ABSTRACT
The theology of Emil Brunner (1889-1966) is nourished by the vitality of the human’s relationship with God, and central theologically for him is his claim that the human’s true God-dependence constitutes the human’s true self-dependence. Brunner is convinced that Protestant theology’s recovery of the Reformers in the early part of the twentieth century was due in no small measure to the recovering of the great Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard.1 He identifies Kierkegaard as one of “the great men who are exceptions in the realm of theology” because he has taken up “the true task of the Christian thinker.”2 Brunner is convinced that it is anthropology, the doctrine of the human, which is the appropriate place for the discussion between the Christian faith and non-Christian thought, and Kierkegaard with his existential philosophy “has placed his intellectual genius at the disposal of this discussion.”3 Brunner does not simply receive from Kierkegaard; he receives his existential message, appropriates it deeply, and then with the feisty vigor of Kierkegaard himself promotes that message by critiquing prevailing antithetical perspectives of the time. This polemical promoting of all that Kierkegaard was about sets Brunner apart from other theologians of his time. Even though Emil Brunner was Swiss, he is appropriately included in a volume on Kierkegaard’s influence on German theology because he participated in German culture and wrote most of his theological works in German.
