Conversing with Barth

John C. McDowell, Mike Higton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351948647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Karl Barth addressed all the major themes of dogmatic theology, and in so doing made his own distinctive contribution to each of the ongoing conversations that constitute that theology. This book presents important new 'conversations with Barth' by leading contemporary theologians and Barth scholars. Each contributor offers their own distinctive emphasis to bring to light the ways in which the depths of Barth's work may illuminate or be illuminated by the work of other prominent thinkers who preceded or followed him. The conversations they host between Barth and other philosophers and theologians raise critical questions in the reading and appreciation of Barth's thought, and explore a wide range of themes in dogmatic theology. This book not only adds to the comprehension of the riches of Barth's theology but also presents an important contribution to the ongoing conversations and debates alive in theology today. Contributors: Nicholas Lash, John Webster, Timothy Gorringe, Graham Ward, George Hunsinger, Ben Quash, Mike Higton, John McDowell, Eugene Rogers, Katherine Sonderegger, David Clough, David Ford.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Karl Barth as Conversationalist

Mike Higton and John C. McDowell

There were two main reasons for conceiving this project. In the first place, we felt that something more ought to be done to shake off the nagging suspicions, commonly voiced, that Barth does not make a good conversation partner. James Barr’s comment is representative of one kind of objection: Barth, he says, ‘paid little attention to other people’s opinions’ (Barr, 1993, p. 31). Stating the problem in this way, of course, leaves Barr vulnerable to a lazy riposte – one that would simply rack up a list of Barth’s approving citations or lengthy discussions of the ideas of other thinkers. His theological appreciation of Mozart’s praise of creation, or of Heidegger and Sartre’s limited but nevertheless instructive discussions of nothingness are well known, for instance. Such proof-texting is always frivolous, however, and leaves the core of Barr’s suspicion fatally undamaged. Something more far-ranging is being claimed by Barr here: that Barth’s theology illegitimately secures itself from critique; that it polices its narrow location assiduously and only lets in a few carefully vetted others when convinced that they can be of service.¹

In the second place, we began this project not only because of our sense that this kind of suspicion depended upon an ill-judged account of what Barth was up to theologically, but for the far more positive reason that we are convinced that, in practice, Barth still remains a fascinating and important figure for the doing of theology today. We wanted not only to show that Barth was best understood as a conversational theologian, but also to encourage others to engage in wide-ranging, many-voiced conversations with him. Something of this conviction is already apparent in a claim of Paul M. van Buren’s in 1964:

If we would learn something of what it is like to be a man of the twentieth century in intimate conversation with the long past of theology (and thereby perhaps learn something more of that past than is easily discernible from these New World shores) it will be worth our while never to dismiss this man as a relic of an antique world or as a conservative or reactionary who will not move with the times. (Buren, 1964, p. xiv)

The recent increased rate of growth in secondary literature on Barth’s theology is itself an indication of the value of this comment. Whilst there may have been times since his death when Barth’s influence seemed to be a spent force, the vast majority of reflections on his theology published during the past five years or so should make us dubious about any such claim. Of course, the forms of reception of that influence differ widely from those who dine and converse with a welcome guest to those who attempt to flee from an intruder but, both to critical friend and to bemused enemy, Barth seems to present an inexhaustible field for redescription and engagement. However much we are willing to attribute to the self-absorbed dynamism of the academic Barth-studies industry, there must be something about his work which allows that industry to thrive – and, in any case, genuinely interesting readings and debates continue to be developed, particularly amongst those who, whilst enthusiastic about his theology, respect Barth’s fear of being uncritically repeated (see Barth, 1963b, p. 12). More than 20 years on, we may echo John Webster’s conclusion to a survey of Barth literature from 1975 to 1981: ‘… the understanding and critical reception of Barth’s work is a task which is still not at all finished. There could hardly be a better testimony to a theologian’s continuing fruitfulness’ (Webster, 1982, p. 35).

Karl Barth: Conversationalist

A volume entitled Conversing with Barth is a viable project, we believe, because Barth saw himself standing within the spaces opened up for him by his past and found the shape of his thought subtly refigured through the various conversations he had with his contemporaries. Karl Barth was a conversational theologian. Yet we need to be careful to interpret that comment appropriately, for Barth has sometimes been misread by those who presuppose a different conception of what it means to be a conversationalist.² Barth says:

You speak of conversation, but what does this mean? Conversation takes place when one party has something new and interesting to say to the other. Only then is conversation an event. One must say something engaging and original, something with an element of mystery. The Church must sound strange to the world if it is not to be dull …. We may read philosophers (and we should!) without accepting their presuppositions. We may listen respectfully (I have a holy respect for a good philosopher!). We can learn much from philosophy and science. But as theologians we must be obedient to the Word. (Barth, 1963b, p. 19)

Several things are noteworthy about this set of comments. First, Barth’s interest in presuppositions betrays an interest in the particularity and difference that makes conversation possible. We do not converse because we share a common foundation, and can trade variations upon that agreed theme, but because we are different. Barth’s reiteration of his commitment to determinatively ecclesial presuppositions is not a refusal of conversation, any more than is his recognition of the different presuppositions of the philosophers.³ Conversation involves difference and the awareness of difference – neither the suppression nor the ‘celebration’ of difference, but a willingness to take it seriously. Put differently, Barth is aware that any conversation is always between a particular someone and a particular someone else; there can be no atemporal or acontextual conversation in which the conversation partners leave who they are behind in order to conduct a dialogue in so-called ‘objectivity’.

We could compare this unembarrassed reliance on presuppositions which are not shared, but which need not isolate, with Harnack’s 1923 complaint that Barth was ‘unscientific’ in his work – a complaint which seems to conflate reading guided by unshared presuppositions with a relativistic free-for-all. For Harnack, if there is no obviously objective reading of a text, then its meaning fragments into the chaos of readers’ private preferences.⁴ For him, only a hermeneutical objectivity grounded in universally shared assumptions can free readings from potential nihilism and for public discussion, interaction and assessment.

Barth’s response exposes the unshared presuppositions in Harnack’s own position. ‘I think I owe it to you and our listeners’, he says, ‘to confess that I do consider my answers open to debate, but that still for the time being and until I am shown a better way I reserve all else to myself. Nonetheless, your objections cannot deter me from continuing to ask along the line of those answers’ (Barth, 1972b, p. 40). Here, Barth subverts Harnack’s own accusations by charging him with not listening and with methodological parochialism – the ‘science’ of theology may be broader than Harnack had imagined, but Harnack is unprepared to entertain any voices different from his own. Harnack’s theology, then, is the one that is closed (ibid., p. 42). Even so, Barth continues, ‘I would like to be able to listen attentively in the future to whatever you also have to say. But at this time I cannot concede that you have driven me off the field with your questions and answers, although I will gladly endure it when it really happens’ (ibid., p. 52). Barth is unapologetic in naming the particular shape of his own presuppositions, those which set him on the particular path he was to tread – they are theological ones. As the ‘But’ in his claim cited earlier suggested (‘But as theologians we must be obedient to the Word’), he is clearly not prepared to renege on his commitments. That would be to deny who he is.

Returning to that quotation, we can, second, note Barth’s insistence that ‘[t]he Church must sound strange to the world if it is not to be dull’. Far from believing that his presuppositions bar him from conversation, by enclosing him in an impervious enclave, Barth instead believes that those presuppositions precisely enable him to converse. Despite what we have just been saying, this is not because he has some theory which would argue that, in general, particularity and conversation go together, but rather because the specific shape that his Christian identity takes is one that is constitutionally open to conversation – in a way that may or may not find partial parallels in the differing identities of others. So, for instance, it is precisely because he is a Christian that Barth is committed to a particular way of seeing the world in Jesus Christ that recognizes and generously admits its indebtedness to those who have spoken within the Christian Church past and present. This is not only clear in the lectures available as Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1972a), but as early as the Preface to the first edition of Der Römerbrief. There, Barth was able to claim that ‘[t]he understanding of history is an uninterrupted conversation between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of tomorrow. And it is a conversation always conducted honestly and with discernment’ (Barth, 1968, p. 1). This is not, for Barth, some general commitment to the role and possibilities of tradition, but a theological conviction that rests on a recognition that our activity as Christian theologians exists only in constant dependence, and also that this dependence is itself the fruit of an original, establishing and generative absolute dependence.⁵ Prayer, then, is the origin of conversation, and a theology of grace demands attention to the notion that we converse because we have been conversed with – in Jesus Christ. We listen to the other because we listen to God – Christ is the divine Word and human hearing. The church lives in the faith that it is not engaged in dialogue only with itself.

Note the view of tradition, of handing-on, which is implied in this formulation, however. Barth is not satisfied with maintaining a commitment to some supposed identifiable set of theories or practices that could be carried through time in a pristine and immutable condition. He speaks of a conversation between yesterday and tomorrow, not of a sacred deposit delivered yesterday which we are charged to carry through to tomorrow. Barth could agree, in general, with Richard Roberts’ rejection of ‘[t]he mechanical recapitulation of Christian doctrine merely as items in an inherited belief system, undertaken as though nothing had happened’ (Roberts, 1997, p. 716). It is frequently noted, for instance, that Barth, despite being a Reformed theologian, has learned to read the Reformers critically, as one concerned with how they might speak to theology in the twentieth century rather than with the assumption that they said all that they needed to say in the sixteenth. His re-envisioning of the doctrine of election in CD II/2 is a good example of his avoidance of what Roberts calls a ‘theological necrophilia’ (Roberts, 1996, p. 192; see also Barth, 1972a, pp. 16f.; McFadyen, 2000, p. 50).

Third, our quotation from Barth’s Table Talk indicates that Barth did not restrict the conversation to which his faith called him simply to the Christian tradition. William Stacy Johnson puts it well (although the term ‘event’ would seem better suited to Barth’s descriptions than ‘mystery’) when he claims that:

Respect for the mystery of God would seem to demand nothing less than a multidimensional approach to the theological task …. In his survey of Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, for example, Barth professed a desire to attend to ‘all the voices of the past,’ and not merely the ones which have stood in official favor. This is necessary, he said, because one cannot anticipate in advance which voices will speak to the genuinely ‘theological’ elements in human endeavour. (Johnson, 1997, p. 37 referring to Barth, 1972a, p. 17)

Both in theory and in practice, Barth displayed a willingness to engage with secular philosophy. All kinds of extra-ecclesial claims and facts can become witnesses to the Gospel, and can be perceived as such in the light of a Christological hermeneutic: Barth’s specifically Christian presuppositions provide him with an ear by which he can listen to voices from beyond the explicit pale of faith (Barth, 1990, p. 92; CD I/1, p. 176).⁶ As Rowan Williams says, ‘the church judges the world; but it also hears God’s judgment on itself passed upon it by the world’ (Williams, 2000, p. 330).

Bruce Marshall argues that:

… on his [Barth’s] account the range of theological discourse seems unlimited; he seems concerned to deny rather than assert that there are ‘spheres’ of discourse ‘external’ to theology …. Since theological discourse has no abiding ‘outside’, distinctions between discourse ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to theology, while in some respects perhaps provisionally useful, can in principle never be binding. Barth does not distinguish theology from other sorts of discourse primarily by locating a special subject-matter for it, still less by the principled exclusion or rejection of other kinds of discourse. What distinguishes theology is rather the particular way in which it strives to order all discourses: it interprets and assesses them by taking ‘Jesus Christ as he is attested for us in holy scripture’ as its primary and decisive criteria of truth and meaning …. Theology for Barth seems to be an open-ended project of understanding and judgement which, within the obvious limits of its human practitioners, aims at an estimate of all things – from Mozart to birth control, the rearmament of Germany to riding horses – oriented around this particular criterion. (Marshall, 1993, p. 456)⁷

Barth makes positive but critical use of, for instance, extra-ecclesial anthropologies (CD III/2) and of Mozart’s music (CD III/...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Karl Barth as Conversationalist
• 2 ‘There is no past in the Church, so there is no past in theology’: Barth on the History of Modern Protestant Theology
• 3 Culture and Barbarism: Barth amongst the Students of Culture
• 4 Barth, Hegel and the Possibility for Christian Apologetics
• 5 A Tale of Two Simultaneities: Justification and Sanctification in Calvin and Barth
• 6 Exile, Freedom and Thanksgiving: Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar
• 7 The Fulfilment of History in Barth, Frei, Auerbach and Dante
• 8 ‘Mend Your Speech a Little’: Reading Karl Barth’s das Nichtige through Donald MacKinnon’s Tragic Vision
• 9 The Eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth
• 10 Et Resurrexit Tertia Die: Jenson and Barth on Christ’s Resurrection
• 11 Fighting at the Command of God: Reassessing the Borderline Case in Karl Barth’s Account of War in the Church Dogmatics
• 12 Afterword: Conversing with Barth
• Index of Names