652 - Born Before All Time? The Dispute over Christ's Origin

Born Before All Time? The Dispute over Christ's Origin
By Karl-Joseph Kuschel
New York, Crossroad, 1992. 664 pp. $50.00.

It should be said at the outset that this book is neither for neophytes nor the faint-hearted. It is long, the print is small, the learning prodigious (some of it evidenced in one hundred pages of footnotes), and the terrain traversed is complex. Yet, for all of that, this book is fresh, invigorating, and written in a style as sprightly as German academic discourse ever gets.

The author, who works at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in the University of Tübingen, is concerned with the question as to

654 - Born Before All Time? The Dispute over Christ's Origin

whether the pre-existence of Christ is a matter to be professed today and, if so, on what conceptual grounds. In order to address this question, he takes the reader through three main sections. The first, under the heading of "Failed Conversations of Yesterday," explores the debates between Harnack, Barth, and Bultmann on this theme; the second revisits the biblical material; and, in the third, the author engages contemporary theologians, though it should be noted that they are all European and almost all are German: Pannenberg, Rahner, Jungel, Moltmann, Kasper, Kung, and Schillebeeckx are the main ones. In the process, he offers "a piece of narrative theology: the history of theology as narrative and narrative as the reconstruction of an argument."

The first section is used to "help us arrive at basic options for christological thought." What we see is Harnack's opposition to pre-existence grounded on his notion that this was a theology that came along later due to Hellenistic influence, a view repeated with modification in Bultmann, becoming the "opposition pole" for Barth. Barth opposed his Christ against culture to Harnack's Christ of culture and his postmodernity to Harnack's modernity. Barth insisted that modernity's claim of "subjectivity to absoluteness is to be relatized," and the self-awareness of the modern subject "with its delusion" must be confronted. Barth's way of doing this, his very distinctive christology, the author nevertheless finds to have been a mistake.

In the second section, Kuschel argues that the idea of pre-existence grows within the New Testament. With respect to the Synoptic Gospels, he observes that "the overwhelming majority of exegetes assume that Jesus cannot have understood himself to be a pre-existing and coming Son of Man." Nor, for that matter, did Paul. On Philippians 2:5-11, for example, the author says that "this hymn does not contain ... an independent statement about pre-existence or even a christology of pre-existence." In Paul, "there is no sign of any unambiguous and explicit statement about pre-existence." The first time the idea arose is in Colossians, which he believes was not Pauline, and the genesis of the belief had much more to do with the shaky world order, with the anxiety it created, than with Christ himself. Colossians 1:15-20 "was meant to bear testimony in faith to a new human existence in Christ capable of resisting these powers." After Colossians, the idea oscillated back and forth in terms of its acceptance until John boldly advoctated it. From the second century on, most of the Church "accepted the Johannine pre-existence christology unhesitatingly, but developed it theologically."

The idea of pre-existence anchors the meaning of Christ in an antecedent world, but if that anchorage is removed, Christ's meaning for the modern world can be understood in ways that are more fluid and less fixed. This is what the author seeks to do in his final section as he uses contemporary theologians to explore these possibilities. Hans Kung, for example, is seen as having achieved just such an emancipation

655 - Born Before All Time? The Dispute over Christ's Origin

for God, which has also meant that the Church is now emancipated from having to think either that Christ or Christianity are unique.

This is a book of weight and significance that amply repays serious study. Some readers, however, will have some qualms about it, two of which stand out. First, in the middle section on the New Testament, the author appears entirely unaware of the more sober, more conservative side in Anglo-American biblical scholarship whose reading of the same passages he uses reaches very different conclusions. At the very least, it would have been nice if he had shown his awareness of this scholarship, even if he rejected its conclusions. Second, the structure of the book is a little puzzling. He begins with the Harnack-Barth-Bultmann debates because this is when theology really started "getting interesting," a point that might well be contested. The connection between this first section and the one that follows it on the New Testament, however, is not at all clear except that, in the end, the failure the author pronounces over these debates clears the way for him to think that it is only with current theologians and, it turns out, only among those who are German, that we can find anything of value being done in theology. The impression is unfortunate and it mars what is, in fact, a substantial contribution.

David F. Wells

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary,
South Hamilton, MA