Book Reviews

Wynne, Jeremy J. Wrath Among the Perfections of God’s Life (New York: T & T Clark, 2010)

Wynne, Jeremy J. Wrath Among the Perfections of God’s Life (New York: T & T Clark, 2010), 232 pp. $130.00 ($44.95, paperback).

Reviewed by Adam J. Johnson (April 04, 2013)

Did the incarnate Son suffer the wrath of the Father? Are different “natural” catastrophes acts of punishment by an angry God? Will humankind eventually be divided (or has it already been divided?) into those who enjoy God’s gracious blessing in eternity or suffer at the hand of his righteous wrath without end? The doctrine of the wrath of God plays a significant role in a wide range of theological (and cultural) “occasional and thematic” questions. In Wrath Among the Perfections of God’s Life, Jeremy Wynne offers compelling and well-rounded account of this doctrine so as to better equip the church to grapple with these questions by stepping back and “work[ing] out with greater systematic specificity the Christian claim that wrath belongs to God in his perfection” (1). Wynne’s approach is heavily indebted to Barth overall, though he offers a new distinction between providential and redemptive “modes” of God’s perfection (see 63) in order to clarify how, in Barth’s theology “grace and mercy—and by implication God’s wrath—may be ascribed to God without compromising the freedom of the life which God has from himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (110).

The key to Wynne’s thesis is his proposal concerning “modes” of the divine perfections—an argument which has two movements. First, Wynne argues that in the act of God we “have to do rather with the glory of the Lord, God alive in our midst, the One seeking freely and gratuitously to give life to creatures, and so sustain them in their own, particular being as not-God” (23). That is to say, Wynne begins with an immanent-economic distinction (see 24). But he does so in such a way as to account for God’s economic activity with and for us as the God who makes room for his creatures within his own proper glory and life, and thus sustains and blesses the creature. Second, Wynne argues in the key constructive section of the book (see 109–14) that “a systematic account of divine perfection [must think] along two axes. Thinking the divine perfections along the first axis accommodates the fundamental, asymmetrical distinction between Creator and creature, infinite God as he is present to finite creation. . . . This first distinction may be maintained and developed as a providential mode of divine perfection” (111). But because the creature is not only finite but sinful, we must also think along a second axis, a “redemptive mode of divine perfection” which “accommodates the contingency of God’s life as it is lived for and among sinful human beings” (111).

Beginning from an account of God’s livingness (31), Wynne argues that wrath is one of God’s attributes against those who contend for a more immanentistinterpretation—that what we might call “wrath” is merely the natural consequence of sinful behavior. Specifically, it is such as a mode of divine righteousness in its confrontation with sin. That is to say, wrath “as one instance of the variety proper to the life of God, may be efficiently and effectively located among the perfections of God as a redemptive mode of divine perfection and, more specifically, as a redemptive mode of his righteousness” (13). Righteousness is proper both to the divine life in eternity and to its enactment in the triune God’s creation (i.e., a providential mode of activity). Given the reality of sin, however, God acts righteously partly in the mode of wrath: this is “God’s unrelenting opposition to sin” (116). Thus we can affirm both that in knowing God’s wrath we truly know God, and that wrath is not present in God from eternity in the same sense as are God’s love, holiness, and knowledge since conflict with sin is not present in God from eternity.

Wynne’s description of God’s wrath is far from one-sided. He locates it within an animated account of the living God’s perfections, particularly emphasizing wrath’s relationship to righteousness and justice. In a particularly felicitous move, however, Wynne ties God’s wrath to divine patience. He argues that the Bible affirms divine wrath in this context: the “triune God may choose to take up this work [of wrath] in a gracious act of passing over sin for a time, dealing with it not on the basis of historical process or in light of the vicissitudes or perceived necessities of creaturely time, but rather out of the resources of his eternity” (136). God’s work of wrath is one done patiently, and thus in utter generosity—another divine perfection Wynne helpfully binds to God’s righteous wrath.

The engagement with divine patience is motivated in part by Wynne’s study of Romans 3:21–26. This constitutes a significant part of Wynne’s argument, along with several other key biblical passages, as he intentionally seeks “a clear mending together of two activities often thought exclusive, namely systematic theological reflection and a disciplined reading of the texts of Scripture” (12). Complementing his study of such theologians as Turretin, Schleiermacher and Barth in the first part of the book, Wynne delves into choice biblical passages in the second part. The movement between the two parts, however, is delightful, for a strong theological engagement with Scripture is balanced with a nuanced exegetical, inter-textual, and canonical engagement with Scripture.

Wynne argues that wrath is a mode of righteousness, but that righteousness is properly related to generosity. Moving beyond the scope of Wynne’s own argument, we can see that it readily applies to the doctrine of the atonement. Penal substitution does not merely concern appeasing the wrath of God independently and as such, but is—or ought to be!—fundamentally concerned with God’s righteous generosity, which has wrath as a mode of its operation but which also properly includes the generous creation of rightness. In short, we cannot understand the righteous wrath of God in his atoning work apart from the resurrection and the re-creation that it entails.

The argument that the divine perfections have modes of activity (e.g., that when faced with sin God can and does enact his righteousness in the mode of wrath) raises an interesting question. If there are modes of attributes, and we know God only in his reconciling confrontation with sin, then we know God’s attributes primarily (if not exclusively) in the modes they take in the confrontation of sin. But if we only know God’s attributes in this mode of activity, do we actually know the character of God at all? In short, does this view create what we might call “attribute modalism,” in which the true character of God is veiled behind the mode of his activity in its confrontation with sin? Barth himself seems to allude to this concern in CD 23.1 (see 326–27).

The solution is ready at hand in the way Wynne locates wrath within righteousness, being careful to specify that God’s saving work is a matter of bringing his righteousness to bear upon our sin both as wrath and in the creation of “rightness.” To put this in terms of the doctrine of the atonement; if we think only of the death of Jesus Christ, then it is true that we only see the attributes of God in their confrontation of sin. But 1 Corinthians 15 demands that we see the resurrection as the primary aspect of Christ’s atoning work, within which his death has meaning. In the resurrection sin has been overcome, and we see the character of God enacted in Jesus Christ the victor who has done away with sin and therefore done away with any threat of “attribute modalism.” Though there are other avenues for dealing with this question (the prayer life of Jesus, for example, as seen in John 17), this response seems particularly fitting given the interest Wynne shows in the doctrine of the atonement throughout the work. And it opens the door to our primary means of accessing the “providential mode” of God’s activity: the Lordship of the ascended Jesus Christ and his work in the church through the Spirit.

Locating the biblical theme of the wrath of God among the perfections of God’s life is a sufficiently interesting task to merit a substantial readership, even if the book were not so well written. Beyond that area of interest, however, readers will find in Wynne’s work a compelling example of integrative systematic, historical and biblical studies under the umbrella of a constructive contribution to Christian doctrine, and an argument that will bear substantial fruit in a number of areas beyond the doctrine of divine perfections.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Fred Dallmayr, ed. The Legacy of the Barmen Declaration: Politics and the Kingdom (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019)

Fred Dallmayr, ed. The Legacy of the Barmen Declaration: Politics and the Kingdom (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 140 pp. $85.00 (hardback).

Wolf Krörke. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologians for a Post-Christian World. Translated by John P. Burgess (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019)

Sigurd Baark. The Affirmations of Reason: On Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

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

Sigurd Baark. The Affirmations of Reason: On Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), xiii + 291 pp. $109.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Justin Coyle (September 09, 2019)

Twenty-two years ago, Bruce McCormack unsettled Barth studies with his book Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford, 1997). This work capsized the Balthasar-Torrance thesis that in his 1931 Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (FQI) Barth, Saul-to-Paul-like, scrapped dialectic for analogy. No, McCormack insisted: Barth’s theology remained dialectical after 1931, even if more christological. The Balthasar-Torrance camp had inflated the “negligible importance” of FQI on Barth’s development (McCormack 1997, x).

Sigurd Baark demurs, though not by rallying Balthasar. Baark’s trouble with McCormack’s critically-realistic-dialectical Barth is not that he’s too dialectical. It is rather that he’s too Kantian (15-17). Kant’s first critique, remember, denied theoretical knowledge of God. We cannot know what we never experience, and we cannot experience what cannot breach space-time. Only, God did exactly this in Christ. And so, McCormack’s fiercely christological Barth boasts knowledge of God after all—and this quite without succor from the latter’s FQI.

But what if Barth did not accept Kant’s critique so blithely? And what if Barth is to be believed when he confesses that FQI remains “the key… to my Church Dogmatics” (13)? Such would, Baark proposes, cleave Barth closer to Kant’s patricidal sons: Fichte, Novalis, even the great and terrible Hegel. Indeed, Barth himself copped to “doing a bit of ‘Hegeling’,” did he not? Taking Barth at his word here means learning to see a “speculative aspect” in his thought (1). What all this comes to is what Baark’s The Affirmations of Reason: On Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology labors to show.

The argument proper commences where German Idealism does: with Kant. Chapter Three précises Kant’s kritische Philosophie from the first to the third Kritik. It rightly shows how Kant develops his necessarily amorphous “apperceptive I” in response to Hume’s challenge: “How to account for the normative status of our most basic concepts” (41)? Kant’s answer is by now cliché: We carry some of these basic concepts with us. Kant stays skepticism, then, by relocating the universal from what’s “out there” to our own categories of thought. All of which raises a question: What exactly is out there? As Reinhold would charge, Kant’s refusal of access to the things in themselves threatens to strengthen the very skepticism it means to scuttle.

Enter Kant’s heirs presumptive, each of whom claimed to be “more Kantian than Kant” (66). Chapter Four spotlights three, and at uneven intervals. Fichte first, who thought Kant’s letter kills but that his spirit gives life. By Fichte’s lights, Kant’s critical philosophy was not critical enough. It censed the Ding an sich in palls of mystery while dogmatically assuming thought’s categories instead of deriving them. Yet Fichte’s ingenious solution to ground everything in the Kantian “apperceptive I” risks replacing skepticism with sheer solipsism. Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht offers a different tableau. Only by loving and losing his fiancé does Novalis encounter himself. We are not yet subjects, love’s lesson runs, until we are given to ourselves objectively in another. This begins to intone the procession of Hegel. For Baark, neither Kant nor Fichte could escape subjectivism. Could Hegel? Yes, but only by refusing to scry knowledge’s limits ahead of time. For Hegel, “absolute knowing” turns out to name a form of knowledge—not, notice, a content—which refuses to know what thinking can think before thinking itself. Hegel’s project, then, presumes a presuppositionless exploration of thinking and its deliverances. A speculative philosophy, to indulge some Hegelese.

Part Two finally opens upon Barth himself. Chapter Five sets Barth’s early theology in relief against romanticism. Baark identifies the shadow of Overbeck over Barth’s revision of Der Römerbrief. Between Römerbrief I and II Barth learns from Overbeck that death threatens our claims to knowledge. Thus, we know only night, only death, only not-God (Rom. 1:18-20). However, even this says too much; we scarcely know “God” enough to negate the concept. Paul’s letter radically reconfigures that concept. Readers learn that God turns out to name whatever is left over after Jesus exorcises our preconceived notions.

Exactly what is leftover, though, is not clear. Just so the Barth of Der Römerbrief I and II fights shy of speculative theology. He remains in thrall to Overbeckian negation—or in “danger,” as Barth himself had it, “of falling into an abstract negation of the world” (168). Chapter Six charts Barth’s course away from mere negation. On Baark’s reading, the Barth of FQI “leaves behind a… temptation to use unrealized eschatology as an epistemic model” (175). Loosed from his bonds to preconceived epistemic limits, Barth’s theology becomes properly speculative.

Anselm’s Proslogion tutors Barth on the form theology must take. A theologian’s credo, that is, bears a dialectical relation to her Credo. Subjective and objective mutually condition one another. But they do only because their form and final unity is given by their identical content, namely the indubitable thinking of God. The near isomorphism between conceiving God and God’s existing scotches the radical negativity of Romans II. After FQI, “affirmation precedes negation” (223). If Barth’s method remains dialectical, it is now a speculative dialectic.

Chapter Seven, Baark’s last, measures the wake of Barth’s shift through his Church Dogmatics. Most interesting here is how Baark brandishes his reading against McCormack. The latter’s infamous “Grace and Being” essay wondered whether Barth should not have thought election logically prior to or constitutive of God’s trinitarian act. Baark objects that anything anteceding God’s eternal act smuggles the very ens quo maius that Anslem and Barth insisted cogitari nequit. McCormack might counter that Baark’s acquittal of Barth’s counterfactualing—“even if God had not elected to be for humanity, it is inconceivable that this would have negated God’s freedom” (257)—in fact defends a non-Hegelian freedom abstracted from the acts by which God reveals himself. The charge of voluntarism, it seems, cuts both ways.

Baark mounts his case for the speculative Barth throughout with tact and charm and skill. Most remarkable to non-Barthian eyes (mine, anyway) is how he reads and understands not only Idealist texts, but also important secondary literature on them. That is a rarity, which is fast approaching extinction these days, at least among theologians. The book is a challenge and a gift, especially to those readers of Barth who cosset a Kierkegaardian skepticism about Hegel’s deliverances.

Yet the story Baark weaves of Barth’s relation to Hegel sometimes sits ill at ease with the one Barth himself tells. Consider Barth 1933 lecture on Hegel, penned after FQI and which Baark does not to my mind cite. There, recall, Barth “must finally say ‘No’ to Hegel” (Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century 383). Hegel’s “confidence in God,” Barth writes, turns out to be—note the warmed-over Feuerbach—“self-confidence” (Barth, 377). More, Hegel’s hubris issues in philosophical problems—the Hegelian identity between thinking and being, for instance (Barth, 377). Readers may wonder, then, why the philosophical vices Barth here identifies in Hegel end up being the very theological virtues (to crib a phrase from Nicholas Adams) Baark wants to spotlight in Barth. This tension scrawls a question-mark over Baark’s conclusion that “Barth’s theology… leaves the essence of the Hegelian framework intact” (281). Still, I dare to hope the future promises more from Baark on this question.

Here’s another question: Baark claims that for Barth “christology pertains to both content and form” (168), even that “the form of speculative theology is christological through and through” (252). But is not the certainty of FQI’s speculative knowledge christological only to the extent that it is Christ-compatible? Different things, these. FQI gifts theology certainty only insofar as “God stands outside the speculative economy as the ultimate arbiter of truth” (205; cf. Barth, PTNC 404-5). But compare Hegel, for whom it is not God qua divine nature who is ens quo maius cogitari nequit, knowledge of whom is therefore certain. Rather this “soil of certainty” (Boden der Gewissheit) is the God-man:

The necessity (Notwendigkeit) [that the divine-human unity shall appear] is not first apprehended by means of thinking; rather it is a certainty for humanity. In other words, this content—the unity of divine and human nature—achieves certainty, obtaining the form of immediate sensible intuition and external existence for humankind, so that it appears as something that has been seen in the world, something that has been experienced… God had to appear (musste erscheinen) in the world in the flesh. The necessity that [has] appeared in the world in the flesh is an essential characteristic… for only in this way can it become a certainty for humanity; only in this way is it the truth in the form of certainty (LPR III, 454-6, my emphasis).

Neither is there any question here of what God might have done otherwise. Hegel, like Maximus Confessor before him, is much too Platonist—or is it Neochalcedonian?—to equate divine freedom with unencumbered choice whose measure is counterfactual possibility. By contrast, Baark’s Barth hews closer to another (unmentioned) Idealist: the mature F.W.J. Schelling, who set his divine Sein-Können against Hegel’s revised Spinozism. Might Baark play Schelling to McCormack’s Hegel?

Whether Sigurd Baark’s brilliant The Affirmations of Reason will unsettle Barth studies the way his quondam advisor McCormack has remains a question. Still, the intellectual resemblance between them seems irrefragable: their command of Barth’s texts, their hermeneutical brio, their speculative mettle. Also common to both is the engagement all readers of Barth owe now them. Students of Barth simply cannot in good conscience ignore Baark. And neither, it seems to me, should any serious student of theology.

Justin Shaun Coyle, Ph.D., Boston College

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Martin Westerholm. The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality

Martin Westerholm. The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), xiii + 249 pp. $115.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Laura Lysen (December 05, 2019)

It is a regrettable truism that theological disagreements easily form into battle lines that exhaust their capacity (or charity) for innovation as they descend into stalemate. In The Ordering of the Christian Mind, Martin Westerholm identifies the central contemporary battleground of theological reasoning and redraws the lines in one of its most polarized centers: debates concerning Karl Barth’s theological reasoning. Responding in particular to the entrenched perception that Barth’s theology does not allow for an adequate account of human reasoning, Westerholm offers a fresh depiction of Barth’s ordering of Christian thought in hopes of communicating its theological and spiritual cogency and power. Westerholm’s persistent impulse to reframe and contextualize enables him to prise open “stale impasses” within Barth scholarship itself: between continuity and discontinuity, dialectic and analogy, realism and critical realism, thorough modernness and ongoing meaningfulness in Barth’s work (233).

Westerholm lays out Barth’s ordering of Christian thought by unfolding how Barth’s own thinking came to be reordered through two defining sets of engagements: his early work with Paul and his later engagements with Anselm. Much of the substance of Westerholm’s argument derives from his treatment of these two moments as essentially generative for Barth’s thought and as continuous with one another. Westerholm shows how the continuity between these moments reaches across developmental discontinuities to trace a vision of theological rationality that deepens as it develops. Key to this vision, as Westerholm presents it, is Barth’s shifting of the question of theological knowledge from the confines of modern (and contemporary) epistemological inquiry to a fundamentally moral and spiritual inquiry, indeed precisely to the question of how creaturely thought is to be ordered in relation to what it knows (chapter 1). Human processes of rationality, in other words, are integral to Barth’s theological interests. On the strength of this reorientation, Barth ventures into the ordering of creaturely thought in correspondence to the divine reality that it knows, and comes to understand, in faith (chapters 2-5).

As a consequence or corollary of the doctrine of justification, Barth first discovers in Paul a noetic standpoint of faith that takes as the principle of its knowledge God’s own activity rather than the conditions and possibilities of faith itself (chapters 2-3). Just as crucially, Barth finds in Paul that God truly can be given to human knowledge in such a way —that is, in promise—as to remain sovereign. This frees Barth to speak quite positively and substantively of how Christian thought is to be ordered by this sovereign presence. Westerholm synthesizes this ordering through three conceptual categories that emerge from Barth’s Pauline engagements and mature through his Anselmian reflections. First, the above standpoint of faith orders Christian thought always to proceed from the position of the eschatological (rather than the empirical) subject, from the position of union with Christ. From here Barth identifies concrete points of orientation for thought. These points of orientation are both material, for instance, in the life and work of Christ and the confession of the Creed; and formal, as in the approach to objects of knowledge in view of their beginning and end in God rather than in a delusive and enslaving immediacy. The very freedom of thought, with its Kantian baggage of autonomy and spontaneity, is here redefined in terms of the obedience of faith.

This freedom of thought takes center stage as Barth turns to Anselm (chapters 4-5) to comprehend faith’s movement to understanding. This turn to Anselm, Westerholm observes, is Barth’s original response to the charge that he was eliding rational processes of “appropriating” the faith (147-51). If faith is fundamentally moral or self-implicating, then faith’s movement to understanding entails the movement of creaturely freedom, in thought and in life, into correspondence to the freedom of God apprehended in Christian teaching. To understand this teaching is again not to inquire into the epistemological force of its claims (“whether” they are true) but to ask after its moral force in shaping creaturely thought in accordance with its witness (“how far” they are true; 219, 233). In this movement, the divine reality becomes not just a procedural or noetic beginning point but the whole substance in which creaturely thought lives, moves, and conceives the possibilities of its existence: indeed, if the standpoint of faith reflects the mind’s sharing in justification, then the movement of understanding, Westerholm suggests, comprises the mind’s sanctification. This completes Barth’s account of thought as a moral and spiritual ordering that can know God in no other way than by being conformed to God. It is not the freedom of autonomy, which justifies itself at a remove from God, but the freedom of obedience—finally, of love—that enables and compels a movement like this. Westerholm concludes with the provocative suggestion that this same choice between freedoms, either autonomy or obedience, may be the real dividing line that Barth has passed on to contemporary thought. Nothing but the latter, Barth (and Westerholm) suggests, can order the mind to acknowledge the truth of God.

The avenues for exploration that open up within this work are more than can be named here. It could be particularly significant, not least in light of contemporary “impasses,” to explore the full methodological range of the “freedom” of thought that orients itself by the obedience of faith. Westerholm’s account of credal confession as offering for Barth “no more than points of orientation”—in Barth’s words, “border posts and anchor buoys” for theological reasoning (232)—already seems to suggest a theological movement somewhat different, and potentially freer, than the expectation (often framed in Barthian terms) that dogmatic claims serve as determinative “starting points” for any theological analysis. It would indeed have been invaluable, if infeasible within this single study, for Westerholm to consider implications such as this on a practical level. “How far” indeed, as a further example, should one understand the displacement of epistemology by moral concerns? Once one has taken a step back with Barth and reframed the possibility of truth, morally and theologically, does this reframing return any implications to the more nitty-gritty assessments of theological truthfulness that have been initially set aside? Finally, what might it mean to clarify the relation between “noetic” sanctification, the overwhelming interest of this work, and the sanctification of Christian life as a whole? Where the relation is addressed, Westerholm tends to suggest a one-way movement from thought to the human life that it orders. What might be said, conversely, concerning the bearing of life on thought? Does this question need greater attention in light of the troubling coexistence of reordered thought and disordered relationships in Barth’s own life, to say nothing of our own?

The Ordering of the Christian Mind is a dense, rich, careful study that rewards the attention it requires. Indeed, it is no nominal survey but a complex symphony of concepts and trajectories that, while carefully organized and narrated, draws long arcs in the material that presume commitment and capacity in the reader to follow them through. The carefulness and clarity of the work, however, makes it accessible and rewarding not only to Barth scholars but to any relatively advanced reader with a stake in Barth studies or in the questions of theological reason implicated here. The book is no less rewarding as it offers, through the particular lens of Christian thought, a rich review of many of the foundational and abiding insights of Barth’s theology. It will take specialists in Barth to assess the particulars of this significant essay in ordering his thought, but there should be little doubt that it will merit and reward the effort.

Laura Lysen, Ph.D. Candidate in Theology and Ethics, Baylor University Department of Religion

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Kimlyn Bender. Reading Karl Barth for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019)

Jeff McSwain. Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018)

Maico M. Michielin, ed. A Shorter Commentary on Romans by Karl Barth, trans., D.H. van Daalen, with an introductory essay by Maico Michielin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Barth, Karl. A Unique Time of God: Karl Barth’s WWI Sermons. Trans. William Klempa (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016)

White, Thomas Joseph, O.P., ed., The Analogy of Being: Invention of Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011)

Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Andrew Burgess, The Ascension in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)

Erik Peterson, Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 9 – Theologie und Theologen: Texte (9/1), Theologie und Theologen: Briefwechsel mit Karl Barth u.a., Reflexionen und Erinnerungen (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 2009)

Eberhard Busch, Barth, Abingdon Pillars of Theology, Richard and Martha Burnett (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008)

P. H. Brazier, Barth and Dostoevsky: A Study of the Influence of the Russian Writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky on the Development of the Swiss Theologian Karl Barth, 1915-1922 (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2007)

Ford, David F., Barth and God’s Story: Biblical Narrative and the Theological Method of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2008 [reprint])

Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-Theological Comparison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Colin E. Gunton. The Barth Lectures Edited by P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), Reviewed by Kimlyn J. Bender (August 05, 2010)

D. Densil Morgan, Barth Reception in Britain (London: T&T Clark, 2010)

Gabriel, Andrew K. Barth’s Doctrine of Creation: Creation, Nature, Jesus, and the Trinity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014)

Resch, Dustin. Barth’s Interpretation of the Virgin Birth: A Sign of Mystery (Surry, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2012)

Webster, John. Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998)

Wood, Donald. Barth’s Theology of Interpretation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Dorrien, Gary. The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology without Weapons (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000)

Paul T. Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: T & T Clark, 2007)

DeJonge, Michael. Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

Neil B. MacDonald and Carl Trueman (eds.), Calvin, Barth, and Reformed Theology (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster Theological Monographs, 2008)

Nimmo, Paul T., and David A. S. Fergusson, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology. Cambridge Companions to Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Suzanne Selinger, Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth: A Study in Biography and the History of Theology (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998)

Johnson, Junius. Christ and Analogy: The Christocentric Metaphysics of Hans Urs Von Balthasar (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013)

Hieb, Nathan D. Christ Crucified in a Suffering World: The Unity of Atonement and Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013)

David Haddorff, Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth’s Ethics for a World at Risk (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2010)

Cortez, Marc, Christological Anthropology in Historical Perspective: Ancient and Contemporary Approaches to Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016)

Migliore, Daniel L., ed. Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017)

Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth 

Migliore, Daniel L., ed. Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), xxvii + 226 pp. $35.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Stephen J. Plant (March 23, 2018)

I can not recall when I first heard the phrase “that’ll preach” used to describe a theological insight capable of illuminating a typical congregant hearing a sermon. Another variant, the question “will it preach?”, subsequently became helpful to ask seminarians about their essays and occasionally to ask colleagues about their teaching. The importance of being able to cash theology in as preaching is something Barth was well aware of. In the 1951 preface to Church Dogmatics III/4, Barth noted that it had been three decades since he was actively engaged in pastoral ministry and in “expounding the Gospel Sunday by Sunday.” Yet, he continued, “what I have done in the meantime has been intended for its benefit” (CD III/4, xi).

In the 11 essays in Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth, which were first rehearsed at the 2015 Karl Barth Conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, we have an impressive body of evidence that Barth’s theology “preaches.” In addition to 11 essays, the book also includes a sermon, which is where I want to begin my remarks. A sermon written for a particular moment in time and a particular congregation rarely transfers successfully to print where, lacking context, the living, spoken word usually turns to lifeless symbols on the page. But Fleming Rutledge’s sermon on Matthew 25:1-13 is exceptional. It was delivered on June 22nd, 2015, days after the killing of parishioners of Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The grace with which she finds illumination of and from this dreadful event in the parable of the bridesmaids (“What’s in those lamps?”) is unforgettably powerful. Ending a book on Barth’s use of the Gospels with a sermon is not only apt, but it is also in every sense inspired. Perhaps if Rutledge’s sermon did not simply have to be the final word, Migliore’s introduction would have been better placed as a conclusion to the collection. As a dutiful reviewer I read it first, but with growing regret, as its succinct summaries of all the essays to follow tended to spoil the surprise of each essay when I came to read them. It is, of course, a fault I now repeat!

The collection begins with Jürgen Moltmann’s essay on “The Election of Grace” in §32 and §33 of CD II/2. For Moltmann, it “is the invaluable merit of Karl Barth to have overcome” the “dualism of belief and unbelief in Christian theology” in his doctrine of election (3). One of the ways Barth does this is by relocating election in the context of God’s self-affirmation since, as Barth puts it, ‘“Everything which comes from God takes place ‘in Jesus Christ”’ (5). On this basis, Moltmann moves to address a number of temptations that a doctrine of election can face, including a temptation to fear one’s faith may be too weak to fight against injustice.

Each subsequent essay exhibits a similar form by setting out to examine critically Barth’s reading of a passage “in the Gospels to determine the ways in which his readings are distinctive or novel” (xiv). In chapter 2, Richard Bauckham considers Barth’s reflections on John 1:1-18. Bauckham, one of only two New Testament specialists to contribute to this volume, offers an appreciative yet critical study of Barth’s somewhat “eccentric” exegesis. Barth’s exegetical approach, which gives preeminence to theological interpretation in relation to other reading strategies, means he does not show much interest in the way “logos” was used in parallel ways in Platonic, Stoic, or Rabbinic sources. The incarnation for Barth is an event “in both eternity and time” (21). But out with the historical-critical bathwater goes the baby: Bauckham regrets that Barth neglects both the literary structure of the Prologue and the importance of its relation to Genesis 1:1-5.

Eric Gregory (chapter 3) explores Barth’s use of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He approves of Barth’s determination to supplement moral applications of the story with an evangelical or soteriological reading in which (as Barth put it) “the primary and true form of the neighbor is that he faces us as the bearer and representative of divine compassion” (45). On this basis, Gregory draws “out some implications for Christian communities often at the forefront of humanitarian aid” (51). Diaconal service to the poor, caring for the sick, the prisoner etc., can never “’be more than drops in a bucket’” for Barth – but such ministry nonetheless witnesses to “the cosmic work of Christ in free obedience” (p.52).

Willie James Jennings (chapter 4) sets Barth’s treatment of the story of the Rich Young Man (Mark 10:17-31) against the background of Barth’s critique of the Swiss Government’s poor record in relation to refugees – particularly Jewish refugees – and the Swiss banks’ willingness to profit from Nazi loot during the war. Barth’s “very different fiduciary vision of the divine promise bound up with the command of God”, Jennings concludes, “could help us think out the relation of money to divine promise in ways that might draw Christians to the freedom of God and away from the anxiety of the rich man” (66).

Paul Nimmo (chapter 5) has the briefest biblical text in view in Matthew 9:36. But Barth’s treatment of Jesus’ compassion for “the crowds” in CD IV/2 opens up several illuminating inquiries for theological anthropology, atonement theory, and what Jesus’ compassion shows us about the compassion of God. The Greek verb, usually translated “compassion”, is related to the Greek word for entrails or bowels (splanchna), which suggests that Jesus’ compassion has a deep and visceral quality. Nimmo rightly describes Barth’s conclusion about the relation of Jesus’ compassion to His Father’s as unequivocal and shocking: “the compassion of God truly concerns His splanchna and thus no less than in the case of all God’s other attributes His eternal and simple essence” (79).

Chapters 6 and 7 both deal with the same Gospel passage: the parable of the Lost Son in Luke 15:11-32, and Barth’s extraordinary Christological reading of it in CD IV/2, §64. Daniel L. Migliore’s sympathetic and intelligent essay (chapter 6) draws out some of the distinctive features of Barth’s treatment of this parable by comparing it with that of Hans Urs von Balthasar. While von Balthasar did not devote quite the focused attention to the parable that Barth did, von Balthasar reads the parable in a Trinitarian way, that is in terms of the Father’s relationship with the Son. In chapter 7, Kendall Cox illuminates some striking similarities between Barth and Julian of Norwich’s treatment of the parable of the Prodigal Son. Like Barth, Julian went beyond typical commentary, which read the parable as involving a contrast between repentant sinners (the prodigal son) and law-bound Jews (the older). Julian, in continuity with Barth, proposes that ‘“In the servant [i.e., the younger son] is comprehended the seconde person of the trinite, and in the servant is comprehended Adam: that is to sey, all men’” (112). Cox goes on to make an intriguing suggestion that in both Julian and Barth, the parable of the prodigal son effectively functions “as a thumbnail of all the doctrinal elements of reconciliation” (117).

In chapter 8, Paul Dafydd Jones explores Barth on Jesus’ agony in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus’ prayer to the Father in each of the Synoptic Gospels that the cup pass/be removed from him has long played a role in Christological and Trinitarian debates, for example in the Monothelite/Dyothelite controversies of the 7th century. In his compelling essay, Jones uses Barth to shed light upon a number of centrally important questions. He begins by discussing Barth’s relation to the past. Barth notes previous theologians but does not feel bound to repeat their conclusions. Rather, for Barth, it is practically an axiom that “dogmatic work succeeds when it makes sense of God’s self-revelation, to which Scripture is the principal witness” (140). Barth is consequently uninterested in certain kinds of speculation about Christ’s inner life. What the Gospels show us, simply, is that “In his prayer to the Father, Jesus freely decides to open himself to sin and to God’s rejection of sin” (147). Jesus freely commits himself to the worst that human sinners can do and to the worst that God can do in rejecting sin. Moreover, this free commitment is made, not by Jesus’ human will alone, or by his divine will alone, but by the Son in whom full humanity and divinity are one. Thus: “During the passion, and especially on the cross, the Chalcedonian adjectives – inconfusione, immutabiliter, inseparabiliter, indivise – no longer apply only to Jesus. They also apply to the work of God and the work of sinners” (146).

Bruce L. McCormack, in a provocative essay (chapter 9), leads off with José Saramago’s controversial novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which subjects “the principal agent at work in the drama’ of Jesus’ life ‘viz. God’” (157). How could God have protected Jesus from Herod’s murderous wrath and not the other innocent children of Bethlehem? In Barth’s treatment of the “cry of dereliction” as “the judge judged in our place” in CD IV/1, McCormack finds at least part of an answer. For Barth, the passion of Jesus is the passion of God himself. On the cross, God experiences death humanly – yet without compartmentalizing suffering to the human nature alone. In the cross, God gives himself – as Barth puts it “but He does not give himself away” (165). Saramago says God – should he exist – is guilty. It “seems to me,” McCormack concludes, “no other answer will do but death in God as a self-imposed act of public acknowledgment of the evil that was, in a very real sense, necessary to the accomplishment of God’s love” (167).

Beverly Roberts Gaventa (chapter 10) treats Barth’s reading of the Emmaus road story, in which both Barth and Gaventa find hints about Luke’s view of Scripture. A customary description of the book of Acts is that it is a history of the Church. Gaventa believes this neglects the extent to which Acts is the second part of an account of the life of Jesus begun by Luke in his Gospel. Jesus constantly appears as an active, living agent in Acts. In Barth’s reading of the Risen Lord’s conversation with the disciples on road to Emmaus, Gaventa sees a robust theology of revelation that can undergird such an understanding of Jesus’ presence in Scripture.

In chapter 11, Shannon Nicole Smythe examines Barth’s word study of paradidómi in the New Testament (normally translated by Barth “handed over” or “delivered”). In CD II/2, §35.4 Barth pursues some of the uses of the term, which he believes is “no mere semantic accident” (189). Smythe uses this discussion to unlock what is at stake in Barth’s conviction that “what God elects in eternity is precisely the history of Christ” (191). God’s unchanging being is constituted by God’s choice of humanity in Jesus Christ’s self-giving love.

Bonhoeffer once told his seminarians that every good sermon should contain a whiff of heresy. Even where Barth’s readings of Gospel texts give off a theologically idiosyncratic odor – as the books on Barth’s shelves in Basel still conjure the scent of his tobacco – they will still “preach.” On every page, this splendid collection provokes reflection that is rich in possibilities for theologians and preachers seeking to hear God’s voice in the witness of the Gospels.

Stephen J. Plant, Dean and Runcie Fellow, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

William H. Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006)

Rosalene Bradbury, Cross Theology: The Classical Theologia Crucis and Karl Barth’s Modern Theology of the Cross (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011)

Christophe Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians: Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann (Zürich: TVZ, 2005)

Kilner, John F. Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015)

Thomas, Günter, Rinse Reeling Brouwer and Bruce McCormack eds., Dogmatics After Barth: Facing Challenges in Church, Society and the Academy (Leipzig: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012)

Karl Barth and William H. Willimon, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon. Translations by John E. Wilson. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009)

Yocum, John. Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)

Williams, Stephen N. The Election of Grace: A Riddle without a Resolution? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015)

Grebe, Matthias. Election, Atonement and the Holy Spirit: Through and Beyond Barth’s Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014)

David Gibson and Daniel Strange, (eds.). Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques, (Nottingham: Apollos, 2008)

David Clough, Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)

Fout, Jason. Fully Alive: The Glory of God and the Human Creature in Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Theological Exegesis of Scripture (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015)

Tyler Wittman, God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Johnson, Adam J., God’s Being in Reconciliation: The Theological Basis of the Unity and Diversity of the Atonement in the Theology of Karl Barth, (London: T & T Clark, 2012)

Hare, John E. God’s Command. Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)

Wüthrich, Matthias D. Gott und das Nichtige: Zur Rede vom Nichtigen ausgehend von Karl Barths KD § 50 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2006)

Wüthrich, Matthias D. God and Nothingness: The Speech of Nothingness from Karl Barth KD § 50 (Zurich: Theological Verlag Zurich, 2006)

Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on Homo Incurvatus in Se (London: T & T Clark, 2006)

Rosner, Jennifer M. Healing the Schism: Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and the New Jewish-Christian Encounter (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2021)

Healing the Schism: Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and the New Jewish-Christian Encounter

Rosner, Jennifer M. Healing the Schism: Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and the New Jewish-Christian Encounter (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2021), 288 pp. $ 34.99 (paperback).

In this second edition of Healing the Schism: Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and the New Jewish-Christian Encounter, Jennifer Rosner brings a new perspective to healing the ancient tensions inherent in Jewish-Christian dialogue. She begins by highlighting the main causes of this ancient schism. Then, from the work of Scott Bader-Saye she identifies four key events, “[which] set the frame for … a new chapter in Jewish-Christian relations …” (246): the collapse of Christendom, the Holocaust, the creation of the modern state of Israel and rise of the Messianic Jewish movement. Rosner believes that these events have contributed to a “widespread reassessment of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism” (2).

Rosner’s study explores “these developments from a theological and doctrinal perspective, focusing specifically upon the Christological and ecclesiological revisions that have accompanied and provoked this widespread assessment” (3). To do this, she journeys with key twentieth and twenty-first century Jewish and Christian theologians who have “significantly contributed to the theological re-envisioning of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity” (3). She asks each of them a key doctrinal question posed by Catholic theologian Bruce Marshall: “To what extent does their thought affirm (or contribute to the affirmation of) both the universal, ecclesially mediated saving mission of Christ and the irrevocable election of the Jewish people, which necessarily includes the ongoing practice of Judaism?” (9).

Karl Barth’s doctrine of election and its relationship to the command of God is the focus of Rosner’s first chapter. For Barth, Jesus Christ is “both the elect man and the electing God” (45) where Israel represents “the elect man (who turns away from the electing God)” and the church represents “the electing God (who turns towards the elect man)” (48). Despite Israel’s resistance to their election and the church’s calling on the grounds of its election, both Israel and the church are elect in Christ (49). Whereas for Barth the church is “the perfect form of the one community of God” reflecting God’s mercy to humanity, Israel witnesses to the judgment from which God has rescued humanity (49).

Rosner rightly recognizes that because Barth grounds the election of Israel within the election of Christ, “Israel is not ultimately at liberty to determine its own destiny” (73). Furthermore, Barth’s consistently negative portrayal of Israel and the “Synagogue” informs his understanding of Jesus’ Jewishness (72). Rosner explains: “Barth offers a theologically powerful understanding of Israel’s existence in Christ, but he lacks an adequate conception of Christ’s existence in Israel. Here Barth’s de-historicized Christology yields an anemic portrayal of Jesus’ Jewishness” (75). In tandem with Stephen Hayes, she believes that Barth’s understanding of Jewishness is primarily grounded in being a negative model of humanity which, while chosen and called by God, does not respond to God (83). This understanding has led Barth to “unwaveringly condemn rabbinic Judaism” (84) because for him there is no sense in which “Jesus himself conformed to Jewish practice, nor any indication that he taught his Jewish followers to do likewise” (77). Ultimately, “while Barth safeguards the Jewishness of Jesus as an essential feature of his Christology, he fails to reckon with the practical implications of this claim” (78).

Rosner concludes that Barth’s doctrine of election and Christocentric ecclesiology strongly uphold the first part of Marshall’s framework. However, with regard to the Jewishness of Jesus, Barth does not leave room for a positive assessment of Judaism “that is not explicitly centered on Christ” (94). Thus, Barth fails to satisfy the second part of Marshall’s question.

Chapter two turns to Franz Rosenzweig, attempting to discover how his work might complement that of Barth. Rosner focuses on Rosenzweig’s seminal work The Star of Redemption, particularly part 3 where Rosenzweig “fleshes out the relationship between Judaism and Christianity’’ and their “parallel yet distinctive trajectories towards redemption” (98). Redemption for Rosensweig is “the process by which man, awakened to revelation, loves his neighbor and thereby the world” (98). For Rosensweig, Judaism ushers in redemption. As Rosner summarizes, “Like the burning core of a star, their [the Jewish people’s] existence must continue to burn without reference to the outside… The Jewish people’s vocation is characterized by a prescribed inwardness, and it is within this inwardness that it lives out the commission of love of neighbor” (100). Christianity on the other hand is represented by the rays that emanate from the core of the star and “exist only by virtue of the burning core” (100). Rosner helpfully notes that for Rosenzweig, Christianity, unlike Judaism ushers in redemption by being dependent upon its “outward promulgation” and is by necessity “missionary” (106). She points out that Rosenzweig understands Christianity and Judaism “as counterweights for one another, each preventing the other from falling into the dangers that perpetually tempt it” (110). The dangers inherent in each faith arise in Rosner’s words, “from their separate but corollary tasks and foundations” (112). She explains that for Rosenzweig, because Christianity has pagan roots, there will always be a danger of deifying that which is not God, be it people or the world. Judaism’s biggest danger on the other hand is in becoming too insular and forsaking “the rest of the world” (112).

Ultimately God “who is truth, is only fully made known in the eschaton when the deep division of Judaism and Christianity is finally and ultimately reconciled” (110). Hence Judaism and Christianity “verify truth in their own way” with the Jew “being born into his vocation” while the Christian is “awakened” into his (110). For Rosenzweig, redemption has universal scope albeit through the different and “mutually exclusive” vocations of Jews and Christians (129).

Rosner argues that in Rosenzweig’s thought “the twin vocations of Judaism and Christianity, the dual loci of redemption’s proleptic presence … reinforce the juxtaposition between Christ and the Jewish people” (129). This coupled with the fact that for Rosenzweig, Jesus “never completely dons a Jewish identity” leaves the first part of Marshall’s framework unfulfilled (143). However, Rosner notes that Rosenzweig construes Torah observance as a means by which Jewish people “live into redemption” (143). In other words, “Torah observance is the actualization of the Jewish people’s election” (143). As such, Rosenzweig’s work upholds the second part of Marshall’s framework (143).

In Chapter 3 Rosner examines “a small constellation of post-Holocaust Jewish and Christian theologians who both build upon and extend the trajectories charted by Barth and Rosenzweig” (145). They include Thomas Torrance, Will Herberg, Michael Wyschogrod, Ignaz Maybaum, R. Kendall Soulen, Scott Bader-Saye, Robert Jenson, George Lindbeck, and David Novak, among others. In reviewing their work, Rosner notes that their theologies come across similar dangers to that of the theologies of Barth and Rosenzweig (perhaps due to their respective proximities to Barth and/or Rosenzweig’s thought). One danger is the “summing up [of] Israel’s vocation in Christ to such an extent that the Jewish people do not retain any positive vocation of their own” (191). This is to “essentially collapse Israel into Christ” (191). The opposite extreme is also problematic – that of preserving Israel’s ongoing positive vocation at the expense of diminishing Christ “such that he becomes merely an exemplary model of Israel’s faithful obedience” (192). Yet still, “a more pronounced version of this danger can be seen in the dual-covenant model, whereby Christ’s significance never even makes contact with the people of Israel” (192).

At the end of this chapter Rosner surmises that while the work of the post-Holocaust theologians partially bridges the gap between Barth and Rosenzweig, there is, as of yet, no “clear picture of how Israel’s unique mission can be preserved while simultaneously upholding the connection forged through Christ between Israel and the church” (195). A constructive theology that satisfies both parts of Marshall’s question, seems at this juncture, “elusive” (196).

For Rosner, the Messianic Jewish community has the potential to play a pivotal role in this endeavor, and it is at this point, in the fourth and final chapter of her book, that she introduces the theology of Mark Kinzer. For Kinzer “Israel’s enduring covenantal vocation and Yeshua’s pivotal role in the divine plan are central presuppositions of Messianic Jewish theology” where Messianic Judaism is seen as a branch of Judaism and not Christianity (Rosner quoting Kinzer, 199). Kinzer contends that Jesus is “the essential link between Judaism and Christianity… as the thoroughly Jewish Messiah of Israel” and “Lord of all creation” (202). This implies that the church and the Jewish people are mutually dependent upon one another: “While the church is tasked with holding the Jewish Messiah before the eyes of the Jewish people, the Jewish people are tasked with reminding the church just what that Messiah’s Jewish identity entails” (212).

Rosner notes that for Kinzer, Christ fulfils Israel’s destiny to carry out its two-fold mission of “ushering creation into consummation” and in “defeating the forces of chaos” that threaten it (213). But in doing so she recognizes that Kinzer portrays the Jewish people as unwitting yet indelible participants in “the redemptive work of their unrecognized Messiah” (225). Because of the permanency of Israel’s role in God’s redemptive plan for the world, Rosner explains that Kinzer proposes a twofold ecclesiology that comprises three distinct yet interrelated ecclesial groups: the people of Israel as one group, the body of Christ as a second group with a third bridging group comprised of Messianic Jews which in Rosner’s words acts as an “an overlapping subsection of both Israel and the church” (225-226).

In this model the Messianic Jewish community acts as an “ecclesiological bridge” between Christianity and Judaism and not as a missionary endeavor to the wider Jewish community. Rosner describes the model as serving “as a witness to Israel of the abiding presence of its Messiah in its midst, and as a witness to the larger Christian church of God’s unfailing love for and election of the Jewish people” (231). She notes that this is the central tenet or “capstone” of Kinzer’s theological system: a “bilateral ecclesiology” where Jews and Gentiles coexist as the ekklesia (232). This model is “an extension of the people of Israel by virtue of Christ and the ongoing presence of the remnant (that is, the Messianic Jewish community)” (238).

While the bulk of Kinzer’s theology has yet to be written, Rosner recognizes that there are concerns about his project, chiefly around his understanding of Christology, soteriology and salvation. Marshall wonders if “bilateral ecclesiology” could collapse into syncretism. Therefore, Rosner rightfully believes that Kinzer’s theology requires more development and clarification on these as well as other issues. But she is equally convinced that Kinzer’s thought provides “a workable answer to Marshall’s question” in that it is uniquely capable of honoring the core convictions of both Judaism and Christianity by affirming “the universal applicability of Christ’s mission and call to discipleship without undermining or eclipsing Israel’s unique covenantal vocation” (238).

However, Rosner concludes her book by admitting that Kinzer’s vision gives rise to an unavoidable challenge: “If the kinds of communities that Kinzer is advocating prove somehow unsustainable, this will be a direct reflection upon the theological paradigm undergirding both those communities. However, if such communities continue to grow and thrive, perhaps this will be an additional sign that Messianic Judaism does indeed have a unique and significant contribution to make” (251-252).

While Kinzer recognizes that his thought “raises as many questions as it answers” (244), one also wonders if Marshall’s question could ever be fully answered. It has to be recognized that Christianity and Judaism hold to separate and competing truth claims. On the one hand, Christianity holds that the Messiah has already come. On the other, Judaism holds that the Messiah has yet to come. It is in this space that Jewish-Christian relations exist where Kinzer’s recognition of the limitations of his position has the potential to be a useful guide for the thought of others.

However, notwithstanding the enormity of the task at hand (most notably regarding the theological work that needs to be accomplished), Rosner’s work, as a critically constructive commentary on the new Jewish-Christian encounter, stands as foundational to any future discussion about the role that Messianic Judaism might play in Jewish-Christian dialogue. She writes with integrity and clarity, providing insight into some of the deepest challenges that Christianity and Judaism face as we continue to journey together into the twenty-first century. As someone involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue at a local level, I for one appreciate her contribution. But I also recognize that Messianic Judaism is very much a minority position betwixt those of world-wide Judaism and Christianity. I agree with Rosner’s conclusion and wait to see if Messianic Judaism will be a bridge between these two world faiths for the majority of participants of either faith.

Glenn A. Chestnutt, Lead Minister, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal

Paul Dafydd Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2008)

The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics

Paul Dafydd Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2008), xiii + 290. $130.00 / £65.00

Reviewed by Darren O. Sumner (April 20, 2010)

The Humanity of Christ supplies the field of contemporary Barth scholarship with one of its most significant works of the twenty-first century so far through a thorough examination of a major locus in Barth’s theology. Originating as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University and recently honored with the Templeton Award, Paul Dafydd Jones’ book examines Christology diachronically through the Church Dogmatics. As the title suggests, at issue for Jones – associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Department of Religious Studies – is Barth’s robust account of the humanity of Jesus Christ, in opposition to the common charge “that Barth’s strong affirmation of Christ’s divinity makes for an enfeebled account of Christ’s humanity” (3). Meticulously researched and organized, the work synthesizes much of theDogmatics, offering summaries and insightful analysis of Barth’s theology.According to Jones, Barth strikes a vital balance between affirming Jesus Christ’s ontological complexity and personal simplicity in an ordering of divine-human relations that identifies Christ’s human work as that of “‘correspondence’ to God’s prevenient direction” (5). Apart from a summary introduction and a conclusion that briefly inquires into the application of Barth’s Christology for ethics and political theology, the book consists of four large chapters. In the first, Jones lays out key christological concepts through studying four topics: 1) the anhypostasia/enhypostasia distinction, which Barth favored; 2) the standing Barth grants the Chalcedonian Definition; 3) prolegomenal moves in CD I/2, including a) Barth’s commitment to a Reformed emphasis on the differentiation of Christ’s natures (over against a Lutheran emphasis on their perichoretic relationship); b) an interest in dyothelitism; and c) Christ’s assumption of sinful ‘flesh’; and 4) the relationship between historical-critical questions and Barth’s dogmatic portrayal of Jesus Christ. Jones identifies the points at which Barth appropriated the tradition and where he reconfigured it for his own actualistic purposes, such as Barth’s preference of ‘essence’ (Wesen) over the Chalcedonian ‘nature’ (Natur) and his use of the minimalist formula, vere Deus vere homo (7). Due to his “circumspect attitude towards conceptual abstraction” (31) and desire to draw christological conclusions from the witness of Scripture, Barth attempted to integrate the concerns of both the Alexandrian and Antiochene schools in a way faithful to Chalcedon’s efforts, yet dispensing with the council’s conceptual apparatus.

Jones’ work is predominantly descriptive here in the first chapter. Concepts such as the logos asarkos, sinful flesh, and the extra Calvinisticum are raised. Jones rightly presses that, for Barth, Christ’s humanity is more than simply a medium in and through which God instrumentally reveals himself. Barth followed the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III) in affirming both two wills and two operations, or agencies, in Christ. By ‘will’ Barth does not mean a ‘faculty,’ Jones suggests, but “a more radical affirmation of ‘the unity of act and being’ that characterizes Christ’s divine-human person,” agency “understood expansively to encompass cognitive and affective processes, decisions, and the realization of intention” (41-2). To avoid the charge of Nestorianism, of ‘agency’ read so strongly that a duality of Christ’s person emerges, Barth affirmed that Christ’s humanity apart from the incarnation was anhypostatic, lacking subsistence and reality in itself (23), and only enhypostatic in its unio personalis with the Son of God. Thus, while Christ possesses a discrete center of willing and acting according to his humanity, that human agency is not a ‘person’ in its own right and apart from its union with God qua Son. This qualification is profoundly important for Barth’s Christology and soteriology and, as we shall see, stirs up difficult interpretive waters.

In Chapter 2, Jones turns to volume II of the Dogmatics, moving beyond Barth’s preliminary (and rather traditional) Christology in I/2 to the complex relationship between the doctrines of Christ, the Trinity, and election. This is seen in God’s capacity for self-determination, the love of God as integral to God’s being, Jesus’ role qua human in covenantal history, and Barth’s stunning identification of Jesus Christ as both ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human.’ Indeed, says Jones, God’s election of Jesus Christ – God’s self-determination to implicate the human history and reconciling work of Jesus in God’s own eternal being – signals God’s affirmation of humanity itself. The doctrine of election, then, is the soil in which Barth’s mature Christology is cultivated.

Jones engages vital (and controversial) issues here, not the least of which is the distinction between God’s immanent life and economic activity (65). Barth “closes the ‘ontological gap’” between the eternal Son and the incarnate Son. His concern “is to describe Jesus Christ as an event and person constitutive of God in God’s second way of being” (66). There is in Barth a direct (if carefully delineated) identification of the man Jesus Christ with the eternal Son, so that one cannot dispense with his human essence when talk turns to God’s immanent life qua Son. “God makes humanity part of God’s being. Divine identity is not unyieldingly ‘inviolate’ (i.e., ontologically uncomplicated, constituted only by ‘pure, unadulterated divinity’), because God freely incorporates ontological difference into the divine life” (78). This is a radical and far too unappreciated move in Barth, but one that Jones sees as decisive. What do theologians do with this? Rather than signaling for a retreat (either from Barth, or from an actualist reading of his divine ontology), Jones’ conclusion is exactly right: with Barth “a strict partition of God’s immanent being as Son and God’s economic work as Son is no longer dogmatically viable” (67).

Jesus as the ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’ stands as the centerpiece of Chapter 2, and rightly so. Jones looks at the first predicate from four angles: 1) as “a statement about God’s loving intention, appropriable especially to the divine Son;” 2) as “an affirmation that God as Son presents Godself and acts in human history;” 3) as “a claim about the divine subject who grounds and directs the life of Jesus Christ;” and 4) as “the contention that God himself, as Son, bears the rejection owed to sinful humankind” (80). This multiform description of what Barth has in mind by such a deceptively simple and innocuous phrase as “electing God” is instructive, demonstrating Jones’s ability to identify the core convictions that motivated the author. The second predicate, that Jesus is also ‘elected human,’ signals that God protects and preserves the integrity of Jesus’ human nature, taking it into God’s own life and so constituting his being qua Son. Here Jones considers the function of the logos asarkos (91-96), as well as Barth’s view of eternity (99-102).

After a brief look at Barth’s “christologically normed theological anthropology” (117) in CD III/2, Jones turns to volume IV/2 in Chapter 3. He criticizes Barth’s patriarchal views on gender and the impact of such “social-scientific and cultural discourses” on his christological concentration (118). Following this, he provides what is perhaps the most extensive treatment of Barth’s use of the communicatio naturarum and idiomatum in print today. One need not read far in the Dogmatics to discover Barth’s concern with the Lutheran genus maiestaticum and the impact of the sixteenth century eucharistic debates on Christology. It may be surprising to see Barth linger here at the communicatio, a point where his penchant for conceptual recasting (in dynamic terms of event, rather than static terms of nature) might lead him to downplay or reject the traditional approach to Christ’s person. Instead, this engagement “enables him to clarify his understanding of Christ’s humanity, thereby lending greater precision to and augmenting significantly the claims of II/2” (121). Barth’s treatment is significant not because he replaces “nature” (Natur) with “essence” (Wesen) – though he does do this – but because he situates the discussion soteriologically, in correspondence with Christ’s divine humiliation and human exanination (cf. 122). This is quite different from the tradition’s tendency to see humiliation and exaltation as temporal descriptions of the Son’s incarnation and, later, glorification. In Barth’s hands, however, “humiliation and exaltation no longer relate to the course of Christ’s life; they now anchor dogmatic descriptions of the modes of existence that respectively characterize the divine and human essences” (125).

Also earning significant treatment in Chapter 3 is Barth’s concern with the singularity of subject in the incarnation – what Jones calls Jesus’ “personal simplicity.” Here Barth sounds “a Cyrillian note” (129), pressing the selfsame identity of the eternal Son and Jesus Christ so that the former cannot be considered in absence of the latter – in absence, that is, of his history. Jones points to Barth’s use of ‘participation’ as a way to illustrate the mutual correspondence and coherence of the divine Son and the man Jesus; the term “allows Barth to suggest that the union of humanity and divinity in Christ’s person is an event mutually confected and, in some respect, mutually forged, given the concurrent activity of Christ’s humanity and Christ’s divinity” (133). Therefore, while the divine Son and the man Jesus are by no means two subjects, they each possess an agential power by which they each take part “in the task of upholding the numerical simplicity of Christ’s person” (133). The divine agency gives and the human agency receives, so that salvation is actively effected by … two coordinate but asymmetrically related agential realities” (144).

Jones’ emphasis on human agency achieves its zenith in his reading of Barth on the communication of graces (138-41). The dialectic of grace and gratitude reflects the proper place of the human essence in theunio hypostatica and hedges off any implication that the divine Son makes merely instrumental use of the human essence. Because God’s ‘summons’ to humankind is answered by the Son qua human, “Christ’s human essence does not exist as a lifeless, insensible vehicle of the Son’s economic working” (139). Thus, Christ as a human person is not merely acted upon, but “is also spurred to act humanly.” This is his gratuitous response to God from our side, on our behalf, which is Christ’s exaltation of humanity – “the birth of human agency in Christ’s act of gratitude” (140-41). Divine and human activities concur and correspond in this man (153; cf. 151).

From volume IV/2, Jones turns back to IV/1 in his fourth chapter, with a look at Barth’s concepts of history (Geschichte) and obedience (Gehorsam). The former is, of course, indispensable for the actualist approach that Barth takes to dogmatics. History is significant because it is here that the divine intention is realized, so that “the life of Jesus Christ constitutes the identity of Jesus Christ” which, in turn, “God makes constitutive of the identity of God qua Son” (191). This is a fine sum of Barth’s actualistic Christology: a dynamic construal of history, and not the static realm of ‘nature’ or ‘essence,’ is where the life of Jesus is the life of the eternal Son of God. Obedience, in turn, is a controlling category for Barth’s Christology – from the relation of the Son to the Father, to Gethsemane, to the cross as revealing Christ’s participation in atonement by means of his own willing sacrifice. Vital to his account of Christ’s obedience, Jones notes, is that Barth understands this orientation as occurring within the life of God: the obedience of Jesus Christ to his Father is not just a human event, but the way of the Son’s eternal being with and toward the Father.

Jones divides the topic of obedience into Christ’s “divine obedience” and “human obedience,” pressing dual agency as the hermeneutical key to Barth’s Christology. Divine obedience “supports Barth’s conviction that it is truly the divine Son who indwells Jesus Christ” (205), stressing that the eternal Son is not different from the Son revealed in Jesus. Perhaps more profoundly, Jones suggests, Barth refines his doctrine of God in §59 in such a way that “his radically actualized ontology overcomes the unnecessary idea that either an affirmation of God’s personal unity or God’s tri-personality must have logical priority” (211; cf. footnote 57). Neither of the classic loci in the doctrine of God, de Deo uno or de Deo trino, are granted priority over the other.

With Jesus’ human obedience Jones returns to the communicatio operationum, which suggests to him that both human agency and divine agency cooperate to effect the one goal of reconciliation (216; cf. 223-25, 249-50). Jones identifies the ‘human action’ and ‘divine action’ in Jesus as distinct but corresponding – one divine initiation, the other human reception. In Gethsemane the human Jesus is realizing, acknowledging, and conforming himself to the divine will (231-42). How closely this apprehends Barth’s view is debatable. For Barth, the “common actualization” of divine and human essences appears not to be two actions seen in correspondence but a single action considered at once from two vantage points. Jesus does not act divinely and, in coordination, humanly; rather his actions simultaneously have divine and human significance. This is how Barth maintains the dyothelitism of Constantinople III, and can speak of a plurality of agencies in the Mediator while yet subjecting these principles to the singularity and simplicity of his person.

If there is any point of caution in this tremendous work, then, it is that Jones’ emphasis on human agency at times unbalances Barth’s insistence upon the singularity of the acting Subject who is the incarnate Son. Jones has a tendency, particularly in the latter half of the book, to speak of Christ’s double agency in such a way as to leave one wondering whether he is, in fact, still describing a singular Subject. For example: The man Jesus’ “human constancy (an unflagging self-determination to be the Son)” is paralleled with God’s constancy (the self-determination of the Son to be Jesus), which “together compromise Christ’s identity” (112). Jones further remarks that God unites “this human,” rather than humanity (an anhypostaticnature), with God qua Son (115). And on Jones’ reading, the divine and human essences together “enact and realize Christ’s personally simple identity,” because “the man Jesus … does not lack agential power (an essential property of human being), and he exerts this power in a way that contributes to, and in fact assists in the establishment and preservation of, the personal simplicity definitive of his divine-human person” (133). That this is fully Chalcedonian explanation of Constantinople III’s “two wills and two operations” is uncertain.

For Jones, the dogmatic emphasis upon human agency seems to function as a bulwark against an instrumentalist view of Jesus’ humanity – thus his desire to maintain Jesus of Nazareth as an “agential power” alongside God the Son. When he is on guard against the tendency toward a dual-subject Christology, Jones is unimpeachable. When that warning falls aside (signaled, for example, by his suggestion that Barth ultimately assigns anhypostasia and enhypostasia a limited role, 25-26), Jones allows himself to speak of ‘the human Jesus’ when what he seems to mean is ‘Jesus’ human agency.’ Perhaps this is mere semantics. What is lacking, however, is a description of what ‘agency’ means to Barth (and to Jones), how this is related to Barth’s dyothelitism and the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s two ‘operations,’ and how a duality of agencies (“two agential powers,” 202) in Jesus does not result in a duality of agents.

Anyone familiar with the organization and scope of the Church Dogmatics will immediately appreciate that an attempt to provide an account of Karl Barth’s Christology is an immense undertaking. The doctrine of Christ touches every area of the Dogmatics, and functions as a conceptual control to most, and so few have attempted anything like this project. Jones rightly acknowledges that his own account of this central locus in Barth’s theology is in no way exhaustive; “with Barth, there is always more that can be said” (242). The author’s analysis is careful and penetrating, with a measured dose of his own constructive syntheses. Jones is upfront about his own influences and sympathies, including commitments to feminist concerns, “postmetaphysics,” and an interest in narrative theology shaped by the school of Hans Frei (cf. 12-13). The Humanity of Christ offers an invigorating reading of a significant element in Barth’s thought, and thus it is highly recommended for serious students of Barth.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Viazovski, Yaroslav. Image and Hope: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015)

Image and Hope: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting

Viazovski, Yaroslav. Image and Hope: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015), 286 pp. $34.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Daniel Rempel (June 22, 2017)

How are Christians to speak about the soul? This is the question Yaroslav Viazovski attempts to answer in Image and Hope: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. For Viazovski, there are four functions of the soul: “(1) the soul makes us distinct from animals and gives us unique dignity, (2) the soul makes us rational and moral agents, (3) the soul is the bridge to the transcendent reality of God, (4) the soul guarantees life after death” (4). Because of both his motivating question, as well as his definition of the soul, Viazovski work is an attempt to uncover an ontological anthropology—a study of what man is—through “a functional comparative study of John Calvin’s and Karl Barth’s ontological anthropologies” (5).Viazovski’s work is yet another in the comparative studies between the work of Calvin and Barth (See Neil B. MacDonald, Carl R. Trueman, eds. Calvin, Barth,and Reformed Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008; David Gibson, Reading the Decree: exegesis, election and Christology in Calvin and Barth, London: T&T Clark, 2009; Cornelius van der Kooi, As in a Mirror. John Calvin and Karl Barth on Knowing God: A Diptych, trans. Donald Mader, Boston: Brill, 2005. For Barth’s work on Calvin, see Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, trans. G.W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995 ). However, while any student of Barth will know of the influence of Calvin on Barth’s theology, Viazovski’s rationale for placing these two theologians in conversation is more than that. For Viazovski, Barth’s introduction of a relational interpretation of the image of God “may be one of the greatest changes in theological anthropology that has occurred since Calvin” (6).

Another reason for placing these two in conversation is that Calvin and Barth represent opposing theological anthropologies: the dualist and the monist (5). For Viazovski, Calvin’s “axiological dualism” of the separation between the material and spiritual is problematic. Viazovski is uncomfortable about speaking of such a separation in the holistic existence of the human. As a result, Viazovski desires an anthropology that does not result in said axiological dualism. For Viazovski, the way to do this comes through Barth (11). Through placing these theologians in conversation, Viazovski hopes to explicate both Calvin and Barth’s anthropology, how Calvin ultimately comes up short, and how Barth can help offer a corrective to Calvin.

Beginning with Calvin, Viazovski engages with the Institutes, Psychopannychia, as well as a host of Calvin’s commentaries on the Bible in order to explicate Calvin’s understanding of the ontological basis of the human being (8). Weaving together these sources, Viazovski highlights four main themes found in Calvin’s anthropological work: the image of God; the knowledge of God; immortality and the intermediate state; and the resurrection and the ultimate hope.

For Calvin, “to have the image of God is to be human” (15). Furthermore, “humanity is constituted by the faculties of the human soul” (19). Therefore, Calvin finds the ground of one’s humanity in the soul. One may conclude solely on this evidence that for Calvin, all goodness of humanity is found in the soul, and all evil is found in the body. However, Viazovski is careful not to let the reader fall into such a misunderstanding of Calvin. No, he says, for Calvin “there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks [of God’s glory] did not glow” (35). Because the body is God’s creation, there is goodness within the body. However, “the soul is superior to the body” and therefore ” ultimately it is irrelevant if the image of God is present in the body in some measure or not” (38). Thus, while having a body is imperative for humanity to live as God’s creatures, and thus carries an intrinsic importance, such importance is dwarfed by the exceeding magnitude of the human soul. Thus, Calvin frames the subjects of the knowledge of God, immortality and the immediate state, and the resurrection and the ultimate hope as treatises on the human soul, with only passing references to the role and function of the body within this divine framework, for it is in the soul that the human finds their worth in God.

Viazovski transitions from Calvin to Barth in a chapter explicating the differences between Calvin and Barth’s method and thought. Showing his indebtedness to Bruce McCormack, Viazovski argues that one of the significant differences between the epistemologies of Calvin and Barth is that Barth is “a modern theologian” (119). Citing McCormack’s work Orthodox and Modern (Baker, 2008), Viazovski lists four characteristics that qualify a theology as modern: [1] an acceptance . . . of critical methods for studying the Bible; [2] a recognition of the loss of respect among philosophers for classical metaphysics . . . ; [3] the recognition of the breakdown of the old Aristotelian-biblical cosmology . . . ; [4] and acceptance of the necessity of constructing doctrines of creation and providence which find their ground in more modern theological and/or philosophical resources” (119-20). Noting McCormack’s criteria of modern theology, Viazovski claims that what makes Barth specifically a modern theologian is that “Barth apparently accepts the Hegelian presupposition that being is becoming but keeps to a strict Creator/creature distinction” (127). Said differently, for Calvin, there is a quantitative difference between God and humanity in that the finite cannot comprehend what is infinite (122). For Barth, on the other hand, the problem is qualitative: “God belongs to the sphere of the unintuitable therefore human beings . . . cannot know God” (122). All of this is to say, “a comparison of Calvin’s and Barth’s anthropologies is, then, not a simple and straightforward comparison. Rather, it is the putting, side by side, of two anthropological systems which belong to different philosophical contexts” (129). It is with this understanding that Viazovski moves to his engagement with Barth’s anthropology.

Unlike his explication of Calvin, which drew from multiple sources to provide a cogent account of Calvin’s theological anthropology, Viazovski limits his engagement with Barth to Church Dogmatics (CD) III/2, which he describes as Barth’s “systematic presentation of the doctrine of man” (133). By engaging Barth, it is Viazovski’s aim “to analyze how Barth’s relational approach to the image of God overcomes the axiological dualism inherent in Calvin’s view of the image, how he understands the soul/body relationship from a holistic point of view and, finally, what his monism does to the ultimate hope of man” (133).

Viazovski begins his engagement with Barth with the understanding that “if, in Calvin, the starting point was the doctrine of imago Dei, in Barth, it is the Christological concept of the real man” (133). For Barth, anthropology is grounded in Christology (136). The human Jesus is “the ontological determination of all human beings” (137). Thus, for Barth, human ontology is not rooted in something essential to our own being, but rather in something exterior to ourselves, that is, the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, for Viazovski, the heart of Barth’s innovation of theological anthropology is that “humanity must partake of [Jesus] . . . It is to be explained by Him, not He by it” (143). Jesus is “the real man” and therefore Jesus is God’s revelation of our true humanity (163). According to Viazovski, “real man, then, is the fundamental anthropological concept in the thought of Karl Barth. It is the starting point of his anthropology and controls all secondary statements about man” (164). Thus, while for Calvin our ontological status is based in the image of God that has been imparted upon us, in Barth our humanity is not found in our own being, but in the relationship we have with Christ, who is the determination of who humanity indeed is.

As a whole, Viazovski provides adequate accounts of the theological anthropologies of Calvin and Barth that will engage both newcomers and experts of Calvin and Barth respectively. However, the nature of the task as he presented it may have shown its difficulties in Viazovski’s writings. What I mean by this is that in the section of Calvin’s anthropology, Viazovski gave himself the task of synthesizing a theological anthropology through engaging with the Institutes, Psychophannia, and a host of Calvin’s biblical commentaries. Without commenting on Viazovski’s conclusions regarding Calvin’s theological anthropology, there was a rigidity to Viazovski’s work on Calvin that made reading difficult in some sections. At times, there were leaps between claims that could have been smoothed out with greater care.

However, any rigidity present in Viazovski’s work on Calvin disappeared when he began engaging with Barth. Working systematically through CD III/2 allowed Viazovski to create a smoother, cohesive narrative of Barth’s theological anthropology. The reader benefitted from this approach, and what we are left with is an engaging and educating account of Barth’s theological anthropology and how it differs from Calvin.

Additionally, as Viazovski’s goal in this book is to work towards the question of how Christians are to speak about the soul, I would have appreciated more of his own voice in this work. While the accounts of both Calvin and Barth were insightful, I would have appreciated more critical engagement with each author. Viazovski showed a slight amount of personal flair in the final chapter, critiquing Barth’s account of the afterlife (or lack thereof), however, as a reader, I was curious to hear Viazovski’s voice throughout the whole of this book.

Altogether, however, Viazovski’s Image and Hope has provided a helpful engagement with both Calvin and Barth. Theology is always influenced by the philosophical assumptions brought to the discipline, and Viazovski has shown this to be a major difference in the work of Calvin and Barth. Additionally, he has shown some of the benefits and deficits of both authors work, and the consequences of various philosophical assumptions. More importantly, however, Viazovski has assembled a resource that helps human beings understand themselves holistically: body, mind, and soul. While it is not uncommon for theological anthropologies to focus on one aspect of the human person above and beyond the rest—this elevation is usually found in the soul—Viazovski refuses to allow his reader to assume any such dichotomy. Rather, in the unity of the body, Viazovski has shown how human beings can understand who we are in relation to Christ.

Daniel Rempel, M.A. Theology Student, Canadian Mennonite University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Edwin Chr. van Driel, Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology

Edwin Chr. van Driel, Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xi + 194 pp. $74.00

Reviewed by David W. Congdon (October 06, 2010)

The debate between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism is often treated as a matter of only historical interest. The perceived esotericism of the words and their connection to speculative flights of scholastic fancy have led many to believe that these positions are irrelevant to contemporary constructive theology. It is therefore much to Edwin van Driel’s credit that he demonstrates the significance of this debate for theological work today. The question raised by these two positions is whether “the incarnation is contingent upon sin” (4). Does the divine will to become incarnate logically precede or follow the will to allow sin? The majority report throughout Christian history has been the infralapsarian thesis that incarnation follows sin. That is, God would not have become incarnate had humanity not fallen into sin. Van Driel presents a case for the minority view that God would have become incarnate regardless.The book, which began as his 2006 dissertation at Yale University, is “a constructive and not a historical study” (171). Though he spends the majority of the time exegeting the supralapsarian positions of Schleiermacher, Isaak Dorner, and Karl Barth, this is clearly for the purpose of setting up his own theological position and not for exploring the history of the debate. Each of these theologians presents a different argument for supralapsarian christology: Schleiermacher grounds his in redemption, Dorner in creation, and Barth in eschatological consummation. Van Driel finds each position, considered individually, hampered by ambiguities and inconsistencies, though he appropriates elements from each for his own constructive position.

Van Driel begins by looking at Schleiermacher’s theology, which is “a reflection upon the experience of redemption and absolute dependence” (10). He examines this theology in terms of its (a) ontological framework and (b) christological basis and content. The claim he makes in this chapter is that there is an unacknowledged conflict within and between these two aspects—ontology and christology—in Schleiermacher’s theology. The ontological problem is due to a tension between two “ontological profiles.” The first (what van Driel calls omnipotence I) restricts creaturely freedom in such a way that while human beings have a “freedom of spontaneity,” this freedom occurs within the scope of God’s causal power. The divine causality encompasses and grounds the entirety of finite reality. The second (omnipotence II) is a restriction on divine freedom such that “God cannot do otherwise than what God does” (13). The divine will is exhaustively realized in the actual world; there are no alternative possibilities for finite reality. This latter ontological profile precludes any discussion of counterfactual possibilities or God’s motivation for doing this versus that.

Within this ontological framework, Schleiermacher develops his christology as the necessary outworking of the original divine decree. The appearance of Christ as the ideal (Urbild) of humankind is the necessary completion of creation, not an addition to creation that responds to the appearance of sin. Because of omnipotence II, divine causality cannot, by definition, be in response to any creaturely activity. God’s causal agency is absolute and thus nonreciprocal. This is what makes Schleiermacher’s christology supralapsarian. Logically, however, this also means that God ordained sin along with its redemption in Christ (24). More importantly for his overall thesis, van Driel claims that this foreordination of both sin and redemption instrumentalizes Christ and makes him only relatively and quantitatively distinct from the rest of humankind. The dialectic of sin and redemption are the means toward a final goal that has no need for Christ: viz., God’s impartation of the divine to all reality. The significance of Jesus Christ “is radically noneschatological” (26). Or as van Driel puts it later, “the eschaton is the consummation of Christ’s redeeming influence, but without need for Christ’s abiding presence” (59). In the end, the central problem from van Driel’s perspective is that Schleiermacher’s ontology precludes the possibility for alternative realities, and yet his christology does not logically make Jesus the only possible redeemer. Schleiermacher even makes counterfactual statements in this regard (28). Van Driel’s proposed solution is to dispense with omnipotence II, and he finds assistance in this task from analytic philosophy of religion (14n24).

Van Driel next takes up Dorner’s complex supralapsarian christology, grounded primarily in creation. This chapter is one of the most interesting due to the unfortunate neglect of Dorner in contemporary theology. If van Driel’s book helps to reintroduce Dorner into the current theological conversation, that would likely be its greatest contribution. Dorner’s theological system depends on his distinction between the natural or physical and the ethical, which he views in ontological rather than moral terms (as we find in the Ritschlian approach). The concept of “the ethical” refers to the “absolute highest and rationally necessary thought” and is thus “identical with God” (37). The ethical is distinguished from the physical by being the unity of necessity and freedom, of being and will. God can only be this unity as the Trinity, and creation is “the ethical and necessary product” of this trinitarian God. This unity of freedom and necessity allows Dorner, unlike Schleiermacher, to affirm alternative possibilities and divine motives in his discussion of God. Nevertheless, like Schleiermacher, the act of creation for Dorner—and its corresponding consummation—is strictly necessary as the product of God’s ethical nature (cf. 40-41, 51).

Dorner’s supralapsarianism is creational in nature because religion is “not primarily about sin, atonement, and reconciliation,” but instead concerns the “consummation of humanity’s essential nature” (45). The incarnation is, for the most part, not the means toward a greater end, but is itself the goal of creation and the fulfillment of humanity’s being as an ethical creature existing in a reciprocal relationship with God. The problem van Driel finds with Dorner’s approach lies in the fact that he is not consistent in his understanding of the incarnation. There are three questions that Dorner does not sufficiently address: (a) is the incarnation ontological or interpersonal?; (b) is the incarnation a means or an end?; and (c) is God’s motive for becoming incarnate (viz. love) necessary or contingent? While Dorner is inconsistent or ambiguous on these points, van Driel argues for viewing the incarnation as an interpersonal eschatological end grounded in God’s contingent love (as God’s will rather than nature).

Chapters four and five both deal with Barth’s theology, and together constitute over a third of the book’s length. The first deals with Barth’s “supralapsarian narrative” and the second with his “supralapsarian ontology.” Van Driel distinguishes the two because unlike Schleiermacher and Dorner, Barth’s ontology is controlled by the biblical narrative of Jesus Christ’s life-history. The fourth chapter thus expounds Barth’s “narrative,” by which van Driel means Barth’s doctrine of election. Here he does a fine job of rehearsing Barth’s exegetical arguments for his understanding of Jesus Christ as both the subject and object of election. Many of the ideas and issues that he will critique at the end of the next chapter are raised here in this survey of Barth’s theology. Two key points are (a) that “election is an eschatological category,” which means that “the eschaton precedes everything else” (78); and (b) that election involves “an ontological connection” between Christ and all other human beings (72).

The fifth chapter on Barth’s ontology is the longest in the book and the most complex. The first half deals with the subject of election, and the second half with the object of election and rejection. For readers familiar with recent debates in Barth studies, the first half will feel the most familiar in terms of content. This is because van Driel here continues his debate with Bruce McCormack regarding the relation between election and triunity that van Driel began in 2007 with an article in the Scottish Journal of Theology. Though the article originally came out of this dissertation, he has revised this section for publication to include a response to McCormack’s reply to his article. Van Driel’s position remains essentially unchanged: he insists that “Barth’s doctrine of election has no ontological consequences for the notions of immanent Trinity, Logos asarkos, or God-in-Godself” (103). The processions and the missions are two separate moments in the eternal life of God, he argues, because the Son cannot be the subject of his own generation. The problem, according to van Driel, is that Barth’s statement that “Jesus Christ is the subject of election” is ambiguous (101); it therefore should be read in the light of ostensibly clearer statements. Interestingly, this places Barth interpretation in the same problematic situation as biblical interpretation. When the Reformers claimed that “Scripture interprets itself,” they said that the clearer passages should interpret the more obscure ones. But who decides what is clear and what is obscure? Finally, it is also worth noting that van Driel’s argument in this section parallels his argument against Schleiemacher’s “omnipotence II” mentioned above. McCormack’s position is opposed to counterfactual speculation, and by opposing McCormack, van Driel remains consistent in his affirmation of speaking about counterfactual possibilities with regard to God.

The more interesting part of this chapter comes in van Driel’s discussion of election’s object. Of all the material in the book, I found this section the most enlightening and significant. Van Driel makes three main claims. First, in a brilliant section, he notes that while Barth replaces the categories of substance with that of history, the logic of history functions in precisely the same way and for the same purposes as the traditional metaphysical substance ontology. For Barth, “history is ontology,” van Driel states (108). Barth’s view of Christ’s life-history functions according to what van Driel will later identify as the “logic of assumption,” which abstracts from the personal, concrete reality of human historicity by positing a general humanum in Christ. This is a crucially important insight. Second, van Driel spends a good deal of time critiquing Barth’s conception of time and eternity, especially when it comes to the eschaton. According to Barth, the eschaton is not the continuation of temporal life, but is rather “a preservation of the life lived” (113). This conflicts, van Driel claims, with Barth’s conception of the resurrection, which “implies a continuance of temporal existence” (114). “Why,” he asks, “is creation only an intermezzo and not the continued active partner over against God?” (118).

The third and final critique concerns the true focus of God’s saving work, which Barth himself says is not sin but ratherdas Nichtige (“nothingness”). The problems here are manifold and resist easy summary. The heart of the critique is that Barth makes God’s rejection a creative act that produces a “third kind of being,” viz.das Nichtige(118). This power of evil then continually threatens creation, such that God’s saving work “is therefore to safeguard threatened creation from the abyss of das Nichtige” (120). The whole doctrine of “nothingness” that Barth develops finally rests upon a presupposed axiom: “all of what is not God necessarily lapses into evil unless God incorporates it into God’s own being. . . Creational life itself is governed by entropy” (122). Though Barth does not explicitly develop this thesis, van Driel argues cogently that this is the assumption controlling Barth’s supralapsarianism. Barth’s position is eschatological in orientation because the primary need is “for creation to receive a share in God’s life” (122).
In chapter six, van Driel reviews the three key “conceptual structures” that appeared in his analysis of Schleiermacher, Dorner, and Barth. By elucidating these structures, he both shows where these three supralapsarian positions differ from each other and sets up his own constructive position to follow in chapter seven. The first and most important concept is the felix culpa, that is, the notion that the fall into sin was a “happy fault” because “it triggered greater gain than would otherwise be received” (127). While thefelix culpa is essential to infralapsarianism, Schleiermacher and Barth both make it central to their supralapsarian theologies, which leads them to make the fall necessary to creation. The problem with this first conceptual structure is that “the good needs the bad in principle,” but this “devalues the excellence of the good.” It fails to realize that the presence of God is “an excellent good in and of itself” (131). The second structure concerns Dorner’s theology and the fact that he makes the incarnation to be a “necessary implication” of God’s act of creation (133). But this conflicts with the ethical and interpersonal conception of the divine-human relationship that Dorner articulates (rightly, according to van Driel). The problem here is that Dorner and others ground the incarnation in some aspect of creation. The solution, van Driel argues, is to ground it instead in God’s character. The third conceptual structure is the relation between christology and pneumatology, and this is where van Driel explicates the “logic of assumption” that begins to make an appearance in his critique of Barth noted above. Here he argues for an “ontological over-againstness between the divine and the human” (141). Instead of a substance ontology (even when construed as history), we need a more robust pneumatology.

All of this sets up van Driel’s constructive supralapsarian position in the final chapter. Like Barth, his is rooted in eschatological consummation. But, drawing upon Dorner, his position is ethical, interpersonal, and contingent in nature—rather than ontological and necessary. Moreover, where Barth’s eschatology is rooted in the divine decision of election, van Driel’s is rooted in the embodied life of the resurrection. He presents three arguments for supralapsarian christology: (a) an argument from “eschatological superabundance” (150), in which what we gain in Christ cannot be contingent upon sin (contra the felix culpa); (b) an argument from the vision of God, according to which if the beatific vision—i.e., what we gain in Christ—is supralapsarian, then the incarnation is as well, because full intimacy with God requires sensory bodily contact; and (c) an argument from divine friendship, in which God’s relation to humanity is motivated “by a delight in and a love for the other” (160). God desires to be in an intimate relationship with humanity, regardless of humanity’s sinful rejection of God. The last argument is finally the crucial one. Friendship is a non-necessary, contingent, embodied relation between two persons. It brings in the category of divine motivation and reciprocity missing from Schleiermacher, emphasizes the ethical and interpersonal aspects in Dorner without the need of an ontology, and stresses the eschatological dimension in Barth without making the eschaton the mere preservation of a past life.

Van Driel’s book is a rich and provocative exploration of supralapsarian christology. There is much here worth lingering over. The question, however, is whether his proposal ought to be adopted. On a purely logical level, his model seems to be as satisfactory as the next. And certainly his proposal has much to commend it. He strongly rejects the instrumentalizing of Christ that is common to almost the entire Christian tradition. He offers a robust “eschatological imagination” (164). And he also avoids the speculative nature of traditional supralapsarianism, which tended to frame the problem in terms of the question: would God have become incarnate had humans not sinned? For all these benefits, though, it is impossible to overlook the fact that van Driel’s position is explicitly designed to avoid the cross. Supralapsarianism, for him, is opposed to atheologia crucis. He says as much in his discussion of divine friendship:
Jesus calls his disciples friends in the context of a conversation about his imminent death: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). But while the death is motivated by friendship, the friendship is not motivated by death. Jesus becomes his disciples’ savior because he is their friend; not the other way around . . . If the incarnation only happened as a function of God’s reconciling action, there would be no need for a continued bodily existence of Christ after crucifixion and death. (161)

The hole in van Driel’s position looms large: Why did Jesus die? Is the cross necessary in any sense? In light of his arguments, this reviewer must conclude with: no, the cross is not necessary. Jesus death could be simply an accident of his controversial preaching and the sinfulness of humankind. Van Driel’s christology has no apparent connection to a doctrine of the atonement, in large part because such a doctrine does not seem necessary. Or if it is necessary, then it needs to be completely rethought, which could be very insightful if he were to explore such a project. If he is right—as I believe he is—to reject the substance ontology that makes Jesus the bearer of a general humanum, then atonement could be conceived as the contingent encounter between each individual and the living Christ (as the crucified one) in the eschatological consummation. That is at least an interesting possibility worth exploring.
As it stands, however, van Driel’s position suggests that God’s desire for friendship and love for humanity precedes (and could logically even preclude) any concern about sin and reconciliation. He even suggests that a gospel of sin and redemption is problematic because “in a time such as ours . . . the sense of sin is minimal” (166). “In my proposal,” he says, “we do not have to preach sin before we can preach Christ; we can preach Christ as the offer of love and friendship with God; and it is thereafter, in the light of that offer of friendship and love, that human beings discover themselves as sinners” (166). While this ordering is correct—and quite Barthian—what does it mean to then discover oneself as a sinner? Does that mean we come to see the significance of the cross of Christ? Or is it rather that we see ourselves as unfaithful friends of God who need, by God’s grace, to return to a right relationship? These questions remain unanswered in van Driel’s otherwise thorough explanation. While he makes an impressive case for a supralapsarian incarnation, one has to wonder if the sharp separation between christology and atonement exchanges biblical fidelity for logical soundness.
Incarnation Anyway is an important book that brings a whole set of ideas and concepts back into the contemporary theological conversation. Van Driel does this in clear, concise prose that is easy to follow and compelling. As a surprise bonus, the book concludes with a bibliographical genealogy of supralapsarianism that may be the most helpful five pages in the entire book. All in all, whether his proposal finds wider acceptance or not, this is a book that professors, students, and ministers will all benefit from reading and engaging.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Ables, Travis E. Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth (London: T & T Clark, 2013)

Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth 

Ables, Travis E. Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth (London: T & T Clark, 2013), 288 pp. $130.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by Luke Zerra (September 03, 2015)

A pervasive tendency in contemporary theology has been to cite Augustine as bestowing a problematic legacy to Western Trinitarian theology. Augustine – as theologians such as Catherine Lacugna, Colin Gunton, and Robert Jenson tell us – is insufficiently Trinitarian, emphasizing divine unity and downplaying the role of the Spirit to the point of losing sight of God’s triunity. Karl Barth, despite initiating the Trinitarian revival of the 20th century, has been critiqued along similar lines. To his critics, Barth’s emphasis on divine subjectivity is overly monistic and potentially modalistic, his focus on God’s eternity divorces the immanent Trinity from the economy of salvation, and his doctrine of the Spirit reduces the Trinity to – in the words of Jenson – a “binity” of Father and Son (105).In Incarnational Realism, Travis E. Ables offers an analysis of Augustine and Barth’s respective pneumatologies in order to counter this “standard narrative” of a supposed trinitarian decline in Western and Augustinian theology (17). Ables claims that at its best Western theology presents a vision of God as a singular self-diffusive act of love and that pneumatology is the means by which we are able to talk about our own participation in this act of self-giving (12). While much of modern trinitarian theology assumes that Christology and pneumatology “operate univocally (and thus competitively)” (187), Ables seeks to show that Western theology ideally teaches that knowledge of God is only possible in the incarnation and that “the work of the Spirit is to make us contemporaneous to, and participants in, the incarnation” (189). This “incarnational realism” is present in both Augustine and Barth, showing that neither in fact suffers from a pneumatological deficiency, and that each theologian offers important correctives to the other’s thought (189).

After sketching how modern theology has sought to approach Trinitarian theology by privileging either the communion of the divine persons or the historicization of the divine being (17-18), Ables turns in chapters 2-4 to Augustine’s De Trinitate. For Ables, apophaticism is key to Augustine’s Trinitarian thought. As supremely unknown, God is only revealed in Christ’s descent to us and in our elevation in the Spirit to the knowledge of God. Rather than amounting to a Neoplatonic natural theology, the famous psychological analogy is then “not an analogy at all, but rather a description of the actualization of the image of God by grace . . . bringing us into union with God” (55). This enactment of the imago dei takes place in and through the Spirit, being the basis of what Ables terms “Augustine’s Ethical Apophaticism” (101). This is the claim that while theological speech ends in unknowing, we come to contemplate God by loving the neighbor, seeing the face of Christ in the other as we participate in God through the Spirit (101-104). For Ables, Augustine’s pneumatology of ethical apophaticism counters both modern theology’s portrayal of Augustine as lacking pneumatological depth as well as Radical Orthodoxy’s positive retrieval of Augustine, which Ables claims reduces the Spirit to a logical necessity (101-104).

In chapters 5-7 Ables turns to Barth, focusing on tracing the development of Barth’s pneumatology in the Church Dogmatics (CD). Looming over Ables’ entire discussion of CD is his claim that Barth’s trinitarianism pivots between an “Augustinian” tendency – which emphasizes divine simplicity and self-giving – and a “Hegelian” tendency focused on divine pluralism (109). In a way, Barth’s pneumatology across CD is a dialectic between these two supposedly contradictory tendencies.

Ables finds an Augustinian tendency in Barth’s dialectic of revelation in CD I/1. Here pneumatology is at the heart of revelation, allowing us to be participants in God’s revelatory self-giving (107). God’s unity means that “God has one work of revelation, God’s self-giving in Christ, and the work of the spirit is the moment of participation in Christ that is at the same time inherent in that work” (114). Similarly, Barth’s famed doctrine of election in CD II/2 has resonances with the Augustinian notion of the totus christus, revealing that participation is objectively grounded in the particular person of Jesus and subjectively enacted through the Spirit (121-125). CD I/1 and II/2 then both rely on the Augustinian notions of simplicity and self-giving as the work of Christ and the Spirit are united in the acts of revelation and election.

On Ables’ account problems arise when Barth deviates from Augustinianism simplicity. Case in point is Barth’s problematic discussion of gender roles in CD III. Here the Hegelian tendency “demands an economy of grace characterized by the mutual production of identity and the instrumentalization of the other . . . Just as God needs another to know Godself and escape the confines of a static and monistic substance, so man needs another—woman—to know himself and escape the solipsism of the solitary self” (130). Chapters 6 and 7 are further devoted to exploring Hegelian idealism in Barth, particularly in relation to CD IV and the influential work of Bruce McCormack. In short, Ables claims that idealism necessitates an other, thereby detracting from Barth’s most essential insight: namely that “there is one common agency and work of God, in the form of God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ, a single and simple self-donation that proceeds from the Father and incorporates us in the work of the Spirit” (150).

Much is to be commended in Ables’ work. He is a clear writer with a gift for lucid explanations of complex ideas and schools of thought. As such, the book is as helpful for demystifying contemporary trajectories in trinitarian theology as it is for analyzing the thought of Augustine and Barth. Further, while much defense of Augustine’s trinitarianism has come from historical theologians such as Lewis Ayers, Michel Barnes, and Rowan Williams; Ables’ work is helpful in offering a defense from the realm of systematic theology, adding an important voice to the debate over Augustine’s legacy.

That said there are some concerns to be raised with Ables’ volume. Surprisingly, the work does not discuss the filioque, a seemingly important point for a book on Western trinitarianism and pneumatology. This is especially the case given Ables’ noting of the importance of Eastern paradigms and theologians in the 20th century trinitarian revival (4-9). This omission – noted by Ables but with no reason given – is likely and understandably due to the limits of space in an already dense book (14).

Further, while Ables’ challenging of masculine language for God is necessary and laudable, his decision to refer to the Holy Spirit with feminine pronouns needs more elaboration and unpacking. While Ables may be correct that in doing so “we can think of the Spirit less as a lone girl, taking a backseat to the starring roles accorded to the guys” (15), Elizabeth Johnson and Sarah Coakley have raised important points about this potentially leading to the devaluation of the Spirit, an end that runs completely against Ables’ goal.

Another concern lies in Ables’ tendency to replace one declension narrative with another. While Ables laments how many theologians subscribe to the “standard narrative” of Augustinian trinitarian decline, much of Incarnational Realism is predicated on a skeptical stance toward Hegel’s legacy in modern theology. While Ables offers compelling reasons for his concerns, much of his engagement is in fact with readers of Hegel rather than Hegel himself. While Ables cedes that his work cannot offer a full internal critique of Hegel (172), Ables’ claims would be strengthened if he were to emphasize that his critique is of particular interpretations of Hegel among theologians and less so with Hegel himself. This is important in a context where a growing body of scholarship – not only by philosophers such as Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin, but also by religious ethicists like Thomas A. Lewis and Jeffrey Stout – has challenged longstanding interpretations of Hegel’s thought.

These criticisms aside, Ables’ volume is an important work for those interested in Augustine, Barth, and contemporary trajectories in trinitarian theology. Ables succeeds in presenting Augustine and Barth as exemplars of Western trinitarian thought at its best: namely, of God as a singular act of self-giving revealed in Christ and in which we participate through the Spirit. Both students and critics of Augustine and Barth will find much insight and value in this book.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Collins Winn, Christian T. “Jesus is Victor!”: The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009)

“Jesus is Victor!”: The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth.

Collins Winn, Christian T. “Jesus is Victor!”: The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), 330 pp. $38.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Matthew J. Aragon Bruce (June 30, 2016)

Anyone with more than a superficial interest in the theology of Karl Barth has encountered the name “Blumhardt.” But many Barth scholars would have little to say if asked about the Blumhardts and their influence on Barth. One the one hand, some might mention their watchwords “Jesus is Victor!” or “Thy Kingdom Come!,” which are prominent themes in Barth’s thought. On the other hand, we might hear something, perhaps with some embarrassment, about the spiritual struggle in Möttlingen and the reported case of demonic possession and an exorcism performed by the elder Blumhardt. And perhaps one or two might even echo Bultmann’s exasperation with ‘obscurantism and superstition” and quip, “The Blumhardt legends are to my mind preposterous” (Rudolf Bultmann, “A Reply to the Theses of J. Schniewind” in Kerygma and Myth I, ed. Bartsch, trans. Fuller; London: SPCK, 1972, 120). Yet it is a fact that that this father-son duo, Johann Christoph (the elder) and Christoph Friedrich (the younger), exercised a considerable influence on modern Protestant theology; not only Barth, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, Jürgen Moltmann, Eduard Thurneysen, and even Paul Tillich, all claimed to be influenced by them in some fashion. Indeed, in a 1936 essay aimed to introduce an American audience to “Contemporary European Theology,” Emil Brunner wrote:

The real origin of the Dialectic Theology is to be traced, however, not to Kierkegaard, but to a more unexpected source, to a place still farther removed from the main theological thoroughfare—to the quiet Boll of the two Blumhardts . . . Both men experienced the reality of the power of the Spirit of the living God in a specially vigorous and powerful way. They were not theologians but they could make theologians think. Theology has worth only when there lies at the root of it something other than theology—that insight and life which were powerful in both Blumhardts. (Emil Brunner, “Contemporary European Theology” in The Church Through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown, ed. Cavert and Van Dusen; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936, 141-42.
So, “just who are these Blumhardt characters anyhow” and how did they influence Barth? It is these questions that Collins Winn seeks to answer for his readers. And answers he provides! Collins Winn persuasively demonstrates that the Blumhardts “were of decisive importance for Barth’s theology” (xiii, 281). Moreover, this influence was not isolated to the earlier stages of Barth’s career as commonly thought; the Blumhardts’ influence is present at every stage of his development, explicitly influencing, e.g., the content and structure of the final volumes of the Church Dogmatics.

It is worth noting that one of the strengths of this book is that the Blumhardts are presented as neither proto-Barthians nor of interest only because of their relationship to Barth. Rather, they are allowed to speak for themselves and are revealed as significant resources for contemporary Christian thought in their own right. Despite the title, this is a book about Barth and the Blumhardts and only as such about the significance of the Blumhardts for Barth.

The book consists of the five chapters, which, after a lengthy yet valuable literature review (Ch. 1), can be divided into two parts. The first part provides an introduction to the life and thought of the elder (Ch. 2) and the younger (Ch. 3) Blumhardt. The second part explicates the significant role played by both Blumhardts in Barth’s early (1911-19) development (Ch.4), and their enduring presence in his theology from Romans to the final volumes of the Dogmatics (Ch. 5).

In the first part, Collins Winn gifts English-language readers with what is one of the best, succinct introductions to the life and thought of the Blumhardts presently available. Regarding the elder Blumhardt, readers are introduced to both his biography—his deep, if complex, roots in Württemberg Pietism, his ministry in Möttlingen and especially the struggle involving demonic possession and exorcism and subsequent spiritual revival in the village, and the community he formed at Bad Boll – and his thought – his Christocentric reading of the Old Testament, his understanding of the Kingdom of God, his pneumatology, and most importantly his eschatology. The same pattern is followed for the younger Blumhardt. In careful conversation with German secondary literature, Collins Winn focuses his attention on the Blumhardt son’s hope for apokatastasis, his eschatological Christology, and his emphasis on God’s love and its revolutionary consequences, particularly solidarity with the poor and oppressed. This latter emphasis leads to the younger Blumhardt’s political involvements, which would have a profound influence on Barth. His turn to religious socialism – seeing in it a parable of the kingdom of God – and subsequent theological disenchantment with socialism, has obvious parallels with Barth’s life and intellectual development.

In Chapter One, Collins Winn provides an analytical review of previous scholarship on Barth’s development that gives attention, or does not, to the influence of the Blumhardts. While there is wide acceptance among Barth scholars that the Blumhardts influenced Barth, this influence has, until now, only rarely been explored with any depth. According to Collins Winn, the Blumhardts’ influence has nether been fully understood nor had much effect in accounts of Barth’s development, with the result that Barth himself has not been fully understood. Von Balthasar, e.g., does not mention the Blumhardts at all. Others, such as Berkouwer and McCormack, in different ways and to different degrees, recognize the importance of the Blumhardts, but give little space to their contribution to Barth’s development. Still others, particularly those who focus on Barth’s political commitments and activities (e.g. Marquardt, Gollwitzer, and Gorringe), do recognize the central importance of the Blumhardts, particularly their teachings about the Kingdom of God. Yet these interpreters give insufficient attention to the Blumhardtian influence on Barth’s dogmatic theology. Those who have recognized that the Blumhardts played a central role in Barth’s theology as a whole, e.g. Joachim Berger, Hans Frei, Eberhard Jüngel, and Gerhard Sauter, tend to limit their attention to the early stages of Barth’s career. This results in the misleading impression that the Blumhardts were only significant for the early stages of Barth’s development. Moreover, these interpreters either fundamentally misunderstood the Blumhardts and their relationship to Pietism (Frei) or their work remains mostly untranslated (Berger, Sauter, and to a lesser degree Jüngel).

Through a careful dialogue with prior scholarship, Collins Winn moves the conversation about the Blumhardts and Barth forward by focusing on eschatology as the central loci of the Blumhardts’ influence. Following the Blumhardts, Barth understood eschatology not merely as “last things,” i.e. as victory of Jesus leading to the eternal life of the individual, but as the victorious in-breaking of the Kingdom of God into the here and now andits revolutionary consequences for the Christian community and the world:

The material transformation that occurred in the victory of Jesus on the cross and in the resurrection has implications for the larger social and political life in which human beings find themselves . . . There is no area of human life that is not affected and taken up into the transformation wrought in Jesus Christ . . . The influence of the Blumhardts’ eschatology reaches across doctrinal lines. This is no less the case in its influences on Barth’s theology. It affected his approach to theological language; it contributed to the shape of his particular integration of theology and ethics; and it most certainly shaped certain aspects of Barth’s Christology, ecclesiology, anthropology, creation and theology of election (64).
In the second part, Collins Winn aims to show just how the Blumhardtian eschatology influenced Barth’s theological oeuvre.

In Chapter Four, Collins Winn narrates an episode of Barth’s early development, focusing on his encounter with the Blumhardts. He closely follows and builds upon McCormack’s account of Barth’s genetic development, providing a congenial complement to McCormack. This chapter contains a detailed account of how and when Barth encountered the Blumhardts. The Blumhardtian influence began in Barth’s youth. His father, Fritz, was one of the last students of JT Beck, whose work is prominent in both the first and second editions of the Römerbrief. Beck was a classmate of the elder Blumhardt and a significant theological influence on the younger. Barth himself made note of his maternal aunt, Elizabeth, who often stayed at Bad Boll and whose Christian devotion and piety made a mark on the young Karl. Barth’s direct engagement with the Blumhardts came later, primarily mediated at first through his close friend Eduard Thurneysen, who arranged Barth’s “decisive” face-to-face encounter with the younger Blumhardt in 1915. The most valuable aspect of this Chapter however is the engagement with Barth’s earliest writings on the Blumhardts. By interpreting these texts with a careful eye to the socio-historical content, Collins Winn convincingly demonstrates that the Blumhardts were among the main catalysts for Barth’s break with Protestant Liberalism and turn to “the Strange New World in the Bible.” Collins Winn’s discussion of Barth’s 1919 Tambach lecture is especially valuable. He shows that the Blumhardts were a significant force behind Barth’s association of the Kingdom of God with the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and that this remained a central feature of Barth’s thought throughout subsequent developments. Collins Winn is absolutely correct when he writes, “if there is a center to Barth’s theology then it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (200). This section should be considered as required reading for those interested in the Barth’s development.

It is Chapter Five however where Collins Winn makes his strongest contribution to Barth studies. Throughout this chapter, Collins Winn reminds his readers of “the critical independence that Barth showed vis-à-vis the Blumhardts” (211). He highlights the fact that Barth’s “primary allegiance was not to a specific theological tradition, but to the living Christ who was, is and will be the kingdom of God” (214). Readers of Barth are well aware that he freely corrects, supplements, critiques, and even dismisses the thought of even his closest interlocutors when they are found wanting. This is no less true of the Blumhardts. But Collins Winn demonstrates that Barth’s conviction that the living, risen Christ is the standard by which all theology stands or falls was something he came to by means of the influence of the Blumhardts. There is much to commend in the final chapter. Highlights include Barth’s response to Berkouwer in CD IV/3.1 concerning the charge of Barth’s ‘triumphant’ christocentrism. Collins Winn demonstrates in detail that the Blumhardtian theme “Jesus is Victor!” is central to Barth’s thought and uses this to show why Berkouwer’s critique misses its mark. Barth is not working “with a Christ-principle” as Berkouwer supposes, something analogous to the Reformed orthodox principle of election and divine decision, but rather “with Jesus Christ himself as attested to by Holy Scripture (232, citing CD IV/3.1, 174). Barth’s Christology does not operate with an abstract “cognitive concept or conceptual principle of grace” but “with the living history of Jesus the Victor, as attested in Scripture, and as experienced anew by the Blumhardts… rooted in the narratives of Scripture that points beyond itself to an actual concrete occurrence” (245). In addition, the chapter includes helpful treatments of the form and content of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation in CD IV.1-3 and on the theme “Thy Kingdom Come!” in the posthumously published fragment The Christian Life.

There is one potential problem with the book that is worth noting. While Collins Winn never makes such a claim explicitly, and, as noted above, rightly recognizes that the living Christ is the center of Barth’s theology, there is a danger of perceiving the Blumhardts as the primary influence behind several of the loci of the Church Dogmatics. Calvin, Luther, and Schleiermacher, e.g., are discussed only in passing and there is almost no discussion of Barth’s philosophical influences. This is understandable as this is a book on Barth and the Blumhardts and Collins Winn is striving to overcome the relative neglect of the Blumhardts in Barth Studies, which he so amply demonstrates in Chapter One. Nonetheless, it is essential that Collins Winn’s book be read along with other, broader, accounts of Barth’s genetic development and the content of his theology.

I signal this danger because Collins Winn has so convincingly proved his thesis: “that not only were the Blumhardts of great importance for Barth’s break from the Protestant liberal theology that he had been trained in as a student, but that these two men… and the powerful theological vision that animated their lives and thought remained of great importance to Barth, even to his mature theology” (281). This book should be considered required reading for future researchers working on the development of Barth’s thought. Moreover, the influence of Blumhardts should no longer be neglected as regards the content of Barth’s theology. Finally, it is the hope of this reviewer that this book will lead contemporary students of theology to take and read the Blumhardts themselves, be it with, beyond, or even against Barth.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Stefan Holtmann, Karl Barth als Theologe der Neuzeit. Studien zur kritischen Deutung seiner Theologie, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, vol. 118 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007)

Karl Barth als Theologe der Neuzeit. Studien zur kritischen Deutung seiner Theologie, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, vol. 118

Stefan Holtmann, Karl Barth als Theologe der Neuzeit. Studien zur kritischen Deutung seiner Theologie, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, vol. 118 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 444 pages. € 79,90

Reviewed by Christophe Chalamet (December 10, 2008)

This remarkable dissertation is – as the author himself indicates – less about Barth himself than about a certain circle of his interpreters in German scholarship. Rather than directly contributing to the theme “Karl Barth and modernity,” Holtmann wishes primarily to help “clarify the implications” (18) of that theme. He does so by first presenting and evaluating what Trutz Rendtorff (part 1), Falk Wagner (part 2), and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (part 3) have written about Barth, before turning to two additional interpreters: Dietrich Korsch (part 4) and Georg Pfleiderer (part 5). This selection of Barth interpreters is critical. The first three scholars under consideration are sometimes referred to as members of the “Munich school” of Barth interpretation (a designation Holtmann avoids throughout the book in order not to blur the differences between these authors, as he makes explicit on p. 409). They are some of the major voices in what has been and still is a sharply critical appraisal of Barth’s legacy. Indeed, as I would put it, most of these scholars are associated with the “Troeltsch renaissance,” to which they have been key contributors in the last decades. So Holtmann focuses his attention on voices who have expressed some of the most stringent criticisms of Barth.The first part of the book, which is also by far the longest one, begins with a close analysis of Trutz Rendtorff’s early publications, starting with his 1958 dissertation on “The Social Structure of the Community”. In it Rendtorff analyzed the theme of modern society’s “autonomy”. The emancipation of Western European societies from their religious roots has led the churches to a state of “permanent” and acute “crisis” (26). This statement reveals much about Rendtorff’s methodology, in which phenomenology and sociology take precedence over the more traditional dogmatic approach. Already in 1958 his aim was to retrieve the broad methodological orientation used by Ernst Troeltsch – an orientation eclipsed by Barth and more generally by the “theologians of the Word” such as Gogarten and Bultmann (28-29, 72). It thus appears that Rendtorff was intent, right from the beginning, to privilege a phenomenological and universal starting point for his theological work, in explicit contrast with the particularism of the biblical and dogmatic approach preferred by several dialectical theologians. Theology had to be done once again from an external standpoint (”Aussenperspektive”; 53), in the footsteps of two towering Enlightenment theologians: Semler and Troeltsch. Rendtorff was seeking to construct a “rational,” “natural” theology (84-5).

Rendtorff’s method as well as his inclination toward Troeltsch might presage a strictly negative evaluation of Barth’s theology. In fact, things are not that simple. The most striking aspect of Rendtorff’s interpretation of modern Protestant theology is his thesis that, far from breaking from late 19th century thought (Harnack, Troeltsch), the dialectical theologians sought to retrieve modernity’s theme of autonomy and thus must be seen as a constructive extension of 19th century thought (100-7). Barth did not ignore the modern problems of subjectivity, autonomy and self-consciousness. Rather, he revitalized them theologically in his own way, namely by “relocating” them in his doctrine of God (107-113). Rendtorff’s thesis was first expressed in 1972, in a section from his book Theorie des Christentums. Historisch-theologische Studien zu seiner neuzeitlichen Verfassung. Rendtorff’s appreciation for Barth’s achievement is limited: he deems it a significant – insofar as the theme of autonomy is now placed at the center of the theological construct – but ultimately inadequate effort, and thus calls for its sublation. Holtmann briefly sketches what Rendtorff sees as inadequacies, but it appears to be related to Barth’s use of Scripture as an instance of heteronomy (112). Another important difference lies in the fact that Rendtorff refuses to distinguish the Church’s being from its phenomenological, sociological dimension, whereas Barth, following the Reformers, understands the Church theologically and confessionally in relation to Scripture and revelation (143).

In his short summary of the first part of the book, Holtmann states that the question whether Rendtorff’s sophisticated interpretation actually conforms with Barth’s own theological intention is not as important as evaluating Rendtorff’s constructive proposal per se. Reading between the lines, the reader may discern that Holtmann has not been convinced by Rendtorff’s program of a “theory of Christianity” based on Troeltsch’s insights (156).

Part two begins with what looks almost like an apology for Falk Wagner: Holtmann states that even though Wagner crudely misunderstood Barth and polemicized against him, it remains interesting to uncover the presuppositions which led to these misunderstandings and polemical attacks. To put it clearly: what led Wagner to see certain parallels between the material shape (”inhaltliche Struktur”) of Barth’s theology and the theoretical constructs (”Theoriebildung”) of Stalinism and Nazism (173, 218)? With his emphasis on Christ’s triumphant reconciliatory work, which takes place independently of any human cooperation, Barth has constructed a “ruinous” idea of the absolute, for it lacks the presence of a truly “other,” according to Wagner. God “plays with himself,” in Barth’s theology. An “assimilation” (the ominous word “Gleichschaltung”) and elimination of the “other,” i.e. of human beings as contingent and free beings, has taken place. God’s omnicausality resembles certain forms of pantheism and the assimilation of the human counterpart betrays signs of a “tyranny” (214-217, 246). God’s absolute sovereignty leaves no room for human freedom. Interestingly, Holtmann does not see such criticisms as mere polemics based on an erroneous reading of Barth’s works (219). Rather, they must be understood as the logical consequence of Wagner’s interest in a theoretical construct of the notion of absolute. Building on the philosopher Wolfgang Cremer’s “theory of the absolute” and wishing to transcend the divide between theology and philosophy, Wagner considers the “idea of God” as triune to be a necessary rational thought, attained speculatively, rather than a reality known only through revelation and faith (174-182). Wagner’s speculative idealism is also apparent in the way a logically necessary idea – the “idea of God” as triune – serves to ground human subjectivity and consciousness within a theory of the absolute (185). The doctrine of the Trinity is “reconstructed” by Wagner “within the framework of a theory of the absolute” to ground “the self-acquisition and self-foundation of self-consciousness” [”die absolutheitstheoretisch rekonstruierte Trinitätslehre als Selbsterfassung (und -begründung) des Selbstbewusstseins”]; 186). What is apparent is that Wagner has lost all confidence in the possibility of any kind of theological realism, which he simply identifies with “premodern supranaturalism”. Everything in theology is conditioned by and dependent on (human) subjectivity. There lies the starting point of all theoretical constructs, including the “idea of God as triune” and christology. Human consciousness, in its active mode (”die Selbstbewusstseinstätigkeit”), is not only the source of theological constructs, it is also the subject matter of theology (223). Now that is quite an antagonistic approach, compared to Barth’s intention! It appears that Wagner did not even try to take up Feuerbach’s challenge (yet he hoped to counter Feuerbach’s critique by speaking not just of the individual but also of the universal consciousness, which he identified as God; 226). Another problem lies in the instrumentalization of the “absolute” in Wagner’s project. As Holtmann points out, in Wagner’s theology “the absolute” is a necessary thought only insofar as it serves to ground subjectivity and consciousness (192). Finally, near the end of part two, Holtmann mentions how Wagner’s more recent criticisms portray Barth as a theologian who used theology to further his personal ambition and quest for power. Barth spoke of the absolute to absolutize his own finite position (251). Here Holtmann rightly takes the gloves off and admits that Wagner’s comments do not reflect a real attempt to understand Barth’s thought (250).

The third part of the book begins by showing how Friedrich Wilhelm Graf’s earliest critique of Barth’s theology, published in 1975, is partly indebted to Falk Wagner’s views on subjectivity and freedom, before arguing that Graf follows Troeltsch rather than Rendtorff and Wagner in his assessment of Hegel’s metaphysics: Hegel’s thought was directed at the right aim, but his “deductive metaphysics of the absolute” (Troeltsch), with its abstraction from the social, cultural and political context, can no longer be pursued, (275-6). Troeltsch’s decisive influence is apparent in Graf’s “historicization” (”Historisierung”) of Barth, which seeks to contextualize his thought. Modernity is essentially a revolutionary way of thinking historically (”historische Denkrevolution”; 286). Using that Troeltschian standpoint, Graf concludes that Barth’s theology is “antihistorical”. Unfortunately, as Holtmann points out, this narrow focus on the problem of historicism does not allow Graf to fully contextualize Barth and to consider what he might have learned from certain “positive” (or conservative) thinkers such as Johann Tobias Beck, Christoph Blumhardt, or Hermann Kutter. More importantly, it neglects material questions such as the question of God (288-9). Holtmann then provides an excellent survey of Graf’s critique of the impact of Barth’s “antiliberalism” during the Weimar Republic. In an article from 1986, Graf has stated that even though Barth’s attitude with regard to democracy and parliamentarism was unambiguous (read: positive), his theology did lead to a relativization of democracy (Barth’s theology “faktisch demokratierelativierend gewirkt hat”; 296). Holtmann disagrees with this assessment. In his opinion, Graf does not try to understand what might have motivated Barth to criticize “liberalism” (313). Certainly, Barth did express some regrets regarding his relatively few public pronouncements against the various antidemocratic forces in Germany in the 1920’s. As a foreign citizen and as a theologian who wished to focus on the center of Christian theology, he did not speak out as clearly and as often as he could/should have (313-4). But Holtmann admits, with Graf, that Barth did not attempt to ground democratic values theologically in any constructive sense until 1938’s Rechtfertigung und Recht(319). Contrasting Graf’s work with Wagner and Rendtforff, Holtmann signals the decisive difference between them: a constructive project on the basis of a critique of Barth’s theology is absent in Graf’s works. Rather, he is content to evaluate Barth’s thought from a Troeltschian perspective, locating Barth in his socio-cultural milieu (326). But even this “historicization” is not adequately pursued by Graf, for it ignores a number of significant authors and texts, including many volumes published in recent decades as part of Barth’s complete works.

The last two parts of the book consist of “side glances” at two additional interpreters: Dietrich Korsch and Georg Pfleiderer. Korsch’s positive contribution, compared to Rendtorff, Wagner, and Graf, has been to take into account the central motif in the Church Dogmatics, namely the “prior facticity of the Christ event and its contemporary proclamation” (340). Korsch thus corrects their insufficient consideration of some of the basic material decisions in the Church Dogmatics (355), and he is interested in identifying the conditions of possibility for furthering the legacy of dialectical theology after and beyond Barth. Also noteworthy is the fact that Korsch places Barth in conversation with Wilhelm Herrmann and Friedrich Schleiermacher, rather than using Troeltsch as a measuring stick (344). Korsch discerns the importance for Barth of the facticity of Jesus Christ’s self-attestation (”Selbstbezeugung”), a starting point which obviously differs from Schleiermacher’s and Herrmann’s interest in human consciousness and subjectivity. But Korsch leans towards abstraction with his analysis of the “structure” of Barth’s thought: the center of theology tends to become a “principle” rather than an event (355).

Moving on to his final interlocutor, Holtmann retraces in great detail Pfleiderer’s interpretation of the development of Barth’s thought, from his earliest writings to the early 1930’s (371-403). Holtmann sees the influence of all previous authors in Pfleiderer’s account (405-6). Pfleiderer’s overarching concern is to show the “practical” character of Barth’s theology, which aimed at constituting a “church” with a theologically clear collective subjectivity (361). Barth’s Tambach lecture, for instance, was a “performative act” meant to create a community among theologians. Grasping the content of that lecture was supposed to have practical consequences: the theme of the electing God simultaneously served as a theological call to discipleship (390). The “applicatio” was inherently present within the theoretical construct (402). This model, according to Pfleiderer, betrays the influence of Marburg neo-Kantianism, a philosophical school for which reason itself “generates” reality. If Barth’s theology is somehow compatible with modernity, it has much to do with these affinities. As Holtmann sees it, Pfleiderer’s main objective is to analyze the way in which Barth’s theologyfunctions. Barth’s own self-understanding, i.e. his way of locating himself in relation to the biblical-reformatory trajectory, is seen as a secondary decision and as a means to an end (405). This interpretation is in fact shared by Rendtorff, Wagner and Graf, who refuse to take Barth at his word when he claims or hopes to be a biblical theologian. What Barth did was merely “clothe” his own ideas in biblical garment (416). Imagining that he might have received theological impulses from Scripture would be utterly naïve and is unnecessary. Holtmann is correct to take issue with this interpretation. He asks: can Barth’s theology be understood if one does not take his use of Scripture seriously? Holtmann’s conclusion is that the five authors under consideration have not taken into consideration the most important reference for Barth’s theology.

Holtmann proves to be equally charitable and perceptive in his detailed presentation and analysis of these five authors. One senses that, far from simply condemning Barth’s critics, he genuinely wishes to understand them and to begin a conversation with them. It is to be hoped that his conversation partners (at least those who are still living) will respond to his critique. In the meantime, Holtmann’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in the critical reception of Barth’s theology.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

McCormack, Bruce L. and Clifford B. Anderson, eds. Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011)

 Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism

McCormack, Bruce L. and Clifford B. Anderson, eds. Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 400 pp. $38.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by SueJeanne Koh (December 07, 2016)

Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism is a collection of essays that arose from the second annual Barth Conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, which took place in June 2007. Alongside other recently edited volumes, Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology (ed. Sung Wook Chung, 2008) and Engaging With Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (eds. David Gibson and Daniel Strange, 2009),this volume reflects the ambivalent but ongoing relationship between evangelicalism broadly construed and the impact of Karl Barth’s theological writings.This particular volume focuses in on American evangelicalism through the particular antagonistic relationship between Cornelius Van Til and Karl Barth. What this accomplishes is the ability to hone in on theological issues of concern that have particularly persisted for those who claim Van Til as part of their intellectual heritage. This heritage arose from the “modernist-fundamentalist” split, most clearly characterized in the establishment of Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929 by J. Gresham Machen. Though the disagreement between Van Til and Barth was years later and in one sense may be narrowly interpreted as a scholastic argument between neo-Calvinists and Barthians, in another it had broader implications for the contours of American evangelicalism as it sought to define its place in the social and cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Van Til may not be a name that comes to mind immediately when thinking about the prominent figures of twentieth-century American evangelicalism, but his consistent and ongoing criticism of Barth’s theology—even if not completely on target, as essays by George Harinck and Bruce McCormack indicate—and influence at Westminster have allowed for implicit familiarity with his thinking in Reformed circles. This is both the strength and the weakness of the volume. It allows, for the most part, a sustained thematic coherence throughout but at the expense of other doctrinal themes that are important to American evangelicals, such as the relationship between justification and sanctification, limited atonement, and baptism and communion.

The first two essays by George Harinck and D.G. Hart helpfully illuminate the historical genealogy and context of Van Til’s work. Harinck carefully provides the evidence that Van Til’s approach to Barth was influenced by his interactions with both Dutch neo-Calvinism and the theology of “Old Princeton.” Van Til took the concerns about Barth’s theology from the Dutch neo-Calvinists and translated these into a polemical defense of “Old Princeton” theology against Barth’s “unorthodox” theology. The result over the years has been a continued mutual but unnecessary suspicion between Barthians and neo-Calvinists, for while Van Til did anticipate some later evangelical concerns about Barth’s theology there were also areas of convergence. Hart points to this more balanced reception of Barth’s work through his historical narrative and genealogy of neo-Evangelicals, broadly associated with the pan-denominational organizations of Fuller Theological Seminary and Christianity Today.

Essays by John Hare and Clifford Anderson take up one of Van Til’s main criticisms of Barth, specifically Barth’s reliance on Kantian philosophical categories, which Van Til believes renders Barth’s theology “unfaithful to the gospel” (90). Hare’s essay is elegant and provocative in now he argues that not only is Van Til’s interpretation of Kant incorrect, but so is Barth’s interpretation, and so the two actually find themselves on the same side of the issue. Hare argues that more current scholarship and research on Kant show that there is nothing in Kant’s epistemology itself that is inconsistent with the gospel and that in fact Kant provides room for the workings of God’s grace. The import of Barth’s appropriation of Kant for evangelical theology is revealed at the end of Anderson’s contribution. Barth’s adaptation of the Marburg neo-Kantian “transcendental turn” speculatively allows for the possibility of a place for religious experience, which risks becoming an avenue for natural theology yet is so important for the evangelical narrative of conversion.

Significant concerns about Barth’s theology often arise from his actualized Christology, with the contention that it results in an abstract conception of the church and universalism. Michael Horton’s essay is particularly illuminating insofar as he delineates the differences between Barth’s Christology and Reformed theology of covenant and election. Although Horton ultimately argues that Barth’s Christology acts as a hermeneutic that obscures the soteriological dynamism of Reformed theology and the witness of scripture, Horton also recognizes the genetic similarities of the two and the possibility of further generative conversation. Adam Neder’s essay on Barth’s innovation regarding the hypostatic union takes up this possibility and provides a nice contrast to Horton’s piece. Neder argues that Barth, while finding resources for his Christology within the Reformed and Lutheran traditions, was above all invested in unfurling what he found in scripture for the sake of doing “evangelical” theology.

Next, Kimlyn Bender and Keith L. Johnson address the theme of ecclesiology, but from two different angles. Bender suggests that because American evangelicalism is marked more by doctrinal assumptions rather than confessional or denominational identity, the result has been “a kind of thin theological gruel owing more to the market and to cultural trends than to the developed theological heritage of the churches” (185). What Bender argues is that while Barth may have had some sharp words for evangelicalism today, he would have appreciated its catholic and ecumenical emphasis. Ultimately, Barth’s conceptualization of the church as “both [the] invisible and visible” body of Christ allows for a richer ontological ground for evangelical identity. Johnson takes up the concern expressed among some evangelicals that Barth’s ecclesiology does not allow for significant ontological expression of human action. He argues that Barth’s conception of the concursus Dei allows for the distinct but vital relationship between God’s action and ours, a necessary outworking of Barth’s doctrine of election. While I am unsure of Johnson’s discussion of the concursus Dei mapping so neatly onto Barth’s account of water baptism, this connection is one that evangelicals might find instructive in terms of strengthening ecclesial identity.

Bruce McCormack and Suzanne McDonald focus on the persistent charge of “universalism” in Barth’s theology, a worry that McCormack analyzes as one that funds all other evangelical concerns about Barth. McCormack’s essay takes up the Pauline witness to the question of eschatology and “hell” and reads it alongside both Barth’s early engagement with Paul in The Epistle to the Romans and his later doctrine of election. McCormack argues that Barth ultimately withdraws from a final affirmation of apokatastasis because of his commitment to upholding the diversity of scriptural voices. McDonald takes a fresh approach to the question of apokatastasis by asking what it means to be “in Christ,” thus bringing into sharper focus the Trinitarian shape of election. Through an examination of John Owen’s pneumatological understanding of election, McDonald reframes the Reformed evangelical concern about Barth’s bent toward “universalism” as one about the relationship between Christology and pneumatology.

The final set of essays in this volume takes up contemporary themes that intersect with American evangelicalism more broadly: the challenge of historical criticism via Carl Henry and Hans Frei (Springs), the emerging church (Franke), and Radical Orthodoxy (Hector). In the final essay, Todd V. Cioffi examines Stanley Hauerwas’s sharp church-state distinction and his use of Barth in support. Cioffi distinguishes Barth’s understanding of the church-state relationship from Hauerwas’s, and argues that Barth’s theology allows for active Christian participation in political and social affairs as affirmation of Christ’s lordship. From one perspective, the inclusion of this last set of essays seems only relevant to the subset of American evangelicals who have an interest in Radical Orthodoxy or who are explicitly familiar with the emerging church. So readers should remind themselves of the particular lens through which this volume is most fruitfully read: the doctrinal differences between Cornelius Van Til and Karl Barth, and the ways in which Radical Orthodoxy or the emerging church draws upon those differences. Finally, Bruce McCormack’s afterword provides a succinct but clarifying analysis of the problems of Van Til’s critique of Barth (e.g., his analysis only extends up to CD II/1) and the remaining fundamental contrasts between the two. While this conclusion might be read as a dismissal of Van Til in the end, McCormack submits instead that it is not “self-evident” about which path to choose. In saying this, he suggests that an ongoing and active searching of the scriptures as the living Word of God and tradition is what marks evangelicalism, more so than an allegiance to a particular figure or commitment to particular issues.

Given the ways in which American evangelicalism has found itself allied with strange bedfellows in the past year and how it has become overwhelmingly identified with certain social and political concerns (e.g., the status of same-sex marriage, the pro-life movement), reading this volume was initially a bit of an exercise in cognitive dissonance. It is also true that the racial and ethnic makeup of American evangelicalism is transforming evangelicalism from the inside out, and so some consideration or acknowledgement of this would have also been appreciated. However, this volume will be helpful to the careful and sympathetic reader who is familiar with Reformed evangelicalism and is interested in clearing the ground of some of the misconceptions regarding Barth and the doctrinal commitments of evangelical theology. Nuanced attention to doctrinal issues cannot fully solve the problems and issues of life together, but perhaps revisiting doctrine along the lines of what we see in this volume may force us to better articulate the connections to its outworking.

SueJeanne Koh, Th.D. Candidate, Duke Divinity School

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Werpehowski, William. Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014)

Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth

Werpehowski, William. Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), xv + 188. $104.95 (hardback)

Reviewed by Matthew Dowling (December 03, 2015)

“The dogmatics of the Christian Church, and basically the doctrine of God, is ethics” (CD II/2:515). This, as much as any statement, captures how Barth thought of the ethical task. When one grasps something of the profundity of this statement, then one will have a better sense of how inseparable Barth considered the link between how the Church should live and the task of theology. As Barth contended, the Church should seek to follow the will of God, an assertion he rooted in the claim of God on the people of God, because the covenant relation that God established with humanity has a double implication: election and command. It is the broad topic of divine command ethics which William Werpehowski critically and constructively engages in his book, Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth.Dr. Werpehowski currently holds the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Chair in Catholic Theology at Georgetown University. He previously spent several decades as a professor of Theology and director of the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University.

This volume was published by Ashgate as part of their Barth Studies series and was a focus (in draft form) of members of the Yale-Princeton Theology Group who convened in Princeton in 2012 to discuss it. As Werpehowski states in his preface, he hopes readers will “come away with a deeper comprehension of [Barth’s] ethics and a greater readiness to think critically with him in conversations about what Christians ought to be and to do.” The content of the book is comprised of material previously available in print but brought together here and revised (chapters 1-6, 9) with the addition of new material (chapters 7, 8, and 10).

Werpehowski’s volume proceeds in two parts. The first part is given over to “Divine Command, Narrative, and Ethics” and is comprised of chapters 1-4. Readers familiar with Werpehowski’s work will recognize in these chapters his continuing engagement with Barth’s surprising relation of divine command ethics, narrative theology, and virtue ethics. In part two, “Virtue, Moral Practices, and Discernment,” the discussion and critical engagement in the chapters centers upon specific moral themes and development in the area of theological ethics shaped by Barth’s consideration of the “reality-constituting acts of God” and his theology, which presupposes a “moral ontology.”

In Chapter One (“Divine Commands and Philosophical Dilemmas”), Werpehowski examines Barth’s approach to the question of the nature and source of the good (asking “Why ought we to obey the command of God?”) and shows, in dialogue with formulations from the famous “Euthyphro Dilemma” and Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, that because God is fundamentally for us in Jesus Christ, God has claimed us as Lord and Master in such a way that human obedience is an expression of our fellowship with God and conformity to Jesus Christ. In other words, humans freely, authentically, and fully assent to God’s self-disclosure. As Werpehowski summarizes, “God’s commands are right because God commands them; but what God commands is always bound to the divine decision that is Jesus Christ” (12).

In his second chapter, “Command and History,” Werpehowski engages two important thinkers and their contemporary critiques of Barth’s ethics of divine command: James M. Gustafson and Stanley Hauerwas. By suggesting that their readings of Barth are too restrictive both with respect to the portion of the ethical writings considered and the general style of interpreting Barth, the author attempts to show that Barth’s ethics are able to account for important facets of human moral agency. As he suggests, Barth’s ethics incorporate a concept of history which grounds reasons for action, character, and ‘growth-in-continuity’ (categories considered missing by the critics) in his category of “history of relationship with God.” For this reason Barth’s ethics ultimately do not fall to these important thinker’s critiques. Barth’s Christian ethic is, qualifiedly but genuinely, an ethic of virtue. Like John Webster’s excellent work on human action and moral theology (to mention just one scholar), Werpehowski is not to be missed as a counterpoint to those interpretations which underestimate Barth’s moral ontology.

Chapter three “Narrative and Ethics”, begins with the observation that Barth’s interest in the history of God in Jesus Christ warrants our interest in the category of narrative. He suggests that Barth’s account of God’s being as a being-in-act and of the being of Jesus Christ as constituted by this action means that a narrative interpretation is at work in Barth’s theology (38). Content in the chapter explores how biblical narrative figures in Barth’s theological ethics. Particularly interesting in this section is the analysis of Barth’s take on suicide and the synthetic manner in which Barth read from a number of different and complex texts towards a theological and ethical consideration of killing oneself. Not to be missed, readers should note Werpehowski’s four guidelines for evaluating Barth’s ethical vision listed at the end of the chapter.

In what is likely the heart of the book, chapter four, “Realism and Discernment”, finishes the first major part of the volume with a discussion about how (what Werpehowski calls) God’s “dynamic realism” stands at the center of Barth’s ethical thought. Werpehowski explores the significance of Barth’s “conceptual redescription” in theological ethics as he subverted modernity’s claim that the moral world could be organized around the self in such a way that the self was a kind of moral spectator and center of judgment. Rather, as a determination of the elect because of the election of humanity by God who is for us, the elect creature exists in grateful witness, who, because she knows grace, she knows God’s sovereign will and desires in gratitude to do it as she is addressed by God. In essence, Barth’s project counters the incipient nihilism of the Kantian ethic, as he builds a theological ethic on the foundation of Jesus Christ. This analysis is really about how one hears the divine command and the ways that divine grace impacts human moral action. Werpehowski explores a very interesting facet of Barth’s theological ethics in the remainder of the chapter: how his critical exposition of themes and their implications for faithful response and action bear on issues of sickness and illusion (with Mary Baker Eddy as the dialogue partner) and how one should honor bad parents. As Werpehowski concludes, “a practice of pursuing a coherent normative account of Christian existence through testing and revision of the language of faith, forged in Bible and tradition, is an essential aspect of Barth’s theological work and, I think, one of his great contributions to Christian ethics today” (62).

Part two comprises chapters five through ten and is given over to “Virtue, Moral Practices, and Discernment.” This section in many ways represents an application of the first part of the book and Barth’s theological ethic to various areas of concern. Here we must be more brief. Chapter five (“What Shall Parents Teach Their Children?”) and six (“In Search of Real Children: Innocence, Absence and Becoming a Self”) explores the divine command in the realm of parental responsibilities and the vocation of children. Chapter seven (“Love of God and the Moral Meaning of Joy”) analyzes how the affection of joy and the disposition of virtues enable us to feel joy well and can serve as a basis for integrity in the Christian life (note this chapter’s reflection on joy in the thoughts of Karl Barth, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas Aquinas). Chapter eight (“Hiddenness, Disclosure, and the Reality of God: The Practice of Truth Telling”) looks at the practice of truth telling and being truthful. Both Barth and Bonhoeffer’s reflections are brought critically together in this chapter to great effect.

Chapter nine (“Practical Wisdom and Integrity”) explores the virtues of prudence and practical wisdom and the sort of “surpassing reasonableness” to which it disposes in the sanctified life of the justified sinner who is reconciled with God in Jesus Christ. Chapter ten (“Desire, Reverence, and Friendship”) is an extensive and free-flowing theological exchange which examines the topic of the love of neighbor.

Weaknesses in the book, if present, were not noted by this reviewer. One of the strengths of this volume, aside from it being a collection of work from a respected, veteran scholar, is that there is a coherent flow to the chapters which readers will likely appreciate. Also, it is always appreciated when an author or editor uses footnotes rather than endnotes – this work has footnotes. An index is included in the volume. The preface to the book is a helpful orientation for readers who may not be as familiar with Barth’s ethical project and Werpehowski’s work within it. Reading a collected volume of this kind from cover to cover is made easier by the applied nature of the second part of the book, which will likely draw the reader along.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Wigley, Stephen D. Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Critical Engagement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007)

Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Critical Engagement 

Wigley, Stephen D. Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Critical Engagement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007), xiv + 178 pp. $145.00 (hardback)

Reviewed by John L. Drury (September 02, 2008)

Toward the end of his life, Hans Urs von Balthasar said of his multi-volume trilogy, “I wrote it all for Barth – to convert him.” Stephen Wigley’s new book can be read as an exposition of this revealing statement. Wigley’s central claim is that Balthasar’s critical engagement with Barth shaped the deep structure of his trilogy. Barth is not merely one interlocutor among others for Balthasar, but rather is the key to understanding the whole of his theology. Although this is not a particularly original or controversial thesis, the enduring significance of Barth for Balthasar’s theological project is all too often forgotten or suppressed. So Wigley’s book contributes to the ongoing appropriation of Balthasar’s legacy by keeping his conversation with Barth in the foreground.

Wigley advances his argument by first discussing Balthasar’s book on Barth, followed by an overview of Balthasar’s trilogy that highlights the presence of Barth as the key conversation partner. This method has the advantage of showcasing the breadth of Balthasar’s engagement with Barth, as opposed to many previous studies that compare the two figures on a selected topic. Unfortunately, given the vastness of Balthasar’s output, this method consistently lends itself to mere summary even when the arguments call for closer examination. Wigley repeatedly acknowledges the limitation of such summarizing, but does not take any significant steps to mitigate its effects. Nevertheless, Wigley makes some crucial claims worthy of attention. I will identify and discuss three such claims, and then offer some more general criticisms of the book.

Wigley’s three most crucial claims are embedded within a single sentence in the conclusion of the book. “What this book does argue is that … the formof von Balthasar’s debate with Barth (centring on a christological reinterpretation of the analogy of being) … provides the key influence which in turn goes on to govern the structure of von Balthasar’s subsequent trilogy” (160, emphasis original). The three claims correspond to the three italicized words.

The first claim concerns the form of Balthasar’s debate with Barth. Balthasar’s book on Barth, argues Wigley, is not only an exposition but also a work of theology in its own right. Balthasar exposits Barth in order to respond to his theology. Of course, anyone who actually read Balthasar’s 1951 book would know this. Yet it is all too easy, especially in the midst of the recent renaissance in Barth studies, to reduce the significance of Balthasar’s book to its interpretive schema. Balthasar’s interpretive schema, famously focused on analogy, functions as a point of entry to reinterpret the analogy of being Christocentrically, thereby taking on board Barth’s driving concerns even while demurring from his views on analogy.

Wigley is certainly right in his description of Balthasar’s intentions, and his treatment of Balthasar’s book on Barth sets up his larger argument nicely. However, it should be noted that exposition and response can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Balthasar’s critical response to Barth claims to follow through on Barth’s own insights in order to arrive at a Catholic position concerning the analogy of being. As Wigley puts it, “Barth has, as it were, not moved far enough” (44). Such an internal critique presumes the accuracy of Balthasar’s interpretation of the trajectory of Barth’s development. At this point, Wigley gives Balthasar too much credit. If it turns out that Barth was not moving in the direction Balthasar thought he was, then Balthasar’s alternative, though it may be justifiable on other grounds, does not succeed as a critical response to Barth. The historical questions of Barth interpretation and the systematic questions of how to respond to him cannot be separated. Wigley has rightly characterized Balthasar’s overarching purpose, but has failed to acknowledge the interconnectedness of exposition and response.

The second claim concerns the key influence on Balthasar’s theology. Of all the many figures Balthasar constructively engages throughout his work, who is the key to unlocking his theology? Wigley argues that Barth is the key influence in Balthasar’s development. In the epilogue, he contends with the recent counterclaims of Mark McIntosh and Kevin Mongrain, who argue respectively that Maximus and Ignatius of Loyola or Irenaeus via Henri de Lubac are the key influences on Balthasar’s thought. Although Wigley acknowledges the significance of these and other figures for Balthasar, he claims that Barth is the key influence developmentally, inasmuch as Balthasar’s critical response to Barth occasions and drives his trilogy.

The justification of such a claim would require the collection and analysis of considerably more evidence than Wigley supplies, especially from Balthasar’s earlier writings, personal correspondence, and unpublished papers that might reveal more of Balthasar’s self-understanding. Yet, at least in terms of Balthasar’s major publication – the trilogy – the significance of Barth is unquestionable. Wigley’s work serves to block those who wish to downplay Barth’s influence. The negative function of this claim is more important that its positive counterpart, because it is doubtful whether debates over who is the key influence on a figure are productive or even meaningful. The more important question is how a theologian creatively integrates many influences within his or her own constructive project. How Barth and Irenaeus fit together within the developing structure of Balthasar’s thought is far more interesting than which one is supposedly more influential. The mention of structure brings us to Wigley’s third claim.

The third and final claim concerns the structure of Balthasar’s theological trilogy. Wigley claims that Balthasar’s choice to structure his major theological publication around the three transcendentals (beauty, goodness, truth) is a function of his Christological reinterpretation of the analogy of being and therefore a direct consequence of his debate with Barth. Put succinctly, Balthasar’s response to Barth is architectonic.

The depth of this structural claim renders it both the most important as well as the most unwieldy of Wigley’s claims, for it suggests the corollary claim that Barth’s influence continues ‘underground’ even as Balthasar’s explicit engagement with Barth subsides over the years. On the one hand, such an underground influence is fruitful for interpretation because it enables one to see Barth’s role in the conversation even when Balthasar does not mention him. On the other hand, such presumed underground influence lets Wigley avoid the interpretive question: Why does Barth’s presence on Balthasar’s pages wane over the years? Wigley acknowledges but does not explain this phenomenon (88-89). Discussion of a few selected later texts where Barth does appear is not sufficient to answer this interpretive question. One must also attend to contextual factors, such as the cooling of their relationship after the publication of the second edition of Balthasar’s book on Barth. Although I tend to agree with Wigley’s structural claim, such weakness in execution raises serious doubts about the overall method of this book, which brings us to some more general criticisms.

Wigley’s reading of texts is unsatisfactory. This does not necessarily undermine the crucial claims highlighted above, but it certainly leads to numerous weak spots, blind spots, and outright errors. Such methodological inadequacy applies differently to different authors in question. Bluntly stated, Wigley interprets Balthasar flatly, represents Bruce McCormack falsely, and does not engage Barth at all.

Wigley claims to employ an “old-fashioned and ‘historico-critical’” (160) method, but he seldom places Balthasar in his wider historical context. Both diachronically and synchronically, Wigley’s interpretation of Balthasar is flat. Although he discusses Erich Przywara in the first chapter and refers to him throughout the book, Wigley does not take time to assess the developments and changes in his thought, nor does he address the complexities of Balthasar’s relationship to him. One gets the impression that Balthasar remained firmly supportive of Przywara’s earlier views throughout his career, when in fact both Balthasar and Przywara continued to develop and grew substantially apart in the process. Balthasar developed his Christologically-grounded analogy of being along this trajectory, which was certainly not fully operative from 1951 on as Wigley seems to suggest. Furthermore, the short-lived yet decisive place of Gottlieb Söhngen in the debate over analogy is entirely overlooked. Many more examples could be given, but these are sufficient to illustrate the endemic problem.

In the course of discussing Balthasar’s book on Barth, Wigley sets his sights on McCormack’s criticisms of Balthasar. McCormack offers an alternative developmental paradigm to the so-called “von Balthasar thesis” that Barth turned from dialectic to analogy in his Anselm book. Wigley claims that McCormack “does not do justice to the subtlety and detail of von Balthasar’s exposition” and obscures the fact that “Balthasar was not seeking simply to introduce and interpret Barth, but to engage and respond as a Catholic theologian” (41). As a criticism of McCormack, the second claim is a red herring. Although Balthasar’s intentions are crucial for understanding his constructive relationship with Barth, good intentions do not always make for good interpretation. Challenging Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth does not obscure Balthasar’s systematic intentions, but rather takes seriously the interconnectedness of interpretation and response. The first claim would be damning, if it were true. However, it is not. The only evidence Wigley cites to illustrate McCormack’s injustice to Balthasar’s “subtlety and detail” comes directly from McCormack’s own concessions (41-42). Wigley completely ignores McCormack’s detailed five-point argument against the received paradigm (Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology pp. 434-441). Wigley cites Balthasar’s emphasis on Barth’s “inner consistency” as evidence of a convergence between the two interpretations (42). However, this misses the import of McCormack’s interpretive paradigm: that Barth consistently developed along a materially different trajectory than Balthasar had supposed. The net result is a gross misrepresentation of McCormack’s argument, setting the book off on the wrong foot from the beginning. This misstep is especially unfortunate because it is entirely unnecessary. Wigley’s overall argument does not require that Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth be wholly accurate. Wigley would have been better off acknowledging that contemporary Barth scholarship has supplanted much of Balthasar’s interpretation and then moving on to show how Balthasar’s engagement with Barth functioned in Balthasar’s own development.

Even more disappointing than the flat reading of Balthasar and misrepresentation of McCormack is the complete lack of direct engagement with Barth. Although he cites Barth’s texts at numerous points, Wigley does not analyze in detail any of his arguments on their own terms. He only repeats Balthasar’s praises and criticisms. This lack of direct engagement contributes to a failure of follow-through regarding the subterranean influence of Barth. For instance, Balthasar’s anthropology and Christology in volumes two and three of Theo-Drama invite systematic comparison with Barth’s own exploration of these topics, but no such analysis is given. Along with these missed opportunities, there are a number of mistaken citations from Barth’s corpus that betray a lack of attention to detail.

Readers expecting a critical engagement with Barth and Balthasar will undoubtedly be disappointed. Perhaps a better title for this book would have been “Han Urs von Balthasar’s Critical Engagement with Karl Barth.” We will have to wait for a truly critical engagement with both figures. In the meantime, this volume provides a sort of “checklist” for further study by identifying many of the key places where Balthasar directly engages Barth. As such it will be of interest to some specialists, and may in due course serve to stimulate much needed research into the complex relationship between two of the church’s greatest theologians.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Reeling Brouwer, Rinse H. Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015)

Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy

Reeling Brouwer, Rinse H. Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), viii + 275 pp. $119.95 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Matthew A. Frost (August 08, 2016)

Since Bruce McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, the lion’s share of work in the field has gone to handling—and arguing about—the implications of that set of historiographic insights. Only a handful of works since have engaged at length in that kind of thorough investigation, which makes it a pleasure to see this new collection of pieces from Ashgate (also available under the Routledge imprint) pursuing just such a course. Dr. Rinse Reeling Brouwer of the Protestant Theological University in the Netherlands has assembled here six detailed essays into Barth’s development in relation to the theologies of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Only two of these handle Barth’s use of Heinrich Heppe’s 19th-century compendium of the period, and the approaches involved reflect the author’s commitment to the primary sources.Thorough and insightful in their details, each of these six chapters has appeared elsewhere in an earlier form over the last decade, whether in a conference volume or—in the case of the comparative loci analysis in the sixth chapter—in the author’s own textbook. Their collection here serves as a solid and accessible point of reference, advancing our understanding of Barth’s progress from Göttingen to his mature dogmatics. The “and” of the title appears as a series of lively conversations that Barth is having with fellow practitioners engaged in a common task. The depth and structural attention Reeling Brouwer devotes to each of these interlocutors is valuable in its own right, teaching the reader as much (if not sometimes more) about the older theology in the course of describing Barth’s engagement with it.

The introduction to the volume is practically a chapter of original work in its own right, justifying the author’s framing of Barth as an engaged interpreter and critic of primary sources from this period. While it is unfortunate that Barth’s—often uncharitably—critical reception among the adherents of these older theologies necessitates such a proposal, Reeling Brouwer’s work is well-suited to its defense. His tour of the relevant sources from Barth’s personal library, complete with annotated tabular listing, allows the author to proceed into a description of the contributions of those old Protestant works to the excurses of each volume of the Church Dogmatics. Whether Barth has gotten them right—he certainly refused on principle to follow the older theologies at numerous points—Reeling Brouwer has given us every reason to push further ad fontes with him, explicitly echoing Barth’s own assertion that we “need not stop at either Schmid or Heppe, but must seek out and traverse the more arduous road to the sources” (6). This is a necessary approach if we would move beyond the limitations left by his reception history.

The first chapter draws on Amandus Polanus (1561–1610) and his Syntagma theologiae Christianae to trace a line from Barth’s early teaching at Basel through his published doctrines of God and creation. In pursuit of a “dialogical dogmatics,” where we hear the sources speaking in their own rights, Reeling Brouwer begins with a structural analysis of Polanus’ massive Syntagma intended to surpass the existing literature. This makes possible a more thorough accounting of Barth’s misgivings about what we might otherwise call “metaphysics” in his engagement with Polanus’ Ramist dichotomies. It also allows for perspective on Barth’s misunderstandings. Perceptively, however, the author does not stop with these, instead locating Barth’s key disagreements in the question of the proper subject matter of theology, and in the epistemological necessities of points of view three centuries apart.

The Leiden Synopsis purioris theologiae, with its attempted forward-looking defense of “pure doctrine” after the Synod of Dort, governs the second chapter in a similar fashion. Where Barth relied on Heppe for this text at Göttingen, Reeling Brouwer shows us how the original text came into Barth’s hands in 1928, and how its direct influence appears in corrections of the Münster prolegomena, Barth’s subsequent lectures, and his mature dogmatics. The wide-ranging thematic comparisons of this chapter do much to illustrate its conclusion that Barth is contesting not the applicability of reason to theology, but the character of reason relative to revelation, as well as what it may be said to contribute to dogmatics.

In the third chapter, the author’s detailed attention to relatively obscure sources gives way to a broader attention to the work of Johannes Cocceius (1603–69), whose contributions to Federal Theology are more widely known—and against whom Barth wrestled in pursuit of a better understanding of “covenant.” Keeping up the dialogical theme, Reeling Brouwer manages a balanced approach that poses questions to and from both Cocceius and Barth, while pushing forward with a better grasp of Barth’s own view in the integration of both protological and eschatological concerns.

Karl Barth himself comes to the fore in the second half, as Reeling Brouwer begins to lead with the interpreter rather than the sources. Not surprisingly, this approach begins with a fourth chapter focusing on Barth’s reading of Heppe for his dogmatics lectures at Göttingen. The author attends closely to Barth’s final course on reconciliation at Göttingen, from the summer term of 1925, from the angle of the ad fontes necessity Barth would later declare in his introduction to Bizer’s 1935 edition. Under this approach, Heppe becomes more clearly a guide to the sources than a surrogate for them, even as the weaknesses of his guidance remain in the doctrine of the church Barth taught at that time. Reeling Brouwer does well to keep the forward view always in sight, reminding us that Barth moved beyond this work, and often in preferable ways.

In the fifth chapter, much as it seems Reeling Brouwer would prefer to extend favor and charity toward the theologians of the early 18th century that Barth handled in his winter 1932–33 course on Neo-Protestantism at Bonn, Barth’s own response to these “Janus-faced” thinkers constrains him. Their maintenance of earlier Protestant orthodoxy, combined with adaptation to the needs of Modernity, is the opposite of the approach Barth would find necessary in the face of the German church struggle. That opposition is borne out in Barth’s conflicts with his more neo-orthodox Zwischen den Zeiten colleagues of the time. His insistence on “taking the next step,” not merely accommodating older orthodoxy to newer times, is well-presented here, and ends with Reeling Brouwer suggesting that we review our own eirenic or polemic approaches to orthodoxy and Modernity in light of the times.

The sixth and final chapter returns to Heppe’s compendium in order to discuss Barth’s developing methodological concerns in constructing dogmatic theology. Reeling Brouwer’s thorough walkthrough of Barth’s developing dogmatic lecture series by comparison with Heppe is far more productive of useful ideas than can be adequately summarized here. It gives both skeleton and flesh to the ghost of the idea that Barth preferred a loci approach to any systematic theology. The author illustrates compellingly that a loci approach does not imply any lack of structure, and shows the ways Barth’s chosen structures emerged from critical engagement with his predecessors. Barth’s noteworthy reticence to engage in methodological description of his own work has left a gap in this space for far too long. It is a delight to see it filled, not only for the benefit of Reeling Brouwer’s own students in the Netherlands, but now also for the English-language academic audience.

The even-handed treatment given in this volume, both to the older Protestant theology and the development in Barth’s own, should commend it to scholars in both fields. For some of these materials, the standard approach leans heavily on Richard Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. With the recent Logos project translating Polanus’ Syntagma, and Brill’s bilingual reference edition of the Synopsis purioris theologiae, it is useful to have fresh secondary approaches to this material as well. But of course, the primary value is to Barth scholarship, and Reeling Brouwer has given a solid example to follow—and frequently an enjoyable read. Engaged readers should also have a look at the extended notes linked in the acknowledgements, which contain the kind of detailed citations of the older and less-accessible literature—along with occasional color commentary—that a reader of Barth’s excurses will find helpful yet refreshingly brief.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Johnson, Keith L., Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010)

 Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis

Johnson, Keith L., Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), ix + 244pp. $120.00 (pbk. $44.95)

Reviewed by Han-luen Kantzer Komline (May 29, 2013)

Interest in the dispute between Karl Barth and Erich Przywara over the analogia entis has recently undergone a revival as John Betz and David Bentley Hart have led the effort to rehabilitate Przywara’s work. Keith Johnson’s defense of Barth’s criticism of Przywara’s analogia entis comes at just the right time to add a vigorous new perspective to the discussion. But this book does more than make a persuasive case for the validity of Barth’s critiques. It also sets forth Barth’s own evolving views on analogy, offering a compelling alternative to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s interpretation in his classic The Theology of Karl Barth. Balthasar contended that Barth’s attention to the substance of theology eventually transformed his method so as to lead him away from dialectic, toward analogy, and therefore toward Catholicism. Johnson proposes that just the opposite was the case. Barth’s ultimate decision to embrace a form of analogy was anything but a correction of his earlier assessments of Przywara’s position, still less a capitulation to Catholic perspectives. With Barth’s mature doctrine of analogy, his earlier quintessentially “Protestant” critiques had attained full bloom.The structure of Johnson’s monograph already drives home a substantive point. Only after spending four chapters meticulously examining previous interactions between Barth and Przywara does Johnson address Barth’s infamous repudiation of the analogia entis in 1932 as the “invention of the anti-Christ” (123). This statement, Johnson illustrates, did not emerge from a vacuum but from nearly a decade of direct and indirect exchange. In chapters six and seven, Johnson evaluates Barth’s mature position on analogy vis-à-vis the Catholic theologians Gottlieb Söhngen and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The inclusion of these chapters is instructive too: the story of Barth’s thinking on analogy continues well beyond the mesmerizing polemical fireworks of 1932.

As it turns out, Johnson shows, this story begins where Przywara’s thinking on analogy does. The first world war irrevocably shaped the attitudes of both theologians toward analogy, though each drew a different conclusion from its events: “While Przywara believed the church had done too little in the face of this tragedy, Barth believed that it had done too much” (14). Przywara intended his doctrine of analogy to encourage the political activity and influence of the church in postwar culture and society. Barth sought to foreclose uncritical efforts to claim God for human political and social agendas. Neither Barth nor Przywara ever abandoned his initial stance on how Christianity and the wider culture should relate. Yet both Barth and Przywara were reformers who sought to help the church avoid its previous mistakes.

Especially in the early chapters of the book, Johnson gives readers more than his title promises, devoting as much careful and sympathetic attention to Przywara as he does to Barth, —and often more, measured by pages of coverage. Not only Barth had grave concerns about the ideas of his counterpart: Przywara saw Barth as a potent threat to the enterprise of cooperation between church and civil society, faith and reason, revelation and philosophy. According to Przywara, Barth’s theology so stressed God’s all-consuming agency as to render the church and her mission irrelevant. Johnson does more than engagingly retell the more familiar story of Barth’s early development from the angle of his evolving perspectives on analogy. He also introduces Przywara’s, lucidly summarizing the complex argumentation of his little-known writings precedingAnalogia Entis, including its most important precursor, Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (1926).

Whereas the trajectory of Przywara’s thinking had been more or less set at the outset, Barth’s thinking on analogy underwent considerable and sometimes surprising convolutions on the way to his mature position. In a brief window of time following his move to the largely Catholic Münster, Barth even made an astounding attempt to appropriate a version of Przywara’s analogy of being. Ironically, it seems to have been Barth’s first encounter with Przywara in person, and his intensive reading of Religionsphilosophie in preparation for it, that decisively disabused him of Przywara’s account. Upon Barth’s invitation, Przywara traveled in February of 1929 to participate in a seminar Barth was teaching on Thomas’s Summa Theologiae. During the visit, Barth heard Przywara deliver a lecture, engaged with him in a seminar setting, and spent two evenings with him in his own home. Familiarity rather than ignorance, Johnson proves, prompted Barth’s eventual critiques. This case is convincing not least of all because of Johnson’s own familiarity with Przywara’s early oeuvre and the patience with which he introduces his readers to it.

In “Fate and Idea,” a series of lectures Barth delivered in Dortmund shortly after Przywara’s visit, we see the fruits of his intensive engagement with Przywara. Barth states in this work: “everything that is exists as mere creature in greatest dissimilarity to the Creator, yet by having being it exists in greatest similarity to the Creator. That is what is meant by analogia entis.” Johnson’s conclusion that “Barth’s summary description of ‘what is meant’ by analogia entis corresponds directly to Przywara’s description of it” (98) downplays Barth’s misrepresentation of Przywara’s analogia entis. Far from implying parity between similarity and dissimilarity, Przywara places a decided accent on the latter. Still, Johnson identifies the heart of the disagreement with clarity and fairness: divergent ideas about what constitutes revelation separate Barth and Przywara, and this divergence stems from their differing views on the implications of human sin. For Przywara, sin does not undermine either creation’s revelatory function or human access to revelation. For Barth, sin entails that God’s revelation to the sinner requires God’s justification of the sinner, a new creation, not just the fulfillment of natural human capacities. This is why for Barth “the doctrine most central to the knowledge of God is not creation but justification” (108). Thus, Johnson argues, Barth’s reasons for rejecting the analogia entis “stand directly in line with the reasons Luther and the Reformers gave for turning away from Roman Catholicism centuries earlier” (121).

One might wish for a little more expansion on this claim. Later in the book Johnson cites Barth’s observation in “Nein!” that the statements of Calvin and Luther had to be sharpened in order to maintain their position. Barth went beyond the Reformers, he shows readers, by applying the principle of justification to epistemology as well as to soteriology. If this is the case, how, if at all, might Barth’s innovation upon their teaching entail a critique of their views as well as Przywara’s? For instance, Johnson observes that after Przywara’s second visit to Barth in 1931, this time to a seminar on “The Problem of Natural Theology,” “Barth’s seminar turned to the opening sections of Calvin’s Institutes on the Christian Religion, and there they found a clear Protestant alternative to the Roman Catholic view as Przywara had presented it” (125). In a footnote Johnson observes that “Barth would turn to these passages from Calvin again on the discussion of the same topic during his response to Emil Brunner’s Nature and Grace.” Yet in Barth’s famous “Nein!” to Brunner, Barth himself states that “What Calvin wrote in those first chapters of the Institutes has to be written again and this time in such a way that no Przywara and no Althaus can find in it material for their fatal ends” (Natural Theology, Wipf & Stock 2002, 104). How does the tension reflected in this statement cohere with, or complicate, Johnson’s presentation of Barth as the champion of the Protestant Reformation’s position on the issue of analogy? The significance of Johnson’s important claim that the dispute between Barth and Przywara is really a reprise of disputes between the Reformers and Rome hinges on the answer to this question.

Johnson’s primary task in the book’s first part, however, is to assess the validity of Barth’s criticisms of Przywara, and he continues to execute it with remarkable sympathy, finesse, and precision as he explicates Przywara’s daunting magnum opus in chapter five. Johnson shows how Analogia Entis deepens Przywara’s insights from Religionsphilosophie without departing from them. Here Przywara continues to present the analogy of being not merely as one among many metaphysical theories, but as the underlying structure of creaturely being as such. Philosophical insight alone can uncover the similarity between human being and God’s being since creaturely being is obviously contingent upon an external source. Christian theology, however, is necessary to appreciate the even more basic feature of God’s relationship to humanity: dissimilarity.

Given such a characterization of the analogia entis, Johnson asks, does Barth’s allegation that Przywara’s analogy moves from below to above still apply? Johnson answers in the affirmative. Przywara may ground the analogia entis in “revelation,” but he understands revelation differently from Barth. In this work, as previously, the key difference between Przywara and Barth is that Przywara locates revelation in creation whereas Barth finds it only in Jesus Christ. According to Barth, God’s revelation in Christ points to moral, as well as ontological, dissimilarity between God and human beings that cannot be ignored in an account of the relationship between God and the world. Thus, although Analogia Entis emphasizes the importance of divine revelation to a greater extent than Przywara had previously, this new emphasis does not allay Barth’s concern that Przywara elides the problem of human sin; Przywara fails to acknowledge sufficiently that because of sin, revelation must correct, not simply perfect, human actions, thinking and institutions.

Johnson helps readers to see that precisely this concern about the lack of critical and corrective distance between God and human beings motivated Barth’s explosive rejection of the analogia entis as “the invention of the anti-Christ” in 1932. As in 1914, Barth feared the Church’s entanglement in alliances that would betray its true identity and saw the potential of Przywara’s ideas to encourage them. It was vital, he believed, to name this threat in unmistakable terms.

Barth eventually ceased to express his critiques of the analogia entis, Johnson explains in the second major part of the book, not because he had become convinced that his earlier critiques were mistaken, but because new versions of the analogia entis such as Gottlieb Söhngen’s had adapted to many of his early objections. Barth wished to do nothing to interfere with the flourishing of a Christocentrism like Söhngen’s in Catholic theology. This did not mean, however, that Barth’s mature view coincided with his. Though Söhngen circumscribed the human pole of Przywara’s analogy such that it concerned the human being in faith, his analogy of being remained intrinsic, while Barth’s was extrinsic. Söhngen wanted to see the created human being per se as transformed by grace, while Barth preferred to limit any analogy strictly to the human as she lived outside of herself in Christ. Again Johnson exposes how doctrines of analogy depend on key decisions about other doctrines, in this case justification as establishing either inherent (Söhngen) or alien (Barth) righteousness.

According to Johnson, these more fundamental differences reveal why neither Barth’s analogia fidei nor hisanalogia relationis imply the kind of rapprochement with Catholic versions of the doctrine that Balthasar attributes to them. The mature Barth does come to allow for much more continuity between divine and human action, creation and reconciliation. But for Barth this continuity is first and foremost a function of election. God’s electing grace is the reason for creation and this statement can never be reversed in such a way as to suggest that creation has a coherent reality apart from it. To say merely that Barth’s analogia fideiand analogia relationis presuppose an analogia entis, Johnson insists, is to overlook the heart of Barth’s conception of analogy: God’s electing grace.

Though many critics still see Barth’s theology of God’s gracious election, and particularly his critical stance on analogy, as undercutting the value and significance of human agency, Johnson shows in a masterful turning of the tables that Barth’s extrinsic and Christological conception of authentic human being inherently includes, rather than precludes, a robust understanding of the human vocation and mission of the church. Human beings are called to participate in Christ’s prophetic work of proclamation as covenant partners who “cooperate with God’s work in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit by sharing in the task of proclaiming the reality of Christ’s work to the world” (224). This vocation to cooperation with Christ’s way of living for the sake of others by proclaiming to them the good news of the gospel is, for Barth, the true meaning of human being in analogy to Christ.

Johnson’s book neither hides behind terminological similarities between Barth and his Catholic interlocutors nor dismisses them. Rather, it probes patiently and painstakingly to discover the distinctive meaning and function of the concepts such as “being” and “revelation” for each thinker, locating these notions in the wider network of doctrinal commitments and presuppositions that define them. But one of the most surprising contributions of Johnson’s book considered as a whole is how—even as it persistently leads the reader beyond superficial disputes to root disagreements about creation, revelation, and justification—it finally offers portraits of Barth and Przywara with a striking similarity. Though their approaches were different, both Przywara and Barth were missional theologians to the core, passionately committed to equipping the church to engage the world beyond her walls. Perhaps this explains why Barth recognized Przywara as a “kindred spirit” with whom, as Johnson observes movingly in the final chapter, he knew he belonged at one table (93). This incisive book comes to us in the vivacious spirit of their fellowship.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Mark S. Gignilliat, Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel: Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Isaiah (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009)

Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel: Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Isaiah

Mark S. Gignilliat, Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel: Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Isaiah (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009) xiv + 165. $79.95

Reviewed by Chad Marshall (November 28, 2011)

That Karl Barth was a biblical theologian of the highest order is everywhere clear, not least in his Church Dogmatics. It is a lamentable, if unsurprising, historical truth that Barth’s prolific biblical exegesis was paid very little attention during his own lifetime. With the publication of Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel, Mark Gignilliat, Associate Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, joins other recent scholars seeking to redress this situation. For such scholars, in contrast to previous generations beholden to a historical-critical paradigm, Barth’s theological exegesis is something to be appreciated rather than ignored. Gignilliat aims to fill a lacuna in this larger effort by giving attention to Barth’s Old Testament (OT) exegesis and the hermeneutical instincts involved therein. Specifically, he demonstrates well how Barth’s recourse to Isaiah throughout the Dogmatics is governed by a priori theological commitments regarding the OT as one part of a two-part Christian canon. For Barth, he concludes, the Bible necessitates “a multi-level reading that respects the discrete witness of the Old Testament while at the same time affirms that the central subject matter of Scripture is God’s triune action seen most concretely in the person and work of Jesus” (134).Gignilliat begins by establishing the context for his eventual engagement with Barth’s exegetical work. The opening chapter begins with a brief introduction that situates the discussion within the wider conversation regarding theological exegesis. This chapter’s bulk, however, sets Barth in the context of OT scholarship circa 1920-1940. The essential question in the tumultuous decades of the Dogmatics’ composition is succinctly stated: should dogmatic instincts “order the use of historical-critical tools,” or vice versa (10)? Gignilliat teases out Barth’s position by placing him in conversation with two OT colleagues representing quite different views. Walter Baumgartner is a “fully committed historical critic from the religionsgeschichte Schule” (10), whose Briefwechsel with Barth occurred between 1940-1955. Baumgartner’s nine letters to Barth represent the prevailing attitude towards Barth among his OT contemporaries, namely admiration for his theology coupled with concern over both his OT exegesis and his perceived negativity toward the historical thrust of modern biblical scholarship. Baumgartner’s argument is typical: “the Old Testament is a product of the religious history of the people of Israel” (16), and its meaning is thus found not in the canon, but in the particularity of this people. Barth’s sometimes-coy responses to Baumgartner reveal a contrasting worldview: the theological confession of the OT as “part of a two-testament canon received in the church as Christian Scripture” (16) is “a constitutive aspect of how one will engage in the interpretive process” (24). These comments foreshadow how Barth’s ontology of Scripture will influence his Isaianic exegesis.

Barth’s second interlocutor is Wilhelm Vischer, his friend, colleague and pastor, whose much-maligned work stands in sharp relief to Baumgartner. The affinities between Barth and Vischer are clear. For Vischer, both testaments “share a common subject matter and a unified witness to Jesus Christ” (17). Further, Jesus Christ is the divine logos who “precedes the Old Testament” and, as such, is “the hermeneutical key to all of Scripture” (17). Finally, that the OT texts are “forward-looking or eschatological in nature” (20) argues against so much modern historical-critical exegesis, the “behind-the-text” approach of which violates the material at hand. Far from opposing the historical-critical enterprise, however, Vischer employs its critical methods to support and verify the presence of Jesus in the OT texts. Herein lies a fundamental difference with Barth, one Gignilliat points out but whose gravity he understates. For Barth, Christological interpretation of the OT resists intellectual verification because it derives from a robust theology of revelation and not from historical-critical inquiry.

This understanding of revelation is the subject of Gignilliat’s second chapter. More precisely, his focus is Barth’s treatment of “the time of revelation” in CD I.2 as the dogmatic context for his formal discussion of the OT. Barth here provides theological rationale for why it is a sine qua non of the Christian faith that the OT, no less than the NT, witnesses to Jesus Christ. There exist three categories of time: God’s originally created time, which has been lost because of the Fall; postlapsarian time, or “lost time”; and, existing alongside both of these, “the time of God’s revelation” in Jesus Christ (28). Both testaments witness to this third category from distinct but equally necessary vantage points. The New Testament (NT) perspective is that of the time of fulfillment, whereas the OT is the time of expectation. Thus the OT fathers were in their anticipation “partaking fully in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of history” (55). Such partaking is a veiled reality that can only follow confession of Jesus Christ as God’s revelatory Word, however. This confessional understanding of the anticipatory nature of the OT– consistent with both the NT and “representative figures” of the tradition (Irenaeus, Augustine, Calvin and Luther) – will control Barth’s exegesis of Isaiah, although, argues Gignilliat, not in a heavy-handed way. Barth does not find Christ “preexistent in various proof texts” (50). Rather the persons, events, and ideas of the OT must be “understood from two vantage points” – in both their historical particularity and their relation to “their corresponding realities in fulfilled time” (57). Thus Gignilliat finds in Barth what he also finds in his mentor, Brevard Childs: a “multi-level or multi-perspectival” reading with “each level or perspective speaking truthfully, though not exhaustively, about the subject matter” (61).

The third and fourth chapters (Isaiah 1-39 and 40-66, respectively) showcase the theological approach heretofore described by observing Barth’s treatment of a “spattering” (136) of Isaianic texts throughout theDogmatics. Among the more substantial and revealing of these is Isaiah 53. Over the course of twelve pages Gignilliat examines three discrete instances in which Barth utilizes this most-cherished and much-scrutinized text in seemingly different ways. The first occurs in Barth’s reflection on the eternity of God in CD II.1, where Isaiah 53 becomes a witness to Christ’s exalted status precisely as the suffering servant. Gignilliat here finds that Barth, much like Calvin before him, lacks concern for the critical historical or hermeneutical issues involved in making Isaiah 53 to speak directly of Jesus Christ. He notes that Barth feels “no compulsion to justify such a claim” (125). This example is juxtaposed with a second one, namely Barth’s use of Isaiah 53 in his demonstration of the OT’s emphasis on the “centrifugal motion of God’s particular covenant with Israel” (126) in CD IV.1. This time Barth makes no direct correspondence to Jesus. Nor, once again, is he crippled by the critical debate regarding the servant figure’s identity, although Gignilliat is careful to point out that Barth was certainly aware of these debates. Barth “seems to transcend or relativize” this issue by emphasizing not whether the servant is an individual or collective Israel, but instead that the servant is simply “God’s human partner in redemption” (127). Importantly, Gignilliat also notes Barth’s appreciation at this juncture “of the fact that the OT text can both refer to a historical situation (fixity) while at the same time canonically witness to an awaited eschatological moment of fulfillment (potentiality)” (128). Much the same is replicated in CD IV.3.1, though Gignilliat’s aim in this third example is to demonstrate Barth’s still “more robust figural reasoning” (133) in this latter volume of the Dogmatics. Although Barth respects the text’s voice, he is not constrained by it. Here the suffering servant is historical Israel and, precisely as such, prefigures Jesus: “Jesus Christ incarnate is Israel incarnate embodying all of her hopes, frustrations, calling and failures in the faithfulness and obedience to the will of God never consistently found in Israel’s history of failure under the covenant but figurally presented in the form of Isaiah 53’s suffering servant” (131). Barth thus moves easily from the text’s fixity to its potentiality to its actuality, i.e. “in Jesus Christ we see the figuration of the suffering servant fulfilled” (132). Thus Gignilliat confirms in these chapters the Childs-like “multi-layered reading” to which he alluded early on.

Following a brief description of Barth’s propensity to read Isaiah both “removed from Christ” and “not removed from Christ,” Gignilliat devotes the final chapter to bringing his multi-layered reading into direct conversation with Childs’: “It is hoped that Childs’ approach may offer insight into what Barth is actually doing” (139) so that we may “learn from Barth the theological warrant for moving seamlessly between figuration and fulfillment in various contexts dealing with the same text” (140). Two points raised by Childs bear significantly upon the task. The first is the importance of ontology in OT exegesis. For Childs, “the New Testament’s witness does call into question biblical scholars’ squeamishness about ontological readings” (141). Similarly, “the confession about Scripture’s own nature and role in the divine economy” is determinative for Barth; it is Barth’s ontology of Scripture that allows him the freedom to “slide between the literal and figural senses of Scripture” (141). The second point regards the relationship between exegesis and theology that – contra the presumption of modern biblical scholarship – Childs holds to be dialectical and mutually informing rather than linear. For Barth too, treating theology as an optional consideration following prior, more scientific exegetical steps is unacceptable. Gignilliat lastly rehearses the three layers of reading involved in Childs’ approach and draws an analogy between this and Barth’s three-fold method (explicatio,meditatio, and applicatio). For both, only such a multi-layered approach does justice to the true subject of Scripture, which is “God’s triune revelation of himself in Jesus Christ” (150).

Much about this book warrants appreciation – more than can be covered here. Chief among its merits is Gignilliat’s strategy for establishing Barth’s nuanced hermeneutical instincts by putting him in dialogue with Baumgartner and Vischer. This approach is creative, well-executed and very illuminating. Furthermore, Gignilliat’s project is at its best when it demonstrates how Barth’s explicitly theological approach can be more appropriate to a text than atomizing historical-critical methods because it respects the final form’s own historical ambiguities rather than interpreting against the backdrop of a hypothetical historical setting of little concern to the text itself (cf., Isaiah 6, p. 78). Finally, Gignilliat is unquestionably successful in demonstrating his primary claim regarding the multi-leveled nature of Barth’s approach to the OT.

There are places for improvement, however. Most conspicuous is the editorial carelessness. Rarely does one find published material so replete with misspellings, incomplete footnotes, awkward syntax, typos, etc. Indeed, the frequency of errors proves a significant distraction and undermines the overall value of Gignilliat’s project. More substantially, Gignilliat could certainly have engaged more critically with Barth. What infrequent criticism we do encounter is rather insubstantial and is typically followed by an apologetic defense (see, e.g., Isaiah 24, p. 99). Virtuoso though he was, aspects of Barth’s hermeneutical practices certainly warrant more critical scrutiny, even from his apologists. More self-critical awareness among its proponents will likely be needed if the practice of theological exegesis is to make headway against its detractors. Finally, Gignilliat’s comparison of Barth and Childs, while interesting and worthy of further study, is executed rather awkwardly in the present study. Gignilliat intends for his final chapter to illuminate Barth’s approach but it ultimately adds little to the picture of Barth that Gignilliat established previously. One is therefore left with the impression that while interesting, the final chapter especially is either incomplete or superfluous to this particular project.

These and other issues notwithstanding, Gignilliat is to be commended for providing biblical scholars and theologians a useful study, one not to be missed by those concerned with theological exegesis, Barth or the Christian reading of Isaiah (or, more generally, the OT). One hopes this will inspire similar, if perhaps more critical, future studies on both Barth’s OT exegesis and its relation to Brevard Childs’ approach.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Collins Winn, Christian T. and John L. Drury eds. Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014)

Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology

Collins Winn, Christian T. and John L. Drury eds. Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), xxiv + 289 pp. $37.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Darren O. Sumner (July 06, 2016)

Numerous volumes in recent years have sought to place Karl Barth’s thought into dialogue with Evangelical theology. These efforts have met with mixed results, and frequently display only the particular entrenchments of the authors and editors. This collection from Christian Collins Winn and John Drury is better than most in that it neither fawns over Barth nor sets him up as an adversary to the true faith. Instead, the editors set out to examine the contours of Evangelical theology as much as those of Barth’s work, setting forth their conviction (which I think is certainly right) that this dialogue has too often been framed improperly ‒ for example by the question of Barth’s orthodoxy (xiv) and, I would add, a misidentification of modern “liberalism” as an existential threat to the Christian churches. Rethinking the identity of Evangelicalism from its many sources and cross-currents will provide an infinitely better starting point. From here Barth’s thought can be engaged beyond the anxiety-inducing loci of Scripture, election, etc. and instead probed with respect to matters such as piety, conversion, and life in the Spirit.Three essays comprise Part 1, “Reframing the Conversation.” Donald Dayton’s 1985 essay on “varieties” of Evangelicalism is reprinted as a very useful framing of the conversations to follow. Dayton identifies three periods or movements identified with the term ‘evangelical’: (1) the Protestant Reformation, with its themes of justification by faith alone and the centrality of Scripture; (2) the Great Awakenings and other revival movements in the Anglophone world, which directed their focus to matters of conversion, regeneration, and sanctification; and finally (3) a “mixed coalition” of forces who, since the fundamentalist-modernity controversy and the Second World War, have found common cause in their opposition to modernism, liberalism, and other cultural and theological trends regarded as erosive of Christian orthodoxy. It is Evangelicalism in this final form that appears most common today, and while its proponents might detect an ally in the Barth who criticizes Neo-Protestant liberalism, they are soon shocked by his willingness to depart from the old doctrinal categories. Barth’s project is a sharp criticism of certain trends in theological modernism, yet one that is performed in a deeply modern way. The result is that one who seems to share Evangelicalism’s fundamental commitments “at the last moment moves off in a new direction that is beyond their comprehension” (15).

Eberhard Busch outlines Barth’s opinion of and interaction with German Pietism in chapter 2, and Kimlyn J. Bender continues to explore this relationship in chapter 3. This is a history marked at first by some appreciable hostility toward an unmoored spiritualism which Barth thought amounted to little more than a different sort of anthropological grounding for theology ‒ that a person’s repentance and consciousness of sin give them some right of claim to God’s grace (25). In later decades, though, Barth came to a more nuanced appreciation for themes such as Christ’s work in the individual through the Holy Spirit (even suggesting in 1967 the need for “a new kind of Pietism”). Busch concludes with a number of insightful questions that Barth’s theology poses to the Pietist, turning over fertile ground for future engagement. Bender, in turn, draws upon the writings of Philipp Jakob Spener to illustrate a number of “family resemblances” between Barth and the Pietists, not the least of which is a forceful correlation of the identity of the church to its mission (59).

Five essays in Part 2 aim at “Reconceiving Christian Experience and Practice,” interacting with Barth on topics such as calling, testimony, and gender and masculinity. Terry L. Cross explores Barth’s openness to Pietism’s inner “heart theology” in Church Dogmatics IV/4, building from the foundation of divine initiative to the individual’s participation in God’s work of salvation as something that (contrary to the ways in which Barth’s critical objectivism is often regarded) is not lacking an inward dimension. James Nelson continues along these lines with a discussion of the divine calling to fellowship with Jesus Christ, which summons the believer to conversion and reconversion. John L. Drury’s concise yet provocative entry is a stand-out here, first outlining the place of testimony within the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition before coordinating this to Barth’s doctrine of Christian vocation. Despite Barth’s own critical stance toward the practice of personal testimony, Drury crisply demonstrates how it can be reconstructed in terms of one’s “participation in the risen Christ’s self-attestation” (112). This only reinforces the external objectivity of the event of redemption, which is necessary to the subsequent task of bearing public witness. On the other hand, Barth’s approach offers a needed corrective to Wesleyans who may regard personal testimony as an independent source of revelation.

In chapter 7 Stina Busman Jost sketches the Evangelical masculinity movement, suggesting as an antidote Barth’s theological interest in the biblical figure of Joseph. Though Barth never gave Joseph extended attention, he did suggest avenues for Catholic thinkers to balance the Church’s teaching on Mary with a “Josephology” which stresses Joseph’s care for the Christ child as care for the church. There are some interesting propositions here for ecclesiology, though the author never quite comes back around to close the circle (or to shut the door) on the masculinity movement. The Josephean principles that would seem most relevant here ‒ those of humility, faithfulness, and obedience ‒ are mentioned but left unexplored.

Finally, in chapter 8 Christian T. Collins Winn and Peter Goodwin Heltzel take the invocation “Thy kingdom come” as key to Barth’s “prophetic ecclesiology,” showing Evangelical communities the importance of prophetic action in the world (for example, in matters of racial justice). In short, the Lord’s Prayer not only reminds the church that God is establishing God’s reign in the world but also that the church herself has been empowered by the Holy Spirit to live in the light of the reality of that kingdom ‒ not awaiting another world in which God reigns, nor seeking to conform this world to a divine order by human works, but “seeking to embody a fundamentally new and better social order” (135) and unveil that which Christ has accomplished for the world.

Part 3’s six essays are collected under the heading “Renewing Christian Doctrine,” including matters of method, election, Scripture, mission, sacrament, and eschatology. Joel D. Lawrence puts prayer at the center of Barth’s theological method, as one must hear the Word of God in order to be able then to proclaim it ‒ even going so far as to suggest (in what seems to me a bit of a conflation) that “theology can only be understood as prayer” (152), since it is (I would say, vitally includes) the practice of listening faithfully to God. And Chris Boesel ably demonstrates how Barth’s doctrine of election cuts against both conservative Evangelical tendencies (i.e. Reformed orthodoxy and fundamentalist biblicism) and also the movement’s Arminian-Pietist strands, “and in each case precisely by resonating with the other at classic points of their mutual disagreement” (166). This makes for a fascinating bit of analysis that far surpasses most Evangelical treatments of Barth’s revision of this central doctrine (the author’s overly decisionist reading of Barth notwithstanding, e.g. 181-82). Boesel makes a significant contribution by showing how certain objections to Barth (for example, his Christocentrism and his universalizing tendencies) are shared by both sides but for very different reasons.

In chapter 11 Frank D. Macchia summarizes Barth’s understanding of Scripture and its relationship to revelation, unraveling the tired canards that opponents have rehearsed now for more than a generation. Kyle A. Roberts surveys the recent history of missiology in the course of his discussion of Barth’s ecclesiology, arguing that this requires that the church be both missional (outward moving and embedded) and eschatological (forward looking and refusing the temptation to identify itself and its efforts with the Kingdom of God). Kurt Anders Richardson summarizes the ubiquity of Barth’s sacramentalism (though, somewhat curiously for this volume, does not engage in any overt dialogue with Evangelical views on sacramental mystery or practices). Finally, Peter Althouse concludes the collection with eschatology, Pentecost, and Spirit baptism, suggesting avenues of engagement between Barth and Pentecostalism.

Rather than outlining a Barth-inspired program for the future of Evangelical theology, this volume thus collects a pastiche of interests ‒ diverse and disparate areas in which Barth’s theology could have much to contribute, should these engagements be worked out at greater length and with greater rigor. As a result, though several of the essays are underdeveloped (particularly in Part 2) the book excels in opening up venues for future conversation. Collins Winn and Drury challenge Evangelical thinkers not only to wrestle with Barth in new ways, but also to return to the question of what has shaped their own traditions most decisively. More must be said here, for it is an indispensable insight that in order for Evangelicalism to appreciate Barth properly it must first better know itself.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Sumner, Darren O. Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2014)

Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God

Sumner, Darren O. Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2014), 256 pp. $112.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Rafael Bello (September 09, 2016)

To ask “Who is Jesus Christ?” is probably one of the hardest and simplest questions that one could pose to the dogmatician of Basel. Darren Sumner’s adapted doctoral dissertation travels through the long difficult response. Sumner has a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen and is affiliate professor of theology at both Fuller Theological Seminary and The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. As it is seen throughout the work, Barth had a desire to honor the ecumenical tradition, but was also eager to make changes. Those changes, however, as Sumner argues do not place him outside the bounds of confessional Christianity.

The book is structured into five chapters. The first chapter deals with Sumner’s own uneasiness with some Christological formulations of the patristic and medieval tradition. In what Sumner calls “the identity problem,” he analyzes instrumentalism and the advances that were made on Chalcedonian Christology. For example, in dealing with impassibility, Sumner points out that many regard Cyril’s Christology as “the definitive word on the topic” (58). However, later clarifications such as dyothelitism and communication of operations refine Cyril’s Christology at this point. Another point of concern for Sumner is the strategy of reduplication under the rubric of divine impassibility. Although the Church always affirmed that “Jesus ever acts theandrically: his divine and human natures, including their respective wills . . . are involved in everything Jesus does,” the strategy of reduplication predicates things to Jesus qua God and others qua man (66). Although Sumner never fully discards this strategy, he states that it leaves hard work to be done after the traditional christological grammar is gone.

In chapter 2, “Barth’s Response to Logos Christology,” Sumner identifies Logos Christology with a threefold meaning: first, the orthodoxy from the early pre-Chalcedon period until III Constantinople; second, Christology from above; and third, a comprehension of the two major types of theologies of chapter one: instrumentalist and compositionalist (73). To understand Barth’s response to Logos Christology, Sumner argues for slight to moderate development in Barth’s thought. In his early years (1924-25) Barth still saw the forma servi as a mere “veil of His divine reality,” thus signaling his apparent acceptance of the extra-calvinisticum (76). However, Sumner argues that as early as CD I/2 Barth is not conceiving of the person of Christ as an “isolated theologoumenon” (85). Such a position places Sumner at odds with one of the sides in the debate of Barth’s Christology. Sumner is sensitive to the fact that even though there are plenty of examples of Barth’s commitment to classical Chalcedonian Christology, the Swiss theologian also desired to move beyond Chalcedon in his later volumes. This willingness to transcend Chalcedon, while at the same time remaining faithful to the council is clear in Sumner’s repeated treatment of the extra-calvinisticum throughout his monograph. Barth’s innovation of the status duplex (exaltation and humiliation) as simultaneously existing in the person of the Son gave him the necessary tool to reject not only the Lutheran kenotic model, but also the Reformed doctrine of the double Logos (asarkos and ensarkos).

The third chapter aims to clarify the dialectical relationship of the Son with incarnation in the theology of Barth. In order to elucidate this relationship, Sumner notes four themes that inform Barth’s later Christology: covenant and election; the incarnation in time and eternity; “two essence” Christology and the communication of natures; and the status duplex. While I cannot go into detail on each of these themes, at the heart of Barth’s project is that he was dissatisfied with a static framework in classical descriptions of natures and essences. With that in mind, Barth perceived a division of being and act in the tradition in order to protect the immanent life of God, which he deemed unbiblical. For this reason, he developed an actualistic ontology that was modern (152). If Barth’s actualism is modern Christology, can it be Chalcedonian? This is Sumner’s question in chapter four. Here, he shows that Barth: 1) reformulated “nature,” “substance,” and “person” (clearly Chalcedonian language); 2) described the person of Christ as history and event; 3) asserted that states of exaltation and humiliation are simultaneous; 4) affirmed that divine and human essences are mutually conditioning; 5) denied the classical doctrine of impassibility; 6) structured a christology dependent upon his actualistic methodology and ontology. However, the Swiss theologian was still inside the bounds of orthodoxy. Remaining in the tradition subsists in other six themes affirmed in Barth’s theology: 1) Jesus is fully God; 2) Jesus is fully man; 3) Jesus’ divine and human essences are perfectly united; 4) in Christ the divine and the human are not confused or changed; 5) in Christ the divine and human are not separated or divided; 6) there is a singularity of subject in Christ’s incarnation.

The last chapter is Sumner’s attempt to synthesize the great amount of information from the previous chapters. He proceeds with a discussion of the status duplex and its relationship to the extra-calvinisticum (which Barth does not completely reject). Next, Sumner continues with a discussion of eternity, divine impassibility, and immutability. Finally, he ends with Barth’s objections to kenotic Christology in light of the obedience and humility in the divine life.

Sumner’s shows patience and compassion in his reading of Barth. Those virtues are hoped from anyone who reads the great master from Basel. His command of the material is impressive. Further, his compassion and sharp analytical mind are present in his discussion of the interpretations regarding the continuity between Barth’s Christology in CD I/2 and IV/1 (86-9). Even though he sees some continuity between Barth’s earlier and later works, he does not quickly side with those who see a strong metaphysical theology running throughout Barth’s works. Intrinsic to Sumner’s project is to see a crescendo of actualism in Barth’s Dogmatics.

A small area of concern is when Sumner describes the Status Duplex, specifically related to the Status Exinanitionis. Even though it is understandable that Barth preferred to get rid of the Logos asarkos in order to actualize the two states in eternity and in time, it is debatable whether Sumner clears Barth altogether from the charge of gradation in the Godhead. Barth writes, “There is a below, a posterius, a subordination, that it belongs to the inner life of God” (CD IV/1, 200-1). Sumner aptly describes that assertion as not confined only to the economy. However, when trying to clear Barth from hierarchy in the trinity, Sumner simply repeats the actualistic refrain that Jesus is in eternity what he is in time. In my estimation this is a valid recourse, but not the only one. Is it possible that Barth is really contradicting himself here? In fact, only 20 pages earlier in CD IV/I, Barth confines subordination only to the ad extra (177). I think that admitting an inconsistency might be the way forward here.

Another comment can also be made regarding Sumner’s project itself. For Barth enthusiasts such as myself, this work may be trying to overachieve. The topic itself of Barth and the incarnation could fill entire libraries. And with this regard one can feel lost in the reading, even though Sumner demonstrates mastery of the sources. There is simply too much in this work. However, as said before, for lovers of Barth’s theology, this work promises and delivers in depth and analysis. For those who are interested in learning more about Barth’s actualism, this is a sane and evenhanded work. Much has been written and much is to be commended. However, Sumner shows that to be invested in s Barth’s Christology, one needs to hear Barth himself first.

Rafael Bello, Ph.D. Student, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack, eds., Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015)

Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective 

Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack, eds., Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015) v + 237 pp. $34.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Brandon Watson (April 09, 2019)

As Barth notes in the opening commentary to Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (ET), the added term “evangelical” should not be understood “in a confessional, that is, in a denominational and exclusive sense” (ET, 5). The same clarification is needed for this volume of collected essays edited by Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack. The book is not concerned with Evangelical-ism, but with the celebration of the publication of Karl Barth’s ET. Additionally, the book commemorates the 200-year anniversary of the founding of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812 and are the proceedings from the 2012 Annual Karl Barth Conference. They offer an intriguing insight into the multi-vacated theme of the conference as well as Barth’s 1962 venture to the U.S. and his fascination, and somewhat complicated relationship, with American ideologies (cf. CD I/1, 73). The essays are organized under four rubrics: Historical Perspectives, Doctrinal and Ethical Perspectives, Dialogue with American Theologians, and Theological Existence in America. These different angles provide a unique perspective on Barth’s historic visit to America as well as how American theology has been shaped over time.

Historical Perspectives

Hans-Anton Drewes, Director Emeritus of the Karl Barth-Archiv, opens the section on Historical Perspectives by analyzing the development of a cluster of doctrinal concerns from Christology to the sacraments in Barth’s thought. Pulling from archival materials, letters, and theological writings, Drewes traces Barth’s train of thought from 1917 to 1967. Taking the form of a hermeneutic of “loyalty,” Drewes shows how Barth remained doctrinally consistent throughout his theological development, while also showing Barth’s own retrospective surprise at his earlier consistency. The fundamental challenge Drewes offers the reader, especially those who wish only to consult the Church Dogmatics for cherry-picked material, is: “Can we understand the teaching of the Church Dogmatics if we do not try to follow its entire course of motion—not in a doctrinal, but in a hermeneutical, loyalty” (28)?

In chapter 2, David W. Congdon, Acquisitions Editor at the University Press of Kansas, places Barth’s ET, as well as some of Barth’s later writings, into their wider, historical and theological context by investigating Barth’s engagement with his career-long existentialist interlocutor, Rudolf Bultmann. The essay highlights the key differences and similarities between Bultmann’s “anthropotheology” and Barth’s “theanthropology,” and seeks to overcome the seeming impasse between the two. After working through the hermeneutical and dogmatic nuances of their positions, Congdon concludes: “Bultmann without Barth lacks the dogmatic basis for mission, but Barth without Bultmann lacks the hermeneutical logic of mission” (62). Interpreting these two theologians alongside one another creates the possibility for a theology that can be both missional-oriented and dogmatically-based, in order to face the concrete challenges of our contemporary situation.

While in the United States, Barth was able to visit three correctional facilities in Chicago, California, and New York. Chapter 3, written by Jessica DeCou, presents an in-depth look into each of the facilities Barth visited. Historically reconstructing Barth’s visits to these facilities, one of which he went on to describe as “Dante’s Inferno on Earth,” DeCou sheds light on the increasing reality of racism and classism in the American prison system since 1962. The forward-looking thesis of the essay uses Barth’s claim that the two criminals being crucified next to Jesus were the first Christian community in order to emphasise God’s grace in stark contrast to human-wrought justice and condemnation.

Doctrinal and Ethical Perspectives

The second section of the book begins with an essay by Kevin Hector, Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School, regarding Schleiermacher and Barth’s respective approaches to theology. Hector explores ways in which scholars (particularly ‘Barthians’!) can practice theology in a Schleiermacherian way, albeit while reworking Barth’s interpretation of Schleiermacher and broadening Barth’s theological method. To accomplish this task, Hector offers a thorough reconstruction of Schleiermacher’s understanding of “piety and his recognition of non-theological norms” as seen most prominently in his construction of Gefühl in an attempt to defend the compatibility of Schleiermacher’s theological method with Barth’s standards for theological norms (101). Hector’s conclusion is a specific challenge to Barthians—and those who practice theology more broadly—to incorporate ethnographic components into theological work and to welcome potential theological compatibilities between Barth and Schleiermacher in order to maintain theology as an academic discipline.

In a chapter on divine and human action in Barth’s ET and later works, Gerald McKenny, Walter Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, takes up a common critique of Barth’s theological ethics: Barth’s account of human agency is linked solely to divine agency which is not useful for ethical “accounts of virtue or growth in holiness” (120). McKenny poses and answers three critical questions regarding Barth’s account of the human moral agent. In his explication of Barth’s later work, primarily CD IV as well as the posthumously published material, The Christian Life, McKenny brings to light Barth’s viable alternative to virtue accounts of ethics or theories of moral growth. The alternative proposed by McKenny expounds Barth’s understanding of freedom as being “freed by God and for God” to focus on the covenantal nature of the encounter between God and humanity.

Continuing in the theological and ethical train of thought, George Hunsinger, McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, “confronts the options” in CD III/2, the locus classicus of Barth’s theological anthropology. After outlining six main features Barth considers to be necessary for a theological anthropology, Hunsinger moves into a critical analysis of the phenomena Barth takes up in CD III/2. Hunsinger outlines these phenomena in four different anthropological types: “naturalism, idealism, existentialism, and neo-orthodoxy” (143-152). After final analysis, Hunsinger notes that Barth deems each of these types lacking, because they grasp the phenomena without “comprehending the reality” (143). Hunsinger closes his essay with three brief “lessons” for Christian scholarship that can be derived from Barth’s methodology in relation to his theological anthropology: that normative criteria be based on scriptural revelation, descriptive criticism is prior to evaluative criticism, and all things are to be understood from a center in Christ.

Barth in Dialogue with American Theologians

In the next section, the volume turns to Barth’s life and work in conversation with American theologians. Daniel L. Migliore, Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, opens this section by placing Barth in conversation with the early Princeton Reformed theologian B.B. Warfield. The particular focus of Migliore’s comparison is Barth’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit, with a special emphasis on how Barth and Warfield articulate a theology of freedom. The comparison is guided by the Spirit’s relation to the science of theology, Scripture, Christ, and the life of the Trinity. Migliore elucidates where the two theologians converge in certain respects, while also noting areas of divergence. Migliore sheds fresh light on the doctrine of the Spirit in Barth and Warfield through his historically grounded dialogical analysis, showing that even the most unlikely dialogue partners can stretch our theological imaginations.

Cambria Kaltwasser, Assistant Professor of Theology at Northwestern College, looks at the “young Scotsman” and former president of Princeton Seminary, John Mackay, and his relationship with Karl Barth. After providing a biographical background, Kaltwasser discusses when Mackay and Barth were able to spend time together in Bonn in 1930, which sparked a mutually encouraging friendship, including Mackay’s assistance with Barth’s conversational English. Kaltwasser moves into an examination of three particular influences Barth had on Mackay in his understanding of Christ, the Church, and the Christian life before closing with a section on Mackay’s theology of the “transforming encounter.” Working from the encounters between Mackay and Barth and toward a theology of the human’s encounter with God and the world, Kaltwasser shows us how Mackay appropriated Barth’s theology with “an openness to an encounter with the same Lord Jesus Christ who captivated Barth” (193).

Peter J. Paris, Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor Emeritus of Christian Social Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, writes the closing essay for this section, in which he shares his hope that those familiar with Barth’s theology will recognize some theological continuities between Barth and Martin Luther King Jr. “despite their different theological orientations” (194). By describing King’s continual fight against racism in America through the power of Christian nonviolent resistance, Paris highlights King’s Christian witness to expose the distorted Christianity of slavery and white theologies. Paris uses this historical context to bring King and Barth into constructive conversation. Even though Barth and King’s theologies diverge in specific areas, particularly in terms of God’s transcendence and immanence, Paris argues that they both sought to effect change through resistance and the practice of Christian love.

Theological Existence in America

The final section of the book contains just two short chapters. The first, written by Katherine Sonderegger, William Meade Chair in Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, uses Barth’s work to offer a thoughtful and pastoral reflection on a painful reality of the “failure of the pastor” (209). Centered on Barth’s exposition of temptation (Anfechtung), Sonderegger uses Barth to articulate a word of hope in light of God’s chosen silence, which, she argues, is evidence of God’s goodness. She also maintains that God’s silence is not to be confused with God’s absence. Drawing from Barth’s doctrine of God, Sonderegger presents God as one who “acts within our sufferings,” as a good and gracious God (220).

In the final chapter, Adam Neder, Bruner-Welch Professor in Theology at Whitworth University, expresses the “sun behind the clouds,” as he calls it, in Barth’s ET. “The clouds” represent the ominous warnings Barth gives to those who teach Christian theology where it is easy for theologians to “veer off track, waste their lives, and do profound harm” (223). The sun, which shines through from behind the clouds, Neder continues, can be seen in the implications of Barth’s theology for those who teach theology in the academy. Neder outlines three implications for classroom teaching derived from Barth’s understanding of theological work and Christian existence: the presence and activity of the Spirit, the existential disturbance of an encounter with the Subject matter of theology, and finally, good teaching is an act of service and love. Neder challenges those who take up the difficult task of teaching theology to continue to show God’s grace, love, and truth in the classroom.

At times (more often than not, unfortunately), North American Barth reception is abstracted from Barth’s own context, especially when employed to defend or uphold strains of American Evangelicalism, of which the title could be confused. The outstanding feature of the volume under consideration is that it bucks this trend by investigating Barth’s complicated relationship with North America while also bringing together an abundance of different voices to bear on the life and work of Karl Barth. Using an oft-neglected work of Barth, Evangelical Theology, this volume serves as a much-needed study for the continued appropriation and critical engagement with Barth in the United States. Unfortunately, the depth of each author’s contribution to this edited volume and the confines of space in this review prevent me from providing a more in-depth analysis of this theologically-rich volume. It is my hope that the reader will pick up the book and find the numerous areas of insight to be illuminating, engaging, and challenging for those engaged in theological discourse. This book comes recommended and will surely serve as a valued resource for students, pastors, and scholars alike.

Brandon Watson, Ph.D. Candidate, Universität Heidelberg

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Hitchcock, Nathan. Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013)

Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology

Hitchcock, Nathan. Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), xviii + 209 pp. $20.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by Sara A. Misgen (September 08, 2014)

Nathan Hitchcock—Assistant Professor at Sioux Falls Seminary—adds to the developing discussion of Barth’s eschatology with his volume Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology. Undertaking a full presentation of Barth’s resurrection theology by focusing primarily on the third and fourth volumes of the Church Dogmatics (CD), Hitchcock also presses Barth’s logic to offer a strong critique of Barth’s participatory eschatology: “For all his profound affirmations of physicality, Barth’s construction of the doctrine comes up wanting. In his presentation of the resurrection body, there is a certain changelessness, a certain lightness, and a certain indistinguishability, all of which suggests a fleshless existence” (xv). The volume itself rests on central commitments to enfleshment and the importance of the body, which lead to some of the more striking critiques of Barth near the conclusion.

Chapter one begins with a sketch of two trajectories that the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh has taken in the history of the church. The first—represented by Jerome, Augustine, and Aquinas—speaks of the resurrection as “collection of the flesh” in which an individual’s “selfsame matter” was collected and assembled in eternity (9). The second trajectory is defined by the participation of human flesh in the divine life and represented by figures such as Origen, Athanasius, and Maximus the Confessor. While these two trajectories are only sparingly referred to in the rest of the book, they serve as a useful orientation to Hitchcock’s later argument, namely that Barth “resonates . . . with the more Eastern, participatory trajectory” (25). In chapter two, Hitchcock explicates resurrection in Barth’s early work by interpreting Barth through three of his major influences: Pietism, Romanticism, and socialism. Arguing that the resurrection of the dead was “the touchstone for Barth’s dialectical approach” (71), Hitchcock notes two equivalences he sees in the young Barth and finds problematic: resurrection as sublation and resurrection as revelation. Worrying that Barth has not provided enough safeguards around human flesh in the eschaton, Hitchcock flags the critique and moves on.

The heart of the book lies in the reading of resurrection in the CD, located in chapters three through five. Chapter three focuses on “the resurrection of the flesh as eternalization,” detailing Barth’s conceptions of time and eternity. Presenting a strong reading of Barth on the relevant points, Hitchcock offers a careful exegesis of relevant passages from CD—focusing especially on volume IV—before concluding that Barth fails to adequately reconstitute time in eternity, and thus fails to protect the “corporeal texture” of a human’s fleshly and earthly history in eternity (107). The chapter also raises questions about Barth’s portrayal of death as the servant of God. Because death is the limit to human nature and the transition point to eternity, it “must be considered necessary and even holy” (107). This, Hitchcock argues, is a problem for any eschatology, and further states that Barth’s position does not match the New Testament witness (108).

Critiques of Barth continue as chapter four moves to the revelatory character of the resurrection. One of Hitchcock’s major concerns is the integrity of Jesus Christ, and he offers a relatively lengthy presentation of Barth’s Christology from CD IV/2 to illustrate the Alexandrian and Lutheran character in Barth’s account of the two natures, despite Barth’s own stated admission to follow to the Reformed tradition (see CD IV/2, 66). While this account is not fully used within the argument of the volume until chapter five, this interpretation of Barth’s Christology does significant work in the final critiques of Barth.

The real weight of chapter four lies in its assertion that Barth makes the resurrection overly noetic and that this results in a strong tendency towards the divinization of the human being in eternity (126). A central key to Barth’s thought on this issue, Hitchcock claims, is the concept of presence. Because the divine and human are present to each other, through the exchange of predicates, humans are glorified by partaking of the divine nature in eternity (141). Following Eberhard Jüngel, George Hunsinger, and Adam Neder, Hitchcock argues that Barth’s account of salvation, for all of its Reformed tendencies, is a form of divinization. This, accordingly, prevents a true resurrection of the flesh: “the dead are raised, but raised not as flesh so much as something flesh-like” (146).

Chapter five is devoted to the resurrection as “incorporation into Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit” (147). Raising concerns about Christomonism in Barth’s pneumatology, Hitchcock suggests that Barth conflates the resurrection and the Holy Spirit within the later volumes of the CD, threatening the very status of eschatology as a theological locus within Barth’s system (152). The lengthiest—and most central—part of the chapter contains an attempt to press Barth’s logic and develop an account of his incorporative soteriology, anticipating an argument that Barth may have made, or refuted, in CD V. Using the form of the doctrine of election from CD II/2, Hitchcock presents an account in which Jesus goes out into the world, only to draw all people to Himself at the consummation of all things: “Christ’s incorporative resurrection concludes with an eschatological collapse in which everything is collected” (159). This is not totally without warrant in Barth’s corpus, given the preference for the totus Christus in CD IV/2 and IV/3, and leads to some of the sharpest criticisms in the volume. The drawing of all individuals to Christ in the eschaton leads to an “eschatological singularity” in which “Barth seems satisfied to speak of a lingering differentiation within Christ’s body. In contrast, I am insisting upon a plurality of bodies” (165). If these speculations are correct, and one accepts Hitchcock’s assertion that individuated bodies are an essential element of personhood, a “Barthian” account of the eschaton necessarily destroys individuality.

This critique develops into one of the most unique claims of the volume: that Barth’s eschatology closely borders on panentheism. Despite Barth’s ardent insistence that Creator and creature are separate, Hitchcock nevertheless notes that by potentially making Jesus Christ the totalizing end of all things “Barth’s eschatologic makes him cousin to the family of panentheists” (169). The chapter ends with an expansion of the earlier critique: Barth’s eschatology not only leads to the destruction of individuality but also the destruction of the Creator/creature distinction, as in the escahton creation is sublated by “non-creaturely transcendence” in Jesus Christ (175). Though Barth does allow that “our respective bodies will be preserved in Christ’s body,” Hitchcock suggests that this neither captures the true meaning of the redemption of the flesh, nor adheres to the creedal witness of the Church, because it fails to detail the specificity of these bodies in eternity (181). In the end, the individual is nominalized and subsumed into Christ, and thus ceases to exist as such.

Chapter six serves a dual purpose as summary of major critiques and the conclusion to the book. The two trajectories detailed in the first chapter are consulted again with the conclusion that Barth falls along the more Eastern participatory trajectory and, problematically, falls into a spiritualizing trend that ignores the importance of the body. Unwilling to completely condemn Barth, Hitchcock offers his sympathies with the former’s theological project and offers a number of suggestions for the usefulness of Barth’s eschatology. Chief among these suggestions is that Barth’s accounts be applied to the immediate state between death and the general resurrection (191). The penultimate paragraph contains three major correctives for Barth’s theology which, if applied, would allow for speaking of a future in the flesh (perhaps pointing to a second, more constructive, study).

There is much to commend about this volume. Hitchcock is a clear and engaging writer, and he offers detailed and impressive readings of Barth. At times, it would have been nice to see him engage with scholarship that offers alternative readings of Barth’s resurrection theology (e.g., R. Dale Dawson’s The Resurrection in Karl Barth [2007] or John C. McDowell’s Hope In Barth’s Eschatology [2000]) even in his footnotes. Given the recent interest in Barth’s eschatology in the CD, this would have provided some added strength to Hitchcock’s readings. Additionally, because some of Hitchcock’s critiques depend on speculations about CD V, readers should press his logic; though, if he is correct, Hitchcock offers important insights into Barth’s thought.

My deeper concerns, however, come from the nature of the critiques and the eschatological presuppositions which support them. Though the book begins with a poetic description of “the resurrection of the flesh” this crucial concept is never explicitly defined. At times, this leads to confusion about its distinction from “resurrection of the dead,” which seems to be used interchangeably throughout (e.g. 26, 176). As a consequence of this imprecision, Hitchcock’s own understanding of redemption and eternity is masked. He repeatedly criticizes Barth for failing to capture the true meaning of the Apostle’s Creed, yet Hitchcock’s own interpretation is by no means necessitated (or even implied) by the line “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh” (1).

Additionally, it is unclear why the reader should accept the criteria of particularity in the eschaton (161), the specificity of redeemed bodies (181), and a “future both kinetic and sempiternal” (184) as meaningful or useful for evaluating or constructing any eschatology. Infrequent appeals are made to passages from the Bible or even a vague notion of “the biblical imagination,” yet Hitchcock fails to offer any account as to why his interpretations are superior to the countless others that have emerged in Christian history. Furthermore Hitchcock favors—and overuses—the term “selfsame” to refer to the resurrection body, yet this loaded term requires him to begin from the assertion he wishes to prove (see xi, for a particularly pointed example). The book itself, and particularly the pointed critiques of Barth, rest on a presupposed eschatology that lurks in the background, but the presuppositions regarding the body as marker of individuality, the necessity for strong continuity of earthly and resurrected bodies, and the role of time in the eschaton are never argued. The criticisms of Barth depend on this understanding, but this means they are only relevant if the reader shares the author’s perspective. Hitchcock’s critique of Barth is weakened as a result of these significant problems, and he fails to offer a meaningful warning to both Barth’s theological descendants and theologians interested in eschatology in general (as he claims in his preface, see xv).

Despite its problems, Hitchcock’s volume is still an important work for those interested in Barth’s doctrine of the resurrection and the larger issues of eschatology proper in the Church Dogmatics. Read alongside other recent studies on Barth’s eschatology, it provides unique perspectives on Barth’s mature thought and some of its potential problems.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Neil MacDonald, Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment (Revised Edition; Paternoster, 2002)

Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment 

Neil MacDonald, Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment (Revised Edition; Paternoster, 2002), xxiv + 403. $39.99 (paperback)

Reviewed by Shane Wilkins (February 27, 2008)

In this volume, Neil MacDonald wants to combat a particular neo-orthodox reading of Barth’s theology as a fideist rejection of the Enlightenment. His provocative thesis is that Barth’s theological epistemology offers “the most cogent” argument in the modern period “on behalf of the rationality of the Christian faith in the face of a loss of belief in the truth of the Bible in the modern age” (xxiv).

MacDonald wants to show that Barth’s theology can accept the Enlightenment challenges to many particular claims of traditional Protestant theology – like historical criticism of the Bible, angelology, the historicity of the resurrection, etc. – without thereby surrendering their theological core. The book’s conceptual core is the theological epistemology upon which Barth’s responses to these challenges depends. While some of this ground has been covered in the literature before, the contribution of MacDonald’s book is to show a startling similarity between Barth’s theological epistemology and Wittgenstein’s private language argument.

The primary point of contact between Barth, Wittgenstein and Kant is their preoccupation with “the metadilemmas of the Enlightenment,” by which MacDonald refers to inquiries about the conditions of the possibility of a subject. Historically, Hume argues that there can be no sensible propositions concerned with things that are neither relations of ideas nor matters of empirical fact. The threat of this disjunction – known in contemporary philosophy as Hume’s Fork – is that it seems to reduce philosophy to either logic and mathematics or the natural sciences. If Hume’s argument is correct, metaphysics and pre-modern theology are both meaningless for they trade in empty concepts that are neither necessary truths, nor matters of empirical fact.

Kant attempted to avoid the prongs of Hume’s Fork in an interesting way. For Kant it is obvious that we do have knowledge of precisely the sort of propositions such as, “Every event has a cause,” which Hume’s Fork disallows. In order to meet Hume’s objection, Kant tries to discover the universal, necessary structures of the human understanding which are the conditions of the possibility of our having legitimate knowledge of such propositions. Kant’s actual account of what those structures are need not concern us here. The important thing is the form of Kant’s argument; arguing from the conditioned thing that we know to the conditions that must be responsible for it. This is the vaunted transcendental turn in Kant’s philosophy, which seems to ‘save’ philosophy from Hume’s Fork by legitimating this sui generis class of synthetic a priori propositions.

On MacDonald’s interpretation, Barth, like Kant, is concerned with a metadilemma. Just as Hume seemed to announce the death of philosophy by reducing its subject matter to non-philosophical disciplines, so Overbeck proclaims the end of Christianity and attempts to decompose theology into non-theological disciplines such as church history and anthropology of religion. The interesting thing is that Barth’s response to Overbeck appears analogous to Kant’s response to Hume: just as Kant tries to save philosophy by appealing to the existence of a class of propositions that escape Hume’s reduction of philosophy, so Barth tries to save theology by appealing to the existence of a class of propositions that escape Overbeck’s reduction of theology. The class of propositions Barth is concerned with here are what MacDonald calls ‘sui generishistorical truth claims’.

The distinction between straightforwardly ‘historical’ and ‘sui generically historical’ claims is that the former are ‘measurable’ and the second have their ‘measure’ only in themselves. MacDonald presumably means that ordinary historical claims can be investigated rationally by the academic discipline of history, but sui generis claims cannot. Why not? MacDonald repeatedly links claims about the epistemological status of sui generis historical events with Barth’s insistence in the Romanscommentary that ‘God is God’, where the italics indicate that God’s transcendence implies that one can properly speak of God only in the paradoxical language of dialectic (cf. 59ff). It is not entirely clear what exactly the relation should be between the claim about the ‘measurability’ of the sui generis and the claim that God can only be spoken of dialectically. Sometimes MacDonald seems to ground the former in the latter, and sometimes the two claims seem to be logically independent of one another.

What is clear, however, is that the mature Barth employs both claims in his understanding of revelation. For Barth, “God’s self-revelation itself . . . creates the very possibility of the means of measuring it” (241). MacDonald notes that here Barth is offering something like a transcendental argument about the condition of the possibility of revelation. This transcendental turn towards sui generis historical truth-claiming is presumably what makes Barth’s theology “the most cogent” argument for the rationality of the Christian faith in MacDonald’s estimation because it allows Barth to hold on to the core affirmations of Christian orthodoxy while simultaneously affirming what is valuable in the Enlightenment critiques of orthodoxy. Thus, for instance, the orthodox theological tradition had asserted the reality of angels, as straightforward historical items within the world. The Enlightenment has shown this belief to be false. Barth’s transcendental turn allows him to accept the Enlightenment’s verdict against the orthodox view of angels while nevertheless asserting their existence in a sui generis sense. Barth thus inherits both traditions, but is not reducible to either – contrary to the neo-orthodox picture of Barth.

Thus, just as Kant attempts to save philosophy from Hume’s Fork with the synthetic a priori, Barth attempts to save theology from Overbeck’s dilemma with sui generis historical theological claims. But it is also clear that Barth’s ‘transcendental argument’ here is not exactly Kantian. Barth’s position actually bears more of a ‘family resemblance’ to Wittgenstein than Kant, MacDonald provocatively suggests.

The central point of confluence MacDonald explores is Wittgenstein’s private language argument. In thePhilosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that the traditional picture of language is desperately confused. On the traditional picture, concepts and sensations are private to the individual. People communicate to one another by translating the sentences of public language back into their own idiosyncratic private concepts. The specter of Cartesian skepticism depends on this picture of language, for the skeptic is asking how private experience can have some objective (i.e., public) validity. If Wittgenstein is right that the concept of a private language is incoherent, then the skeptical problem dissolves because the skeptic must rely upon the very concepts he intends to put into question in order to pose the question itself.

According to MacDonald, the thrust of Wittgenstein’s private language argument is that (Cartesian) skepticism is impossible because the skeptic “attempts to ‘measure’ – criticise – a very distinctive object of measurement, namely: the object of measurement that constitutes the means of measurement itself” (306), which is impossible. This, MacDonald points out, “is precisely the position Barth reached in the Church Dogmatics as regards epistemology” (ibid). In other words, both Barth and Wittgenstein are objecting to the idea that there is a criterion outside the phenomenon of revelation or language by which they could be judged. ‘Language’ for Wittgenstein and ‘revelation’ for Barth both have a sui generis identity that is supported by a sort of non-Kantian transcendental argument.

If MacDonald’s interpretation of Barth and Wittgenstein is correct, the confluence of these two figures is startling. Whether Barth’s theological epistemology is really the ‘most cogent’ way of arguing for the rationality of the Christian faith or not, MacDonald has shown something interesting indeed about the relationship of Barth and Wittgenstein that will hopefully spur further scholarly interest in relating Barth to broader trends in the contemporary intellectual climate. Nevertheless, I must register a few reservations.

First, Wittgenstein’s private language argument is notorious for receiving contentious and conflicting interpretations, to say nothing of whether the argument actually succeeds. So, MacDonald might be opening Barth’s epistemology up to new philosophical criticisms if arguments against Wittgenstein can be appliedmutatis mutandis to Barth as well.

Second, it would seem appropriate to inquire more deeply into the thesis that sui generis events are not capable of historical investigation. This principle is obviously central to Barth’s claims, but it is not immediately clear why an event’s being unique makes it inaccessible to historical investigation. After all, Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon was unique in the sense that it was unrepeatable. The epistemological ‘uniqueness’ of the sui generis historical truth claims Barth is concerned with must derive in some way from their being acts of God. But then the question returns: Why should God’s acting in history make that act inaccessible to historical investigation? In response, MacDonald would probably appeal to ‘God is God’ to ground the claim that God’s acts are inscrutable to historians, but on what would that claim rest? Ultimately it must rest upon the adequacy of Barth’s exegesis, which brings me to my third reservation.

For the Christian theologian, the success of Barth’s theological epistemology must be based in its success as an interpretation of the Bible. On that score, I remain unconvinced on exegetical grounds that the Bible teaches that ‘God is God’ in the epistemological sense Barth and MacDonald want.

But one could have exegetical reservations on more than just this fundamental principle . On each of the separate challenges the Enlightenment poses to traditional theology (angelology, the historicity of the resurrection, etc.), one ought to examine whether Barth’s exegesis of the text really supports the claim that these events are sui generically historical rather than straightforwardly historical in the way the tradition assumed.

Despite these reservations, MacDonald’s book represents an important contribution and should be required reading for anyone interested in seriously engaging Barth and contemporary philosophy.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Beintker, Michael, Christian Link, and Michael Trowitzsch (eds.), Karl Barth im europäischen Zeitgeschehen (1935–1950), Widerstand – Bewährung – Orientierung. Beiträge zum Internationalen Symposion vom 1. bis 4. Mai 2008 in der Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek Emden (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2010)

Karl Barth im europäischen Zeitgeschehen (1935–1950), Widerstand – Bewährung – Orientierung. Beiträge zum Internationalen Symposion vom 1. bis 4. Mai 2008 in der Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek Emden 

Beintker, Michael, Christian Link, and Michael Trowitzsch (eds.), Karl Barth im europäischen Zeitgeschehen (1935–1950), Widerstand – Bewährung – Orientierung. Beiträge zum Internationalen Symposion vom 1. bis 4. Mai 2008 in der Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek Emden (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2010), 528pp. €54,00

Reviewed by John G. Flett (July 12, 2012)

This nice collection, as the title suggests, constitutes the proceedings of the second “International Symposium on the Work of Karl Barth” held in 2008 (a similar volume—entitled Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921-1935)—was published after the 2003 symposium in Emden). It spans twenty-two essays, two discussions and one sermon, and is divided into four parts: plenary sessions, historical and biographical contexts, exegesis of Barth’s work history, and closing remarks. Though these divisions appear somewhat arbitrary in the printed version, more a legacy of its original conference format than an elucidation of the material, substantial work appears throughout. Apart from an essay from George Hunsinger, titled “Justification and Justice: Toward an Evangelical Social Ethic,” and the participation of Bruce McCormack in the discussion panels, this collection has a decidedly continental feel, with many of the contributors perhaps unknown in a North American context. But this difference in voice and the variety of subject matter adds to the benefit of the work. Indeed, it includes such rich material that it makes writing a review a difficult task: one simply cannot do justice to the whole.

Michael Weinrich leads off the first part, “plenary sessions,” with a introductory essay titled “The Theological Starting Points and Perspectives of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: A Trinitarian Hermeneutic and the Determination of Theology’s Reach.” While it does not necessarily contain anything new, this chapter succeeds in delivering a clear and succinct summary of Barth’s founding questions—especially as they appear in the early volumes of the CD. It would be good to see this type of essay appear in English as a teaching tool. Also included in this section are essays by Jan Štefan on God’s Perfections in CD II/1, Bent Flemming Nielsen on the relationship of law and gospel in CD II/2, §§36–39, and Christian Link on Barth’s doctrine of creation. There is also an interesting piece by Henri Wijnandus de Knijff on Barth’s reception in Holland interpreted according to the contest between the “Gereformeerden” and “Hervormden” churches, where the former understood itself as separate from the wider society and charged with a specific task to that society while the latter understood itself in terms of its co-responsibility with society for socio-cultural questions.

Two highlights in this section are Wolf Krötke on “The Sum of the Gospel: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election in the Context of theChurch Dogmatics,” and Eberhard Busch on “Karl Barth in Current Events (Zeitgeschehen): ‘A Swiss Voice’ between 1935 and 1950.” Krötke traverses difficult ground with ease, providing a concise account of the significance and origins of the doctrine of election in Barth’s thinking, before giving seven snapshots of the implications of this position for his wider system, including (in point 7) the significance of being witnesses and heralds to the gospel. Krötke ends with a reflection on the significance of Barth’s doctrine of election for his earlier treatment of the Trinity, while addressing a complaint that Barth’s position permits an abstraction from above and a suggestion from von Balthasar that Barth had now drawn close to the analogia entis. One wishes that Krötke had expended more time on these latter issues, but his task seems to be more one of positive clarification than combative defense.

Eberhard Busch’s contribution differs from the more doctrinal pieces within the section in that it examines Barth’s political protest against Hitler and the reaction of the Swiss government. The data for his treatment comes from the “Schweizer Bundesarchiv” in Bern, and the “Politischen Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes der Bundesrepublik” in Berlin. It is a remarkable and complex story of censorship and of political pressure at the highest levels, with the Swiss government feeling that its neutrality might possibly be threatened through Barth’s actions. Included here is a consideration of how Barth understood the relationship between East and West toward the end of and after the Second World War, how this was perceived by political and even church authorities, and how it was reported in newspapers. The work is so arresting as to seem improbable if not for the impeccable reference work, and I look forward to seeing how it might inform those evaluating the political significance of Barth’s theological position.

Part two, on “historical and biographical contexts,” deals primarily with Barth’s “discussion partners.” Bonhoeffer (Ernst Feil) and Brunner after 1945 (Peter Zocher) both appear here, but so to does “refugee pastor” Paul Vogt (Henrich Rusterholz), publicist Arthur Frey (Frank Jehle), Dutch theologian Kornelis Heiko Miskotte (Hendrik Johan Adriaanse), and Confessing Church leader Hans Joachim Iwand (Gerard Cornelis den Hertog). In the case of Rusterholz’s treatment of Vogt, by way of example, the historical work is exemplary. Less evident, aside from personal support and encouragement, is how Barth’s work found expression in Vogt’s. Better here is den Hertog’s treatment of Iwand, especially in showing how Iwand himself navigated between the different theological authorities (notably Gogarten) of the period. One gains a more dialogical perspective as Iwand raised questions concerning Barth’s understanding of law and gospel and what he considered to be a too sharp negation of the state, one beyond that contained in the Barmen declaration.

Apart from these biographical snapshots, part two includes treatments of Barth on the guilt of the Germans (Michael Beintker), on the reorganization of the church in Germany after the Second World War (Martin Greshat), and on the East-West conflict (Sàndor Fazakas). To select but one, while the Barth material contained in the Fazakas piece may be familiar, the account of that material’s reception within Hungary and the type of questions it posed to both the local and global political order added a living quality to what can be something of an abstracted discussion between monolithic political systems.

Part three, “Exegesis of Barth’s Work History,” focuses more on doctrinal questions with the exception of one essay by Michael Trowitzsch on Barth’s interpretation of Martin Heidegger. Along with the aforementioned Hunsinger essay, Matthias Wüthrich writes on “nothiningness,” Christiani-Maria Bammel on anthropology, and Georg Plasger on ecumenical unity. Cornelis van der Kooi’s short but helpful piece on “Religion as Unbelief: Remarks on a Battle Cry (Kampfparole)” well sets the discussion within the limits of its context. After noting his impulse to address a heresy that sprung out of the church and found embodiment in the “German Christians,” van der Kooi outlines Barth’s position and the “inherent problematic of religion” as a human attempt at self-liberation and the manner in which local culture becomes determinative for this attempt. With this, for van der Kooi, it becomes clear that Barth is addressing the developments within Germany during the period. This conclusion is confirmed though five largely commonsense observations, the very simplicity of which may help move the discussion along.

Though it sometimes trends toward the hagiographical, this is a fine collection and—perhaps thanks to the framing of the conference—avoids becoming mired in methodological questions. Some of the historical research is outstanding, and the few “summary” type of essays in the volume succeed in presenting complex material in a clear and concise manner. If a complaint might be laid, it would concern the absence of any reference to a wider geographical reception of Barth during the same period. In some respects, the fine archival work functions as a type of historical recovery. That is, it perhaps calls into question some of the dismissive stereotypical slogans one commonly hears. It would have been interesting to address the interpretation of Barth’s thinking as it appeared in the English language world, and the way some of these treatments exert an ongoing influence. One might also have liked to see a treatment of Barth’s reception in Korea and Japan. These, however, are small quibbles that do not detract from this authoritative contribution to the field.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

John P. Lewis, Karl Barth in North America: The Influence of Karl Barth in the Making of a New North American Evangelicalism (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2009)

Karl Barth in North America: The Influence of Karl Barth in the Making of a New North American Evangelicalism

John P. Lewis, Karl Barth in North America: The Influence of Karl Barth in the Making of a New North American Evangelicalism (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2009), xvii + pp. 226. $27.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by Scott Rice (July 18, 2012)

John Lewis takes up a rather distinct approach to the influence of Karl Barth’s theology on several evangelical theologians in Karl Barth in North America. Engaging scholars like Donald Bloesch and Bernard Ramm, he moves beyond a standard theological assessment by elevating the role of biography. More specifically, Lewis underlines how the early theological settings, family lives, and educational background of these scholars led to an encounter with Barth’s thought that impacted their own theological development and in turn resulted in “the emergence of a new evangelicalism” (xvii).

Lewis’s first two chapters set the course for the remainder of the book through an overview of Barth’s life and work, as well as some responses to Barth’s theology in North America. He touches upon Barth’s key early influences—Herrmann, Ritschl, and their support of Germany in World War I—but focuses on Barth’s dogmatic concerns, particularly the doctrines of revelation, scripture, and election, as well as Barth’s turn to the Reformers. These were the emphases that came to bear on the new evangelicalism.

In terms of North American responses to Barth, Lewis begins with the reception and ultimate rejection of Barth’s theology by the fundamentalist leaders Cornelius Van Til and Fred Klooster. Uncomfortable with some of the more extreme elements of fundamentalism and desiring greater engagement with the culture, a second group of evangelicals emerged after World War II led by the likes of Billy Graham and Carl Henry. This second group appreciated much of Barth’s work but retained certain hesitations, most notably concerning Barth’s doctrine of scripture. For the remainder of his work Lewis turns to a third group, the new evangelicalism. This group’s desire, claims Lewis, for unapologetically Christian “dialogue with modernism” and a scriptural theology that asks what God might proclaim in his Word before trying to prove that the words are God’s made it ripe for an encounter with Karl Barth’s theology (62, 67).

Chapter three deals with the first of the new evangelicals, Bernard Ramm. Ramm, a physics PhD, made a name for himself in fundamentalist scholarship through a series of publications on the relationship of science and scriptural interpretation. However, in his After Fundamentlism, Ramm reflected on the transitional moment when he realized that the scientific methods he adopted for theology led to a faith “captive to rationalism” (72). Seeking a new direction, Ramm encountered Barth’s Church Dogmatics at Baylor University in the late 1950’s. During this period, Ramm came to appreciate Barth’s engagement with scripture as “witnessing, kerygmatic documents” that “summon faith in Jesus Christ” rather than as “scientific historiography” (81). Barth made it possible for Ramm to acknowledge scripture’s humanity and yet still stand under its divine authority as that which points to God’s revelation.

Geoffrey Bromiley, the prominent translator and professor of historical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, occupies chapter four. Bromiley’s engagement with Barth was a gradual process, taking place after his ordination into the Anglican Communion during the late 1930’s. Lewis emphasizes two of Bromiley’s contributions. First, Bromiley translated immense amounts of Barth’s work and was deeply involved in making Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik accessible in English. And second, Bromiley heralded Barth as one who avoided two pitfalls of his period: rigid double predestination that ultimately distorts “the character of God” as deistic rather than involved in history, and the mythological tendencies that failed to let God’s revelation speak for itself (103).

Lewis assesses in chapter five the one-time critic turned proponent of Barth’s theology, James Daane. Daane’s career was marked by a strong distaste for Barth’s dialectics prior to his time as professor of pastoral theology at Fuller Seminary from 1966-79. There is a mystery to God that lies behind the finite mind, and Daane thought that Barth sought after it too-hastily with his dialectical method. But Lewis discusses Daane’s transition to precisely the opposite view, although the details of this transition remained unknown even to Daane’s departmental colleague, Ray Anderson. Daane became a public advocate of Barth’s doctrine of election by the latter part of his career, arguing for its christological basis in the New Testament, its functionality for preaching, and its historical presence in Calvin’s statement that “Christ is the ‘mirror’ of our election” (118).

Chapter six focuses on David Mueller, former professor of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mueller came under Barth’s influence early in life as his father, William Mueller, wrote a dissertation on Barth in the 1930’s. Lewis begins by referring to David Mueller’s publication, Karl Barth, where Mueller unfolds Barth’s position on Jesus Christ as God’s revelation, “the object of election,” and the true pattern of what it means to be human (128, 131). Mueller again expressed his indebtedness to Barth’s incarnational theology at a conference on the inerrancy of scripture in 1987. Sensing a real struggle in his tradition to come to grips with scripture’s humanity, Mueller claimed that the dominant motif of God’s saving action in scripture takes form in “finite, mortal, erring and sinful human beings” (136). He makes this point not to nullify scripture’s authority, but to emphasize the critical role which humanity—including the humanity of scripture—plays in the economy of God.

Next in line for Lewis is the evangelical scholar Donald Bloesch. Chapter seven presents Bloesch as one whose background in an ecumenically open tradition, coupled with a negative seminary experience under a neo-naturalist faculty’s radically progressive theology, led to a willing reception of Barth’s thought. Barth influenced Bloesch most with reference to his understanding of God, salvation, and scripture. It is worth mentioning the first two. In Barth’s doctrine of God, Bloesch expresses appreciation for the Swiss theologian’s keen attention to “the utter transcendence of the living God” as well as the emphasis on God as the “being who enters into relationships” and whose “power is in the service of his love” (156-9). Drawing primarily from Bloesch’s Jesus is Victor and Jesus Christ, Lewis turns to Bloesch’s response to Barth’s soteriology, particularly the function of the Spirit and its subjective role, the wrath which conceals God’s love, and most notably, the priority of God’s objective redemption in Jesus Christ that dares to hope for all even while—in Bloesch’s opinion—not necessitating universalism.

Chapter eight examines Ray Anderson, another former Fuller Seminary professor. First influenced by T. F. Torrance at Edinburgh, he would develop a specifically “incarnational theology” (171) in the wake of Barth’s thought and in dialogue with colleagues Geoffrey Bromiley and Bernard Ramm. Anderson’s theological anthropology works to define “humanity in terms of God’s self-revelation in the humanity of Jesus Christ, particularly his crucifixion and resurrection. In his crucifixion one can see the grave situation that humanity is in and yet in the resurrection one perceives God’s original intention for humanity” (174, quoting Anderson). In The Shape of Practical Theology, Anderson furthers this project by adopting Barth’s notion of Jesus as the “man-for-others” who determines what it means to be human in relationship (“co-humanity”) and, especially, in life lived for the sake of others (179).

Wesleyan theologian, Donald Dayton, is the last of Barth’s evangelical advocates and the subject of chapter nine. Responding to what he saw as gross misrepresentations of Barth, Dayton published a series of essays and a book entitled Karl Barth and Evangelicalism and dealing with Barth’s reception in North America. The heart of the chapter lies in Dayton’s pietistic evaluation of Barth. Lewis notes that while Barth is better known for his more critical attitude towards the pietist tradition, Dayton captures two potential affinities that make Barth a more accessible resource for his fellow Wesleyans. First, Dayton argues that Barth expressed by the fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics not only a “more sympathetic treatment of Zinzendorf than had previously been in evidence,” but also a significant number of references to “Bengel’s Gnomon, the great pietist commentary” (201). Second, Dayton hypothesizes that pietism’s devotional approach to scripture might have played a greater role than previously known in Barth’s dynamic account of scriptural inspiration. Dayton’s hunch might be a stretch, but it nonetheless says something about the similarities in praxis and doctrine that connect Barth and the Wesleyan tradition.

Lewis concludes by considering some similarities and differences among the new evangelicals, distinguishing in sub-sections their “Influences,” “Motifs,” “Agenda(s),” and “Common Agenda” (215-6). He claims that what united their efforts was a shared longing for a theology in dialogue with modernism “yet beyond the accommodation of modernist theologies” (217).

Karl Barth in North America constitutes a profitable resource for introductory research on Barth’s reception in evangelical scholarship. Lewis’s concentration on the distinct context of each theologian provides a fuller understanding of motivations and the specific points of emphasis in each’s work. While on occasion Lewis can make a straw man of the scriptural inerrantist, his detailed engagement with Barth’s view of scripture as the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ overshadows this fault and makes possible an honest evaluation of Barth’s doctrine for evangelicals who have largely remained hesitant and misinformed on this point. One minor drawback to Lewis’s work is the limited attention given to the reception of Barth and the question of universalism. He does address this issue with Bloesch (who points to Barth’s “impossible possibility,” 168) and in a footnote with Dayton (who notes Barth’s primary concern with the believing community, 199). But the relationship of universal and objective redemption to the scriptural images of divisive judgment must be more thoroughly articulated than Lewis has done if evangelicalism is to fruitfully and honestly appropriate Barth as a resource for the theological task (on the question of universalism, cf. Bromiley’s Introduction to Karl Barth and, more recently, Bruce McCormack’s essay in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism).

All in all, Lewis’s Karl Barth in North America is a clear and insightful work that successfully highlights an important strand of evangelical scholarship that has and continues to appropriate Barth’s theology as a vital resource for the task of elaborating and proclaiming the gospel for today.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Cocksworth, Ashley. Karl Barth on Prayer (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015)

Cocksworth, Ashley. Karl Barth on Prayer (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), viii + 202 pp. $114.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Blair D. Bertrand (December 05, 2017)

Perhaps because the academy views Barth as a systematic theologian, the majority of writing about him directly touches on traditional systematic concerns such as Christology, soteriology, and revelation. Lost is a sense that theological concerns more associated with piety and practice are essential to understanding Barth’s work. In Karl Barth on Prayer, Ashley Cocksworth aims to correct this by placing prayer as one of the constitutive elements of Barth’s theology. To think that one book could suddenly make Barth into a spiritual theologian is naïve. However, making a good start opening up and probing an under appreciated element within Barth is certainly doable. Cocksworth does exactly that. He unpacks Barth’s understanding of prayer and situates it within the overall oeuvre, demonstrating that it is a constitutive element of Barth’s overall project.

This dissertation-turned-book fulfills the intent of the T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology series by constructively engaging Barth through historical analysis and contemporary restatement. Cocksworth presents his own constructive proposal regarding prayer all the while maintaining a close reading of Barth’s thought.

There are a number of arguments at work here: how Barth’s understanding of prayer changes from petition to invocation, the place of prayer in Barth’s ethics of reconciliation, prayer’s influence on understanding Barth’s pneumatology, and the political implications of this understanding of prayer. On all of these Cocksworth remains rooted in textual analysis, not straying too far from the corpus as received, but also not slavishly repeating exactly what Barth said. There is a creativity here and a fresh reading that opens up new areas of thought. The breadth of engagement effectively demonstrates that prayer was a concern for Barth throughout his work; the depth of analysis reveals that prayer is a constitutive element of Barth’s understanding of many theological concerns.

Perhaps the most novel argument is Cocksworth’s intent to situate Barth’s understanding of prayer within what Mark McIntosh calls mystical theology. This argument takes its cue from McIntosh’s observation that “Barth can be read fairly and indeed profitably in connection with mystical theology, not as himself a mystic, but as one whose theology is truly designed to be transformative, to be truthful in orienting the reader towards the abiding mystery of God’s love” (22). Further, Cocksworth picks up on this comment by Barth, “We need not be fanatically anti-mystical . . . there may be a place for a feeling of enjoyable contemplation of God” and takes up the challenge of removing that “may” (emphasis added 25; see CD IV/I, p. 104).

The first step in the argument is to acknowledge that Barth does not develop his theology in line with the contemplative tradition, at least not as understood by McIntosh and others such as Sarah Coakley, David Ford, and Rowan Williams. Cocksworth relies on this contemporary Anglo-Catholic recovery of theology as a spiritual practice to set the criterion of what constitutes legitimate contemplative prayer. Barth is found wanting: “a weakness should also be apparent: what has happened to the tradition of contemplative prayer in Barth’s theology?” (21). Because of this weakness or silence “some creativity needs to be exercised in order to locate and develop positive space for contemplation in Barth’s theology” (22). This kind of announcement, which essentially amounts to saying, “It isn’t in Barth’s theology as conventionally understood but I’m going to argue it is there unconventionally” can strike fear in the reader if the author does not immediately connect the argument to the actual text.

And connecting is exactly what Cocksworth does. As this is one among many arguments he cannot give a thorough going reading of all Barth says about mysticism, but Cocksworth can address “Barth’s critique of contemplative prayer and point out where he might have gone wrong in his reading” (26). Only after connecting his argument to the text does Cocksworth move onto “investigate what a Barthian form of contemplative prayer might look like by attending to neglected areas of the Church Dogmatics” (26). Cocksworth thus connects historical analysis to contemporary restatement.

In places, Barth allows for and understanding of contemplation similar to the classic understanding of purgation-contemplation-illumination. For instance, Barth opens a space to allow the text to speak when one reads scripture. The historical critical reading is secondary to the living word and, in attempting to hear this living word, the interpreter must sit in openness and receptivity. Within this suppliant posture is a kind of contemplation. Cocksworth is certainly correct here. Active contemplatives such as Ignatius of Loyola dwell in this kind of posture when encountering Scripture. There are differences for sure, highlighted by Cocksworth when he uses phrases like “not incongruent with” or “looks like” but enough similarities to make it convincing that contemplation of Scripture is a common element between the tradition and Barth (47, 57).

Cocksworth also notes significant differences between Barth and the contemplative tradition. Where much of spiritual theology might understand the Christian life as a progression or maturing through stages, it is clear in Barth that “there are no stages to pass through or steps to take so that the ethical agents can be or become more than who they already are in Christ” (31). Cocksworth fairly points out that Barth’s two main critiques of contemplative traditions are that they either have “an overemphasis on inner experience” or “an underemphasis on ethical action” (37). Perhaps unfairly, Cocksworth calls Barth’s engagement with mysticism as “appearing anachronistic, largely unsubstantiated, unrefined and inattentive to the particularities of the tradition” (34).

There are at least two paths of investigation that may have helped Cocksworth’s assessment of Barth. To address the charge of anachronism, Cocksworth could have considered Barth’s understanding of prayer in relation to German pietism. The richest tradition of prayer that Barth directly engaged with was not Orthodox or Roman Catholic theology retrieved by contemporary theologians such as McIntosh and Coakley. Rather, it was a kind of German pietism that he wrote from and against. Cocksworth does not address this tradition in any substantial way. Given that part of Cocksworth’s argument rests on Barth “maturing” from petition to invocation it seems reasonable to give some consideration to Busch’s argument in Karl Barth & the Pietists: The Young Karl Barth’s Critique of Pietism & It’s Response (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

Another possible avenue of investigation, one that would help in revealing Barth as attentive to at least one part of the tradition, would focus on Barth’s treatment of the unio Christi. As Cocksworth points out, Barth is critical of the imitatio Christi tradition for the very reasons that make the unio Christi tradition so important (133). When Cocksworth develops the full implications of correspondence within invocation and the agency of the Holy Spirit in relation to the individual prayer, a work like Adam Neder’s Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009) would offer further refinement and insight. Neder’s tracing of the unio Christi throughout each volume of the Church Dogmatics could bring the “clarification of the mechanics of that participation” that Cocksworth wants (79).

These criticisms should not discourage the reader. Cocksworth has a great number of insights that further both our understanding of Barth and of prayer. For instance, Cocksworth moves the field forward in understanding how the divine-human relationship plays out in prayer. The old charge against Barth that he has no place for human agency is laid to rest so that “the more prayer is divine does not mean prayer is any less the work of the ethical agent” (70). Or when Cocksworth situates Barth’s treatment of prayer within the ethics of The Christian Life in Chapter 6, there is a new opening created for Christians to understand how prayer and political action relate. For Barth, “in prayer, the Church is given the freedom to ask God ‘what are we to do?’ and the openness to receive the guidance of the Holy Spirit in each new moment (149). These two examples can be multiplied.

In the Conclusion, Cocksworth reflects on Barth’s treatment of prayer in Evangelical Theology, particularly on its implications for “the prayer-theology relation” (171). Following Anselm, Barth ends up where “implicitly and explicitly, proper theology will have to be . . . prayer” (173 citing ET 165). Given that Cocksworth sees a development in Barth concerning prayer and since Evangelical Theology is one of the last writings we have from Barth, perhaps this was the place to begin a study of Barth and prayer? Barth traces his own understanding of prayer in the line of Anselm not in the current retrieval of spiritual theology. The Anselmian themes of “bold humility,” “openness,” “disruption,” and “transformation” are what Barth draws on in both his theological project and in his understanding of prayer. When Cocksworth traces, contextualizes and works with these themes is when he is strongest; when he attempts to measure Barth against a standard Barth rejected, he is less convincing.

Rev. Dr. Blair D. Bertrand, Lecturer, Zomba Theological College, Zomba, Malawi

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

David Guretzki, Karl Barth on the Filioque, Barth Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009)

Karl Barth on the Filioque

David Guretzki, Karl Barth on the Filioque, Barth Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), xi + 224. $99.95

Reviewed by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker (February 16, 2011)

David Guretzki’s book Karl Barth on the Filioque sets out to clarify “the ‘inner theological rationality’ of Barth’s defense and use of the filioque” (17) from the earliest hints of its presence in the Epistle to the Romans through the Church Dogmatics. Guretzki, an Associate Professor and Dean of the Seminary at Briercrest College and Seminary, has revised for this publication the doctoral dissertation he completed under Douglas Farrow at McGill University. He adopts what he calls a “genetic-intrasystemic” approach, by which he examines both the historical development of the filioque in Barth’s thought and its systematic significance for Barth’s theology. Motivated by a desire to correct various false assumptions about the role of the filioque in Barth’s thought, Guretzki necessarily also examines the filioque controversy itself both past and present. In so doing, he addresses concerns surrounding the place of the filioque in ecumenical dialogue. Guretzki claims that Barth’s use and defense of the filioque is not typical of the Western filioquist tradition and that, therefore, the standard criticisms do not necessarily apply. This is not to say that others do not emerge. Guretzki provides a rich study of Barth’s position on the filioque, tracking both its development over the course of Barth’s writings and its theological functions in and implications for Barth’s theology.

In chapter one, “Karl Barth and the Filioque: History and Literature,” Guretzki calls into question “two fundamental presuppositions that characterize the majority, if not all” (52) studies on the filioque and Barth. The first presupposition is that Barth’s defense of the filioque in the CD stands alone and apart from his earlier works. The second is that Barth presupposes the filioque as a dogmatic a priori that then informs his subsequent trinitarian and pneumatological theology. Guretzki argues that Barth’s adherence to the filioque is a feature of his early dialecticism and results from (rather than determines antecedently) his analysis of the self-revelation of the triune God.

Chapter two, “The Genesis and Development of the Filioque in Barth’s Earlier Theology,” examines the pneumatological framework of Barth’s early theology, focused primarily on the Epistle to the Romans and theGöttingen Dogmatics. Guretzki argues that Barth’s “most mature application of the filioque in CD IV can be understood as a return to, and material expansion upon, the Christocentric and dialectically shaped pneumatology of the second edition of Romans” (59). While Barth does not set forward an explicitly filioquist position in Romans, Guretzki argues that his pneumatology implicitly supports such a position. Guretzki aims to demonstrate the theological affinity between the role of the Spirit in this earlier expression of the divine trinitarian dialectic and its mature articulation in CD IV. The claim is that Barth’s filioquist position is latent in the very structure of his doctrine of the Trinity from the outset not as a presupposition, but as an organic feature of Barth’s thought.

The primary point of interest for Guretzki in the Göttingen Dogmatics is that it shows how Barth “located the filioque primarily within the discussion of his doctrine of Revelation rather than as a speculative problem on the doctrine of the inner Trinitarian relations” (79). This is a crucial distinction from the filioque’s traditional understanding, which was framed as a question about the immanent being of God. For Barth, however, questions about the immanent Trinity cannot be separated from questions about revelation. According to Guretzki, Barth upholds the filioque “on the basis of the possibility of a personal reception or apprehension of the revelation of the God who is both far (the Father) and near (the Son)…for unless the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, and proceeds from both, then temporal, contingent reception of the eternal is impossible” (82). A further point Guretzki raises is that in the GD, Barth develops the threefold form of the Word of God (revelation, scripture, preaching) on a structural analogy to the immanent Trinity. In this schema, the Spirit corresponds to preaching which, proceeding from both revelation and scripture, is thus present and ongoing. Barth will modify this analogy however, which shift Guretzki discusses in chapter three, “The Defense of the Filioque in Church Dogmatics I/1.” Here, he argues, Barth tries to address the problems encountered in the more linear trinitarian analogy of the GD with the result that the three forms become much more interdependent or perichoretic. This means, however, that the role of the filioque in the analogy is no longer obvious. While Barth continues to hold to the filioque, he no longer does so according to this structure.

Barth formally defends the doctrine of the filioque in CD I/1. As in the GD, Barth discusses the filioque in terms of the doctrine of revelation. The Spirit brings humanity into communion with the Son who reveals the Father, and this communion “is possible only because the Holy Spirit is antecedently the eternal communion of the Father and the Son” (105). Guretzki claims that the filioque expresses the revealed reality of the communion of the Father and the Son. It also expresses their differentiation, however: the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit “are dialectically related in such a way that one relies eternally and continually on the other in order to differentiate itself from the other” (111). For Barth, if the economy reveals the Spirit to have been given by the Son and the Father, then this must also be true in eternity.

Guretzki devotes chapter four, “The Function of the Filioque in the Church Dogmatics,” to pondering the necessary role of the filioque for Barth. First, the filioque is necessary for Barth because it recognizes the distinctive unity and communion between the Father and the Son to which John’s Gospel in particular attests. The relationship of Father to Son “is a unique and dialectically structured relationship which does not exclude the Holy Spirit, but is utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit for its reality” (131). Second, the filioque guarantees the communion between God and humanity – and it does so on the basis of the immanent eternal communion of the Trinity, following the rule of identity between the immanent and economic Trinity. The “unique reciprocal unity of relationship that exists between the Father and the Son in the Spirit” is the ground for the relationship between God and humanity (130).

While Barth never systematically addresses the filioque after CD I/1, Guretzki notes how he applies it at various points throughout the CD. Guretzki claims that “Barth would often relate Father, Son and Holy Spirit in such a way that his commitment to the filioque clearly shines through” (135). The most important and unique role that the filioque plays in Barth’s theology is its positing of an “eternal ground by which it is possible for the Spirit to be the ‘indissolubly real connexion’ between God and the creature, between the Father and his Son, and between the divine and the human in Jesus Christ” (158). The Holy Spirit is the “agent of continuity” (158) both eternally and temporally, in such a way that ontological unity as well as distinction are maintained in the triune relations both ad intra and ad extra. Guretzki explains that it is “precisely because the Spirit proceeds from the common origin of the shared being of the Father and the Son that the Spirit is to be understood as the active divine agent” (160) who unites without dissolving distinction. This is the “dialectical filioquist pneumatology” (162) of the mature Barth, whose roots reach back to the Epistle to the Romans.

Guretzki raises several criticisms of Barth’s filioquist position, the most significant of which hinges on Barth’s positing of structural analogies to the Trinity: the threefold form of the Word of God and the triad of creation, history, and creation history. Guretzki perceives these to be at odds with Barth’s resistance to the analogia entis or vestigium Trinitatis. It strikes this reader, however, that Barth’s opposition to the analogia entis and Barth’s use of analogical concepts are not necessarily contradictory. Barth opposes the analogia entis andvestigium Trinitatis (which ought not to be wholly conflated) as statements of ontological affinity that allow for human knowledge of God apart from revelation. Analogical concepts are not necessarily subject to the same criticism; Barth does not object to the interpretation of revelation, but to side-stepping it altogether. Guretzki argues that the analogy of creation, history, and creation history seems to be an abstraction read into the immanent Trinity, rather than an economic revelation of triune relations concretely located in the biblical narrative. It is not clear, Guretzki posits, that Barth “found a filioquist structure displayed in the relationship of creation and history, but rather that he sought to relate creation and history on the basis of a doctrine of the filioque already presupposed” (162). This second, stronger point also suffers from the imprecision regarding Barth’s position on analogy. If Barth found the triune and filioquist structure to be revealed in the economy, is there necessarily a problem for Barth in using an analogical description of its unveiling in creation, history and creation history? If, as Guretzki claims, Barth’s trinitarian and specifically filioquist positions arise early in his thought from his analysis of revelation, then it seems that the analogy might not be problematic in exactly the same way as a dogmatic a prioriapplied to the economy independently of revelation.

Barth’s distinction between the possible true use the vestigium Trinitatis and its historical use, which he opposes, might be helpful in untangling his position. In his discussion of the vestigium in CD I/1, Barth admits that God’s impartation of a distinct form to creaturely reality such that it becomes a divine instrument might properly be called a vestigium Trinitatis. Thus if creation, history, and creation history (and revelation, scripture, and preaching) can be called creaturely realities made mediums of divine revelation, albeit in a general or abstract way, then it is conceivable that Barth might positively call them vestigia Trinitatis without implying that they create a noetic path to God in creation itself apart from revelation. Indeed, on this reading, it is revelation that makes them vestiges of the Trinity, not an inherent vestigial quality that makes them revelatory. The troubling aspect of these analogies is perhaps not that they are analogical (or rather, vestigial), but that they are formalized systematically in Barth’s thought, as Guretzki rightly points out. The systematic formalization of the analogies lends them the false appearance of being revelatory in themselves, rather than as the imperfect but faithful labor of human speech about the self-unveiling God. Guretzki’s criticism is well-placed, but a more rigorous examination of how analogy functions for Barth is necessary for precise criticism on this point.

Guretzki’s study raises several intriguing questions for further scholarly pursuit, and does so engagingly. He revisits several of the questions posed throughout the book in his conclusion, such as the degree to which Barth’s filioque is Hegelian, whether Barth has an ecumenical contribution to make to the filioque debate, and whether the filioque contributes to a conflation of the economic and immanent Trinity. Guretzki’s work is an excellent introduction to the presence and significance of the filioque in Barth. He covers a broad swath of material which orients the reader to various controversies and potential inconsistencies at stake in Barth’s adherence to the filioque, as well as to its theological richness and complexity. He offers a view of the difficulties as well as the resources to be found in Barth’s filioque both in the context of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity, as well as in the ecumenical context of Eastern-Western dialogue. Given its tight focus on the particular dogma of the filioque, readers of this book would benefit from theological background in trinitarian doctrines and debates. The work will be an invaluable read for academics interested in Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity or the history of the filioque controversy and its ongoing importance in modern ecumenical efforts.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Oakes, Kenneth. Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy

Oakes, Kenneth. Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 304 pp. $125.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Derek Alan Woodard-Lehman (July 01, 2016)

As its title indicates, Kenneth Oakes’ Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy provides a comprehensive interpretation of Barth’s views on theology, philosophy, and their relationship to one another. Oakes – Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame – self-consciously follows the now familiar method of Bruce McCormack by providing a “genetic account” of the overall development of Barth’s thought on these matters. Oakes begins with the previous interpretations of Cornelius Van Til, Jörg Salaquarda, Henri Delhougne, and Johann Friedrich Lohmann, but moves well beyond them. Unlike these earlier, more selective interpreters, Oakes’ work spans the entirety of Barth’s career and the variety of his writings. He begins with Barth’s earliest published essays and ends with his latest public remarks transcribed in the Gespräche. The fruit of Oakes’ unparalleled comprehensiveness is an argument for robust continuity between Barth’s early and late theology, both on the issue philosophy and in general. Like Hendrikus Berkhof, Oakes sees Barth as a “Hermannian of a higher order.” And like McCormack, but with a provocative twist, Oakes sees Barth as a “hyper-Hermannian” who is not only “orthodox and modern” but “orthodox and liberal” as well (59, 244, 250).

In the “Introduction,” Oakes contrasts his own genetic approach to those he terms “formalist” and “particularist” (18). Formalist approaches focus on Barth’s explicit programmatic statements about philosophy. They look for those general apologetic and polemical remarks that characterize Barth’s early liberal theology and later dialectical theology. But they tend to reduce Barth’s views to slogans like “theology against philosophy” or “theology subsumes philosophy.’” The well-known works of Cornelius Van Til and Trutz Rendtorrf are “formalist” in this sense. Particularist approaches focus instead on Barth’s direct engagement with individual philosophers. They look for his specific remarks about thinkers like Kant, Hegel, and Natorp. But they tend to reduce the textual evidence examined to a very narrow range. The lesser-known works of Simon Fisher and Walter Lowe are “particularist” in this sense. Oakes finds both approaches deficient, writing, “If the first option results in bare and largely uninformative statements, then the second offers little more than a sophisticated index” (18).

Oakes incorporates the strengths of formalist and particularist approaches while avoiding their weaknesses by looking beyond obvious texts, yet without overlooking them. In chapters two through five, he treats the “usual suspects,” including “Fate and Idea” (1929), “Theology and Philosophy” (1960), and the discussion of “conceptual subordination” in the Dogmatics’ subsection “Freedom Under the Word” (1938). In chapter six, he importantly treats neglected texts in Barth’s moral theology, such as “The Problem of Ethics Today” (1922), “Theological and Philosophical Ethics” (1930), as well as the series of lectures published as Ethics (1928-1930). To these Oakes adds a lengthy exposition of the Kant chapter from Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1926-1933) – regrettably, without paying similar attention to the equally important Hegel chapter. And throughout, Oakes patiently traces Barth’s less programmatic engagements with philosophy throughout the various stages of his development from Romans to Dogmatics.

As a result of this impressive exegetical labor, Oakes reveals that Barth’s use of the term “philosophy” has four distinct senses. First, and most generally, “philosophy” names those basic ideas, beliefs, values, norms, and ideals that form the background of all human doing, saying, and thinking in any sociohistorical context. Second, and more determinately, in Barth’s context “philosophy” sometimes names the canonical Western tradition running from Plato to Kant, as well as the overall intellectual and cultural milieu that tradition creates. Third, “philosophy” sometimes names particular canonical figures or schools with a tradition, such as Kant or Neo-Kantianism. In this, the second and third senses of philosophy name the specific content that performs the general function of philosophy in the first sense. Fourth, and finally, “philosophy” names “systematic” thinking that aspires to “totality.” Barth often glosses this last sense of philosophy as “metaphysics,” whether it is that of transcendental logic or that of natural theology. Western philosophy is emblematic of philosophy in this fourth sense. Idealist philosophy is paradigmatic of it.

With this revelation alone, Oakes far surpasses his formalist and particularist predecessors. Formalists have mistakenly treated “philosophy” flatly, as if it always signified the same thing. Particularists have mistaken the part for the whole, falsely assuming that Barth’s view on a specific philosopher or philosophy was equivalent to his view of philosophy in general. Getting right about how previous accounts have gone wrong is an accomplishment in itself. But Oakes does more. He attempts to set things right. He does so by noting that Barth’s sensibility about “philosophy” varies dramatically according to which sense of philosophy is under discussion. Oakes concludes that, “It is safe to say that Barth tended to be more comfortable with philosophy as a local knowledge [i.e., first sense] or historical pursuit [i.e., second and third senses] than he was with philosophy as a global venture [i.e., fourth sense]” (160). Put differently, the more determinate and determinative “philosophy” becomes, the more determined Barth becomes to maintain theology’s independence.

Oakes turns to Barth’s sense of his own use of philosophy in chapter seven, “Afterthoughts.” By Barth’s own reckoning, he most often uses “philosophy” in the first two senses, sometimes in the second sense, and never in the fourth sense. Insofar as all human doing, saying, and thinking necessarily rely on ideas, beliefs, and values, so too theology relies on philosophy in the first two senses. This is unexceptional, and therefore unexceptionable. And insofar as Barth sees his own use of philosophy in the third sense as “eclectic” and “ad hoc,” he sees it as innocuous. Oakes best captures Barth’s sense of himself by reporting a pithy nautical metaphor from his debate with Emil Brunner. In contrast to Brunner, who Barth describes as having a philosophical “harbor,” Barth describes himself as having many philosophical “ports of call” but no “anchorage” (113-114).

Oakes further exhibits Barth’s self-understanding by reporting two similarly memorable exchanges form his 1962 lecture tour of the United States. The first is from a panel discussion at the University of Chicago. When Schubert Ogden queried Barth if his theology “depended” on philosophy, Barth flatly denied it, remarking, “Take this glass of water, for example. I am not dependent upon it” (238.) To which Jaroslav Pelikan quipped, “But you are dependent on water in general – if not on this particular glass” (ibid). The second exchange is taken from a conversation at Princeton Seminary. When a seminarian asked about his use of Kant and Plato, Barth admits that, “I have a little philosophy somewhere in my head.” Yet he insists that, on the specific point under discussion, “I never thought of any philosophy in this relation.” For Barth, it is licit to have a little philosophy “in your head.” But it is illicit to have any “in mind.” As a “free and happy science,” theology is freed from having to presuppose a philosophical basis for itself. Yet it is free to have whatever philosophical basic presuppositions suit its purposes.

Here, near its conclusion, the great strength of Oakes’ books issues in a small, but significant weakness. Throughout, Oakes has aimed to present his readers with Barth’s own account of theology and philosophy as he himself presents it. Oakes succeeds masterfully on this count. However, Barth’s own account of theology and philosophy does not fully account for the presence and influence of philosophy in his theology. Although far more comprehensive than its formalist and particularist predecessors, Oakes’ account is not exhaustive. And, to be fair, it neither aims to be nor claims to be so. Still, Oakes’ reinterpretation remains selective. He appraises the philosophy theme only in terms of Barth’s explicit thematization of philosophy. He leaves aside the many places where the presence and influence of philosophy can be seen even when it is not named.

To mention but one prominent example, Oakes pays no attention to the fundamentally Kantian account of empirical cognition as the synthesis of intuition and understanding that governs Barth’s theological epistemology throughout the course of his career. Here, as elsewhere, the issue is not so much “Karl Barth on theology and philosophy” as it is “philosophy in Karl Barth’s theology.” It is not a matter of what Barth says about philosophy, or even what he says about what he is doing with philosophy. It rather is a matter of what Barth actually does with philosophy. And what matters most is not whether or not Barth had a little philosophy “in his head” without having any “in mind,” but whether or not there is philosophy on the page.

This criticism, to be sure, is minor. It regards what Oakes has left undone, rather than what he has done. And, in many ways, the desire for Oakes to do more is motivated by the fact that what he has done, he has done so very well. Oakes has given us what he promised: an interpretation of Karl Barth’s account of theology and philosophy in his own words. He has given us a comprehensive orientation to Karl Barth’s own account of theology, philosophy, and their relation to one another. This, in turn, should generate an equally comprehensive reorientation of in subsequent interpretation of the presence and influence of philosophy in Barth’s theology.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Bender, Kimlyn. Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology, new ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Publishers, 2013)

Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology, new ed

Bender, Kimlyn. Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology, new ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Publishers, 2013), xx + 304. $36.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by W. Travis McMaken (February 08, 2015)

Students of Karl Barth will welcome the reissuance in paperback of this volume by Kimlyn Bender, now associate professor of theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary. Originally published by Ashgate Press in their Barth Studies series, this new edition remains unchanged save for the edition of a short foreword by D. Stephen Long, and an even shorter preface by the author. The volume itself is an exercise in demonstrating that “ecclesiology is a synthetic doctrine,” “dependent upon other theological doctrines and their attendant propositions and principles to provide it with shape and substance.” In the case of Barth’s theology especially, the most important of these determinate loci is christology, “for the identity of the church is intimately connected to that of Christ” (1). Bender’s volume is an exercise in elucidating precisely how Barth’s ecclesiology takes its content and contours from his christology.

Following the introductory first chapter, Bender’s volume proceeds in two parts. The first part is given over to “Barth’s Early Ecclesiology,” which comprises chapters two and three. Starting with Barth’s teacher Wilhelm Hermann, while also occasionally looking back further to Schleiermacher, and continuing through a discussion of reactions to Barth’s ecclesiology as expressed in the Göttingen Dogmatics, this material provides the necessary background for the second part, which discusses Barth’s mature ecclesiology of theChurch Dogmatics period.

In chapter two specifically, Bender examines Barth’s navigation between the poles of Neo-Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Bender’s discussion highlights how Barth found both of these options problematic for the same reason: “Barth opposed in Catholicism what he opposed in liberalism, namely, the loss of the qualitative difference between God and the world and the absolute distinction between Christ and the church, as well as the confusion of divine and human agency wherein the human claims the Spirit as a permanent possession so that revelation exists not by divine initiative but human prerogative” (56).

Chapter three begins by charting Barth’s shift from ecclesiological writings that are primarily critical in mode to those that are primarily positive or constructive. Bender highlights as well how this shift was supported by Barth’s discovery of traditional christological categories, along with the recognition that the logic of such categories “is also regulative and paradigmatic for understanding all divine and human relations” (65). It is this logic that Barth employs in the ecclesiology of the Göttingen Dogmatics, well laced with actualism. Bender also discusses in this chapter some early criticisms of Barth’s early ecclesiology, and Barth’s response to those criticisms.

Part two comprises chapters four through nine. If part one provided necessary historical or developmental background, chapters four and five provide necessary dogmatic background for Barth’s mature ecclesiology. Chapter four addresses the doctrine of election as “The Foundation of Ecclesiology.” It is so insofar as this doctrine preserves “the theological character of the church” through articulating its reality as “the product of divine will rather than human desire” (128). Chapter five deals with the doctrine of reconciliation as the “Context of Ecclesiology.” Bender’s discussion in this chapter have to do with Barth’s reformulation of traditional christological categories in an actualistic mode, thereby positively integrating Christ’s person and work. The logic of how this ties into ecclesiology comes out clearly: “Jesus Christ . . . lives in correspondence to God, and in an analogical manner, the church lives in correspondence to Christ” (147).

Chapters six through eight deal with the heart of Barth’s ecclesiological material in Church Dogmatics IV, but here we must be brief. Chapter six discusses “The Origin of the Church as the Fellowship of the Spirit.” Bender’s discussion here includes a very interesting examination of the dialectic between church as event and church as institution in Barth’s thought, and this is also the chapter that treats Barth’s discussion of the traditional four marks of the church. Other themes mentioned involve the church’s obedience and growth. Chapter seven examines “The Order of the Church as the Body of Christ.” This is where we hear about the church’s form, and the dynamics of the totus Christus in Barth’s thought. Also treated here is Barth’s oft overlooked material on church law. Chapter eight handles “The Ordination of the Church as the People of God in the World.” Primary here are discussions of the church “in” and “for” the world, but there is also a significant examination of Barth’s thinking about the relation between the church and the state. Chapter nine concludes the volume by providing a summary, but also by discussing more recent criticisms of Barth’s ecclesiology and providing a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of his positions.

It is possible to pick nits in assessing Bender’s volume. For instance, historical study of Barth’s early theology has continued in the decade since the book’s initial publication, and certain aspects of Bender’s treatment might be modified in light of more recent research. Study of Barth’s ecclesiology has also continued, with an emphasis emerging in English language Barth studies on the place of mission in his thought. While this component is certainly not absent from Bender’s treatment (see esp. 244ff), it may be that it deserves more of a programmatic place. More generally, the volume has a very finely balanced and formal approach that gives it something of an encyclopedic feel. There are many positives to such an approach, but it also can also exert a lulling effect upon one who attempts a reading from cover to cover.

These mild criticisms aside, however, Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology deserves a prominent place on any bibliography dealing with the great Basler’s ecclesiology. It should be the first stop for anyone—pastor, student, or professional theologian—who seeks an introduction to Barth’s doctrine of the church. It is thus more than fitting that this valuable title has now been made available in a much more affordable paperback.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Allen, R. Michael. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader (New York: T and T Clark, 2012)

Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader

Allen, R. Michael. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader (New York: T and T Clark, 2012), x + 241. $39.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by Ben Rhodes (April 29, 2014)

An old friend of mine who teaches analytic philosophy at an Ivy League university recently contacted with an apparently simple request. He was looking for a compact, canonical exposition of what Barth had to say about the Trinity. If no single secondary source could be relied on to provide such a summary, he would settle for a short selection of primary text.

As anyone who has spent time with Barth’s writing will undoubtedly appreciate, this is very nearly an impossible task. Barth wrote so much about the doctrine of the Trinity, in so many places, and with such beautifully spiraling (and occasionally exhaustingly repetitive) dialectical energy that no short summary can hope to capture what Barth had to say on the topic of the Trinity. This observation could easily be extended to almost any doctrine treated by Barth. But it is singularly unhelpful to recommend reading the entirety of the Church Dogmatics, especially to an analytic philosopher who is looking for a short answer. What to do?

The volume under review – R. Michael Allen’s new introduction to and selection of readings from Barth’s Church Dogmatics – is not the answer to my friend’s request. But it does provide the best one-volume collection of substantial highlights from theDogmatics currently available in English, and thereby admirably succeeds in its stated purpose. Allen’s intent is to improve on the 1961 volume of selections from the Dogmatics, edited by Geoffrey Bromiley and introduced by Helmut Gollwizter, which stopped at CD 4.2. In his words, the reader is meant to give “[g]reater guidance for the novice, laying Barth’s statements over against his wider corpus as well as the classical dogmatic tradition and his modern interlocutor” (ix). More precisely, Allen has composed a reader in the best sense of the term: a coherent collection of selections from a massive primary source that serves to introduce its shape and scope, while whetting the individual reader’s appetite for more.

Barth specialists will all have (different) complaints about what is not included or is insufficiently emphasized, and no review can hope to settle those disagreements to anyone’s satisfaction. The principle of selection is perhaps most clearly stated near the end of Allen’s short introduction to Barth’s life and work, after Allen briefly surveys the debates about the relative importance of dialectic and actualism in Barth’s theology (6-9). Allen suggests that both concepts are secondary, being utilized in explanatory service to Barth’s recovery of “key dogmatic concepts drawn from the classical and Reformed theological tradition and deployed to expound the logic of the gospel. Indeed, Barth’s most important contribution is surely his deliberate retrieval of classical Protestant divinity amidst a modern theological culture that had all but forgotten such conceptualities” (8). For a sense of how deeply sympathetic Allen is to this understanding of “retrieval” see his recent Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Baker Academic, 2015) written with Scott Swain. While I tend to read – and almost always teach – Barth in much the same way, it is important to note that there are other ways to characterize Barth’s most important contribution: less loyal to the classical and Reformed tradition and more creatively speculative, perhaps most especially in the area of the significance of Barth’s christological reformulation of the doctrine of election. Those who prefer another principle of selection will find themselves wishing for another kind of reader, as the Barth on display here is most definitely a Reformed dogmatician.

Allen’s organization is clear and consistent throughout. After his introduction, he has 14 chapters that deal with a large dogmatic slice of Barth, straightforwardly entitled as follows: The Word of God in Its Threefold Form, The Trinity, The Word Heard and Testified, The Perfect God, The Election of Jesus Christ, Theological Ethics, Creation and Covenant, Providence, Nothingness: Sin as the Impossible Possibility, Reconciliation in Christ, Justification and Sanctification, The Living Christ and the Promised Spirit, Vocation and Witness, and The Christian Life. Each chapter begins with an arresting quotation from Barth, followed by a one-page summary by Allen of the doctrinal material and the larger context from which the selection is drawn. The short bibliographies appended to each summary serve as a kind of list of recommended readings, providing a topically focused survey of the secondary literature. However, the bulk of the material in each chapter consists of around fifteen pages from Barth’s, typically from one or two uninterrupted blocks of the Church Dogmatics. Ellipses are rare. Allen prefers to let Barth speak for himself. But Barth does not speak alone: Allen provides lucid explanatory footnotes on almost every page.

These footnotes contain some of the more interesting contributions from Allen, and display his calmly comprehensive and judiciously balanced voice to great effect. Many of the footnotes supply helpful quotations from elsewhere in the Dogmatics or Barth’s other works, rounding out the selections in the main text. Allen often clarifies the terms that Barth is using, situating Barth within the theological tradition, occasionally commenting about Barth’s context, and drawing on a wide variety of secondary sources (mostly in English, though Allen is also aware of and gestures towards major German scholarship). It is in the footnotes that we glimpse what Allen must be like in the classroom: widely read, magisterially irenic, and clearly Reformed. Allen’s footnotes succeed admirably well in helping readers situate Barth as a theologian of the historical and ecumenical church, whose arguments have continuing relevance to contemporary dogmatic discussions, but Allen does not shy away from proffering his own judgments on both the usefulness and limits of Barth’s theological insights. Scholars may benefit from Allen’s footnotes, but they are not written for specialists.

Considered as a whole, the book is very well designed for students who are coming to the Dogmatics for the first time, precisely because it provides a one-volume sampler of doctrinal highlights in Barth’s own words. More substantial engagement with Barth will require reading more of Barth himself, but this volume gives a doctrinal distillate of the great riches of the Dogmatics. As I told my philosopher friend, Allen’s book is a great place to begin if one is willing to read more of Barth, but not a very satisfactory solution if one is looking for a summary of what Barth said. There are other, more incisive introductions to Barth as a theologian. But Allen’s Karl Barth’s Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader deserves to sit on the same shelf as the new edition of the Dogmatics from T&T Clark, which it so accessibly summarizes.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Amy Marga, Karl Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism in Göttingen and Münster: Its Significance for His Doctrine of God, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010)

 Karl Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism in Göttingen and Münster: Its Significance for His Doctrine of God, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie

Amy Marga, Karl Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism in Göttingen and Münster: Its Significance for His Doctrine of God, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), viii + 204. € 79.00

Reviewed by W. Travis McMaken (September 19, 2011)

This tidy volume, a revision of the author’s doctoral thesis completed at Princeton Theological seminary, undertakes to chart the complex relationship between the life and work of Karl Barth and Roman Catholic theology. Attending especially to the early years of Barth’s academic career, Amy Marga – assistant professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary – explores the way in which Barth “sharpened many of the rough edges of his own thought on the Roman tradition’s solid grindstone” (8). Barth was concerned in this period with thinking through God’s concrete objectivity or, in technical German theological vocabulary, God’sGegenständlichkeit. In doing so, Marga argues, he both learned and ultimately diverged from Roman Catholic thought.

Marga’s first chapter is concerned with the interaction between Barth and Roman Catholic theology not only during the period explicated in this volume, but also (and here, briefly indeed) through the end of Barth’s life. Two episodes from this chapter are especially worth noting. The first concerns Barth’s introduction to Thomas Aquinas through the ministrations of Erik Peterson. As Marga highlights, this is a significant moment in German Protestantism because it signaled a break with the way in which liberal Protestantism valued and interpreted history by admitting that theology done prior to the Reformation was useful for contemporary theological endeavor. The ecumenical importance of this move deserves note: “If the entirety of Christian history is legitimate for informing theology, there is no reason why Protestants and Catholics could not study this history in conversation with one another” (29). Second, Marga briefly discusses Barth’s engagement with Erich Przywara. Both theologians were interested in developing a thick articulation of God’s objectivity, and both were working at the cutting edge of their confessional commitments. Each was interested in the other’s tradition and desirous of real collaboration. Again, this was ecumenically significant. Barth’s inviting Przywara to lecture in his Thomas Seminar heralded “the dawn of a new Era in Catholic-Protestant dialogue” insofar as it was “the first meeting of its kind, between theologians on opposite sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide, who were genuinely interested in the theological commitments and concerns of the other” (46).

In her second chapter, Marga begins by charting a broad intellectual desire in the years following World War I to reconnect humanity with its transcendental ground, however conceived. Both Protestant and Roman Catholic theology shared this urge. While Catholics turned to an account of human life within the context of ecclesial community as a ground for objectivity, Protestants were more interested in a shallow ecumenical unity that was nothing but a neo-Protestant reprise insofar as it depended upon the religiosity or spirituality of the individual. Barth never wanted to reconnect humanity with its transcendental ground – God’s objectivity –through subjectivity, whether conceived individually or communally. But how was Barth to do this otherwise? Barth was spurred on here by Przywara, who criticized Barth’s early position on God’s wholly otherness by arguing that it left no room for divine-human interaction and, consequently, no hope for reconciliation. Pryzywara’s own way of holding together God and humanity was the analogia entis. Barth’s response to Przywara was to develop an account of God’s veiled objectivity in Jesus Christ based on an anhypostatic-enhypostatic Christology. He layered on top of this an account of the three-fold Word of God which, based on the Spirit’s continued work, extended God’s objectivity beyond the historical confines of the incarnation. All of this creates a more dynamic account of God’s objectivity than that found in Roman Catholicism: “In contrast to the Gegenständlichkeit of God in the Catholic Sacrament of the altar, which was a Gegenständlichkeit that relied on the innate objectivity of the elements used in the Sacrament, Barth insists that God is objectively and concretely present only through that which God as the Spirit creates, namely, through faith and obedience” (83).

The third chapter continues with a discussion of the incarnation in Barth’s thought and explicates the presuppositions associated with the doctrine in Barth’s mind in the 1920s. This is vitally important material because it explains why Barth was able to employ a version of the analogia entis in his Münster ethics lectures only to so vehemently reject it a few years later, while also shedding light on Von Balthasar’s assessment that Barth’s analogia fidei can be reconciled with an analogia entis. This assessment is possible because Von Balthasar and the Barth of Münster agree on the aforementioned presuppositions. These are: first, that the incarnation presupposes creation, which is to say that reconciliation presupposes creation; second and very closely related, an “original relationship” obtains between God and humanity outside of and presupposed by the incarnation; third and finally, incarnation and reconciliation peacefully coincide with creaturely existence. Marga sets out these presuppositions at the beginning of the chapter (cf. 92), and spends the remainder tracing them through Barth’s texts from that period. The vital insight is that Barth goes on to reject these presuppositions, however.

Przywara’s visit to Barth’s seminar in 1929 represents a crucial moment in Barth’s developing account of God’s objectivity, pushing him away from these shared presuppositions. In his presentation, Przywara reflected on the relationship between faith and church, and on the way in which the church mediates God’s objectivity. It was a highly sophisticated account, but Barth was uncomfortable with it in part because he thought it lacked a proper asymmetry between the two factors. He worried also that such an account located God’s objectivity “within creaturely reality,” where it is “determined by the objectivity of creaturely realities themselves” (128). The point of divergence was the relation between reason and faith, with Barth taking a more Anselmian approach against Przywara’s Thomistic one: for Barth, faith is presupposed by theological reason, rather than faith presupposing reason. Furthermore, “even the presuppositions to faith must be grounded in God’s act alone” (135) given that human reason has no access to God’s self-revelation apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. Barth’s actualistic way of thinking becomes important here insofar as he reconceives the relationship between creation and incarnation / reconciliation by understanding God’s activity in the latter preceisely as an act of creation.

Marga’s task in her fifth and final chapter is to show how Barth’s engagement with Roman Catholic theology on the question of God’s objectivity bore fruit in the doctrine of God he advanced in Church Dogmatics 2.1. She identifies the primary difficulty with Barth’s theology up to this period as difficulty in relating “God’s eternal being to time” (162). This is a variation on the question of how the believer encounters God’s objectivity. Barth’s solution to this problem now in CD 2.1 is to say that God’s objectivity is a reality for God’s own eternal triune life, and only then is it a corresponding reality for us. This is God’s primary and secondary objectivity, the result of which is the affirmation that “God’s correspondence to God’s own being is the basis for human knowledge of God” (166). Given such a position, Barth criticizes the Roman Catholic approach on two points: first, its knowledge of God is not strictly determined by reconciliation; and second, this results in the danger of improper division in knowledge of God as Creator on the one hand, and as Reconciler on the other. Marga does not end on this critical note, however; rather, she concludes with a discussion of Gottlieb Söhngen, who worked to demonstrate the way in which the analogia entis might be articulated from within Barth’s analogia fidei in light of his mature doctrine of election.

Two drawbacks to Marga’s volume deserve attention. First, although providing some discussion, one would like to hear more about developments in Roman Catholic theology during the period in question, and how they might have influenced Przywara, Barth, and their interaction. Second, Marga often quotes at length in German. She provides translations in an appendix, but this is cumbersome. Why not reverse such a procedure for the sake of readability?

None of this detracts from Marga’s accomplishment as a whole, however. This volume would be valuable if only for the archival work that undergirds it, but that archival work is coupled with clear theological analysis. Marga provides a very well composed and carefully researched account of Barth’s early theological development in conversation with Roman Catholicism that deserves consultation from Barth scholars, as well as from any who would sort through the myriad dogmatic issues bound up with thinking about God’s objectivity.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Viazovski, ​Yaroslav. Karl Barth’s Doubts about John Calvin’s Assurance: A Study of Two Doctrines of Assurance (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag, Dr. Müller Aktiengesellchaft & Co. KG, 2009)

Hancock, Angela Dienhart. Karl Barth’s Emergency Homilietic: 1932-1933 A Summons to Prophetic Witness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012)

Karl Barth’s Emergency Homilietic: 1932-1933 A Summons to Prophetic Witness 

Hancock, Angela Dienhart. Karl Barth’s Emergency Homilietic: 1932-1933 A Summons to Prophetic Witness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), xxvi + 336. $42.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by David B. Ward (April 29, 2015)

Angela Dienhardt Hancock’s work on Karl Barth’s homiletic has the potential to rescue a beleaguered memory of the preacher Karl Barth from a horde of rightfully disgruntled homileticians. How many homileticians have given audible groans, arched eyebrows, or theatrical rolling of the eyes at the mention of Barth’s injunction against the use of introductions or conclusions in sermons? Even Barth’s seemingly allergic reaction to training for and use of standard sermon forms is puzzling enough.

Teachers and students of preaching have wondered at Barth’s uncanny ability to express succinctly our experience of the impossible necessity of preaching while elsewhere debating the most basic rules of the art. Those who love the dialectical thinking of the great theologian simply ignore his Homiletics (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) as another example of a specialist stepping beyond the limits of his competence. Those who find Barth to be too acontextual, too potentially abused by chauvinists and Eurocentric theologies, see his Homiletics as a case in point. Enter Hancock’s masterful portrayal of the context as well as the multiple texts that gave birth to the singular English–language work, Homiletics.

No reader of Hancock’s book will emerge with the same imagination of Karl Barth with which they entered. The Barthian will find new contextual grist for the appreciation mill. The anti-Barthian will leave tempered in their disavowal—if not awed at his tenacious display of peaceful courage as an alien voice during the violent birth of a totalitarian regime.

The primary thesis of Hancock’s work is that Barth’s lectures on homiletics were attempts to address an emergency situation, a temporary context. This emergency situation was unique in its challenges and required a very careful analysis of the means of protest available to a preacher in an increasingly state-controlled church. There was the very real danger of gaining no hearing whatsoever in any form of theological resistance. The church herself and the majority of her leaders were drunk on the wine of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and revolution for the glory of the German people. Pulpits everywhere preached on themes with politicized introductions and climaxing conclusions heading toward a great “Heil” to the state and eventually Hitler himself as the leader (Führer) of a great German awakening.

Chapter one details the account of Barth’s journey from “theological liberalism to a theology of revelation” (1). The reader is reminded of the history of theological thought in Germany which moved from Ritschl to Troeltsch and left an entire generation surrounding Barth “searching for a way to undermine the epistemological assumptions of historicism itself” (6). The beginnings of major themes for Barth are seen in their seminal form: “self-authenticating” revelation, the “Godness of God,” hidden secularity, the “always miraculous” nature of an understanding of God “breaking in” on human consciousness, the threefold Word of God, and—of course—the dialectical method in relation to the analogia fidei. Even in this brief overview, Hancock begins to lay out her claims that Barth was a theologian of resistance who “began to imagine a theology free enough to call into question every ideology, every hegemony, and every claim to ultimacy that arose from the human sphere, even if it arose from the sphere of the church” (18).

Chapter two outlines Barth’s “theological existence in the Weimar years” (38). Hancock reveals that it was at the end of this period that Barth asked a nationalistic practical theologian-cum-dean, Emmil Pfennigsdorf, to endure Barth’s teaching of a course in Homiletics, Pfennigsdorf’s field. Most of the numerous conflicting parties in the Weimar Republic had this in common: “an unquestioning and unquestioned nationalism” (41). Such nationalism was fueled by a deep embitterment at the Treaty of Versailles, which subjugated the German people to monstrous concessions. The general populace held that this treaty was responsible for their difficult economic circumstances: hyperinflation, 35% unemployment, food scarcity, etc. (50) Hancock outlines the “stab in the back” mythology that pointed to internal traitors—such as communists, Jews, and diverse foreign “others”—as catalysts of Germany’s defeat, humiliation, and subsequent hardship. Hancock clearly outlines how the “Red Pastor of Safenwill,” Swiss citizen, and Social Democrat Barth was able to “keep substantive conversation alive in Bonn” while it denigrated into riots elsewhere (57). He pushed Germans of all persuasions to “dig down into the heart of things, to measure the ever-present claims regarding nation, race, Volk, and church by the one Word that calls them all into question” (90).

In Chapter three, Hancock succeeds in turning some of the most critical views on Barth on their head. She accomplishes this simply by detailing the verbal context in which Barth was teaching: the rhetoric of the Weimar republic. Barth the alleged blind modern spilling out universals becomes Barth at the edge of postmodernity, unsettling universal claims. Barth the Eurocentric becomes Barth the anti-nationalist. In the homiletical realm, Barth’s reputation as a stodgy traditionalist—silent in the face of contemporary evil—emerges as Barth the resourceful voice of resistance. The Barth depicted in these pages is a “relentless critic of nationalism . . . , a member of the Social Democratic Party, someone who was known to reject fascism, anti-Semitism, and militarism, someone who impressed the importance of theological thinking at a time when revolution was in the air” (132). All of Barth’s criticism of relevance or timeliness to the currentzeitgeist came during a time when revolution was not for the minority but against the minority, not for the foreigner but for the oppression of the foreigner, not for a disentangling of state and church but for a hierarchical marriage of the two. Perhaps critical theologians, deconstructionist theologians, feminist theologians, and other postmodern voices can more appreciatively read this Barth.

Chapter four is where homileticians will begin to feel at home. Here Hancock focuses on Protestant proclamation in the academic heritage and cultural settings of the waning Weimar republic. Hancock begins with a brief but clear outline of the Schleirmachian schema for theological education and moves through the development of homiletics post-Schleiermacher. This chapter explores German homiletics through three lenses of competing influences: “Enlightenment rationalism, Lutheran orthodoxy . . . or ‘supernaturalism,’ and pietism” (141). Figures such as Alexander Schweitzer, Theodosius Harnack, Claus Harms, Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck, Christian Palmer, and even the French Alexandre Vinét are outlined for their contributions and emphases. The chapter concludes by describing how the context of Weimar pressed preachers to believe that German preaching, though in solidarity with “modern man,” was not “close to life” enough (153).

Emil Pfennsigdorf, the homiletician whose territory Barth invades with his lectures on preaching, is portrayed as a culmination of the process of matching German homiletics with the “Germanness” in vogue in 1933. This Volkish, nationalist and triumphalist Hegelianism awoke and saw the light of their new leader (Führer) and cross (the Swastika). Against this backdrop, Hancock introduces us more directly to the Barth who opposed the modern “theme” sermon, who grew uneasy with introductions seeking relevance to the currentzeitgeist, and placed the concern for the hearer in the “widest possible horizon” of “the Godness of God” (181). The strands of Barth’s thoughts that seem to oppose contextual preaching reemerge as clear attempts to resist the use of demographics and contextualization as a means of “persuading the hearer of the nationalist Protestant agenda” (183). What seemed like anti-liberation homiletics, becomes liberationist homiletics in a unique way.

Chapters five and six flow from the careful portrait of Germany chapters one through four established, providing a historically situated way to read Barth’s lectures on preaching. Each week of lectures and discussions is interspersed with the unfolding political, ecclesiastical, and cultural context of the dawn of the Third Reich. Brown shirt Nazi thugs roam the streets meting out violence between lectures. Steel Helmet youth sit in the back of the lecture hall. A political strong-arm battle over who will be the sole bishop emerges. Detractors of Hitler are disappeared. Emmil Pfennigsdorf preaches yet another nationalistic sermon. Heinrich Himmler announces the opening of the first concentration camp for the “protective custody” or people of Communist or Barth’s Social Democratic persuasion (240). Barth was “demoted from his office as senator of the faculty (which designated him as future Dean)” (254). And yet, through all this, the supposedly silent Barth continued his lectures of theological resistance to Germanness and propaganda, ran for ecclesiastical office (a necessarily political move), and began reflecting on with whom he should be arrested and hung if necessary.

In this context, Barth’s table of virtues for homiletics resounds more strongly. Humility becomes important since, in a nationalistic climate, one must guard carefully against assuming the meaning of the text or the meaning of history. Courage emerges as even silence on the issue of Germanness, the Third Reich, or Hitler himself was a dangerous stance to take. Independent honesty arises as resistance to the temptation to falling in with the ranks of marching, saluting, Heil Hitler-proclaiming preachers. This also explains Barth’s allergic reaction to thematic preaching that allowed Nazism to corrupt sermonic content. Even the reading of German newspapers could “poison language from the outside” (310). In all of this, Barth cannot be seen as “politely apolitical,” or as attempting to offer a “universal homiletical blueprint” (327). Hancock argues Barth’s homiletical classroom was a place of peaceful resistance. She has made her case.

Systematic and dogmatic theologians will profit in reading Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic as a glimpse into the practical implications of Barth’s theological thought. Postmodern theologians of any stripe will benefit from a more charitable and—ironically in this case—contextual reading of Barth. Practical theologians in general will find a treasure trove of insight into the theological depth of their tasks, a picture of how easily we stray, and reclamation of a much-maligned practical theological text.

Hancock leans too heavily on the original German for even most academic readers. Her insistence on using the German terms to avoid miscommunication is understandable. Yet even more frequent parenthetical uses of her own glosses would have been helpful. The glossary at the back is an aid in this direction, but not terribly convenient for the uninitiated. Also, it is possible that Hancock may have pushed the pendulum too far the direction of Barth-acceptance. Even though Barth was clearly attempting resistance, it does not follow that his particular attempt was without flaws and failures. Some criticism of his homiletical theory is still warranted, even necessary.

These small concerns aside, Hancock has gifted us with one of the most significant works to date on Karl Barth’s thoughts from a practical theological perspective. It is certainly the most substantive engagement with Karl Barth’s lectures on preaching available. The secondary or supporting elements of Hancock’s work focus on various source documents that give us a more rounded picture of Barth’s lecture series: the unavoidable translation issues related to a German text, a pre-World War II context, and the distance from a twenty-first century audience. Though this is her secondary focus, the fruit of the book in this direction is more than worth the price of entry. As a result, every homiletician who is either traveling along Barthian roads, or seeking to resist the corruption of preaching from oppressive cultural forces must take Hancock as a close companion. Like any good companion, the journey will not only be richer for it, but more enjoyable as well.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Tseng, Shao Kai. Karl Barth’s Infralapsarian Theology: Origin and Development, 1920–1953 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016)

Karl Barth’s Infralapsarian Theology: Origin and Development, 1920–1953

Tseng, Shao Kai. Karl Barth’s Infralapsarian Theology: Origin and Development, 1920–1953 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 319 pp. $39.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Chet Harvey (January 10, 2017)

Shao Kai Tseng’s Karl Barth’s Infralapsarian Theology is an analysis of Karl’s Barth’s theology related to the lapsarian question, which concerns the logical ordering of God’s decrees of fall and incarnation. The received wisdom has been to read Barth as a supralapsarian, both because of his own self-designation as “purified supralapsarian” as well as his formulation of the doctrine of election. Tseng has the lofty goal in this work of renaming Barth’s beliefs as basically infralapsarian. The book’s two-fold thesis is developed over two major sections. Tseng’s first thesis is that Barth’s mature formulation of the doctrine of election involves “a dialectical combination of both lapsarian positions,” including an infralapsarian position on the object of election and the order of the divine decrees (29). His second thesis is that Barth’s struggles with the lapsarian question “are in fact one important factor driving his theological development” (34). Tseng’s major goal in this work is to place Barth’s theology related to the lapsarian question within the broader context of Reformed theology.

The first major section, comprising chapters one and two, offers an assessment of Barth’s lapsarian position. In chapter one, Tseng argues that Barth’s understanding of the seventeenth century lapsarian debate is deficient, and therefore his definitions of the terms, particularly infralapsarianism, are inaccurate. Barth’s most notable error is his description of infralapsarianism as insinuating a chronological, rather than logical, ordering of the decrees. In chapter two, Tseng examines Barth’s fullest treatment of the lapsarian question in CD II/2 to assess his reasons for claiming supralapsarianism and his actual implicit position. According to Tseng, Barth is averse to infralapsarianism for two major reasons. First, he believes it is a result of metaphysical speculation rather than God’s revelation in Christ. Second, he believes that it implies a disruption in God’s original plan for creation. As Tseng emphasizes in chapter one, this is based on Barth’s misunderstanding of the nature of the decrees in the infralapsarian system as chronological rather than logical. In assessing Barth’s actual lapsarian position, Tseng contends that it is best understood dialectically, being basically infralapsarian but also containing supralapsarian elements. Particularly, Barth’s description of the incarnation as response to human fallenness suggests infralapsarianism, but the teleological priority he gives to election suggests supralapsarianism.

The second major section, comprising the remainder of the book, moves chronologically through several of Barth’s major writings to show how his own position develops and the impact that his assessment of the lapsarian question has on other major theological formulations. One of Tseng’s contentions in this section is that Barth’s mature Christology, which is basically infralapsarian in its description of the incarnation as the result of humanity’s fall, comes to undergird his doctrine of election, which early in his career is basically supralapsarian in its ordering of election and the fall. Chapters three, four, and five offer assessments of his doctrines of revelation, election, and Christology during the stage in his career when he hasn’t yet brought them together. Chapter three explores Barth’s Römerbrief II, a work built upon the dialectic of the impossible-possibility of revelation. Tseng argues that in this early period of his career, Barth’s doctrine of election is basically supralapsarian because he describes God’s election on the eternal-eschatological level as determining humanity’s fall into sin on the historical level. However, infralapsarian strands can be seen in his doctrines of revelation and Christology, both predicated on human fallenness.

Chapter four continues with the Göttingen Dogmatics, where Barth’s Christology suggests infralapsarianism in his description of the incarnation as made necessary by humanity’s sin. Tseng points out that during this period of his career, Barth moves toward an actualistic understanding of election, thus eliminating his earlier separation of the eternal and historical levels, and therefore removing a supralapsarian strand from his theology. Specifically, “the incarnation as the objective aspect and election as the subjective aspect of revelation as such are both predicated on humanity’s fallenness” (183).

The groundwork for merging his doctrines of Christology and election begins during Barth’s years at Bonn, which is the subject of chapter five. His doctrine of election in this period contains infralapsarian strands in its description of election as necessary because of human fallenness. However, it could still be considered basically supralapsarian because he grounds each person’s faith or unbelief in God’s eternal decision, suggesting a supralapsarian double-predestination. Tseng proposes a basic contradiction in this period, later remedied, between the methodological conviction that God-talk must be through Christ and his own doctrine of election, grounded in God’s eternal decision apart from Christ.

In chapter six, Tseng contends that Barth’s infralapsarian Christology becomes a chief factor in the reformulation of his doctrine of election in 1936, a time period marked by Bruce McCormack and others as “the beginning of the mature phase of Barth’s theology” (177). There has been some debate concerning the influences on Barth’s reformulation, with Pierre Maury’s lecture on Calvin’s doctrine of predestination considered by many as a major factor. Tseng’s argument is that Barth’s answer to the lapsarian question is a major factor in his new formulation of election adopted in his 1936 work Gottes Gnadenwahl, which reveals a correspondence between the works of Christ and the eternal being of God that removes his earlier contradiction. In this formulation, election becomes “God’s eternal decision to become incarnate,” and thus both predestination and reprobation are viewed in light of Christ (192). As Tseng has already demonstrated, incarnation is a response to human fallenness, and therefore there is an infralapsarian element within his new doctrine of election.

Chapter seven continues the analysis of Barth’s movement towards a full-fledged Christocentric doctrine of election by examining CD II/2, where election becomes for Barth the sum of the Gospel. The central idea of election in CD II/2 is that Jesus Christ is both electing God and elected human, and thus the doctrine of election is known through Jesus Christ. Once again, Barth reveals a dialectical engagement with election in relation to creation. On the supralapsarian side, Barth implies a logical precedence of election over creation in God’s decrees. However, on the infralapsarian side, Barth explains fallenness as the reason for the incarnation. In this work, he claims his lapsarian position as “purified supralapsarianism,” and Tseng explains that in doing so Barth is critiquing the error of separating God’s eternal decrees from God as revealed in Christ in the classic rendition of supralapsarianism. For Barth, Jesus Christ is the object of God’s eternal election, and humanity indirectly becomes the object through participation in Christ.

The eighth chapter concludes Tseng’s analysis of Barth’s work by discussing his theology of sin in CD IV/1. Tseng argues in this chapter that Barth’s christological doctrine of sin is grounded in an infralapsarian understanding of human fallenness. Specifically, God’s Yes in Christ is presupposed by God’s No to the Adamic-history, or history of fallenness, of the world. Tseng enters into the multi-layered current debate surrounding the relationship between Trinity and election in order to show further infralapsarian strands to Barth’s Christology. In particular, Tseng argues that Christ enters into this world-history by taking on human nature as a result of human fallenness. In Tseng’s words, “The incarnation is the history of the electing God’s entrance into the history of God’s fallen covenant partner, in order to sublate the latter’s history of fallenness for the sake of and in the election of all in Christ” (289).

In this work, Tseng presents both a provocative and robust account of Barth’s theology related to the lapsarian question. Both parts of his thesis are sure to draw scholarly engagement for some time. Concerning his first thesis, readers might not be convinced by Tseng’s argument that Barth’s position should be labelled as basically infralapsarian. For Tseng, the deciding factor is Barth’s consistent treatment of humanity as the sinful and lost object of election, which falls squarely on the infralapsarian side of what is considered the basic question of the classic lapsarian debate. However, Tseng’s analysis shows justification for claiming Barth as a purified supralapsarian with infralapsarian strands. Tseng himself demonstrates throughout the work that Barth does not fit neatly within either category, and without dialectic lenses his position can appear either inconsistent or contradictory.

Related to Tseng’s second, larger thesis, it would be difficult to argue against his thorough analysis of Barth’s position and its impact upon his doctrinal formulations. In fact, this is where Tseng’s work shines brightest. He clearly explains complex issues within Barth’s theology, always with an eye to the effect of Barth’s lapsarian conclusions on other doctrinal developments. Most importantly, Tseng demonstrates that the lasparian question can act as a hermeneutical key for discerning the impetus of several major elements of Barth’s theology. However, this work is intricate and at times laborious in its process of ascertaining Barth’s position, and Tseng’s own engagement with current scholarship requires some background knowledge. For readers with this knowledge, this work is highly recommended.

Chet Harvey, Ph.D. Student, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Ensminger, Sven. Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014)

Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions 

Ensminger, Sven. Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), x + 262 pp. $114.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Nicholas Krause (March 05, 2019)

Turning to Karl Barth as a critical resource for a Christian theology of religions, as Sven Ensminger does in this text, seems, on the face of it, quite counterintuitive. Not only is Barth remembered by many as a great critic of religion, he has been generally dismissed by the field of comparative religion as an exclusionist hindrance to the understanding and appreciation of diverse religious traditions. Even among careful readers of Barth, who will no doubt scoff at John Hick’s description of Barth’s position as one of “sublime bigotry,” the subject of religion and non-Christian religions in Barth’s thought is mostly seen in negative terms. A handful of recent works in Barth studies, however, has taken to correct this misreading of Barth. Ensminger’s contribution belongs within this emerging conversation—along with Garrett Green and Gavin D’Costa amongst others—and contains probably the most comprehensive treatment to date of the question of Barth and other religions. Ensminger argues it is precisely those elements in Barth’s thought often seen as least conducive to thinking about other religions and Christian engagement with them—namely, his doctrine of revelation and his devastating critique of religion—that, rightly understood, offer the most promising resources for developing a theology of religions that is both confessional and open to real encounter with other faiths.

Ensminger develops his argument in three main parts. The first four chapters offer close readings of Barth’s writings on relevant topics in both the Church Dogmatics and other more pastoral and ecclesial writings, sermons, and conversations, in order to develop an account of Barth’s position on non-Christian religions within the context of his larger theological vision. The second part of the book further develops this account by placing it in conversation with two other prevalent approaches to mapping religious diversity: “inclusivism,” represented chiefly by the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, and “pluralism,” championed most popularly by the philosopher of religion John Hick. After comparing and distinguishing Barth’s position from these other approaches, part three concludes the book with a single chapter sketching the contours of a Barthian theology of religions and how such an approach fits within the emerging fields of comparative theology and theology of religions.

In chapter 1, Ensminger takes up Barth’s doctrine of revelation, bringing to the fore two crucial components of Barth’s account: on the one hand, Barth’s relentless insistence on the centrality and universality of the revelation of Jesus Christ, and, on the other hand, his simultaneous contention that such revelation is not limited to the Church alone but may appear in “other words” and “other lights” in the world. The crucial point Ensminger develops in this chapter is that Barth’s openness to other “media” of revelation is grounded not in a natural theology, wherein other religions apprehend truth about God independent of revelation, but rather in the universality of the particular and exhaustive revelation of God in Jesus Christ. For Barth, God’s radical freedom and sovereignty mean that God can “speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog,” not because knowledge of God is available outside of revelation but precisely because God may choose to reveal Godself through these things (28; CD I/1, 55).

In chapter 2, Ensminger considers the second crucial component of Barth’s thought having to do with the question of other religions: the notion of “religion” itself. Barth addresses the subject of religion most explicitly in CD 1/2 §17, titled “The Revelation of God as Aufhebung of Religion.” Ensminger details the history of poor translation and reception of this piece of the Dogmatics, especially in North America, as well as the recent efforts by Garrett Green, John Webster, and others to set matters straight. In short, whereas previous translations rendered Aufhebung as “abolition” and thus read Barth as naming the relation of revelation to religion in terms of complete negation, recent and more nuanced readings capture the more dialectical relation, wherein revelation “sublimates” religion, both “abrogating” and “affirming” it (51-52). Ensminger’s contribution to this development in readings of §17 is to bring even greater nuance and clarity to the dynamics of the revelation-religion relationship. The ultimate payoff of Ensminger’s work in this key chapter, however, is to center the Christian religion, rather than other religions, as the primary subject of Barth’s critique of religion, thus presenting a compelling argument against readings of §17 that see in it an exclusivist condemnation of other religions as forms of Unglaube or “unbelief,” against which Christianity appears as “true religion.” For Barth, Ensminger shows, the Christian religion is judged like all other religions, and only proven “true” insofar as it faithfully bears witness to God’s revelation.

While chapters 1 and 2 provide the critical material for Barth’s theology of religions, chapters 3 and 4 go on to locate this approach within Barth’s larger theological vision. Attending to Barth’s anthropology and doctrine of sin, and then to his doctrine of election and the question of universalism, Ensminger demonstrates how Barth’s position on non-Christian religions is situated within a commitment to both the human person as covenant partner with God and the universal reconciliation of Jesus Christ. Barth’s great contribution to a Christian theology of religions on this point, Ensminger believes, is the way he locates a radical openness to non-Christian others, not in a general theory of religion but in the particular and unique work of God in Jesus Christ.

In the following two chapters on Rahner and Hick, which constitute the second part of the book, Ensminger demonstrates the difficulty of placing Barth within the usual “exclusivist, inclusivist, pluralist” typology of theology of religions. Barth, Ensminger shows, shares much with Rahner’s inclusivism, including a deep commitment to the universality of the revelation of Christ, a reluctance to consider Christianity in itself a superior form of religious expression, and an openness to the universal salvation of humankind paired with an insistence on the “impossible possibility” of eternal loss. Nevertheless, two basic features mark Barth’s divergence from Rahner: a far less optimistic attitude toward the possibility of natural knowledge of God and a greater reluctance to thematize human action in salvation. In short, Barth’s emphasis on revelation positions him uncomfortably within either an exclusivist or inclusivist framework. Barth shares much less in common with pluralists like Hick, yet Ensminger argues in chapter 6 that Barth provides important resources for addressing some of pluralism’s key criticisms of confessional theology. For instance, Ensminger shows how Barth’s criticism of religion offers an important form of self-criticism absent in both exclusivists and even pluralist thinkers like Hick.

Ensminger’s book offers much in the way of contributions to both Barth studies as a whole and the emerging conversation around Barth, religion, and non-Christian religions, in particular. Ensminger is at his best when offering close, nuanced readings of key passages in Barth’s writing. His careful exposition of §17, as well as its context and unfolding logic, is one of the book’s highlights. Additionally, Ensminger’s discussion of Barth’s “theory of lights” (Lichterlehre) to explain the relation of the one Light of Christ to secular “other lights” and his account of Barth’s various “media of revelation” offers an important analysis to these somewhat neglected parts of Barth’s corpus. Ensminger’s careful work of distinguishing these two concepts in Barth’s thought—that is, “secular parables” and “other lights”—and showing the differing purposes they serve will be of great interest to readers of Barth on the subject of revelation. Finally, one feature of Ensminger’s text that establishes it as unique in the emerging body of scholarship on Barth and religion is Ensminger’s attention to Barth as a decidedly pastoral theologian, thus locating Barth’s thinking about religion amongst pastoral, rather than purely dogmatic, concerns.

One general question this reader of Ensminger’s book is left with concerns the possible difficulties and limits engendered by attempting a theology of religions, and an account of interreligious encounter in particular, alongside an emphatic denial of the possibility of the natural knowledge of God. If the truth which Christians hear in a secular word or the voice of a non-Christian other is always only an echo or repetition of something previously disclosed in the one revelation of Christ, what reasons do Christians have for pursuing genuine encounter with non-Christian others? In other words, what specifically is to be gained by engaging otherness when one can always return to the particular divine disclosure in Jesus Christ and those sources most directly concerned with testimony to it, namely Scripture and Christian proclamation? What is unique to the encounter with the non-Christian other that demands Christian engagement and attentiveness? These questions concern not so much Ensminger’s particular argument in this book, but the adequacy of Barth’s theology for an account of interreligious engagement. I am confident a compelling answer to these questions can be given on Barth’s own terms and suspect it would look something like a Barthian theology of otherness and divine encounter. Such questions merely point to the room available in this emerging area of Barth studies for further constructive work.

Nicholas Krause, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Religion, Baylor University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Joseph L. Mangina, Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004)

Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness

Joseph L. Mangina, Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), xiv + 208. $29.95

Reviewed by Jason T. Ingalls (June 19, 2009)

Joseph L. Mangina – an Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto – opens a welcome door to the study of Karl Barth’s theology in this volume, which was begun with the aid of Wallace Alston and Robert Jenson at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, NJ. Mangina’s work includes his previous book Karl Barth on the Christian Life: The Practical Knowledge of God (2001).

The aim of this volume is, very simply, to get a student reading Karl Barth’s theology, specifically the Church Dogmatics, as quickly as possible by providing “orientation to the major themes and topics that dominate Barth’s thought” (xi). Mangina does this in seven chapters, some ordered diachronically (1, 6-7) and some synchronically (2-5). Chapter one describes Barth’s life, biography, and theological development, and then offers an introduction to the Church Dogmatics and a guide to reading them. “While it is possible to read theChurch Dogmatics independently, and profit from it,” Mangina writes, “one’s appreciation is helped if one is able to set it in the context of the author’s fascinating life” (xi). With the aid of classic stories and new insights, Barth walks off the page.

Chapters two through five each takes a volume of theChurch Dogmatics, outlines what Mangina calls its “basic move,” summarizes the volume, and introduces a theologian to engage Barth in constructive dialogue. Chapter two addresses CD I, whose basic move is, according to Mangina, “God speaks” (29). After stating with force Barth’s emphasis upon God’s priority in Revelation, Mangina brings Barth into critical dialogue with George Lindbeck. Mangina addresses CDII in chapter three: “Barth’s basic move in the doctrine of God is thus to affirm God’s utter, sovereign priority over human beings – a sovereignty concretely determined as grace or covenant fellowship” (58). Chapter three brings Barth and Michael Wyschogrod into conversation on the Doctrine of Election. The Doctrine of Creation (CD III) is chapter four’s topic. Here Barth’s basic move is “the dependence of creation on the specific reality of Jesus Christ, who is the Alpha as well as the Omega” (88). In this chapter, Mangina sets the table between Barth and Stanley Hauerwas on suffering. Finally, chapter five is concerned with the Doctrine of Reconciliation (CD IV), whose basic move is “simply [the] equating of reconciliation with the concrete person of Jesus Christ” (119). Mangina introduces Robert Jenson here to discuss Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection with Barth.

Chapters six and seven represent Mangina’s critical engagement with Barth’s work and show most readily the direction of his reading. Chapter six deals “with Barth’s ecclesiology and ethics, key components in his understanding of the Christian life” (xii) and places Barth in dialogue with Henry de Lubac on the church. The final chapter argues that Barth is an “evangelically catholic” theologian (179) and outlines Mangina’s hope that Barth will find a greater voice in ecumenical dialogue.

Mangina thinks Barth is a valuable ecumenical contributor because he was a quintessentially ‘biblical’ theologian. As such, he is someone to whom all Christians should listen, even if they end up disagreeing with his conclusions. Throughout Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness, Mangina highlights Barth’s biblical usage, but he does so in no place more thoroughly than in the chapter on Election. Starting with the notion of “covenant fellowship,” a notion rooted in “the very heart of the Old Testament” (73), Barth exposits the doctrine in a “profoundly communal, temporal, and historical” way (74) which springs “almost instinctively” from “a narrative mode of thinking” grounded in the biblical text (75). Narratively, one can see that “to say ‘God elects me from all eternity in Jesus Christ’ and to say ‘God elects me here and now to a life of witness in this particular congregation’ are not, for Barth, mutually exclusive propositions” (75). Barth maintains this biblical thrust straight through his lengthy exegeses of the OT and Judas, and, in the end, is “so biblical” that Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod, the conversation partner in this chapter, maintains that the Jewish people must treat Barth as a member of the family (78).

But to highlight Barth’s biblical character, Mangina seems to downplay the extraordinary systematic accomplishments of II/2. While Mangina ranks the dogmatic excurses of II/2 “among the most brilliant in the entire Church Dogmatics,” he goes on to say that “far more important and compelling are the excursus devoted to biblical themes” (76). Thus, while Barth’s modified supralapsarianism is described (but not named) earlier in the chapter, its systematic importance is left unlauded and undiscussed, relegated to a mention of Calvin’s “double predestination” and “[Barth’s] critical dialogue with earlier Protestant theology” (71, 76). In this instance, Mangina seems to collapse Barth’s dogmatics into his exegesis.

Ultimately, this section would have been stronger if the three-fold nature of the Church’s proclamation, which Barth outlines in the opening chapter of Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959: 11-12), had been maintained. There, Barth says that exegesis continually asks the question “as to the source or provenance of the Word” (12). Exegesis is the ‘whence’ of the Church’s proclamation. Practical theology stands on the other side and asks “how? – that is, the question about the shape and form of the proclamation” (12). Standing squarely in the middle is dogmatics, which again and again asks the question, “what?” – what should the Church proclaim? This movement from whence to what to how is important because the tasks are substantially different and yet are equally necessary in their proper order to support the proclamation of the Church. In this sense, dogmatics takes its stand upon exegesis but cannot be collapsed into it. It would have been possible for Mangina to highlight Barth’s extraordinary biblical character without downplaying his dogmatic contributions.

But this is only a small consideration and will not keep this volume from being a jewel for Barth’s beginning students. Even though it opens the door to a large quantity of material, Mangina is aware of the projects’ limits and clear about its goals. “My goal is to wean the student from the secondary literature as quickly as possible, and to move her along toward an actual engagement with Barth” (xii). Mangina is also clear about his hope: “I will be happy if the pages that follow provide an entrée into the rich world of the Church Dogmatics. I will be more gratified still if they convey some of Barth’s intellectual adventuresomeness, humour, and deep love of God” (xiii). The author should be more than gratified. It is impossible to step away from this small volume without a living sense of three people: Mangina, Barth, and the God who flies across our vision like a bird on the wing.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Benjamin Dahlke, Die katholische Rezeption Karl Barths: Theologische Erneuerung im Vorfeld des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 152 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010)

Die katholische Rezeption Karl Barths: Theologische Erneuerung im Vorfeld des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils

Benjamin Dahlke, Die katholische Rezeption Karl Barths: Theologische Erneuerung im Vorfeld des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 152 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 256 pages. € 79.00

Reviewed by Amy Marga (February 21, 2012)

Benjamin Dahlke tracks the Roman Catholic reception of Karl Barth’s theology from its early days in the Romans commentary (1922) into his Church Dogmatics (1958) in this reworking of his dissertation, written for the Catholic faculty at the University of Mainz, Germany. Dahlke’s work is organized into ten brief chapters and it takes the form of a survey that treats a long line of German-speaking Catholic thinkers who found Barth’s theology problematic but impossible to ignore.

As Dahlke demonstrates, Catholic intellectuals of the day generally considered problematic the aspects of Barth’s theology that were more deeply shaped by his dialectical orientation. But they welcomed Barth’s move back to a Protestantism that was not constrained by Liberal Protestant principles. Catholics saw this as a return to a genuine and honest Protestantism that would allow for substantial interconfessional dialogue. Dahlke’s research also illustrates how, once having established an anchor for their criticism of the other, each side may have lost track of the new developments taking place in the works of the other as the decades advanced. From Barth’s side, this anchor was the concept of the analogia entis, which the Swiss thinker took as the sign of a pervasive Catholic natural theology. Likewise, Catholics barely registered the major development of Barth’s theology in his doctrine of election and the reconstructed Christology that followed. They continued to see him as a representative of the dialectical theology that characterized his early years.

Chapters One and Two cover the first Catholic reactions to Barth’s Romans commentary by thinkers like Joseph Wittig, Joseph Engert, Erich Przywara, and Karl Adam, as well as general reactions to the movement of dialectical theology and its philosophical presuppositions. These early reactions centered on what Catholics saw as the unacceptable divide between God and the world posed by the dialectical theologians and their seemingly “antihistorical” theology. These criticisms recognized that dialectical theology was trying to think through the God-world relationship under the conditions of modernity but, instead of moving forward, Catholics believed that the dialectical theologians were only moving back to the thought-world of Kant. To Catholic thinkers such as Michael Gierens and Friedrich Maria Rintelen, dialectical theology drove theology into an impossible situation of subjectivism, agnosticism, and even speechlessness with its insistence on the “infinitely qualitative difference” between God and the human. What such reactions failed to see in Barth’s own theological development, as Dahlke points out, is that Barth’s thought had begun moving on almost as soon as he became the representative of dialectical theology among Catholics.

In Chapters Three through Five, Dahlke shows how the conversation between Barth and his Catholic interlocutors revolved around the common ground that both shared, namely, a continued commitment to the practices that accompany faith, and the reality of the Church. Catholic intellectuals like Bernhard Rosenmoeller, Robert Grosche, and Erich Przywara, all of whom were guests in Barth’s home and in his classes at one time or another, provided serious and honest engagement with the theological and dogmatic differences between the two confessions. The differences between Catholic and Protestant theology continued to come to light through these helpful interactions. Dahlke names the sacramental theology of the Catholic thinker, Damasus Winzen, and the robust Mariology supported by Robert Grosche, as examples of such differences. These conversations provided Barth with perspectives that eventually became significant elements in his Church Dogmatics.

Chapter Six treats the Catholic reaction to how Barth demonizes the analogia entis in the preface to Church Dogmatics I/1, where he calls it the “invention of the Antichrist.” Dahlke provides a survey of the various thinkers who sought to interpret Barth’s outburst and its significance for Barth’s work as a whole. Bernhard Bartmann, for example, argued that a rejection of a concept like the analogia entis and the possibilities it provides for talk of a genuine relationship between God and the world leaves Barth’s concept of revelation in the Church Dogmatics vacuous. Daniel Feuling came to a similar conclusion. Other thinkers like Jakob Fehr analyzed Barth’s attitude towards the analogia entis from a Neothomistic perspective. They too found inconsistencies in his concept of revelation. As Dahlke demonstrates, it was Gottlieb Söhngen who sought a way out of the seeming impasse between what Barth perceived as “natural theology” within Catholicism (represented by the analogia entis) and the Catholic perception of Barth’s doctrine of revelation. Söhngen perceived a new theological turn in Barth’s work, one that would avoid the philosophical abstractions of Neoscholastsicism and find its impulse in the historical concreteness of God’s own revelation within history. On this point, Catholic thought and the commitments of Barth’s own theology converged.

Dahlke dedicates Chapters Seven through Nine to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s the interpretation of Barth’s theology. He treats von Balthasar’s interpretation, and the “turn” to eschatology that characterized aspects of von Balthasar’s dialogue with Barth’s theology, in Chapter Seven. Von Balthasar analyzed through an eschatological lens the God-world relationship that had been the central locus of controversy between Barth and the Catholics. Dahlke helpfully shows that it was only through intense engagement with Barth’s theology that von Balthasar was able to penetratingly analyze Neoscholasticism and produce the kinds of insights into the Catholic commitments to nature and grace, the doctrine of analogy, and the relationship of natural to supernatural that would eventually lead to a renewal in Catholic theology.

The concluding Chapters Ten and Eleven comprise a brief exploration of Barth’s influence on the Nouvelle Théologie that spread through Germany and France. This includes further analysis of von Balthasar’s influence over Catholic theology with the appearance in 1951 of his book, Karl Barth. Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie. Dahlke analyzes von Balthasar’s development of Barth’s Christocentrism by means of his own constructive perspective on pneumatology, which deeply influenced both Roman Catholic theology and Anglophone Barth studies.

Overall, Dahlke’s volume contributes solidly to the growing body of research on Barth and Roman Catholicism that shows how important this conversation was for theological development in the twentieth century. The book gives important—if not ground-breaking—insights into the way that Catholics treated Karl Barth as a thinker who revolutionized Protestant theology. This engagement allowed modern Catholic thinkers to more fully and openly explore their own accounts of the God-world relationship. Dahlke’s treatment of von Balthasar as an interpreter of Barth and as a central thinker in the dramatic developments in twentieth century Catholic theology is also of great service to any student of this period. If there is a criticism to be made to this fine piece of work, it would be that the survey-like organization of the material does not always adequately capture the novelty, dynamism, and cutting-edge character of the relationship between Barth and his Catholic interlocutors that jump-started a new way of doing theology.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Price, Robert B. Letters of the Divine Word: The Perfections of God in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013)

Letters of the Divine Word: The Perfections of God in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics

Price, Robert B. Letters of the Divine Word: The Perfections of God in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), ix + 210 pp. $39.96 (paperback)

Reviewed by Jeremy Wynne (September 28, 2017)

Robert B. Price offers Letters of the Divine Word as a companion and guide to Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (CD) II/1, where Barth outlines his doctrine of the divine perfections. The book is a lightly revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis. It is elegantly written, demonstrates broad knowledge and sharp analysis of the secondary literature, a keen eye for exegetical detail, and fidelity to “the pastoral warmth and kerygmatic urgency,” which characterizes Barth’s own writing (5). Most compelling, however, is its form: Letters of the Divine Word is an exercise in commentary, “a close reading and analysis of a single text, rather than an endeavor to argue a specific thesis” (1). In this respect, it offers not only instruction in Barth’s thought, but also a compelling model for theological engagement.

Until recently, commentary work was widely considered a gold standard for theological reflection. This was for good reason. Not only is commentary of a particular text “one of the great intellectual opportunities” for original thought (1), but it can also render an overwhelmingly difficult text accessible; mitigate some of an author’s prolixity; and thereby transmit works of enduring importance to subsequent generations. Commentaries required on Lombard’s Sentences in the medieval period might be the example par excellence, though the practice itself is much older. Even though commentary is not unknown today in the realm of dogmatics or philosophy—Thomas Aquinas himself will sometimes receive such attention—still, Letters of the Divine Word is unusual. It’s neither a comparative study, like Claus-Dieter Osthövener’s examination of Barth and Schleiermacher, nor is it focused narrowly on a single aspect of Barth’s doctrine, like Todd Pokrifka’s fine book on Barth’s method. Rather, it provides a careful listening to the whole and in this sense, it has no peer.

However, one might ask, does CD II/1 warrant this kind of attention? Price gives two compelling responses in his exposition. First, Barth himself argued that an account of who God is bears basic significance for theology. It provides the truth common to “all other statements which dogmatics or preaching might wish to make” (13). So, for example, an account of the Lord’s Supper is only as good as the understanding of God’s omnipresence that lies beneath it (121). Many similar examples are readily available. Second, Barth was profoundly creative in his reworking of the divine perfections. In Barth’s work, Price points out, God’s wisdom “cannot be separated from Jesus Christ and reduced, for example, to the establishment and maintenance of some kind of universal moral order” (95). This core judgment—that an exposition of the perfections is bound to the particularities of divine action rather than the generalities of speculative concern—operates across Barth’s Church Dogmatics and distinguishes his approach. In a helpful aside, Price remarks there was a time when this vitality might have been swamped by the “famous neighbors on either side” of this part-volume of the CD, namely “the attack on natural theology before and the doctrine of election after” (6). But that time has passed. Barth’s work—as “one long exercise in trying to indicate the wealth and irreducible particularity of God’s identity” (188)—is receiving renewed attention.

Thus, Price provides an attentive paraphrase of the whole. He is alert to the historical and theological background and so to Barth’s theological development. But Price sets for himself the primary task of a clear and transparent description, a contemplative account of the words and their meaning. He wants to accurately speak for another.

In working through Letters of the Divine Word, this reader was reminded of the following quotation:

In the main . . . I will try to engage in a kind of stocktaking and let the man display himself as though I were under his pulpit or his podium, my interest focused not on his external or internal biography but on the things he has to tell us, and within the sphere of our present study on the one question of what he means by what he has to tell us, desiring only to hear more from him for a better explanation of what he means (Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982, xviii).

These are Barth’s own words, though they are taken from another text. By them, he indicated the program that he himself would follow in composing commentary on the work of another great theologian, whose intellectual powers Barth respected and whose fatal flaws he struggled with immensely. I offer the quotation here because the comparison with Price’s approach is striking. What Barth would extend to others, Price has extended to Barth. Letters of the Divine Word not only brims with quotations drawn judiciously from the CD and others of Barth’s letters, sermons and writings, but Price admirably resists the various temptations that would send theological commentary off its rails: temptations to translate terms rather than instruct readers in a new idiom and discourse; to allow pressing contemporary social and political matters to steer and sift one’s attention; to flatten-out doxology in favor of a supposedly more analytic mode of argument; and so on. As a result, Barth’s voice is indeed dominant, and admirably so, such that at points Price’s text is a splendid mirror of Barth’s own “sober exuberance” (192).

Because of the depth and complexity of Barth’s doctrine of God, the text could be approached in several different ways. One might helpfully work backwards from his conclusions, or perhaps identify the judgments that run across the whole of the volume and provide for its unity. In the most straightforward fashion, however, and despite the regular glances forward and backward within Barth’s argument, Price allows the contours of CD II/1 to guide his progress. The first four chapters are keyed to successive paragraphs in Barth’s own doctrine of God. Chapter one traces the thesis that God’s freedom for the creature and his freedom from the creature are actually one and the same (CD §28). Chapter two turns to matters of definition, derivation and arrangement, offering a helpful account of Barth’s rich dialectic (CD §29). In chapters three and four, the exposition lengthens as Price focuses on the content of the perfections themselves, first as God’s love (CD §30) and then as God’s freedom (CD §31). He follows carefully as Barth moves from “grace to glory, and from gratitude to joy” (170), along the way interjecting valuable observations concerning Barth’s chosen architecture and unchosen conversation partners.
What role, finally, does interpretation play in Letters of the Divine Word? All commentary writing struggles under the possibility of opening as many avenues for reading and inquiry as possible. In some cases, the overall effect can be a frustrating indecisiveness or scattershot critique, the comment wandering too far from the original author’s concerns. Conversely, theological judgment at this early stage might exert too heavy a hand, closing down options the author may not have seen and excluding issues of contemporary interest outside the commentator’s own circle. The line is a fine one. In this reader’s opinion, Price admirably intones his own (often strong) judgments without becoming mired in disputation.

It is notable that Barth himself comes in for minimal critique. Price acknowledges a few points of concern, often stressing that these shortcomings are the result of over-compensation on Barth’s part, the “harmful side-effects” of a strong dogmatic defense. For example, Price suggests that Barth should not have been so wary of nominalism as to attribute mercy and so, presumably, the object of mercy to God’s eternal life ad intra. Grace would have been more adequately handled, he corrects, as a readiness or “capacity to overcome opposition” rather than as an active overcoming (58; cf. 71). Neither should the subjectivism of liberal Protestant thought have pressed Barth to avoid “positive exposition” of the Holy Spirit in his account of God’s omnipresence. Surely, Price suggests, there are better ways “to secure the Spirit’s full reality [as distinct from the human spirit] in a theologically hostile context” (125, 127). In all of this, Price generously keeps to the primary goal of the genre—not to argue with the text but to allow it better to speak for itself.
If Barth receives minimal critique, the same cannot be said of his interpreters. Price, in fact, leaves few stones unturned—large or small. What is at stake is not only the material content of these perfections, but, to reiterate, also the way in which they inform other points of doctrine. Perhaps it is this urgency which sharpens some of the more pointed language in these sections. That said, Price’s substantive concerns stand on their own. He argues, for example, that the charge of modalism that many lay at Barth’s feet is undermined through close attention to Barth’s description of eternity, i.e. “the divine proximity and remoteness by which God is present to himself and coexistent in three modes of being at one and the same time” (117). Likewise, interpretations of Barth’s dialectical method have often failed precisely because they do not follow “the intrinsic order of divine revelation” (46). Other points of concern include contemporary ways of relating immutability and election (141), or omnipotence and human agency (154-155). These are all important and often controversial matters, and Price sheds light on the inadequacies of competing interpretations, while offering his own principled arguments in response.

The final chapter indicates one possible course for future evaluation. Price concludes the book by artfully retrieving three “basic theological decisions” that Barth himself lays down in his exposition of the knowledge of God (CD §27), all of which lie back behind “the details of what [Barth] says” and therefore exert a “determinative influence over the whole” (184, 195). These are Barth’s decisions:
(1) to ground everything he says about the perfections exclusively in God himself, (2) to expound the perfections explicitly as those of the very essence of God, and (3) not to abstract these perfections from their implications for the Christian life (186).

As he proceeds, Price sets each decision in contrast to the theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, whose work runs in quite the opposite direction: from below to above, from the general to the particular. The juxtaposition is startling and provocative, and underscores the sense that much remains to be done in the way of evaluating Barth’s arguments in CD II/1. There is energy, beauty, and economy in this commentary. Letters of the Divine Word has caused this reader to want to pick-up Barth’s doctrine once again and, in light of new insights and vantage points, to read from the beginning, “to marvel with him at the beauty” of God’s glory and live gratefully before the One who “gives pleasure, creates desire, and rewards with enjoyment” (193).

Jeremy Wynne, Assistant Professor of Theology and Director of Graduate Studies in Theology, Whitworth University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Busch, Eberhard. Meine Zeit mit Karl Barth: Tagebuch 1965–1968 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011)

Meine Zeit mit Karl Barth: Tagebuch 1965–1968 

Busch, Eberhard. Meine Zeit mit Karl Barth: Tagebuch 1965–1968 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 760 pp. $43.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by Matthias Grebe (June 13, 2015)

Dr. Eberhard Busch, Professor Emeritus for Systematic Theology and Director of the Karl Barth Research Centre at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, has authored multiple works on Reformed theology, John Calvin, and the German Kirchenkampf (1933–1945). But he is perhaps most famed for his scholarship on the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968).

In 1975, Busch published his doctoral thesis under the title Karl Barth: His Life and Letters from Autobiographical Texts, which went on to prove an indispensable resource for Barth scholarship. However, it was not until 2011 that he published the Tagebuch, which documents the experiences and conversations Busch shared with Barth during the years he spent as Barth’s academic assistant and personal helper (1965–1968). Although Barth wanted to do so, he never wrote an autobiography, and felt that the main problem with biographies is the lack of honesty. He therefore actively encouraged Busch’s detailing of his thoughts, interactions and conversations, in the hope that some of these might one day be published (5).

The task of reviewing such a text is a difficult one. How does one write a review of a diary containing entries spanning over a three-year period including some significant gaps in time and substantial variations in content and style? Thus to review a diary (or as Friedrich Wilhelm Graf called it, a “theologiehistorische Quelle von eigenem Rang”) calls not only for consideration of Busch’s lively and descriptive narrative of Barth’s life, but also an analysis of the way in which these anecdotes and exchanges converge to form a composite whole that adequately depicts the richness of the subject’s personality, thought, and work.

Goethe-Mozart: 11-24-1965 (26–28)

It is well known that Barth loved the Austrian composer Mozart. In the diary we find a very interesting entry on how, late in life, Barth viewed the arts and considered the difference between Mozart and the German poet and writer Goethe.

After an entry about Barth’s hospitalization, Busch writes about Barth’s renewed interest in the works of Goethe. On reflection, Barth regards himself as more able to talk about Goethe at this point than in 1933 when he wrote the lectures on Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History. But what interests him most are the comparisons that can be made between Goethe and Mozart. For Barth, Mozart was a Hör-Mensch (a person who listens), whereas Goethe was a Seh-Mensch (a person who sees). What Barth means by this is that Mozart understood everything as centred around Vernehmen (hearing), hearing the cosmos—listening to a Klang (sound) with open ears. But what about Mozart?, Barth asks. How did he hear? And how did Goethe see? According to Barth, whereas Mozart was selbstlos (selfless), Goethe was radically selbstbezogen (self-referred), and saw the world in relation to himself; his education was Selbstbildung (self-education). What Goethe therefore missed, Barth believed, was suffering, sickness, death, and all things transitory (Vergängliches)—hence Goethe’s disgust for crucifixes and his lack in interest of Christian art. Mozart, on the other hand, had a life that was filled with suffering. And therefore, even though Mozart was no Church Father or prophet, and even though as a Freemason he actually protested against the Archbishop of Salzburg, he nevertheless felt able to carry a candle through Vienna at the procession of the Feast of Corpus Christi (27).

What is highlighted here is Barth’s particular interest in the way that Goethe bypassed Christianity, uninvolved (unbeteiligt) and without any polemic, in effect treating it as non-existent. Even Nietsche, Barth holds, had to rail against the scandal of the cross, and Hegel actually integrated it into his knowledge of the Geist. In this way, Barth observes, Mozart, though not a model “Christian,” was still constantly forced to confront the Christian faith, whereas Goethe saw it as a thing of the past, something that was “behind” him (28).

Ratzinger-Session, Flight from the living God: 2-25-1967 (229–235)

The diary also has an extensive theological section in which Busch provides insight into how Barth taught and led seminars and colloquia. This is fascinating information for anyone who is interested in Barth’s theological methodology and his role as a teacher of theology. Barth held numerous theological colloquia (see, for example, the account of the colloquium on Calvin, 309–313), but one particularly notable one was on the constitution De divina revelatione of the Second Vatican Council, which was attended by the Roman Catholic professor Joseph Ratzinger from Tübingen, and which highlights Barth’s strong ecumenical and pneumatological interest in his late years.

Busch writes that he and three other students were tasked with devising questions to pose to Ratzinger. Under Barth’s instruction two central questions were formulated (229). The first was on the relationship between the Gospel and Church tradition. The constitution speaks as if the preservation and actualization of the Gospel depend on its transmission by the Church. Should this not rather be the other way around, that the life and witness of the Church—and thus its transmission of the Gospel—are themselves dependant on the Good News of Jesus Christ itself? The second central question asked whether the transmission of the Gospel and the growing knowledge of the apostolic witness are truly safeguarded by the Church and especially the juridical-historical succession of bishops, and whether they are independent of the work of the Holy Spirit.

Barth confessed afterwards that he was impressed by the eloquent and precise ad hoc replies that Ratzinger gave. However, he also remarked upon the very particular structure Ratzinger applied to his answers, and wondered whether there was a hiatus between Ratzinger’s speech and his thought, because he always seemed to offer two options (“either/or” or “on the one hand/yet on the other hand”, 230). In doing so, Ratzinger’s theological thinking was characterised with a catholic wideness and inclusiveness, and Barth noticed (and at the time whispered to Busch) that the alternatives Ratzinger gave were not really alternatives at all, but both views that Ratzinger himself held.

Barth usually remained quiet in these sessions in order to give space for the guest lecturer and allow the students to ask questions. When Ratzinger spoke, however, Barth chose to follow up with one very stern question. Having listened to Ratzinger’s description of the rich tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, why, Barth wondered, was there no explicit mention of the Holy Spirit? And why should this tradition still play such an important part for the Roman Catholic Church? Barth asked Ratzinger whether there was a certain “fear” of the Holy Spirit, a question that appeared to rattle the theologian (though Busch suggests that he was polite enough not to disagree with Barth). Barth ended the session with an appeal that, though both churches agree on certain points, we should not deceive ourselves in thinking that we are at the endpoint or goal. Instead, he said, we are still waiting for the one, apostolic Church (230–231).

On Baptism: 3-7-1967 (242–246)

Arguably one of the most interesting but also controversial topics in CD IV is Barth’s doctrine of baptism, an on-going issue of scholarly debate. Busch recounts a conversation he had with Barth on this matter, which gives us a rare insight into how the CD was written and the way conversations shaped Barth’s dynamic theology.

After Barth submitted the manuscript of his book on baptism to Busch for proof-reading, Busch asked Barth about the difference between Geistestaufe (baptism by the Spirit) and Wassertaufe (baptism by water). Busch questioned whether Barth was drawing too sharp a distinction between the two, to such an extent that baptism by the Spirit can almost be said not to amount to baptism at all. Barth answered with a typically lively “No, No,” on the basis that baptism by the Spirit is the pivotal moment in the event of baptism—it is only under these conditions that the word sacrament can be used, the pure divine act (Handeln) of God through which a human being becomes a child of God (242–243).

However, Barth insisted that this “objective” (243) act of God is not something that can be safeguarded by a minister’s sprinkling water over an infant. Thus the individual becoming a new member of the congregation should be seen as the answer to that which is executed (vollzieht) by God alone through the baptism by the Spirit. Busch interjected by asking whether this meant ripping the two apart, but once again Barth rebutted with his characteristic “No”—that this was not his intention. Instead, he said, his concern to preserve their unity was clearly shown in his emphasis that these two moments are part of one Ereignis (event). In Barth’s view, Spirit and water baptism correspond in the same way that the divine Word and human response do, and they should therefore not be seen as mingling or one swallowing up the other. The personal human response to the promise of the Word of God is not simply a consequence the human might choose or not choose, but is instead the essential moment of the baptism of water itself.

Would this mean, Busch asked, that all infant baptism is invalid? Barth answered that he did not mean that. While infant baptism could never be all-sufficient, it nevertheless represented a valid human response. According to the Protestant infant baptism rites, Barth added, the human response is in some sense included in the substitutionary “Yes” given by the godparents, who are called to bear witness to the Christian faith. However, here it is helpful to remember that Barth’s particular focus was on adult baptism, where the candidate had to respond to the grace of God, saying “Yes” for herself (244).

Busch ended the conversation by asking Barth about baptism by fire. Barth replied that he had yet to say anything on the topic, and that it probably meant the biblical language for judgement. He told Busch to write down his own ideas on it at the right place in the manuscript so that Barth could add his own thoughts later.

Rösy Münger, the will of the parents is the will of God: 5-23 / 5-25-1968 (572–581)

The diary also gives very personal insights into Barth’s life and struggles. One reoccurring topic is that of his somewhat thwarted relationship with Rösy Münger, his first love.

In a moment of self-reflection after sharing a bottle of Tokaji with Busch, Barth opens the conversation with a description of their tragic love story. Rosy did not come from a family of theologians, and Barth’s parents did not approve of the Münger family. They belonged to the liberal Christian Church in Bern while the Barth family belonged to the conservative wing. Partly because of his parents’ pressure and partly for his own reasons, Barth broke off the relationship with Rösy, but he was later haunted with doubts over the decision, questioning whether the advice of his parents really aligned with the will of God on the matter. The only answer Barth received was that “Elternwille ist Gottes Wille” (576)the will of the parents is the will of God. Two nights later—without wine or the usual Mozart this time, but with a bottle of Schnapps hidden behind his books—Barth again showed his vulnerability and shared with Busch some stories about his student years in the fraternity Zofingia, and about Barth and Rösy’s first kiss at a ball. To that day, Busch writes, Barth remained unsure about why he allowed his parents’ will to overrule his own desires.

The importance of the Lord’s Supper: 11-22-1966 (131–135)

As a theologian of the Church, Barth was very much interested in liturgy and its various pitfalls. Even though the section in CD IV/4 on the Lord’s Supper was sadly never written, the diary highlights an insight into Barth’s thought on this matter.

Barth points out the key lacuna of the Reformed Ein-Mann-Betrieb (one-man-operation, 132), and how it can only be filled with the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Something is missing, he believed, if a church service only includes a sermon and no Eucharist! It is this celebration that highlights that something actually happens (geschieht) in the church service—namely, after God’s Einbruch (in-breaking) to our world there needs to follow a corresponding human communal Aufbrechen (out-breaking). For Barth, this obviously had to be the Lord’s Supper as understood in a Protestant sense, not the Roman mass. Busch points out that this view (i.e., that a service is incomplete without this meal) did not represent a new thought for Barth; for many years he had held that Protestant teaching on the topic was lacking.

Leuenberg with church leaders: 2-28-1968 (533–534)

Barth was very much a theologian of and in conversation with the people. We see this engagement throughout his life, which did not stop even in old age. After a period spent in the Swiss hospital, Barth asked Busch to join him at a meeting of Reformed, Catholic, and Christ-Catholic church leaders in Switzerland (524).

It was a day of reflection, and Barth and von Balthasar were asked to give talks. On arrival Barth showed signs of weakness, and Busch arranged a chair in the lobby (as pictured on the front cover of the volume). Here he was greeted by various church dignitaries as he sat and smoked his beloved pipe. Without a proper manuscript, Barth gave a lively talk on a theme that was close to his heart in his last years: the renewal of the Church. His thesis was that the Church can overcome internal discord if different denominations choose to live in reformational renewal, not in order to adjust to modern society but as a constant act of return to the God witnessed in the Holy Scriptures. It is God, said Barth, who renews through his Word and his Spirit, and in response the Church should live in renewal in order to serve God and our fellow human beings. Busch tells how on the journey home Barth said that, having given his talk, he felt like a “deer being brought to fresh waters” (534).

The Visit to Rome and Pope Paul VI.: 9-20-1966 (82) and 10-5-1966 (83–94)

Barth’s interest in his later years in the Second Vatican Council and the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church cannot be overestimated, as seen in Busch’s entry two days before Barth’s visit to Rome in 1966. Before his departure Barth prepared a number of questions and organised for copies of his works as gifts for Pope Paul VI, which he signed in Latin. He received a warm reception in Rome, and Busch describes with some mirth how much Barth enjoyed the various privileges laid on by the Vatican, including a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Barth said he was treated like a cardinal (84).

In Rome he had the chance to ask his prepared questions in seminar-style sessions, which sometimes lasted over three and a half hours with six to twelve people present. Barth also met with with Jesuits including Karl Rahner and Professor Dhanis (the director of the Gregoriana), cardinals such as Alfredo Ottaviani, and archbishops including Pietro Parente. Barth conversed with the Pope in French, and, although he remarked that his private audience with Paul VI was the highlight of the trip, the Pope nevertheless did not strike him as strongly theologically versed! The Pope had clearly heard about all the seminar-style conversations Barth had with the Vatican theologians and chose to lead their discussion in such a way that Barth was barely able to make any sustained comment. One mishap detailed is the meeting with Cardinal Augustin Bea. Barth had read Bea’s decree on religious freedom the night before in his hotel room and considered it a fairly lousy piece. He evidently communicated this in their discussion the next day, and the two were unable to find much common theological ground when discussing the topic of freedom (87–88).

Concluding Remarks

As with all of Busch’s works on Barth, Meine Zeit mit Karl Barth is not only invaluable for those working on Barth, but achieves that rare combination of detached insight and genuine intimacy with his subject, successfully depicting the Geist of his friend and mentor. Moreover, his memoirs of those final years with Barth are full of humorous anecdotes (such as Barth’s allowing Busch to use his cigars, tobacco and gramophone but not the wine!, 52–53), personal exchanges and startling—even profane—entries, alongside theological deliberation. The work is comprehensive in its view on Barth’s specific theological, political and artistic concerns, his interactions in the academy and Church, and his friendships and family. It is so extensive that its index lists over 700 separate names (though sadly no theological subject index! Perhaps this could be added in the English translation), and yet it still remains a uniquely composite—and not fragmented—piece.

But does it offer us an encounter with “ein anderer Karl Barth” (5, see also 131–135), markedly different to the one we already know from his works? Such is the breadth of Barth’s whole output that we already have an extremely comprehensive idea of who he is, his theological bugbears and obsessions, proclivities and whims. Nevertheless, the richness of Busch’s description introduces the reader to another side of the multi-faceted theologian: one who, facing death in his old age, witnesses at the end of his life that he truly trusts in the message which he had taught and preached to generations, and that the life, death, and resurrection of Christ continues to transform lives and give comfort and hope. Forthright in his views and unbending in his theological stances, Barth shaped theology in Europe and beyond from the twentieth century to the present day. His vast theological oeuvre can only be complemented by this beautiful depiction of the complexities and vulnerabilities of the man himself and of his relationships with his friends, his colleagues, and his God.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

de Liagre Böhl, Herman. Miskotte. Theoloog in de branding, 1894‐1976 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2016)

Miskotte. Theoloog in de branding, 1894‐1976 

de Liagre Böhl, Herman. Miskotte. Theoloog in de branding, 1894‐1976 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2016), 352 pp. €35,00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Eleonora Hof (November 13, 2018)

Although the work and life of K.H. Miskotte is not yet widely read in the United States, the Dutch theologian, cultural critic, socialist and life-long friend of Karl Barth deserves attention for his existential, literary and creative theological adaptation of Barthian thought. Miskotte introduced, expanded and reworked Barth’s thought for a Dutch context.

The commencing of Barth’s and Miskotte’s story can be traced back to February 1, 1923, the exact day when Miskotte read Barth’s Römerbrief. Miskotte was clearly not impressed. In his diary, he audaciously accused Barth of Marcionism, a startling claim which could not be sustained. Yet, his claim reveals how Miskotte initially perceived Barth to be distinguishing between the God of the Old and the New Testament, due to Barth feeling threatened by the apparent severance of the bond between Christ and Christianity.

Consequently, Miskotte considered it his duty to write Barth a letter, insisting that Barth should pay greater attention to the theology of Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrugge. Barth, upon receiving this letter, was clearly not pleased with this intrepid and unsolicited advice, since he was already engaging the work of Kohlbrugge and acknowledging his influence on his own theology.

In 1937, Miskotte heard that Barth had begun the project of writing a systematic theology. Miskotte wrote Barth a letter in which he criticized this endeavor opining that Barth was forsaking his calling as a prophet. According to Miskotte, Christians should instead live in protest against the grounding structures of the current world, mirroring Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel. Naturally, Barth disproved of Miskotte’s critique. To Barth, Ivan Karamazov’s protest on its own was futile: its meaning is directly derived from the fact that his rebellion is embedded in the life of Christ who rightfully authorizes this protest.

Miskotte’s reference to The Brothers Karamazov reveals how his reading of literary works informed his theology. Miskotte was deeply impressed by the beauty he found within literature and nature. He was also drawn to mysticism, because he was enticed by the lure of nature in his early life and Miskotte remained a sensitive soul overwrought with the impressions of beauty throughout his life. Miskotte’s predisposition to romanticism and mysticism meant that he was not enticed by the dialectics of Barthian theology, hence his initial resistance to Barth’s thought. We still do not have a satisfactory account of what ultimately led Miskotte to embrace Barth’s theology, but when he did, it was decisive, and Miskotte remained a lifelong admirer and proponent of Barth. Miskotte saw in Barth’s dialectics the discovery of the very structure of the biblical testimony itself. This uncovering of a new way to read the Bible led to an intense concentration on exegesis and hermeneutics. Miskotte’s own hermeneutic approach shows his fervent desire to take the foundational structure of the Biblical testimony seriously. He emphasized time and again in his Biblical ABCs that we do not yet know through reason or philosophy who God is – God reveals himself not in philosophical categories such as omnipotence or omniscience, but principally through his actions. Reading the Bible becomes thus an exercise in encountering the actions of God, which teach us the relational and personal character of God.

In the ensuing friendship between Miskotte and Barth, Miskotte’s own character and expertise “surplus” of Miskotte remained visible, namely his artistic sensibilities, his knowledge about literature and his sensitivity for nature’s wonders. Whenever they met, Barth would receive a “crash course” in recent literary developments. Nevertheless, they would never be complete equals in their friendship. Miskotte remained a pupil of Barth, even though Miskotte was a creative theologian in his own right, and Barth refused to seriously engage with Miskotte’s pressing concern regarding Barth’s rejection of infant baptism.

When the chair of systematic theology in Utrecht became vacant, efforts were undertaken to appoint Barth to fill this chair, since he was recently forced out of his chair in Bonn. Barth was eventually found to be too leftist—whatever that might have meant exactly in that context, we do not know—and Barth was asked instead to deliver a series of lectures at Utrecht. These lectures consisted of a treatment of the Apostles’ Creed, and they were translated and annotated by Miskotte. The publication of these lectures was the very first Dutch translation of Barth’s work and they made him accessible beyond the theological guild. Barth’s lectures at Utrecht were published in English in 1962 as Credo.

In his wartime writing, Biblical ABCs, Miskotte paired his zeal for the foundational words of the biblical testimony with an exposition of the nature of pagan religion. The result was an accessible booklet aimed at congregants and pastors in Amsterdam, helping them to formulate a better resistance against the deadly Nazi-occupation in the Netherlands. A better resistance is a resistance grounded in a theological understanding of the pagan roots of national-socialism The Biblical ABCs is currently being translated into English by Dr. Collin Cornell and myself, and is under contract with Lexington – Fortress Academic and will be in print in late 2019. .

As I wrote my dissertation on postcolonial missiology, naturally I read the section in the biography that discusses Miskotte’s Indonesian travels with great interest. Miskotte was invited in 1937 to give a lecture series in present-day Indonesia, which was under Dutch colonial rule until 1949. The diary entries and letters written to his wife during this trip are preserved, and a selection is published in K. H. Miskotte. een keuze uit zijn dagboeken en andere teksten (Baarn: Uitgeverij de Prom, 1994). Miskotte himself spoke in private about the paradigmatic influence that this Indonesian trip had on his thought, but this influence never materialized in his work apart from three lectures he delivered in Haarlem on the topic of the church in the colony. De Liagre Böhl spoke matter-of-factly about the Indonesian trip and he praises Miskotte for his timely critique on the colonial church in Indonesia. However, when reading the diary entries of Miskotte himself, another image emerges, namely, of someone who was not exempt from the pernicious sexualization of indigenous women. Miskotte wrote at astonishing length and detail about the bare breasts of the women he encountered, barely concealing his own arousal. In one telling quote, which is included in De Liagre Böhls’s biography, Miskotte fixes his gaze upon a pregnant woman, whom he considers to be “bursting with life”. This sexualization of these indigenous women was an integral part of the colonial logic since celebration of the fertility of colonized women went hand in hand with the exploitation of their fertile and perceived virginal land. As such, Miskotte’s private remarks are far from innocent, since they lay bare how even well-meaning theologians were not exempt from the poisonous air of colonial rhetoric. The biographer would, therefore, have done well to devote more attention to this troubled dimension of Miskotte’s engagement with colonialism, which would have resulted in a more nuanced treatment. Given Miskotte’s complex personality, he was able to both denounce the colonial church, and still also embody a colonial male gaze at the same time.

For Barth scholars, this biography has much to offer, despite the fact that the book is only available in the Dutch language. The book offers a model for how to write a theological biography due to its accessibility, the seamless merging of the personal and the theological, and its avoidance of hagiography. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that it has become possible to discuss mental ailments and instability openly, and how these mental health issues impacted the work of highly-respected theologians. Miskotte is no different. His life was characterized by profound melancholic periods, interspersed with periods of almost maniacal productivity. Miskotte wrote his dissertation in only half a year. This feat is not simply a manifestation of genius, but it also signals a warning sign about his mental health. With sensitivity and empathy, De Liagre Böhl writes about the great tragedy that struck the Miskotte household in 1946. During this year, the Miskotte family attended a wedding ceremony and ate some contaminated fish. With the exception of Miskotte, everyone in the family fell seriously ill, which resulted in the death of Miskotte’s wife and daughter from a typhus infection. An intense personal and spiritual crisis ensued where Miskotte blamed himself for what happened, citing his occasional egocentric behavior in their marriage as the cause of the tragedy.

De Liagre Böhl’s biography is a helpful resource for both theologians and non-theologians. As the great-grandson of Kohlbrugge, De Liagre Böhl is not a theologian by trade, but rather a historian who has written well-regarded biographies of Dutch literary figures. De Liagre Böhl’s skill as a historian has enabled him to make theological concepts accessible for non-theologians without sacrificing quality.

Hopefully this biography might contribute to a more thorough reflection of the Barth-reception in the Netherlands, not just within historical studies, but also within the field of systematic theology as well. This biography could therefore be read alongside Susanne Hennecke’s monograph Karl Barth in den Niederlanden Teil. Theologische, kulturelle und politische Rezeption (1919-1960). As the reviewer of this study, E.G. Meijering asserts that the waning influence of Barth in the 1960s in the Netherlands could have been related to the growing interest in the work of Martin Buber, of whose work Miskotte was, to put it in contemporary language, an “early adopter.” It remains the case, regretfully, that Barth called Buber disparagingly a “Neuphärisäer.” Since the interest in Jewish-Christian dialogue flourished during that time period, Barth’s unwillingness to engage Buber might have hampered his further reception in the Netherlands. Miskotte’s early dialogue with thinkers such as Buber, Rosenzweig, Ernst Bloch and Max Brod inoculated him against this pernicious sentiment, and this engagement functioned as a trailblazer for Christian-Jewish dialogue in the Netherlands.

Eleonora Hof (BA 2008, cum laude, ETF Leuven; MA 2010 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, cum laude; PhD 2016 Protestant Theological University Amsterdam) is a board member of the Miskotte Foundation and minister-in-training in the United Protestant Church in Belgium

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Moseley, Carys. Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth 

Moseley, Carys. Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), x + 219 pp. $110.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Clifford B. Anderson (August 25, 2016)

A great deal of contemporary Barth scholarship follows well-worn paths, exploring dogmatic themes with reference primarily to the Church Dogmatics. Refreshingly, Carys Moseley’s Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth charts new territory in the field of Barth studies. Moseley, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, traces Barth’s theological perspective on nations from his earliest theology to his Church Dogmatics, drawing on relevant Anglo-American and continental scholarship to articulate her perspective. Her study demonstrates the significance of the neglected concept of nation in Barth’s theology.

Moseley builds on a significant secular body of literature on nations and nationalism. While she introduces key concepts from this literature, readers may find themselves wishing she had provided greater context for some distinctions she draws. In particular, understanding her argument requires distinguishing between “nations” and “states.” As Barth remarked in his Ethics, “Nation and state are not coextensive.” The former is a socio-cultural entity whereas the latter is a political configuration. There are numerous examples of stateless nations-that is, nations without sovereign governments–ranging from the Scots in Great Britain to the Uighur in Asia to the Kurds in the Middle East to the Cherokees in the United States. What is the theological significance of nations? Should every nation have its own state, as nationalists contend? Did God divide the world into nations in Creation? Do nations serve providential purposes or even promote soteriological ends?

Moseley constructs her argument chronologically. From his earliest days, Barth was always hostile toward nationalism. His hostility arose in part due to his Swiss citizenship. As a citizen of a state founded on a treaty between four national groups, Barth inherently rejected the nationalist dogma that every nation must have its own state. His socialism also inclined him toward internationalism. Indeed, Barth’s bitter disappointment at socialist collusion with nationalism at the beginning of the Great War propelled him into his search for new theological foundations. By the conclusion of the war, Barth had developed a trinitarian reading of Scripture that countermanded the tendency to identify the Holy Spirit with national enthusiasms. His firm distinction between the spirit of the nation and the Holy Spirit informed his resistance to National Socialism during the Second World War. However, it also leaves open questions. If nationalism constitutes a form of idolatry, does that mean that national differences also lack theological significance? Barth returned repeatedly to this question throughout his career. In the section on “Near and Distant Neighbors” in Church Dogmatics III/4, he acknowledged nations as historical constructs within which Christians are called to respond to God’s providential decrees. While not rooted in creation, national bear historical significance.

Zionism influenced Barth’s views significantly. The Jewish people were the theological exemplar of a stateless nation, at least prior to 1948. Moseley’s attention to Judaism is crucial for her study. Barth’s support for the establishment of Israel seems to contradict his anti-nationalism. Why should the Jewish nation require its own state when lots of other stateless nations do not? Of course, the fate of the Jews during the Shoah provided abundant historical rationale. But Barth also provided a theological rationale–Israel is not fundamentally a nation in the secular sense, but called to be a nation by divine providence. As Moseley describes Barth’s views, “Israel is a people or nation only due to God’s election” (178). As I understand the argument, the existence of Israel as a nation is not the consequence of the Created order or historical providence, but a judgment against the aseism of other nations and against their consequent nationalisms.

Barth’s understanding of the place of Israel among the nations also likely reflected his reading of the Pentecost narrative. Moseley skillfully intertwines a history of the exegesis of the second chapter of Acts. The Pentecost narrative is relevant for the study because it addresses the relation between the spirit and the national identity. Barth did not subscribe to the dominant opinion among New Testament scholars of the period questioning the reliability of narrative in Acts. Moseley shows that the skeptical reading stemming from F. C. Baur supported theological efforts to disassociate the early church from its Jewish origins. As she notes, such readings of Acts lead others to substitute their nations for Israel. Barth’s acceptance of the (miraculous) historicity of the Pentecost narrative in Acts, which bolstered his defense of the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed, provided him with the theological resources necessary to safeguard the identity of the Spirit against any nationalist appropriation.

Barth’s alternative to nationalism was likely the formation of large multinational states. Moseley notes that Barth’s dislike of nationalism made him “oddly nostalgic for the Holy Roman Empire as a superstate which kept nationalism in its place” (17). Barth backed away from this nostalgia after the Second World War–probably because, Moseley speculates, he wished to avoid conflation of his position with Hitler’s imperialism. Barth would undoubtedly have been a strong supporter of the European Union, however.

We might also wonder what his perspective would have been toward multinational corporations. In our era, corporations are effacing national boundaries and have acquired powers formerly associated with sovereign states. Moseley does not explore this question, which obviously is speculative rather than historical. On the one hand, Barth classified “nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism” together as pernicious forces. On the other, corporations have arguably become social-cultural entities that transcend the boundaries of nations and states, relativizing national cultures and languages. Would Barth’s hostility toward capitalism have predisposed him against finding any positive role for multinational corporations? Or might he have regarded them as unlikely allies in his fight against nationalism?

Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth will appeal broadly beyond the field of Barth studies to ethicists and to scholars working on political theology from a variety of viewpoints. Her attention to the exegesis of Acts makes her study of interest to New Testament scholars as well. Given the wide appeal of her subject matter, I wish that Moseley had confined disagreements with fellow scholars of Karl Barth to the footnotes. The presence of these asides scattered throughout her text likely arises from the book’s origins as an academic dissertation, but detracts from the readability of her narrative.

Despite the occasional forays into intramural disputations, Moseley’s work deserves wide reading from theological and political scholars. In the era of the renewal of political theology, which is closely associated with Carl Schmitt’s claim that politics is always about the distinction between friends and enemies, Barth demonstrated a peaceable alternative that both preserves differences between nations while relativizing their final significance in light of God’s providential designs for the reconciliation and redemption of his peoples.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Petershans, Sören. Offenbarung des Namens und versöhntes Leben: Eine Untersuchung zur Gotteslehre bei Kornelis Heiko Miskotte. Arbeiten zur Systematischen Theologie 11 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt,2016)

Offenbarung des Namens und versöhntes Leben: Eine Untersuchung zur Gotteslehre bei Kornelis Heiko Miskotte. Arbeiten zur Systematischen Theologie 11

Petershans, Sören. Offenbarung des Namens und versöhntes Leben: Eine Untersuchung zur Gotteslehre bei Kornelis Heiko Miskotte. Arbeiten zur Systematischen Theologie 11 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt,2016), 320 pp. $85.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Collin Cornell (December 05, 2017)

The back cover of Sören Petershans’s book indicates that the thinker in question—Dutch theologian Kornelis Heiko Miskotte—remains largely unknown to German-language theology. Germans may dimly recall Miskotte as a mid-century interpreter of Karl Barth and a pioneer of Jewish-Christian dialogue. But beyond that, nichts! If such obscurity obtains in German-speaking lands, it runs much deeper in the Anglophone realm.

Petershans thus faces a relatively uncongested theological arena upon which to stage his thesis: that far from being merely a Barth epigone, Miskotte developed his own distinctive theology, and that its individuality is nowhere more evident than its doctrine of God. Hence the title of Petershans’s book, which in English reads, Revelation of the Name and Reconciled Life: A Study on the Doctrine of God according to Kornelis Heiko Miskotte.

Christian Link and Ulrich Körtner supervised the 2014 University of Vienna dissertation which Offenbarung des Namens und versöhntes Leben, in revised form, represents. The first 96 pages of Petershans’s study provide a bird’s-eye view of Miskotte’s theology and an examination of his three greatest theological influences. These remarks prepare for the longer, more focused, and more innovative second part of Petershans’s book.

Kornelis Heiko Miskotte (1894-1976) was born in Utrecht and studied theology at Utrecht University. After graduating, he pastored for twenty years in both rural and urban settings, completing a dissertation at the University of Groningen while serving as a full-time pastor. His first theological mentor was Johannes Hermanus Gunning, Jr., a founder of the Dutch “Ethical Theology.” The central concept of this theological school was encounter with God. Divine revelation imparted a way of life and not doctrinal content; truth was a matter of ethics and not objective and rational. Miskotte would later call this approach “ethical mysticism.” Above all it sought a synthesis of faith and culture. Although Miskotte would later dissent sharply from this synthesis, his mature doctrine of God nonetheless inherits much from this theological school. Miskotte’s emphasis on experience, even experience of God, and his sense of apostolic solidarity with culture and the world alike trace back to Gunning’s influence.

In 1923, while serving in his first pastoral call, Miskotte read Karl Barth’s Römerbrief. His initial journal entry on it deems Barth’s style expressionist and his thought Marcionite. However, Barth won him over after only a few days. Miskotte began a correspondence with Barth—and a theological friendship—that would last until Barth’s death in 1968. Barth would in 1956 address Miskotte as “the seer and poet among my friends.” Miskotte considered himself a disciple. He wrote several books on Barth, including two on the Church Dogmatics alone, and he became the best-known proponent of Barth’s theology to the Netherlands. Barth’s influence saturates Miskotte’s theology; Miskotte’s understanding of divine revelation is deeply indebted to it. Like Barth and other dialectical theologians, Miskotte renounced any synthesis of God and culture. Instead he upheld the particularity and event-character of God’s self-disclosure. Miskotte also shared Barth’s Christological concentration (as it has been called) and his attentiveness to the theological locus of predestination. For him as for Barth, Jesus Christ is the singular and exclusive Word of God, and God’s initiative towards humanity in Christ coincides with God’s own self-determination from eternity.

The last of Miskotte’s three major influences is the Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, whose Star of Redemption Miskotte read in 1928, and about whom he wrote much of his Groningen dissertation. In common with many Christian dialectical theologians, Rosenzweig’s work centers on divine revelation as an event. In distinction from other dialectical theologians, Rosenzweig envisions the proper name of God—the Tetragrammaton—as the event of revelation. Miskotte wholly absorbed this conviction. Rosenzweig also taught Miskotte to prize the Old Testament as a self-standing theological witness. Indeed, for Miskotte the Old Testament already contains “all truth,” and it preaches God’s becoming-flesh (Gottes Fleischwerdung). The unique property of the New Testament is only to name this becoming-flesh as Jesus Christ—and so to foreground divine love. Rosenzweig also confirmed for Miskotte the experiential nature of encounter with God.

The second part of Petershans’s book divides into three sections. The first draws on analytic philosophy of language to streamline and sophisticate Miskotte’s view of the divine name. Here Petershans differentiates between proper names and appellatives (Benennungsnamen). God appointed one proper name to the divine self—YHWH. As a proper name, YHWH refers fixedly to one unsubstitutable individual, even as that individual’s other attributes and forms of address vary. In this way, Petershans layers a more technical vocabulary onto Miskotte’s own comments that the divine name is “a nameless name”—truly empty of content and solely referential—while attracting other names and qualities.

The second and third sections present the heart of Petershans’s book. Petershans engages in close exegesis of Miskotte’s writings, primarily his 1956 book, When the Gods are Silent (English translation, Harper 1967) and his primer in Bible reading, Biblical ABCs, written under Nazi occupation in 1941 and still untranslated into English. These sections also demonstrate Petershans’s thesis that Miskotte’s doctrine of God is distinct relative to Barth. The second section, entitled “Revelation as Revelation of the Name according to Miskotte,” accesses Miskotte’s concept of revelation through his teaching about predestination. Petershans organizes much of his discussion on the basis of a schema he derives from section headings in Miskotte’s Biblical ABCs:

Name = Revelation
Name = YHWH
Name = Jesus Christ

Miskotte identifies the divine name YHWH as the event of divine self-revelation. But he also understands revelation most basically as sanctification (Heiligung), that is, as effecting Lebensänderung—“life change.” For Miskotte, divine revelation as such transforms the participating human subject. This is seen in Miskotte’s treatment of the paradigmatic burning bush narrative (Exodus 3), where God’s communication of a name is at the same time a divine self-determination (Selbstbestimmung) to liberate Israel from Egypt—a Lebensänderung of some magnitude. Miskotte calls this event an Urtat—a primordial act of divine self-demarcation; Petershans glosses it as “predestination.” In the schema above and throughout his writings, Miskotte also equates this event with the Bible’s other proper name: Jesus Christ. Miskotte thus speaks of “one covenant,” “one salvation,” and “oneness of the times,” in that both testaments of the Christian Bible by a “double reference” witness to a single divine self-determination to save. Together but distinctly they testify to a single divine predestination of the divine self for assumptio carnis—“assumption of flesh.” In this way, Miskotte makes revelation of the name and reconciled life to coincide, as in Petershans’s main title.

Miskotte views the two testaments as united in their witness to God’s becoming-flesh, but he also differentiates them, and that difference silhouettes his individuality relative to Barth. The difference—or “surplus,” as Miskotte calls it—of the New Testament vis-à-vis the Old is its clarity in presenting this “one salvation” as justification. The surplus of the Old is its clarity in presenting salvation in its aspect as sanctification. The Old Testament, in other words, articulates the revelation of the divine name within a rich and concrete variety of human experiences—erotic and political, economic and ethical—while the New Testament does not. Because he prioritizes the Old Testament, the human and participatory “side” of revelation is thereby given prominence in Miskotte’s theology. In just this regard, Petershans argues, Miskotte distinguishes his doctrine of God from Barth’s. Barth focuses on revelation as justification, and so seals his theological system off from human experience; Miskotte focuses on revelation as sanctification, maintaining a greater openness to human experience and culture. To be sure, as Petershans observes at length, the two theologians differ in their Trinitarian doctrine: Miskotte hardly speaks of the Trinity while Barth is famous for recovering it. But Petershans locates the more fundamental divide in Miskotte’s view of divine self-revelation as sanctification.

Offenbarung des Namens und versöhntes Leben brings welcome attention to an interesting and underappreciated theologian in the dialectical trajectory. For that alone Petershans’s book renders a valuable service to the theological academy. Petershans also deserves thanks for giving a relatively clear overview of a theologian whose thick prose and meandering presentation one early reviewer described as “stygian” (James Brown, Scottish Journal of Theology, 1969). Also valuable is Petershans’s engagement with other authors who have written about Miskotte, particularly since most of them write in Dutch. Petershans’s frequent translations from Dutch to German in footnotes, for example, are helpful. However, not all the sections of his book are equally successful. Petershans is at his best when he exposits Miskotte—and not when he makes long summaries of secondary literature on analytic philosophy or theologies of revelation. His book will be of interest to Barth scholarship as an example of free-thinking and constructive Barthianism.

My thanks to Dr. Eleonora Hof for her helpful comments on a draft of this review.
Collin Cornell, Ph.D. Candidate, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Emory University
The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Currie, Thomas. The Only Sacrament Left to Us: The Threefold Word of God in the Theology and Ecclesiology of Karl Barth

The Only Sacrament Left to Us: The Threefold Word of God in the Theology and Ecclesiology of Karl Barth 

Currie, Thomas. The Only Sacrament Left to Us: The Threefold Word of God in the Theology and Ecclesiology of Karl Barth (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 196 pp. $23.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Catherine C. Tobey (February 15, 2016)

Mega churches in urban centers and small suburban and rural congregations suffer alike from priestly mentalities and cults of personality. In The Only Sacrament Left to Us, Thomas Christian Currie poises the insight of an unsatisfied and passionate theologian who calls us back to Christ as our center, our life, our everything, and commissions us all to an Advent state of mind.

The key, for Currie, is the threefold Word of God, which is not only intimately tied to Karl Barth’s concept of the church, but also to his whole venture. Currie takes a step forward in Barth studies by presenting a case for Barth’s development of the threefold Word of God as it relates to Barth’s gospel-centric actualistic ecclesiology. Here, he beckons readers to consider once and for all their notion of how God works in the church.

Currie begins his study with a thorough overview of Barth’s earliest efforts regarding the threefold Word of God, which were inspired by Reformation theologians such as Martin Luther and Heinrich Bullinger. Throughout his time in Göttingen and Münster, Barth grappled with this concept, concerned with affirming God’s dynamic freedom, denying the divinization of Scripture, and prioritizing God’s Self-revelation; his conclusions were published in Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2. Currie closes the first chapter after tracing Barth’s conception of Christian preaching, exposing how proclamation becomes the Word of God and what this means for humanity.

Though, unsurprisingly, “Barth’s concept of the threefold Word of God has a christological emphasis,” it also has “a pneumatological dimension” (30). In the second chapter, Currie turns to the vital role of the Holy Spirit who “is the source of unity between the one Word of God and its secondary forms” (41). Currie calls attention to the idea that the Spirit makes Christ’s presence manifest as the church engages Scripture and proclaims the gospel. Throughout this event, humanity remains humanity, never gaining control of the Word of God but necessarily relying on the Holy Spirit to carry out its purpose.

In the third chapter, Currie puts the church at the forefront of the discussion, digging into Barth’s early theological writings and the first three volumes of the Church Dogmatics. His reflections on the integral relationship Barth envisions between the threefold Word of God and the church’s life are thought provoking, to be sure, but they leave the reader feeling scattered. Though situated as a crux, it is difficult to connect with Currie in this section, which is perhaps due to either the lack of clear structure or the esoteric nature of his discussion. The latter of which is surprising, due to his role as both pastor and theologian.

In the next chapter though, Currie comprehensively considers contemporary scholarship regarding Barth’s use and revision of the threefold Word of God, seamlessly intertwining quotations and explaining a wide diversity of complex perspectives. He also takes the time to grapple with the content of Church Dogmatics IV/3, where Barth’s engagement with the threefold Word of God culminates as he revisits and amends it. Currie points to Barth’s renewed interest in solidifying and distinguishing Christ as the only Word of God, who “alone introduces Himself, presents Himself, and declares the good news of the gospel” (92).

One example of this shift is Barth’s expanded description of where Christ can manifest himself and create witnesses, namely, outside of the scope of Scripture and proclamation. In addition, rather than speaking chiefly of proclamation like before, Barth emphasizes the role of prayer. Here, Currie clarifies that Barth does not seem to dismiss his earlier thoughts regarding the threefold Word of God, but simply seeks to ensure the church knows their place in this relationship with Christ. Indeed it is as if Barth wants to warn the church, and particularly the clergy, against acting as if they had a corner of God.

In the final chapter, Currie demonstrates the current relevance of Barth’s conception of the threefold Word of God to the Church, ecclesiology, and Barth studies, focusing on the reasons behind Barth’s revision. Faced with the rise and expansion of the church, Barth sought to remind it of its humanity, rejecting any “attempts to clutch, possess, or lay claim to the contemporary presence of Christ” (146). Currie insists, on behalf of Barth, “The church is not a crutch, it possesses no inside track nor does it exist as a sphere of superiority in relation to others” (146).

By tracing the development of the threefold Word of God in Barth’s work, Currie demonstrates a deep appreciation for Barth and achieves a great depth; this is nearly paralleled in his excellent engagement with other scholars, including those who were highly critical of Barth. Currie stays close to Bruce McCormack’s unparalleled insight throughout this volume, drawing in other modern sources of wisdom, like Kimlyn Bender and Eberhart Jüngel, as appropriate.

The volume is dense, packed with richness applicable to both the academy and the church today. Readers can’t help but walk away with a heavy heart for the church, hopeful that as it faces the demise of Christendom, it will turn away from its entitled, self-sufficiency, open its eyes to its Lord, and be freed from itself so that it may truly be the church.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

David B. Hunsicker. The Making of Stanley Hauerwas: Bridging Barth and Postliberalism, New Explorations in Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019)

The Making of Stanley Hauerwas: Bridging Barth and Postliberalism

David B. Hunsicker. The Making of Stanley Hauerwas: Bridging Barth and Postliberalism, New Explorations in Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), xvi +234 pp. $40.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Luke Zerra (May 28, 2020)

The thesis of The Making of Stanley Hauerwas is easily stated: Hauerwas is a Barthian and a postliberal; the one informs the other so that Hauerwas is postliberal insofar as he is Barthian and vice versa. This raises the question of what the terms “Barthian” and “postliberal” mean, as well as what it means for Hauerwas to take them up. Hunsicker argues Hauerwas is a Barthian in a direct but low-flying sense. He does not follow Barth point by point, but “understands the basic impulse that set Barth’s theology in motion: the rejection of Protestant liberalism” (6). Hauerwas learns from Barth how to diagnose and go beyond the problems of liberal theology. Hunsicker’s deployment of “postliberal” follows from this. Hauerwas is postliberal insofar as he articulates a theology and ethics after liberal Protestantism. Key here is Hauerwas’s highlighting of the relationship between “Christian convictions and Christian practices” (10). Where protestant liberalism is said to unhitch doctrine and ethics, Hauerwas strives to “describe human agency as it relates to the God who is presupposed in the basic narratives of the Christian faith” (10). Hauerwas’s postliberalism is sustained by what he learned from Barth, and his Barthianism is identified with his desire for a theological imagination that is genuinely post-liberal.

Hunsicker makes this argument that Hauerwas is a Barthian and a postliberal in response to what he calls the “Schleiermacher thesis” and the “Ritschl thesis.” The Schleiermacher thesis, exemplified by Nicholas Healy’s Hauerwas: a (Very) Critical Introduction (Eerdmans, 2014), holds that Hauerwas’s ecclesial focus risks substituting the church for God as theology’s subject matter. As the charges go, Hauerwas is closer to Schleiermacher than to Barth theologically, because he places more focus on the Church’s communal experience than God’s revelation in Christ. The Ritschl thesis, advanced by John Webster and Nigel Biggar, claims that Hauerwas’s Christology is one of moral exemplarity and that his view of scripture emphasizes its ecclesial importance at the expense of its revelatory nature. On both counts, Hauerwas stands accused of repeating the habits of Protestant liberalism and thus being un-Barthian. Hunsicker seeks to defend Hauerwas against these claims.

Hunsicker’s case comes in three parts. Part one rehearses key moments in Hauerwas’s biography and identifies major influences that shape him as a Barthian. Key here is Hauerwas’s diagnosis that Protestant liberalism falsely divorced doctrine from ethics. This separation occurred, first, through the Kantian claim that if God is a subject beyond empirical knowledge then theology ought to be about morality and, secondly, through the claim that morality could be established without reference to particular religious convictions. If the first narrative allows human action to replace God as the subject of theology, then the second allows America to replace the church as the site of moral formation among Christian ethicists on Hauerwas and Hunsicker’s telling. Barth, by insisting that practical reason flows from a theological description of the world, gives Hauerwas the resources to resist the Kantian narrative that separated doctrine from ethics. Hauerwas learns to resist the second narrative from several thinkers, including H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey, but Hunsicker identifies John Howard Yoder as the key influential voice in Hauerwas’s theological development. What Yoder gives Hauerwas is an insistence on the church, not the state, as the context for Christian ethics. Although Barth seems to be absent here, Hunsicker argues that Hauerwas understands the projects of Barth and Yoder “to be largely commensurate with each other” (43). Commensurability is perhaps too strong an identification, but the important point is Yoder’s role in mediating Barth to Hauerwas through texts like Karl Barth and the Problem of War (Abingdon, 1970) and in personal conversation. Hauerwas thus learns from Yoder to read Barth in a manner that rejects an ethic which implicitly privileges the interests of the state. Barth, Hunsicker shows in part one, is central for Hauerwas’s diagnosis and prescription for the problems of Protestant liberalism.

Parts two and three take on, respectively, the twin challenges of the Schleiermacher and Ritschl theses. In response to the Schleiermacher thesis, Hunsicker argues that Hauerwas’s ecclesiocentrism is a development of insights learned from Barth’s Christocentrism. These are materially different central focuses, but Hunsicker argues Hauerwas’s ecclesial focus is on the church as a site where Christ constitutes a people as members of his body. The Schleiermacher thesis is overcome because Hauerwas’s ecclesiocentrism, on Hunsicker’s view, privileges divine rather than human activity. In considering the Ritschl thesis, Hunsicker agrees with the claim that Hauerwas emphasizes scripture’s ecclesial mediation in a way Barth never would but argues that this does not make Hauerwas a Protestant liberal. This is because Hauerwas’s aim in prioritizing communal reading of scripture is to resist prioritizing the individual’s interpretation of scripture, which Hauerwas thinks is a liberal move present in American churches across political divides.

I see two issues in Hunsicker’s work related to the central terms of “Barthian” and “postliberal.” First, though Hunsicker makes an excellent case for the influence of Barth on the formal shape of Hauerwas’s thought, key divergences seemingly remain on the level of moral theory. Hunsicker is attentive to some of these, showing how some differences—such as Hauerwas’s and Barth’s respective ecclesial and Christological focuses—can be read as places were Hauerwas develops insights from Barth. Yet, I worry more fundamental differences remain. Hauerwas’s ethics, for instance, is oriented around the notions of character and virtue while Barth’s is centered on the idea of divine command (cf. CD II/2 §§36-39). While some readings of Barth put him in conversation with virtue ethics, such as Kirk Nolan’s Reformed Virtue After Barth (WJK, 2014), Barth and Hauerwas’s central categories for moral reasoning ultimately differ in some important ways. It is one thing to say that Hauerwas takes from Barth important insights about the narrative shape of Christian life or for diagnosing issues in liberal Protestant social ethics, but it is quite another to suggest that how Hauerwas thinks about human action and reasoning is Barthian. Can one have Barth’s focus on divine command and the focus on character and virtue that Hauerwas takes from Alasdair MacIntyre or Thomas Aquinas? Hunsicker is wise to not reduce Hauerwas to Barth, noting differences such as Hauerwas’s embrace of casuistry, which Barth rejects (chapters 3 and 8). However, it is still worth interrogating how Barthian Hauerwas is if he is a moral theologian whose moral theology turns out to be quite different than Barth’s at key points. Here’s an example. Hauerwas is a pacifist, arguing that nonviolence is sustained by the virtues and bears witness to Christ’s Lordship. Barth resists what he takes to be the moral absolutism of pacifism, instead leaving open the possibility of “borderline cases” wherein God’s command must be discerned (CD III/4 §55). This is not just a difference in judgment about war’s moral status, but a difference in moral reflection. Hauerwas is committed to nonviolence and its constitutive virtues as essential to Christian witness while Barth is committed to God’s freedom to command violence in exceptional cases. Both seek to bear witness to Christ’s Lordship and to promote peace within particular contexts, yet important differences seem to remain. These are complex issues, yet I trust Hunsicker’s deft analysis of Barth’s formal influence on Hauerwas’s moral theology will inspire many to take them up.

The second point relates to the terms “liberal” and “postliberal.” As mentioned, Hunsicker coordinates Hauerwas’s Barthianism to postliberalism, with the understanding that Hauerwas learned from Barth how to do theology after liberalism. This raises the question of the relation between the German and American liberalisms to which Barth and Hauerwas are respectively responding. Barth’s work came as a bombshell on the playground of the theologians tutored by liberal theologians such as Schleiermacher, Troeltsch, or Ritschl while Hauerwas’s work threw a similar bombshell at liberal Protestant ethicists following Rauschenbusch or the Niebuhr brothers. How similar, however, are these two liberalisms? For instance, the Niebuhr brothers, James Gustafson, and Paul Lehmann each bear the imprint of Barth’s influence yet remain more or less tethered—on Hauerwas’s telling—to liberal habits of thought (see Hauerwas, “Christian Ethics in America [and the JRE],” in Journal of Religious Ethics 25.3 [1997]: 57-76). I agree with Hunsicker that there are formal similarities and family resemblances between the liberalisms to which Barth and Hauerwas were each responding. I also agree that reading Barth gave Hauerwas a critical purchase on social ethics in the Protestant liberal vein. Yet I worry that running the two traditions together risks casting “liberalism” as too neatly defined, thus obscuring the particularities of what Barth and Hauerwas each responded to. I also worry that if someone like H. Richard Niebuhr can have dispositions influenced by both Barth and liberalism then why not Hauerwas? This worry is amplified if one follows readers of Barth—such as Bruce McCormack or Christoph Chalamet—who claim Barth himself never fully shed his liberalism. Since much of the book is defending the claim that Hauerwas is not a liberal because he is a Barthian, then these points need to be dealt with carefully and with precision. For Hauerwas to be postliberal we must be clear on what liberalism is and this may mean admitting the categories are fluid and at overlapping at points.

These questions come not from a place of skepticism towards Hunsicker’s thesis that Hauerwas is a Barthian and postliberal, but rather because of how generative this book was for my thinking as an ethicist variously invested in Barth’s theology as a resource for moral reflection. One particularly generative claim Hunsicker makes is that Hauerwas can, in important ways, be thought of as a pragmatist of sorts (9). As Hunsicker notes, pragmatic themes in George Lindbeck and other postliberal theologians have been recognized; yet in my judgment pragmatism is not adequately recognized as a feature of Hauerwas or Barth’s thought. Hauerwas’s pragmatism arises in the importance of performance and witness to his work. Hauerwas is convinced that Christian claims are intelligible by being enacted in the church’s life. The doctrinal commitment that Christ is Lord—to give a Hauerwasian example—is performed through the church’s witness of nonviolence. Hauerwas, Hunsicker suggests, take up this variety of pragmatism from what he has learned from Barth about keeping doctrine and ethics together. That Hauerwas learns this from Barth shows Barth is more of a pragmatist than often acknowledged and shows that Hauerwas’s pragmatic moments come not only from his reading of Wittgenstein but from Barth’s influence. I hope Hunsicker’s insight bears fruit for fuller treatments comparing Hauerwas’s moral reasoning with that of pragmatist thinkers, something Hauerwas himself has done in conversation with Jeffrey Stout and Romand Coles. I also hope Hunsicker’s insights regarding pragmatism will help to further readings of Barth’s thought, such as those offered by Derek Woodard-Lehman or Peter Ochs, as pragmatic in important ways. Identifying pragmatic strands in Hauerwas, and by extension Barth, is an important suggestion on Hunsicker’s part, and one with which more readers of Hauerwas and Barth ought to wrestle.

Given how prolific and occasional Hauerwas’s writing is, Hunsicker does a great service to ethicists and Barth scholars by drawing together Hauerwas’s various engagements with Barth into a synoptic vision. For budding theologians and ethicists, The Making of Stanley Hauerwas stands as a helpful example of how to hold theological and moral claims together. In my judgment, Hunsicker makes a convincing case that Hauerwas’s theological vision is formally “Barthian” in a low-flying, but meaningful sense. This is to say that Hauerwas neither claims to be a Barth scholar nor to follow all of Barth’s theological decisions. Nonetheless, Hauerwas can be said to be a “Barthian” in the sense that his critique of Protestant liberalism, wedding of doctrine and ethics, and focus on the narrative of God’s work in Christ as central for moral reasoning are all taken from meaningful engagement with Barth. There is much to learn from Hunsicker’s work, and I trust it will be a central guide for those navigating the thought of either Hauerwas or Barth.

Luke Zerra, Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton Theological Seminary

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008)

Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth 

Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 320. $35.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by Matthias Gockel (October 23, 2009)

This collection of essays comes from one of the leading interpreters of Karl Barth and shows how his thinking has developed in the last decade. When one reads the book as a whole, it becomes clear that Bruce McCormack regards Barth not as an icon but as an exemplary companion in the quest “to understand what it means to be orthodox under the conditions of modernity” (17).

The first part of the book analyzes Karl Barth’s relationship to nineteenth-century theology. McCormack is convinced that the time has come to compare systematically “the relative merits of the two most impressive constructive theologians … in the modern period – those of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth” (41).

Chapter 1 focusses on theological epistemology. After Kant’s limitation of theoretical knowledge to the realm of intuitable phenomena, knowledge of God has become “deeply problematic to modern theologians” (24). According to McCormack, Barth’s commentary on Romans attempts to establish the independence of revelation and, in doing so, belongs to a tradition that begins with Schleiermacher’s effort to make religion independent of metaphysics and ethics. Barth relocates the problem in the realm of theological epistemology and thereby attempts “to transcend Kant’s restrictions” (27). For Barth, revelation occurs “within the realm of theoretical knowing” (28), yet it is a distinct kind of knowing, because its source is an act of God in which the human knowing apparatus is “grasped by God from without and made to conform to God as its object”. Revelation as a Christian dogmatic concept must be God’s self-revelation. Moreover, if the unintuitable God is truly to be known, God must make Himself intuitable in such a way that His unintuitability is not set aside. Whereas the commentary on Romans imagines such an event by means of expressive metaphors and an “appeal” to divine power, Barth soon discovers Christology, especially the doctrine of the incarnation, as the dogmatic topic with which he could explain his discovery: “The life of Jesus of Nazareth is God’s life; his intuitability is God’s intuitability” (32).

The essay concludes with “programmatic suggestions” regarding the proper categorization of Barth. Philosophically, Barth is a foundationalist of the Kantian sort. Theologically, however, Barth cannot be called a foundationalist, since his philosophical convictions do not provide the “ultimate ground” for his theological truth-claims. McCormack suggests the term “transfoundationalism”, in which the prefix ‘trans-’ refers to the possibility of transcending foundations without negating them. Such an act of transcendence must not be understood as human self-transcendence, since its basis is a “realistically conceived divine act” (35, my emphasis).

Chapter 2 compares the doctrine of election in the theologies of Alexander Schweizer and Karl Barth. Both men agree that “what God does in time must be grounded in His eternal being” (a quote from Schweizer) and point out that the classical Reformed doctrine of predestination emphasizes the unconditionality of God’s grace. For Schweizer, God’s grace belongs to God’s eternally and omnipresently active love, insofar as this love is confronted by sinful human beings. Grace belongs to the divine attribute of love, insofar as this love is confronted by human sin. It is not dependent on a person’s faith or unbelief. Still, Schweizer follows the classical Augustinian model of election, which focusses on the question of why some believe and others not. He insists that God’s grace, like God’s love, is universal in its scope. Here, the concept of “applicative grace” comes into play. Applicative grace is not irresistible or compulsive but must be received willingly. God’s grace is universal in nature but particular in effect. Schweizer eventually treats election as “a subcategory of providence” (55). Herein, he is indebted to Schleiermacher.

Barth locates election in the doctrine of God, whereby God is not only the subject but also the primary object of election. The starting-point of Barth’s dogmatic reflection is the concept of God’s self-revelation in the history of Jesus Christ. On this basis, he asks: What must God be like to do what he has done? According to Barth, God reveals himself “in taking to himself a fully human life as his very own (in all of its limitations up to and including death)” (58). This act of God has its ground not in some hidden divine decree or decision but in the eternal being of God. The history of Jesus Christ is truly God’s self-revelation. But Barth goes even one step further, at once modifying and deepening the classical doctrine’s emphasis on God’s unconditional grace. Jesus Christ is not only God’s self-revelation but also God’s self-determination. God’s being is determined once and for all in a primal decision (Urentscheidung), in which God elects Himself for us in Jesus Christ. “There is no will of God that would be different from the will of Jesus Christ.”[1]

McCormack concludes: “The promise contained in the Schweizerian principle that what God does in time must be grounded in the eternal divine being could not be realized by Schweizer himself because he was unable to secure it against doubts that God might not be in himself what God appears to us to be through his works.” In contrast, Barth’s understanding of God’s self-revelation a posteriori in Jesus Christ makes clear “how the works of God are grounded in the eternal divine being as it really is in and for itself.” (61)

Chapter 3 is devoted to continuities in the theologies of Barth and Schleiermacher and the question why Barth reacted so strongly against Schleiermacher. McCormack argues that when Barth turned against Schleiermacher, he turned against a “form of Schleiermacherianism” (64) represented especially by Ernst Troeltsch.

For Troeltsch, the development of the religious consciousness takes place in accordance with “general laws and tendencies” (Troeltsch). McCormack doubts whether such an approach stands in the tradition of Schleiermacher, who does not think of religion in general terms and knows no religion or God-consciousness ‘as such’. The ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ does not exist in a pure form, since the ‘feeling’, or immediate self-consciousness, is always connected with the sensible self-consciousness. It cannot “be controlled, mastered and brought into play at the whim of any individual in whom it is found” (73). Schleiermacher’s theology is a critical one, and herein lies a basic continuity between Schleiermacher and Barth. The “infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity” is a trade-mark of Schleiermacher as much as of Barth. “Absolute dependence is indeed absolute; one can, under the impact of divine causality, surrender oneself to its power, but one cannot cause it to be effective.” (74) Moreover, Schleiermacher’s theology thematizes the contents of the Christian (not an abstract) pious self-consciousness determined by a community with particular religious beliefs and dogmatic propositions. In the process, the feeling of absolute dependence remains “beyond the conceptual grasp of the dogmatician” (77).

The difference is also visible in Troeltsch’s Heidelberg lectures on the subject of Glaubenslehre in 1912 and 1913. Here, McCormack argues, two central features of Schleiermacher’s “critical theology of consciousness” (69) are missing. First, the feeling of absolute depedence is replaced by a ‘Christian principle’ and an anti-naturalistic ‘religion of personality’. Second, Schleiermacher’s strict distinction between God and the world is abandoned in favor of an “interpenetration” of divine spirit and human spirit. Troeltsch himself was aware of the differences but thought he was “carrying out Schleiermacher’s program” (80). For McCormack, this is the main reason why Barth thought he was rejecting Schleiermacher when, in fact, he was rejecting Troeltsch.

So, which Barth shall we use for a comparison with Schleiermacher? McCormack chooses not the later Barth, “who seems in the eyes of many to have mellowed in his attitude towards Schleiermacher” (64), but Barth’s earlier theology (especially the lectures on systematic theology in Göttingen and Münster, 1924-26), which he calls a “‘Church Dogmatics’ in the Schleiermacherian tradition” (81). For McCormack both men think of revelation as a “giving”, not a “given”. Both use a critical and heuristic tool for their respective expositions of dogmatic topics: while Schleiermacher employs the notion of absolute dependence, Barth speaks of God’s veiling and unveiling in revelation. The intention is the same: to point to the limits of dogmatic propositions and to ensure that dogmatic reflection is not speculative or starting from principles a priori, but hermeneutical, “assimilating the witness of Holy Scripture to particular doctrinal themes and the witness of tradition to that witness” (85).

Chapter 4 discusses Barth’s theological exegesis of Philippians in the context of hermeneutical debates during the 1920s. It reminds us that Barth became famous not as a dogmatic theologian but as a “highly innovative exegete” (89), who shared the historical-critical concern for what the text says but was not willing to adopt positivist standards as a precondition of “scientific” exegesis.

Part two of the book (Chapters 5 and 6) contains a critical discussion of postliberal (or nonfoundationalist) and postmodern Barth interpreters in the English-speaking world, written especially for the German-speaking scene, which argues that these interpretations rest on “misreadings” (153) of Barth’s understanding of revelation. In order to flesh out his critique, McCormack offers a sophisticated exegesis of Church DogmaticsII/1, § 27 (“The Limits of the Knowledge of God”), which sheds new light on Barth’s critique and appreciation (!) of the analogia entis (cf. 310).

Part three turns to ontological issues and includes the essay that has elicited such a lively, sometimes heated debate (Chapter 7), due to propositions like the following: “God’s essence…is knowable because it is constituted by the act of turning towards us. God in himself is God ‘for us’” (190).

For McCormack (and not only for him), Barth’s greatest theological contribution is the doctrine of election inChurch Dogmatics II/2 (especially §§ 32-33), because here “the historicizing tendencies of well over a century of theology prior to him found…both their relative justification and their proper limit” (183). Here it becomes clear that God is not the hidden God of the ‘absolute decree’. “At the beginning of all the ways of God with the world stood … the God-human, Jesus Christ” (184). The Logos, or the ‘eternal Son’, never existed “in and for himself”, in “a mode of state of being above and prior to the eternal decision to be incarnate in time” (186). Barth arrives at this conclusion through an exegesis of the prologue to the Gospel of John. “In the beginning with God was this One, Jesus Christ. And precisely that is the predestination.”[2] Certainly, the Logos was a-sarkos (not enfleshed) prior to the incarnation. Still, McCormack emphasizes that even before the incarnation the Logos was incarnandus (to be incarnate). “The Second Person of the Trinity has a name and his name is Jesus Christ.” Hence, the immanent and the economic trinity are “identical in content” (191).

The content of God’s election is the covenant of grace. In this covenant, God neither undergoes an essential change nor engages in “mere role-play” but remains true to Himself. This is so, because the eternal decision to establish the covenant of grace is also a decision about God’s self. God has freely decided to be defined in all eternity by the history of Jesus Christ, especially his death on the cross, “as a being-for this event” (189). Hence, Barth’s theological ontology is actualistic and covenantal. God’s being “is actualized in the decision for activity in time” and “constituted … in a most concrete, particular relation” (190). The incarnation is a historical event. Nevertheless, “God is already in pretemporal eternity – by way of anticipation – that which God would become in time”. God’s being in eternity is “a being which looks forward” (191).

At this point, McCormack calls for a critical correction of interpretations that subordinate the doctrine of election to the doctrine of the trinity. He admonishes us that Barth’s theological development should be taken more seriously. “The day when Church Dogmatics could be read as though it had been written in the space of a single afternoon, as though every part were fully consistent with all the others, is over” (17-18). Barth’s doctrine of election in CD II/2 deals with a question that was already adressed in the doctrine of the trinity in CD I/1: Who is the God who reveals Himself? The answer in each volume is fundamentally the same: God is the God of His self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Yet, differences in the details exist, due to Barth’s christocentric revision of the doctrine of election. McCormack is not the first to notice them, as he himself acknowledges.

Logically, Barth’s doctrine of election in CD II/2 would require the retraction of certain claims (not every claim!)[3] in the earlier volumes, which suggest that God is triune ‘in and for himself’, independently from God’s self-determination in the election of Jesus Christ and the covenant of grace.[4] McCormack therefore regards “the triunity of God, logically, as a function of divine election”. God’s trinitarian self-differentiation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “is given in the eternal act in which God elects himself for the human race. Thedecision for the covenant of grace is the ground of God’s triunity” (194). We are not dealing with a temporal sequence; the point is to emphasize the unity of the eternal act of God’s self-determination.

The issue is revisited in Chapter 10, where McCormack insists that the idea of Jesus Christ as the subject of election must be understood in light of the “basic paradigm” of Barth’s doctrine of the trinity, that is, “in terms of a single divine subject in three modes of being” (270). He argues that “if God is the same subject as ‘Father’ and as ‘Son’, then the subject who makes the decision to be Jesus Christ is the same subject who ‘becomes’ Jesus Christ as a consequence of this decision” (270-71, with reference to CD IV/1). He concludes that “in the strictest sense, it is the ‘Father’ who is the subject of election – and because this is so ‘Jesus Christ’ can be the subject of election only because the subject that the ‘Father’ is, is the same subject that ‘Jesus Christ’ is” (272). “Because God’s being is a being in the act of electing, the identity of the one divine subject as ‘Father’ is something He gives to Himself precisely in this decision – and therefore in the one eternal event in which the Son is begotten and the Holy Spirit is spirated.” (266)

Moreover, the separation between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ acts of God, or between God’s nature and God’s will, is put aside. Instead, there is one eternal act or event. “What is ‘natural and necessary’ in God is itself the consequence of the one eternal act of self-determination”. Divine freedom is not simply a freedom from ‘internal’ or ‘external’ need or deficiency, so that God somehow must be able to exist ‘in and for himself’. Such a concept of God is too narrow and limited by metaphysical assumptions about the self-sufficiency of divine being. It easily leads to a concept of God “as impassible, as removed from suffering, and so forth” (273). The consideration that existence is a necessary predicate of God should never be “abstracted from the decision in which God gives to himself his own being” (266). McCormack points to a passage Church Dogmatics II/1, § 28, where Barth explains that God is not only actus purus (Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastics) but actus purus et singularis, “concretely, in the singularity of the event of God’s self-revelation in time” (272). We will encounter the ‘essence’ of God “either at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Saviour or not at all.”[5]

Although these passages in CD II/1 do not refer to election as God’s self-determination, the theological ontology is the same, as Barth’s understanding of the divine decree makes strikingly clear. The key here is the idea of God’s constancy, faithfulness, and reliability, “the absoluteness and finality of the free love, in which God, at the beginning of all things, has chosen and decided.” God’s freedom is the concrete decree, that is, God’s free decision to determine His own being as God in the covenant of grace. Predestination “without doubt is also a bond and an obligation, which God for Himself has taken upon Himself and which he has decided to keep in complete freedom (a freedom that is but the freedom of His love).”[6]

Chapter 8 discusses Barth’s historicized christology. Although he was opposed to “metaphysical speculation” from early on, there was a time when his thought was not without it and indebted to “the abstract metaphysical ontology which underwrote the Christology of the Chalcedonian Council” (207). With his doctrine of election, however, Barth moves beyond such an ontology. The key is the insight that Jesus Christ is the subject of election, so that election is “a free act in which God assigned to Himself the being God would have for all eternity” (216). God’s decision to be God-for-us is also the event in which God differentiates himself into the three modes of being – Father, Son and Spirit.[7] As a result, Barth is able “to bid farewell to the distinction between the eternal Word and the incarnate Word” (217): the second mode of being in God isJesus Christ.

This insight leads McCormack to support Bertold Klappert’s “striking claim that ‘Barth does not think incarnationally in the neoorthodox sense’” (221).[8] The doctrine of reconciliation in CD IV/1 does not any longer include a ‘special christology’, that is, a doctrine of the person of Christ in terms of the two-natures-doctrine. Instead, the two-natures-doctrine is an implication of the doctrine of reconciliation. “The being of Jesus Christ is a being in a history” – the history of the gracious God and the reconciled human being in their unity. “And exactly that which takes place in this history, and therefore in the being of Jesus Christ as such, is reconciliation.” According to McCormack, the root of this understanding of christology is to be found in Barth’s doctrine of election. For Barth, there is no metaphysical subject that unites itself to a human ‘nature’. Instead, in the divine election humankind is taken up “into the event of God’s being”, in which both God and humankind receive their “most essential determinations” (223). This does not mean that the asymmetry in their relation is set aside. God participates directly in the being and life of a human being, whereas the human being Jesus of Nazareth “participates in the being and existence of God indirectly by freely willing to live in correspondence to the history of God inaugurated in the covenant of grace” (228). Still, the two modes of participation are two aspects of a single history. They find their unity in the primal decision (Urentscheidung) of God’s gracious election.

The topic of participation is discussed extensively in Chapter 9, in the context of the recently revived debates on ‘deification’. McCormack brings Barth into conversation with Eberhard Jüngel and shows that their position is very similar: “Participation in God, Yes; Deification, No” (235).

The fourth part of the book contains five shorter writings that add flavour to the collection by highlighting the relevance of Barth’s theology for contemporary culture and, specifically, our life in the church and in society. McCormack interprets Barth not as a pre-modern or postmodern but as a modern theologian. Yet, what does he mean by ‘modernity’? The introduction mentions two main characteristics – the rise of historical consciousness and the acceptance of critical methods in Biblical studies; the demise of classical Greek metaphysics and the corresponding cosmological paradigm – and asks how Barth reacted to them. According to McCormack, Barth accepted the Kantian critique of metaphysics and found inspiration in the thinking of the Marburg neo-Kantians, especially their actualistic ontology, which he applied to the concept of God: to be is to act. He also accepted the historical-critical approach to the Bible and followed Schleiermacher (and others) in the rejection of natural theology. But the truly novel aspect of his theology is visible, according to McCormack, in the attempt to develop a historicized Christian doctrine of God. God’s eternal election “to be ‘God for us’ in Jesus Christ is an act in which God constitutes his being as a being for historical existence (i.e., the incarnate life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth)” (13).

On the one hand, McCormack’s thesis that Barth’s alleged turn from ‘dialectical’ to ‘analogical’ thinking between 1921 and 1931 – proclaimed by both critics (Tillich) and friends (von Balthasar, T. F. Torrance) – is a chimera, has been largely accepted. On the other hand, it is still possible to project such a turn simply onto a later stage in Barth’s thinking and thereby neglect the decisive development in Barth’s theology: the shift from a pneumatocentric to a christocentric dialectic. McCormack points us to the epistemological impact of God’s veiling and unveiling in revelation: “where God is truly known in his hiddeness, it is the whole of God which is known and not ‘part’ of God” (110). Initially, the Realdialektik focuses on the actualistic relation of God to individual human beings, which shapes the prolegomena to the Church Dogmatics (CD I/1 and I/2). From CD II/2 onwards, it is transformed into an ontological Realdialektik of the covenant, which focusses on the actualistic relation of God to God’s self and thus to human beings.

Despite many discussions of McCormack’s monograph from 1995, I wonder if Protestant theologians in general and Barth scholars in particular have absorbed its insights. These days, it is alleged that McCormack interprets Barth through Schleiermacher or through Hegel, who were, by the way, devoted Christian thinkers. Others find fault with his thesis that the ecumenical creeds are only “relatively binding as definitions of what constitutes ‘orthodoxy’”, since a perfect conformity of Christian teaching to the Word of God as attested in Holy Scripture “is not attainable in this world” (15). But what really matters are other considerations, for example, the thesis that “the death of Jesus Christ in God-abandonment, precisely as a human experience, is…an event in God’s own life” (189).[9]

According to Karl Barth, the doctrine of God’s gracious choice is the ‘sum of the gospel’. Are we ready for the good news that the history of Jesus Christ is the history of God and we as human beings are an integral part of it?

[1] Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. II/2, 124. ET Church Dogmatics, vol. II/2, 115.

[2] Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. II/2, 157. ET Church Dogmatics, vol. II/2, 146.

[3] Cf. the following quote that anticipates the central theme of CD II/2: “the reality of God which encounters us in His revelation is His reality in all the depths of eternity” (Church Dogmatics I/1, 479).

[4] Indeed, the quote McCormack offers from CD IV/1 (193n14, cf. also 220-21) is startling, and all the more so, since a few lines down in the same passage Barth admonishes us that we shall not “dream of a ‘Logos in himself’”, that “we have to reckon behind [God’s free, gracious will] with no Son of God in himself, particularly with no logos asarkos, with none other than the incarnate word of God” (see Karl Barth,Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. IV/1, 54-55. ET Church Dogmatics IV/1, 52-53).

[5] Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. II/1, 293. ET Church Dogmatics II/1, 261.

[6] Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. II/2, 200. ET Church Dogmatics II/2, 183. Therefore, it makes little sense to ‘guard’ God’s freedom by referring to the immanent trinity.

[7] McCormack speaks of a “certain logical priority” of election over the triunity of God (218). Kevin Hector has argued that, for Barth, “triunity is logically prior to election,” but he agrees with McCormack that “God’s triune being coincides eternally with God’s decision to be God-for-us” (Kevin W. Hector, “God’s Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 [2005]: 258).

[8] Similary, albeit with a different focus, Ingolf Dalferth points out that incarnation christology is an interpretation of the confession that Jesus Christ is risen and not “the christological theme”. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte. Zur Grammatik der Christologie (Tübingen 1994), 31.

[9] Again, Dalferth is an important conversation partner. He also understands the death of Jesus Christ as an event in God’s own life, although he conceptualizes it in terms of an existential-theological hermeneutics, instead of a christological ontology, with a focus on the “eschatological significance [of the cross] for God, and through God for us.” Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte, 44.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009)

Participation in Christ: An Entry in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics

Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), xv + 135. $24.95

Reviewed by Cambria Janae Kaltwasser (December 14, 2009)

In this book, Adam Neder, associate professor at Whitworth University, traces what he identifies as the “taproot of Barth’s theology: the confession that God’s gracious action toward the world is concentrated ‘in Christ,’ who is both the savior of the world and its salvation, the giver of grace and grace itself” (xi). While the nature of humanity’s being ‘in Christ’ is arguably the bedrock of the Church Dogmatics, bridging the doctrines of revelation, election, creation, and reconciliation, it is a motif that rarely receives the attention of a full-length study. With this volume, Neder aims to bring Barth’s theology of participation in Christ to the fore by unpacking it from within the four volumes of the Church Dogmatics, thereby providing – as the title suggests – an introduction to this monumental work. Neder approaches the theme of participation in Christ from the widest possible scope in summary sections at the beginning of each chapter (a feat achieved by the author’s familiarity with the entirety of the Church Dogmatics), and then zooms in to examine in rigorous detail key paragraphs and sections from each volume. The result is a fast-paced survey of all the major loci of the Church Dogmatics as seen through the lens of humanity’s being in Christ.

Chapter One treats Barth’s doctrine of the Word of God, highlighting its emphasis on revelation as an eventin which the human being comes under the lordship of God. For Barth, revelation implies union because “to know God is to be joined to him in faith and obedience” (1). Neder divides this discussion between examinations of paragraphs 5 and 6 of CD I/1, respectively “The Nature if the Word of God” and “The Knowability of the Word of God.” He highlights Barth’s stress on the irreducible distinction between God and the human being in the event of revelation. The indirect event nature of revelation safeguards the meaning of grace by ensuring that faith is never construed as a human possession. Therefore, “rather than denying divine-human communion, Barth intends to highlight its intimacy and reality by describing it within a framework adequate to its participants—the utterly free and gracious Lord of the covenant and his correspondingly free and grateful servants and friends” (7). In treating paragraph 6, Neder illumines Barth’s stress upon the concrete form of this union: grace manifests itself as a determination of the human being for God. Therefore, far from banishing faith to an intellectual realm, “Barth existentializes knowledge of God” by equating knowledge with obedience (10). In the event of revelation, God’s free determination for the human being enables a correspondingly free determination of the human being for God.

In Chapter Two Neder explicates Barth’s doctrine of election through sustained focus on paragraph 32 of CD II/2. Here Barth portrays election as both God’s self-determination to be God for us and his determination for humanity in the one human being Jesus Christ. This determination by God forms the focal point of Neder’s study. In Barth’s doctrine of election, participation in Christ is disclosed in its twofold form. In election’s objective form, all of humanity is included in the history of the covenant by virtue of Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, accomplished on our behalf. Yet, rather than replacing the obedience of individual human beings, Jesus’ history, “establishes a trajectory for humanity, defining humanity by governing it as a telos” (18). Therefore the subjective side of participation in Christ, the free obedience of human subjects, is included in and ensured by the objective side. Thus, for Neder, the theme of participation allows Barth’s treatment of election to blend seamlessly into his ethics, the imperative aspect of objective participation in Christ: “The command of God is God himself in action drawing human beings into active fellowship” (25).

Chapter Three highlights the anthropological implications of Barth’s doctrine of creation by examining CD III/2’s paragraph 44.3, “The Real Man.” Neder claims that the theological anthropology of volume three arises directly from decisions made in II/2, where Barth argued that “there exists no independent relationship between God and creation apart from Jesus Christ” (30). Jesus himself establishes and enacts human nature. To be human is nothing other than to be summoned by God. One of the richest components of the chapter is Neder’s explanation of the importance of the historical-covenantal category in Barth’s thought. According to Neder, Barth juxtaposes the concept of static, independent human being with that of being as history. Without Jesus Christ, human being is static, in accordance with its own limits. Within Jesus Christ that being gains a history both as it is transcended by God from without and as it is enabled to transcend itself through active obedience.

Barth’s ontology of grace is addressed in Chapter Four through explicating paragraphs 57.1 and 58.1-2 in CDIV.1. Calling paragraph fifty-seven “an extended ontological preface to the entire doctrine of reconciliation”(43), Neder here clarifies his interpretation of Barth’s actualistic account of participation: since God’s being is in act, participation is a union of actions rather than a melding substances. God shares himself with humanity by including them in covenant history; human beings participate in that history by responding in free obedience.

Within the treatment of paragraph 58.1, Neder’s section on simul iustus et peccator is particularly illuminating for current debates on justification. He explains that – in Barth’s hands – the doctrine “is not first of all a statement about the sin and righteousness of the Christian. It is rather an affirmation that the source of that righteousness (Jesus Christ) lies outside (aliena) the believer. The simul iustus et peccatorguarantees that Jesus Christ is not merely a step along the way, but the content of salvation itself” (48-9). Neder’s explanation suggests that the simul ought not to be construed as obscuring the two-sided nature of the covenant, but in such a way that Jesus’ enactment of our humanity includes and has as its telos the subjective participation of individuals, which is always a matter of utter dependence on Jesus Christ. Barth does not deny individual inner transformation but takes critical aim at a certain “ontology of grace,” which asserts that grace is something “detachable” from Jesus, given to the believer in the event of transformation (49). God’s grace is rather his action in Jesus Christ, which “draws forth human response, but it does not create effects that linger in the pious soul apart from God’s action” (49). Neder writes, “Human ‘being’ is not the possession of self-contained individuals free to accept or reject God’s grace. Rather, human being isenacted in response to God’s grace. In this act, the individual whom Jesus Christ has established as a freely active subject in him embraces this identity and becomes in herself who she is in him” (51). In his engagement with paragraph 58.2 Neder goes on to cover three aspects of the one grace of Jesus Christ—justification, sanctification, and vocation—and their corresponding subjective manifestations in the Christian life—faith, love, and hope.

An historical-covenantal Christology grounds Barth’s actualistic account of union with Christ, and this Christology occupies Chapter Five. The focus rests on CD IV/2’s paragraph 64.2, highlighting Barth’s re-interpretation of the hypostatic union “as an event of lordship and obedience, the perfect coordination of two distinct sets of actions, divine and human, which are never confused with each other” (62). Barth reappropriates the Reformed teaching on the indirectness of the union of natures in the person of the Son. He rejects deification not only for its leaning towards docetism and synergism, but because of its tendency to focus on the “ effect of the direct penetration of Jesus’ flesh by the divine nature,” which looks away from the living and active history of Jesus Christ. Instead, the incarnation is a confrontation between God and human being in which the human being is “exalted to true humanity” by being freed for active obedience to God. Short analyses of paragraphs 66.2 and 71.3, respectively “The Holy One and the Saints” and “The Goal of Vocation,” are included here as well. Neder concludes his study with excursuses on the implications of Barth’s theology of participation for sacramentology, human virtue, and ecumenical dialogue on theosis.

With this compact volume Neder skillfully weaves together the central lines of Barth’s thought on ontology, Christology, and anthropology, ably unpacking dense material from across the Church Dogmatics and never losing sight of his central aim of illuminating humanity’s being in Christ. Consequently, this volume helps Christians think through the meaning of participation in Christ without falling prey to quasi-substantialist portrayals of grace, which Barth so adamantly rejects not merely because they erode the Creator/creature distinction, but because they abstract away from the event of God’s self-revelation in and the activity of the living Christ. Neder aids us in seeing how Barth’s insistence on maintaining union in distinction and on emphasizing participation as a ordered fellowship, is aimed at magnifying the intimacy of participation in God by maintaining the centrality of the living Jesus Christ.

This reader’s only criticism of the book lies not in its content but its structure, which unfolds as a series of summaries rather than as the elucidation of a single thesis through contact with various materials. One wonders if the work might have been better served if Neder had begun with an interpretation of his findings rather than providing merely formal scaffolding for the uninitiated reader. From the first, the reader is made to ask after the heart of how Barth understands participation in Christ and its significance to present-day discussions. Rather than unifying his study with a few interpretive assertions upfront, Neder leaves these essentials for the reader to unravel chapter by chapter as the work unfolds.

Yet, this volume is a challenge altogether worth the reader’s efforts both for yielded insights into the thought of Barth and for connections between multiple areas of Christian faith and practice. Neder’s offering is a truly systematic work, in that it enables Christians to think together the doctrines of God, Christ, humanity, sin, and salvation. It is a truly evangelical work, in that it calls the church to reflect upon its proclamation of the living Christ and its summons by God to live into our true being in him. It is, thus, a truly welcome work.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

DeCou, Jessica D. Playful, Glad, and Free: Karl Barth and a Theology of Popular Culture (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014)

Playful, Glad, and Free: Karl Barth and a Theology of Popular Culture 

DeCou, Jessica D. Playful, Glad, and Free: Karl Barth and a Theology of Popular Culture (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), ix + 254pp. $39.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by Paul L. Metzger (April 29, 2014)

Jessica DeCou claims that this volume is the consequence of “a lifetime of theological interest in popular entertainment and a lifetime of ‘researching’ television” (x). Some might wonder why the author would focus attention on Karl Barth’s towering theology as the basis for developing a theology of popular culture, especially television. The answer lies in DeCou’s assessment that Barth did not make an idol of high culture, or popular culture for that matter. Barth is no respecter of this or that cultural enterprise, vocation, or trade (see Barth’s Ethics, 218). However, he did not discount secular pursuits either. For DeCou, the artistic domain of culture has provisional status in Barth’s theology with his concepts of play and release, as it bears witness to the Spirit’s eschatological kingdom promise of universal redemption for humanity.

The goal of DeCou’s study (a revised version of her Ph.D. dissertation) is to bring Barth together with present-day research “on popular culture and with cultural producers in order to develop theological definitions and criteria that resonate more deeply with popular entertainment’s secular self-understanding” (4). The result will be the development of more appropriate and astute analyses that account for the various complexities that pertain to popular entertainment’s production and distribution.

DeCou divides the volume into two major sections. The first major section aims at providing an overarching “theoretical framework” (6). DeCou focuses attention on pneumatology, eschatology, and hermeneutics. The first chapter attends to Barth’s famous statements against culture and modern treatments of pneumatology. The second chapter argues against what the author calls Barth’s “true words approach” bound up with treatments of Church Dogmatics (CD) IV/3 paragraph 69, which she takes to be simply “an extension of his doctrine of the Word—virtually the same in both content and context as his remarks against theology of culture in CD I/1.” DeCou maintains that “this material should therefore be abandoned in favor of a model guided by Barth’s writings on culture and the Spirit in the context of his eschatology, which better harmonize with his own analyses of particular cultural forms” (7; see also 55, 83). Chapter three involves rebuilding Barth’s theology of culture based on his treatment of the doctrine of redemption, which features constructive treatments of the doctrine of the Spirit and culture. In this context, “Art . . . is presented . . . as a worthy achievement in its own right, contributing to human flourishing by ‘playing with reality’ and thereby inspiring hope as a reminder that the present is not the final word. Moreover, the very possibility of human recreation derives from humanity’s re-creation by the eschatological Spirit, remaking humanity into playful children of God” (7). The fourth chapter develops what she takes to be Barth’s “hermeneutic of culture” based on his use of art and literature. Barth is able to engage art constructively in a mutually beneficial manner that upholds the distinctive traits and contours of theology and culture/art respectively. In this chapter, DeCou extends Barth’s treatment of the Spirit as the subjective possibility of revelation to be “the subjective possibility of theology of culture, revealing it to be playful, glad, and free” (8).

The second major section of the volume focuses on the development of a Barthian theology of popular culture. The fifth chapter seeks to demonstrate that there is room in Barth’s thought (which often highlights high art and culture) for the affirmation of popular culture or entertainment. DeCou, who argues that “work and culture are virtually synonymous” in Barth’s theology (148), draws from his analysis of human work and applies those categories to her study of popular culture. These categories are objectivity, value, humanity, reflectivity, and limitation (8, 148-155). For DeCou, “the specific task of popular entertainment is to contribute to play, fellowship, and relaxation, augmenting the task of culture by fostering individual and communal wholeness and augmenting the task of art by pointing to the universality of the promise of the Spirit” (8). She then moves from theory to practice in chapters six and seven (9). In chapter six, DeCou applies Barth’s five categories of work to the theologian of culture: “What makes theological analyses of popular culture objective, valuable, human, reflective, and properly limited” (9)? In the final chapter, the author applies these same five criteria to the domain of “the production, distribution, and reception of television programming” (10). DeCou speaks of popular culture in interchangeable terms with popular entertainment, referencing “television, movies, popular music, celebrity, advertising, and so on” (21). In the final chapters, she focuses attention exclusively on television. Some readers may puzzle over DeCou’s consideration of television given that the only two instances where Barth wrote about television were criticisms; however, his criticisms centered more on the advertising industry’s influence than on the content of the programs (9, 168). For Barth, television bound up with entertainment could become a lordless power, whereby we become enslaved to pleasure; fixation with pleasure makes it impossible for us to enjoy anything (163, 166).

DeCou demonstrates sensitivity to the task of dogmatic theology, on the one hand, and the secular calling of popular culture, on the other hand—most particularly entertainment and television (5). She couples Barth’s principles of objectivity, value, humanity, reflectivity and limitation with his pneumatological eschatology to produce a work of great promise for theology of culture (243). Theologians should not demand that entertainment be anything other than entertainment; in other words, they should not demand that entertainment fulfill its own theological task (193). Theological approaches to popular culture should also guard against wild speculation or “dilettantism,” approaching popular culture and entertainment with a deep awareness of the various contours and dimensions involved and the necessary tools for exploration (180). Elsewhere, the author cautions that television should not produce work that makes politics and ideology the focal point. In short, the aim of television is to provide quality entertainment (242).

In addition to DeCou’s keen sensitivity to the respective domains of theology and popular culture, the author also shows how playful Barth’s theology is, contrary to many casual readings. It is argued that “art is the specific action that exemplifies play”, and “humor” is “the general attitude that is commanded in light of the promise of redemption” (155). We should never take the present too seriously; thus, relaxation and entertainment have their place in view of the eschatological promise. DeCou distinguishes artistic culture from popular culture or entertainment. While entertainment is a form of art, it has a special, distinctive calling in caring for human well-being: its “accessibility” speaks to the “universality” of the Spirit’s promise of redemption (155-156).

I will not take this opportunity to engage the criticisms of what DeCou calls the “true words approach” that she associates with Robert J. Palma’s Karl Barth’s Theology of Culture (Pickwick, 1983) and this reviewer’s work (The Word of Christ and the World of Culture [Eerdmans, 2003]). Let it suffice to say that my approach accounts for CD IV/3, paragraph 69 as one among many important selections of Barth’s various writings that reflect his overarching christological framework. I chronicle the development of his christological concentration for the construction of a theology of culture that addresses the sacred and secular domains. The “true words” paragraph and theme do not have privileged status in my volume in relation to other christological emphases, although they are and should be accounted for in the development of a theology of culture that seeks to address the theological import of Barth’s entire corpus. Moreover, while DeCou’s work is a welcome addition to the research on Barth and theology of culture, it does not account sufficiently for Barth’s core themes and mature movements bound up with his christocentric concentration. While accounting for the relation of pneumatology to christology for a Barthian theology of culture would certainly have merit, the development of a Barthian approach from his fragmentary and incomplete doctrine of redemption (albeit in conjunction with what he writes elsewhere on relevant subjects as in his doctrine of creation) is premature and lacks sufficient warrant. Would it not be more advantageous to position a study pertaining to pneumatological features in complementary terms to those studies that have focused on Barth’s christological concentration in his various works? Moreover, would it not also be beneficial to demonstrate how the pneumatological emphases enhance the christological in ways that go beyond prior studies toward the development of a theology of culture along Barthian lines? I readily admit that more work needs to be done in this direction.

Concerns and questions aside, DeCou’s work is to be celebrated in that it provides fresh insight into an often ignored area of Barth research. As already noted, DeCou highlights the need to account for pneumatological considerations in the development of a theology of culture of play and related themes pertaining to such cultural domains as the arts and entertainment. Moreover, DeCou provides a prophetic caution to academic theologians and other scholars who might otherwise dismiss popular entertainment such as television as not worth their while. All too often, class and gender stereotypes abound pertaining to television and other forms of popular entertainment. Related stereotypes go back to ancient times (161). While one should guard against the fixation with popular entertainment as a lordless power, one should not dismiss it or the general populace. Rightful consideration of them arise from a theology of freedom, playfulness, and glad tidings bound up with the universal hope for humanity centered in Christ and the eschatological Spirit of hope. Regarding Christ and the gospel message, DeCou powerfully writes, “One could argue that Christian theology should have an advantage, to some degree, in overcoming elitists attitudes toward television as a legitimate scholarly and/or theological domain of inquiry because of the more popular nature of its founding documents and the ‘low class’ entourage of its founder (elitist is certainly not the word that springs to mind when reflecting on the life and death of Jesus)” (161). Barth’s commandeering of a line from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (popular entertainment in Shakespeare day) for the import of his Römerbrief for theology and culture in his day applies here: “Well-roared, lion!” (CD II/1, p. 635)

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Stroud, Dean G. ed. Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013)

Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich 

Stroud, Dean G. ed. Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 215 pp. $20.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by David Stark (January 04, 2017)

Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow presents a collection of twelve sermons set within historical context. Dean Stroud, a former Presbyterian pastor and professor emeritus of German Studies at the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, seeks to give readers access to some primary sources from a significant few who resisted the Third Reich in their preaching. The sermons are drawn from 1933 to 1944 and arranged chronologically. These sermons take several forms: topical, occasional, expositional, single-verse meditation, and multi-text theological refection. Four of the twelve sermons are based on Old Testament texts. Well-known figures like Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Niemöller are included, but many lesser known preachers like Gerhard Ebeling and Julius Van Jan offer homilies to which Stroud rightly draws attention.

The sermons are presented so that readers can “draw their own conclusions about Christian opposition to Hitler” (x). As such, this work is not meant as an apologia for the church. “Without a doubt,” Stroud acknowledges, “the church as a social and political institution failed the test of confronting Nazism” (4). Most pastors did not offer significant resistance—a point Stroud underscores by including an appendix with the German Christian sermon supporting the loyalty oath to Hitler.

Stroud sets this collection of sermons in historical context by offering brief introductions to each sermon and by providing a 45 page overview of Nazi Germany (following Paul von Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler as Chancellor). Obviously, with such limited space, Stroud can only offer a basic primer. Still, this section manages to provide enough guidance that those who have not studied this period in history will be able to appreciate many of the nuances and subtleties within the sermons. Particularly helpful is Stroud’s attention to the political, rhetorical, and theological aspects of the rise of the Third Reich. Politically, Stroud highlights Point 24 of the Nazi platform of the 1920s, discusses the impact of the Nuremberg Laws, traces the horrors of the Kristallnacht pogrom, and emphasizes the misuse and manipulation of “blood,” “state,” and “Volk.” Theologically, Stroud discusses the development of an Aryan Jesus, the Nazi refusal to admit sin, the elevation of Hitler as an object of faith, and the rise of the nationalistic and anti-semitic German Christian movement. He also highlights significant responses from Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Niemöller through the Barmen Declaration, the underground seminary at Finkenwalde, the Pastor’s Emergency League, and the Confessing Church. Rhetorically, Stroud discusses the impact of Nazi rhetoric. This includes the use of euphemisms and the manipulation of language as noted above. It also includes an analysis of superlatives used by Nazis to describe themselves (i.e. “smartest,” bravest”) and their political threats (i.e. “worst,” most dangerous”) (43). Furthermore, as Stroud notes, Hitler and Goebbels consistently used pejorative adjectives when referring to targets like the Jews (15).

Stroud believes that these rhetorical and theological observations become especially important for understanding the ways that preachers sought to counter Nazism. He is surely right, but it should be noted that the book does not develop this argument. Rather, Stroud simply highlights seven themes of opposition: “the authority of Jesus Christ; the sovereignty of God; both the Old and New Testaments as Holy Scripture; the purity of the church; the certainty of God’s judgment on Germany for immorality and for the failure to love the neighbor, especially the Jewish brother and sister; the relevance of the gospel after the European Enlightenment and in spite of Nazi pseudoscience and paganism; and the gospel’s insistence that Christians must risk even their lives for the truth of Christianity” (48). Any conclusions about the use of these themes in sermons or their effectiveness as a response to the Nazi agenda are left to the reader’s discernment.

While some readers will appreciate this interpretative freedom, others will wish that Stroud had offered more of a scholarly presence. This longing extends to other areas of the book as well. For instance, Stroud makes extensive use of Wikipedia as a source for contextual details, and he does not always define concepts with enough nuance. This latter point is especially felt in his reflections on politics and preaching. Here the study would have benefitted from distinguishing between apolitical interpretation (e.g. of the zweite Reiche) and political application in Nazi Germany. So too Stroud struggles to distinguish political intention from practical effect. He observes, on the one hand, that the Barmen Declaration “declared that Jesus Christ alone had claim to a Christian’s entire existence and thus rejected the notion that there were other ‘areas’ of life in which Christians had ‘other lords’” (41). Yet, on the other hand, Stroud asserts that the Declaration “was a statement of Christian faith and not a political agenda” (41).

In his treatment of Karl Barth, Stroud offers a mixed witness. At times his treatment approaches hagiography: “The influence of Barth, and others who agreed with him on his approach to homiletics, would be hard to overemphasize” (35). At other times Stroud offers a more rational assessment of some of Barth’s important works. He notes that Barth’s commentary on Romans, “challenged readers to hear the epistle as God’s word directly addressing the present moment” and held that a human kingdom is “without exception, never the kingdom of God” (31). Barth’s lectures on Homiletics, Stroud asserts, call for the text to control the sermon and point to Jesus Christ as the word of God in holy scripture (33). Stroud observes that Barth wrote the first draft of the Barmen Declaration with the intention of combating German Christian claims that someone other than Jesus could be lord (40).

Beyond the introductory section, however, Stroud offers surprisingly little detail about Barth’s preaching or influence. Stroud includes only one of Barth’s sermons. By comparison, both Paul Schneider and Helmut Gollwitzer have two sermons each in this collection. And, while Barth’s sermon on Jesus as a Jew is equally profound in its Christology and troubling in its implications for modern Jews, Stroud offers little more reflection than a few footnotes. Stroud might have asked: Why does Barth say Jesus “was” (rather than “is”) a Jew? How does Barth understand the on-going presence of Jews to affect Christian existential reflection?

Perhaps these kinds of questions are the ones that Stroud wants to elicit in the reader rather than answer himself. Perhaps Stroud intends simply to pass along important primary sources that lead the reader to an experience of resistance preaching:

“Worse than the rising cost of food for a people is the rising cost of God’s word…But it is always the nation and its people who are to blame when such an expensive time hearing God’s word comes. Certainly we too have brought this period of the church’s crisis in Germany upon ourselves” (Paul Schneider 101-2).

“Here we see the price we are paying for the great falling away from God…houses of God that were sacred to others have been burned to the ground, property belonging to the foreigner plundered or destroyed, men who faithfully served our nation and who fulfilled their duty in good conscience have been thrown into concentration camps simply because they belong to another race, and all this without anyone being held accountable!” (Julius von Jan, 112).

“The unwillingness to repent destroys the bridge leading to your neighbor. Repentance rebuilds this bridge” (Helmut Gollwitzer, 124).

Indeed, the strength of this work is that it presents sermons from the 1930’s and 1940’s as words that are “as ‘preachable’ today as they were then” (x). Perhaps they are a little more preachable in 2017 than one would like, but such an observation only underscores the important contribution Dean Stroud has offered to scholars and preachers today.

David Stark, Th.D. Candidate, Duke Divinity School

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

​Lindsay, Mark R. Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014)

Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology 

Lindsay, Mark R. Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 204 pp. $24.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Amanda MacInnis-Hackney (July 11, 2016)

In his book, Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology, Mark Lindsay asks the question: how is the Holocaust “a determinative event of witness”? (65). Following on the work done in his preceding two volumes, Covenanted Solidarity (2001) and Barth, Israel and Jesus (2007), Lindsay picks up the issue of natural theology and aims to move Christian theology beyond a mere acknowledgement of the event of the Holocaust, by offering instead “a totalizing hermeneutic by which the whole of Christian doctrine and praxis are critiqued and, where necessary, re-stated” (65). Lindsay argues that the Holocaust is not solely an anthropological revelation: that is, it does not just reveal human depravity. Therefore, the key questions for Lindsay include: how can the Holocaust be fit into an understanding of God’s self-revelation? Is the Holocaust in any way revelatory? What about God is revealed in the event of the Holocaust? Lindsay’s thesis is two-fold. First, the Holocaust is an event or “moment of witness” of divine revelation. Second, Lindsay also wants to hold this in tension with Barth’s rejection of natural theology since Barth makes a distinction between events which bear witness to revelation and revelatory events. Therefore, the Holocaust, Lindsay argues, “should be understood – not as an event of revelation as such, but as a testifying event that bears witness to the reality and nature of the revelation and more importantly, to the God to whom that revelation refers” (66).

After surveying modern Jewish and Christian theological responses to the Holocaust in chapters one and two, Lindsay turns to Barth’s “no” to natural theology in chapter three. He argues that Barth’s opposition to natural theology both helped him oppose Nazism, and hindered his ability to understand the theological significance of the Holocaust (67). Lindsay traces the development of Barth’s rejection of natural theology, surveying Barth’s Theologische Existenz heute, Lutherfeir, Für dies Freheit des Evangeliums, and the opening volumes of the Church Dogmatics. He argues that Barth’s methodology is to “do theology as though nothing has happened” which leads to Barth’s insistence on revelation resting solely in God’s self-revelation rather than any type of tradition or event, be it political or religious (78).

In chapter four, Lindsay starts by looking at Barth’s treatment of radical evil in CD III/3, which had been written in the years immediately following the conclusion of WWII, and notes that Barth does not specifically mention the Holocaust in this text even though it was written against the backdrop of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Indeed, as Lindsay notes, “nowhere does Barth make explicit any link between the atrocity of the Shoah and the reality of das Nichtige” (93). Lindsay briefly considers the possibility that Barth’s silence is in keeping with the general silence immediately after the Holocaust, but concludes that the focus needs to be on Barth’s theological methodology, the same methodology which resulted in his adamant “no” to natural theology. Therefore, Lindsay’s argument in this chapter is that “it was Barth’s refusal to countenance the legitimacy of natural theology that rendered him simply unable to posit the Holocaust as an event that demanded to be taken with theological seriousness. The undeniable contextual brilliance of Barth’s theology was, at the same time, its most profound deficiency” (94-95). If Barth does not include the Holocaust in his discussion of radical evil, is there another place in his dogmatic project where the Holocaust could appear? Lindsay turns from CD III/3 to Barth’s discussion in IV/3.1 on the possibility of “other lights” in the secular sphere that can testify or witness to the revelation of Jesus Christ. To test this, Lindsay looks at four criteria: the goodness of the parabolic word, the orientation of the parabolic word to the Word of Life, the fruitfulness of the parabolic word, and the parabolic word and the claim of repentance. Lindsay argues that the Holocaust meets the second and fourth criterion but not the first and third, meaning it does not meet Barth’s definition of a secular parable (114).

In chapter five, Lindsay seeks out another locus for the Holocaust in Barth’s theology, a “theological loophole” as it were (115). By placing Barth in dialogue with Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkovits, Lindsay sees a point of contact, specifically in the dialectical tension of a God who both self-manifests and remains hidden. For Berkovits, this tension is found in the Hester Panim (hiding face) of God. For Barth, this tension is found in his doctrine of revelation, where God both veils and unveils himself. Thus, Lindsay argues, “God within world historical occurrence is, for both Barth and Berkovits, simultaneously ‘hiddenly present’ and ‘presently hidden’” (129). The divergence comes in terms of the specific mention of the Holocaust: Berkovits makes the connection between the hiddenness of God and the Holocaust explicitly, while Barth does not (129). The solution, just like in chapter four, is to turn to Barth’s Christology. Lindsay looks at the theme of the concealment of God in Barth’s commentary on the Apostles’ Creed and in CD IV/1, arguing that in the crucifixion of Christ, “torture, execution, and God’s silent turning away of his face coincide[s] with the most profound moment of his Self-revelation” (134). God is both concealed and revealed in the crucifixion because it “the singular place of God’s absence and presence, of God’s silence and of the Deus Dixit” (135).

In chapter six, Lindsay continues exploring the christocentric foundation of self-revelation in the event of the crucifixion by considering the question of divine suffering. After surveying the historical tradition concerning divine passibility, and briefly referencing the ongoing debate concerning Barth’s doctrine of election and the nature of the Trinity, Lindsay traces Barth’s position on divine passibility from his lectures in the 1920s through to his doctrine of reconciliation. For Barth, Christ’s suffering is not limited to his humanity, but is instead experienced in both his humanity and his divinity. As such, God is passible because Christ’s suffering “is taken into the very heart of the Godhead” (157). Importantly, this suffering cannot be understood apart from the reality of Jesus’ taking on not just human flesh, but specifically Jewish human flesh. It is Barth’s acceptance of the doctrine of passibility and his attentive treatment of theological significance of Christ’s suffering which then “facilitates dialogue with the idea of God’s solidarity in suffering with the Jewish victims of the death camps” (163). Thus, looking at the Holocaust from a Barthian framework, God was indeed present in the suffering and death. This is because in becoming the Word became flesh, the crucified Lord stands in solidarity with humanity, and more specifically with the Jewish people. Therefore, the Christian tradition can understand the Holocaust “as a theologically significant event of witness, to which the church must attend,” without embracing natural theology, because we can, using Barth’s theological framework, “locate within it an event that testifies to what has already been revealed by God about himself” (167).

Lindsay’s latest volume on Barth and Judaism is both an important contribution to existing Barth scholarship and an excellent piece of constructive theology, demonstrating yet another example of the multifaceted flexibility of Barth’s Chalcedonian Christology as a theological framework. While acknowledging the difficulties, omissions and insensitive remarks made by Barth about the Jewish people, Lindsay is right to note that it is not just that the Holocaust challenges Barth’s theology, but at the same time “Barth’s theology itself poses challenges to post-Shoah theology” (164). Therefore, Reading Auschwitz with Barth is an important resource, not just for Barth scholars, but for Christian and Jewish theologians working on issues of post-Holocaust theology, supersessionism, and interreligious cooperation and dialogue.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

David Gibson, Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin and Barth, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009)

Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin and Barth

David Gibson, Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin and Barth, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), xiii + 221. $130.00

Reviewed by Sung-Sup Kim (July 23, 2010)

David Gibson is currently Assistant Minister at High Church, Hilton, in Aberdeen, Scotland. This book is a lightly revised version of his dissertation written under the supervision of Francis Watson at the University of Aberdeen. Its thesis is fairly straightforward: John Calvin and Karl Barth exhibit contrasting sets of theological relationships between Christology and election, and the root of this contrast lies in how the two theologians read Scripture. This book adds to the recently growing subfield of studying these two theological giants in tandem; furthermore, it contributes to the growing awareness of the inseparable relationship between exegesis and doctrine.

Chapter 1 (“Calvin, Barth and Christocentrism”) is an introduction to the whole project, laying out the thesis and discussing methodological issues. Gibson argues that both Calvin and Barth develop “christocentric” doctrines of election. The point of contention, of course, is what is meant by christocentrism. The author follows Richard Muller’s argument that Calvin (along with the Reformed orthodox) follows “soteriological christocentrism” and Barth “principial christocentrism” (6). The former places Christ at the historical and soteriological center of God’s work of redemption, and its christological interests are driven by the question of salvation and Christ’s economic function. The latter, on the other hand, sets Christology as the methodological rule of all theological thinking. Gibson comes up with a correlative distinction to describe the two theologians’ approaches to Scripture: christologically extensive (Calvin) and christologically intensive (Barth). He uses these concepts to show the similarities and differences in how Calvin and Barth read Scripture and develop their respective doctrines of Christology and election.

In Chapter 2 (“Christology and Election”), Gibson focuses on Calvin’s commentary on John’s Gospel and Barth’s fine-print exegetical section on the prologue to the Gospel in Church Dogmatics II/2. Barth famously criticized Calvin’s doctrine of election for picturing Christ only as a means of executing a hidden absolute decree, but Gibson faults Barth for not mentioning Calvin’s commentary at all—especially on verses such as John 13:18 and 15:16, where Calvin does understand Christ as the subject of election in his role of appointing apostles. The crucial difference, however, is that while Calvin maintains a conceptual distance between Christ ensarkos and asarkos in the so-called extra Calvinisticum, Barth removes it with his direct identification of Jesus with the Word. Furthermore, while Barth sees Christ as the true object of election in whom we also are elected, Calvin pays more attention to the soteriological significance of Christ as the object of our faith. In short, Calvin’s main interest is in showing “what God does” and wills for our salvation, and Barth’s is in “who God is” (42).

The election of Israel and the church occupies Chapter 3 (“Community and Election”), and Gibson here follows Calvin and Barth’s exegesis of Romans 9-11. It is a meticulously close discussion of where the two theologians diverge while reading the same text. For Calvin, the eternal choosing of one people to belong to Christ comes to fruition in the form of two different economic dispensations: Israel in the Old Testament, and the church in the New. There is a linear movement from Israel to the church so that “Israel is typological of the church,” but for Barth “both Israel and the church are typological of Christ” (153). The two form one community of God with different vocations. The difference again lies in the two different kinds of christocentrism. For Barth, the inseparable unity of judgment and mercy in the one person of Jesus Christ leads to the unity of Israel and the church. Calvin, on the other hand, focuses not on God’s being but on his will in the temporal history of salvation to choose some and to reject others. The disjunction between the elect and the reprobate is more emphasized.

In Chapter 4 (“Hermeneutics and Election”), Gibson further develops his argument that Calvin’s exegesis is christologically extensive and Barth’s is christologically intensive. He shifts his attention to the Institutes and the dogmatic parts of Church Dogmatics in order to explicate their contrasting hermeneutics. Calvin does not identify Christ exclusively with the Word. He famously disliked speculation, and as an antidote he resorted not to a christological ground but a textual ground—the written Word, giving “a form of methodological priority to the written rather than the incarnate Word” (175). Barth, on the other hand, exclusively identifies Christ with the Word, and Scripture, the written Word, is a witness to this one living Word. Jesus Christ himself is the content of biblical witness. Consequently, Barth’s christocentrism in his exegesis is intensive. On the other hand, Calvin places Christ at the center of covenant history and hence at the center of Scripture, but in his reading each part of Scripture has a relatively independent standing.

This book offers a carefully constructed comparison of Calvin and Barth with a close reading of their exegetical works. Too often these theologians’ dogmatic characteristics have been attributed to everything from their philosophical mindset to their quirky personalities, but not enough to differences in how they read the Bible. Gibson draws attention in the right direction. Furthermore, the distinction between soteriological and principial christocentrism (and the corresponding distinction between extensive and intensive christocentrism) that he places in the center of his thesis has the power of simplicity to carry the whole argument to the end with coherence.

Gibson claims that this book does not provide an evaluation of either theologian’s exegesis or his doctrine of election. Nor does it examine Barth’s relationship to Calvin—such as whether his criticism is right or to what extent Barth is indebted to Calvin. Rather it is a descriptive analysis and comparison of the two theologians put side by side. But it is difficult not to ask whether such an attempt may risk taking them out of their respective contexts. As Cornelis van der Kooi shows in As in a Mirror: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Knowing God, the great ditch named Kant lies between the two so widely that a direct comparison would seem somewhat forced. Furthermore, it is sometimes doubtful whether Gibson really takes a merely descriptive stance between Calvin and Barth. His central thesis of soteriological and principial christocentrism comes from Muller, whose anti-Barthian sentiments are well known. Of course, Gibson may use Muller’s concepts without subscribing to his sentiments, but the line sometimes seems blurry. An example is his discussion of the relationship between the Trinity and election in Chapter 2. Touching on the controversial topic in recent Barth scholarship, Gibson sides with the interpretation of Edwin Chr. Van Driel et al (against Bruce McCormack et al) that God’s eternal decision of election is a self-determining decision but not a self-constituting one. But Gibson’s argument leaves an impression that he wants to bring Barth as close as possible to Calvin in their trinitarian understandings. Has his indebtedness to Muller perhaps motivated him to defend Barth and harmonize him with Calvin in some way?

Nevertheless, this book does well what it sets out to do: to lay “the necessary foundation for such evaluations” (27). And “such evaluations” should ask the really interesting questions that this book anticipates: What is the theological relationship between Calvin and Barth? Did Barth read Calvin correctly? Whose doctrine of election is more faithful to the biblical witness? Whose reading of Scripture makes more sense? Those who work on such questions will find a great resource in this book. In fact, these are some of the questions that we cannot avoid asking in our struggles to find the proper identity of Reformed theology in our time.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Hans Vium Mikkelsen, Reconciled Humanity: Karl Barth in Dialogue (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010),

Reconciled Humanity: Karl Barth in Dialogue

Hans Vium Mikkelsen, Reconciled Humanity: Karl Barth in Dialogue (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), xiv + 280. $30.00 / £19.99 (paperback)

Reviewed by Darren O. Sumner (January 30, 2012)

Hans Vium Mikkelsen (Center for Theology and Religious Education, Løgumkloster, Denmark) offers a reading of Karl Barth’s theology that engages a most important question: Does the incarnation of God the Son affect God’s own, inner life? If God is being-in-act, does the event of Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection in some sense constitute God’s own existence? Or does God exist in eternal repose apart from this event? Mikkelsen commends Barth as a vital dialogue partner for contemporary theology, and his approach here is threefold: [1] to describe Barth’s doctrines of revelation, anthropology, sin, and atonement or reconciliation; [2] to place Barth in conversation with contrasting thinkers, including René Girard, Martin Buber, Regin Prenter and Wolfhart Pannenberg; and [3] to develop his own criticism of Barth’s theology as failing to reach his aim of making the incarnation determinative for God’s being.

In this review I will first offer a summary of the important chapters and Mikkelsen’s major moves with a minimum of evaluative commentary, and then move to criticize his reading of Barth – particularly on this central question of the relation of Christology to the being of God. I conclude with more general comments on the book and its usefulness.

I

Reconciled Humanity is divided into three parts. Part I attends to Barth’s doctrine of revelation. Chapters 2 and 3 present Barth’s views on revelation and Scripture. Because human persons cannot attain knowledge of God by any other means, God must be both the subject and the object of revelation. This takes place according to the history of Jesus Christ narrated in Scripture – God has entered into time rather than eternally transcending it – and this is a free (non-necessary) act. For Barth, the text of the Bible is secondary insofar as it bears witness to Jesus, though it is primary in the sense that Scripture is the locus of one’s “first and foremost encounter [with] God’s self-revelation” (29-30). Chapter 3 concludes with a more constructive test of Barth’s hermeneutical method, which Barth passes by offering a “two-way reading of Scripture” that attends not only to what the text has to say to the reader, but also to what the reader brings to the text in the act of interpretation. Through this act the reader is “able to enlighten the Bible” (40) even as she is enlightened by it. An approach like fundamentalism would read Scripture in only one of these directions, presuming that the text is the fixed locus of self-authenticating divine truth not also shaped in the act of reading.

This builds to the much longer fourth chapter, where Mikkelsen gives an attentive reading of Church Dogmatics (CD) I/1. He considers revelation’s objectivity in light of its divine origin; the individual’s experience of revelation in its ambiguity; the necessity of “acknowledgment”; and our participation in revelation as a transforming act. The subjectivity of revelation consists in the human person’s experience of the presence of God, which gives men and women understanding of self viz. their relation to the Word of God (58-64). This is their “participation” in revelation, not as mere static hearers but as doers, those who are shaped by their encounter with the reality of God’s disclosing presence. All of this is properly framed within a non-experiential approach to theology, however, in order to properly qualify Christian experience and maintain theocentrism. God is the agent, and the human person does not possess that which is given.

Part II concerns the question of creaturely life – as being-in-encounter (Chapter 5) and as subject to sin and nothingness (Chapter 6). Mikkelsen describes Barth’s use of Buber and the I-Thou encounter in CD III/2, as well as the unpublished lectures of 1943/44 (in which Barth engages Buber more directly) that formed the basis of this part-volume. Failure to live in encounter with other creatures is judged to be a refusal of God’s will, “the horizontal correlate to what Barth elsewhere describes as the impossible possibility: the human being’s wish to live without God” (119). This material is generally satisfying, though there is a moment when Barth’s anthropology is overshadowed by the author’s affinity for Buber. In the following chapter, Mikkelsen provides a thorough summary of Barth’s doctrine of sin as nothingness. Das Nichtige is the negative correlate to the divine election of grace, not created but rather “given existence through God’s rejection” (135). It has no ontological substance since it lacks a God-given telos (131). Yet there is no eternal dialectic between election and rejection: as opposition to grace, sin is defeated and overcome (139-40). This approach is in contrast to Emil Brunner’s anthropology, which Barth believed granted sin real ontological force by allowing free will to play an essential role in what constitutes humanity.

The sum of all this is a theological anthropology with both vertical and horizontal dimensions. On the one hand, the phenomenon of human being is subject to and rightly interpreted by the “true human,” Jesus Christ, as creaturely being redeemed out of the sinful morass by its Creator. On the other hand, human being consists very basically in the mutual and self-sacrificing encounter with the other. Any other attempt at anthropology, such as a description founded in the human being’s sinful character, is inadequate and misleading (93).

Mikkelsen’s greatest interest lies in Christology and the atonement, the subject matter of Part III (seven chapters, nearly half of the book’s page count). This is where the author is more constructive, more willing to venture disagreement with Barth, and more prone to flaws in his interpretation. Mikkelsen is right to note a certain “Chalcedonian pattern” in Barth’s Christology. Barth overcomes the limitations of a more classically construed doctrine of the incarnation, however, by combining the two natures doctrine and the status duplex, so that Christology may be seen as both “from above” (the humiliation of God) and “from below” (the exaltation of the human) (147). Here Mikkelsen treats the important topics of anhypostasis/enhypostasis and the relationship of the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos, although neither treatment goes very deep or seizes upon Barth’s more provocative insights. The explanation of enhypostasis is somewhat muddled (the author suggests that the human nature of Christ had its own hypostasis which is incorporated into that of the Logos: 149), and the author introduces the troubling term “absorption” when speaking of the humanity of Christ in relation to his deity: (“The human nature of Christ is absorbed into the being of God”; 151).

In a short chapter on the covenant, Mikkelsen explains Barth’s criticism of federal theology. Positively, federal theology tried to understand the work of God as an event and not as a system of interdependent doctrines (173). However, it also introduced a split between the divine persons, and between God’s essence and will, by conceiving of the covenant of redemption as a mutual pact between the Father and the Son (175-7). This footnote in doctrinal history will be important for understanding Barth’s own thought. Mikkelsen takes up in Chapter 9 the place of judgment and sacrifice in the atonement, comparing Barth’s doctrine with René Girard’s theory of mimesis. For Barth, God is both the subject and the object of judgment, and so the human desire to judge others is exposed and contradicted. For Girard, it is basic to human nature to imitate what another has, and so the only possibility for unity is when the community unites against a common enemy (a scapegoat) and therein justifies the violence inherent in its religious practices. Mikkelsen’s best conclusion is that the two are only formally similar in this way, that is, as they both expose from without the a priori of the human condition (the inclination to judge others, or to imitate others; 192). Otherwise, Barth’s use of Anselmian notions of judgment and punishment for sin are quite foreign to Girard’s theory – though Barth does score points in downplaying the sacrificial model. Materially speaking, Mikkelsen is right to observe that Barth’s theology requires that the death of Jesus on the cross is willed and accomplished by God – something inimical to Girard’s view (cf. 190, 193).

The author rehearses the “double outcome” of the traditional doctrine of predestination, and Barth’s well-known criticism of it, in a brief chapter on election. Mikkelsen’s judgment is that Barth is an unqualified universalist, a verdict he offers without nuance or argument despite a two-page excursus wherein he seeks to justify the claim but finally offers no substantive engagement (212-13). This is followed by an important chapter on punishment and divine wrath. Barth eschews any doctrine of atonement that posits an inner conflict between God’s justice and God’s mercy, emphasizing instead that it is God who is at work on the cross. The Father does not punish the Son but, together, the Father and Son work self-sacrificially to do away with sin and restore the broken relationship with creatures. Mikkelsen stresses well that this fissure is on the human side: we are turned from God, but God is not turned away from us (as many forms of penal substitution theory would have it). Mikkelsen therefore describes the punishment endured by Jesus in terms of “God-absence” (215, 228-9). The Father did not pour out holy wrath upon the Son, but permitted the Son to take up the human being’s status as separated from God. This is not only true of the cross, says Mikkelsen, but also of the whole of the incarnation since the Son takes on fallen human nature, humanity turned away from its Creator (pp. 237-8).

Mikkelsen argues in the penultimate chapter against the old thesis that the humanity of Jesus Christ plays no important role in Barth’s Christology. Then in the provocative final chapter, he argues for the importance of Christology “from below”: “Jesus can only be understood as Christ in and through the resurrection and ascension” (250). As Barth had it, proper Christology is methodologically neither strictly “from above” nor “from below” but a dialectic of both. The subject of the Christ event is seen to be the very Son of God, and “it is only through the story of Jesus that the Christology from above gains its content” (ibid).

II

Mikkelsen’s descriptive work in Parts I and II is generally reliable, and so the following critical evaluation is mostly limited to Part III. With respect to Christology and atonement (his preferred translation ofVersöhnung, rendered “reconciliation” in the CD; cf. 145n1), Mikkelsen’s reading of Barth is solid on the larger picture, but deficient when explicating the details that make Barth’s theology look the way that it does. He is right, for example, to point to Barth’s actualist understanding of the being of God (cf. 158-60). But to speak of this being as “constituted by the acts of God” on the one hand, and of “the essence of God in and for himself prior to history” as the precondition for those acts on the other (158-9), seems to indicate that Mikkelsen’s grasp of the matter lacks precision. Revelation may have a dialectical quality, for Barth, but actualism is not a dialectic.

Further, it is confusing that the author would stress the character of punishment as God-absence so vigorously only to then state that God the Father was not really absent from the suffering Jesus, but that Jesus only felt abandoned – a feeling that “God himself absorbs” and eliminates (229). Jesus’ death in God-abandonment is important to Barth’s understanding of the atonement as a judgment on sin, but it does raise difficult questions, particularly with respect to the triune relations and the unity of God. Mikkelsen’s relegation of God-abandonment to “feeling” signals a last-minute failure of resolve in the face of these challenges. Instead of depicting the death of the Son as God’s firm and final rejection of sin, Mikkelsen risks psychologizing the event of the cross, trading the intra-divine conflict for a fictive “punishment.” He does not deal with Christ being made sin, or the need for sin (not the Son) to be destroyed by divine wrath, or the trinitarian problem inherent in all talk of “God-absence.” On this latter point, Mikkelsen claims early on that Barth’s doctrine of the triune persons as “one absolute subject’s three modes of being” will need to be replaced with “three subjects of the Trinity” to make his thesis work (158; cf. also 176). This phrase should give the reader pause, as well as the author’s failure to explain or defend it elsewhere in the text.

The author’s stress on divine mutability strongly suggests the influence of process theology on his thought. “If God is really taking a risk, this must also … involve at least a potential change in the being of God” (226). God must be able to learn from His experience (262n27). God puts Himself at risk, risks Jesus deserting his task, risks losing Himself to the other. This simply presses Barth’s rhetoric too far, failing to attend to the counterbalancing statement that in giving Himself to creatures God “does not give Himself away” (230; cf. also 232, where Mikkelsen cites this statement). God’s commitment to being God for creatures is real and significant for God’s own life; but, as Mikkelsen observes, Barth is unwilling to hedge on divine freedom, and certainly does not believe that he needs to do so in order to secure this point. Mikkelsen further confuses actualism with process theology, asking, “[i]f it is the acts that constitute the being of God, must God’s being then not be a being in ongoing development (at least potentially)” (259)? But Barth argues that God’s being is not constituted by “acts” of His relation to creatures in general, but by the et singularis act of God’s revelation and reconciliation in Jesus Christ (cf. CD II/2, 264). Mikkelsen’s version of actualism is not rooted in an eternal, divine decision but in the more Hegelian commitment to history that he seems – ironically – to eschew but of which he believes Barth is somewhat guilty (26-7; cf. also 160-4, 256-7). Mikkelsen is driven by the concept of Deus pro nobis, and has concluded that if God is in relation to creatures then God must be vulnerable to creatures: “To be in relation means to be able to relate, which again means to be able to interact mutually” (261). For Barth, however, “God is who He is in His works,” yet “they are bound to Him, but He is not bound to them” (CD II/1, 260).

The author’s central claim is that Barth thus failed to integrate the incarnation and the being of God because he upheld the doctrine of immutability (cf. 211n15). In Mikkelsen’s judgment, Barth’s actualist understanding of God therefore seems “not to make any major difference at all, as the intention of the incarnation can be traced back to God’s original essence (whether it be in the form of an original being or an original will). Nothing new then has really happened to God in the incarnation” (260). Mikkelsen finally wants to argue against such a hidden God that God’s inner being is “dynamic,” i.e. capable of change, and therefore capable of absorbing Jesus’ experience of death on the cross (157n23). When the Son suffers, “God really suffers in his own inner being; there is no God beyond the God who suffers” (257). This he takes to be contradictory to Barth’s own Christology, despite Barth’s best intentions to allow the life of Jesus to be determinative for God.

It is unfortunate that Mikkelsen successfully identifies the actualist character of Barth’s theological ontology but later fails to apprehend the ways in which this impacts his thought – in areas such as intra-trinitarian relations and God’s relationship to history, for example. Barth insists that the Word’s becoming flesh means that God really has taken humanity into God’s own life, with all the ontological implications that entails. This is a point that Mikkelsen stresses well. But because he has lost sight of the fact that Barth grounds the incarnation in God’s eternal election, the author can only conclude that “one consequence of God’s absorbing of human finitude must be that God not only is able to change, but also that God actually did change during the incarnation” (224). He acknowledges that this thesis contradicts Barth, but he fails to see why Barth could (and, indeed, had to) maintain divine immutability: God’s inclusion of humanity in the divine life viz. the Son is eternal and not merely punctiliar. And so the incarnation, while not excluding God’s being, does not signal a change in God but rather the actualization in history of that which God, by virtue of divine decision, has always been (cf. 224-5, 257). Mikkelsen’s thesis falls apart not so much because he gets Barth wrong as because he has not paid sufficient attention to getting Barth entirely right.

In addition to overlooking the role of Barth’s revised ontology here, and much to the detriment of his own argument, Mikkelsen relies on Pannenberg’s misreading of Barth and the arguments of process theology. Barth ends up sounding too much like Cyril of Alexandria in the very ontological differentiation between the immanent and the economic Trinity, and divine freedom is regarded as in competition with God’s self-commitment to creatures (258). Barth’s authentic Christology, in fact, secures all that Mikkelsen seems to want, but without sacrificing divine immutability. Rather than subjecting God to history, actualism protects against God’s mutability and historical contingency on the one hand, and God’s failure to fully enter into the human condition and exist as Deus pro nobis on the other. Barth does this by locating the ontologically decisive “moment” in eternity.

III

There is much in Mikkelsen’s work to admire. Reconciled Humanity is clearly written and approachable. Mikkelsen is a capable describer of the larger contours of Barth’s thought when he allows Barth to speak for himself. The book evinces the author’s clear grasp of Barth’s theology with respect to the deeply important matters of revelation, humanity and sin, as well as his ability to communicate the relevant concepts. But those in search of an introductory text will likely find the book alternately illuminating and frustrating. The study begins slowly with a basic description of Barth’s theology, but gains complexity as the author proceeds to increasingly critical analysis. For example, the issue of the analogia entis arises in Chapter 2 in more accessible (if perhaps confused) terms of Paul Tillich’s method of correlation (22). On the other hand, Mikkelsen introduces the influence of Hegelian and Kantian thought forms without explaining them sufficiently (cf. 26-7), and a similarly unexplained comment refers to a Danish debate over Barth interpretation (110). All this results in an uneven discussion: too simple at times for Barth scholars, and too over-reaching for the layperson.

In areas where Mikkelsen seeks to engage Barth in dialogue – the incarnation and atonement, and the doctrine of God – he quickly loses the grounding provided by his descriptive skills, alternating between formal errors in his strategy of argumentation and material errors in ascribing to Barth either positions he did not hold (e.g. speculative theology and “the fear of an unknown God,” retaining the fear of reprobation inherent in the older doctrine of predestination; 234-5), or problems that Barth did, in fact, overcome (e.g. a competitive account of divine freedom and God’s self-commitment to the world; 257-8). The text also betrays the author’s idiosyncrasies, such as dense repetition of the same point throughout a single paragraph, and the footnotes’ compulsive badgering of the English translation of the Kirchliche Dogmatik as not adequately capturing what Barth really means (ten times by my count, seven of which are in Part I alone).

The book is heavy on interpretive claims and, at key moments, light on supporting evidence. Mikkelsen’s desire is to commend Karl Barth as a dialogue partner for contemporary theology, which is a worthy undertaking. But one suspects that those likely to agree with Mikkelsen’s material conclusions on divine mutability will not find reasons to engage Barth as a dialogue partner here, instead finding reasons to pigeonhole him as yet another representative of a tradition that describes the divine economy as merely “an outpouring of the original will of God,” and that views the world as “nothing more than the stage on which God can perform his act” (260). This is unfortunate, since Barth has much to say here. On the other hand, more conservative interpreters of Barth will be just as unlikely to enter the dialogue, albeit for opposite reasons: Mikkelsen’s agenda is beyond the pale for classical theism, rendering his actualist reading of Barth suspect.

Even if the work does not entirely succeed in its later analytical moves, Mikkelsen identifies all the right questions with respect to Barth’s views of the triune God, the incarnation, and the atonement, and his descriptive powers are significant. Reconciled Humanity is a fascinating study and a welcome attempt to place Barth in conversation with other twentieth century figures and concerns.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006)

Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics

Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006), x + 310. $38.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by W. Travis McMaken (August 01, 2007)

Stephen J. Grabill, a theological research scholar at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and editor of the “Journal for Markets and Morality,” provides an excellent introduction to the Reformed natural law tradition in his recent volume Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics. This volume, the product of Grabill’s dissertation at Calvin Theological Seminary, hopes to “rediscover and rehabilitate natural law and related doctrinal concepts” (2), aspects of the Reformed tradition largely ignored in the wake of, among other things, Karl Barth’s critique of natural theology. Grabill believes that fear of “tacit acceptance of Roman Catholic theological and philosophical presuppositions” (9) and latent anti-scholasticism (cf. 4) have also been involved in this eclipse.
Grabill’s volume champions the richness of the Reformed natural law tradition by means of three interwoven movements. First, the Barth – Brunner debate over natural theology is identified as the impetus for the 20th century eclipse of natural law in the Reformed tradition. Second, the role of natural law and related concepts is explored in the thought of Reformed theologians from various stages in the development of Reformed scholasticism in order to overcome fears concerning covert Roman Catholicism. And third, resulting familiarity with the thought of these figures helps to overcome latent anti-scholasticism. The attention given to these Reformed authors is also important because Grabill strives to overturn the notion, which he laments as a result of the Barth – Brunner debate, that John Calvin is the measure of all Reformed theology.

Medieval scholastic antecedents to the Reformed natural law tradition are explored in Chapter two (Grabill’s treatment of Barth in the first chapter will be addressed later), where Grabill sketches the basic contours of realist, realist mediating and nominalist understandings of natural law. All these positions ground natural law in God’s will: “what makes something ultimately obligatory is that God commands it” (58). Differences between them pertain to divergent understandings of how God’s will, natural law and eternal law relate. Indeed, Grabill argues that the nominalist position does not entail relativism. It simply affirms that God could have chosen another moral system than that which God did in fact choose, although “[h]aving chosen this one…it is binding” (66). This chapter concludes with a brief look at Calvin on “the potentia absoluta / ordinata distinction” (68), setting the stage for the following chapter.

Chapter three addresses John Calvin (d. 1564). Grabill’s argument is that “Calvin, at least in principle, leaves open the formal possibility of developing a systematic doctrine of natural law founded upon the natural knowledge of God the Creator” (71). Much of this material deals with the duplex cognitio Dei in Peirre Viret and in Calvin. The result of this analysis is Grabill’s conclusion that on the one hand Calvin repeatedly affirms that humans can know God salvifically only through Jesus Christ as found in Scripture, while on the other he repeatedly denies the claim that without Christ there is no valid knowledge of God whatsoever. (81)

Always eager for an opportunity to distinguish between Barth and Calvin, Grabill notes that the former “argues Christ alone as revelation, whereas Calvin…maintains both special revelation apart from Christ and general revelation” (85). In the final analysis, Grabill understands Calvin as broadly realist in orientation, and concludes that – if nothing else – Calvin’s treatment of the conscience leaves open the possibility of developing doctrine of natural theology and natural law that satisfies Reformed scruples about “the human fall into sin, with all its attendant epistemological frustrations and ambivalences” (96).

Peter Martyr Vermigli (d. 1562), a former Augustinian monk who was later closely associated with Thomas Cramner and Martin Bucer, is the subject of Chapter four. Thanks to Vermigli’s “formal training in the via antiqua and the medieval Augustinian traditions” he was able “to develop a more internally consistent and sophisticated understanding of [the doctrines associated with natural law] than was possible for Calvin” (121). Vermigli’s sophisticated use of the distinction between contemplative and practical knowledge reinforces this notion. He affirmed that a certain basic knowledge of God “is apparent both from the handiwork of creation and being engrafted in the human mind” (117). This latter notion refers to God creative activity with reference to the soul, which is the seat of the conscience for Vermigli (112). With reference specifically to morality and the natural law, Vermigli believed that the post-lapsarian human will is capable of partial knowledge of and obedience to God, although this lacks salvific capacity.

Chapter five is devoted primarily to Reformed political theorist Johannes Althusius (d. 1638), although considerable time is spent investigating the theologian Jerome Zanchi (d. 1590). This chapter tends to focus on the relation between various types of law:

Proper law, or positive law developed by humanity, is the application of natural law to particular circumstances. One interesting point found in this chapter is the notion, advocated by Zanchi, that natural law is not a ‘relic’ of the imago Dei or something associated with essential human nature, but moral knowledge restored by God in post-lapsarian humanity (cf. 139).

Like Zanchi…Althusius holds that the moral precepts of the Decalogue are derivative from the logically prior lex naturalis, that is, the universal knowledge of morality God implanted in the human mind at creation. (132)

Francis Turretin (d. 1687) is the subject of the sixth and final chapter. Turretin’s “theological system is self-consciously scholastic…and self-consciously Reformed” (152). In Turretin, the themes developed thus far are brought together into a higher synthesis than previously achieved. Grabill summarizes his position well: “Although God provides true knowledge of himself in the works of creation and providence, natural revelation is a nonsalvific but morally culpable source of information about God” (158). The moral force of natural law arises both from God’s nature and from the nature of humanity as rational beings in this created order. Those precepts that derive from the former are immutably necessary, while those deriving from the latter are contingently necessary (cf. 170-173). This formulation is a critical affirmation of the realist natural law tradition, and as a repudiation of nominalism.

A sketch of the Protestant natural law tradition’s development into the modern period, with the suggestion that these thinkers tended toward Remonstrant and Socinian positions opposed by Turretin (cf. 176), is offered in conclusion. Barth is once again addressed in much the same way as in the first chapter, where Grabill attends to Barth’s rejection of natural theology and natural knowledge of God in his debate with Brunner. Although this treatment leaves something to be desired, it does identify the crux of Barth’s concern. Grabill writes that, for Barth, “knowledge moves in only one direction, from above to below” and notes that Barth intends to “eliminate the possibility of moving from man to God” (33). After a brief consideration of divine command ethics, Grabill concludes by considering Jacques Ellul, Henry Stob, John Hare and Richard Mouw on the question of natural law.
Grabill’s treatment of Barth is the Achilles heel in an otherwise very well researched and executed volume. Although Grabill casts his project as a rediscovery of the Reformed natural law tradition after Barth, he does not offer arguments as to why Barth was incorrect in assessing natural law. In the place of arguments, Grabill prefers to describe Barth negatively as ‘Christocentric’ or ‘actualist’ without explaining why these things should be rejected. Grabill does strongly critique Barth’s interpretation of Calvin on natural law and natural theology. But it is not the same thing to establish that Barth was incorrect in his interpretation of Calvin and to establish that Barth was incorrect to reject even Reformed versions of the natural law and natural theology traditions. More is expected from someone who recognizes, as Grabill does, that it was “Barth’s desire to go further than the Reformers” specifically by “repudiating the Augustinian deposit in prolegomena” (188). Furthermore, there is no evidence that Grabill has given any attention to Barth’s treatment of the knowledge of God in the opening paragraphs of Church Dogmatics II/1. This is especially unfortunate since Barth here provides an illuminating treatment of the biblical text, interpreting Psalm 8, Romans 1 and other key passages (cf. CD II/1, 100-128).

This avoidance of Barth’s arguments calls into question the success of Grabill’s project to “rediscover and rehabilitate natural law and related doctrinal concepts” (2). Rather than addressing Barth’s arguments, Grabill merely sets him to one side. If the Reformed natural law tradition is to be rediscovered and rehabilitated after Barth, it will have to be done in deep conversation with Barth. This sort of rapprochement between Barth and the greater Reformed tradition on these questions might be pursued through a consideration of Thomas F. Torrance’s epistemological realism. Indeed, Torrance appears to move in this direction in his short work entitled Juridical Law and Physical Law (Scottish Academic Press, 1982).

These difficulties aside, Grabill has provided a valuable resource on and introduction to the Reformed natural law tradition. Though the endnote format is frustrating, Grabill’s notes are often illuminating. A 34-page bibliography provides a helpful guide for further study. Grabill’s chapters on the various Reformed thinkers from Calvin through Turretin provide excellent introductions to their understandings of natural law and related doctrines, and throughout these chapters he achieves fine balance between engagement with secondary literature and with primary texts. For these reasons, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, though weak in its treatment of Barth, certainly has a place in Reformed theological studies.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Nolan, Kirk J. Reformed Virtue After Barth: Developing Moral Virtue Ethics in the Reformed Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014)

Reformed Virtue After Barth: Developing Moral Virtue Ethics in the Reformed

Nolan, Kirk J. Reformed Virtue After Barth: Developing Moral Virtue Ethics in the Reformed Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 208 pp. $30.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Michael J. Leyden (June 27, 2017)

For those of us concerned with the discipline of Christian moral reasoning, one of the great delights of the past twenty-five years has been the introduction of Karl Barth’s voice into ethical discourse. Attitudes have changed towards his moral theology during that time, and scholars have been increasingly open to his distinctive and sometimes contrary understanding of ethics. Broadly speaking there are two approaches in the secondary literature. The first seeks to make sense of Barth’s project and give a coherent account of what he was doing and why (scholars such as Paul Matheny, John Webster, and Paul Nimmo are good examples of this). The second seeks to bring Barth into an existing conversation about particular issues either to clarify, critique, or extend the discussion. The present work by Kirk Nolan, Assistant Professor of Religion at Presbyterian College, adopts the second approach. This is not a book on Barth’s ethics per se, neither is it making the case that he was a virtue theorist (though, in places, it does more than suggest the compatibility of virtue theory and Barth’s theology with varying degrees of success). Rather, the book explores the constructive possibility of a Reformed virtue theory if Barth’s theological concerns are heard and received. As such, this volume primarily addresses an ethical debate in the Reformed tradition, which Nolan thinks will benefit from Barth’s insight that ethics is “grounded in and shaped by a covenant based in God’s free election of humankind” (5). For exclusivist Barthians this may be frustrating, as there is clearly space for a more comprehensive and thorough reading of the ethics of the Church Dogmatics. Yet, it is an interesting and provocative proposal.

Following the introduction, the volume is divided into five chapters: three descriptive chapters and two constructive chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the history of virtue ethics in the Reformed tradition and begins by noting the “the current lack of attention to virtue in the tradition” despite a historic legacy in Calvin’s Institutes, The Westminster Confession, and Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue. Drawing on these three, Nolan explores the contours of Reformed virtue theory, and in particular the natural metaphors used to describe God’s engagement with the world. He concludes by outlining how “Barth’s theology has the potential to make powerful contributions to Reformed moral virtue ethics” by redirecting, re-describing, and reorientating the project “as to the proper source of morality” in God (35). Barth’s emphatic Christological method challenges the natural theology which Calvin and Edwards employ, and replaces it with a more thoroughgoing (and arguably quite particular) Chalcedonianism.

Chapters 2 and 3 take serious note of Barth’s critique of the virtue tradition, whilst also suggesting one possible way in which Barth may be a critical friend of virtue ethics. Barth’s Christocentrism is the basis of the critique, particularly as read from the human-side of the Chalcedonian formula, since, for Barth, “the defining features of our relationship with God through Jesus Christ are also the determinative characteristics of what makes us human beings” (38). Ethically speaking, these relational features determine the shape and content of human agency and the course of ethical deliberation. Furthermore, Nolan observes that Barth’s emphasis on incarnation and revelation undergird his objection to the analogia entis and habitual grace, both of which feature in traditional Reformed virtue theories, and is the basis of his claim that what it means to be human is something we learn only from God who reveals it to us in Christ. Barth has not convinced critics such as Sheila Davaney here: “she argues that . . . Barth’s account of divine and human interaction fails to provide a place for human responsibility and integrity” (39). Davaney’s is an oft-rehearsed retort, initially championed by John Cullberg and Robert Willis; Barth’s emphasis on God is said to overwhelm human capacity and ability, providing no room for the human being to act (and without a proper place for human agency there is little work for the Christian ethicist to do!). However, building on John Webster’s work, Nolan rebuts Davaney’s account of both divine and human agency in Barth for its overemphasis on divine sovereignty at the expense of divine condescension. The latter enables meaningful human action, because the full human Jesus Christ was an ethical agent. His point is that only when sovereignty and condescension are held in balance (and some degree of tension!) can a genuine picture of human agency be offered. It is the humanity of Christ, assumed in the incarnation, which enables us to speak about our own genuine humanity because it holds before us the image of what full humanity is. Here is a crucial part of Nolan’s developing argument: the humanity of Christ is indicative of the kind of moral life other human beings are to cultivate in words and deeds, something to move towards in our decisions and actions. This is not simply by being an example to us of the moral life, but more provocatively by being the directly embodied address and command of God to us. Our humanity is therefore found in response to his humanity. With this in mind, Chapter 3 attends to William Werpehowski’s assessment of Barth’s ethics as a type of narratival virtue ethics — i.e. because Barth thinks each of us has a moral history, in which we are encountered and commanded by God “moment by moment”, all of our decisions in the present also draw upon our decisions of the past — and delineates a series of convergences and divergences between Werpehowski’s reading of Barth and Barth’s objections to virtue theory. While Werpehowski’s insight that Barth can offer something useful to virtue ethics is affirmed, the divergences in detail mean that Nolan must find an alternative way to do Barthian virtue: ”Reformed virtue ethics on Barthian lines will have to part ways with Werpehowski’s reading of Barth” (71). Thus, the task of the final chapters is to outline Nolan’s constructive proposal.

Chapter 4 begins with five (Barthian) theological commitments around which Nolan structures his Reformed virtue ethics: 1) God is the God who has chosen unequivocally to be God for us; 2) our identity in Christ is marked by the struggle between old and new, simul justice et peccator; 3) the relationship between God and us is unidirectional, such that God’s grace is given to us in revelation, not through our own natural capacities; 4) the relationship between God and us is Chalcedonian in character; 5) grace is not separable from the God made known in Jesus Christ but is in fact identified with that person. With these in mind, he offers his critical reading of three of Thomas’ virtues: temperance, prudence, and charity. Attention to specific virtues allows Nolan to show what this ethics would look like in reality. In each case, Nolan argues that Barth’s approach sees the enactment of these virtues as human response to divine command. This places the theological emphasis on God and not human capacity. However, just as Thomas thought practicing virtues makes us more virtuous, so Nolan argues obedience to God’s commands in Christ affects the respondent: “our response to God’s initiating activity strengthens the virtue” (91). Significantly, Nolan argues that the need to cultivate these virtues in obedience is absolutely necessary because of the “marked struggle” mentioned above; since we are justified sinners, our response to the divine command is a struggle for us, in which we must choose obedience not disobedience. As we do, we grow more able to respond rightly in the future. This movement, framed theologically by the covenant of grace and practically by the community of faith, is our personal and corporate history, and the cultivation of virtuous responses to God’s command is our formation as Christian disciples. The final chapter explores what this has looked like in concrete terms in the recent history of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and suggests ways forward.

Nolan’s argument is interesting, and it is worthy of attention. As a constructive work, drawing on Barthian insights to re-envision Christian virtue ethics, it is exciting and provocative. As an account of what Barth is doing constructively with his moral theology, I am much less convinced. The eventful character of divine address in Barth’s ethics in the Church Dogmatics is much more dynamic and surprising than I think Nolan allows. Nonetheless there is much to inspire here too — his emphasis on human responsibility before God is a strand of Barth’s moral theology which is often overlooked. Readers will be tested and stimulated by this book, both ethicists and Barth scholars alike, and will be forced to re-examine and sharpen their own ideas. For this reason they should read it.

Michael J. Leyden, Tutor and Lecturer in Systematic Theology, St Mellitus College

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Norwood, Donald W. Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015)

Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II 

Norwood, Donald W. Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015) xxi+263. $35.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Marjorie Corbman (February 02, 2016)

In Reforming Rome, Norwood offers a valuable contribution to existing research on the relationship between Barthian theology and movements for reform within the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, exemplified best by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). While other recent works on this theme have focused on the nuances of the theological conversations (and divergences) between Barth and Catholic figures, most notably Benjamin Dahlke in Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal and Vatican II (2012) and the contributors to Bruce L. McCormack’s and Thomas Joseph White, OP’s Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth (2013), Norwood gives special attention to the context of the ecumenical movement as a framework for interpreting Barth’s responses to the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Norwood, as a minister of the United Reformed Church who has himself been involved in ecumenical efforts, makes a compelling case for the enduring significance of the conversation between Barth and his Catholic contemporaries for the pursuit of church unity.

The book contains seven chapters: 1) “Why Rome? Why Reform? Why Barth?”, an argument for the continued importance of these three loci of the book for ecumenical dialogue; 2) “Reforming Rome: Continuing the Reformation,” a description of the necessity for continued “reform” in achieving church unity; 3) “Responding to Vatican II, Part 1,” an examination of Barth’s responses to two integral documents produced by the Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation) and Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church); 4) “Responding to Vatican II, Part 2,” a discussion of Barth’s understanding of Church authority, papal power, and the meaning and mission of the Christian community; 5) “Reforming or Converting Karl Barth: Roman Catholic Critics,” an overview of the varied Catholic critiques of Barth and Barthian approaches; 6) “Differences That Still Divide?”, a look towards the remaining points of division between church communities in light of the conversations of Barth and his Catholic colleagues; and 7) “The Rediscovery of Unity,” a call for Christians today to enact the act of solidarity, unity, respectful challenge, and “exchange of gifts” found in the event of interdenominational gathering in Vatican II.

Norwood describes himself as approaching the task of writing the book as a Protestant minister who had “fallen in love with the Council” through studying its documents, reading the reports of those who were present, and meeting those who attended its sessions (200). Norwood seems struck especially by the spontaneity and openness of the Council, springing evidently from Pope Saint John XXIII’s experience of prayer that allowed the Catholic Church to welcome so forthrightly the voices of its Protestant critics to its own process of discernment. One of the loudest of these voices, Norwood persuasively demonstrates, was Barth’s, though he was unable to attend the Council in person.

In examining Barth’s own responses to the Council, the influence Barthian theology likely had on some of the Council documents (especially on Dei Verbum), and correspondence between Barth and Catholic thinkers, Norwood establishes the importance of viewing Barth as a crucial conversation partner for the Catholic Church in the periods before, during, and following the Council. Norwood’s work is most convincing and gripping when illustrating the importance of Barth’s relationships with individual Catholic scholars, particularly in his descriptions of his friendship with both Hans Urs von Balthasar and Hans Küng, but also with most of the major figures of Catholic thought in the twentieth century, including Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI).

Cataloging with detail Barth’s dialogues with these Catholic scholars, all of whom apart from von Balthasar were present at the Vatican II sessions as periti (theological experts), Norwood depicts the middle of the twentieth century as a watershed moment in ecumenical dialogue and efforts due in part to the clear sense that emerged of the need for the Church to respond in a unified way to the unique moral challenges of the time. While in the centuries between the Reformation and the twentieth century (as Norwood cites Barth stating), Catholics and Protestants no longer spoke to but only about each other, the Second World War brought many Catholics and Protestants together into bonds of “common resistance to Hitler” (51).

In portraying the source of ecumenical progress as shared prayer, action, and “friendship” (50), Norwood gives texture to a more theoretical discussion of the common points and diverging positions of Reformed and Catholic theology. More importantly for Norwood’s purposes, the model of communal sharing and respect seen in the Council and the period in which it occurred serves as a necessary example for anyone concerned with church unity today. Before theological differences can be resolved, participants in dialogue must be willing to engage in what he, referencing the Catholic theologian Margaret O’Gara, terms “ecumenical gift exchange”—a practice of generosity and respect acknowledging that unfamiliar traditions have gifts to offer to one’s own (213-4).

It is this framework of “gift exchange” that guides Norwood’s most interesting argument, going beyond historical examination of Barth’s engagement with Vatican II to posit that the Second Vatican Council itself bore out Barth’s vision of the Church as an “event,” a gathering-together, even though this ecclesiological image was not emphasized in the Council documents themselves. While Vatican II largely presented the Church as an already-given entity (though its images of what that entity is, of course, radically departed from the previous near-total identification of the Church with its hierarchical institutional structure), the Council, Norwood says, was a Spirit-inspired event, an image of a “New Pentecost” that in itself complemented more static understandings of Christian community (74-5).

One of Barth’s “gifts” to the pursuit of church unity, Norwood shows, was an uncompromising commitment to the importance of the “ministry of the community,” not separated into categories of hierarchy and laity, but rather that of all called by Christ to the same tasks of praise, proclamation, healing, and prophetic action (109-111). Norwood relies on Timothy J. Gorringe’s Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (1999) to interpret Barth’s “rejection of all patterns of domination in the church” as connected with Barth’s larger project of opposing any unjust power (103-4). At the same time, Norwood demonstrates that Barth was willing to learn from Catholic examples (both contemporaneously and historically) about the power of the unified voice and action that comes with the more centralized authority of the Catholic Church. Barth’s Reformed skepticism of hierarchical power is not necessarily incompatible with respect for the Church as a unified body, but, rather, that both theological emphases have much to offer the other.

One of the repeated strands of Norwood’s book is a disappointed reflection on the lack of progress both ecumenically and within the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council. A major aspect of this lack of progress highlighted by Norwood is the lack of resolution between claims of “papal primacy and episcopal collegiality” (218-219). It is a shame that this book was completed just as such significant change was beginning to occur on the Catholic front; it would have been fascinating to read Norwood’s application of Barth’s thought to Pope Francis’ recent movements towards decentralization and collegiality within the Catholic Church. Francis’ call in 2014 to those participating in the Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to “speak with parrhesia [boldness] and listen with humility,” especially, seems to resonate with the same spirit of challenge and friendship Norwood values in Barth and his Catholic conversation partners.

Reforming Rome will be of interest to both Protestants and Catholics concerned with the pursuit of church unity. Written in an accessible (even pastoral) style, it will be helpful both for theologians and for interested general readership. The main weakness of the volume is a tendency for the author to repeat himself, circling around to many of the same points and citations, which can be distracting at times to the reader. However, on the whole this is a comprehensive, well-researched, and lovingly-written contribution to Barth studies as well as (more importantly) to reconciliation and understanding between Protestant and Catholic communities.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Rashkover, Randi. Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise (New York: T&T Clark, 2005)

Rashkover, Randi. Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 215 pp. $80.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by Zacharie Klassen (February 21, 2017)

Published in 2005, Randi Rashkover’s Revelation and Theopolitics no doubt occupies an important place in the increasing Jewish engagement with the works of Karl Barth. Indeed, Rashkover’s more recent Freedom and the Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics (Fordham, 2011) extends some of her engagement with Barth in Revelation and Theopolitics to a treatment of Barth on the law. As the full title of the book here being reviewed suggests, however, this book is not principally about Karl Barth. Rather, the book offers a comparative reading of the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig and the Christian theologian Karl Barth as presenting what Rashkover calls a “theology of testimony” that could support “a philosophically justified theopolitics” for Jewish and Christian communities in an age where the question of the role of religion in the public square continues to vex many (3).

According to Rashkover, a theology of testimony is built on the assumption that “knowledge of God is possible only in the context of the ethical labor of the elect individual who seeks through her moral endeavor to testify to the loving act of the transcendent God” (3). Rashkover is fully aware of how the language of knowing God through “ethical labor” may be interpreted as repeating certain Kantian ideas about God as being the rationally necessary “postulate” for ethics (22), as well as his affirmation of the moral autonomy of the individual. To show that there is a concrete relation to Kant in her analysis, but also to show that Kant’s ideas are not the foundation for a theology of testimony, Rashkover spends the first chapter analyzing the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, noting Rosenzweig and Barth’s “shared inheritance” of his thought (9). While this chapter includes some of the most challenging material of the book, a close reading is rewarding and important for understanding how Rashkover reads Rosenzweig and Barth to both inherit and improve upon Cohen’s thought. Rashkover notes that Cohen took Kant’s categories of critical idealism and did what Kant was never willing to do, namely, to apply the categories to religion or revelation and specifically to the sources of Judaism (14). By doing this, Rashkover claims that Cohen improved upon Kant in two ways.

First, Cohen was willing to develop assertions regarding God that went beyond Kant’s appeal to God as mere cause of the created order. This led him to conceive of the concept of “correlation,” which Rashkover interprets as the relation, begun in God’s act of revelation, “between God as the origin of reason and a human’s response to this revelation by means of her employment of that reason” (18). Developing the concept of correlation in relation to the biblical language of God’s holiness, Cohen then claimed that God was not only the postulate that made ethical action rational, but also the pre-condition and model of human morality (22-23). Called to be holy, human beings must “emulate” God through moral action and in doing so show themselves to know God only through “acknowledgement” of and devotion to God (24). Second and following from the above, Rashkover notes that Cohen’s principle example of correlation is divine forgiveness and grace, topics that Kant refused to give weight due to their potential for undermining the freedom and autonomy of the rational individual to act (30). While these two moves beyond Kant are promising in Rashkover’s view, in that they turn with seriousness towards religious sources, she finally claims that Cohen’s advance is only partial, since he still requires that Jewish sources fit the idealistic constrains of ‘ethics’ and ‘reason’ rather than letting the sources determine what counts for ethics and reason.

Turning to an analysis of Rosenzweig and Barth in the subsequent four chapters, Rashkover demonstrates how these two figures prioritize religion or revelation in their accounts of ethics. In the second chapter, Rashkover points out that, contrary to Cohen, Rosenzweig’s account of revelation in The Star of Redemption “does not have any conceptual referent” (59). Revelation, for Rosenzweig, is always the “act” of the transcendent God and as such it is consistently out of the grasp of idealistic possession. Reading The Song of Songs, Rosenzweig argues that God’s revelation is the revelation of God’s “unconditional and commanding” act of love for the beloved, which is also the election of the beloved (60). Being so elected by the transcendent God, the beloved simultaneously finds herself called to acknowledge this love while having no possession of it such that she could simply re-present it through reason. Furthermore, finding herself loved, she acknowledges a time without that love – the time of sin (62). Experiencing this love but also recognizing sin, the beloved is now called to testify to the God she desires and who is absent. Here Rashkover sees the significant improvement on Kant (as well as Cohen) being Rosenzweig’s appeal to “theological desire” as the basis for epistemology and ethics rather than the “postulate of God” as “rational need” (66).

The appeal to “theological desire” here may sound like a return to Schleiermacher, but in the third chapter Rashkover shows how this is not the case by treating what she calls Rosenzweig’s “philosophically plausible theology of the Word of God” (77). There she argues that, for Rosenzweig, desire for the transcendent God can be testified to in human language without reducing revelation to the subjective experience of the religious individual since a philosophical analysis of language shows that language “suggests transcendence without objectifying it” (80). In other words, rather than just testifying to a subjective experience, Rosenzweig understands language to be expressive of reality. The Word of God does not consist of particular words or propositions then, but must be understood as supplying a language for “the experience of divine revelation and command” and “the human response to this experience…” (90). The human experience and response to the divine revelation and command demonstrate, however, the dialectical character of the Word of God in that language itself expresses “language’s inability to describe…the Other” (92). This does not mean that the human response has only a negative function, for the positive function of human response is also displayed when theological desire translates into love of neighbor (99).

In chapters 4 and 5, Rashkover turns to an analysis of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and selections from the Church Dogmatics (hereafter ER and CD respectively), arguing that Barth’s account of “theological knowledge . . . is structurally the same” as Rosenzweig’s (120). In fact, Rashkover argues that the account of revelation given by Cohen, Rosenzweig and Barth are similar in that all affirm revelation as the means by which human beings come to knowledge of God. For the Barth of ER, however, this knowledge is possible “only by an act of God’s grace through which God lovingly displays his righteousness and commands us to obedience . . . ” through the cross and resurrection (124). By way of this “love-command” structure, Rashkover rightly understands Barth to be articulating a theology of “divine election.” The elect individual, however, can only experience the revelation of God’s love and command as a judgment of the reality of sin and so the negation of the present world. Pointing out a difference between Rosenzweig and Barth here, Rashkover notes that, for Barth, in ER “the redemption afforded in revelation does not pertain to or have any positive effect on our current world” but must find expression only in “the new world” (128). As a result, the only way a believer testifies ethically to God is through repentance (130). In order to draw out any kind of “positive praise of God” from Barth’s writings, Rashkover claims that one needs to turn to his account of revelation in the CD where she claims Barth provides an alternate picture of “the form of the divine act of revelation” even as he remains committed to a dialectical account of that revelation (138). According to her, the Christology in CD II/2 provides an account of positive testimony in that there Barth declares Jesus Christ, the Word of God, as not only the basis for knowledge of God, but also as the visible “basis for ethical life” (152). The incarnation is “the site of positive testimony to God” whereby human beings are able to see “a portrait of the elected human being who positively loves and participates in the glory of God” (155). While human beings cannot realize the perfect testimony to God’s love that Jesus embodied, they can nonetheless “enact obedience and practical testimony to God in this world” through love of neighbor (159).

In the final chapter, Rashkover develops what she calls a “politics of praise” whereby covenantal communities like Judaism and Christianity can testify to God’s love through “the prophetic call of proclamation and critique, and the cry for justice” in the political sphere (171). Both of these elements, as Rashkover sees it, have been sorely hampered by “Constantinianism” on the one hand and modernity’s “church-state divide” on the other (172-173). Due to the dialectical character of their respective theologies of testimony, both Rosenzweig and Barth see testimony as a prophetic critique of human political realities (including those of religious communities) that attempt to secure the needs of a people at any cost (174). For Rosenzweig this came to expression in his critiques of certain strands of liberal Jewish tradition that too closely allied Judaism and the state and in Barth through his involvement in the Confessing Church. These examples show, for Rashkover, that a theology of testimony does not preclude religious communities from involvement in any form of ethical or even legal expression in the pursuit of justice, but it does mean that the form of expression will always be held in tension with the recognition of its own dialectical character as testimony and never as stable norm or dogma.

There is much to commend in this book. Beyond helpfully demonstrating the shared relationship between the thought of Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Barth, Rashkover has developed a framework for thinking about Jewish and Christian political engagement that should enrich ongoing work in this area. For readers unfamiliar with the Jewish authors and concepts being explored, this work will provide a helpful (although challenging!) introduction. In such a short review, much was left out that readers would also benefit from attending to, such as Rashkover’s take on the debate over Barth’s so-called turn to analogy the CD, as well as a surprising and helpful engagement with philosopher Gillian Rose in the last chapter.

Zacharie Klassen, Ph.D. Candidate, McMaster University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Spencer, Archie J. The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability. Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015)

The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability. Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology

Spencer, Archie J. The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability. Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 441 pp. $40.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Kathryn Bradford Heidelberger (February 13, 2017)

How can a human being speak meaningfully of God? Given that language is a human construction, and given that the Divine life is a transcendent reality that stands outside of finite experience, using language to meaningfully speak of God may seem like an impossible or fleeting task. Archie J. Spencer, in his book, The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability, sets out to find a way where one can make true and meaningful statements about God which neither collapse God into human experience nor distance God so far from human experience that God becomes entirely unknown. In order to accomplish this goal, Spencer takes up two differing thought systems that are used to solve the conundrum of making speech about God intelligible. The first, analogia entis, or analogy of being, affirms that there is some kind of resemblance or analogy between God and human beings that is the impetus for language about God (16). The second, analogia fidei, or analogy of faith, is a kind of shorthand for the gospel as it is written in Scripture, and affirms that the relationship between Creator and created is solely dependent on the Incarnation as the Word of God. Only on the basis of the revealed Word of God can language hope to make true statements about God (17). Using careful research and masterful analysis, Spencer argues for a Christologically grounded account of analogia fidei that clarifies just how the term ‘analogy’ can be used properly in reference to God and human beings. A very rough sketch of Spencer’s argument is presented in brief below in order to highlight his movement from analogia entis toward analogia fidei.

Beginning with Plato and working through Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and Augustine, Spencer’s first chapter outlines the foundations for the use of the term analogy and how it entered Christian theological discourse. For Plato, at the heart of his understanding of analogy is a principle of absolute dissimilarity, meaning that though the transcendent realm and the human realm are absolutely distinct and dissimilar realms, a principle of logic remains such that analogies can be drawn in between the two realms (35). Analogy, on this view, is a sort of reasoning from experience. Key to Plato’s thought is what Spencer terms “cause-effect-resemblance,” or CER, which is the assumed belief in the presence of the universal, the whole, which is the foundation of all analogy (36). Ultimately, Platonic thought appeals to an innate resemblance between the sensible and the suprasensible, and this resemblance presents itself to the senses by rational engagement with CER (40).

Aristotle somewhat shares Plato’s concept of CER, except that while Plato theorized that all phenomena participate in the forms, Aristotle distinguishes between particulars and universals, giving superiority to the universals. For Aristotle, the forms are expressible by means of analogy. Analogy can point us to wisdom (a form), which is the knowledge of the universal cause of all in Aristotle’s conception (50). As such, cause, as it points to intelligible forms in things, “accurse to things as their fundamental being” (50). Basically, this means that analogical predication about forms reveals an ontological reality inherit within that analogy. When applied to God, then, Aristotle assumes a relationship between existent things and God as the cause of that existence. Cause, in this instance, is the common relation, even though they are absolutely dissimilar. In classic thought, then, analogy arose out of ontological and cosmological conceptions of CER.

Augustine adapts Platonic thought into Christian theological discourse through his doctrine of creation. According to Augustine, the human soul is created in the image of God, while the human being remains composite of two substances—body and soul (81). Analogy, for Augustine, assumes a similarity between the “triunity of human being as soul and the triunity of God.” This similarity is the basis upon which human beings can speak meaningfully of God. As such, Christian discourse came to be wholly framed and determined by Platonic and Aristotelian modes of speech about God, which are in turn defined by CER and analogical modes of speech.

In the second chapter, Spencer’s task is to show that Aquinas developed a confused and inconsistent method of analogy that left the ensuing Catholic tradition open to taking Aquinas’ thought down a variety of interpretive avenues, ultimately leaving revelation and theology susceptible to synergistic tendencies (92). One of Aquinas’ most significant developments in regards to analogy is his insistence that nothing is predicated univocally (113). While Aquinas affirms that there is an imprint of the Creator on creation, this imprint is similar in its very dissimilarity. If it was a univocal relationship, the Creator and creation would be collapsed in the same genus or species. But God cannot be reduced to a genus or species because God is totally dissimilar to all of creation as God is the final cause of creation (113). Put another way, God and creation relate to one another analogously, which is a kind of recognizable, intrinsic relation between God and creature. Though Aquinas wants to maintain dissimilarity in the midst of relation, he cannot escape falling into an ontological/metaphysical conception of intrinsic analogy (118).

Spencer briefly analyzes Scotus’ and Cajetan’s adaptions of Aquinas’ use of analogy, noting that Cajetan’s developments give us the term analogia entis. Cajetan works analogy out by proper proportionality, rather than using Aquinas’ understanding of intrinsic attribution. Creation imperfectly participates in God’s being, thus reflecting perfection in a way (170). Cajetan develops the analogia entis as creation’s participation in God’s being, in a way that is mean to protect God from being univocal to creation. But in so doing, being is abstracted from divine revelation, which leads being to be dissolved into creation or God, leaving human beings with no grounding for speaking of and relating to God in any concrete manner.

If all of this sounds confusing—it is. Aquinas and his subsequent followers leave us with a muddled understanding of analogy based on philosophical principles that they attempted to graft onto theological inquiry. Ultimately, Spencer concludes that there can be no true “Catholic doctrine of analogy” precisely because Aquinas and his subsequent followers failed to create a concise, clear definition of analogy.

Chapter three marks the beginning of Spencer’s constructive turn as he explores the use of analogy in Karl Barth’s theology. Barth rejects the analogia entis because it fails to concern itself with revelation. For Barth, revelation is of singular importance in regards to doctrinal expression (181). God cannot be intuited by any natural means nor can we speak meaningfully about God based on abstract understandings of being, essence, and existence. Rather, responsible speech about God must be constituted solely on the basis of God’s self-revelation (187). This is the analogia fidei. Caught up in Barth’s rejection of analogia entis in favor of analogia fidei is also a concern to affirm that God is not bound up in any metaphysics of necessity that would require some kind of cooperation on the part of God and humanity—this puts God in danger of collapsing into human categories. Rather, the doctrine of providence is essential here because it emphasizes divine election and favor in the act of revelation (202).

In developing the analogia fidei, then, Barth places all of theology’s weight on Christology. God’s self-revelation to humanity through Jesus Christ is through and through an act of God—we do not meet God in the act of revelation; God meets us in revelation (219). As opposed to Aquinas, where humanity meets God in something innate to creation, Barth develops an encounter between God and humanity that is exclusively a divine act. In this way, God is His act of revelation and is fully revealed in this act (221). As far as human beings are concerned, Barth maintains a qualified use of the word analogy to describe our participation in the “reality of the revelation of God” (223). The revelation of God in the event of the Incarnation posits God as a comparable object for human beings (225). Understood in this way, then, analogy has a purely Christological determination. In the midst of the Christological grounding of analogy, however, Barth is also adamant to maintain absolute disparity between God and human beings—they are not on the same scale of cooperation or identification. It is solely by revelation through Incarnation that theological speech is possible (232).

Jüngel furthers Barth’s conception of the analogia fidei by developing the analogy of advent. The analogy of advent focuses primarily on the event of God’s coming to us through the Incarnation. Jüngel argues that God is not an unthinkable being, but rather that God is thinkable precisely because he has spoken in His Word (255). This speech, or address, is a “language event” of the Gospel, and is grounded in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Having demonstrated the unviability of analogia entis in favor of the analogia fidei and the analogy of advent, Spencer concludes his book with a final chapter that seeks to establish an even more robustly Christologically centric account of God’s speakability. This chapter is the most constructive and original of Spencer’s preceding chapters, where he develops his own account of the ways analogy can be understood to speak responsibly about God. First, as analogy of participatory Word, Christian theological conviction assumes that there is some kind of divine participation in creation and vice versa. In this participation between God and humanity, the full entirety of the glory of God is revealed in the work of Jesus Christ (329). Human beings, through Divine action, are caused to participate in the Word. Second, as analogy of performative Word, theological speech, in the act of proclamation, liturgy, and sacraments, performs the Divine drama of revelation (351). Finally, as analogy of parabolic Word, Spencer affirms, “God is, primordially, human in his divine election” (374). Parable brings speech to language, opening up both temporal and metaphorical possibilities for language within the bounds of the revelation event. Parable affirms that God comes into language in such a way that a relation between God and humanity is established, a void crossed, all on the basis of God becoming Incarnate (379).

All in all, Spencer’s work is impressive and well worth the read. The book isn’t exactly an introduction to the topic of analogia entis and the speakability of God, though it does provide a thorough overview of the theological conversation thus far. In this way, it is an excellent primer on the most crucial aspects of the debate, and is fair and reasonable in its critique of the analogia entis. At the root of Spencer’s theological contribution to the conversation is his desire that all theological speech and language enact the story of the Gospel. If theological speech fails to proclaim the exclusive act of God’s revelation found in Jesus Christ, Spencer asks that we question the truth and validity of that speech. At the end of the day, then, Spencer’s work is a call to theologians to take special care with their language, as it analogous to the revealed Word of God.

Kathryn Bradford Heidelberger, Benedictine University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Busch, Eberhard. The Barmen Theses Then and Now: The 2004 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010)

The Barmen Theses Then and Now: The 2004 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary 

Busch, Eberhard. The Barmen Theses Then and Now: The 2004 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 101 pp. $16.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Ryan David Hawk (January 31, 2017)

In the realm of historical theology, it is often easy to examine the events and documents of the past as merely that, things of the past. We study the history of things to observe what happened and what we can observe or learn from them in a tangible sense. But all too often, the density of these events and their implications lose their clarity, and the practicality for us today can be overshadowed with verbosity and grand explanation that the non-academic practitioner simply cannot follow. I am thankful to say that Professor Eberhard Busch’s lectures on The Barmen Theses breaks from this pattern and offers a rich and robustly pastoral take on one of modern church history’s most important documents.

It is always a formidable task to take the notes of lectures and make them into a readable script to be consumed as a reader rather than as a listener. The way we approach hearing a lecture and reading a book are often different. Here, the translation of the 2004 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, seventy years after the publication of the original Barmen Declaration, are carefully constructed to allow one to hear what is being said while also reading what is being spoken to the Church in 1934 and today.

Busch sets out on his task placing the reader in the midst of the struggle of two kingdoms. What it means to stay true to the nature and ethic of the Church as it relates to the idea of one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church, has been set against the context of culture, philosophy, war, and practical ethics in light of national socialism. In each similar historical scenario that has occurred before, a confession becomes the major signpost of the Church in a given age. The Apostolic and Nicene creeds along with the Augsburg Confession and Heidelberg Catechism can be seen as standard backdrops to “orthodox” faith in Church history and in the respective Lutheran and Reformed camps out of which Barmen comes. Understanding this, Busch notes that “The Barmen Declaration is, to be sure, not timeless, but it is also not time bound as are the others. Its strength is that it guides the church in a very particular situation to listen solely to the Word of God, trusting it alone, and obeying it alone,” (4). This is what makes Barmen transcendent to the situation from which it was birthed. These same theses can be applied to us today with the same immediate theological implications.

Busch begins by examining the historical framework and context for the Barmen Declaration. He carefully considers what the climate was at the time in a brief introduction. In this, he does presuppose a particularly dense knowledge of the historical context from the reader. This does not diminish what he will do throughout the text. Rather, it opens the reader to the possibility that more research must be done in the macro narrative of German Christianity in the 1930’s. The end of the introduction offers an equally impressive and exhaustive list of resources to observe, though many of these are in German, naturally.

Each chapter takes on one of the six theses of Barmen. A re-assertion of the authority of each statement as being grounded in scripture only adds to the timeless significance of its contents for us today. Moreover, in addressing each thesis, a highlighted context is the diversity of those gathered at Barmen who agree to the confession made. The idea of Christ being the head of the church was a powerful statement in 1934 as the rest of the country was being persuaded by the Führer principle and were justifying allegiance to God and also to Hitler as His divinely appointed servant to German renewal.

In response to the criticism and possible anti-Semitism in thesis one regarding Jesus being the only way to God, Busch allows for Barth’s clarity on the issue to speak for itself. Barth’s Christological emphasis is that the Old Testament speaks of Christ as the one who is to come as Lord of all! “Thus we say that Christians are not God’s chosen people in place of Jews, but rather that they, the Jews, are elect, and we are, thank God, (through Christ) called into them“ (33). There is a synthesis of the larger narrative that Busch identifies in Barmen that sees the New Testament faith and practice of hearing, trusting and obeying that ‘Christ is Lord!’ are carried over from the Old Testament’s roles of prophet, priest, and king exclaiming ‘that Christ is coming and He is Lord!’ Thesis one sets the authority of everything that follows by way of Christ and the revelation and authority of scripture.

Consistently in the other chapters, Busch connects the Lordship of Christ, and the authority of scripture into themes of assurance and responsibility. “Christian ethics is an ethic of freedom . . . that is not practiced in isolation but rather in connectedness with God and his children who are my brothers and sisters,” (47). This ethic is rooted in Christ as the head of the body, and doing what the head does. The ethic is rooted in prayer and community. When we read about the kirchenkampf, the subtle mistake is thinking that there was full unity amongst the churches that fell outside of the German Christian church. However, as Busch notes in his excursus of the third thesis, unity was impossible because many were welcoming to the nationalistic morale boost of the state. Further, it shows that there was a crack in the theological foundation of ecclesiology, as many church bodies had truly forgotten what the purpose of the church was. This is shown in the amount of ‘confessions’ that were drafted in 1933 alone.

In chapter four, Busch examines the responsibility of servant leadership. The church is free to serve only because Christ is Lord and serves the world. The church cannot and should not take a role in political leadership for privilege; it leads in how it serves. Moreover, Busch explains that service in this way is not a form of captivity. “It is a particular and concrete form of freedom” (66). Within the church there is no dominion of some over others, rather there is the whole congregation that serves under the headship of Christ. This participation is not merely an optional aspect of Christianity and the make up of the church; it is an “elemental component” of bearing witness to its living Lord.

The climax of the Barmen Declaration is thesis five. Public worship in the political world and the role of the church and the state are arguably at the very core of the entire document. How Busch examines this through Barth’s words re-affirm the role of the church in its assurance that Christ is Lord. The lords of the earth will pass away, but the reign of the Lord is forever. In this the allegiance is always to the sovereign God. The state, which has authority only through that which is given to them by God, has a necessary task of governing fallen humanity for the sake of justice and peace. What is clear is the distinction between the church and the state. “The church can speak and act politically only as the church, only in its hearing of the Word of God and only in His service” (75). Thesis six then examines the holistic mission of the church within it’s purpose as a place were the Word is preached and the sacraments administered, bearing witness to the kingdom that will never end.

While Busch meticulously exegetes the text of Barmen, he does so with grace to allow breathing room from the original text and Barth as its primary writer. In this case, the original intent of the text is still preserved, but it also is sprinkled with fresh insights and commentary that only a person like Busch could extrapolate as a world class scholar in Barth studies, and one who comes from a reformed and purely ecumenical understanding for the sake of the church universal and its primary mission existing under the Lordship of Christ. Moreover, it is not just the scholarly aspect that should be praised. While highly academic in its content, there is a welcoming note of pastoral consideration in Busch’s approach to the meaning of the Barmen text that solidifies the title of the book in the here and now. If the visible church exists within and embodies true space, then the agreed upon confession at the Barmen synod has a connection with all of the confessions that have stood before them. What Barmen gives us is not a replacement ideology, but a continued practical theology that in this way is a Church that is always reforming itself under the Lordship of Christ, for the sake of the world, for the glory of God, and here, Busch does well to guide us.

Ryan David Hawk, Ph.D. Student, Queen’s University Belfast

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

R. Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

The Resurrection in Karl Barth

R. Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), ix + 246pp. $99.95

Reviewed by David W. Congdon (May 23, 2008)

In his Jena diary, Hegel writes: “In Swabia people say of something that took place long ago that it is so long since it happened that it can hardly be true any more. So Christ died for our sins so long ago that it can hardly be true any more.” It is precisely this problem—the distance between Christ and us, between the “there and then” and the “here and now”—which Karl Barth addresses in his doctrine of the resurrection, according to Dale Dawson’s fine analysis. Dawson argues that the resurrection is not only the “pivot point of Barth’s theological discourse” (7), but also an inexhaustibly rich doctrine which answers the problem of Lessing’s great ugly ditch. The resurrection ensures that Christ is not trapped within his pre-Easter history but is fully present to people of all times.

Dawson begins his book by presenting the problem of what he calls the “eclipse of the resurrection” in Barth scholarship. While acknowledging that Barth scholars are emphatic about the central place of the resurrection in Barth’s theology, Dawson claims that they generally overlook “its radical systematic significance” (12). To substantiate this claim, he briefly discusses, among others, Peter Carnley, Richard R. Niebuhr, G. C. Berkouwer, John Macquarrie, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Hans Urs von Balthasar, T. F. Torrance, and Eberhard Jüngel, before directing most of his attention to Bruce McCormack. Dawson criticizes McCormack’s argument that Barth replaces the time-eternity dialectic with the anhypostatic-enhypostatic dialectic of veiling and unveiling. Instead, Dawson argues that “an aspect of the time-eternity dialectic persists (as a soteriological theme)” (27). He later explains:

If the incarnation addresses the ontological distinction between God and creatures, then the resurrection, according to Dawson, addresses the soteriological distinction between Jesus and others, between the objective and subjective dimensions of our salvation.

The bulk of Dawson’s study fleshes out this basic thesis through a close reading of Barth’s theology. After an introductory chapter, he begins by analyzing Barth’s 1924 commentary on 1 Corinthians, The Resurrection of the Dead. Dawson then proceeds, in successive chapters, to go through volumes III/2, IV/1, IV/2, and IV/3 in theChurch Dogmatics. He interrupts this sequence with a chapter introducing and explicating Barth’s overall treatment of the resurrection in CD IV as “the movement of Jesus Christ in his completed reconciling being and action— extra nos and pro nobis—to us in our as yet opposed and unaffected anthropological sphere” (83). The book concludes with a chapter of criticisms and dogmatic proposals.

Dawson is concerned throughout to show that Barth’s theology of the resurrection remains consistent over the course of his life. Barth’s work is the “consistent unfolding of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth” as the “single material insight” for his entire dogmatics (34). For this reason, the book returns to many of the same themes from chapter to chapter. The most prominent motifs include the resurrection as revelatory event, historical reality, trinitarian action, a new act of God, and the basis for Christ’s continuing presence with us. The most prominent theme, however, describes the resurrection as the movement from Jesus Christ to us. Dawson describes this as a transition “from the narrower christological sphere to the anthropological sphere” (87), from “the being and activity of Jesus Christ pro nobis” to “the being and activity of Jesus Christ in nobis” (113). This transition is primarily understood as a movement from the ontic reality of reconciliation to the noetic apprehension of our reconciliation.

Dawson, however, is not content with a simple ontic-noetic dichotomy. He argues that the resurrection also has an ontic dimension—or, rather, to use Barth’s terminology, it is “a divine noetic which has all the force of a divine ontic” (194). For this reason, he criticizes Barth for being inconsistent or at least unclear regarding his understanding of the resurrection. Barth, he says, is “too strongly influenced” by a strict ontic-noetic distinction (123), which is why Dawson prefers the pro nobis-in nobis distinction to the ontic-noetic, since the former has ontological implications on both sides of the transition. Dawson locates the problem in Barth’s use of the terms Auferweckung (awakening) and Auferstehung (resurrection or self-revelation).

According to Dawson’s analysis, Auferweckung refers to the Father’s act of awakening the passive Son in the power of the Spirit, whereas Auferstehung refers to the self-disclosure of the active Jesus Christ in his movement toward others. The former emphasizes the role of the Father and Son in the event of reconciliation as well as the ontic character of resurrection as a conferral of new being on the dead Jesus and, correspondingly, upon us. The latter emphasizes the sole activity of Jesus Christ in accomplishing our reconciliation and defines resurrection as a purely noetic event. While Dawson argues that Barth’s theology tends (rightly, he thinks) toward understanding the resurrection as an ontologically new act of God upon the passive Jesus (in the sense of Auferweckung), he criticizes Barth for not remaining faithful to this insight. This also leads him to criticize Barth for being—of all things—insufficiently trinitarian with respect to the resurrection.

In arguing his thesis, Dawson both overstates his case and at times confuses his terminology. A clear example of the former is his argument with McCormack. Dawson’s attempt to map the time-eternity dialectic onto the relation between Jesus’ history and the history of others is unconvincing. Moreover, it is unnecessary to his overall argument and perhaps even counterproductive. By applying the time-eternity dialectic to the christo-anthropological relation, he separates Jesus from the rest of humanity where Barth is always concerned about bringing them together or, to be more precise, actualizing them in the same being-in-act of Jesus Christ. Dawson seems at times to be creating a problem for the resurrection to “solve.” The “soteriological” distinction between Jesus Christ and others that he highlights early on seems to imply that the crucifixion has no salvific significance apart from the resurrection. I say “seems” because Dawson is not always clear. He says that “Barth’s anhypostatic-enhypostatic christology…is not yet the revelation and impartation of that reality. It denotes an ontic, but not yet a noetic christology” (31). Here Dawson speaks of an ontic-noetic distinction, but in the same breath he says that the resurrection is “revelation and impartation,” which is both noetic and ontic. This leads us to the problem of terminology.

Throughout his book, Dawson’s use of the pro nobis-in nobis distinction demands further clarification. Occasionally, he uses “in us” to mean that reconciliation is noetically revealed “to us,” but at other times he uses “in us” to mean that reconciliation is made ontologically effective for us here and now. This ambiguity mirrors the ambiguity that Dawson notices in Barth’s own thought, but instead of clarifying this terminology, he ends up repeating what he identifies as a problem in Barth’s text. On several occasions, this results in a misreading of Barth and an overstatement of his argument. For example, Dawson introduces a quote from Barth by saying that, in the resurrection, “the reconciled human being and action in Jesus Christ reaches to us” (italics mine). But in the quote itself, Barth only says that the resurrection opens our eyes to what has been accomplished. Again, on the same page, Dawson introduces a quote by stating that Christ’s reconciled being “has been made effective for us all” (italics mine). But Barth only says that resurrection makes Christ’s death “present” to all (126). In both cases, Dawson presses Barth to say something that he does not quite say. Even if Dawson’s reading holds up—though it is not clear that it does—his own analysis lacks clarity and obscures important distinctions between, inter alia, effected and revealed, in nobis and ad nos. Perhaps part of the problem is due to the fact that Dawson is pushing for consistency where Barth intends to speak dialectically, something to which Dawson is not always attentive.

While Dawson sometimes pays too little attention to detail, at other times he pays too much attention and misses some of the larger theological concepts at work. For example, in his discussion of CD IV/3, he repeatedly mentions the prophetic office of Christ without once discussing the doctrine of the munus triplex. Similarly, throughout the book he refers to the connection between the relation of immanent Trinity to Jesus Christ and the relation of Jesus Christ to others without once mentioning Barth’s doctrine of theanalogia relationis. Both of these oversights are attributable to the fact that Dawson’s book is a close reading of these texts—but only a close reading. Dawson does not connect these texts to the overall architectonic, nor does he think systematically beyond the issues raised directly by the text itself.

By sticking so closely to the primary texts, Dawson ends up doing us both the great service of reading Barth charitably and with attention to detail, and the disservice of leaving many relevant questions unaddressed. Most conspicuously, Dawson does not offer any suggestions for how his reading of Barth relates to the important work of Pannenberg, von Balthasar, or Robert Jenson on the resurrection. His analysis of Barth’s method could have been contrasted with Pannenberg’s historical-scientific approach. His critique of Barth’s inconsistency regarding the Father’s act of awakening the passive Jesus could have easily led to a fruitful engagement with von Balthasar’s treatment of the same in Mysterium Paschale. And his analysis of the relation between Trinity and resurrection—particularly his argument that “the resurrection is God’s reassertion of himself in his trinitarian being” (221)—would have been greatly augmented by a discussion of Jenson’s theology. Dawson’s intention to remain focused on Barth’s text is commendable, but his work feels incomplete due to his avoidance of contemporary debates about the resurrection. While Dawson does the hard and necessary work of reading Barth carefully, he does not take the next step of synthesizing the material and bringing it into conversation with the work of others.

Despite these reservations, Dawson lays a solid foundation which future theologians writing on the doctrine of the resurrection will find immensely useful. His discussion of the resurrection as the “turn of the crucified Lord to others” is both thorough and theologically interesting. The chapters on CD III/2 (the contemporaneity of Christ) and IV/2 (the Spirit as the power of the transition from Christ to us) are particularly strong. While not without its limitations, Dawson’s study is an important and theologically rich contribution to Barth scholarship that should be read by anyone working on the doctrine of the resurrection.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

McMaken, W. Travis. The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013)

The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth

McMaken, W. Travis. The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), xi + 324 pp. $69.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by R. David Nelson (April 29, 2015)

The problem of continuity has hovered in the foreground of Barth studies for the past few decades. Far from being simply a point of neuralgia among Barth scholars, the question of whether and to what extent Barth’s sizeable literary output bears witness to a real change or changes of mind is laden with implications for understanding of developments in Protestant theology and for critical reflection upon the methods and tasks of Christian dogmatics.

Among the several texts typically singled out as acid tests for this problem, Church Dogmatics IV/4—the so-called “baptismal fragment”—stands out for several reasons. It is one of the final texts in the canon to have appeared, written when Barth was in his ninth decade and well into physical decline. Consequently, some scholars have opined that several of the text’s conspicuous features—in particular, its self-asserting tone and Barth’s occasional fastness and looseness when discharging biblical exegesis—are indicative of the moribund dimming of his theological wits. More substantively, since the turn exhibited in the fragment at least appears to be quite severe—and since also Barth insisted that dogmatics and ethics and praxis are, in the end, inseparable from one another—a late reversal of Barth’s thought concerning baptism at least raises the question of the coherency of the contours of his program for Christian theology. The “fragment” on baptism casts its shadow backwards, as it were, over the whole of Barth’s literary output and the theology his writings encapsulate.

Among the several texts typically singled out as acid tests for this problem, Church Dogmatics IV/4—the so-called “baptismal fragment”—stands out for several reasons. It is one of the final texts in the canon to have appeared, written when Barth was in his ninth decade and well into physical decline. Consequently, some scholars have opined that several of the text’s conspicuous features—in particular, its self-asserting tone and Barth’s occasional fastness and looseness when discharging biblical exegesis—are indicative of the moribund dimming of his theological wits. More substantively, since the turn exhibited in the fragment at least appears to be quite severe—and since also Barth insisted that dogmatics and ethics and praxis are, in the end, inseparable from one another—a late reversal of Barth’s thought concerning baptism at least raises the question of the coherency of the contours of his program for Christian theology. The “fragment” on baptism casts its shadow backwards, as it were, over the whole of Barth’s literary output and the theology his writings encapsulate.

Travis McMaken’s fine book makes a signal contribution to contemporary Barth studies by significantly advancing the English-language discussion of this nexus of issues. He sets forth a convincing case that Barth’s late turn away from paedobaptism is a logical consequence of the dogmatics and ethics of reconciliation that unfolds in CD IV. But McMaken also contends that Barth followed one of two possible trajectories in order to arrive at a doctrine of believer’s baptism as the human action that corresponds to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. There is, McMaken shows, another way through the labyrinth of the doctrine of reconciliation—the end of which is a genuinely evangelical doctrine of infant baptism. In effect, then, McMaken’s study rescues from Barth’s harshest critics both the baptismal fragment and the putative change of mind it encapsulates, and also demonstrates that one can follow Barth closely and still end up elsewhere. For readers of Barth, this at least tacitly entails that his canon—specifically the texts on baptism—must be approached with a hermeneutic that is both sophisticated and flexible. For those interested in the future of the doctrine of baptism, McMaken’s work demonstrates that Barth still has very much to say and that his contribution is pliable enough to inform a range of Protestant baptismal theologies and practices.

McMaken commences his analysis with a brief and selectively plotted survey of the development of approaches to Christian paedobaptism from the nascent church of the first century up to Barth. While, to be sure, more attention could be paid here to the many nuances found in those theological and liturgical traditions associated with infant baptism, McMaken succeeds in establishing the insight that Barth’s contribution and its reception must be seen in light of a broad distinction that may be drawn between “sacramental” and “covenantal” modes of baptismal theology. In short (and following McMaken’s terminology) “sacramental” baptismal theologies pivot on the notion that church rites utilizing tangible media “either impart to the individual the salvation achieved in Christ or else sustain and deepen it” (60-1), while “covenantal” baptismal theologies, typically associated with the Reformed tradition, situate baptism alongside circumcision as signs of the sanctified relationship between God and elected humanity (101).

This differentiation of groupings of traditional paedobaptismal theologies beneath the headings of sacrament and covenant is pivotal for the whole of McMaken’s study. In chapters two and three, he demonstrates and defends, with the support of his own exegesis of critical biblical passages, Barth’s complaints with both trajectories. Barth was notoriously allergic to a general theological concept of sacramentum—not least, as McMaken shows, because it has been employed all too clumsily in the tradition to blur the distinction between divine and human agency (86 ff.). On the other hand, Barth’s christological reorientation of the doctrine of election leaves him uneasy about the juxtaposition of infant baptism and circumcision as signs of God’s grace towards a putative elect group within humanity. In both cases—that is, in regard to both the sacramental and covenantal approaches—material dogmatic commitments lead Barth to reject traditional notions of paedobaptism. Hence, in this negative sense, the baptismal theology of CD IV/4 is ingredient to Barth’s mature doctrine of reconciliation.

In the fifth and final main chapter, McMaken turns to the constructive task of attempting to resuscitate a doctrine of paedobaptism from the very commitments that lead Barth down the path toward credobaptism. It is beyond the scope of the present review to test the doctrinal, liturgical, and ecumenical possibilities at stake in the “relatively new” approach to baptism that McMaken proposes here. It should suffice to suggest that this chapter should be extracted from the present work and expanded elsewhere if the author indeed desires his proposal to be taken seriously as an advance in the tradition. Having voiced this caveat, it should be noted that the chapter does serve a significant role in the present context, as it demonstrates that the basic architecture of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation can, with some tweaking and the help of interlocutors (in the instance of McMaken’s proposal, mainly Calvin), be used as the groundwork for an altogether different baptismal construction.

In the excellent commentary that makes up the fourth chapter, McMaken maps out Barth’s positive case forcredobaptism. For Barth, a dogmatic account of God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ demands proper attention to human actions in correspondence to God. Barth, McMaken demonstrates, is able to establish believer’s baptism as the foundation of the Christian life at precisely this point; namely, as the first act of obedience in response to the command of grace. The distinction between the baptisms of the Spirit and water that features in CD IV/4 unfolds along these lines: baptism with the Spirit is the New Testament locution for “the awakening to faith in which one recognizes the reconciliation wrought between God and humanity in Jesus Christ as pertaining also and directly to oneself”; baptism with water is “the faithful response one renders to God in light of that recognition” (207). Barth’s occasionally bombastic tone and fast and loose exegesis aside, the baptismal theology that emerges in the fragment is, in the end, perfectly consonant with the dogmatics that serves as its basis.

It is the hope of this reviewer that McMaken’s outstanding book will help to mitigate the problematic reception history of Barth’s baptismal theology in the English-speaking world. McMaken prevails in situatingCD IV/4 within an affirmative reading of the continuity of Barth’s program. Moreover, McMaken proves that Barth’s thought can propel careful and clever interlocutors into new and even unexpected theological directions. The book is highly recommended as one of the best recent monographs on Barth and his legacy.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Paul Louis Metzger, The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and the Secular Through the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)

The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and the Secular Through the Theology of Karl Barth

Paul Louis Metzger, The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and the Secular Through the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), xxiii + 252pp.

Reviewed by Clifford Blake Anderson (February 10, 2005)

Paul Louis Metzger is Associate Professor of Christian Theology and the Theology of Culture at Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He is also the Director of the Institute for the Theology of Culture, “New Wine, New Wineskins,” at Multnomah and editor of the new journal, Cultural Encounters. In his recent publication, The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and Secular through the Theology of Karl Barth (2003), Metzger seeks to overcome the common perception that Karl Barth was theologically disinterested in culture. By mustering together his many theological writings about culture and the details of his practical engagement with cultural questions, Metzger demonstrates that Barth’s theology–both in theory and in practice–was always culturally-engaged.

Metzger contends that Karl Barth’s mature theology of culture emerged in the Göttingen Dogmatics, where Barth drew upon the christological categories of anhypostatsis and enhypostasis to produce a more adequate conception of the relation between the sacred and the secular than the dialectic of time and eternity of Romans II had permitted. According to Metzger, Barth sought a middle way between the fusion of the sacred and the secular and the separation of the sacred and the secular. “The problem with the medieval synthesis was that it did not make space for the radical difference between the sacred and the secular spheres. The problem with the Enlightenment project, on the other hand, was that by dismissing or at least privatizing the institution of religion, the secular created a vacuum it was unable to fill” (120). Metzger agrees with George Hunsinger’s interpretive use of the ‘Chalcedonian pattern,’ which he thinks also provides a key to understanding how Barth conceived of the relation between the secular and the sacred (cf. 189; 194; 233). Metzger argues that Barth’s search for a middle way likewise characterized his politics, which rejected both theocratic and secularized models. He contends that whereas Barth correctly identified the theocratic tendencies of the National Socialist state, he failed to recognize that a perverse theology also undergirded the apparently ‘secular’ communist states. “Whatever the atheistic state is,” writes Metzger, “it is not godless. It may not be pseudo-Christian, but it is not secular either” (193).

Metzger makes a crucial distinction between “secularity” and “secularism.” Barth endorsed the concept of secularity, which he identified with the humanization of culture. However, he rejected secularization, which Metzger defines as “the alienation of humanity and human culture from God” (70). Barth was thus opposed both to the divinization and to the secularization of culture. “Barth’s doctrine of the Word enables him to give a critical yet constructive response to culture whereby space is also made for the secular other in relation to the sacred. That is to say, the dedivinization and desecularization of culture leads to itshumanization, that is, the affirmation of the secular” (230).

Barth’s emphasis was primarily on the synthesis between the secular and sacred according to Metzger, not the diastasis between them. “…The point of diastasis is to break up faulty syntheses so that a more wholesome synthesis may be established, one that has in fact already been established with the world through the Word of Christ” (87). Such synthesis is based on the unity of the divine and human in Jesus Christ. For Barth, he writes, “that diastasis is only truly divine diastasis when viewed from the standpoint of the synthesis God provides for mediating the world to God in the incarnation of Jesus Christ” (225).

Metzger puts forward interesting parallels between Barth’s theological appreciation of the secularity of culture and his appreciation for the secularity of science. “Barth’s doctrine of creation gives room to science to engage in scientific enquiry apart from theological constraints” (212f.). He is also among the few (along with Colin Gunton) who do not fault Barth for failing to carry out an extensive engagement with questions of natural science in Church Dogmatics III (119).

There is a certain tension between creation and reconciliation in Barth’s theology according to Metzger (107f.). “The tension in Barth’s thought is due to the absence of consideration being given to the Word’s ministry in creation in distinction from reconciliation and redemption” (109f.). He discovers an analogous tension in Barth’s doctrine of revelation, where the ‘divine content’ tends to ‘overshadow’–though not ‘overwhelm’–its ‘secular form’ (cf. 151f.). Metzger seeks tentatively at points to correct that imbalance, by contrasting Barth with Irenaeus, for example (110ff). But can this tendency be corrected without the secular ‘overshadowing’ the ‘sacred’ in turn? In other words, can a level balance be struck between ‘secular form’ and ‘divine content’ in our fallen world? If the cultural were to rid itself of misguided theological pretensions, would it thereby become truly secular and, as such, a fitting counterpart to the ‘sacred’? But is not the goal of culture–redemption–always hidden to culture? A secularity that resists ‘secularism’ cannot suffice if the goal of the secular remains hidden in God. A degree of instability will thus always characterize the concepts of secularity and secular culture–a point which Metzger also acknowledges toward the conclusion of his work. “…There is a sense in which there must always exist a point of tension between creation and redemption, between what is and what will someday be, given the presence of evil in the creation” (219).

Such critical questions to Metzger should not obscure his achievement. Metzger’s study of Karl Barth’s theology of culture takes its rightful place at the forefront of a growing body of literature that challenges and overturns common North American prejudices about the theology of Karl Barth. In the light of Paul Louis Metzger’s study, North American theologians may come retrospectively to regard Karl Barth–and not Paul Tillich–as the preeminent theologian of culture in the twentieth century.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Purvis, Zachary, Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)

Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Purvis, Zachary, Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 336 pp. $100.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Calli Micale (June 15, 2017)

In a recent blog post for Oxford University Press, Zachary Purvis describes the dwindling state of European universities at the end of the 18th century:
In the late 18th century, universities as institutions appeared on the brink of collapse. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic era subjected universities—and theological faculties in particular—to an unrelenting onslaught of hostility. As the armies of the French Revolution spread across Europe, they seized university endowments for the state and suppressed theological and other faculties in favor of specialized professional and technical academies. (Zachary Purvis, “The University: Past, Present…and Future?” Oxford University Press Blog, October 16, 2016)

Despite the precarious situation of higher education, the simultaneous, emerging phenomenon of encyclopedia (Encyklopädie) expanded academic possibilities. Encyclopedia allowed for a new perspective of the whole. The mass collection of data provided scholars the ability to diagnose knowledge gaps and recognize patterns on a grand scale. The encyclopedia became a vast mirror of not only the nature of the university, but of the sum knowledge accumulated by humans to date.
In brilliant and clear prose, Purvis unpacks the formation of theology as science (Wissenschaft) and modern theological education as rooted in the emergence of encyclopedia. He shows how theological encyclopedia in Germany, pioneered by Friedrich Schleiermacher, provided the model for all major disciplines. Theology, he argues, determined the structure of the modern scientific research university. Schleiermacher’s Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1811), paired with the work of his contemporaries, served as the leading influences in theological method and training, effecting all corners of academia. Schleiermacher envisioned theology not as closed off from other faculties, but as informed by the higher disciplines (medicine and law) and the lower disciplines (history, philosophy, philology, etc.). His thought brings to light the significance of interdisciplinary study, especially the comingling of the sciences with the humanities. “One of the main results of the transformation inaugurated by Schleiermacher was the upending of theology’s internal and external dispositions, by which I mean the relation of theology’s branches to one another and toward the university as a whole” (5). Purvis offers a significant contribution in both the depth of the historical study and its relevance for the current conditions of decline in higher education. My summary will follow Purvis in distinguishing between three parts of the work. I roughly characterize these parts as: (1) the cause of modern theological encyclopedia; (2) an account of the object, modern encyclopedia; and (3) a description of the object’s effects.

The first part, chapters 2-4, explore the many causes of theological encyclopedia’s emergence and its centricity in German theological education. Purvis traces the concept from the often misrepresented Greek expression ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, meaning ordinary, all-encompassing training (20-21). He notes the wide-spread influence of Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (426) for early modern theological compendia. Another source of inspiration, are pre-modern reference works resulting from the Reformation, notably those penned by Erasmus, Luther, Melanchthon, and their successors. Purvis also catalogues the state’s insistence on introductory courses structured under encyclopedia to ensure students a basic acquaintance with the methods of each discipline. This educational reform encouraged reflection on the object of the discipline, the aims of its projects, and relation to other fields of knowledge. While theologians continued to understand their work in terms of scientia and sapientia, their view of its content transformed from “habitus to a deposit or collection of truth.” The emphasis moved away from sapientia to highlight scientia (Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983, 61-62; cf. Purvis, 63). Giving particular attention to Johann August Nösselt and Gottlieb Jakob Planck, Purvis first shows the influence of idealist and neo-humanist principles, and second the budding separation of theology into subdivisions as the new direction of theological training took shape. In reaction to late eighteenth century secular skeptics of pre-enlightenment theological tradition, Nösselt and Planck provided a defense of modern theological knowledge. They affirmed the possibility for theology to pursue “pure truth.” Thus, the purpose of encyclopedia was to order and unify the diversity of knowledge—“to sift and to supplement (die Reinigung und Ergänzung)” in order to do more than continue the tradition, but to contribute to the field and push it along (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums 2nd ed., 1830, in KGA I/6. §19, 333; cf. Purvis, 37). The early aim of encyclopedia was to generate a foundation that would serve as catalyst for efficient intellectual progress. Purvis argues that this shift in how theologians thought about their object of study, particularly its identification as an academic Wissenschaft, led to its historicization: “the recognition that Christianity’s values and ideas are historically conditioned and subject to change” (5).

In Chapters 5-7, Purvis argues that Friedrich Schleiermacher, more than anyone, brought together theology and science. The Brief Outline attests to the new theological programme of the modern world as “historically focused” (140). Purvis shows Friedrich Schelling’s importance for Schleiermacher’s work in two ways. First, Schelling and his Lectures on the Method of Academic Study (1803) serves as a foil to Schleiermacher in that while Schelling emphasized philosophy and “abstract themes,” Schleiermacher argued for Church life as the center of the discipline (108). Wissenschaft was not a detriment to the Church, but rather “held out promise for breathing new life into an ancient pursuit” (9). Second, Purvis’s close study of Schleiermacher and Schelling shows commonalities between the two. For example, both argued for uniting speculative and historical theology. Modern theology has always acknowledged its indebtedness to Friedrich Schleiermacher, but Purvis singles out its indebtedness to Schleiermacher’s engagement with encyclopedic learning and his reflections on theological training.
Chapters 8-9 describe the effects of Schleiermacher’s thought on both theological encyclopedia and the study of theology broadly. To do so, Purvis, like other historians, distinguishes between two groups of scholars, the speculative and the mediating. The speculative theologians follow Hegel and reject both Schleiermacher’s embrace of historicism and his insistence on the significance of pastoral training. Whereas, the mediating theologians found value in a plurality of theological thought and method, using adversaries to complement one another. The mediating theologians were largely responsible for continuing the trajectory Schleiermacher set forth. Purvis emphasizes the contribution of Karl Rudolf Hagenbach and his Encyklopädie und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften. In the end, Purvis touches on critics of theological encyclopedia, notably Karl Barth. Despite his admiration for Schleiermacher, Barth argued that theology is not science, because theology depends on divine revelation. Theology is witness to God’s activity in the world; its referent is “wholly other.” For Barth, theology cannot justify itself in ordinary terms of “academic responsibility” (226; see also Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 9-10).

Zachary Purvis provides a succinct analysis of theological encyclopedia’s significance for shaping theology as a discipline amidst institutional turmoil. He helpfully reframes the study of the history of theological education in terms of its relationship to higher education. As a theologian with a serious interest in Friedrich Schleiermacher, and because Schleiermacher features prominently throughout the text, my only regret is that Purvis did not include a chapter that dealt in more detail with the influence of theological encyclopedia and the Brief Outline on Schleiermacher’s later work, specifically The Christian Faith (Glaubenslehre). Purvis claims that the Brief Outline (Kurze Darstellung) made Schleiermacher’s major dogmatic work possible, but does not articulate, to my satisfaction, the relation between the two or the influence of the one on the other. Notwithstanding this oversight, the text is a welcome addition to our perspective of the whole. I recommend the work to any student or scholar with an interest in nineteenth century thought, modern theology, or theological education.

Calli Micale, Ph.D. Student, Yale University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Diller, Kevin. Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response. (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2014)

Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response.

Diller, Kevin. Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response. (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2014), 352 pp. $34.00

Reviewed by Darren Kennedy (March 03, 2016)

Tensions between theology and philosophy reach back even before Tertullian famously queried, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian raised the crucial question of the relationship between and ordering of theology and philosophy. Can religious thinkers simply espouse their beliefs without constraint from philosophy or must they justify those claims by philosophy’s canons? To what extent? Many have tried to navigate these treacherous waters throughout the past two millennia. Nevertheless, many perceive that the divide between theology and philosophy hit a peak in the theology of Karl Barth. Kevin Diller’s significant book Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response not only successfully challenges this view, he also persuasively argues that Alvin Plantinga’s philosophy brings philosophical clarity to Barth’s theology of revelation. The cumbersome and somewhat intimidating title gives little indication of the book’s clear, direct and often entertaining style. While readers of either Barth or Plantinga will likely respond to the title with perplexity and a furrowed brow, Diller methodically makes his seemingly implausible case to great effect. Ultimately, the most beneficial outcome of Diller’s book is a fresh approach to “theology’s epistemological dilemma” that offers new paths for both theologians and philosophers in their respective fields and in interdisciplinary conversations.

Based on his doctoral dissertation written under the direction of Professor Alan Torrance at the University of St. Andrews, Diller has expanded his text and jettisoned some of the cumbersome aspects of the dissertation form. Diller’s book argues convincingly that Karl Barth’s theology of revelation and Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of Christian belief stand as complementary voices rather than combatants in the quest to address “theology’s epistemological dilemma.” Several recent scholars have argued against the widely held view that Barth’s thought is anti-philosophical at best and irrational at worst, but Diller’s elucidation of both Barth’s statements against philosophy as well as natural theology illuminate Barth’s core concerns with ordering and qualification rather than a wholesale dismissal of philosophy. Diller uses Barth’s debate with Adolf von Harnack to exemplify the way that Barth does “indeed curtail the free rein of philosophy over theology” but not ban it entirely.

Diller’s clear and accessible style draws the reader in through the opening chapters. He outlines his argument succinctly in the introduction and continues to carefully illustrate the significant commonalities between the two Reformed scholars. Page by page, one can almost feel the furrowed brow being replaced by eager anticipation of Diller’s next move. The book offers something new and surprising for even the most well-versed scholars in either writer. Delightfully, Plantinga registers his own surprise in the Foreward: “Barth rejects the fundamental claims of the Enlightenment; I agree. Barth rejects any attempt to come to knowledge of God “from below”; I agree. Barth argues that serious Christian believers should not be apologetic (they have nothing for which to apologize); again, I agree” (11). These three convergences alone give grounds for a constructive conversation if not “a unified response.”

Diller’s ambitious aim is aided in his careful restraint in delineating each thinker’s ideas. By listening sensitively to both Plantinga and Barth, he makes far more cautious claims about each and avoids common mistakes of other scholars. For example, Diller painstakingly arrives at the conclusion that Barth is a “theo-foundationalist.” He stresses that Barth’s rejection of certain Enlightenment assumptions allows him to answer other Enlightenment concerns. Barth’s theology of revelation rejects the “accessibility requirement” or the assumption that theological knowledge “must spring from trustworthy grounds that are readily accessible to the theologian” (81). Barth rejects the requirement claiming that humans have no innate capacity for this knowledge. Nevertheless, humans have knowledge due to God’s movement from above. Here, Diller helpfully explains, “Barth is a foundationalist—not a classical foundationalist, but a theo-foundationalist” (85). Do not be fooled by seemingly self-deprecating statements like, “Let me be clear that I am not attempting to contribute a new insight about Barth to the field of Barth studies” (43). While his description of Barth’s theology of revelation may not be ground-breaking, his interdisciplinary use of it with Plantinga is. Aided by Plantinga’s philosophical lens, Diller describes the philosophical strength of Barth’s theology of revelation.

While the groundbreaking contribution of the book is in the complementary engagement of Barth and Plantinga, Diller’s clarity makes each chapter useful on its own as well. For example, Diller’s two chapters on Barth’s theology of revelation set the foundation for the unified response, but also offer teachers of theology an excellent introduction to one of the more challenging and easily misunderstood aspects of Barth’s theology. The same can be said of his discussion of Plantinga’s epistemology of Christian belief. In both cases, Diller gives readers a remarkable tool chest of ideas for thinking critically about epistemology and the challenging questions that often shake Christians in their faith. While academically rigorous throughout, the book has a practical aspect that the title does not readily indicate.

Remarkably, Diller largely succeeds in arguing for “a unified Barth/Plantinga response” to the epistemological problem. In doing so, he reframes many old questions and opens up new possibilities for fresh conversations. Perhaps this success made his discussion of biblical inerrancy towards the end of his book more disconcerting. Using Barth and Plantinga to fix the reader’s attention solidly on God and “God’s saving, reconciling and redeeming action”, Diller returns the reader to the abstract questions of the nature or attributes of Scripture. While handling the discussion with his characteristic clarity and subtlety, Diller seems to undercut many of his own advances in the book. He candidly states, “It seems safe to say that Barth would not have affirmed even a qualified form of inerrancy” (276) and leaves Plantinga’s explicit views on inerrancy out of the discussion. Nevertheless, Diller rightfully concludes that the “Barth/Plantinga proposal does not require a specific construal of inerrancy, but it does discourage some views of scripture that are sometimes associated with simplistic formulations” (279). The danger of bringing the topic of inerrancy into the conversation here is that it seems to make the Bible’s inherent “inerrancy” the focus and source of confidence for the believer rather than the dynamic, ongoing action of God “from above.”

Diller’s outstanding book opens the door to a new, clearer, and more beneficial conversation between theology and philosophy. The book not only deserves to be read widely by students, scholars and pastors, it deserves to be read with the same care and critical fairness that he offers to both Barth and Plantinga. Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma shows remarkable depth of understanding and keen grasp of the corpus of each great thinker. Diller’s clear and direct style brings the reader through challenging material with relative ease repaying the reader handsomely for the investment given. Diller’s significant contribution to both theology and philosophy offers a new space and framework for interdisciplinary discussions. Perhaps the Barth/Plantinga unified response can bring us all to a deeper understanding of the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

McCormack, Bruce L., and Thomas Joseph White, eds. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013)

Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue

McCormack, Bruce L., and Thomas Joseph White, eds. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 304 pp. $36.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Kathryn Bradford Heidelberger (November 28, 2017)

Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue is an impressive ecumenical endeavor. Bringing together a diverse range of both Catholic and Protestant scholars in dialogue, this edited volume reflects upon the lasting legacy of two of the most renowned thinkers in each tradition. In the introduction, Thomas Joseph White observes that putting Aquinas and Barth together in dialogue can and will be a fruitful undertaking precisely because “each offers us a profound vision of reality understood theologically in light of Jesus Christ” (4). Though Barth and Aquinas diverge at crucial points in their theological writing, their Christocentric grounding is the foundation upon which this “unofficial” dialogue builds. Further, this Christocentric grounding informs the ecumenical endeavor itself: “Christian ecumenism is a Christ-centered task” (38). White concludes by reminding the reader that the achievement of this unofficial dialogue rests in the cultivation of Christian friendship, a theme which will resonate throughout the book as individual scholars interact with Barth, Aquinas, and one another. The book is helpfully divided into five major theological themes under which a Catholic Thomist and Protestant Barthian interact. Readers are invited into an ever-unfolding conversation between scholars and friends who are masters of their traditions.

The first section, “The Being of God,” begins with the late Robert Jenson’s reflections on Barth and the being of God. Not only is Jenson’s essay exemplary in the way he describes his reading of Barth as a pilgrimage, but he also masterfully demonstrates the complexity and nuance of Barth’s deceptively simple “God’s being is act.” Ultimately, God’s being in act, for Jenson, is both an “implosion of freedom” and an “explosion of love” as the triune God elects himself in Christ to be our savior (51). Jenson’s essay is followed by Richard Schenk, who reflects upon Thomas’ writings that lend themselves capable of bearing up under the challenge of theodicy. In other words, Schenk’s essay seeks a Roman Catholic theologia crucis within Thomas. Schenk affirms that though Thomas accepted the role of metaphysics and philosophy in revealing the reality of God, these are insufficient for telling us that God is the God of our salvation (58). Seen in this way, then, Schenk affirms that metaphysics, for Thomas, functions more to remind human beings of their finitude, which in turn enables the possibility to have faith in the God of grace and salvation. Rather than providing human beings with every answer to existence and suffering, God’s reality, revealed through philosophical and theological encounter, reminds human beings of their fragility in relation to God.

The second section, “Trinity,” takes up the challenge to define God’s attributes in relation to God’s person and mission. Guy Mansini’s essay, “Can Humility and Obedience be Trinitarian Realities?” puts the Rule of St. Benedict in conversation with Thomas’ insights on the mission of Christ to help us understand just how the virtues of humility and obedience are present within the life of Christ. Following Mansini, Bruce McCormack’s essay advocates for a point of convergence between Barth and Thomas found in their shared understanding of the unity of God’s missions and procession. For McCormack, Thomas and Barth both articulate that the processions and missions form a single eternal act. The main difference between them, for McCormack, lies with Barth’s strongly Christocentric movement from the economy to the immanent Trinity versus Thomas’ speculative approach to the divine essence. The third section, “Christology,” begins with an essay by Keith Johnson on the role of natural revelation in creation and covenant. Beginning with Thomas’ account of natural revelation, Johnson notes that, for Thomas, knowing God through reason is a “preamble and presupposition” to knowing God through sacred doctrine (138). Natural revelation, then, isn’t alone sufficient for revealing God to a human being. Turning to Barth, Johnson points out that because of the reality of sin, the early Barth rejected any possibility of human beings receiving knowledge of God apart from grace. However, later Barth realized that because human beings are created by God, a relationship exists between them that cannot be totally severed by sin. Barth then articulates that human beings were created precisely as a function of God’s decision to reconcile sinful humanity through Jesus Christ. This allows Barth to embrace a qualified natural revelation that respects the relationship between God and humanity while keeping a Christocentric focus: all natural revelation must be tested against the person and work of Christ. Ultimately, though vast differences remain between them, Barth and Aquinas both affirm that God reveals himself through the created order, which is none other than a function of God’s relationship to human beings.

Thomas Joseph White’s essay, “The Crucified Lord: Thomistic Reflections on the Communication of Idioms and the Theology of the Cross” compares Barth’s later Christology with the Christology of Aquinas as a way to move forward in ecumenical conversation. White notes that Aquinas’ Christology actually stands closer to the classical Reformed scholastic tradition than Barth’s Christology, even though Barth is perhaps the most prolific modern expounder of the Reformed tradition. White suggests that, because of this reality, Reformed engagement with classic Thomism might prove to be especially fruitful. And for Catholics, White suggests that the philosophical implications of Barth’s theological positions warrant more investigation.

The fourth section, “Grace and Justification,” begins with Joseph Wawrykow’s reflections on grace in Aquinas and Barth. Wawrykow affirms that both Barth and Aquinas recognize the divine initiative of grace—it always precedes every human activity. Thus, for both figures, anything human beings do is in response to divine initiative. But Wawrykow also points out several key differences between Barth and Aquinas’ understanding of grace. Most notably, Aquinas has an account of merit that Barth does not share. Barth rejects the idea of merit because of its sinful element; it allows human beings to claim too much for themselves. And though Wawrykow affirms Barth’s concerns, he concludes by noting that Aquinas himself keeps the focus squarely on the glory of God when discussing anything about human merit as one lives a life of grace.

Amy Marga’s essay, “Reconciliation in Karl Barth and the New Life of the Justified Sinner in Christ,” argues that Barth and Aquinas converge on their shared understanding of how grace operates in a person’s life. They diverge in how the justified sinner relates to their new existence, mediated through Jesus Christ. Focusing primarily on Barth, Marga affirms that grace, for Barth, is inherently disruptive, annihilating the old self in order to re-create a new self, mediated through Christ. This stands in opposition to Aquinas, who understands grace operating in the life of the reconciled person on multiple levels.

In the final section, “Election, Providence, and Natural Law,” John Bowlin explores Barth and Aquinas on election and requirement in relationships. Bowlin observes that Barth and Aquinas assume a social theory of obligation, defined primarily by the “friendship that God’s gracious love creates” (240). Though Barth and Aquinas will diverge at significant points as to how the relationship between humanity and God unfolds, both assume that obligation is a part of human life, and that it is predicated upon friendship, not coercion, when applied to the divine human relationship. Holly Taylor Coolman ends this section with an essay on divine and human action in Aquinas. Coolman coins the term analogia lex to describe Aquinas’ comprehensive understanding of law through an exegesis of the Secunda pars to argue that the law serves to move human beings toward ultimate happiness with God. Coolman concludes her essay by emphasizing that the law, for Aquinas, has a distinctly Christological and pneumatological focus in the way it directs us toward our eternal end with God.

Bruce McCormack concludes the volume with a brief epilogue on the possibilities of philosophy and ecumenical dialogue. McCormack poignantly observes that the ecumenical endeavor ultimately is one striving toward a faith that does not yet exist. The common faith toward which ecumenism aims can only exist as ecumenical conversations respond to the needs and concerns of its conversation partners. This volume is an excellent example of McCormack’s observations. The scholars engage with one another’s work in charity and with acuity, presenting Barth and Aquinas’ lasting legacy with fresh possibilities for further dialogue and friendship. Surely this book should be a model for “official” Catholic-Protestant dialogues in the future. Those who wish to cultivate friendship across lines of Catholic-Protestant difference would do well to acquaint themselves with the essays contained in this book. It is ideal for those who have engaged either Aquinas or Barth in their studies and wish to expand their understanding of both figures in a distinctively ecumenical setting. One’s theology will be better for it.

Kathryn Bradford Heidelberger, Benedictine University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday (eds.), Trinitarian Theology after Barth Princeton Theological Monograph Series 148 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011)

Trinitarian Theology after Barth 

Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday (eds.), Trinitarian Theology after Barth Princeton Theological Monograph Series 148 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), xviii + 400pp. $46.00.

Reviewed by Aaron T. Smith (January 30, 2013)

Sixteen essays collected from a symposium held in May 2009 at Carey Baptist College (Auckland, New Zealand), this text provides further evidence that the theology of Karl Barth excites—and provokes—continued attention in the church and academy. The book’s title reflects the title of the symposium, although the editors have organized the writings according to a more detailed schematic: not just Trinitarian Theology after Barth, but “with” (4 papers), “after” (7 papers), and “beyond” (5 papers). Discerning what the editors intend by these designations takes some interpretive effort. The preface hints that they refer to contributions by some whose academic work is focused on Barth, by others who are observers of him, and by a third group whose work is critical but appreciative of him. The content of the book’s three parts, however, does not match this paradigm, and no other is provided.

Contributions doing theology with Barth might best be characterized as illustrating the enduring relevance of particular features of his thought. Paul Molnar rehearses the significance of Barth’s construal of the role of the Holy Spirit in human knowing; he is the subjective correlate to the objective Word. The continued importance of Barth’s basically Reformed epistemology is that it marginalizes natural theology. Because God is known only by the Spirit’s act of commandeering human thought and making it correspond to his address, there can be no knowledge “that God is” apart from awareness of “who God is.” The Spirit does not illuminate the mind to grasp abstract deity, even a deity that could be associated with the Spirit generally over against the Word. Thus, attempts to prove the mere existence of “God” on the basis of reason and experience are by their very nature ineffectual.

Ivor Davidson and Murray Rae constructively expand upon two themes, which to date have not commanded much sustained consideration within Barth studies. Davidson takes up the subject of divine light. He sketches the NT disclosure that God is light (1 John 1:5) within a Trinitarian framework characterized by Barthian elements. God defines light, not vice versa; God is light in triadic self-repetition (the Son is “light from light,” the Spirit is the transparency between Father and Son); the shining of God’s light externally derives from the radiant fullness of his perfect essence, and thus reflection of God’s effulgence in time adds nothing to who God is in eternity. As to the last point, Davidson locates himself among those interpreters of Barth who consider God’s immanent triunity to be logically prior to his actions in history.

Rae considers the topic of space and God’s relation to it. He observes that Barth rejects the strict Augustinian separation of God from space, arguing instead that spatiality is proper to God. For Barth, triune God defines space. It is patterned after the unity in differentiation that characterizes God’s being. Space is not a bare container of static objects, but dynamic, “a condition by which persons and also things are differentiated one from another” (79). As T. F. Torrance also noted, this relational account of space places Barth in conversation with modern physics.

More than a decade has passed since Bruce McCormack argued thematically that, for Barth, God’s self-election in Jesus is logically (not chronologically or ontologically!) prior to his triunity, and therefore that Barth’s early, “traditionalist” trinitarianism would have to be revised on the basis of his later Christology. McCormack’s contribution to the present volume offers a much-anticipated explanation of what this revision must entail. Because McCormack’s thesis has so heavily influenced the scope and shape of Trinitarian theology in Barth’s wake, his essay is examined more fully here than are the others.

McCormack begins by identifying a problem in the way Barth derives his doctrine of the Trinity in CD 1.1 from the statement, “God reveals himself as Lord.” The problem is that at this point in Barth’s thinking,lordship is understood in the abstract, as God’s “freedom from human epistemic mastery . . . [and] his freedom in the ontological sense of independent and unique being” (93). God’s lordship is grounded in the noetic and ontic autonomy proper to theoretical Godness. But as McCormack observes, this abstract sort of power conflicts with the tangible way Barth eventually defines lordship in CD 4.1 in terms of command and obedience.

Methodologically, Barth’s attempt to derive the Trinity economically is short-circuited in his early work by principled commitment to God’s differentiation from time, and thus is not successful until undertaken in light of his mature, materially concretized Christology. Crucial to the latter is Barth’s reversal of the relationship of the person and work of Christ. In CD 4, he understands the person in terms of his salvific work, not the other way around as he had from Göttingen through CD 1.2. That reversal enables Barth to construe the Son, qua Son, in terms of suffering and submission.

Barth utilizes the controversial genus tapeinoticum (“genus of humility”) in order to make submission proper to eternal God. This interpretation of the communicatio idiomatum emphasizes that the Son’s act of self-emptying (Phil. 2) is not by subtraction of his divine attributes, but rather by addition of the attributes of his human nature. From all eternity, the logos exists in anticipation of the flesh he would assume in time. There is no logos asarkos but only the logos incarnandus, only the Word defined by qualities of existence revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, that is, by submission to the Father’s will and ultimately the cross.

Lordship now refers to God’s peculiar freedom to will such an existence for himself: from all eternity, God determines to be what he will become in time. In Trinitarian terms, the Father commands and the Son obeys humanly by the power of the Holy Spirit. And this means that God’s triune being is logically determined by his election in Jesus to be God-for-us. God does not exist as an essential philosophical substance, but actualistically as an unchanging subject—his immutability is the constancy of his self-determination to exist in the triune act of command and obedience.

One wonders whether McCormack might be comfortable replacing the traditional definition of “Trinity,” asone essence in three coequal and coeternal Persons, with one subject in three coordinate and coeternal actions, or perhaps better, one action in three co-determinative and coeternal iterations. The second appears more provocative, but might best encapsulate the insight McCormack harvests from Barth: God’s existence is entirely in the act of coming to humankind, which takes a triadic pattern as giving, receiving, and upholding actual covenant designs.

McCormack’s essay makes for a nice segue to the second part, doing theology “after” Barth. Writings in this section more or less target unresolved tensions in Barth’s thought, typically by engaging secondary analyses, and propose correctives. Two essays that do not fit this characterization, and seem better suited to Part One, are those by Andrew Burgess and Adam McIntosh. Burgess highlights the essentially Trinitarian character of salvation for Barth. Triune God is who the act of saving is “done by” and the one the act is “done to” (he is Subject and Object in a proper ontology of election), as well as salvation’s ultimate “purpose” (eschatological reconciliation of all things in him). McIntosh’s thesis is likely to be a stretch for many students of Barth: Barth’s doctrine of appropriations functions as an ordering principle for the whole of the Church Dogmaticsand supplies triune “language” for a “radically particularized ecclesiology” (239).

Outliers recognized, remaining contributions to the book’s second section engage various interpretations of Barth and attempt to carry forward, correct, or apply their conclusions. Phillip Tolliday takes up the work of Kevin Giles and a report issued by the Anglican Diocese of Sydney to assess whether Barth might be accused of subordinating the Son to the Father, particularly in a way that could be used by cultural conservatives to support coordinate gender subordination. Myk Habets criticizes Barth’s defense of the filioque by following Torrance, and by critically examining the work of David Guretzki. Habets finally seasons Thomas Weinandy with Leonardo Boff in order to suggest that filioque be augmented with patreque and spirituque. Besides the avoidable architectural complexity of these two chapters, they lack the kind of wide-ranging primary-source interaction with Barth required to handle their sweeping topics successfully.

More successful are the essays by Andrew Nicol, John McDowell, and Benjamin Myers. Nicol explores the way that both Barth and Robert Jenson construe death in a dialectical way—as basic to human finitude and as the “wages of sin” (Rom. 6:23). Death itself is not judgment, since human life is not naturally infinite, but the sign of judgment. The gospel message is that our bounded lives, which are under this sign, will be “divinely interpreted by love in the infinite eschatological community of the triune God” (252).

McDowell contrasts Vincent Brümmer’s account of prayer with the Trinitarian logic of CD 1.1. Whereas Brümmer posits a “conversational” model of prayer that projects modern categories of personhood on to God, treating him without plurality, Barth offers a genuinely Trinitarian model in which the object of prayer is an actualistic subject. Because God has his being in the event of triune relationship, McDowell concludes that certain common features of praying assumed by Brümmer (and others) must be challenged. For instance, there is no prayer generally, but only response to the God whose being is in coming to us in Christ by the Spirit; prayer is not getting something from God by acting upon him; God is not readily objectified, and so prayer is more complex than “relay-race” (280) succession from our act to God’s act.

Myers notes that McCormack is not the first to find discontinuity between the trinitarianism of Barth’s early work and doctrinal convictions of his maturity. In a 1979 essay, Rowan Williams suggested that Barth’sChurch Dogmatics contained two doctrines of the Trinity. Myers interprets Williams’s work as an implicit defense of McCormack—a somewhat complicated argument on the surface, but capably worked out. “The aporia of [CD 1.1],” Myers says summarizing Williams, “emerges from its portrayal of God as something akin to an autonomous human subject” (128). Just as McCormack would, Williams finds Barth’s early thought to be governed by an abstract concept of lordship, defined by noetic and ontic autonomy. And with McCormack, Williams identifies the corrective to this in Barth’s doctrine of election. Election is of critical importance because as noted, it allows Barth to conceive of the economy as constitutive of God’s self-determination (to be-for-us) without necessitating change to the Godhead.

Contributions made to the third part, doing theology “beyond” Barth, reflect a range of interest in Barth, and comprehension of him, as they consider various constructive proposals. Nicola Hoggard-Creegan rather breezily asserts that Barth’s resistance to finding vestiges of the Trinity belongs to a bygone era. She claims that today it is necessary to identify triadic analogies, patterns of love and relationship, and semiotic presentations of unity and diversity in order to counter the secularized account of creation given by contemporary atheists and agnostics. Unfortunately, Hoggard-Creegan barely acknowledges the pitfalls of self-projection when seeking presumptive evidence of anything (surely, if God was thought to be a unity of four “persons” rather than three we would ignore triadic structures and “find” only quadratic ones), fails to assess the relationship between books of nature and scripture, and therefore offers no treatment of what the latter says about our inabilities (in a state of sin) to rightly translate the former. She also seems unconcerned with the fact that Barth articulated his theology in the face of modern atheism.

Haydn Nelson makes a more rigorous attempt in his paper, although it is not clear how it amounts to doing Trinitarian theology “beyond” Barth. Nelson contends that God’s impassibility is best understood as “active constancy,” that “God is active in that he is touched by suffering, yet is constant in that he is not overwhelmed or ontologically shaped by suffering” (343). While this formulation echoes certain features of Barth’s early trinitarianism, once again Barth’s early doctrine of the Trinity was largely a restatement of the tradition. It is a nice approximation of what the tradition has been saying at least since Cyril, but this formulation rejects a central element of the late Barth: the cross affects God’s very being.

Ashley Moyse and Antony Glading are deliberate in engaging Barth. Moyse utilizes Barth’s doctrine ofperichoresis to construct a model for ethical dialogue that he believes is better suited to application in biomedical fields than traditional options. Deontological (duty-based) and existential (being-based) ethics proceed from teleological pictures (outcome-based)—as do the Son and Spirit from the Father, respectively—and all three interpenetrate each other. Glading refreshingly refutes the popular notion that the Spirit is subordinate in Barth’s theology, demonstrating that for Barth the Spirit gives structure and content to time itself as the contemporaneous “here and now” of Christ. He understands Barth to move along a “Christo-pneumatological” trajectory (as opposed to Spirit-christological).

Finally, Ulrike Link-Wieczorek argues a welcome and thought-provoking thesis—that the Trinity should not be a doctrinal stumbling block in inter-religious dialogue. Link-Wieczorek reminds that throughout the OT, God names himself in a way that takes up covenantal history. The NT naming of God is thus merely a continuation of this reality. “Father, Son, and Spirit” are gains for the language by which we contemplate God, not gains for God’s ontology. God was, is, and will be the God who makes himself known among humankind. (In Barthian terms, Jesus is the eternal subject and object of God’s elective activity, and this activity defines his being; similarly, God ad extra is eternally determinative of God in se). This means that contemplation of God’s presence enjoys fundamental continuity between the old and new covenants—in both cases we encounter the God who determinatively reveals himself in the act of human cognition. Link-Wieczorek recommends that Trinitarian grammar is useful not for deriving a doctrine of God, as Barth did inCD 1.1, “but rather for ascertaining the contemplative culmination of the vision of the presence of God” (305).

As indicated, the quality of argumentation among the volume’s contributions is inconsistent, which is to be expected in any collection. It is also worth noting inconsistency in the book’s editing. Essays range from 44 pages to a mere 15. In some cases, grammar is flawless. Others contain multiple infelicities. Obvious errors are a citation of a nonexistent volume of the Dogmatics (2.3), formal inconsistency in references to theDogmatics awkward or incomplete sentences and spelling mistakes, inappropriate punctuation (commas and periods that need to be removed or inserted), unnecessary spaces, and inconsistent use of block quotations. None of these problems is egregious, but as an aggregate they give the work a feeling of sloppiness.

The volume’s upside, however, outshines its downside. The range of topics covered within its broad Trinitarian rubric is remarkable. Certain constructive proposals (e.g., by Davidson and Rae) frame pregnant lines of inquiry. Several pieces by younger scholars and students suggest a lively future for Trinitarian theology after Barth. For those studying Barth in Europe and North America, it is refreshing to hear from conversation partners from Australia and New Zealand. Lastly, it is perhaps a signature strength of the work that contributors include a vicar and two ministers. Their inclusion in no way compromises the learned temper of the volume, and it hearkens to Barth’s own participation in Pfarrertage. It also functions as a welcome reminder of the ecclesial focus of his theological efforts.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Dempsey, Michael T., ed., Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011)

Dempsey, Michael T., ed., Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), x + 301pp. $38.00 (paperback)

Reviewed by Mark R. Lindsay (January 31, 2014)

Karl Barth, it would seem, has been a perennially controversial figure. One need only rehearse his debates with Harnack, Brunner, and Van Til to catch a glimpse of the controversies with which he surrounded himself, or at least was inadvertently surrounded, during his lifetime. Indeed, one of the fascinations of Barth studies is the way in which Barth’s monumental corpus continues to facilitate multiple—and at times entirely contradictory—interpretations. Notwithstanding pleas to the contrary, Barthian orthodoxy remains as contested as ever. This is perhaps no truer at the moment than in the debates swirling around the constitution of the Trinity and the locus of God’s electing will. The arguments continue apace despite the fact that the genesis of the debate is now more than a decade old. Michael Dempsey’s collection is devoted to this debate. As he states in the introduction, these debates get to the heart of two very particular matters: the question of which contemporary theologian, or school, can properly lay claim to the Barthian mantle—at least within the English-speaking world; and the rather more ultimate question of the nature of God’s very being in freedom (17). In this volume, Dempsey brings together twelve eminently qualified theologians—including some of those around whom this debate has revolved, such as George Hunsinger, Bruce McCormack, and Paul Molnar, and other somewhat younger, though no less able scholars, such as Christopher Holmes, Paul Daffyd Jones, and Paul Nimmo—to tease out the implications of these two questions. The result is a highly readable and thought-provoking collection of essays.

The first five chapters are sets of ‘challenge-and-response’ from the two sides of the controversy. Kevin Hector and Paul Molnar square off against each other, as do McCormack and Hunsinger. For those who are not familiar with the contours of the argument, the issues can be roughly summarized in the following terms. According to Bruce McCormack, Barth came to understand Jesus Christ as both the electing God and the elected human being. This alteration of the doctrine of election constituted a fundamental break with Reformed tradition because it dissolved the distinction between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos, between theincarnatus and the incarnandus. Election is not simply something that God does, but is rather intrinsic to God’s very being. Indeed, it is the decision by which God constitutes God’s own being as triune. In McCormack’s words, “God is what he is in the eternal decision of election and not in a state or mode of existence that is above or prior to that decision” (136). That is, the works of God ad intra (the Trinitarian processions) find their ground in the first of the works of God ad extra (election). Molnar and Hunsinger rail against this, both from the perspective of their own exegesis of Barth’s theology and also on account of the dogmatic implications of such thinking. In large part, the collapsing of the immanent into the economic Trinity—a charge directed against McCormack, but which he stoutly repudiates—renders God essentially dependent upon creation, at ultimate risk to God’s own freedom (see 55, 105, 109).

Those readers who have been following the debate will find none of the content or the essays in the first half of part one new. Each chapter in part one is a republication of an article which has previously appeared elsewhere (primarily in Modern Theology, IJSTand SJT, between 2005 and 2010). Nonetheless, their collation here is particularly useful for orienting the reader to the nuances of the debate.

In the second half of part one, we are introduced to fresh perspectives, largely from key representatives of the younger generation of Barth scholars. In “Obedience, Trinity, and Election,” Jones reflects materially upon the way in which Barth’s notion of christological obedience points to the complication of God’s triunity and electing action (155). It seems to me, however, that his more substantive point lies elsewhere. He urges us to think both with and, importantly, beyond Barth, arguing (perhaps contra the more senior scholars whose claims set the scene in the opening section) that, if one of the pressing questions here concerns Barth’s legacy, then the Church Dogmatics does not close off interpretive license or limit it to one dominant hegemonic reading. Rather, the Church Dogmatics opens up an array of competing interpretive possibilities. “Recent debates,” he contends, “should be viewed as an opportunity . . . to embrace a new sensibility, characterized by interpretive open-mindedness” (139). His welcome plea resonates especially loudly in light of the oft-times rancorous tone which has infected many of the exchanges between the key protagonists in this debate.

In the following essay, Nimmo criticizes the christological concentration of the debate. Insofar as the point at issue fundamentally bears upon the locus of election, at the center of which rightly stands the person of Jesus Christ, this concentration has been right and proper. Nimmo suggests that a pneumatological perspective is both helpful and necessary as well. Leaning ultimately more towards what he calls the “strong” reading of Barth—that is, towards McCormack’s view that from CD II/2 onwards election preceded Trinity within Barth’s epistemological frame—Nimmo pursues two constructive consequences for pneumatology. First, since the eternal Son can never be abstracted from the incarnate Logos, we must likewise reject the notion of a Spirit abstracted from the mediating activity between Jesus Christ and the community of God’s church (178). Second, since the Logos is always and ever the Logos incarnandus, so too therefore must we think of the Spirit as always the pneuma inecclesiandus, the Spirit “to be enchurched” (178).

The next essay shifts from a consideration of God’s own being and action to the actions of the human community. Christopher Holmes takes up the challenge of the debate with respect to Barth’s ethics which, he notes, is ingredient to the doctrine of election. Election includes within itself “a profound anthropological correlate” (200). Thus ethical orientation for the creature always means conformity to that for which she has been eternally elected. In the same way that God is eternally self-determined to be the One who gives Himself to the creature, so too the creature has an elected vocation; the creature is summoned to become what she is in Christ—the covenant partner who gives herself freely to God. With conscious reference to Jüngel, Holmes suggests that the best way of articulating this is in terms of “reiterative humanity”: “humanity is true humanity inasmuch as it reiterates in time what it is eternally determined to be” (198). In the context of the overarching debate, this preference for reiterative rather than constitutive language sways Holmes more towards Molnar’s side. While appreciative of McCormack’s stress on God’s constitutive determination pro nobis, Holmes nonetheless finds McCormack’s actualistic “covenantal ontology” by which true humanity is realized only in the act of faithful obedience, guilty of undermining God’s freedom and self-sufficiency and—consequently—it undermines human freedom as well.

Aaron Smith’s contribution is in large part an overview of the key differences between McCoamck and Molnar, through the interpretive lens of the time-eternity dialectic. He helpfully distinguishes between the two purposes of the McCormack-Molnar debate, which should in turn affect our interpretation of their respective merits. McCormack, he notes, presents a constructive thesis intended to tease out the logical implications of Barth’s position which Barth himself did not articulate. Molnar, on the other hand, seeks to defend Barthian orthodoxy without engaging the substantive concerns of McCormack’s argument. Noting that much of the force of the debate hinges upon the nature of God’s being in eternity, Smith highlights the different construals of eternity offered by both McCormack and Molnar. He points out that since they define eternity differently, they are bound to reach different conclusions (216–219). Similarly, whereas McCormack privileges Barth’s statements on divine unity—that in God, Jesus Christ always was “and stands at the most primordial moment of divine being” (220)—Molnar prefers to emphasize the distinction between the eternity of Jesus Christ and the nonbeginning of God in se (220). In sum, the great benefit of this essay is in demonstrating that insofar as McCormack and Molnar enter it with differing objectives, and define key terms differently, they are to some degree talking at rather than to each other.

Smith’s essay concludes part one. With contributions from Nicholas Healy and Matthew Levering, the essays in part two broaden the debate ecumenically by introducing two Catholic voices into the discussion. Both Healy and Levering ultimately reject McCormack’s thesis, though their differing reasons for doing so are in themselves materially instructive. Healy’s contribution engages less the question of the doctrine of God and more the question of theological epistemology—not, perhaps, because he wants this to be the case, but rather because he thinks that this is what McCormack’s argument entails (243). McCormack, notes Healy, argues that for Barth himself the problem of the knowledge of God is the central concern (242). Yet Healy suggests that McCormack’s characterization of the various interpretive schools—neo-orthodox (read “pre-modern”), postmodern, and Kantian critical realism—by which Barthian epistemology is mediated are themselves caricatures which do nothing more than compel McCormack to read Barth, paradoxically, in a transcendental speculative fashion. On the contrary, the “naïve realism” of pre-modern epistemology, which finds its classical expression in the Thomism repudiated by Kant bears no relation to what Thomas actually said. According to Healy, “It would certainly be a naïve mistake to read Thomas as if he were a philosophical thinker engaged in a kind of deduction of God’s being and attributes from principles generally available” (239). This is precisely what McCormack’s Barth does, but at the expense of falling victim (or better, being made to fall victim) to an uncritical speculative method. Reading McCormack’s Barth in light of Aquinas, Healy argues that McCormack’s articulation of election is “grounded not on Scripture but on a transcendental deduction, and thus on logic rather than revelation” (242). One gets the impression from Healy that McCormack makes Barth do precisely what he says Barth was trying to avoid.

In “Christ, the Trinity, and Predestination,” Matthew Levering also rejects McCormack’s conclusions, though with a touch more appreciation for his attempt to incorporate election within “a fully christological and Trinitarian framework” (245). He does so because he hopes to engage with McCormack on the basis of dogmatic theology rather than Barthian exegesis. Levering affirms van Driel’s contention that, if Jesus Christ is the subject of election, then one cannot avoid the tautology that Jesus Christ elects to be Jesus Christ and the correlative collapse of the constitutive distinction between trinitarian immanence and economy (247). His greater concern, however, is to “receive McCormack’s interpretation as a challenge to Thomistic theology,” noting that what non-Barthians have hitherto missed is the nexus between election and the doctrine of the Trinity (252). Levering teases out the implications of this by bringing McCormack’s thesis into dialogue with Thomas’s doctrine of predestination. In the end, he suggests, Aquinas would agree with the centrality of Jesus to the doctrine of election—yet, unlike McCormack (or McCormack’s Barth), would reach this conclusion not without metaphysical philosophy.

The third and final part consists of only one concluding chapter, in which Paul Louis Metzger queries the import of Barthian trinitarianism for contemporary ethics. Choosing a rather odd conversation-partner, the prosperity preacher Joel Osteen (one wonders how often he and Barth have been mentioned in the same breath!), Metzger engages with the idea of freedom, which in its various construals, is fundamental to the underlying debate about God’s being. Arguing that any discussion about God’s gracious election must include consideration of its “concrete implications . . . for human action” (281), Metzger’s aim is to tease out the social consequences of Barth’s doctrines of Trinity and election. He does this in deliberate contrast to the Osteen-style prosperity gospel movement. The latter, he says, is characterized by individualism (your best life now); consumerism (your best life now); and escapism (your best life now). The gospel, in contrast, speaks to us of a God in whom there is no inter-trinitarian competition or individualistic frame of reference, of a gift of grace that far exceeds consumerist impulses, and of a sacrificial co-existence that eschews moral escapism (286, 288, 291). The self-determining freedom of the prosperity gospel movement is thus contrasted with the freedom which derives from the security of knowing ourselves to be freely elected by the God who is eternally free in Himself, and which therefore enables a commitment to sociality.

In sum, this is an attractively presented book which engages with one of the most intriguing and hard-fought battles within Barthian theology of recent times. The weight of essays, at least numerically, leans towards the Molnar-Hunsinger position more than McCormack’s side even though his thesis frames the debate. In truth, however, this controversy extends beyond the boundaries of Barthian exegesis. It goes even beyond the question of who can now lay claim to the Barthian mantle. Much more importantly, as Levering has observed, this debate goes to the heart of dogmatic thinking about the nature of God Himself and His relationship with the world of creation.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Burnett, Richard E. ed. The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013)

Burnett, Richard E. ed. The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 272 pp. $40.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by J. Scott Jackson (March 26, 2019)

The theologically curious, many of whom have read little if any of Karl Barth’s work, occasionally will ask where the great Swiss theologian discusses a particular topic. Anyone who has spent some time poring through Barth’s writings knows how tricky such questions can be. Rather than sending these interlocutors scrambling to the now numerous standard, introductory works or to the imposing fine print in the index of the Church Dogmatics, I might rather point them to one or two articles in the Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth, ably edited by Richard Burnett of Erskine Seminary.

This volume aims to define and contextualize the key terms, ideas, and figures that shape Barth’s work, and to do so concisely. Within the limitations that inevitably hamper such an ambitious project, it succeeds remarkably well. Moreover, as a compilation of short pieces from an international team of 65 scholars, the Handbook serves not only as overview of the key themes and concerns that permeate Barth’s daunting corpus, but also as a precis of the state of Barth studies in the early 21st century to date. Contributors hail from the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, and Croatia (the editor himself acknowledges the lack of contributions from thinkers from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America is a weakness of the text).

Articles in this text are written by established experts who have published on their respective topics—so, among many notable examples, there are essays by Bruce McCormack on “Revelation,” Kimlyn Bender on “Church,” and by Kathryn Sonderegger on “Israel”—such that the articles often serve as an entree into a particular scholar’s own body of work. The research value of the book is enhanced by all-too-brief bibliographies at the end of each entry, and a summary bibliography at the end; Barth’s works in German and in English translation are also listed near the front.

An exhaustive compendium of the Barthian lexicon, Burnett admits, is impossible in one slim volume, but it does achieve an admirable comprehensiveness, nonetheless. There are nearly 100 articles—from “Actualism” (Paul Nimmo) to “Worship” (Michael D. Bush)—ranging from 500 to 2,500 words. 19 of these articles, particularly those on issues of biblical interpretation and historical criticism, were authored by Burnett himself. As he points out, the breadth, scope, and depth of Barth’s corpus can be intimidating, not only for the neophyte taking her first plunge into the material, but also for seasoned scholars seeking to summarize complex theological topics in such a compressed format. Nonetheless, as Burnett quips, “Life is short. Barth is long,” (p. x), and a roadmap such as this one might help the explorer on the long journey through the caverns of this theological oeuvre. A number of contributors reported that writing their assigned articles with such brevity was a singularly vexing task. Some writers approach their topics more genetically, whereas others take a more synthetic approach; many writers touch upon not only bellwether works such as The Church Dogmatics and the second edition of Romans, but they also draw upon early lectures, sermons, and other material published and/or translated in recent decades.

A few articles are devoted to other theologians whose work shaped, impacted, or intersected with Barth’s work directly, including Luther and Calvin, Harnack and Hermann, and Bultmann and Brunner. However, there are no articles on younger contemporaries such as Bonhoeffer or Gollwitzer. The authors that address Barth’s theological Sitz im Leben by and large share the consensus of most recent researchers that Barth’s vexed relationship with the 19th century’s mixed theological legacy was complicated. For example, Christophe Chalamet, in a piece on Wilhelm Hermann, notes the lines of continuity between Barth and his esteemed teacher that persisted throughout his dialectical and dogmatic work: thoroughgoing Christocentrism, the independence of theology from philosophy and the natural and social sciences, and the self-authenticating character of Christian faith.

The more thematic articles are, quite naturally, weighted toward Barth’s overriding preoccupations; I count at least eight articles that focus directly on the person and work of Jesus Christ (and many more that do so indirectly), and a bevy of pieces pertaining to Barth’s actualist theological ontology, his aversion to speculative natural theology, and his dynamic view of Biblical inspiration and interpretation. For example, Garrett Green, in his entry on “Faith,” insists on the event character and ineluctably mysterious nature of the human encounter with God.

The volume on the whole focuses on exposition of Barth’s work rather than plumbing the contemporary issues and controversies it has spawned. Nonetheless, one does find words of critique. For example, in a perceptive and otherwise appreciative article on “Christian Life,” Joseph L. Mangina echoes a common criticism that Barth’s ethics is sometimes deemed lacking in the arena of concrete application: “At times one longs for him to descend from those long, looping trains of thought in the large print, and even from the riches of Scripture in the small print, into the realm of the empirical and practical,” (p. 30). Such critiques notwithstanding, several articles do situate Barth’s theological and ethical commitments within the matrix of the practical socio-political struggles of his day. Thus, in his entry on “Liberalism,” Georg Pflederer argues, “Barth’s antiliberalism and antimodernism played a key role in the fight against National Socialism and its theological devotees,” (p. 139). Yet Pflederer also shows that such a stance of “antipluralism” was rooted not in a wholesale rejection of the modern Protestant tradition but rather stemmed from the early (pre-dialectical) Barth’s intensive engagements with socialist praxis during his Safenwil pastorate. Moreover, Stephanie Mar Smith (“State”) shows that Barth views civil authority—not uncritically, to be sure—but positively as a structure intended to preserve the freedom of the church to proclaim the Gospel—a role that was viciously abrogated by the idolatries of National Socialism. As someone interested in such matters, I would have liked to see more articles exploring Barth’s political theology and practical engagements, a fertile field for much contemporary research. Articles by George Hunsinger (“Justification”) and Timothy Gorringe (“Freedom”), two scholars who have explored the relationship between Barth’s dogmatics and his politics in depth, do not focus on these issues in this volume. Gorringe does, however, argue that Barth conceives God as identifying with the oppressed in their concrete struggles, though the human quest for liberation inevitably falls short of this ideal: “Barth thought the revolutionary could be an agent of God, but revolutions cannot accomplish real freedom,” as the fundamental existential problem of sin cannot be overcome through social struggle alone (p. 79).

This Handbook would serve as an excellent resource, especially for graduate students (or advanced undergraduates) pulling together a term paper on Barth’s theology as well as for more advanced scholars who seek a refresher. A pastor friend, who has read a decent amount of Barth, tells me he has found the volume full of grist for the mill of his sermon preparations. One caveat, though: as the articles can be dense at times, given the complexity of the material, I would not necessarily recommend this book as the text best suited to be the student’s initial foray into Barth’s work. For that task, the many fine surveys now available, coupled with focused primary text selections, might still make the best route for the beginner—though there is much serviceable material here to use in tandem with other introductory texts. Still, the Handbook is a superb resource for the reader with at least a little background in Barth and modern theology.

J. Scott Jackson, Independent Scholar

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Karl Barth. Barth in Conversation: Volume 2: 1963, Eberhard Busch, ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018)

Barth in Conversation: Volume 2: 1963

Karl Barth. Barth in Conversation: Volume 2: 1963, Eberhard Busch, ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), xx + 250 pp. $40 (hardback).

Reviewed by Christophe Chalamet (December 15, 2020)

Barth in Conversation: Volume 2 offers some of the interviews and conversations Barth hosted either in his home in Basel, in a neighboring restaurant or elsewhere, in the year 1963, one year after his official retirement from his position at the University of Basel at the age of 76. Not all of the discussions Barth had in that year were recorded or transcribed, and so this volume includes only some of them. But what is included is very interesting and a most welcome addition to the body of Barth’s writings.

These texts were available since 2005 in German as vol. 41 of the Gesamtausgabe (Barth’s complete works), edited by Eberhard Busch (Gespräche 1963, Zurich: TVZ). Conversations from the years 1959-1962 have already been published, both in German (Eberhard Busch ed., Zurich: TVZ, 1995) and in English (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017). The conversations from the years 1964-1968, which are published in the third volume of Gespräche, were published in German in 1997 (Eberhard Busch ed., Zurich: TVZ). An English translation was published last year (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019).

What kind of conversations do we find in this volume? The first thing to say is that they are varied. Some are conducted by journalists, for national or international newspapers or magazines (the most famous being Time). These journalists asked about the complicated process that led to the naming of a successor to Barth in Basel (Helmut Gollwitzer was a strong contender, favored by many, including Barth himself, but a public outcry over his left-leaning politics derailed the process), or about his views on Pope John XXIII, Paul VI and the council, or on theology and journalism (see e.g. 6-7). Some are discussions with pastors, for instance from France or Germany. Other encounters involved theology students. A brief exchange with students from the Bossey Ecumenical Institute contains snippets, almost in haiku style, that convey some of the essential things Barth wished to say in his writings (8-9). In other discussions with students, Barth was invited to comment on recent developments within Protestant theology (Herbert Braun, Ernst Käsemann, Heinrich Vogel, Jean-Louis Leuba, but also John A. T. Robinson and his highly successful book Honest to God; see 80-81, 91, 111, 161-165, 202). Speaking to the “wave” of Robinson’s pamphlet and the support it had found from Bultmann and Tillich (the latter also invoking Bonhoeffer), Barth was under the impression “that it is turning people off a bit because it is also too boring, it is too thin” (191). That particular conversation then turned quite tense (or “a little vibrant,” as a participant put it; 199), as Barth spoke of pastors and theologians who had become “infected” by Bultmann’s ideas (192), and the tension only rose further as a participant told Barth that to them he was “a part of history” (200).

In several conversations, Barth expresses his astonishment and joy at having heard Pope Paul VI unambiguously emphasize the centrality of Jesus Christ in his opening address (on September 29, 1963) to the second session of the council (90, 145, 206, 225). Certainly, this was a balm for Barth, who was distressed by the success of Robinson’s book and by the kind of praise it had received by some of his old theologian friends and conversation partners.  Discussing Heinrich Vogel, Barth makes very interesting comments on the use and abuse of “paradox” in theology. Certainly, “the theology free from contradiction […] is an eschatological concept,” and yet theology cannot “content” itself “with paradoxes,” it must not be “stuck” in paradoxes: the most important thing is in fact to keep everything “in motion” (93).

In one of the discussions, Barth expresses his critique of Billy Graham’s evangelistic strategy: “he goes after people with gun in hand and says, ‘You must be born anew!’” (96). To theology students at the Protestant faculty in Paris, Barth, who was puzzled by their questions (“where can we see Jesus Christ?”; “Should the Church stop speaking and choose silence?”), says: “The questions I’m hearing here are funny. You are all so complicated, and I am the one who is simple. You are young, but it seems to me as though you’re talking a little like old folks” (110).

One of the interviews Barth gave, in Copenhagen in April 1963, was (wonderfully) titled: “It is not my fault that there are Barthians” (11)! In another interview given in that city, he concludes by saying: “I have never demanded that someone should parrot me. It is not about me, but about the truth, the truth in love” (19). As is well-known, the truth, for Barth, is personified or incarnated in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. This leads Barth to worry a little bit about “Christology,” which as a doctrinal construct may become a sort of screen that blocks the one who really matters, namely Christ himself (90).

The interview with Georges Casalis from May 12, 1963 is noteworthy, especially when Barth describes his Church Dogmatics (CD) as a way of circling the same mountain, again and again, looking at it from various perspectives (24). The original, German editorial introduction to this conversation states that the tape recording of this interview could not be found (20), but in fact it circulated here and there, not just as an audiotape but as a video.

There are some recurring topics or concerns in these lectures. One of them is Barth’s critique of Gerhard Ebeling’s theology of “faith” (60-61, 166, 202-204), which he sees as a severe reduction, similar to Luther’s early theology, or Ernst Fuchs’s “glossolalia” (202). Barth was not thrilled to see the creation, under the leadership of Ebeling, of an “Institute of Hermeneutics” at the University of Zurich (196, 200). Infant baptism is another recurring topic (57-65).

One sees in these exchanges a Barth who is happy to interact with Pietist pastors of various stripes (see the very long and rich conversation with the Württemberg Church Brotherhood, 28-69, and his mention of various Pietist groups who came to meet him; 69 and 177). The battles of the early years (around the end of World War I and in the ensuing years) were long gone, and Barth wishes to send signals of humility in the course of the discussion. As he puts it at the close of their long conversation: “All of this was not [presented] dogmatikōs [as a firm doctrinal formulation] but gymnastikōs [as something to be tested]. If this or that turned out to be helpful to you, then I am certainly glad about that” (69). In a particularly interesting moment from a conversation with pastors from the Rhineland, Barth explains how students who attend his seminar discussions (Sozietäten) in Basel at times arrive with a certain inner distance, thinking: “Aha, this is that monument worthy of historic preservation, which one must respect but of course cannot follow.” But some of these students eventually realize, after several meetings and a close reading of a brief excerpt (30 pages or so) from the Church Dogmatics, that “everything is completely different” from what they imagined (191). Barth repeats this in several conversations, and at one point in the one conversation where things became tense, he wished he could simply read a small section of CD with his guests to try to alleviate the criticisms that are addressed to him. At the same time, Barth made sure to say that he had a “tough skin” and that he was ready to hear all of the critiques, even those that are expressed bluntly.

The translation seems to be excellent throughout. I have spotted only a few infelicities, for instance, the mention of the death of an esteemed colleague and friend, Hans-Joachim Iwandt, who has been “immortalized” (90; such a literal translation of the German “verewigt” does not seem ideal to me; see Gespräche 1963, 137). There are also a few errors. On 111n6: “et” instead of “und”; on 122n22 and 188n104, the French contains several minor errors; on 202n139: “May 28, 1912” instead of “May 28, 1922.” But these details should not detract from the clear, significant gain that this publication represents, and from the gratitude for the hard work that was needed to bring this project to completion.

I would like to end this review with this reminder, with which Barth closes his conversation with students from Göttingen: the old, esteemed professor wishes them “a successful conclusion of [their] theological studies, the completion of which is actually to be expected only at the conclusion of [their] earthly days” (104).

Christophe Chalamet, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Geneva

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Keith L. Johnson, The Essential Karl Barth: A Reader and a Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019)

The Essential Karl Barth: A Reader and a Commentary 

Keith L. Johnson, The Essential Karl Barth: A Reader and a Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 384 pp. $40.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by Christophe Chalamet (December 21, 2020).

What, given the breadth of Karl Barth’s œuvre, belongs to his most “essential” writings? Keith Johnson gives us his answer in this volume, which comprises three parts, each preceded by an introduction: “Barth’s Theological Development” (13-101), Barth’s “Church Dogmatics” (103-300), and “Barth’s Political Engagement” (301-345). The volume opens with a brief but very helpful and comprehensive survey of Barth’s life (1-12), followed by an introduction to the first part of the book.

The first selected text is drawn from the first chapter of Barth’s Römerbrief, in its 2^nd edition (1922). Of course, this may give the impression to some that Barth did not write much of value before then, which is slightly unfortunate, especially given the significance of the first edition of his commentary (completed four years earlier in 1918) as well as of even earlier writings, some of which have only been recently published in the German edition of Barth’s complete works (Gesamtausgabe). It would have been very good to translate some pages from the first edition (which remains untranslated in any language, as far as I can see). But the purpose of the book is to introduce readers to Barth’s œuvre, and so Johnson’s decision is understandable. The decision to include excerpts from the very first chapter of Barth’s commentary is sound: right away, with this first selection, the reader is placed before a text on “Jesus Christ our Lord” (24-27). But one then misses some of the powerful hermeneutical insights that are found in the well-known (and highly significant) preface to this 2^ndedition. It goes without saying that limiting the selections from Romans to certain pages from its first chapter means leaving out some pathbreaking insights found in later chapters of the commentary. But it was simply impossible not to leave important things out.

The Göttingen dogmatic lectures are included with a short (a little over 4 pages) but well-selected section in which Barth speaks of Deux dixit – “God has spoken” – indeed a key theme in his first dogmatic lectures, not only as “the usual perfect” but as “an eternal perfect” (66-67).

Readers of Barth’s works can easily consult most of the texts that are included in this volume. But there are a few exceptions, which are worth signaling. Most significantly, there is Barth’s “Farewell” (Abschied) to Zwischen den Zeiten, the journal he had co-founded with Eduard Thurneysen, Friedrich Gogarten, and Georg Merz in 1922. This text, written on October 18, 1933, is now available in English for the first time, in Matthew J. Aragon Bruce’s translation (82-92). The next selection, after this text from 1933, comes from Barth’s important lecture on “The Humanity of God.” This is a big jump in chronology, from 1933 to 1956, but one that can be explained by the fact that, during these two decades, Barth was working on his Church Dogmatics. And some other texts bridge this big gap in the third and final part of the book, titled “Barth’s Political Engagement.”

Part 2 comprises 19 brief excerpts from Barth’s Church Dogmatics (CD) with an emphasis on CD I/1 with four excerpts (compared to only one excerpt from CD I/2), and then one or two excerpts from the remaining volumes of CD (notably with three excerpts from II/2). In two hundred pages, one is thus presented with key sections from the CD and its 8,000 pages or so. The introduction to part 2 (103-107) will be extremely useful to students. The selections have been made very carefully and wisely. One notices an emphasis on the themes of “The Knowledge of God” (chap. 16; 17 pages, whereas other chapters are two to three times shorter), a text which is presented as “one of the most important passages in Barth’s writings” (149), on “The Doctrine of Election” (chap. 18; 15 pages), as well as on “The Obedience of the Son of God” (chap. 25; 17 pages). The introduction to chap. 19, “The Election of Jesus Christ,” strangely fails to mention the departure that Barth’s treatment of this theme represents, in critical dialogue with earlier presentations in the Reformed and in the Christian tradition (but see 350 for comments on this in the conclusion).

Part 3, on “Barth’s Political Engagement,” focuses on the period of the Second World War and the years leading up to it. Two minor quibbles: It would have been useful to mention that Barth was not just a Swiss citizen (303), as he also became a German citizen in 1926 after moving to the University of Münster. It would also have been good to include material from texts he wrote in 1914-1915 since these years amount to the most significant turn he experienced in his life as a theologian (however, see Keith Johnson’s helpful comments in the conclusion). One finds instead, and very usefully, a brief retrospective reflection on the 1920s (written in 1962 and made available in English here for the first time, in Matthew J. Aragon Bruce’s translation; some parts of the text are not clear to me: “The ‘Youth-movement’ called, and they gave themselves in those years” [305]; what does this mean?), an Advent sermon from December 1933 (chap. 31), the Barmen Declaration (chap. 32), a letter to American Christians from December 1942 (chap. 33), and, finally, excerpts from Barth’s lecture from 1946 on “The Christian Community and the Civil Community” (or, as Keith L. Johnson prefers, see 338n2: “The Community of Christians and the Community of Citizens”) (chap. 34).

The book closes with a conclusion titled “The Tradition of Karl Barth” (347-365). Students will find these pages very useful. It is nice to see Barth’s lecture on humanism, given at the ‘Rencontres internationales’ in Geneva in 1949, a text seldom quoted even by Barth specialists, feature so prominently at the close of the book (361-363; this text is particularly interesting in that it announces the 1956 theme of “The Humanity of God,” in my opinion). One small question: with the two editions of his commentary on Romans, did Barth really arrive “on the scene as a prophetic voice from the wilderness, […] descending from the Swiss mountains with a message of judgment for a century-old tradition of academic theology” (347)? The rhetoric is nice, but the fact is that if, around 1918, one had asked some of the most significant figures in German academic theology if they had heard of this Swiss pastor, many would have answered that indeed they knew him personally. Scholars such as Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, Johannes Weiss, Adolf Schlatter, Martin Rade, Adolf Jülicher, Theodor Häring, Hermann Kutter, and Leonhard Ragaz all knew Barth personally (Troeltsch and Häring exchanged letters with him in April 1912). Barth was not an unknown, smelly, bearded prophet who came out of nowhere with a bang! He was a young theologian of obvious promise, who had published several pieces in some of the most respected theological journals in his day.

Did Barth see himself “as a theologian without a tradition” (364)? Here too, I am not so sure. He saw himself as a Reformed theologian, and so as a participant in one precise tradition – which does not mean of course that he could appropriate all aspects from this tradition. It seems to me that he constructed his own tradition, with the kind of eclectic approach that Keith Johnson rightly points out (349, 351).

One very small detail: In the conclusion, a quote from Barth’s 1933 “Farewell” (“Abschied”) refers readers to the German edition in the Gestamtausgabe (353n12), without referring to the presence of this text in the book itself, on page 86.

Keith Johnson’s own expertise on the question of natural theology and on the (exclusive) source of knowledge of God in God’s actual, living Word, certainly determined in part the choice of texts that made it into the book, both with regard to content and quantity, as well as some of the topics that are emphasized in his conclusion (e.g. the dialogue with Hans Urs von Balthasar; see 356-359). I do not find this regrettable at all, because these interests are indeed central to Karl Barth’s theology, and it gives a certain sharpness or angle to the volume. Students of theology will be very grateful that such a book exists. There is no doubt that this resource will greatly profit anyone who wishes to begin, or to continue, to read Barth.

Christophe Chalamet, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Geneva

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Martha L. Moore-Keish and Christian T. Collins Winn eds. Karl Barth and Comparative Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019)

Karl Barth and Comparative Theology

Martha L. Moore-Keish and Christian T. Collins Winn eds. Karl Barth and Comparative Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 288 pp. $75.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by John Sampson (April 1, 2021)

What might it look like to bring Karl Barth in dialogue with a non-Christian religion? How might his theology enrich or be enriched by a thinker from another religious tradition? These are the questions taken up and explored in Karl Barth and Comparative Theology. Editors Martha Moore-Keish and Christian Collins Winn introduce the volume by outlining its twofold purpose. On the one hand, the book intends to show that Barth can make an important contribution to comparative theology. On the other hand, it “offers a novel trajectory for engaging and thinking with and beyond Barth into the reality of religious pluralism in the twenty-first century” (7). The editors and contributors explore how Barth might serve as a constructive thinker for doing comparative theology, which moves beyond attempts to categorize or theorize about religious pluralism and instead seeks to learn from a different religious tradition without downplaying respective religious commitments. Comparative theology usually begins with the careful reading and comparison of a discrete set of texts or rituals from various traditions and culminates with the theologian returning to his or her own “home” tradition having learned something new or different. In the forward, Francis Clooney, a leading voice in comparative theology, says he has come to respect Barth more over time, but admits that Barth’s theology is still not “fully adequate to a Christian interreligious openness” (xii). Nonetheless, the contributors go on to engage Barth in a variety of ways in conversation with Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and African Traditional Religions. These make up the five sections under which two different contributors interact with Barth and their respective tradition in a comparative dialogue. Each section is followed by a response from a theologian from that tradition itself or with intimate knowledge of the tradition being discussed.

A dialogue between Barth and Judaism is taken up at the outset, adding to the growing body of literature on the topic. Randi Rashkover argues that Barth’s theology is insufficient in itself for comparative Jewish-Christian learning, because, according to Barth, God’s eternal electing activity in Christ “echoes” within the ecclesial community but cannot be measurably and effectively attested therein (26)

James Farwell engages Barth and Buddhism, seeking to enrich Barth’s thought in conversation with the 13^thcentury Japanese Buddhist thinker Dōgen. He argues Barth’s understanding of the relationship between religion and human effort can be illumined by an analogous approach Barth himself peremptorily dismisses in §17 of Church Dogmatics I/2, namely Zen Buddhism, exemplified by Dōgen. Farwell shows how both thinkers illumine each other’s understanding of “true religion.” Dogen’s nondualism, moreover, can help Christian theology give a better account of Christian practice than can Barth’s dualism. Pan-Chiu Lai compares Barth’s ambivalent position on universalism with Mahayana Buddhism, identifying similar features in Barth’s thought with the Mahayana Buddhist vision for universal salvation. Lai attends to the early and late developments in Barth’s thinking and shows how from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective Barth’s theology can be understood as a species of universalism. Barth’s view also comprises several distinct strands of doctrine which can be resolved within a Mahayana framework, especially the doctrine of skillful means (upāya) (97).

With the help of David Burrell’s comparative hermeneutic, Joshua Ralston brings Barth’s dialectical theology of revelation into comparison with the Islamic thought of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Ralston argues Ghazali shares Barth’s belief that to speak rightly of God means to speak in accordance with God’s own speech. Barth’s focus on particularity and belief that revelation constitutes its own “proof” are shared with Sunni Muslims. Both Barth and traditional Sunni Islam, “claim that divine revelation is largely self-authenticating and nonfoundational” (124). Analogies of being as well as uses of human reason are for both Ghazali and Barth shaped first and foremost by the particularity of revelation, and this enables both thinkers to mutually enrich each other’s thought without blurring their differences. Kurt Anders Richardson argues that there are many parallels between Shi’a Muslim Messianic theology and Barth’s eschatology. There can be found a similar understanding of “double Parousia” in the Christologically centered eschatology of Barth and the messianic expectation of Islamic Mahdism. Double Parousia refers to the expectation of the return of a messianic figure as well as the palpable sense of their hidden presence in the here and now.

Focusing on Barth and Hinduism, Marc Pugliese argues that Adi Śankara’s Advaitin’s reading of Kena Upanisad (KeU) affirms Barth’s claim that ultimate reality is nonobjectifiable, even though the two thinkers articulate this idea in different ways. Barth argues that God is the acting subject of revelation and never becomes an object for us. Sankara’s Advaitin (nondualistic) reading of KeU sheds light on how the innermost self (ātman) is ultimate reality (brahman) and that this leads to a non-objectifiable awareness. Pugliese then shows how Sankara’s Advaita reading can help support Barth’s understanding of God’s inalienable subjectivity in response to critics—such as Jürgen Moltmann—who charge Barth with modalism.

Victor Ezigbo examines Barth in dialogue with African Traditional Religions. He argues that there are parallels in Barth’s theology of the written word of God and Christopher Ejizu’s understanding of ofo in the indigenous religion of the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria. Ezigbo illustrates how ofo can be understood in many ways, but in the thought of Ejizu it as an “object of communication with the divine and the entire supernatural realm” (219). The parallels between this understanding and Barth’s view of Christian Scripture can be seen with the respective human origins of ordinary objects that mediate both divine action and the experience with God as well as the divine freedom that resists human attempts to limit God’s activity. Tim Hartman also explores different theological insights through a comparison of Barth and African Traditional Religions (ATR hereafter). Three categories frame his comparative dialogue and shed light on commonalities between Barth and ATR: creation, disobedience (or sin), and destiny (or salvation). Both Barth and ATR affirm a sense of God’s otherness from what God has created, while acknowledging that God has made himself accessible. As it relates to disobedience (or sin), both Barth and different voices from ATR “claim that when humans become aware of their separation from the Divine, they long for that connection to be reestablished” (236). This connection, according to Barth and ATR, has noteworthy comparisons and contrasts that mutually enrich one another when brought in conversation.

Karl Barth and Comparative Theology offers an impressive range of engagement with Barth’s theology in conversation with different religious traditions. Some contributors and respondents are far less optimistic about what Barth can offer comparative theology (e.g. Rashkover, Rambachan) while others engage in creative comparative dialogues by interpreting or defending Barth with the help of another religious tradition (e.g. Lai, Pugliese). The volume as a whole, therefore, does not offer a singular “Barthian” vision for doing comparative theology. Instead, it remains deeply ambivalent over how Barth can (or cannot) contribute to learning across religious borders. No doubt this is one of the volume’s intended purposes, to bring together a diversity of scholarly opinions to reflect on where Barth’s theology sits in relation to comparative theology as a discipline itself, which, as the editors say, is “undergoing a total reconceptualization.” (1) But with such a variety of contrasting positions laid out in the chapters and chapter responses, how it is that Barth actually helps reconceptualize comparative theology is not altogether clear, and the volume is weaker for it. One reason for this may be related to a concern Paul Knitter raises in his response to the chapters on Buddhism, stating that the “theological payoff” of the comparative dialogues is lacking (106). This criticism may well apply to the volume as a whole. Many if not most of the comparisons made between Barth and another religious tradition are rich and thought-provoking, shedding tremendous light on similar points of emphasis and shared ways of thinking about ultimate reality. But it is difficult to say in what ways these comparisons further theological understanding, enabling Christians to learn something they did not previously know about God and Christian faith as a resultof the dialogue. Granted, this touches on a deeper concern surrounding comparative theology as a mode of theological inquiry itself, one which is meant to be separated from theologies of religion (although in what ways this is actually possible is something scholars continue to debate to this day.) The volume thus attempts to take Barth in an entirely new direction, seeking to more than theologize about religious pluralism in general, which is what scholars like Sven Ensminger have done in Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions. In contrast with the wealth of existing literature on Barth and theologies of religion, Karl Barth and Comparative Theology strives to get particular, by entering into actual dialogue with particular religious thinkers and traditions in order to further interreligious understanding as a result. Even if the theological payoff of these dialogues may be lacking, the volume will no doubt serve as an important conversation starter on how, with Barth’s help, we can think about and practice interreligious learning in our ever-increasingly pluralistic age.

John Sampson, Ph.D. Candidate, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Kevin Hargaden, Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age: Confronting the Christian Problem with Wealth (Eugene: Cascade Books. 2018)

Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age: Confronting the Christian Problem with Wealth

Kevin Hargaden, Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age: Confronting the Christian Problem with Wealth (Eugene: Cascade Books. 2018), ix+181 pp. $28.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Henry Walter Spaulding III (April 13, 2021)

It is no secret that material wealth looms over many aspects of human life. Though material wealth always existed at the forefront of human moral aliment, scholars of many fields have termed a new problem with wealth. Hargaden terms this new obsession neoliberalism, “a rationality that seeks to apply the methods of economics to all aspects of life” (4). Interested readers can find many resources that describe the various histories and properties of neoliberalism. However, very few works exist to aid the Christian theological imagination in navigating neoliberalism. Sources exist that name Christianity as the source of such a movement,  but rarely does one find an explicit theological critique of neoliberalism relevant to the academy and the Church [1]. Kevin Hargaden’s book Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age fills such a gap, adding an important contribution to recent research on the intersections of Christianity and neoliberalism such as Adam Kotsko’s Neoliberalism’s Demons (Stanford, 2018), Devin Singh’s Divine Currency (Stanford, 2018) and Dotan Leshem’s, The Origins of Neoliberalism (Columbia, 2016).

The chief argument of Hargaden’s book lies in a vigorous rejection of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism confronts Christianity in a specific way because it, as Hargaden writes, “represents a theological problem for Christians because those who live under its reign are encouraged to share a vision for our common life that is unavoidably idolatrous” (4). Hargaden insists that Christian theology, with a primary focus on the parables of Jesus, provides the imagination necessary to resist the all-encompassing idolatry of wealth. Hargaden’s interpretation of wealth relies on an apocalyptic presentation of Karl Barth’s exegesis of the parables to draw the reader’s immediate attention to the normative claims of the expectation of in-breaking God’s kingdom (36).

By relating neoliberalism to the apocalyptic coming Kingdom of God, Hargaden identifies time as a central piece for the reader’s consideration. According to Hargaden, time is a central intersection in the neoliberal age and the expectation of God’s coming reign. In the neoliberal age, humans must measure their finite moments according to patterns of production, consumption, debt, and competition that fundamentally reorients our understanding of humanity. By measuring time according to interest rates or production of products, humans must weigh the worth of their life according to a harsh economic calculus that puts humans tragically at odds with one another. Human moral thinking reduces itself to economic practicality that always reaches for the economically advantageous.

Hargaden turns to Karl Barth to address the problem of neoliberalism. As apocalyptically interpreted by Karl Barth, the parables “explode any hope” of the ethics offered by neoliberalism. Hargaden recognizes that the parables often deal rather explicitly with wealth, a fact that was not lost on Barth either. As Hargaden writes, “The message is in the medium and by embedding his economic discussion in the form of enigmatic short stories, Jesus teaches us in ways that are complex, open, and resistant to readings that seek only for the bottom line” (41). Hargaden recognizes that when approaching the parables, one needs a guide.

The great service Hargaden performs for those in Barth studies is the conversation he sets up between economic thought and Barth’s theology. Hargaden develops Barth’s interpretation of the parables as an economic theology, a connection also discussed in works such as George Hunsinger’s Karl Barth and Radical Politics Cascade, 2017) and Willie James Jenning’s “A Rich Disciple?: Barth on the Rich Young Ruler” in Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth (Eerdmans, 2017). In choosing Barth as his economic guide, Hargaden acknowledges a long-appreciated element in Barth’s theology, namely his exegesis of Scripture. Barth is an unmatched exegete among his peers and offers a unique interpretation of the Scriptures. Hargaden chooses several parables with specific attention to the various ways that parables expound upon the idea of time, wealth, and kingdom: the parables of the ten virgins, the parable of the talents, and the parable of the Sheep and Goats. Hargaden provides the necessary information to understand the parables when he states that they “puncture” the neoliberal frame of reference out of which culture operates (138). Barth brings this puncturing to life in a way that directly confronts the decisions one makes. Hargaden locates the act of economic decision in one’s understanding of humanity. Neoliberalism envisions humanity according to a harsh rubric of production and consumption that shapes bodies according to a biopolitics of economic power. However, the parables envision a different understanding of humanity. According to Barth’s interpretation, as presented by Hargaden, humanity only understands itself to the inescapable mystery of God’s eschatological inbreaking. Rather than measuring human time through the logic of production and consumption, the human celebrates a different time where capital is not the source of one’s life but the extravagance of a kingdom that requires Christians to give lavishly of its resource for a kind of abundance not found in production and consumption (172). This is the meaning of the parable according to Hargaden set free through the interpretation of Barth.

Appropriately, the only response to the parables is praise. Hargaden recognizes that the parables are not just compelling literature, but an entire world that one can only dare to approach through the act of praise. In worship, Christians playfully enter the rich young man’s world to answer as a community the same question that confronted him: what possessions possess contemporary Christianity? How might the rich young man’s path become our own? In Hargaden’s rendering, only through a steady diet of parable and table can the contemporary Christians resist neoliberalism’s lure. It is not a theoretical concern, but one practically embedded within the appetite of the Christian. Through this nourishment, Hargaden hopes that the body will “squander [its] wealth on the kingdom, in exchange for the kind of abundance” only found in the parables (172). Though many Christians do practice the Eucharist and still hoard wealth, this is, according to Hargaden, in direct violation of the eschatological command to divest oneself of such opulence.

Before concluding, Hargaden spends significant time exploring a practical analysis of neoliberalism through his engagement with the Irish economy. Nevertheless, Christians of every culture must perform this kind of honest work. Neoliberalism is a theological problem that confronts the gospel and attempts to narrate a new ekklesia by binding our desires to a different time. In other words, utilizing the idiom so prevalent in Hargaden’s book, neoliberalism is an apocalyptic power aligned with the powers of sin and death. As an apocalyptic theologian, this is an area to which I wish Hargaden had dedicated more space. However, neoliberalism’s seductive influence cannot be denied, and those familiar with apocalyptic theology will naturally make the connection.

By way of conclusion, I offer this brief story that summarizes my appreciation of Hargaden’s book. I use this book in a senior-level course on Christian ethics in the general education curriculum. I have students of every major in this course, from Education to Theology. One day after class, a very bright Business major approached me about Kevin’s book. She stated that she lamented having never once heard this account of money as a Business major. She concluded our conversation by stating that the book changed her mind about wealth. As a business major, she learned one narrative about wealth and its banality, but after reading this book she recognized it was a banality of evil. As I reflect on that day, I wonder if Christian theology often suffers from a false modesty that must tailor its efforts to the limits of the neoliberal mind to remain “practical” or “relevant.” As one who grew up in the Church, she never once heard a sermon or lesson that challenged neoliberal accounts of wealth. One of this book’s most outstanding contributions is its lack of modesty concerning the gospel’s demands, which includes a rejection of wealth. I assume that what ails our present moment is not that we teach Christian ethics, and it fails, but that we do not try. Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age asks readers to try.

Henry Walter Spaulding III, Adjunct Professor of Christian Ethics, Mount Vernon Nazarene University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Juliane Schüz. Glaube in Karl Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik: Die anthropologische Gestalt des Glaubens zwischen Exzentrizität und Deutung (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2018)

Glaube in Karl Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik: Die anthropologische Gestalt des Glaubens zwischen Exzentrizität und Deutung 

Juliane Schüz. Glaube in Karl Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik: Die anthropologische Gestalt des Glaubens zwischen Exzentrizität und Deutung (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2018), xii + 396 pp. $114.99 (hardcover).

Since the publication of Barth’s Römerbrief in 1919, the critique that Barth subordinates all consideration of the human being has been prominent. The laser-like focus on the objective understanding of God amidst post-war times and articulating an autonomous divine subject to replace the post-enlightenment free and autonomous human subject are just two ways Barth has been seen to overcome theological and philosophical trends from the 19th century. Barth’s supposed attempt to exclude anthropological considerations altogether from theological reflection has been refuted in both German and English speaking Barth scholarship (381-384). Juliane Schüz, currently a pastor at the Protestant Church in Oestrich-Winkel, brings Barth’s notion of human subjectivity to light by focusing on how he understood human faith. Barth built on his earlier work on faith where he described faith as a Hohlraum, Sprung, or Wunder. The progression of Barth’s understanding of faith can be seen as a progressive increase in tempo leading to the crescendo in the locus classicus §63 in Church Dogmatics IV/1 (CD hereafter) where the music of faith finds its rhythm as Anerkennen, Erkennen, and Bekennen.

The work is divided into three parts: 1. Introduction (Die Einleitung) (3-93); 2. The Foundation of Faith and the Essence of the Human (Die Begründung des Glaubens und das Wesen des Menschens) (97-226); and 3. The historical Implementation of Faith (Der geschichtliche Vollzug des Glaubens) (229-296). In the introduction, Schüz clarifies her approach in using the concepts eccentricity and interpretation (Ekzentrizität and Deutung) (43-47). She has built these concepts to overcome the shortcomings of two approaches: hermeneutical and interpretive-theoretical (35-43).  The hermeneutical approach focuses on the eccentric structure (ek-zentrischen Struktur) of faith. The interpretive-theoretical approach does not adequately account for the object-oriented notion of faith Barth develops. Schüz’s constructive proposal is to situate the knowing of faith (das Kennen des Glaubens) between eccentricity and interpretation. In this construal, faith is a new understanding and is both eccentrically related to God and a form of interpretation understood as a human, non-eschatological act (44). Schüz understands Barth’s account of faith as an act fully predicated on the human being between the two poles of eccentricity and interpretation. Chapter two makes up the latter section of the introduction and offers an overview of the entire CD (69-90). For anyone reading Barth’s extensive work for the first time, this overview provides an excellent look at the overall structure of Barth’s work.

Chapters three through five make up the first major part of the work. The overarching background argument of chapter three is the well-trodden path of the point of contact between God and humanity (Anknüpfungspunkt). Shedding light on themes permeating Barth’s understanding of faith in the CD, Schüz addresses his debate with Brunner in the 1930s, showing Barth’s continued denial of the human possibility of faith (116-119). Schüz is careful not to allow the debates surrounding the point of contact, whether positively or negatively construed (109-112), to distract from the purpose of the chapter, which is to provide a clear background for how Barth understood faith theologically. The actualistic point of contact, as well as the imago Dei, are Christologically articulated and conveyed to the human for Barth (134).

A critical piece of Schüz’s work is the differentiation she makes in chapter four regarding the ontic and ontological components to faith (141). The historical and material form of the human de facto(die geschichtliche-irdische Gestalt) is the human’s ontic form as sinner while the human in Christ is how the human being is ontologically determined (141-144). The entirety of the chapter is built around these two notions and shows how Barth holds the two together while also providing a strict distinction and differentiation between the two. Human history is the place for the realization of God’s eternal decree (ewiger Beschluss) to be in a communal relationship with humanity. Barth’s rendering of the analogia relationis, Schüz contends, is the concretization of the ontologically determined human being in the male-female analogical relations (174-179). Here Schüz misses a crucial opportunity to critique Barth’s understanding of gender as will be indicated later in the review.

After determining that Barth rejects any human possibility to realize faith, in chapter five, Schüz discusses his paradoxical conclusion that despite human inability or incapacity for faith, human faith is nonetheless a free human act. Schüz delineates particular distinctions to clarify Barth’s seemingly contradictory position. The sinner does not have the actual possibility (Möglichkeit) to make a decision of faith given the reality (Wirklichkeit) of one’s sin that outweighs the possibility. Thus, Barth can speak of a human-natural impossibility and a spirit-enacting necessity of faith (menschlich-natürlicher Unmöglichkeit und geistgewirkter Notwendigkeit des Glaubens) (205-207). As a free, theologically qualified choice, there is no real decision to believe; rather, it is understood as the first choice of faith to choose God just as God chose humanity (211, note 71). Given Barth’s theological (here, read Christological) qualification of freedom, Schüz determines that Barth is offering a case for a formally understood theologically relational compatibilism of divine-human agency (224). Having correlated how Barth understands human freedom and divine action, Schüz provides a segue into the second main part of the book—chapters six through nine—by defining how Barth’s conception of freedom aligns with the category of eccentricity and interpretation. In so doing, she provides an excellent transition and reminds the reader of the case she has been making throughout the text thus far.

Moving into the second major part of the book, focusing on the historical implementation of faith, chapter six delves into Barth’s understanding of historicity and actualism (229). Schüz turns back to the origins of Barth’s dialectical theology to understand the background for how he developed his understanding of historicity (230-235) into his understanding of faith in the CD as being historical and not only a non-temporal vocational event (239). In conversation with Wolfhart Pannenberg’s critique of Barth’s seemingly plastic and objectified understanding of reconciliation, Schüz unfolds a doubled form of eccentricity. Through faith, the human acknowledges Jesus’ history as being one’s own history. Jesus’ history is always “for us,” such that humans are unable to exist otherwise outside of this involvement with Jesus, while the history of Christ continues to have an effect in history (250). In the “cognitive occurrence” of faith, the human recognizes Jesus’ work while automatically being an “active occurrence” that affects one’s entire life on an existential level (268-269). The existential level of faith, according to Schüz, is to be understood partly as a self-assertion of Christ and partly as an implementation within the life story of the believer, therefore not ahistorical.

Building on the previous chapter’s discussion about human action and participatory existence, chapter seven engages how Barth understands the process of human ethical progression and becoming. Barth’s understanding of Luther’s simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and a sinner) has to be worked out from an understanding of history as being in becoming (281-284) and correlated to the act of Christ and Christ’s self as a being in becoming (285-290). The human being is included in the continuous unfolding of Christ’s historical becoming such that the human is always receiving the new being of faith as “prinzipiell anfangendes Sein” (290). The event character of participatory faith, conceived as a daily new beginning, does not mean that Barth adheres to a “giving over” of faith completely to human control. The growth of faith is not to be understood as a linearly advancing process, but “geschieht in verschiedensten ‘Einzelgeschichten’” (300). To further Barth’s claim, Schüz takes the categories of hope (311-312) and the continuity in memory and expectation (312-314) to reveal the correlation between Barth’s actualism and continuity. In sum: “In faith, the human is continuously eccentrically (ek-zentrisch) related to Christ, finds certainty in Christ, and, however, remains in a state of hope and does not become the owner of this new reality. Human faith is concurrently only a hoping, remembering and expecting interpretation (Deutung) of one’s personal participatio Christi” (316).

Chapter eight brings Barth’s threefold knowledge of faith to the fore. In some sense, one could argue that the entire book has been leading up to and in conversation with CD IV/1 §63. There is no other section of the CD cited more frequently throughout the work than these forty pages that make up §63 on the Holy Spirit and Christian faith. Schüz explicates these three modes of Kenntnis as they each offer various changes of the human’s life orientation. The Anerkennen indicates the constituting moment of faith where a change of relation from a self-related knowledge to a perspective in correspondence to God occurs (322-335). In the Erkennen the human being interprets one’s self anew in light of the true human Jesus Christ (335-346). The new orientation and relation comes to expression in the Bekennen such that the human being is expressed as witness (Zeuge) in the form of human solidarity (Mitmenschlichkeit) with the church and world (346-360). These three “moments” work together: “The Anerkennen of God, as the Erkennen of God, also changes one’s own self-interpretation, which in turn becomes visible in the life of the believer as Bekennen” (319). In this threefold Kennen of faith, human beings are newly constituted in a differentiated unity in relation to God, self, and the world. If there was a chapter to recommend above all others, it is chapter eight. Here, Schüz is really at her best, integrating difficult Hegelian argumentation and reception, counterbalancing post-Hegelian critics with dialectical nuance, and providing pastoral insight into the God-world relationship.

To conclude, Schüz returns to the central notions of faith as understanding between eccentricity and interpretation (Glaube als Verstehen zwischen Exzentrizität und Deutung). The Exzentrizität is indicated throughout the work as ek-zentrizität to indicate the etymological play on the prefix “ek” (out of) and the root “Zentrum” (center). The center of the human being in faith is located outside of one’s own self, namely, in Jesus Christ. As such, the human center is always enabled from the outside, formed from the outside, and outwardly directed (379). Jesus Christ builds the center of the human self. The Deutung pole of understanding is differentiated in such a way that the understanding of Deutung, as counterpart to religion, does not confuse God with human interpretation (389). The life of the believer, prior to words being confessed, is the focus of the Bekennen des Deutens and is verified by Christ in daily life as witness (395).

Barth’s ecclesiology and pneumatology are not the focus of the work (51-55). Given the seeming lack of differentiation between the work of the second and third person of the Trinity, according to Schüz, the interrelated movement of faith between the work of the Son and the gift of freedom in the Spirit is not brought to the fore. Schüz sets the limits in order to focus on human faith, on the epistemological focus of human existence in faith. To limit one’s work is necessary, but to negate the univocal work of the Son and Spirit does not seem advantageous in this case. One purpose of the book is neither to short-circuit Barth’s Christological orientation nor the anthropological form of faith (93). Both aspects of faith are to be presented in relation to one another where the former grounds the latter and the latter provides the noetic and ontological basis for the former. The Christological focus of faith Schüz claims does not flesh out into the implications for God’s triune identity, even to the extent of explicitly denying an ontological change to the divine-human relation (374).

Two final critical notes are worth mentioning briefly in closing. First, the book offers a very thin account of faith’s relation to love. The relationship between the human’s new understanding in faith and faith hoping for eschatological fulfillment is critically linked throughout the text. Schüz mentions neighborly love (Nächstenliebe) as being tethered to and manifesting the divine inner-trinitarian love relations (175-179); yet the interconnectedness of faith and love is largely left untouched. The correlation of faith working through love and love finding expression in faith is not only Barthian but Pauline. Second, Barth’s understanding of male/female relations is glossed over. Schüz notes that his understanding of gendered relations should not be followed nor agreed with (see note 97 on pages 177-178), but she does not offer an internal critique of Barth in terms of how these relations relate to faith. The implications of a binary structure to the “possibility” of faith could be detrimental and overcoming Barth’s rigidness here would have been advantageous.

To say Barth studies has been a male-dominated field is an understatement. The lack of scholarship from women in the field is a travesty, giving further reason for the wax and wane of productive and constructive conversations with Barth’s life and work over the years. Juliane Schüz’s work is very welcomed as an outstanding piece of scholarship and sustained treatment of faith as a theological locus in Barth’s magisterial Kirchliche Dogmatik. It is also a welcomed addition to the hopefully continuously growing number of women scholars grappling with “dead old white guys.” This work is highly recommended for Barth specialists and theologians interested in how a dogmatic locus such as faith could have gone so long without sustained treatment such as one finds here. The work would likely not interest laypersons or the average reader, yet it still contains current implications for living a life of Christian witness. Nonetheless, the work is a welcome and needed treatment in Barth studies and in theology more broadly. Anyone working on Barth, specifically on faith, will need to engage with Schüz’s work. It will no doubt prove to stand the test of time as a crucial work on Barth’s enduring legacy.

Brandon K. Watson, Doctor of Theology Candidate, Heidelberg University and Wissenschaftlicher Assistent für Systematische Theologie Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal-Bethel.

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Hani Hanna. The Christology of Karl Barth and Matta al-Miskīn (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019)

The Christology of Karl Barth and Matta al-Miskīn

Hani Hanna. The Christology of Karl Barth and Matta al-Miskīn (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019), 280 pp. $100 (hardback).

Scholars still debate what Karl Barth’s thoroughgoing Christocentrism entails for the doctrine of God and anthropology: If Jesus fully expresses the essence of deity, and if Incarnation and atonement historically realize God’s decision to embrace human life without remainder, must we discard such tenets of classical theism as divine impassibility? Moreover, if the Savior perfectly realizes covenantal freedom, must we revise Christologies that construe his human nature as the passive receptacle of the divine Incarnation? In this constructive study, Reformed theologian Hani Hanna brings Barth into conversation with the Coptic Orthodox monk and theologian Matta al-Miskīn (Matthew the Poor). Hanna plausibly argues that these two thinkers independently arrive at strikingly similar conclusions: to wit, traditional substance metaphysics must be replaced with a Christocentric, dynamic ontology that affirms divine passibility and the full human agency of Jesus. In Hanna’s account, each theologian works as a faithful revisionist within his respective tradition. In critical dialogue with Reformed orthodoxy, Barth revamps the hypostatic Christology of Chalcedon (451 CE), whereas Matta revises the Alexandrian Logos-Sarx paradigm of Athanasius and Cyril that formed the conceptual background of that ecumenical council. Both theologians, Hanna claims, achieve parallel objectives by severing dogmatics from Hellenistic philosophical commitments to divine-human “dualism” and recasting key Christian claims within dynamic ontologies that help address modern concerns with questions of revelation, history, and human freedom.

In chapter one, Hanna grounds his constructive thesis in a critical reading of fifth-century Christological debates. How Hanna’s proposal is received will hinge largely upon the extent to which his critical account of traditional hypostatic Christologies and their limitations is accepted. As Hanna sees it, Cyril, the lodestar of Coptic orthodoxy, rightly stressed Jesus’ singular, personal identity as the Word incarnate as the locus of salvation. Nestorius, his Antiochene opponent, affirmed the full distinction of divine and human natures more robustly than Cyril, but in doing so he risked compromising Christ’s personal unity. Yet both Cyril and Nestorius, according to Hanna, shared dubious metaphysical presuppositions which reified the distinction between the infinite God and finite creatures in terms of “static,” abstract essences. Whether “the Absolute” is conceived more in terms of the ineffable one of Neoplatonism or the unmoved mover of Aristotle, substance metaphysics has infelicitous consequences for the coherence of theology, he claims. In short, God so conceived remains aloof from human sin and suffering while the Incarnation is reduced to paradox or metaphor. Holding this framework in tension with the biblical narrative forces Cyril, Hanna claims, to make apophatic appeals to divine mystery which entail a sacrifice of the intellect—chief of which is the paradox that in Christ, the divine Son suffered “impassibly.”

This (ostensible) dualism entails untoward consequences for Jesus’ humanity as well, Hanna claims Cyril rightly stressed the priority of divine initiative in the hypostatic union but construed it such that Jesus’ human nature is seen as a passive instrument subsisting wholly within the Logos, and thus lacking any independent intentional agency. Like other modern critics, Hanna argues that these moves risk rendering Jesus as something less than a full human being. Compare, for example, the formidable critique of Alexandrian Christology by Wolfart Pannenberg in chapter 8 of Jesus: God and Man (Westminster Press, 1968). Chalcedon, more a hedge against heresies than a basis for positive construction, reiterated these inherent tensions in Alexandrian Christology rather than resolving them, and these problems ramified in subsequent tradition, both in the Christian East and West. According to Hanna, these moves have diverted theology from the stark realism of the biblical narrative. Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross, in particular, should push theologians to view divine love as kenotic, suffering freedom for humanity.

The next three chapters explore Barth’s mature dogmatics, which initiates an intervention into these debates. According to Hanna, one cannot pigeonhole Barth’s Christology as strictly following Alexandrian, Antiochene, or Chalcedonian precedents. However, Barth’s commitment to the actuality of Incarnation and atonement remains fundamental. The ancient tradition, Hanna argues, honed in on soteriology and extrapolated Christological predicates as the conditions for the possibility of Christ’s saving agency. Barth, in Hanna’s view, grounds theology in concrete revelation, the actuality of the covenant in which the Triune God just is who God reveals Godself to be. This move, Hanna avers, allows Barth to parry modern worries—e.g., those of Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Feuerbach, in particular—about the knowability of God while addressing these modern thinkers’ concern for the free human agent acting within history. Atonement, Barth insists, consists in events that transpire in this world, in our history — even as it is grounded in an antecedent decision in God’s eternal election of humanity as God’s covenant partner. Hanna follows Bruce L. McCormack in situating the decisive turning point in the later Barth’s theological development within the doctrine of election (see Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Oxford, 1995; CD II/2). The personal unity of the Redeemer subsists in God’s primal decision to be for us without remainder in Christ, who is the electing God and the elect human. This paradigm shift comes to fruition in the doctrine of reconciliation (CD IV/1-3). There, Barth integrates Christology and soteriology by mapping Calvin’s account of Christ as prophet, priest, and king with the later Reformed emphasis on humiliation and exaltation: in the person of the Mediator, God embraces suffering and death in humility while exalting the human covenant partner to sanctity and renewed vocation in the Spirit. This narrative framework, as Hanna sees it, eschews attempts to define divinity and humanity as abstract, self-contained “natures.” This revised covenantal ontology, Hanna argues, resolves the lacunae of classical Christology by affirming God’s eternal freedom, constituted as self-offering love, and a free and fulsome human response. Building upon Barth, Hanna replaces notions of divine impassibility with a view of divine immutability, meaning a steadfastness of God’s moral character that reaches its pinnacle on the cross of Christ. Concomitantly, Hanna retrieves from Barth a covenantal ontology centered on the Christ event as a perfect consilience of divine and human wills: The historical Jesus actualizes and reveals God’s primal election of humankind to a free partnership. This perfect community (Gemeinschaft) between the divine and human covenant partners in Christ is not static but unfolds across the Savior’s life in a process of uniting (Vereinigung). Hanna writes: “For Barth, Jesus’ life is identical with God’s. However, this identity is actualistic; it is a life of fellowship between God and a human agent” (p. 106).

Since Matta al-Miskīn probably read little of Barth, and none of the Dogmatics, the congruities between the two thinkers that Hanna ably analyzes are striking. Hannah traces these parallels in two chapters that explore Matta’s “covenantal ontology” and “historicized Christology,” respectively. Unlike the dogmatic academic theologian in Basel, the Egyptian monastic leader worked largely in pastoral genres, with writings spanning biblical interpretation, spirituality, and even popular journalism. Both thinkers, though, were attuned to modern theological currents. These convergences, Hanna claims, justify his reading of Matta’s more occasional writings in light of Barth’s more systematic categories. Thus, in moves that evoke Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, Matta defines the oneness of Christ dynamically, within a history consisting in a twofold movement—the Incarnation (or kenosis) of the Son of God and the exaltation (or theosis) of the Son of Man. Though Matta’s early thought was rooted in Alexandrian substance metaphysics, throughout his career he gradually moved beyond its strictures, according to Hanna. What emerged was a narrative-oriented reconstruction of Christ’s person and work, in which the Incarnation is presented as “one history, starting in eternity-past and rolling towards eternity-future. The subject of this history is the human Son of God, who is temporally the Father’s acting agent as the representative of all humanity” (p. 141). In contrast with a Greek philosophical construal of substances as self-contained realities, Matta’s theological ontology conceives God’s being relationally, intrinsically oriented toward fellowship with God’s creatures. Hanna labels this paradigm “covenantal realism,” which he discerns as Matta’s third way beyond a “mysticism” that dissolves humanity into divinity through an unmediated union, and an apologetic “rationalism” that “puts God in a box” (p. 142). Matta’s solution to the problem of how God becomes human in Christ while remaining divine Hanna labels a “correlation of grace”—a mutual openness between the Holy Spirit and the human being. Matta makes claims that evoke Barth’s doctrine of election. He claims that the Logos incarnandus (the eternal Word) is always already oriented to its historical realization as the Logos incarnatus (the Word made flesh). Suffering is depicted as a potentiality in divine life — not an evil in itself. The soteriological heartbeat of Christology is Jesus’ free decision to suffer on the cross for human sinfulness. The Mediator’s oneness consists in the harmonic, covenantal decision in both his humanity and his deity to give himself for us and our salvation. It contrasts starkly with a fallen, Adamic suffering marked by selfishness. Christ suffered in his divine nature and being, and not merely in his human nature, as many traditional theologians have held, as Hanna reads Matta. Matta’s historicized Christology conceives the being-in-act of Jesus Christ as one event, in eternal and temporal dimensions, realized in two movements of God’s kenotic embrace of creation and the deification of Jesus’ human life, which, not limited to the initiating moment of Incarnation, unfolds throughout the events and free obedient decisions of his life from the River Jordan to Golgotha. Matta parries the worry of some Coptic contemporaries, which no doubt Barth in his own way would have shared, that this process of deification, in which our own humanity participates by extension, abrogates the Creator-creature distinction. The full agency of human life, enacted historically, is never subsumed by the indwelling Spirit. As is also the case with Matta’s view of the church as the continuation of the Incarnation, according to Hanna, Matta’s language of deification includes elements of hyperbole leading to unfortunate ambiguities.

In the conclusion of his thorough study, Hanna hopes his comparison between Barth and Matta could model and foster ecumenical dialogue across the Christian East and West as well as interfaith dialgoue. Hanna writes: “The supralapsarian Christology of Barth and Matta, as grounded in covenantal election, provides a basis on which the reality of God’s salvific presence outside the bounds of Christianity may be intelligibly affirmed without compromising the particularity and commitments of the Christian faith” (p. 238). Critics may question whether Hanna has fairly characterized such classical Christologies and theologies, and fuller questions in a Barth-Matta dialogue, too, remain to be probed. Still, Hanna’s account of the two thinkers demonstrates genuine lines of dialogue that could enrich academic theologies and the confession of the church today.

J. Scott Jackson, Independent Scholar

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Ike Miller. Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020)

Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John

Ike Miller. Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020), xviii + 229 pp. $35.00 (paperback).

Before I review Ike Miller’s particular contribution in this book, I want to talk about Intervarsity Press Academic’s “Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture” series as a whole. I was refreshed after reading the series introduction prepended to Miller’s work. The series understands itself to be grappling with the state of “two disciplines that should never have been divided” (xiii), the study of Scripture and the study of doctrine. The series editors inform the reader that they can expect constructive theological works, marked by an “evangelical commitment to a deeply scriptural theology” (xv), which attend to the tradition of theological reflection, in order to come to a better understanding of Christian doctrine. Finally, the purpose of these investigations is for the life of the church. The work of the series is meant to help people read Scripture and so “come to know God and ourselves more truly” (xvii). These aims are robust enough to help stave off pablum, yet flexible enough to allow many different approaches to Scripture and doctrine. I hope to see ongoing contributions to this series for this reason.

A word of disclosure before I proceed. I am a Roman Catholic theologian who has studied gratefully and learned much from the writings of Karl Barth. My own specialization is in the work of St. Augustine, so I will have more to say on Miller’s retrieval of the bishop of Hippo than his use of Karl Barth—perhaps to the chagrin of my reader. My situatedness as a Catholic theologian will perhaps help the reader understand my particular quibbles with the book. My criticisms are of the places where Miller does not go far enough in his retrieval of patristic exegesis. Before explaining this, I will tackle the structure and purpose of the work as a whole.

Miller has done an admirable job putting Augustine and Barth into conversation concerning the doctrine of illumination. He has written a book that will be useful to undergraduates, graduate students, and clergy interested in this topic. The premise of the work is that Augustine and Barth shared some major insights, particularly in their readings of the Gospel of John. These shared insights give Miller a way into his constructive proposal, wherein he offers a dogmatic account of the theology of illumination. On the first page, he proposes a definition of illumination he intends to support through his readings of Augustine and Barth: “illumination is human participation in the Son’s knowledge of the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit…it is human participation in the light of the divine life” (1). To argue for this proposal, Miller offers an introduction plus nine chapters divided into three equal parts. Parts one and two provide expositions of Augustine’s and Barth’s interpretations of the Gospel of John and their respective doctrines of illumination. These parts are set out in parallel, three chapters each. In the first, Miller gives an account of each writer’s method of theological interpretation, the second shows how that method of interpretation plays out in their readings of John’s Gospel, and the third offers an interpretation of their respective doctrines of illumination.

Part three of the work is where Miller synthesizes his findings from parts one and two, applying what he has learned to offer his own proposal for a doctrine of illumination. He does this, too, in three chapters. The first is his own treatment of illumination in John’s Gospel that draws on contemporary Johannine scholarship in addition to Barth and Augustine. This first chapter also includes an excursus on illumination in the wider canon of Scripture. The second is where Miller gives his own definition of illumination and puts flesh on that definition’s bones by treating illumination in terms of the economy of salvation and participation. In the third chapter, Miller gives a description of illumination in terms of the reading of Scripture and in human experience more generally, using Barth’s concepts of determination (Bestimmtheit) and acknowledgment (Anerkennung).

The strongest of these three chapters is chapter nine, which I will briefly summarize. In this chapter, Miller brings us to his constructive proposal—articulating the doctrine of illumination by way of economy and participation. The force of the former is to come to terms with illumination in specifically trinitarian terms. Illumination as doctrine cannot be separated, Miller argues, from the doctrine of God as triune. Miller sees the weakness of some contemporary accounts of illumination to be their pneumatological focus, which misses the point that illumination “as an economic activity of God is grounded in and derivative of God’s being as light in God’s self” (186). God as Trinity—a Trinity of divine light—is the Trinity who illuminates the human person in the economy of salvation. The force of the latter, participation, is to describe how illumination is accomplished in human beings. This section is focused on participation in a Barthian key rather than offering a Platonic-Augustinian account of participation. Readers will be delighted or dismayed about this as their metaphysical proclivities incline them.

Finally, Miller counters a weakness he finds in other contemporary accounts of illumination, an exclusive focus on its cognitive dimensions. Here his disagreement is with John Webster, though it seems Webster is likely representative of a tendency rather than the sole perpetrator. Miller wants to hold together the cognitive with the “affective aspect of illumination” (198). Drawing on both Augustine and Barth, he argues for illumination as “regeneration” (201), which catches up the whole of the human person—emotions as well as intellect. In this way, we are asked to see illumination pertaining not just to human knowledge about God, but as a call issued to the whole person into new life in Christ. In a delightful phrase he repeats in this book, Miller says, “illumination is revelation communicated with particularity” (202). Knowing God by his own divine light elicits the cognitive, affective, and moral response of this human person.

I want, now, to return to my quibbles. Miller has done a good job of pulling together different strands of the tradition of theological reflection. His summaries of Augustine’s and Barth’s positions on illumination and his engagement with their readings of the Gospel of John are well done, though more careful treatment of Thomas Aquinas’ thoughts on the agent intellect (58-59) would have improved it. I said before that I think Miller doesn’t go far enough in his retrieval of patristic exegesis. It is true that he laments the limitations imposed on the interpretation of Scripture by “modern historical critical scholarship” (22). I am in avid agreement with him that the patristic position on the divine authorship of Scripture guarantees the unity of the text and permits an approach impossible for someone who uncritically adopts the assumptions of historical criticism.

This makes it all the more baffling to me when Miller attempts a classification system of Augustine’s interpretations of Scripture into the “literal-historical,” “salvation-historical,” and “rhetorical-historical” (18-19). The upshot of this division is to be able to account for Augustine’s “seemingly arbitrary exegetical conclusions” (19) in the so-called rhetorical-historical register. The reason I find this confusing stems from what Miller himself says about the role illumination has to play in the reading and interpretation of the biblical text. He is sympathetic to Barth’s position that “we do not possess the Spirit of the Bible, the Holy Spirit—it possesses us” (87). For Barth, and I suspect for Miller, “the inspiration and illumination of Scripture are both acts of this work of the Spirit revealing this second person of the Trinity” (149). All this culminates in Miller’s case for the illuminated heart and mind encountering God in Scripture, such that he wants to say, “this Spirit-sustained way of being informs how we obtain ‘meaning’ from the text” (206). Why pull your punches then and worry over the difficulty of systematizing Augustine’s methods?

All this is to say that Miller has more of an ally in Augustine than he realizes, just as his own worries about Augustine’s spiritual readings of Scripture are more beholden to modern conceptions of meaning-making than he might realize. They are certainly more beholden than they need be given his robust position on illumination and its role in our readings of the Bible. Augustine thought of the reading of Scripture as an ongoing process that could take the reader deeper and deeper as she grew in sanctity and familiarity with God’s idiom. A multiplicity of true meanings can coexist in a single verse of Scripture because of its divine authorship, and the revelatory work of illumination is what brings those true meanings to light for any given reader. Miller’s book goes a long way toward opening up the possibilities of patristic interpretation to an audience perhaps less familiar with its riches than they would like to be. For that, Miller is to be commended. His constructive proposal for a dogmatic account of illumination opens the door not only to further work retrieving those texts for his audience but for taking them even more seriously than he does in this book.

Philip G. Porter, Assistant Professor of Theology, University of Mary

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Faye Bodley-Dangelo. Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T & T Clark, 2019)

Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics 

Faye Bodley-Dangelo. Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T & T Clark, 2019), 208 pp. $130.00 (hardback).

Faye Bodley-Dangelo’s Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics is deeply researched, well-argued, and poignantly relevant. This work demonstrates breadth and depth in research, both in terms of its critical engagement with primary and secondary literature, and its precision in argumentation. Bodley-Dangelo notes that while existing scholarship has addressed the implications of Barth’s non-foundationalist approach, the field has yet to sufficiently wrestle with “Barth’s sexist and heteronormative conception of sexual difference” (1). In Sexual Difference, Bodley-Dangelo carefully and critically analyzes this aspect of Barth’s theology by illuminating the tensions between Barth’s Christological account of human agency, and his ordered, male-oriented version. This is expressed specifically in the contrast and inconsistency between Jesus Christ (celibate) as the True Human and Barth’s centering of heterosexual marriage as an ordered, necessary relationship of male initiative and female response. The problem in Barth’s account is his bifurcation of human agency apart from Christ into “male” and “female” agencies (176). Bodley-Dangelo’s book offers a compelling argument that corrects these problematic aspects of Barth’s anthropology with Barth’s Christology and in so doing, moves the conversation forward with clarity and grace.

In chapter 1, Bodley-Dangelo begins where Barth does: reorienting theological methodology. His refutation of natural theology and nineteenth-century theology means the reorientation of the theological/human agent; one is neither a collaborator with God, nor self-sufficient, but instead, the human person stands in humble receptivity to the Word. Here, “Barth preserves the freedom and mystery of the divine address from human control and manipulation” (30). It is this freedom of the divine agent that later ensures true freedom of human agents. Bodley-Dangelo draws on both Church Dogmatics (hereafter CD), especially CD I §15 and §22, and Barth’s concurrent Advent lectures in The Great Promise to show how his proposal of Mary and Elizabeth in Luke 1 are models of this receptive and responsive methodology also opens the way for the subversion of gender conventions as a form of freedom for human agents. Chapter 2 shows how this methodological reorientation shapes Barth’s understanding of an “ethically oriented intersubjective model” of human agency (37). Focusing on §18 and Barth’s treatment of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Bodley-Dangelo shows how Barth’s work in CD I/2 anticipates his Christological anthropology in CD III. The difference is that in §18, Barth’s approach explicitly rejects the orders of creation and any theological move that would set (heterosexual) marriage as a necessity for humanity. Instead, the “neighbor” is seen as paradigmatic and is given ethical significance as a creaturely medium for the revelation of Christ. Similar to the orientation towards the task of theological reflection, the human person must encounter the “other” with humble receptivity as one through whom we may encounter Christ. Bodley-Dangelo helpfully notes that this aspect of Barth’s argument (the receptivity towards the other as receptivity to Christ) stands as an indirect critique of the racist Nazi party at the time of CD I’s writing; to exclude or denigrate the “other”, the “neighbor” is to do so to Christ. It is this subversive quality that Bodley-Dangelo carries into her critique of Barth’s doctrine of creation.

Bodley-Dangelo continues with Barth’s critique of Nazi ideology in Chapter 3 regarding his doctrine of creation, though here Barth runs into problems. Where before he used the parable of the Good Samaritan to affirm the humanity of all persons, regardless of race or ethnicity, here Barth’s anxieties about Nazi myth and maternal imagery in creation leads to “anxiety about female fecundity” (81). Bodley-Dangelo points out that Barth sees maternity as a potential for what he argues are the problematic aspects of natural theology (creature as collaborator with rather than recipient of God), which undermines “divine potency” (64). The main point of this chapter is to demonstrate Barth’s uneasy and unclear relationship with “female” humanity, which plays out concretely in the next chapter.

Following Barth’s uneasy relationship with “female” humanity, chapter 4 argues that the key problem in the anthropology of CD III is Barth’s ordered male-female dyad, which leads to two distinct kinds of human agency: male agency, which is characterized by active initiative towards and on behalf of the other, and female agency, which is subordinated to and only ever in response to male initiative. Bodley-Dangelo highlights the inconsistencies in Barth’s account, including how he makes Eve “inanimate” in Genesis 2, only to try and “reanimate” female agency by pointing to the Song of Songs (88). Here Bodley-Dangelo asserts her unique contribution to the debate in Barth scholarship regarding the male/female dyad in CD III (Bodley-Dangelo names works by Frykberg, Fraser, Rogers, Ward, and others [84]). Where other critiques of Barth’s views of gender start with his analogy of relations (e.g. the Trinity) or focus on the ordered male/female dyad without regard for the broader project in CD III, Bodley-Dangelo argues the materials necessary to correct what she calls Barth’s “truncated” female agent are available in CD III itself; the resources for “unsettling and re-imagining the patriarchal heterosexist features” are already present in Barth’s discussion of Genesis 2 (89).

In chapter 5, Bodley-Dangelo continues to problematize Barth’s claim that heterosexual marriage (the ordered male/female relationship) stands at the center of human agency by addressing Barth’s relegation of a celibate Christ whose sex/gender does not regulate his interactions with others to the margins of what it means to be human. In order for the tensions of reciprocity (§45.2) and order (§45.3) in the male/female relationship to be resolved, Christ must be at the center. By starting with Barth’s account of Christological human agency, Bodley-Dangelo shows how Barth “imposes order (along with sexual difference) retrospectively” (135), “tacks it on” to his Christological account of human agency, and does so by relying “on readers’ assumptions” about sexual difference (145).

Even so, Bodley-Dangelo argues in Chapter 6 that it is precisely Barth’s attempts to avoid natural theology and the orders of creation that open the way to destabilize his assumptions about a strict male/female sexual binary; his insistence on divine freedom/agency in CD I make way for genuine human freedom/agency in CD III. By re-centering anthropology in Christ, difference between (among!) the sexes is relegated to the realm of all other differences. Because Barth refuses to associate the male-female binary with any creaturely aspects (his nein! to natural theology and orders of creation), these categories of identity necessarily become dynamic and non-essential. Here, Bodley-Dangelo draws on the work of feminist scholar Judith Butler, who argues for the “performative” nature of gender. Just as Butler “unsettles” gender, so Bodley-Dangelo unsettles Barth’s heteronormative and patriarchal account of human agency and reorients it around Barth’s Christological account of human agency. In so doing, Bodley-Dangelo not only resolves this problematic tension in the CD, but also shows how Barth’s Christological account of human agency is a resource for understanding human agency and the significance of difference in all relations. This opens the way for a more fluid and contextually meaningful account of difference, including sex, gender, and sexuality. Bodley-Dangelo’s corrections to Barth result in truly Christologically-rooted, mutual human agents in encounter with each other across all differences (174).

This is a strong, academic work that is concise, critically engaged, and compellingly argued. Bodley-Dangelo lists the central problems of Barth’s account as “heterosexism and androcentrism,” but predominantly addresses the issue of female agency in Barth’s dogmatics (176). There is reference to the expansion of Barth’s corrected Christological anthropology to include non-heterosexual partnerships throughout, but the main focus is re-orienting the conception of human agency regarding Barth’s male/female dyad. This is not a weakness, as the work Bodley-Dangelo does to highlight the problem of Barth’s truncated female agent is what makes way for the possibility of queer inclusion, but it is worth noting that this book primarily addresses the question of human agency with specific reference to female (and therefore, human) agency (in response to Barth’s own terms).

Overall, Bodley-Dangelo’s Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmaticsis important not only for Barth studies, but for the ongoing conversations regarding the significance of otherness, difference, and agency in theological anthropology. Anyone seeking to understand the issues and assets within Barth’s own account, interested in engagement with existing secondary literature, and looking for a compelling correction to and relevant re-reading of Barth’s Christological anthropology need look no further than Bodley-Dangelo’s work.

The Rev. Dr. Taylor Telford, Whitworth University

The views expressed here are strictly those of the author; they do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Barth Studies or Princeton Theological Seminary.

Rosner, Jennifer M. Healing the Schism: Healing the Schism: Barth, Rosenzweig, and the New Jewish-Christian Encounter. Emerging Scholars. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016)

Hanna Reichel. After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2023)

After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology

Hanna Reichel. After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2023), 225 pp. $40.00 (paperback).

In After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology, Hanna Reichel, the newly appointed Charles Hodge Chair of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, confronts a pressing reality: theology is in crisis and “has been for a while” (1). Across our diverse social, political, and economic landscapes, myriad forms of “bad theology” have become deeply entangled with the violence of our world. This entanglement has led many to question not only the relevance but the very necessity of theology in a contemporary context where it often appears both complicit in and generative of such violence.

Reichel’s work serves as a sobering reminder that theology’s future hinges on a crucial reconceptualization of its role that begins at the level of methodological practice and commitments. Reichel argues that the path forward for theology lies not in attempting to redeem or justify itself against modern critiques through method but in surrendering this desire. Reichel proposes a “desoteriologized” practice of theological method (248). This approach conceives of method after method by acknowledging theology’s limits, namely its susceptibility to sin and need for God’s grace. Reichel contends this grace is not just a theological concept but the condition that makes theology possible.

Reichel structures their argument along three parts, carefully modeling After Method’s structure with Martin Luther’s articulation of the threefold uses of the law. Just as Luther defined the law as a mirror, curb, and guide, Reichel posits that one must understand theological method in a similar tripartite manner. In this regard, theological method serves as a tool for curbing its users from “bad theology,” as a mirror of one’s sinfulness, and thus a guide toward kenotic solidarity with others. In short, method serves as a means to certain ethical ends. Such a construal dislodges method from a salvific or redemptive authority position into a provisional state of pragmatic use. Method, here, is understood not as the source of redemption or justification for the theologian but as a means through which she can grasp the finitude of theology as a discourse and discipline toward the pursuit of better theologies.

Parts 1 and 2 explore the first and second uses of the law of method in its functions to 1) curb the theologian from “bad theology” and 2) be a mirror of her finitude in the task of theology. In these opening chapters, Reichel brings together two seemingly unlikely interlocutors to demonstrate the possibility of a shared theology “after method”: the queer liberationist Marcella Althaus-Reid and the dogmatic systematician Karl Barth. Reichel reveals a surprising convergence in their theological pursuits by juxtaposing these influential yet divergent thinkers. While both respond to their respective contextual concerns and employ different theological methodologies, Reichel demonstrates a shared, common end between both thinkers. They reveal the limits of theological language to grasp both divine and human realities properly and the very impossibility of the theologian’s craft without the intervention of God’s grace. In this way, both Barth and Althaus-Reid reveal a “theological realism” that seriously considers theology’s impossibility to redeem itself from its own sin. Hence, as an often repeated refrain throughout the text, Reichel contends, “Method cannot save us.”

In this way, Part 3 centers around a third use of the law of method—law as a guide—that addresses the possibility of theology after method. Here, conceptual design theory is crucial in imagining “the end of redemption and the beginning of ethics” (153). Doctrine, in this case, is qualitatively judged according to the potential of its usefulness. In the same way that architects design and construct buildings to serve specific purposes and enhance user experiences, the nature of doctrine grants particular “affordances” that suggest the subject’s specific and possible uses. Reichel understands doctrine as provisional, contextual, and material and, thus, best evaluated on how well it best serves the purposes of its conceptual architecture. In this way, Reichel’s argument for theologies “after method” is not necessarily the rejection of method but a reconceptualization of method not as the locus of God’s redemptive work in the world, but as a means of curbing the theologian’s craft from bad theology, mirroring the finitude of the theologian’s own, and guiding the theologian toward God’s grace that conditions the very possibility of theology to even be.

This well-designed structure enables Reichel to delve into the intricacies of method, illuminating its multifaceted nature as a force that simultaneously constrains, reveals, and directs theological inquiry. By rethinking method as a form of “law” that informs and shapes the theologian’s craft, Reichel prompts readers to reevaluate the role and function of method in theological discourse. This reframing sets the stage for Reichel’s central proposal: to reconceptualize method not as an end but as a tool through which one pursues specific ethical concerns. In this context, Reichel revisits the often contentious debates between systematic/dogmatic and constructive/liberationist theologians. These groups have traditionally viewed each other as adversaries, frequently dismissing the “other camp” as perpetrators of bad theology. By applying their nuanced understanding of method, such as in the cases of Barth and Althaus-Reid, Reichel seeks to bridge this divide, suggesting that these seemingly opposed approaches might find common ground and mutual enrichment through alternative uses of method toward solidarity, or more precisely, kenotic solidarity that sacrifices the desire to save one’s theology through method by attending instead to the provisionality of theology that affords possibilities for belonging across lines of theological and disciplinary difference. By embracing this, Reichel’s work opens up new opportunities for theological engagement that are more humble, honest, realistic, and ultimately more attuned to the possibility of doing better as theologians; hence, After Method proves to be a valuable work for both the scholar or seminarian who is ever curious about the possibility of theology to still have any meaning in a world where theological discourse remains in crisis. In this context, After Method bears witness to the grace that breaks into such a crisis, opening up possibilities for the theologian’s craft and the methods we employ to make sense of such grace.

Yanan Rahim N. Melo, Editorial Assistant, Center for Barth Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Charles Helmer, The Lord Who Listens: A Dogmatic Inquiry into God as Hearer (Leiden: Brill. 2024)

Charles Helmer, The Lord Who Listens: A Dogmatic Inquiry into God as Hearer (Leiden: Brill. 2024), pp. 226. ISBN 978-9004693067

In The Lord Who Listens: A Dogmatic Inquiry into God as Hearer, Charles C. Helmer offers a theological exploration of an often-neglected concept in Christian theology but familiar to those attuned to Christian Spirituality: God’s act of listening. Published by Brill as part of the Studies in Systematic Theology series, Helmer’s work draws from biblical studies and the theology of Karl Barth to provide a holistic treatment of God’s hearing. For those familiar with Barth’s theological oeuvre, God’s listening receives significantly less attention than God’s speaking. Thus, Helmer’s work is both novel and necessary for the future of Barth studies.

Central Theme: The Listening God
Helmer’s central thesis is that one should view God’s hearing as an active and essential part of divine perfection, which complements the theology of God’s speaking. Throughout the book, Helmer argues that God’s listening is not passive but intentional, gracious engagement with humanity. This idea, according to Helmer, redefines how believers relate to God, particularly for those who cry out to be heard.

The book begins by examining scripture’s treatment of God as a hearer. Helmer carefully engages with biblical texts, ranging from the Old Testament’s portrayal of Abraham and the Psalms to the New Testament’s transformation of these ideas. He identifies listening as a divine attribute central to God’s covenantal relationship with humanity. By positioning God as a hearer, Helmer emphasizes the intimate nature of this relationship: God is not only a distant, commanding voice but also a close listener who engages with the cries, prayers, and sufferings of creation.

Interaction with Karl Barth
A significant portion of Helmer’s work engages with Karl Barth’s theology, particularly Barth’s focus on God’s sovereignty and divine freedom. For Barth, God’s relationship with creation involves speaking and hearing, but Helmer adds depth by emphasizing God’s hearing as a transformative divine attribute. He contrasts Barth’s ideas with other theologians who focus on God’s aseity, suggesting that God’s ability to hear is not a sign of vulnerability but rather a demonstration of divine love and grace.

Helmer develops a nuanced view of God’s interaction with the world through this theological grammar. Barth’s emphasis on divine agency is preserved, yet Helmer extends it by showing how God’s hearing plays a key role in maintaining the creator-creature distinction. God’s act of hearing reflects God’s constancy and commitment to creation, which assures believers that their prayers are always heard, even in moments of silence or doubt.

Implications for Christian Doctrines
The second half of The Lord Who Listens turns to the implications of God’s hearing for key Christian doctrines. Helmer skillfully ties the concept of divine listening to anthropology, Christology, and soteriology. He suggests that humanity’s identity is shaped by being heard, drawing a connection between divine listening and human development. This concept echoes throughout his discussion of anthropology: humans are created as social beings, formed by the voices of others and, more importantly, by God’s attentive listening.

Helmer’s argument is especially compelling Christologically. He describes Christ as the “Always-Heard Word,” whose relationship with God is characterized by constant communication. In Christ, God’s perfect listening is manifest, and the resurrection is presented as the ultimate triumph of this divine attentiveness. Helmer offers a unique lens through which to view the Incarnation as God’s ultimate act of hearing and responding to human suffering.

One of the most profound sections of the book is Helmer’s treatment of human suffering and the existential need to be heard. Helmer provides a theological framework that assures believers of God’s attentiveness in a world where many feel their cries go unheard. This notion is relevant to modern-day suffering and societal issues, where many are marginalized and silenced. Helmer’s argument that God’s hearing is a “dignifying grace” positions this attribute as essential to Christian hope.

Critical Analysis and Conclusion
The Lord Who Listens is a deeply theological work that offers new insights into an overlooked aspect of Christian doctrine. Helmer’s engagement with scripture and theology is rigorous, yet his writing remains accessible to those familiar with dogmatic theology. One of the book’s strengths is its interdisciplinary nature: Helmer engages with theology and brings in philosophical and existential reflections on human existence and suffering. His work is as much a pastoral resource as a scholarly one.

However, the book may be challenging for readers unfamiliar with systematic theology or Karl Barth’s works. The depth of theological analysis can sometimes feel overwhelming, particularly for those unfamiliar with dense theological writing. That said, Helmer’s clear structure and careful explanation of key concepts help guide the reader through the complexities of the subject matter.

This book is recommended for theologians, pastors, and anyone interested in deepening their understanding of God’s nature. It will particularly appeal to those seeking theological resources to address suffering, prayer, and divine engagement. Helmer’s creative and thoughtful approach makes The Lord Who Listens an essential addition to any theological library.

Hank Spaulding, Editorial Assistant, Center for Barth Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary