Theology and Church. Karl Barth
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power governing the church. On the evidence of the history of the church, the existence of God can be maintained only on the assumption that he withdrew his hand from Christianity in its historical existence. Such an assumption need not damage at all the honour due to God or to what men call God’ (p. 266).
‘To include Christianity under the concept of the historical, means to admit that it is of this world, and like all life has lived in the world in order to die’ (p. 7). ‘From purely historical considerations, the only possible conclusion is that Christianity is worn out and has grown senile’ (p. 71). ‘The idea of judging Christianity simply as history only heralds the dawn of the age when Christianity will come to an end and vanish’ (p. 9).
The only possible abode of Christianity lies, so far as the past is concerned, not in history, but in the history before history, the super-history (Urgeschichte). And only non-historical concepts, standards, and possibilities of observation could put us in the position to understand, to talk about—in fact, to represent in any way—this Christianity which is not Christianity in any historical sense. ‘Christianity means nothing else than Christ and the faith of his followers in him; it is something above time; in the life-time of Jesus, it had as yet no existence at all’ (p. 28). ‘Pursuit of the problems of super-history is permitted only to investigators who can see in that light—therefore to investigators with cats’ eyes who can manage in the dark’ (p. 20).
The beloved historical division between events and that which calls them into existence is impossible in relation to Christianity. For example, to take a New Testament book seriously means to know nothing of its author except for the book itself, and nothing of the ‘history of the times’. Direct conversation with the author makes the book as such superfluous and deprives it of its historical existence. Author and book coalesce into one (pp. 21–3). For another example, original Christianity in relation to the world had Socialism within itself; while our present-day combination of Christianity and Socialism, whether subsequent or anticipatory, only betrays our lack of the inclusive and conclusive possibilities of the super-historical (pp. 26–8). Hastily formulated historical hypotheses on the relation of beginnings to their continuations become impossible. ‘Can one human figure as passive as Jesus be thought of historically as the founder of anything in the world? Is not Christianity an historical edifice to the dimensions of which the figure of Jesus is wholly irrelevant?’ (p. 39). ‘The faith of Paul, springing to life after the death of Jesus, is no less of a miracle than the faith of Jesus in himself’ (p. 62).
The usual historical-psychological value judgements become impossible. For example, the dissimilarities between Jesus and Francis of Assisi are much more significant than the renowned likenesses (conformitates). On the one hand, ‘Francis exemplifies in himself the peace which Christianity proclaims even more completely than Jesus himself. Jesus required faith in himself, a demand which in itself excludes all peacefulness and presupposes the possession and use of power. Francis merely displays faith and shows a trait of amiability which Christ wholly lacks.’ On the other side, ‘to follow Christ, as St Francis understood it, was to follow him in the way which most exalts Christianity to the heights and glorifies it, and not to follow him where Christ himself stands, outside the ideal of Christianity’ (p. 39). Our Neo-Franciscan friends should ponder on that a little.
Most impossible of all becomes the all-too-hasty adaptation and application of supposedly historical concepts in general to supra-historical phenomena. Who, for instance, could dare to claim to understand Jesus unless he finds in himself the place where he feels himself to be simply one with God? And who could dare assert that oneness of himself? Who can fail to see that Jesus was ruled by the conviction that what is impossible in the actual world could be basic reality in another world? It is precisely in the demands which are based on this conviction that Jesus seems least of all to be a vague dreamer without experience of the world. But in this conviction, which alone would make him comprehensible, who dares to follow him with real earnestness and consistency (pp. 47–9)?
‘The contradiction between the original Christian eschatology and the contemporary hope for the future is fundamental’ (p. 66). ‘It is of no use to make profession of Christianity and to march in the opposite direction’ (p. 67). ‘The demand of Matt. 18:3 by itself either removes the possibility of Christianity in the world or takes the church off its worldly hinges’ (p. 64). Whoever recognizes all these ordinary impossibilities as such and yet finds a road to the super-history, to Jesus—let him walk that road, but not too quickly nor with too much assurance.
At the instant when things lose their immediate connexion with the last things, when the plain tie between the other side and this side ceases to bind, when any view other than the absolutely critical becomes possible for us, at that moment, which is all too similar to death, there begins the history of degeneration, church history. Overbeck even agrees with Zündel in his significant judgement that Paul already belongs in this second period; although it may be true that no one has really understood Paul who thinks today that he can share Paul’s opinions (p. 54), and equally true that Paul does not wholly lack important marks of the super-history (pp. 55–63).
But church history ‘stands actually between life and death, and to see it overweighted on the one side or the other depends solely on the situation and the arbitrary choice of the observer. History also continues life, even as it prepares death, (p. 21). But in any case, after the expectation of the Parousia had lost its reality, Christianity lost its youth and itself. It has become something wholly different; it has become a religion, an ‘ideological antidote’, as we must admit with Bernoulli. And ‘religion certainly shares with the world its origin from the human world’ (p. 74).
But Christianity will not be a religion, will not be in any sense an antidote—quite apart from the fact that such an antidote is of no use whatever to man. Man lives and must live from his certainty of the ‘last things’. And that is something very different.
III
Overbeck, unlike Kierkegaard, does not make his complaint against modern Christianity as himself an advocate of a true Christianity in opposition to a false (p. 279). He cannot assert forcibly enough that he is without any relation to Christianity of any kind. He claims for himself no religious mission. He holds so little of Christian belief that he never once counts himself among its believers! (p. 255). He will speak only of what he knows. And he expects (even apart from himself) no reform but only ‘a gentle fading away’ of Christianity (p. 68). He was early conditioned to regard even the religious struggles of the Reformation as pathological, even ‘without the stimulus of a serious hatred for Christianity and religion’ (p. 289).
But on our side, we know from his own words the significance it had for him when he thus placed himself ‘in the air’. Actually a more positive position does not exist than the mountain path he walks between the two chasms. His controlled, restrained pathos, as he steps forward, with the utmost knowledge of his subject, to give warning against the fictitious relationship between Christianity and the modern world, his far from ‘sceptical’ insight and reverence, and the urgency with which he speaks of those matters which merit it, the hopeless conflict of his whole life which was never fully resolved just because of his complete respect for reality, all these in the last analysis can be understood only as ‘Christian’, as a fragment of ‘super-history’. There hovers above this wholly critical book something of the peace of God that is higher than all reason—and perhaps this is all the more felt because its author did not at all so intend.
Yet it can even be debated whether Overbeck was more anxious to protect Christianity against the modern world or the modern world against Christianity. Bernoulli seems desirous of emphasizing the latter. Of course, Overbeck does both. But if his position is accurately portrayed at the end of the preface, where Bernoulli makes him stand guard on ‘the threshold of metaphysical possibilities’ (p. xxxvi), with the humanist culture in front of him and behind him Christianity, ‘the problem which puts all history in jeopardy, the problem whose nature is fundamentally enigmatic’ (p. 7)—it is a picture which inevitably reminds us of the Faustian ‘May the sun remain behind me’—then we may well be tempted to a different emphasis from Bernoulli’s.
It is not from humanist culture and it is not from Christianity