Walter Mostert

Walter Mostert (born June 10, 1936 in Wuppertal ; † March 4, 1995 in Zurich ) was a German theologian. Since 1986 he has been professor of systematic theology at the University of Zurich.

Walter Mostert

Life

Mostert was born on June 10, 1936 as the son of a textile engineer in Wuppertal. There he attended the old-language Wilhelm-Dörpfeld-Gymnasium from 1947 and passed his Abitur in 1956. After Mostert instinctively decided to study theology, he studied 1956–1962 in Bonn (especially New Testament exegesis with Philipp Vielhauer ), in Göttingen (especially Old Testament exegesis with Walther Zimmerli ) and in Zurich, where he worked in the symbiosis of historical and systematic work with Gerhard Ebeling found his theological teacher. After the 1st theol. Examining the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland in 1962 , he returned to Zurich to do his doctorate with Ebeling. As his assistant he followed him to the theological faculty in Tübingen in 1966 and returned with him to the University of Zurich in 1969. He completed his dissertation in Zurich in 1974 and received his habilitation in 1976 with a historical and dogmatic study of the motif of the incarnation of the Son of God with Thomas Aquinas. When Gerhard Ebeling resigned in 1980, Mostert was his successor, initially as associate professor, at the chair for systematic theology with special emphasis on fundamental theology and hermeneutics. With the full professorship in 1986, he became head of the Zurich Institute for Hermeneutics. From 1988 to 1990 he was dean of the theological faculty in Zurich. In 1994 Mostert fell ill with leukemia and died on March 4, 1995 at the age of 58.

theology

Sense or certainty?

Mostert initially concentrated his dissertation on the problem of the certainty of salvation. This problem grew more and more into the fundamental question of whether a dogmatic way of thinking does not dominate modern man, which fixes him completely on his actions, so that a search for the meaning of life always only leads man to his meaning constructs Throw back action and therefore remain pointless. Mostert used this dogmatic thought to theological criticism of Luther's distinction between person and work, in order to break the fixation on action and to open up the dimension of certainty to those seeking meaning by justifying the person of the sinner by grace. The dissertation was finally given the title “Sense or Certainty? Attempt a theological criticism of dogmatic thinking ”. The doctorate by the Theological Faculty of the University of Zurich was awarded in 1974 with “summa cum laude”. In 1975 Mostert put the core of his dissertation up for public discussion in a large-scale, well-received article on “Experience as a Criterion of Theology”. His thesis: experience in a precisely theological sense is experience with sin.

Incarnation

In February 1976 Mostert submitted a post-doctoral thesis to the same faculty: “Human becoming. A historical and dogmatic study of the motif of the incarnation of the Son of God in Thomas Aquinas ”, with which he was qualified as a private lecturer by the Theological Faculty of the University of Zurich. Mostert analyzed a quaestio of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. He investigated the question of whether Christ had become man in order to free the descendants of Adam and Eve from sin again, as Anselm of Canterbury put it, or whether there was an additional goal for the incarnation of Christ, such as the calling of man for cooperation with God in the development of the kingdom of God, as Bonaventure said. Determined and differentiated at the same time, Mostert agreed with Anselm's opinion, which Thomas had also followed, that Christ became man solely for the sake of man's sin. Here Mostert saw a great closeness to Martin Luther .

Faith and Hermeneutics

In 1998, Gerhard Ebeling, Pierre Bühler published "Collected Essays" by Mostert under the title "Faith and Hermeneutics". There are essays and lectures through which Mostert became known in theological and philosophical circles during his lifetime as an astute fundamental theologian, who was able to concisely pose Reformation questions in a modern context and thus how to provoke them. B. by his resistance to a widespread forgetting of sin. Mostert was concerned with the rediscovery of an ontological understanding of sin, without any theology becoming too harmless.

Experience with sin

In 2008 Karl Adolf Bauer, Peter Koller, Christian Möller and Harald Weinacht published further essays and lectures by Mostert under the title: “Experience as a criterion in theology. Theological chunks from three decades (1966-1995) ”to illustrate the experiential dimension of Mostert's theology. For Mostert, experience remains superficial as long as it does not experience sin. "Sin is man's denial of living on a kind of goodness that he has not produced himself, but is constantly receiving". But people are so fixated on their actions that they cannot even perceive what is really wearing them. As a doer, man wants to be creator and not creature. What consequences this perversion z. B. has for ecological action, was already seen astutely by Mostert in his dissertation in 1976. How people get from making into receiving, from speaking into hearing, from making into giving, that was Mostert's crucial question from the start.

Mostert saw the contribution of theology to modern empirical research in a new, demoralized understanding of sin, which helps people to understand and confess their deepest and most terrible experiences with themselves in order to become more experienced. What kind of experiences are these? “I don't do the good that I want; but the evil that I do not want, that's what I do. "(Rom 7:19) That Paul had such a personal experience with the experience of his being torn apart is possible because he has gained a new place for his existence in Christ, from from which he can recognize and admit the abysses over which his existence is stretched. Man without Christ hides his own abysses and clings to his own successes and achievements, but imposes on them just such a soteriological weight that they do not inherently have. Mostert sees sin "in the unwillingness or inability of man to finally correspond to the finiteness of his acts" and "to expect a reassurance of his being from them, which the acts of life cannot provide. Only through this burden of the interest in reassurance do the acts of life become morally bad and ontologically sinful. "If the acts of life collapse under the burden of the interest in reassurance, then, since people cannot exist without reassurance of themselves, the flight to supposedly objective, generally valid insurance instances the way out, which reinterprets people's experience with the help of a seemingly objective, universally valid system and thus veils them for a while. Mostert counts any kind of science among such insurance bodies that helps to transpose the experience of the individual into a larger system of experiences. Then the experience of the individual appears only random, marginal and subjective. Against this generalizing trend of the sciences, which can be effective in theology as well as in the empirical sciences, Mostert tried to bring the experience of the individual to justice.

Peculiarity of his lectures

Mostert's essays and lectures, as well as his dissertation and habilitation thesis, suffer from the fact that they are extremely condensed and demand extreme tension from the reader. For this reason, even during his lifetime, his writings were mostly an “insider tip” for connoisseurs and specialists who did not shy away from intellectual efforts. It was different in his lectures, in which Mostert took small steps in thinking with his listeners, gave them side glances at what seemed irrelevant, told their own experiences and risked refreshing polemics. In these lectures, which are preserved as handwritten manuscripts in his estate, the intermediate steps become recognizable, which in Mostert's essays are left for the reader to think about. So it made sense to decipher some of his most important lectures and publish them as books:

• The lecture from WS 1993/94 "Church, Baptism, Last Supper (Ecclesiology and Sacraments)" with the title: " Jesus Christ - Beginner and Finisher of the Church"
• The lectures on “Doctrine of Justification I – III” from SoSe 1978-SoSe 1979 under the title: “Justification - biblical-theological, dogma-historical, fundamental theological”.
• The lecture on “Christology I – II” from winter semester 1985/86 and summer semester 1986 under the title: “ Jesus Christ - true God and true man. Two lectures and an essay on Christology ”.

Mostert reveals himself in these lectures

• as an interpreter who leaves no systematic question without the justification of a “consistent exegesis” (E. Jüngel ).
• as a fundamental theologian who makes Reformation theology the foundation of a truly modern theology;
• as a hermeneut who hermeneutically makes the question of sin the foundation of self-criticism and who theologically only understands experience as experienced when it has become an experience with sin (Romans 7)

Publications (a selection)

Monographs

• Sense or certainty? Try a theological critique of dogmatic thinking. (= Hermeneutical studies on theology. Vol. 16). Mohr, Tübingen 1976, ISBN 3-16-137732-X (= dissertation , University of Zurich, 1974).
• Incarnation. A historical and dogmatic study of the motif of the incarnation of the Son of God in Thomas Aquinas. (= Contributions to historical theology. Vol. 57). Mohr, Tübingen 1978, ISBN 3-16-140322-3 (= habilitation thesis , University of Zurich, 1976).
• Jesus Christ - Beginner and Finisher of the Church. An evangelical doctrine of the church. TVZ, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-290-17375-5 .
• Doctrine of justification. Biblical-theological, dogma-historical, fundamental theological. TVZ, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-290-17580-1 .
• Jesus Christ - true God and true man. Two lectures and one lecture on Christology. TVZ, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-290-17620-4 .

Anthologies

• Faith and Hermeneutics. Collected Essays. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1998, ISBN 3-16-146967-4 .
• Experience as a criterion in theology. Theological fragments from three decades 1966-1995. EVZ, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-290-17502-3 .

Remarks

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Curriculum Vitae WALTER MOSTERTS from 1977, with additional remarks by Gerhard Ebeling, in: Pierre Bühler, Gerhard Ebeling et al. (Ed.): Walter Mostert, Glaube und Hermeneutik. Collected Essays. Tübingen 1998, pages 1-6.
2. ^ Walter Mostert: Incarnation. A historical and dogmatic study of the motif of the incarnation of the Son of God in Thomas Aquinas. (= Contributions to historical theology. Volume 57.) Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1978.
3. ↑ See the institute's homepage: http://www.hermes.uzh.ch/aboutus/geschichte.html
4. ↑ Walter Mostert: Sense or Certainty? Attempts at a theological criticism of dogmatic thought. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1976, pages 139-151.
5. ↑ Karl A. Bauer, Peter Koller (ed.): Experience as a criterion of theology. Theological chunks from three decades. 1966-1995. TVZ, Theologischer Verlag Zurich, Zurich, 2008. Pages 55–88.
6. ↑ Incarnation , page 150.
7. ↑ Incarnation , page 155ff.
8. ↑ Pierre Bühler et al. (Ed.): Walter Mostert. Faith and Hermeneutics. Collected Essays. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1998.
9. ↑ Experience as a criterion in theology , pp. 77–80.
10. ↑ Johannes Block: The talk of sin in the sermon of the present. A study on hamartological homiletics using the example of sermons from the Internet. Theological Verlag, Zurich 2012, pages 315ff and 351ff
11. ↑ Experience as a criterion in theology , page 82.
12. ↑ Karl A. Bauer, Peter Koller (ed.): Experience as a criterion of theology. Theological chunks from three decades. 1966-1995. TVZ, Theological Publishing House Zurich, Zurich, 2008.
13. ↑ Eberhard Jüngel : On the way to the point. Theological remarks. Chr. Kaiser, Munich 1972, page 50f.
14. ↑ 9. The editors: Karl Adolf Bauer, Peter Koller, Uwe Mahlert, Christian Möller, Harald Weinacht.
15. ^ Doctrine of Justification I: biblical-theological. In: Doctrine of Justification. Biblical-theological, dogma-historical, fundamental theological. TVZ, Zurich 2011.
16. ↑ Justification I , pages 253-318