In what follows I offer a dyptich on the assurance of salvation and its relation to good works in three Christian traditions, Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic. The Orthodox Reformed (or the Reformed scholastics in the generations after Calvin) consider the assurance of salvation in terms of the practical syllogism: crudely put, my salvation depends on God's election, but I can tell whether I am among the elect by examining my good works. The Orthodox Lutherans (Lutheran scholastics in the generations after Luther) consider die assurance of salvation in terms of fides praevisa, or (crudely) faith that God foresees, in abstraction from the further question of whether or not God also causes it. Thomas Aquinas, comparable in method and influence, considers the sort of knowledge that observation of one's merits bestows: not certainty but conjecture.y

Eberhard Jüngel is by turns one of the most stimulating and one of the most exasperating writers in modern theology. His style can be both diffuse and tightlypacked, both dryly technical and rhetorically impassioned, combining the scholarly rigours of a formidable intellect and the effusiveness of a highly popular lecturer and preacher. His translators routinely complain of the difficulties of rendering his involved German into lucid English, while it is rumoured that Jüngel celebrates on hearing of their problems. He shows very little interest in English-language theology, but remains firmly within the milieu of the German tradition. He inherits from Barth the conviction that theology deals with profound realities which require no apology and which can never bereduced to simplistic verbal schemata. From his Doktorvater, Ernst Fuchs, he has gained a hermeneutical perspective whose concern with issues of temporality and language goes back to the later Heidegger. This dual legacy lends obvious intellectual weight to Jungel's creative theology, but it also ensures that his work does not make for easy reading.

William abraham criticizes the Yale school of theology for its ‘systematic cultivation of studied obscurantism.’ Abraham does not doubt the intellectual gifts of the Yale theologians, but he chides them for failing to tell us something definitive about God. ‘One hopes for such minimal things from a theologian. After all, that has always been a central element of any serious theology.’