Jüngel on Trinitarian Prayer

German theologian Eberhard Jüngel is professor of systematic theology and philosophy of religion at the University of Tübingen and is one of the most admired living theologians. Although not very well known in the US, he has achieved something like "cult-status" in the theological blogosphere.

I want to look at a brief article that he published in the journal Word & World in 1998 titled "Trinitarian Prayers for Christian Worship." In this article Jüngel gives a brief plea for filling in the "experiential deficiency" in the church today of the doctrine of the Trinity through praying in a trinitarian structure. He follows this by submitting 19 trinitarian prayers that he has used when asked to contribute to his congregation's liturgy.

Reflections on the doctrine of the Trinity have picked up theological steam in the past 30 years, with theologians and philosophers of religion publishing a flood of books and articles on various facets of the Trinity: feminist perspectives, postmodern perspectives, social and political perspectives...you get the picture. But for all this Trinity-talk among the theologians, are church members experiencing any kind of change or edification in their thinking in the Trinity?

Perhaps not. While we want to embrace the fact that we worship a Triune God, we may secretly share Immanuel Kant's famous complaint that the Trinity is practically irrelevant to our lives.

Jüngel's proposal to counter this tendency is to focus on a core practice in Christian worship: prayer. His claim is that "Trinitarian prayers call Christians to experience the life of the triune God." It so often happens that our prayers are offered to a monolithic conception of God, and this hinders our capability to experience the fullness of the Trinity. Jüngel emphasizes that "this God does not exist in splendid isolation, but is One who exists from eternity as a Being in community, indeed, who exists as a community of mutual otherness."

We are urged, then, to give a trinitarian structure to our prayers that does justice to this definition of the Godhead. The idea is that we are to address this trinitarian community of mutual otherness

in such a way that the respective particularity of each person of the Trinity is called to mind. This particularity is remembered so that those who are reminded of it begin to share in the life of the trinitarian God. And with that, Christians begin to experience the mystery of the divine Trinity - an experience which, then, has great practical value.

I heartily agree with Jüngel's thoughts here, that when we pray, we should do so in a way that allows us to recognize and experience the triune life of God.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, of course, has long emphasized the practical value of the Trinity in church life and in worship. Indeed, it is claimed within this stream of Christianity that the Trinity is the foundation for our own personhood. Bishop Kallistos Ware's writings have illuminated this facet of the Trinity in my own thinking. And so, with this in mind, Jüngel concludes his reflections with this stirring reminder: "For if the human is the image of God, then the human, too, is meant to turn the otherness that distinguishes among people toward community that does not level out such otherness."

One minor point of curiosity (and possible contention) that I have with Jüngel's article is in the way that he fleshes out, so to speak, his definition of the triune God and our faith in Him:

Faith in God the Father is faith in God as the origin of life; faith in God the Son is faith in the God who, for our benefit, died our death. But faith in God the Holy Spirit is faith in the God who, in himself, endures this contrast between life and death and who resolves the contrast to the benefit of life. 

 Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be something suspiciously Hegelian going on here. I am with Jüngel when he affirms faith in the Father as the origin of life. I am with him when he affirms the Son who dies in our place. But when it comes to the role of the Holy Spirit, is it really the case that we can say that He is the "Divine Synthesizer" who mediates the thesis of life in the Father and the antithesis of death in the Son? Is this the role that we affirm of the Holy Spirit? Is this our faith in Him, that He "resolves the contrast"?

Maybe there's nothing too objectionable in this. But I would be more inclined identify faith in the Holy Spirit more as faith in the One who restores and perfects creation through love.

Maybe Jüngel's phrasing can be considered equivalent to this idea. But I am a little supicious of the Hegelian language, which even seems to de-personalize the role of the Spirit, making it look less like personal agency and more like an impersonal principle of mediation.

Despite my hesitation here, I gladly embrace and endorse his proposals to correct the experiential deficiency of the doctrine of the Trinity through trinitarian prayers.

Ricoeur on Forgiveness (Part 2)

In the previous post, we were left with the dilemma that Ricoeur poses us: If forgiveness is essentially the  unbinding of the action from the agent, then forgiveness disintegrates our sense of self rather than restores it. Further, how can I be responsible and accountable for my actions, how can I be an ethical self, if I my actions have been flung from my being, and I have no reference to them?

Ricoeur's response comes by way of calling attention to a philosophy of the self, which in his later work he calls a "phenomenology of the capable man or l'homme capable." This phenomenology attempts to
"recover the hidden truth of our operative acts - of being capable." In other words, Ricoeur claims that the unity between the agent and her actions is to be found in the notion of capability. Ricoeur draws upon various philosophical sources to emphasize that at the heart of the human are notions of potentiality, the basic power of the agent to act and suffer. Indeed, he is drawn to describing the ontology of the human as "Being-as-the-power-of-the-possible."

In order to link all this up with forgiveness, Ricoeur connects the notions of being as potentiality with Kant's philosophical anthropology found in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Ricoeur here draws upon Kant's distinction between the "propensity to evil" and the "predisposition to good." While humans have a radical propensity to evil actions, this is not the most original feature of human existence. We have a predisposition to the good that is deeper within our nature than moral evil. The conjunction of these two considerations thus claims that we have the capacity to commit both good and evil action, but our capacity for the good runs deeper than our capacity for evil.

Ricoeur notes that this is one of the most important features of the narratives in Genesis 1-3, that although humanity has fallen into radical evil, this evil is not our origin. Our truly original nature is found in the capacity for good.

Venema explains the relation to forgiveness in this way:

"Regardless of how radical evil may be, Ricoeur claims that good conscience is never rendered completely incapable of genuinely responding to the demand of forgiveness. While action and agent are always coupled together, evil action can be unbound from the heart of selfhood because the heart is never completely incapable of beginning again" (pp. 70-71). 

 When forgiveness in this way recognizes the agent as always capable of reorienting his path toward the good, it can unbind the evil action from the agent while at the same time affirming the underlying core of the self in its power for the good.

Ricoeur puts it this way:

Under the sign of forgiveness, the guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than his offenses and his faults. He is held to be restored to his capacity for acting, and action restored to its capacity for continuing... And, finally, this restored capacity is enlisted by promising as it projects action toward the future. The formula for this liberating word, reduced to the bareness of its utterance, would be: you are better than your actions.

 I believe that Ricoeur's thought here has some interesting implications, and next time I'll wrap things up by mentioning a couple of them.