Died: Eberhard Jüngel, Theologian Who Saw Trinity Revealed in the Cross
East German student of Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger believed “God has become speakable.” Read the article from Christianity Today.
Image: University of Tübingen / edits by Rick Szuecs
Eberhard Jüngel, the leading Protestant theologian to emerge out of Stalinist East Germany, died on Tuesday at age 86.
Jüngel’s work was never popularized, and he was overshadowed in some ways by his peers and colleagues—notably Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Küng, and the future Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger. As a philosophical theologian, his scholarship could seem “out of joint,” one scholar noted, with contemporary concerns and popular trends.
But the theologians who did discover Jüngel were often drawn in by his dense arguments and intense focus on God’s self-revelation, the centrality of the Trinity in understanding God, and the importance of the doctrine of justification by faith.
“God’s being-as-object,” Jüngel wrote, “consists in the fact that God as God has become speakable. And the knowledge of God consists in the fact that the God who as God has become speakable comes to speech in that ‘he is considered and conceived by men.’ This event, in which the God who as God has become speakable comes to speech in human words, is faith.”