114 - Word and Faith

Word and Faith
By Gerhard Ebeling
Translated by James W. Leitch
442 pp. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1963. $6.25.

This collection of some eighteen essays and articles by the successor to Emil Brunner at the University of Zürich, written between 1950 and 1960, is a masterly and most stimulating theological performance. It is the work of a competent Biblical scholar, historian of theology, and theologian with sure insight into the contemporary mind. Each of these essays tackles a theological problem which is as difficult as it is timely. After a discussion of the history of a problem, Dr. Ebeling comes to the point, and has his say, and stops. In the process he invites us to do our own thinking and to make our own progress as theologians. This is as it should be, and we must be grateful for his courtesy.

It is difficult to review a book of this kind. Almost every essay calls for a treatment of its own and demands serious criticism. However, the book does have a complex unity which should at least be indicated. We shall do this our own way, without denying that it could be done in several other ways as well. The primary concern of Dr. Ebeling is hermeneutics: that is, how a man living in the Western world today is to receive and understand "the tradition of Jesus [which] is the tradition of faith" (p. 374). This of course is commonly recognized as the theological problem today. However, Dr. Ebeling's statement and treatment of it are such as to put it in a newly impressive light. His historical investigations and his neomodernism together produce a tone which is fresh if not altogether new. He insists (we think rightly) that there is a new dimension to atheism and secularism in our day. He also insists that "the critical historical method" of understanding Christianity requires a new approach to Christian doctrine. The chief value of this book in our judgment is that it will not let us talk our way out of these two aspects of our intellectual situation.

Atheism today means the end of "natural theology," with its God next to the physical world, which was characteristic both of orthodoxy and its Enlightenment critics. The secularism of today means the end of supernaturalism which in one way or another meant belief in a world next to the one in which we live and meet good and evil. On the other hand, the historical method means the end of doctrines of revelation which exempted the Bible and church dogma and doctrine from historical understanding. There are no teachings, Biblical and ecclesiastical, which

115 - Word and Faith

are not products of human thought and are not to be understood in the context of historical events. To set aside certain propositions about God, man, the world, destiny, as ipsissima verba Dei is to relinquish the historical method of studying Christian documents. And this way is not open to the educated mind of our time. A theologian who is serious about his hermeneutical responsibilities must make common cause with the atheists and secularists of today, and he must pursue the historical method in his theological activity. It is to be hoped that readers of Dr. Ebeling will not try to talk themselves out of this double problem. There is not much one can do about those who do not see the problem. But those who do see it owe it to the Church to wrestle with it with all their mind and might.

In this task they will receive very good help from Dr. Ebeling. They may not end up agreeing with him, but they will be helped ahead by him. He gives them the green light with the thesis that speech about God and speech about the reality of man and the world go together. There is no speaking about God without speaking about man, and in speaking about both we must speak about "word." Man is real in and by his word: by his word which binds his past with his future in his present: in his present in which he is open to his future as a being with conscience, one who acts by making promises and practices truth and experiences freedom. Thus it is that he is a man of faith: a faith which a Christian receives from Jesus, as a matter of historical reality. Jesus of history is Jesus the ground and source of faith which is expressed by the conscience of man who is real in his world. In the proclamation of the Word of God to the believers and unbelievers alike there is a "word-event" which quickens them to have their own reality as beings who exist by their word, by which they are not as human beings. This word-event is Jesus, the Word of God become flesh, for it is He who gives the unbeliever as well as the believer the freedom-with-responsibility of a human being. Thus it turns out that there is not one problem of preaching to the believer and another to the unbeliever. It also turns out that the Jesus we preach is the historical Jesus who exercised toward those around him and exercises toward us "the improbable power of faith" (p. 228).

The above is of course a most sketchy and inadequate review of such a complex (and that rightly) book. I hope it will lead many to read this volume carefully, thoughtfully, and courageously; for it may, according to Dr. Ebeling's hope for theology, be to them a salutary word-event (p. 424). It is impossible to indicate the scope of this book without at least giving the Table of Contents. It is enough to say that it contains more than one would believe possible to include in one volume.

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We shall single out the chapters on the historical method, the "Non-Religious Interpretation of Biblical Concepts" (on Bonhoeffer), "Jesus and Faith," the question of the historical Jesus, "Word of God and Hermeneutics," "Theological Reflexions on Conscience." There is here a feast for any one with the proper palate.

There is one criticism I wish to make, more in sorrow than in scorn. One is rather appalled at the persistent and apparently deep-seated individualism in Christian theology. When Dr. Ebeling speaks of "The Word of God," he refers to it as an event which "posits a personal relation between God and men." "God's Word," he says, "creates faith and thereby makes us free to a right obedience" (p. 176). Of faith, he says that "it arises on the ground of divine initiative, an act of God, in which-instead of himself-man is challenged to find the ground of his being . . ." (p. 211). He defines man in terms of conscience, and conscience he regards in the traditional fashion as man's accountability to himself and to God (p. 417). He places man in "the world," as "the place where we believe," and as "the whole of reality" (pp. 362, 415). He rightly understands Bonhoeffer to say that man experiences both his limitedness and his wholeness in his "encountering his neighbor" (p. 153); but nothing comes out of this suggestion. The ontological significance of man's existence as fellow man (and the theological and ethical) eludes Dr. Ebeling, and in our judgment makes his book more tradition-bound than he cares to be. It prevents him from doing justice to the fact that both "word" and "faith" are interpersonal realities, and can hardly be discussed properly except as aspects of the communion of fellow men. Hence he hardly does justice to the faith-making power of Jesus, and to the Word of God as an "event." When all is said and done, God is, to Dr. Ebeling, the ground of man's existence, "who alone can make man (i.e., conscience itself) true and free, because God alone can identify man as man, can make him one with himself, by reconciling him with God" (p. 422). This is good Christian doctrine, but it will hardly do as theology for the unbelievers as well as the believers (as it is intended to be by Dr. Ebeling). It is hardly a convincing way to talk about God to an atheist of our time. It may have been good enough for Luther, or Calvin, but it is not good enough for the unbeliever today. Can it be that the individualistic tradition which has dominated Christian theology since Augustine has arrived at a dead end? Even if it has not, there is no harm in taking the communion of fellow men more seriously as the context of talk about God.

Joseph Haroutunian
University of Chicago Divinity School
Chicago, Illinois