A tribute to Ernst Kasemann and a theological testament

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 1998 by Zahl, Paul F M

PAUL F. M. ZAHL*

On February 14, 1998 the New Testament scholar and theologian Ernst Kasemann died. He was 91 years old. He was buried from the Protestant Parish of Tbingen-Lustnau on February 25th.

For all who knew him, let alone the very wide circle of those who were influenced by his work, Kisemann's death was a blow. It also occasioned many moments in which to give thanks. This brief essay is one of them.

In the early 1990s I was able to spend three years at the University of Tubingen studying the theology of Ernst Kiisemann. This research was conducted under the supervision of Jirgen Moltmann. Kasemann was very much alive and well, despite his chronic protestations of illness. He was in full provocative mode during that entire period.

After receiving the doctorate in systematic theology December 6, 1994, I returned to the U.S. to take up duties at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. At that point Kasemann and I began a correspondence. This correspondence revealed the astonishing strength and continuity of his theological reflection. Four of his letters were direct responses to friendly theological criticism and interpretation. These letters, composed at the end of his life, comprise a dense, terse theological testament. I have translated them from German into -English and offer them to the readers of Anglican Th.eological Review), with brief commentary to establish the context. Only a few cuts have been made, of certain private and family observations.

To establish the context of these letters, it is necessary first to give a short profile of Ernst Kasemann's life. He was born July 12, 1906 in Dahlhaussen near Bochum. He said that his youth was "alone and joyless."4 Hav,ing studied theology at Bonn (where he was influenced by Erik Peterson) and Marburg (where he first met Rudolf Bultrnann), Kasemann came to Tubingen in 1927 in order to hear Adolf Schlatter. He received the doctorate from Marburg in 1931 and served in parish ministry from 1933 to 1946. His ministry in the mining town of Gelsenkirchen drew down the wrath of the Gestapo. He was imprisoned briefly in 197. Kasemann was active in the Confessing Church's struggle against Alolf Hitler.

In 1946 he became Professor of New Testament at the University of Mainz. From 1951 to 1959 he was Professor of New Testament at Gottingen, until he was called to Tubingen. He retired from active teaching in 1971.

Kasemann considered himself a revolutionary "partisan," campaigning against idolatry on every front. His celebrated confrontation with the Gestapo in 1937; his conflict with the "Pietists" in the late 1970s, who believed that he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus; his highly public sympathy with student radicals in 1968; the fact that his daughter Elizabeth became a political revolutionary in Argentina and was murdered by the Junta there in 1977: these and many other important moments in a life that can properly be described as almost "world-historical,' were all shaped by the metaphor of struggle against the principalities and powers.

On the scholarly side, Kasemann was known as one of the founders of the "second quest" for the historical Jesus, as a leading theologian of Paul and Pauline apocalyptic, and as a student of John's Gospel. The inner core of all his written work, as the following letters attest, was his highly individual reception of justification by faith. If Kasemann was a partisan of the partisans and a higher-critic of the higher-critics, he was also a Reformation theologian par excellence. He did not at all mind being called a "Gnesio-Luther(lner" (a "purest of the Lutherans"), although he really wasn't. He was too combative to be held to any one school of thought. His personal heroes were F.C. Baur and Martin Luther.

The first letter I received of a strongly theological characterafter my family and I had come to Birmingham-was typical. Kasemann spent three paragraphs describing his many illnesses and limitations, even asserting that he had not read my dissertation. Then, like lightning, he was right into it! He seemed completely focussed at all times on his theological mission, and extraordinarily well-informed given the fact that he had been emeritus for 24 years.

The reader will note Kasemann's focus on the word "godless" and its meaning. For him, the "godless" are those who have come to the end of their hopes of achieving self-importance or self-worth and have been reduced to "nothing." God has acted to "justify" such by His intervention in Christ, through which the "godless" receive their true God or "]Lord." Kasemann criticizes my identification of Jesus on the Cross with the "godless," stating that this goes further than he intends. He also parries my criticism that he "de-individualizes" persons when he claims that a "man" (Mensch) is no more or less than the "concretion" of his or her "Lord." Kasemann moves immediately on to a reflection concerning philosophical Idealism, which he believes to be the true culprit in abstracting away the entire world. He introduces his vital notion of the Christian individual as being a revolutionary "partisan," at war with the powers of this world.