Wingren's Theology in 2500 Words

Pruning a Text or Doing Justice to Wingren’s Theology

I have been in hiding for the last couple of weeks as I had to complete an article on Gustaf Wingren’s theology. He was a leading theologian in Lund from the middle of last century and was involved in some of the great debates at the time (democracy, women priests, church and state). He was very gifted and had a golden tongue, people listened to him, but he was also antagonistic in his attempt to build fronts against other theological standpoints. For example, when he held his inaugural lecture as new professor of dogmatics and theological ethics in 1951, only 41 years old, he bluntly told the audience, including his famous predecessor Anders Nygren, that henceforth Anders Nygren’s main contributions (his work on eros and agape [the question of Christian love] and his philosophical justification for theology) were null and void. The audience were stunned, did not know what to think. In the end Wingren was persistent in his theology of creation and law. He has convincingly demonstrated that before we can talk about the gospel we have to know that we are created beings of God and that there is an existence as human beings (and including all other living beings and matter, be it organic or inorganic) that has to be redeemed. Wingren could speak to common man and woman and make him and her feel important regardless of who he or she was.

Wingren is one of the great ones as a scholar and has written extensively, his major works I think consists of at least 15 books. I had now been asked to write an article on Wingren’s theology in a book series on creation and redemption as a background to a theological reflection relating to ecology and the environment. The project is very ambitious and the authors are from all continents of the world. Wingren would only be able to occupy a small part of volume two. Nevertheless I was glad to have this assignment as that gave me an opportunity to return to his theology again and he was indeed my professor in Lund. The only problem was that in the end my article had to be maximum 2500 words, that is roughly 5 A4 pages. I did not think too much about it except towards the end when I had to ask myself, is it possible to prune a text down to 2500 words and at the same time do justice to Wingren’s theology. Sitting here in Rottne, I do not have the answer, but I have a few comments to make. In my editing process I went down from I think 6418 words eventually to the required size. In the process I lost a few valuable pieces of theology.

Had it not been a theological text where I had to elaborate on creation and redemption I could have chosen a different path; with a short space it might have been better to tell a story that would in itself give a clue to his theology. But that was not to be. I have reflected on this phenomenon of cutting things shorter and shorter and one should know that there is a limit to what you can endure “smärtgräns”. If you go below that limit you may lose more than you gain. Another word for this tendency is “snuttifiering” (which is all too apparent in various newscasts today. Notorious is the famous Palestinian scholar Edward Said who stopped making televised interviews altogether (and he was exposed to the US media being a US citizen) for he never had a chance to develop his argument, he was invariably asked to sum up his point of view in a couple of words only. So there is a limit to everything. In a way I had reached that limit, for when I read through my text, now down to a little more than four pages, I realised that I had taken out an absolutely crucial part about how Irenaeus (a second century theologian) connects Christ’s work with Adam, who in fact (as representing humankind) was redeemed by Christ also. In order to survive, handing in a credible text, somehow reflecting Wingren’s thought, I had to bring back this paragraph on Irenaeus into my text. I did that and felt so much better afterwards.

So why read Wingren? Three things; he binds together the fact that creation, especially the physical creation, is by God. The remarkable thing is that we exist; he dares talk about the resurrection of Christ as a historical event, which however remains something that cannot be proven but must be believed; he wants to talk about death as something natural in this world against this background, knowing very well that this is a sore point in a secular Western society, where death is kept at bay in our use of language, and also physically. Maybe I should just have given one of the quotes that makes me love this Wingren, who indeed was a firm believer but at the same time perhaps the best theologian Sweden ever had in the 20^th century; with this quote I would only have required about 200 words and maybe would have said more about his theology than my 2500 words. Here is the quote:

“Life is death, life is a way of dying. There is an old word about the grain of wheat which comes alive just when it dies, a word from the New Testament with different interpretations (många bottnar), in addition a word that the farmer even today understands well. Nothing in life is quite meaningful unless it leads to my being made use of. If I am made use of I am worn down. Death on the actual day of dying is only a special case of this meaningful wearing down.”