Eberhard Jüngel remains one of the most important German Lutheran post-Barth theologians. We are indebted to John Webster’s long-standing interest and engagement with Jüngel for raising his profile among British students of theology. One of Webster’s former doctoral students has now published the fruits of his research, focussing primarily on Jüngel’s theology of sacraments. David Nelson thus adds another dimension to the growing body of English language volumes on the work of this notoriously complex theologian. It is pleasing to report that Nelson not only renders Jüngel’s thought in an accessible manner, but engages with an area of his theology which is relatively unexplored.

For any familiar with Jüngel’s writing the central motifs here will already be well rehearsed. Jüngel’s rigorous intellectual pedigree draws upon Luther, Barth, Heidegger and, most importantly Fuchs. His theology is rooted in the Barthian language of event, but most often this is expressed in relation to language. God comes to the world in a word-event of encounter; words do not simply signify reality but embody it. As God comes to speech in this word-event the continuity of our existence is interrupted and made new. For Jüngel this leads to a distinctively ontological understanding of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, and lies at the heart of his understanding of God’s relationship to the world in and through Jesus Christ. In essence this is Barth’s language of revelation as ‘event’ baptised in Heideggerian existentialism mixed with Fuch’s new hermeneutics.

In his introduction, Nelson traces these influences, among others, correctly situating Jüngel within the broadly Lutheran tradition. The book then divides into four parts. The first section examines the sacramental character of the word of God. Here the basic contours of Jüngel’s thought are carefully outlined. Much of the material here comes from Jüngel’s earlier work, including his magnum opus God as the Mystery of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). Nelson concludes the section by rehearsing criticisms previously expressed by Webster and Thiselton. There is a tendency for Jüngel to assert that only language that is commandeered by God in his coming to the world is ‘true’ language. This raises the question of the status of everyday language. Is this simply redundant? Is the regular use of words to refer to reality really subservient to the ‘higher’ use to which God makes use of them in coming to the world?

Part two examines Jesus Christ as the one true sacrament, another recurring theme in Jüngel. One of the most interesting sections here analyses Jüngel’s dispute with an Augustinian hermeneutics of signification. It is argued that, while in ordinary language words acts as signs, pointing to an external reality, the same cannot be said when referring to the word of God. This word does not simply point beyond itself to God; to do so is to posit an ontological gap between the word and its content. This renders the word of God susceptible to human critique and reason while potentially conceiving of God as ‘wordless and dumb abstract majesty’ (p. 64). The hermeneutics of address correct this; God is encountered in his very being as he comes to speech in the word. In this way Jüngel understands that any understanding of sacrament must begin with the unique place of encounter and revelation, the person of Jesus Christ.

Part three examines the way in which Jüngel articulates the sacramentality of the church. Here Jüngel’s proposal is distinctively Protestant. The church’s sacramentality does not derive from a continuity of historical priesthood, but is grounded in the encounter with the risen Christ in the events of preaching, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These are events which interrupt our existence; the sacramentality of the church is punctiliar rather than continuous.

The final part focusses on the sacraments of baptism and communion. This is the distinctive contribution of this book, yet, strangely the least satisfying. There seems to be some discontinuity in Jüngel’s limited writing specifically on the sacraments. This is, in part, due to some later writing in which he seems to shift his position in a way not dissimilar to Barth’s late shift in his theology of baptism. The major criticisms of Jüngel’s scheme are well rehearsed, and Nelson follows these through well. Firstly, by placing so much emphasis on Jesus Christ as the preeminent sacrament, there is a tendency to play down the sacramental significance of the church’s action in baptism and communion. Secondly, by focussing almost exclusively on the interruptive character of the word of address, Jüngel finds it hard to develop a theology of the everyday reality that is interrupted. In other words, a theology of encounter struggles to articulate the relationship between event and the on-going vicissitudes of existence. What is the relationship between event and history? What is clear from Nelson’s account is that Jüngel’s later writing in El Ser Sacramental (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme: 2007) does indeed seek to articulate this. Nelson does look at this in some detail in chapter 12, but the conclusion still seems to fall back on older critique. Perhaps it is hard to integrate this later work with the thrust of much of his work. Yet one has the impression that Nelson’s engagement with this later writing was quite a late discovery in the writing of a thesis and the overall conclusion does not quite do justice to the shift noted in Jüngel’s thought.

Overall this is an important and lucid account of an influential theologian whose own writing is not easy to read. Nelson does us a great service in outlining the sacramental aspects of his writing, hitherto largely bypassed in the literature. I suspect that a later edition may address my concerns, but as a resource for students of German theology after Barth this is a useful addition to the literature. More generally, for preachers looking for a theology of preaching in relation to baptism and the Lord’s Supper, Nelson is a good guide into a stream of theology with which not all will be familiar.

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