Narrative theology of E. Jungel and the philosophy of the name of A.F. Losev

The article is concerned with an attempt to correlate the thinking of being and faith of Revelation in modern German evangelical theology and in Russian religious philosophy on the example of the work of E. Jungel and A.F. Losev. The author reveals the uniqueness of Jungel’s concept of the Word of God in comparison with the event nature of the Word of God by K. Barth. Jüngel’s narrative theory of the Gospel parable is comprehended in the article in the perspective of finding common ground and especially with the philosophy of symbolic reality, of the name by A. Losev. Jungel thinks through the event nature of Revelation as the Word of God proposed by K. Barth, using the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger, He develops a theological hermeneutic ontology in which the event of the Word of God acquires the features of the Gospel narrative of the parable. As discursive theology, based on the idea of the metaphysical absolute, is destroyed from the German thinker’s point of view, narrative theology wins its positions. For the German theologian, the core of the Christian kerygma – the death of God – is organically linked to the tradition of nineteenth-century philosophical atheism and is revealed in it no less than in theology and religious philosophy. The Russian philosopher refers to Hegel’s dialectics and Husserl’s phenomenology in understanding the event of God’s Revelation. However, he tries to integrate them into the model of Neo-platonic metaphysics, from which, in his opinion, they were formed. Losev, to the extent that he is a metaphysician, proceeds in the concept of name, unlike Jungel, from the principle of the analogy of being rather than the analogy of belief. The name for the Russian philosopher is not a story, but an energy (force) that has an ontological nature. With him, the name reflects essence rather than describing an event. Losev goes back to Antiquity to reanimate Neoplatonic metaphysics by means of the concept of the symbol, burying in it Plato and the non-metaphysical forms of thinking of the Christian kerygma. Jungel’s theology funds the word-centrism of the Protestant cult and contributes to the explication of the new-modern image of Christianity in Protestantism. Losev, for his part, does not undertake to explicate beyond metaphysics the antique-medieval mystery nature of the Christian cult in Orthodoxy. He needs to convey in his philosophical and theological thought not only the verbal aspect of the event of Revelation. In order to express the aesthetic and mystical dimension of Revelation, the Russian philosopher engages the metaphysics of all-encompassing unity with the idea of an unchanging Absolute

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