everyday phenomenon of need. However, Jüngel goes on to say that
the justification of sinners means that people find ‘acceptance
with God’. A person who does this‘is accepted irrevocably, once and
for all’.^5
Jüngel further claims that the Christian concept of righteousness
highlights a particular relationship and fellowship between human
beings and God. In this fellowship of righteousness, people can live
‘as people whom God acknowledges’. Quoting the biblical scholar
Gerhard von Rad, Jüngel holds that‘righteousness in human beings
is the fact of our being acknowledged by God’.^6 In the quotes above,
Jüngel employs the same German verb already used by Hegel,
namely,anerkennen. The English translation, however, renders it by
three different verbs:‘recognize’,‘accept’, and‘acknowledge’.
Jüngel thus assumes a basic human need for the recognition on which
our personhood depends. In addition, the salvific act of justification is
claimed to have close links with the phenomenon of recognition. With
von Rad, Jüngel holds that the biblical justification is essentially an event
of divine recognition. According to this strong exegetical claim, God
exercises acts of recognition/acknowledgement/acceptance in fulfilling
the salvific plan for humankind. The basic need for recognition thus has
a theological counterpart in God’s act of recognition. Remarkably, these
claims are not seen as part of the contemporary theory of recognition,
but as timeless truths of Christianity. The claims thus prompt a power-
ful need to study issues of religious recognition in detail. Is Jüngel really
speaking about long theological traditions or rather ascribing a modern
concept to the old content?
This question is an important one, since the philosophical and
sociological studies of recognition assume that it is a modern concept
that stems from Hegel. While some of its features may have been
created by Rousseau and Fichte, the idea of mutual recognition that is
employed in contemporary social philosophy is strongly dependent
on Hegel. Moreover, social theorists do not consider religious or
theological authors to have played any role in the intellectual history
of recognition.
The present study challenges this assumption and claims that the
intellectual roots of the concept and conceptions of recognition
are found in classical, medieval, and early modern religious sources.
(^5) Jüngel 2006, 7–8. (^6) Jüngel 2006, 62. Von Rad 1992 (orig. 1957).
Introduction 3