The Affirmations of Reason: On Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology

297 Pages·2018·2.37 MB·English

by  Sigurd Baark (auth.)

T H E
A F F I R M A T I O N S
O F R E A S O N
On Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology
Sigurd Baark
The Affirmations of Reason
Sigurd Baark
The Affirmations
of Reason
On Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology
Sigurd Baark
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
ISBN 978-3-319-70792-1 ISBN 978-3-319-70793-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70793-8
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For
The German Reformed Church of Copenhagen
Venite et ascendamus ad montem Domini et ad domum Dei Iacob
Isaiah 2:3
v
F : K B
oreword arl arth
I t
and ntellectual hought
Among the questions asked with regard to Karl Barth’s theology the last
few decades, I consider the historian Rudy Koshar’s one of the most per-
tinent: ‘Where is Karl Barth in modern European history?’1 Writing from
the perspective of intellectual history, Koshar notes that Barth is usually
presented either as the intellectual leader of the Confessional Church
(Bekennende Kirche) in the struggle against National Socialism in Germany
during the 1930s, or dismissed as a ‘neo-orthodox’ theologian with little
to say about intellectual thought in general outside the realms of theology.
While it may be true that Barth is among the thinkers in the twentieth
Century who have generated more secondary literature than most—9910
items according to a 1992 bibliography2—sustained interest in Barth is
found mainly if not solely within theology as an academic discipline. This
circumstance belies the fact that Barth, within his German-speaking cul-
tural realm and beyond, was not only a specialized theologian but also a
public intellectual. Together with such luminaries as Walter Benjamin,
Ernst Bloch, Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger,
Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Franz Rosenzweig, Carl
Schmitt and Max Weber, just to name a few, Barth was keenly interested
in understanding his contemporary culture and society. Although he was
using theology as his means for interpreting contemporary culture, at the
1 Rudy Koshar, ‘Where is Karl Barth in Modern European History?’, Modern Intellectual
History, 5:2 (2008), 333–62.
2 Hans Markus Wildi, Bibliographie Karl Barth, bd 2: Veröffentlichungen über Karl Barth
(Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1992).
vii
viii FOREWORD: KARL BARTH AND INTELLECTUAL THOUGHT
same time he was a part of the broader critical conversation together with
academics and intellectuals from other disciplines or realms. In other
words, theology was not a compartmentalized reserve for theologians
only, but part of the general conversation, and theologians generally con-
sidered themselves to be part of the public intellectual conversation. Barth
was a central figure in his time.
To mention but one work initially, Barth’s commentary on Paul’s let-
ter to the Romans (Der Römerbrief or The Epistle to the Romans, the
second edition from 1922) did not merely radically transform theol-
ogy—no little feat in itself—but also made an impact felt far beyond
theology.3 This is the work that made him famous and earned him a
chair; at the time of its conception he was working as a pastor in a Swiss
village. The second edition from 1922 is actually a completely reworked
version of the first edition from 1919; the approximately 500 pages of
the first edition was replaced by another 500 pages three years later, as
Barth thought that he had to say things differently this time around.
Barth’s commentary on the Romans is not simply a philological and his-
torical explanation of the letter but an interpretation of it aimed at his
own time. In a perhaps not coincidental parallel to the reformer Martin
Luther 400 years earlier, Barth here signals a departure from a cultural
Christianity that saw the Gospel as an extension of contemporary German
culture and vice versa. Instead, the Gospel becomes a message of crisis
for all human endeavors, especially all attempts to put a hyphen between
‘culture’ or ‘politics’—in any of its forms, conservative, liberal or social-
ist—and ‘Christianity’. This sense of living in a time of crisis, where ‘all
that is solid melts into air’ to quote Marx and Engels, was a general senti-
ment among cultural critics at the time. It was a theme that Barth’s
Romans shared with other works at the time, for instance Oswald
Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–1922) or Ernst Bloch’s The
Spirit of Utopia (1918), although Barth’s version of it rooted the
crisis metaphor in theology. In his Romans, Barth turns out to be a reader
of philosophy and literature as much as theology, and in terms of its influ-
ence, his book was also read by authors, philosophers and so on, and not
only by theologians. Romans is content-wise, as well as stylistically, a very
powerful, expressive work, directed against all forms of anthropocen-
trism, immanentism or Cultural Protestantism. As such, it undoubtedly
3 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated from the 6th ed. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
FOREWORD: KARL BARTH AND INTELLECTUAL THOUGH T ix
belongs to the classics of its age and deserves to be read among other
such classics, be they historical, philosophical, psychological, sociological
or theological.
Why has this only happened to a limited extent? Why is Karl Barth’s
The Epistle to the Romans usually read as a theological classic but not a
cultural classic? One reason for this compartmentalization of theology is
identified by Rudy Koshar as a ‘secularistic bias’ in intellectual history. As
it has been taken for granted, because of some implicit version of the
secularization thesis, that religion is on the way out, Barth and his works
have often been sidestepped. Since he is a theologian, he cannot, per defi-
nition, have played any role as a public intellectual, at least not in the eyes
of posterity. But this is not all: in comparison to Barth’s time, we are also
the victims of an increasing academic specialization, meaning that theolo-
gians write about other theologians, philosophers about other philoso-
phers and so on. This means that the general, public discussion that Barth
was a part of has been made doubly invisible. However, as the seculariza-
tion thesis lately has been modified or questioned, the secularistic bias
is slowly disappearing. Barth’s theology as well as theology in general is
increasingly seen as an important aspect of the intellectual history of the
recently passed century—although there might be an aspect of theology’s
own compartmentalization that still needs to be overcome.
Given, then, that Koshar’s question about the place of Barth in European
history is pertinent, there is also another question that should be asked,
which is at least as important, namely, ‘where is Karl Barth in contemporary
intellectual thought?’ Given that Barth’s theology has an important place
in modern European intellectual history alongside other intellectual
achievements, one may well ask whether Barth’s theology also might have
some continuing relevance for our own times. It is interesting to note how
many of the intellectual authorships from the early part of the twentieth
Century are considered to have precisely that. Imagine contemporary
thought today without such names as those in my list above—Benjamin,
Bloch, Bultmann, Cassirer, Heidegger, Freud, Husserl, Jaspers, Rosenzweig,
Schmitt and Weber—not only as historical authors but also as interlocutors
for current thought: without them you will imagine an impoverished dis-
cussion. Perhaps, then, Barth, among all these other intellectuals, does not
belong only in history but in the current intellectual discussion.
There have been some obstacles to considering Barth’s place in the
general intellectual discussion that are internal to theology and that has to
do with labeling him a ‘neo-orthodox’ theologian. In a dramatic and
x FOREWORD: KARL BARTH AND INTELLECTUAL THOUGHT
drastic form this sentiment is expressed by the Swedish author and priest
Rune Pär Olofsson in the header of an article in an evening newspaper, as
a characterization of Barth’s theology: ‘God is everything, human beings
are nothing, and you are an idiot…’.4 What Olofsson summarizes in this
witty but still unsatisfactory header is Barth’s talk of God as the ‘Wholly
Other’ that hits us human beings ‘right from above’ (‘senkrecht von
oben’). Taken at its face value, this idea, from the second edition of The
Epistle to the Romans, seems to be the worst kind of ‘revelatory positivism’
and aiming at an outright destruction of human subjectivity. Of course,
Olofsson’s article has not affected the reception of Barth’s theology at all,
with the possibility of an exception in Sweden, but nevertheless similar
sentiments (in less dramatic forms) has turned some of theology against
Barth. Especially, then, if such an impression of Barth’s theology were to
be true, it is not a likely candidate for a critical conversation with philoso-
phy, psychology, sociology and other disciplines.
What such a characterization of Barth’s theology does not recognize,
however, is how the idea of God as the ‘Wholly Other’ that strikes us
‘right from above’ should be interpreted with regard to Barth’s more gen-
eral concept of crisis and thus as more dialectical than what just an out-of-
context quote might suggest. Barth’s theology is an act of self-relativization
as much as a relativization of other positions; thus it is more of an inter-
vention than a position. In other words, Barth is trying to phrase some-
thing similar to many other thinkers at the time, namely the insight that
there is in innate tendency of human thought and action to go astray and
only a radically critical thought that recognizes this tendency is sufficient.
In that sense, Barth shares some of the insights of, say, Marxism or psycho-
analysis about the fundamental alienation of human beings. One might say
that the compartmentalization of theology mentioned above plays a trick
here, as it veils some of the echoes between theology and other forms of
thought that otherwise might be obvious. Now, even if the idea that lies
behind Barth’s conception of the ‘Wholly Other’ in Romans might be
more complex than some of his interpreters seem to think, he nevertheless
moved on, to his magnum opus, Kirchliche Dogmatik or Church Dogmatics,
a work of more than 9000 pages, published between 1932 and 1967,
where his original idea of crisis is modified and deepened but not
4 Rune Pär Olofsson, ‘Gud är allt, människan intet och du är en idiot…’, Expressen,
November 10 (1964).
FOREWORD: KARL BARTH AND INTELLECTUAL THOUGH T xi
abandoned.5 The length of this work alone gives us a hint about why the
interpretation of Barth requires an effort comparable to what it takes to
understand Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud.
What some theologians have seen as an obstacle to the reception of
Barth’s thought in theology as well as more generally, others have seen as
an asset to a genuinely critical discussion. There has been a steady trickle
of articles, books and dissertations comparing Barth to Martin Buber,
Edmund Husserl, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida,
among others. The common denominator between these different works
is the recognition of the critical and dialectical aspect of Barth’s thought
which makes it interesting to compare to philosophers or philosophies
paralleling a similar trait. Juxtaposing the philosopher and the theologian
might accomplish a mutually critical elucidation of the one and the other,
but also serves to highlight why Barth is not to be regarded as some kind
of anti-philosopher. Reading Sigurd Baark’s Ph.D. dissertation Seeking out
the Enemy on His own Ground—problems and proof in dialectical theology
around the time of its defense, two things struck me immediately. First,
that I had never read this kind of comparison between G. W. F. Hegel and
Barth before, but that it made complete sense. Second, I also sensed that
Baark’s interpretation of what is to be understood by ‘dialectics’ has really
clarified this central aspect of Barth’s theology. Building upon earlier
works by his supervisor in Princeton, Bruce McCormack, but also the
Danish theologian Bent Flemming Nielsen, but taking them further,
Baark clearly shows how Barth, far from being the ‘revelatory positivist’ he
has been accused of, belongs among the speculative philosophers of
German Idealism.6 Through his dissertation, Baark made a significant
contribution to the stream of studies recognizing the potential of Barth’s
thought for a genuine contribution to our contemporary critical discus-
sion about culture and society as well as religion.
In his current book, The Affirmations of Reason, Baark builds upon his
dissertation in explaining this speculative aspect of Barth’s theology, thus
bringing him into the contemporary intellectual discussion. In an exem-
plary way, Baark opens up the hitherto little explored avenue between
5 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 13 vol., eds. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–1969).
6 Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis
and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Bent Flemming
Nielsen, Die Rationalität der Offenbarungstheologie: Die Struktur des Theologieverständnisses
von Karl Barth (Århus: Aarhus University Press, 1988).