Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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triadic formulation: (a) the principle of criticism, (b) the principle of analogy, and (c) the principle of correlation. Under the presupposition that God is God, Barth does not reject this triadic principle; rather he radicalizes it in light of the theological subject matter. For Barth, to see through the historical to the spirit of the Bible is not merely to focus on Paul himself, but it is a task of understanding God as theological Sache. The spirit of this Sache inspires; thus God speaks to us even in the midst of our sociopolitical upheaval. The kingdom of God as theological subject matter is the in-breaking reality of God into our time. To see through our time to God’s in-breaking reality is a more critical and radical approach than the historical-critical method.
When it comes to hermeneutics in Barth’s exegesis, Jüngel focuses on an existential relationship between the text and its interpreter. In so doing, he tends to compare Barth to Heidegger. When Barth, for instance, radicalized the oblique intention toward intentio recta of theological Sache, Jüngel saw a new direct intention, namely a new naiveté that emerges from the energy of self-reflection.21 Unlike Jüngel’s reading of Barth’s hermeneutics of simultaneity in a Heideggerian fashion, Marquardt attempts to see Barth’s notion “more critically than historical critics” in light of political-social and historical consciousness.22
According to Marquardt, a social and political problem is supposed to be the criterion for the meaning of historical criticism in view of Barth’s principle of understanding. The primacy of reality can be seen as the key concept in his hermeneutics. Recognizing the primacy of the text’s reality before the exegetical method of historical criticism, Barth radicalized the historical-critical method by placing it second to the Bible’s addressing sociohistorical and political concerns. This view is, for Barth, an exegetical discipline—in other words, a result of radical critical reflection rather than a postcritical second naiveté in the sense of Heidegger or Jüngel.
Obviously Barth does not replace the hermeneutical circle through his Sachkritik. Rather he makes this hermeneutical circle the criterion of all historical critique. In radicalizing the historical-critical method, Barth calls into question “text in texts,” “the word in words,” “the subject matter in the matters of subject,” namely the depth of the text, which is the objectivity of the historical critics. Given this fact, Barth’s dialectical thinking of God’s eschatology is explicitly of hermeneutical and social-practical character and horizon.23
According to Marquardt, Barth’s theology cannot be understood apart from its life-setting in his socialist activity.24 In the Barth files there is a yet-undeciphered report on Kropotkin and Leninism. The real origin of Barth’s theology is, argues Marquardt, “his theological existence in Safenwil,” which means “socialist praxis.”25 Marquardt’s contribution severely challenges the general neo-orthodox or conservative portrait of Barth.
In dealing with a consequence of Barth’s concept of the politics of God for the society, Ulrich Dannemann makes a theological justification of Barth’s understanding of society, social structure, and its concrete political forms for his investigation. According to Dannemann, Marquardt’s interpretation enables us to see and reconstruct—more clearly and precisely than in existing Barth scholarship—the history of the theological existence of Karl Barth from its genesis, its continuity, and its discontinuity from his early theology of socialism to his dogmatic-theological discourse of Jesus Christ.26 Apart from Marquardt, Dannemann pursues the connection between theological knowledge and political praxis in Barth primarily through a systematic structure-analysis of Barth’s two Romans commentaries and his doctrine of reconciliation in Church Dogmatics.
In an introduction to the debate about Karl Barth in Germany, George Hunsinger (in a North American context) tries to actualize political radicalism in the theology of Karl Barth. Hunsinger’s thesis is that “theology must not be politicized, nor politics theologized. Theology can make its contribution to politics only by remaining theology.”27 In agreement with the basic orientation of Marquardt, Hunsinger tries to clarify and correct what remains obscure and misleading in Marquardt’s interpretation. Albeit with a critical reservation against Marquardt, Hunsinger does assent that “the socialist perspective which Marquardt opens up may well be one of his most lasting achievements.”28
According to Hunsinger, the contributions of Marquardt and Frei lie not only in starting with Barth’s earliest writings, but also in paying considerable attention to the first edition of Romans (1919), which has been widely neglected. Barth’s concept of God (alles in allem real verändernde Tatsache dass Gott ist 29), which is also Marquardt’s key concept of Barth’s political hermeneutics, is to be understood on the basis of a practical socialist experience, thereby maintaining an intrinsic connection with society and politics. In viewing Barth’s political praxis as an analogy or parable of God’s kingdom, Hunsinger characterizes a relationship between theology and politics in Barth’s mature theology as follows: “formally analogical, materially socialist, and existentially actualist.”30
Drawing upon Marquardt, Peter Winzeler, and Sabine Plonz, Timothy Gorringe attempts to construct a contextual reading of Barth for the sake of an “affirmation of a remarkable unity in his theological output from 1916 to 1968.”31 In accepting Marquardt’s basic thesis—that Barth’s methodology is his theological social biography—Gorringe makes a genetic reading of the inextricability of theology and politics in Barth’s thought. Barth’s own advice to students in his lectures on nineteenth-century Protestant theology—that they “make a synchronous chart for every single year of the period” “for the sake of a mass of connections”—serves as inspiration for Gorringe to engage in a contextual, genetic, and historical-material reading of Barth. For Barth, the “historian should take history seriously as a force outside himself, which had it in its power to contradict him and which spoke to him with authority.”32
Barth’s first Romans commentary was written in a highly contextual sense, evident in his dialectical unity between theological Sachkritik and political awareness. This unity both illumines and determines Barth’s eschatology. However, many scholars tend to abandon Barth’s earlier position after his move from Safenwil to Göttingen. In contrast to Marquardt’s religious-socialist reading of Barth is the statement of Klaus Scholder, for instance, that “with the turn to biblical theology Barth effectively gave up political engagement. The political world in the narrower sense, the world of political ideas and decisions, no longer formed any fundamental part of his theological thinking.”33 And in protest against Marquardt, Gerhard Sauter says that Barth had no political theology in any plausible sense of the term.34
Jüngel, in his study on Barth, also takes issue with other interpretations of Barth on two fronts. He challenges the liberal-fascistic interpretation of Barth in the school of Munich, and the religious-socialist interpretation of Barth in the school of West Berlin. Jüngel first calls into question works of Falk Wagner and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, stating,
I marvel at the ‘reconstruction of the construction’ of Barth’s theology, which in Germany comes primarily from Munich. They see through Barth’s theology and pronounce it to be simply a genuine product of the spirit of its time, even though it was directed against that spirit. In this connection