Lutheran on Coexistence

A dapper Cyranosed professor moved eagerly from tea to lecture platform to seminar last week at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. Students and faculty members welcomed Oscar Cullmann as one of Europe's outstanding Protestant theologians, author of Peter, an exegetical study of the origins of the Papacy (TIME, Dec. 7, 1953), and of a noted eschatological work, Christ and Time. His listeners found Theologian Cullmann's English fluent, his manner affable, and his occasional comments on the U.S. apt.

"Hardly anyone in America seems to know the Biblical languages," he said. "In Europe, Greek and Hebrew are compulsory at all the seminaries. Every theologian should be able to read Scripture in the original languages, of course, but every minister should as well. New meanings disclose themselves."

Toward Neoliberalism. Lutheran Cullmann, 53, is a great searcher for new meanings himself. Born in Strasbourg, he has occupied the chair of Early Church History and the New Testament at Switzerland's Basel University since 1938. Theologian Cullmann also teaches early Christianity at the Sorbonne, commuting to Paris for two days of lecturing every fortnight. Cullmann stitches busily away at his theological works on trains between Basel, Paris and Rome (soon to be published is his book on the Christology of the New Testament, and also in progress are a French translation of the New Testament, a commentary on the Gospel of John, and innumerable lectures). As he watches Europe's intellectual landscape, Commuter Cullmann sees some significant trends. Most notable:

P: French Roman Catholics and Protestants are drawing closer together in the field of Biblical study. At the Sorbonne, about half his students are Catholic. Says Cullmann: "There has been a significant increase in recent years in the amount of freedom Catholics have in working on Biblical texts. Private discussions on theological matters between Catholics and Protestants are being encouraged."

P: In Protestant thinking, the trend is away from Karl Earth, whose postwar neutralism has lost him some of his following. There is a tendency on the Continent, as in the U.S., says Cullmann, toward neoliberalism in theology.

Among Cullmann's most provocative topics is the Christian view of the state, which was the subject of his four lectures at Union last week. The attitude of Christianity toward most modern problems, says Cullmann, can only be found by deduction from the principles of the New Testament, but the Christian attitude toward the state, he holds, is explicit in the Gospel and at its very heart.

The End-Time. Those who see the Christian belief in the end of the world as implying an attitude of indifference to earthly values are dead wrong, according to Cullmann. But though Christianity does not deny the world, it does not affirm it. either. The complex attitude that places the Christian between the two is what Cullmann calls "chronological dualism." This is "the conviction that, on the one hand . . . Christ the end is already fulfilled, and that nonetheless the consummation is still in the future, since the framework of the present world still endures . .."

As a result, "the church, first, must loyally give the state everything necessary to its existence. It has to oppose anarchy and all Zealotism within its own ranks. Second, it has to fulfill the office of watchman over the state. That means: it must remain . . . critical toward every state and be ready to warn it against transgression of its legitimate limits . . . "In the course of history the church has always assumed a false attitude toward the state when it has forgotten that the present time is already fulfillment, but not yet consummation. Then we get ... erroneous solutions . . . either that the church tries to put itself in the place of the state, or else that the state is simply accepted uncritically in all that it does, as if there were no problem at all ... In both cases the church is guilty of the same fault: relinquishment of the New Testament interpretation of the end-time. Just this interpretation is the association of church and state in a peaceful and fruitful coexistence."

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