Theopedia

Emil Brunner

Not because I believe in the Scriptures do I believe in Christ, but because I believe in Christ I believe in the Scriptures.1

Overview

Emil Brunner (1889-1966) was a Swiss Reformed theologian associated, together with Karl Barth, with Neo-Orthodoxy, the twentieth-century dialectical theology movement that challenged nineteenth-century theological liberalism.2 Brunner located Scripture’s authority not in the text’s own qualities but in the believer’s existential encounter with Christ through it, a move that drew criticism from Reformed evangelical writers.34 He also broke publicly with Barth in the 1930s over whether any place remains for natural theology.5

Life and Ministry

Brunner was ordained in the Swiss Reformed Church and served as a pastor at Obstalden, Switzerland, from 1916 to 1924. In 1924 he became professor of systematic and practical theology at the University of Zurich, a post he held continuously apart from extended lecture tours in the United States and Asia.2

Theological Contribution

Brunner is grouped with Barth and Rudolf Bultmann as one of the twentieth century’s “classical existential” or dialectical theologians: thinkers who located the authority of Scripture not in the text’s own qualities but in an individual’s existential encounter with God, an event (Ereignis) rather than a fixed propositional deposit.3 On this account Scripture is a witness to God’s Word, Jesus Christ, and “becomes” the word of God when that encounter occurs, rather than being the word of God in a static, settled sense; Brunner states a position close to Barth’s own on this point.3

Because Scripture’s authority for Brunner rested on the encounter rather than on the reliability of the text, he could treat internal discrepancies among the Gospels as no threat to that authority: “God can speak to us His single, never contradictory word through … the contradictory accounts of Luke and Matthew.”6 He likewise resisted grounding Scripture’s authority in historical investigation of authorship:

On what a quaking ground has the Church of the Reformation, and its “orthodox” perversion, placed both itself and its message! We owe a profound debt of gratitude to the historical criticism that has made it quite impossible to maintain this position.7

For Brunner, faith in Christ was the ground of faith in Scripture, not the reverse.1

Brunner extended this logic beyond the biblical text itself, allowing that “God can, if he so wills, speak his Word to a man even through false doctrine and correspondingly find in a false Credo-credo the right echo of his Word.”8 Roger Nicole, surveying this strand of Brunner’s thought, summarized it more pointedly still: “Somehow it is God’s voice, too, in the Koran or the Vedas.”9

Historical Significance

Brunner and Barth broke publicly over the place of natural theology. Brunner argued for retaining a place for natural theology within a revelation-centered system; Barth rejected this outright, replying to Brunner’s essay Nature and Grace with a tract titled simply No!.5 The two had until then been associated together as founders of the same movement; they did not reconcile the disagreement.10

Kruger argues that this model, which Brunner shared with Barth and Bultmann, grounds a book’s authority in existential encounter rather than in the text’s own qualities, and so leaves the neo-orthodox position unable to provide “any real basis” for restricting the canon to a fixed set of books.3 Cornelius Van Til devoted a book-length Reformed critique, The New Modernism, to Barth’s and Brunner’s shared theology.4

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

References

  1. Brunner, Revelation and Reason, 170, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1. ↩ ↩2

  2. “Brunner, Emil,” in The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001-2007). ↩ ↩2

  3. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1947), cited in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1. ↩ ↩2

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God,” editor’s note, citing Emil Brunner, Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace,” and the reply “No!” by Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel, introd. John Baillie (London: G. Bles, Centenary, 1946). ↩ ↩2

  6. Emil Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter, trans. W. Amandus Loos (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), 173, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1. ↩

  7. Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1946), 168, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1. ↩

  8. Emil Brunner, Truth as Encounter (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1943), 137, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1. ↩

  9. Roger Nicole, “The Neo-Orthodox Reduction,” in Challenges to Inerrancy: A Theological Response, ed. Gordon Lewis and Bruce Demarest (Chicago: Moody, 1984), 141, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1. ↩

  10. John W. Hart, Karl Barth vs. Emil Brunner: The Formation and Dissolution of a Theological Alliance, 1916-1936 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), cited in Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, editor’s note. ↩