Abstract

This study in the thought of an important but difficult thinker centers on his attempt to reformulate the identity of essence and existence characterizing God's being in a way which does justice both to modern self-consciousness and to Christian faith's understanding of the crucified Christ as God's self-identification. The result is an ontology of God's "death" in Jesus which resonates throughout Jungel's thought and positions the Trinity with respect to the traditions of metaphysical theism. ;An initial chapter orients the reader to Jungel's work, and identifies his chief influences . Chapter Two represents an overview of how Jungel conceives the practice of theology, concentrating on the centrality of reflection on faith and the linguistic mediation of faith's originary event, the history of Jesus as Christ. Important implications will surface about the kind of God presupposed in this theological project. Chapter Three next turns to the drama of modernity in which the classical formulation of divine simplicity fell to pieces as the self-grounding rationality of Descartes gained the ascendancy. Once this "necessary" God was revealed in its superfluity, its intellectual and cultural death had to follow. ;It is on the ruins of the necessary God that Jungel begins to reconstruct the unity of divine essence and existence in a new way. Chapter Four presents the initial, highly abstract gestures toward a "more than necessary" God; already at this stage Jungel begins to bring out the implications for theistic thinking of a divine simplicity based on God's givenness as an historical fact in Jesus. This process of elaboration is further portrayed in Chapter Five as Jungel's views on God the creator are shown to point toward love as the existence with which God's essence must be equated. Chapter Six then examines more closely the "ecstatic" procedures of language and faith as explications of how God's being is identified with the crucified one. Finally, Chapter Seven concludes the study by summarizing its results in relation to Jungel's trinitarianism, and by offering assessments of his theistic project, its strengths, weaknesses and potential significance