Abstract
Bengt Kristensson Uggla serves as Professor of Philosophy, Culture and Management at the Swedish-speaking Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. He also teaches at the Stockholm School of Theology. As a young student, he became acquainted with Gustaf Wingren in Lund. He realized what a metamorphosis the famous professor had experienced under the influence of the radical left-wing activist Greta Hofsten, whom he married in 1976. She was not an academic, but a public intellectual. For political reasons, she had given up her career as a civil servant to make her living as a postman. Kristensson Uggla, who himself is a scholar of Paul Ricoeur, has written a remarkable biography of Gustaf Wingren, the most influential, creative and controversial Swedish theologian in the generation following Anders Nygren and Gustaf Aulén.
Wingren (1910–2000) was a prolific and provocative writer involved in passionate theological conflicts. The self-evident context of his systematic theological studies was the university and church until his life took a new turn. He left his wife after 30 years together and married Greta Hofsten. Under Greta’s influence, he staged a far-reaching re-contextualization of his theology. Society understood in socialist terms became his frame of reference. His Lutheran theology of creation and incarnation, law and gospel was reinterpreted in social and economic terms. After having been next to a-political and enclosed in his academic environment, in his later years Wingren became a sharp public critic of the church and of liberal capitalism. By using biography as his method of research, Kristensson Uggla is able to demonstrate how Wingren’s intellectual project under the influence of Hofsten was transformed into a ‘political’ theology focusing on societal change.
Kristensson Uggla has written a solid analytical introduction to Wingren’s theology before and after this metamorphosis. Already in his inauguration lecture in 1951, Wingren launched an attack on his predecessor Anders Nygren’s programme of motif research and the famous Agape and Eros (Engl. transl. 1932). According to Wingren, Nygren’s programme had resulted in a falsification of the biblical message. Given the hermeneutical presuppositions and contextuality of theology, he challenged any idea of timelessness and unchangeability. He included everything that Irenaeus of Lyon understood by salvation in the concept of recapitulatio, which means becoming human again. He presumed an original affirmation of creation-given human life as something to be restored by participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. Wingren spoke of ‘grain-of-wheat eschatology’, of descent and dying as a condition for true life. Through salvation as recapitulatio, humankind would regain its humanity. Rather than contrasting the human and divine, he positively defined the relation between Christ and humanity, incarnation and anthropology and articulated an alternative holistic understanding of faith in opposition to the Lundensian search for characteristically Christian motives.
This brilliant intellectual biography is a most readable introduction to one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Many of Wingren’s books are available in English. The encounter of the retiring university professor with the student revolt of the late 1960s made him not only leave the ordained ministry, confront both his church and his colleagues, and take a radical political stand, but recontextualize his theology and set a new agenda for systematic theology at the world famous faculty in Lund.