Introductory

The context of Jüngel's theological anthropology is his overarching concern to provide an account of the relation between God and man in which their respective realities are affirmed. The distinction between God and man, that is, is formulated as part of a larger strategy of excluding monism, whether it be a theomonism in which man and the world vanish as mere functions of God's self-affirmation, or an anthropomonism in which discourse about God can in the last analysis be reduced to discourse about the world. Properly to distinguish between God and man is to affirm that they constitute an irreducible duality in which neither is to be absorbed into the other.

Jüngel's anthropology is written with panache and not a little rhetorical flourish. If its presentation is at once markedly bold and defensive, this is because it is in many ways an apologetic exercise, directed to those who suggest that to give a Christological basis to anthropology may be to curtail the liberty and even the reality of man. Theo- or Christomonism, the absorption of man into the one divine reality, is, of course, a charge frequently levelled against Barth's doctrine of man. It is a charge which Jüngel's interpretations of some of the fundamental moves of Barth's anthropology, as well as his own essays in the area, have sought stoutly to deny.