BOOK REVIEW:
God's Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. By Eberhard Jüngel. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001. 142 pp. ISBN: 0567083357. 

Although published in 2001, this book is not new, and has even been previously translated into English. Its appearance is welcome nonetheless. Originally published in 1965, it has seen several editions in German, of which the fourth provides the basis for this translation. Its popularity in Germany, as well as its first (1976) and (now) second appearances in English, are testimony to its status as perhaps the finest treatment of Karl Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity. In terms of the author’s sheer depth of understanding, his ability to maneuver easily in the very complex conceptual world of Barth’s thought, the book is still unsurpassed. That having been said, however, it should in no way be mistaken for an introduction to Barth’s trinitarian thought. First, it is at least as concentrated and demanding as Barth’s thought itself; it is not a simplification of Barth’s doctrine for students (although to the advanced student already familiar with Barth it can be marvelously clarifying), but converses with that doctrine at its own level. 

Second, as editor and translator John Webster astutely points out in his helpful introduction, what we have here is not a straightforward restatement of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity; the title of the translation has accordingly been changed back to that of the German original: not The Doctrine of the Trinity but God’s Being is in Becoming. Not claiming to touch on all the important elements of Barth’s trinitarianism, Jüngel’s “paraphrase” concentrates instead on certain metaphysical and epistemological aspects. It originally attempted to mediate and critically recast a dispute between Helmut Gollwitzer (who understood himself to be continuing Barth’s project) and Herbert Braun (a rather radical student of Bultmann) about how to properly understand God’s being as essentially and radically love. Can the “independent” reality of God over against humanity be preserved in spite of such a stress on salvific selfgiving (the concern of the Gollwitzer)? But then how can this independence be affirmed without uncritically invoking the old metaphysical concepts of “essence” and “subject-object” (resulting in that “objectivization” of God anathema to the Bultmannians)? 

Jüngel believes that Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity affords a way of evading this dilemma by redefining its terms. The point is that God has redefined the being of humanity alienated from God by identifying with the human existence of Jesus even to the point of death, transforming the forces that distort and prevent true human relation (to God and others) by taking them up into the divine being itself and reinserting them in a new form into human history as communities of the Holy Spirit. But God can do this because God is already constituted by a pattern of relations in which love and freedom are equally primordial. God freely “expands” the relationality that God always already is into a strictly “corresponding” relationality to the creature. The salvific relation of love into which God invites human beings is indeed essential to God’s very being, but only because it represents a resonance or correspondence with the self-relationality, the play of self-position and self-negation, which defines God’s being “before” the creature exists.

Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity not only allows a new approach to the ontological problem of divine being, but it also helps resolve the epistemological issue of how God can be known without becoming “objectified”. God can, as it were, “deploy” the otherness of this internal pattern of triune relation by selectively identifying with worldly realities, revealing or interpreting the divine being to human beings through a uniquely free objectivity (constituted as graced events rather than as objectified products of human cognition). This idea of “secondary objectivity” is both sacramental and, more fundamentally, Christological; Jüngel deftly sketches how it shapes Barth’s entire approach. 

Webster’s thorough revision presents few striking departures from Horton Harris’s original translation, but the minor changes are telling in their cumulative effect. He knows when to be more literal than Harris (preserving the careful architecture of Jüngel’s concepts and his Heideggerian play with etymologies) and conversely when to be more colloquial (when following the precise form of Jüngel’s serpentine Germanic sentences contributes nothing to the reader’s understanding). Like Harris, however, he wisely chooses to let what is obscure in the original remain obscure in the translation. And obscurity there undoubtedly is, but much brilliance as well. Hopefully this new version of a formidable little classic will spark renewed discussion of its central and still cogent themes: the concept of God “after” metaphysics, the possibility of theological language, and the still unplumbed depths of the old Trinitarian dogmas. 

Paul DeHart
Assistant Professor of Theology
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SUMMER 2002, VOL. 2, #4.