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The Theology of Ernst Käsemann ‐ I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
Ernst Käsemann was born in Westphalia in 1906. His graduate studies, in the leisurely and protracted German manner, were coming to a close in 1933, the year in which Hitler was voted into power and his dissertation on the concepts of the body and the body of Christ in St Paul was published. From the outset, as a young pfarrer in Westphalia, he belonged to the Confessing Church: the organized opposition to the influence of National Socialism among German Protestants. At the age of forty, in 1946, he returned to academic life as professor of New Testament studies, first at Mainz, then at Gottingen, and since 1959 until his retirement at Tubingen. On the third day of his first semester as a student at Bonn in 1925 he started going to the class on the Epistle to the Romans which was being given by Erik Peterson: “the course of my study and in some sense, as befits a theologian, my life was decided” (p vii). In 1973 he published the commentary on Romans which had occupied him for many years. A third revised edition was required a year later. This is the text, very carefully and literally translated (almost pedantically, although that is a laudable fault in the present current of wretchedly inadequate translations), by Geoffrey W, Bromiley, which is now under review.
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- Copyright © 1981 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 I have followed the commonly accepted dating but in the first volume of his Paulus der Heidenapostel (1980), sticking to the internal evidence of Paul's own letters alone, Gerd Ludemann comes up, excitingly and persuasively, with a much earlier dating for I Thessalonians ‐ about the year 41, which explains why they were so taken aback when some of them died before the Parousia. The Epistle to the Romans would be not later than 55 AD.
2 Thus E. M. Sidebottom in the Century Bible commentary (1967) Which makes the Letter of James a fascinating witness to a form of Christianity interested in the teaching of Jesus but apparently not in the cross or resurrection.
3 See Paul's Letter to the Romans (1975), reviewed in New Blackfriars April 1976 by Lewis Smith.
4 See Karl Barth: The Epistle to the Romans (1933). Perhaps I should declare an interest in the Epistle to the Romans: it was reading Barth's commentary in the Easter vacation of 1952, when I was twenty, that converted me to the Christian faith and thus to belief in God. I had written off the Church of Scotland when 1 was about thirteen, and the “English Kirk” was out of the question ‐ which left nothing else but Rome, and “O the mind, mind has mountains” from the Hopkins sonnet settled me in that direction. I had not talked to any Catholics; I was finally received into the Catholic Church in York on the vigil of the Assumption 1954.
5 At this point I would thank the Dominican nuns at Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight with whom I recently worked through the Epistle to the Romans in the light of Kasemann's commentary.
6 In the next instalment, reviewing Pierre Gisel's book on Käsemann.