Freedom under the Word

Karl Barth's Theological Exegesis

Westerholm, Martin, Rhodes, Ben

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781493416851
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Freedom under the Word, top-tier scholars offer critical engagements with Karl Barth's exegesis of Christian Scripture and explore its implications for contemporary hermeneutics and biblical interpretation. Focusing on rare texts from the Barth corpus, the book considers the legacy and potential of Barth's theology by presenting a wide-ranging engagement with and assessment of Barth's theological exegesis. It covers Barth's career chronologically, providing insight into his theological development as it relates to Scripture. Contributors include John Webster, Francis Watson, Wesley Hill, Stephen Fowl, Paul Nimmo, and Grant Macaskill.

Part 1
Barth’s Theology of Scripture

one
Barth’s Theology of Scripture in Developmental Perspective

Martin Westerholm

Introduction

Given the education and inclinations of the young Karl Barth, it was not a given, humanly speaking, that biblical exegesis would be central to his theological contributions. Barth’s father worked for a time at a small college in Switzerland that sought to train “scriptural” preachers;1 he later arranged for Barth to attend the conservative-leaning university in Bern, where he himself held a chair funded by the traditionally inclined branch of the Swiss church. But the young Barth found neither classical Protestant theologies of Scripture nor typically Protestant emphases on exegesis compelling. Barth’s interest in theology had come to life through confirmation classes that impressed upon him the dubious nature of the “later orthodox theory of the literal inspiration of the Bible”;2 he was unhappy in Bern and pressed his father to permit him to attend more liberal institutions. Having finished his education, he began work as a minister without a sense of the “worth” of the Bible.3 His early preaching and teaching reflect the emphases of the liberal theology of his day. Faith and religion appeared as matters of experiential encounter with God; the significance of Old Testament figures was taken to lie in their religious personalities; and the Old Testament as a whole was treated as significant only because it formed Jesus’s own religious consciousness. The New Testament, in turn, was viewed as so many accounts of the apostles’ experience of faith, and reading Scripture was understood as a means of sharing in this experience. Stronger claims about the inspiration of Scripture were treated as aberrations that are absent from the best elements of the early church and Luther and unable to account for the “variations, losses, mistakes” in Scripture.4

Careful engagement with Scripture itself was formative of Barth’s turn away from these notions. This engagement came about in part because it was demanded by Barth’s pastoral work. Barth wrote later that, whatever his own inclinations, his task was “above all to preach the Bible,”5 and that, viewed retrospectively, “it was extremely fruitful for me, as I entered upon twelve years in the pastorate, to be compelled to engage myself much more earnestly than ever before with the Bible as the root of all Christian thinking and teaching.”6 Barth’s job demanded a measure of attention to Scripture, but this attention may not have shifted his thinking had he not faced pressure from other quarters. Engagement with Scripture became crucial for Barth not only because of the weekly sermon but also because his basic convictions came to seem inadequate in the face of class struggles and the tumult of the First World War. “Real problems of real life” drove Barth to think through the foundations of his various positions and eventually to make what he later called a “turn back to the Bible.”7 A commentary on Romans, published first in December 1918 (and cited as published in 1919) and then again in a revised edition in 1922, was the most substantial fruit of this turn. The 1922 edition in particular marked a turning point in Barth’s life, for it catapulted him to the center of theological debate. This work was widely seen as announcing the end of the theological project that marked nineteenth-century neo-Protestantism. It stands as a seminal work in twentieth-century theology.

The task of this chapter is to trace the theology of Scripture that emerged as Barth executed a “turn back to the Bible” and to trace the development of this theology as Barth’s thinking matured. The essays that appear in this volume treat aspects of Barth’s exegesis that are ranged across the whole of Barth’s career. It will be useful for us to be able to situate this exegesis in relation to the theology of Scripture that shaped Barth’s work at various points. On one level, Barth’s theology of Scripture is striking in the degree to which its basic building blocks remained stable from the early 1920s onward. Yet, on another level, some of the idiosyncrasies of the exegesis that we will encounter in this volume make better sense against the backdrop of shifts in the way that these foundational building blocks are configured. Barth’s work is noteworthy in part because he possessed a remarkable capacity to allow himself to be surprised by Scripture. Openness to surprise brought with it an openness to rethinking just how Scripture is best understood and interpreted. Attention to the movement of this process as preparation for considering his exegesis is the task of this chapter.

Barth’s Early Understanding of Scripture

The first question for us concerns the understanding of Scripture that informed Barth’s work between 1915 and 1921. For reasons we will come to in due course, explicit attention to a theology of Scripture was secondary during this period to consideration of the content of Scripture itself, but this work on theology of Scripture marks a turning point in theological history and reflects a set of instincts about the nature of Scripture that are foundational for Barth’s later thought.

The focal point of Barth’s thinking at this point was his account of just what the Bible presents. In 1917, Barth gave a lecture that took up the questions: “What is in the Bible? What sort of house is it that the Bible is a door to? What sort of land spreads out before our eyes when we open up the Bible?”8 Barth’s answer was that the Bible presents the activity of God as a sovereign reality that constitutes a new world. “‘What is in the Bible?’ . . . In the Bible there is a new world, the world of God.”9 The new world that is grounded in the activity of God stands in absolute opposition to an “old” world made up of morality, religion, culture, and all else that issues from human activity. Far from complementing and completing these human realities, divine activity represents “a blast of trumpets from another world” that “interrupts your reflections about yourself, and your life, . . . the nurturing of your religious thoughts and feelings.”10 It asserts the sovereignty of God over against all human speaking and doing. “A new world stands in the Bible. God! God’s sovereignty! God’s honor! God’s inconceivable love! Not the history of humanity but the history of God.”11 “It is certain that the Bible, if we read it with careful attention, leads us exactly to the point at which we must decide to accept or disavow the royal sovereignty of God. This is precisely the new world of the Bible.”12 The Bible is the place that human beings go to learn again to speak of the sovereignty of God, to recognize that “God is God.”13

The suggestion that the decisive content of the Bible is a new world that stands opposed to the “old world of war and money and death” presents a kind of scaffolding around which Barth’s understanding of Scripture is constructed.14 The first point that issues from it is an account of the divine activity that is required if creatures are to grasp the true content of the Bible. Barth declares that, because human activity belongs to the “old, sick world” of human striving, the new world of divine activity may be apprehended only through the work of the divine Spirit.15 “The Bible ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Barth’s Theology of Scripture
• Part 2: Barth’s Early Exegesis
• Part 3: Barth’s Doctrine of God in Exegetical Perspective
• Part 4: Barth’s Doctrine of Creation in Exegetical Perspective
• Part 5: Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation in Exegetical Perspective
• Contributors
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Author Index
• Back Cover