Brunner’s 1914 dissertation (Das Symbolische, 14), where Brunner writes: ‘Religious knowledge is thus the knowledge of a transcendent realm (Überwelt) latently contained in the moral consciousness of the norm’. 255  Nature, 21. 256  See Butler, 122: ‘The law of nature which convicts man in the revelation in Creation is transformed into love which is the end and fulfillment of that lex naturae’. 257  Das Gebot, 130–1 (ET: 146). 258  Ibid., 123 (ET: 140). 254 

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mind when discussing the office of the law’.259 Brunner reaffirms this point in Der Mensch im Widerspruch: ‘It is only through the most extreme intensification of the law that grace can be understood. But this understanding of grace can only come in that the legalistic relation to God itself is recognized to be sin. The point of greatest proximity to God is at the same time the point of greatest distance, the most direct point of contact is at the same time the most intense point of contradiction’.260 In the 1932 essay, however, Brunner uses a footnote to set his treatment of the elenctic use of the law in relation to the point of contact within the broader context of Luther’s reckoning with natural knowledge of God: ‘Luther’s identification of the relationship of general and special knowledge of God is completely clear, unmistakable and in the many places where it is handled, self-contained: “Duplex est cognitio Dei, generalis et propria. Generalem habent omnes homines, scilicet, quod Deus sit, quod creaverit coelum et terram.  .  .  .  Sed quid Deus de nobis cogitet  .  .  .  homines non noverunt” (WA. 40, 607)’.261 Then, staying with Luther, Brunner describes the dialectic of general and special revelation in terms of the knowledge of law and gospel: ‘“There are two types of knowledge of God, one is knowledge of the law, the other the gospel. . . . The knowledge from the law is known to reason and reason has almost grasped and sensed God” (WA. 46, 667, 8ff)’.262 In the main text, however, Brunner reformulates this in terms of his own formal and material imago dei: ‘Precisely this knowledge of God belonging to human nature as such is to [the Reformers] the necessary presupposition of all preaching of the gospel. However just as equally clearly, as all the Reformers affirm, they dispute a material continuity of this natural knowledge of God with the revelation of Christ’.263 This, unsurprisingly, leads to what is perhaps Brunner’s favourite statement by Luther: Luther, with an ingenious formulation – whose significance he was conscious of himself and which he therefore often repeats – held both together, the negative and the positive: They (the heathen) have cognitionem legalem. The law determines the content and limit, i.e. it describes 259  Ibid., 132 (ET: 147–8). Cf. Muller, 320, who combines the usus elenchticus and usus paedagogicus,  and defines them as ‘the use of the law for the confrontation and refutation of sin and for the purpose of pointing the way to Christ’. While Brunner explicitly attaches the pedagogical use to the political use, his treatment of the elenctic use clearly bears this pedagogical function as well. 260  Mensch, 161–2 (ET: 161). 261  ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’, 250 n.1. 262  Ibid. 263  Ibid., 250.

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the circle of immanent religious possibilities to which Luther manifestly reckons a certain theistic metaphysics or some form of belief in a creator of the world. For the Reformers a unity of the moral and religious is given in the concept of the law, whereby here we do not have to question further about the specific content of this law and about its relation to the “Law of Moses” and to the “Law of Christ”.264 Consequently, ‘proclamation that does not make contact with the conscience misses the human being; proclamation that does not put the conscience to silence is not the gospel’.265 Faith, therefore, occurs both positively ‘in the conscience’ and negatively ‘against the conscience’.266 While Brunner only briefly mentions the role of the law in his delineation of the issue in Nature and Grace, the structure of the argument is similar, ultimately turning on the dialectic of sin and grace: ‘No one who agrees that only human subjects and not stocks and stones can receive the Word of God and the Holy Spirit can deny that there is such a thing as a point of contact for the divine grace of redemption’.267 Building on the first counter-thesis, Brunner now adds that ‘this point of contact is the formal imago Dei’, that is, the ‘capacity for words’ and ‘responsibility’ maintained by all humans.268 While the first two points recall Brunner’s extensive reckoning with theoretical and moral reason, the adjacent assertion that they imply ‘the purely formal possibility of . . . being addressed’269 runs alongside his long-time critique of monism: only where Sein and Sollen, or What Is and What Ought to Be can be distinguished, and where the Ought is understood in terms of an external (moral) law addressed to ‘me’, is real decision possible. Insofar as this ‘categorical imperative’ creates personhood, ‘only a being that can be addressed is responsible, for it alone can make decisions’.270 It is therefore this external, moral, sense of ought, or consciousness of responsibility that renders ‘prevenient knowledge’ of sin: ‘Only a being that can be addressed is capable of sin. But in sinning, while being responsible, it somehow or other knows of its sin. This knowledge of sin is a necessary presupposition of the understanding of the divine message of grace’.271 Similarly, Das Gebot und 264  265  266  267  268  269  270  271 

Ibid., 251. Ibid., 251–2. Ibid., 252. Nature, 31. Ibid. Cf. Nature, 32: ‘Materially there is no point of contact’. Ibid., 31. Ibid. Ibid.

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die Ordnungen affirms the same dialectical paradigm: ‘Knowledge of grace presupposes the law. . . . Without this law there is no knowledge of grace’.272 Likewise, in Nature and Grace, ‘it will not do to kill the dialectic of this knowledge of sin by saying that knowledge of sin comes only by the grace of God. This statement is as true as the other, that the grace of God is comprehensible only to him who already knows about sin’.273 In fact, Brunner adds, ‘the case is similar to that of the divine ordinances or of the law: Natural man knows them and yet does not know them’.274 If the law and orders were really known, ‘he would not be a sinner’, but if they were not known at all, implying a lack of the formal imago dei, ‘he would not be human’.275 The same holds for the more theoretically oriented notion as well: ‘The Word of God could not reach a man who had lost his consciousness of God entirely’.276 Thus, Brunner’s argument for the point of contact centres on the notion that ‘this dialectic must not be onesidedly abolished. On the contrary it must be strongly insisted upon’, because ‘only in this dialectic does the responsibility of faith become clear’.277 Reaching the end of the section, satisfied his distinction between the formal and material aspects ensure ‘the doctrine of sola gratia is not in the least endangered’, Brunner again expands his doctrine to include nature in the broadest sense: ‘The sphere of this “possibility of being addressed” includes not only the humanum in the narrower sense, but everything connected with the “natural knowledge” of God. . . . What the natural man knows of God, of the law and of his own dependence upon God, may be very confused and distorted. But even so it is the necessary, indispensable point of contact for divine grace’.278 This statement, along with the treatment from Das Gebot und die Ordnungen and the 1932 essay, demonstrates how Brunner’s doctrine of law and gospel directly determines the key element in his treatment of nature and grace. Several years later, in Der Mensch im Widerspruch, Brunner substantively reiterates the argument from Nature and Grace, giving one of the most telling statements in his entire corpus about Das Gebot, 131 (ET: 147). Nature, 31. 274  Ibid. 275  Ibid., 32. 276  Ibid. 277  Ibid. 278  Ibid. This parallels Brunner’s expansion of preserving grace and the orders of preservation to include the majority of useful human activity. See Nature, 29: ‘All activity of man which the creator himself uses to preserve his creation amid the corruption of sin belongs to this type of activity within preserving grace’. Also, Nature, 30: ‘All human arts by which man, thanks to the Divine grace of perfection, maintains himself’. 272  273 

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the importance of the dialectic of law and gospel for his entire theological programme: The present humanitas is not, like Catholicism teaches, the proper and original human nature (since it is only missing the donum superadditum). Nor is it, as Barth teaches, a secular state of affairs of no relevance to theology; but rather, precisely in its merely formal character, it is what is left over from humanity’s original relationship to God. But what is leftover is not to be understood – as the Reformers do – with the quantitative term ‘relic’, but it must rather be understood in a dialectical sense, as the present legalistic structure of human being that is dialectically related to the gospel, which, first, is able to bring human life some degree of order; which, second, necessarily preserves humanity’s relation to God – even if perversely; which, third, serves as a point of contact to the gospel, but which at the same time, fourth, is the point of the maximum opposition and repulsion. I have never taught anything other than this dialectical point of contact; for the past 12  years (cf. my essay on the law in the Theologische Blätter) the unchanging point at the center of my theological thinking has been, precisely like it is of the Reformers, the dialectic of law and gospel.279 Twelve years prior to Der Mensch im Widerspruch, as detailed in Chapter 2 above, Brunner was writing his essays on law and revelation, particularly ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’, which can now be seen in its conceptual continuity with Nature and Grace. Oddly, this statement, surprising as to its clarity and finality, as well as its essential summary of a large portion of Brunner’s life work up to that point, is relegated to an appendix. 6.  New Creation Brunner’s treatment of new creation in his sixth and final counter-thesis is based on the theological-conceptual implications of his presentation of ‘nature’ in the previous five counter-theses and repeats several key emphases stemming from his long-time critique of mysticism, apparent as early as Das Symbolische in 1914.280 Following the exposition on the point of contact, new creation is the second of two issues in Nature and Grace ‘indirectly’ related to theologia naturalis.281 Like the point of contact, new creation requires the 279  280  281 

Mensch, 499–500 (ET: 514–15). E.g. Symbolische, 6–7. See above, Chapter1, section II.a. Nature, 21.

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previously established objective theologia naturalis as a presupposition, but is not itself a conceptual expansion of this theologia naturalis. Brunner stresses the continuity of the ‘formal personality’, that is, ‘the subject . . . the fact of self-consciousness’, essentially, perseverance of the capacities for communication and responsibility from the state of sin to the new life in Christ, viewed in relation to personal identity. Thus, Brunner characterizes Barth’s ‘false conclusion’ in the following manner: ‘The new creation is in no wise a perfection of the old, but comes into being exclusively through destruction of the old and is a replacement of the old man by the new. The sentence, gratia non tollit naturam sed perfecit, is in no sense correct, but is altogether an arch heresy’.282 While the counter-thesis could be worked out in application to creation/new creation as a whole, Brunner focuses primarily on ‘the old and new man’, thereby extending his earlier treatment of the formal imago dei into his treatment of new creation in terms of ‘the new man’. As will be seen below, the continuity of the formal personality between the ‘old and new man’ parallels the believer’s continued, yet changing relation to the ‘command of God as law’, now expressed in terms of the tertius usus legis.283 The first sentence of Brunner’s counter-thesis, unclear in the translation, can be paraphrased as follows: ‘What Scripture says about the death of the old man always refers to the material and never to the formal side of human nature’, meaning ‘the subject as such, the fact of self-consciousness, is not destroyed by the act of faith’.284 This, says Brunner, ‘is the difference between an act of faith and mystical ecstasy. And this difference points out the character of that event in contrast to the impersonal character of mysticism. The personal God meets man personally. That involves the continuance of self-consciousness’.285 In this regard, the slightly earlier treatment of the law in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen presents the same notion of formal continuity in terms of the believer’s relation to the law: from the interconnected political and pedagogical uses to the elenctic use, and finally to the ‘tertius usus’, which is the role of the law for the believer insofar as it acts ‘as guidance for faith’.286 Thus, following his treatment of the elenctic use, ‘the meaning of the law for unbelief in the believer’287, Brunner develops his account of the law’s role in the life of faith, an account which presupposes that since 282  283  284  285  286  287 

Ibid. Das Gebot, 132 (ET: 148–50). Natur, 350. Cf. Nature, 33. Ibid., 33. Das Gebot, 123 (ET: 140). Ibid., 132 (ET: 148).

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personal identity is not destroyed by grace, the believer is now understood to be simul iustus et peccator: ‘Not even for faith itself does the law lose its meaning as the God-given exposition of what it means for our action to be “in Christ”. But the reality of our belief does not mean that we have simply become one with the will of God. God remains over against us even in faith, and we go down the right path only when God guides us’.288 While, Brunner acknowledges the potential objection that ‘this guidance does not occur through the law, but through the Holy Spirit’, he responds: ‘Certainly, but the Holy Spirit only speaks to us where Scripture also speaks to us: Word and Spirit, the “letter” of the law and the Spirit which makes it alive. The Spirit must interpret the law, and can only do so if the law is present and remains present. . . . This is why we must teach the usus tertius legis, the usus didacticus, the guiding function of the law more clearly than Luther did’.289 Thus, the law does remain in place for the believer, but the believer’s relationship to the law has changed.290 The argument for new creation in Nature and Grace works within the same paradigm. Acknowledging what seems like an approximation to mysticism, Brunner suggests that Gal. 2.19-20291 demonstrates the point, noting the statement, ‘“Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me”. . . follows upon the sentence, “for through the law I am dead . . . I am crucified with Christ”’.292 This statement, ‘“for through the law I am dead . . . nevertheless I live”’, says Brunner, ‘signifies the preservation of the formal personality even beyond the death of the material’.293 That is, while the law means Ibid. See Butler, 139: ‘Although Brunner stressed justification by faith as the basis of the Christian ethic, the law had a large place for him in the development of the content of Christian ethics. The dual elements of law and gospel were present in these two emphases. Just as faith and obedience are correlative in that one is not complete without the other, so gospel and law are correlative, for the Christian cannot live with the one without the other. Brunner—as Luther—recognized that the Christian is simul iustus, simil peccator. The Christian still needs the law to avoid antinomianism, but the law without the gospel is legalism, another perversion of the Christian’s response to God’s grace’. Cf. Volken, 103. 289  Das Gebot, 132–3 (ET: 149). 290  See Douglas Schuurman, Creation, Eschaton, and Ethics: The Ethical Significance of the Creation-Eschaton Relation in the Thought of Emil Brunner and Jürgen Moltmann (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 27 n. 39: ‘Faith effects an alteration of the law so that it approximates the fatherly will of God in its “third use” in the Christian life as guidance’. See also Dogmatics II, 433 and Emil Brunner, Eternal Hope (trans. Harold Knight; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 201. 291  Gal. 2.19–20: 19For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (NRSV) 292  Nature, 33. 293  Ibid., 350. My translation. Cf. Nature, 33. 288 

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the  death of the material person in sin, the ‘formal personality’ or self-consciousness, which includes the formal capacity for receiving the law, that is, words and consciousness of responsibility remains intact. In other words, Brunner is simply arguing for the preservation of the personal selfconsciousness and identity from sin to grace. On the other side, then, ‘together with this restrictive statement about the formal element we get, as it were by way of correction, an opposite statement concerning the material element: yet not I but Christ  .  .  .  in me’.294 While awkward in both the original and the translation, Brunner simply means on the one hand that in the transition from sin to grace, the formal personality and self-consciousness remain identical, but on the other hand the material element is ‘Christ  .  .  .  in me’. His point, in explicit contradistinction to what he understands to be mysticism, is to reject theosis – the notion that the believer becomes identical with Christ – because the formal personality, the self-consciousness, persists through both sin and grace: ‘That is why the New Testament never proceeds to use the expression sometimes used by Luther: that in faith the believer becomes Christ’.295 Thus, while the fall into sin does not destroy the personal identity and selfconsciousness, neither does grace. As such, preservation of the formal personality in the transition from the old to the new applies equally to the work and presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer: ‘Faith’ is ‘the work and gift of the Holy Spirit’, but the Bible ‘never says: the Holy Spirit within me has faith. But rather: I believe through the Holy Spirit’.296 Here, Brunner acknowledges that I Cor. 2:12297 comes closest to the former seemingly mystical statement, but that ‘it must surely be interpreted to mean that in so far as we have the Holy Spirit, there takes place in us an act of the divine self-consciousness through the Holy Spirit. But it always remains “within us”. It never turns to identity’.298 The 1932 essay on the point of contact makes precisely the same point: ‘Talk of the Holy Spirit is not talk of possession, but its opposite. It is talk about what occurs not alone to me, but also in me’.299 This entails preservation of one’s Ibid. Ibid., 33. 296  Ibid., 34. 297  1 Cor. 2.10-12: 10These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. 12Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. (NRSV). 298  Nature, 34. 299  ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’, 246. 294  295 

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individual decisive personality and agency in contrast to a deterministic kind of spiritual possession that erases characteristic marks of the believing individual. In other words, ‘the identity of the human subject is guarded where the Spirit is spoken of; therefore the important expression is to receive the Holy Spirit’.300 Properly understood then, neither the doctrines of the new birth/new creation nor the doctrine of the Holy Spirit should lead to the type of mystical enthusiasm that mandates either acknowledgement of an a priori monism or an immediate absorption of the believer into the divine in the act of faith or later at the eschaton: ‘By holding fast to the identity of the formal personality this expression asserts personal sobriety over against every form of ecstatic exuberance’.301 On this basis, parallel to the notion of the persistence of the law in its third use, the idea of new creation must be counter-balanced by the notion of ‘reparatio, of restoration. . . . It is not possible to repair what no longer exists. But it is possible to repair a thing in such a way that one has to say: this has become quite new’.302 Thus expressing his lifelong concern to preserve space for personal decision in explicit contrast to predestination or materialistic notions of causality, Brunner now prepares to bring his thoughts on new creation to a close: ‘Only within such a sober or careful means of expression is it also possible to preserve for the act of faith the character of responsibility and decision. And upon this depends the possibility of an imperative of faith, which—as everyone knows—is as characteristic of the New Testament as the statement that faith is the gift and work of God’.303 With these words, having begun with creation and worked towards consummation, Brunner brings his treatise on nature to a close, saying: ‘These theses sum up my theologia naturalis, of which Karl Barth is so suspicious’.304 7.  Summary Significantly, Brunner caps his six counter-theses with several statements placing the argument in Nature and Grace in direct relation to his nearly 20-year dispute with Barth as found in their correspondence and his early Nature, 34. Ibid. 302  Ibid. Cf. Mensch, 489 (ET: 499). ‘Redemption is not only but always also and always primarily restoration, renewal’. See Zeindler, 89. 303  Nature, 34. 304  Ibid. 300  301 

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writing. Recalling his approximation to Barth’s radical dialect in Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube and ‘Die Grenzen der Humanität’, Brunner confesses: ‘There was a time when—like Karl Barth himself—I did not see the contrast between the Gospel and the natural knowledge of God as clearly as I do at present’.305 Indeed, in Brunner’s case, the published evidence indicates the majority of his key writings from the early 1920s to 1934 turn precisely on an effort to work through this issue, whether in terms of law and gospel, law and revelation, reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, natural and revealed knowledge of God or nature and grace. Also consistent is Brunner’s concern with Barth’s development in direct relationship to these dialectical pairings. Whereas Brunner initially worries about the cosmological nature of Barth’s appropriation of the infinite qualitative distinction and his subsequent adoption of Overbeck’s Todesweisheit, he counters by stressing the limits and unity of theoretical and moral reason, entailing restraint of both positive and negative speculative theology. Against this backdrop, Brunner’s next statement can appear in context: ‘Anyone who will now read the 1922 edition of Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans will be amazed at the broad stream of platonist speculation about things divine, which has entered the mainstream of biblical theology. The same applies to my own earlier writings’.306 On the one hand, this charge and confession might appear strange with only Brunner’s Mittler and Barth’s second Romans on hand, given their mutually strong critique of natural knowledge of God and modern theology. However, on the other, in light of their longrunning debate and his earlier writings, Brunner’s reasons for labelling certain parts of Barth’s earlier theological programme speculative become clear in their proper context. Incidentally, Brunner is not alone in this fear, despite its initially counter-intuitive sense. Virtually echoing Brunner’s concern in  1918 about Barth’s ‘cosmological’ negation, Attila Szekeres, in 1964, writes that the Barth of the Römerbrief period ‘presumes a kind of negative natural revelation that is revealed in the crisis of humanity, where. . . . Bible and philosophy stick together in a certain affinity’.307 In other words, according to Szekeres, ‘Barth’s Romans does indeed allow room for natural theology – at the point where the Krisis is manifested’.308 Ibid. Ibid., 34–5. 307  Attila Szekeres, ‘Karl Barth und die natürliche Theologie’, Evangelische Theologie 24 (1964), 230. Cf. Chapter. 1, section III.c above. 308  Szekeres, 230. 305  306 

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b.  ‘The Reformers’ Doctrine and its Antithesis’ While the accuracy of Brunner’s interpretation of Luther309 and Calvin310 is a separate issue, his self-understanding as a theologian of the Reformation vis-à-vis Barth is essential to Nature and Grace. As their correspondence shows, the interpretation of both Luther and Calvin had been an explicit point of contention between Barth and Brunner since the mid-1920s, though frequently in terms analogous to nature and grace, such as law and gospel, and reason and revelation.311 His actual proximity to the Reformation notwithstanding, the arguments Brunner uses to connect his formulations to Luther and Calvin further betray the inner-workings of his critical standpoint towards Barth and explicitly reinforce many of the concerns first voiced in the late teens. Now, more confident in his reading  of the Reformation, and especially of Calvin, Brunner sets out  to  demonstrate that if Barth’s charges of ‘Thomism’ and ‘NeoProtestantism’312 apply to him, ‘then this applies even more to that of Calvin’.313 This task leads Brunner to work through Calvin’s understanding of nature, his doctrine of the imago dei and his ethics in a section entitled ‘The Reformers’ Doctrine and its Antitheses’. Brunner concludes the section in classifying his opponents, particularly Roman Catholicism, the Enlightenment and Barth, by evaluating their respective understandings of nature and grace through the rubric of reason and revelation maintained by Reformers. 309  Brunner’s former student, Edward A. Dowey Jr., in ‘Redeemer and Redeemed as Persons in History’, in The Theology of Emil Brunner, 196, refers to Theodosius Harnack, Adolf von Harnack’s father, as ‘Brunner’s favourite Luther interpreter’. Brunner’s reliance on Harnack’s Luther is unquestionable, considering the broad overlap of key themes like law, the wrath of God and various christological emphases as found in Theodosius Harnack, Luthers Theologie, mit besonderer Beziehung aus seine Versöhnungs- und Erlösungslehre (2 vols; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1927). See also Brunner’s review essay of the 1927 edition of Harnack’s work, ‘Der Zorn Gottes und die Versöhnungdurch Christus’, Zwischen den Zeiten 5, 5 (1927), 93–115. On Barth-Brunner, EB: 27 January 1927 (#61), 150, Brunner refers to Theodosius Harnack ‘as a companion’ that ‘shows us the real Luther, who along with Calvin is truly at odds with all modern anthropologists’. 310  Regarding ‘Brunner and Calvin’, see not only Karl Barth’s response in No!, 94–109, but also Peter Barth, ‘Das Problem der natürlichen Theologie bei Calvin’, Theologische Existenz heute 18 (1935), 3–60 and the published doctoral thesis by Brunner’s student, Günter Gloede, Theologia naturalis bei Calvin (Stuttgart: 1935). Brunner and Peter Barth’s relevant correspondence is found in Barth-Brunner, 416–30, 441–4. See also Jehle, 308 and Edward Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 265–7. In addition, see Brunner’s pamphlet, Das Vermächtnis Calvins: Vortrag bei der Calvinfeier in Großmünster am 28. Juni 1936 (Bern: Gotthelf-Verlag, 1936). 311  See Chapter 4, section I.b. 312  Neo-Protestantism refers to liberal theologies taking their lead in one way or another from Schleiermacher. It is identical with ‘Modern Theology’, Brunner’s own term, which is used throughout this analysis. 313  Nature, 35–6.

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In accordance with his aim of preserving a theological doctrine of nature from Barth’s ‘one-sided’ determination of grace, Brunner begins his treatment of Calvin with an evaluation of the Reformer’s concept of nature, again differentiating between the subjective and objective senses. Consequently, objective ‘nature’ in Calvin refers to ‘the original creation’, including both natural life and the orders of human life, such as culture and society in the broadest sense.314 Objective ‘nature is for Calvin’, therefore, ‘both a concept of being and a concept of a norm’315 reflecting ‘the will of God . . . implanted in the world from creation, the divine rule of the world’, and expressed variously in terms of lex naturae and the orders of creation.316 By contrast, nature in the subjective sense means sinful humanity’s (mis)understanding of this objective revelation in nature. Whereas, sin affects nature ‘not only subjectively . . . but also objectively’317, the impact of sin on ‘the divine order of nature’, that is, nature in the objective sense, is not ‘so much as to render the will of God, the “rule” of nature invisible’.318 In order to distinguish between the impact of sin on both the objective and subjective concepts, Brunner uses his principle of contiguity: ‘When the center of the person is under discussion, the personal nucleus, the actual relation to God, then the two concepts, the objective and the subjective, coalesce’.319 While sin does not affect nature in the objective sense in such a way as to necessitate an independent Christian mathematics, sin entirely perverts both human self-understanding and its understanding of God. It is on this basis, Brunner concludes, that Calvin can say on the one hand that ‘sin is unnatural, against nature’, or on the other that ‘sin is the expression of human nature in contrast to creation and redemption’.320 Nature, then, is ‘theologically’ significant, because from the ‘experience’ of ‘preserving and providential grace’, the believing Christian can know God ‘from nature other than man, but also from man himself’.321 In fact, ‘God demands of us that we should know and honor him in his works’.322 By knowledge, Brunner means ‘partial’ and ‘imperfect’ knowledge of God in objective nature viewed from the standpoint of grace.323 This imperfection, 314  315  316  317  318  319  320  321  322  323 

Ibid., 37. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 37–8. Cf. Chapter 3, section I.d.2 above. Ibid., 38. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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however, does not mandate abandonment of this objective natural knowledge of God in creation324, because ‘through Scripture the revelation in nature is both clarified and complemented’.325 Accordingly, the two revelations in Scripture and nature stand in a ‘two-fold’ relation: first, ‘Scripture serves as a “lens”’, clarifying the revelation in nature, and secondly, ‘Scripture shows us the heart of God, which is not revealed in natural revelation’.326 ‘Scriptural revelation’, therefore, ‘does not make the natural [revelation] superfluous’, because ‘only through Scripture is the latter made effective and only by Scripture are we properly led to it’.327 At this point, Brunner buttresses his position by invoking the classical Reformed identification of the ‘content’ of the lex Scripta and the lex naturae328, suggesting Scripture’s clarifying role ‘applies especially to the knowledge of the divine will from the law and the natural ordinances. We know of the law of God in our reason or in our conscience. This lex naturae is identical in content with the lex scripta, though the lex scripta is necessary to make again perfectly clear the writing of the lex naturae which has, as it were, faded’.329 While the lex naturae is the ‘will of God in creation’, this fact must be revealed, and an identical pattern applies to the ordinances, insofar as ‘they have to be made known afresh by Christ as ordinances of creation’.330 In terms of the subjective conception of nature spoiled by sin, Brunner claims that in Calvin’s theologia naturalis the imago dei ‘forms the transition from natura in the objective sense to natura in the subjective sense’.331 From the perspective of faith, therefore, that is, Calvin’s standpoint, the imago dei functions in a parallel manner to the law in its two-fold objective-subjective meaning in relation to the gospel. On the one hand, the imago dei points to Christ as the original image of God, and on the other hand, the imago dei points to the soteriology of reparatio and regeneratio as the restoration of that image in humanity.332 Likewise, from the standpoint of the gospel, the law is understood as pointing humanity towards the divine will and yet  also demonstrates humanity’s inability to fulfil the will of God and the need for redemption. Like the law, Brunner employs the imago as a dialectical Ibid., 38 and 39. Ibid., 39. 326  Ibid. 327  Ibid. 328  See Muller, 175: ‘The lex naturalis is inward, written on the heart and therefore obscure, whereas the lex Mosaica is revealed externally and written on tablets and thus of greater clarity’. 329  Nature, 39. 330  Ibid. 331  Ibid., 40. 332  Ibid. 324  325 

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concept, meaning ‘in a Christian theology the concept of the imago Dei can only be understood in conjunction with that of sin as the loss of that imago . . . this dualism, this inner contradiction in the human essence, is characteristic of man as he is now’.333 Thus, the image of God in humanity is both ‘irrevocably spoilt’ and at the same time also the divine image.334 Whereas Calvin preserves the dialectical character of the imago dei in terms of a ‘remnant’, Brunner, fearing this sounds quantitative, suggests a qualitative account in terms of a formal image that remains and a material image that is lost. Despite this minor disagreement, Brunner asserts that it is precisely Calvin’s remnant, like his own formal image, which is responsible for ‘the entire human, rational nature, the immortal soul, the capacity for culture, conscience, responsibility, the relation with God, which—though not redemptive—exists even in sin, language, the whole of cultural life’.335 Significantly, for Calvin, ‘even fallen man still has—thanks to the “portion” of the imago that he has retained—an immortal soul, a conscience, in which the law of God is indelibly and irremovably planted’.336 Calvin accordingly ascribes sinful humanity some ‘capacity for recognising truth’, and in this regard, ‘wherever a man of science investigates the divine laws of the starry heavens, wherever an artist creates any great works, there the Spirit of God is active in him, there he is in relation with divine truth’.337 In terms of the subjective concept of nature, however, it is precisely these factors stemming from the retained formal imago (‘in which the law of God is indelibly and irremovably implanted’) that also give ‘man occasion to misinterpret himself’.338 That is, ‘the imago gives man occasion for false idealistic speculation, i.e. for an immanentist interpretation of what can be rightly understood only transcendentally, i.e. if the divine act of creation is taken into consideration’.339 As the imago is both ‘the seat of responsibility’ and ‘the seat of religion’: ‘Thus also the imago is necessary for any knowledge of God in nature. Here, therefore, the objective and subjective concepts meet. The imago, which man retains, is the principle of the theologia naturalis in the subjective sense, i.e. of that knowledge of God derived from nature, of which man is capable apart from revelation in the Scriptures or in Jesus Christ’.340 This subjective natural theology, which is always a ­misinterpretation despite 333  334  335  336  337  338  339  340 

Ibid. Ibid., 41. Ibid. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 42–3.

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its proximity to God, is ‘of no practical import’, ‘unnecessary and ­invalidated by the better knowledge we have gained in Christ’, and ‘not only imperfect but always disfigured by untruth’.341 Therefore, in place of this subjective natural theology ‘Christ gives us the true theologia naturalis, the true knowledge of God in his works in the same way in which he gives us a new knowledge which goes beyond all knowledge that is natural and which is in this sense supernatural’.342 In ethics, likewise, ‘the true ethica naturalis, like the theologia naturalis, finds its perfection in Christ alone’.343 For Calvin then, ‘the only thing possible to unregenerate man is a righteousness which amounts exactly to what is otherwise known as justitia civilis’, because he ‘believes in an original revelation from the time of creation’, although ‘its relation to the lex naturae is not made clear’.344 Brunner also finds Calvin’s treatments of matrimony and the state are derived from his theologia naturalis, which is based on the objective revelation in creation, particularly ‘knowledge of the ordinances of creation which only a Christian can have’.345 As ‘the pagan theologia naturalis no ­longer counts. . . . Calvin is altogether dependent on the concept of lex naturae which he derives from creation’.346 ‘This is, roughly speaking, Calvin’s theologia naturalis. In  all essentials it is also that of Luther’.347 By ‘Christian natural theology’, then, Brunner means the essential rewriting, clarification and fulfilment of nature by revelation in Christ and Scripture. As Brunner’s concern is to preserve a theologically determined concept of nature, he dwells little on the subjective misinterpretation of the objective revelation in creation, although this indeed constitutes a major concern in his early writing. On the next few pages, Brunner gives his characterization of the ‘antitheses’ to the Reformers’ thoughts on nature, particularly the Roman Catholic, the Neo-Protestant and Barth. In each case, Brunner classifies his opponent’s position on nature and grace as undialectical. In Roman Catholic doctrine, for example, Brunner claims that ‘the objective and subjective concepts of nature coalesce, they coincide as it were, completely’.348 This is because in Roman Catholicism the imago is not lost due to sin, ‘but only the dona superaddita, the justitia—or, more properly, the perfectio originalis’ and ‘thanks to the undamaged imago the theologia naturalis is derivable from reason alone’, 341  342  343  344  345  346  347  348 

Ibid., 42. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 45. Ibid. Ibid.

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meaning that ‘nature, i.e. the divine order of creation, is entirely accessible and adequately intelligible to reason alone’.349 In Roman Catholicism, consequently, ‘the natural knowledge of God is free from the twilight that lies upon it in the doctrine of the Reformers. There is no antinomy in it. A dichotomy has taken the place of antinomy. On the one hand, nature, on the other grace, on the one hand reason, on the other revelation. Both are neatly divided by a horizontal line, distinguished from one another like the first and second storeys [sic] of a building’.350 In other words, ‘the theologia naturalis is for the Reformers dialectical, for Roman Catholicism undialectical’.351 However, Brunner admits this particular point was not of primary concern to the Reformers because their focus was soteriology: ‘The idea that the imago Dei in man is intact provokes their wrath’, although ‘they follow up the consequences of this idea and of its opposite, as it were, only upwards, in the direction of soteriology but not downwards, in the direction of theologia naturalis. This is why hardly one Protestant theologian is properly informed on this subject’.352 By this, Brunner simply means the Reformer’s trace their dialectical notion upwards to the new creation/‘new man’, as in his sixth counter-thesis above, but not downwards with regard to natural knowledge of God, although awareness of this particular aspect of the theology of the Reformation is not common since ‘the concept of nature . . . common to all theology until the time of the Enlightenment’ was not properly accounted for in the nineteenth century.353 On this ground, Brunner gives a brief summary of his progress, then extends his critique to the Enlightenment: If one wanted to put it metaphorically, one would have to say that for the Reformers the light of revelation in Christ must shine into nature in order to light up this foundation. The Roman Catholics separate them by a neat horizontal line. For the Enlightenment the light of reason reaches upwards into the sphere of redemption to the extent of doing away completely with the distinction between the lumen naturale and the revelation in Christ.354 Ibid., 46. Cf. Gottlieb Söhngen, ‘Natürliche Theologie und Heilsgeschichte: Antwort an Emil Brunner’, Catholica 4 (1935), 97–114. Söhngen and other Catholic theologians, not to mention Barth, reject Brunner’s understanding of Catholicism in Nature and Grace. Cf. Ghisler, 63; Leipold, 275 n. 152; Sauter, 281. 350  Nature, 46. 351  Ibid. 352  Ibid., 47. 353  Ibid. 354  Ibid. 349 

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Here again, the consequence of this depiction of nature is undialectical, with the result that in the Enlightenment model, ‘the whole of theology becomes theologia naturalis, or at least the distinction between the revelation in Christ or in the Scriptures becomes blurred and uncertain’.355 Reaffirming one of the key emphases of the distinction between general and special revelation in the eristic portion of Der Mittler, Brunner states that ‘rationalism proper is the complete abolition of the distinction’.356 At this point, the translation is again unclear, but the German text clearly asserts that Barth misunderstands ‘Neo-Protestantism’ as a ‘mixture of both principles’, that is, as a mixture of reason and revelation instead of the abandonment of revelation for reason.357 Whereas in the Reformers, ‘natural knowledge of God is, as it were, rightly threatened by revelation’, in Neo-Protestantism ‘the independence of revelation is threatened by natural knowledge’.358 Now, Brunner turns his critique towards Barth, using the categories of theologia naturalis and revelation: ‘As regards the controversy between Barth and myself, the picture would have to be completed thus: in Barth’s theology theologia naturalis is not only threatened and restricted by revelation but it is altogether done away with’.359 In other words, Brunner finds Barth is mistaken when ‘he considers the characteristic of the Reformer’s theology to be the denial of theologia naturalis’360, even though ‘the Reformer’s doctrine of the lex naturae and natural theology is obscure and not clearly thought out and that they failed to assert the contrast with sufficient sharpness’.361 Nonetheless, it is only in relation to Barth’s ‘complete denial’ of natural theology that Brunner is willing to acknowledge his own position ‘as an “approximation to Roman Catholicism”’362, and on this basis, Brunner reaffirms the line he has been touting against Barth since nearly the beginning of their acquaintance: We may ask why Barth should so violently and brusquely deny a doctrine which is obviously in accordance with the Scriptures and the Reformation, in spite of his being otherwise so loyal to Scripture and being so seriously concerned to capture the message of the Reformation. I believe that the 355  356  357  358  359  360  361  362 

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 364 and Nature, 47. Ibid., 47–8. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 48. Ibid.

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answer lies in a one-sided concept of revelation. Barth refuses to recognize that where revelation and faith are concerned, there can be anything permanent, fixed, and, as it were, natural.363 Precisely as in the arguments over humanism in 1918 and the law in 1924, Brunner finds Barth’s ‘one-sided’ conception of grace destroys nature.364 This error, essentially being Schleiermacher’s in reverse, Brunner attributes to Barth’s ‘actualism’, for Barth ‘acknowledges only the act, the event of revelation, but never anything revealed, or, as he says, the fact of revelation. The whole strength of Barthian theology lies in the assertion of the actual. It is here that revelation in the ultimate, fullest sense can only be an act, God speaking to me here and now’.365 While Brunner has indeed also worked for a kind of actualism, especially evident in his christology366, his unwillingness to unite the doctrines of the person and work of Christ in Der Mittler is symbolic of his reticence with Barth’s programme. Here, Brunner brings the argument into its final phase, preparing to run through the nature-grace relationship once more, now by analogy from ‘the fact’ of revelation in Scripture. Counter Barth’s ‘assertion of the actual’, ‘the event of revelation  .  .  .  is only one side of the biblical concept of revelation. The other side is its very opposite’.367 Simply, like Jesus Christ, Scripture objectively bears divine revelation: It is the fact that God speaks to me here and now because he has spoken. Above all, that he speaks to me through the Holy Spirit because he has spoken in Jesus Christ. This “has” is maintained in the concept of the Canon. The Bible is the “fact of Revelation” of God. It is true that the Scriptures become the Word of God for me only through the Holy Spirit. But they become the Word of God because they already are it. They become it through that, which is written, the solid body of words, sentences and books, something objective and available for everyone.368 While the relation is not mentioned here, it should be noted that this objective-subjective pattern is identical to the believers relationship to law as the will of God in its tertius usus369, which like the person of Christ and Ibid., 48–9. Barth-Brunner, EB: 30 January 1918 (#8), 19 and Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 25. See also Nature, 16, 59. 365  Nature, 49. 366  Chapter 3, section II.b. 367  Nature, 49. 368  Ibid. 369  Chapter 4, section II.a.6. 363  364 

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Scripture must also be illumined by the Holy Spirit in order to be understood rightly. Keeping this form, Brunner moves by way of analogy from the objective revelation in Scripture to the objective revelation in nature: ‘Once we have understood this, it is not difficult to acknowledge the fact that God speaks to us through his work in nature, in the wide sense of the old usage. The whole arrangement of the world, with its fixity and the permanency of its being, is a manifestation of God’.370 Next, in a sleight of hand, Brunner takes the opportunity to insert his equation of revelation and justification, another point he has maintained consistently against Barth since 1924371, writing: ‘[Nature] does not bear this function “in itself”—any more than the Scriptures—but only because to this Word is added an ear that hears it, to this manifestation an eye that sees it’.372 In this regard, ‘an expression is only expression where there is an impression to correspond to it. It is impossible to see the expression of God without it making an impression. Where that is so, the Scriptures speak of sin and unbelief both where scriptural revelation (or prophetic revelation or revelation in Christ is concerned)’.373 Insofar as God’s revelation in Christ corresponds to and is only complete in justification by virtue of the work of the Spirit, God’s revelation in creation leaves an impression, which must likewise be revealed by the Holy Spirit. In this regard, both general and special revelation share a similarity in form, reflecting the influence of Kierkegaard on Brunner’s conception of communication of revealed truth: ‘God does not speak to us except by signs and pictures. By the picture-language of the order of the world and by that of the prophetic and apostolic word. Even Jesus Christ is a piece of picture language or, as Kierkegaard puts it, an “indirect communication”. For direct communication is paganism. Direct communication cannot communicate the message of God, but only that of an idol’.374 This again not only affirms the objective-subjective qualification of the meaning of natural theology, but also serves to delimit special revelation.375 That is, without the distinction between general and special revelation, there can be no special revelation: ‘That is the reason why it is not possible to deny the “fact of revelation” of God in the order of the world of nature for the reasons which Barth gives, for example in the context of his rejection of 370  371  372  373  374  375 

Nature, 49. See Chapter 2, section VI.b and Chapter 4, section I.b. Nature, 49–50. Ibid., 50. Ibid. See Chapter 2, section VI.d.

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the analogia entis.376 For if one did, one would also have to abandon the fact of the revelation of God in Scripture and would thus lapse into an enthusiastic idea of revelation’.377 In relation to his earlier critique of Schleiermacher’s identification of general and special revelation, Brunner’s use of the Reformation keyword ‘enthusiasm’ in the context of his critique of Barth is significant. Even in the final pages of Brunner’s critique, many of his long-time concerns, specifically established within the context of his attempt to work out the dialectic of law and revelation, appear again and again. c. ‘The Significance of Theologia Naturalis for Theology and The Church’ In the final section, Brunner spells out the varied practical implications of his argument. While his own situation in Zürich was certainly different from his colleague’s in Germany, this should not be taken as an indication that only Barth’s concerns were politically relevant and Brunner’s were merely intellectual. Nature and Grace does not simply have a theoretical-theological point to make, but consistent with Brunner’s thought from the mid-teens up to ‘Denken und Erleben’ and beyond, not only the foundational moral impetus of the ‘consciousness of responsibility’ is essential, but also the order of the ‘state’ is a central concern. Traugott Koch suggests that Brunner justifies his treatment of nature and grace in the final section on the practical implications of theologia naturalis, and not in expounding his position from the standpoint of sola gratia and sola scriptura.378 While Koch may have pinpointed a discrepancy between the stated intentions and the final product, Brunner’s emphasis on the immediate and inherent practical relevance of his argument is in character. Whereas Brunner begins the essay on the ‘point of contact’ with practical matters379, it is with explicit reference to ethics, communication and proclamation of the gospel that he concludes Nature and Grace.380 Regarding ethics, Brunner’s says little new in his conclusion, but does clarify his counter-theses and reading of Calvin with several points that refer 376  See Hudson, 135–7 and Indinipolous, 50–1. Vincent Edward Smith, review of Der Glaube bei  Brunner, by Lorenz Volken, The Thomist 12 (1949), 220: ‘Unlike Barth, Brunner seems somehow groping toward the analogy of being and is willing to preserve the phrase imago dei in something of its traditional sense’. 377  Nature, 50. 378  Traugott Koch, ‘Natur und Gnade: Zur neueren Diskussion’, Kerygma und Dogma 16 (1970), 172. 379  ‘Anknüpfungspunkt’, 239. 380  Nature, 51.

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specifically to his doctrine of law. While acknowledging the orders can be read in either a conservative and direct manner or in the indirect and ‘refracted’ manner of the Reformers, Brunner again rejects the notion that the negative potential mandates abandonment of the orders altogether.381 Rather, in faith, Christian ethics must recognize the orders as the objective impress of God’s creative activity, although faith only relates to the orders insofar as they determine the context or ‘framework’ for Christian action: ‘Christian social ethics throughout the centuries may be defined as the doctrine of love founded in Jesus Christ and of its function in society according to the divine institution of the latter’.382 If this relationship is denied, the result ‘is an invincible individualism’.383 This is problematic, not only because community itself is one of the orders of creation, but because denial of the external-objective divine order leads to a rationalistic or internal-immanent ethics turning entirely on reason – an epistemological standpoint that affects social structures and produces ‘liberalistic doctrines of the state and matrimony’384, and presumably, though Brunner does not name it here, capitalism. Thus, ‘we have to acknowledge the fact that God has not simply put us into a “world”, but into his creation, whose laws can be known in spite of sin, by those who know God in Jesus Christ’.385 Inasmuch as these laws and orders are objectively real, all ‘those who  .  .  .  act in accordance with the laws of these ordinances, do the works of God’.386 But this brings only justitia civilis, not justification: ‘The same applies to all those who fulfil the law of God—whether the written or the lex naturae—in any way whatsoever’.387 This means that ‘the law—whether it be written law or the lex naturae or one of these ordinances—is the form in which the divine will is revealed, which only through the Holy Spirit becomes a concrete divine commandment, governing my existence here and now. Only the Holy Spirit teaches us to know the law and the ordinances truly, in accordance with the needs of the moment’.388 Where this is the case, ‘the will of God is done not only outwardly but inwardly also’389, that is, not only formally, but materially in love. However, again recalling the impassioned language of 1922’s ‘Grenzen der Humanität’, Brunner suggests that even for society at 381  382  383  384  385  386  387  388  389 

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 52. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid.

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large an awareness of these ‘objective limits’ and ‘objective guides’ ‘is the only way out of this chaos’.390 While Brunner acknowledges Barth’s concern that a faulty conservative doctrine of the orders is causing political problems in Germany, he suggests that it is precisely the non-dialectical nature of this account, also implicit in Barth’s own totalizing rejection of the orders, which is the real problem for theology. Following on from this point, Brunner details a related concern in dogmatics, suggesting Barth’s rejection of the ‘principle of analogy’ constitutes ‘a piece of theological nominalism, in comparison with which that of William of Occam appears harmless’.391 Including the analogia entis within a broader category of analogy, Brunner’s primary interest is to demand acknowledgement that all theology, including Barth’s own, uses analogical language for God: ‘The analogia entis is not specifically Roman Catholic’, but is the basis of all theology, Christian and pagan.392 The issue, then, is not ‘whether the method of analogy may be used, but how this is to be done and what analogies are to be employed’.393 This task is rooted in the necessity of distinguishing between the lost material and retained formal imago dei, in which the very possibility of communication itself is rooted. On this basis, Brunner turns to the ‘practical ecclesiastical significance’ of theologia naturalis insofar as ‘the task of the Church is the proclamation of her message’.394 Next, Brunner reaffirms his christological grounding, writing ‘the incarnation is the criterion of the knowledge of the divine likeness of man’, but ‘man’s undestroyed formal likeness to God is the objective possibility of the revelation of God in his “Word”’.395 Similar to the revelation in Scripture and the revelation in nature, here also the Holy Spirit is necessary for understanding the divine Word proclaimed in human words.396 Although the fact the church can speak at all is due to the ‘point of contact’, it must also use the appropriate words.397 As in Brunner’s letter to Barth fourteen years earlier398, this is still a matter of making the right critical distinctions: ‘The wrong way of making contact is, to put it briefly, to prove the existence of God’399, because it ‘presupposes a self-sufficient rational system of 390  391  392  393  394  395  396  397  398  399 

Ibid., 52. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 55. Ibid. Ibid., 56. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Barth-Brunner, EB: 2 September 1920 (#19), 42–53. Nature, 59.

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knowledge of God’.400 By contrast, ‘the centre on which everything turns is the centre of the theologia naturalis: the doctrine of the imago Dei and especially of responsibility’.401 Not only Christian pedagogy and education are based on the necessity of making this distinction, but also Christian proclamation to the unbeliever. Thus, in addition to the urgent political concerns, Brunner finds that Barth’s theological programme, in its supposed attempt to root out all natural theology, unwittingly jeopardizes the very medium on which it relies, the appropriation of human words to communicate the divine word. With this in mind, Brunner closes his argument with the imperative that receives Barth’s thunderous No!: ‘It is the task of our theological generation to find the way back to a true theologia naturalis.  .  .  .  It is high time to wake up to the opportunity that we have missed’.402

III.  Summary In relation to Brunner’s theological writings dating from 1914, it quickly becomes apparent that Nature and Grace is not an intellectual journey to the periphery of dogmatics, but is rather dedicated to what Brunner frequently refers to as the most fundamental concern of his entire theological programme, a concern also bearing immediate political relevance. Theology must be conceived dialectically, and the paradigm for this conception is taken directly from the dialectic of law and gospel and subsequently used to mediate between natural and revealed knowledge of God, reason and revelation and nature and grace. This is evident in Nature and Grace in several ways. First, the interconnection between the selected topics in the theses/ counter-theses section demonstrates that Brunner is not fighting for a singular recognition of natural theology in one particular locus, such as Prolegomena or the Doctrine of God, but rather for a dialectic of nature and grace governing theology at every point between creation and consummation. Brunner suggests this in the introduction to the countertheses: ‘We could cite many similarly derived theses from other departments of theology, e.g. from the doctrine of the new birth, of sanctification, from the doctrine of faith and works, etc. I confine myself to those which have 400  401  402 

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 60.

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stood in the centre of the latest discussions’.403 A quick tour through Brunner’s Dogmatics accordingly reveals the presence of the law-gospel dialectic throughout, implicitly and explicitly, from the doctrine of God to the doctrine of the church. Second, the dialectical position of the law constitutes the theological foundation of Brunner’s six counter-theses. The formal imago dei, retained despite the fall, corresponds to humanity’s theoretical and practical reason: awareness of the starry skies and the moral law, communication and consciousness of responsibility. The law is the basis for the objective revelation of God in creation and human nature, as well as humanity’s subjective misinterpretation of the objective revelation in nature due to sin. The doctrines of sin and creation necessitate the doctrine of the orders of creation and preservation, corresponding to the law in its first use. The second use of the law, the elenctic conviction of sin, serves as the point of contact for the gospel, while continuity of the personal identity from law to gospel corresponds to the third use of the law in relation to the work of the Spirit. Brunner is concerned that Barth’s rejection of these distinctions will lead to the undialectical absorption of law into gospel, humanity into God, of nature into grace. Third, Brunner demonstrates the overall importance of the dialectic of law and gospel in his theological programme insofar as it provides the common ground for his criticism of both Barth and Schleiermacher, not to mention Roman Catholicism. This fact, perhaps more than any other, also demonstrates Brunner’s overall theological independence in relation to Barth – in the end, Brunner was simply not willing to compromise on the issue of law and gospel.

403 

Ibid., 34.

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When Barth put together his controversial piece on ‘Gospel and Law’ in 1935, he could not have possibly rendered a more pointed constructive response to Brunner’s entire theological programme to complement his already critical No! In light of their correspondence, the words Barth uses in the opening paragraph can be seen to directly implicate Brunner’s position on the issue of law and gospel: ‘For to start by saying law in a real and serious sense, and only then—presupposing all that has thus been said—to say Gospel would, with the very best intentions in the world, be to speak not about the law of God and therefore most certainly not about His Gospel either. At best this customary road is infested with all sorts of ambiguities’.1 That Brunner responded to this essay directly in Der Mensch im Widerspruch and proceeded to defend his reading of Luther as well as his earlier position in Nature and Grace is a clear indication of his recognition of the ramifications of Barth’s essay for their now waning dispute.2 While this is not to say that Barth’s essay was formulated explicitly as a response to Brunner, it does appear likely that he had his erstwhile comrade in Zürich in mind at the time. Whereas Barth’s essay on gospel and law in  1935 represents the culmination of a well-established tendency in his theology, evident prior to his first Romans commentary in 19193, this study has argued likewise for the early and persistent presence of a dialectic of law and gospel in Brunner’s theology. In lieu of a line-by-line summary of the foregoing analysis, the following few pages suggest the most significant points to be taken from the presentation as a whole viewed in terms of Brunner’s relationships to Barth, Kant and the Protestant dogmatic tradition. First, in reference to the Barth-Brunner relationship and their debate over nature and grace, the seeds of what develops into the later debate can Barth, ‘Gospel and Law’, 3. See in particular the five appendices to Der Mensch im Widerspruch (ET: Man in Revolt): ‘The Image of God in the Teaching of the Bible and the Church’; ‘On the Dialectic of the Law’; ‘The Problem of “Natural Theology” and the “Point of Contact”’; ‘Philosophical and Theological Anthropology’; and ‘The Understanding of Humanity in Ancient Philosophy and in Christianity’. 3  See especially Chalamet, 96 and 109–11 and McCormack, 275–6 and 397–9. 1  2 

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be seen to take root quickly and grow in the earliest phase of their relationship. By 1918, they already have ‘an old point of contention’.4 While this was unquestionably compounded by personal, even psychological differences, it was nonetheless explicitly theological and concerned specific theological issues from seed to blossom. For his part, Brunner exhibits an overall concern for the strength of Barth’s expression that becomes manifest in a detailed philosophical and theological critique of both Barth’s ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, with explicit reference to the relationship between law and gospel. Brunner reaffirms this concern in Nature and Grace, repeating his earlier criticism of Barth’s ‘one-sidedness’, now even implying that Barth is ‘undialectical’. Significantly then, as Brunner explicitly states in Nature and Grace, his critique and constructive response to Barth is of a same piece with his critique and constructive response to Schleiermacher. In sympathy with Brunner, Paul Lehmann suggests that if Protestant theology ‘goes in the way which Barth is demanding of it, it can expect only a revival of the very supernaturalistic spiritism against which the Enlightenment quite properly protested’.5 Given Brunner’s reductive methodology, this ‘spiritism’ is little different from modern theology’s equally un-dialectical, ‘rationalistic’ system. Thus, counter the modern and Enlightenment reliance on reason on the one hand and what he saw as Barth’s one-sided depiction of revelation on the other, Brunner intends to steer towards an interpretation of Paul and the Reformers while holding rigidly to a dialectic of law and gospel. In this regard, the relationships between reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, justice and justification, state and church, general and special revelation and nature and grace, all reckoned with according to the base paradigm of law and gospel, come to the very centre of theology and theological discussion. Brunner’s later works, such as his Dogmatics, demonstrate precisely this concern, ranging this dialectical contrast to almost every doctrine in the Christian confession. When Brunner writes of ‘a New Barth’ in  19516, both his praise and ­critique land on the very same concerns as before, although ‘natural theology’ is no longer at the centre of discussion by name and the conversation returns directly to issues raised as early as 1916: Brunner praises Barth for his apparently new appreciation for humanism and humanity7, while Barth-Brunner, EB: 28 November 1918 (#11), 25. Paul Lehmann, ‘The Dilemma of the Protestant Mind’, The Journal of Religion 20, 2 (1940), 140. 6  Emil Brunner, ‘The New Barth: Observations on Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Man’, Scottish Journal of Theology 4 (1951), 123–35. Originally printed as‘Der Neue Barth: Bemerkung zu Karl Barths Lehre vom Menschen’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 48, 1 (1951), 89–100. 7  ‘The New Barth’, 126–7. 4  5 

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­ uestioning whether his expression of grace is not too strong8 and why he q cannot concede to some form of natural law.9 At bottom, Brunner returns to the concern driving both his early correspondence and Nature and Grace, that is, that Barth risks collapsing the grace of redemption into the grace of creation: Such then seems to be the hidden unity of Barthian thought. And yet I do not venture to say: This is what Barth means; I can only ask: Is this really what he means? I cannot rightly believe that this is how he wishes it to be understood. For then the work of Atonement would no longer be a work, the call to repentance would become superfluous and the decision of faith ceases to be a decision.10 In this instance, Brunner’s expression is strongly reminiscent of some of his very first theological statements, now nearly 35 years in the past. While the determination of ‘what Barth means’ on this issue will have to be left for others to debate, it is undoubted that Brunner was a perceptive reader of Barth’s earlier theology, precisely because of his own thoughts about law and gospel. In terms of the ‘practical implications’ of the debate, given Brunner’s lifelong concern with political and social issues, it is necessary to take the practical emphases in his overall theological programme seriously, especially in 1934. While Barth was indeed under a great deal of pressure in Germany, sufficient acknowledgement of this point neither obviates Brunner’s own political concerns nor justifies a de-politicized reading of Nature and Grace. Like Barth, Brunner was also a political theologian, not only in his days a religious socialist, but throughout his career. Finally, in consideration of the Barth-Brunner correspondence and Brunner’s published writings: Barth’s response to Brunner in ‘Nein!’ does appear excessively harsh, however, Brunner’s incessant criticism of Barth, nearly 18  years by 1934, was also excessive, and despite this nearly unrelenting tension, it does not seem likely that Brunner would have brought about the dissolution of their ad hoc theological alliance on his own. Second, Brunner’s relationship to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy is worth separate comment. The persistent focus on Kant in this research, in comparison to Brunner’s other notable philosophical influences such as Ibid., 128. Ibid., 131. 10  Ibid., 134. 8  9 

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Kierkegaard, Ebner and Buber, simply reflects the fact that Brunner derives key elements of his doctrine of law from Kant, makes frequent reference to Kant and consistently uses Kantian terminology in his earlier writings. While it is possible that Brunner maintained certain independent philosophical commitments at some point in the teens, it is clear that in the maturation of his theological programme, Brunner appropriates Kant’s critical idealism on explicitly theological grounds. It is for this reason that Brunner’s earlier theology may be referred to as ‘critically idealistic dialectical theology’. For Brunner, the Kantian critique of reason, as well as the underlying unity of theoretical and moral reason, is compatible with an understanding of law found in both Scripture and the tradition. In other words, Brunner sees the Kantian critique of reason as the high point of what ‘natural’ humanity can know of God and itself apart from God’s personal self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This is particularly evident in Brunner’s identification of the ‘law written on the heart’ with the ‘written law’, which matches various trends in Reformed covenantal theology’s consideration of the Mosaic Law as a republication of the natural law. As indicated, Brunner also arranges his treatment of Kant’s theoretical and moral reason in a Kierkegaardian manner, that is, in terms of stages that can be verified by an independent phenomenological analysis beginning with the pre-theoretical realm and culminating with moral consciousness. This forms the common basis for philosophical ethics and the religions. In this regard, it is likely that Brunner’s focus on the direct moral address of the law in the final stages – the transition from ‘one ought’ to ‘thou shalt’ – is as foundational to Brunner’s personalism as Ebner and Buber’s dialogical influence. The early stages of this personalistic and dialogical trend are detectable in Brunner’s writings before Ebner began publishing his principle work in 1920, and in any case, Brunner’s reading of Kant and his reading of dialogical philosophy and theology are not incompatible and are indeed mutually intertwined in his earlier theology. On this basis, Kant and Kierkegaard, along with Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber should continue to be regarded as Brunner’s primary philosophical influences. Further, while the use of Kant against positive speculative theology is intuitive, Brunner’s efforts to use Kant to restrain what he finds to be negative speculative theology in some of Barth’s earlier writings is not immediately obvious. In this case, Brunner simply argues that Barth’s early totalizing negation, which he also refers to as Barth’s ‘radical dialectic’ in connection with Overbeck’s Todesweisheit, had itself crossed into the realm of negative speculation about God, a negative natural theology, so to speak. For Brunner, consistent appropriation of the Kantian critique of reason

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should guard against speculation both positively and negatively, and he explicitly uses this safeguard to ensure that the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity is ultimately a moral and personal distinction resulting from human sin as personal rebellion against God, not from human finitude and humanity’s cosmological distance from God. It is for this reason that Brunner could make so little use of what he saw as Overbeck’s ‘non-critical’ criticism and ultimately used Overbeckian terms such as Urgeschichte and Todesweisheit in a Kantian critical manner instead of in a ‘radically dialectical’ manner that he saw as negating the traditional dialectic and ordering of law and gospel. In connection to this point, Brunner’s attempt to bind the doctrines of the person and work of Christ together in Der Mittler, a move which reaffirms his commitment to a unified conception of revelation and justification corresponding to theoretical and moral reason, is equally intended to prevent a one-sided, or cosmic account of divine revelation insofar as divine revelation is completed in human justification. In this regard, divine revelation and justification in Christ are the end and fulfilment of the law. Inasmuch as Brunner’s treatment of the justifying work of Christ in Der Mittler has generally received less attention than the more ‘theoretical’ or ‘revelation’ oriented doctrine of the person of Christ, sufficient regard for this aspect of the doctrine of atonement in Brunner’s Mittler could serve to mitigate some of the criticism levelled at that work. In terms of neo-Kantianism, Brunner’s maturing writings in the 1920s frequently demonstrate not only an outright critique of several neo-Kantian philosophers, Paul Natorp in particular, but also explicit praise for what Brunner understands to be classical Kantian philosophy. This is not to say that neo-Kantianism does not influence Brunner’s thought in ways that he is both aware and unaware, but his writings clearly indicate that his increasing intention is to hold to classic Kantian critical idealism. Accordingly, when Brunner employs the concept of the ‘origin’, he very explicitly reckons with it as a limiting concept, and one that is hardly different, if not identical, to his doctrine of law. Third, in addition to Brunner’s relationship to Barth and his philosophical influences, particularly Kant, several words are necessary about Brunner and the broader Christian tradition. By focusing on Brunner’s appropriation of a ‘Reformation’ dialectic of law and gospel, this study shows that the now frequent reading of Brunner as a philosophical theologian will not do. While Brunner’s philosophical influences are always pervasive, if not occasionally in control, it is unquestionable that Brunner intended to incorporate these influences into a system that was fundamentally Christian and traditional in terms of its basic dogmatic structure and concepts.

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Although it is clear that Brunner did not read every part of the tradition accurately and explicitly rejected other parts, his earlier theology nonetheless reveals him to be in the process of developing into both a modern and tradition-oriented dogmatic theologian. Brunner’s eristic theology including his appropriation of Kant, which he also referred to as ‘theological journalism’, places him in modernity, whereas his dogmatic system places him well within the Reformed tradition, though with Luther’s influence clearly in view. Again, Brunner’s dialectic of law and gospel is essential to both of these characteristics and demonstrates the overall versatility of Brunner’s theological programme. Whereas Brunner’s correspondence with Barth and published writings show he is continually hesitant to adopt the doctrinal language of Protestant orthodoxy, he is nonetheless clearly willing to reformulate traditional dogmatic concepts into modern language. Brunner’s significant two-fold meaning of the law emerges out of this overall commitment to the dialectic of law and gospel and is analogous to his treatment of objective and subjective nature in Nature and Grace insofar as the divine will as law, implanted in nature and moral consciousness, constitutes the basis for an objective revelation of God in creation. Although humanity subjectively perverts this objective revelation because of the fall, it still constitutes the basis for society, governance and culture, which Brunner refers to as the orders of creation and preservation and are largely identical with the first use of the law. This can also be described in terms of the imago dei, which is materially lost due to sin, but formally retained and serves as both the theoretical-communicative and moral point of contact for the gospel because it fosters knowledge of the law. This is the second use of the law, or the point where the law convicts of sin. Finally, in relation to the formal imago dei and personal identity that are retained despite the fall, knowledge of the law now serves as a guide for the Christian life through the work of the Spirit, otherwise known as the law in its third use. Viewed in relation to the dialectical position of the law in Brunner’s thought, the argument in Nature and Grace is more easily connected to his overall dogmatic concerns as well as to its immediate political and ecclesial implications. In conclusion, Brunner’s commitment to the dialectic of law and gospel belies the fact that his critique of Barth in Nature and Grace does not merely reflect a side issue to be debated among professors of theology, but rather represents one of his most basic concerns as a dialectical theologian with ramifications for both church and state. Or, to use the words of Martin Luther with which this study began: ‘Everything hangs upon this difference’.

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Unpublished and Archival Materials

‘The Brunner-Ragaz Correspondence’. Frank Jehle, who also transcribed Brunner’s letters, graciously made this material available to me. Ragaz’ letters were transcribed by Hans Ulrich Jäger-Werth. The following materials were obtained at the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich and are listed as found in Nachlass Emil Brunner. Zurich: Staatsarchiv, 1995., available in Zurich at the Staatsarchiv and the Zentralbibliothek: ‘Gesetz und Evangelium’. Ms und Typoskr. von Buchfragmenten [?]. (StAZ WI 55, Sch, 98). ‘Gesetz und Evangelium, das Problem rein theologisch-abstrakt’. Typ. eines Essays. o. D. (StAZ WI 55, Sch, 98). ‘Gesetz und Evangelium’. Referatsskizze Typ. ThAG (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) 10 February 1941, (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 84). ‘Gesetz und Offenbarung’. Typ. eines Referats vor dem Pfarrkapitel Aarau, 11 January 1925 (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81). ‘Die Menschenfrage im Humanismus und Protestantismus’. Typ. eines Vortrages in Giessen und Marburg, 22. und 23. Jan. 1925 (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81). ‘Vernunft und Offenbarung’. S.S. 1934 (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 106). ‘Zur Theologie des Gesetzes’. Skizze eines Referats für die ThAG, Typ. o. D. (StAZ WI 55, Sch. 81).

278

Index

Abelard  184 absolute dependence  36, 44, 62, 65–6 actualism  xiii–xiv, 181, 255 Adam  69, 81, 217 aestheticism  38, 63 Agricola, John of  213 Althaus, Paul  210 analogia entis  257, 259 anamnesis  119, 123–5, 127, 135, 178 Andersen, Carlton S.  115n. 149 anhypostasis  164, 202 Anselm  184 Anthon, Peter  11n. 83, 90–1 anthropology  xiv, 1, 9, 94, 96, 108, 115, 144–9, 152, 157–8, 175, 203–4, 207, 221 in modern theology  27, 37–8, 98, 108, 248n. 309 anti-intellectualism  26, 49, 58 antinomianism  1, 32, 41–2, 60, 62, 66, 86, 141, 154, 159, 213, 244 apologetics  15, 129, 142 a priori, religious  29 Athanasius  96 atonement  168, 179, 183–95, 265, 267 Augustine  43 Barr, James  198 Barth, Karl passim Barth, Peter  248n. 310 Barthian theology  255, 265 Beethoven, Ludwig van  77 Bergson, Henri  3, 28, 50, 64 Bible, the  22, 22n. 14, 39, 72, 76–7, 80, 139, 160, 172, 189–90, 194, 198–9, 207, 211–12, 216, 224–5, 227, 229, 236–7, 244–5, 247, 250–1, 255

and the Holy Spirit  244, 256 and reason  217 Scripture Principle  133n. 270, 207 and tradition  1, 203, 229, 266 as Word of God  133, 155 Bixler, Julius  6–10, 91n. 5 Blanshard, Brand  7–9 Blaser, Klauspeter  201 Blumhardt, Johann  80 Bohren, Rudolf  200n. 28 Bolshevism  23 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  181n. 258 Bouillard, Henri  7, 37n. 92, 51n. 194, 199 Brunner, Emil passim Brunner, Hans Heinrich  3n. 7, 197n. 2 Buber, Martin  16, 33, 55, 266 Buchmann, Frank  5 Bultmann, Rudolf  8, 93n. 14, 138, 143 Busch, Eberhard  73, 200, 201n. 32 Butler, William Warren  229n. 203, 238n. 256, 244n. 288 Cairns, David  7n. 49, 8, 53, 129n. 244, 157, 158n. 123 Calvin, John  22, 96, 144, 203n. 38, 205n. 44, 208–9, 222n. 151, 232, 248–57 Calvin’s Institutes  139, 206 capitalism  20, 22–4, 26, 62, 258 categorical imperative  35–6, 66, 112, 121, 151, 212, 240 causality  74–6, 78, 95, 173, 219, 232, 246 Chalamet, Christophe  14, 208, 263 Channing-Pearce, Melville  9 Chapman, J. Arundel  6n. 46, 60n. 264 christology  18, 33, 138, 139n. 6, 148, 152, 170–95, 255

280

Index

command divine  1, 37, 61, 126, 140, 149, 210–11, 213, 216, 220, 229, 235–6, 243 moral  29, 62, 86, 114–15, 121–3, 151 communication  51, 219–20, 231, 243, 256, 261 divine  39, 51, 123, 128, 182n. 262, 203, 207, 219–20, 227 indirect  256 community  23n. 16, 24, 31, 220, 233n. 228, 234, 235n. 239, 258 conscience  26, 56, 100, 175, 204, 212, 223–4, 237, 240, 250–1 consciousness  51, 63, 65, 77, 94, 102, 109–10, 117, 121, 132–3, 208 of God  66, 116, 161n. 149, 241 of guilt  54, 238n. 254 of the (moral) law  192, 203 moral  113, 154, 159, 177, 192, 213, 225–7, 231, 238 religious  35–6 of responsibility (see responsibility) self-consciousness  59, 63, 66, 94–5, 98, 111, 148–51, 154, 169, 225, 243, 245 of sin  15, 56, 125 consummation  217, 246, 260 Conti, Charles  91n. 5 contradiction  55–7, 107–9, 115–19, 134–5, 142, 148–51, 159, 161, 205, 220–1, 239, 251 cosmology  74, 76, 221, 226 covenant  163, 168, 179–80, 212, 266 creation  123, 164–5, 176, 186, 198, 202, 204, 249–53, 260–1, 265, 268 new creation  216, 242–6, 253 orders of (see orders of creation) crisis, theology of  6–9, 11, 91n. 5, 205 critical idealism/philosophy  17, 19, 30–1, 50, 52, 55n. 225, 58, 78, 80, 89, 94n. 17, 100, 103–7, 109, 115, 117, 134, 137, 207, 266–7 cross  79–81, 108, 127, 153, 167, 184–5, 191, 193, 195 theology of (theologia crucis)  79, 127, 127n. 233, 156, 183, 187

Darwinism  49 death  24, 106, 193, 243–5 of Christ  81, 117, 193 line of (Todeslinie)  79, 117 wisdom of (Todesweisheit)  79, 83, 117 decision  61, 65, 68–70, 73, 111, 118, 150, 165, 174, 219, 240, 246, 255 deification  28 demand of God  211–14, 235 moral  54–5, 115, 179n. 252 Descartes, René  103 determinism  73, 78 Deus dixit  206–9 dialectic passim radical dialectic  56–7, 87, 277 un-dialectical (as accusation against Barth et al.)  203, 209, 252–4, 261, 264 dialectical theology  4, 19, 37, 72, 89, 175, 205, 266 donum superadditum  242 Dowey, Edward  181n. 257, 248n. 309 Ebner, Ferdinand  16, 33, 55, 266 Eckhart, Meister  72, 78 Einmaligkeit  163 Einstein, Albert  101 encounter  xiv, 143, 147–8, 166, 178n. 247 enthusiasm, religious  31, 36, 38–9, 52, 59, 86, 106–7, 117–18, 122, 132, 134, 246, 257 Erasmus  70 eristic theology  9, 18, 45n. 149, 90, 135, 137–70, 172, 176, 179, 195, 199, 226–7, 254, 268 eschatology  79–80 eternity  103, 130 time and eternity  10, 85, 174 ethics Christian/theological  8, 61–2, 69, 85, 204, 210, 214, 232, 235, 237, 244n. 288, 248, 257–8 monistic  61, 232 philosophical  36, 148–9, 151–2, 158–61, 170, 176, 192, 252, 258, 266

Index experience  26, 28, 30, 56, 74, 76n. 372, 83, 94, 104, 107–8, 113, 120–1, 139, 177, 206, 225, 249 religious  33n. 73, 36, 38, 41–6, 63–5, 86, 155, 166, 176n. 231, 177 expiation  187–95 fall, the  123–4, 127, 216, 218–20, 222, 245, 261, 268 feeling  27, 29, 38–9, 43, 109 in Schleiermacher  36, 58–9, 62–6, 107, 155, 172 Feuerbach, Ludwig  108 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  28, 42, 52, 71–2, 77–8 finitude  9, 74, 119, 129, 134, 185, 209, 221, 267 freedom divine  70, 73, 105, 165, 187, 191 human  41, 43–4, 48, 56, 60, 73, 76, 81, 98–9, 108, 110–11, 114, 117, 128, 150, 160, 204, 218, 221, 236 Gardner, Harry Miller  171 Geist  17, 24–5, 29–30, 32, 34n. 74, 43, 47–8, 53, 63–5, 76, 86, 122, 219 Gerrish, B. A.  58n. 246, 61n. 266, 156 Gestrich, Christof  19n. 2, 22n. 12, 90n. 2 Gibbs, Charles  9n. 74 Gifford Lectures  6, 21 Gloede, Günter  248n. 310 Göckeritz, Hermann Götz  200n. 27 God as the Absolute  38, 53, 65, 89, 102–3, 107, 110, 114–15, 119–23, 126, 131, 135, 137, 149, 153, 163–4, 169, 183, 210 creator  10, 114, 123, 160, 189, 193, 198, 222, 224–37, 240, 241n. 278 deity  173, 204 Deus absconditus  56–7, 125–8, 131, 135, 148, 205, 208–10, 224 Deus revelatus  56, 128, 131, 148, 208–10 Deus ex machina  65 deus nudus  156 hidden  28, 127, 131, 133

281

Lord  130, 160, 164–6, 169, 187–8, 191, 203 natural knowledge of  18, 156, 189, 217, 227n. 185, 228, 239, 241, 247, 250–1, 253–4 natural and revealed knowledge of  18, 198, 209, 212, 216, 237–8, 247, 260 revealed  131, 167, 233, 250 Trinity  133, 142n. 35, 169 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  42, 117, 123 Gogarten, Friedrich  4, 6, 8, 138, 143, 206 Gordon, Wendell Johnson  19n. 3 grace  15, 46–7, 61–2, 66, 81, 124, 126–7, 129–30, 135, 152–3, 161, 180, 191, 197–261, 265 nature and passim Hall, Douglas John  22n. 14 Harnack, Theodosius  248n. 309 Hart, John W.  3n. 7, 5n. 33–4, 12, 14, 77, 92n. 11, 138–9, 145–6, 199–200, 210 Hart, Trevor  198, 202 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  42, 51–2, 60, 80, 105, 107–9, 113, 117–18, 134, 149, 157 Hegelianism  97 Heidegger, Martin  93n. 14, 94n. 17 Helmer, Christine  58n. 246 Herder, Johann Gottfried  118 Herrmann, Wilhelm  19n. 2 Hesselink, I. John  7–8 historicism  37–8, 118, 144, 162, 195 Hjört, Birgette  235n. 239 Holder, Rodney  199n. 13 Holl, Karl  210 Hollenweger, Walter  107n. 95 Holy Spirit  24, 66, 240, 244–6, 255–6, 258–9 Hubbeling, Hubertus  15 Hudson, Thomas Preston  92, 107n. 94 humanism  70–2, 77, 83, 87, 94–6, 109, 117–18, 126, 155, 192, 231, 234, 255, 264 Humphrey, J. Edward  3n. 7, 19 Husserl, Edmund  45, 94, 149

282

Index

I-Thou  5, 16, 33, 159, 177, 220 idolatry  50, 204, 227 imago dei  89, 119–25, 174–5, 176n. 231, 205, 216–23, 257n. 376, 260 formal and material  203, 224–5, 228, 231, 233, 237–43, 248–57, 259, 261, 268 immiseration, theory of  83 incarnation  129, 131, 169, 176–7, 183, 234, 259 Indinoplous, Thomas A.  182n. 262 individualism  24, 41, 72, 220, 258 infinite qualitative distinction  9, 106, 109n. 196, 185, 247, 267 intellect  24, 32, 34, 48 intellectualism  23, 26, 29–30, 33, 43–4, 49–54, 57–60 intuition  28, 51, 106–7, 109, 113 in Schleiermacher  59, 63 Jehle, Frank  3–6, 22–3, 33, 47, 67, 78, 94, 200, 248, 277 Jesus Christ  24, 30–1, 45, 56, 70, 81, 131, 164, 214n. 81, 223, 258 justifying work of  176, 180, 195, 267 as Logos  56–7, 138, 176, 178 as Mediator  138, 170–95 Person of  70, 138, 164n. 165, 174 Person and Work of  xiv, 10, 144n. 48, 151–2, 162, 170, 176–83, 187, 195, 255, 267 revelation in  126–7, 132, 135, 153, 163–4, 171, 174, 182, 203, 214, 216, 226–7, 251, 255–6, 266 Jewett, Paul  9, 162, 169n. 196, 174n. 221 Judaism  43, 48, 147, 185, 193 judgement  80, 89, 117, 125–6, 177, 235n. 239 justice  5, 73–4, 160n. 140, 214, 264 justification  56, 79–80, 118, 128n. 241, 130–1, 138, 159, 179–80, 205, 208 by faith  46, 48, 129n. 244, 148, 161, 177, 207–10, 235, 244n. 288, 258, 264 self-justification  116, 124, 207, 209 justitia civilis  229, 231, 252, 258 justitia originalis  218

Kant, Immanuel  17, 26–8, 33n. 73, 35–7, 41, 43, 51–2, 60, 61n. 266, 74–5, 79–81, 89–135, 137, 151, 160, 189, 210, 224, 263, 265–8 Kierkegaard  9–10, 40, 71, 83–5, 99, 105, 148–9, 256, 266 Koch, Traugott  257 Kohnke, Klaus Christian  97n. 30 Kramer, Werner  72n. 347 Krisis  56–7, 104–5, 109, 111, 117, 120, 123, 126, 205, 247 Kutter, Hermann  3–4, 6, 67, 69, 71, 75, 77, 200 Langemeyer, Bernhard  16n. 110 Laplace, Pierre-Simon  101 law in the Bible  160, 189–90, 211–12, 236 cognitio legalis  221, 225, 239 Decalogue  98, 116, 211–12, 231, 236 gospel and law  2, 81, 180, 205–6, 207, 209, 244, 263 and gospel passim law and revelation  17–18, 87, 89–135, 137, 148, 151–2, 170, 172, 176, 195, 201, 206, 225–6, 242, 247, 257 as the Lex  229, 232–6 lex aeterna  211 lex naturae  159, 232–4, 238, 249–50, 252, 254, 258 lex Scripta  250 Mosaic (lex mosaica)  31, 170, 211–12, 250, 266 natural law/law of nature  22, 61, 66, 99, 150, 154, 156, 164, 170, 186, 204, 207, 211–14, 233, 238n. 256, 266 nomos  118–19, 122–3 as religious a priori  61, 112, 122 uses of the law  214, 229–46 legalism passim Lehmann, Paul  264 Leiner, Martin  16n. 110, 19n. 3 Leipold, Heinrich  15, 19n. 3 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  42 liberalism, political and economic  22–3, 25, 32, 42, 86

Index liberal theology  4, 8, 19, 22–3, 32–3, 68, 145, 155, 164, 248n. 312, 258 Locke, John  42 love  179n. 252, 191–2, 194, 203, 205, 218n. 217, 220–3, 236, 258 Luther, Martin  1–2, 22, 36, 38, 45–6, 48, 70, 78, 116, 125, 149n. 73, 153, 155–6, 177, 183, 206, 208–9, 213–14, 225, 238–40, 244–5, 248, 252, 263, 268 Lütz, Dietmar  14n. 100, 149n. 73 Mackintosh, H. R.  6, 11, 19n. 2, 66 mammon  24 materialism  20, 24–5, 30, 32, 38, 45, 47, 74–5, 77, 117, 144–5, 219, 227, 232 McCallum, J. Bruce  12, 199–200, 206 McCormack, Bruce  14, 20, 79, 164, 181, 206, 215, 263 McDowell, John C.  199n. 13, 202, 222n. 151 McGiffert, A. C.  11, 42n. 132, 66 McGrath, Alister  181n. 258 McKim, Donald  181n. 257 Melanchthon, Phillip  192, 213 metaphysics  16, 22, 35–6, 43, 53, 55, 60–1, 90, 97, 99, 108, 240 Migliore, Daniel L.  14 modernity  26, 32, 40, 68, 87, 146n. 65, 173, 268 modern theology  2, 17, 32–68, 74, 76n. 372, 78–9, 81–2, 86–7, 89, 107, 132–3, 171, 191, 215, 247, 248n. 312, 264 monism  23, 38, 41, 44–5, 47–8, 51, 58, 61–2, 66–7, 86, 99, 105, 108, 117, 162, 191, 193, 203, 232, 240, 246 Moody, Dale  9 Moses  29–31, 98, 146, 169, 240 Mozley, J. K.  7, 8, 10–1, 166 Muller, Richard  229n. 204, 237n. 250, 250n. 328 Müller, Denis  8n. 61 mysticism  36, 38–9, 41–2, 45–6, 48, 50–2, 57–67, 86, 91, 99, 106–8, 117, 128, 134, 145, 152–6, 166, 172–3, 184, 195, 207, 242–6 mythology  164–5, 169, 174–5, 181

283

Natorp, Paul  97, 100n. 44, 113, 267 naturalism  22, 49, 66, 117, 145, 232 natural theology/theologia naturalis  xii, 18, 56, 74, 108, 109n. 102, 145, 175, 197–261, 266 nature and grace  xiii, 2, 48, 90, 97, 107, 132, 135, 197–261 Nelson, Robert J.  143n. 38 Neuenschwander, Ulrich  108n. 41, 160n. 139 Neo-Kantianism  36, 58n. 246, 97–9, 106n. 90, 110n. 115, 112–13, 134, 209, 267 Neo-Protestantism  248n. 312, 252–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich  40, 59n. 253 nominalism  259 O’Donovan, Joan  199, 205 objectivism  xiv, 28–9, 31, 54, 58n. 246, 71, 73, 76–7, 150, 177 Occam, William of  259 Offenbarungsmächtigkeit  227 orders of creation  213n. 81, 214, 216, 229, 232–8, 241, 249, 258–9, 261, 268 origin, the (Ursprung)  54–5, 57, 86, 97, 101, 119–25, 178, 217 orthodoxy, Protestant  22–3, 59, 61, 68, 91, 146, 268 Overbeck, Franz  46, 71, 78–87, 100, 231, 247, 266–7 Oxford Group Movement  5 paganism  41–2, 44, 153, 168n. 190, 174n. 221, 232, 252, 256, 259 pantheism  48, 59, 65–6, 154, 227 paradox  38, 55–6, 91, 117, 121, 131, 207 Paul  1, 30, 38, 45, 48, 61–2, 69, 76–8, 98, 116, 129–30, 132, 155, 177, 179, 212, 217, 226 pedagogy  4, 67, 260 Pelagianism  128 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich  77 person, human  27–9, 31, 86, 91, 121, 168, 245, 249 personalism  16, 166, 181n. 258, 266

284

Index

personality  16, 28, 38, 117, 155 formal  219, 230, 242–6 of God  60, 130, 163, 164n. 166 personhood  151, 156–7, 187, 217, 240 phenomenology  94–6, 97n. 30, 110, 148–51, 169, 225 philosophy and theology  17, 32, 34, 89, 91, 96, 101–6, 132, 134, 158, 210, 212, 247, 264, 266 pietism  41–2, 45–6, 51 in Brunner’s childhood  2, 22 Plato  29, 31, 44, 51–3, 83, 103, 110, 178 Platonism  31, 77, 95, 98, 108, 108n. 100, 119, 123–5, 146, 181, 207, 247 Pöhl, Ivar H.  14n. 100 Point of Contact (Anknüpfungspunkt)  8–9, 12, 15, 57, 189, 203–4, 212–13, 216, 229, 237–42, 245, 257, 259, 261, 263n. 2, 268 preaching  67–8, 71, 141, 207, 239 predestination  73–4, 78, 81, 87, 246 pragmatism  26, 29–30 principle of contiguity  10, 156–8, 170, 249 prolegomena, theological  206–10, 260 promise (divine)  55–6, 162–3, 170, 179, 186, 193, 208, 222 proofs for the existence of God  36, 74, 151 cosmological  75, 108 moral  114 ontological  108 physico-theological  74 protology  79–80 psychologism  35, 37, 44–8, 50–1, 53–4, 90, 144, 162 radical evil  36, 97, 115–19, 123, 127, 135, 148 Ragaz, Leonhard  3, 23, 33, 45, 67, 200 rationalism  59, 90, 194, 254 reason, theoretical and practical  17, 25–8, 32, 53, 55, 61, 67, 124, 165, 261 and revelation  10, 17, 89, 91–3, 95–6, 101, 129, 132–4, 141, 162–3, 216, 223, 227, 247–8, 254, 260, 264

redemption  48, 66, 79, 85, 108, 118, 182, 191, 207, 217, 240, 246n. 302, 249–50, 253, 265 self-redemption  48, 83, 191 regeneratio  250 religion  152–5, 159–69, and passim in Schleiermacher  57–67 philosophy of  16, 33, 36, 108, 129, 172–3 religions, the  43–4, 151–4, 164, 172–4, 176n. 231, 188, 192, 204, 211, 227, 266 religious socialism  3, 19–20, 25, 27, 67, 77, 220, 232 Renaissance  37 reparatio  194, 246, 250 Rest, Karl H.  22n. 15 restitutio  194 responsibility  61, 71, 114, 120–2, 160, 179, 204, 220–5, 228, 231, 240–1, 243, 246, 251, 260–1 consciousness of  94n. 17, 150n. 76, 203, 219, 224–6, 233, 240, 245, 257, 261 resurrection  80–1, 83 revelation in/and the Bible  130, 133, 159, 168, 172, 184, 188, 207, 226–8, 250–2, 254–7, 259 in creation  175, 203, 205, 226–8, 238n. 256, 252, 256, 261, 268 delimitation of  97, 131–5, 148, 171, 175, 181, 195, 206–7, 234, 256 divine self-revelation  105, 107, 127, 130–1, 161, 163, 176, 182n  262, 194, 203, 226, 228 general and special revelation  95, 132, 138, 171–6, 184, 199, 202, 209, 216, 224–9, 238–9, 254, 256–7, 264 and justification  89, 97, 126–30, 133, 135, 137, 148, 166, 179–81, 187, 194–5, 223, 234, 256, 267 in nature  95, 170, 204, 207, 224, 227–8, 247, 249–50, 256, 259, 261 Ritschl, Albrecht  22, 47, 144, 184, 188, 190 Roessler, Roman  16n. 110 Roman Catholicism  16, 22, 45–6, 48, 61, 146, 199, 242, 248, 252–4, 259, 261

Index Romans, Barth’s Commentaries on  13, 27, 71–87, 155, 224n. 167, 231, 247, 263 Romanticism  41–3, 45–6, 49–51, 58–9, 60n. 264, 90, 135, 144n. 48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  42, 59 sacrifice  187–95 Salakka, Yrjö  15–16, 19n. 2, 29n. 49, 33n. 73, 54, 55n. 225, 76n. 372, 238n. 254 salvation  10, 24, 31, 66, 128–9, 133, 167, 193, 207, 218, 224–6, 228, 230, 237 Sauter, Gerhard  7n. 50, 197n. 4 Scheld, Stefan  162n. 153 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph  42 Schildmann, Wolfgang  67n. 303, 143–4, 200 Schleiermacher Brunner on  4, 10, 22, 32, 34–40, 42–4, 48, 57–68, 86, 107–8, 116, 118, 132, 134, 139, 144n. 48, 155, 184, 199, 209, 232, 248n. 312 Brunner’s critique of Barth and Schleiermacher  68, 132, 161, 209, 255, 257, 261, 264 scholasticism  21–2, 35, 144 Reformed  95, 132 Schrotenboer, Paul  15, 160, 183 Schultz, Robert  66n, 264 Schuurman, Douglas J.  244n. 290 Scripture, see Bible sin passim Sinai  29, 80 Smith, Vincent Edward  257n. 376 socialism  23–4 Socrates  30, 44, 83 Söhngen, Gottlieb  253n. 349 soteriology  250, 253 Spengler, Oswald  20–1 Stumpf, Samuel Enoch  14 subjectivism  28, 37, 42, 44, 68, 90, 127 Szekeres, Attila  247 speculation  32, 39, 52–4, 57, 58n. 246, 60, 74–5, 98–9, 103, 107, 203 Spencer, Herbert  38, 157 Spengler, Oswald  20–1 super-history, see Urgeschichte synergism  205

285

Taylor, Vincent  7n. 6 theological journalism  144, 147, 268 theological method  2, 21, 23, 26, 42, 52, 58, 94–6, 102–3, 118, 134, 137–51 theosis  245 Thurneysen, Eduard  4, 37, 67–71, 78–9, 81–5, 206, 210 Tillich, Paul  93n. 14, 126 timelessness  146–7, 151n. 83, 160, 165, 173, 177–8, 189, 208, 211 Tolstoy, Leo  40 totalitarianism  5, 14 Troeltsch, Ernst  22, 212n. 79 Urgeschichte  79, 83, 267 Van Til, Cornelius  9 Vogelsanger, Peter  20n. 6, 24n. 20 Volk, Hermann  14n. 100, 139n. 6, 163n. 162, 171n. 201, 181n. 259 Volken, Lorenz  14n. 99, 51 Voltaire  159n. 131 Weber, Otto  181n. 257 Webster, John  8n. 61, 73n. 356 Wengert, Timothy J.  213n. 80 Westermann, Claus  198–9 Wildberger, Hans  22n. 12, 68, 138n. 1 Willey, Thomas E.  97n. 30, 106n. 90 Williams, Daniel D.  91n. 5 Word of God  92, 128n. 241, 130, 133, 139–46, 177–8, 182, 215, 219–21, 240–1, 255 works-righteousness  38, 45–6, 80, 86, 155–6, 159, 161, 183, 207, 209, 229 wrath, divine  10, 14n. 100, 55–7, 62, 89, 126–7, 131, 135, 148, 178–80, 185–6, 191, 193–4, 205, 223, 224n. 162, 231, 248n. 309 ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ 48, 57, 80–1, 119, 205, 215, 218, 234, 264 Zeindler, Matthias  8, 246n. 302 Zwingli, Huldrych  180n. 255 Zwischen den Zeiten  57, 93, 138, 200n. 29, 210