A tribute to Ernst Kasemann and a theological testament

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

22 August 1995

Dear Herr Zahl!

For the last nine months your dissertation has been sitting on my desk in the study, enclosed within it the very nice family photo that you sent at the end of April. For that I have not yet thanked you and I now can. with my sincere apologies. I do have my excuses, which you will understand and will consider sufficient. From the fact that I have just one fonth ago entered the ninth decade of my life, and that I am now not only the eldest in my theological faculty but am also the oldest living of the academic theologians who were part of the radical wing of the Confessing Church in Germany, I bear heavily the burdens of my age.

In February I was operated on for cataracts by means of laser surgery and for four or five weeks thereafter had to be very guarded in respect to any reading I might do. Then came our Diamond Anniversa]? (60 years!) and in July my 89th birthday. To head off the storm, we first retreated from Tubingen to our daughter's house. But the 70 letters we received finally had to be answered. Then, with the end of the semester, the foreign students left town, after which the Prague Society and several others came to us, all of whose visits we had to take in small doses. In mid-September, the third (cataract) operation will probably take place.

After that, it will become clear whether I shall go slowly blind or just be further reduced in productivity. Your dissertation in any case will have to wait in order to be read to its conclusion. Or it may have to wait until it sits before me in book form. Now I have complained enough, but have laid out my burdens before you. So long as my wife is still with me, I remain serene. Our life was full of adventure and not in vain. That is enough.

Now, to your work: It has been highly praised by both examiners and deserves it, tco. I do not expect the Americans in general to read my work with much sympathy. I remain wide open to their criticism and feel all right about that. But where there are many opponents, there are also reliable friends. You belong among the latter. People like Keck and Martyn will step up for me from the trenches, and in England Barrett and the Edinburgh people especially, in Scandinavia Jervell, and also Alorgan and Templeton. I think you will understand, therefore, if I now appear critical, because our agreement is already established. I owe you as much a debt as anyone. I do hope that your work will appear in America. I would also gladly see an edition of your work published in Germany.

On the objective side, I do not agree with the way you say on page 74 that faith means "to be one of the godless," even though you immediately clarify a "godless" one as one who is "at the end of his own works." One should not over-state matters. Everywhere in the Bible there are truly pious people, that is, receivers and doers of God's works, therefore instruments of the Holy Spirit, pneumatics really.

Less tolerable to me is where you occasionally reckon Christ on the Cross as being among the godless, although you mean that He was like us with the exception of sin. One should neither leap over the Old Testament nor over Pentecost, leap over neither the "humble" nor over the "charismatics," because they refer themselves to God's help and remain among the tempted ("Angefochtene"). God's servants ought not to be thrown into the same pot as the unfaithful, and certainly not the suffering Christ. I do not know whether you develop elsewhere more ]?recisely what we both mean by the expression "godless," and therefore refer as "godless" to Christians who arm themselves with their own piety and thus look down on the poor heathen. God is powerful in the world and obdurately overturns any who convert God's gifts into their own works and pompous titles, as Paul himself says of Israe'. Paul represents himself as one of these in Philippians: he was zealous for the Law and therefore had to be broken into pieces.