Abstract
The first sentence of this book—from its chapter of introduction, by Brian Brock—is an implicit mission statement: ‘Hans Günter Ulrich is, unfortunately, not widely known in the English-speaking world’ (p. 1). This should not be the case and after this publication, it surely will not be the case much longer. I find it hard to recall a book as thought-provoking and idea-generating as this one.
This volume comprises nine representative essays by Ulrich, grouped in three batches of three. They address theological ethics within the three traditional Lutheran stations: ecclesia, politia and oeconomia. The chapters touch on economics, the adoption of children, the ‘complex indeterminacy’ of human beings when considered from the view of genetics (p. 206), disability ethics, the Christian understanding of law, and a great range of many other topics. It is an astonishing contribution. Although this stands as a collection of pieces Ulrich ‘had prepared earlier’, they have been woven together seamlessly so as to cast light on each other, leaving no impression of the dreaded ‘Best of’ compilations.
There are a number of important ‘Ulrichian’ concepts introduced in this volume and the first chapter rotates around one: Messianic time. This is ‘the time of God's ongoing activity and thus the time of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who apocalyptically invades our rational or spiritual worlds, however they may be configured, in order to realize His own work of transformation and creation’ (p. 40). Thus the now-and-not-yet in which we live is not an empty space, a time of finger-tapping waiting, and neither is it a building site where we must construct the Kingdom. It is the time when God's reality has broken in on us, where we discover that better than hoping for freedom, we have instead been granted deliverance.
This programmatic argument is then unpacked in the following chapter, where Ulrich makes the case that the way to read Bonhoeffer is through this ‘account of apocalyptic Messianic-ethics’ (p. 51). In a carefully crafted argument, Bonhoeffer's concept of ‘stations’—‘public places, places of public existence, visible to the world, where the secret of God's guidance and action are explicitly stated’ (p. 72) is unfolded. Ulrich cautions against reducing these stations to landmark moments in an individual's testimony but rather as shared, communal ‘places where God's presence is to be expected, where God's people meet and come together in order to meet God’ (p. 76). The reader is introduced here to more Ulrichian touchstones, including the centrality of Romans 12:1-2 to his thinking, his ‘conditio humana’ concept and an understanding of ethos as something close to that way of life where we feel at home (p. 60).
The first section ends with a third chapter that applies all this to a real-world question—what is the place of research in theology? It is a question we all have to wrestle with, even if it is mostly prompted by a disputatious comment at a university social event from a colleague in a different department who has had a few too many drinks. Ulrich's careful reasoning will equip any theologian to navigate this social awkwardness, or more seriously, to justify a department's existence at the hands of an austerity-excited administrator. Drawing on Barth's reading of Anselm and O’Donovan's work in The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), he makes a strong case that theology is a research endeavour not in the sense that it generates novelty but that it is a science that explores what is given. In this sense, it is closer to the natural sciences than might be popularly recognized (p. 87). Ulrich's claims are digestible by the sort of friendly scepticism that theology often encounters in contemporary universities but that does not mean they are not nutritionally dense, theologically speaking. Theological claims are reports of knowledge, which have been grasped, but incompletely. How we go on grasping again these things that have been given is a task of discernment. ‘To be wise’, Ulrich concludes, ‘is to remain eternally open for a completely new experience’ (p. 105).
The second section addresses ‘Christian witness in the world’ (p. 109) and the fourth chapter presents an argument about the appropriate public appearance of religion. Written from a continental European perspective, Ulrich suggests that the Lutheran tradition offers ‘an especially good forum to answer’ the question of how Christianity should appear in public (pp. 114–15). My own daily work involves theological research at the service of colleagues from the social sciences and hard sciences who are trying to formulate realistic policy proposals for Irish society. I found this to be one of the clearest and most complete accounts I have read of what it might mean to be a Christian in the res publica. He establishes a distinction between ἔθος (ethos) which he sees as the political unity of a community and ήθος (aethos) which is ‘the form and context of Christian living’ (p. 129). These domains are not in contest, though they are clearly not the same. What this means is that the Christian is at home in the ecclesia and therefore is liberated to serve in the politia without the need to make it their dwelling. We are thus licensed to struggle for the common good (p. 134) in a way that flows organically from our own internal awakening to how Jesus is for us (p. 129).
The fifth chapter extensively engages the work of Giorgio Agamben to explore what God's economy aims at and what role the church occupies in it. The development Ulrich offers is rooted in his insistence that Messianic time is ‘not a suspension (katechon), but the particular consummation of God's adventus oikonoia’ (p. 151). It follows that we rule out of bounds ‘all talk about a God “behind” human powers or authorities (as an invisible hand or vague “Providence”) in favour of looking for a God who is visibly reigning and governing the world through his people insofar as they remain attentive to this direction in his Word’ (p. 152). This stands not just as a decisive rebuttal of a widespread accommodation that Christians have made with a certain kind of flat-footed neo-classical economics, but as a sort of summary of Ulrich's entire project. The good news is that God's deliverance is not an idle hope, not a theory to toy with, but a reality breaking in on us.
The final chapter in this section concerns the adoption of children. While not blind to psychological questions around attachment, political questions about the imperialistic resonances of much cross-border adoption, or the practical policy concerns that apply to social workers, Ulrich presents here a distinctly theological reflection on adoption. But considering this narrower question, he is able to reorientate our thinking around child-bearing, parenting, and the communal commitment we are bound to make to children. His first move is to remind the reader that, contrary to a million speeches from politicians, children are not ‘our future’. Better by far to adopt the biblical perspective that they are God's heritage (p. 167) which ultimately allows us to see in every child's existence a demand to enact justice. The child—whatever its origin—makes a claim on us. To truly appreciate this is to begin to see that the conditio humana is ‘defined by its context in God's story. The adoption of a child is thus understood in its truth: as an act of joyful acknowledgement of this particular child as God's heritage—and so God's own eschatological presence’ (p. 176).
The seventh chapter represents a critical appreciation of the American bioethicist, H. Tristam Engelhardt, Jr. This engagement is an opportunity for Ulrich to delve into the ‘noetic work that accompanies the Christian work of ethics as seeking good works grounded in God's story’ (p. 181). While there is much to appreciate in Englehart's work, Ulrich ultimately finds his critique of secular bioethics is incomplete because of his reliance on ‘concepts such as “reason” and “culture” that remain within the secular logic that is the target of his critique’ (p. 204). Christians, Ulrich suggests, ‘ought not aspire to shape society by claiming to possess the one “real” truth or to present theological knowledge as a foundation for all other knowledge’ but should instead develop the attention to see how ‘God's mercy and justice enter the world in the good works that articulate judgements in practical domains’ (p. 205). This approach is both robustly theological and yet also hospitable to those who might reject entirely the Christian narrative.
In chapter 8, Ulrich presents the conclusions that he and Walter Doerfler, a geneticist, have arrived at as a result of teaching courses together in Erlangen University. For them, the ethical task is hermeneutical: ‘Ethics, I am suggesting, is rather primarily work in the linguistic domain, a critical engagement with our dominant patterns of moral discourse in order hermeneutically to transform them by relating them to their real context as part of our human condition’ (p. 209). This chapter sets up a fascinating dialogue between the popular misconceptions about the possibilities of genetic science and the complex, often indeterminate reality. Especially notable is how Ulrich summons Blaise Pascal to the witness stand, speaking with an almost prophetic precision about the ethical significance of what happens in genetic laboratories even at a remove of almost 400 years.
I say all of this of chapter 8 but neglect to add a detail that would likely justify on its own the purchase of the book and the investment of the time to read it. If nothing else, this chapter is a brilliant exposition of what truly interdisciplinary theological research can look like. Ulrich's willingness to risk teaching classes with a geneticist enables him to compellingly argue for his hermeneutical approach by means of reference to its real-life benefits. He has demonstrated that theological ethics is not inherently subordinated to something called ‘nature’ when it collaborates with the natural sciences (p. 228).
This is all the more significant because of the content of the final chapter of the book which considers God's transfiguring presence in our midst as discovered by attending to the lives of people with disability. In dialogue with Hans Reinders, Brian Brock, and Amy Julia Becker among others, Ulrich describes the Christian life as a process of ‘becoming real’ which can also be seen as ‘translocation’—a journey that is cognitive but much more than that whereby we are confronted with our place in God's story (p. 245). Our friends with disabilities are our guides on this pilgrimage. What serves as a summary for the chapter argument could also summarize the book's wider project: ‘The decisive reality of God is that God has willed to share his lively being with us. In God's story with us no one is omitted, because God depends on individual human beings, that is, on real individual figures, to pursue God's will and so for God's will to become concretized in a particular way’ (p. 264).
This book is a masterpiece. It features a very useful list of Ulrich's publication history and the even more useful introductory chapter by Brian Brock. But its contribution is grounded on the imaginative scope of Ulrich's chapters. It is the kind of text that inspires its readers to write more theology, either building on the insights presented here so clearly or disputing them. We started with the opening sentence of the introduction and it is fitting to end with the closing sentences: ‘Ulrich shows us how the historical Christian tradition can still be lived in, can still reveal the world, and is so much more than a moral program or a dogma about the truth. This is theology that cannot rest content until transfigured by a living God’ (p. 24).