Gems of Wisdom from Emil Brunner: Transcendence and Free Decision

Last updated on: December 21, 2015 at 8:18 am by Roger E. Olson

Gems of Wisdom from Emil Brunner: Transcendence and Free Decision 2015-12-21T08:18:22-05:00 Roger E. Olson

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Emil Brunner (d. 1966) is one of my favorite theologians. In fact, I like him better than Karl Barth; he’s much clearer than Barth. Reading and studying Brunners Dogmatics in seminary liberated me from fundamentalism and kept me firmly grounded in Pietism (but of a “higher order”). Brunner was part of the “dialectical” movement in theology that reacted to liberal Protestantism without adopting fundamentalism. When I read him again and again I see foreshadowings of narrative theology and “postliberalism.”

Brunner eschewed rationalistic apologetics in favor of what he called “eristics” by which he meant dialogue in which the Christian attempts to show the superiority of our worldview over alternatives in terms of providing satisfying answers to life’s ultimate questions. He did not believe in natural theology (even though Barth wrongly and somewhat viciously accused him of it).

Here is a gem from Brunner’s first volume of Dogmatics entitled The Christian Doctrine of God (now republished by Wipf & Stock). It’s an example of “eristics” (as opposed to dogmatics):

“Jesus Christ came in order to reveal…eternity, and to integrate our life within the dimension of this twofold eternity in order that our life should not be lost in nothingness. For apart from this integration into eternity, ‘we pass our years as a tale that is told.’ Apart from this foundation in eternity, and this goal in eternity, the whole history of humanity is a mere nothing, which is swallowed up in the whirlpool of the temporal. Without this firm foundation in our eternal Origin, and without the firm goal in the eternity at the end of the ages, man literally lives ‘for the day’; he is like a mayfly which lives for a day, and then disappears; his life is played out on the surface of the finite. Only through his relation to eternity does he acquire depth; the ‘surface’ is the finite, the temporal, eternity alone is ‘depth’. And this dimension of ‘depth’ is the same as the dimension of ‘meaning.’ Either life has an eternal meaning or it has no meaning at all. For what is meaning, if it can be finally swallowed up in meaninglessness, and annihilated? And what sort of ‘meaning’ would there be without an eternal foundation?” (304)

One of the best gifts I received this year is a 1932 copy of the German fifth printing (so near first edition, not quite) of Brunner’s classic Der Mittler (ET The Mediator)—his monograph on Christology signed by him—Brunner. Strangely, it has within it the original sales receipt dated 1935 from a bookstore in Japan! Brunner signed it to a man named “Tanaka.” A friend gave me the book and receipt in it and I treasure it. My assumption is that “Mr. Tanaka” purchased the book in Japan in 1935 and then had Brunner sign it when he came to Japan to teach in the early 1960s. There are other possible explanations, of course.

Brunner, professor of dogmatics at the University of Zurich, was much better known as the leading “dialectical theologian” both in Great Britain and America during the years between the two world wars. Then, after WW2 Barth’s star rose and put Brunner into the shadows. However, many American seminaries and divinity schools used Brunner’s Dogmatics as the “staple” textbook(s) for systematic theology courses throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. My alma mater, North American Baptist Seminary (now Sioux Falls Seminary) used it in the mid-1970s and I found it extremely refreshing—as a non-liberal alternative to fundamentalism. However, the third volume had then gone out of print and so we were unable to use it as the main textbook in “Systematic Theology 2.” My professor, Ralph Powell, tried to get permission from the publisher to copy it for students’ use but failed. So, instead, we had to read Louis Berkhof (ugh)! Along the way, during the two semesters of Systematic Theology we also read from Bernard Ramm, Augustus Hopkins Strong and G. C. Berkouwer. I, however, checked Brunner’s third volume of Dogmatics (“The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith and the Consummation”) from the library and read it with great enjoyment and benefit. His discussions of the church (“fellowship, not institution”) and faith (“gift and task”) and prayer (“conversation with God”) greatly blessed me.

Fortunately, now, all three volumes of Dogmatics are available free on the internet. They are also available from Wipf & Stock. And I hope Alister McGrath’s very fine new intellectual biography of Brunner entitled Emil Brunner: A Reappraisal (Wiley/Blackwell) will revive interest in the Swiss theologian who still has much good to say to us.

If someone asked me what I see as the main difference between Barth and Brunner (other than the amount they wrote and the clarity with which they wrote) I would say “objectivism” versus “subjectivity” in the God-human relationship. Barth was still firmly rooted in classical Reformed theology calling his doctrine of election “purified supralapsarianism.” (InterVarsity Press is about to publish a monograph by one Shao Kai Tseng entitled Karl Barth’s Infralapsarian Theology. I will be interested to see how the author defends his thesis in light of Barth’s own labeling of his theology as “purified supralapsarianism! Maybe someday I’ll write a book—or at least an article [more than a blog post which I did here]—on “Karl Barth’s Arminian Theology!) I agree with another of my favorite theologians, the late Donald G. Bloesch, in Jesus Is Victor! that Barth’s view of the God-human relationship in salvation focused too much on God’s decision of election and too little on the human response of faith. Brunner emphasized the latter as well as the former. His account of “election” in Dogmatics is consistent with classical Arminanism:

“The absolute free grace of God, purely generous love—that is Jesus Christ. It is applied to the world as a whole, it applies to all; but it applies to all in so far as they believe. Whoever excludes himself, is excluded; he who does not allow himself to be included, is not included. But he who allows himself to be included, he who believes, is ‘elect.’ To believe in Jesus Christ and to be of the elect is one and the same thing, just as not to believe in Jesus Christ and not to be of the elect is the same thing. There is no other selection than this, there is no other number than that which is constituted by the fact of believing or not believing.” (Dogmatics I, The Christian Doctrine of God, 320)

Elsewhere, in the same context, the last several chapters of Dogmatics I, Brunner makes absolutely clear he rejected any divine determinism in salvation (“monergism”). Ultimately, salvation is entirely a gift of God but one that must be received freely and can be rejected. This from a Swiss Reformed theologian! He placed at the center of his whole doctrine of the Christian life—from beginning to end—the “I-Thou Encounter” which is the “moment of decision” for or against the love of God calling a person into communion with God. It’s interesting to me to know that Pietist preacher Christoph Blumhardt was Brunner’s godfather and he dedicated Dogmatics 3 to him: “This book is dedicated to Christoph Blumhardt. It was he, the prophetic witness to Jesus, who in the days of my youth by direct personal contact and, later through men like Kutter and Ragaz, rooted me deeply in the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit. I have always loved and honoured him as one of those in whom the divine light shone forth, and in gratitude I regard my theological work as the harvest of his sowing.”

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