523 - An Appraisal Of Brunner's Theology

An Appraisal Of Brunner's Theology
By George S. Hendry

THE simultaneous publication of two new and very large volumes¹ calls attention in an impressive way to Brunner's theological achievement and its significance. This fortunate, but apparently unplanned, conjunction has, to be sure, one unfortunate implication: the third and final volume of Brunner's Dogmatics was not available when most of the essays in the symposium were Written, though one or two of the Writers evidently had access to it, and it is in this volume that some of the distinctive positions he has taken are most fully explicated. In his postscript to the symposium Brunner refers several of the Writers to this volume for answers to the questions they have put to him. On the other hand, Brunner has already treated the most important topics of his third volume in a series of monographs, and, in addition, the usual pattern of his thought is so orderly and consistent that the direction it Will take can be anticipated and no major surprises need be expected.

I

The topics treated in the third volume are those that belong to the third article of the creed, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the life of faith, and the Christian hope. All of these Brunner has already treated in earlier works, the second and the fourth most extensively; for the others The Divine-Human Encounter, which he himself regards as his most original work, is programmatic.

Brunner sees the work of the Holy Spirit primarily in the representation of the historical revelation of God in Christ, which faith thus apprehends in a relation of mediated immediacy. He is critical, however, of the intellectualistic preoccupation of western

¹ The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation; Dogmatics, Vol. 111, by Emil Brunner. 484 pp. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1962. $6.50.
The Theology of Emil Brunner; The Library of Living Theology, Vol. III, edited by Charles W. Kegley. 395 pp. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1962. $7.50.

524 - An Appraisal Of Brunner's Theology

theology with the cognitive function of the Spirit, and he pleads for a larger recognition of what he calls the paralogical-dynamic function of the Spirit as the giver of life (and not only of light) in the manner of the elder Blumhardt, if not in that of the Pentecostals of the present day, and, consequent upon this, a realization of the eschatological role of the Spirit as the pledge of the Christian hope. At the same time the emphasis is so exclusively on the functions of the Spirit that the Spirit himself virtually disappears behind them. Brunner despairs of formulating a "doctrine of the Holy Spirit" on the basis of the New Testament evidence, and he appears to write off the doctrine, as it subsequently took shape, as an aberration, It is not clear why the functional approach, which lie applied to Christology in the second volume, is not applicable here.

The main theme of the first section is the church, and here Brunner reaffirms his thesis that the identification of the church with the ecclesia of the New Testament is a gigantic and disastrous misunderstanding; for the ecclesia is a fellowship of persons who are united by the Spirit through faith in Christ, never a juridical society or corporation of the sort it has become in both Catholicism and Protestantism. He does not mean that the true church is an inward, invisible, spiritual reality, as opposed to an outward, visible social reality. He does not deny that the church has, and must have, an institutional form and organization. He merely denies that the principle of order in the Body of Christ derives from its bodiliness, and insists on its spirituality. The ministry, accordingly, is purely a matter of charismatic function, that is, the exercise of gifts bestowed by the Spirit, and not an office or order in the institution.

The historical development of the primitive ecclesia into the juridical institution Brunner regards as a fall, almost commensurate in its gravity with the fall of man. He sees the root of the evil in the depersonalization of Christian salvation and the mechanical and quasi-magical conception of the sacraments. Essentially Catholic in origin, its corrupting effects have spread to the Protestant churches as well.

II

Brunner's thesis sets him in a long historic succession, indeed an apostolic succession, as he claims; for he finds its earliest precedent in Paul's struggle against the Jerusalem church. The line of suc-

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cession runs through those radical spirits of the Reformation period who protested against what they considered the half-measures of the Reformers, and though Brunner claims no affinity with them, he reproaches Luther for his timidity in regard to the very radical proposals for tile reformation of the church which he advanced in his Deutsche Messe. It continues through the jurist Rudolf Sohm, who propounded a similar thesis seventy years ago, and it no doubt reaches its latest station in the No-Church movement in Japan, with which Brunner became familiar in the years he spent there.

It has to be remembered that the background of Brunner's protest is the state-church of continental Europe, which often appears to owe its tenacious hold on life to bodily inertia rather than to spiritual vitality. Everyone who knows it can understand his exasperation with the church in Europe, of which he draws an exceedingly gloomy picture. American readers, however, may experience some difficulty in recognizing their own churches in the glowing colors in which he paints them by way of contrast. It is true, of course, that the American churches have escaped the conditions which have brought the church in Europe to its present critical state. But there is more than one way in which the church can misunderstand itself, and what appears to be utopian from a distant, European perspective may prove, on closer inspection, to be topical-all-too-topical.

Nevertheless, despite some elements of over-statement, Brunner has raised disturbing questions which all churches would do well to take seriously. And he is by no means alone in raising them. There is a current of resistance to the trend toward institutionalization which is infecting the churches in America. And even within the Roman Catholic Church, recent decades have seen evidences of restiveness with the juridical conception of the church which predominates there and a desire for a return to the conception of the church as the mystical Body of Christ. Perhaps some of this will appear at the Second Vatican Council.

III

Closely related to the misunderstanding of the church as a sacred institution is the misunderstanding of faith as assent to doctrine; for this is the only kind of faith the institutional church can demand. The misunderstanding, therefore, cannot be removed except by the

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restoration of the ecclesia, whose witness to the word of Christ is backed by the witness of its own life as the community of faith. Faith is a kind of existence in which the self freely surrenders its autonomy to the divine Thou who meets it in Jesus Christ with both sovereign demand and absolute assurance. It is so distinctively Christian that there can be no other kind of faith, although Brunner admits approximations to it are to be found in the Old Testament and in non-Christian religions.

Faith has its paradigm in justifying faith; for it is here that God's self-communication in Jesus Christ reaches its goal by determining the self-understanding of man. Faith is not acceptance of the divine self-communication in opposition to the self-understanding of the recipient; this would be false objectivism, of which, Brunner seems to suggests, the Lutheran emphasis on the forensic character of justification (simul justus et peccator), for all its value, is not entirely innocent. Nor is it merely an alteration in man's self-understanding, without reference to the divine act of self-communication; this would be false subjectivism.

Brunner sees contemporary theology torn between these two extremes-the objectivism represented by Barth, who virtually banishes the believing subject from the equation and who moves in the direction of a traditional, but anachronistic, orthodoxy; and the subjectivism represented by Bultmann, whose demand for existential interpretation, legitimate in principle, tends to dissolve the Christian faith into an existential philosophy. Brunner seeks to avoid both extremes with a doctrine of faith as "the coincidence of divine self-communication and human self-understanding" (p. 205) but he leaves himself with the old problem, in an intensified form, how faith, so understood, can compass the other articles of the creed, creation, providence, the kingdom of God, etc.

Traditional orthodoxy sought to answer this question by distinguishing various grades or stages of faith. Calvin held that some articles of faith, such as the veracity of Scripture, were "presupposed" by faith in Christ, whom he recognized to be the "proper" object of faith. The Westminster Confession distinguishes three grades or levels of faith, ranging from a general faith in the contents of divine revelation, through a special faith in the commands, the threats, and the promises, to a most special faith in Christ (XIV, 2). Luther, on the other hand, came nearer to seeing that faith and belief differ in

527 - An Appraisal Of Brunner's Theology

kind, and not only in degree; lie taught that justification is the only article that can "come into our experience," and that the others can only do so through it. Brunner finds this congenial to his own existential conception of faith, but he is not blind to the difficulty that Luther's proposed test does not determine which other articles are to be subjected to it. It did hot occur to Luther that the test of experience could be employed reductively. But if we refuse to follow Schleiermacher, is there any other alternative to accepting the articles inherited from the orthodox tradition and so becoming neo-orthodox"?

Brunner contends, much like Harnack, that the Reformers' subservience to the dogmatic tradition led them to obscure their own distinctive insights into the nature of faith by combining faith in Christ and faith in doctrine under the same rubric. He sees the clarification of these two concepts of faith as a problem which theology has failed to solve and which has been reopened with a new urgency by the current debates on hermeneutics. These point to the need for a new doctrine of Scripture which will "take its shape from justifying faith or faith in Christ" (p. 241); but before addressing itself to this task, theology, he suggests, would be advised to wait until the smoke of the hermeneutical battles has somewhat subsided.

IV

Brunner organizes his doctrine of the Christian life around the concepts of regeneration and conversion, rather than justification, because he finds them more apt to express the totality of the new creation. In faith man possesses the new being, and does not merely believe in it; yet this new being belongs to the transcendental rather than to the empirical self. Brunner's dominant concern in this section is to eliminate the monergistic conceptions of grace which led the Reformers to reduce the role of the human subject to one of pure passivity, like "a block or a stone," as the Lutheran Formula of Concord expressed it. On the contrary, he insists: "Man's transformation through the Holy Spirit does not happen without the presence and coöperation of the man himself" (p. 298).

Grace does not exclude, but includes the human factor-otherwise there would be no place for prayer in the Christian life. Brunner suggests that a test question to apply to any doctrine of the Christian life would be whether it accommodates a theology of prayer. He

528 - An Appraisal Of Brunner's Theology

himself rounds off his presentation with an interesting and suggestive chapter on the theology of prayer. (Elsewhere lie expresses some curiosity as to what, if anything, Tillich will have to say on this subject.)

Brunner's concern with the personalization of the life of faith will recall to some readers the work of the English theologian, John Oman, especially his best known book, Grace and Personality. Much water has flowed under the theological bridges since Oman's day. Nevetheless, it is a matter for regret that Brunner, though less parochial in his reading than most theologians of continental Europe, shows no trace of acquaintance with Oman. A comparative study of their different approaches to the same objective would be instructive.

V

Eschatology for Brunner is not a more or less optional appendix but an integral element of revelation. He presents it under the title: "The Consummation in Eternity of the Divine Self-Communication." The God who communicates himself is the God of the kingdom, the God who has a purpose for history, and therefore faith, as it apprehends God, is drawn into his moving purpose and becomes pregnant with hope. This is the "fundamental myth" which faith cannot give up without giving itself up.

The root of Bultmann's demythologized eschatology, which discards the objective hope of the kingdom as a vestige of Jewish apocalyptic and leaves only a subjective understanding of human existence, is traced to a philosophically conditioned preference for the abstract over the concrete, and for the symbolism of space over that of time. Feuerbach and Freud, who treat the Christian hope as an illusory projection or wish-fulfillment, ignore the real dimensions of the human predicament disclosed in faith, while those who adhere to substitute hopes like the idea of progress or the Marxist millennium are victims of a confusion of categories which can only bring disillusionment.

Brunner freely admits, however, that the superiority of the Christian to these substitute hopes cannot be demonstrated by argument. The only effective demonstration would be the evidence of its vitality in the life of the ecclesia, and he believes lie can discern in the history of the church "something like a law that … the more powerfully life in the Spirit of God is present in it, the more urgent is its

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expectation of the Coming of Jesus Christ" (p. 400). This may be true, but it is not likely to impress those who believe they are riding the wave of the future. Similarly the arguments Brunner uses to demonstrate the intrinsic connection between faith and hope, depending as they do oil the view he takes of the relation of eternity to the three modalities of time, will not be found fully convincing by all readers, especially when they note that he appears at times to fall back on specific promises of the parousia (pp. 378, 387).

Brunner's treatment of the last judgment is highly suggestive. He rejects the popular idea that the issue is between final loss and universal salvation and asserts that we can only take a position on this issue when we adopt a neutral or spectator stance which is incompatible with our responsibility to God. From the standpoint of existential involvement, he maintains, we must affirm both, despite the logical contradiction. The two doctrines of damnation and universal salvation are related to each other as law and gospel in a paradoxical unity which discloses itself only in the situation of existential encounter with God in his self-communication. This, however, does not constitute a retreat into subjectivity or imply that Christian eschatology is unable to make objective affirmations. The Christian hope is not redemption from the world; it is the redemption of the world.

Brunner argues cogently in the final chapter of the book that the "cosmic expansion" of the Christian hope, as he calls it, is not a peculiarity of the Epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians but implicit from the outset in the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord. The cosmos is for the sake of the divine-human encounter and is destined to participate in the consummation of God's purpose with his creatures. For if the perfection of the creature does not involve the dissolution of the distinction between creature and Creator, this implies a "world," new and unimaginable, no doubt, but yet a world, in which we shall be perfected in the presence of God and of one another and. in perfect transparency to ourselves, a world in which we shall know as we are known.

VI

The editor of The Theology of Emil Brunner has assembled a distinguished group of essayists for a comprehensive review of the main aspects of Brunner's work. Their variety is itself an index of

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the wide variety of Brunner's interests. It is, of course, impossible to comment on all of the essays here. All are of a high level-though some are not entirely unpredictable. Paul Tillich expresses warm sympathy with Brunner's notion of truth as encounter, but raises the question whether "the person-to-person encounter is the only valid analogy to the Divine-human encounter and whether, therefore, in the description of the way of knowing God, the personalistic categories should be used exclusively." Reinhold Niebuhr in a short essay discusses some of the problems that are present in Brunner's concept of "orders of creation," and is led, in turn, to suspect that he has made a "too radical distinction between the realms of the personal and the institutional."

Several of the essayists are men who were themselves students of Brunner's and who have followed the directions he gave them to points at which they have encountered critical questions. David Cairns, who has long studied Brunner's doctrine of man as responsible being, raises some profound questions regarding the basis of this responsibility and the nature of man's freedom in the original state of creation. Edward A. Dowey is doubtful whether Brunner consistently adheres to his avowed personalism in his interpretation of the saving work of Christ. Theodore A. Gill is somewhat disappointing on Brunner as teacher and preacher. According to reports, Brunner is superb in both capacities, and readers who know his charisma claritatis through his books would have been glad to receive some first-hand impressions of him in action. But Gill has either interpreted his assignment in a different sense or allowed himself to be diverted by his enthusiasm for some of Brunner's distinctive themes.

One other essay, which may be mentioned, is devoted to Brunner's concept of philosophy. He has always been eager to keep the conversation alive between theology and philosophy, and it is particularly interesting (as well as unusual) to get the reaction of a professional philosopher. George A. Schrader of Yale shares Brunner's esteem for a critical philosophy, like that of Kant, which recognizes the limits of human reason, but questions whether this must be regarded as the only valid form of philosophy from the Christian standpoint and whether philosophy cannot be as dialectical and existential as theology. It may be added that Brunner's "Truth as Encounter" (mistitled The Divine-Human Encounter) is soon to be reissued with

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a new introduction in which he seeks to clarify his relation to philosophy.

Brunner's own contributions to the volume consist of a brief intellectual autobiography and a final essay in which he offers patient, detailed, but not always convincing replies to the points raised by the essayists.

VII

It is Brunner's misfortune that he has been so long regarded as an interpreter of Barth and that his own great eminence has been overshadowed by that of his Basel neighbor. Perhaps this is the penalty of living in a country where even a towering peak like the Jungfrau. can be overshadowed by the Matterhorn. Brunner has borne this circumstance with good grace, and he has endured some rough treatment at the hands of his temperamental compatriot. Yet he has maintained the integrity of his own thought and developed his own insights, to the vast enrichment of contemporary theology. His work has made a considerable impression in America, perhaps more so than in Europe. Gill relates an anecdote of a Barth-Brunner encounter in which Barth said, "They tell me that I am the best known theologian in America," and Brunner replied, "Yes, and I am the most read." His books, which have nearly all been translated, have maintained a steady sale over the years, and have been used as texts in many institutions. There are many on this continent who are conscious of a great debt they owe to him and who will concur in the judgment of Reinhold Niebuhr that Brunner has been one of the seminal theologians of our generation.