Chapter 2
his treatment of metaphysical and Cartesian thought from the nineteenth century in general and in his analysis of Nietzsche’s penetrating questions in particular is a method to think Christianly of God. His “thought” of God emerges from historical events involving Jesus of Nazareth who makes God accessible in God’s “retrieving of us.” Jüngel’s ontology of God is worth the following long quote: The thought of God results from this event, and is not therefore its presupposition . . . The supporting argument of the view we are contesting is the objection that even in the original emerging situation of the Christian faith and of its valid theology, the thought of God was the general anthropological presupposition of the Christian faith, which is not present today in that form and which then must be regained; we have designated the reality of the biblical texts as a possibility which leads theology in its task of thinking of God as God . . . The fact that God makes himself accessible to humanity presupposes that God has something to do with humanity . . . . To think God, thought is taken along in that it thinks faith and what faith believes in . . . . As such, theology is ‘theologia in via’ (theology underway) . . . if God is the issue, then experience can never be ruled out . . . but it cannot be regarded as programmed . . . The way that God is to be thought can more precisely be defined on the basis of the insight that God is present . . . as the one who is absent . . . . What Nietzsche felt he had to denounce as the frightful deceptiveness of a symbol is the true basis for the only possible way to think God: God on the cross. 55
Given this background, we now turn to Jüngel’s positioning of Bonhoeffer as that twentieth-century theologian who returned the “death of God” to its theological home.
55
Ibid., 155–169. 46