Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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of God and the revolutionary event of the general strike in Switzerland. The root cause of the revolutionary event, which was implanted by God in the hearts of the workers, consisted in a longing for a new world. Because of his bold assertion, Thurneysen was denounced as a Bolshevik pastor.251 Along the line of Barth, Thurneysen interprets the Bible in terms of the social-historical connection that implies a hermeneutical character. For Thurneysen and Barth a historical-materialistic reflection of understanding process underlies their approach to the organic connection between the world of the Bible and the world of the newspaper.252
The significance of Blumhardt and Kutter for Thurneysen lay in their reappropriating the voice of socialism for the repentance and renewal of the church. In other words, against popular misunderstanding they did not fall into a politicization of the church through socialism, or conversely into an idealization of socialism through Christianity. From this standpoint we see that Barth and Thurneysen were attesting to an organic connection between the Bible and political events. The new world in the Bible has material relevance to what happens politically in our world. Barth tried to find in the Bible actual political orientation toward human action in the revolutionary situation of 1918. The connection between the Bible and the newspaper occupies fundamental hermeneutical significance for his exegesis as well as for his understanding of the Word of God. Reading of all sorts of world literatures and, above all, the newspaper, was urgently recommended for understanding Barth’s Romans commentary.
In the face of the daily newspaper, Romans needed to be understood in a new light. This competence came out of the conversion to the Bible, from inside out, namely, from its own subject matter. Barth’s theology of the Bible explicitly retains this social, political interest instead of withdrawing it from biblical interpretation. For Barth, biblical interpretation has to do with reflection on the relation between God and the Bible and social circumstances. The blueprint of theology should be no other than the preparation for a political sermon and social praxis. As Barth further states,
One day I awakened as president of an eleven-member emergency commission with 6000 francs of cash as capital that was raised by our manufacturers. All at once at the eleventh hour mammon begins to totter on his throne and it is a life or death matter for soup to be prepared in the schoolhouse for everyone. . . . The question is whether such measures can prevent the entry of Bolshevism into Safenwil? . . . The post arrives—again without a newspaper. What is happening in Basel? The cowardly anxiety of the Basler Nachrichten is an amusing point in the general world picture. I wonder what Kutter’s sermon sounded like yesterday, whether or not, and how, perhaps, he found a way to make a public spectacle of the principalities and powers of this age. What are we going to say this time in the coming period of Advent?253
The Bible does not pass by the problem of the political situation. What was at issue is how to articulate adequately the organic connection between the Bible and politics. It was, therefore, of special significance for Barth to identify the organic relevance of the Bible and the political-update event in a theoretical-practical manner. In other words, the Bible is a Word to a theological subject matter as well as a Word to social situation. The primary theme of the Bible and theology is the history of God that renews the world. God who speaks of God’s will in this history is by no means a continuation of human will. In contrast, the will of God radically demands a new creation of humans, leading all human morality, culture, and religion to silence. God’s deed brings a new world to the fore. The Bible witnesses from the beginning to the end to God’s new life of advent, of breaking through. Jesus Christ stands before us as the victor who has overcome the old world. Christ “has become the mediator for the whole world, the redeeming Word, who was in the beginning of all things and is earnestly expected by all things.” “He is the redeemer of the growing creation about us.” What the Bible announces is “that God must be all in all; and the events of the Bible are the beginning, the glorious beginning of a new world.”254
Having faith in the God of the Bible means believing in God’s breakthrough which is begun in Jesus Christ. This faith leads to believing that a relation between God and the human world must be acknowledged as God’s victory. God’s condescension in Jesus Christ, the fight and victory of the kingdom of God are, for Barth, political content. The acts of God are not restricted to the private existence of individuals, but are social and universal. No wonder that Barth repeatedly relates the Revelation of John, chapter 21, to the proclaimed revelation of the new world: “Behold the tabernacle of God is with men! The Holy Spirit makes a new heaven and a new earth and, therefore, new men, new families, new relationships, new politics.”255 God makes a new politics. So God’s action is political. The unity between knowledge and interest can arrive in this discovery of the Bible when this political interest is brought explicitly to social consciousness and defined in accordance with it. Barth seeks in Bible just such an actual political orientation of human action as in the revolutionary situation of 1918. This is also a hermeneutical aspect for Barth that directs him to knowledge and understanding by putting together the newspaper and the Bible. This social-historical contemporaneity retains a fundamental significance for Barth’s hermeneutics regarding exegesis and his understanding of the Word of God. This contemporaneity will become manifest in his commentary on Romans. Barth argues for a conversion to the Bible from the inside out, from its own subject matter to what lies beyond.
A new world, namely, the world of God, is in the Bible. It is a spirit in the Bible. God drives us to the primary matter, whether we want it or not. The Holy Scripture interprets itself despite our human limitations. We must dare to follow this urge, spirit, and current in the Bible. Herein Barth conceptualizes a hermeneutical spirit, “scripturae ipsius interpres,” in terms of the world-effective reality. The resurrection creates its world-effectiveness through the constitution of a subject of the new, in other words, a “solid subject,” in Ernst Bloch’s sense. That is the meaning as the new physicality.256 The new world in the Bible is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is of social and political significance. The resurrection is not to be exchanged for the immanent law of history or as the law of dialectical materialism. However, in the effective realm of the resurrection, God has no spectators, because the resurrection is the constitution of the revolutionary subject. Given this fact, totaliter aliter in Barth’s view mediates the reality of God and the reality of world, and grounds God’s presence in society.
Totaliter aliter is not a metaphysical or distancing concept but a qualified concept with a particularly social content. Henceforth the new world in the Bible, the new world of God, implies the revolutionary overthrowing of the existing bourgeois society. Totaliter aliter is originally the new society in the thought of Barth in contradiction to the declining society, and the original in this contradiction is God. As to the concept of totaliter aliter Barth reports: “It was Thurneysen who whispered the key phrase to me, half aloud, while we were alone together: ‘What we need for preaching, instruction and pastoral care is a “wholly other” theological foundation.’”257 Human praxis must be shaped in correspondence to the breakthrough of God, which means the new world. Human political action has a task and a duty to participate in God’s new creation of the world. From this standpoint, Barth articulates his theopolitical slogan: “waiting for the kingdom of God.”258 This waiting should not be misunderstood as a passive and unpolitical theology, a so-called waiting-room theology; for being just such a theology Ragaz ridiculed it.259
By contrast, it is a deeply engaged commitment and a revolutionary stance in expectation of the coming kingdom of God. Barth’s theology of expectation is well articulated in his lecture of 1922, “Not und Verheissung der christlichen Verkündigung.” Schellong views Barth’s theology of waiting for