Theopedia

Eberhard Jüngel

Overview

Eberhard Klaus Jüngel (1934-2021) was a German Lutheran systematic theologian and, for over three decades, professor at the University of Tübingen.1 Writing in the wake of Karl Barth, he argued that God’s being is constituted with reference to the incarnation rather than known or defined apart from it, a claim Steven J. Duby treats as a “correction” and “destruction” of the classical doctrine of God’s absoluteness, immutability, and impassibility.2

Life and Ministry

Jüngel trained theologically at the Sprachkonvikt in East Berlin before spending 1957-58 at the Universities of Zürich and Basel, where he attended Karl Barth’s seminars.1 He earned his doctorate in 1961 under Ernst Fuchs with a dissertation on Paul and Jesus, Paulus und Jesus: Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie, and completed his habilitation in systematic theology the following year.1 Besides Fuchs and Barth, he counted Gerhard Ebeling, Heinrich Vogel, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger among his formative influences.1

He lectured in New Testament at the Kirchliche Hochschule Berlin-Ost from 1962 to 1966, then held a chair in systematic theology and the history of dogmatics at the University of Zürich from 1966 to 1969.1 From 1969 until his retirement in 2003 he was Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Tübingen, where he also directed the Institute for Hermeneutics, and from 1987 to 2005 he directed the Evangelisches Stift Tübingen.1 He went on to direct Heidelberg’s Research Centre for Protestant Studies from 2003 to 2006 and held the Hans-Georg Gadamer Chair in Theology at Heidelberg in 2007.1 He died in Tübingen on 28 September 2021.1

Theological Contribution

Jüngel’s central claim, developing Barth’s theology in a Lutheran direction, is that God’s being is constituted with reference to the incarnation rather than established or known independently of it. He focuses on God’s “unity with perishability” in his identification with “the man Jesus,” concerned to show how God’s love is enacted through his opposition to death and “nothingness.”2 On Jüngel’s account, the love of the Father and the Son “takes place as the radical relatedness of God to an other which is absolutely opposite to him,” namely the human essence God creates for that purpose; consequently, “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and vice versa,” so that “the Crucified One belongs to the concept of God.”2

Jüngel presents this as a “correction” and “destruction” of the “classical doctrine of God” and its commitments to divine absoluteness, immutability, and impassibility, on the ground that the “thought of God” must “correspond to the being of God,” making “the man Jesus” the “place of [God’s] thinkability.”3 From this he draws what Duby calls an “analogy of advent”: the incarnation establishes a correspondence between God and humanity, and so between human language and God’s own being, grounding the possibility of true speech about God.3 Jüngel develops this doctrine of God at length in his major work, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism.4

Historical Significance

Duby groups Jüngel with Robert Jenson and Bruce L. McCormack as theologians who, developing Barth’s own claim that the incarnation is the proper starting point for the doctrine of God, go further by making the ontological claim that the incarnation constitutes God’s being rather than merely revealing it.5 Against this shared trajectory, Duby responds that the person of Christ is never accessible independently of Scripture’s own verbal exposition of him, so the incarnation cannot function as a starting point prior to and apart from the biblical text, and offers a further response to the ontological claim later in the same chapter.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “Eberhard Jüngel,” accessed September 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_J%C3%BCngel. The Theopedia Library holds no dedicated biographical treatment of Jüngel’s life, so this entry was the source for these biographical facts (dates, education, and academic posts). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 135-36. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 136. ↩ ↩2

  4. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), cited in Duby, God in Himself, “Bibliography,” 307. ↩

  5. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 135-37. ↩

  6. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 138-39. ↩