Emil Brunner's life-long preoccupation1 with the theology of revelation resulted from what he considered to be a twofold deformation of the biblical concept of revelation: (1) a deformation by Protestant liberal theology that compromised its uniqueness and transcendence; (2) a petrification by the orthodox theology of Protestantism and Catholicism which transformed revelation from a living encounter into an object, either the bible or a deposit of propositional truths. Against the first deformation, Brunner insists that the biblical conception of revelation is absolutely unique and differs radically from that of non-biblical religions. Against the second, he underlines the personal nature of the Christian revelation as event, and the impossibility of expressing its full meaning in an abstract definition independently of its manifold and concrete forms.Despite his insistence that the biblical concept of revelation is totally different from that of non-biblical religions, Brunner willingly admits that 1 Revelation was a partner-theme with faith in Brunner's first two works of protest against the theology of the nineteenth century: Erlebnis, Erkenntnis und Glaube, 1921, and Die Mystik unddm Wort, 1924. Again in 1925, revelation was the theme of a small work, Philosophie und Offenbarung. In Der Mittler, 1927, revelation dominates almost every page, for one of its main aims is to show that the Person of Christ is the unique revelation. In the same year appeared the Religionsphilosophie evangelischer Theologie, which is a confrontation of the Christian concept of revelation with Rationalism, Subjectivism, Historicism and Orthodoxy. The works, Gott und Mensch, 1930, 'Die Frage nach dem "Ankniipfungspunkt" als Problem der Theologie', in Zwischen den Zeiten 10 (1932), 'Gesetz und Offenbarung' in Theologische Blutter 4 (1925), 'Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie', in Zwischen den Zeiten 7 (1929), and finally the work in which they all culminated, Der Mensch im Widerspruch, 1937, are all, in whole or in part, attempts to expose and develop a Christian anthropology, and thus be able to define the relation between the natural man and the revelation in the Word of God, i.e. der Ankniipfugspunkt for God's revelation. Brunner's answer to Karl Barth in Natur und Gnade, 1934 was a clarification of his views on natural revelation. His short work, Vom Werk des heiligen Geistes, 1935, indicates how the 'once-and-for-all' historical revelation in Jesus Christ is made present to all generations, or in Kierkegaard's terminology, how all men are made gleichreitig, contemporaneous with the revelation in Christ. The six conferences that appeared in 1938 under the title Wahrheit als Begegnung are an attempt to illustrate in the personalistic categories of Ebner and Buber, the significance for Christian theology of the biblical concept of truth as the event that occurs when man in faith meets God in His revelation. In 1941 appeared Offenbarung und Vernunft, dedicated entirely to exploring the Christian concept of revelation. Finally his views ...
