Eberhard Jüngel is by turns one of the most stimulating and one of the most exasperating writers in modern theology. His style can be both diffuse and tightlypacked, both dryly technical and rhetorically impassioned, combining the scholarly rigours of a formidable intellect and the effusiveness of a highly popular lecturer and preacher. His translators routinely complain of the difficulties of rendering his involved German into lucid English, while it is rumoured that Jüngel celebrates on hearing of their problems. He shows very little interest in English-language theology, but remains firmly within the milieu of the German tradition. He inherits from Barth the conviction that theology deals with profound realities which require no apology and which can never bereduced to simplistic verbal schemata. From his Doktorvater, Ernst Fuchs, he has gained a hermeneutical perspective whose concern with issues of temporality and language goes back to the later Heidegger. This dual legacy lends obvious intellectual weight to Jungel's creative theology, but it also ensures that his work does not make for easy reading.