Abstract
After a distinguished career in Europe, Dalferth, prolific author and specialist in hermeneutics and philosophy of religion, moved to Claremont in 2008, which might explain the first English translation of a text, dedicated to his mentor, Eberhard Jüngel, which had originally appeared in German in 1994. It had been provoked—a polemical tone runs through the book—by the appearance, two decades earlier, of John Hick’s edited volume, The Myth of the God Incarnate. D. locates the history of European Christian theology as the creation of a hybrid, third linguistic world, between an otherwise binary matrix of Mythos and Logos. His contribution is to demonstrate that articulation of the belief that God has raised Jesus from the dead led to a new grammar, “a Christological thought form” (52) for doing theology.
This polished translation contains a new preface by the author, in which he refers to his more recent christological writings, primarily essays and articles from 1998 to 2006, but the text remains unchanged. The subject index, however, has been reduced from 25 pages to 5. The work is, throughout, a conversation with other Protestant, mainly German, theologians.
Using analytic philosophy, grammar, and logic, D. exhaustively construes various meanings of traditional categories, and argues brilliantly for the theological centrality of the Resurrection as manifestation of the eschatological inbreaking of the inexhaustibly creative power of God: “Christian faith stands or falls with the confession that Jesus has been raised by God” (12). All theology requires a clear and careful exposition of this confession. The Resurrection, rather than the Incarnation, is the starting point for understanding Christology, the Trinity, and pneumatology. The focus is soteriological throughout.
D. sees three necessary tasks to reorient theology: (1) rethink resurrection in the light of the cross—the christological question; (2) explore what cross and resurrection mean for a proper understanding of God, which is to ask about God as Trinity; (3) and ask what God’s activity in cross and resurrection means for us, which is the doctrine of pneumatology. This set of interlocking questions is meant to provide the framework for his book: “Cross and Resurrection—the Word of the Cross”; “Jesus Christ—Fundamental Problems in Constructing a Christology”; and “Trinity—The Theological Relevance of the Cross for the Idea of God.”
The last chapter, “Atoning Sacrifice,” is a provocative and sustained rejection of traditional understanding of the death of Christ as sacrificial, as well as a repudiation of liturgical interpretations that focus on sacrifice. It would find echoes in much contemporary Roman Catholic theology, which is mostly absent from this project. Although rigorously argued, this chapter seldom refers to the previous chapters and seems almost as an appendix to the rest of the work, although it is intended as the locus of his pneumatology.
A few questions remain. D. finds fault with Moltmann for being unable to integrate a pneumatological component in the mystery of salvation, but D. himself provides only a very muted treatment of the Holy Spirit: the work is a thoroughly Christocentric project. Second, D. argues that until we get the grammar right, talk of inculturation of Christianity is premature. In today’s suffering, broken, and multicultural world, however, it is not clear that this grammar, finely tuned in the West, would serve as the only global grammar. The book is, nonetheless, a tour de force of rigorous theological argument.