Emil Brunner

Life

Brunner was born in Winterthur, in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. He studied at the University of Zurich and the University of Berlin and was ordained a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church in 1912. In 1913 he received his doctorate in theology from the University of Zurich with a dissertation on the symbolic element in religious knowledge. From 1916 to 1924 he served as pastor in Obstalden, a mountain village in the canton of Glarus. During this period, in 1919, he studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

In 1924 he became professor of systematic and practical theology at the University of Zurich. Sources differ on the date of his retirement, giving either 1953 or 1955. During his professorship he was a visiting professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1938, and from 1946 to 1948 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. From 1953 to 1955 he taught at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, and helped establish the institution. After retiring he was largely unable to work because of a prolonged illness, and he died in Zurich in 1966.

Ministry and Work

Together with Barth, Brunner led the "dialectical theology" movement. This movement, which placed renewed emphasis on God's revelation in opposition to nineteenth-century liberal theology, is commonly called "neo-orthodoxy." His major works include The Mediator (1927), on Christology, and The Divine Imperative (1932), on Christian ethics, as well as Man in Revolt, Truth as Encounter, and the three-volume Dogmatics. In Truth as Encounter he located truth not in a system of doctrine but in the event of personal encounter between God and human beings.

Controversy with Barth. In 1932 Karl Barth sharply criticized Brunner in the first volume of his Church Dogmatics. Brunner responded in 1934 with Nature and Grace. He charged that Barth, contrary to Romans 1 and the Reformation tradition, denied all "natural revelation"—that is, any way in which God is made known through the created order. He further argued that such a position left no foundation on which to build Christian ethics. Brunner held that even after the Fall, humanity had not entirely lost the image of God. That same year Barth issued a direct rebuttal in a pamphlet titled No! Some scholars have argued that Barth's rejection of the Oxford Group movement, which Brunner supported, also contributed significantly to the estrangement between the two men.

Ecumenical work. From the 1930s onward Brunner served on study commissions of the ecumenical movement, and in 1948 he attended the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam as a delegate. He also served as a theological adviser to the YMCA and devoted himself to the training of its secretaries.

Influence on the Korean Church

In 1949 Brunner visited Korea at the invitation of the Korean YMCA. During this visit he reportedly gave a week of public lectures on communism and democracy. According to a study published in the journal of the Korean Society of Church History, the purpose of the visit was to train YMCA leaders. His lectures dealt mainly with social and political issues rather than theology, which gave them particular relevance amid the intense ideological conflict of the time. However, the dominant conservative churches, which did not accept biblical criticism, found parts of the lectures difficult to accept. As a result, Brunner came to be regarded as a liberal theologian regardless of the actual content of his lectures. Korean translations of his works began to appear around the time of this visit.

Assessment

Brunner is regarded as one of the most widely read theologians in the English-speaking world in the mid-twentieth century. The Mediator, The Divine Imperative, and Man in Revolt long served as standard textbooks in Protestant seminaries. At the same time, some have pointed out that the label "neo-orthodoxy," though widely applied to him, is imprecise. Criticism came from several directions. Barth firmly rejected Brunner's natural theology, believing that it obscured revelation given by grace alone. Some in Korea's conservative churches regarded him as belonging to the liberal camp. Brunner, for his part, maintained that acknowledging natural revelation was necessary both for faithfulness to Scripture and the Reformation tradition and for establishing an ethic through which the church could engage in dialogue with the world.