Scope:
Twentieth-century religious thought really begins with the publication of Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans in the aftermath of World War I. Shaken by the brutality of the war, Barth rejected the close links between the gospel and modern Western culture asserted by liberal religious thinkers of the 19th century. For him, Schleiermacher and others had glorified the human at the expense of the divine. Barth, however, like Kierkegaard, emphasized God's transcendence of all that is human, including religion. Indeed, Barth goes so far as to say that critics like Feuerbach were right: Religion is really just human beings talking about themselves; it is, therefore, a lie, or "unbelief." Unlike Feuerbach and the other masters of suspicion, however, Barth contrasts "religion" with "revelation" and views the task of the religious thinker as one of "confession" — the acknowledgment of and reflection on God's saving message.
Outline
I. One of the fascinating things about studying history is reflecting on how historians help us get a handle on the past. For a number of reasons, this is a crucial issue for the study of religion.
II. In 1918, Karl Barth published the first edition of a book entitled The Epistle to the Romans, a theological commentary on Paul's letter from the New Testament that almost single-handedly swept
aside the liberal tradition of 19 -century theology.
A. For Barth and others, the carnage of World War I shattered the confidence in the promise of Western civilization that had characterized the liberal theology of the 19th century.
B. In The Epistle,he announces his main criticism of liberal theology: The gospel does not tell us that we are divine but proclaims a God utterly distinct from us, a God we are incapable of knowing.
C. Barth agrees with such theologians as Schleiermacher that religion is where human beings find their highest possibility and search for the source of their fulfillment, but religion, he says, is ultimately "unbelief."
1. If you start with the human in religion, you will never get to God, who utterly transcends the human.
2. The more we try to reach God through religion, the more we get caught up in our own purposes and projects.
3. As in Luther and Calvin, Barth emphasizes our continuous efforts to justify ourselves.
4. He even agrees with Feuerbach that religion is projection and most theology is anthropology.
5. Barth is as suspicious of religion as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are, but he sees such suspicion as not so much
modern as biblical: It is demanded by the gospel itself; thus, the Christian is required to be suspicious of his or her own religion and all human religion.
III. Instead of humans trying to reach God through religion, Barth says that we must allow God to reach us through God' s revelation, which Barth describes as "God's self-offering
and self-presentation."
A. Theology, then, is reflection on God's revelation and, thus, must begin with the confession of faith in that revelation as it is received through the gospel.
B. But how do we know that what Christians call revelation is indeed revelation and not some other human construction?
1. Barth refuses the apologetic task of trying to prove that it is revelation because it must be taken on faith.
2. He writes only: "The proof of faith consists in the proclamation of faith. The proof of the knowledge of the Word consists in confessing it."
3. T o try to defend the confession by means of rational or experiential arguments that rely on warrants or criteria from outside of Christian faith is already to acknowledge that humans can judge the divine.
4. As Kierkegaard had argued, God gives us not only the revelation but also the possibility of receiving the revelation.
IV. Theology must be based in the Bible and must read the Bible not as revelation per se but as the witness to God's revelation in
Jesus Christ.
A. Barth can accept much of biblical criticism because the truth of the words of the Bible consists in their illumination of the event of Jesus Christ.
B. But Barth argues that biblical criticism does not have the "creative energy" that allows it to genuinely struggle with the "matter" of the text, the enigma of God's revelation.
Suggested Reading:
Barth and Green, On Religion. Barth and Hoslgms, The Epistle to the Romans.
Ford, The Modern Theologians.
Questions to Consider:
1. What is Barth's primary criticism of liberal theology?
2. How can Barth criticize all religion as "unbelief' but still call Christianity the "true religion"?
Lecture Twenty-Three — Transcript
Barth and the End of Liberal Theology
One of the fascinating things about studying history is reflecting on how historians help us get a handle on the past by organizing it in the form of narrative. For a number of reasons, this is crucial for thinking about religion. So, think, first of all, about the stories religious traditions tell about themselves in making themselves into traditions. For Jews and Christians, the most obvious example of such a story is the Bible.
But we can also think about the stories that they develop out of the Bible. So, think, for example, about the stories the rabbis tell about the origin of the oral law in God's revelation to Moses — or think about the Catholic focus on the passage from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus tells Peter that he is the rock upon which he will build his church.
Through these stories, the rabbis and the Church ground their authority — and not only defend, but also construct the tradition; they're setting up the tradition, and they' re establishing it and getting it going.
Historians tell stories, too — so they tell stories, for example, about religious people telling stories and constructing traditions. One way to put this is that they retell — using the tools of scholarship religious stories. We can contrast these two types of stories. We can distinguish between stories told in religious faith and historical, narrative accounts of what historians say "really happened." As we've seen, one of the main challenges faced by the 19th-century theologians was to negotiate this contrast, to accept the distinction between biblical stories and history, but in a way that didn't completely undermine the authority or the truth of the Bible.
In this context, we also need to think about the story I'm telling in these lectures, and one way to do this is to consider some of the framing devices that I'm using. Of course, perhaps the most important framing device that I'm using in telling the story is the concept of modernity. I'm always struck in my classrooms when I talk about modernity, or I talk about the Enlightenment, or I talk about the scientific revolution — and students ask: "Well, when did modernity begin?" I can give dates if I want to, and I can say 1648, but then I immediately have to qualify because it's not a matter of an exact point in time — it's not a matter of objective dating — but it's a matter of the story. It's a matter of trying to make some distinctions in the flow of history that don't have exact dates, but can tell us roughly about when certain kinds of things are happening. They' re narrative devices — the term "modernity" is a narrative device.
One would think it's a bit different when we are using more objective dates — so when we say something like "the 20th century," that sounds a bit more objective. But even here, we have to keep a couple things in mind. Number one, when we talk about the 20th century, we are still using a Christocentric form of dating that is, we are dating things from the time of the birth of Christ. But even aside from that, a common historical narrative of the 20th century has the 20th century beginning in August of 1914 — that is, at the start of World War I. This is a good way for us too, in these lectures, to think about the 20th century — and particularly 20 -century religious thought.
As I've said, one of the defining characteristics of 19th-century liberal theology was that it shared and theologized the general optimism that many in Europe and the United States had about the advancement and moral superiority of Western culture. But, as many have said before me, this cultural and theological optimism was shattered on the battlefields of Europe after August 1914, and this is why we tend to talk about the 20th century beginning at this point.
In 1918, as the war was drawing to a close, Karl Barth — who was at that point a pastor in the small city of Safenwil, in his native Switzerland — published a book called The Epistle to the Romans. This book was a theological commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans from the New Testament. In 1922, Barth published a second edition of this book, in his theologically imaginative, in his scathing indictment in the book of liberal theology made The Epistle to the Romans a sensation. So, by the time Barth published the sixth edition of the book, and this was 10 years after its first appearance, so in 1928—it had grown to a book of 557 pages of commentary on a document that in the New Testament is about 18 pages. The letter that Barth was writing about — Paul's Letter to the Romans — is one of the most influential theological documents of the Christian tradition, and Barth's commentary on this letter was to become one of the 20'" century's most important theological works.
Before the war, Barth had studied under two of the most prominent thinkers in the liberal tradition, Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann, but he was disillusioned by the utter failure of his teachers to speak out against the war, and he found their liberal theology of little use to him as a pastor — and so Barth spent the war years radically rethinking his approach to Christianity. The Epistle to the Romans documents the first results of this rethinking.
After the publication of the book, Barth was appointed to teach theology at Gottingen University, even though he didn't have a doctorate, and subsequently he taught at Munster and then at the university in Bonn. It was there, in the early 30s, that Barth became one of the primary authors of the Barmen Declaration, and this was a document that rejected the alliance between the Nazis and the German Evangelical Church. What the document did was it rejected the subordination of the Church to the German state, and this was an alliance that the Nazis were trying — with some success — to forge.
So, Barth resisted the Nazis; as a consequence, he was banned from teaching in Germany, and he returned to his native Switzerland to teach and write until his death in 1968.
In the Preface to the sixth edition of The Epistle to the Romans, Barth sums up his thinking with the following:
The Gospel [he writes] is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men. Salvation comes to them from Him, because they are, as men, incapable of knowing him, and because they have no right to claim anything from Him.... The Gospel is the Word of the Primal Origin of all things, the Word which, since it is ever new, must ever be received with renewed fear and trembling. [We can hear Kierkegaard here] The Gospel is therefore not an event, nor an experience, not an emotion—however delicate! Rather, it is the clear and objective perception of what eye hath not seen nor ear heard.
In this lecture, I will try to explain what this means and how Barth's approach to the Bible, Christianity, and theology ushers in a new paradigm for thinking about faith and suspicion — one that differs not only from the liberal theologians of the 19th century, but also from the traditionalists or Fundamentalists with whom this passage might seem to suggest some affinity.
So, I'll first talk about Barth's criticisms of liberal theology, and these are criticisms that employ a suspicion of religion that, in many respects, matches that of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Then, I'll move from suspicion to affirmation — that is, to talk about · how Barth moved beyond this critical perspective on religion to develop a more constructive vision of Christian theology. Here I want to focus particularly on his concept of revelation and his view of biblical interpretation.
Lets return to the passage I just read from the Preface to The Epistle to the Romans. The critique that Barth will develop of liberal theology is clearly announced here: Barth says to us that the Gospel does not tell us that we are divine, but rather proclaims a God that is utterly distinct from us — a God we are incapable of knowing. It' s this idea of the distance between human and divine that Barth emphasizes over and over — and in this, we see Barth's strong allegiance to Kierkegaard. Barth writes: "If I have a system, it [consists in] what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative [difference]' between time and eternity."
It was neglecting this difference, this utter distinction, between humans and God, this infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity — it was neglecting this difference that was, for Barth, the key failure of liberal theology. This failure was particularly evident for him in the way Schleiermacher used the concept of religion.
We can think about this criticism from two perspectives. First, Barth rejects apologetic theology — that is, he rejects the strategy — the theological strategy — that uses philosophical or generally secular. categories in order to make sense of Christianity for non-believers. If we remember, this, of course, was the whole point of Schleiermacher's Speeches to its Cultured Despisers —right? Schleiermacher does not begin with Christianity, doesn't begin with the claims of the Gospel, but he begins with a general category of religion, and he's trying to speak to the cultured despisers to show them that they should be taking religion more seriously — that they can turn away from Orthodox Christian faith and turn toward their own experience, and in that experience they' ll find real religion and the basis of a genuine Christianity. But, for Barth, to begin with religion is to begin with humanity, and it's to begin with a universal human capacity for piety, for reverence, for this sense of dependence. From that starting point, Barth argues, that human starting point, we' re never going to get to God because of the radical distance separating humanity and its religion from God. So, what Barth wants to argue instead is that we have to begin with God, and we have to begin with God's radical transcendence of all human capacities, and we have to begin with God's effort to communicate with human beings — that is, we need to begin with God's revelation; this is to begin with God's action, not with a human capacity.
Barth wasn't an enemy of modernity as such, but he did think that a theology that began with religion as a human capacity fell into the modern tendency to emphasize human autonomy, human possibility over God's authority and our status as God's creatures. This is one reason why Kierkegaard was so important for Barth, because it was Kierkegaard who first criticized modern theology by stressing God' s radical transcendence and by focusing on the paradox of God' s entrance into history.
So, like Kierkegaard, Barth wanted to explain not so much what religion was. He didn't want to defend religion per se — rather, he wanted to do theology in a way that would glorify God and reflect on God's action with respect to human beings. So, this was theology not as apology, but as confession — that is, theology that began with an assertion of faith.
This brings me to the second aspect of Barth's criticism of Schleiermacher: Although Barth agrees with theologians like Schleiermacher that religion is where human beings find their highest possibility and search for their source of fulfillment, he also believes that religion is what he describes as "faithlessness" or "unbelief." It's in this tension between religion as humanity's highest possibility and religion as unbelief that we see what we can call the "dialectical nature" of Barth's thinking. That is we can only talk theologically, for Barth, by shifting back and forth between these two perspectives without allowing them to collapse into one another — or without allowing them to completely contradict one another — so, this dialectical thinking, this thinking that takes two poles that may seem to be opposite to one another and tries to move back and forth and maintain a tension between them.
We see something similar in Luther's claim that Christians are always simultaneously sinners and saved — as human beings, we are inevitably and always sinners, but we are also chosen by God. God gives us his grace, and so we are always justified, and the point is that we are both at the same time.
To back up and come at this from a slightly different angle, we can say, with Barth, that God is qualitatively distinct from man, utterly. transcendent, and that consequently we — on our own — whether it' s through Kant's postulates or Schleiermacher's experience, we can never bridge the gap between us and God The more we try to do it through religion, the more we try to reach God through our religion, through our own capacities and powers, the more we try to comprehend God or experience God, the more we get caught up in our own purposes and projects — the more we sin, and the more our religion is unbelief. In our desire for justification, for salvation, for fulfillment — we become, on Barth's view, idol-making creatures; we create a God, and we create gods in our own image and, therefore, deafen ourselves to the reception of God's Word.
Indeed, Barth goes so far as to say that Feuerbach was right — that religion is projection, that usually when human beings talk about God, they are really talking about themselves. Barth even wrote an introduction to Feuerbach's book, The Essence of Christianity, in which he affirms much of what Feuerbach has to say, and he says early on in that introduction that the attitude of the anti-theologian Feuerbach was more theological than that of many theologians. With this comment, we arrive at a crucial point in these lectures on faith and suspicion — for Barth is telling us that suspicion of religion is by no means only the task of the atheist, but is, in fact, central to the biblical message and to the theological task.
We can think here of the story in the Bible of how the Israelites under their head priest, Aaron — fashioned a golden calf to worship at the same time that Moses was up on Mount Sinai receiving the law from God. or we can think about the Prophet Amos, who says to Israel: "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies."
For Barth, such stories must not be interpreted simply in terms of the human tendency to doubt God or as an example of the difference between Jewish or Catholic rituals and Protestant faith. Rather, the point of these stories is that, from the perspective of God' s revelation, human religion — whether Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or any other kind of religion — is always unbelief.
Of course, Barth's compliment to Feuerbach is somewhat backhanded, for he goes on to say that although Freud's thesis is right — religion is projection, it's also trivial for it is something that anyone who's really read the Old Testament or the New Testament should know: Of course, religion is projection and, from a theological point of view, idolatry.
In this sense, Barth is as suspicious of religion as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, but he sees such suspicion not so much as modern, but as biblical and theological. It's demanded by the Gospel; it's demanded by revelation itself; the Christian is required to be suspicious of his or her own religion and all human religion. I'm going to come back to this point in the next lecture and develop it at a little more length, but here I want to talk a bit more about what Barth means by "revelation" — because at this point, the question is going to naturally arise: If all this is true, if religion is unbelief, if God is radically transcendent, what can we say about God? What is the theologian supposed to do? For the most part, The Epistle to the Romans, the book that shook the foundations of European Christianity in the years after World War I, was a polemic attack on Christianity and Christian thought — and it leaves the reader with this question, but not much of an answer. It's only in the years and decades following this book that Barth was able to work out a more constructive position, and this position is based on the principle that instead of attending primarily to human religion or human experience, the theologian must attend, first of all, to God and God's action — that is, to revelation.
So revelation, according to Barth, is "God's self-offering and self presentation," and this revelation tells us something utterly new. It's God's Word, and this Word is to be found, in its pure form, in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ: Christ is the Word of God. This revelation is testified to, witnessed, in the New Testament, and it is spoken to us, again and again, in the words of preaching.
So, for Barth, this is not to identify God's Word with human words, words in the Bible or words in sermons, but it is to say that the Word, Jesus Christ, can be found there. So, theology, as Barth understands it, is reflection on God's revelation — and thus, must begin with the confession of faith in that revelation. So, what exactly does faith confess? Well, again, most fundamentally, it confesses the Gospel Jesus is the Christ. As Barth puts it:
"If we deviate only a nail's breadth from this confession, we are not theologically in earnest, and we do not speak about revelation at all. Revelation is God's sovereign action upon man or it is not revelation"
So, this is the starting point, to affirm this is what it means to have faith, and theology is to be, understood as this faith seeking understanding — again, Anselm's view of what theology is: faith seeking understanding.
So, the confession that Jesus is the Christ is essentially an axiom for the theologian. It is not something that the theologian questions — it is the starting point, the given. This approach represents an inversion of Schleiermacher's theology: Where Schleiermacher begins by talking about the human capacity for religious experience, where Schleiermacher begins by telling us something fundamental about human beings — Barth starts with God as revealed in Jesus and argues that it's the only starting point that we have for theology, and it is from a starting point that Jesus is the Christ that we find out who we are. So, we don't begin by saying: "Okay, here's what human beings are: They have this capacity for religion," and we go on from there. We begin with Jesus Christ, and it's only then that we can find out who we are.
So, theology, as Barth will put it, does not begin in anthropology — it does not begin in reflection on what human beings are. But, anthropology — finding out what humans are — begins with theology. First, we have to know what Jesus Christ is. Many of us will still want to ask: How do we know that what Christians call revelation Jesus is the Christ — is, indeed, revelation and not some other sinful human construction? For Barth, we don't know — we have faith; we start with that point — we believe it. So, he' ll say: "The proof of faith consists in the proclamation of faith. The proof of the knowledge of the Word consists in confessing it."
For those of us in doubt or for those of us suspicious of claims to revelation, this strikes us as a rather poor proof, but we need to think about it from Barth's perspective. He's rejected apologetics. He' s rejected the project of defending Christian faith to those who do not possess it. That means he's rejected the modern project of defending Christianity by means of rational or experiential arguments that rely on ideas commonly held outside of the Christian faith. He's not appealing to anything outside to say: "Okay, this is true."
Baith thinks that if we try that, if we go this modern route, we give up the game in advance — we acknowledge that humans can judge the divine, and he thinks the divine is something that, by definition, we can't judge.
So, how should we read this? How should we understand this? Well, we can start by invoking Kierkegaard again, because it seems that this problematic that Barth is articulating here is close to the same one Kierkegaard deals with when he invokes the idea of the condition. That is, God gives us not only the revelation, but also the possibility of receiving the revelation. Receiving the revelation is not made possible by some inherent capacity that we have, but it's made possible by God. So, we say, for example, that the structure of our ear gives us the capacity to hear, and we can describe that structure apart from the act of hearing. That's what Schleiermacher's doing. He says we can describe religion apart from any particular religious claim or revelation.
But Barth claims that we don't have the capacity to receive God' s revelation — it's not something natural; we have lost this capacity through our sin. The capacity — or, as Kierkegaard would say, the condition for revelation is given in and through revelation. Barth will say it this way: "the actuality and the possibility of this event of revelation are the being and action of God." It all comes from God. This is Barth's way of saying that everything comes from God, even our faith in God.
We might say that one has this faith because one has experienced the Word of God, God's revelation, and holds on to it. There's no doubt an experiential aspect to all of this, but it might be better to say that, for Barth, it's not so much that we have an experience of God, but that God takes hold of us in and through his Word. God's Word impinges upon us, interrupts our lives, in a way that we can't shake.
This brings us back to the question of God's Word. What exactly is God's Word, and how does this help us understand God's revelation? As I've said, God's Word, first and foremost, is given to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's through this event that we are saved and through this event that we come to understand who we are and how we should live.
But, of course, we only have access to this event through its human witnesses as they are recorded in scripture. So, scripture, for Barth, becomes the privileged locus of theological work and preaching. But since these are human words, the words of the Bible are human words, we must read the Bible as always pointing to something else — that is, pointing to Jesus Christ. So, the Bible is not revelation per se, but it's the witness to God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Moreover, Barth thinks that the words of scripture only point to the Word in a dynamic sense — that is the core message of the Bible — and this is what theologians call the "kerygma," or the proclamation — the kerygma only shows itself as the Bible is reinterpreted and deployed in particular circumstances: in biblical exegesis, such as Barth's book on Romans, or in sermons.
But this is not to say that biblical exegetes or preachers — or, for that matter, theologians — are speaking for God; rather, it means, for Barth, that by. God's grace, God repeats his revelation: He speaks his Word, again and again, through these human words.
One thing this means is that despite his strong claims about revelation, it's not difficult for Barth to accept the validity of historical criticism, because—unlike those who read the Bible literally — Barth sees the truth of the words of the Bible only in the way they illuminate the event of Jesus Christ. Some words, he says, do this more than others — some words in the Bible do this more than others; some are more central than others. So, Paul, for example, in Paul's Letter to the Romans, is, for Barth, absolutely central. This gives Barth a criterion with which to discriminate what is essential and what is less essential — and a way to acknowledge the historical character of the Bible. So, you can take the Bible apart to find out about the people who wrote and compiled it. You can ask historical questions about what did and did not really happen.
But, for Barth, the key remains the fact of the human imagination at work in stories such as the story of the Virgin Birth — or the empty tomb, the incarnation, and the resurrection. Imagination is at work on something that did happen, even if we acknowledge that these witnesses to these events could not fully conceive, exactly, of what it was that was happening.
So, Barth's main point about biblical criticism in relation to his own work is not that it treats the Bible historically — that's not really what he's doing in his own work. He's trying, rather, to find that point in the Bible that really faces and struggles with what he calls "the matter of the text." So, he's looking for those points in the Bible where the struggle with what really happened and the work of human imagination on that struggle is being expressed in a particularly essential way.
The witnesses who wrote the Bible were struggling with the enigma of what they saw and they experienced, and the theological interpreter of the Bible must do the same, So, these words of the Bible are privileged witnesses, and the interpreter must explore them — even inhabit them, put him or herself in the world of the Bible, and to allow his or her thinking to be shaped by it. One of the best readers of Barth—George Hunsinger—puts it this way in writing about the biblical narratives from Barth's perspective:
The work of divine inspiration in the formation of the narratives was not precluded by the work of human imagination, nor did the inventiveness involved in the work of human imagination necessarily preclude divine inspiration. Human imagination, disciplined by the mystery of the subject matter, was construed as the source from which the narratives were proximately produced.
This is a bit of a complicated passage, but the main point here is that God, understood as "divine self-witness," God revealing himself through the Bible and through preaching of the Bible, that is through human words that are formed — these human words are formed in discipline and imagination, and the key, I think, here is this idea of being "disciplined by the mystery of the subject matter."
I think we should understand this discipline, first of all, as the recognition that human words can never capture God — and that any truth that they might have comes from God, not from human knowledge. In other words, it comes from human words that rather than confidently asserting truths about God in a sense turn away from their own authority in pledging obedience to, and pledging faith in, God's authority — so, these words, rather than trying to grasp God, create a space in which God can come to the listener.
For Barth, we are faithless, even as we try to make room for God but God, in his grace, reveals himself anyway. So the task it seems is to, nonetheless, try to discipline ourselves by mystery — by recognizing our incapacity to grasp or comprehend God — and, for Barth, by acknowledging our faithlessness, by acknowledging that our religious words are always limited, always problematic, and always — in a certain sense — not quite getting God.
Barth's impact on the religious thought of the 20th century and beyond was immense, and I' ll remind you of this on more than one occasion in the upcoming lectures. For us, a crucial element of this impact was his suspicion of religion — and in a number of ways, as, I've said, this suspicion was as relentless as the suspicion of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. So, at this point, it makes some sense to pause and to consider this suspicion and its relation to theology in some more detail, and this will be the task of the next lecture.
