Theology and Church. Karl Barth
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criticism, but with a psychological analysis and interpretation of the religious self-consciousness that is deliberately pursued as an extension of the Cartesian line of thought—what Wobbermin called ‘religio-psychological existential thought’. This is a line of thought which takes seriously the inter-relation between man’s knowledge of God and his self-knowledge, and between his self-knowledge and knowledge of God, that is, the correlation between God and man, but it is one which thinks away the free ground of that correlation in God, takes its starting-point in man’s immediate self-consciousness, and makes its ultimate criterion man’s certainty of himself. Even if that means starting from a religious I-consciousness and returning to it as the criterion of certainty it involves a religio-psychological circle which is fundamentally ‘vicious’, for it has no objective ground independent of its subjective movement, and no point where its circular movement comes to an end, since the ‘God’ at the opposite pole is only the correlate of man’s consciousness, and so points back to man for its testing and truth.
In all these different movements there is, insists Barth, a basic homogeneity of method from Schleiermacher to Bultmann, in which theological thinking takes its rise from a basic determination in the being of man, so that the only truth it is concerned with or can be concerned with is truth for man, truth which can be validated only by reference to his self-explication controlled by historical analysis of human existence. Two fundamental propositions are involved in this whole line of thought: a. Man’s meeting with God is a human experience historically and psychologically fixable; and b. this is the realization of a religious potentiality in man generally demonstrable. These fundamental propositions remain essentially the same even if the idiom is changed to that of existentialism. It is this line of thought which throws up a theology in which the Church and faith are regarded as but part of a larger context of being and in which dogmatics is only part of a more comprehensive scientific pursuit which provides the general structural laws that determine its procedure, and so are the test of its scientific character. This means that theology can be pursued only within the prior understanding, and by submission to a criterion of truth, derived from a general self-interpretation of man’s existence; so that theological activity is merely the servant of man’s advancing culture, and the tool of a preliminary understanding which, as Bultmann has said, is reached ‘prior to faith’.
The point where this line of thinking creates the most acute difficulty, Barth says, is in its interpretation of Jesus Christ, as we can see already in the theology of Schleiermacher, where it is evident that in spite of its Christo-centrism, Jesus Christ fits rather badly into the system. We can indicate this problem from another point of view, by noting the influence of French impressionism upon interpretation or the science of hermeneutics. Normally when one reads an author one understands what he says by looking with him at the ‘object’ to which he points or which he describes, but early in the nineteenth century there grew up the tendency to study the text of an author in its correlation with the ‘subject’ or the author himself rather than in its correlation with the objective reality he intended, and so to read it as an expression of his individuality or genius. It was largely under the influence of Schleiermacher, followed by Lücke and Dilthey, that theological interpretation made this fundamental change in direction, but it was an essential by-product of the romantic movement of the nineteenth century as a whole, and derived ultimately from the Renaissance.
Applied to the New Testament, however, this meant that the focus of attention was not so much upon Jesus Christ himself in his ontological reality as Son of God become man, or even as objective historical Figure, but upon the creative spirituality of the early Church which produced the interpretation of Jesus we have mediated to us through the New Testament, and only upon Jesus as the occasion or co-determinant of this religious consciousness. Hence the real function of the New Testament was held not to be the communication of divine truth and revelation, but to be the means of provoking us to discover and take up a similar way of life to that manifested by the first generation of Christians. The fact that their way of life was expressed in what must appear to us (it is said) crude mythological forms can only be a challenge to us to probe behind it all to the essential meaning that it enshrined. Looked at in this way, it becomes apparent that there is basically little difference between Schweitzer’s insistence that we must use the apocalyptic portrait of Jesus in the Gospels like a painting of Van Gogh to help us ‘tune in’ to the Weltanschauung behind it all, and Bultmann’s insistence that we must use the whole ‘mythological framework’ of the New Testament Kerygma as the occasion for an ‘existential decision’ through which we can reach authentic existence.
Barth’s contention is that, apart from the questionable quasi-scientific character of this procedure, far from revealing the essential nature of the Gospel, it reduces it once more to an expression of transient human culture by correlating it to an independent and general anthropology. Schweitzer has shown so clearly, and Bultmann knows very well, that ‘the historical Jesus’ constructed by the scholars of the nineteenth century was a ‘Jesus’ dressed up in the thoughts and ideas of the nineteenth century and tailored to fit into the satisfactions of modern man, but because the Jesus reached in that way is always a construction of our own, that does not allow us to by-pass the objective reality of the historical Jesus Christ in order to focus our attention upon something fundamentally different—whatever we may call it, ‘the anonymous spirit of Jesus’, or ‘authentic existence’, or anything else—for in so doing we are projecting our own self-understanding in his place, substituting man’s creative spirituality for the Word of God, and engaging in a new mythology. Does not all this mean that we have renounced rational knowledge of God, and are seeking to impose forms of our own upon ‘faith’ which we have drawn from the structures of historical existence and society as we have found them? Does all this carry us one step beyond Schleiermacher? Is it not rather a more dangerous and menacing subjectivism, if only because it thinks it is free from it? Thus Barth’s historical studies will not allow him to think of the existentialist exegesis and existentialist theology as something apart, for it does not matter whether it derives its anthropology from Schleiermacher and his school or from Heidegger and his school—the fact that it subjects Christianity to a prior understanding of human existence reachable apart from revelation and faith, and so interprets the Word of God not out of its own objective rationality, but out of some special potentiality or knowledge alleged to belong to man as such, means that this theology is only a manifestation of secular human culture, and that what is essentially and distinctively Christian has been allowed to slip away like sand through the fingers.
It was especially in the second edition of the Commentary on Romans, as we have seen, that Barth launched his attack upon the false assimilation of Christianity to culture, and upon the immanentism and pantheism which that involved. What he sought to do was to create what he called a diastasis, a radical separation between theology and culture, which he felt to be eminently necessary if we were to think clearly again about God, and about man, and of their reconciliation in Jesus Christ. It was part of the intention of the Romans to free man’s understanding of Jesus Christ from the prior understanding of culture which dragged him down into historical existence as interpreted by man himself, and to insist that a proper theological procedure involved an approach to him which let our previous understanding and naturalistic Weltanschauungen be called into question. It was an attempt to let God himself in all his justifying grace call the bluff of civilized European man, in order to induce him to think soberly, that is, in such a way that he learns to distinguish the objective realities from his own subjective states and conditions.
The intention of the Romans was by no means an attack on culture as such, but rather the opposite, upon a bogus mystification of culture which required to be disenchanted of its secret divinity before it really could be human culture. Thus the thinking of Barth at that stage was dynamically dialectical, for he sought to bring both the No of God against all man’s attempt to make himself as God, and yet to bring the Yes of God’s victorious love and mercy to bear upon man in his agony and despair in order that he might find healing, not in reconciling principles of his own devising, but in the reconciling grace of God alone. Already there is apparent in the Romans that immense emphasis upon humanity, as that to which God has directed his saving love, and to which we also in obedience to God must direct our attention in the humanity of our fellow men, but in the polemic to