Brunner, Emil

« appointment there the following year; in 1924, he took the chair of systematic and practical theology.

It was at this time that Brunner discovered Barth's Der Römerbrief (The Epistle to the Romans) (1919) and joined the 'theologians of crisis' contributing regularly to the journal Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times) (Barth, K. §§1-2).

He subsequently became a major exponent of 'the theology of crisis' .

Like Barth, Brunner found inspiration in Kierkegaard's warning against the accommodation of Christian faith to human culture ( Kierkegaard, S.A.

§§4-5 ).

His main concern was to restore the sovereignty of God.

Thus he centred theology on the gospel of sin and grace while emphasizing the infinite qualitative distinction between God - the Wholly-Other - and human beings.

Brunner denied human beings any natural knowledge of God, whether by reason, feeling or will; the knowledge of God is exclusively supernatural.

Faith in revelation is the sole medium for our knowledge of God.

Brunner insisted on the primacy of biblical revelation. Having returned to the supernaturalism of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, Brunner launched a spectacular offensive against neo-Protestantism, or liberalism.

Die Mystik und das Wort (Mysticism and the Word) (1924) distinguishes Christian faith from the modern understanding of religion, as exemplified by Friedrich Schleiermacher (§7) ; Der Mittler (The Mediator) (1927) claims allegiance to Nicene and Chalcedonian Christology.

Brunner defended the divinity of Christ the Mediator against the lives of Jesus presented by the historicizing and psychologizing schools of the nineteenth century.

What he most disapproved of in neo-Protestantism was the reduction of Christ to a wise teacher or a heroic figure, the identification of progress with divine providence, and uncritical confidence in human nature. 2 Eristic and natural theology In 1929, Brunner published a programmatic article, 'Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie' (The Other Task of Theology) , which presaged the coming break with Barth.

Responding to an epistemological, a missionary and an ethical motive, Brunner's theology was shifting from the content of revelation (the 'what' ) to the appropriation of revelation (the 'how' ).

Whereas expounding God's revelation in Christ through Scripture defines the first theological task, the second one consists in clearing the path for its appropriation by human beings.

Brunner called 'eristic' the type of apologetics that stresses the delusion of reason; he claimed to have borrowed this theology from Pascal, Hamann and Kierkegaard.

An article entitled 'Die Frage nach den " Anknüfungspunkt " als Problem der Theologie' (The Question of the 'Point of Contact' as a Theological Problem) (1932) argues in favour of an innate human disposition to the divine.

In it, Brunner contends that the Word of God does not encounter a passive, unresponsive being, but a thinking subject, a responsive and responsible person.

Brunner called the 'point of contact' that which corresponds in epistemology to the human ability to hear and respond to God's revelation, in anthropology to the infralapsarian image of God, and in ethics to evil conscience. The rehabilitation of natural theology, though of a different kind, came in 1934.

Brunner's essay 'Natur und. »