Karl Barth and Comparative Theology 9780823284627

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KARL BARTH AND COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY

Comparative Theology

Thinking Across Traditions

series editors Loye Ashton and John Thatamanil This series invites books that engage in constructive comparative theological reflection that draws from the resources of more than one religious tradition. It offers a venue for constructive thinkers, from a variety of religious traditions (or thinkers belonging to more than one), who seek to advance theology understood as “deep learning” across religious traditions.

KARL BARTH AND COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY martha l. mo ore-keish a n d c h r i s t i a n   t. c o l l i n s w i n n , e d i t o r s

Fordham University Press new york 2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

CONTE NTS

Foreword: Some Reflections on Barth and Comparative Theology ix francis x. clooney

Introduction 1

c h r i s t i a n   t. c o l l i n s w i n n a n d m a rt h a   l . moore-keish

I

Barth and Judaism

1

Comparative Theology, Comparative Wisdom, and Covenantal Logic 19 r a n d i r a s h kov e r

2

Faith as Immunity to History? Rethinking Barth and Fackenheim 36

chris boesel

Response to Part I 57

peter ochs

II Barth and Buddhism

3

Barth’s Theology of Religion and Dōgen’s Nondualism 67

ja m e s fa rw e l l

4 Barth and Universal Salvation: A Mahayana Buddhist Perspective 85 pa n - c h i u l a i

Response to Part II 105

pau l k n i t t e r

viii Contents

III Barth and Islam

5

Analogies across Faiths: Barth and Ghazali on Speaking after Revelation 115 j o s h ua r a l s t o n

6 Karl Barth and Parousia in Comparative Messianism 137 k u rt A n d e r s r i c h a r d s o n

Response to Part III 155

m u n ‘ i m s i r ry

IV Barth and Hinduism

7

God as Subject and Never Object to Us: Reading Kena Upaniṣad with Karl Barth and Śaṅkara 163

marc A. pugliese

8

“Do Not Grieve”: Reconciliation in Barth and Vedanta Desika 184

john N. sheveland

Response to Part IV 203

a n a n ta n a n d r a m ba c h a n

V Barth and African Traditional Religions

9 Speaking about the Unspeakable: Conversing with Barth and Ejizu on Mediated Divine Action 211 victor I. ezigbo

10 Humanity and Destiny: A Theological Comparison of Karl Barth and African Traditional Religions 228 t i m h a rt m a n

Response to Part V 249

n i m i wa r i b o ko

Conclusion. Barth’s Dreams: Religions as Scandal and Parable 257

s. mark heim

Acknowledgments 265 List of Contributors 267

FOR E WORD SOME REFLECTIONS ON BARTH A N D C O M PA R AT I V E T H E O L O G Y Francis X. Clooney, S.J.

I am glad to see this volume on Karl Barth and comparative theology, made up of fine essays from established and new voices in comparative theological studies. Like many other theologians who themselves did not do constructive comparative theological work, Barth has now been brought into constructive theological engagement with a number of religious traditions. At first glance, of course, Barth is an improbable resource for any progressive theology, particularly the interreligious. This is true if one is thinking of certain theological claims starkly stated, or of the theology of religions one might most easily draw from Barth’s theology, or of his sharp rhetoric, aimed at Christian and non-Christian alike. It is also the case if one is thinking of disciples who, like the disciples of Hans Urs von Balthasar, take refuge with him in order to be shielded from the wider, pluralistic world. But this volume assures us that Barth’s rich, complex theology holds resources to be valued in today’s world. Both Barth and comparative theology have a tendency to unsettle settled positions. Barth was deeply skeptical of his own Protestant heritage insofar as it had become a culturally safe and privileged ecclesial establishment. His powerful appeal to nothing but the Word of God and the subsequent withering critiques undercut many theological and ecclesial edifices. His powerful teachings are also potent in upsetting religious studies, insofar as that field fosters the reduction of faiths to religions and religions to the phenomenon of religion, and as it overprivileges distanced, objective study. Barth draws us in deeper, to the religion to which we belong, and into encounter with the religions we study; safe distance is not something he would tolerate. By its particular

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Francis X. Clooney

study of the other, comparative theology robs us of our stereotypes of other faith traditions, strips away our unwarranted presumptions about the uniqueness of many of our beliefs and practices, dispels many of the excuses we have for not learning from our neighbors, and thus highlights instead what is truly distinctive and different. Comparative theology need not be limited to any par ticular strand of theology; it is not merely a liberal way of thinking, and it need not have anything in common with relativism or reductive pluralism. Teaching and researching some of the great Hindu traditions does not lend itself to weak positions. Indeed, given the power of some of non-Christian religious positions, strong Christian positions are needed to balance fierce and strong Hindu philosophical and theological reflection. From a comparative theological perspective, Barth’s passionate, hard challenge is a valuable perspective with real power. Comparative theology, too, has the ability to undercut and weaken established, self-privileging positions. A coalition of Barthian and comparative theological views, such as is proposed in various ways in these essays, can be disruptive indeed. Faith begins in the particular. Someone truly appreciating Barth’s insight into the power of faith and his refusal to reduce Christianity to its characteristics as a religion will also appreciate how comparative theology proceeds without first elaborating a host of theoretical starting points and presuppositions. Explanation often positions one from the start in the sensible religious middle or an academically respectable theoretical site. Comparative theology, too, starts in the middle of things, confronting powerful religious ideas and emotions. This practical focus also makes it more than ordinarily open. In its actual work, comparative theology can include very many theological perspectives across the spectrum, and it would be a much weaker discipline were it to have no space in it for the energies of an evangelical theologian by precluding such from the start. The current volume, though breaking new ground, is not entirely novel. Already in 1959, K. Satchidananda Murty had engaged Barth’s thought in his Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedanta, particularly in a three-way comparison of Barth, Śaṅkara, and Emil Brunner on the problem of exclusive religions claims.1 One of the earliest full Englishlanguage studies of Barth on religions, and one possessed too of a constructive comparative angle, is Allan Loy’s 1963 Yale dissertation The Theological Interpretation of the Relation of Christianity to Other Reli­ gions, with Particular Reference to Karl Barth. Near its end, in light of

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Barth’s discussions of bhakti and Hinduism, Loy draws on Barth while yet moving beyond his limited comments on Hinduism: When the divine determination organises and transforms Hinduism’s basic concept of man’s achievement of oneness or identity with God, this concept becomes the actuality of a true union (as distinct from a unity or identity) with God, created by God and utterly dependent upon him, and yet one in which man is genuinely a subject. Similarly, the “descent” of Vishnu as the fish or the boar etc., or as Ram Chandra or Sri Krishna, now becomes the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. The idea of grace is freed from the control of the human emotion of love for the Isvara who lifts man out of the stream of samsara, and now receives its actual content and meaning from God who has redeemed the world and set up his righteous reign in Jesus Christ; the uncertain part played by the idea of God in Bhakti becomes the certain act of God in Jesus Christ, and the surrender of prapatti (complete resignation to God) with its content of human longing, becomes the faith that is awakened by the approach of God in Jesus Christ and which is given its content wholly by its Object. The typically Hindu dramatic sense and musical forms which have so well expressed the ancient search for shanti (peace) are transformed into the drama and music of praise and gratitude for a peace which is given.2

It is so very interesting that more than fifty years ago Loy ventured into a constructive Barthian theological engagement with Hindu bhakti. Surely more work can be done to detect early instances of scholarly engagement with Barth’s theology about other religions. As a Catholic, and in my studies in seminary, I myself was not much exposed to Barth’s thought until I took a seminar on Barth at Harvard Divinity School around 1977, while in my studies at the nearby Weston Jesuit School of Theology. My own more concerted thinking on Barth arose when I was asked to review Gavin D’Costa’s Theology and Reli­ gious Pluralism (1986).3 In the chapter on the “Exclusivist Paradigm,” devoted largely to Hendrik Kraemer, D’Costa distinguishes him from the harsher Barth: “When asked how he know that Hinduism was unbelief, [Barth’s] immediate answer was ‘a priori.’ ”4 And: “Some exclusivists remain content with this entirely naive assessment of the non-Christian religions, and certainly Kraemer thought that Barth stopped here—undialectically.”5 But (agreeing with D’Costa) I found Barth too fascinating to write off as a mere exclusivist.

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My own reading of Barth, more selective than is ideal, has always focused on Church Dogmatics I/2 (1938), wherein his views were both unsettling and intriguing. Here was a Christian with as starkly powerful a scripturalist disposition as was held by those stalwart defenders of revelation, the Mimamsa ritual theologians and Vedanta theologians of the divine reality. Here was a most serious Christian theologian who also looked deep into religion and religions and refused to settle for facilely stated similarities and differences; Barth was strong enough and weighty enough to be measured alongside the great Hindu thinkers. I came to see that it is possible and useful to use Barth in unexpected ways, as it were purifying theology for the sake of a better engagement with religions. In my Hindu God, Christian God (2001), as in other chapters, I was seeking in the fifth chapter—“How Revelation Matters in the Assessment of Religions”—a strong Christian position, to show that even conservative, staunchly orthodox Christians could be just as well drawn into comparative conversations.6 More recently, teaching Śaṅkara commentary on the Brhadaranyaka Upaniṣad, I have found that this learning requires us to acquire the ability to see how radical he actually is; and this in turn allows for, begs for, a serious counterpart in Christian tradition, and Barth is one of the small group of theologians who can hold his own next to Śaṅkara, as a like-minded theological colleague in a diametrically opposed tradition. So I have come to respect Barth more over time, and thus appreciate the great advance made by this volume. Not that I can agree fully with Barth or believe that his theology is fully adequate to a Christian interreligious openness. To show where Barth falls down, I cannot help but comment on one aspect of his own comparative work that is not dealt with directly in the essays that follow, his abrupt dismissal of the great bhakti tradition of Srivaisnava Hinduism in Church Dogmatics I/2 (1956), just before his well-known engagement with Jodo Shinshu Buddhism: In the same context we are also reminded of the Indian Bhakti religion. But even if we accept the parallel, it is not nearly so forceful as the Japanese one. Bhakti is an act of utter surrender and resignation. In it our own will is placed absolutely at the ser vice of another’s. It can easily be intensified into a personal act of inward inclination and love. The high or supreme God to whom Bhakti is offered can have any name or character. It is the emotion of love itself and as such which redeems man,

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which enables him to participate in the answering love of God which even in earthly things allows him to be sympathetic and kindly, unselfish, patient and serene. There is mention of a certain neutralising of all other means of salvation. As a kind of modest counterpart to the Protestant doctrine of justification, there is mention of a “cat rule,” by which the soul of every thing can be surrendered to God and does not need to make any effort, because God leads it to salvation in the same way as a cat carries its kitten. This is in contrast to a “monkey-rule,” in which God’s relation to the soul is characterised by the she monkey, to which the young must still cling even while they are carried. The most uncertain part played by the idea of God, the substitution of surrender and love for faith, and the utter and complete formlessness even of the concept of love, show that we are in a quite different world from that of the Japanese religion of grace, and an absolutely different world from that of Evangelical Christianity. It would be a very degenerate form of modern Evangelical Christianity which felt that the Bhakti religions could claim kinship with it.7

This judgment seems very widely off the mark to anyone who has studied Srivaisnava thought. It is not clear what Barth means, or why he allocates all his sympathies only to Shinshu Buddhism. As I puzzle over this matter now, it seems to me that Barth quite possibly had read Rudolph Otto’s India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted (1930),8 which expounds this bhakti religion, speaks of surrender and love, offers an explanation of the cat-rules and monkey-rules and sees the challenge here of an obvious parallel to the Protestant religion of grace.9 Near the start of the subsequent long chapter, “The Relation of Christianity to the Bhakti Religion,” Otto himself places in sequence mention of bhakti and the turn to Japanese Buddhism: “A farreaching similarity to Christianity in the bhakti-religion in its different fields has often been recognized by theologians—in Japan, for instance, in reference to the reverence paid by the bhaktas to the gracious and saving Buddha Amida.”10 Most of what we need to make sense of Barth’s comments—apart from the negative judgment made by Barth—is already present in Otto’s text. Barth could well have had Otto’s book on his bookshelf and could well have read it, even if he offers no source for what he says about Srivaisnavism, moving instead quickly to judgment. This may actually show his discomfort with this most obvious interreligious instance of a

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religion of grace, very ably presented by the esteemed Otto. Had Barth at least named and engaged Otto’s work more completely and engaged Otto’s thought fully, his comments on Srivaisnavism would have been more convincing and open to further discussion. Why does it matter that Barth missed the Srivaisnavas so egregiously? From my perspective as a theologian who has studied Srivaisnavism for decades, it matters first of all that Barth endangered his own theology by treading too confidently onto unfamiliar ground, rejecting and demeaning a very beautiful and honorable tradition, and with no documentation at all for his swift dismissal of more than a millennium of Srivaisnava theology. The Srivaisnavas have nuanced theology, worked out in great detail; God is not God-in-general, but God who selfreveals in specific ways; devotion is not the same as surrender, and each has its own characteristics. It is ironic that Barth tripped over his own a priori sentiments, almost casually, as if in a rush to skip ahead and think instead about a favored form of Buddhism. Perhaps the more distant world of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism was a case Barth could contemplate with great equanimity; sometimes, it is the nearer and striking similarity— such as that of a Hindu theology of a personal God and of divine love and grace—that poses the greater challenge. More impor tant, and more pertinent to this volume, it also means that Barth was after all not really equipped to be a comparative theologian; today we can honor his theological power and brilliance by doing what he was not equipped to do, learning from our religious others before passing judgment on them simply on the basis of what we know about ourselves and our own faith tradition. He did not have ready the learning and underlying disposition to travel from his own tradition to the other, and back again, learning along the way. Speaking of Hinduism and Buddhism only in a rather general way, he could not as effectively as one might have hoped avoid blurring the one into the other, or reducing Srivaisnava Hinduism and Jodo Shinshu Buddhism to instances of a more general religious notion useful to his own project. So a question stands before us—and now is answered in many ways in this volume: What if Barth had learned to be a comparative theologian? On this question, some very good work has been done in recent years. John Sheveland, a contributor to this volume, has shown us productive ways in which Barth can be engaged in Christian and interreligious studies. In his 2010 essay “Solidarity through Polyphony” and 2011 book Piety and Responsibility, he offers us a richer repertoire of possibilities

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xv

for a proper and fertile thinking-through of the Hindu and Christian traditions together, drawing on Barth, along with Karl Rahner and the Hindu theologian Vedanta Desika, without allowing any particular thinker to exclude taking seriously the others.11 Also in 2011, Ankur Barua published his “Religion Versus the Religions: The Dialectic of Divine Reality and Human Response in Karl Barth and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.”12 This careful essay notes some important intellectual resemblances between these contemporaries, and it highlights the need for an interreligious apologetics that contests their strong positions, each appreciated anew in light of the other. Still more recently, Sven Ensminger, one of Gavin D’Costa’s students, in 2014 published his dissertation as a monograph, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions.13 Ensminger argues for Barth’s important contribution in changing our stance on the various religions by getting us to rethink religion and God’s relation to human endeavors. Although Barth’s theology might seem potentially exclusivist, in fact, Ensminger says, it resets the conversation among religions on a new and surprisingly productive foundation of a theology centered not on Christianity but on Jesus Christ. It is timely, then, that the essays in the current volume move things forward still further, with the synergy of an admirable collaborative project that should affect how we think about Barth and religions. Important and welcome is the intention of its editors and contributors to respect and draw on Barth while pushing farther ahead in the necessary work of theologically informed and spiritually open comparison. Given their different themes and approaches, mostly tradition-specific, they also remind us of the astonishing breadth of Barth’s writing and the fundamental wholeness of his Christian theological worldview. I commend the editors of and contributors to this volume for their excellent work, evidence once more of the maturation of comparative theology. Notes 1. K. Satchidananda Murty, Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedanta (Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, 2012). 2. Allan Loy, The Theological Interpretation of the Relation of Christianity to Other Reli­ gions (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1963), 212. 3. Gavin D’Costa, Theology and Religious Pluralism: The Challenge of Other Religions (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1986).

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4. Ibid., 54. 5. Ibid., 59. 6. Frank Clooney, Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break down the Bound­ aries between Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 7. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 341–342. 8. Rudolph Otto, India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted, trans. Frank Hugh Foster (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930). 9. Ibid., 55–56, 51. 10. Ibid., 61. 11. See John Sheveland, “Solidarity through Polyphony,” in The New Comparative Theol­ ogy: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis Clooney (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), and John Sheveland, Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika (New York: Routledge, 2011). 12. Ankur Barua, “Religion versus the Religions: The Dialectic of Divine Real ity and Human Response in Karl Barth and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,” Journal of Ecumeni­ cal Studies 46 no. 2 (2011): 163–182. 13. Sven Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Reli­ gions (New York: T&T Clark, 2016).

Introduction Christian T. Collins Winn and Martha L. Moore-Keish

This volume brings the theology of Karl Barth into dialogue with the burgeoning field of comparative theology. In so doing, we recognize that we are drawing Barth into conversations that he himself would never have had. Apart from some engagement with Jewish thought, and a footnote regarding Pure Land Buddhism in Church Dogmatics II/1 (1957), Barth did not spend time learning from the religious traditions of others. We also recognize that we are introducing into the field of comparative theology a thinker who has long been viewed with suspicion. Our wager in this experiment, however, is that both fields of study might benefit from such unlikely interchange.

Comparative Theology Though rooted in the vagaries of nineteenth-century Orientalism and imperialism, the discipline of comparative theology is currently undergoing a total reconceptualization. In the nineteenth century, in an attempt to bring religious traditions into contact with one another, and often to classify them within a hierarchical taxonomy, comparative theology was developed as a subset of comparative religions.1 Since that time, a great deal has changed in the various disciplines of religious studies and in the sociopolitical realities that often drove the questions of theorists of religion. The category of religion itself has come under scrutiny as a creation of the modern nation-state,2 and the broader theoretical quest for a “theology of religion” as it played out in the latter half of the twentieth century is increasingly seen as problematic. Theorists now prefer to speak of “theologies of religious pluralism” to indicate that there is no

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one theological perspective that can or should dominate in attempts to theologically theorize the phenomena of religious pluralism.3 Within this context, comparative theology has reemerged as a strategy that enables one to avoid the most egregious problems of the category of “religion” as such, in order to foster encounter between diferent traditions, though in a more limited and circumscribed fashion. The new comparative theology is interested in questions of truth, but it no longer seeks to unify all truth claims into a single coherent theory or field of knowledge. As Francis Clooney describes it, “comparative theology is a manner of learning that takes seriously diversity and tradition, openness and truth, allowing neither to decide the meaning of our religious situation without recourse to the other.”4 Comparative theologians such as Clooney and John Thatamanil typically maintain strong commitments to a “home” tradition, but they also take seriously the normative claims of at least one other religious tradition, learning “across religious borders”— and in the process, challenging the very notion that these borders are impermeable, or the traditions incommensurable.5 Comparative work is marked by a kind of improvisational indeterminacy. Phenomenologically speaking, comparative study generally comprises careful reading and comparison of a discrete set of texts or rituals from diferent traditions. Frank Clooney himself avers, “In my view, the foremost prospect for a fruitful comparative theology is the reading of texts, preferably scriptural and theological texts that have endured for centuries and millennia, and that have guided communities in their understandings of God, self, and other.”6 Though not all contributors to this volume begin with texts, all would concur with the need for close attention to particularity in the comparative enterprise. Usually a theorist will engage the texts and categories of another tradition, seeking to be immersed in the literature for the purpose of understanding how a diferent tradition understands and conceptualizes the world, God or the gods, and the human community. Then—with these texts, questions and categories in mind—the theologian returns to reread and reengage her home texts and practices to discover new insights in light of what she has learned from another tradition. The outcome of such a procedure cannot be predicted. In general, however, deep learning across religious boundaries is the goal, with the broader purpose of promoting interreligious understanding, cooperation, and peace. Such a procedure is especially adept at engaging one of the most pressing questions of our times: How does one understand and practice one’s own particular faith com-

Introduction

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mitment in the midst of religious diversity? This issue has attracted an increasing amount of attention from Christian theologians over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.7

Karl Barth In the midst of the burgeoning interest in thinking theologically about and with religious “others,” the theology of Karl Barth has usually been considered less than helpful.8 Early in his Church Dogmatics, Barth issued a stinging indictment of all human religion as “faithlessness,” and Christianity alone as the “true religion.” At the same time, he noted that religion could “become true” and argued that Christianity was indeed “true religion” insofar as it had received the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. This claim has caused many theologians, such as Paul Knitter, to label Barth an “exclusivist,” that is, one who believes that Christians alone know God truly and are thus able to be “saved.”9 Based on his blanket judgment on religion, it would appear that Barth has little to contribute to comparative theology, other than a forceful “Nein!” In the past few years, however, some intrepid Barth scholars have suggested other wise, reengaging the Swiss Reformed theologian on the question of religion and religious pluralism with some provocative conclusions. J. A. Di Noia, Garrett Green, Paul Chung, Glenn Chestnutt, Tom Greggs, and Sven Ensminger have all ofered careful readings of Barth’s critique of religion, suggesting that Barth’s theology might provide a constructive resource for a Christian theology of religious pluralism.10 The primary place where critics and defenders begin their analysis is in the extended consideration of religion that occurs as a subsection of Barth’s discussion of the reception and subjective appropriation of revelation. In paragraph 17 of the Church Dogmatics, Barth ofers a critique of “religion as faithlessness.”11 Contrasted with revelation, which is “God’s self-ofering and self-presentation,” which “encounters man under the presupposition and in confirmation of the fact that man’s attempts to know God from his own point of view are futile—wholly and completely,”12 Barth argues that religion as such is, “the concern—of godless man.”13 This is a blanket judgment on all religion, including Christianity, which also “stands under the judgment that religion is faithlessness.”14 In Barth’s construal, revelation is the site of divine action, while religion functions as a site constituted by the human proclivity to construct idols. It is the human attempt to know God on humanity’s own terms rather

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than on God’s terms. It is, therefore, the most sublime, most creative, and most pious attempt to resist God and God’s revelation. As such a remarkable form of unfaithfulness, God says no to religion precisely in and through revelation by rendering a judgment that human attempts to know God without recourse to revelation are futile. Barth underlined this perspective with his use of the terms Aufhebung and aufgehoben.15 In the original English translation of this section of the Church Dogmatics, these terms were rendered as “abolition,” a term that clearly highlights the negation or judgment under which religion falls from Barth’s perspective. This translation emphasized and amplified the anti-idolatry concerns that were certainly one of the motivations for his critique of religion. However, as persuasively argued by Green and others, it also obscured the full picture of Barth’s argument.16 Though a common term in the German language, the technical meaning of Aufhebung is derived from Hegel’s philosophy of history and refers to a dialectical movement of negation, affirmation, and “sublimation” (Green’s preferred term) or lifting up into a higher state. The use of Aufhebung to describe God’s judgment of religion therefore indicates that something more complex is going on here than a simple argument against religion. The other side of Barth’s critique is the affirmation that by God’s gracious action religion can “become true.” Because revelation is the encounter of God with real human beings in concrete human contexts, the historical, cultural, political, and even religious character of human beings will not be left out. God justifies sinners in the fullness of who they are; thus God also lifts up or redeems the historical, cultural, political, and even religious dimensions of human life, taking these aspects into God’s gracious embrace to make them useful as witnesses to God’s grace. It is important to note that Barth is not claiming that the truthfulness of a religious tradition becomes a kind of permanent quality which adheres in religious practices, texts, or institutions, much less in human practitioners. Rather, Barth understood the imbuing of religion with the quality of truthfulness in an actualistic manner, or as an event that had to occur again and again as God engaged the homo religiosus, both judging and rectifying it to make it a fit means of witness to God’s gracious action. Of paramount importance, and ultimately deeply problematic for many theorists of religion, was Barth’s argument that revelation was not an abstract or universal category, but that it was concrete and particular. Barth identified the event of revelation with the name of Jesus Christ.

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Thus, what makes a religion true is its living relationship with the name of Jesus. It is this conviction that leads Barth to note that although “religion is never and nowhere true as such and in itself,” Christianity, in a unique way, can become, by an act of God’s grace “the true religion.”17 It is this move that leads Alan Race to describe Barth as an example of “the most extreme form of the exclusivist position,”18 privileging Christianity as such. Several of Barth’s defenders, however, have countered that this assessment betrays a lack of attunement to Barth’s overall argument, in which Christianity itself is subjected to critical scrutiny, is only true by an act of divine grace, and thus subsequently, “the Christian cannot come to the inter-faith table with any sense of a privileged position, nor even as an equal, but only as one who is the most guilty of idolatry and selfrighteousness even in the quest to purge herself of these things.”19 These defenders point out that Barth’s critique of religion was never primarily concerned with other religious traditions, but with the concept of religion as such that had come to dominate theological reflection in the nineteenth century. As noted by Ensminger, the primary aim of paragraph 17 was “to engage with the movement represented by Friedrich Schleiermacher that drew religion to centre stage in Christian theology—and not to dismiss all religions that are not called ‘Christianity.’ ”20 Likewise, Di Noia insists that, contrary to popular understanding, Barth’s judgment on religion is “emphatically not one that is pronounced upon the world of non-Christian religions by Christianity, nor by its representatives. Nor is it an empirical judgment.”21 It is above all a critique of Christian piety, not a condemnation of others. Green likewise rejects the common interpretation of Barth as an enemy of the study of religion. In a bold move, he even advocates for Barth to be included in the “religious studies canon,” precisely because of his “insider” status, as an incisive theorist of religion who is unapologetically grounded in a religious community.22 Most recently, Greggs has drawn from both Barth’s and Bonhoefer’s critiques of religion to construct a “theology of religions against religion.”23 According to a growing number of Christian theologians, then, Barth’s critique of religion can contribute to a theology of religions that says more than “Christianity—true; the rest—false.” These theologians also insist that for a full picture to emerge of the potential that Barth’s theology might hold for a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, paragraph 17 will have to be read in tandem with Barth’s later thoughts on the “Light and the lights” as articulated in paragraph 69 of the Church Dogmatics.

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Written some twenty years later, CD IV/3 (1961) also takes up questions related to revelation. In his discussion of the “Light of Life” Barth reflects on the relationship between the one true Light or Word of God, Jesus Christ, and all of the many “other words which are quite notable in their way, other lights which are quite clear and other revelations which are quite real.”24 Functioning very much in a solar-lunar dynamic, in which there is only one true source of light that gives light to other entities, the One True Light, Jesus Christ, gives light to all of creation, which in turn sets up lights and words that reflect the One True Light. These other words and other lights, include words and lights expressed both within the church and beyond.25 Here again, Barth places Christianity in solidarity with other religious traditions by noting that even in the church, the True Light is not a possession, even if, for Barth, the True Light shines in an especially bright and clear fashion there. At the same time, Barth’s identification of revelation with the name Jesus Christ does place Christianity in a diferent position vis-à-vis the wider human family. Supposedly the Christian knows or has heard the One True Light, whereas others perhaps have not. Counterintuitively, however, this does not place the Christian in a position of superiority, but rather judgment. Barth argues that the closer proximity to the One True Light forces the Christian not to judge those who have not heard or seen the light explicitly, but instead to ask how far those in the church have heard the Light, and to what extent their little lights reflect faithfully the One True Light. Those words and lights that appear outside of Christianity are described as “secular parables,” and Barth argues that there is no reason not to accept them as true, provided that they find some conviviality with the truth revealed in Jesus Christ. They are to be anticipated and received gratefully. However, Barth is unwilling to consider that these external testimonies to the truth of Jesus Christ should have normative value for Christian theology. They do not rise to the level of revelation. As Ensminger describes it, “On the one hand, Barth affirms the universal existence of such lights and parables of the kingdom. On the other hand, Barth warns against assigning universal significance to any of these lights that will always remain particular. The only one revelation that remains of universal significance is the one revelation of God in Jesus Christ.”26 Barth’s unwillingness to systematize or universalize the truths and lights that can be heard beyond Christianity is an expression of his insistence on upholding the integrity and diference between the One True Light and the lights. For Barth, not only does this keep the divine and the

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human from being confused—for the distinction between the Light and the lights also pertains to so-called Christian lights—but it also produces an affirmation of the integrity and creaturely particularity of the various lights. Interestingly, Barth’s position here points toward a form of interreligious encounter that values the par ticular, allowing for similarities and diferences to emerge without reducing diferent traditions to a generic sameness or needing to reconcile them through a new synthesis. In other words, Barth would seem to ofer a good partner for comparative theological endeavors, wherein the question of a universal category of religion is bracketed out and the need to harmonize diferences into a higher synthesis is generally avoided. Significantly for the current volume, numerous scholars have indeed been picking up on this potential in Barth, bringing his theology into dialogue with other religious traditions, with varying results. Francis Clooney, John Sheveland, Randi Rashkover, Glenn Chestnutt, and Pan-chiu Lai, among others, have all ofered comparative engagements of one sort or another, bringing Barth into dialogue with key figures from Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions.27 Because of the perception of Barth among the majority of comparativists and theologians of religious pluralism, and because of a relative lack of familiarity among Barth scholars, most of these studies have not received the attention that they deserve.

About This Book The present book seeks to extend and deepen this conversation by ofering a series of comparative theological performances that bring Barth’s theology into conversation with theological claims from other religious traditions, for the purpose of modeling deep learning across religious borders from a Barthian perspective. The project hopes to make two overall contributions. First, we believe the volume will show comparativists that Barth can make a constructive contribution as a Christian theologian to the comparative theology discussion. To Barth scholars we believe that the volume ofers a novel trajectory for engaging and thinking with and beyond Barth into the reality of religious pluralism in the twenty-first century. Scant attention has been given to Barth as a conversation partner in the discipline of comparative theology, and we seek to open up new trajectories for comparative theology with this unlikely interlocutor.

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Even as the authors here are primarily interested in engaging Barth as a conversation partner in the enterprise of comparative theology, some of the essays also continue and deepen recent reflections on Barth and theology of religion. For example, Randi Rashkover’s essay ofers a kind of prolegomenon to comparative theology from a Barthian perspective, “repairing” Barth’s theology of revelation with a fuller appreciation of how the Word of God is received in time, as suggested by Christian theologian Robert Jenson. In so doing, Rashkover ofers her own Christianinformed Jewish intervention in Barth’s theology of religions that might help ground comparative theological work. For each tradition addressed in this volume, two scholars of Christian theology engage Barth in conversation with themes and figures from another religious tradition. Many of the essays construct fruitful interchange between Barth and a particular scholar from another tradition; for instance, Joshua Ralston engages Barth on the topic of revelation with al-Ghazali, and James Farwell imaginatively pairs Barth and Dogen on the critique of religion. Others seek to compare Barth’s thought with larger themes from the other tradition, as does Lai Pan-chiu in examining Barth’s theology of universal salvation in conversation with Chinese Buddhism, or Tim Hartman’s efort to think with Barth about theological anthropology in comparison with African traditional religions. Each section then concludes with a response either from a theologian from within that tradition itself or from a theologian with intimate knowledge of the tradition. By engaging Barth in this way, we do not seek to present him as the perfect Christian theological conversation partner. Nearly all of the essays that follow include critiques—sometimes sharp critiques— of Barth’s theology on par ticular points. We do contend, however, that Barth can be a helpful conversation partner for comparative theology precisely because he is such a strong and influential voice for the particularity of Christian theology in the modern world. The writers present a wide variety of interpretations of Barth, and they draw from various parts of Barth’s massive theological output. The essays are arranged according to the extent of Barth’s own explicit engagement with the religious traditions represented here. Thus, we begin with two essays that engage Barth and Judaism, and we end with two essays that initiate conversation between Barth and African traditional/indigenous religions, a conversation that Barth himself did not anticipate. The remaining chapters, engaging Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism, each of

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which Barth mentions briefly in the course of his work, fall in the middle of our collection. In the first essay, Jewish theologian Randi Rashkover explores the encounter between Frank Clooney’s approach to comparative theology and Barth’s confessional theology, with a par ticular eye to their implications for Jewish-Christian relations. Building on her earlier work in Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics, she ofers appreciation for Barth’s confessional approach, which in theory permits the possibility of revelatory encounter beyond the Christian community, because of God’s freedom coupled with the lawful limit of that freedom. However, she argues here, Barth’s critical theology needs a “covenantal repair,” a theological supplement that pays closer attention to the positive role of sanctification through the community’s living apprehension of the Word in time. This “repair” is needed not only for Christians, but for ChristianJewish comparative exchange, so that both communities can describe how a claim about God’s revelation “makes sense” in divine-human conversation. She finds resources for this repair in the work of Robert Jenson, with its analysis of the “covenantal character of the Word.” She concludes that this covenantal logic of scripture (the seeds of which she detects even in Barth’s own theology) “renders both Judaism and Christianity viable participants in the adventure of Clooney’s comparative learning.” Chris Boesel also reflects on the enterprise of comparative theology in his essay “Faith as Immunity to History? Rethinking Barth and Fackenheim.” Reading Barth in conversation with three diferent postHolocaust Jewish theologians on the question of God’s relationship to history, Boesel comes to a new appreciation for the diversity within the Jewish tradition itself. This leads him to pose the impor tant question: “If one is to rethink Christian faith and theology in response to engagement with the Jewish ‘other,’ which Jewish ‘other’?” He challenges all theologians engaged in comparative work to consider whether a predisposition to seek common ground restricts which “others” we engage. He goes on to reconsider his original critical reading of Barth, recognizing that Barth’s own theology “appears to move with an interreligious freedom that can be appropriated as responsive to the diversity of intra-Jewish diference itself,” because of its own emphasis on the radical judgment of God that stands over every human religious claim. Boesel ends by acknowledging the problem of supersessionism that continues to haunt

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Barth’s theology and that must be confessed by any theologian seeking to engage Barth as a conversation partner in Jewish-Christian encounter. In response to these two comparative theological performances, Jewish scholar Peter Ochs ofers comparative theology “raised to the ninth degree.” In nine (sometimes subdivided) moves, he ofers summaries of Boesel and Rashkover’s work, ofers his own constructive observations informed by “scriptural theology,” and then compares the two essays with each other. Finally, he rereads them in light of his own model of scriptural theology. The two essays on Barth and Buddhism both engage aspects of the Mahayana tradition of China and Japan. James Farwell begins by challenging the now-common classification of Barth’s theology of religions as “exclusivism,” calling his position rather a “kerygmatically generated inverse pluralism.” Arguing that Barth’s project is a rejection of any theology of religions, Farwell goes on to engage Barth as a partner in comparative theology, particularly in conversation with the Zen teacher Dōgen, who founded the Soto Zen school of Japanese Buddhism. Despite Barth’s own quick rejection of Zen Buddhism as a religion that seeks salvation in human striving, Farwell finds in Dōgen a critique of religion very similar to Barth’s own. That surprising convergence is itself a worthwhile fruit of comparative theological study. Coupled with this critique, however, Dōgen ofers an illuminating nondualism that makes no ultimate distinction between practice and realization, between the path and the goal of “salvation.” This ofers a new insight that may helpfully temper Barth’s own emphasis on God’s revealing Word as opposed to human efort. Farwell concludes by “asking whether this Buddhist nondualism might ofer help for a Christian theology that honors human efort in religion while preserving what Barth takes to be the core of Christian faith.” Pan-chiu Lai takes up the question of universal salvation in Barth, in conversation particularly with Chinese Buddhism, which recognizes a variety of entrances or “dharma-gates” to salvation. After describing several aspects of the universalism of this Mahayana tradition, Lai turns to Barth and notes parallels in his own theology, including the provocative suggestion that what some scholars deem an inconsistency or change in Barth’s position over time may actually be an example of the Buddhist practice of “skillful means,” a change in teaching method in order to address a diferent concern. Finally, in considering Barth’s doctrine of election, Lai suggests that “Barth’s universalism is more fundamental to

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his own position, while his denial of universalism is merely his own skillful means that is made for the benefit of his audience.” Even so, from a Mahayana perspective Lai critiques Barth’s “implicit universalism” for three reasons: (1) because its caution about declaring a robust universalism does not attend adequately to the need to cultivate compassion in the hearers, (2) because it attends only to human salvation, rather than salvation of all creatures, and (3) because it does not affirm the equality of all humans with the humanity of Christ, implying that there remains an essential diference between humans who are saved and the risen human person of Christ. Paul Knitter responds to these two essays on Barth and Buddhism from his own unique perspective as a “double belonger,” one who is nurtured by and engages in both Christian and Buddhist practices. From that vantage point, and drawing from decades of theological scholarship in religious pluralism, Knitter critically engages Lai and Farwell, suggesting in the end that all eforts in comparative theology with Barth must acknowledge more honestly the inherent dualism and Christomonism in his approach. Joshua Ralston begins the section on Barth and Islam by frankly acknowledging Barth’s own harsh and dismissive comments about Islam and the possibility of Muslim-Christian dialogue. In spite of these comments, Ralston seeks to engage Barth (especially the early Barth) as a conversation partner in comparative theological work by placing his dialectical understanding of revelation as the veiling and unveiling of God in conversation with Ash’arite Sunni thinking about God and revelation, specifically Abu Hamid al- Ghazali’s Al-Maqsad al-Asna (The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God). Both theologians affirm the particularity of revelation that comes only from God, and both reject the possibilities of any analogy of being (analogia entis). For both, to speak rightly about God is emphatically to speak “after revelation”—so analogy and reason may be used, but only in light of what God has first revealed (in Jesus Christ or in the Qur’an). In the end, Ralston calls for theology to be done in a diferent tone than the triumphalism of Barth: “a patient and humble particularity that speaks not only of analogies within faith but also notes ways that we can do theology by attending to analogies across faiths.” In the second essay in this section, Kurt Richardson compares similar eschatological perspectives in Barth and in Shi’a Islam. He discusses

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Barth’s complex understanding of Christ’s parousia as both present and future, and he suggests that there is a parallel understanding in Shi’a Islam, with the first and second occultations of the Twelfth Imam, and the expected return of Jesus and the Mahdi at the end of time. Richardson attends to both the synchronic and the diachronic dimensions of the God-world relation, in which the synchronic refers to the role of the Mahdi and the risen Christ now, while the diachronic refers to the eschatological expectation of their return. He notices striking parallels between the two formulations, both of which have a cosmos filled with the hidden presence of a saving figure who comes toward them from the future to rectify all things. In light of the personal presence of the hidden holy one in both Barth and Shi’a theology, Richardson suggests that community life in the here and now is determined by presence and expectation. Mun’im Sirry responds to these two essays by highlighting diference more than commonality: the diference between Barthian and Islamic thinking, diferences of scholarly interpretation of Barth, and diferences within Barth’s own theological understanding. With appreciation for the work of Ralston and Richardson, Sirry nudges the conversation toward deeper attention to real diferences between religious traditions, suggesting that such diference “should not be viewed as a source of misguidance but rather, perhaps, the consequence of the divine merciful radiance.” In the next set of essays, two scholars bring Barth into conversation with two significant thinkers in the Hindu tradition: the eighth-century Advaita (nondual) philosopher Adi Śaṅkara and the fourteenth-century Srivaisnava theologian Vedanta Desika. First, Marc Pugliese ofers a close reading of Śaṅkara’s interpretation of the Kena Upaniṣad and Barth’s reflections on the self-revelation of God (especially in CD I/1), focusing on the issue of divine subjectivity. He notes that despite their diferences, the two texts exhibit strong parallels in their descriptions of ultimate reality as utterly nonobjectifiable. Most interesting is Pugliese’s suggestion that the Kena Upaniṣad can help respond to critics of Barth by further developing Barth’s theology of God’s subjectivity in ways that follow from what Barth himself says. John Sheveland sets the theme of reconciliation in Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/2 and IV/1 in conversation with Vedanta Desika’s discussion of Bhagavad Gita 18:66 and its call to take refuge in Narayana alone. In both cases, the futility of the human condition is real, but it is sec-

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ondary to the power of divine salvation. Human beings thus live in a paradoxical situation of having been reconciled, yet living much of the time as if that were not so. Sheveland concludes his essay with “pastoral gleanings,” drawing out practical constructive implications from this comparative encounter. In response to these two essays, Advaita scholar Anantanand Rambachan ofers comments both appreciative and critical, extending and deepening the conversation between Barth and these particular thinkers. He commends both Pugliese and Sheveland for their work so far, and ofers each of them a particular challenge to think further about an implication of their comparative work. The final section of this volume opens the door to a newly emerging conversation between Barth and African traditional (or indigenous) religions, as noted earlier. To begin, Victor Ezigbo explores the theme of mediated divine action through a comparison of Barth’s interpretation of scriptural authority and Christopher Ejizu’s view of the nature and functions of ọfọ in the indigenous religion of the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria. In both cases, a human-made object can function as a means for people to encounter God, even as God remains free, never identified or confused with the object. Ezigbo attends carefully to the details of how objects mediate divine-human encounter in each case. Without minimizing the diferences between Barth’s theology and the Igbo understanding of ọfọ, he concludes with attention to their shared conviction that God’s freedom to use fallible texts and objects to encounter humans should chasten every efort to restrict God or make the divine in our own image. Tim Hartman examines African traditional religions more broadly, comparing three major themes in its theological anthropology with the theology of Karl Barth: creation, disobedience/sin, and destiny/salvation. Drawing especially from the work of Kofi Asare Opoku and Jacob Olupona, Hartman argues that Barth and African traditional religions (ATRs) share similar understandings of God as creator who is wholly other than creation, but who is close to creation, and a disruption of that original closeness because of human disobedience. However, because of their diferent interpretations of human disobedience, Barth and African traditional religions difer significantly in understanding salvation, or the resolution of the disruption caused by that disobedience. In his concluding reflections, Hartman suggests a further convergence worth exploring: In contrast to some other Western theologians, “both Barth

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and ATRs posit a universal understanding of humanity in relation to God; all humanity is treated as one whole, not divided into groups.” In the final response of the volume, Nimi Wariboko affirms Ezigbo and Hartman for their pioneering eforts in drawing Barth into conversation with African religious traditions, even as he also cautions against their emphasis on common ground rather than genuine diference. He concludes with a question that ought to occupy all scholars engaged in comparative work between such diferent traditions: How to compare text-based discourse with “fragments of social life”? These essays, together with opening and closing observations from Frank Clooney, Mark Heim, and John Thatamanil, ofer a rich array of comparative experiments in theological reflection. We hope that scholars both comparative and Barthian will find here fodder for further reflection, with conversation partners that they never expected to find. Notes 1. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 72–104. 2. See, for instance, William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 57–122; and William E. Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 3. See, for instance, Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002). 4. Francis Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 8. 5. See John Thatamanil, The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006). 6. Clooney, Comparative Theology, 58. 7. See, for example, the diverse approaches to this question in Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997); Gavin D’Costa, Christianity and World Religions: Disputed Questions in a Theology of Religions (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); David F. Ford and C. C. Pecknold, eds., The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); S. Mark Heim, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001); and Keith E. Johnson, Rethinking the Trinity and Religious Pluralism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011). 8. Some of the following material on Barth, religion, and theologies of religious pluralism also appears in Martha Moore-Keish, “Karl Barth and John Thatamanil: Two Theologians Against Religion,” Bangalore Theological Forum XLV, no.  2 (December 2013): 91–104; reprinted in Always Being Reformed, edited by David Jenson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 77–91.

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9. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions, 23–31. 10. See Donald W. Dayton, “Karl Barth and the Wider Ecumenism,” in Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter Phan (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 181–189; Garrett Green, “Challenging the Religious Studies Canon: Karl Barth’s Theory of Religion,” Journal of Religion 75 (1995): 473–486; J. A. Di Noia, “Religion and the Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243–257; Paul  S. Chung, “On Karl Barth in Interreligious Studies and Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 18, no.  2 (2008): 212–227; Glenn A. Chestnutt, Challenging the Stereotype: The Theology of Karl Barth as a Resource for Inter-religious Encounter in a European Context (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010); Tom Greggs, Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2011); and Sven Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014). 11. We are following here, Garrett Green’s retranslation of paragraph 17 of the Church Dogmatics, which Green shows was marred by serious translation errors. See Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, trans. Garrett Green (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2006), 53. 12. Ibid., 57. 13. Ibid., 55. 14. Ibid., 87. 15. See Garrett Green, “Translators Preface,” in Barth, On Religion, viii–ix; and Ensminger, Barth’s Theology, 50–53. 16. Ibid. 17. Barth, On Religion, 85, 86. 18. Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983), 11. 19. Tom Greggs, “Bringing Barth’s Critique of Religion to the Inter-faith Table,” The Journal of Religion 88, no. 1 (January 2008): 84. 20. Ensminger, Barth’s Theology, 79. 21. Di Noia, “Religion and the Religions,” 250. 22. Garrett Green, Introduction to Barth, On Religion, 28. 23. See his Theology against Religion. Other recent engagements of Barth and religion include Matthew Myer Boulton, God against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), esp. chap. 1; Paul  S. Chung, “Karl Barth’s Theology of Reconciliation in Dialogue with a Theology of Religions,” Mission Studies: Journal of the International Association for Mission Studies 25, no. 2 (2008): 211–228; Paul  S. Chung, “Karl Barth and Inter-Religious Dialogue: An Attempt to Bring Karl Barth to Dialogue with Religious Pluralism,” Asia Journal of Theology 15, no. 2 (2001): 232–246; Wolf Krötke, “A New Impetus to the Theology of Religions from Karl Barth’s Thought,” Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture 7, no. 2 (2011): 29–42; responses by Cliford B. Anderson (43–46) and John P. Burgess (47–50), and rejoinder by Krötke (51–54); and Geof Thompson, “Religious Diversity, Christian Doctrine, and Karl Barth,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 1 (2006): 3–24.

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24. Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1959), 97. 25. “Our statement is simply to the efect that Jesus Christ is the one and only Word of God, that He alone is the light of God and the revelation of God. It is in this sense that it delimits all other words, lights, revelations, prophecies and apostolates, whether of the Bible, the Church or the world, by what is declared in and with the existence of Jesus Christ” (ibid). 26. Ensminger, Barth’s Theology, 37. 27. See Francis X. Clooney, Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 129–162; John Sheveland, Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Deshika (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011); Randi Rashkover, Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005); Glenn Chestnutt, Challenging the Stereotype: The Theology of Karl Barth as a Resource for Inter-religious Encounter in a European Context (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010); Lai Pan-chiu, “Barth’s Doctrines of Sin and Humanity in Buddhist Perspective,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 16, no. 1 (2006): 41–58. See other articles by the same author that pursue this interest in Barth and Buddhism: “Barth’s Christological Harmatiology in Mahāyāna Perspective,” Hill Road 8, no. 2 (2005): 151–177, and “Sinful Flesh, Sinful Nature and Tathāgatagarbha: An Investigation on Christological Anthropology,” CGST Journal 35 (2003): 209–229.

1 Comparative Theology,

Comparative Wisdom, and Covenantal Logic

Randi Rashkover

Francis Clooney’s comparative theology ofers a bold new voice to the now nearly fifty-year old efort to improve Jewish-Christian understanding. Consequently, a rigorous encounter between Clooney’s comparative work and Karl Barth’s theology is important for Jewish and Christian thinkers interested in Jewish-Christian relations. In the following I will illuminate how Clooney’s association of confessional and comparative theology registers as a call to repair Barth’s doctrine of Israel (Israellehre) and supplement Barth’s account of the biblical Word. The stakes of this encounter between Clooney and Barth are very high. Arguably, a confessional theology of witness that cannot participate in comparative theology is not viable. More specifically, an encounter between Clooney and Barth helps us appreciate the relativism and subjectivism that lurk in Barth’s dialectical theology when considered apart from the power of the Word for the community who apprehends it and can act according to it. The same condition required for a viable conception of Christian witness is required for comparative learning with Jews. As Michael Wyschogrod once said in response to Barth’s charge that Jews have the promise but not the fulfillment, “A promise from God is like money in the bank. If we have his promise, we have its fulfillment. If we do not have the fulfillment, we do not have the promise.”1 My discussion will consist of three stages: (1) a brief description of Clooney’s comparative theology, (2) an assessment of the extent to which Barth’s theology ofers a basis for comparative Jewish-Christian learning, and (3) an analysis of why a deeper commitment to the sanctifying power of the covenantal Word is required to supplement Barth’s own theology of the Word for the work of Jewish-Christian relations and comparison.

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Comparative Theology In his Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders, Francis Clooney asserts that comparative theology is an approach to the comparative study of religious traditions that weds faith and inquiry. Doubts concerning the possibility of such a marriage have long constituted a cornerstone conviction of scholars of “religious studies.” The category of “religion” and the attending work of the religious studies scholar are not native to believers, says J. Z. Smith in his well-known essay “Religion, Religions, Religious.”2 Clooney’s work challenges this position. His approach to comparative theology works on two fronts. Not only does it wed faith and comparative inquiry, but it also carves out a model of nonpolemical interreligious dialogue. Both tasks presuppose an account of religious traditions as resources of learning and reparative or righteous activity. I will detail herein what I take to be the conditions of the possibility of a faith tradition resourced for comparative learning. Before I do so, it is important to highlight the contribution this comparative learning can make to eforts in interreligious dialogue, using work in JewishChristian relations to illustrate. Ever since Nostra Aetate, Jewish-Christian dialogue has largely conformed to a “getting along” model. Useful for practical purposes only, this model presupposes a dramatic diference between the revelatory contents and/or claims of the traditions involved but also recognizes, external to these contents, certain human commonalities that suffice to make shared projects or practical endeavors possible.3 Participants at this level do not exchange what are taken to be par ticular and so-called untranslatable elements, such as the laws or doctrines of their respective traditions. Rather, participants keep their most treasured truths to themselves harboring, I would argue, the possibility for a latent polemicism. This strictly “practical” engagement needs a theoretical corrective. By “theoretical” I do not mean the mere presentation or explanation of a community’s beliefs, but an exposure of the reasoning processes implicit in a community’s par ticular and concrete claims. Clooney’s comparative theology ofers a fine example of this kind of exchange. Genuine understanding, Clooney maintains, guards against easy abstractions that predetermine the subject matter of the tradition studied. “The comparative theologian needs to [pay] . . . attention to the particular details of traditions wherein key truths dwell, and not [to the] a priori judgments informed only by knowledge of her own religion.”4 Such a focus should

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be local rather than sweeping, textual rather than ideational and material more than abstract. Moreover, participants in comparative theology must be able to ofer credible accounts of their own tradition and become familiar with the credible accounts of another. “Theologians have particular responsibility, since the public credibility of faith positions relies in part on our demonstration that we are inter-religiously literate, knowing what to say, how to make measured judgments within the bounds of our learning.”5

Barth, Israel, and Comparative Theology With this brief description of Clooney’s comparative project in mind, we can now ask whether Barth’s account of the gospel can serve as a resource for comparative theological work when viewed from the position of its contribution to Jewish-Christian relations. Let us begin by considering the groundbreaking essay by the late Michael Wyschogrod, “Why Was and Is Karl Barth’s Theology of Interest to a Jewish Theologian?” Written on the coattails of an historic 1966 meeting between the two scholars in Basel, Switzerland, the essay identifies the common appreciation for the God of the Bible shared by Barth and Jewish theologians. Like scholars of Judaism, Barth appreciates the God of the Bible who demonstrates his free power by choosing to draw near the children of Abraham. Barth, Wyschogrod says, is a “biblically-attuned thinker whose focus is on the God of Israel.” As noted, Wyschogrod’s biblical God is free and electing.6 Indeed, God’s freedom is so great as to be incomprehensible to us, and Wyschogrod maintains that among Christian theologians it is Barth who takes this freedom most seriously. Unfortunately, Wyschogrod’s portrayal of the biblical God renders his account of Judaism and Barthian Christianity incompatible with Clooney’s project. A God whose freedom registers as incomprehensible and unpredictable is a God whose ways exceed our understanding, even when those ways are the ways of the law: Because Israel hears the Word of God in scripture it is simply not capable of dismissing these commandments, whether they make sense or whether they do not (emphasis mine). . . . The Jewish reader dreams of a Barth who would understand Israel’s refusal to discard its commandments, its stubborn clinging to practices which make no sense other than that they are written in the bible.7

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Wyschogrod’s view is incompatible with comparative theology, because comparative theology presupposes the ability to ofer credible accounts of one’s tradition and is nonpolemical. However, it is not possible to ofer a credible account of one’s tradition if one’s tradition is inscrutable, the by-product of a God whose own transcendent incomprehensibility casts a shadow over the comprehensibility of the commandments he delivers. Moreover, failure to ofer a credible account of the contents of one’s tradition together with a claim to having been “elected” and/or “loved” by an incomprehensible God renders participants in that tradition polemically positioned in relation to those who have not been the beneficiaries of an inscrutable act of God in history. Consequently, even if Wyschogrod identifies an overlap between his account of Jewish election and Barth’s, this does not mean that the overlap is a fruitful resource for comparative theology or even that Barth’s theology comports with the description Wyschogrod gives. In Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics,8 I took up the second of these points, arguing that Barth’s recognition that the law is the form of the gospel renders his witness theology a more efective basis for interreligious encounter than what we find in Wyschogrod’s thought. More specifically, I illuminated how Barth’s appreciation of the lawful character of divine freedom and the free nature of God’s lawfulness give rise to an account of Christian witness as justified (affirmed) and yet also limited or lawful (ordered) in relation to a wholly other God. If Wyschogrod’s reverence for the nexus between divine freedom and Abrahamic election left open the prospect of an unchecked and potentially polemical account of Jewish (and Christian) communal privilege, a more rigorous account of election mindful of the lawful diference between the divine and the human can bring into view a rationality and limit regarding the exceptionalism of witnessing communities. The same God whose freedom in grace engendered the possibility of witness is a God whose infinite qualitative diference from us installs a limit upon this testimony, opening up the viability of someone else’s account. As Barth himself wrote, Is it not inevitable, then, that our self-understanding as Christians should constrain us on this side, together with our knowledge of the existence of Jesus Christ in its universal significance, to an openness towards others. . . . For all of the seriousness with which we must distinguish between Christians and non-Christians, we can never think in terms of a

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rigid separation. All that is possible is a genuinely unlimited openness of the called in relation to the uncalled.9

There is nothing, I argued, in the logic of Christian witness to close it of from listening to the testimony or discourse of those outside of the tradition. If anything, Barth’s logic of election, I argued, encourages Christian openness to non-Christian revelatory proclamations since anything less constitutes a denial of God’s freedom, the freedom of God to love and elect wherever and whomever he chooses.10 Let us evaluate this reading of Barth’s argument with greater scrutiny. A Christian’s obligation to recognize another’s right to testimony derives from the fact that she is neither the source of the justification nor the truth of her own claim. Both the rationality and potential truth-value of Christian witness emerge strictly from God’s elective self-determination in Christ. Consequently, as a Christian, she simply cannot deny the rationality and/or possible truth of another’s testimony. Christians, Barth says, are “made by Him [emphasis mine]. His witnesses . . . not for the vain increase of their knowledge of men, the world and history by this or that which they now come to know of God.”11 Still, what does this acknowledgment look like, and does it prepare the Christian to engage in comparative theology with Jewish partners? Simply stated, if Christian witness is commensurate with an openness to a non-Christian witness as justified and possibly true, and yet if such justification and potential truth of the other’s claim is, like my own, beyond my control since both rest upon an unpredictable act of divine will, then openness to another’s witness amounts to little more than openness to another’s hope that her witness (in whatever form or expression she ofers) will be verified by God. Devoid of a standard by which she can measure the veracity of her own claim, the listening Christian must concede the same lack of standard in discerning the truth-value of another’s claim. No doubt, Barthian Christians may engage with non-Christians in an exchange of wishes, hopes, and dreams, but without a reliable means of verification (one which is available and usable by the claimants themselves), such dreams cannot count as “credible” statements of a tradition and cannot constitute the material for an authentic comparative exchange. Consequently, recognition of the lawfulness of God’s freedom does not, I have come to recognize, suffice to render Barth’s Christian a viable participant in comparative theological exchange, even if it issues a

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corrective to Wyschogrod’s overemphasis upon election as an expression of divine freedom alone. At its core, Barth’s theology sufers from a tendency toward abstraction, and an encounter with Clooney’s call for comparative theology brings this tendency into bold relief. Barth’s Israellehre ofers a good example, as attested by a range of noteworthy scholars including Katherine Sonderegger, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, and Eugene Rogers.12 Across the board, scholars recognize the failure of Barth’s Israel doctrine to initiate real learning about Judaism, its concrete texts and living reality. Sonderegger addresses the point directly. According to Barth, she says, Israel does not live an individual existence; it belongs to another. . . . Israel serves Christ, despite the rejection of “its Messiah,” much as the stuf of our environment must answer to our call. . . . As his environment, the community expresses nothing of itself, but reflects its one Lord. . . . It mirrors the form of the Person “judged,” the form of the One who is “passing away.”13

In light of this, Sonderegger asks, does not “Barth’s treatment of Israel . . . denigrate history, reduce reality to the Idea now . . . called Jesus Christ?”14 The problem briefly stated is that while Barth’s electing God certainly uses his freedom for us (i.e., affirms us and does so within the context of God’s transcendent lawfulness), this same God does not use his freedom to communicate “to us.” God’s electing grace remains always God’s exclusive privilege, leaving recipients unable to apprehend, predict and/or proclaim this grace in a way that can be publically understood and evaluated. Without, in other words, a more developed account of how Barth’s theology of the “Nein” stands in relation to his theology of the Word, Barth’s theology of critique and “justification” devolves into a subjectivism or conventionalism of the ecclesial witness. Barth’s theology needs, I will argue, a covenantal repair.

From the Nein to Wisdom Barth scholars have long argued over the relationship between the Nein expressed so powerfully in the second edition of the Epistle to the Romans and the theology of Word in the Church Dogmatics.15 Does the emphasis in the Dogmatics upon the eternal and electing Word alter the impact of the earlier Nein? Unfortunately, I believe the answer is no.

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The power of Barth’s theology derives from its undying critique of the religious and nonreligious discourse of his day. Barth was not alone in proclaiming the brutal and tragic failure of early twentieth-century European thought and politics, but his Nein registered as the most compelling response to it within Christian and Jewish theological circles. “No!” Barth said to the modern reverence for unbridled human power. “No!” Barth said to an anthropological focus of Christian discourse. And by “no,” Barth meant “no” to the sufering permitted and caused as a result of them. Still, Barth’s Nein is not his own. It is, he maintains, the central message of the gospel itself. If God’s Word is “the truth of God,” it is a truth which registers to us “a question-mark against all truths . . .[a] krisis of all power . . .” a divine Nein to all of our eforts to repeat it, appropriate it and render it somehow our own. The community “is related to the Gospel only insofar as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself.”16 Immersed in the Krisis of the divine judgment, the community’s witness is dialectical only in relation to the Word. Undoubtedly, Barth’s Nein is a biblical Nein, but does it exhaust the Word? Has Barth taken the rightful insistence upon the Nein as a call to return to the Word, and nonetheless collapsed the two together? Surely there is more to the Word than the Nein. To say other wise is to mistake a prophetic recognition of the failure of modern culture to arrive at a meaningful account of scripture for the meaning of the scripture itself, and in the process choke of access to the scripture’s salvific possibilities, its reparative resources, its tools of wisdom. Unfortunately, Barth’s developed account of the electing power of the Word in the Church Dogmatics does little to alter the identification in Romans of the Word and the Nein. If, as Barth himself attests, the Church Dogmatics ofers a more detailed account of the divine “yes” as God’s eternal election of human persons in Jesus Christ, this election is an election of Jesus as the only authentic witness of God’s word. I have found few more pointed accounts of the limits of Barth’s Christological “yes” than that ofered in the work of Robert Jenson. In a 1993 essay, “You Wonder Where the Spirit Went,”17 Jenson brings to the fore the character and consequence of Barth’s truncated pneumatology as this impacts his account of communal salvation. There is, according to Jenson, a diference between a divine echo and the reality of a pneumatologically afected community. For Barth, as Jenson reads him, determination of and action

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according to the Word arise only through the interaction between God and God’s eternal electing activity in Christ. At best, this activity echoes within the witnessing community but cannot be measurably and efectively attested thereby. The Word issues a powerful Nein unmitigated by the labor of the Holy Spirit. The consequences of this neglect are grave. As Eugene Rogers notes, Jenson illuminates how for Barth “the Spirit is no agent in itself but God’s capacity to echo in some other agent. The echo is unreliable or too hard to discern—‘subjective’ in any agent but Jesus. . . . The Spirit echoes rather than acts in human history. Thus the Church reduces all too easily to Church history, rather than mediating salvation.”18 Devoid of the mediating agency of the Spirit by means of which God’s electing grace is presented “to” and not only “for” the witnessing community, the community devolves into subjectivism since the infinite qualitative diference between the divine and the human appears to prohibit access to the signs of salvation that undoubtedly constitute the central gift of the electing God to the elected community. But what is the way forward? What can we say about this apparent Barthian dead end? Has it not left us with the paradox of the elected community whose electing God is so wholly other that both he and his command to love and to witness remain forever incomprehensible? Hasn’t the Nein itself lost all meaning if it inevitably dissolves into the discourse of the selfsame human community who stands in perpetual need of God’s free election? Surely this cannot be the entire story, for Barth tells us that witness assumes the form of repentance; awareness of our sin ofers the dialectical yet undeniably authentic expression of God’s unique love and reality. Sin is a negative signpost of the infinite. The announcement of sin holds meaning, a negative meaning no doubt, but a meaning nonetheless. Barth was correct in declaring that the Nein does not stand alone. It constitutes a feature of a larger discourse. More specifically, the Nein is a judgment or a proposition concerning the relation between the finite and the infinite; either we speak of sin, and when we do we issue a judgment of relation, or we cannot speak of sin at all, and the Nein devolves into meaninglessness. This is good news, for we have discovered that the Nein operates within a larger system of signs. In Barthian terms, the meaning of the Word as Nein presupposes the meaning of the Word as more than Nein. God’s “judgment” makes sense only in relation to our sanctification. I will shortly discuss what it means to think of the scripture as the condition of the possibility of an announcement or judgment of the Nein in rela-

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tion to an infinite for which it is the negation. Certainly, I do not mean to suggest that scripture afords readers a single account of what it means to say that sinners relate to the transcendent God. To speak of scripture as the condition of the possibility of repentance is to speak of scripture as an occasion or opportunity for the determination of judgments asserting the relation between the finite and the infinite as these relations are discerned over time. It is to speak of the labor of the Holy Spirit as it renders God’s Word available “to” persons as an address that they take up and respond to in history. In this context, Nein will signify the community’s ability to say, “The gospel is not properly conveyed in this judgment or account of the relation but here in this one.” Nein will mean “critique” within a context of knowing what can count as an announcement of witness and what cannot. I will detail how a community evaluates its judgments. Suffice it to say here that the process is one whereby participants ask whether or not a given judgment regarding the gospel demonstrates the gospel as meaningful in the current context. To achieve such a determination requires communal investigation into how a judgment is held in relation to other judgments taken as meaningful in that same context. Critique, we have concluded, does not stand alone without dissolving into meaninglessness. We owe this observation to Hegel who first identified the problem with respect to Kant’s “critique” of reason,19 a problem that, as noted, extends its shadow over Barth’s partial turn to the Word. Briefly stated, Hegel identified the limits of Kant’s critique in its failure to recognize the synthetic labor of Reason that it nonetheless presupposed. Having bent over backward to announce the irreparable gap or negation between the finite and the infinite, Kant failed to appreciate the synthetic links forged by this insight itself. As a result, Kant relegated reason to the knowledge of the subjective knower, knowledge which is always inadequate over and against the reality of the “thing in itself.” However, Hegel maintained that such a conclusion failed to tell the whole story. A reason capable of reflecting upon its own limits was a reason that exceeded them so far as it could and did issue judgments about the negative relation between its categorical knowledge and the so-called infinite or noumenal realm. What first appeared as an announcement of the limits of a finite reason had morphed into the recognition of a higherlevel activity of reflection altogether. Barth’s Nein bears all the marks of the Kantian critique, its limits and potential for repair. If however the Kantian repair requires recourse to

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“reason” or “infinite thinking” as the exercise of reflection, the Barthian repair requires recourse to the infinite thinking of and with the scripture, an infinite thinking made possible within the context of a more complete account of the elective logic of the biblical Word and the relation between the covenant logic of Israel and the covenant logic of Christ.

Covenant Logic and the Signs of Salvation At this juncture, the encounter between Clooney’s comparative theology and Barth’s theology of witness has yielded a call to deepen Barth’s account of the Word. More specifically, the encounter has taught us that (1) confessional theology is only critical when it presupposes a wider discourse within which and in relation to which this critique may assume meaning, and therefore, (2) Barth’s strictly practical and critical account of theological work presupposes and requires a speculative and/or theoretical component. In other words, justification or the encounter with the divine “No” presupposes sanctification or a divine “yes” manifest through the hermeneutical labor of the witnessing community as it appropriates and apprehends God’s Word in time. Finally, it has taught us that (3) the same account required to understand Christian life is needed to render Christianity a resource for Jewish-Christian comparative exchange when by comparative exchange we mean a nonpolemical encounter between the credible accounts of two diferent traditions. Among Christian theologians, it is Robert Jenson whose work most powerfully reflects this move. Echoing the analysis ofered here, Jenson’s introductory account of the task and labor of Christian theology attends to the necessary relationship between theology as practical critique and theology as theoretical reflection when both emerge as hermeneutical responses to the covenantal address of the biblical Word. Deeply cognizant of the binary between a heavy-handed dogmatic Catholicism (the theology to which Barth directed his Nein) on the one hand and a nearly self-defeating and relativistic Protestant humility (into which Barth’s own thinking can devolve) on the other hand, Jenson identifies the turn to the tradition’s hermeneutical engagement with the text as the means by which both approaches may be mediated. The two strands of Christian thought need each other. Like me, Jenson understands that critique cannot stand alone. It presupposes content and it presupposes a standard by means of which we can assess it. In Jenson’s language, it presupposes a “determinate object of thought.”20 Without that object of thought, cri-

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tique morphs into subjectivism. On the flip side, religious claims concerning said object of thought must be available for critique lest we identify the truth of Christian witness with whatever Catholic theologian’s decree. Surely both formulas are needed. When the Reformation’s rule from proclamation is not followed, theology slips from its assignment. When the catholic rule from prayer is not followed, theology slips from its object, for it is the church’s prayer and praise, in their verbal form and in the obtrusively embodied forms called sacrifice, that the church’s discourse turns and fastens itself to God as its object.21

Most significantly, it is the Word of scripture, according to Jenson, that ofers the condition of the possibility of both. It provides the “content” or “message” that the Reformers sought to protect, and it guarantees the diference between the message as God’s Word and the apprehension of that Word by the community. However, Jenson’s description of the Word as the condition of the possibility of theoretical and practical reflection is none other than a description of its covenantal character, when by covenant I mean a relationship consisting in both divine promise or love and a human response or apprehension of that announcement. Jenson’s explicit identification of the covenantal character of the Word correlates directly with his identification of trinitarian thinking and the Hebrew scriptures and his appreciation for the inextricable link between the divine promise and its fulfillment in and through our righteous wisdom. Frequently, he says, “The church’s trinitarianism is . . . thought to depart from Israel’s interpretation of God. This is the exact contradictory of the truth.”22 Jenson’s case relies upon his understanding of the gospel. As an announcement of good news, the gospel is a witness to something. “Our reflective situation over against the gospel as our object can be subtle rather than merely treacherous only if we persevere in attending to one character of the gospel: that it is witness to something.”23 Either the gospel is a witness “to” something (i.e., about a “determinate object of thought”) or it is not. But if it is not a witness to something, then it is not about anything and there is little need to attend to it. But, what is its determinate object? The determinate object of the gospel is the event of God’s resurrection of Jesus. More specifically, the determinate content is God’s identification of Godself as the one who raised Jesus as this announcement is understood and interpreted by the apostles who first

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witness to it. Consequently, witness is tantamount to a claim regarding God’s Word in relation to persons. But this is just another way of saying that Christian witness is a “judgment” (in the Kantian sense) that expresses the relation between the infinite and the finite. But how do we know or on what grounds can it be maintained that this judgment, this claim is indeed about something? What is the condition of the possibility of the objective validity of the witness to the resurrection? The answer, of course, is the determinate object of thought itself. God’s resurrection of Jesus itself constitutes the condition of the possibility of its own knowability. It is the object that establishes the means by which knowledge of it is possible. What do I mean? What does it mean to say that “God is the one who raised Jesus”? According to Jenson, the claim that God is the one who raised Jesus takes on meaning as the conjunction of two primary (first order) semantic resources. On the one hand, “God is the one who raised Jesus” is a divine announcement, a divine self-identification. “Jesus raised” is the divine self-indexing of God’s own identity, a “see here: This is who I am. I am the one who you can find in these objects,” or as Jenson details, “the loaf and cup, the bath, and the rest of the gospel’s factual churchly embodiment [which count as] his own objectivity.”24 By the same token, this self-indexical announcement is addressed to persons; it is a call to them that they should participate in the apprehension of this objectification. Inevitably they will take it up from the vantage point of their own perspectives. The gospel, Jenson insists, is a composite of divine Word and church, and together both constitute its content. The determinate object of thought is an address to others. God’s resurrection of Christ is not merely for but spoken to the community and rendered apprehensible by this speech and by way of the other material signs which are referenced by God in his announcement. In this way, God’s grace functions as the condition of the possibility of the appropriation and/or knowability of it by those who witness to it because God’s grace is expressed in signs. So understood, witness refers to the ongoing process of the community’s discernment of the relation between the infinite and the finite such that this judgment (i.e., God is the one who raised Jesus) continues to “make sense.” Taken together, the good news registers as a divine-human conversation, the contents of which get formulated into judgments expressed in the scripture and the canonical tradition, or what we may describe as a historically refined depository of wisdom. That articulations of the gos-

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pel assume the character of their current pronouncement in history and contribute to an ever-developing pool of righteous knowledge derives from the fact that the gospel is not, in Jenson’s estimation, a repetition or echo of God’s speech. We must ask: Why is thinking needed? . . . We have heard the gospel and now are to speak it; why not just repeat what we heard? Should not gospelspeakers be qualified primarily by accurate memory or close preservation of documents? The gospel . . . lives only in history. If the gospel is indeed to be news decisive for those who, at a time and place, are there to hear it, it must be news about the projected fulfillments and feared damnations by which people’s lives are then and there moved, and these are constant across neither time nor space.25

From the start, God’s self-confessed identity as the one who raised Jesus was addressed and taken up by the apostolic community, who interpreted it within the framework of their already established understanding of the Hebrew scriptures. In this way, apostolic witness operated as an extension of Jewish wisdom—a testimony to an event thought to be narratively (and as we will see logically) contiguous with Israel’s prior encounters with the God who liberated Israel as this encounter was itself apprehended and responded to by the Israelite community. If, in other words, God’s self-confession as the one who raised Jesus constitutes the condition of the possibility of the appropriation of this address by the community to whom it is spoken, that is, if it constitutes the condition of the possibility of the objective validity of the gospel witness itself, this is a direct result of the Hebraic and more specifically covenantal context by means of which the apostles understood it. The transcendental logic of God’s Christological selfconfession, or extent to which God’s self-confession constitutes the condition of the possibility of the apostolic community’s ability to make judgments regarding the relation between the infinite and the finite over time, comes out of the covenantal logic of the Hebrew scriptures, and it is a restored awareness of this logic that, according to Jenson, Christianity needs in order to preserve the Gospel as the lifeline of practical Christian witness and speculative Christian knowledge. I maintain that this is also necessary in order for Christianity to operate as a participant in the nonpolemical and potentially reparative work of comparative learning. A closer look of the logic of relations at work in Exodus 19 illuminates Jenson’s and my position.

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Exodus 19 exposes the transcendental logic of the Word, whether this is the Word that God conveyed in the redemption from Egypt and the giving of the law at Mount Sinai or the Word that God spoke in the resurrection of Jesus. But what is this transcendental structure? “Moses went up to God, and the lord called to him from the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the sons of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and brought you to Myself” (Exodus 19:3–4). Often taken as God’s invocation of a prior enactment of love and redemption, Jenson reads Exodus 19:4 as a call to the future. All discourse, Jenson remarks, tenses toward the future insofar as it addresses a listener who will upon hearing it take it up into her own understanding. Likewise this is true with respect to God’s particular announcement of love here addressed to the Israelites at Sinai, and what emerges is a logic of promise and fulfillment, grace and sanctification. God’s Word is both because it is addressed to us and as such it generates the conditions for our ongoing appropriation and discernment of it through time. An invocation of God’s past deed, this announcement also counts as promise, not by virtue of the predictability inscribed in God’s history but by virtue of the command to attend to it implicit in the address (i.e., “see” or “you see” what I did to the Egyptians). In other words, “Hear O Israel” as stated in Deuteronomy 6:4 means, “Take note of the objective manifestation of my action and apprehend it and act accordingly.” God speaks and objectifies his grace, and the community receives it. Covenantal conversation, we might say, draws from four total semantic sources: divine and human announcement or utterance and divine and human interpretive contexts. On the one hand there is God’s particular announcement, but this announcement presupposes the long and eternal trajectory of God’s own wisdom. On the other hand, the community utters its own reply but it too is indebted to an interpretive history that accompanies it in its understanding of the world around it. In the Torah, God speaks his wisdom to us that we may appropriate it as our own. God, Jenson says, “includes us just as and only (emphasis mine) as he speaks torah to us.” And he cites Deuteronomy, “Oh Israel, give heed to the statues and the ordinances which I teach you . . . that you may live. That will be your wisdom and your understanding in the gift of the peoples” (Deuteronomy 4:1–6). Most significantly, Jenson’s account echoes references to the notion of covenant throughout the rabbinic corpus. In Midrash Rabbah, Song of Songs, we read, “When the Israelites

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heard at Sinai the word ‘I’, their souls left them . . . the Holy One blessed be He . . . sweetened the Word for them.”26 God speaks to the people from out of God’s history of encounters with them. Still, God’s covenantal word is sweet. It is for the people to receive in the moment and interpret in light of its own ongoing history into the future. We have come this long way in order to accommodate Clooney’s association between confession and comparison and have learned that indeed a call for comparative theology registers as a call for a confessional tradition to take seriously its signs of salvation, the sweetness of the scriptural Word as apprehended and acted upon by elected communities. A Christianity that cannot engage in comparative learning with Jews and others is a Christianity that devolves into subjectivism, a Christianity incapable of enacting an awareness of its sin and/or a life of sanctification and witness. That the key to the recovery of a post-Barthian Christian confession could be found in a retrieval of the covenantal logic of the Hebrew scriptures as reflected in the theology of the rabbis and in a Christian theologian like Jenson, only demonstrated the extent to which Barth’s theology of the Word contained the seeds of its own repair. That is, repair emerges when Barth’s “Nein” is understood as a part of God’s covenantal conversation not only to his people but for and with his people, a conversation within which this people responds through the ongoing determination of its understanding of the relation between the finite and the infinite, sin and sanctification, promise and fulfillment. In closing, it is important to return to Clooney’s project and illustrate how an account of the covenantal logic of scripture renders both Judaism and Christianity viable participants in the adventure of Clooney’s comparative learning. With the help of Jenson we have come to understand how scripture and in par ticular the semiotic logic by means of which it operates constitutes the condition of the possibility of a tradition of righteous judgments regarding the relation between the finite and the infinite generated by the witnessing communities. It is these judgments, I maintain, which provide the material for comparative learning so far as they can be defended as elements of a credible account. Earlier we determined that a credible account is one for which the determinant can ofer just that, “an account.” Such an account works as more than a simple presentation of a claim but ofers a deeper explanation of why the claim “makes sense.” But what might such an account look like? According to Jenson (and I agree), it looks like a formulation of the relation between the infinite and the finite that helps render God’s

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announcement meaningful; that is, it looks like a contemporary formulation of what it takes to say God’s Word in a way that fits together with the other claims we use and accept. When, Jenson asks, might a speculative reflection upon a traditional claim count as a theologically valid position? When that speculative reflection helps make the tradition’s response or witness a meaningful one. The scriptural test of a theologoumenon is its success as a hermeneutical principle: whether it leads to exegetical success or failure with mandated churchly, homiletical, liturgical and catechetical uses of Scripture. Presented by the church with a text and a stipulated use, we try by aid of such theology as we have to make the stated use of the text.27

So understood, speculative reflection presupposes critical analysis. It is called upon to answer the questions, “Are we witnessing the gospel, are we performing the law, are we rightly hearing God’s announcement?” Nonetheless, what matters here is not only the fact that the speculative comes into play on account of the practical, but that the practical concern can be addressed by the labor of the speculative. Having appropriated the sweetness of the Word that has been addressed to them for them to “see,” to “hear,” and to “know,” the community is in a position to think and reflect upon the nature of the judgments it issues and in this reflection ask the transcendental questions: “How are we making this judgment, how are we identifying the infinite and the finite in this particular claim and how does this formulation relate to other claims we make?” Comparative theology presupposes this sort of transcendental reflection and the very conditions of it are covenantal. Any Christianity capable of comparative learning is a Christianity that has recovered the logic of its covenantal origins and sees itself as a continuation of the wisdom of Israel. Notes 1. Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish- Christian Relations, ed. R. Kendall Soulen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 210. 2. In Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms in Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–284. 3. For an example of this approach, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” Union Theological Seminary Quarterly Review 21, no. 2 (January 1966): 117–134. 4. Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 15.

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5. Ibid., 6. 6. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 58–63. 7. Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, 217. 8. Randi Rashkover, Freedom and Law: A Jewish- Christian Apologetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). 9. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3.2, ed. T.  F. Torrance and G.  W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1962), 494. 10. See Rashkover, Freedom and Law, 271–274. 11. CD IV/3.2, 576. 12. Katherine Sonderegger, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Israel, (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Die Entdeckung des Judentums für die christliche Theologie: Israel im Denken Karl Barths (Munich: Kaiser, 1967); Eugene Rogers, “Supplementing Barth on Jews and Gender: Identifying God by Anagogy and the Spirit,” Modern Theology 14, no. 1 (January 1998): 43–81. 13. Sonderegger, That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, 66–67. 14. Ibid., 54. 15. For an extensive review of this issue see Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 16. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 36. 17. Pro Ecclesia, 2 no. 3 (Summer 1993): 296–304. 18. Eugene Rogers, The Holy Spirit Classics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 10. 19. For an early yet determinative presentation of Hegel’s analysis, see G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977). 20. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1:12. 21. Ibid., 14. 22. Ibid., 63. 23. Ibid., 12. 24. Ibid., 13. 25. Ibid., 14–15. 26. Midrash Rabbah, Song of Songs, V, 16, 3. 27. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:32–33.

2 Faith as Immunity to History? RETHINKING BARTH A N D FA C K E N H E I M Chris Boesel

This chapter presents a personal history of comparative encounter between the Christian theology of Karl Barth and the Jewish philosophy and theology of Emil Fackenheim and the various moments of rethinking that history has entailed. It is the history of my own journey as a Christian theologian who, deeply informed by Barth, became increasingly engaged with Jewish theological and philosophical thought in the post-Holocaust context. I believe this encounter between Barth and Fackenheim meets the general characterization of comparative theological encounter laid out by Francis Clooney and others.1 However, the story of this journey also raises a question for me about certain unstated theological assumptions that sometimes appear to frame the comparative theological encounter. I often get the impression that the result of rethinking one’s own tradition in light of a comparative theological encounter with a religious “other” is generally expected to follow a rather predictable course, causing one to move from more conservative and orthodox dimensions of one’s home faith toward more progressive, open, and dialogical theological positions, for example, in relation to religious pluralism.2 This is how I sometimes hear the value of comparative theology as a discipline being characterized in informal contexts: It functions to question “fixed,” “closed” orthodoxies and helps move theologians and their theologies toward fluidity and dialogical openness. That this is assumed to be a good thing betrays the progressive theological assumptions of those making the characterization. However, mine is a journey in which the rethinking of my own tradition (e.g., Christian theology à la Barth) in a progressive direction in light of my growing knowledge of the religious “other” (e.g., Fackenheim) becomes complicated—indeed, rethought—the more

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deeply the religious “other” is engaged within the conflictual multiplicity of “conservative” and “progressive” in their own intrareligious context. The question that is raised for me in light of this journey, then, is this. If, methodologically, the outcome of comparative theological encounter is to be truly open, unforeseeable, and not anticipatable—as, for example, no less a leader in the field than John Thatamanil claims—can a genuine comparative theological encounter lead to more orthodox, less dialogical positions within one’s home faith?3 Is this allowed, given that even Clooney assumes the results of comparative encounter will entail “the destabilization and reformation of [for example] Christian identity?”4 And it came to pass that during the course of my graduate studies I presented a paper in which I radically rethought Barth’s Christian theological position on revelation and history in response to Fackenheim’s Jewish treatment of that issue in light of the Holocaust (I will present the basics of that rethinking shortly, as the first “moment” of my comparative encounter). After presenting the paper, a Jewish auditor of the session vehemently chastised me for taking Fackenheim seriously as the voice of Judaism and Jewish theological thought. This was a European Jew who spoke with such emotion and authority that I could not help wondering if she had lost family in the camps. In an attempt to understand this unanticipated response, I continued to study Fackenheim on faith and history, but now in the context of other Jewish theological voices (Eliezer Berkovits and Joseph B. Soloveitchik are the other Jewish thinkers I focus on in this essay). The more I came to know and understand the intra-Judaic conflict on this issue, the more I was led to rethink Fackenheim’s approach and position. This rethinking of Fackenheim in light of other Jewish voices in turn called for a rethinking of my previous rethinking of Barth in light of Fackenheim. Here, again, is my question: What if this rethinking of Fackenheim in the midst of other Jewish “others” results in a new rethinking of Barth that counters the conclusions of the previous rethinking; that is, that results in a rechanging of one’s mind, a “return”—that is also a going forward—to a deeper affirmation of Barth’s Christian position in relation to Fackenheim, but with an accompanying depth of appreciation for the risks involved? Is this rechanging of one’s mind a possible—or more to the point, acceptable— outcome of comparative theology?5 Relatedly, to what extent is the project of comparative theology

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truly open to unknown consequences of the comparative encounter? To what extent—at least as practiced by some—might it be predisposed if not predetermined in the direction of certain outcomes more than others, for example, outcomes consistent with certain progressive ethical and theological assumptions and commitments?

Barth on Divine Revelation and Immunity to History In To Mend the World, Emil Fackenheim notes that “Barth wrote about the Jews as though the Holocaust had not happened: for his Christianity it had not happened. Only the original Good Friday was before Easter. Every subsequent Good Friday, Auschwitz included, is after Easter, overcome in advance.”6 This critique of Barth’s theology is rooted in Fackenheim’s view of the Holocaust as a radically unique historical event, an event of total rupture. It is “an event that calls into question all things: God, the ancient revelation and the modern secular self-confidence, philosophical thought, and indeed, any kind of thought.”7 For thought to confront the Holocaust on these terms—a nonnegotiable criterion for any authentic thought, according to Fackenheim—it must risk self-exposure to this untranscendable rupture, which is to risk being ruptured itself. Fackenheim’s reading of the relation between eternity and history in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption is central to his own attempt to bring Jewish thought into confrontation with the Holocaust as total rupture. Fackenheim argues that, in writing after both Spinoza and Hegel, Rosenzweig succeeds in committing thought to the untranscendable historicity of the human situation. In Fackenheim’s reading, “the ‘old’ thinking [of Spinoza], having carried the mind above time and existence, causes it to dwell in eternity,” whereas “the new thinking [e.g., of Rosenzweig, post-Hegel] . . . is plunged . . . into existential limitations, now known to be untranscendable.”8 This does not, however, mean that eternity is dispensed with for Rosenzweig. In Fackenheim’s reading, The Star of Redemption “does not raise [humanity] above time but rather carries God into it.”9 Consistent with the modern trajectory of philosophy toward radical historicity, “any rise above time [into eternity]” for Rosenzweig, “becomes a mere form of escapism.” However, because equally committed to Judaism, time is by no means free of the determining influence of eternity; rather, time is invaded by eternity. Simultaneous with his insistence in the Star upon humanity’s “timebound creatureliness,” Rosenzweig—according

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to Fackenheim—finds eternity “confirmed” in the midst of time in “the liturgical life of the synagogue,” and “climactically so in Yom Kippur, which celebrates the promise of eternal redemption.”10 Fackenheim is led to conclude that, despite Rosenzweig’s commitment to the historical embeddedness of human thought, his commitment to eternity’s presence in the midst of that historical embeddedness “sacralizes” Jewish history. All of Jewish existence “is geared toward” and determined by that eternal presence such that, “while much in world history [may be] of great moment, in Jewish history nothing of moment had happened or could happen between Sinai and the messianic days.”11 For Fackenheim, “to make Judaism [and Jewish thought] absolutely immune to all future events except messianic ones” in this way is “to dismiss [a priori] the challenge of contemporary events rather than risk selfexposure.”12 Consequently, despite Rosenzweig’s commitment to thought’s historical embeddedness, Fackenheim argues that Rosenzweig’s own Jewish thought is immune from vulnerable self-exposure to radical historical events subsequent to Sinai—in this case, the event of the Holocaust as total rupture. And it is by his overriding commitment to eternity confirmed within history, in Yom Kippur, that this immunity to history is secured. It is impossible to ignore the clear parallels between Rosenzweig’s negotiation of eternity and history, as read and ultimately rejected by Fackenheim, and the Christological formulations of Barth’s doctrine of revelation. In short, for Barth, the historical event that is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is nothing other than the invasion of time by eternity such that all Christian existence (indeed, all existence) is geared toward it and determined by it. In Barth’s theology, God is carried—or carries herself—thoroughly and irrevocably into time and history in such a way that “the Christian God cannot be thought of outside of the human Jesus of Nazareth.”13 As George Hunsinger notes, for Barth, “Jesus Christ . . . is the unity of time and eternity” such that “eternity is defined as inseparable from the par ticu lar temporality of Jesus.”14 However, because Jesus is the revelation and the historical actualization of God’s eternal will in the midst of time, neither can history as such be thought of apart from the eternal reality incarnate in Jesus’s par ticu lar temporality. There is a double movement here that parallels the way in which Rosenzweig sees eternity relating to history in the tradition of Yom Kippur. On the one hand, the eternal becomes radically historical in the

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divine revelation that is Jesus Christ. On the other hand, as the eternal in the historical, this revelation determines the nature and meaning of the historical as such. The divine decision that is “made flesh” in Jesus is a decision of God’s eternal and sovereign will that cannot be finally altered, obstructed, or negated by any other force or power, historical or otherwise. It would seem, then, that no historical “happening” between Easter and the messianic days can have any ultimate or final significance for Christian thought outside of what has already been “eternally determined” concerning all history in the historical death and resurrection of Jesus.15 No rupture of history after Easter could alter or rescind what has been accomplished at Easter (as divinely revealed, according to Christian confession), that is, “the promise of eternal redemption.” This is precisely Fackenheim’s critique: Barth’s theology is immune a priori from confrontation with the Holocaust as total rupture. Fackenheim’s pointed challenge: “Has the Good Friday [i.e., the crucifixion of the Jews in the belly of Christian Europe during the Holocaust] . . . overwhelmed the Easter? Is the Good News of the overcoming itself overcome?”16 So runs the first round of this comparative theological engagement. My conclusion at this point was to respond to Fackenheim’s questions in the affirmative.17 Barth’s Christological view of revelation and its relation to history must be abandoned.

Rethinking Fackenheim on Revelation, History, and Tradition But the story does not stop there. As I mentioned in the introduction, when I delivered my paper on Barth and Fackenheim, the most critical response came from a Jew ofended at my taking Fackenheim as an authoritative source for Jewish religious response to the Holocaust. It seemed my good-faith attempt to subject my own tradition and conviction to the authoritative voice of “the other” had served to further silence another “other.” I became convinced that if I was to responsibly discover what changes in Christian theology were truly called for by a deep-tissue engagement with the Jewish “other” I would have to engage more deeply the diversity of Jewish positions on these issues. Following through on this commitment led to a series of other encounters with Jews and Judaisms wherein my rethinking of Fackenheim gained a bit more depth and dimension. I spent a year of full time study at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, researching Fack-

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enheim and other Jewish responses to the Holocaust within a Jewish studies curriculum. Over the course of a year of study and many conversations a fuller appreciation of Jewish diversity began to emerge. I began to see more clearly the fault lines of theological diversity on the specific issue of the Holocaust—and the issues of Judaism and Jewish identity more generally—as well as the complex dimensions and causes of this diversity. Eliezer Berkovits and Joseph B. Soloveitchik are phi losophers, like Fackenheim, but also Orthodox rabbis (Fackenheim was ordained in the Reform tradition), though to varying degrees of “conservativism” in relation to modernity. Just as Fackenheim difers significantly from other progressive post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers arguing for the radical uniqueness of the Holocaust (Richard Rubenstein, for example), there is no single, unified Jewish voice of Orthodox Judaism defending traditional commitments to divine revelation in the face of the Holocaust. It is this deep-tissue diversity of the Jewish “other” that is decisive for my specific— and ongoing—comparative theological encounter between Christian theology and Judaism. elie zer b erkov i ts : t he hol o cau st and we stern ci v i li z at i on Eliezer Berkovits maintains that the Jewish people “have had innumerable Auschwitzes” throughout their history (indeed, “each generation [has] had its Auschwitz problem”). He argues that despite whatever sense in which the Holocaust might be unique as an historical phenomenon, “the problem of faith presented by the holocaust [sic] is not unique in the context of the entirety of Jewish experience.”18 With this position Berkovits stands unambiguously on the Orthodox side of the debate: The dimensions of the Holocaust do not outstrip (so as to render inadequate) the eternal commands and promises of God revealed in the Torah and explicated in the rabbinic tradition. Fackenheim forms the central question posed by the Holocaust to theology and faith as a question of God and the death camps: The eternal, covenantal promises of God revealed at Sinai are rendered null and void at Auschwitz. However, Berkovits does not simply give an answer opposite that of Fackenheim’s. Rather, he reframes the question itself. “Perhaps even more important than the question, Where was God? is, Where was Man?”19

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For Berkovits, “Man” refers explicitly to the “man” of Christian, western civilization. If the Holocaust is a rupture of history, it is so as “a world catastrophe” marking “the final phase in the moral disintegration of Western civilization.”20 While it is also a Jewish catastrophe (albeit one among many), it is so on a qualitatively diferent scale. For Berkovits, the history of the Jewish people, while concurrent with world history, is nevertheless qualitatively distinguished from the latter by being an eternal history, “the messianic history of the am olam,” the eternal people.21 It is precisely this distinctive—and divinely revealed—nature of the Jewish people and its history that is confirmed by the Holocaust. Contra Fackenheim, it is not the unprecedented existence of Auschwitz that determines the theological meaning of the Holocaust, but the Jewish survival of Auschwitz—a survival for which the history of the Jewish people is replete with precedents.22 For Berkovits, then, the Holocaust is a Jewish catastrophe that can be seen to “once again reveal the unique position held by the people of Israel in history.”23 Despite his affirmation of God’s eternal covenant with the Jewish people, Berkovits is equally as adamant as Fackenheim in rejecting the way the Holocaust is interpreted by a number of Orthodox rabbis as God’s punishment of the Jews for what they see as unprecedented apostasy and assimilation during the modern period. “Not for a single moment shall we entertain the idea that what happened to European Jewry was divine punishment for any sins committed by them. It was injustice absolute.”24 This raises the problem of how to continue to affirm the traditional belief in God’s covenantal sovereignty over history in a way that does not impugn God’s character. Berkovits addresses this problem by turning to the rabbinic tradition of “El Mistater, the hiding God.”25 He shows how the Talmud developed the Biblical tradition of questioning God in response to catastrophe into a new understanding of the character of God’s sovereignty. No longer is God’s silence in history “formulated as a problem; it is an exclamation: God, you are silent; you are not seen in history.”26 This enables Berkovits to argue that God’s “terrible silence” during the Holocaust does not contradict traditional affirmations of God’s providence over history.27 According to the concept of El Mistater, this terrible silence is the very manifestation of God’s providence over history. It witnesses to God’s modus operandi: God is the silent one. Revelation is not contradicted by Auschwitz. However, while the rabbinic tradition of El Mistater explains God’s silence in terms of traditional affirmations of God’s providence, Berkov-

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its does not appear satisfied that it adequately defends the character of a provident God who, while not directly authorizing the Holocaust, would nevertheless countenance such an event of “ultimate evil” and “injustice absolute.”28 To address this worry, Berkovits supplements his El Mistater argument from biblical and Talmudic traditions with a philosophical logic of theodicy that is, if not exclusively then at least equally, part of the philosophical and theological traditions of the Christian, Western civilization that he has described as lying in moral ruin. Berkovits gives God’s countenance of the Holocaust a highly metaphysical defense; it is the logical result of the ontological constraints entailed in the conditions of possibility necessary for the existence of goodness and human freedom. “God cannot as a rule intervene whenever man’s use of freedom displeases him. It is true, if he did so the perpetration of evil would be rendered impossible but so would the possibility for good also disappear.” He goes on: “If there is to be man, he must be allowed to make his choices in freedom.” Berkovits then concludes: “The question therefore is not: Why is there undeserved sufering? But, why is there man? . . . Why a world? Why creation? . . . Given man, God himself could eliminate moral evil and the sufering caused by it only by eliminating man, by recalling the world of man into nothingness.”29 While Berkovits sees the cultural heritage of Christian, Western civilization together with the zeitgeist of the modern West as radically judged, lying in ruins, and without a future, he nevertheless appears willing to find—or unable to avoid finding—philosophical-metaphysical common ground with that heritage upon which to defend the moral character of the God of Orthodox Judaism against the moral scruples of that very zeitgeist. In turning to Joseph Soloveitchik, we turn to an Orthodox rabbinic voice that is equally conversant with and able to constructively resource the philosophical and theological traditions of the west, both ancient and modern.30 However, Soloveitchik appears to be less squeamish about the modern perception of JHWH’s moral character in relation to the Holocaust, to the point of framing the latter as part and parcel of JHWH’s eternal, unquestionable covenantal faithfulness. j oseph s ol ov ei tc hi k : t he hol o c au st and th e j ewi sh su f f erer In his lengthy essay “Kol Dodi Dofek: It Is the Voice of My Beloved that Knocketh,” Joseph Soloveitchik draws a clear distinction between the

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halakhic response to evil and sufering and what he considers to be “intellectual abstraction,” “philosophico-speculative thought,” and “theoretical-metaphysical” attempts to “grasp the all-encompassing framework of being.”31 Not surprisingly, then, Soloveitchik frames the central question of the Holocaust in halakhic terms, which, according to this distinction, are “devoid of the slightest speculative-metaphysical coloration.”32 Soloveitchik’s question: “What obligation does sufering impose upon man?” For Soloveitchik—in stark contrast to Berkovits—“man” here refers explicitly to the Jewish suferer of persecution. “We do not inquire about the hidden ways of the almighty [e.g., what is, as a rule, metaphysically necessary for God, à la Berkovits] but, rather, about the path wherein man shall walk when sufering strikes.”33 What is Soloveitchik’s halakhic answer to this reframed question? “Sufering imposes upon man the obligation to return to God in complete and wholehearted repentance. Afflictions are designed to bestir us to repent.”34 The Holocaust, as an instance of personal sufering and affliction, is “designed” and “imposed” as a means of divine judgment. To what purpose? To bring God’s people to repentance. And from what does one repent but sin—“corruption, vulgarity, and depravity.”35 As Soloveitchik frames the question, the Holocaust is an instance of God’s loving punishment for sin, for the purpose of “man’s self-renewal and his supernal redemption.”36 The Holocaust does not contradict the revelation of God’s eternal covenant with the Jewish people but confirms that revelation, as an instance of God’s loving faithfulness to that covenant. Here is an instance of precisely that response to the Holocaust which Fackenheim calls “inauthentic” (Rubenstein: “obscene”) and which even Berkovits rejects as “heartless.”37 Indeed, although it is Berkovits who explicitly confronts and refutes the uniqueness arguments of Jewish thinkers such as Rubenstein and Fackenheim, it is Soloveitchik who represents the opposite pole in the debate. More interestingly, his relation to Berkovits reveals the extent of polemical division within Orthodox Judaism. But we must not overlook the fact that the polemic goes in both directions. It is not simply Soloveitchik who represents a morally bankrupt view of Judaism from the perspective of more mainstream contemporary Judaisms, whether progressive or Orthodox. That is, Soloveitchik’s position is not anathema to fellow Jewish thinkers like Fackenheim, Rubenstein, and Berkovits because his theological convictions do not share or allow him to care about the same moral categories and criteria that they hold dear. On the contrary, Soloveitchik cares deeply

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about the moral responsibility of Jewish response to the Holocaust. But his understanding of moral responsibility is determined by decisively different theological assumptions (e.g., for faithful halakhic existence the very possibility of moral responsibility and of knowing what it concretely entails is radically rooted in and determined by God’s special revelation on Sinai). For Soloveitchik, the response of Fackenheim—but also of Berkovits— is not simply unfaithful, it is an abdication of response, and so of the possibility of moral responsibility itself. Soloveitchik claims that to pursue questions about God and cosmos in response to evil is to “formulate a metaphysics of evil,” which is, in fact, “to cover it up.”38 A non-halakhic response “relates to evil from a nonpractical point of view and philosophizes about it from a purely speculative perspective,” constituting a “denial of the existence of evil in the world.”39 The response of halakhic Judaism, on the other hand, according to Soloveitchik, “does not flinch from confronting evil face to face” (note the use of confrontation language so important to Fackenheim).40 It asks “neither about the cause of evil nor about its purpose but rather about how it might be mended and elevated.”41 For Soloveitchik, then, only Orthodox halakhic Judaism truly confronts and responds to evil—doing so “with a powerful will, with resourcefulness, daring, and imagination.”42 The fact that Soloveitchik’s polemical diference from Fackenheim and Berkovits is rooted in religiotheological assumptions does not exclude the fact that it entails its own severe moral critique as well. c onseque nces f or t he c o m parat i v e th eol o gical en c ou n t er As I hope these readings have shown, it is a mistake to think that Fackenheim’s and Berkovits’s respective moral judgments of Soloveitchik’s position are more ethical because less determined by religio-theological assumptions (e.g., about divine revelation and halakhic obedience), being therefore less biased or distorted. The fact is, they are grounded in different religio-theological assumptions—assumptions determined by and within the context of Judaism’s various and often conflictual responses to modernity (a conflictual variety of responses that, it should be noted, reflects the tradition of argument and contestation deeply rooted in the Jewish rabbinic tradition). This has serious consequences for Fackenheim’s argument that authentic response to the Holocaust is

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only possible as a naked confrontation of self-exposure to total rupture. Not only does a naked confrontation with the Holocaust free of any theological assumptions appear to be impossible, the very interpretation of the Holocaust as total rupture appears to be itself determined by theological (as well as philosophical and historical) assumptions. Consequently, the initial interruptive authority of Fackenheim’s argument is seriously displaced at this point in the story of my comparative journey. A difficult question for the comparative theological enterprise confronts us here. If one is to rethink Christian faith and theology in response to engagement with the Jewish “other,” which Jewish “other?” The nature of the predicament is such that one can find oneself in the unexpected position of reaching for what are sometimes extra-Jewish sources to help one think through the issues raised by the intra-Jewish conflictual diferences. In my own case, I found myself rethinking my rethinking of Barth in response to this rethinking of Fackenheim. Barth reemerged as a resource at this point not as a means to escape this predicament but precisely because he seemed to ofer the possibility of responsibly inhabiting it in a way that others did not. It is this dimension of Barth’s thought that I will attempt to bring out in the sketch of my rethinking (of my previous rethinking) of Barth on revelation that follows.

Rethinking My Rethinking of Barth and Fackenheim First of all, with regard to the question of “Which Jewish other?”: given the sharp disagreements between Fackenheim, Berkovits, and Soloveitchik and the height of the stakes involved in that disagreement, which Jewish other is now to inform my understanding and/or rethinking of Barth’s view of revelation in terms of comparative encounter? If comparative theology as a discipline includes (albeit not exclusively) the search for and discovery of common ground and resonance across religious difference this would suggest Soloveitchik as the more apposite Jewish interlocutor for a comparative theological encounter with Barth on divine revelation and history.43 However, this raises a question about the underlying rationale for comparative theology as a discipline. If that rationale includes a stated or unstated desire or assumption that comparative theological encounter will—or should—engender transformation of a religion’s exclusivist claims and impulses, then we would seem to have a problem. For what Barth and Soloveitchik share as common ground are

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respective versions of just such exclusivist claims and impulses. The question is raised, then: Does the formation of comparative theology as a discipline entail certain assumptions that would work to restrict which religious “others” are deemed appropriate for comparative encounter, for example, according to the extent to which they may or may not lead us to more open, progressive theological positions. Due to the constraints of time and space in this context, I leave this as an open question. In what follows I will attempt to suggest how my reconsideration of Barth’s view of revelation, in response to a rethinking of Fackenheim made necessary by the conflictual multiplicity of Jewish voices, discovers a complexity that is unaccounted for in Fackenheim’s initial critique of Barth and constitutes a resource for confronting the important issues raised by the intra-Jewish diference on revelation and the Holocaust. reve l ation as ru p t u re of hi story a nd tra di ti on As Fackenheim knew well, for Barth, the reality of revelation is inseparable from God’s entry into history in the person Jesus of Nazareth. What Fackenheim appears to be less clear about is the extent to which this movement of God into history constitutes a radical crisis of history—“the disturbance of all disturbings”—with consequences similar to those entailed in Fackenheim’s concept of the Holocaust as total rupture.44 In fact, there is a strong resonance between Barth’s view of revelation as the crisis of all history and Fackenheim’s rendering of the Holocaust as an ontological impossibility that became an ontic reality. But Fackenheim does not seem to see this resonance. For Barth, any concept of history as possessing an autonomous, necessary logic of progression and continuity, any notion of innate internal meaning, coherence or telos—whether material or divine—is radically ruptured by the eternal-historical event that is Jesus Christ.45 There remains nothing we call “history” that might provide a “place to stand,” a ground or criterion for authenticity, either for thought or existence. Rather than providing immunity from a radical rupture of history, then, the consequences of the event of revelation to which Barth attempts to point constitute a predicament of radical, inescapable exposure to the rupture of history. More important, Barth understands Christian history, together with the theological and liturgical traditions of the Church, to be directly in the crosshairs of the crisis and judgment of all history that occurs in

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Jesus Christ as the revelation and actualization of God’s eternal will. This is true even of scripture. Barth does indeed set scripture over and against the Church and its theology as an external, material, and normative word confronting and addressing the Church (as opposed to a symbolic self-expression or possession of the Church). It is the prophetic and apostolic witness to the living, personal Word of God that is Jesus Christ: God for and with us in Jewish flesh. However, scripture in and of itself, as human witness, is always under the crisis and judgment of that Word and absolutely at its disposal. Its witness—lacking any authority of its own—can always only wait to be freely taken up and used, affirmed and confirmed, in a free event of divine revelation according to the living Word’s (that is, Jesus Christ’s) good pleasure in the power of the Holy Spirit.46 The “eternal” is not “continually” present in and available to the Church in any of its forms, offices, or traditions as the result of divine revelation, that is, as the result of the radical and full entry of the eternal God into history in the person of Jesus.47 As distinct from Berkovits and Soloveitchik in relation to traditional sources and practices of Orthodox Judaism, then, for Barth there is no authority of the Church or of Christian traditions of thought and practice to protect or defend from a conception of the Holocaust as total rupture of history. All conceptions of the Church and its traditions are always already totally ruptured—under the most radical crisis of judgment. Consequently, there is no essential authority or continuity of Christian thought or practice that could claim immunity to historical rupture, and so no immunity to be defended.48 reve l ation as es c hatol o gi c ally open li mi t A critical distinction emerges here that brings us to the focal point of this comparative encounter. As we have just seen, for Barth, Christian traditions of faith, thought, and practice—including Barth’s own theological thought—are exposed to the Holocaust, whatever its nature might be, without any innate divine or revelatory authority or essence that would invest them with any sort of immunity. However, as Fackenheim knew, for Barth, the same cannot be said of the event of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ itself. For Barth, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (as witnessed to in scripture) constitutes the event of God’s eternal will in action in history, as a part of history for all of history. In confronting this

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event, the Holocaust—even if total rupture and abyss—confronts a limit in much the same (paradoxical) way that, for Barth, the infinity of the “eternal fire” of hell meets its limit.49 Here I can only briefly note several ways in which this distinctive relation of revelation to history and so to the Holocaust may not be fully accounted for in Fackenheim’s critique of Barth.50 1. For Barth, revelation does not constitute immunity from confrontation, but is confrontation itself. To whatever extent the Holocaust is a radically novel event, even to the extent of constituting a total rupture of history, its confrontation with the event of divine revelation that, for Barth, occurs in Jesus Christ, can only be a confrontation with a radical rupture of all history by which it is itself already confronted. Consequently, this is a confrontation wherein the former contests the latter as a contradiction of counter-testimony: rupture confronting—and confronted by—rupture. 2. For Barth, only God can finally answer and refute this countertestimony. Only God can demonstrate the extent to which the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is indeed the “promise of eternal redemption”—the reconciling of all creatures to God and so of all creatures to one another, accomplished once for all, and for all of history. Only God can demonstrate that this promise is not rendered null and void by the Holocaust. Such a demonstration can and will only occur by God speaking and acting again, as the living God, in final fulfillment of her self-revelation in the particular, historical reality of Jesus. Which is to say again, that the Church or the Christian cannot finally answer or refute this countertestimony. The Church and the Christian are necessarily thrown into inescapable exposure to the unresolved tension of this confrontation between the revelation to which they attempt to bear witness and the radical countertestimony of the Holocaust. And because of the distinctive nature of this revelation, their witness to it—if it is to be faithful—must include and make visible their own exposure to this confrontation and their own inability to either avoid or resolve it. This kind of witness, then, is also a “waiting:” waiting for God to prove faithful to God’s promise of eternal redemption, to demonstrate that the Holocaust, even if total rupture, is not in fact the final word, but meets its ultimate limit in God’s eternal will enacted in the Jewish flesh of Jesus. 3. Until God does speak and act again in final fulfillment of her selfrevelation in Jesus, this confrontation remains eschatologically open. The

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witness of the Church and of the Christian, then, is both a pointing in faith to what God is believed to have done, once for all, and a waiting for what only God can do and—in faith and hope—will do. Therefore, in bearing this witness the Church and the Christian wait with the world for God to prove herself faithful and able—in final and fulfilling selftestimony—to prove herself the living God who has committed herself fully from before the foundations of the world to the reconciliation and redemption of all things—even in the face of the Holocaust. 4. But, for Barth, this witnessing of the Church and the Christian that is a waiting is also, simultaneously, a “hurrying” toward that final fulfillment of God’s will and action in Jesus Christ.51 For Barth, the revelation to which the Church and the Christian bear witness and the divine fulfillment of which they can only await are also a summons to responsible action within the open situation of confrontation, contradiction, and countertestimony in which the Church and the Christian find themselves and which they can neither escape, foreclose, or resolve.52 Accomplishing nothing fulfilled or final by their own merit or power, the concrete actions entailed in Christian witness are attempts at faithful obedience to the summons heard in what is believed to be the revealing, reconciling will and work of God in Jesus Christ. In the open situation of confrontation with the Holocaust, the Church and the Christian are summoned to witness to the ways in which the Holocaust stands as radical contradiction to what they confess to be the eternal will and action of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ: God’s reconciling love for all, the Jew first, and also to the Greek.53 This means concrete acts of confession of and repentance from the Church’s monumental betrayal and rejection of its own confession of faith and the entailed summons to concrete acts of witness and obedience prior to and during the Holocaust, confession and repentance accompanied by faithful, concrete action for the sake of the creaturely well-being of the Jewish neighbor today. I am fully aware of how the historical behav ior of the Church toward Jews twists this last statement into a cruel joke. When was the Church ever faithfully obedient to the summons of the divine Word it professes to hear and believe in terms of concrete commitment and action for the creaturely well-being of the Jewish neighbor? But it is precisely Barth’s understanding of that divine Word in its relation to history, and to Christian history in particular, that demands unflinching critique and judg-

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ment of the Church and its traditions of thought and practice in this respect; that leaves no room for any investment in the sanctity or authority of Christian tradition or identity that would require apologetics and protection—immunity—from the vicissitudes of history, including the shamefulness of its own history. The unrepentant and unself-critical Church is the Church—in either its conservative or liberal/progressive modes—that has not been instructed by Barth’s theology. barth and t he c on f li c t ual m u lt i pli ci t y of j ewish “ ot hers ” We have seen how, on one hand, Barth seems to resonate with the orthodox Jewish voice of Soloveitchik precisely where the latter disagrees most strongly with Fackenheim on the issue of divine revelation and history. This can give the impression that, faced with the conflict between Fackenheim and more orthodox Jewish thinkers, the Christian reader of Barth would have methodological grounds to focus on the more conservative and theologically robust figures for comparative theological engagement. However, on the other hand, a simple privileging of (orthodox) common ground (e.g., between Barth and Soloveitchik) is not what occurs here. We can now see that the relation of Barth’s thinking on revelation and history places him in a much more complex relation to this intra-Jewish conflictual multiplicity. Barth can be, and is, just as critical as Fackenheim of any and all convictions regarding a divinely infused authority and continuity of religious or theological tradition—particularly his own—that would result in any immunity from radically novel historical events and necessitate concerted eforts to defend or mount an apologetics for tradition in the face of all such events as a requirement of religious identity, faithfulness, and authenticity. In this respect, Barth can actually be seen to share Fackenheim’s critical concerns about a divinely authoritative religious tradition in such a way that allows him to be more open and responsive—less defensive and reactionary—in relation to Fackenheim’s argument for the Holocaust as total rupture of religious history and religious tradition than either Berkovits or Soloveitchik. Fi nally, Barth resonates with both Fackenheim and Soloveitchik with regard to the way faithful response to the Holocaust—however it is conceived—necessarily entails concrete, material action beyond theological and/or metaphysical “thought.”

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At this point in my comparative journey, then, Barth’s view of revelation and history—in ecumenical freedom amidst the conflictual diversity of Christian theological voices54—can be read as engaging the conflictual diversity of Jewish voices in a way that both resonates with and diverges from diferent voices within that diversity, at diferent points, for diferent reasons. That is to say, it appears to move with an interreligious freedom that can be appropriated as a theological resource responsive to the conflictual diversity of intra-Jewish diference. It is critical to note that this freedom is the paradoxical consequence of the way in which Barth’s theology itself, root and branch—and with it the possibilities and consequences of any comparative engagements with religious or theological others—lies under the radical judgment of the (confessed) divine revelation to which it attempts to witness. It is under the shadow of this judgment, by which it is rendered impossible and in that impossibility receives its true possibility, that Barth’s theology—together with whatever interreligious freedom it might entail—is characterized by an intractable eschatological openness that is beyond Barth’s power (or the interpreter of Barth) to close or resolve. a reth inki n g of bart h t hat c on ti nues to hold There is at least one important way in which Barth himself did not appear fully and consistently instructed by his own theological insights on these issues. It involves the particular issue of supersessionism and its relation to the lexicon of the “teaching of contempt” within the history of Christian anti-Judaism. It is possible to argue that Barth’s distinctive form of “soft” supersessionism entails self-critical mechanisms that can and should—if faithfully inhabited—explicitly resist the material damages to the Jewish neighbor always threatening and too often actual in replacement (i.e., “hard”) supersessionism. These mechanisms include resources to reject and resist the lexicon of anti-Judaism historically employed by “replacement” supersessionism’s “teaching of contempt.”55 However, Barth does not use the self-critical mechanisms of his “soft” supersession to reject and resist this lexicon of anti-Judaism. On the contrary, he employs language resonating with this lexicon to acutely painful efect. And it is on this point that I am as compelled today as when first reading Fackenheim to part with Barth. This rethinking of Barth has only been strengthened by my further engagement with Fackenheim’s work within the context of other Jewish “others.”

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Notes 1. Francis J. Clooney, S.J., “Comparative Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook for Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 653–669. 2. See, for example, John  J. Thatamanil, “Comparative Theology after ‘Religion,’ ” in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology, ed. Stephen  D. Moore and Mayra Rivera (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 238–257; “God as Ground, Contingency, and Relation: Trinitarian Polydoxy and Religious Diversity,” in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider (Oxford: Routledge Press, 2011), 238–257. 3. “Any theology that knows beforehand—that is to say before conversation and encounter—what its proper agenda is and ought to be is about to co-opt, assimilate, and domesticate other traditions. Resistance is futile. But is it possible to imagine that theology might proceed other wise than by way of appeal to questions and criteria established before and apart from dialogue?” (Thatamanil, “Comparative Theology after ‘Religion,’ ” 251). For a brief engagement with Thatamanil over how I believe his own comparative theological work might entail a certain ethical “knowing beforehand”—an appeal to ethical criteria “established before and apart from dialogue”—with regard to which “resistance is futile,” see http://divine-multiplicities .blogspot .com. 4. Hugh Nicholson, “Comparative Theology after Liberalism,” Modern Theology 28, no. 2 (April 2007): 244–245. 5. In comments on Francis Clooney’s characterization of comparative theology, Hugh Nicholson seems to go further than Clooney himself with regard to an assumed outcome of comparative theological encounter. “These two dimensions of Clooney’s theological challenge, namely, the destabilization and reformation of Christian identity, together imply a relational conception of Christian identity. The recognition of other forms of religious identity forces a revision of one’s own” (Nicholson, “Comparative Theology after Liberalism,” 244–245). My emphasis. 6. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of a Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 133. 7. Ibid., 9. 8. Ibid., 63, my emphasis. 9. Ibid., 78. 10. Ibid., 149. Yom Kippur means “Day of Atonement.” In terms of religious significance, it marks the last day to atone for the sins one has committed against G-d during the past year. Therefore, on Yom Kippur the creature finds themselves before G-d in a distinctive encounter between the historical and the eternal. 11. Ibid., 33, my emphasis. 12. Ibid., 16. 13. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2, ed. T.  F. Torrance and G.  W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 8. 14. George Hunsinger, How to Read Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17. 15. CD II/2, 310. 16. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 285, 286.

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17. We find a Christian precedent for this proposal in Johann Baptist Metz’s statement, “By Auschwitz every thing is measured” (ibid., 294). And to this my rethinking of Barth at the time would add: By Auschwitz, even Easter itself is measured. 18. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: KTAV, 1973), 90, 98; 88–89, my emphasis. 19. Ibid., 7. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. Ibid., 42. 22. Ibid., 90, 98. In stark distinction from Berkovits, here, Fackenheim sees the survival of Auschwitz and of the Holocaust itself—together with the defeat of Hitler—as wholly accidental. 23. Ibid., 36, my emphasis. 24. Ibid., 89. 25. Ibid., 65. 26. Ibid., 94. 27. Ibid., 85. 28. Ibid., 84, 89. 29. Ibid., 105–106. 30. Soloveitchik is known for the ingeniousness of his serious, constructive engagement with key philosophical thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche, as well as with Christian theological thinkers like Kierkegaard and Barth, in the ser vice of an argument for the unqualified uniqueness of Jewish “halakhic” existence. Concerning recent contestation of the (albeit distinctive) dialogical and constructive nature of his engagement with western philosophy and Christian theology, see, David Hartman, Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2001). 31. Joseph D. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek: It Is the Voice of My Beloved that Knocketh,” in Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust, ed. B. H. Rosenberg and F. Heuman (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1992), 53–54. For resonance with Barth on Christian thinking being “bound to what has already happened,” see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, volume I, part 1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al., 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1964) 8. See also, Barth, CD II/2, 4. 32. Ibid., 55. 33. Ibid., 56. 34. Ibid., 57. 35. Ibid., 56. 36. Ibid., 57. 37. Ibid., 93. 38. Ibid., 53. 39. Ibid., 53, 55. 40. Ibid., 35. 41. Ibid., 36. 42. Ibid., 54–55. 43. Clooney identifies “the determination to discern and stress what religious people have in common” as one of two “underlying motives” by which comparative theology is

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48.

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nourished. Clooney, “Comparative Theology,” 657. Indeed, Soloveitchik was aware of Barth’s work and similarities between them can be seen on at least two issues: their view of covenant as the basis for creation and, more pertinent to our concerns here, a shared skepticism regarding the necessity and/or fruitfulness of interfaith dialogue due to the nondialogical basis of religious truth. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), and “Confrontation,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 6, no. 2 (1964), respectively. (I am indebted to Reuven Pepper for alerting me to Soloveitchik’s engagement with Barth.) It has been suggested that Soloveitchik’s engagement with Barth was a resource for his argument against of the necessity of interfaith dialogue. See Hartman, Love and Terror, and Mark R. Lindsay, Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel (Oxford: Routledge, 2007.) To the extent that this is the case, it raises the same question as my own journey of comparative encounter: Are practitioners of the discipline of comparative theology open to the possibility of comparative encounter leading away from interfaith dialogue and theological positions of religious pluralism rather than toward them? Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 57. Barth, Romans, 29–30, 35; Barth, CD II/2, 7–8, 94–95. CD I/1 (1936), 113, 119. This is true even for the Eucharist, according to Barth. He criticizes the Roman Catholic tradition for seeing “the presence of Jesus Christ in His Church . . . in the fact that under certain conditions there flows forth from Jesus Christ a steady and unbroken stream or influence of divine-human being on His people.” Barth, CD I/1, 68. Here Barth emerges as a—for some, perhaps surprising—answer to John Thatamanil’s question, “Can one imagine the possibility of a theology that is aware from the outset that no tradition is itself pure, singular, homogenous, and thus ‘uncontaminated’?” (Thatamanil, “Comparative Theology,” 251). Barth’s is just such a theology, from first to last. What Thatamanil seems either unable or unwilling to consider is the possibility—albeit, the divine possibility; that is, admittedly, the very outside chance— that theology might be addressed by and so “begin” with the interruptive event of divine revelation rather than with “dialogue” wherein humans are talking amongst themselves about themselves, e.g., about their various religious experiences. The former case would of course mean that theology never really begins, is never capable of constituting a beginning—is never at or in the beginning—but is always only a secondary response to divine address and action by which all human thought and discourse, theology included, is radically interrupted and over which all thought and discourse has no determinative control or domesticating authority (of either the orthodox or progressive variety). In reference to several New Testament passages that seem to suggest the finality of divine judgment, Barth says the following: “A final possibility—or, rather, an entirely new possibility beyond the completed judgment, beyond the payment of the last farthing—is not absolutely cut of by these passages . . . There is still the prospect of it, even if in endless remoteness and depth . . . the eschatological possibility, salvation on the day of the Lord. This does not remove nor weaken the punishment, but it gives it a limit which encloses even that which is boundless in itself, eternal fire” (Barth, CD II/2, 486–487).

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50. A point worthy of greater explication if space permitted: this is not just any divine authority or power. It is an authority and power most clearly displayed on the cross: God’s subjecting God’s self to the forces of history in absolute vulnerability, even to death by torture and execution. 51. Barth takes the dialectical theme of si multa neously “hurrying and waiting” from the Blumhardts. See: Karl Barth and William H. Willimon, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon, trans. John E. Wilson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 25, 31; Karl Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of Ethics, trans. R. Birch Hoyle (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993); Nigel Biggar, The Hastening That Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 85f.; and Christian T. Collins Winn, “Jesus Is Victor!” The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009). 52. For Barth, following the Reformed tradition, God’s gracious and reconciling Word to and for us that is Jesus Christ is also God’s command, God’s claim over our lives and over all of life. 53. Romans 1:16. 54. For a reading of this distinctive “ecumenical freedom,” see Chris Boesel, “Better News Hath No Evangelical Than This: Barth, Election, and the Recovery of the Gospel from Evangelicalism’s Territorial Disputes,” in Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology, ed. Christian  T. Collins Winn and John  L. Drury (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 162–190. 55. See Chris Boesel, Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith, Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008), 81f.

Response to Part I Peter Ochs

The dialogue between Chris Boesel and Randi Rashkover ofers up a feast of comparative theology: what I shall label CT raised to the nth degree, of which I shall report six degrees (CT6). In an initial degree of comparative theology, or CT1, a Christian scholar of theology (Chris Boesel) compares a Christian theologian (Karl Barth) and a Jewish philosophic theologian’s (Emil Fackenheim) attention to history after the Holocaust. Then CT2 opens many sublevels of comparison. Within Boesel’s essay there are comparisons, first, between Barth and Fackenheim on theology after the Holocaust; second, a rethinking of Barth in light of Fackenheim’s response to Rosenzweig; and, third, a rethinking of Fackenheim in light of a comparison among two diferent Orthodox Jewish theologians, Eliezer Berkowitz and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. In CT3, a Jewish scholar (Randi Rashkover) poses an encounter between Frank Clooney’s project of comparative theology and Barth’s theology of witness as a means of entree into Barth’s potential contribution to comparative theology. Then CT4 opens many sublevels of comparison. Within Rashkover’s essay are many comparisons: first, a reading of Barth’s Israellehre reread in light of Clooney’s comparative theology; second, a comparison between diferent dimensions of Barth’s theology; and third, a comparison between Barth and Robert Jenson’s theologies of Israel and, thereby, between their approaches to comparative theology. CT5 brings these two essays into comparison. This volume juxtaposes the essays by Boesel and Rashkover, inviting the reader to extend the measure of comparative theology to the two essays as well. The essays offer either comparable or contrastive approaches to evaluating Barth’s potential contribution to Jewish/Christian comparative theology.

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CT6 represents the several levels of comparison that I ofer in this response essay. My initial efort is to bring Clooney and Rashkover’s accounts of “confessional theology” into dialogue with “scriptural theology” as another name for a certain practice of scriptural reading and interpretation; and, then, to bring Clooney’s “comparative theology” into dialogue with an account of dialogue among practices of reading scripture. My second efort is to compare Boesel’s Barth and Rashkover’s Barth from the perspective of these approaches to “scriptural theology.” Finally, I reread Boesel and Rashkover’s inner dialogues in light of the same model of scriptural theology. Here, then, is CT6, which I present as a means of inserting four working hypotheses into the round after round of comparisons. The first hypothesis is that each round of Jewish-Christian comparative theology will succeed best when the ground of comparison is each tradition or participant’s reading of scripture or, otherwise put, when additional levels of theological comparison are grounded in responses to scripture. The primary reason is that scripture refers to disclosed/revealed graphemes, black-on-white signs that sit openly on the table between the partners in dialogue or comparison: the literal table or the table of history. Sitting there in the light of day, these graphemes declare, as it were, their privileged status over any purportedly competing disclosure/revelation: in particular, claims by individual readers or individual communities of readers to possess the authoritative or privileged or literal or true meaning or force of the graphemes as words or explicit symbols within a given natural language. The second hypothesis is that the alternative would be to ground comparison in first person claims whose antecedents remain hidden to the partner in dialogue/comparison and that this alternative undermines the possibility of either theological dialogue or comparative theology. My suggestion continues Rashkover’s claim that “it is not possible to ofer a credible account of one’s tradition if one’s tradition is inscrutable.”1 I read this to imply that claims of divine inscrutability are equivalent to first person claims to having nonpublic access to knowledge on the basis of which public debates can be decided. The claim of nonpublic access is what problematizes the claimant’s participating either in interreligious dialogue or in comparative theology as Clooney presents it and as both Rashkover and Boesel receive it. Nonpublic access does not deny the possibility of truth, only the possibility of ofering nonprivate warrants for

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truth, where private warrants (whether private to individuals or individual communities) belong to private languages. The third hypothesis is that, when religions or theologians hold their warrants to be private, then the only conditions for comparison or dialogue are pragmatic in Charles Peirce’s post-Kantian sense. Rashkover refers to such conditions, in transcendental fashion, as “conditions for the possibility” that some claim could be publicly warranted. If I claim that God has told us X and Y but I can’t tell you why, then the public warrants for my claim would be discovered among the publicly visible effects of my claims, as in Jesus’s injunction “Ye shall know them by their fruit” (Matthew 7:16). Jesus refers there to prophecies. Charles Peirce read this injunction as if to say: “we cannot understand prophecies on the basis of the apparent meanings of their words, since the words refer to a time we do not yet know and conditions we would not yet recognize. In such a case, we will locate the meaning of these words in the actions/consequences to which they give rise and in our evaluation of the prophecies in light of those consequences.” Say, for example, Isaiah received the prophecy “Be ever hearing, but never understanding” (Is. 6:9). Who could comprehend this prophecy? If the words Isaiah received were intended to peer into certain events in a future time, then they would remain inscrutable in a sense close to what I believe Rashkover speaks of: We might picture the apparent semantic meaning of these words now, but we could not judge thereby what they would signify in the prophetic future. Isaiah was not, however, prophesying just to himself: his words appear in Scripture as presented to the people of Israel. To read Isaiah’s work pragmatically would be to ask what diference it would make if Israel receives these words? One plausible answer is that Israel might be brought to repentance like the residents of Nineveh in response to Jonah’s prophecy. Another plausible answer is that, sometime in the future, Israel may sufer some destruction and a future prophet may associate that misfortune with Israel’s having failed to repent and take heed of Isaiah’s words. The fourth hypothesis is that pragmatic measures tend to be more reliable to the degree that they measure responses to serious crises. One reason is that, in the face of crisis or utter destruction, inscrutability appears as the appropriate epistemic response rather than as a religious conceit. In this case, inscrutability emerges not as a private claim to divine privilege but as a public claim that the previous instruction we believe we have received from God does not, at least in its plain sense, enable

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us to fathom what we now witness and sufer. In such a moment, inscrutability is not a refusal to ofer witness; it is the very witness: for what we behold is the undoing of our capacity to respond and, therefore, the incapacity of our inherited languages of explanation and action to explain and call to action. This is the very witness to el mistater, to God who hides his face, which is his voice of accounting and instruction. Boesel vividly illustrates this condition for turning from semantic to pragmatic measures of what we witness. Boesel’s reflection on Barth is posed in relationship to the Holocaust as modern civilization’s prototype of crisis, and he draws his readers through subtle levels of encounter with the epistemic consequences of gazing on crisis itself. On a first level, he sympathized with Fackenheim’s castigating Barth for protecting Christian theology from critique in light of the Holocaust. On a second level, however, Boesel discovered that, in the company of his religious contemporaries, Berkovits and Soloveitchik, Fackenheim’s theodicy no longer appeared representative of major trends in religious Judaism after the Holocaust, so that Fackenheim’s theology no longer appeared as the appropriate measure of Barth’s capacity to respond to the historical crisis of Judaism. For Boesel, the broad range of Jewish responses appeared to relativize not only what response a Jewish theologian might ofer to this defining crisis but also what witness Jewish theologians might ofer to the “naked” event itself. Boesel concludes, “A difficult question for the comparative theological enterprise confronts us here”: with which Jewish “other” would one engage in dialogue? I interpret Boesel’s question as a sign that Jewish theology has itself become inscrutable as it faces the Holocaust and that the appearance of this inscrutability awakens a rediscovery of Barth’s Theologie der Krisis. Boesel is prepared to reestimate the words of Barth he previously questioned: “Human nature and human history in general have no independent signification [outside of God’s eternal decision in Jesus Christ].”2 Boesel explains: “For Barth, revelation does not constitute immunity from confrontation but is confrontation itself. To whatever extent the Holocaust is a radically novel event . . . its confrontation with the event of divine revelation that, for Barth, occurs in Jesus Christ, can only be a confrontation with a radical rupture of all history by which it is itself already confronted.” This does not imply, however, that the church is immune: quite to the contrary, “the Church or the Christian cannot finally answer or refute this countertestimony. The Church and the Christian are necessarily thrown into inescapable exposure to the

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unresolved tension of this confrontation between the revelation to which they attempt to bear witness and the radical countertestimony of the Holocaust.” In this vein, one might say that some Orthodox Jews and Christians alike do not hide from the horror of consummate catastrophe; instead, they renew their sorrowful yet steadfast faith in the face of such disaster. This is not indiference but a nonidentical repetition of their traditions’ primordial steadfastness in face of divine rupture. Boesel’s closing words appear to display a new appreciation of the one-witnessin-two that might display the ground of Jewish-Christian dialogue and comparative theology: a communicative unity across the diference between Orthodox Jewry’s maintaining the halakhah in the face of utter catastrophe and the Church’s (especially the post-Holocaust Church’s) “summons to responsible action within the open situation of confrontation, contradiction, and countertestimony in which the Church and the Christian find themselves and which they can neither escape, foreclose, or resolve.” Rashkover’s overall argument emerges from her appreciative reading of what “confessional theology” means to Clooney. Her argument is that a theology that confesses God’s utter inscrutability would not be a theology that contributes well to comparative theology or theological dialogue. What, then, are the conditions for non-inscrutable confessional theology? Rashkover argues that Barth speaks to one condition when he recognizes that “law is the form of the Gospel”: so that, in Rashkover’s words, Barth ofers “an account of Christian witness as justified (affirmed) and yet also limited and lawful (ordered) in relation to a wholly other God.” Rashkover locates a second condition in Barth’s acknowledging that, in her words, “God’s elective self-determination in Christ” implies that the witness to God is “neither the source of the justification nor the truth of her own claim.” Rashkover ofers a third condition, however, that stands in dialectical relation to the first two: that the “Divine Nein” to merely human eforts is necessary but not sufficient to render theological confession public. It is necessary because it extends to the divine word what, earlier, I attributed to the public graphemes of scripture: that they do not lend their authority to any individual claim to have captured scripture’s public meaning. The graphemes are insufficient, however, because they do not yet disclose the “divine ‘yes’ as God’s eternal election to human persons in Jesus Christ.” Rashkover argues that it is Robert Jenson, not Barth, who ofers the Barthian-like pneumatology that best articulates this divine yes.

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Jenson argues that Barth’s “Nein” is displayed only as an inscrutable or private individual claim unless, in Jenson’s words, it “presupposes a determinant object of thought.”3 The object of thought is the divine Yes as the object of the Gospel’s authoritative word: the event of God’s resurrection of Jesus. The divine No is a “call to [people] that they should participate in the apprehension of this objectification.” As Rashkover explains, “it is the Word of scripture, according to Jenson, that ofers the condition of the possibility” of both the divine no and yes, or both prayer and proclamation. It is scripture that delivers both the “divine selfidentification” (utterly independent of the human knower), such as “God is the one who raised Jesus” and the critical implication of this announcement for human behav ior: that God calls to the community (the Church) to follow him. In Rashkover’s words, this second dimension of the word displays its covenantal character as a word spoken in conversation with a community of human speakers for the sake of their correction and instruction. For Rashkover, finally, Jenson’s pneumatological display of the Divine Yes as well as Divine No in Scripture enables his Barthian-like scriptural theology to provide the grounding for comparative theology that remains undeveloped in Barth’s own words. The illustration Rashkover ofers serves, I would say, to commission Christian and Jewish scriptural theologies as partners in potentially fruitful Christian-Jewish comparative theology or theological dialogue: the Divine No and Yes, presented by way of the Gospel’s proclamation “that Jesus is raised from the dead,” finds its analogue in Exodus 19’s witness to the Divine No of God’s word on Sinai and the Divine Yes of God’s redeeming Israel from oppression in Egypt. For Jenson, therefore, “the God who raised Israel from bondage” “raised Jesus from the dead.” I would add only one caution to this reading of scripturally grounded comparative theology: this particular comparison works so well because both halves belong to the Church’s unified scripture. In order for a model of scriptural theology to extend more widely to comparative theology, Barth’s pneumatology may need to be extended in additional ways.4 Notes 1. Referring to “the by-product of a God whose own transcendent incomprehensibility casts a shadow over the comprehensibility of the commandments he delivers.” 2. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 8, 175, 181.

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3. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press 1997), 1:12. 4. In Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Ada Township, MI: Brazos, 2011), I argue that Jenson’s pneumatology remains close to an American Christian tendency to emphasize the communally covenantal character of the received word. This pneumatology readily succeeds in promoting Jewish- Christian dialogue. I suggest that a diferent but complementary Anglican pneumatology provides a better entree to other species of interscriptural dialogue, such as Christian-Muslim dialogue. The Anglican pneumatology appeals less to the place of the Spirit in covenant and more to the place of the Spirit in the created world.

3 Barth’s Theology of Religion

and Dōgen’s Nondualism

James Farwell

It is not uncommon among those who work in the theology of religions to characterize Karl Barth as a Christian exclusivist. This essay begins by questioning the applicability of that terminology to his work; yet, playing with the terminology as an instructive misreading, I suggest that Barth’s position is better described as a peculiar kind of pluralism—a “kerygmatically generated inverse pluralism.” This is visible in his treatment of Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism in the Church Dogmatics I/2, 17.1 After considering this position, I turn to a form of Buddhism that Barth, in the course of his remarks on other religions, dismisses in favor of Pure Land: Zen Buddhism. Specifically, I explore the form that Zen takes in the teaching of Dōgen, considered the founder of the Soto Zen school. Dōgen manifests a very nuanced Japanese form of the nondualism2 that characterizes the Mahayana “perfection of wisdom” tradition in Buddhism and that, for Dōgen, produces a judgment about religion that is very similar to Barth’s. After a consideration of what Barth and Dōgen hold in common, I turn finally to some conjectures about the significance of Dōgen’s nondualism, with a brief aside related to Tibetan thought, asking whether this Buddhist nondualism might ofer help for a Christian theology that honors human efort in religion while preserving what Barth takes to be the core of Christian faith.

Theology of Religions In the last half-century, “theology of religions” has become the settled terminology for that activity in which a member of a religious tradition thinks about the fact of the world’s religious plurality and, specifically, what one is to make of it; whether, as a practitioner in one tradition, the

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claims and practices of traditions diferent from one’s own are to be considered true or valid, and in what sense. It is to that enterprise that the terms like “exclusivist,” inclusivist,” and “pluralist” belong. The material concern of a theology of religions is that which is “within” religions, that is, truth claims, but also symbols, texts, devotional practices, and the like with which truth claims are interwoven and to which comparative attention is given. Karl Barth is not engaged in the theology of religions, because this material concern and the basic premise of a theology of religions—that the contents of religions are worthy of evaluation and comparison—is quite beside the point of his project. In fact, he would not consider the theology of religions to be a theology at all. Barth’s lack of interest in a theology of religions makes sense in relation to the larger project in which he is engaged. For Barth, the logos tou theou is properly and only the God-human Jesus Christ, and theology, in its only true sense, an elaborative proclamation of the implications of that person and the redemptive event constituted in and by him. Religion as such, or in itself, for Barth, is of no essential value in this proclamation— not even the Christian religion!—because all religion is the human effort to reach the divine and, in its very attempt, shows as clearly as anywhere the incapacity of human beings to do the very thing we aim to do. It contradicts itself in reaching for an impossible goal because the goal has already been given by grace. Religion is redeemed only by the contradiction of its own contradiction that is Jesus Christ, in whom God redeems, elects, saves the human and does so as one who first loved us,3 coming from outside the scafolding we build to reach that which is already given. It is received precisely not by efort but by faith. This is the core of the Christian kerygma for Barth. Thus, the absence—in fact, the rejection—of a theology of religions by Barth: because the material content of religions is human efort, and because human efort is not soteriologically significant. Still, it is instructive to engage, playfully, with its terminology to get a clearer sense of what Barth is doing. In such a playful exercise, “exclusivism” is certainly not the right term to borrow for Barth, whose position would be better described as a “kerygmatically generated inverse pluralism.” It is “kerygmatically generated” because his view of religions purports not to be a function of a theological or social scientific-comparative analysis of these human activities, but of a prior theological commitment rooted in divine revelation that renders religion soteriologically insignificant from the outset; and “inversely pluralistic” because the implication of that revela-

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tion is that religions as such—aspiring to attain to the Divine, to obtain justification, to enter into communion, to decenter the self in favor of the Truly Real,4 or whatever the terminology—are coextensive with all other human eforts and they are all false. Religions are shown to be such systems of human efort in the light of the revelation of God in Christ. If Barth does not ofer a theology of religions, one might say this position does ofer a theology of religion. This is true, if one simply means by this that Barth makes a judgment about the nature of religion as a direct implication of his theology—more precisely, of revelation. This is not a theology of religion in the sense that one would use of, say, Schleiermacher or Tillich (involving phenomenological, philosophical, anthropological, and other sources brought into dialogue, in one way or other, with textual and doctrinal sources) to develop a “scientific” theological account of religion.

Barth on Pure Land One can see this position of Barth’s worked out in his assessment of Pure Land Buddhism. In his Church Dogmatics, he ofers a nod to Hindu devotional traditions and to Zen, but he dismisses both very quickly. Zen is dismissed because he considers it an obvious and clear example of religion as “a demand for redemption through man’s own powers, specifically by striving after a higher morality, a mystical absorption and contemplative knowledge as the ‘path of holiness.’”5 We will return to this interpretation of Zen. In contrast to his position on Zen, Barth pronounces it an “almost providential occurrence” that in Shin Buddhism an East Asian religion exists as a parallel to Reformed Christianity.6 The parallel he sees between these two religions is their structural center in “grace.” Barth claims in fact that Shin Buddhism is a “Japanese religion of grace” that involves the call upon Amida’s name, in which the Shin Buddhist practitioner will “strengthen himself in the face of his utter sinfulness with the wonderful thought that on the basis of the original promise he is nevertheless not rejected.”7 As similar as Pure Land sounds to Barth’s own rendering of the Christian kerygma, he ultimately judges Jodo Shinshu insufficiently attuned to the gravitas of the human situation before God; driven more by a pastoral response to the difficulty human beings have in satisfying a desire for redemptive dissolution, which relativizes even Amida Buddha as one who is “on the way”; and committed to a faith in Amida as a means to

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that end that is externally related to it.8 These diferences might be deepened on close analysis, or Shin Buddhism might even become more pure, perhaps even as a result of exposure to Christianity.9 If Barth were doing a theology of religions, his sympathy for Pure Land Buddhism’s orientation to grace and potential for refinement by its exposure to Christianity, not to mention the basic insinuation that it is “almost providential,” might seem to be sketching the direction of a Christian inclusivism. But his point has little to do with the relative truth of any of these religions, because, again, religions are a matter of human efort to reach the divine and are as such bankrupt. In what way, then, does Barth consider Shin Buddhism’s existence “providential?” It is providential because it “confronts Christianity with the question of its truth precisely in its form as a consistent religion of grace.”10 That confrontation confirms Barth’s contention that Christianity is not true because of its content. That Christianity might be a more nuanced form of a religion of grace would not change the fact that this orientation toward grace is found in Pure Land too and even (in a generous moment, having dismissed it earlier), in a less refined form, in “Bhakti religion.” In fact, “the existence of Yodo religion [Jodo Shinshu] is to be called providential because it makes clear with relatively great urgency that among the religions only one thing is decisive concerning truth and falsehood,” and that is the name of Jesus Christ in whose name is summed up “the essence of the reality of divine revelation, which all by itself constitutes the truth of our religion!”11 It is not in the structure of grace as such, nor even in the (reformed) Christian doctrines of original sin, justification, and so forth that Christianity finds its truth, for the truth is not “within” Christianity, nor in the pagan religions that can also include these or similar doctrines within them.12 These are all, rather, “predicates of the subject Jesus Christ” and have truth precisely in that they are “reminders”—in fact, evidence of “being reminded”—that all is given in Christ. They are acts of confession and witnesses to the name of Jesus Christ.13 Pure Land Buddhism, precisely by its similarities to Christianity reveals the contrast between the religions and that to which Christianity testifies: that what is soteriologically significant is not the grace that lives within religion, but the grace by which it lives and to which it testifies. That is found alone in Jesus Christ. So it is that we see the authentic and essential diference of the Christian religion in comparison to the non-Christian religions, and thereby its character as the

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religion of truth in comparison to the religion of falsehood, only in the fact, the event, in which the Church, instructed by Holy Scripture, never tires but always stays awake to hear, proclaim, and believe Jesus Christ and no other to be grace and truth; and that it pleases him to acknowledge this ser vice [of the church’s confessing and witnessing] ofered to him, and so, in the confessing and witnessing of the church, to be his own confessor and witness. It is just here, in fact, that the church must be weak in order to be strong.14

Note the language of “the religion of truth” as opposed to “the true religion,” although Barth is not perfectly consistent with this language. But the phrase is aptly chosen here for the point being made. The Christian Church lives not by the strength of its own testimony to grace but by the grace to which it testifies, which is in some sense Christ’s own confession— the confessing, the divine-human act of self-revealing that is itself Christ. Christianity’s privilege is only that it is sublated by God’s selfrevealing in Christ and testifies to a power that comes from beyond the precincts of all religions, including its own.15 Pure Land Buddhism is not wrong because it has the wrong ideas—the wrong object of veneration— and Christianity is not right because it has the right object. In fact, the ideas of the two religions are quite similar, depriving Christianity of any assumption that its doctrines are utterly unique . . . that its distinctive proclamation is its uniqueness. Christianity is right to the extent that it is a living breathing testimony to the right subject, the only divine-human subject there is: Jesus Christ, upon whom the church and all the world entirely depends. In the end, Pure Land fails like all other traditions (and Christianity too, when it forgets its own purpose and testimony) when it imagines that its content generates the truth. One can criticize Barth’s position on Pure Land Buddhism in a number of ways, and not simply because his interpretation of it lacks some of the nuance of that tradition’s relationship to the broader history of ideas in Buddhism. But for our purposes, we will set aside this matter, as well as the ongoing debate about Barth’s theological method, and simply grant that Barth considers his approach the only one appropriate to Christian theology if it is truly to be grounded in faith. Let us consider what light is cast on that approach if, in fact, it is placed next to what appears an analogous approach that Barth dismisses: Zen Buddhism, exemplified by Dōgen. We turn there with an interest in the possibility of a comparative theological account, a moment of learning across religious borders,

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passing over and returning,16 with a particular interest in the relationship between human efort and goals in Buddhism and Christianity.

Dōgen Zen Given Barth’s kerygmatically generated inverse pluralism, it would seem that the Zen Buddhism of Dōgen, far more than the Pure Land Buddhism of Shinran, would pique his interest.17 Dōgen, roughly Shinran’s contemporary, manifests a suspicion of religion, and of Buddhism as religion, analogous to Barth’s own suspicions of religion, although Barth is apparently unaware of this parallel. This allows him to ascribe to Zen a preoccupation with “man’s own powers” and with “striving,” as noted above. Barth might be forgiven his dismissal of Zen if one considered only Dōgen’s admonitions to the practice of zazen, or seated meditation, and to his references to Buddha-mind, which do suggest an urgency to the practitioner’s efort: Be mindful of the passing of time and engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire . . . . 18 . . . while travelling, abiding, sitting and reclining, in the midst of afairs as they pass, though various diferent events come up, [the practitioner] goes along seeking an opening, mind occupied [with his quest]. With his mind so forcefully earnest, there can be no failure of attainment . . . . Unless you arouse a mind comparable to this, how will you accomplish the great task of the Buddha-Way, which cuts of the turning round of birth and death in a single instant of thought?19

A similar emphasis on earnest striving seems to be present when Dōgen speaks of zazen as the “true path of enlightenment” and, among many gates, the “front gate for Buddha-dharma,” using language of attainment: The great master Shākyamuni correctly transmitted this splendid method of attaining the way, and tathāgatas of the past, future, and present all attain the way by doing zazen. For this reason it has been transmitted as the front gate. Not only that, but also all ancestors in India and China have attained the way by doing zazen.20

Barth is, of course, extremely allergic to religion as efort or the “attaining” of religious goals. However, a closer look at Dōgen’s teaching reveals

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something more complicated than this is going on. In a passage criticizing the reliance on beliefs, Dōgen says, You should also know that we do not originally lack unsurpassed enlightenment, and we are enriched with it always. But because we cannot accept it, we tend to groundless views . . . we miss the great way; our eforts are fruitless.21

So the practice, the endeavor, seems to be fruitless if it does not “attain” something already given. When you first seek dharma, you imagine you are far away from its environs. But dharma is already correctly transmitted; you are immediately your original self.22

He goes on to enjoin that Instead [of taking up various metaphysical views and inquiries], sit zazen wholeheartedly, forming the Buddha’s seal and letting all things go. Then you will go beyond the boundary of delusion and enlightenment, and being apart from the paths of the ordinary and the sacred, immediately wander freely outside ordinary thinking, enriched with great enlightenment.23

Complicating the very distinction between “delusion” and “enlightenment,”—the very idea that there is something to strive for—Dōgen elaborates: To suppose that practice and realization are not one is nothing but a heretical view; in Buddha-dharma they are inseparable. Because the practice of the present moment is practice-realization, the practice of beginner’s mind is itself the entire original realization. Therefore, when we give instructions for practicing, we say that you should not have any expectation for realization outside of practice, since this is the immediate original realization.24

This extremely important and characteristic notion of Dōgen’s, translated as “practice-enlightenment,” and its connection to “original self,” or “original face,”25 reflects his subtle understanding that, while practice is necessary, its efect is not so much the achievement of an outcome external to the practice, as in the relationship between an instrument and a goal, but rather the awakening in practice to something already given, an “abiding in Buddha-dharma” that undercuts illusion.26 This practice

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challenges the very notion that there is delusion and awakening, secular and sacred, or progress from one to the other. Dualities are undercut. This is a significantly more complicated notion of the relationship between practice and goal, efort and realization, than Barth captures in his indictment of Zen as a religion of human striving. This is visible in many other passages, including his practical instructions on zazen—in fact in the same passage where he urges practice “as though saving your head from fire”: Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a Buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away . . . . Sit solidly in samadhi and think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the art of zazen.27

Dōgen’s nondualistic approach to practice as enlightenment is a Japanese elaboration of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and especially Madhyamaka philosophy within that tradition. In order to get at this lineage, it is helpful to rehearse quickly the core teaching of the Buddha Shakyamuni in the Pali Canon. Briefly, we human beings are disturbed and preoccupied with the impermanence of human life, an experience that brings to us dissatisfaction (dukkha) and a deep existential discomfort (the First Noble Truth). Our preoccupation with the need to fortify the essential self against that impermanence leads us to attach ourselves to things, experiences, or ideas that will end the dissatisfaction and angst that attend our sense of impermanence, or avert those things that cause it (the Second Noble Truth). It turns out, however, that the pattern of attachment and aversion in which we engage as a solution to our dukkha is itself the problem. In other words, we sufer not because we have so far failed to attach ourselves to the right things or avoid wrong ones, but because the pattern reflects a view of an essential self that can be fortified and protected that is not the manner of human existing. Attachment and aversion are rooted in delusion. Ending that pattern of attachment and aversion is the actual solution to the problem (the Third Noble Truth). Human persons are, in fact, empty (shunyata) of an essential self capable of fortification and protection against impermanence. We are anatman, no-self, and we arise and pass away in an interconnected relationship to all other, similarly constituted sentient beings. In order to cease our sufering, we must let go of the notion of self that funds our

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pattern of attachment and aversion. That is made possible by walking an eightfold path of wisdom, right living, and meditation (the Fourth Noble Truth). This is an awakening to how things truly are, the enlightenment of the practitioner.28 The question that arises from this Buddhist diagnosis of sufering and prescription for its healing is that, if sentient beings do not have permanent, inherent being—if they are empty of this sort of being—then what sense does it make to speak of a self that seeks a solution to dukkha, and what is it that is sought? It would seem that thinking in this manner simply replicates the problem the Buddha diagnoses, retaining the essential self (just at a deeper and more persistent level, as a metaphysical idea of emptiness) and implying a solution to it that is itself permanent (Buddhadharma). It was this puzzle that the Mahayana school of Buddhism took up and developed in the “perfection of wisdom” tradition, developing an elliptical way of speaking of the emptiness of the self and its objects of desire—even the desire for the telos of religion—that is nondualistic.29 In the Mahayana Mahaprajnaparamita-hridaya sutra—commonly called the “Heart Sutra”—Avalokiteshvara (a manifestation of the Buddha important to the Mahayana tradition) says to a disciple whose views are mistaken: Therefore, Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness . . . . all dharmas [essentially, constituent elements of beings] are defined by emptiness, not birth or destruction, purity or defilement, completeness or deficiency . . . . Therefore . . . [there is] no causal link, from ignorance to old age and death; and no end of causal link, from ignorance to old age and death; no sufering, no source, no relief, no path; no knowledge, no attainment and no non-attainment. Therefore, Shariputra, without attainment, boddhisattvas take refuge in Prajnaparamita.30

The sutra suggests that the perfection of wisdom is a path in which the dualist distinction even between being on the path and not being on the path drops away. Even to speak of the four noble truths (“no sufering, no source, no relief, no path” in the preceding translation) engages in the dualism that the truths undermine. The sutra ends with a mantra that implies nirvana is “reached” by letting go of the very distinction between samsara (the cycle of birth and death, and its attendant dukkha) and nirvana (the extinction of the cycle). Thus, the claim of Madhyamaka

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philosopher Nagarjuna: “there is not the slightest diference between cyclic existence and nirvana. There is not the slightest diference between nirvana and cyclic existence.”31 It is this nondualist approach to the relationship between practice and realization, between efort and goals, to which Dōgen gives his own turn in the elliptical logic typical of the East Asian tradition: Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided. There is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth-and-death.32

Zazen, the “front gate” among practices, is not for anything; it is a “pathless path,” skikantaza—just sitting, sitting for no purpose that sitting achieves—and that is its purpose. To the extent that nirvana is “achieved” by the practitioner, what is learned is that no inherent state called nirvana is to be sought and attained; no inherent self obtains it; and to realize this at a level of depth is nirvana. Put diferently, zazen is a path necessary to those who are beset by the sufering that attends dualistic thinking; the goal of that path is the extinction of dualism and the attachment that it funds, the recognition that there is no goal that is “other” to be achieved, no path necessary to walk that will obtain it. The path and the goal are not two— one’s efort does not lead to the goal of awakening—yet practice and realization are not one, since practice is necessary and arises from a sense of separation from awakening—but they are, in fact, “not two.” The complexity and nuance of Dōgen’s nondualism deserves far more attention than space allows it here. What we have covered, however, should be sufficient to counter Barth’s rather peremptory dismissal of Zen as anything more than a religion of human efort. This interpretation of Zen reflects a failure to appreciate the complex relationship between effort (zazen, as well as kōan and sutra study) and goal (awakening or enlightenment) in the Zen Buddhist tradition, at least as it is represented by one of its most impor tant figures. If one were concerned primarily with the history or phenomenology of religions, one could simply say that Barth is illiterate in the particulars of Zen, or the logic of the nondualist Mahayana tradition, and leave the matter there. One could also read in Barth’s theology of religion a colonizing and circular logic functioning within his nonfoundationalist method: He defines religions in general according to his understanding of the proper testimony of one religion in

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particular and then finds the rest, and his own, inadequate when they do not square with that understanding. These are not insignificant criticisms of Barth’s shortcomings, but one always ends up in a cul-de-sac with this sort of criticism as far as Barth himself is concerned, as he intends nothing other than a theology rooted in Christian faith and, eo ipso, would find such a criticism to land on a space he is not himself attempting to occupy. Rather than debate whether Barth lands somewhere he doesn’t intend, or does not land there but ought to, one could go another, more interesting, and perhaps more productive way: One could take Dōgen Zen to be a provocative conversation partner to Barth’s own concerns, although the origin and end of those concerns are obviously very diferent. What can we see more clearly in each by considering both thinkers together? And what constructive contribution to Christian thought might emerge by moving from Barth to Dōgen and back again? barth and d ō gen , si de b y si de Perhaps the nature of religion itself is one of the matters seen more clearly by looking at it with Barth and Dōgen together. It seems that both understand religion to be productive only when marked by two characteristics: (a) religion’s true work is fulfilled when it points away from itself with its practices and teachings; and, (b) what religion points to is a reality prior to those practices and teachings—a reality that is already its foundation. For Barth, Christian practices of worship, preaching, teaching, and activities in the world are only true “to themselves” when true to what they proclaim: that by none of these practices is grace won or love earned. God’s gift of Jesus Christ—his life, death, and resurrection—is one in which the divine and human are revealed, and revealed as love—as a prior commitment and accomplishment at one with the nature of both. Christian practices, including the discursive practice of theology, are true to the extent that they are gathered up, sublated, by that revelation to which they point. These practices, then, do not accomplish something but testify to it. For Dōgen, the practice of zazen—the “front gate” of the Buddha-dharma—is not valuable in itself (the point of practice is to wake

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up), nor as an instrument that leads to awakening (as this is a renewed dualism), but as the awakening to how things are: that emptiness, shunyata, characterizes all things, including the practices. To make the practice the object of attention as a Buddhist is to replace attachment to worldly goals with attachment to Buddhism; an even deeper and more pernicious form of the malady of delusion that “Buddhism” diagnoses and heals. Of course, the significant diferences between Barth and Dōgen on religion live in these accounts. As we have seen, for Barth religion as such accomplishes nothing of soteriological import, for the incapacity of human beings to achieve salvation is the very truth to which religion, when properly sublated by revelation, points. For Dōgen, religion accomplishes something that is nevertheless already how things are and therefore also not accomplished. So the relationship between true religion and efort for Barth is essentially null; the relation between true religion and efort for Dōgen is, for lack of a term more appropriate to its subtlety, paradoxical: Those who study the way seek to be immersed in the way. For those who are immersed in the way, all traces of enlightenment perish. . . . Those who practice the Buddha way should first of all trust in the Buddha way . . . where there is no delusion, no false thinking, no confusion, no increase or decrease, and no mistake. To arouse such trust . . . and to practice accordingly, are fundamental in studying the way.33

Too, the all-encompassing reality to which Barth and Dōgen testify are diferent: for Barth, God in Christ is the fullness of reality, and the definition of it; it has no other name. For Dōgen, the reality of Buddhadharma is the emptiness that characterizes all being; and, yet, it is neither a transcendent unity and locus of being, nor being over against beings; the relationship between emptiness and all things is itself “not-two.” It is at precisely this point of substantial worldview divergence that the possibility of “learning across religious borders” emerges: Could Zen Buddhist nondualism help a Christian theology animated by Barth’s principal concern give a better account of Christian practice? Whether such nondualism could be taken on board by the Christian tradition, or whether it already lives in minority traditions within Christian theology and mysticism has been debated for some time, especially since the exchange between Masao Abe and prominent Jewish and Christian think-

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ers in the 1990s.34 But the matter of interest here is one specific to Barth’s concerns—the question of the nature of religion as efort and the corollary question of the relationship of efort and goal in religion. Is there something to be gained for a Christian theology regarding these matters, by passing over from Barth to Dōgen and back again? cros s - religi ou s learn i n g Barth’s sense of a dogmatic emergency, not to mention his foundation in a Western tradition shot through with the influence of the logic of noncontradiction, makes him a very dualistic Christian thinker. Religion is this, not that, for Barth; it is testimony, it is not efort, not in any way efective in reaching toward the divine. It begins in Christ and nowhere else; beginning anywhere else is unfaithful, and mere religion, even if a religion of grace. Barth is clear, and brilliant, in his witness to a theology that is also, correspondingly, this, not that; it is faithful only if it proclaims this understanding that is none other than the Christian gospel itself, as he understands it. The dualism that marks Barth’s strong “this-not-that” approach to Christian theology and to religions is particularly visible in his occasional resort to the language of exteriority when speaking of the way God comes to humanity in Christ.35 Such dualism is a significant component of the engine that drives the early dialectical character of Barth’s work and survives in the theology of religion of the Church Dogmatics, in which the truth of Christian religion is a function of its sublation by the Word of God. The problems with the “over-against-ness” of this revealing Word that comes to us, this sense of exteriority, are many—not least that it sits somewhat uneasily with Barth’s central contention that all that is truly human and divine is in Christ who manifests the fullness of both; and that what is revealed there is relation in which the divine and human are from the outset reconciled through divine grace, and being truly human, found only there, such that human sin falls away into nihility and human efort is null. To what, then is God’s action actually “exterior?” Could Dōgen’s nondualism ofer an understanding of the relationship between (as it were) ultimate reality and the human efort to connect to it that preserves both the priority of the former (its “exteriority,” “its coming to us”) and the real significance and reality of the latter as experienced by practitioners? I submit that it matters to preserve the latter, because the Christian scriptures and tradition are in fact shot through with

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the language of effort and reward, of practice and attainment, even in the context of an affirmation that effort itself stands on grace as its foundation. Christianity is like most other religions in this regard, whose traditions speak of devotional, mystical, ritual, and social practices that have the efect of getting one somewhere in regard to the goals to which the religion testifies. Ascetical traditions, including those of Christianity, are replete with the imagery of the mastery of practices and disciplines that do something for and in the practitioner, that cultivate something measurable and progressive and cannot simply be reduced to witness, although they are also that and surely arise from that to which witness is given. One could simply side with Barth that these ways of speaking about efort and attainment are, eo ipso, misconceived, but that does require one to believe that many religious people are misguided about their religion. The practical imperialism of that view should be obvious. But if one sheds the Barthian dualism while retaining his central contention and looks through Dōgen’s nondualist lens, one might see these systems of efort as a feature of the religions that do not undermine the priority of the ultimate, but function paradoxically with it. Perhaps Zen nondualism, taken on board by a Christian theology, would allow a Christian to contend that there is an inescapable place for efort, for practice “as though saving one’s head from fire,” for seeking that which one does not yet have or know, precisely as the way of accessing that which is, in the end, not attained, but given and graciously present. In the spirit of Dōgen, a Christian might acknowledge that the relationship between efort and goal is “not-two”— indeed, that the relationship between God and the world is itself neither one nor two, but “not-two”—God being present wherever we arrive, so that “that which we are seeking is causing us to seek.” That this aphorism aptly summarizes both the instincts of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and of Augustine’s long quest in his Confessions is telling.36 A supporting example from the Mahayana tradition—one that is more systematic in nature than the Japanese traditions—may bring into sharper focus the suggestion being made here that one can appreciate the efficacy of practice and the importance of efort without overthrowing Barth’s core concern. In a diferent spin of the “not-two” tradition of Mahayana Buddhism, Tibetans speak of “two truths,” conventional and ultimate truth,37 and of their relationship in the awakened mind that hold both conventional distinctions (beings look and behave like one thing and not another, this, not that) and ultimate truth (all such beings are interdependently arisen and impermanent) simultaneously. The awakened per-

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son cognizant of the two truths lives, operates, speaks, decides, attains, and accomplishes or fails to accomplish in ways that are powered by dualistic distinctions while understanding that, in reality, there is no speaker, no doing, nothing to be done, nothing to be gained or lost, only realized in the ongoing interdependent process. The Western mind is inclined to prefer one of these levels of truth to the other, “overcoming” the conventional with the ultimate. The Tibetan mind sees such an either-or approach as failing to comprehend fully the phenomenal world. Can Christian theology not speak of “two truths,” of faith both as witness to what is given (that the first and final word of God is love) and efficacious striving toward it in which one gives up every thing to attain the field in which the treasure of great price is buried?38 Is Christian liturgical practice not, in fact, both ritual enactment of a moral self appropriate to the world it ritually sketches, 39 and, at the same time, the celebration of what already is given, as Christians receive eucharistically their own true selves, “becoming what [they] receive,” as Augustine put it?40 They do, after all, make the effort of approach to the altar where the gift is waiting. My references to Augustine are quite intentional because, of course, Barth’s theology is an articulation centered in the preoccupations of the Pauline-Augustinian strand of the Christian tradition. This strand is deeply concerned with the bankruptcy of human efort and the incapacity of the will to choose the good. But, as hinted above, the Christian tradition is a wide and diverse chorus of voices, including some in which the language of efort and reward are more delicately interwoven with the notion of God’s grace coming to us. As Rowan Williams once noted, Christianity is marked by “an interwoven plurality of perspectives on what was transacted in Jerusalem.”41 That is, what constitutes the unity of the Christian community is a shared affirmation of the full and universal soteriological significance of Jesus Christ, but the manner in which that significance is articulated and how one connects with it is stated and understood in ways historically and geographically more diverse than Christians sometimes notice about themselves. In contrast to the PaulineAugustinian problematic, one thinks of the community that produced documents like the gospel of Matthew or the Didache in which the lack of confidence to choose well and do well that characterizes Paul’s writing is not present. To the contrary, there is a sense there that human beings have it within their capacity to choose and to follow the commands laid down by and embodied in Jesus; he who is “God with us,” empowers

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them as their teacher to walk the path, but walk it themselves, they shall.42 The work of discipleship, the efort to see rightly and behave righteously yields the reward of the kingdom, even while the ofer of the kingdom is an original movement of the divine toward the human community. There is less of an allergy in that strand of the Christian tradition than in Barth’s to the delicate, interwoven texture of grace and efort, of what is given and what is achieved, and a nondualistic strategy of theological testimony analogous to Dōgen’s teaching on Buddha-dharma might help to express it. In this, Barth’s testimony to the givenness of grace is not lost; to the contrary, it is lifted up as the core of the Christian practice, something that permeates all human efort, and all our striving comes to rest in that which has always already been available. That which takes us time and efort to “attain” is received then, more than ever, as “good news.” No doubt Barth himself would not approve of this proposed theological strategy, which leans in the direction of a positive pluralism or even a pluralistic inclusivism by allowing nondualistic Buddhist insight to reshape Christian language. But for any Christian theologian who wishes to take seriously both human agency and divine grace and who is convinced that Barth, while right about the priority of grace, needs a more robust notion of sanctification that accounts for the value of strenuous spiritual endeavor, Dōgen and his subtle Zen tradition may teach a discursive strategy worth learning. Notes 1. Unless other wise noted, citations throughout will be from the very fine translation of Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/2 (1938), 17, by Garrett Green, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion (New York: T&T Clark, 2006). 2. “Nondualism,” technically, is centered on a tetralemma in Indian logic in which, with respect to any x, the following are the possibilities: x; not x; both x and not x; neither x nor not x. The Buddhist “perfection of wisdom” tradition plays with these negations, holding them at once in permanent, dynamic tension. In this essay, the term “nondualism” will be used in a general way to describe the Buddhist resistance to “either-or” thinking that characterizes the western logic in which Barth is largely embedded. 3. I John 4:19; Barth, On Religion, 59. 4. A shorthand version of the position of John Hick. 5. Ibid., 101. 6. Ibid. Barth’s interest is in “Yodo Shinshu,” or Shin Buddhism, more commonly rendered today as “Jodo Shinshu,” the Pure Land tradition rooted in the development of Honen’s teaching by Shinran. 7. Ibid., 103.

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8. Ibid., 104–105. 9. Barth, On Religion, 105. This would not be an exposure to Christianity as a religion, but to the revelation by which Christianity is sublated and makes it, as such, true. See Barth, On Religion, 100. 10. Ibid., 101. 11. Ibid., 105. 12. Ibid., 105–106. 13. Ibid., 106. 14. Ibid. 15. In translating Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Green prefers the term “sublimation” to sublation; see his “Translator’s Preface,” viii–ix. 16. I borrow these concepts from John Dunne, The Way of All the Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1972), ix–x; and see Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); chaps. 1 and 4. 17. To speak of Shinran’s Buddhism as the Pure Land school and Dōgen’s as the Zen school is anachronistic, but the solidification of their teachings into these traditions justifies the rhetorical associations for our purposes. 18. Dōgen, “Zazen-gi” and “Gakudō Yōjin-shū,” in Moon in a Dewdrop, ed. by Kazuaki Tanahashi (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 29, 31. All subsequent citations of Dōgen refer to this volume unless other wise indicated. 19. Dōgen, Record of Things Heard, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2001), 2:15. 20. Dōgen, “Bendō-wa,” 145, 147. 21. Ibid., 150. 22. Dōgen, “Genjō-Kōan,” 70. 23. Dōgen, “Bendō-wa,” 150. 24. Ibid., 151. 25. Dōgen, “Genjō Kōan,” 70; “Bendō-wa,” 146. 26. Dōgen, “Bendō-wa,” 152. 27. Dōgen, “Zazen-gi,” 29–30. 28. Bhikkhu Boddhi, In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005), 75–78. 29. In Sanskrit, “perfection of wisdom” is prajnaparamita. The extent to which the teaching of Mahayana is a subsequent development, or an explication of the original teaching of the Buddha, is a preoccupation of both Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism that need not detain us here. 30. Red Pine, trans., The Heart Sutra (Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004), 2–3. 31. Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 75. 32. Dōgen, “Shōji,” 74. 33. Dōgen, “Gakudō Yōjin-shū,” 42. 34. A record of this exchange can be found in John B. Cobb, Jr., and Christopher Ives, eds., The Emptying God: A Buddhist- Christian-Jewish Conversation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990). 35. See, e.g., Karl Barth, CD I/2 (1956), 18, 368; Barth, On Religion, 85.

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36. Consider Augustine, Confessions, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960), 1:1–2, 43–44. 37. For an introduction to this doctrine whose full complexity is beyond our scope here, see Guy Newland and Tom J. F. Tillemans, “An Introduction to Conventional Truth,” in Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–22. 38. See Matthew 13:44. 39. See Kevin Schilbrack, “Ritual Metaphysics,” in Thinking through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kevin Schilbrack (New York: Routledge, 2004), 128–147; Timothy F. Sedgwick, Sacramental Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 13–25. 40. Augustine, “Sermon 272,” in The Works of St. Augustine, III/7, trans. Edmund Hill (New Rochelle, NY: New City Press, 1993), 300–301. 41. Rowan Williams, “Does It Make Sense to Speak of a Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy?” in The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honor of Henry Chadwick, ed. Rowan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18. 42. See Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21–28: A Commentary, trans. James E. Crouch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 293.

4 Barth and Universal Salvation A M A H AYA N A B U D D H I S T PERSPECTIVE Pan-chiu Lai

Universal salvation is a controversial topic in Barth scholarship. The issues involved are not limited to whether and in what sense Barth advocates for universal salvation,1 but include also why Barth’s theology seems to logically imply it on the one hand, while Barth himself explicitly denied it on the other.2 Instead of ofering a detailed theological “exegesis” of Barth’s own publications, this chapter attempts to shed light on these issues through comparing Barth’s position with Mahayana Buddhism, which is well known for its advocacy of universal salvation. This essay will start with a sketch of a Mahayana Buddhist vision of universal salvation. Based on an exploration of the possibility of interpreting Barth from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective by highlighting some of the similarities between Barth’s theology and Mahayana Buddhism, this essay will then attempt to discuss the questions concerning whether and in what sense Barth advocates universal salvation, and to explain Barth’s ambivalent position on universal salvation through the perspective of Mahayana Buddhism. It will conclude with a few critical comments on Barth’s own theology in comparison with Mahayana Buddhism.

Universal Salvation in Mahayana Buddhism Universal salvation can be regarded as a trademark of Mahayana Buddhism, which started in India around the beginning of the common era as a movement aiming at reforming the then prevalent spirituality in Buddhism. It flourished mainly in East Asia, and developed into various schools, including Ch’an/Zen Buddhism, which is probably the best known school of Buddhism in the Western world. Another famous school

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of Mahayana Buddhism is the True Pure Land Buddhism or Shin Buddhism, which was developed from the Pure Land Buddhism in China and became the biggest Buddhist organization in Japan. Though Mahayana Buddhism is doctrinally diversified, it is relatively unified in its moral ideal.3 The Mahayanists express their religious ideal mainly through articulating the image of the bodhisattva, who is characterized by his or her profound wisdom and compassion, as well as the efort to benefit all sentient beings on his or her way to attain Buddhahood. According to the stereotype made by the Mahayanists, this religious ideal is far superior to the then-prevalent Buddhist ideal of the Arhat (literally, the worthy one), who has attained nirvana through diligent spiritual practice and is liberated from the cycle of samsara. The Mahayanists even deliberately coined the pejorative term “Hinayana” (literally, “small vehicle”) in order to highlight the distinctiveness or superiority of the “Mahayana” (“great vehicle”) as a path to a greater salvation. In other words, the Hinayana holds that only a very small number of people may be able to achieve the spiritual enlightenment or liberation by observing all the precepts and practicing diligently a very restricted way of life. In contrast, Mahayana Buddhism advocates for a salvation which is not only more universal in scope but also more universally accessible in terms of the means. Furthermore, according to Mahayana Buddhism, the final goal of salvation is the universal attainment of full Buddhahood, which is more ultimate than the ideal of the Arhat advocated by the Hinayana. As we are going to see, this Mahayana vision of universal salvation is particularly manifested in various ways.4 pure l and an d am i da In Buddhist-Christian dialogue, True Pure Land Buddhism is often taken as an expression of Buddhist universalism and compared with Christian universalism.5 In fact, Barth himself also made a rather extensive comparison with True Pure Land Buddhism.6 From a Mahayana Buddhist perspective, it is impor tant to note that the True Pure Land Buddhism developed in Japan is merely one of the branches of Pure Land Buddhism, and the Pure Land Buddhism in China ofers an arguably more universalistic approach to salvation. In Mahayana Buddhism, there are many realms or lands built by various bodhisattvas, including Amitābha (also known as Amida) who built the Western Pure Land, a paradise where people will get enlightenment

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easily. According to the Larger Sukhāvatī-vyūha Sūtra, believed to be compiled in the first and second centuries, Amitābha was named Dharmakāra before attaining Buddhahood, and he had made forty-eight vows. The eighteenth and nineteenth vows read: If, when I attain Buddhahood, sentient beings in the lands of the ten quarters who sincerely and joyfully entrust themselves to me, desire to be born in my land, and call my Name, even ten times, should not be born there, may I not attain perfect Enlightenment. Excluded, however, are those who commit the five gravest ofences and abuse the right Dharma. If, when I attain Buddhahood, sentient beings in the lands of the ten quarters, who awaken aspiration for Enlightenment, do various meritorious deeds and sincerely desire to be born in my land, should not, at their death, see me appear before them surrounded by a multitude of sages, may I not attain perfect Enlightenment.7

These two vows, especially the eighteenth vow, laid the foundation for the popular practice of invocating “Nan-mo O-mi-to Fo” (Hail, Amida Buddha). According to these vows, if one truly longs for rebirth in the western pure land, Amitābha will come to one’s death bed and take one there. This belief assumes the reliance on the other-power (tariki) from Amitābha, the idea of eternal Buddhahood and the universal compassion of bodhisattva.8 This Pure Land path of relying on other-power instead of one’s own self-power (jiriki) is in principle universally accessible for all human beings, but in actual practice it may implicitly exclude those who do not have that kind of faith. This exclusivist implication can be seen in the True Pure Land Buddhist teacher Shinran (1173–1263) in Japan. According to Shinran’s interpretation, in this Last Age (mappō), due to the seriousness of human sins, the self-power way of salvation is no longer valid; and the only workable way of salvation is the sole and exclusive reliance on the other-power to be received from Amida.9 However, as the nineteenth vow indicates, to “do various meritorious deeds” is not necessarily to be excluded in the emphasis on relying on the other-power from the bodhisattva. Diferent from the exclusivist interpretation of the Pure Land path ofered by the True Pure Land School in Japan, Chinese Buddhism as a whole prefers to adopt a nonexclusive interpretation, suggesting that the other-power way of salvation is merely one of the possible ways to enlightenment. The distinction and compatibility between these two paths (namely other-power and self-power) are

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widely accepted by various schools of Chinese Buddhism. Some Chinese Buddhists even advocate some sorts of dual cultivation of Pure Land and Ch’an (also known as Zen in Japanese), and the latter is well known for its emphasis on self-reliance.10 In short, in Chinese Buddhism, the Pure Land piety is regarded as one of the valid ways to salvation and does not exclude other valid way(s) to salvation. This affirmation of the compatibility or even complementarity of the apparently contradictory approaches of other-power and self-power can be understood as another or even higher expression of the Mahayana vision for universal salvation. It is because people may have diversified spiritual orientations—some would prefer self-power, whereas some others other-power. If there is only one valid way to salvation, no matter whether it is other-power or self-power, someone will be excluded. In order to meet the diversified needs of the sentient beings and to achieve universal salvation, a plurality of paths to salvation is needed. The affirmation of the plurality of entrances or dharma-gates to salvation is thus arguably even more in line with the Mahayana vision of universal salvation than the sole advocacy for the exclusivist path of relying on the mercy and other-power of the bodhisattva or Buddha. sk il lful m ean s This affirmation of the plurality of paths to salvation is crystallized in the Mahayana concept of “skillful means” (upāya) or “skill in means” (upāyakauśalya), which assumes that the Buddha/bodhisattva will use a variety of means skillfully in accordance with the diversified levels of spiritual maturity and the specific spiritual orientations of the sentient beings.11 Although these entrances or paths seem to be mutually exclusive or contradictory, they can be employed by the bodhisattva as useful tools helping diferent kinds of sentient beings to attain Buddhahood. Based on the concept of skillful means, the Mahayanists usually recognized the “Hinayana” doctrines as part of the Buddhist dharma and even employed them as useful teachings for those who are not yet ready for Mahayana doctrines. For example, even Shinran suggests that the traditional Buddhist teachings associated with the path of self-power are merely the Buddha’s skillful means, which aim to make people feel frustrated and despair in their practice of monastic life, morality, or meditation so that they may then turn to reliance on the other-power and grace of the Buddha or bodhisattva.12 In other words, although the “Hinayana”

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doctrines are inadequate, as long as one understands clearly their limitations and scope of applicability, one can employ these tools to help those who may benefit from these elementary teachings. This may imply the Mahayana view that, since ultimate truth cannot be captured by words, the Buddha’s or bodhisattva’s teachings are not statements conveying objective truths. Rather, they are therapeutic by nature, aiming only at the elimination of the misunderstandings. In fact, various schools of Chinese Buddhism developed their own systems of doctrinal classification (pan jiao) in order to classify or rank various scriptures, together with their related doctrines, and to organize them into a coherent hierarchical system.13 This may be further elaborated to develop an inclusivist attitude towards other religions,14 and to rank the non-Buddhist scriptures or doctrines. The concept of skillful means can be further extended to affirm that if necessary, the bodhisattvas can even employ some unconventional, unexpected, or even seemingly unorthodox or “un-Buddhist” methods. This concept vividly demonstrates the bodhisattva’s compassion as well as the wisdom of nonattachment to a particular method or channel. As the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra suggests, in order to save all sentient beings, the bodhisattva may arrive in hell, the realm of beasts or the realm of the hungry ghosts, and the bodhisattva may also show stupidity, greed, or desire; however, “though appearing to employ unorthodox methods of salvation, he follows the correct teaching in saving living beings.”15 s alvation for t ho se i n hell The bodhisattva’s arriving in hell is concretized in the story of Kṣitigarbha.16 According to the Sūtra of the Great Vows of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, Kṣitigarbha prayed for the relief of his mother sufering in hell: May all the Buddhas from all the quarters in the ten directions have mercy and pity on me and listen to this extensive vow that I am about to take for my mother’s sake . . . . From this day forth and throughout hundreds of thousands of myriads of millions of kalpas to come, I will succor and deliver all sinful, sufering beings in all worlds, in all hells and on the three evil paths of existence, causing them to leave the evil paths of hell-dwellers, of animals and of hungry ghosts; and it is only after all beings subject to retribution for sins have achieved Buddhahood that I myself will attain complete enlightenment.17

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This prayer is in line not only with the Mahayana spirit embodied in the rituals performed for the beings sufering in the realms of the hungry ghosts (preta) and hell (naraka), but also the filial piety emphasized in Chinese culture, which supports the idea of transferring one’s merits to the deceased ancestors.18 According to the Buddhist theory of karma and retribution, there are six realms of samsara, including the lowest realms of hungry ghosts and hell, which are for those who had really bad karma and thus deserved to sufer and receive punishment there. The advocacy of compassionate acts towards the sentient beings sufering in these realms is an affirmation of the compassion to be shown to those who do not deserve it, and a proclamation of the superiority of love above justice, retribution, and karma. In the transmission and development of the story at the popular level, the vow of bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha is articulated as, “If I do not go to hell to help them there, who else will go?” or “Until the Hells are empty, I vow not to become a Buddha; Only after all living beings are saved, will I myself attain Bodhi.” With the affirmation of the bodhisattva’s vow to empty hell, the Mahayana vision of universal salvation covers in principle all sentient beings. d o ctrine of bu ddha- nat u re In the Tathāgatagarbha tradition of Mahayana Buddhism,19 it is suggested that all sentient beings have Buddha-nature, which is the innate potential for Buddhahood. The process of attaining Buddhahood is thus considered as a process of realizing the innate Buddha-nature through cultivation.20 This belief concerning the innate potential for Buddhahood of all sentient beings might implicitly deviate from the then prevalent position of the Yogācāra (which literally means yoga practitioner) School of Mahayana Buddhism on icchantika. According to the Yogācāra School, icchantika is the most deluded kind of person who has no innate potential for Buddhahood and thus cannot attain Buddhahood. The mainstream of Chinese Buddhism following the tradition of Tathāgatagarbha instead of Yogācāra, affirms explicitly that even an icchantika has Buddha-nature and thus can attain Buddhahood. In the subsequent development of the doctrine of Buddha-nature in Chinese Buddhism, even trees and grasses are believed to have Buddha-nature, an idea becoming rather popular in the contemporary context of ecological concern.21 In Japa nese Buddhism, Zen master Dōgen (1200–1253) further elaborated

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the doctrine to suggest that all beings, including those seemingly lifeless things, have Buddha-nature too.22 This view implies that even inorganic existences are included in the scope of salvation. To summarize, these aspects of Mahayana Buddhism embody the vision for universal salvation in diferent ways. First, in terms of the scope of salvation, all sentient beings, including both human and nonhuman are included (at least in principle) in ultimate salvation. Second, in terms of the depth of salvation, even the most unworthy evildoers, including those sufering in hell, are included in universal salvation. Third, in terms of the height of salvation, it is believed that all beings will eventually attain full Buddhahood, meaning that salvation is not merely the elimination of karma but also the elevation of all lives to the maximum actualization of their potentials unto the same status of the Buddha. Fourth, in order to achieve this universal salvation, the Buddha(s) employed a variety of skillful means in a very long span of time in order to address the divergent needs of diferent kinds of sentient beings.

Mahayana Characteristics in Barth’s Theology Given the Mahayana Buddhist vision for universal salvation outlined above, one may find comparable features in Barth’s theology.23 First, Barth rejects the “Calvinistic” doctrine of double predestination, ofering a Christocentrically reconstructed doctrine of election, which takes Jesus Christ as both the subject and object of election, both the electing God and the elected human being. Barth’s doctrine of election was suspected by some scholars as a form of universalism in disguise because Barth suggests that God elects all human beings through Christ, and the only human being to be rejected is Jesus Christ himself.24 Furthermore, Barth himself seems to be quite open to universalism, for he explicitly states that “To be more explicit, there is no good reason why we should not be open to this possibility . . . of an apokatastasis or universal reconciliation.”25 In spite of Barth’s denial of universalism, Barth’s rejection and reinterpretation of the Calvinistic doctrine of double predestination seems to be parallel with the Mahayana critique of the Hinayana, and, as we will see, his Christological interpretation of the doctrine of election is quite comparable to the Mahayana advocacy for universal salvation. Second, Barth makes some bold assertions that seem to point towards the universality of divine salvation. For example, he suggests that “the

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revelation of God is not bound up with the religion of revelation.”26 This may imply that the divine revelation can take place outside of Christian churches. Barth even affirms that other than Jesus Christ the True Light, there may be other lights.27 Furthermore, though Barth suggests that true humanity is manifested in Jesus Christ rather than Adam,28 he also suggests that those who do not know Jesus Christ, for example followers of Confucius, can have true knowledge of humanity, and their understanding of humanity may be even more profound than that of many Christians.29 Barth particularly mentions the secular parables of the kingdom of God and suggests that “God may speak to us through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog”30 in order to illustrate that God can employ not only religious agents, but also the non-religious or atheistic agents as tools for divine revelation. For Barth, there would be even ungodly “co-brothers” (Mitbrüder) from the kingdom of God outside the walls of Christianity.31 To be sure, Barth also offers important qualifications to these assertions,32 but taken together they suggest a universal vision that deserves to be compared with that of Mahayana Buddhism. Third, Barth seems to adopt various and even contradictory discourses in a way comparable to skillful means in Mahayana Buddhism. Barth is famous for his stern “No!” to natural theology,33 and is criticized as onesided on this account.34 However, according to some of his critics, Barth tacitly corrected his early position on natural theology in his later writings without publicly acknowledging it.35 This criticism assumes that there was a significant change of position from the early Barth to the late Barth. In the past, many scholars followed the hypothesis articulated by Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) highlighting the change from the early Barth’s position characterized by dialectics (or the diastasis between divinity and humanity) to the late Barth’s emphasis on analogy (or the humanity of God or the unity between divinity and humanity).36 In recent years, under the influence of Bruce L. McCormack’s study, scholars tend to highlight the continuity rather than discontinuity between the so-called early (dialectical) Barth and the late (analogical) Barth.37 The question is whether it is a real change of mind or position, and whether there is any contradiction between the so-called early and late Barth. Regarding the relationship of Barth’s early and late positions, it is important to note that Barth himself recognizes his own theology as “corrective theology” (Theologie des Korrectives).38 It is Barth’s judgment that the whole direction of nineteenth century liberal theology had gone wrong

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and become too one-sided; in order to correct it efectively, one may need to take the risk of using another one-sided discourse to counterbalance or neutralize it.39 Viewed in this perspective, Barth’s early critique of religion, which might sound one-sidedly negative or even exclusivist, was made knowingly by Barth, in order to counterbalance the one-sided tendency of praising Christianity as a human religion in the prevalent liberal theology. In other words, the seeming one-sidedness of his early theology was made knowingly with particular purpose—to say the “No” loudly and emphatically in order to help the audience to understand the “deep secret yes.”40 Viewed from the Mahayana perspective, especially the doctrine of skillful means, perhaps there was no significant change in Barth’s own understanding, though his expressions are diferent in his early and late publications. In his early publications, similar to a Ch’an/Zen master (if not bodhisattva) with skillful means, Barth used his language skills, employing complex dialectical expressions, to correct the liberal theologians’ misunderstandings or mistakes. This use of dialectical expressions can be compared with the dialectical expressions employed by the Mahayana School of Middle-Path (Mādhyamaka), which aims to eliminate negatively the false understandings of the ultimate truth, rather than to describe the ultimate truth in a positive way. When the situation or intended audience changed, Barth might use analogical expressions more frequently. In other words, there may have been no change with regard to Barth’s own understanding and position; what is changed is the teaching method, form of expression, or point of emphasis. Perhaps this understanding of Barth may explain why there are significant changes in the expressions and yet there are also a lot of continuities between Barth’s early and later writings.41 Considering the corrective character of Barth’s theology as a whole, it is quite possible to raise the question whether one can interpret Barth’s seemingly ambivalent position on universal salvation along this line, arguing that Barth’s affirmations and denials of universal salvation are a species of his skillful means. The features of Barth’s theology outlined earlier show remarkable similarities to the dimensions of universal salvation in Mahayana Buddhism described above, though Barth’s theology is Christian and not Buddhist.42 Barth’s understanding of human nature, especially the relationship between the humanity of Jesus Christ and that of other humans, his affirmation of divine action outside the confines of Christianity, and his view on the nature of theological language, are comparable to the Mahayana doctrines of Buddha-nature and skillful means. I have explored

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some of these points of convergence above, and in other articles.43 In the remainder of this essay, I will review Barth’s doctrine of election through a Mahayana lens.

Barth, Election, and Universal Salvation Regarding Barth’s position on universal salvation, as Tom Greggs highlights, Barth’s doctrine of election seems to present an unsolvable dialectic which demands recognition of the mystery of the work of God, and rejection of any theological attempt to replace Christ as a person with a principle.44 “Barth, therefore, rejects universalism as a principle, but he advocates the total and final victory of Christ as a person: his universalism is one which entirely arises from particularity.”45 Barth’s doctrine of election seems to be in line with “pessimistic universalism,” which emphasizes human sinfulness and unbelief, rather than “optimistic universalism,” which assumes an optimistic view of human nature.46 However, a Mahayana understanding of bodhisattva as fully human may help us reevaluate whether Barth’s universalism is truly “pessimistic.” When a bodhisattva (such as Amida) made the bodhisattva vow to save others and to become Buddha, he/she was a human being. If a human being can make this altruistic and even self-sacrificial vow, this suggests that benevolence or compassion is part of human nature, at least in certain cases. The possibility of universal salvation through the saving power of the bodhisattva then arises from the goodness of human nature which is exhibited in the bodhisattva’s vow. Similarly, if Jesus Christ’s decision to obey the divine will and/or to accept self-rejection exhibits human nature par excellence, then the actualization of universalism relies on a positive, if not optimistic, view of human nature embodied in Jesus Christ.47 Though the distinction made by Greggs between “pessimistic universalism” and “optimistic universalism” may not be absolutely applicable to Barth or Mahayana Buddhism as a whole, it remains fair to say that according to Barth’s doctrine of election, his approach to universal salvation comes closer to the approach embodied in the stories of Amida and Kṣitigarbha than to the approach advocated by the doctrine of Tathāgatagarbha. Whereas the latter seems to assume an optimistic view of human nature, the former approach clearly affirms human sinfulness, the inadequacy of salvation through self-power, and thus the necessity of salvation by other-power.

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There are significant diferences between the approaches to universal salvation embodied in the stories of Amida and Kṣitigarbha. Amida focuses on those who are still alive but are going to die sooner or later, while Kṣitigarbha targets those who are already deceased and now sufering in hell. The universal salvation advocated in the vow of Amida is what Oliver Crisp describes as “contingent universalism.” That is, instead of proclaiming that all sentient beings must be saved, Amida’s vow allows that some people may be excluded due to their own decisions (see the eighteenth vow mentioned). In contrast, the approach to universal salvation embodied in the vow of Kṣitigarbha may lead to a kind of “necessary universalism,” which affirms that hell will eventually be empty. Whereas the contingency in the former is based on the freedom of the recipients of salvation, the necessity in the latter is grounded in the determination of the savior.48 Both approaches share the same feature that the universal salvation to be achieved is based primarily on a par ticular person’s, namely the bodhisattva’s, altruistic or self-sacrificial compassion and the resultant decision or vow, rather than an ontological principle, for instance, the doctrine of Buddha-nature. At this point, Barth’s approach is again similar to the approaches embodied in the stories of Amida and Kṣitigarbha than to that of the doctrine of Buddha-nature. In comparison with Barth’s doctrine of election, considering Barth’s denial of universalism (as a necessity guaranteed by a certain ontological principle), Barth’s position may be more in line with contingent universalism (diferent from the case of Kṣitigarbha), though for Barth the contingency is based primarily on the divine freedom instead of human freedom (diferent from the case of Pure Land Buddhism). In order to respect divine freedom, Barth refuses to limit the extent of God’s salvation on the one hand, and opposes any attempt to make it an obligation or necessity for God to save all human beings on the other hand. In other words, no one can limit the scope of God’s salvation, and no one can force God to save all.49 A significant diference between Barth and Mahayana Buddhism in general and Pure Land Buddhism particularly is that in Barth’s theology, Jesus Christ is an electing savior, elected (as well as rejected) by God first, whereas in Mahayana Buddhism, the bodhisattva is primarily a selfappointing savior rather than being elected by a supreme divine being. In Christian theology, Jesus Christ’s self-rejection seems to be both “eternally” made by the divine Son and manifested in the incarnation (Phil.

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2:6–8) and “historically” confirmed by Jesus Christ as a human being, who, as Barth suggests, obeys the Father, who exhibits a “self-giving to the creature” and betrays no “autocratic self-seeking.”50 In spite of these apparent diferences, with regard to the election done by the electing savior (Christ or bodhisattva), certain self-rejection is involved in both Christianity and Buddhism. The two stories of Amida and Kṣitigarbha share the emphasis that the bodhisattva refuses to enter into nirvana until the completion of the salvific work promised. In other words, in order to save the others, the bodhisattva prefers to reject himself or herself first. Of course, this self-rejection is provisional or temporal, rather than ultimate or eternal, because the bodhisattva will eventually enter into nirvana when the salvific work promised or avowed is completed. Similarly, the self-rejection of Jesus Christ symbolized by the cross ends with the victory symbolized by the resurrection. Though the bodhisattva’s way to nirvana and Jesus Christ’s way to resurrection are seemingly diferent in terms of destination, both paths involve the savior’s self-rejection.

Barth’s Denial of Universal Salvation Based on the Mahayana interpretation of Barth’s theology outlined above, one may consider whether one can interpret Barth’s ambivalent attitude towards universal salvation, especially his denial of universalism, in a Mahayana perspective as well. It is well known that Barth explicitly denies the doctrine of apokatastasis.51 However, no matter how much Barth denies it, some scholars insist that if Barth follows his own basic theological presuppositions consistently and thoroughly, his theology will inevitably lead to universalism.52 The debate concerning whether and in what sense Barth advocates for universalism seems to indicate that there are two contrasting strands in Barth’s thought, one leaning toward universalism and the other against universalism. In view of the seeming discrepancies between Barth’s own discourses on related issues, some scholars, such as Oliver Crisp, raise the issue whether one should make a distinction between the “letter” and the “spirit” of Barth’s doctrine of election.53 Crisp further suggests that “The scope of human salvation envisaged in the theology of Karl Barth is either a species of universalism, or comprises several distinct, incompatible strands of doctrine that he does not finally resolve.”54 Given the above comparison between Barth and Mahayana Buddhism, especially their approaches to election, it is possible to argue that from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective, against Crisp’s suggestion,

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Barth’s theology is both a species of universalism, and comprises several distinct, incompatible strands of doctrine, which (regardless of whether Barth might have finally resolved them) can be resolved within a Mahayana framework, especially the Mahayana doctrine of skillful means. In the perspective of Mahayana Buddhism, it is quite obvious that Barth’s theology exhibits certain Mahayana characteristics, though sometimes not as apparent as the corresponding expressions in Mahayana Buddhism. These characteristics include not only his doctrine of election, and his interpretation of Christ’s descent into Hell, but also his affirmation of the divine activities beyond the Christian churches as well as the corrective nature of theological discourses. It is noteworthy that Barth’s denial of universal salvation is quite comparable to the practice of skillful means in Mahayana Buddhism. As it is reported by Eberhard Jüngel and highlighted by David W. Congdon, Barth once stated that “I do not teach it (universalism), but I also do not not teach it.”55 Based on these, it is possible to suggest that Barth’s universalism is more fundamental to his own position, while his denial of universalism is merely his own skillful means which is made for the benefit of his audience. The pedagogical reason for the denial of universalism is obvious. As Jürgen Moltmann puts it, “If universalism is proclaimed, is the result not the light-minded recklessness that says: why should I believe, and bother to lead a righteous life, if I and everyone else are going to be saved?”56 In other words, even though Barth privately held or preferred a sort of universal salvation, he might not want to declare this publicly or unreservedly. This Mahayana interpretation of Barth’s denial of universalism is reminiscent of the case of Origen (182–254), who is widely recognized as the most important pioneer of universalism in the history of Christian theology. As some commentators notice, though Origen upheld universal salvation, he refused to teach it publicly to the novice or Christians who are not spiritually mature enough to receive this teaching.57 Comparable to yet slightly diferent from Barth, Origen might say “I do teach it (privately to the few who are mature enough to receive it), but I also do not teach it (publicly to those who are not mature enough to receive it).” In other words, though it is wrong to teach universal salvation as an official church dogma to be held and taught publicly, it is allowable for individual theologians to hold it as a theologoumenon. This approach to handle the issue of universal salvation is very much in line with Origen’s own theory of divine accommodation (sygkatábāsis, accommodatio),

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which is also quite comparable with the Mahayana concept of skillful means.58 The example of Origen seems to suggest that in spite of the differences between Barth and Origen on universal salvation,59 it is possible to consider explaining the ambivalence of Barth’s position on universal salvation in comparison with Origen and also in the perspective of the Mahayana concept of skillful means. This Mahayana explanation of Barth’s denial of universalism is diferent from, but not necessarily contradictory to, the explanation based on Barth’s respect of the divine freedom and his affirmation of the role of the Holy Spirit in the divine election.60 After all, upholding the divine freedom and the role of the Holy Spirit in election can promote gratitude, humility, and service. Contrary to the interpretation that Barth’s position is coherent and non-universalistic, a Mahayana interpretation may suggest that Barth’s position can be, though not necessarily is, coherent yet universalistic. Its coherence is not in the sense of logical consistency and coherence, but that the divergent and apparently contradictory expressions can be integrated in a coherent doctrinal system in which diferent doctrines can be understood as diferent skillful means.

Critical Remarks Though it is possible to interpret Barth from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective, which can affirm the universalistic tendency of Barth’s position and its coherence with his denial of universalism, there are some critical diferences between Barth and Mahayana Buddhism on universal salvation. First, in comparison with the largely unequivocal affirmation of universal salvation made by Mahayana Buddhism, Barth’s position on universal salvation is relatively more reserved and can be described as “implicit universalism.”61 In contrast, outspoken Christian advocates of universal salvation such as von Balthasar from the Catholic tradition and Timothy Ware from the Orthodox tradition attempt to justify their hope for the universal salvation not only on the ground of divine freedom or grace, but appeal more importantly to the merciful heart which a Christian should have.62 Similarly, the affirmation of universal salvation in Mahayana Buddhism is based mainly on the compassionate heart of the bodhisattva, who is primarily a human person who is compassionate to all sentient beings. According to this approach to universal salvation, the most crucial issue concerns primarily what one should hope for, which

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is not merely a matter of “orthodoxy” (doctrinal correctness or correct faith about God), but also a matter of “orthopraxis” (the correct practice a Christian should perform) as well as orthopathos (the right compassion a Christian should have). Barth’s efort in basing his doctrine of election as well as his position on universal salvation on the divine grace and freedom in revelation and salvation, rather than on any anthropology or metaphysical principle, is entirely orthodox. However, in comparison with the Mahayana Buddhist emphasis on the bodhisattva’s compassionate heart toward all sentient beings and the approach of grounding the hope for universal salvation in the merciful heart a Christian should have (mentioned by von Balthasar and Ware), one may wonder whether Barth’s position on universal salvation is adequate in terms of orthopathos. Perhaps an adequate Christian theology, including particularly its position on universal salvation, should reflect and be based on not only what Christians do and/or should believe, but also their love and hope. Of course these three—namely faith, hope, and love—should not be separate in Christian doctrine, practice, and spirituality. Second, in comparison with Mahayana Buddhism, which emphasizes that all sentient beings, including nonhuman beings, are included in the universal salvation as recipients of salvation, Barth’s Christological doctrine of election is relatively more restricted in terms of scope.63 To be sure, Barth might admit the eschatological unity of all beings in Christ, and in this sense the divine election includes the whole creation, but Barth’s actual discourses on the divine election focus on humanity. If Barth upheld a theocentric approach consistently and thoroughly, his doctrine of election might have included nonhuman creatures in a more explicit way. Though Barth does not exclude explicitly the participation of nonhuman beings in salvation, his discourses often take the creation as the basis rather than participants of the covenant, or as background for salvation rather than recipient of salvation. This is significantly different from not only Mahayana Buddhism but also the theology of Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Barth’s contemporary. Tillich is relatively more explicit in affirming the participation of nonhuman beings in the fall and salvation as recipients of salvation rather than background of the drama of salvation. Given this understanding of the participation of nature in salvation, it is not surprising that there are some studies exploring the positive significance of Tillich’s theology for contemporary ecological theology,64 and even for the dialogue with Mahayana Buddhism on environmental issues.65 In contrast, Barth’s theology has attracted much

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fewer studies concerning its positive significance for ecological theology. It is rather ironic that although Barth himself was critical toward the “anthropocentric” tendency (in the sense of creating God according to one’s image) in nineteenth-century Protestant theology,66 his Christocentric doctrine on divine election remains largely “anthropocentric” (in the sense of omitting the nonhuman creatures) in its presentation, though not necessarily in terms of intention. Third, the universal salvation advocated by Mahayana Buddhism implies not only the universality of the scope of salvation, but also the completeness of universal salvation. Mahayana Buddhism, especially its doctrine of Buddha-nature, affirms that all sentient beings will eventually attain Buddhahood and share the same status as other bodhisattvas/ Buddhas. From the Mahayana Buddhist perspective, there is no essential diference between the Buddha and other sentient beings. Emphasis is placed on the equality and the sameness in terms of nature among the Buddhas (who have attained full Buddhahood already) and the sentient beings (who have not yet attained Buddhahood but will attain it eventually). The Mahayana doctrine of Buddha-nature affirms the eventual and ontological equality between the Buddhas and sentient beings, and rejects any absolute ontological diference between them. The question is whether and to what extent Barth will make comparable claims. As Greggs points out, Barth’s doctrine of election emphasizes rather than negates human participation; it assumes active human participation and an ontological union in Christ, and it takes the full realization of humanity as the result of election. Unlike Mahayana Buddhism, however, which upholds the sameness of the humanity of the bodhisattvas and ordinary human beings, Barth’s theology seems to assume that the humanity of Christ is both like and unlike the humanity of other human beings.67 In view of this, the relationship between the humanity of Christ and that of other human beings should be further spelt out and compared with Mahayana Buddhism. Further investigation should also be done on Barth’s interpretation of the doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell, as well as the election of Israel and the salvation of Judas Iscariot.68 Notes 1. For example, Joseph D. Bettis, “Is Karl Barth a Universalist?” Scottish Journal of Theology 20, no. 4 (1967): 423–436. 2. J. Colwell, “The Contemporaneity of the Divine Decision: Reflections on Barth’s Denial of ‘Universalism,’ ” in Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell, ed. Nigel M de S.

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

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Cameron (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), 139–160; Oliver D. Crisp, “On Barth’s Denial of Universalism,” Themelios 29 (2003): 18–29. See Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–6. See further: Lai Pan-chiu, “Reconsidering the Christian Understanding of Universal Salvation in Mahayana Buddhist Perspective,” Ching Feng, n.s. 12 (2013): 19–42. See Paul O. Ingram, The Modern Buddhist- Christian Dialogue (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 347–382. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 280–361. A much better translation with a helpful introduction is Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, trans. Garrett Green (London: T&T Clark, 2006). Barth’s discussion on the True Pure Land Buddhism attracted responses from the Christian as well as the True Pure Land Buddhist perspectives respectively. See Charles T. Waldrop, “Karl Barth and Pure Land Buddhism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 24, no.  4 (Fall 1987): 574–597; Dennis Hirota, “On Recent Readings of Shinran,” The Eastern Buddhist 33, no. 1 (2001): 38–55, esp. 39–40; and Dennis Hirota, “Images of Reality in the Shin Buddhist Path: A Hermeneutical Approach,” in Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism, ed. Dennis Hirota (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 33–72, esp. 34–48. The English translation cited here is prepared by Hisao Inagaki. See his The Three Pure Land Sutras (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2003). Roger J. Corless, “Pure Land Piety,” in Buddhist Spirituality: Indian, Southeast Asian, Tibetan, Early Chinese, ed. Takeuchi Yoshinori et al. (London: SCM, 1994), 242–271. Alfred Bloom, “Shinran’s Way,” in Buddhist Spirituality: Later China, Korea, Japan, and the Modern World, ed. Takeuchi Yoshinori et al. (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 222–238. David  W. Chappell, “From Dispute to Dual Cultivation: Pure Land Responses to Ch’an Critics,” in Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism, ed. Peter N. Gregory (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 163–197. For the concept of skillful means, see Michael Pye, Skillful Means: A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism (London: Duckworth, 1978); John W. Schroeder, Skillful Means: The Heart of Buddhist Compassion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). Alfred Bloom, “Shinran’s Way,” 230. For the principles and practices of doctrinal classification, see: Man Chanju, The History of Doctrinal Classification in Chinese Buddhism: A Study of the Panjiao Systems (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006). See Kristin Beise Kiblinger, Buddhist Inclusivism: Attitudes towards Religious Others (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). Burton Watson, trans., The Vimalakirti Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 93–94. Karl Ludvig Reichelt, Truth and Tradition in Chinese Buddhism: A Study of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, trans. Kathrina van Wagenen Bugge (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2001), 77–126. The Sutra of Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha’s Fundamental Vows, 2nd ed., trans. Upasaka Taotsi Shih, ed. Frank  G. French; http://www. sinc . sunysb.edu /clubs/ buddhism /ksitigarbha/chap4.html (accessed on March 28, 2011).

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18. Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism, 229–231. 19. In comparison with the Mādhyamika (literally means middle path) and Yogācāra schools of Mahayana Buddhism in India, this tradition was less influential in India but became very prominent in China. For a brief survey of this tradition, see ibid., 103–128. 20. See, for details, Sallie B. King, Buddha Nature (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1992). 21. Simon P. James, Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 64–69. 22. See Masao Abe, A Study of Dōgen: His Philosophy and Religion, ed. Steven Heine (Albany: State University of New York, 1992), 35–76; Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Enlightenment: Origins and Meaning, trans. John C. Maraldo (New York: Weatherhill, 1979), 102–124. 23. See further Lai Pan-chiu, “Karl Barth and Buddhist-Christian Studies in China,” Journal of Comparative Scripture 6 (2015): 69–112. 24. For example, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Man Be Saved”? trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,1988), 94, 196–197. 25. CD IV/3.1 (1961), 478. 26. CD I/2, 329. 27. CD IV/3.1, 113–114. 28. Barth, Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5, trans. T. A. Smail (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956), 6, 10. 29. CD III/2 (1960), 199, 276. 30. CD I/1 (1936), 60. 31. Barth, Gespräche IV, 1964–1968, 401, in Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action, ed. Paul S. Chung (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008), 462. 32. As Sven Ensminger points out, Barth’s mentioning of “dead dogs,” “Russian Communism,” etc. aims to affirm God’s sovereignty in employing various media of revelation rather than the existence of other revelations, and the affirmation concerns potentiality or capability rather than fact. Furthermore, Barth’s mentioning of “other lights” does not compromise the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the true Light. Other lights can shine only because they are illuminated by the Light of Life. See: Sven Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 27–40. 33. See Barth, “No!” in Natural Theology, ed. John Baillie (London: The Centenary Press, 1946), 65–128. 34. Emil Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” in ibid., 59. 35. Hans Küng, Does God Exist? trans. Edward Quinn (London: Collins, 1980), 525–528. 36. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). 37. Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 38. Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935), 103. 39. CD II/1, trans. T. H. L. Parker, W. B. Johnston, K. McKnight, and J. L. M. Haire (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), 634. 40. John Webster, Barth (London: Continuum, 2000), 20–48.

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41. For example, regarding Barth’s theology of religion/religions, his relatively early, though not the earliest, “critique” of religion in §17 “Gottes Ofenbarung als Aufhebung der Religion” of CD I/2, involves not only “abolition” but also “exaltation” of religion, and shows certain continuities with his discussion on “other lights” in CD IV/3. See Lai Pan-chiu, “Barth’s Theology of Religion and the Asian Context of Religious Pluralism,” Asia Journal of Theology 15, no. 2 (2001): 247–267; see also Garrett Green, “Introduction: Barth as Theorist of Religion,” in Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, trans. Garrett Green (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 1–29. The difference between his early and later discourses on religion might have been shaped by the diferent political contexts in 1930s and 1960s respectively. His early critique of religion during the 1930s particularly reflected his involvement in the Barmen Declaration against the “German Christians” and Nazism. See Ensminger, Barth’s Theology, 24–27. 42. In addition to the formal doctrinal similarities with True Pure Land Buddhism mentioned by Barth himself, the vow made by Kṣitigarbha is reminiscent of Barth’s interpretation of Christ’s descent into hell. For a rather extensive discussion on Barth’s position without any reference to Buddhism, see David Lauber, Barth on the Descent into Hell: God, Atonement and the Christian Life (Burlington: VT: Ashgate, 2004). 43. For example: Lai Pan-chiu, “Barth’s Doctrines of Sin and Humanity in Buddhist Perspective,” Studies in Inter-religious Studies 16, no. 1 (2006): 41–58. 44. Tom Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 29–31. 45. Ibid., 31. 46. Tom Greggs, “Pessimistic Universalism: Rethinking the Wider Hope with Bonhoefer and Barth,” Modern Theology 26, no. 4 (2010): 495–510. 47. In fact, both Barth’s Christological anthropology and the Tathāgatagarbha doctrine of Buddha-nature assume a positive or optimistic view of human nature without neglecting the existence of sin. See Lai Pan- chiu, “Sinful Flesh, Sinful Nature and Tathāgatagarbha: An Investigation into Christological Anthropology” (in Chinese), CGST Journal 35 (2003): 209–229. 48. For the distinction between contingent universalism and necessary universalism, see Oliver D. Crisp, “I Do Teach It, but I Also Do Not Teach It: The Universalism of Karl Barth (1886–1968),” in “All Shall Be Well”: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology, ed. Gregory McDonald (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2011), 306–309. 49. Timothy Scheuers, “An Evaluation of Some Aspects of Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election,” Mid-American Journal of Theology 22 (2011): 161–173, esp. 168–169. 50. CD II/2, 177–178. 51. CD II/2, 417, 476–7; IV /3, §70.3 “The Condemnation of Man”; cf. Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, 29. 52. See Michael O’Neil, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election,” Evangelical Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2004): 311–326. 53. Oliver Crisp, “The Letter and the Spirit of Barth’s Doctrine of Election: A Response to Michael O’Neill,” Evangelical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (2007): 53–67. 54. Crisp, “I Do Teach It,” 305. 55. See Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth, a Theological Legacy, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 44–45; cf. David W. Congdon, “Apokatastasis and

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56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66. 67. 68.

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Apostolicity: A Response to Oliver Crisp on the Question of Barth’s Universalism,” Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 4 (November 2014): 465, n. 2. There are some affinities between David W. Congdon’s interpretation of Barth and the Mahayana interpretation of Barth ofered in this essay, especially Congdon’s emphasis on Barth’s understanding of the existential and missionary nature of theological speech exhibited particularly in Barth’s discourses related to universal salvation. I would like to thank the editors of this volume for ofering critical comments and constructive suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay, including drawing my attention to Congdon’s article, which was formally published more or less at the same time when the draft of this essay was submitted to them. Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 1996), 239. See Mark S. M. Scott, “Guarding the Mysteries of Salvation: The Pastoral Pedagogy of Origen’s Universalism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18, no. 3 (2010): 347–368. For the concept of divine accommodation, see Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). For a comparison between the Mahayana Buddhist concept of skillful means and the Christian concept of divine accommodation, see Lai Pan-chiu, Mahayana Christian Theology: Thought-Experiments of Sino- Christian Theology (in Chinese) (Hong Kong: Logos & Pneuma Press, 2011), 69–102. See Greggs, Barth, Origen and Universal Salvation, esp. 206–215. Suzanne McDonald, “Evangelical Questioning of Election in Barth: A Pneumatological Perspective from the Reformed Heritage,” in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, ed. Cliford B. Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 250–268, esp. 264. Scheuers, “Some Aspects of Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election,” esp. 167–172. See von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Man Be Saved”? 97–113, esp. 105–107; Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church: New Edition (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 262; Lai Pan-chiu, “Reconsidering the Christian Understanding of Universal Salvation,” 37–39. In articulating his animal theology, Andrew Linzey draws on Barth for a more holistic theology of salvation, but Linzey is also well aware of the limitation of Barth’s theology in this respect. See Andrew Linzey, Animal Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000); Animal Theology (London: SCM Press, 1994), especially 7–12. For example, Lai Pan-chiu, “Paul Tillich and Ecological Theology,” The Journal of Religion 79, no.  2 (1999): 233–249; Michael  F. Drummy, Being and Earth: Paul Tillich’s Theology of Nature (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000). . Lai Pan-chiu, “Kingdom of God in Tillich and Pure Land in Mahayana Buddhism,” in Internationales Jahrbuch für die Tillich- Forschung Band 5/2009, ed. Christian Danz, Werner Schlüssler, and Erdmann Sturm (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2010), 151–172. Barth, Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (London: Collins, 1961), 9–32. Greggs, Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, 32–34, 43–48. For Judas, see Barth, CD II/2, 458–506. For Israel, see Katherine Sonderegger, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Israel” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

Response to Part II Paul Knitter

I have to begin with a confession: I am able to respond to the task assigned me by the editors of this volume in only a halfhearted way. I have been asked to ofer some Buddhist reflections on these two essays. But I am, as it were, only half-Buddhist. Yes, I have been studying and practicing the teachings of the Buddha since the 1980s, but I have been doing that as a Christian. I am one of those people recently identified as “double belongers”—people who find themselves necessarily nourished by two very diferent religious traditions. In my case, I am trying to be both a disciple of Jesus the Christ and of Gautama the Buddha.1 Though my original practice and my formal training is in Christianity (specifically, Roman Catholicism), for these reflections, I will try to address Pan-chiu Lai and James Farwell as a Buddhist (specifically of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism). My dual Christian identity, however, will, I hope, serve me well; starting all the way back in my doctoral dissertation, Karl Barth has been a pivotal dialogue partner in my theological journey.2 A double-belonger, I would like to suggest, is especially equipped to carry out, or assess, the task that comparative theology (CT) sets for itself.

The Promise and Challenge of Comparative Theology In these two essays, both Lai and Farwell clearly take on the task and goals of CT. Each starts with a particular problem, crystallized in the theology of Karl Barth but facing Christians in general, and they turn to a comparative engagement (I would call it a dialogue) with Mahayana Buddhism for help in finding a solution. For Lai, it is “to explain Barth’s ambivalent position on universal salvation.” For Farwell, it is the problem of

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spiritual practice—what role does practice actually play. (I see this as a reflection of the ongoing Christian tussle with how to reconcile grace and works.) But in the way each of them actually carries out their comparative project, I note subtle but significant diferences. Lai, it seems to me, slips into the defect that I have noted in much of the early eforts at CT by Francis X. Clooney and James L. Fredericks.3 He is impressively strong on comparison but rather weak on theology. His lineup of “Mahayana characteristics of Barth’s Theology” is enticing: as all will be enlightened, so for Barth (ambiguously) all will be saved; as Mahayana recognizes “many doors” to enlightenment, so Barth honors “words outside the walls of the church”; as bodhisattvas renounce themselves for others, so did Jesus; both Pure Land and Barth promise a “contingent universalism.” Fine, but where is the theological payof from these similarities? What in these similarities might enable Christians to learn things they did not previously know? Isn’t that the intent of CT? I identified two areas where Lai is clearer about what Christians or Barth might learn from Mahayana Buddhism. He suggests that we regard Barth’s early vociferous “No” to Emil Brunner and liberal theology, or his yes-but-no assertions about universal salvation, as upaya or “skillful means.” This is an alluring suggestion but well nigh impossible to prove. Besides, what theological lessons can we learn from it? Much more theologically pregnant is what I consider to be, for Lai, the primary challenge that Mahayana poses for Barth: Barth’s “implicit universalism,” Lai urges, should boldly endorse Mahayana’s “unequivocal” universalism, and to do that, Barth and Christians need more of a “compassionate heart toward all sentient beings.” As for the theological revisions that would be necessary for developing such a compassionate heart, all Lai ofers is the somewhat ambiguous statement that “an adequate Christian theology . . . should reflect and be based on not only what Christians do and/or should believe, but also their love and hope.” But he does not clearly indicate just how “what Christians believe” will have to change in order to allow and sustain such love and hope. Farwell, it seems to me, does aim at, and articulate, a “constructive contribution to Christian thought . . . by moving from Barth to Dōgen and back again.” Yes, like Lai, he points out revealing similarities between Barth and Dogen. For both of them, “religion’s true work is fulfilled when it points away from itself . . . to a reality that prior to those teachings and practices and is already its foundation.” But there are also diferences,

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stark diferences. And it is from these diferences that Christians “might acknowledge that the relationship between efort and goal is ‘not-two.’ ” But then Farwell goes on to recognize the revolutionary conclusion— revolutionary for Barth and western Christians—that such sacramental nonduality calls for a theological nonduality, namely “that the relationship between God and the world is itself neither one nor two, but ‘nottwo.’ ” This is comparative theology at its best—drawing clear, both deconstructive and constructive, theological conclusions from the comparison/dialogue with another tradition.

Comparative Theology Must Include Theology of Religions But I want to go on to suggest, as cautiously and carefully as I can, that the comparative “constructive contributions” that both Lai and Farwell, with difering clarity, draw from their comparisons between Barth and Buddhism are not entirely coherent. And that is because they do not sufficiently recognize how Barth’s theology of religions, with its Christological foundations, stands at odds with what they suggest Barth and Christians can learn from Buddhism.4 Farwell asserts “the absence—in fact, the rejection—of a theology of religions by Barth.” But I would like to suggest that the very reasons why Barth rejects a theology of religions are the contents of his theology of religions. Farwell recognizes those contents in his awkward (as only theologians can be awkward!) but accurate definition of Barth’s view of all religion—yes, including also and primarily Christianity—as a “kerygmatically generated inverse pluralism.” I would translate that more simply and I hope still accurately as “a biblically based exclusivism.” Farwell summarizes Barth’s theology of religion in a nutshell: “the material content of religions is human efort, and . . . human efort is not soteriologically significant.” For Barth, human efort is never soteriologically significant. (Whether that is really so, is Farwell’s central question.) In Jesus Christ, and only in Jesus Christ, is the insignificance of religion “assumed” (extending the assumptio carnis) and “sublimated” (aufgehoben) into the one true religion whose name, because of Jesus, is Christian. And then Farwell, like many a comparative theologian, urges us to “simply grant that Barth considers his approach the only one appropriate to Christian theology” and get on with the comparative task. That recommendation to “simply grant” stopped me in my critical tracks. And

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when Farwell goes on to state that any suggestion that such a theological verdict on religion excludes the soteriological validity of other religions would be a criticism that “lands on a space he [Barth] is not himself attempting to occupy,” I have to respond that whether he wants to occupy that space or not, that’s where he lands! This is what a theology of religions is all about—to determine, through open discourse within the Christian churches, what is the theological assessment of other religions that is most faithful to the original and ongoing Christian witness (the theological task) and to the phenomenological reality of the other religious traditions (the comparative task). I fear that to “simply grant” and so skip over Barth’s theology of religions and rush to a Buddhist comparative engagement with him is to construct a building on what might be a foundation of sand. This brings us to the recent (and not so recent) eforts to reassess Barth’s contribution to a Christian theology of religious pluralism. (Such eforts, I believe, form an impetus and sustaining pillar for this book.) Lai echoes earlier attempts at reassessment in his claim that the later Barth (i.e., after paragraph 17 of CD I/2 and especially in paragraph 69 of CD IV/3) affirmed the value of “other lights,” “Mitbrüder,” and “secular parables” in other religions. More recent attempts to free Barth from the shackles of exclusivism argue that Barth’s overall verdict on religion as Unglaube was aimed at Christian piety and at the very modern concept of religion rather than at other religions.5 As Joseph Di Noia summarizes this defense of Barth, his judgment on religion is “emphatically not one that is pronounced upon the world of non-Christian religions.” 6 But even if Barth did not intend to aim this negative assessment of all religion at non-Christian communities, that is where, it seems to me, it unavoidably points. For Barth, all religion, as Farwell makes clear, like all human works, are not of themselves “soteriologically significant”; they are not capable of connecting us with the divine. That can happen only in, and only through the reception of, the revelation and grace given in Jesus Christ. Barth makes this incontestably clear in his analogy of the sun: what renders a religion “true,” has nothing to do with what it is or does. Only the sun of revelation given in Jesus Christ determines its truth, its acceptability. And this sun shines only on the Christian religion. Just as there is no essential diference between the parts of the earth in the darkness of night and those in the light of day, there is no diference between other religions and Christianity. But it is only the religion on

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which the sunlight of Christ shines that is “aufgehoben” or “sublated” to be the true religion.7 This, I believe, is the clear message of paragraph 17. To suggest, as Lai does, that in the subsequent more inclusive development of Barth’s theology he came to see that “the revelation of God is not bound up with the religion of revelation,” Lai forgets, I suggest, that Barth never abandoned his insistence that the revelation of God is bound up with Jesus Christ. As I have argued elsewhere more extensively, while Barth may have broadened his theological anthropology to recognize “other words and other lights” outside of the community of Christ, he never changed or compromised his Christology. Those other words and parables and lights were to be understood and engaged according to the “analogia fidei” (not the analogia entis); and that meant their positive content or their soteriological potential can be identified, known, and actuated only through the proclaimed Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is why Barth, in a letter to his friend Georges Casalis on August 18, 1963 (five years before his death), warned him that in his conversations with the non-Christians of Cameroon he should not dare to suggest that their religions provide “a sign that humanity has been created for a relationship with God.” That would be to return to the “old miserable situation” in which theologians replaced God’s singular revelation in Christ with manmade religion.8

Buddhism’s Foundational Challenge for Christians: Nondualism Only by recognizing and grappling with the Christomonistic foundations of Barth’s theology of religions9, I suggest, can Lai and Farwell explore the central and richest challenge of a comparative engagement of Barth and Mahayana Buddhism. Farwell clearly, though somewhat timorously, recognizes this challenge (Lai does so more indirectly) when he observes that in order for Christians to learn from Buddhism that “the relationship between efort and goal is ‘not-two,’ ” they will also have to ask whether “the relationship between God and the world is itself neither one nor two, but ‘not-two.’ ” This is a radical learning from Buddhism. Just as for Dōgen, “the relationship between emptiness and all things is itself ‘not-two,’” so for Christians the relationship between the Creator and creation might be such that, though diferent (“not one”!), they have their existence, their being, in each other (“not-two”).

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Here, I believe, is the required basis for Farwell’s call for a sacramental nonduality between human efort and divine grace—an ontological nonduality between divine being and finite being—a truly reciprocal nonduality in which not only we “live and move and have our being in God” (Acts 17:28), but God “lives and moves and has God’s being in us.” Farwell, rather hesitantly asks, “whether such nondualism could be taken on board by the Christian tradition.” For me, his essay clearly suggests that we can. This will be the further work called for in a comparative theological project between Barth and Buddhism, or Christian theology and Buddhism. But—and here is my final constructive criticism for both Farwell and Lai—such a comparative theological project will not be able to proceed unless we also recognize that in Barth and in much of Christian theology we have a quite dualistic Christology and soteriology. Whereas for Dōgen and Mahayanists, our Buddha-nature that expresses the nonduality of Emptiness and form is a given, and our problem is to wake up to this ontologically given reality, for Barth the transcendence of the Divine is such that it must enter the finite created world senkrecht von oben—perpendicularly from above. And that happens at one point and one point only in history: in Jesus Christ. Farwell points out that this Christ-event brings about a kind of nondual presence of God’s grace in the world so that our eforts are but the expression of that grace. But for Barth and many Christians, such as a presence is caused by, and limited to a relationship with, Jesus Christ. For Dōgen, such a presence (symbolized in Buddha-nature) is a universal, ontological given. For Barth, it is a presence that is brought about by (not just revealed by) the Christ event and then limited to those who have access to that event through the proclaimed word. To pursue the directions for a comparative exploration of Barth and Buddhism that Lai and Farwell, each diferently but both creatively, lay out for us, we will have to, I suggest, take more seriously and boldly Buddhism’s nondualistic “kerygma” and its Christological implications. Notes 1. How well I am doing this can be judged from my Without Buddha I Could Not be a Christian (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2011). 2. Toward a Protestant Theology of Religions (Marburg: N.G. Elwert Verlag, 1974). 3. Paul Knitter, “Can We Put Our Theological Money Where Our Dialogical Mouths Are?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 49 (2014): 166–173, at 170–171.

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4. This is a reflection of the ongoing, but recently clarifying, debate about the relationship between comparative theology and the theology of religious pluralism. See Kristin Beise Kiblinger, “Relating Theology of Religions and Comparative Theology,” in The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the New Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney (New York: T&T Clark International, 2010), 21–42. 5. See Garrett Green, “Challenging the Religious Studies Canon: Karl Barth’s Theory of Religion,” Journal of Religion 75 (1995): 473–486; J. A. Di Noia, “Religion and the Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243–257; and Tom Greggs, Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2011). 6. Di Noia, “Religion and the Religions,” 250. 7. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 388 and 339–343. 8. A copy of this letter in the Barth-Archive in Basel. For an expanded presentation of this argument that Barth did not change his essentially exclusive theology of religions, together with extensive references to his Kirchliche Dogmatik, see the Excursus “Did Barth Change His Verdict on the Religions?” in Knitter, Toward a Protestant Theology of Religions, 32–36. 9. See CD I/2, 388 and 339–343.

5 Analogies across Faiths BA RT H A N D G HA Z A L I ON SPE A K I NG A F T E R R E V E L AT I O N Joshua Ralston

Karl Barth is an odd choice to leverage as a source for Christian-Muslim dialogue, let alone a constructive comparative theological project. (In) famously, Barth derided all religions, even Christianity, as human attempts at self-justification. He also rejected natural theology, the sensus divinitatis, and the analogia entis—categories that are often invoked as possible theological justifications for interfaith dialogue. With regard to Islam more specifically, Barth’s limited comments on the religion shows a lack of comprehensive knowledge of Islamic thought or practice and thus he tends to rely on crude stereotypes of Muslims.1 Barth rejects the most common theological starting points for Christian-Muslim dialogue. He rules out appeals to shared theological foundations—be it monotheism, a scripturally attested Creator, or trust in divine providence—as doctrinal loci that might allow Christians and Muslims to comprehend one another. In his critique of natural theology, for instance, Barth argues against any notion that imagines belief in divine unity or monotheism as being somehow advantageous for human knowledge or interreligious exchange. “A good example of absolutising of uniqueness is provided by the noisy fanaticism of Islam regarding the one God.”2 In terms of providence, Barth perceives Islamic acceptance of absolute divine governance coupled with the hiddenness of God to be a one-sided misunderstanding. “And in Islam this obscurity of God and His rule has been made a principle and therefore a caricature.”3 This problematic account of divine sovereignty, one that Barth also perceives in certain reformed scholastics, must be rethought in and through attention to God’s revelation in the act of Jesus Christ. Taken together, Barth avers that, “It is unthinking to set Islam and Christianity side by side, as if in monotheism at least they have something in

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common. In reality, nothing separates them so radically as the diferent way they appear to say the same thing—that there is only one God.”4 Moreover, Barth discards the very possibilities of a comparative Christian-Muslim exchange, when he argues that Christian theology should study Islam, but that “in this outer circle generally there is nothing that it can abstract and use.”5 Islam may be worthy of investigation and study, but not of the type that would, in the well-known words of Francis Clooney, allow for “deep learning across religious borders.”6 Given that such statements are littered throughout Barth’s corpus, it would appear wise to abandon a Christian-Muslim comparative project before it even begins. For on what grounds could a Barth-influenced dialogue with Islam even be possible? Where might you turn to develop a constructive engagement between Barth and Islamic thought? Glenn A. Chestnut has proposed one intriguing solution beyond this impasse, namely to extend Barth’s cautiously positive understandings of the integral relationship between the church and synagogue to include also the mosque.7 He contends that Barth’s theology of the universality of grace, the Light and the “ little lights,” and God’s covenanting action might create space for Christian-Muslim engagement particularly around social justice and the common good. While this is one promising avenue, its focus is limited to questions surrounding ethics and does not return to Barth’s ongoing critiques of both Islam and the very category of religion. Nor does he fully address Barth’s own position on Christianity and religion and thereby make sense of how Barth does not fall victim to a fideism that issues in a renewed form of Christian triumphalism. It would seem that when it comes to theology proper and accounts of divine revelation, Barth’s theology leaves us with little option besides pitting the two traditions and their views on God and God’s Word against one another. One must choose Christ or Qur’an. Is there any way to remain faithful to Barth’s central theological and methodological commitments to particularity, the analogia fidei, and theology as rooted in exegesis and not return to Barth’s own demagoguery of Islam? Must appeals to theology as thinking with and after divine revelation simply pit the Word as Jesus against the Word as Qur’an? It is the burden of this chapter to argue that Barth’s theological commitments need not lead a constructive theologian to a fideism that forecloses the possibility of rich comparative theological work.8 By engaging the hermeneutical comparative theology of David Burrell to chasten Barth’s own triumphalist tendencies, I will suggest that Barth’s dialecti-

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cal theology of revelation, particularly his account of the analogia fidei and the veiling and unveiling of God, might be leveraged in such a way as to provide a fruitful site for engagement with certain key aspects of Ash’araite Sunni thinking about God and revelation. As such, I suggest that one surprising and overlooked place that Barth’s theology might be refashioned to engage with Islam is precisely where he seems least amenable to other religions—namely his early dialectic theology, from Römerbrief through Church Dogmatics I/2. To make this case, I bring Barth’s dialectic theology of revelation in Römerbrief and Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2 into comparison with Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Al Maqsad al-asna fi sharh ma’ani asm’a Allah alhusna (The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God). Against simplistic readings of Sunni thought that interpret it as mere fideism that rejects reason, the dominant Ash’arite tradition—which includes the seminal figure under comparative study: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali—involves a dialectic in which reason is employed in the service of interpreting revelation. Ghazali, like Barth will later argue, gives primacy to the particularity of divine revelation and has a deep wariness toward participatory analogies of being. For Barth and Ghazali both, to speak rightly of the God who is wholly other is to speak in accordance with God’s own speech—or to speak after the Word. Put diferently, I intend not to reject the analogia fidei, but to consider how it might be extended across religious boundaries. Somewhat ironically, then, given the dominant assessments on Barth in comparative theology and theologies of religion, I am suggesting that Barth’s theology of revelation and divine speech might ofer unique angles for engagement with Sunni Islam. Before turning to my reading of al-Ghazali, it will be advantageous to first understand some of the key moves in Barth’s theology of revelation in Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2 and how they might be chastened by the commitments of comparative theology.9

Speaking after God: Barth on Analogy and Revelation th e wh ol ly ot her god As is well known, Barth posits a fundamental divide between God and the world. God is the wholly other One who cannot be equated with or compared to any creaturely reality. “This critical distinction between God and the world found expression in a well-known formula as early as November 1915: ‘World remains world. But God is God.’ ”10 Part and parcel of this commitment to the transcendence and uniqueness of God is a

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wariness toward human reason to know and speak rightly of God. All human speech about God, if not grounded first in God’s own selfrevelation, is little more than human conjecture and projection. While Barth eventually explicates this divide in and through his account of the event of Jesus Christ as the One who unites God and humanity, he never recants his early views on the fundamental reality of God’s otherness. As Bruce McCormack has argued, the dialectic that is vehemently maintained in his Römerbrief and in his resounding response to Emil Brunner remains consistent throughout Barth’s work. There is no point of contact between God and humanity—be it natural theology or an inner religious disposition. George Hunsinger notes, “In and of ourselves, Barth argues, we have no readiness at all to know God.”11 Barth’s early dialectic, as is made clear in the first and second editions of the Römerbrief, might appear to be a return to the common metaphysical distinctions of classic theism. To counter the immanence of liberal theology, Barth turns to divine transcendence. “God is the unknown God, and precisely because He is unknown, He bestows life and breath and all things. Therefore the power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men.”12 God is wholly and ontologically distinct from the world and thus all language of God is insufficient to capture God. “God can be apprehended only through Himself and His faithfulness. He is intelligible only by faith.”13 And yet, Barth’s dialectic, even in his later Dogmatics, never returns to these classical formulations. As Bruce McCormack argues, “in no way did his (Barth’s) realism represent a return to a somewhat naïve, metaphysically grounded realism of classical . . . theology.”14 Instead, he posits a dialectic in which the wholly other God remains distinct from the world even as God unveils Godself in and through creaturely media. God’s self is truly given to human beings in the event of revelation, even as God remains hidden by creaturely realities. For Barth, divine unknowability is a scriptural and theological commitment and not a philosophical one.15 This dialectic is not finally “resolved” through metaphysics, but enacted in and through Barth’s Christology. While there is no natural point of contact, Barth insists that God—in God’s act of speaking in and through Jesus, scripture and preaching—nonetheless communicates with human beings. Put far too simply, rather than the ontological divide of classical theism, being crossed by some traditional combination of divine revelation, participatory metaphysics, negative theology, and/or doxological practice, Barth

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deploys an actualist view of revelation and a dialectic of veiling and unveiling. It is this One who is revealed and not something behind or beyond him. The wholly other unknowable One makes Godself known in and through the event of revelation. “Speech, including God’s speech, is the form in which reason communicates with reason and person with person. To be sure it is the divine reason communicating with the human reason and the divine person with the human person. The utter inconceivability of the event is obvious.”16 Barth’s theological commitments to both the uniqueness of God’s identity and reality of divine speech frame his interpretation of both religion and analogy. barth ’s crit i qu e of reli gi on and th e ana l o gia e n tis Barth’s dialectic and scriptural commitment to God’s utter transcendence entails particular critiques of both the category of religion and epistemologies that undergird the analogy of being. In paragraph 17 of Church Dogmatics, Barth inveighs against the very category of religion— questioning its capacity to mediate the divine and insisting instead that religion is a means of human self-justification. Religions, even Christianity, are placed under the radical judgment of the divine Word. “We cannot, as it were, translate the divine judgment that religion is unbelief into human terms, into the form of definite devaluations and negations”17 All religions, even Christianity, stand under divine judgment. Still, Barth’s dialectical understanding does not stay there. Christianity is reinvested with some qualified authority. Barth argues that God nonetheless elects to use Christianity in the process of divine veiling and unveiling. All religions are human attempts at self-justification, but Christianity is nonetheless called the true religion. Since the introduction of the present volume, not to mention other works,18 address Barth’s theology of religion, I want to draw specific attention to the relationship between Barth’s critique of religion and his critique of the analogia entis. These are two distinct issues, but the main structure of Barth’s criticisms of each overlap in significant ways. Part of the fundamental problem of religion as a theological category, particularly when seen as a means toward divine revelation, is that it subsumes the concrete and par ticular under a universal term. Thus religion becomes the genus and Christianity a species. General categories of religion, such as the notion of divine and human communication or

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experiences of transcendence or the inefable, are understood to be the essence of religion and Christianity is just one manifestation of this. What is lost in such an understanding is the very nature of Christian revelation, namely the encounter with the particular Divine Word in the event of Jesus. The particular, which for Barth is the thing itself, is made into a general example. For Barth, Jesus Christ is not the highest example amongst others of a pattern of divine revelation, Godconsciousness, or the ideal person. Barth’s theology of revelation begins with the particular—in all its scandal—as the locus of revelation and only then is he willing to move toward universal claims. “The real catastrophe” in this move for Barth “was that theology lost its object, revelation in all its uniqueness.”19 The only proper way, according to Barth, to speak of religion is to first speak of revelation and God’s action toward human beings. Only then might a theological account of religion be ventured. To do other wise is to allow the terms of religion—here understood as primarily in its nineteenth-century academic meaning—to frame and shape theologies of revelation. While much has been written about Barth’s account of religion as unbelief or faithlessness (Unglaube),20 I want to note the close relationship among analogy, revelation, and religion, and the particular and the universal in Barth’s theology. In fact, near the very end of §17.1 Barth references his arguments in I/1 concerning the analogia fidei and analogia entis, implicitly connecting the latter to liberal theologies of religion. This view of revelation and religion is deeply related to Barth’s rejection of the analogy of being. The problems with analogy of being for Barth are numerous, and ever shifting throughout his writings.21 According to Barth’s reading, the analogy of being posits an analogical similarity (within a greater ontological distinction) between creation and God whereby humans might comprehend something of God. In a strongly worded preface to CD I/1, Barth calls the analogy of being the invention of the antichrist. Most important for understanding analogy’s relationship to religion, Barth interprets both religion and the analogia entis as a human grasping at or controlling of God. It turns God’s revelation into a general account of human knowing or longing that sublimates the particularity of God’s Word. They both, according to Barth, seek to control and domesticate God and make God’s revelation serve human ends—they are both in some fashion, then, faithlessness. “This would mean His allowing us to gain control over his Word, to fit it in with our own designs, and thus to shut up ourselves against Him to our own ruin.”22 A human

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system, be it through analogy, theories of religion, or natural theology, risks idolatry. This is not to say that Barth’s own im mense theological output is marked by a blind fideism or rejection of all analogical thinking. Barth is adamant that “the Word of God is a rational and not an irrational event.”23 It is simply that one cannot judge the rationality of the Word by prefixing human generalities or categories upon the divine Word, as in a theology of religion or the analogy of being. Divine revelation is distinct and particular—it is God’s speech in, through, and as the person Jesus. Revelation begins and ends in God and never relies upon any human capacity to understand it. Rather, by the power of the Spirit, the Word comes to shape and form genuine human rationality.24 What Barth proposes, then, is to turn away from an analogia entis that begins with the general categories and instead to consider an analogia fidei that always begins with the par ticular revelation of Jesus and then thinks with and after it. Theological analogy and the work of human reason operate within the primacy of revelation, but never confuse revelation with human cooperation or correspondence. Reason, analogy, and metaphor are all appropriate and authorized modes of theological discourse insofar as they are focused on and in ser vice to the theo-exegetical task of speaking after the particularity of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Barth’s theology demands that the theologian think with and after the particularity of Divine speech, eschewing universal discourse that would shoehorn God into our categories. And yet, his own engagement with most other religious traditions, particularly Islam, is devoid of any such reading. Rather than allowing his theology of revelation and his commitment to specificity and particularity to inform his views of other religions, he relies on sweeping generalizations. While our final assessment of another religious tradition should be grounded in our own central theological claims, our readings and understandings of other traditions should seek to operate within the internal logic of that tradition. The problem is that simply invoking the particularity of divine revelation in Jesus Christ to reject other particularistic claims to divine revelation is deeply unsatisfying. It risks pitting one account of divine revelation against another. It is not simply a choice between religion and revelation as Barth implies in paragraph 17, but between a Christian account of revelation and another tradition’s theology of revelation. It is here that some of the hermeneutical commitments of comparative theology might be employed in order to move Barth’s own internal commitments to

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particularity and divine revelation beyond his focus on the uniqueness of Christianity to include a more humble appreciation of other traditions. Might there be a way of remaining committed to the particularity that shapes Barth’s thinking and the primacy of divine revelation without issuing in a competitive model?

Chastening Barth with Comparative Theology One of the hallmarks of much comparative theology is an ardent commitment to specificity and sympathetic readings. Given his work on the Abrahamic religions, David Burrell’s comparative approach presents a promising strategy for evading the extremes of conciliation in which particularity is lost and isolation in which traditions are closed in on themselves.25 Burrell rejects the Enlightenment view of a universal neutral rationality that is severed from tradition and the practices that shape human persons. As Wittgenstein and McIntyre have shown, because language and human reason are intrinsically embedded within traditions and practices, there is no neutral rationality. The heritage of Western Enlightenment reason, in which religious diference and particular revelation is a scandal, has been largely taken over by advocates of religious pluralism. Burrell demurs from such views in claiming, “We need to step outside of our presumptive certainties—those of our faith as well as those of a Western intellectual superiority that would minimize the truth claims of any religious traditions.”26 Evading the central import of Jesus Christ for Barth or the Qur’an for Ghazali is not an option. However, the fact that religious claims exist within distinct linguistic communities (and in the case of Islam and Christianity ones that are shaped by revelatory scriptures) does not foreclose the possibility of learning and reasoning across traditions. It is on this point that Burrell ofers the clearest challenge to the way that Barth links his own commitment to the particularity of divine revelation and his critique of other religions. Instead of rejecting comparison, Burrell presents a model of “creative hermeneutics, whereby conceptual patterns, often developed separately, can illumine one another.”27 The skills and rationality that are developed through engagement with one historic tradition can equip practitioners to see and learn from another. “Rationality will then show itself in practices that can be followed by persons operating in similar fashion from diferent grounding convictions.”28 For instance, even when Christians do not share in Muslim convictions regarding the centrality and finality

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of the Qur’an, their own understanding of Christ’s existence as the Word of God and Christian scripture’s importance for theology, better equips them to follow the reasoning of Islamic arguments that appeal to the status of the Qur’an as divine Word. Diferences of belief or practice, also, prove particularity illuminating as they invite reconsideration of internal theological claims. Diferences “help us move out of settled patterns of discourse into ways of understanding ‘the other’ and a consequent fresh appreciation of our own traditions.”29 As a Christian theologian, I need not affirm the status of the Qur’an as the Word of God to understand and appreciate the logical and moral force of such an appeal for Muslims—for in fact, Christians also make such an appeal in reference to the Word of God made flesh. Following Burrell and contra Barth, it is not convincing to dismiss out of hand the particular claims of another religion and its views of divine revelation simply because they do not accord with our own. There may be good reasons for Christian theology to demur from various Islamic claims about the Qur’an or God’s names, but to invoke a predetermined understanding of Islam in order to evade its particular claims is simply neither intellectually convincing nor theologically necessary. Of course, Barth and other Christian theologians can and should ofer theological understandings of religious diversity in reference to Jesus Christ. However, there is also a need to find more nuanced and enhanced modes of engagement with the specific and particular challenges that other traditions put to Christianity. This is not to make Barth into a postliberal, since there are good reasons internal to Barth to reconsider his stance on other religions. For one, such an argument fails to follow through on Barth’s own commitment to particularity and revelation as the starting point for theological reflection. While Barth is always focused on the par ticular event of Jesus in his articulation of a Christian dogmatic theology, he rarely, if ever, engages other traditions in their own particularity. The focus on religion as an epistemological category limits Barth’s willingness to engage with the specificity of other religions. Certainly Barth has his own internal Christological reasons to doubt Muslim claims regarding God’s handing down the Qur’an as the definitive revelation. Still it is unclear on what grounds Barth could intellectually justify an outright rejection of another religious tradition’s claim to divine revelation. Barth might argue that Islam’s account of God and humanity is necessarily a human attempt at self-justification or works righteousness, but this does not

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address the Islamic claim that God has spoken decisively and uniquely in the Qur’an. Barth is convinced that external appeals to history, science, or religion to justify claims of revelation are too fraught and shaped by the assumptions of disciplines alien to theological truth to be convincing. For Barth, the “proof” of revelation is itself. However, this is also the case for the vast majority of Sunni Muslims. Both Barth and traditional Sunni Islam claim that divine revelation is largely selfauthenticating and thus nonfoundational. In fact, if one wants to follow Barth and demand that the event of Jesus is its own self-authentication, one received in faith, or the Islamic claim that the Qur’an’s proof is its own beauty and power, then external appeals to history are insufficient. Invoking an account of a self-authenticating revelation only to ignore another similar claim to the power of revelation (Jesus as Word and Qur’an as Word) risks inscribing fundamentalism and evades the challenge of ofering a theological account, not of religion, but of an alternative revelation. In the Qur’an, Barth is not encountering a religion per se but an alternative claim about divine speech. The Qur’an and Muslim accounts of God’s Word and its claim on human lives presents an ever stronger challenge to Barth’s theological logic than a general theory of religion does. In the face of competing scriptures, the appeal of natural theology, in all their various forms, is thus an attractive option. However, Burrell’s comparative hermeneutic ofers opportunities for rethinking Barth’s own views on other religious communities, thereby opening up possibilities for employing aspects of his commitments for the sake of a comparative theology. The fact that Barth is wary of analogy, committed to the normativity of divine revelation in the event of Christ, and attentive to the ways that God is both wholly other and yet revealed, could make him particularly well equipped to engage with Sunni thought. That Barth was not engaged with in-depth study or engagement with Islam does not necessarily mean that a theologian convinced by key aspects of Barth’s theology of revelation needs to follow his assessment of Islamic thought and practice. To the contrary, one who has learned from Barth might be a particularly attentive reader of Sunni claims regarding the Qur’an, the limits of analogy, and the place of divine speech in theological discourse. Put diferently, chastening Barth with Burrell means that one can follow Barth’s methodological instincts regarding the particularity of divine revelation, a suspicion about the overarching category of religion, and a wariness about analogy and not necessarily conclude with an ar-

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dently anti-Muslim position. It must, however, be clearly stated that such a comparative move necessarily means leveraging Barth’s commitments to particularity, revelation, and the analogy of faith in a way that runs contrary to Barth’s own views on both Christian theology and Islam. Barth’s thinking alone does not allow for the type of comparative project that this paper argues for. Thus we are not simply reading one aspect of Barth against another Barth in order to reveal a better Barth. Rather, I am proposing that engaging Barth after comparative theology demands advancing Barth’s thinking beyond what his own views allow and thus ofering a critique of his views on other religious traditions in their own right (if not his views on religion as a category). As such, Barth’s analogy of faith might function as a hermeneutic to read across traditions and issue in a less combative and more nuanced analysis of Islam (and other traditions). While this will not satisfy one who adheres strictly to Barth’s own claims, it is a reasonable extension of Barth’s commitment to particularity and one that might open up new avenues in constructive engagement with Barth, as well as an implicit critique of the limits of comparative theology for Christian-Muslim exchange. Such a method demands that Barth’s commitment to particularity, thinking after revelation (Nachdenken), and the self-authenticating nature of divine revelation not close in on themselves but be extended outward to another tradition. As Barth will later do, the Persian reviver of Islam, Abu Hamid alGhazali (d. 505/1111) questions the very possibility of human speech about God and struggles to hold together a commitment to God’s radical otherness with the human need to speak of God. Both reject the analogy of being, express concerns about the capacity of philosophy to lead to saving knowledge of God, and hold strongly to an account of divine revelation. And yet, their accounts of the form and content of revelation— Barth’s insistence on the event of Jesus Christ and Ghazali’s emphasis on the revealed names of God in the Qur’an—are fundamentally distinct. Rather than either ignoring or enshrining such diference, I follow Daniel Madigan’s suggestion that if we take a step back from the explicit content of the distinct revelations of Jesus and the Qur’an and turn to the broader theological issues around transcendence and revelation, there are analogical and broader conceptions that might give space for conversation.30 To do this, we must appreciate and understand the theo-logic within Ghazali’s appeals to the divine names and divine speech.

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Ghazali on the Names of God Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God is an extended reflection upon the relationship between God’s incomprehensibility and the “meanings of the most beautiful names of God” revealed in the Qur’an.31 In this theo-exegetical and spiritual work, Ghazali wrestles with the challenge of speaking of a God who outstrips all descriptors. How is it possible, Ghazali asks, to know and speak about the wholly Unknowable One? Like Barth will do later, Ghazali rejects the possibility of a strict analogy of being. Rather, he profers that the only adequate source for true human description of God is revelation. Humans fail to rightly identify God unless “they use the means by which He praises Himself, and use His names and attributes which He has enumerated.”32 And yet even these names, while adequately predicated onto God, are also veiled within the medium of human language. God’s true essence remains hidden even with revelation. For Ghazali, it is God’s own selfdisclosure in the speech of the Qu’ran that forms the basis for all subsequent philosophical and theological inquiry. The work is at once a philosophical consideration of language, predication, and divine transcendence and a practical-doxological handbook for praying the names of God. As Taneli Kukkonen has argued, Ghazali’s work is unique in the history of Islamic thought in so far as he weds the concerns of kalam, Islamic rational or dialectic theology, with those of Sufi practice. “Before al-Ghazali no one had attempted to wed a theoretical analysis of the names and attributes to that devotional focus which their remembrance (dhikr) is meant to evoke.”33 Throughout this meditation, Ghazali continually returns to two main themes: God’s unknowable nature and the human desire to share in the meaning of God’s names. “No one other than God knows God, in this world or the next.”34 Humans desire something that by definition is impossible. The key for Ghazali is to hold both of these facts simultaneously. The believer must certainly be vigilant in resisting human speech that imagines God as comparable to created reality, as “the knowledge of God—great and glorious—is totally unlike the knowledge of creatures, so the knowledge creatures have of Him will neither be perfect nor authentic, but illusory and anthropomorphic.”35 Yet how can one speak of God’s greatness beyond all descriptors? Is there any object of speech when one names the One who outstrips creaturely realities?

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Ghazali knows this quandary. His thought begins and ends with the facts of theology’s impossibility: a transcendent and unknowable God coupled with finite and limited creatures. “Praise be to God, alone in His majesty and His might, unique in His sublimity and His everlastingness, who clips the wings of intellects well short of the glow of His glory, and who makes the way of knowing Him pass through the inability to know Him.”36 Ghazali’s writings—which resist easy Western categorizations— never seek to evade these central truths, but to guide his readers deeper into them. To accomplish this, he employs philosophical, theological, exegetical, and homiletic skills to unfold the meaning and mystery of God. on th e limits of anal o gy Like Barth, Ghazali is adamant in his rejection of an analogia entis as the means to bridge the epistemological and ontological gap between God and creatures. He writes, “There are two ways of knowing God—may He be praised and exalted: one of them inadequate and the other closed.”37 The inadequate way for Ghazali is analogy, since it is inevitably insufficient to what it describes. “No analogy is possible, because of God’s utter unlikeness with anything created, as the Qur’an makes clear: ‘Nothing is comparable to Him’ (42:11).”38 Rather than moving human speech upward toward true speech of God, Ghazali worries that analogy drags God downward into the all too-human imaginary. Not to mention human love or justice—comparing God to human kings or judges or artists compromises God’s tawhid (absolute oneness and uniqueness). While analogy (qiyas) is a recognized and vital aspect of fiqh (jurisprudential reasoning), the practice is not as positively received within kalam. Kukkonen writes, “As far as the divine essence is concerned, orthodox Islamic belief will not countenance any hint of a thoroughgoing ‘analogy of being.’ ”39 The problem of analogy of being for most in both the Hanbali and Ashar’i traditions is that analogy inevitably compromises the central Islamic commitments to divine transcendence and unity. Ghazali is aware, though, that human knowledge depends upon comparison. “For a man cannot understand anything unless he has in him something corresponding to it.”40 One can only speak, write, and know through analogy. Yet, analogy is insufficient for describing God; “His attributes are too exalted to be likened to ours!”41 What then is to be done?

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In his reflection Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names, Ghazali profers that the only adequate speech for God in the face of apophasis is revelation. Human speech fails to rightly identify God unless “they use the means by which He praises Himself, and use His names and attributes which He has enumerated.”42 Proper theological speech, then, entails speaking after God’s revelation. Revelation contains the whole of theology and is a guide toward proper speech of God. Thus, Ghazali takes the revealed Ninety-Nine Names of God (al-Rahman, al-Raheem, al-Malik, and so on) to be the proper starting point for true human speech about God. We name God as King (al-Malik) or Friend (al-Wali) because God has revealed these to be true. God’s beauty and names, even when spoken in prayer or revealed in the scriptures, remain beyond creaturely understanding. Importantly, this is not to say that human speech about God cannot be predicated truly to God. In fact, Ghazali argues that human speech, in so far as it is shaped by the revelation of the Qur’an, ofers genuinely true descriptors of God. It simply is that human beings do not know how Qur’anic descriptions such as God’s throne or right arm “map” onto God. Muslims are to both use these names in prayer and employ them in theological discourse without asking how (bi-la kayf ) they are precisely true. Within the broader scope of revelation, the believer is free to employ analogies in their struggle to move toward God. In fact the vast majority of the text is a study in how Ghazali carefully employs analogy to interrogate and explore how Muslims might both use the divine names and model their own moral lives on them. Analogical reasoning, in a way that both draws from philosophical accounts of predication and the analogy of being while not becoming beholden to it, is part and parcel of Ghazali’s argument. Revelation may be both the beginning and end of the human pilgrimage to God, but Ghazali finds verbal confession of little use unless it is tied to faith and the inner transformation of the person. Ghazali’s own argument for the superiority of the “analogy of faith” to an “analogy of being” is not only an epistemological claim like Barth, but also a spiritualpractical one. Revelation, when unhooked from the driving force of desire for God, becomes nothing more than the recital of words. The words may be accurate, but the confessor is no closer to God with them. “All one needs is to understand the meaning of the words and to have faith in them, and this level is shared by common people, even by young boys.”43 In fact, Ghazali asserts that to simply invoke the names of God, and thereby assume you can adequately predicate these onto God is a

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problem. Revelation, confession of faith, and theological dialectic, while all good and helpful resources in one’s journey toward God, can often halt or ensnare as much as guide and direct. Ghazali constantly struggles to expose the misidentification of various forms of theological speech and spur the person onward. Moreover, knowing the names—even somehow sharing with them—does not lead to true knowledge, for “to know something is to know its essential reality and its identity, not the names derived from it.”44 And human comprehension of the essential reality of God is impossible. Ghazali does not cultivate longing for the unknowable God only to leave the human being lost in the wilderness of paradox. Instead, Ghazali guides human desires through various false destinations toward religious practice—particularly worship—which is the main aim of his own writing in The Ninety-Nine Names. Rhetorically, Ghazali stretches both philosophy and theology to their breaking point, creating tension and heightening the mystery of the human predicament. When these forms of speech fail, he turns to the practices of prayer and praise. For Ghazali, doxology is the proper avenue for human speech about God. Fadlou Shehadi observes how praise serves as the criterion for judging correct speech about God. “If an attribute expresses what by human recognition is praise then it may be used (or, presumably, has already been used in the Qur’an), other wise not.”45 Doxology is the grammatical rule for human speech about God. on th e limits of phi l o s ophy In his (in)famous polemical work The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa), Ghazali claims to “show the incoherence of their belief and the contradiction of their word in matters relating to metaphysics; to uncover the dangers of their doctrines and its shortcomings.”46 According to Ghazali’s reading, the Islamic philosophers had drunk so deeply from wells of Aristotle that they had compromised the Qur’anic account of God and the world, imagining a God and world unlike the one seen through the eyes of faith. However, Ghazali’s exposure of the philosophers’ failings is not carried out through an archaic battle between faith and reason. Instead, he takes on the epistemological framework of the philosophers in order to expose the fissures within their own thought. As Ebrahim Moosa says, “In order to expose the flaws of his interlocutors, Ghazali polemically led them into an ambush to concede

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epistemological nihilism.”47 At its core, Ghazali claims that philosophy has epistemological and cosmological commitments, or first principles, that remain unexamined and are indefensible. Rather than begin philosophy from these starting points, Ghazali suggests a shift to the foundation of revelation and faith, whereby philosophy may serve the journey toward God.48 Ghazali is not against reason and philosophy per se, as his detractors such as Ibn-Rushd accuse, but against the tendency for philosophy and reason to outstrip their capacity and become their own end. When falasfa claims omnicompetence, it fails as a tool for seeking truth and nurturing faith. Ghazali’s understanding of the ontological gap between God and creatures warns against overconfidence in philosophical reason. “He does not resemble anything nor does anything resemble him,”49 since “the specifying mark of divinity belongs to none but God—the most high and to be held holy—and no one knows it but God, nor is it conceivable that anyone know it except Him.”50 Philosophy need not contradict this central claim of faith, but when philosophy does, it fails to be a proper guide toward God.51 The particularity of revelation must give guidance to philosophical engagement and not vice versa. It should go without saying that Ghazali’s philosophical influences and his doctrine of God remain radically distinct from Barth’s. While Ghazali is well known for his vicious critique of philosophy, recent scholars have posited that he remains deeply influenced by the Aristotelianism of Islamic philosophy, particularly Ibn Sina. Far from rejecting philosophy outright, he often employs its logic for the sake of his own intellectual projects. The opening reflections on names, naming, and knowledge in his Ninety-Nine Names are a case in point. Even with his critique of falasafa in place, Ghazali remains deeply indebted to key aspects of classical theism, ideas that Barth roundly critiques. His rejection of analogy and theological method is also indebted to a longer theological tradition of apophatic theology and its accompanying attention to the importance of practices, as well as the Ashar’i mediating position around divine attributes. Still it is a misunderstanding, then, to see Ghazali’s work as seeking a philosophical solution to the epistemological divide between creator and creature. The ontological and linguistic gaps between God and humanity cannot be overcome and in fact any theology that seeks to overcome this chasm risks domesticating the divine. What Ghazali does is to write for the sake of faith, attempting to lead the human heart ever deeper into

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the mystery of God through meditation on revelation and the way this issues in practices of worship. “To be able to understand God in our language cannot have the aim of knowing what God is, but to understand in order to believe, to worship, and to live righteously.”52 In fact, the entirety of Maqasid centers around a commentary on the Islamic practice of reciting God’s revealed names. All of its brilliant theological and philosophical reflection upon the nature of God leads to extended counsel about prayer and worship. It is in the practice of praising God through God’s revealed names that the human begins to share, however minimally, in the meaning (but not the essence) of the divine names. “Ghazali believes that God is glorified both by attributing to Him the highest perfection man can conceive, and by taking a paradoxical step further and saying, God is even above all that.”53 At its core, the treatise is an attempt to guide the reader into this kind of faithful speech about God’s beautiful names, while respecting God’s inefability.54 “The end result is perhaps not an entirely happy one: it amounts to conceding that without divine grace, we do not know exactly what we are saying.”55 God’s beauty and names, even when spoken in prayer or revealed in the scriptures, remain beyond creaturely understanding. We must speak, theologically and prayerfully, in a mode that thinks after God’s own speech in the Qu’ran. While it is anachronistic, I want to suggest that Ghazali’s kalam is something like a form of nachdenken. Theology is best understood as thinking after the speech of God.

From Analogy of Faith to Analogies across Faiths For Barth and Ghazali both, to speak rightly of the God who is wholly other is to speak in accordance with God’s own speech—or to speak after revelation. Analogy, reason, philosophy, and spiritual practices are all endorsed, but only insofar as these are shaped first and foremost by the particularity of revelation. This examination of Barth and Ghazali has attempted to sketch this shared concern, even as I sought to avoid a reading of the two thinkers that might eliminate diferences or propose a shared interfaith agreement on the general idea of divine and human speech. Theology, at least for large parts of the Protestant and Sunni traditions, is impossible apart from the specificity of God’s revelation. For Barth and Ghazali, the most faithful human speech about God is a response to what God has already spoken (be it in Jesus Christ or the Qur’an). With appropriate attention to the strong diferences between

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Ghazali and Barth, there still remains a shared theological commitment to thinking about and employing reason and analogy under the primacy of the particularity of revelation. In the end, we are proposing a model of comparative theology that does not contradict either Protestant commitments to the finality of scripture, or Sunni arguments that the Qur’an is the furqan (final criterion). As such, this essay is less a constructive theology of ChristianMuslim special revelation, and more an experiment in developing a form of comparative theology grounded in the analogia fidei. In fact, such an approach, when understood comparatively and porously, is particularly well-suited suited for future engagement between the Sunni Asha’arite tradition and Protestant traditions committed to some form of scripture as the unnormed norm of theology. Of course, there are numerous claims by Barth that would push against this type of comparative generosity. When Barth writes, for instance, that “we either know God himself and therefore entirely, or we do not know him.”56 Or when he argues “And as the God of the Christian belief is seen in the fulfillment of the covenant between Himself and man as this has taken place in Jesus Christ; as His will is not therefore an obscure and concealed but a clear and revealed will, it is obvious that He is also different from the God of Judaism and Islam.”57 Without denying these comments from Barth, I want to suggest that by reframing Barth’s analogy of faith—in and through the methodology outlined above—space might be opened to allow the theologian to engage others more sympathetically and humbly. This is not to deny the centrality of Christian claims, even those that are incommensurable with Islamic ones. What I am proposing is not to ignore the question of the specific content of revelation, but to recognize ways that at the outset these diferences are insurmountable. There is no way of resolving these diferent commitments to the content of revelation, but there are better and worse ways of attending to them. In attending to the par ticular ways that Ghazali unfolds his theological account of God’s names, one can note the overlapping commitments and worries with Barth’s later views, particularly on the primacy of God’s revelation, the limitations and possibilities of philosophy, and the need to think with and after God’s self-naming. Ghazali also presses back against Barth, particularly in his early thinking, to locate the use and purpose of the analogy of faith more clearly within the spiritual and prayerful life of believers. Certainly, Barth notes how divine revelation and

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theology that thinks with and after God’s Word is oriented to and for the Church, especially the pulpit. Barth is also adamant that the Christian life, and the work of the theologian is marked by listening and prayer. Still, Ghazali’s central question is how divine and human speech function in prayer and spiritual disciplines of forming people to imitate and share in God’s character. The driving question for Ghazali is: How do I pray in light of the transcendence and revelation of God? For the early Barth, analogia fidei is more an epistemic category for challenging liberal theology than a framework for prayerful speech. In contrast, Ghazali is concerned that one knows the limits and uses of analogy so that the believer can pray rightly and follow God’s Word appropriately. The whole discussion of analogy, revelation, and the divine Names in Ghazali is located in a handbook for prayer. While Barth famously claimed in Evangelical Theology that theology “can be performed only in the act of prayer,” the practice and outworking of these claims are left underdeveloped, particularly in relationship to Barth’s theology of divine speech and analogy.58 This aspect of Ghazali’s thought, and the experimental practices and analogies that it authorizes, presses back against Barth’s primary epistemic focus on the relationship between analogy, revelation, and religion. We do not simply know something rightly because we have read it or heard it proclaimed, but insofar as the Divine Word comes to live in and through our prayer life. Such a comparative theology of analogy, then, would not only chasten Barth’s views on Islam but also ask him to learn something about the various practical and doxological habits that the analogy of faith might inculcate. This need not be a return to the liberal centrality of the religious subject or an undue focus on feeling and personal piety, but an honest assessment of how our theological speech finds primary expression in and through doxology.59 One challenge in employing Barth’s theology for our present situation is to note that his own theology unfolded with a certain necessary theological confidence—bordering on triumphalism—that was one appropriate response to the turn to the subject in nineteenth-century liberalism and the challenges of the two great wars. While such a triumphant particularity served his own generation well, I am not convinced that this is the appropriate theological stance for Western Christians in the twentyfirst century. Instead, we should cultivate a theological disposition marked by humble particularity. Such a nonanxious, humble, and unapologetic theology need not issue in a Christian triumphalism (here understood as unflinching rejection of others), but might instead encourage

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a patient and humble particularity that speaks not only of analogies within faith but also notes ways that we can do theology by attending to analogies across faiths. Such a Barth-inflected comparative theology is necessarily a scripturally chastened project, one that forgoes speculative comparison and instead moves in and through scripture(s) to seek to speak—in prayer and theology—after God’s own Word. Read as such, Barth and Ghazali are not incommensurable rivals, but something like dialectic guides for speaking (and living) faithfully in light of God’s Word. Of course, there remain fundamental disagreements about the particularity of God’s Speech, but this diference is ultimately unresolvable since both Ghazali and Barth contend that the proof of God’s revelation is not something external to it—be it philosophy, history, or science—but its own redeeming power and intoxicating beauty. Notes 1. For a study of Barth’s views on Islam, see Glenn A. Chestnutt, Challenging the Stereotype: The Theology of Karl Barth as a Resource for Inter-Religious Encounter in a European Context (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), chaps. 1 and 2. 2. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 448. 3. CD III/3 (1961), 28. 4. CD II/1, 449. 5. CD I/2 (1956), 828. 6. Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 7. Chestnutt, Challenging the Stereotype, chaps. 4–5. 8. This is not meant to be interpreted as arguing that Barth himself does not fall victim to such an attitude, but that his commitment to the analogy of faith can be extended in ways not done by him or most that follow in his trail. 9. Given the fact that the entire volume includes various readings of Barth, particularly his account of religion, I chose to give more space to Ghazali’s less familiar views than to a close reading of Barth. 10. Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1935 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1995), 129. 11. George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 93. 12. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 36. 13. Ibid., 112. 14. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 130. 15. Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, 82–84.

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16. CD I/1 (1936), 135. 17. CD I/2, 300. 18. See, for instance, Sven Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Tom Greggs, Theology against Religion: Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); and J. A. Di Noia, “Religion and the Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243–257. 19. CD I/2, 294. 20. See Garrett Green’s introduction to Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 1–32. 21. See Keith  L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: Continuum, 2010), and Thomas Joseph White, ed., The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or Wisdom of God? (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 22. CD I/1, 139. 23. Ibid. 24. See JinHyok Kim, The Spirit of God and the Christian Life: Reconstructing Karl Barth’s Pneumatology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 127–187. 25. These are the two dominant modes of Muslim-Christian encounter according to Clinton Bennett’s Understanding Christian-Muslim Relations: Past and Present (New York: Continuum, 2008). 26. David B. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 215. 27. David B. Burrell, Towards a Jewish- Christian-Muslim Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011), xii. 28. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 203. 29. Ibid., 195. 30. Daniel A. Madigan S.J., “People of the Word: Reading John with a Muslim” Review and Expositor 105 (2007): 81–95. 31. Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, trans. David Burrell and Nazih Daher (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1992), 1. 32. Ibid., 1. 33. Taneli Kukkonen, “Al- Ghazali on Accidental Identity and the Attributes,” Muslim World (2011): 658. 34. Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, 36. 35. Ibid., 44. 36. Ibid., 1. 37. Ibid., 39. 38. Eric Ormsby, Ghazali: The Revival of Islam, 60. 39. Kukkonen, “al-Ghazali on Accidental Identity and the Attributes,” 674. 40. Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, 40. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 1. 43. Ibid., 30. 44. Ibid., 37. 45. Fadlou Shehadi, Ghazali’s Unique Unknowable God (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964), 105.

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46. Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1997), 3. 47. Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 185. 48. For an alternative reading, see Frank Grifel, al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology (London: Oxford University, 2009). 49. Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, 34. 50. Ibid., 35. 51. Even with his critique of falasafa in place, Ghazali remains deeply indebted to key aspects of classical theism, ideas that Barth roundly critiques. It should go without saying that Ghazali’s philosophical influences and his doctrine of God remain radically distinct from Barth’s. 52. Shehadi, Ghazali’s Unique Unknowable God, 110. 53. Ibid., 106. 54. Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, 30. 55. Taneli Kukkonen, “Al-Ghazālī on the Signification of Names,” Vivarium 48 (2010): 74. 56. CD II/1, 79 57. CD III/3, 30. 58. Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. Translated by Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 160. 59. For some constructive possibilities for interpreting Barth’s theology of prayer along these lines, see Don E. Saliers, Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), 69–81; Joel D. Lawrence, “ ‘Speak, for your Servant Is Listening’: Barth, Prayer, and Theological Method,” in Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology, ed. Christian Collins Winn and John  L. Drury (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 149–161; and Ashley Cocksworth, Karl Barth on Prayer (London: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2015).

6 Karl Barth and Parousia

in Comparative Messianism

Kurt Anders Richardson

Christian theology in the twentieth century turned significant attention to eschatological reflection. Under Albert Schweitzer’s devastating critique at the turn of the century, the common nineteenth-century portrait of “the historical Jesus” as a most enlightened moralist in cultural evolution had to give way to the prophetic Jesus’s “thoroughgoing eschatology”1 that characterized the gospels of the New Testament. This course correction in theology highlighted the rift that had grown up between biblical studies and theology. While Karl Barth would radically disagree with Schweitzer in many ways, his theology, and its abundant exegetical features, captures the eschatology of Jesus throughout. Indeed, it may be argued that one of the best ways to understand Barth’s entire project in the Church Dogmatics is through its “eschatological realism.”2 The “eschatological” here refers to the fact that revelation and its redemptive realization in re-creation through Christ is the critical ground for Barth’s theological program. Christianity, of course, is not the only religious tradition with a strong eschatological dimension. All of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have eschatologies based on common messianic roots. “Messianism,” a term most commonly found in academic Judaism, refers to Jewish doctrinal systems expounding belief in a Messiah figure, shaped in large part by the “King David” narratives and prophetic allusions of the Old Testament. Messianism includes a cosmological perspective that is “messianic,” descriptive of the events and universal implications of this Jewish figure and fulfillment of the End of Days, the consummation of the divine plan for redemption and final judgment. “Christology,” the theology of the person of Jesus Christ in Christianity, is also justifiably termed “Christian messianism”—given its marked “Davidic” elements (see Rom.

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1:1–4). Jesus Christ’s second coming or appearing (parousia) brings about the End of Days. As discussed more fully below, the Shi’a system of belief in the Mahdi (from muhtadun “the rightly guided one(s)” (see Qur’an 3:51–56, 90; 6:82; and 4:175) or hidden (“occulted”) Twelfth Imam and his appearing (parousia) at the End of Days to accomplish much the same divine goals, is justifiably termed “Islamic messianism.” All three faiths present scriptural narratives of their own, but with many overlapping features of an “Abrahamic messianism” that are conspicuously related to a common core of Judaic conceptuality and expectation. Typical of these narratives are their “apocalyptic” features, end time cosmological events signaling the End of Days in often cataclysmic terms. Parousia is a common term in biblical and theological studies in Christianity to refer to the second coming of Jesus. But increasingly Islamic scholars have been using the term for their own eschatological visions. By the end of the first millennium, soteriological features inherent in the eschatology of the Qur’an began to manifest themselves in narratives of redemptive sufering, which led to elaborations upon the parousia of Jesus as Messiah accompanied by the Mahdi who would signal to the Muslim faithful that the end of the age had arrived.3 Shi’a theology has the most developed Muslim messianic theology (and eschatology), and as will be explored here, contains many poignant parallels to the Christian eschatology of Barth. Rooted in a redemptive future, Christian and Muslim messianism/Mahdism advances at base the teaching of an ultimate mediatorial figure appearing to defeat injustice. This chapter will explore Barth’s Christologically centered eschatology together with what might be called the “double parousia” of the end in Shia Islam: Messiah and Mahdi in a single event of mediation toward the consummation of all things in resurrection and new creation. It will highlight material from Barth’s Church Dogmatics that is seldom highlighted but not at all unimportant in his Christology. In particular, I will draw attention to the way that for Barth, Jesus’s parousia refers not only to his second coming but also to his risen, hidden presence here and now. At the Second Coming of Christ, the hidden presence of Christ, the basis of all holy living, gives way to the real presence of Christ inaugurating the end and the new beginning of the actualization of holiness. In Shi’a Islam, there is a similar conviction that the Mahdi who is expected at the end is even now present in a hidden way, inspiring and empowering the work of the community. Through this comparison, I hope to show that there is remarkable convergence in a complex notion of parousia that includes both expecta-

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tion of the return of Jesus (and the Mahdi, for Shi’a) and a palpable sense of the hidden presence of this eschatological figure even now.

The Messianic Figuration in Shi’a Islam One of the originating points of messianic expectation in all three Abrahamic traditions is found toward the end of the Mosaic narrative, at the beginning of his last will and testament; the extraordinary passage in Deuteronomy 18:15–18, which indicates that God will raise, after Moses, a prophet who will be, like him, a divinely guided leader: The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet. . . . I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them every thing that I command.

In this text, first Moses announces his knowledge of God’s action regarding his successor, though the implication is that no text of Torah has established prophetic succession or recognition. Then in the Mosaic narrative the text provides a first person address of YHWH to Moses: A divinely guided prophet will arise to lead the people. Moses’s immediate successor is Joshua, a prophet with warrior status, setting a kind of loose precedent for later messianic ideals.4 This is one of the formative Torah texts evocative of the messianic expectations of the New Testament and Qur’an. In the Mahdism of Islam, chiefly explored by the Shi’a, “al-Mahdi” is a title derived from the passive participle of hada, “to guide,” which is also a divine attribute of Allah: “And truly God guides those who believe unto a straight path” (Surat al-Hajj, 22:54); “thy Lord suffices as a Guide and a Helper” (Surat al-Furqan, 25:31).5 One of the key features of messianic expectation, as observed in the Deuteronomy passage, is exhibited here: the arrival (reappearing) of a savior/redeemer figure who mediates divine purpose to believers and to the world at large. From the beginning of the messianic theme and its reception in Islam, Mohammad had never been in view, largely because of this text originally addressed to him: “Surely thou wilt die, and surely they will die. Then on the Day of Resurrection, before thy Lord will you dispute” (Surat al-Zumar, 39:30–31). Many conquering Muslim kings would self-apply the term, but an eschatological emphasis safeguarded the messianic expectations: “Yet We desired to be gracious to

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those who were oppressed in the land, and to make them imams, and to make them the heirs, and to establish them in the land, and to show Pharaoh and Haman and their hosts that which they dreaded from them” (Surat al-Qasas, 28:5–6). These and other texts provided grounding for the development of a general Shi’a expectation of twelve imams/successors of the Prophet and in the Twelver tradition to the “occultation” or the hiddenness of the Mahdi awaiting the moment of his parousia. The historical Mahdi (fully named Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Mahdī) is understood to have been born in Samarra, a city in Iraq, on the fifteenth of Shabaan in the year 225 AH.6 Until the age of five, he lived an obscure life under the care of his father. After the martyrdom of Imam Hasan al-Askari, the Mahdi assumed the responsibilities of Imamat. Immediately thereafter in 260 AH (874 CE), the “Minor Occultation” started. This lasted for sixty-nine years, until 329 AH. In this period, four special representatives served as intermediaries between him and the people; he did not address larger groups directly. According to Shi’a interpretation, this occultation was originally envisaged as short-term, but because of the danger of oppression from the Abbasids, the twelfth imam had to go into a second occultation. This decisive message was then sent out from the hidden Imam: “For the second occultation has now occurred, and there can be no appearance until, after a long time when Allah gives His permission, hearts become hardened and the world becomes filled with injustice.”7 The period of hiddenness was drastically extended in order to prove, it seems, that perfect religion cannot be established by human politics. One of the chief characteristics of the imams is the strict noninvolvement in political afairs, since only divine rule through a guided imam could suffice in the world. The imam’s emissaries had not been able to carry out his policies in the world; thus, only at the time determined by God would the infallible influence of the imam be revealed; until then, usually in secret, he would be known as al-Mahdi or al-Qaim (the One who rises). Until then, believers endure this extended period of testing and purification in their expectant waiting for his appearing. This notion of the two occultations was found in the “Unseen” of the Quranic verse: “God will not leave the believers as you are till He separates the bad from the good. And God will not apprise you of the Unseen” (Surat al-‘Imran, 3:179). Knowing the purpose of waiting and yet not seeing the awaited one, patient endurance is required in spite of the confirming knowledge that the hiddenness of the Mahdi is the divine purpose. These developments in theology and law cemented together the

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idea of the twelfth imam as savior and the reality of his occultation in a doctrine of return (al-Raj‘a). The twelfth imam, then, will appear at Allah’s appointed “Day” for the total purification of Muslims. His occultation (ghaybah), however necessary according to Allah’s plan, absolutely excludes the possibility of believers influencing the time, and therefore they are prohibited from ever predicting the time of the Mahdi’s appearing—which could be described properly as his parousia. The eschaton, then, belongs entirely to Allah, and the revolutionary appearing of the Mahdi will bring about redemptive transformation. Confusion over the role of the Mahdi is largely an indeterminacy regarding the nearness or remoteness of the return. Of the terms for the Mahdi’s reappearance: qiyam (rise),8 zuhur (appearance, emergence), and khuruj (coming forth), it is zuhur that best corresponds to parousia:9 The one whose presence is marked by hiddenness will become an unveiled presence for the realization of God’s purposes in the world. Because the occultation was one of absent presence, the Mahdi’s appearing tended to be seen as a reappearing of the infallible Imam who would guide believers into the Last Days before the resurrection. Chief among his accomplishments would be the defeat of all enemies of the Prophet’s companions and the securing of righteousness that will reign over the whole world. This eschatological doctrine became clarified as the Abbasid Caliphate (850–1258 CE) waned in early Islam. Delay of the Mahdi became regarded as necessary because of the apocalyptic signs of restoration that would immediately precede his necessary End time appearing.10 Teaching about the trials of faith became signs of end time tribulation at the time of the Appearing, indicative of its necessity. Since according to Shi’a theology, the prophetic spirit had continued from the Prophet through the succession of imams, the doctrine of the Mahdi found authoritative witness and development. The great question of the “hour” of his appearing, however, is not resolved. Built into attending to this question was the fear that a false prediction or rebelliousness would actually lead to further delay of the Mahdi’s appearing. This could happen with the often cited: “God efaces what He will and establishes, and with Him is the Mother of the Book” (Surat al-Ra‘d 13:39).11 Postponement of the Mahdi was caused by such things as the murder of Hussein (the Shi’a martyr in early Islam) or the improper revealing of the secret of the time of the appearing. The issue tended to be resolved by affirming clear signs of the Mahdi’s appearing but with God alone is the knowledge of the future time. Believers would have to endure separation from their imam with

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consolation from messages about the signs of the zuhur in every generation, with expectancy arising from continuous detections of immanency— vital in the annual celebrations of Ashura, that is, mourning for the death of Hussein but also anticipating the appearing of his descendant. What is crucial about the appearing of the Mahdi is the simultaneous appearing of Jesus, as anticipated in the Qur’an 4:159: “There is not one of the People of the Book, but will surely believe in him [Jesus] before his death, and on the Day of Resurrection he will be a witness against them.”12 Indeed, the tradition of consolation and universal justice for the poor believers that is closely intertwined with Judaism and especially Christianity (e.g., the Sermon on the Mount) is very frequently cited: “Yet We desired to be gracious to those who were oppressed in the land, and to make them imams and to make them heirs” (28:5; cf. 7:137; 6:165; 27:62) and “And We have indeed written in the Psalms, after the Reminder that My righteous servants shall inherit the earth” (21:105; cf. 24:55; 9:32, 33). The trajectory of Allah’s plan through the Mahdi, as with Jesus, is universal in scope: “He it was who sent His Messenger with guidance and the Religion of Truth to make it prevail over all religion, though the idolaters averse” (9:33 and 61:9). This conveys an apocalypticism of hope: “Moses said unto his people, ‘Seek help from God and be patient, Truly the land belongs to God; He bequeaths it to whomsoever He will among His servants. And the end belongs to the reverent’ ” (7:128). What is crucial about the simultaneous parousias of Mahdi and Jesus the Messiah is the emphasis upon holiness of practice as both condition and result.

Resonances in Shi’a and Christian Messianism Eschatology in Christianity and Islam reveals a significant degree of overlap, beginning with the finality of Jesus (Isa) as fulfillment of the Abrahamic messianic hope and the finality of Mohammad in the history of prophets.13 In the first instance, the revelation of each respectively signals the arrival of the “Last Days” (Heb. 1:1) and the arrival of “the Seal of the prophets” (Qur’an 33:40). In both revelations there is contained “realized” (fulfilled) and “unrealized” (not yet fulfilled) eschatology.14 The end of days, marked by general resurrection, is a cardinal belief in both traditions and lies directly behind the motivations for obedience to God and ethical living. The themes of redemptive sufering and return—but through two separate imams in Shia Islam—paralleling Christian doctrine is significant: twelve apostles/imams, seventy-two disciples of Jesus/

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companions of Hussein (the second imam), the now absent yet “present” Mahdi (twelfth and final imam) who will return as the guided one, the Mahdi of messianic expectation which from a Christian perspective reflects astoundingly similar attributes. Massive attention in Islamic eschatology is given to signs of the End, particularly the appearance of the Antichrist (al-dajjal) and Isa’s parousia to destroy him and his works. This takes place for most Sunni and Shi’a interpreters in conjunction with the parousia to destroy all of God’s enemies, to whom Isa defers in leading all believers into the worship of God in the new age. The interest in Isa’s role is so keen that he can even outlive the Mahdi in the end: “The Messenger of Allah . . . declared, ‘A nation which has me as its beginning, Isa ibn Maryam as its end, and the Mahdı in between, will never be destroyed.’ ”15 Like the arrival of Jesus in the Johannine Apocalypse to destroy the enemies of God and God’s people, “the messianic Imam,”16 the Mahdi will come to avenge the death of Hussein, the sufering of all the imams, and ultimately vindicate all believers who have lived through or died in the world’s great tribulation. Before bringing the preceding Shi’a conception of the Parousia into dialogue with Barth, some more general comments regarding Shi’a and Christian messianism are in order. From a comparative theological perspective, the doctrines of the Mahdi have significant parallels with those of the risen/ascended Christ and of his parousia.17 Since the Qur’anic declaration that the Jews did not kill Jesus does not necessarily contradict the gospel accounts that Jesus laid down his own life in redemptive suffering, the redemptive sufering of Hussein and the eschatological return of the Mahdi accompanying Jesus’s parousia become an intriguing site for comparative theological reflection. The point of convergence, for the purposes of this essay, begins with the problem of the delay of the parousia and continues with respect to a theology of actual appearing. These features are seen to express the principle of God’s will to both guide and test believers: “Does mankind suppose that they will be left to say, ‘We believe,’ and that they will not be tried” (Qur’an 29:2), given the purpose of trials: “that God may separate the bad from the good” (8:37). As to the Return (Raj’ah) itself, it is deeply rooted in the apocalypticism of the Qur’an with its resonances in the Bible: In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. O, ‘Ali ibn Muhammad al-Samari . . . you will die in six days. Settle your afairs, and leave no testament in favor of anyone to fill your office after your death.

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Indeed, the second [variant: the complete (tamma)] occultation has occurred, and there will be no parousia save with God’s permission.18

Analogous scriptures for Mahdawit doctrine can be found in key biblical examples such as Jesus’s words in the gospel according to Luke: Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves. But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. (Lk 12:35–40)

Because of the redemptive sufering of the imams in Shi’a Islam, believers enjoy their continuous intercession (shafa’a) until the day of resurrection. In many traditional narrations, the ultimate appearing or parousia of the Mahdi is also the appearing of the other eleven imams and the Prophet himself. One famous narration of the coming event has the first imam, Ali, acting in a role like Saint Peter with the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, declaring: I am the slave of God and the brother of the Prophet of God; I am the trusted friend of God, the storehouse of Divine knowledge and the treasury of His secrets; I am the veil (hijab) of God and the face of God to which all must turn if they wish to see Him; I am the bridge to God and the “scales” of God. . . . I am the one who will decide who enters heaven and hell: the rewards of heaven are mine to bestow and the punishments of hell mine to mete out. I am the one who will appear framed in the disc of the sun at the end of time. . . . I am the Lord of the “return,” and the one to whom God has bequeathed His knowledge and His greatest name . . . 19

Seemingly an appropriation of the fruits of Christ’s ascension/resurrection in the Parousia, the narration conveys an intercessory communication regarding that which will bring an end to all persecution and death and years of waiting. Salvation is achieved by the intercession of the Mahdi, with its apex in the final mediation when the Mahdi, the twelfth

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imam, appears to mediate redemption, proving to the world that he had not died but was occulted until Allah’s chosen time. There are analogies between Christian interpretations of Jesus’s atoning death, resurrection, ascension, and return and the three eschatological figures of Shia Islam: “Husayn [sic] as the martyr undergoing docetic death on behalf of the Shi’ite community; the Mahdi, whose ‘occultation’ is analogous to the ascension of Christ and whose zurhir is analogous to Christ’s parousia; and Muhammad, who will take on the sins of the whole world and then atone for them.”20 Two key aspects of life in the time before the final parousia are emphasized: (1) the “tribulation” or intizar, which must be endured indefinitely since no one knows the divine end date, and (2) the all-important issue of proper conduct while living in and through this time of expectation.

Barth’s Messianic Parousias One of the strong features of Barth’s Christology is the living presence of the risen Christ to believers and the believing community in all times and all places. This messianic presence fills the gap between the two parousias of Jesus Christ, between his first and second advent. Barth includes parousia in many of his summaries of the work of Christ: incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, parousia (literally “presence”). Entirely consistent with the Shi’a Quranic frame of reference is the Pauline for Barth with its consistent connection of the promised parousia and the appeal to the pursuit of holiness: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Th 5:23). This is also that which is mediated to the believer by the Messiah’s high priestly office (cf. Heb 7:26) made fully manifest at his Second Coming. The parousia and holiness of living are inseparable in both messianic frames. One of the early references to the parousia in Church Dogmatics places the future event squarely within the flow of universal salvation history: Every man is actually related to the Church by the fact that he exists with it in the space between the ascension and the parousia of Jesus Christ. To that extent he is actually involved in the calling to that service which is ofered in its true and explicit form in the Church: the service of proclaiming Jesus Christ. It is in the light of this summons, of the fact that simply as he is, as a man, he can be a neighbour to me here and now at any

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moment, as the Samaritan was to the man halfdead by the roadside, it is in this light, and not in the light of the fact that he is an outsider, that I must regard him from within the Church. I could not believe in the Church if in it and by it I did not find hope even for man as such. Man himself now becomes a sign. He can and must show mercy. He can and must summon to a genuine praise of God, and in that way render to the children of God that necessary service. He can and must be my compassionate neighbour. He can and must and will, not by his own capacity and will, but because the Son of God has made Himself my neighbour in His incarnation and revealed Himself my neighbour in His resurrection.21

Barth’s bracketing of revelatory events between the first and second parousia of Christ has changed from the life of Jesus to the life of the Church in and through his ascension and resurrection,22 reflecting the condition of zwischen den Zeiten (“between the times” of Christ’s first and second comings). This hope defines every human being through the Church’s proclamation of the gospel summons as well as the new ethics of the resurrected human being in the Son of God. The parousia functions in a fundamental way for Barth’s portrayal of divine mercy in time and beyond time. God’s mercy is expressed directly not only in “the economy of salvation, but genuinely and truly the freedom and power of His Godhead. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is merciful in Himself. In this essential freedom and power He speaks and acts mercifully in His revelation, reconciliation and sanctification, in His covenant with Israel, in the epiphany and parousia of Jesus Christ.”23 The parousia of Christ produces a “new awareness,” which is actually a standing before “the frontier of all time . . . of ‘qualified time.’ ”24 Barth is so committed to the future reality that he is on the alert for anything in theology that might diminish the hope of Christ’s return in any way. The parousia is essential to the one Christ-event that comprises resurrection, ascension, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the second coming.25 The final parousia of Christ marks the end of “the Easter time and history” as declared in the story of the Ascension of Christ with the disciples left gazing up toward heaven and assured that he will return in the same manner from heaven (Ac 1:11). Jesus’s “disappearance into heaven . . . the sum of the inaccessible and incomprehensible side of the created world . . . the throne of God, the creaturely correspondence to his glory, which is veiled from man, and cannot be disclosed except on His initiative.”26 While Barth is against all visualizations of “the Resurrected Him-

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self,” nevertheless, “the ascension—Jesus’ disappearance into heaven—is the sign of the Resurrected.”27 Tied inextricably to the unilateral communication that is this appearing, the throne of God is the Entsprechung (“correspondence”) in human terms of the divine glory. Jesus has “entered the side of the created world which was provisionally inaccessible and incomprehensible, that before their eyes He ceased to be before their eyes” but has not ceased to be human.28 In this self-disclosure as ascended and invisible “in provisional distinction . . . lives on the Godward side of the universe, sharing His throne, existing and acting in the mode of God . . . to be known once for all as . . . this exalted man . . . as the One who exists in this form to all eternity.”29 Exegetically, Barth regards as “the most important” verse: “a cloud received him out of their sight” (Acts 19). This signifies not merely God’s hiddenness but actually Jesus’s inseparable identity with “God’s hidden presence” which will be reversed by “the coming revelation [the conclusive revelation] which penetrates this hiddenness.” The heaven that is closed to humanity presently will be opened from “God’s side” by Jesus’s parousia. This parousia is reversing the conditions of his invisible presence (Mt 28: 20) established by the ascension—“the proleptic sign [‘this upward and forward-looking sign’] of the parousia” of the coming consummation. This is “the Easter history” of “the whole retrospective memory of the Resurrected,” which is bracketed by the two events of the ascension and the parousia, the former as the sign of the latter: “pointing to the Son of Man who will finally and visibly emerge from the concealment of His heavenly existence and come on the clouds of heaven” (Mt. 24: 30).30 Barth thus gives great attention to every aspect of the two parousias, one into hiddenness and the other, the appearance of Christ and his manifest presence in the world.

Barth’s Parousias in Comparative Reflection Barth distinguishes between Christ’s first parousia (his visible presence between Easter and ascension) and the invisible presence of Christ available now, until the final parousia as a sign of His exaltation to the right hand of God, to eternal life and rule; of His transition to a presence which is eternal and therefore embraces all times. But it did end with the ascension, just as it had begun with the sign of the empty tomb. With the end of the time of this particular event

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there began the time of another form of His parousia, His living present— no less complete and sufficient in itself, but quite diferent. There began a time in which He was no longer, or not yet again, directly revealed and visible and audible and perceptible (as He had been) either to the disciples, the community, or the world.31

Jesus’s hiddenness to his followers and to the world is ofset by His presence mediated by the Holy Spirit proclaiming and hearing the word, but hidden from the world. This is the “time of the community”—between the two visible presences, a movement “from direct vision to direct vision . . . by His Holy Spirit.”32 Jesus is the one who is, who was and who is to come. Barth repeatedly calls him “The Resurrected”—as the Muslims call the Mahdi “the Risen.” The knowledge of Jesus’s resurrection was restricted to his immediate followers. This concealment—as with the Mahdi, in his “occultation”— Barth also calls the “temporal isolation,” is part of the “interim time of the community . . . for the conversion of the world.” Jesus is “the Lord of the cosmos” as well as “Lord of His community . . . a time of His invisibility.” The Mahdi, although asymmetrically related to the Messiah of the Last Day, brings about efects in his arrival that are no less cosmological though short lived—a period of some years rather than a millennium or a new age. Like Jesus’s eschatological parousia, according to Barth, Jesus’s resurrection is the necessary “confirmation of the fulfilment of time, in a glory which is no longer par ticular and transitory, but universal and permanent . . . . His future, for us.” For Jesus the two events of resurrection and parousia “are a single event of anticipation and fulfilment (cf. 1 Pt 1:3).” Jesus is the hidden blessing nevertheless present to the church and to the world through the Holy Spirit. His community is not hoping in “abstract blessings” or even the new creation, but is concentrated entirely upon “Jesus Himself.”33 The vindication of faithful hope in both traditions is the focus. The hope of the New Testament is the hope for “the imminent coming of the kingdom” now in this interim period of faith and love based upon the recollection of Jesus through the Gospel and its history in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit establishing the spiritual parousia of Jesus: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock” (Rev. 3:20), Barth cites with the realism of faith. This is the community’s “patient expectation,” a perseverance because of His future “general and conclusive revelation” established by his prior resurrection. The community is “not to give up

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expecting the Lord, and expecting Him soon . . . its gaze is always on Him.”34 In conversation with Islam we recognize that the expectations of the Messiah and the Mahdi are characterized similarly with a faith shaped by this profound sense of imminence. According to Barth, this imminent hope is the “third dimension” beyond faith and love that must not be diminished in any way by merely a “historical sense” of Jesus’s presence. Anything less than imminent hope is “only psychologically and socially” understanding him such that the “heavenly session and rule of Jesus have become the mythological and highly exaggerated expression of a value judgment.”35 Barth did not live to write CD V in which the eschatology would have achieved full exposition, including the parousia of Jesus. What we do have nevertheless is his extensive elaboration on the consummating Parousia, which is nothing less than “the liberation of all creatures from the bondage of corruption to the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Interestingly, Barth pays close attention to the reappearance of Moses and Elijah in the Eschaton. When the final parousia happens, all the redeemed will be “privileged to stand with these ancient witnesses of truth in Advent” (cf. 2 Pt 1:16–21).36 This accompaniment of the two eschatological prophets in the parousia of Jesus provides something of a comparative framework by which we can grasp how the Shi’a could imagine the Mahdi to have the Messiah accompanying him for the world’s renovation. In view of the occulted presence of the Mahdi, Barth’s account of Jesus’s presence now could be called the “occultation of Jesus,” that is, the time since the coming of the Holy Spirit where “Jesus is thus both present and not present.”37 Taking seriously the call to “watchfulness,” Barth can even exclaim: “perhaps the Church of today! . . .”38 is the community to whom Jesus will appear in the parousia of his final appearing. The hidden presence of the absence of Jesus in the church and to the world is an existence which exhibits and experiences the lordship of Jesus in the form of the lordship of His Spirit. We refer to the lordship of Jesus in the time between the resurrection and the parousia and therefore between the commencement and the completion of His final revelation. That it has the form of the Spirit means that the community not only derives temporally from this commencement and moves towards this consummation, but that it is effectively established and gathered by the One who was and who comes,

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being not only ruled but continually nourished and quickened by Him. That is why it lives always in expectation, and even in imminent expectation. That is why its prayer is Maranatha (1 Cor. 16:22; Rev. 22:20).39

This “community of the intervening time,” “the Church of the interim . . . between the resurrection and the parousia,” lives entirely in light of “the judgment of the final revelation to which it now moves, so that its present life and action is weighed in the balances of His future.” This is its position and “pledge of its hope” which “alone can give its witness vitality and strength”40 as the community fulfills its mandate of ser vice in Jesus’s name through obedience to the Spirit. This coming judgment which belongs to Jesus resonates with the Shi’a eschatology, which has corresponding signs that point to the attending arrival of the Mahdi and yet the trials of the faithful during the interim. Barth brings into poignant relief the historic questions of faith regarding the reasons for this interim: “For the time between is not the time of an empty absence of the Lord, nor is it the time of a bewildering delay in His return, in which it is enough for the community to maintain and help itself as best it can. On the contrary, it is the time of God’s patience and purpose, and it is the business of the community to recognize the character of this time.”41 What the faithful must do is persevere under the highly imperfect conditions of the present age. Barth also connects Jesus’s occultation and the ethics of faithful living with his absent presence. Muslim ethics of the present as the waiting for the Return are no less mystical in their apprehension of the presence of the absence in each moment, in each opportunity to express the mercy of God in solidarity with the other both inside and outside the community. The fact that the present, the interim, is the time “when Jesus is still hidden” means that this present-absence remains determinative for “the attitude and conduct of the community” and its experiences. In this regard, Barth is particularly focused on the parables of parousia in Matthew 25: He is no less present, though hidden, in all who are now hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick and in prison. Wherever in this present time between the resurrection and the parousia one of these is waiting for help (for food, drink, lodging, clothes, a visit, assistance), Jesus Himself is waiting. Wherever help is granted or denied, it is granted or denied to Jesus Himself. For these are the least of His brethren. They represent the world for which He died and rose again, with which He has made Himself su-

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premely one, and declared Himself in solidarity. It is for them that He sits at the right hand of the Father, so that no one can know Him in His majesty, or honor and love Him as the Son of God, unless he shows concern for these least of His brethren. No one can call God his Father in Christ’s name unless he treats these least as his brethren. This is the test which at the last judgment will decide concerning the true community which will inherit the kingdom: whether in this time of God’s mercy and patience, this time of its mission, it has been the community which has succored its Lord by giving unqualified succor to them in this needy world. . . . Such is the question addressed to the community of the present by the approaching parousia.42

To sum up, the double parousias of Christianity and Islam through the lenses of Barth and the Shi’a accounts of the Mahdi show us highly comparable features of the spiritual and the ethical. The strangeness of occultation in Islam becomes familiar again through taking seriously what Barth has to say so extensively about the Parousia of Jesus on the Last Day. Until that day, both communities await Jesus and both await a consummation. The role of the Mahdi is unique to Islam and its theological development is unique to Shi’a Islam. What becomes of it is part of ongoing theological conversation and growing understanding. Notes 1. See Albert Schweitzer, Das Messianitats- und Leidensgeheimnis: Eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1901); The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. F. C. Burkitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); the potency of this paradigm continues through the work of Dale C. Allison, such as The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009). 2. I. U. Dalferth, “Karl Barth’s Eschatological Realism,” in Karl Barth: Centenary Essays, ed. S. W. Sykes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14–45; see Ingolf U. Dalferth, Crucified and Resurrected: Restructuring the Grammar of Christology, trans. Jo Bennett (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), and The Presence and Absence of God: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2008 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010). 3. See Zeki Saritoprak, “The Mahdī Tradition in Islam: A Social-Cognitive Approach,” Islamic Studies 41, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 651–674. 4. On the stipulations of Deuteronomy 18, see Hans M. Barstad, “The Understanding of the Prophets in Deuteronomy,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 8, no.  2 (1994): 236–251. 5. All citations of the Qur’an in this essay are from The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

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6. See 14 Questions about Imam az-Zaman, vol. 1 (Mumbai: Association of Imam Mahdi, 1982), 13, Question 9. 7. Jassim M. Hussain, The Occultation of the Twelfth Imam (A Historical Background) (London: Muhammadi Trust of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1982), 125. 8. Closely related to qiyamah, “resurrection,” and the question of the Mahdi preceding or succeeding the general resurrection, see Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of Mahdi in Twelver Shi’ism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 24; note also that the Mahdi is regarded as the Qa’im (Risen One) of the family of Muhammad, perhaps to distinguish him from the Parousia of Jesus. 9. See Abbas Amanat, Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern Amer ica (London: Tauris, 2002), 114. 10. “If We will, We will send down a sign from Heaven and their heads would remain bowed before it in humility” (Qur’an 26:4); “We shall show them Our signs upon the horizons and within themselves till it becomes clear to them that it is the truth” (Qur’an 45:53); see Abdul-Rahim Mugahi, “Forty Hadith: The Awaited Savior of Humanity,” http://www.al-islam.org: [Muhammad Ibn Abi al-Bilad (reported) on the authority of Ali Ibn Muhammad al-Azdi, on the authority of his father, on the authority of his grandfather, who said:] The Commander of the faithful, peace be on him, said: “Before the one who will arise (al-qa’im), there will be red death and white death; there will be locusts at their usual time and at their unusual time like the colours of blood. As for red death that is (from) the sword, while white death is (from) plague”; see also http://www.al-islam.org /articles/signs-reappearance-twelfth-imam-ajtf. 11. This is a key verse also seen as establishing a principle of abrogation, that is, later verses superseding earlier verses in Qur’anic exegesis. 12. See the translation by Sayyed Abbas Sadr-Ameli, An Enlightening Commentary into the Light of the Holy Qur’an (Seattle: CreateSpace, 2015). 13. Surprisingly perhaps, Isa (Jesus) is acknowledged in the Qur’an as Messiah. At his birth he utters inspired blessing upon himself: “Peace be upon me the day I was born, the day I died, and the day I am raised alive!” (19.33)—a verse that leaves open entirely the manner of Jesus’s death and resurrection as witnessed in the New Testament; the next aya (verse) continues, “That is Jesus son of Mary—a statement of truth” (19:34), which also leaves room for understanding of the incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus. 14. Willem  A. Bijlefeld, “Eschatology: Some Muslim and Christian data,” Islam and Christian & Muslim Relations 15, no. 1 (2004): 35–54, at 37. 15. Quoting a Shi’i tradition from Ibn Hanbal et al., see ibid., 41; see also Mohammed Ali Amir-Moezzi, The Divine Guide in Early Shi’ism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam, trans. David Streight (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Muhammad ibn Husayn al-Mahdī, the hidden, occulted twelfth Imam will emerge with Isa (Jesus); he was born in 869 CE. 16. So titled from Sachedina, Islamic Messianism, 4f. 17. In general, Islamic tradition regards Jesus as having ascended/risen and therefore occulted without dying and being resurrected. But the Qur’an does not necessarily exclude the possibility of embracing the Passion/Resurrection accounts of the gospels of the New Testament—based, e.g., on Qur’an 19.

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18. Said Amir Arjomand, “The Crisis of the Imamate and the Institution of Occultation in Twelver Shiism: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 4 (November 1996): 491–515, at 509; see Mariella Ourghi, Schiitischer Messianismus und Mahdī- Glaube in der Neuzeit (Würzburg: Ergon, 2008). 19. Colin P. Turner, “The ‘Tradition of Mufaḍḍal’ and the Doctrine of the Rajʿa: Evidence of ‘Ghuluww’ in the Eschatology of Twelver Shiʿism?” Iran 44 (2006): 175–195, at 187. 20. Ibid., 188. 21. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 423. 22. Or bracketed also as “the miracle of Easter” with “the miracle of the Parousia” in his reading of Philippians 2:11, e.g., CD II/1 (1957), 221. 23. CD II/1 (1957), 372. 24. Ibid., 635. 25. CD III/2 (1960), 499. 26. Ibid., 453. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 454. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. CD IV/1 (1956), 319. 32. Ibid., 734; Barth then perceives the one coming or presence in three: the risen Christ at Easter, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit making him present to the community and to the world, and the presence of the Second Coming of Christ. But these three parousias are one in “three forms of his coming,” something that Barth sees “formally corresponding” to the New Testament witness to the triune God of revelation. Indeed, this can only be seen, with the full reception of the New Testament witness to the “climax of His coming” (e.g., 1 and 2 Th; 1 Co 15; Jo 6:39, 40, 44, 54) culminating in the resurrection of human beings and the new creation at the end of days. Indeed, Barth finds this analogy so appropriate that he ascribes a perichoretic unity to the oneness of the three forms of parousia such that each one of the parousias contains the other two (297, cf. CD, I/1, 425). 33. CD III/2, 489–492. 34. Ibid., 493. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 454. 37. Ibid., 499. 38. Ibid., 501. 39. Ibid., 506. 40. Ibid., 507. 41. Ibid., 508. 42. Ibid., 509.

Response to Part III Mun’im Sirry

Karl Barth is one of the most celebrated Christian theologians of the twentieth century, who (in the words of Eberhard Busch) “has dominated the subject-matter of theology and posed the questions with which the theologians of the diferent churches have been, and are, occupied, although they may want to ‘go beyond’ him, go back behind him or even protest against his answers.”1 It is, therefore, understandable that scholars interested in Christian-Muslim relations may ask whether or not Barth’s theology can be a resource for Christian-Muslim theological conversations. The simple answer is “yes,” not despite his generally negative view of Islam but rather because of it. In order to have a fruitful theological discussion, people of diferent faith traditions do not have to exaggerate similarities that they share with one another. What is needed is not to impose commonalities, but to respect diferences. Even when things look similar on the surface, at the deeper level we may find them quite diferent. This is also true with a comparative theology. Scholars have been discussing for a while the usefulness of comparison without having a consensus on the use of key terms in such a way that we seem to compare apples and oranges. The question, it seems to me, is not whether comparison is possible, but rather what purposes it serves. In fact, comparative studies are not only concerned with finding commonalities, but also identifying diferences. More important, in the field of comparative theology, there should be significant issues that are worth comparing and, perhaps, also debating. The two chapters by Joshua Ralston and Kurt Richardson attempt to illuminate Barth’s dialectical theology in comparison or, more precisely, in conversation with the Ash’arite theology (represented by the twelfthcentury Sufi al- Ghazali) and Shi’ite Islam respectively. Although they

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strive to find commonalities between Barth and al-Ghazali on the one hand and between Barth and Shi’ites on the other, implicit in their arguments is how diferent Barth’s theology and Muslim approaches are. Even their choice of diferent aspects of Barth’s view of God is telling: Ralston stresses the question of the unknowability of God, while Richardson emphasizes God’s presence. These two approaches to God may not reflect tensions or contradictions, but they certainly entail diferent emphases. We should not assume that Barth has produced a single body of knowledge in the sense that his massive works represent a coherent and internally consistent perspective. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with picking out two seemingly contradictory aspects of Barth’s theology. Apparently his approach to the religious belief of others has also been viewed diferently by diferent scholars. Barth has often been mentioned as an example of the exclusivist paradigm; however, a more careful study seems to question the charge of his exclusivism.2 In this regard, J. A. Di Noia says, “On a careful reading of the relevant sections of the Church Dogmatics, as we shall see, the charge that Barth’s position with regard to non-Christian religions falls simply at the exclusivist end of this spectrum cannot be sustained.”3 Gavin D’Costa briefly notes that Karl Barth “admittedly also overturns these categories by being an exclusivist, inclusivist, and universalist all at once.”4 Theological reflections as complex as Barth’s defy a simple characterization. Ralston is correct when saying that Barth’s crude stereotypes of Muslims might have been the result of his “lack of comprehensive knowledge of Islamic thought or practice.” However, his limited comment on Islam does not mean that he has no interest in other religions, nor can such a cursory discussion of Islam be a basis for claiming that he “discards the very possibilities of a comparative Christian-Muslim exchange.” As Sven Ensminger has argued correctly, “Barth’s theology is never eliminating and shutting down any conversation between Christians and non-Christians.”5 As Ralston himself puts it nicely, Barth’s negative view of Islam should not be seen as “foreclos[ing] the possibility of rich comparative theological work.” If understood in terms of a strong Christocentrism, Barth’s theology reflects a Christian theology of religions. To quote Ensminger again, “The criterion for making such a statement is thereby first and foremost Jesus Christ.”6 This also explains his strong view that there is no possibility to know God without the help of revelation, which is exclusively in the person of Jesus.

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I am particularly intrigued by Barth’s contention as cited by Ralston that “it is unthinking to set Islam and Christianity side by side, as if in monotheism at least they have something in common. In reality, nothing separates them so radically as the diferent way they appear to say the same thing—that there is only one God.” This statement points to a crucial issue about how the one God is expressed so diferently in Christianity and Islam. It can also be understood in a positive sense in such a way that despite their radical diferences, Christians and Muslims believe in and worship the same God. This serious theological diference must first be admitted as reflecting the uniqueness of each religious tradition, without negating the shared divine origin. In several verses, the Qur’an expresses its diferent theological conception of God from that of Christians. Some verses may even be understood as polemical in the sense that they not only negatively describe other religions, notably Judaism and Christianity, but also criticize them both in terms of doctrines and social interactions. For instance, the Muslim scripture criticizes Christians for their belief in the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of Trinity (e.g., Qur’an 5:17, 73, 154). While vigorously repudiating the Christian conception of God, the Qur’an presents a strict monotheism. However, despite these serious theological diferences, the monotheistic nature of Christianity is not denied. The Qur’an seems to reflect this position when it unequivocally confirms that Christians worship the God of the Qur’an, while at the same it strongly criticizes them for their belief in trinitarian monotheism. When asking Muslims to debate the People of the Book in the best way possible, the Qur’an also instructs them to say, “Our God and your God is one” (Qur’an 29:46). This is the one and same God whose name is invoked in monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques (22:48). These diferences at the deeper level can be traced to the variant conceptions of revelation in Christianity and Islam. In Christian discourse, the term “revelation” usually refers to God’s revealing Himself in the person of Jesus, the God incarnate. Thus, the center and fullness of revelation is Jesus Christ. In Islam, God does not reveal Himself but rather His will through His revelation, which is later compiled into a single book, known as the Qur’an. Therefore, the Qur’an has a special status in the Muslim life and practice. While the doctrine of “incarnation” reflects the core teaching of Christianity in the sense that the word of God became flesh (the body of Jesus), in Islam it is known as “inlibration,” which

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means that the word of God became the book. This diferent conception of revelation has had a profound impact in the way Christians and Muslims perceive the nature of God diferently. On the one hand, since revelation is understood as God’s act in a special way in Jesus Christ, it ofers humans an intimate knowledge of God. On the other hand, Muslims emphasize God’s transcendence to extent that the Qur’an (42:11) claims that God does not resemble any of His creature, a doctrine known as “tanzih” (transcendentalism). It is important to understand this conception of revelation, for Barth’s contention that there is no human possibility to know God without the help of the divine is based on this very notion of God revealing Himself exclusively in Jesus Christ. It seems that Barth’s concentration upon the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is determinative of his total theological orientation. The exclusiveness of the revelation of God in Jesus “has made it clear that for him all true knowledge of God is inextricably tied to God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, which is made knowable through God’s presence in his Spirit, and affirmed in faith.”7 In other words, by His selfrevelation in Jesus Christ, God became an object of human knowing. This is an irony of Barth’s insistence that knowledge of God is impossible, wholly impossible, yet God—precisely because He is God—is capable of crossing the line and making Himself known to us through His revealing Himself. According to Barth, we must speak of God as the Wholly Other because no human endeavor can attain the knowledge of God, in the light of revelation. His rejection of natural theology is a case in point. He says, “Natural theology is the doctrine of a union of man with God existing outside God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. It works out the knowledge of God that is possible and real on the basis of this independent union with God, and its consequences for the whole relationship of God, world and man.”8 For Barth, this is absurd. For through God alone may God be known. It is also important to note that God’s unknowability by way of natural reasoning is not because He is remote or absent from this world, but rather because of His radical transcendence. For Barth, God is transcendent in relation to this world, but at the same time He is also radically present and active in the world. This last aspect of Barth’s exposition of the revelation of God is highlighted by Kurt Richardson in his Reading Karl Barth: New Directions for North American Theology (2004).9 Reflecting on God’s identity as selfcommunication, Richardson writes “Barth reminds us that God comes

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to us in his revelation by a means of a divine act of condescension or descent (heruntersteigt) into our world. God accommodates Himself to us, to the contingencies of our existence, which he does supremely in the flesh of Christ, the man Jesus.”10 Here, instead of emphasizing the unknowability of God, Richardson expands the conversation to include the way in which theology’s knowledge of God may be grasped within “the condition of created reality, which are the same for all paths of knowledge.”11 This entails human knowledge of the intimate presence of God in our world, rather than simply His externality and transcendence. Divine revelation comes as a free gift of God and elevates humans to an intimate knowledge of God that would be impossible without divine assistance. “Because God gives himself in our knowing of him,” Richardson argues, “what we know is always a share in God’s own self-knowing.”12 Thus, what is at issue is not about God’s unknowable absence or knowable presence. Rather, it is the question of more subtle and theologically adequate differentiation about modes of divine transcendence and presence. Richardson’s contribution to this volume further emphasizes the nearness of God and His presence here and now. He has successfully demonstrated points of convergence between Christian and Shi’ite messianic figuration whose presence is marked by hiddenness and expected appearance for the realization of God’s purposes in the world. But, again, even here the diference in their messianic theology is profound: The Shi’ite Mahdi is never understood to be an incarnation of God. We must be aware that Christians and Muslims difer in the way the messianic theology is employed. “Although the similarity of Islamic messianism to Judeo-Christian ideas of the Messiah has been noted,” Abdulaziz Sachedina argues, “the idea of the Mahdi as held by Muslims has a distinctive Islamic coloring.”13 By pointing to subtle diferences, I do not mean to suggest that commonalities between Barth and certain streams of Islamic theology are superficial. It is important to admit the significance of structural diferences in the way key religious doctrines are conceptualized. As discussed earlier, in Christianity and Islam the modes of God’s disclosure are radically diferent. I would argue that the diferent ways in which God is conceived by both Muslims and Christians should not be viewed as a source of misguidance but rather, perhaps, the consequence of the divine merciful radiance. It is because of their diferences that people of diferent faith traditions should learn to enrich one another. Such profound differences can also be found even within a single religious tradition. Of

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course, it is easier to deal with similarities than diferences as the latter have often been viewed as obstacles to interreligious relations. It is therefore instructive that these diferences and obstacles can and must be turned into opportunities for fruitful conversations among various religious communities. Notes 1. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. J. Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), xiii. 2. See Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism (New York: Orbis, 1982), 11. 3. See J. A. Di Noia, “Religion and the Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 244. 4. Gavin D’Costa, “Theology of Religions,” in The Modern Theologians, ed. David F. Ford (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 630. 5. Sven Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions (New York: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2014), 214. 6. Ibid. 7. David L. Mueller, Karl Barth (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976), 89. 8. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 168. 9. Kurt Anders Richardson, Reading Karl Barth: New Directions for North American Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). 10. Ibid., 133. 11. Ibid., 135. 12. Ibid., 169. 13. Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of Mahdi in Twelver Shi’ism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 2.

7 God as Subject and Never

Object to Us

R E A D I N G K E N A U PA N I Ṣ A D WITH KARL BARTH AND ŚAṄKARA Marc A. Pugliese Theologians work by at once distinguishing themselves and borrowing from religious others. Indeed, engagement with the religious aliter may contribute to one’s own religious identity. The propinquity of more remote religious others has increased with modern globalization but theologians have always engaged the theologically proximate. At what point does a “religious other” become a “member of another religion,” though? A pressing question today is whether typologies of “religions” are modern Western colonial inventions. If the boundaries we draw between diferent “religions” and “traditions” within the same “religion” are more notional than real, then perhaps when Barth engages others in the “Christian tradition” he is thinking “across religious borders.”1 Barth does periodically interact with more remote religious others but Barth’s interaction—positively and negatively—with those in the broader “Christian” tradition is plentiful. His accentuating and debating diferences with religious others while simultaneously arguing for his own positions approach comparative theology’s “apologetic” dimension.2 Thus, perhaps Barth and comparative theology are not as incongruous as they may at first seem. Taking this proposition as plausible, the following brings together Barth and Adi Śaṅkara’s Advaitin reading of Kena Upaniṣad (KeU) in a tentative act of comparative theology. Both affirm that ultimate reality is nonobjectifiable even though the reasons for and implications of these affirmations diverge. These significant differences notwithstanding, Śaṅkara’s reading of KeU could ofer insights for Barth’s theology of God’s subjectivity in ways that follow from what Barth expressly says. These insights are tested for their utility in how they serve as responses to criticisms that divine subjectivity in Barth merely serves the purpose of explicating divine Lordship and entails modalism.

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Reading Kena Upaniṣad with Śaṅkara The Upaniṣads comprise part of the Vedas, scriptures that originated in ancient India the acceptance of which defines “Hindu” religious traditions according to a common typology.3 Like the Bible, the Vedas were written diachronically and are diverse in content. Each of the Vedas has four parts corresponding to their chronological development, with the Upaniṣads being the last, and hence Vedānta (“end of the Vedas”). Hallmarks of South Asian religious thought like karma, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, renunciation, asceticism, and yoga, emerge in the Upaniṣads. Kena Upaniṣad is one of the oldest and most important Upaniṣads, and it likely appeared in its current form in the middle third of the first millennium BCE. It has four parts (khaṇḍas) and, beginning with our experience of subjectivity, infers a transcendent and nonobjectifiable awareness. Our investigation focuses on the first and second khaṇḍas:4 k haṇḍ a 1 (1) By whom impelled, by whom compelled, does the mind soar forth? By whom enjoined does the breath march on as the first? By whom is this speech impelled, with which people speak? And who is the god that joins the sight and hearing? (2) That which is the hearing behind hearing, the thinking behind thinking, the speech behind speech, the sight behind sight— It is also the breathing behind breathing— Freed completely from these, the wise become immortal, when they depart from this world. (3a) Sight does not reach there; neither does thinking or speech. We don’t know, we can’t perceive, how one would point it out. (3b) It is far diferent from what’s known.

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And it is farther than the unknown— so have we heard from men of old, who have explained it all to us. (4) Which one cannot express by speech, by which speech itself is expressed— Learn that that alone is brahman, and not what they here venerate. (5) Which one cannot grasp with one’s mind, by which, they say, the mind itself is grasped— Learn that that alone is brahman, and not what they here venerate. (6) Which one cannot see with one’s sight, by which one sees the sight itself— Learn that that alone is brahman, and not what they here venerate. (7) Which one cannot hear with one’s hearing, by which hearing itself is heard— Learn that that alone is brahman, and not what they here venerate. (8) Which one cannot breathe through breathing, by which breathing itself is drawn forth— Learn that that alone is brahman, and not what they here venerate. K haṇḍ a 2 1 If you think “I know it well”—perhaps you do know ever so little the visible appearance of brahman; there is that part of it you know and there is the part which is among the gods. And so I think what you must do is to reflect on it, on that unknown part of it: 2 I do not think that I know it well; But I know not that I do not know. Who of us knows that, he does know that; But he knows not, that he does not know. 3 It’s envisioned by one who envisions it not; but one who envisions it knows it not.

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4

5

And those who perceive it perceive it not; but it’s perceived by those who perceive it not. When one awakens to know it, one envisions it, for then one gains the immortal state. One gains power by one’s self, And by knowledge, the immortal state. If in this world a man comes to know it, to him belongs the real. If in this world a man does not know it, great is his destruction. Discerning it among each and every being, the wise become immortal, when they depart from this world.

Adi Śaṅkara (700s CE) reads KeU from the perspective of the Advaita (“unqualified nondualism”) Vedānta school.5 Śaṅkara laconically sums up the Advaita reading as the “great saying” (mahāvākya): “ātman (the innermost self) is brahman (ultimate reality).”6 Brahman is ultimate reality. Ātman is the innermost or true self. For Advaita, the human problem is ignorance (avidyā) of the self’s true nature, which brings sufering. “Realization” that the self is absolutely identical (“nondual”) with brahman is the solution and brings liberation (mokṣa).7 Ātman’s existence is self-evident because ātman is self-revealing in our immediate awareness. Ātman is “known” in this sense. What is “unknown” is ātman’s true nature. Brahman is limitless (infinite) awareness, so ātman’s real nature is limitless awareness. Our ego, or “I-notion” who thinks, feels, experiences, and acts, is due to ātman. The problem is that our I-notion wrongly identifies itself with the body, senses, feelings, and mind. This causes sufering because these are generated, finite, change, and perish. They are always limited and incomplete. By contrast, ātman as nondual with brahman transcends all limits. Limitless fullness is bliss because it lacks nothing. Hence our problem is not ignorance of ātman’s existence. It is ignorance of ātman’s nature. The goal of scripture study under the guidance of a teacher (guru) is not to establish ātman’s existence, which is selfevident. The goal is to replace our I-notion’s ignorance of ātman’s true nature with the knowledge that it is brahman.

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Because brahman is unique, the valid source of knowledge (pramāṇa) of brahman is unique. Brahman cannot be known by perception and processes of reasoning reliant on sense perception. For Advaita the valid source of knowledge of brahman is the words of the Vedas, specifically the Upaniṣads. Brahman “is known from the scriptures alone” (BSBh 2.1.6). Reasoning based on the Upaniṣads is valid knowledge because it has valid grounds. Why is ātman brahman? The body, senses, and mind with which we confound ātman are both objects and instruments of our awareness. As such they neither are, nor can objectify, awareness. Plus, any attempt to objectify awareness requires another nonobjectified awareness doing the observing (KeUBh 2.1). There is thus always nonobjectified awareness. Only the infinite is nonobjectifiable because every thing finite is delimited by a form by which it can be known as an object. Our innermost self (ātman) as nonobjectified awareness is therefore infinite. If ātman and brahman were diferent they could objectify each other, but they are both nonobjectifiable and infinite. Because there cannot be two infinites and both ātman and brahman are infinite, ātman is brahman. Therefore, ātman’s awareness is brahman’s awareness. KeU begins with the experience of our subjectivity to arrive at knowledge of ātman’s nature as nonobjectifiable, limitless awareness. For Śaṅkara, when KeU diferentiates between awareness and the mind, body, and senses as objects of awareness, it employs Advaita’s teaching method of “distinguishing between seer and the seen” (dṛg-dṛṣya vivēka). KeU identifies the awareness revealed by introspection with brahman. For Śaṅkara, then, KeU teaches that “ātman is brahman.” In the opening verse (1.1) the disciple asks what moves the mind, breath, and speech, and what joins together the senses of seeing and hearing. Here the disciple sees that the mind, body, and senses habitually identified with the self are the passive instruments of something else, and hence not self-functioning and self-explanatory. Their activities depend on some other subject. The word “enjoining” implies intelligence and volition. Combining the sense organs for a common end implies a purposeful subject (KeUBh 1.2) precluding merely impersonal force. Later, the directing and intelligent subject is identified as brahman (1.4–8). The guru’s response (1.2) makes clear that this mover and enjoiner is indeed a conscious subject: It is the seer, hearer, speaker, breather, and thinker, the consciousness behind the mind, body, and senses. Because

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the mind, breath, speech, and senses are perceptible as objects they are distinct from the conscious subject who perceives them. Śaṅkara adds that because the efect is always contained in the cause, the source of the mind must itself be a subject with intelligence and volition (KeUBh 1.5). Wisdom and liberation from the cycle of rebirth (saṃsāra) come from ceasing to identify one’s innermost self with these faculties. 1.3a expresses a dilemma: Sight, thought, and speech cannot reach ātman, so how can we know or teach about it? For Advaita, ātmanbrahman transcends perception, categories of class, attributes, and the modes by which something is known and described (KeUBh 1.3). Because brahman is the inner reality of the faculties seeking to apprehend it they cannot “go to” brahman. Brahman is “already there” (KeUBh 1.3). The guru then cites the teaching that brahman is “far diferent from what’s known” and “farther than the unknown” (1.3b). By saying he does not know how to teach it, the guru is not denying the possibility. Rather, brahman’s uniqueness dictates a unique manner of instruction (prakriyā). Brahman is not like objects of knowledge, says Śaṅkara, because they are finite and determined. Brahman is “farther than the unknown” because we need not seek it as we would something unknown. As identical with one’s self brahman is certainly known, self-evidently, but the self is not a “known” as an object because the self as awareness can never become an object to itself (KeUBh 1.3). Verses 4–8 iterate the noetic, sensory, and communicative faculties, saying they cannot objectify brahman but are rather objectified by brahman. Brahman is the inner power of the senses and mind, perceives the senses, and knows the mind. Therefore, brahman is beyond them. These verses repeat a pattern in parallel: (1) The faculty cannot objectify brahman. (2) Rather, brahman as awareness objectifies the faculty. (3) Injunction to “learn” this awareness alone is brahman. (4) Denial that the objects of popu lar worship are brahman.

Each verse denounces conventional religion because the objectified divinity that popular worship requires is not really God. That the objectifying powers the worshippers employ are themselves objectified and empowered by brahman is a supreme irony. The second khaṇḍa expands the antinomy that brahman both can and cannot be known. 2.1 is usually taken as the guru testing the disciple (KeUBh 2.1). The disciple may think she now knows brahman “well.” This

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implies knowledge acquisition, but one cannot acquire what one already possesses (KeUBh 2.1). Even if she has abandoned traditional deities a mental construct taken as brahman’s form may remain. Knowing via an intelligible form is to limit and objectify. Since the knower cannot objectify herself the disciple cannot in this sense “know” herself (ātman) to be brahman (KeUBh 2.1). The disciple says she is not under any such delusions (KeUBh 2.2). She restates diferently (2.2) what the guru said earlier (1.3): Brahman is other than the known and the unknown. She does not “know” brahman the way others claim to “know” brahman, just as they would know anything else, and so thereby fail to really know brahman. She knows brahman in the unique sense of the nonobjectifiable immediacy of awareness. This knowledge is wisdom, liberation, and immortality (2.2–5). In summary, for Śaṅkara, KeU’s teaching amounts to “ātman is brahman.” Through introspective self-examination KeU leads to a nonobjectifiable awareness that is both the true self and ultimate reality. The mind, body, and senses are objects and passive instruments of awareness, so they are not the true self. Noetic, sensory, and communicative faculties can never objectify this awareness because it lies behind them, accounts for them, animates them, employs them, and itself objectifies them. That which animates but is not animated, objectifies but cannot be objectified, is subject but never object, is ultimate reality or brahman. Any so-called deity objectified by speech, thought, sight, or hearing is really an idol. Never known as an object but never unknown since it is identical with one’s innermost self, this subject-who-is-never-object is known in a sui generis way.

Barth on God’s Subjectivity We now turn to Barth. For Barth, God per se is the inalienable subject whom we ourselves cannot objectify but who nevertheless in revelation objectifies God’s self without surrendering subjectivity. Early programmatic statements include: God “is the subject par excellence, the subject, which is never and nowhere object.”8 God “is never in any sense ‘object,’ but is always unchangeably subject” who “can never become an object to the thought directed toward him.”9 “The subject of revelation is the subject that remains indissolubly subject. One cannot get behind this subject. It cannot become object” (CD I/1 [1936], 381).

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For Barth, God’s subjectivity, revelation, and the Trinity are bound together. In an early letter he wrote, “I understand the Trinity as the problem of the inalienable subjectivity of God in his revelation.”10 The Church Dogmatics locates the “root of the doctrine of the Trinity” “in revelation” (CD I/1, 332; cf. CD I/2 [1956] 878) such that the Trinity is ultimately concerned with the subject presupposed in the real ity of revelation (CD I/2, 362). In genuine self-revelation the revealing subject is completely present in the revelatory event and efect. Self-revelation of God must correspond to God’s self. The revelatory act must be identical with the revealer and so fully correspond to God’s being (CD I/1, 353, 428): “In the predicate and object of the concept of revelation we must again have, and to no less a degree, the subject itself. Revelation and revealing must be equal to the revealer” (CD I/1, 353). Therefore, the self-revealing God is identical with the act of revelation, which is identical with revelation’s efect. Selfrevelation is self-impartation (CD I/1, 437). In unimpaired unity God the subject is at once revealer, revelation, and revealedness (CD I/1, 299). In all three, God is “equal to Himself, one and the same Lord” (CD I/1, 383). “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” denote God in threefold repetition and God is the one God in each repetition (CD I/1, 350). God’s Lordship is what God reveals. This Lordship means God is conditioned by nothing except God’s self. God is entirely self-determined and unconditionally free. God alone is the source of God’s freedom: “Lordship means freedom” (CD I/1, 306; see also 302–303, 384). Lordship also means God is the indissoluble subject whom we cannot get behind, objectify, or master. God cannot be “given into the hands of man, who . . . could more or less control God as he does other realities” or “be grasped by man or confiscated or put to work” (CD I/1, 321). Divinity is Lordship, Lordship is freedom, and freedom is freedom from any control. We cannot objectify God because we cannot control God. In God’s self-revelation God’s very essence is revealed to be Lordship as unconditioned freedom and inalienable subjectivity (CD I/1, 296–332, 381–382). Because this is revelation of God’s self, God as the absolutely free subject is identical with the act of revelation (CD I/1, 296). Lordship is both revelation’s content and form, with no distinction between them (CD I/1, 306, 314). The divine subject’s choice to be self-revealing constitutes God’s being.11 Thereby God is precisely the God who reveals: “God is who He is in the act of revelation” (CD II/1 [1957], 257, 262). God is Lord, and in free-

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dom God chooses to be the God who reveals. God’s self-revelation thus reveals that God is free to reveal God’s self, the possibility that revelation can happen, and that it has happened. God freely determines God’s triune nature when God chooses to be the self-revealing God: “God is eternally subject and never object, that he determines himself and is knowable exclusively through himself in the ‘pure act’ of his Triune Personality.”12 God’s self-constitution is a manifestation of divine freedom. How? In the Trinity God actualizes the impossible: God becomes unlike God’s self, diferentiates God’s self from God’s self, and all the while remains “one and the same, the sole God” (CD I/1, 320, 324). This bringing forth of God from God while remaining absolutely one reveals a Lordship superior even to that exercised in creating what is not God (CD I/1, 433).

Initial Comparative Reflections Despite significant diferences, there are similarities between Barth’s divine subject and Śaṅkara’s awareness that is ātman-brahman. Both are nonobjectifiable, and for Barth this is precisely why God is inalienably subject: “The subject of revelation is the subject that remains indissolubly subject. One cannot get behind this subject. It cannot become object” (CD I/1, 381). Barth’s assertion that God “can never become an object to the thought directed toward him” corresponds to how ātman-brahman is that “which one cannot grasp with one’s mind” (KeU 1.5) and “the knower cannot be known” (KeUBh 2.1). Both are fully self-revealing: “God is seen, believed, recognized, and known only in the act of his selfrevelation.”13 And: “The self (ātman) of anyone does not require to be revealed to anyone with the help of any other means” (BSBh 2.3.7). Both remain entirely subject and never object in their self-revelation. To be sure, there are dissimilarities. For instance, Barth is concerned with God’s Lordship or freedom from any control. We ourselves are creaturely subjects whom others may transform from an “I” into an “it” that can be surveyed, grasped, and mastered. For Śaṅkara, the mind and senses are unintelligent and passive instruments of awareness requiring illumination by the awareness that is ātman-brahman to function. However, precisely this point may be useful in responding to Barth’s critics, as we shall see. A crucial diference is that for Barth, God’s Lordship is revealed in how God does the impossible by objectifying and conditioning God’s self in

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freedom. In the trinitarian self-diferentiation the divine subject becomes an object to itself. The God who cannot be conditioned is self-conditioned (CD II/1, 303). By making the unconditioned conditioned, and the nonobjectifiable objectifiable, God demonstrates divine Lordship. When God brings forth God from God in freedom, when God posits God’s own reality distinct from God, the divine subject objectifies itself and becomes an object of knowledge and love to itself (CD I/1, 433, CD II/1, 49). This divine self-knowledge is the source of our knowledge of God. In God’s self-determination God becomes an object to God’s self in the Trinity, which is the ground of God’s self-revelation to us in Jesus Christ, in whom God becomes the object of our attention and thoughts. In Jesus we really see God.14 In and through the Holy Spirit we share in the divine subjectivity, and yet this enfolds within it our own subjectivity (CD I/2, 203–242, 265–279). Still, we do not and cannot objectify God ourselves. In absolute freedom God makes God’s self an object to us and makes us the subject. Even in God’s making God’s self the object to us God remains subject. In Jesus, God is both acting subject and an object acted upon (CD II/2, 101–102; CD IV/1 [1956], 246). Hence, the inalienable subject, the divine “I,” really becomes a “Thou” to us, albeit still one we ourselves cannot survey, grasp, or control (CD I/1, 348, 381; CD IV/2 [1958], 50). Śaṅkara would deny that the unconditioned divine subject conditions and objectifies itself. Barth does say, though, that God’s threefold repetition and self-revelation involves no division in the divine subjectivity. The repetition is not a duplication or multiplication. God “all the while” remains “one and the same, the sole God.” Barth is unequivocal that God has only one center of subjectivity, one “center of consciousness” or “personality.”15 As often noted, contemporary connotations of “person” difer from those of the original Latin persona. For Barth “personality” is ascribed to God’s one essence, not the three hypostases or personae (CD I/1, 348–68). Divine simplicity means there is only one “I” in God (CD I/1, 350) and three “I’s” would be tritheism. The one divine subject is the preeminent person.16 Perhaps the problems Śaṅkara would see with Barth’s statements about God’s self-objectification could be addressed by Barth’s insistence that the objective revelation of God’s Lordship is precisely revelation of God’s nonobjectifiability. Barth continuously speaks of God in God’s self-revelation as “Subject,”17 and the “object and content” of revelation is this sovereign divine subject who speaks and acts (CD III/3 [1961], 177;

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CD IV/2, 51). In any case, Barth is adamant that God in se is always nonobjectifiable to us. For his part, Barth would oppose KeU’s starting point of human subjectivity, equating our subjective awareness with God’s self-revelation. Barth condemned the anthropological starting point and experientialism of much nineteenth-century theology: “The bad thing about the modern theology of experience is that it builds its certainty about God upon something that is given in the human subject.”18 Yet, Barth protested against taking human subjectivity as the locus of revelation, not appeals to subjectivity per se. Claiming that revelation lies in the depths of human subjectivity is diferent from using categories derived from human subjectivity to discuss God. Barth denies the former but does the latter.19

Barth’s Critics Reading Śaṅkara’s treatment of ātman-brahman as nonobjectifiable awareness together with Barth on God as inalienable subject may prove useful in addressing Barth’s critics on this very point. Critics say Barth’s express intentions and actual theology conflict: Strenuously opposing any theology that takes human subjectivity and religious experience as its starting points, Barth starts with God as an anthropomorphically conceived subject and identifies religious experience with God’s experience.20 Although couched within a trinitarian framework, this leads Barth into modalistic monarchianism. Because it has been influential and oftrepeated, here we survey Moltmann’s critique with a view to examining ways that Śaṅkara may contribute to a response consistent with what Barth himself says. Moltmann rejects what he dubs the “theology of the transcendental subjectivity of God,” of which Kant is the proximate origin and Barth the exemplar.21 According to Moltmann, modernity’s “turn to the subject” and replacement of “substance” with “subject” as the primary category of being entered Protestant theology in force after Kant. Because of Kant, the nonobjectifiability of God and the ego featured prominently in nineteenth-century Protestant theology. Kant argued that God and the self are beyond the limits of reason and hence transcendent of categorical experience. They are noumenal mysteries that can never become categorical “representations” (Vorstellungen) and are therefore nonobjectifiable.22

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Roundly criticizing Kant’s bifurcation of subject and object and his minimization of history, the German idealists (e.g., Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) identified divine and human subjectivity and saw history as the outworking of the divine subject’s self-diferentiation-inunity. The divine subject is perfect only if it can relate to itself, so God is eternal self-diferentiation and self-identification. This is a triadic reflective self-distinction and self-recollection patterned after the Trinity. With subject and object merged, God is the subject in both the act of revelation and in our receiving revelation. For Hegel, our thinking about God is really God thinking God’s self. There is no mediated knowledge of God through the world, only a direct divine “self-communication”; neither is there a real subject-object relationship in this knowledge, only subject self-identical with subject. Kant and German idealism informed all nineteenth-century German theology. For Wilhelm Herrmann, Barth’s teacher, God’s nonobjectifiability and the ego’s nonobjectifiability are two aspects of the same mystery, with the corollary that God is revealed to us in our inner subjectivity. God is the absolutely free subject, never an object of our cognition or control, and God’s triune subjectivity alone makes religious experience possible in the nonobjectifiable depths of human subjectivity. Thus far, Moltmann’s account includes interesting parallels to Advaita: God and the self are nonobjectifiable; God is known immediately in human subjectivity; knowledge of God and self-knowledge are ultimately identical; and this knowledge is sui generis. In 1925, Barth leveraged an ambiguity in a statement of Herrmann’s: “Wir können diesen Gott nicht anders erkennen als dadurch, daß er sich uns selbst offenbart.”23 Up to the comma this is clear: “We cannot know this God other than through.” After the comma could mean either: “that He reveals Himself to us ourselves” or “that He Himself reveals Himself to us.” The former corresponds to how, for Hermann, God is revealed in the depths of our subjectivity, but Barth preferred the latter. This shows how for Barth God’s subjectivity replaces human subjectivity. Consequently, for Barth the Trinity becomes merely a means to secure and interpret the divine subject’s absolute freedom in revelation. God alone is the revealer, the revelation, and the revealedness in threefold repetition. In God’s self-manifestation to us, we are absolutely dependent on the sovereignly free threefold divine subject who can never become an object to human thought. According to Moltmann, however, this entails modalistic Monarchianism:

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Under the conditions of modern Eu ropean times God is no longer thought of as supreme substance. He now counts as absolute subject. Consequently, ever since German Idealism the divine monas has been interpreted as the absolute, identical subject. God is the subject of his own being and his own revelation. . . . For these historical reasons it is quite understandable that the early church’s trinitarian formula: una substantia—tres personae should now be replaced by the formula: one divine subject in three modes of being. . . . But if the subjectivity of acting and receiving is transferred from the three divine Persons to the one divine subject, then the three Persons are bound to be degraded to modes of being, or modes of subsistence, of the one identical subject. But viewed theologically this is a late triumph for the Sabellian modalism which the early church condemned.24

Moltmann reasons that in Barth’s explication of “God reveals God’s self as Lord” the Trinity is, and all divine action in history comes from, only one subject. Deity consists of a se freedom, but there can be only one absolute Lord. In the Idealist reflection logic there is only one and the same “I” in whom God contemplates, finds, becomes conscious of, and manifests God’s self. “Threefold repetition” is not the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.25 In summary, Moltmann contends that Barth’s theology of divine subjectivity comes from German Idealism, makes the Trinity’s sole purpose that of securing God’s absolute freedom in revelation, displaces trinitarian orthodoxy with heretical modalism, and epitomizes exactly what Barth so adamantly opposed: grounding theology in anthropology and identifying religious experience with God’s experience.

Insights from Kena Upaniṣad Replies to these criticisms of Barth are not wanting, and even Barth himself anticipated and addressed the modalism criticism (CD I/1, 355–358; cf. 382).26 Can Śaṅkara’s Advaita reading of KeU point to theological reasons for God’s inalienable subjectivity apart from the modern “turn to the subject” and securing divine freedom? Two millennia before Western modernity, Upanishadic thought developed robust reasoning for ultimate reality’s inalienable subjectivity. This alone should give pause when contemplating Moltmann’s genealogy of the idea. Despite rapid divergence in reasons and implications, KeU’s

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and Barth’s contentions that ultimate reality is nonobjectifiable do set similar trajectories. Perhaps Śaṅkara’s reading of KeU can suggest further responses to Moltmann’s critiques. Perhaps these even follow from what Barth himself explicitly says. KeU says that the director of our perceptive, communicative, and cognitive faculties is not the object of those faculties. Śaṅkara elaborates that ātman-brahman is the existence and activity of these faculties. It is the core of all things, of the ear, the eye, the word and the mouth. Omnipresent and without parts, it is always connected to even the mind (KeUBh 2.4). Ātman-brahman also moves these faculties (KeUBh 1.4). Without ātman-brahman they cannot function: “There cannot possibly be any activity where ātman does not preside” (KeUBh 1.2). Even the mind itself is incapable of thinking, willing, and determining without it. It is “the deepest interior of all . . . the source of all their functioning capacity” (KeUBh 1.2; cf. 1.5). Here are reasons besides God’s freedom for why we cannot objectify God. God is the condition of the possibility of our cognitive and perceptive faculties’ existence and functioning, so God cannot become an object to them. God as their ground and power is “already there,” so God does not “reach out to God” through them as a subject reaches out to an object (KeUBh 1.2–5). The awareness illuminating the mind is not illuminated by the mind (KeUBh 1.5). The inner principle of our faculties’ powers of objectification cannot itself be acted upon by those powers: “The fire that burns and enlightens things does not enlighten or burn itself” (KeUBh 1.3). Related is how KeU impresses the limited scope of our perceptive, cognitive, and communicative faculties. Each faculty has a peculiar power whereby it objectifies other entities but cannot objectify itself. When speech itself is spoken of, thought is thought, seeing is seen, and hearing is heard (KeU 1.5–8), our awareness objectifies these faculties but not via their own objectifying powers. In ātman, sight is not seeing itself, hearing is not hearing itself, the mind is not thinking of itself, and so on. KeU thus places not only brahman beyond our thought, sight, hearing, and speech. It also places our own subjectivity beyond our ken. There is an aspect of ourselves that we can never objectify. If we think we have perceived and thought about our own subjectivity, there is an awareness doing the thinking and perceiving which itself is not being thought and

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perceived. Therefore, our subjectivity always eludes its own grasp: “The knower cannot be known by the knower just as fire cannot be consumed by fire” (KeUBh 2.1). These reasons for why we ourselves can never objectify God resonate with Barth’s theology of creation. Barth would never identify our subjective awareness with God but would agree that our subjective faculties have limits. He would deny that we find God by examining our own subjectivity but would assert that proper self-examination in the light of God’s revelation shows the limitations of our powers of objectification. These are additional reasons why God can never become an object to our thought: If our own mind, senses, and speech escape their own purview, then does not God? If we cannot objectify our own subjectivity can we objectify the divine subject? Indeed, Barth’s references to the “riddles” of creation and human existence point in this direction.27 Critics of Barth on God’s subjectivity target divine freedom and aseity, but God is also Creator. God gives our created and therefore limited noetic and communicative faculties their existence and activity. They cannot “go out” to that which precedes them as their necessary condition. They are beyond even their own ambit. By their powers we cannot objectify even our own subjectivity. How then could we objectify the ground and power of our subjectivity? Barth is clear that by God’s will and grace creation exists distinct from God. Creation has its own reality, nature, and freedom in an existence appropriate to creatures. That creation exists thusly without derogating from God as the all in all is the “riddle of creation,”28 and another revelation of God’s omnipotence. Yet, Barth’s opposition to viewing God as the “First Cause” does not stop him from saying God is the “presupposition behind all things that are capable of analysis and description”29—which includes our objectifiable faculties of objectification. Creation is “grounded in Him.”30 God gives creatures, including humans, their being and nature.31 God’s Word and will give “being and existence” to creatures continually threatened with the possibility of nothingness.32 Indeed, God the Word is the unobservable “Primal Origin” and “Primal Cause and Power.”33 Nonetheless, God’s transcendence does not preclude God’s immanence (CD IV/1 [1956], 187). God’s immanent presence in all things—again by the Word—is itself a riddle, yet God is the true but hidden and unobservable “One” in all human beings.34 Our powers are not from ourselves

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because God’s power sets all observable limited and limiting powers of nature in motion and is beyond them all.35 By themselves creatures can do nothing (CD III/3, 170) so we cannot act independently, as God’s partners (CD III/1 [1958], 231). Even that faculty most proper to human beings, freedom, does not possess its reality from itself.36 Now, are not these insights from KeU and Śaṅkara predicated on a natural theology that Barth would dismiss? For both Śaṅkara and Barth these considerations arise from revelation, not natural reason and experience. Again, for Śaṅkara the valid source of knowledge of brahman is scripture explained by the teachers: One cannot be persuaded to believe in brahman by the evidence of the senses and other modes of proof, but it is possible to make him believe by the aid of the Scriptures. . . . And brahman can be known only by instruction from the preceptors and not by logical disquisitions. (KeUBh 1.3; cf. Introduction, 1.2)

Thus, Śaṅkara would reject “natu ral theology.” Like Barth, however, Śaṅkara does accept reasoning and experience that correspond to scripture. For Barth, creation is a revealed doctrine that cannot be known by human reason and experience apart from revelation.37 Yet, once known by revelation, creation implies the considerations that arise from KeU and Śaṅkara’s reading of KeU. Plus, because of Jesus the incarnate Word all humans are—indeed all creation itself is—not without God’s Word. There are “true words” outside of the Church.38 What about the modalism charge? Here adding “nonduality” to the considerations regarding subjectivity’s existence and activity may be helpful. If as Moltmann claims there are three distinct divine subjectivities, then either there are three diferent gods or none is God. The persons’ subjectivities have their existence and activity from themselves or from something more ultimate. If the former, there are three diferent gods. If the latter, none is God. There is another reason that none is God in the former case. Intersubjectivity involves seeking to know and be known by the other. In addition to the mutual objectification this entails, seeking to know an unknown implies a deficiency in the subject seeking to know. Nondual with brahman, ātman lacks and seeks nothing (KeUBh 1.3). Lacking something and objectified, the divine persons would not be God. Just as ātman must be nondual with brahman in subjectivity if the “great say-

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ing” “ātman is brahman” is true, the divine subjectivity must be absolutely one if each of the three persons is to be God. Conversely, if the three persons’ subjectivities have their existence and activity from something more ultimate, then they are dependent, not unconditionally free, and hence not God. As the principle of knowing, ātman-brahman requires no other knowing principle “just as one light cannot possibly require another light” (KeUBh 2.4). Were the persons’ subjectivities not their own principle of knowing, then the existence and activity they depend upon would be “Lord,” not they themselves. The Trinitarian mystery is not the logical impossibility that one equals three. It is that three things (hypostases) are each nondual (completely identical) with and exhaustive of one thing (God’s essence) but not identical with each other (CD I/1, 367–368). If each person’s subjectivity is nondual with one unconditionally free and independent subject, then each is fully God and Lord but God the Lord is one. In KeU’s and Śaṅkara’s lines of reasoning about divine subjectivity, there can be only one nonobjectifiable divine subject. Corresponding to how in Western theology the only distinctions between the persons are their relations of opposition but each is really a diferent subsistent relation, each person’s subjectivity is absolutely identical (nondual) with and exhaustive of the one divine subjectivity—because each person is absolutely identical with and exhaustive of God—but there are three real and distinct persons. Each person is the one and only divine subject in such a way that there are not three distinct subjects. The three persons are each fully God without sacrificing the unity of the Godhead and the unity of the divine subjectivity. Moltmann is also concerned about an impersonal divine essence.39 Barth does say that God is a transcendent person. For Western trinitarianism, the persons are nondual with the essence. “Person” can signify the divine essence indirectly when expressed by way of hypostasis, and can do so directly insofar as the essence is the same as a hypostasis.40 Intellect and will are personal properties. Each person’s hypostasized will and intellect are identical with the one essence. Hence there is only one divine will and only one divine intellect, and God is substantially personal.41 Correspondingly, Śaṅkara says one ātman is completely conscious and intelligent in all things yet remains undivided: “There is no diference in its essence, just as in the essence of the Ākāś (ether) in a vessel or mountain cave” (KeUBh 2.4). For Barth, God’s absolute freedom is

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revealed precisely in God’s freedom “to diferentiate Himself from Himself . . . yet remain the same . . . and to exist as the one sole God” (CD I/1, 320). This demonstrates God’s Lordship in doing the impossible only if the “sole God” is one nonobjectifiable and indivisible subject. The divine essence is personal, undivided by the three persons, and complete in each person. For Śaṅkara, “not two” precludes brahman diferentiating brahman from itself. But could brahman self-diferentiate if unqualified nonduality remained? For Barth, God is so powerful that God can “diferentiate Himself from Himself,” “become unlike Himself,” be “God a second time,” while remaining “one and the same, the sole God,” who is “equal to Himself,” “one and the same Lord.” Barth affirms that God is “One without a second” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.2.1) and cannot be other than God’s self (KeUBh 2.4). But God the Lord does the impossible. If brahman is omnipotent,42 then could not brahman self-diferentiate while remaining absolutely nondual, “One and the same brahman”? If brahman is really nonobjectifiable then need such a proposition’s inscrutability be telling against it? For Barth this is inefable mystery (CD I/1, 367–368).

Conclusion For diferent reasons, Barth and Śaṅkara both claim that ultimate reality is an inalienable subject. For Śaṅkara, introspective self-examination reveals that the true self (ātman) is nonobjectifiable awareness nondual with brahman. For Barth, God’s freedom entails God’s nonobjectifiability as articulated in the doctrines of revelation and the Trinity. Despite these and other diferences, insights arising from Śaṅkara’s reading of KeU may be fruitful for further developing Barth’s theology of God’s subjectivity in ways that follow from what Barth himself says. These may also be useful in addressing the common criticism that God’s inalienable subjectivity has the only real purpose of buttressing Barth’s theology of God’s Lordship and entails modalism. If this comparative theological undertaking has been successful then similar opportunities abound for thinking Barth and Advaita Vedānta together.43 Such thinking together could very well issue in the impossible possibility of finding “unexpected parallels, since Barth thinks like a Hindu,”44 and the impossible possibility of Barth’s “learning across religious borders in a way that discloses the truth of my faith, in the light of their faith.”45

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Notes 1. One of Clooney’s definitions of comparative theology is “learning across religious borders in a way that discloses the truth of my faith, in the light of their faith.” Francis  X. Clooney, S.J., Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 16. 2. In addition to being “confessional,” comparative theology can also “apologetic.” See Francis X. Clooney, “Comparative Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John B. Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 653–669, esp. 662. 3. “Hindus” difer on the status of other sacred writings, but acceptance or rejection of the Vedas has been one chief way of diferentiating “orthodox” (āstika) from “heterodox” (nāstika) traditions, like Buddhism and Jainism. South Asian tantric (esoteric) traditions are variously Vedic and non-Vedic, but the boundary lines are not so clearly demarcated. 4. Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upanishads: Annotated Text and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 365–371. Another division, indicated by parentheses, takes verses three and four in the first khaṇḍa as one verse. Śaṅkara follows this parenthetical enumeration. 5. “Nondualism” here means absolute identity with no qualifications. The rival Viśiṣṭādvaita (“qualified nondualism”) school maintains identity of essence but real distinctions in properties or “qualities.” 6. Māṅḍukya Upaniṣad 1.2, quoted in Śaṅkara, Commentary on Kena Upaniṣad (Kena Bhāṣya) 1.3, 1.4, 2.1 (henceforth “KeUBh”). 7. Śaṅkara calls this Aparokshanubhuti (“self-evident”), sometimes translated “selfrealization.” See Śaṅkara’s fuller discussion in Commentary on the Brahmasūtra (Brahmasūtra Bhāṣya) 1.1.1 (henceforth “BSBh”). 8. Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics, ed. Hannelotte Reifen, trans. Geofrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 1:87. 9. Karl Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf (Munich: C. Kaise, 1927), 170. 10. Karl Barth, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914–1925, trans. James  D. Smart (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1964), 185. Cf. Barth, Christliche Dogmatik, 12, 140, 151. 11. Space prohibits fuller justification but this interpretation sides with Bruce McCormack in the McCormack-Hunsinger debate. For an outline of the diferent approaches, see Peter Goodwin Heltzel and Christian T. Collins Winn, “Karl Barth, Reconciliation, and the Triune God,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, ed. Peter C. Phan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 173–191. 12. Karl Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920–28, 1st ed., trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (London: SCM Press, 1962), 256. 13. Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, 1:87. 14. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), 191; CD II/1 (1957), 49, 54, 67, 268; CD II/2 (1957), 54. 15. E.g., Barth, Christliche Dogmatik, 151. 16. CD II/1, 271, 284–286, 301. 17. E.g., CD II/1, 458; CD II/2, 54; CD III/3 (1961), 177; CD IV/1 (1956), 18; CD IV/3.1 (1961), 293; CD IV/3.2 (1962), 541.

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18. Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, 1:67. 19. Barth uses human consciousness, knowing, willing, and acting to discuss God’s subjectivity (CD II/1, 271–272, 284–286, 301). Congdon argues that Barth was not rejecting existentialism’s concern with human existence per se and its place in theological reflection. Rather, Barth was rejecting how existentialist theology takes human existence as the terminus a quo for theological reflection. David W. Congdon, “Theology as Theanthropology: Barth’s Theology of Existence in Its Existentialist Context,” in Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective, ed. Clifford  B. Anderson and Bruce  L. McCormack (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 30–66). 20. Here and elsewhere, “religious experience” refers to an inner precognitive, nonobjective, sense of the divine posited by many nineteenth-century German thinkers in the wake of, and sometimes in response to, Kant. This noncategorical intuition is referred to in various ways including Anschauung and Gefühl, but not always corresponding to Kant’s and Schleiermacher’s uses. Barth criticized this notion without referring to it as “religious” experience. 21. What follows summarizes Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 5th ed., trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1967), 50–58; Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 13–16, 63–65, 139–144. 22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 513, 518, 528, 553; Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), 70–72. 23. Wilhelm Herrmann quoted in Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 52. 24. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 139. For the complete explanation, see 139–144. 25. Ibid., 141. 26. “Modalism can be charged against Barth only out of ignorance, incompetence, or (willful) misunderstanding.” George Hunsinger, “Mysterium Trinitatis: Barth’s Conception of Eternity,” in For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology, ed. George Hunsinger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 165–190, at 170 n. 5). 27. See, e.g., Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 297, 452, 494; “The Task of Ministry,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper, 1957), 197, 199; and Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 54. 28. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 53–58, 199; CD III/1, 95; CD III/3, 9–10, CD IV/1, 331. 29. Barth, Romans, 494. 30. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 55. 31. Ibid., 54; CD III/1, 95, 230. 32. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 50, 56–57; CD III/1, 231. 33. Barth, Romans, 28, 296, 312. 34. Ibid., 452–453. 35. Ibid., 36. 36. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 56. 37. Ibid., 50–51, 54; CD I/1, 390–391.

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38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

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CD III/2, 136, 148–150; CD IV/3.1, 115–117, 122–125, 130, 163–165. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1a.29.4; cf. 1a.29.3. For Aquinas, because God’s intellect is God’s substance it is one, not multiple (ibid., 1a.14.4). The divine will is likewise identical with the one divine act of existence (ibid.,1a.19.1). Some Upaniṣads describe brahman as all-powerful, as does Śaṅkara (BSBH, 1.1.2, 1.1.3). These include but are not limited to natural theology, the analogia entis, God’s nature, “nominalist tendencies,” idolatry, the nature and sources of valid religious knowledge, divine self-revelation and self-attestation, negative theology, dialectical Godtalk, and salvation/liberation as “already accomplished.” Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17. Clooney also speaks of “Hindu Barthians.” Clooney, Comparative Theology, 16.

8 “Do Not Grieve” R E C O N C I L I AT I O N I N B A R T H A N D V E D A N TA D E S I K A John N. Sheveland

Karl Barth’s critique of “religion,” addressed in this volume’s introduction by Christian T. Collins Winn and Martha L. Moore-Keish and in several chapters, would seem to preclude the possibility of discovering substantive, material theological consonance between Barth’s theology and those available for inspection in other global religions. Barth rested his critique of religion upon an abstract a priori method now recognized as a significant weakness in the context of the contemporary values of academic rigor and global responsibility in the construction of theological proposals. Yet, properly understood, the critique of religion remains a meaningful contribution. The critique was less concerned with the theological status of other religions than with the persistent human tendency to lack confidence in the promises of God (Unglaube) and, more aggressively, to project or engage in what he called later in the life the “nostrification” of God, wherein Christians equate their cause with God’s and God’s cause with their own.1 Indeed, “religion” so understood merits critical attention. This clarification of intention in Barth’s critique clears out space for comparisons of the substance of Barth’s theological program with that of other religions even if he was unable to anticipate the fruit of doing so. Joseph Di Noia observes that Barth’s critique of religion predated the development in the second half of the twentieth century of the Christian theology of religions captured in the somewhat forced typology of Pluralism-Inclusivism-Exclusivism.2 While some consider him to be an advocate of what came to be known as the “exclusive” or “replacement” theology of religions, identifying him with it is both somewhat anachronistic and risks obfuscating his principal concern with the critique in

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Church Dogmatics I/1, namely, to isolate and interrogate the human phenomenon of religion, as he uniquely understood the term, as a scene of chronic human vulnerability and sin. His concern in the first instance fell on the liability “religion” poses, as “nostrification,” to Christians and to the churches, rather than to pronounce upon the theological credibility of discrete religions about which the theologian could learn and eventually be accountable.3 On this basis, the critique of religion poses no particular challenge to a contemporary reader’s appreciation of Barth’s potential for the new comparative theology.4 Indeed, material theological substance disclosed in acts of comparison poses a more powerful warrant for comparative work than does an a priori method discourage it. Identification of Barth with the “exclusive” or “replacement” theology of religions also excuses theologians from taking seriously the expansive material theological contributions he made, which continue to be recognized and received in ecumenical and global contexts of theological reflection. Karl Barth’s dramatic and eloquent theological anthropology is on display in Church Dogmatics III/2 and its culmination in a theology of reconciliation in CD IV/1. Fifty years on, these loci of reflection remain enduring resources for contemporary theological reflection and for pastoral application. A comparison of these features in Barth and Vedanta Desika—a fourteenth-century South Asian Srivaisnava theologian recently the subject of at least three serious comparative theological studies5 —reveals suggestive moments of overlapping consonance of voice, all sounding precisely in the context of theological diference.6 This chapter “ faces” the theologians toward each other for a comparison of their construals of the existential poverty of the human situation before God and the graciousness of the God who redetermines this same situation through uniquely divine action, which action also conditions humanizing ethical encounter.7 For focus and control, this chapter interfaces Barth’s anthropology and doctrine of reconciliation with Desika’s exposition of Bhagavad Gita 18:66—also known as the Carama sloka—and its recommendation to surrender or take refuge in Narayana alone. The chapter closes by organizing a set of pastoral insights gleaned from the comparison which, in lieu of a theology of religions, ofer a compelling basis on which to predicate constructive, fruitful comparative theological learning between Barth, Desika, and their interested heirs.

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Existential Poverty and Its Redetermination We can begin with Desika’s reading of the impor tant verse from the Bhagavad Gita in which Lord Krishna therapeutically addresses the warrior Arjuna—and the reader—saying, “Having completely given up all dharmas, to me alone come for refuge. From all sins I will make you free. Do not grieve” (18:66). This verse comprises the third of the three holy mantras of the Srivaisnava tradition, the Carama sloka, and according to Desika is best understood with and through the other two mantras. The first mantra, the Tiru mantra, reads: “Aum, obeisance to Narayana.” It signals the human dynamism toward the one true God identified as Narayana—“resting place” or “abode”—and the corresponding appropriateness of praise. Despite its brevity, Desika holds this mantra to encapsulate the second and third mantras, as their kernel. The second mantra, Dvaya mantra, reads: “I approach the feet of Narayana with Sri. Obeisance to Narayana with Sri.” This mantra expresses the act of faith in which one surrenders or takes refuge in the one true God who, in this tradition, is understood as the divine couple, as Narayana and the goddess Sri, each with their mutually referring and conditioning divine attributes. Chief among these attributes may be counted the divine desire and readiness to save by granting release from the painful cycles of existence, as well as the divine experience of enjoyment of the company of the surrendered. In the third mantra—the Carama sloka—the divine word of address takes shape as summons and promise: “Having completely given up all dharmas, to me alone come for refuge. From all sins I will make you free. Do not grieve.” This third mantra is a direct quotation of Bhagavad Gita 18:66, a verse which has as its context Krishna’s specific divine word of address to the warrior Arjuna, as love. “Here from me now, the supreme word, the greatest secret of them all: you are indeed my beloved, so I will speak for your wellbeing” (18:64).8 As Francis Clooney has noted, for many centuries Srivaisnavas have understood these mantras not simply as expressive of important ideas, but are taught and experienced, spoken and felt, as descriptive and effective psychological enactments of devotion.9 Despite their brevity, they express the experience of the human situation before God in ways tangible and synthetic of the broader Srivaisnava Hindu tradition of understanding the Vedas.

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Desika develops crucial teachings pertaining both to the divine and human in his exegesis of the Carama sloka. He communicates a range of attributes that make the seeking of refuge in God alone, through surrender, the most fitting and appropriate human vocation for achieving release (moksa) from cyclic existence (samsara). The intimate relationship of the divine and human envisioned in the achievement of release from samsara finds particular expression in a Sanskrit verse in Desika’s Srimad Rahasyatrayasara (Holy Essence of the Three Sacred Mysteries), a verse in which Desika provocatively imagines the divine voice to speculate, “When shall I take back (and wear) (these jivas) like jewels from which the dirt (prakriti) has been removed?”10 Captured here in lovely speculative language is the divine desire to be sought for refuge, to give refuge, and to enjoy the intimate presence of those who seek return. The theological remark on the eagerness of the divine to grant release to those surrendering and seeking refuge in God alone comments, equally, on the anthropological situation as Desika understands it. In the Tamil verse that follows, Desika explains this divine-human relationship with special attention to the action of the divine couple on behalf of those incapable: “I am the means as well as the ends to be attained. The aspirant (to mukti) should become subject to me and seek my protection. The upaya called saranagati is not the direct means for attainment . . . means like bhakti yoga and karma yoga are no aids to prapatti. I will myself stand in the palace of all such means (as are prescribed for attaining the desired fruits). I am the messenger and the master. Seek me as your refuge and be free from all anxiety.” So says the Lord and surrounds me on all sides.11

Desika subscribes to an ontology of participation in which the divine couple are the inner self of all persons as well as their intended end, in the moksa of participation in the divine life. On analogy with Thomism, Narayana with Sri are the end of all beings or their final causality. They are also the means or efficient causality because of whom the release of beings from samsara into participation in the divine life is possible. Desika brings a rather sober analysis of karma yoga as the path of action and achievement and especially of bhakti yoga as the path of devotion and love for God. Against the relative endorsement of these spiritual paths in the Bhagavad Gita—where bhakti, in particular, is celebrated— Desika discloses both to be burdensome and even inefectual, as well as

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not in keeping with the eager divine determination to save. Desika’s depiction of the divine couple’s compassion for beings and omnipotent graciousness toward them in overlooking their “countless ofenses” raises this question: Of what does persons’ existential poverty consist?12 Despite its preferred status in the Bhagavad Gita, throughout Desika’s writings the path to the divine consisting of loving devotion is superseded, if not abrogated, by prapatti or surrender. More dire still, the path to the divine consisting of karma yoga is simply so exhausting and time consuming as to be impractical. To be sure, karmic efort and achievement are never in vain. Its efects are permanent or, in Desika’s words, “built up, as it were, with stone.”13 In a poetic work exploring the supremacy of the spiritual value of surrender, Desika demonstrates a synthetic approach by validating, in one verse, the value of karma yoga as ser vice done unto the divine couple. Yet in the very next verse, he sublimates that value with an analogy that leaves little doubt: Lord meditated upon by Yogis! Like a man of dwarfish stature desirous of getting at a fruit (beyond his reach) who, giving up the attempt to gather it with his uplifted hands, fervently begs of a tall person to secure it for him, in the same way, a clever person gives up the groups of upayas (means) which are too arduous to be adopted by him, and in their place relies on thee.14

The timing of when the aspirant attains the fruit of moksa through the unaided means of karma yoga, is a totally open question, one that in Desika’s construal gives the person no immediate hope or expectation of relief, since negative karmic impressions from the past may be conditioning the foreseeable future toward more of the same. Similarly, those who pursue the path of bhakti, Desika later confesses, do not “attain even a millionth part” of what is obtained by those who have surrendered to the divine couple through prapatti and who have uttered the mantras.15 Theoretically, karma yoga represents forward motion toward moksa, however delayed; pastorally it provides little hope. Bhakti yoga fairs better but still pales in comparison with the efficiency and surety of prapatti or surrender. Desika judges bhakti and finds it deficient in several ways. First, it is unsuitable for the sudras, who exist at the lowest level of the social caste system. Second, it is unsuitable for the three higher levels of the caste system (Brahmins, Ksatriyas, and Vaisyas) who lack the ability or knowledge to practice bhakti and whose eforts—as with

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karma yoga—may pale in comparison with their unfavorable karmic histories. And it is unsuitable for any who are impatient and cannot bear delay in the attainment of moksa. Soberly, Desika notes that “one act of disobedience leads to further acts of sin. Sin committed again and again destroys wisdom and the man without wisdom begins further acts of a sinful nature.”16 For such ones—namely, for all—the difficulties of bhakti become exponential, unmanageable, and grounds for the same grief that the Carama sloka recognizes as unnecessary and preventable through more efective cooperation with the divine will to release. Indeed, conscious reflection upon one’s own vast heap of sin committed throughout one’s immeasurable karmic prehistory— akin to walking upon the “hot sands of samsara”— can be a helpful exercise, Desika writes, to provoke the urgent desire “to hasten toward the path leading to bliss [prapatti].”17 In two separate texts of poetry each soaked in vivid metaphor and contextual references, Desika expresses the urgency in the key of pastoral urgency: “If, before the sprouts of sin issuing from a mass of bad acts grow without control, you do not approach with your bow Sarnga, even you will not be able to stop their growth, or Lord of the Hill of Elephants.”18 Accentuating the felt sense of helplessness so far as to urge the feminine principle of the divine pair to act before even the divine pair are rendered helpless in the mounting presence of sin, Desika now also resonates with a Pauline tone of impotence in the face of the per formance of duty, a confusion owing to a karmic history which deeply problematizes and confuses the present moment. Swamin! Every moment I do prohibited acts as if they were acts ordained to be done. I give up doing ordained acts as if they are prohibited ones. Like these, the hosts of my other transgressions are numerable. Thy Mercy (Daya) the Supreme Empress should be there to help me attain my desire (Purushartha).19

Because of such frustrated volition and its frustrating efects, Desika turns to the human person’s ability—caused in part by grief from the foregoing—to renounce his or her own responsibility for accomplishing moksa, to surrender (prapatti) to the divine couple—ever willing and eager—the burden of moksa’s uniquely divine prerogative. Throughout diferent writings Desika vacillates between an array of rough equivalents for surrender, yet in his most systematic and lengthy text, Srimad Rahasyatrayasara, he employs prapatti.20

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The Carama sloka literally necessitates prapatti, as one of his closing remarks in the Srimad Rahasyatrayasara suggests, articulated from the divine perspective of pastorality: Your knowledge is limited; your ability is insignificant; your life is short and you are also impatient of delay. Therefore do not go about seeking other [means] which you cannot fully understand, which you cannot easily adopt and which can bear fruit only after much delay. Realize that I who am easy of access to all, who am the Savior of all the worlds, and who am endowed with all the attributes essential for a Saviour, am the only [means] and perform the surrender of the responsibility of protecting yourself to me with its five limbs.21

The five limbs, attributes, or critical dispositions attending the surrender of the burden of responsibility over to Narayana with Sri include, first, cultivation of a will congruent with the Lord’s own will and no longer hostile to it. The second cultivates action pleasing to the Lord. The third cultivates a felt sense of helplessness (karpanya) or impotence in bearing one’s own burden of responsibility for release, strongly reflected in the poetic verses above. The fourth, correlatively, is great faith—as confidence, trust—in the Lord’s desire, ability, and indeed eagerness to take on this burden. The fifth seeks this same protection through performance of a tangible, demonstrable action—such as asking for protection—so as to correspond in one’s own freedom both to one’s inner nature and to the divine determination to save. It is helpful to recall that this theological anthropology develops in connection with the Carama sloka of Bhagavad Gita 18:66, the third holy mantra of Srivaisnava Hinduism, with its assurance of specific divine action (i.e., freedom from sin) in the presence of specific human liabilities (i.e., inability to achieve release), with specific human consequences (i.e., liberation from grief). In this sense the Carama sloka undoubtedly operates in the presence of human weakness and helplessness, and indeed presupposes recognition of that grief which comes through experience of futility and frustration, that specific grief which results from wrong views and actions stemming from helplessness unrecognized. Yet in Desika’s treatment, equally if not more prevalent is the singular form of gratitude stemming from uniquely divine action that redetermines this same human situation so profoundly that the Carama sloka can ofer the precious words of encouragement, ma sucah— “do not grieve.”

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Karl Barth and the Pastoral Ever the pastor, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics can be read on many levels, the pastoral surely ranking high on that list of interpretive options. Like Desika, Barth treats the brokenness of the human condition not on its own terms but theologically on the basis of what the divine Word of address discloses about brokenness and the divine determination to reconcile.22 This theme can be easily overlooked in Barth’s theological anthropology, where he can be prone to lengthy descriptions of sin and the personal loss it signals, which of course need to be interpreted according to the asymmetrical relationship of sin to grace in which grace occupies primary and sin secondary significance.23 Because of his theological—i.e., Christocentric—approach to the doctrine of sin, it is disclosed only in reconciliation. In this we encounter in Barth something of a resonance or analogy with Desika, in whose reflection the divine couple stand eager and ready to save, and who in the Carama sloka pledge such release. The significance of helplessness, for Desika, comes into full picture only in the light of the divine determination to address it and nullify its efects. So too, analogously, for Karl Barth. As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of the man created by God. The attitude of God in which the faithfulness of the Creator and therefore the unchanging relationships of the human being created by Him are revealed and knowable, is quite simply His attitude and relation to the one man, Jesus: His election of this man; His becoming and remaining one with Him; His self-revelation, action, and glorification in Him and through Him; His love addressed to Him and through Him to those who believe in Him and to the whole of creation; His freedom and sovereignty which in this man find their creaturely dwelling and form, their Bearer and Representative. . . . This is God’s attitude towards sinful man. He answers or reacts to the sin of man by this relation to the man Jesus.24

Thus, despite the seriousness with which Barth takes and explores the doctrine of sin, its power is secondary. This is not to diminish sinfulness and its devastating efects, but to locate, probe, and explain these efects in terms of the grace of God disclosed and realized in Jesus Christ, which serves theologically as the only possible interpretive principle in Barth’s theology. “We are forbidden,” he writes, “to take sin more seriously than

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grace.”25 The divine word of address—as verdict—contains an inner therapeutic or pastoral logic and necessity as its purpose. With Desika’s recommendation of prapatti—of surrender to what God wills to do and does do—one encounters the possibility of human correspondence to the divine intention to accomplish for persons what they themselves cannot other wise accomplish or even anticipate. In Barth, resonance can be detected insofar as common, broken human experience suggests reconciliation to be impossible, even as the divine already has made it available. At this point it may be seen how God sees man in spite of and through his sin, and therefore how we ourselves are incapable of seeing him. What is impossible with man but possible with God emerges at this point, namely, the vision of nature and essence which can be distorted by sin but not destroyed or transmuted into something diferent, because even in its sinful distortion it is held in the hand of God, and in spite of its corruption is not allowed to fall.26

This divinely determined and fixed ontic reality which characterizes persons before God, as God’s beloved elect, renders all the more grave and tragic their noetic, pervasive tendency to find themselves covered over (bedeckt)—and actively covering over themselves—in sin and selfcontradiction.27 Both are real, sin and grace, and because of the primacy of the one over the other, Barth frequently refers to sin as impossibility, as contradiction profoundly of oneself as a creature determined and redetermined by the Word of God for communion. Thus, Barth wishes to address the question of exactly who is the “real man” (wirkliche Menschlichkeit): “The real man is the sinner who participates in the grace of God. . . . As he rebels against this and against God, trying to live, not in dependence on divine grace, but in the power of his own freedom and merits, he entangles himself in self-contradiction.”28 Because Barth subscribes to an ontology of active relations, the question of who or what is real humanity is determined by the Trinitarian “I-Thou” relationship which Jesus Christ, in his humanity, fulfills with God and with his fellow brothers and sisters. The humanity of Jesus is “not merely the repetition and reflection of his divinity, or of God’s controlling will; it is the repetition and reflection of God himself.”29 As the humanity of Jesus Christ discloses the real humanity of fallen sinners who nonetheless participate in the grace of God, their identity and vo-

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cation is to become images of the humanity of Jesus, who alone is the image of God. In other words, persons are called to be with and for each other not as objects but as I-Thou covenantal relationships, as human persons, in correspondence to the basic form of humanity revealed in Jesus himself. To be covenant partners with God and with each other, and therefore to be human, is both an ontic identity grounded in the free creation of God and, because of sin, also a summons subjectively to realize this identity through the disorienting mist of brokenness. “Humanity” in this sense functions as a normative and vocational rather than descriptive category. Descriptively, the humanity that persons encounter in others as well as themselves can be isolated, neutral, and even opposed to covenantal responsibility. But as a norm and summons, the humanity of the man Jesus reveals to persons a new possibility aligned with their divine determination. A man without his fellows, or radically neutral or opposed to his fellows, or under the impression that the coexistence of his fellows has only secondary significance, is a being which ipso facto is fundamentally alien to the man Jesus. . . . No, even as he denies it, his creaturely nature stands in the light of the humanity of Jesus, and it is bright in this light, accusing him of sinning in his inhumanity not only against God and his neighbor but also and primarily and finally against himself, and yet not ceasing to bind himself to his Saviour and Deliverer. To sin is to wander from a path which does not cease to be the definite and exclusive path of man even though he leaves it.30

In a way not dissimilar from Barth’s emphasis on the secondary significance of sin and the primacy of the divine determination, Vedanta Desika articulated the paradox experienced in, on the one hand, having a destiny divinely determined but which is, on the other, lived in selfcontradiction of that fundamental reality, covering it over and rendering oneself confused, even to the point of grief. Personal initiatives and disciplines employed to overcome both the grief and its causes are formally possible and build up real efects, but practically these founder, for Desika, and so the confluence of immediate personal sin and a vast and unfavorable karmic prehistory of the same renders persons efectively helpless, the realization of which triggers a spiritual insight of receptivity necessary for the divine action to take hold and become subjectively transformative. For both theologians, a picture is developing of

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the divine life in that intermediary space between, on the one hand, a person’s state of active and pervasive sinfulness and, on the other, the conscious recognition of one’s status as a recipient, as one who is still and always held in being. In that intermediary space, the divine determination is immutable and indestructible, and it is expressed by both authors in intimate language. In that transitive space between a “frontier” separating humanity from God and the redemption of the human subject as a “friend” and indeed “child,” God is found waiting in patience. In patience, the reconciliation that has already been achieved is ofered anew, here and now. The divine awaits in human persons their dawning realization of what has been made permanently theirs. The indestructible, patient divine determination for covenant relationship leads Barth, in comparison, to minimize sin as a “lie, an absurd self-deception, a shadow moving on the wall.”31 What fills that space or frontier? It is this pure divine mercy which fills the abyss, the mercy which we have to recognize and adore in this act of God, the mercy which we have to seek afresh every morning, the mercy for which we can only reach out and ask as beggars, the mercy in relation to which we can only be recipients.32

One material consequence of that pure divine mercy is the impossibility, from the creaturely and human sphere, to alter one’s own human nature, to undo or negate what God has done in creation and reconciliation. Sin thus covers over but does not destroy human nature. He can still rebel and lie and fear, but only in conflict, in impotent conflict, with his own most proper being. He can and necessarily will be judged, but his own most proper being will be his judge. All his mistakes and confusions and sins are only like waves beating against the immovable rock of his own most proper being and to his sorrow necessarily breaking and dashing themselves to pieces against this rock.33

Despite the various iterations of a broken human condition, Barth unwaveringly witnesses to the indicative reality circumscribing, enfolding, summoning persons to full realization. “Jesus Christ is God’s mighty command to open our eyes and to realize that this place is all round us, that we are already in this kingdom, that we have no alternative but to adjust ourselves to it, that we have our being and continuance here and nowhere else.”34

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Here we have come full circle back to the summons contained in the Carama sloka—“do not grieve”—with the reason for the end of grief having been accomplished already in the divine life and given as permanent ofer to the broken and grieved.

Pastoral Gleanings The inherent pastorality of both theologians’ construal of reconciliation can now be made explicit in a set of three constructive remarks that can be gleaned from this comparison. The attention given in these three remarks stresses analogical relationships evident in comparison, even as additional comparisons might disclose disanalogies or dissonance between the two.35 Responsible authors and poor victims of sin. This comparison discloses a shared purpose in Barth and Desika sensitively to understand human persons not only as responsible authors but poor victims of sin and of an array of personal and socially received conditions that when internalized function to impede them from self-recognition as subjects of divine purpose and determination.36 The implications of this insight begin with the personal, subjective recognition of what God stands ready in patience to do, but they extend just as clearly toward a social ethic of care for persons in community. Understood as responsible authors and poor victims of sin, persons in community recognizing the dialectic in themselves stand more ready spontaneously to refrain from judgment and condemnation of both self and other. What may emerge in this salutary understanding of self, other, and community is a trajectory of human possibility that presupposes brokenness and in so doing is more ready to respond to it therapeutically and constructively, as opposed to projecting onto persons and communities narratives of cleanliness and uncleanliness, acceptability and unacceptability, in ways that are themselves broken and symptomatic of what Barth named as “nostrification.” This trajectory of human possibility privileges rehabilitative and inclusive responses to sin and self-loss over punitive and exclusive responses. Sin recognized and confronted can dispel the myths of purity and impurity that tear communities apart by relating to brokenness in broken, dysfunctional ways perpetuating more of the same despair and grief that Desika recognizes as the target of divine redemptive purpose indicated in the Carama sloka. The principle of solidarity begins in the recognition of the equality of all as broken, and deepens in the related recognition of the divine purpose

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to redeem and reconcile as the yet deeper and immutable truth circumscribing all, so that judgment and verdict are the mercy of God poured out for all. Judgment as mercy, which is to say judgment governed by the telos of reconciliation, bars practices of shaming from authentic human encounter. Desika writes of the Carama sloka that “what is asked to be given up may be stated to be the prevention of the vain efort to perform what one is not capable of or the giving up of such vain efort along with the shame or remorse of one’s inability to do it in full.”37 As a characteristic of the divine relationship to persons, the giving up of practices of shaming may likewise be held up as a sign and symptom of right relationship in community. Accepting acceptance. This comparison discloses shared purpose in Barth and Desika to communicate the redemptive divine action for—and over against—human persons even when they have difficulty accepting acceptance or anticipating their own acceptability. It is important to note that the primacy given to prapatti or surrender in Desika’s interpretation of the Carama sloka and Bhagavad Gita 18:66 runs somewhat against the grain of the Gita’s general message concerning bhakti yoga and to a lesser extent karma yoga. He questions the centrality of bhakti yoga in the Gita text by referring the reader to the painful experience of having too few spiritual resources to follow through adequately with the yoga of works (karma) or the yoga of loving devotion (bhakti). In theory these paths may have value, but in practice they disappoint and frustrate the achievement of moksa. His anthropology of existential poverty thus drives him to interpret the Carama sloka somewhat against the grain of the Gita itself. Yet in so doing he finds a conversation partner in Karl Barth, for whom the human tendency toward works righteousness and “nostrification”—the tendency to identify our cause with God’s, and God’s cause with ours—is itself disclosed in revelation as sin. The pastoral application of this shared theological judgment deepens the first pastoral gleaning noted above. It can be sketched in the following general way, even as the variety of concrete human experience would of course tease out additional texture and meaning. Even in the presence of the divine word of address, a word in which for Desika and Barth alike the divine unconditionally values and accepts the beloved, persons nonetheless struggle to accept acceptance. The lie appears more real than the truth. The priority assigned to grace in Desika and Barth’s anthropologies gives rise to the pastoral corollary of persons’ acceptance, declared and made real in and by God, in ways that cannot be predicted, antici-

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pated, or even understood, but which are final, decisive, and empowering of the same persons in their concrete spheres of human living and dying. The perceived need to prove or validate oneself, or to earn favor through behav iors apart from the acceptance of the divine word of address, is itself the broken human condition both authors wish to disclose. So too, because the redeeming of persons comes from outside of them— from the divine—the redeeming itself cannot be anticipated or understood in the same terms of the broken humanity redeemed. Both authors wish to clear away space for the genuinely new and unpredictable divine work of redemption or release. More gently still, both theologians, precisely in their stress on surrendering to or acknowledging divine action, implicitly eschew the very conditions by which persons might turn to themselves or each other in hatred. The first form of hatred ruled out is the self-hatred which presents as an inability to accept oneself as flawed, that persistent temptation to sanitize and remove oneself from the thoroughly broken existence into which all are thrown. Rather, both theologians bear witness to the divine word of acceptance and care and love for persons as a wholly other divine prerogative for creaturely care (e.g., Bhagavad Gita 18:64). A second form of hatred ruled out is the tendency to look on one another in judgment, nonmercy, or shame. As the divine word addresses all as broken and flawed and as subjects of redemptive divine action, it removes the possibility of habits of mind and behav ior that distance persons one from another, habits that would transfer personal shame to others for their own reception and internalization of unacceptability. Against both forms of hatred, both theologians witness eloquently to the solidarity of human persons both as accepted by God and placed into vocation for authentic community and relationship marked by reciprocal care. Patient hope for the world. This comparison discloses shared purpose in Barth and Desika not only to highlight the definitive action of God to save human persons from conditions which threaten them but a tacit recognition of the process or development through which they can, in their freedom, apprehend and seize for themselves the promises of God ofered to them, however gradually and haltingly. We are dealing with the powerful distinction Barth drew between the “ascription” of what God has done in Jesus Christ, objectively, if not always persons’ subjective “appropriation” of what God has done for them in their respective contexts of human living and dying.38 For Desika, the debilitating experience of spiritual exertion and its subsequent grief coupled with the divine promise to

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free persons from it, functions to encourage in oneself the transition from a notional appreciation of being the one to whom the promises of God apply in some abstract manner (“I free living beings from all sin”) to the subjective appropriation of the promise as personal and indicative (“I have been freed from all sin and grief”). In Barth, emphasis is placed not simply on the depth and pervasiveness of sinfulness but on the divine determination to address and treat the human person always as “a new subject.”39 This divine determination is described as the “truth” that overcomes the “lie.” The implications for life together in community might appear as follows. The truth of solidarity in sinfulness overcomes the lie that some are pure and others are impure in a static, fixed sense. The truth of the immutable divine determination to be lord and savior overcomes the lie that some are fated to experience redemption and reconciliation while others are lost to these causes and have no meaningful reason to hope for a new future. The truth of reconciliation as permanent ofer overcomes the lie that current patterns of dysfunctional relating in community are a matter of course or too habituated to change, nullifying transformation before it begins. For the community of persons each of whom has been and continues to be dealt with in the divine presence as “a new subject,” is a community of persons summoned together likewise to deal with each other as “new subjects,” as open futures, as persons for whom hope is possible because grace has been experienced as actual. Hope is the “coming alive” or “taking root” of the promise of God in the concrete and shifting contexts and histories of living persons. As the dynamic of “coming alive” or “taking root” of the divine promise in persons, hope is the subjective consent and appropriation of what God wills to do and does do, toward oneself as well as toward others, and for future experience. In this sense, hope sets its gaze both to the future as well as the present with a renewed allowance for the process and development by which persons in time might apprehend and correspond to their divine determination. The pastorality of the doctrine of reconciliation thus entails an enduring hope for the world and a perception of the world, precisely as fallen, as susceptible to transformative action and change over time, yet not by its own resources. While not to be minimized, personal and social dysfunction yet must be recognized as potentially transitive rather than permanent states of human living and history. Rather than essentialize the dysfunctional as “lost,” patient hope will perceive and even create oppor-

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tunities to relate in redemptive rather than dysfunctional ways, and in so doing recalibrate expectations concerning what is possible.

Conclusion The work of comparative theology can at times be perceived as a corrective to the abstract, theoretical qualities of the theologies of religions which preceded it and to which it responds. To date, reception of Barth’s critique of “religion” has been coopted by the theologies of religions debate. Yet a central interpretive key to Barth’s Church Dogmatics and to his personal life alike as a pastor is the care of human persons. Rather than a future in which Barth’s contribution to the changing interreligious landscape continues to be artificially minimized by and critiqued as an exclusivism straw man, a pivot is needed. First, the work of comparative theology today needs to attend more self-consciously to the human situation of fracture and to resources for reconciliation already thematized quite explicitly in a variety of religious traditions. Second, interpretation of Barth’s utility for the new comparative theology needs to pivot away from misleading identifications with a straw man example of exclusivism toward fresh consideration of his material theological claims as well as their pastoral implications. Arguably, a great and relatively unexplored frontier in the new comparative theology today can be found in Barth’s corpus which, if engaged more thoroughly, would not only open up new directions for the work of comparative theology but would, through such exposure, contribute new interpretive possibilities for Barth studies. Notes 1. Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, trans. Geofrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 218. 2. J. A. Di Noia, O.P., “Religion and the Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), 243–244. For a statement on the developments within and rehabilitation of the typology, see Kristin Beise Kiblinger, “Relating Theology of Religions and Comparative Theology,” in The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney, S.J. (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 21–42. 3. For treatments of Barth’s critique that liken it to the exclusive or replacement theology of religion, see Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 19–32; David Brockman and Ruben L. F. Habito, eds., The Gospel among Religions: Christian Ministry, Theology, and Spirituality in a Multifaith World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 86–90.

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4. For a discussion of the new comparative theology in contrast with the old, see Hugh Nicholson, “The Reunification of Theology and Comparison in the New Comparative Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77, no. 3 (2009): 1–38; Francis X. Clooney, ed., The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (London: T&T Clark, 2010), especially chap. 3. 5. Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Beyond Compare: St. Francis De Sales and Sri Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008); Francis X. Clooney, S.J., The Truth, the Way, the Life: Christian Commentary on the Three Holy Mantras of the Srivaisnava Hindus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); John N. Sheveland, Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 6. Elsewhere I have argued on behalf of an appropriation of Renaissance polyphony as a comparative theological heuristic available to the comparative theologian to imagine and think through comparison not merely of ideas discovered in comparison but the voices for whom the ideas matter and whose inviolable diference does not preclude— indeed, requires—a framework of unity. See Piety and Responsibility, 1–12, 11–112; “Solidarity through Polyphony,” in Clooney, The New Comparative Theology, 171–190; and “What Does Theological Method Have to Learn from Musical Polyphony?” in Understanding Religious Pluralism: Perspectives from Religious Studies and Theology, ed. Peter C. Phan and Jonathan S. Ray (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 264–276. In his commentary on the Carama sloka, Clooney too suggests that the verse is “consonant” with Christian frameworks of divine action and human transformation in, for example, Matthew 19, Galatians 5, John 15–16. The Truth, the Way, the Life, 169. 7. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2, ed. T.  F. Torrance and G.  W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 213–214. 8. Gavin Flood, ed., The Bhagavad Gita (New York: Norton, 2015), 88. 9. Clooney, The Truth, the Way, the Life, 16. 10. Desika, RTS, chap. 29, 501. 11. Ibid., 528. 12. Ibid., 529. 13. Desika, RTS, chap. 4, 46. 14. Desika, Saranagati Deepika, 23:87–88. 15. Ibid., 28:95. 16. Desika, RTS, chap. 4, 44. 17. Ibid., 46–47. 18. Desika, Varadarajapancasat, 31:39. 19. Desika, Saranagati Deepika, 48:114–115. For a lengthier treatment of the human condition that leads to surrender, in conversation with yet further textual examples from Desika, see Sheveland, Piety and Responsibility, 134–146. 20. For a brief survey of prapatti and its rough equivalents, see Sheveland, Piety and Responsibility, 140–141. 21. Desika, RTS, chap. 29, 563–64. 22. CD IV/1 (1956), 136, 138–139, 142, 144. 23. CD III/2, 41; CD IV/1, 138–139. 24. CD III/2, 41.

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

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Ibid. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 28, 30, 206. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 319. Ibid., 227. CD IV/1, 89. Ibid., 89–90. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 99. In Piety and Responsibility, my appropriation of the musical metaphor “polyphony” and its application to theological comparison of Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika predicates comparison on the tension between similarity and diference among the voices compared. Polyphony raises up tension and diference as the precondition for vocal resonance. For examples of diference and even disanalogy between Barth and Desika, see Piety and Responsibility, 151–198. CD IV/1, 138. Desika, Srimad Rahasyatrayasara, chap. 29, 498. CD IV/1, 147. Ibid., 145–146.

Response to Part IV Anantanand Rambachan

In his chapter “God as Subject and Never Object to Us: Reading Kena Upaniṣad with Barth and Śaṅkara,” Marc A. Pugliese ofers us an insightful reading and faithful summary of Śaṅkara’s commentary on the first two sections (khaṇḍas) of the Kena Upaniṣad, which is concerned, in a special way, with pointing to the nature of brahman as nonobjectifiable awareness and as the ultimate subject. The clarification of brahman as subject in the Kena Upaniṣad is the basis for Pugliese to consider its insights for Karl Barth’s theology of God’s subjectivity. For the purpose of instructing about brahman, the Advaita tradition has developed a number of pedagogical methods (prakriyā). The method of distinguishing between the subject and object (dṛg-drśya prakriyā) is associated particularly with the Kena Upaniṣad. The method is based on the experience, in every act of knowing, of a knowing subject, a process of knowing and an object of knowledge. Its aim is to help the student appreciate the body, sense organs and the mind as objects of a subject that cannot be objectified. The Kena Upaniṣad is less interested in ofering word definitions of brahman and more with helping the inquiring student to discover the reality of brahman as nonobjectifiable awareness because of which all cognitive and mental processes occur. This is the point of the teacher’s characterization of brahman as “Ear of the ear (śrotrasya śrotram),” “Eye of the eye (cakṣuṣaḥ cakṣuḥ),” “Mind of the mind (manasaḥ manaḥ),” and so forth. These statements have at least two purposes. First, they point to the senses and the mind as inert instruments of perception and thought that require an aware subject, even as a telescope requires a pair of eyes. Second, they identify brahman as the sustaining ground of all physical and mental activities.

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As awareness, brahman reveals and objectifies the mind, senses, body, and objects of the world. In itself, however, it is never objectified by anything. Brahman is awareness, and to objectify brahman, another awareness is necessary. Awareness, according to the Advaita, is singular and can never become its own object. The ear of the ear in the Kena text is the ear of all ears; the eye of the eye is the eye of all eyes. Barth, according to Pugliese, shares with Śaṅkara the understanding of ultimate reality as a nonobjectifiable subject. In the case of Barth, however, the point of emphasizing the nature of God as “inalienable subject,” is connected with the issue of control. As Pugliese states it, “We cannot objectify God because we cannot control God.” The assumption here is that the ability to objectify anything confers the power to control it. Human objectification of God therefore impedes divine freedom. In the Kena Upaniṣad, the teaching about brahman’s ultimate subjectivity is not connected with a concern to preserve the freedom of brahman. At the same time, it is true that the ultimate subject that is beyond the grasp of the sense organs, the organs of action and the mind, is also beyond the control of these. It is not an object existing like other objects within space and time and, as the Kena Upaniṣad (5) reminds us, even the mind cannot objectify it (yanmanasa nā manute) and treat it as object of contemplation. Pugliese suggests that Barth’s arguments and justification for God’s subjectivity may be enriched by Advaita ones. In par ticular, he proposes that an Advaita reading of the Kena Upaniṣad opens possibilities for realizing that God is subject because, as creatures, our noetic, sensory, and communicative faculties are limited and because as Creator, God is the inner existence and activity of these faculties. A central question, however, is whether Barth’s theology can indeed accommodate this Advaita insight. Does it demand too much of Barth? Brahman, as Pugliese correctly notes, is self-evident and self-revealing. As awareness, brahman’s reality does not require proof. It is present, according to Śaṅkara, in the indubitable sense of one’s own existence. One cannot deny one’s own existence. The nature of brahman as nonobjectifiable awareness is not, for Advaita, a matter of speculation. That “I exist,” and “I am aware,” do not require proof. It is also obvious that one cannot objectify one’s own awareness. Brahman is the content of the Ithought (ahaṁkāra) or ego. According to the Kena Upaniṣad (2:2), one can appreciate this fact without objectifying brahman.

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I do not consider, “I know (Brahman) well.” Nor do I not know. I know and I do not know. Among us, whoever understands that statement, “It is not that I do not know. I know and I do not know as well,” he knows that (Brahman).1

The teaching of the Kena Upaniṣad finds its culmination in the student’s appreciation of her identity with brahman. Her true self (ātmā) is nonobjectifiable awareness and identical with brahman, the limitless awareness in all eyes, ears, and minds. For Śaṅkara, Advaita teaching culminates in the understanding “I am brahman (ahaṁ brahmāsmi),” the full and free being. This understanding of one’s identity with the limitless brahman is liberation (mokṣa). It frees one from erroneously identifying oneself entirely with the finite body and mind and from the assumption that the self is subject to birth and death. Barth’s understanding of God’s subjectivity is a necessary proposition for defending God’s freedom. It is certainly not a claim about the nature of God as revealed immediately in human consciousness and definitely not an argument for any form of divine-human identity. The understanding of God’s subjectivity is not liberative for Barth. For Śaṅkara, on the other hand, knowing brahman as nonobjectifiable awareness is liberative, since it implies the recognition of nonobjectifiable awareness to be one’s own nature. Both Śaṅkara and Barth, as Pugliese notes, ofer arguments for revelation. For Śaṅkara, we cannot know the nature of brahman without the teaching of the Upaniṣads. They are both cognizant of the limits of human knowing without revelation. In the case of Śaṅkara, however, these limits arise from the fact that the mind and senses, inert as these are, cannot illumine the light of awareness because of which they function. Analogically, one cannot use a telescope to view one’s own eyes. This argument, it appears to me will not be of much use to Barth unless God is identified with the awareness that shines in the minds and sense organs. Pugliese notes that Barth will oppose the Kena Upaniṣad’s “starting point of human subjectivity, equating our subjective awareness with God’s self-revelation.” Such a fundamental diference makes one more skeptical of the value of Advaita arguments for Barth’s theology. Pugliese has skillfully presented the Kena Upaniṣad’s discussion of brahman’s nature as ultimate subject and Barth’s arguments for God’s subjectivity. Both ofer reasons why brahman/God is not an object. One

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cannot help but note, however, that radical diferences in the understanding of this subjectivity persist, making the incorporation of Advaita insights for Barth difficult, if not impossible. God’s subjectivity is a logical necessity for Barth; for Śaṅkara, the reality of brahman’s subjectivity is experiential; it follows from the nature of brahman as nondual awareness shining in the body, senses, and mind. Is Barth able to speak of God as the infinite being within and transcending all things finite? Is he able to speak of divinity as the empowering awareness in all things physical and mental? John N. Sheveland’s essay is a comparative treatment of Karl Barth’s anthropology and doctrine of reconciliation with Vedanta Desika’s understanding of Bhagavad Gita 18:66: “Having completely given up all dharmas, to me alone come for refuge. From all sins I will make you free. Do not grieve.” Sheveland commences and concludes his essay with reflections about the status of Barth’s theology in the context of comparative work. According to Sheveland, the identification of Barth as a Christian exclusivist has excused theologians “from taking seriously the expansive material theological contributions he has made, which continue to be recognized and received in ecumenical and global contexts of theological reflection.” Sheveland returns to this issue also at the end of his essay, noting that “Barth’s utility for the new comparative theology needs to pivot away from misleading identifications with a straw man example of exclusivism toward fresh consideration of his material theological claims as well as their pastoral implications.” This is an important observation. These essays by Pugliese and Sheveland establish the relevance of Barth’s work for comparative study. Such work is not possible if one is unable to look beyond Barth’s theology of religions. If the focus on Barth’s theology of religions distracts from his central concern to interrogate religion as a human construct, we cannot also overlook the fact that his claims about the salvific and truth-value of other religions were intentional and may deter deep comparative work. Unlike the writers in this volume, Barth chose not to look deeply into other religions. There is the well-known account told by the Indian Christian theologian, D. T. Niles, about a conversation with Karl Barth. In the light of Barth’s view of religion as unbelief, Niles asked him how many Hindus he had met. “None,” replied Barth. “How then,” inquired Niles, “do you know that Hinduism is unbelief?” Barth replied, “a priori!”2 For Barth, encounters with the religious other or her tradition are not nec-

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essary for making judgments. What the other says about herself is not significant and does not matter. All that one needs to know about the other is derived from the reading of one’s own sacred text. Such an approach seems to be the very opposite of theological openness. Paul Knitter reminds us that the “religions themselves have to be a real source for their theology of religions—that is, for what they think about religions.” He does not ask that we set aside our sacred texts, but that these have to be balanced by what we learn from the study of other traditions and conversations with their practitioners.3 Barth’s critique of religion as “unbelief,” is predicated on the understanding of religion as humanity’s efort to do what God has done and freely ofers. Christianity is true only because, as Paul Knitter puts it, “it’s the only religion that knows it is false religion; and it knows, further, that despite its being a false and idolatrous religion, it is saved through Jesus Christ.”4 In his essay, however, Sheveland establishes important places of consensus between Desika and Barth, especially on the source of salvation. In the Carama sloka (18:66), the overcoming of grief (mā śucah), is “accomplished already in divine life and given as permanent ofer to the broken and grieved.” The significance of this is clear for Sheveland. For both theologians, a picture is developing of the divine life in that intermediary space between, on the one hand, a person’s state of active and pervasive sinfulness and, on the other, the conscious recognition of one’s status as a recipient, as one who is still and always held in being. In that intermediary space, the divine determination is immutable and indestructible, and it is expressed by both authors in intimate language.

The implications of Sheveland’s insight about Desika and Barth cannot be easily overlooked since it challenges a central thesis of Barth about the nature of religion and his privileging of Christianity. The radical theological implications of comparative study are apparent here and ought not to be ignored. What can we say about the God of Barth and the God of Desika in the light of Sheveland’s work? What can we say about the nature of salvation in the Hindu tradition? There is one further point in Sheveland’s essay on which I want to offer a comment. This focuses on his unpacking of the meaning of reconciliation in Barth and Desika. In Sheveland’s view, persons who recognize in themselves the dialectic of being “responsible authors and poor victims of sin,” would “spontaneously refrain from judgment and condemnation of self and other.”

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What may emerge in this salutary understanding of self, other, and community is a trajectory of human possibility that presupposes brokenness and in so doing is more ready to respond to it therapeutically and constructively, as opposed to projecting onto persons and communities narratives of cleanliness and uncleanliness, acceptability and unacceptability, in ways that are themselves broken and symptomatic of what Barth named as “nostrification.”

I found Sheveland’s section on “Pastoral Gleanings” to be a power ful comment on the theological implications of the understanding of divine grace and human brokenness for community and relationships. The language of “cleanliness and uncleanliness” speaks in a special way to the hierarchy of caste, founded as it is on notions of purity and impurity. In the case of Desika, however, there is no evidence that his theology of divine grace had implications for the construction of a new human community and the removal of “habits of mind and behav ior that distance persons one from another, habits that would transfer personal shame to others for their own reception and internalization of unacceptability.” The movement from theology to inclusive community is not as spontaneous as Sheveland seems to describe. Even if one argues, as Desika does, that caste duties should be performed without expectation of result and only as a mode of ser vice to God, the fundamental assumptions of caste go unchallenged. Caste, after all, is not just about the individual performance of assigned duties but a definition of oneself in relation to the other regarded as having diferent duties and a lower or higher place in the social order. According to Sheveland, “both theologians witness eloquently to the solidarity of human persons both as accepted by God and placed into vocation for authentic community and relationship marked by reciprocal care.” The evidence does not seem to be there in the case of Desika, and there is much to ask about Desika’s understanding of community and human reciprocity. Notes 1. Kenopaniṣad, trans. Swami Dayananda Saraswati (Chennai: Arsha Vidya Centre, 2008). 2. Cited in Gerald R. McDermott and Harold A. Netland, A Trinitarian Theology of Religions: An Evangelical Proposal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 230. 3. Paul Knitter, Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 56–57. 4. Ibid., 26.

9 Speaking about the Unspeakable C ONVERSING WITH BARTH AND EJIZU O N M E D I AT E D D I V I N E A C T I O N Victor I. Ezigbo

One way of approaching Barth’s discussion on religion and the relevance of his theology of religion to contemporary interreligious dialogue is to explore this question: How is it that God uses a human-made object as a medium to engage a religious worshiper? To answer this question, I will read Barth’s theology of the Christian scriptures in the light of the multiplex phenomenon of ọfọ—a popular religious object that symbolizes authority, truth, morality, godliness, and justice in the indigenous religion of the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria. Answering the question I posed requires bringing Karl Barth into dialogical communication with African indigenous religions.1 This is a difficult task because African indigenous religions were not on Barth’s theological radar.2 We could only assume that African indigenous religions were included in Barth’s broad categories of “animistic, totemistic, ascetic, mystical, and prophetic religions.”3 Consequently, two major hurdles await any theologian that seeks to bring Barth and African indigenous religions into dialogue. First, since Barth did not engage African indigenous religions directly in his theological reflection, attempting to bring him into dialogic communication with these religions may appear to be a doomed project. The issue here is the danger of making assumptions about Barth that either misrepresent his theological agenda or superimpose a foreign agenda on his theology. There is also the issue of competing beliefs and practices in the numerous religions that are subsumed under the term “African indigenous religions.” Of course, in spite of the diferences in belief and practices, as Jacob Olupona has noted, African indigenous religions maintain “a unity, as certain themes run through all the religious traditions irrespective of where they may be found.”4

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Second, some scholars do not consider Barth a viable ally in their pursuit of genuine interreligious dialogue and/ or theology of religions. Barth’s claim that “The church is the locus of true religion, so far as through grace it lives by grace”5 certainly does not help to make a case for his relevance to any interreligious dialogue that does not give a special privilege to Christianity. Some scholars also wonder if Barth’s usage of the term “religion”—that is, human (wrongheaded) attempts to appropriate God’s presence6—can really be of use to contemporary discourse on the theology of religions, which is predicated on an understanding of the term as shaped by the concept of “world religions.”7 In spite of these two hurdles, I contend that reading Barth’s theology of the Christian scriptures in the light of ọfọ as construed in the works of Christopher Ejizu provides a helpful context for engaging in dialogue between Christianity and African indigenous religions.8 I will show that there are parallels in Barth’s understanding of the religious functions of the written Word of God (i.e., the Bible) and Ejizu’s view of the nature and functions of ọfọ in the indigenous religion of the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria. To draw out these parallels, I will focus on the following three related issues. First, I will discuss the human origins of the Bible and ọfọ as construed by Barth and Ejizu respectively. Barth and Ejizu agree that an ordinary object (the Bible in Christianity and ọfọ in Igbo indigenous religion) can become “objects” of divine mediated actions. Second, I will examine the roles these two human-made “objects” play as the means through which human beings may experience God. Human-made objects, even when they are used by God to accomplish a given purpose, cannot stand in God’s place. For Barth, the Bible is not God’s revelation—that is, it is not to be directly identified with the being of God.9 Barth rejected any direct identification of God’s revelation (or God’s self-discourse) with the Bible.10 Similarly, for Ejizu, in indigenous Igbo religious and cultural thought, ọfọ is not equated with the mode of being or mode of operation of ancestors, gods, or the great God. Third, I will discuss God’s freedom vis-à-vis the limits of human-made objects in the context of God’s prerogatives to encounter the worshipper. Barth’s view of God’s relationship to the Bible and Ejizu’s conception of ọfọ highlight the divine freedom or divine surplus, which resists human attempts to limit God’s activity within a particular religion. In drawing out the parallels between Barth’s view of the Bible and Ejizu’s view of ọfọ, I do not wish to collapse the theological diferences

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between Christianity and African indigenous religion, in particular Igbo indigenous religion. But while the diferences should be preserved if we are not to compromise the uniqueness to which they point, they do not constitute an irreconcilable chasm. Barth’s theology of the written Word of God and Ejizu’s conception of ọfọ provide a sufficiently flexible ground to engage in a form of comparative theology of religion that aims to discover in both Christianity and Igbo indigenous religion the limits of the human dialectical task of speaking about God—an “unspeakable” divine being.

Ọfọ in Ejizu’s Thought The origins and functions of ọfọ should be imagined within the context of human world /spirit world matrix. In Igbo indigenous religion, these two worlds enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Although human beings occupy a central place in this relationship, they owe their existence to Chukwu (the “Mighty God”) and their subsistence in the human world to their chi (the guiding spirits assigned to each individual by Chukwu),11 other divinities, and ancestors. Chi, which has been variously rendered into the English language as a “guiding spirit,” “personal life force,” “guiding angel,” and sometimes (wrongly) as “God,”12 highlights the symbiotic relationship between human beings and the pantheon of spirit beings (Mighty God, divinities, ancestors, and other spirit beings). A person’s chi largely determines his or her fortunes, misfortunes, and destiny. As Ejizu notes, “Chi is believed to be a powerful spirit being intricately linked with the physical life and fortune of every individual human being. . . . At the person’s death the particular chi is deemed to have fully accomplished its mission. It is ultimately credited with or blamed for whatever good or bad fortunes the individual might have experienced in life.”13 It is common among the Igbos for someone who has experienced a great loss or misfortune to say “chi mụ egbuo mụ” (“my chi has destroyed me”). A person’s chi is, however, deeply influenced by other external beings such as gods, lesser divinities, and ancestors. For the purpose of this essay, it is noteworthy that a person’s acts greatly impact the outworking of his or her chi. The saying “onye kwe chi ya ekwe” (literally, “if a person believes his or her chi [also] believes”) expresses a common belief among the Igbos that the attainment of well-being is the result of a cooperative work of human beings and their guiding spirits. A person’s morality (or moral choices and acts) represented by ọfọ symbols can also influence the efectiveness of his or her chi.14

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The human origin of ọfọ is undebated in Igbo indigenous religion, unlike the origin of the Bible, which is hotly contested in Christianity.15 The word ọfọ is used by the Igbos in two major related ways. First, ọfọ is the name of a tree (Detarium elastica) that grows in many parts of Igboland.16 Second, ọfọ is equally the name for a staf or twigs (of variant forms, shapes, and sizes) that is made with the fallen branches of the ọfọ tree.17 The functions of ọfọ (in the second usage) vary from community to community. Ọfọ’s multiplex functions sometimes pose a great difficulty to non-Igbos and to nonnative speakers of Igbo language. It is not merely a religious object; it performs also political, social, and cultural functions. These multifarious functions of ọfọ may not pose any serious difficulty to the Igbos because they typically see the religious, political, cultural, and social spheres as parts of a single human experience. A few examples are in order to illustrate the manifold functions of ọfọ. In a religious context, ọfọ may be used during prayer rituals. Sometimes ofering prayers to God, gods, or ancestors is described as igọ ọfọ—a religious ritual that is predominantly a pronouncement of blessings upon people.18 Ọfọ is also sometimes used by sorcerers and magicians to place a curse on people.19 In the social sphere, ọfọ is a symbol of morality, truthfulness, peacefulness, and justice. It is also used to seal a contract or covenant between two parties.20 A person who aims to declare his or her peacefulness or innocence in the face of conflict may say e jim ọfọ— literally, “I am holding ọfọ,” even though the person may not have the sacred staf in his or her possession at the time of such utterance. In the political arena, a family’s ọfọ, which is held by ọkpara (a legitimate first male child), is a symbol of authority. The ọkpara is expected, as the holder of the family’s ọfọ, to represent the afairs of the family members—both the living and the ancestors. He is equally expected to mediate objectively and impartially among members of the family during conflicts, and also to appease gods and ancestors in order to secure the family’s well-being. Two stages in the making of the ọfọ symbols are noteworthy. The first can be described as the nonconsecrated stage, and the second the consecrated stage. In both of these stages, ọfọ remains a human-made object. Two forms of ọfọ objects are prominent among the Igbos: the twig form and the carved form. The twig form is made with the fallen branches from the ọfọ tree. The number of the branches used range from four to sixteen.21 The branches are tied together with iron or copper wire. The twig form is the most prominent. The wooden carved form is also popu lar among some Igbo communities. While some are carved from ọfọ trees

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others are made from other trees and metals. The carved form of the ọfọ objects, which are made from wood, metal, and copper, come in diferent sizes, shapes, and designs. Some, for example, have “a concave face, a halo shape around the head, crisscross patterns on the shaft, and a flat disk or a ring at the end.”22 However, any ọfọ object made from non-ọfọ trees is generally considered as an “imitation” or “representation” of the real ọfọ object (that is, those made from ọfọ trees).23 When and how the ọfọ tree came to occupy such an elevated status of significance in Igbo societies is unknown.24 In terms of why ọfọ trees are used to make the “real” or “authentic” ọfọ symbols, the answer may not be farfetched. Ọfọ trees are believed to be sacred in traditional Igbo cosmology. What is not clear, however, is whether they are originally held to be inherently sacred or if the “sacredness” is projected retrospectively onto the trees because of the “sacred” functions the holders of ọfọ are expected to perform in their communities or the “sacred” virtues and value (such as justice) that ọfọ represents. Whatever the case, many Igbo people continue to see ọfọ trees as sacred. In many communities it is still considered taboo to cut down ọfọ trees except for the designated religious, social, and political purposes.25 The process of consecrating ọfọ objects for religious, social, or political purposes varies from community to community in Igboland. Depending on the occasion and purpose, the consecration ceremony is accompanied with oath taking and festivity. Only when ọfọ objects are consecrated are they expected to become efficacious for what they are intended to accomplish. It is noteworthy, however, that even in the consecrated stage when ọfọ objects are recognized as religious, social, or political symbols, they neither cease to be human-made art objects nor do they become divine or represent gods (as in an idol).26 Arthur Glyn Leonard is therefore wrong to claim that in the Niger Delta region ọfọ is “the god of justice [that] resides in a tree of the same name.”27 On the contrary, ọfọ is a symbolic representation of the religious, social, and political virtues and values associated with God, lesser divinities, and ancestors, which inform personhood and also enforce unity in traditional Igbo communities. As Ejizu observes, “Ofo refers to the natural bond of unity which exists between members of individual kin-groups. Yet at the more abstract level, the symbol is said to mean truth, justice, righteousness, power, authority, wholeness, and moral innocence, all of which are key ideas and values that underlie and regulate interpersonal and group relationships of the traditional Igbo.”28

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Ọfọ sticks or symbols are “sacred” because they are construed as such by traditional Igbo communities and because they can be used as instruments by gods, ancestors, and priests to accomplish certain tasks in a community. However, ọfọ sticks or symbols remain human objects even after they are consecrated. While gods and ancestors may act through ọfọ sticks and symbols, they do not cease to be the work of art created by humans for religious, social, and political purposes.

The Bible in Barth’s Thought Transiting to Barth and Christianity from Ejizu and Igbo indigenous religions, the relationship between the Bible and God was a theme to which Barth devoted enormous attention. To him, God is a dilemma for humans: They want to speak about God but cannot speak appropriately about God on their own.29 Yet, it will not do, Barth insists, to resolve this dilemma either by speaking abstractly about an unknown God or by not speaking about God at all. Also, insofar as the term “God” refers to a personal being who acts (the God who speaks and hears),30 it is not an empty word that should be filled with materials from human religious conceptualities or existential experiences. Barth, of course, is not saying that people are incapable of attempting such a task, for that is exactly what religious people do, including Christians. He writes, “Christians know that they are in too great solidarity with all other men not to have to admit that even when they think and utter it, the word ‘God’ will always need afresh the genuine precision, fullness, and interpretation that come to it.”31 Barth’s point is that the God of Christianity is the one who supplies the content for the term, the content that should end all the “discussion concerning the word ‘God.’”32 To put it bluntly, for Barth, human beings cannot speak about God without God’s help. In Christianity, God should be imagined, Barth insists, as the one who summons humans to an adequate knowledge of God. In relation to the word “God,” the question is unavoidable: who among all those who have it in their minds or express it on their lips can claim that their picture or concept of God is wholly and exclusively correct? Might it not be that the establishment of a peaceful pantheon, which includes an altar to the unknown God, is the most suitable solution to the problem posed by the presence of that word? Or might it be simpler to consign the problem to an historical museum by fundamentally renounc-

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ing any serious use of the word? Christians, however, move through the misty territory invoking the Father with crying, sighing, and rejoicing, praising the Father, thanking the Father, and above all praying to the Father, their life being a life in this vocative.33

This conception of God, revelation, and theological language deeply informs Barth’s view of the verbum triplex—threefold word (of God): the “Word of God preached,” “Word of God written,” and “Word of God revealed.”34 In Barth’s theology, these three forms of the Word of God intersect and also are interrelated.35 Since the written Word of God is the primary focus of this essay, I will describe how Barth imagines its nature and place in the God-human relation. Barth contends that Christian theology should explore God’s selfrevelation (which is embodied by Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ) as “attested to the Church of Jesus Christ by Holy Scripture.”36 He works painstakingly to avoid any direct identification of God’s self-revelation (Jesus Christ) with the Bible—the collection of texts comprising human expressions of their encounter with God and their attestations to God’s self-disclosure in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.37 For Barth, then, the Bible is a human-made collection of texts, which God uses to accomplish great works in and for the readers and hearers (such as pointing them to Jesus Christ—God’s self-revelation).38 I will explore further how God uses the Bible to accomplish things among humans in the next section. Here, I will focus on the nature of the Bible itself. The Bible, to Barth, is authored by human beings who were never elevated beyond their frailty, finitude, and fallibleness.39 Although the authors of the Bible were sanctified by God’s grace, their words (assembled in the Bible) were not inerrant. He writes, “If the prophets and apostles are not real and therefore fallible men, even in their office, even when they speak and write of God’s revelation, then, it is not a miracle that they speak the Word of God.”40 Barth goes on to contend that the authors of the Bible must be understood as people who are “at fault in any word, and have been at fault in every word” and as those who have “spoken the Word of God in their fallible and erring human word.”41 Diminishing the humanness of the Bible and the fallibility of the authors, for Barth, undermines God’s gracious and miraculous act of using them to accomplish great work in the community of worshippers.42 If God was not ashamed of using the fallible words of human beings, Barth insists, Christians should not be ashamed to accept them as fallible. Neither will it do to seek to extract “the Word of

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God in the Bible from other contents, infallible portions and expressions from the erroneous ones, the infallible from the fallible, and from imagining that by means of such discoveries we can create for ourselves encounters with the genuine Word of God in the Bible.”43 In Barth’s thought, the Bible is the work of human beings. Like ọfọ, it is a human “object,” and it does not cease to be a human product. Barth, however, contends that the Bible can become the Word of God when it is used by God to speak to people. He writes, “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it.”44

The Bible and Ọfọ as Vehicles for Divine Action A central question with which I am concerned in this essay is: How is it that God acts with and through human-made objects or texts like the Bible and ọfọ to encounter a worshipper? In African indigenous religions, which are less organized and structured than Christianity, when referring to the prime creator of the world, God is believed to be known only through mediated means such as lesser divinities and the ancestors. Such knowledge of God is provisional, however, for human beings cannot know the “ways” of God or gods exhaustively. Some African Christian theologians have superimposed a Christianized notion of God on the ideas of God (and gods) in African indigenous religions. Using a Christian theological category to interpret the ideas of God and gods in Africa when discussing African indigenous religions, however, is seriously problematic. Many such Christianized interpretations of African indigenous religions are deeply influenced by Western thought forms that are foreign to indigenous thoughts of Africa. The resultant theological eforts are usually interpretations of African indigenous religions that fail to represent adequately the manner in which the adherents of the religions experience and relate to deities in their own terms.45 Jacob Olupona bemoans this state of afairs and pushes for an approach to the study of African indigenous religions that allows for the religious practices and experiences of their adherents to “speak for themselves.” Such an approach, for Olupona, would prevent “scholars from imposing a preconceived theistic formula on the materials studied.”46 In the indigenous religious thought of the Igbos, the ọfọ tree, as Ejizu observes, “is perceived by the traditional Igbo as a special revealer of the sacred.”47 Ejizu describes ọfọ as an essential “ritual stick of prayer” and a

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religious “object of communication with the divine and the entire supernatural realm.”48 But how exactly does this human work of art become a medium through which the Igbo people who adhere to the indigenous religion commune with divine beings? While Ejizu does not deal explicitly with the theological issue I am pursing in this essay, he provides helpful insights into the divine-human encounter that occurs within the context of ọfọ tradition. For example, he argues that ọfọ “is one of the central symbols of Igbo traditional religion and life through which the sacred is continually present to the people.”49 As the symbolic representation of divinely sanctioned values (such as truthfulness, justice, goodliness, equity, and faithfulness—in covenantal contexts), ọfọ reminds the adherents of the indigenous religion of Igbo of the divine presence in the world, particularly in their midst. As Ejizu observes, “The structural features of the [ọfọ] plant seems to have . . . recommended the tree to the traditional mind which might have sensed in these ‘extra–ordinary’ features . . . special divine presence.”50 In the complex relations of divine-human (or spirit-human) worlds, the ọfọ symbols awaken in the adherents of the indigenous religion “the sense of the supernatural beings” that are responsible for their existence and subsistence on the earth (ala mmadụ in Igbo) and also their responsibilities to some beings that dwell in the “underworld” (ala mmụọ or mụọ), and those that reside in “heaven” or “sky” (elu).51 If the Bible is a human-made text (i.e., a collection of fallible writings by fallible human beings), can we still speak of the Bible as “inspired” by God? How do the words of human beings become the Word of God? Barth describes this process as a “miracle.”52 Barth’s aim is to show how the words of humans in the Bible can truly become the Word of God. He writes: Recollection of God’s past revelation, discovery of the Canon, faith in the promise of the prophetic and apostolic word, or better, the selfimposing of the Bible in virtue of its content, and therefore the existence of real apostolic succession, is also an event, and is to be understood only as an event. In this event the Bible is God’s Word. That is to say, in this event the human prophetic and apostolic word is a representative of God’s Word in the same way as the word of the modern preacher is to be in the event of real proclamation: a human word which has God’s commission to us behind it, a human word to which God has given Himself as object, a human word which is recognized and accepted by God as good, a human word in which God’s own address to us is an event.

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The Bible is the concrete means by which the Church recollects God’s past revelation, is called to expectation of His future revelation, and is thus summoned and guided to proclamation and empowered for it. . . . The Bible is God’s Word as it really bears witness to revelation, and proclamation is God’s Word as it really promises revelation.53

Two interrelated principles can be deduced from Barth’s words stated above: the “attestation” principle and “catalyst” (or “means”) principle. These principles govern Barth’s understanding of the Bible’s relation to God. On the “attestation” principle, the words of the Bible, for Barth, are a witness to God’s revelation: it points the readers or hearers to God’s selfrevelation in Jesus Christ. As Robert Brown notes, “But we are not to go back to a book, we are to go back through the book, to the One to whom the book basically witnesses, namely the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. It is to bring us to him that the book is so necessary, for we cannot get to him apart from the book.”54 Barth’s theology of scripture is deeply Christocentric. His discussions on the Bible’s nature, authority, and self-authentication culminate in how this body of text points people in the direction of Jesus Christ as the Word of God in flesh. “We can know that in the life of the Church, and indeed in its life with the Bible,” Barth writes, “it is a matter of [the] decision and act of God or rather of the actualization of the act of God which took place once and for all in Jesus Christ.”55 Barth’s theology of Scripture is also Christocentric in that he sees Jesus Christ as the “definitive mode of God’s selfrevelation” through whom human beings can learn what they “need to know about the relationship of revelation to the various media through which God has chosen” to make God’s self known to the world.56 The “catalyst” principle is grounded in the freedom of God to graciously use fallible words of the Bible to accomplish tasks that can authentically be called God’s. For Barth, God accepts and uses the words of the Bible as “good” and also as “God’s own address to us.” The Bible, therefore, is an instrument that facilitates the knowledge of God’s act in the world, particularly, God’s act in Jesus Christ. Now, in Barth’s thought, the Bible is both God’s Word and what becomes God’s Word. This way of imagining the Bible’s relation to the “Word of God” is largely conditioned by Barth’s view of the Word of God, as Bruce McCormack notes, as a single Word that manifests itself in three forms: revelation (Jesus Christ), Scripture, and preaching (which is derived from the Scripture).57 For Barth, on the one hand, the Bible is God’s Word because God called and

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empowered the prophets and apostles who wrote the words of the Bible. Such divine empowerment and calling to prophetic and apostolic offices, of course, does not make the words of the Bible any less human. The writers of the Bible still wrote from their own experiences, cultures, and social locations. On the other hand, the Bible becomes God’s Word (that is, “becoming what it already is”) when God graciously chooses to bear witness to God’s self through the words of the Bible.58 However, the Bible still remains in its nature one of the three forms in which God’s Word manifests itself even in such moments when God has not chosen to use the use the words of the Bible to bear witness to God’s self.

Divine Freedom and Religious Objects What Barth’s theology of scripture and Ejizu’s theology of ọfọ share in common is the centrality of divine freedom: It is within the purview of God and lesser deities to exercise their prerogatives to decide when to use human symbols or objects (the Bible and ọfọ) to bring about change in the experience and knowledge of a worshipper. In Barth’s theology, it is God’s prerogative to use the Bible as a medium of encounter between God and humans, making human words the Word of God. Barth contends that God uses the Bible in its verbal form. Yet, he argues, “Verbal inspiration does not mean the infallibility of the biblical word in its linguistic, historical, and theological character as a human word.” On the contrary, verbal inspiration “means that the fallible human and faulty human word is as such used by God and has to be received and heard in spite of its human fallibility.”59 The event in which the Bible becomes the Word of God is not grounded in human efort but rather in God’s decision. Barth writes: [The] presence of the Word of God itself, the real and present speaking and hearing of it, is not identical with the existence of the book as such. But in this presence something takes place in and with the book, for which the book as such does indeed give the possibility, but the reality of which cannot be anticipated or replaced by the existence of the book. A free divine decision is made. It then comes about that the Bible, the Bible in concreto, this or that biblical context, i.e., the Bible as it comes to us in this or that specific measure, is taken and used as an instrument in the hand of God, i.e., it speaks to and is heard by us as the authentic witness to divine revelation and is therefore present as the Word of God.60

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While we need the Bible in order to encounter God’s Word, the Bible neither takes the place of God nor guarantees at all times and in all places God’s usage of its words to bear witness to God’s self, God’s presence, and God’s act in the community of the hearers. On the one hand, Barth wants to protect the humanness of the Bible—in all of the limitations associated with any written work. The Bible does not become the Word of God because it is superior to other written works. On the other hand, Barth also highlights the privilege of the Bible over other written works. Although the Bible is genuinely human, it can become the Word of God “in virtue of the privilege that here and now it is taken and used by God Himself, like the water in the Pool of Bethesda.”61 As noted earlier, for Barth, the Bible enjoys this unique status as the human “object,” which God uses to bear witness to God’s self, because God called and empowered the prophets and apostles who wrote the words of the Bible. In the indigenous religion of the Igbos, the spirit beings (God and lesser divinities) and the ancestors make ọfọ efficacious in the preservation of truth, morality, and justice sometimes by the means of bringing harm to the ofenders as a means of punishment. As Ejizu has noted, individuals holding the ọfọ sticks or symbols may use it during prayer or religious ceremony to “invoke divine blessings on someone.”62 This function of ọfọ is grounded in the belief that it serves as “a vital medium of communication between man and supernatural order.”63 During worship “words uttered before the shrine are thought to reach the god [at which shrine the ceremony is conducted] through the instrument ọfọ.”64 Here again, it should be pointed out that while humans are to ask for blessings or curses from deities during worship with the “help” of the ọfọ stick, they do not ultimately control the outcomes of their requests. Such outcomes are outside their powers. God, lesser divinities, and ancestors determine such outcomes.

Conclusion I make four observations by way of conclusion. First, two impor tant “texts” (the Bible, in a written form, and ọfọ, in an art form) in Christianity and Igbo indigenous religion respectively can be described as truly human products. This way of construing the two “texts” or “objects” creates a fertile ground for Christians and the adherents of Igbo indigenous religions to engage in a truly dialogical communication that moves beyond merely exchanging ideas. Accepting the Bible and ọfọ as human-

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made texts or objects, negatively, neutralizes potentially vicious territorial religious wars between Christians and adherents of Igbo indigenous religions, and positively, creates a genuine common ground for them to pursue in common some ways in which they can enrich their understandings of God and God’s mediated acts in the world. Religious conflicts and incredulity toward interreligious dialogues are in many cases grounded in the quest to protect the sphere and uniqueness of a religion. Many adherents of competing religions are, therefore, locked in what may be described as “territorial religious wars” aimed at protecting the theologies, beliefs, and practices of their religions. While there are important diferences between Barth’s conception of the Bible and Ejizu’s conception of ọfọ, both uphold the active roles of human beings in the making of objects that may help facilitate, albeit in diferent ways, communication and fellowship between God and the worshipper. Second, if Barth’s theology of the Word of God is located within the context of the question about the universal significance of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, it provides a sufficiently flexible ground to engage in a form of comparative theology that aims to discover in both Christianity and African indigenous religions the limits of human dialectical task of speaking about an unspeakable divine being. As I have shown in this essay, the Christian scripture as imagined by Barth and the ọfọ symbols as described by Ejizu open a door to meaningful interreligious conversations between Christianity and Igbo indigenous religion. Third, the notion of divine freedom discussed in this essay provides a fertile ground to engage in interreligious dialogue that (1) preserves the limitations as well as uniqueness of Christianity and African indigenous religions and (2) averts the dangers of seeking to confine God’s activity within a particular religion. Is not Barth’s understanding of divine freedom (in the sense of God’s making human words to become God’s Word) his Achilles heel in his critique of religion? If, as Barth believes, God uses fallible human beings and also errant human words (even in the Bible) to miraculously accomplish divinely initiated acts, we may ask: Does it not follow that God can equally use the fallible theologies, religious beliefs, and beliefs in African indigenous religions to accomplish great work among adherents of these religions? Barth’s response to this question will be nein (“no”) primarily because he believes that the Bible is unique in the sense that it is God’s Word and not merely what becomes God’s Word. Barth’s argument for the uniqueness of the Christian Holy Scripture, however, may not be convincing to people of other religions that have Holy Scriptures.

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Barth would need to show that God did not call and empower the authors of the scriptures of other religions. Even Barth’s Christocentric theologies of God’s self-revelation, in my judgment, should not necessarily rule out God’s freedom to act efectively through non-Christian objects. Fourth, the question about the “universal” significance of Jesus Christ should not be framed in a way that explores what Jesus has to do with religions other than Christianity as if it is the prerogative of the Christian religion to determine the scope of Jesus’s significance. To successfully bring Jesus into the discourse on the Christianity—African indigenous religions relation, we should ask, “What has Jesus to do with both Christianity and African indigenous religions?”65 The freedom of God the Father to act through or within (and not act through and within) a religion at a given time should also be extended to God the Son (Jesus Christ). In other words, Jesus has the freedom to act (or not to act) through and within any religions. If the conversation Jesus had with a certain Samaritan woman (John 4:4–26) is any indication of his theology of religions, we can deduce from the conversation that Jesus “undoes the assumption that God is localized and entrenched in a given religion.”66 Jesus in the conversation criticized “the attempts of the Jews and Samaritans to entrap God in their religions.” Many adherents of both religions seem to be guilty (in their fights over the proper place to worship God— Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim) of an inadequate theology for imagining divine presence in a way that “strips God of the ability to simultaneously interact with and distance God’s self from human religions.”67 In speaking about God, we are in danger of making God into our own image. But we cannot avoid speaking about God entirely. What we need is a theological mindset that is grounded in God’s freedom and willingness to use fallible or errant texts and objects to critique and redirect our (mis) understandings of God’s acts in the world. Notes 1. Some scholars prefer the term “African traditional religions” (ATR) to African indigenous religions. I have chosen African indigenous religions because the word “traditional” may suggest that such religions are static, closed, and have not adapted to the external pressures of competing religions (e.g., Christianity and Islam). 2. I will focus primarily on Barth’s discussions on religions and the Word of God in Church Dogmatics. 3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 281. Several African scholars of religion and theologians consider

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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the terms “animistic” and “totemistic” grossly inadequate for describing the indigenous religions of Africa. See John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1991), 17–19; E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973), 108–134. Jacob K. Olupona, “Major Issues in the Study of African Traditional Religion,” in African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991), 26. CD I/2, 280. The arbitrariness Barth speaks of in this context is informed by his claim that Christians ought to speak about God as the being who encounters humans “as it is attested to the Church of Jesus Christ by Holy Scripture.” Barth, CD I/2, 280. Also Barth wrote, “let us start with the proposition that in the Bible we have a revelation of true religion, of religion defined as what we are to think concerning God, how we are to find him, and how we are to conduct ourselves in his presence—all that is included in what today we like to call ‘worship and ser vice.’ ” See Karl Barth, “The Strange New World within the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, ed. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 41. Wolf Krötke, “A New Impetus to the Theology of Religions from Karl Barth’s Thought,” Cultural Encounters 7, no. 2 (2011): 29–30. Christopher Ejizu is a Nigerian Roman Catholic priest and a scholar of religion. His works focus primarily on African indigenous religions and their impact upon Christian experience. Unlike Barth, who was concerned with making theological judgments, Ejizu’s work on ọfọ traditions was primarily explorative and descriptive. CD II/2 (1957), 52–53. Victor I. Ezigbo, Introducing Christian Theologies: Voices from Global Christian Communities (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013), 1:99. For more discussions on the Igbo concepts of Chi, see Christopher I. Ejizu, “Chi Symbolism as a Potent Mirror of Igbo Indigenous Worldview,” Anthropos 87 (1992): 397– 389; M. C. Onukawa, “The Chi Concept in Igbo Gender Naming,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 70, no. 1 (2000): 107–117; I. Chukwukere, “Chi in Igbo Religion and Thought: The God in Every Man,” Anthropos 78 (1983): 516–534; Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975), 159–175. See Ejizu, “Chi Symbolism as a Potent Mirror of Igbo Indigenous Worldview,” 379–380. Ibid., 386. Ibid., 388; see also Chukwukere, “Chi in Igbo Religion and Thought,” 531. The competing theories of Inspiration (e.g., dictation theory, verbal theory, dynamic theory, and illumination theory) highlight the disagreements among Christians on the origins of the Bible. For more discussion on this issue, see Ezigbo, Introducing Christian Theologies, 69–74. Christopher Ejizu, Ọfọ: Igbo Ritual Symbol (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension, 1986), 32. Some writers have described ọfọ as Deterium Senegalense. See Eli Bentor, “Life as Artistic Process: Igbo Ikenga and Ofo,” African Arts 21, no. 2 (1988): 66–94. Ejizu, Ọfọ, 31.

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18. Emefie Ikenga–Metuh, “Context, Content, and Spirituality of Igbo Prayers,” Research in African Literatures 16, no. 3 (1985): 322. 19. Ejizu, Ọfọ, 51. Interestingly, some Christians in Nigeria use the Bible as their source of authority when pronouncing curses on people they see as demonic agents. 20. Ibid., 63. Economic contracts or marriage covenants sealed with ọfọ are considered a “binding treaty” (igba ndụ in Igbo) in the eyes of humans and God (and other spirit beings). 21. Ibid., 38. 22. Bentor, “Life as Artistic Process,” 67. 23. Ejizu, Ọfọ, 37. 24. On this issue, Ejizu wrote, the ọfọ “symbol appears to have an autochthonous origin probably traceable to the proto–Kwa cultural matrix of the Kwa–speaking peoples of the West African sub-region.” See Ejizu, Ọfọ, 164. Some myths present the ọfọ tree as the first plant God created. For more discussions, see Ejizu, Ọfọ, 64–68. 25. Ejizu, Ọfọ, 72–73. 26. Bentor, “Life as Artistic Process,” 66. 27. Arthur Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and Its Tribes (London: Macmillan, 1906), 301. 28. Ejizu, Ọfọ, 164–165. 29. See Barth, “The Strange New World within the Bible,” 37–50. 30. To Barth, God (the Father) “invoked by Christians is not just called such when deep down and in truth he is no more than an idea or epitome of fatherhood. Deep down and in truth he is really Father. He is thus a speaking and hearing subject, a subject that acts personally. He is more than a power ful and efficacious object; he is an object only to the extent that a person, and independent subject, can also be called an object—by making itself an object to others without ceasing to be a subject. To put it epigrammatically and objectively, in himself he is not an object.” Karl Barth, The Christian Life, translated by Geofrey  W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 52. 31. Ibid., 54. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. CD I/1 (1936), 88–120. 35. Ibid., 120–124. 36. CD I/2, 280. 37. Ibid., 109. 38. Ibid., 530. 39. Ibid., 528. 40. Ibid., 529. 41. Ibid., 530. 42. Barth’s view of the Bible makes some Christian theologians, especially Evangelicals, very uncomfortable. Even some theologians who do not accept a direct identification of the Bible with God’s revelation to the extent of diminishing the humanness of the Bible find Barth’s view troubling. One such theologian is Kevin Vanhoozer, who faults Barth for construing the Bible simulta neously as verbally the Word of God and at the same time as what becomes verbally God’s Word only when God freely and gracious

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

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decides to make it so. He argues that that the Bible is best construed as “a set of human-divine communicative actions that do many diferent things.” See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 150–151. Vanhoozer, of course, needs to show how the Bible is a “fully human and fully divine act” without diminishing any of the two constants (human and divine) or giving a special privilege to one of the two constants. CD I/2, 531. CD I/1, 109. For more discussions on this issue, see John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1991), 45–69; John Parratt, Reinventing Christianity: African Theology Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 64–76; John S. Pobee, Toward an African Theology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1979); E. Bolji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1975). Olupona, “Major Issues in the Study of African Traditional Religion,” 28. Ejizu, Ọfọ, 119. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 119. Ibid. CD I/2, 528–529. CD I/1, 109, 111. Robert McAfee Brown, “Scripture and Tradition in the Theology of Karl Barth,” in Thy Word Is Truth: Barth on Scripture, ed. George Hunsinger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 7. CD I/2, 531. Bruce  L. McCormack, “The Being of Holy Scripture Is in Becoming: Karl Barth in Conversation with American Evangelical Criticism,” in Evangelicals Scripture: Tradition, Authority and Hermeneutics, ed. Vincent Bacote, Laura C. Miguelez, and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 62–63. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 67. CD I/2, 533. CD I/2, 530. Ibid. Ejizu, Ọfọ, 61. Ibid. Ibid. Victor I. Ezigbo, “Religion and Divine Presence: Appropriating Christian ity from within African Indigenous Religions’ Perspective,” in African Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa: Emerging Trends, Indigenous Spirituality, and the Interface with Other World Religions, ed. Afe Adogame, Ezra Chitando, and Bolaji Bateye (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 187–203. Ezigbo, “Religion and Divine Presence,” 197. Ibid.

10 Humanity and Destiny A T H E O L O G I C A L C O M PA R I S O N OF KARL BARTH AND AFRICAN T R A DI T IONA L R E L IG ION S Tim Hartman

“One must come out of one’s house to begin learning.” “When the right hand washes the left, and the left hand washes the right, then both hands will be clean.”

Whether African or Barthian, this chapter invites laying aside one’s presuppositions as each perspective illuminates aspects of the other through the comparison. As described in the African proverbs that form the epigraph to this chapter,1 through the “washing” described here, both “hands” will be made “clean,” revealing more of each theological tradition than was initially apparent. The “African way of life” was categorized by early non-African observers as “African religion.” “African traditional religion” (ATR) was the name that outsiders (primarily Europeans) initially gave to the integrated ways of life practiced by many Africans that had spiritual, cultural, religious, economic, and political aspects. These anthropological and religious scholars in the 1960s and 1970s were attempting to describe, group, and classify the myriad of cultural and religious expressions of African peoples. In the 1980s, the diversity in beliefs and practices among Africans lead to the prevailing use of the plural term, ATRs.2 The justification for such a characterization is based in how “the African predominantly interprets his world theologically, rather than in scientific terms,”3 according to Ghanaian theologian Kwesi Dickson. The beliefs categorized as African traditional religions and the theology of Karl Barth have had little to no formal contact with one another. As a result, there is little scholarly literature on Barth and the religions of Africa, in contrast to the works on Barth and Judaism or Barth and Islam.4 The comparison is difficult, since stereotypes, worldviews, and misunder-

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standings characterize both Barth’s approach to Africans and Africans’ ignoring of Barth’s thought. Even though there is not a natural, organic, or ongoing conversation between Barth’s theology and African traditional religions (ATRs), as a non-African Christian theologian, I find this admittedly unusual comparison of two disparate ways of thinking about “God” (or the Divine) and the world to be invigorating and worthwhile. These two radically diferent approaches and understandings illuminate assumptions that might other wise pass uninterrogated. The similarities demonstrate truths about the human condition while also mitigating against claims of exclusivity. In short, there are theological insights discovered through a comparison of Barth and ATRs that are not revealed in isolation. Both traditions ofer theological solutions uniquely tailored to the problems each identified in divine-human and human-human relationships. This comparison crosses many boundaries: Western/non-Western, African/Eu ropean, North/South, Christian/non-Christian, and so on. Yet, one of the insights of this chapter is that new meaning appears in the interstices between these categories. Specifically, I am fascinated that while ATRs maintain a close connection between the Creator and the creation, Barth—as a Christian theologian—believes that human disobedience (sin) ruptured the divine-human relationship. God then provided a means for reconciliation in the person of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Yet, Barth’s par ticu lar articulation of universal reconciliation displays more in common with ATRs than many of his fellow Christian theologians. While this chapter does not address the diferences between Barth and other Christian theologians, the similar (though by no means identical) claims about the divine-human relationship in Barth and ATRs captivate me as much as the diferences. For his part, Barth exhibited little explicit interest in the peoples or religious traditions in Africa or elsewhere outside of Europe and North America.5 Few Barth scholars after Barth have demonstrated an interest in African spirituality, ancestor veneration, or indigenous religious expression. In a similar manner, few Africans have read Barth’s work or even heard of Barth. Some African Christians, particularly in South Africa, and some African American theologians have engaged Barth’s work.6 For many Africans, even those who are Christians, there have not been compelling reasons to engage the writings of a twentieth-century Swiss theologian such as Karl Barth.

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This chapter, then, compares three categories related to the divinehuman relationship: creation, disobedience (or, sin, in Christian parlance), and destiny (or, salvation). However, even in the naming and conceptualizing of these categories, the comparativist must be wary about importing alien terms and theories, then foisting them upon the thought of Karl Barth or ATRs. In this essay, I group similar concepts together while trying to preserve authentic language and meanings. This task is complicated by the fact that most, if not all, of the literature on ATRs is written by scholars trained in the West. This educational bias has created a narrative of ATRs that is based in Western, often Christian, categories. Nigerian Jacob Olupona, himself a professor at Harvard University with a doctorate from Boston University, ofers this overview of the field: The vast majority of scholars who have studied African traditional religions and African diaspora religions have been adherents to other religions or have been areligious. While the anthropological emphasis on participant observation has generated many insights into the lived religious experiences of practitioners, scholar-practitioners argue that many of the nuances of African and African diaspora religions remain closed to those who are not themselves devotees. Scholars like Asare Opoku and Wande Abimbola, a traditional babaláwo (Ifá diviner), have dramatically shifted the questions that occupy the field by insisting that all scholars in the field take seriously the concerns and interests of practitioners.7

Ghanaian Kofi Asare Opoku’s writing figures prominently in this essay as representative of ATRs. Opoku, having lived and taught in the United States, knows the Western context and has written about ATRs for Westerners. The comparative task is further complicated by the difering characteristics of each theology and their difering authoritative sources. In contrast to the authoritative role that the Bible plays in Barth’s thought, there is no single sacred text within African traditional religions. The practices within an African culture communicate religious ideals and values through oral histories and communal rituals. As the Tanzanian theologian Laurenti Magesa writes, For Africans, religion is far more than “a believing way of life” or “an approach to life” directed by a book. It is a “way of life” or life itself, where a distinction or separation is not made between religion and other areas of human existence. If one is to speak of “revelation” or “inspiration,” it

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is not to be found in a book, not even primarily in the people’s oral tradition, but in their lives.8

These ritualized social manifestations demonstrate the core convictions of ATRs. Through observing rituals (and their interpretations) outsiders can gain understanding about African beliefs.9 Opoku describes how religious knowledge is communicated within a clan: “Normally, a person does not need any special instruction in religion. He picks it up as he grows and begins to participate in the communal rituals and ceremonies. It is only priests, chiefs or leaders of religious associations who require special instructions.”10 In this sense then, for Africans, African religions are caught, not taught. In Barth’s theology, the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ— primarily as witnessed to in the Bible—defines orthodox Christian belief that informs practices.11 In ATRs, “The distinctive feature of traditional African religion,” writes Opoku, “lies in its being a way of life.”12 ATRs ofer a clear focus on the present—making a way of life in the world. There is little to separate African culture and African religion, thus to name certain practices of African culture as “religious” is a misnomer.13 In spite of the danger of overgeneralizing, this chapter follows the lead of Olupona and Asare Opoku, among others, who use the acronym, “ATRs,” in a specific and circumscribed sense, in referring to those shared aspects of African spiritual and cultural life that permeate diverse clans and tribes across the continent, and represents “the spirituality of indigenous black Africa as a whole.”14 For Olupona, as long as there have been humans in Africa, there have been beliefs and practices that we can rightfully refer to as religious.15 Opoku reminds us that ATRs are not simply past relics, but are a present reality for many Africans.16 The term “African traditional religions” (ATRs) then names the continuity of contemporary religious practices and beliefs with historic forebears (ancestors). ATRs are indigenous value systems that trace their origins to the earliest expressions of human consciousness.17 ATRs are a living tradition that both ofer a connection to the past and guidance for navigating the present and the future.18

Creation: God as Wholly Other A shared theological conviction for both Barth and ATRs is that God/ the divine/the Supreme-Being is wholly other. Famously, Barth adopts

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Søren Kierkegaard’s phrase “infinite qualitative distinction” to describe the relationship between God and humanity. In the preface to the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans, Barth writes, if I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity . . . “God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.” The relation between such a God and such a man, and the relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy.19

For Barth, God’s transcendence is the starting point for understanding the divine-human relationship. God—the Creator—created a world, including human beings, that was wholly diferent than who God is. Human beings are considered to be made in “God’s image.” However, that likeness does not bridge the gap between God and humanity. Humans cannot become God; however, for Barth, God assumes human flesh in the God-man, Jesus Christ. Similarly, according to Opoku, “West Africans . . . regard God as wholly other and unlike man. He is completely above His creation.”20 While, in ATRs, God is wholly diferent from humans, God remains approachable and available to Africans. Opoku writes, “everybody is believed to have a direct link to God by possessing a life principle called okra, kla or aklama that never dies. The belief in a direct link to God is expressed in the Akan proverb that states: ‘Obi kwan nsi obi kwan mu’ (No man’s path crosses another man’s path).”21 In short, God (known by the Akan people as “Onyame”) “is available to all without the assistance of human intermediaries.”22 The eternal okra (spirit/soul) facilitates the direct link between an individual and the divine—without any intermediaries. Thus, for ATRs, the divine is wholly other, yet accessible to all Africans. For Barth, God is wholly other, yet accessible to all humanity via the God-man, Jesus Christ. Both ATRs and Barth ofer accounts of the creation of humanity and the resulting distance/separation that then occurs between humanity and God. For ATRs, the narratives are passed down from generation to generation through rituals and oral histories. For Barth, the narrative is found in the opening chapters of Genesis. In many ATRs, at creation humans were understood to live in close proximity to the Supreme Being; often humans could touch the sky from the earth. Opoku describes the intimate connection: “To the Akan [of Ghana], God and men once lived very close together, and we could reach, touch, and feel Him.”23 Following

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a series of actions by humans, the Divine withdrew from humanity, separating the sky from the earth. African groups ofer difering accounts of the causes of this separation. For the Akan, An old woman began to pound her fufuu [a staple food that is made by pounding cooked yam] regularly, using a mortar and a long pestle. She hit God every time she pounded fufuu, so He moved further and further away from men and went into skies.24

Olupona concludes a similar telling of the Akan tale, “Consequently, Nana Nyame [God] distanced himself from the world in order to escape the aggravation.”25 This account, as in others from across Africa, attributes the separation of humanity from the Creator to human misdoing or disobedience.26 Nyame did not intervene in human afairs and simply withdrew when sufficiently annoyed. Barth’s understanding of the divine-human relationship and the resulting separation demonstrates similarities and diferences with the Akan narrative. In Genesis 1 and 2, the earth, the sky and every thing in them, including humans, are created and declared to be good in God’s eyes. Then, in chapter 3, the first humans, Adam and Eve, choose to listen to a serpent instead of God. They disobey God by eating of the fruit of a tree that ofers knowledge of good and evil. God is angry with their disobedience and casts them out of paradise, the garden of Eden. Barth does not read these biblical texts literally or as historical accounts.27 He did not believe that Adam and Eve were historical persons in a state of innocence in a physical garden, but neither did he understand the Genesis account as mere fiction. Instead, he understood the Genesis account to be “saga.” For Barth, “saga,” depicts a prehistorical view of history (CD III/1 [1958], 82): I am using saga in the sense of an intuitive and poetic picture of a prehistorical reality of history which is enacted once and for all within the confines of time and space. . . . It is a sacred saga, because it speaks of God and because it speaks of Him—this is its peculiar feature—as the Creator. (CD III/1, 81, 92)

Barth insists that the Genesis account is saga, rather than myth, because it points to “a real Creator and a real creation . . . And this fact alone is the distinctive characteristic of the biblical creation histories” (CD III/1, 92). For Barth, the real purpose of the creation accounts in Genesis is to reveal who God is as Creator through the actual created order, and

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secondarily, to describe the human tendency toward real, actual disobedience. Barth writes, “There never was a golden age. There is no point in looking back to one. The first man was immediately the first sinner” (CD IV/1 [1956], 508). Barth seeks to demystify the first humans, including not allowing anyone to blame their sin on someone else. Barth is only willing to embrace a restricted understanding of original sin that rejects all hereditary sin and means “the voluntary and responsible life of every man” (CD IV/1, 501).28 Barth continues, “No one has to be Adam. We are so freely and on our own responsibility” (CD IV/1, 509). Every human commits his/her own sin, freely and under no compulsion. Every human then is responsible for the consequences of his/her sin.29 To sum up, Barth’s doctrine of creation (based on the biblical material) and the understanding of creation in ATRs (based on rituals and oral histories) make similar claims about God and humanity. In both, there is an ontological distinction between God and humanity: Simply, the creatures are not the Creator. At the same time, ATRs use much warmer and more intimate language to describe the original closeness between God and humanity than Barth does. In both theologies, human beings are responsible for the separation that occurs in the divine-human relationship. Further, neither theology holds to a hereditary understanding of original sin. In fact, Dominique Zahan writes, “Traditional African religion is devoid of the notion of original sin.”30 Though Barth and ATRs define “sin” diferently, they both emphasize par ticular individual human actions, not a condition passed down from one generation to the next.

Disobedience, “Sin,” and Original Sin “The most significant feature of African ethics,” according to Ghanaian John Pobee, “is the belief that man is born free from sin and remains so until he contaminates himself or until something pollutes him.”31 An African’s position before the divine is safe; their status is foolproof, and one cannot fail. There is a belief in an afterlife.32 Even without an understanding of original sin, “the claim that African societies such as the Akan had no sense of sin before the advent of Christianity is misguided and unfounded.”33 Pobee defines sin in African thought as “any act, motivation, or conduct which is directed against the sensus communis, the social harmony and the personal achievement sanctioned by the traditional code.”34 First and foremost, sins are acts (not a condition) against an in-

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dividual or a society. While these sinful acts have natural consequences, the ancestors may punish sin as well. Thus, sins against fellow humans or creation, are committed “against the spirit world as well.”35 Yet, human sin—while violating the community (including the ancestors)—does not afect God or a person’s status before God. For Opoku, sin is understood as: a “lack of love in communal relationships more than in terms of a divine retributive law.”36 South African Simon Maimela further emphasizes the societal understanding of sin: “It is not the self-sufficient God who sufers or benefits from human activity but our fellow humans who are impoverished or enriched by what we do to them.”37 Within ATRs, wrongdoing or disobedience (sin, in Judeo-Christian parlance) is an expected part of life.38 In contrast to the relational understanding of sin and wrongdoing expressed in ATRs, Karl Barth ofers a Christological understanding of sin.39 Unlike many other Christian theologians, Barth has no independent doctrine of sin.40 Instead, Barth’s understanding of sin is intricately connected to his understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Barth’s formal consideration of human sin comes late in his Church Dogmatics, in the sixtieth paragraph in volume 4: “The Doctrine of Reconciliation,” immediately following his exposition of the reconciliation of all humanity with God that was achieved through the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. In a sense, then, Barth implicitly assumes “the disruption of the relationship between God and man which made this [Christ] event necessary and which was overcome by this event” (CD IV/1, 359). Significantly, Barth is making a bigger point: Humans do not know that they are sinners apart from God in Jesus Christ. For Barth, sin has so corrupted the divine-human relationship and human knowledge that “Access to the knowledge that he is a sinner is lacking to man because he is a sinner. . . . He sees and thinks and knows crookedly even in relation to his crookedness” (CD IV/1, 360–361). Only when a person is confronted by the work of God in Christ on his/her behalf can one realize that he/she is a sinner. As Barth writes, “He sees himself unmasked and has to recognize and confess himself as disobedient to God, as the one who is at odds with Him and with his neighbor and himself, as the man of sin” (CD IV/1, 362). Humans realized their sin through encountering Jesus Christ; they must take responsibility for the consequences of their disobedience. The reason that Barth can make such a claim, one which seemingly ignores notions of conscience, natural law, and even indigenous customs

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and taboos, is that, for Barth, sin is primarily an ofense against God. Thus, how can one know one has ofended God without first knowing who God is and what God has done? In light of God’s gracious actions towards humanity, human sin (broadly understood by Barth as pride or disobedience [CD IV/1, §60], sloth or ingratitude/refusal [CD IV/2 (1958), §65], and falsehood or unbelief [IV/3 (1961), §70]) is revealed. In short, “sin is the enemy of God, and God is the enemy of sin” (CD IV/1, 409). Further, both views claim that when humans become aware of their separation from the Divine, they long for that connection to be reestablished. The creation narrative for the Akan people about the woman who annoyed Nyame with her mortar and pestle continues: When people realized what had happened they tried to find a way to bring God back into their midst. The old woman suggested that they should all bring their mortars together and pile them one on top of another to form a “ladder” to reach Him. They discovered that they needed just about one more mortar to make a ladder long enough. The old woman then suggested that they pull out the bottom-most mortar and put it on top. When they attempted to do this the whole construction collapsed on them and killed many.41

The above account ofers striking similarities to the Genesis 11:1–9 account of the Tower of Babel, where the community says, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; other wise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4). Following the account of the Great Flood in Genesis chapters 6–9, Noah’s descendants began to populate the earth (Genesis 10). As the people seek to demonstrate their own sufficiency in building the tower, God responds in anger to their “resultant arrogance” (CD III/4 [1961], 314) by “confusing their language there . . .[and] scatter[ing] them abroad from there over the face of all the earth” (Gen. 11:7–8). Barth uses Genesis 11 to document God’s judgment against the human desire for independence (CD III/4, 312–323). In the building of the tower, comments Barth, this people was shaping its own future and destiny and becoming its own lord. . . . This building is wrong to the extent that it is obviously a departure from grace. It is wrong to the extent that as a supreme cultural achievement projected and accomplished in this sense, and particularly in the case of the tower

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as the overarching of supreme human culture by a form of supreme human religion, it is most radically and forcefully directed against God, and therefore a work which is evil in intention, corresponding only too closely to the promise and invitation of the serpent in Genesis 3:5. (CD III/4, 314)

The sin at Babel demonstrates human pride, disobedience, ingratitude, and unbelief, all in one event. Again, Barth connects this account to the first sin in Genesis; God responds forcefully and with finality. For Barth, humans may feel the distance between themselves and God—a separation which they themselves cause—but humans cannot bridge the gap. Opoku’s interpretation of the Akan origin myth resonates with Barth’s reading of the Babel narrative: These stories . . . also point to one basic truth, namely, that if man were self-sufficient, he would have no need of religion, but because he is not, he uses religion to bring about the original harmony, self-sufficiency or unity that existed between him and the Creator. Africans express this universal need to be united with the Creator in their own way; for example, the Akan represent man as trying to bridge the gap by piling a stack of mortars in order to climb it to reach Him.42

In a parallel to Barth’s commentary, human self-sufficiency is not the response to the divine-human separation. Yet, in a contrast that will become more clear in the following section, an African may use “religion to bring about the original harmony, self-sufficiency or unity that existed between him and the Creator.”43 For ATRs, human disobedience has consequences but there are religio-cultural practices available to restore right relationship with others and to appease the ancestors. Barth and ATRs thus posit a God who is “wholly other” and both theologies place the blame for the distance between God and humanity on human actions. They also both assert that individual self-sufficiency cannot overcome the separation, but their “solutions” to this “problem” differ significantly. Due in no small part to the difering understandings of who is (primarily) ofended by human disobedience (for ATRs, the wrong is against society; for Barth, the wrong is against God), the two theologies ofer difering understandings of human destiny, what Barth calls salvation.

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Human Destiny In life, in death, and in life beyond death, Africans remain members of their families and communities while experiencing “an inward sense of union with a presence that is eternal.”44 In contrast to Judeo-Christian theologies, there is nothing anyone can do to dislodge or tarnish this “divine spark that links every human being directly to God.”45 Africans overcome their acts of disobedience through acts of reconciliation with one another, the ancestors and gods. This is the foundation of African morality and spirituality. As Pobee writes, The main thrust of African morality is to promote good and harmonious relations between men and society. It does not set out primarily to regulate the relationship between men and God, for it is assumed that when men straighten out their relations with each other, right relations with God will ensue.46

Being in right relationship with others helps to ensure that one is in right relationship with God. Ritualized acts such as making oferings to gods are part of being in right relationship with others. In contrast (and similar to his understanding of human disobedience), Barth ofers a Christological account of human salvation. For Barth, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ achieve reconciliation for all humanity. In and through Jesus Christ, the separation between God and humanity is overcome. Salvation—only possible in and through Christ— is made available to all humanity.47 However, since in ATRs the connection between humans and their Creator cannot be attenuated, there is no need for a concept of salvation per se. The Creator may be upset and need to be appeased, but there is no ontological threat from which one must be saved. Kenyan John Mbiti notes that very few African peoples picture the afterlife “in terms of punishment or reward. For the majority of African peoples, the hereafter is only a continuation of life more or less as it is in its human form. . . . A person dies and yet continues to live: he is a living-dead, and no other terms can describe him better than that.”48 Death is the next step in the cycle of life.49 The spirit of the deceased does not die, but instead lives on in the afterlife. For those who lived a noteworthy life and died a good death, they may become an ancestor. Others may merely wait until it is time to join with a new child about to be born and in this way reenter the physical world. While “the final destiny of man depends upon the way he

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has lived his earthly life,”50 all that is at stake is the quality (the comfort the spirit experiences, the ease of its journey, and the reverence it receives from the living), not its very existence or connection to the Divine.51 While ATRs emphasize the interconnection of all creation, especially among fellow members of a tribe or clan, Barth seeks to emphasize who God is and God’s initiative, not only in creation, but also in reconciliation. Barth writes, To put it in the simplest way, what unites God and us men is that He does not will to be God without us, that He creates us rather to share with us and therefore with our being and life and act His own incomparable being and life and act, that He does not allow His history to be His and our history ours, but causes them to take place as a common history. That is the special truth which the Christian message has to proclaim at its very heart. (CD IV/1, 7 revised)

In Barth’s theology, although God does not need to be in relationship with humanity, God desires such a relationship. In fact, God wills not to be alone, but instead for the story of God and the story of humanity to be a joint, mutual story. Barth intentionally used Geschichte, translated here (and throughout his Dogmatics) as “history,” because Geschichte has a broad meaning that encompasses both “history”—a cluster of events in time and space and “story”—a retelling of events that draws attention to their coherence and meaning.52 Through the use of Geschichte, Barth demonstrates that for him, theology—and more broadly the divine-human relationship—is not about true propositions or abstract concepts, but about the story (history) of God’s pursuit of humanity. The work of reconciliation of humanity by God in Jesus Christ is known as atonement. Barth began his explication of the doctrine of reconciliation with the claim: “Atonement is History (Geschichte)” (CD IV/1, 157). Barth’s understanding of atonement as story/ history is rooted in the actual events of Jesus Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension as witnessed to in the Bible. According to Barth, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, fully God and fully human, lived a life without sin (as God intends for all humanity), died as a common criminal (receiving the punishment human disobedience deserves), and was raised from the dead (overcoming death itself and accomplishing eternal life with God for all humans). This story, the Christ-event—which is actualized in concrete, historical moments—brings reconciliation between God and all of humanity.

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The goal of God’s actions is for humans to share life with God through ser vice. God has chosen humanity for life and for a task. In the theological terms Barth employs, justification (being made right with God) and sanctification (being made holy by God) are intimately connected to an individual’s vocation (the task God has given him/her in the world). German theologian Margit Ernst-Habib summarizes this point nicely: For Barth, “Personal salvation is not the central focus of Christian life and piety, but participating actively in God’s mission is.”53 Therefore, in Barth’s theology, human action is in response to God’s grace— God’s prior actions on behalf of humanity. In one’s earthly life, one can choose to live in correspondence with God’s commands (and thereby fully participate in the divine-human relationship), or one can persist in pride, sloth, and falsehood, missing out on what God intends. Either way, God’s prior action in Jesus Christ accomplished universal reconciliation for all humanity. In Jesus Christ, God has chosen all humanity and elected them for a purpose. While Barth deeply hopes that each individual human being will embrace God’s love, he stops short of advocating universal salvation.54

Conclusion What might Barth and followers of African traditional religion say to each other through this unprecedented comparison? To begin with, Barth and ATRs narrate the story of creation in similar ways: God/the divine creates, humans respond with disobedience, then God withdraws. The diferent understandings of the causes and sources of human disobedience, however, necessitate diferent responses from God/the divine and from humanity, and ultimately Barth and ATRs ofer contrasting understandings of human destiny. According to Barth, God as Creator is qualitatively other than creation, yet this radical otherness is dramatically bridged by God-in-the-flesh, Jesus Christ. In contrast, within African cosmology, the divine-human connection remains without rupture and there is no need for such dramatic bridging of the diference. Barth’s God withdraws further, then responds more dramatically, entering into life with humanity. The result is that Barth presents a portrait of God participating in human, earthly experience. A Barthian Christian might ask a practitioner of ATRs how God/the divine enters directly and fully into human life. On the other hand, Barth’s doctrine of the incarnation treats human-

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ity almost generically, without attention to par ticular material cultures. A practitioner of ATRs might ask a Barthian Christian how an understanding of the incarnation would be strengthened by more sustained engagement with the particularity of human cultures in story, objects, and rituals, such as ATRs provide. Having said this, Barth and ATRs have a similar emphasis on the universal human condition before God, especially when compared to much of Western thought. The Western colonial mindset involved compartmentalizing and perpetuating the use of numerous dichotomies such as: Christian/pagan, civilized/savage, chosen/rejected, saved/damned, redeemed/guilty, rich/poor, and white/black.55 By contrast, both Barth and ATRs posit a universal understanding of humanity in relation to God; all humanity is treated as one whole, not divided into groups.56 In Barth, all humans are created and given freedom for God, all humans disobey God by misusing their freedom (sin), and all are reconciled with God through the Elect One, Jesus Christ. In ATRs, everyone born into a particular tribe or clan is in relationship with the Supreme Being and will return to the spirit world after death. For discrete ATRs, this understanding applies universally to all in the tribe or clan; for instance, the claims of Akan religion apply to all who are Akan. Though Barth and ATRs ofer broad views of the human condition that avoid destructive dualities, they difer on the extent of their universality. ATRs do not consider the condition of humans who are not of their people group and certainly not of those who are not of African descent. ATRs believe in the ongoing connection of God with all Africans through their understanding of creation and the relationship between human community and individual identity. In this way, ATRs demonstrate one way that they are inclusive, flexible, and open, not dogmatic, traditions. Barth, by contrast, ofers a consideration of all human beings through his doctrine of election. Barth argues that by God’s eternal self-determination, Jesus Christ is both the Electing God and the Elect Human, who receives both God’s gracious election and the just punishment for human sin. As a result, all humanity is in relationship with God through Christ. For Barth, God’s unconditional, unmerited election of all humanity precedes (and anticipates) human disobedience, or sin. Sin, then, for him, is not simply separation from God. Instead, it is the failure of humans to live in correspondence with their election. This doctrine of election might enrich conversation between Barth and ATRs in two ways. As a contrast

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with the anthropology of ATRs, Barth ofers a universal claim about human relation to God that does not observe tribal or national boundaries. In concert with ATRs, and in spite of Barth’s strict distinction between the Creator and the created order, his emphasis on God’s prior electing grace highlights the eternal gracious connection between the divine and humans, rather than separation caused by sin. To return to the opening of this essay and the shared conviction of God’s otherness and divine activity, Opoku ofers an insight from ATRs that just as easily could have come from Barth. Opoku writes, “It is God who saves and not any religious system. . . . Any understanding of God which comes through one religious system must not be confused with the reality of God, for God remains greater than any religious system, or our understanding of him.”57 Barth agrees that “the reversal of revelation and religion” has produced disastrous consequences (I/2, 292). Barth continues later, writing: “The name Jesus Christ creates the Christian religion, and without it it would not exist” (CD I/2 [1956], 346). By the time Barth writes Church Dogmatics IV/3 §69, he operates with a more dynamic understanding of revelation than he had in I/2, §17. In §69, he considers the “matter of reconciliation as revelation” (CD IV/3 [1961], 38) that includes insisting that the mere presence of the name of Christ is treated as a principle that insufficiently captures the story/history of Jesus Christ.58 For both Barth and ATRs, the reality of God and divine activity is primary. Their shared focus on God ofers a reminder of the role that spirituality plays across cultures: for humans to avert their gaze from themselves to focus on others and the divine/God. To return to the African proverbs from the outset of this essay: by “leaving our own house” for learning, this comparative analysis of understandings of the divine and of human cultures in the theologies of Karl Barth and ATRs has revealed generative insights about humanity and destiny in sharper relief than other wise possible. Let us hope that as these “two hands” continue to wash one another, both of them will be made cleaner. Notes 1. Kofi Asare Opoku, ed., Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1975), 19, 34. 2. For more on the invention of the term “ATR” and its transition to “ATRs,” see the impor tant article by Rosalind Shaw, “The Invention of ‘African Traditional Religion’ ” Religion 20 (1990): 339–353. I use the descriptor African traditional religions (ATRs),

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5.

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7. 8. 9.

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not African indigenous religion(s), out of deference to African Christian theologians such as Kwame Bediako, Bénézet Bujo, and John Mbiti who seek to articulate indigenous African understandings of the Christian faith based in their belief that God in Jesus Christ has always been present and active on the African continent and with African peoples. From their point of view, both African (traditional) religious beliefs and rituals as well as African Christianity are indigenous religions of Africa. For representative examples, see Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995); Bénézet Bujo, African Theology in Its Social Context, trans. John O’Donohue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992); and John  S. Mbiti, New Testament Eschatology in an African Background: A Study of the Encounter between New Testament Theology and African Traditional Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Kwesi Dickson, Theology in Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 50. One recent exception is Esther Acolatse, For Freedom or Bondage? A Critique of African Pastoral Practices (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), which engages Barth’s theological anthropology in Church Dogmatics III/2, ed. T. F. Torrance and G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), to construct a Jungian approach to pastoral counseling with Africans. In Church Dogmatics, Barth mentions Africa only twenty times—primarily in reference to European missionaries to Africa, or to Africa as an object of missionary outreach. Barth did not seek to engage African spiritualities or worldviews, nor did he have access to the writings of African Christian theologians who began publishing widely shortly after his death in 1968. Noteworthy African American examples include J. Kameron Car ter, James Cone, Willie James Jennings, and Andrea White. On the South African context, see Charles Villa-Vicencio, ed., On Reading Karl Barth in South Africa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988). Jacob Olupona, African Religions: A Very Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford, 2014), xxiv. Laurenti Magesa, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), 25. Kara Ellis Skora writes, “Studying the current social and ritual manifestations of death and ancestorhood . . .[help] to understand what present-day Asante think regarding the afterlife-as well as what they value in this world” (8). For contemporary research on Asante ritual, see her Last Remembrance in Kumase, Ghana: Retrieving Meaning and Invoking Identity in Asante Life through Death (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2007). Skora updates the classic anthropological work of R.  S. Rattray from the early twentieth century. Kofi Asare Opoku, West African Traditional Religion (Accra: FEP International Private Ltd., 1978), 11. For more on Barth’s understanding of the Holy Spirit, as compared to African understandings of the spiritual universe, see Tim Hartman, “The Promise of an Actualistic Pneumatology: Beginning with the Holy Spirit in African Pentecostalism and Karl Barth,” Modern Theology 33, no. 3 (July 2017): 333–347. Opoku, West African Traditional Religion, 13.

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13. For some African scholars, the very attempt to categorize African rituals, spiritualities, and traditions as “religions,” including the acronym ATRs, is an act of colonialist paternalism. Many African scholars also took exception to the 1910 Missionary Conference in Edinburgh that dismissed ATRs as “superstition” without sufficient sophistication or structure to be categorized as “religions.” See Okot p’Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (Kampala: East African Literature Bureau, 1970), and Ali Mazrui, “Africa and Other Civilizations: Conquest and Counterconquest,” Africa in World Politics, ed. John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 69–91. See also Henk J. van Rinsum, “ ‘They became slaves of their definitions’: Okot p’Bitek (1931–1982) and the European Traditions in the Study of African Religions,” in European Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa, ed. Frieder Ludwig and Afe Adogame (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004), 23–38. 14. Laurenti Magesa, What Is Not Sacred? African Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 3. Magesa also views “African religion as one in its essence.” See Magesa, African Religion, 16. 15. Olupona uses ATRs to refer to the “various indigenous spiritual systems . . .[that] are timeless, beginning with the origin of human civilization on the continent, perhaps as early as 200,000 BCE, when the species Homo sapiens is believed to have emerged.” Jacob Olupona, “African Traditional Religions,” Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices, 2nd ed. (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research, 2014), 1:1. 16. Opoku ofers a helpful gloss on what is meant by “traditional” when he writes: “To call the religion ‘traditional’ is not to refer to it as something of the past; it is only to indicate that it is undergirded by a fundamentally indigenous value system and that it has its own pattern, with its own historical inheritance and tradition from the past. At the same time, African traditional religion is practiced by millions of Africans in our time and it is therefore a contemporary reality which exists objectively and in fact.” Opoku, West African Traditional Religion, 9. 17. The spread of Islam and Christianity has been so complete in many areas of the African continent that few people remain who practice solely traditional religions. ATRs account for only 1.3  percent of world population (around 156 million people) and about 15  percent of Africans living south of the Sahara. See Olupona, “African Traditional Religions,” Worldmark, lxiii, 1. Yet, as Olupona notes elsewhere, the declining numbers are “not to say that people have completely forgotten former gods or have abandoned a sense of the world as being full of numerous spirits.” See Olupona, African Religions, 36. 18. See Terence Ranger’s impor tant article “African Traditional Religion,” in The World’s Religions, ed. Stewart Southerland et al. (London: Routledge, 1988), 106–114. Ranger argues for the historicity and adaptability of African religions, writing, “It seems clear, then, that African religion has a history—or perhaps more accurately that African religions have a history. The problem is to discover how to document and describe that history” (108). In ATRs, writes Olupona, “the emphasis is on the core beliefs— ancestors, deities, divination, and sacred myths—rather than uniform doctrinal teachings. Sacred myths . . . are not static but rather undergo reinterpretation as one generation passes down the oral narratives to the next generation . . . African traditional religions are communally maintained and routinely change in response to people’s lived experiences and needs.” Olupona, African Religions, 5.

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19. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 10. For additional uses of the “infinite qualitative distinction,” see Romans, 330–331, 355, and 356 and Church Dogmatics IV/1 (1956), 364 (as part of his discussion of sin in §60). Barth returned to this imagery when he wrote: “What expressions we used—in part taken over and in part newly invented!—above all, the famous ‘wholly other’ breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above,’ the not less famous ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.” Karl Barth, “The Humanity of God” in The Humanity of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 42. 20. Opoku, West African Traditional Religion, 33. 21. Kofi Asare Opoku, “Cooking on Two Stones of the Hearth? African Spirituality and the Socio-Cultural Transformation of Africa” Journal of African Christian Thought 13, no. 1 (June 2010): 5. 22. Opoku, West African Traditional Religion, 30. 23. Ibid., 23. 24. Ibid., 23–24. A similar account is also told in Olupona, African Religions, 26–27. I use this Akan account as representative of what Dickson describes as: “The concept of God is to be encountered all over Africa, and going with this belief are stories of his having withdrawn away from men: there are widespread stories of how God used to live with human beings in a primal state of peace; he then withdrew, far, far away from the world of humans,” see Dickson, Theology in Africa, 52. For more stories of creation from throughout Africa, see Stephen Belcher, African Myths of Origin (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). 25. Olupona, African Religions, 27. 26. Opoku, West African Traditional Religion, 24. 27. Opoku ofers a similar view for ATRs. He writes that the creation stories “must not be taken literally; they should be understood only symbolically.” Ibid., 25. 28. Barth’s excursus on original sin where he explicitly rejects hereditary sin is in CD IV/1, 499–501. 29. Barth is deeply resistant to all notions of fatalism. As British theologian John Webster writes, “Barth’s anthropology betrays a deep-seated instinct to hold together agency, responsibility, and guilt, and to refuse all forms of fatalism in which sin is viewed as anything other than what we both will and do.” (John Webster, “ ‘The Firmest Grasp of the Real’: Barth on Original Sin,” in Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 67. 30. Dominique Zahan, “Some Reflections on African Spirituality” in African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings and Expressions, ed. Jacob Olupona (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 3. 31. John S. Pobee, Towards an African Theology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1979), 166. 32. However, according to Malcolm McVeigh “although the African has many problems, uncertainty regarding the after-life is not one of them. His belief in the survival of the personality after death is his a priori.” See Malcolm McVeigh, God in Africa: Conceptions of God in African Traditional Religion and Christianity (Cape Cod, MA: Claude Stark, 1974), 153. 33. Pobee, Towards an African Theology, 104.

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34. Ibid., 111. 35. Ibid. 36. Kofi Asare Opoku, “ Toward a Holistic View of Salvation,” in Healing for God’s World, 52. See also S. S. Maimela, “Salvation in African Traditional Religions,” Voices of the Third World 8, no. 4 (December 1985): 1–15. 37. Maimela, “Salvation in African Traditional Religions,” 7. 38. Interestingly, there are also accounts that sinning can be avoided through human effort. See Skora, Last Remembrance in Kumase, Ghana, 99. 39. For an in-depth analysis of Barth’s understanding of sin, see Wolf Krötke, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Philip G Ziegler and Christina-Maria Bammel (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005). See also John Webster, “‘The Firmest Grasp of the Real’: Barth on Original Sin,” in Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 65–76; and Allen Jorgenson, “Karl Barth’s Christological Treatment of Sin,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 4 (2001): 439–462. 40. Paul Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 23. 41. Opoku, West African Traditional Religion, 24. 42. Ibid., 24. 43. Ibid. 44. Kofi Asare Opoku, “Cooking on Two Stones of the Hearth?” 5. 45. Ibid. 46. Pobee, Towards an African Theology, 166. 47. Barth devotes more than three thousand pages in volume IV, “The Doctrine of Reconciliation,” of his Church Dogmatics (which was left unfinished when he died) to explicating his understanding of the role of God in Jesus Christ in the redemption of humanity from sin. 48. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 161. Pobee concurs: “It is generally believed that the dead go on a journey and that death does not end life. This present life is seen as a preparation for the after-life where the dead continue to live after they have completed this life.” Pobee, Towards an African Theology, 137. As one exception to this view, some scholars maintain that the Yoruba have a notion of orun rer (the good heaven) and orun buru (the bad heaven from which no rebirth is possible). See William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 115. 49. Pobee, Towards an African Theology, 139. 50. Ibid. 51. In fact, Opoku writes, “between the world of the living and the world of the dead there is constant traffic.” See Kofi Asare Opoku, “African Traditional Religion: An Enduring Heritage,” in Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John  S. Mbiti, ed. Jacob K. Olupona and Sulayman Nyang (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993), 76. 52. For more on Barth’s use of Geschichte, see Paul Dafydd Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 188–203.

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53. Margit Ernst-Habib, “Chosen by Grace: Reconsidering the Doctrine of Predestination,” in Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 89. 54. Barth would disagree with the principle of universalism because it departs from the actual history of Jesus Christ, and because he does not see sufficient Biblical evidence to prove that all humanity is saved in Christ. For more on Barth and universalism see, Tom Greggs, “ ‘Jesus Is Victor’: Passing the Impasse of Barth on Universalism” Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 2 (May 2007): 196–212; George Hunsinger, “Hellfire and Damnation: Four Ancient and Modern Views,” in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 242–248; and Bruce McCormack, “So That He May Be Merciful to All: Karl Barth and the Problem of Universalism,” in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, ed. Bruce  L. McCormack and Cliford B. Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 227–249. 55. Frantz Fanon described the “delirious Manichaeism” inherent in the entire colonial project as the colonizers and the colonized were thrust into societal roles that have proved deeply damaging for both. See Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 160; and Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 6, 15, 43. 56. Of interest for further study would be a comparison of the complex topic of race or ethnicity in Barth and ATRs. The broad contours of their divergence are captured by two interpreters. The late Ghanaian phi losopher J. B. Danquah writes, “Akan religion, in its highest expression, is the worship of the race.” The Akan Doctrine of God (London: Routledge, 1968), 169. Ernst-Habib thinks with-and-beyond Barth: “Through God’s gracious election in Christ, boundaries are broken up, definitions of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ are fundamentally challenged; the ‘chosen race’ can only mean the ‘ human race.’ ” Ernst-Habib, “Chosen by Grace,” 92. As the spirituality of ATRs focuses on one’s tribe or clan, African Christian theologians have gone to great lengths to demonstrate how Africans can relate to Jesus Christ—a non-African Jew. For example, Kwame Bediako’s ground-breaking essay, “Jesus in African Culture: A Ghanaian Perspective,” first published in 1990, seeks to articulate how Africans can relate to a Savior who is a Palestinian Jew, a figure who is explicitly not of their tribe or clan. To do so, Bediako constructs an ancestor Christology that is distinctive but not unique among African Christian theologians. See Kwame Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel in Africa (Oxford: Regnum, 2000), 20–33. 57. Opoku, “An Enduring Heritage,” 70. 58. Another topic for future research would be a comparison of Barth and ATRs on the role of culture in divine communication. In ATRs, tribal or clan culture is the primary means of communicating about the divine and about what it means to be human. For Barth, the primary means of revelation would be through the Word of God witnessed to in the Bible. God could and does use cultural media to reveal Godself to humanity, but only ad hoc.

Response to Part V Nimi Wariboko

Karl Barth is too important an interlocutor to ignore in African Christian theology. It is thus not surprising that an increasing number of African theologians are turning to him as they construct their theologies and bring them into conversation with some of the leading Western voices in the theological and philosophical academies.1 Those who share this methodological approach to constructing African theology believe that “African theologies need to be within the overall traditions of the church and that theologies emerging from Africa need to be assembled and engaged with the Church universal.”2 However, not every African scholar welcomes this approach; some maintain that African theology should not be subjected to what Western theologians or philosophers say but should focus on African cultural and conceptual categories to interpret what Jesus Christ means to Africans and what it means to be an African Christian. In this vein, Kofi Appiah-Kubi argues, “Our question must not be what Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, or any other Karl has to say, but rather what God would have us do in our living concrete condition. Rather, it is time to answer the critical question of Jesus Christ: ‘Who do you (African Christians) say that I am?’ ”3 Similar tensions apply to the current eforts to bring Barthian theology and theologies of African traditional religions (ATR) into conversation. Both Victor Ezigbo and Tim Hartman in their separate chapters have (somewhat) managed to walk the fine line between the two schools of thought. Indeed, their chapters are theologies on the boundary, finding and locating their thoughts at the meeting point of Barth and ATR without giving undue advantage to either side (I will qualify this remark in the conclusion). But there is something about this liminal place of conversation that should make us pause. This constructed common space of

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interlocution is generated by a comparative method that pays more attention to agreement than to diference. There is an impulse to make sense of Barth’s theology and cultural categories of ATR in terms of translatability (of agreements) and how their paths converge in some underlying unity of conceptualization or practice. Consequently, diferences are downplayed; comparative theology thus shifts away from uniqueness or from clarifying manifest diferences that might produce better engagement between Barth and ATR. All these notwithstanding, the fruits of the interreligious dialogue and comparative theology that Ezigbo’s and Hartman’s chapters have produced hold great promise for constructing an African Christian theology that takes seriously Africans’ rootedness in traditions of ATR.

The Igbo Ọfọ and Barth’s Word of God Ezigbo brings Igbo traditional religion and Barth’s theology into conversation through God’s use of human objects as media to engage worshipers. In his perceptive comparative analysis, Ezigbo situates the Igbo ọfọ as the dynamic equivalent of Barth’s Word of God, especially the Bible as one of its forms. The ọfọ is a religious object that mediates God’s (gods’) action. Though God uses it to accomplish purposes in human societies, as a symbol of divine power and presence, and as a means through which human beings may experience God, it is never equated with the being of God. Ezigbo demonstrates parallels in Barth’s understanding of the religious functions of the written word of God (i.e., the Bible) and the nature and functions of ọfọ in Igbo religion. Barth maintains that though the Bible (a human object) is the word of God, it is not God’s revelation (God’s self-disclosure); it is not to be directly identified with the being of God. Ezigbo’s creativity is to equate the ọfọ and the Bible as both human “objects” that can become mediums of divine action and proceed from this presumed equivalence to provide a comparative analysis of the theology of ATR and Barth’s reformed theology. His eforts are truly commendable, if not for anything else but for focusing on “fragments of social life” in both Christianity and ATR.4 The Dutch anthropologist Peter van der Veer argues that to understand societies scholars must not only engage in cross-cultural approaches but also think about the societies under investigation in terms of fragments or “parts” and not as unified cultural wholes. He calls the specific “parts” or ethnographic contexts “fragments

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of life.” His method is set against the “totalizing” of communities or civilization, the turn to statistical analysis of “big data,” or the emphasis on psychic or cultural universals. The fragments-of-social-life approach enables scholars, he maintains, to gain a perspective on the larger religious life or cultural wholes.5 Civilization or religion is not a system or a unified whole and by concentrating on its fragments the scholar seeks to interpret what the members or adherents “are up to, or think they are up to” without essentializing their faith.6 The creative interpretations of fragments of social life can only gesture to the ways that the members or adherents themselves might think the various fragments or parts would make up the whole. Van der Veer adopts this strategy for cross-cultural comparison in order to avoid constrictive universalizing theoretical frameworks, generalizing about traditions, or universalistic Western claims about civilizations, religions, societies, and so on. Ezigbo gives to his readers some sense of Igbo or Barthian culture’s way of thinking through his analysis of their “fragments of social life,” a way of thinking and responding to the world that is always subject to endless internal debates. In this case, he shows how specific objects of divine mediation (Bible or ọfọ) are connected to other fragments of social life within which they function and circulate in particular religions (theologies) and cultures. But he often tilts toward statements of generalism or underlying unity that he thinks are valid for the two religions or theologies and thus undercuts the value of his eforts and the value of comparison (in the Peter van der Veer’s sense). At this juncture, it is germane to push back on some of Ezigbo’s arguments. Though Ezigbo makes good eforts to isolate Barth’s understanding of the Bible as God’s word from his whole, coherent understanding of the Word of God as a threefold form and as a methodological concept, his delineation is not robust enough to wave of the potential criticism of category mistake. For Barth the Word of God is not merely an object, but a concept, a specific and controlled conceptualization of divine revelation. In making the comparison and equating ọfọ to the Word, Ezigbo is extending Barth’s category to social and historical contexts in which it does not really apply. Ezigbo assumes that we are dealing with the same kind of practices in Igboland and in the West (Christianity). But we are not. For Barth, the Word of God is neither about the physicality and historicality of the written word, nor its immanence, but its transcendent and transcendental condition and conditioning. Its universal and

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comprehending command challenges and penetrates all physicality and historicality. The Word of God cannot be reduced to just one object alongside others; it is the very ground of all words, commands, and revelations. Even the truth of the Bible as a form of the word of God is found outside itself, in the Word of God, God’s self-disclosure. Thus, the Word of God for Barth has the quality of “algorithm”: It is arche-revelation that arranges the historical statements about human encounter with God into the written word of God, the Bible. This is where Ezigbo’s analysis would have benefitted from a method of comparison that accents diference rather than agreement. With this diferent line of thought, one would have started with the ọfọ as an oath, the practice of swearing to God or spirit being in Igbo traditional religion, and then nudged Barthian theology to meet for comparative analysis on this terrain, the act of swearing to God. Particularly, presenting Barth’s God as one who takes the Bible as an oath.7 For example, Psalm 138:2 says, “For You have magnified Your word above all your name.” God swears, makes an oath by God’s name, which is itself God’s self-disclosure (Gen. 22:16, Luke 1:73, Heb. 6:13). Understanding oath in this way shows that there is no distance between God’s activities in the world (swearing) and the name (of) God. The name of God is the event, the act of oath, and the event or act is the name of God.8 The event of swearing came to name God as the very act that divinizes both the act and the event of God’s self-disclosure. The point that we should not miss in all this is that the very act of God swearing by God or God’s word is that for God there is no split between being and word, no rift between words and deeds, no gap between language and life. This is, precisely, the point also made by ọfọ. The ọfọ as both oath and performative word is about statements and the truth of historical statements. In doing this (the practice of) ọfọ aspires to collapse the distance between words and deeds, between words and things of human beings. Its practitioners hope to indissolubly link words and deeds, to caulk the split between words and deeds. God as the speaking subject in Psalm 138:2 or Hebrews 6:13 is concerned about the oath nature of God’s word, so God attempts to tie himself to the veritative power of speech. In this way, God is aware of the split in language and deed that also trouble the Igbos and all peoples, and thus willing in God’s own way to tie language to life: God is the oath and God is the act of speaking, utterance. God swears (using words, God’s word) by God’s name and thus God is the act of oath and God is invoked because God has made Godself the oath.

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What Ezigbo’s brilliant chapter reveals, but which he seems to have missed, is the ethical relation between speaker and his or her word, subject and truth. For Igbo ethics, ọfọ appears to be the name of every statement that cannot be uttered or taken in vain. Ọfọ is the name or “God” (“god”) that the Igbo hope will make speech to reliably track performance or things. While the theology of Igbo traditional religion aims to directly establish correspondence between the speaker and her or his words, Barth attempts to establish this ethical relation between his subject (God) and truth, speaker and speaker’s word through three forms of revelation, with the written word of God and the preached word of God occupying relatively weaker positions compared to the revealed word of God, Jesus Christ. There may not be much diference, after all, between the Igbo subject and Barth’s God. They both face the same dilemma. The moment a person speaks, he or she is implicated in the truth of what he or she is saying. To solve this problem, Igbo resorts to the ọfọ and Barth delimits the direct correspondence of human artifact (Bible) and God, or Barth’s God swears an oath.

Divine-Human Relationship: Africa and Barth Tim Hartman passionately defends a critically informed method of comparing Barth’s theology and ATR’s theology. He is efective in debunking Western theological presupposition that treats Barth’s theology as rational and transcendental and ATR theology as merely “religious” (in the peculiar Barthian sense of this term) and immanent. This capacity stems from his serious engagement with divine-human relationship in both theologies. Through studying three dimensions of this relationship (creation, sin/disobedience, and salvation/destiny), he highlights the ways Barth’s theology and ATR’s theology are similar—and he sometimes points the reader to their diferences, which, unfortunately, he generally marginalizes. While Hartman shows a superior ability of studying key dimensions of divine-human relationship in both theologies in order to accent their similarities, his method is unable to translate diferences between the two theologies. But we are getting ahead of our story. We launched into a response to Hartman’s essay without first restating the key points of his arguments. The work of his chapter, as he defines it, is to compare the categories of creation, disobedience, and salvation in the two theologies. The chapter

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is driven by the notion of a wholly other God; and the utter distance between human beings and God is refracted through the lens of the infinite gaps between Creator and creature, divine holiness and human sinfulness, and salvation and separation. While he states that for Barth the divine-human relationship is a story (history, Geschichte) of God’s pursuit of humanity, he is not very clear about what it means for ATR, except, perhaps, in the Barthian sense of human eforts to appropriate God’s presence as in the African myth of a community stacking up mortars upon mortars to reach God. Hartman’s way of making the comparison begs a turn to Paul Tillich’s argument about two ways of approaching God and the two types of theology that ensue from them. Tillich explains: One can distinguish two ways of approaching God: the way of overcoming estrangement and the way of meeting a stranger. In the first way man discovers himself when he discovers God; he discovers something from which he is estranged, but from which he never has been and never can be separated. In the second way, man meets a stranger when he meets God. The meeting is accidental. Essentially they do not belong to each other.9

Barth sets up the divine-human relationship as the meeting of strangers, but for ATR it is a story (and yes, also Geschichte) about overcoming estrangement from the God who was so near that the pestle of an old woman pounding cooked yam could hit God (or God’s abode). While Tillich’s philosophy of religion provides us with a diferent way of comparing theologies of Barth and ATR, it does not in my mind adequately capture how ATR views the divine-human relationship. The divine-human relationship is not considered as a binary opposition between overcoming estrangement or the meeting of strangers, but about intensities of participation in divine presence at various sites, moments, and events insofar as all forms of existence always already participate in the divine presence. Moments or places of heightened, diferential intense participation becomes the manifest presence of God’s Spirit. Divine-human relationship is akin to a force field of intensities of participation in God’s (or common spiritual) presence; it names faces, forms, and degrees of relatedness. Thus, one is hard pressed to accept Hartman’s characterization of God in ATR as Wholly Other, and transcendence is not the starting point for understanding the divine-human relationship in ATR. If only Hartman had paid more attention to the notion of spirit in ATR and tried to bring such notion into conversation with Barth’s theology

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of the Spirit, which does not see continuity between God’s Spirit and the spirit of human beings, he would have characterized his analysis of the divine-human relationship in both theologies diferently. In ATR the Spirit of God is present in human beings and is immanent in human experience and thus the human being is not at variance with the Creator, and he or she is self-transcendently oriented toward God’s Spirit. In fact, there are many specific theologies of ATR that do not harbor the notion of ontological distinction between God and human beings as Hartman claims.10 Thus, applying the notion of Wholly Other to notion of God in ATR is not a solidly defensible position.11 His problematic characterization would have been avoided if he had used pneumatology as the starting point for his comparative engagement of theologies of Barth and ATR. In spite of my disagreement with the nuances of Hartman’s arguments, I dof my hat for his very thoughtful essay.

Conclusion The key problem I see with Ezigbo’s and Hartman’s chapters is that in their eforts to compare Barth’s theology to that of ATR, compare textbased discourse to fragments of social life, they treat social life as “social text.” While Barth’s theology might be a closed text, the social life of the practitioners of ATR is not a closed text. Comparative theologians, to borrow the words of Peter van der Veer, need “to steer clear of a universalizing approach that first defined” some kind of “sin” or “ human object” that mediates divine action and then study it comparatively across religions and theologies.12 There is another problem, that which often bedevils pioneering projects that extend the thought of a major thinker to new, or hitherto neglected, subject matters. They have fallouts. Their type of fallout is like the background radiation of the Big Bang that lingers and insinuates itself into all dimensions of space. The extension of Barth’s thought to interreligious dialogue and comparative theology—some kind of intellectual Big Bang—emits similar fallout. What lingers in the background or deep structure of the two chapters is the conceptualization of the social life or theology of ATR adherents that presumes the universality of Barthian understanding or categories. These criticisms should not be construed to take away something substantial from the fine quality of Ezigbo’s and Hartman’s chapters. Their scholarships have demonstrated that any rigorous application of Barth’s

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thought to interreligious dialogue or comparative theology must be a multidirectional, thickly descriptive engagement. More important, they have shown that when the great Barth confronts ATR, all that is solid in the theologies of ATR does not melt into air or spontaneously combust into flames (pardon the allusion to another Karl, namely Marx, here). This includes concepts of God, creation, destiny, and human artifacts that mediate divine human encounters, and the encompassing divine-human relationship. Indeed, Ezigbo and Hartman wasted neither Barth nor ATR in their most welcome additions to African theology. Notes 1. See, for instance, Esther Acolatse, For Freedom or Bondage? A Critique of African Pastoral Practices (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014); Charles Sarpong Aye-Addo, Akan Christology: An Analysis of the Christologies of John Samuel Pobee and Kwame Bediako in Conversation with Karl Barth (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013). 2. John S. Mbiti, Bible and Theology in African Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 15. This methodological approach involves a critical engagement with Western scholars even as African theologians pivot their thought around African cultural categories. 3. In Kofi Appiah-Kubi and Sergio Torres, eds., African Theology en Route (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), viii. 4. For a discussion of how fragments of social life function in comparative study, see Peter van der Veer, The Value of Comparison (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 5. Ibid., 1–47. 6. Cliford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 15. 7. Indeed, ọfọ best compares with the Bible as an object of oath-taking in African Christianity or God’s word as oath of God. 8. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 46. 9. Paul Tillich, “Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 10. 10. See Nimi Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008), 35–93. 11. Hartman assumes African traditional religions (ATR) as unified cultural wholes, taking the viewpoint of Kofi Asare Opoku not only as an exemplar of ATR but indeed ATR itself. He thus goes from sketching particulars in one cultural context to painting a picture of ATR as a unified cultural whole. 12. Peter van der Veer, “In Defense of Fragment,” http:// blogs.ssrc .org /tif /2014 /05/14 /in -defense-of-the-fragment, para. 2, line 10.

Conclusion: Barth’s Dreams R E L I G I O N S A S S C A N D A L A N D PA R A B L E S. Mark Heim

Thomas Merton is a patron saint of comparative theology avant la lettre, while Karl Barth is often viewed more as its bête noire. It is curious, then, that as Merton’s path took him ever deeper into the experience of other religious traditions, his engagement with Barth’s theology expanded as well. This is documented in the journal entries published as Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.1 Indeed, in his notes, Merton referred to that book as “Barth’s Dream.” He refers to Barth’s account of a dream about his beloved Mozart, in which Barth was tasked with examining the composer on theology. Before all questions, Mozart stood silent.2 Merton saw in this dream Barth’s own implicit recognition that he owed his salvation to the natural grace of a “divine child” like Mozart more than to the theological weight of revelation. Merton concluded, “Fear not Karl Barth! Trust in the divine mercy! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation.”3 These comments stem from Merton’s early encounter with early Barth, and their teasing tone presumes a rather flat stereotype of natural theology versus revelation. But, as Rowan Williams has noted, in later journal entries Merton moved steadily to a deeper appreciation of Barth, in parallel with his growing knowledge and appreciation of Zen Buddhism.4 Years later, in June 1967, he wrote, “As for theology, I confess that I have become more and more suspicious of it in its contemporary form. After Barth.”5 He follows this up with a brief passage that summarizes what he found in Barth that resonated so powerfully with his Buddhist exploration. “The great joke is this: having a self that is to be taken seriously, that is to be proved, free, right, logical, consistent, beautiful, successful and in a word ‘not absurd.’ ”6 Merton is deeply moved by Barth’s recognition that “the self before God is not serious, it is groundless. It is not something that exists in its own density and solidity: the self before God

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is poised on the divine word, the divine communication over an unfathomable abyss.”7 Barth’s profound sense of divine freedom and gratuitous election in Christ fosters a frank acceptance of the emptiness and insubstantiality of any projected self. It is not only “religion” that Barth readily dispels, but also the presumed selves that pose the problems our constructed religions are to solve. In fact, the two go together. My primary theological mentor was an Australian Baptist named George Peck, from whom I received my earliest appreciative instruction in both Barth’s theology and in Hinduism. I knew just enough to be aware that this was thought an unusual combination. He had been a missionary in India before coming to Harvard for doctoral work in the late 1960s. The theological context was still Barth’s context. Secular thought, atheistic Marxism and cultural Christendom were the reference points and social justice (antiwar, civil rights, feminism, antipoverty) was the testing ground. But from Peck I caught a fascination and respect for Hinduism that would later take me to India. From him and other missionary-scholars like John Carman, I learned to suspect what direct dialogue and experience confirmed: The religions remained both profound challenges and profound treasures that secularism would not sweep away. Unlike Merton, who had gravitated toward Barth as a Catholic, across the ostensible hostility between their traditions, Peck had come from a conservative Baptist background, and gravitated to Barth over the suspicious objections of conservative evangelicals. His love for Barth grew alongside his firsthand appreciation for Hinduism. He found in Barth a theological prescription for whole-hearted Christian commitment and an exuberantly open mind to other faiths. One offhand but vivid sentence summed up his view: “Because I am committed to Christ, I am open to other religions.” I have spent a good deal of my career trying to unpack that sentence. The experience of these two quite diferent but interreligiously engaged thinkers signal to us that though Barth’s theology is not programmed for interreligious engagement, it may be extremely fruitful in it.8 This volume goes far to correct the assumption that Barth’s only value for comparative theology is as a bad example. It is not possible in this space to address specifics in these essays, but only to ofer some general observations. Theology done across religious traditions cannot escape grappling with the notion of “religion” itself, as much recent scholarship attests.9 So long as that category seems problematic, Barth will be rele-

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vant. Every religious form of life resists condensation into an item in a generic set. It is not a stretch to see a Barthian solidarity with other religions where each resists the same reduction that Barth saw implicit in accepting modern views of religion as the basis for theology, including theologies of religion.10 “Pluralist” theologies of religion famously downplay the varied historical particularities of various traditions as conditioned cultural forms of receptivity to a common reality and experience. This is largely congruent with the similar judgement that Barth makes on “religion” as forms of human striving. The diference arises when such theologies rationally triangulate the nature of the unknown real on the assumption that these forms are equally good or bad guides to its nature and requirements. Barth insists we must take the unknowability of the divine more seriously. It is a silence or emptiness that can only be broken from the divine side, in an act of particularity that must be received and characterized particularly. The great polemic of the early Barth is against those who in some way want to go back on this realized gap between our cultural forms and divine reality. If nothing else, this makes Barth an important source for comparative theology, an object of comparison. Francis Clooney testifies to Barth’s importance as a Christian interpreter with the weight and sophistication to place alongside great figures in other traditions who advance similarly “fierce” particularities of revelation or scripture, like the Hindu sage Sankara.11 Comparative learning would be impoverished were there no Christian interlocutors to bring to the table around such issues.12 Barth’s sharp concern for the uniqueness of Christian identity makes him an important if somewhat ironic partner of those with similar concerns in their own traditions. If we sincerely hope to include such perspectives from other religions in our circle of learning, we need to understand the richest forms they take in our own. There is little to be gained by trimming Barth to fit a supposed comparative theology mode. The challenge is to extend the community of comparative conversation to include those with the most distinctive affirmations of their own traditions.13 Barth does not rest Christianity’s value on its incrementally superior cultural achievements, or its unique qualities of religious experience or even the wisdom of its theological teachings, but simply on God’s gracious ofering in Christ.14 Precisely for this reason, he has no hesitation in recognizing that those outside the church can see and accomplish things those inside do not. Barth is confident that the thing that by all

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accounts (from those inside or outside) makes Christians diferent—the confession of Christ as God’s good and definitive word to humanity—is also entirely sufficient to provide the ground for Christian faith amid its alternatives.15 This meant that he was free to discover that secular persons (and, I would suggest—to an extent largely undeveloped in his own thinking—those in other religious traditions) excel Christians and the church on any of these particular fronts, including at points of theological understanding. The appropriate response to this is both grateful learning from the other and enhanced humility in one’s faith. Here, like many writers in this volume, I am moving into speculation about what it might mean to engage religions in Barth’s spirit, as opposed to limiting ourselves to his actual example. I believe that the thinness of Barth’s concrete treatment of religions stems from the key fact that he did not regard them as contextual threats or crucial challenges on a par with neo-Protestant cultural Christianity or atheistic rationalism. He saw those challenges as urgent because they sapped Christian vitality at the European crisis moment of confrontation with ideologies of nation, race, and class. Ironically, if he had seen the religions more negatively in this respect, the evidence suggests that he would have developed a much more attentive interaction with them. It was not just that Barth did not know much about the historical and intellectual texture of these religious traditions. He did not see them as contextual parties to his crisis moment.16 There is no religious other who figures for him as philosophical others such as Hegel or Nietzsche or Overbeck did, or theological others—supremely Schleiermacher—or even the cultural other such as Mozart. In all these cases, it is precisely the passionate imperative Barth felt to clarify the right Christian path that led him to an equally passionate and intellectually sympathetic engagement with the critical alternatives. In all these cases, his famously dialectical frame of thought produces a distinct “yes” in tandem with his firm “no.” The lack of a burning reason to say “no” to the religions deprived us of a fuller picture of what that filled-out “yes” might have been. I was drawn to Barth upon first acquaintance less by the energy of his polemic than the ebullience of his respect for and delight in those who did not share his views. Take for instance these words from an essay on Schleiermacher: “Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendor this figure radiated and still does—I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it—may honorably pass on to other and possibly better ways. . . . Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a

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position to love again and again, may not hate here.”17 Whether it was Schleiermacher, a fellow theologian, or Nietz sche, whose antipathy to Christianity could hardly be greater, Barth’s objections typically came hand in hand with a vividly formulated statement of what was unsurpassingly right about the other’s perspective. A serious discussion could only proceed with a radical appreciation for the truth in Nietzsche’s vision, for instance, and a forthright engagement with its critical application to Christian thought. This was not a narrowly intellectual matter. Barth often expressed not just respect but a species of personal gratitude for these others, a sense of providential rightness that they were exactly as they were and should be, in their own integrity. It was through their very otherness that there was a word to be heard, a word of human greatness or a word of divine illumination. The fierce gravity of Barth’s theological argument pairs oddly with this equanimity about the integrity and personal worth of his opponents, a dialectic whose most acute theological expression may be the incipient universalism that is so much debated among his interpreters.18 It is this Barthian spirit, thoroughly grounded in the substance of his thought, that we can imagine turning with full energy toward the religions. We can link it with a second Barth dream, shared with several of his friends and mentioned in one of his last writings.19 In it, he imagined a coming “theology of the third article” as complement to his Christological theology. After all, he asked, isn’t the God “confessed by his people through the revelation of his covenant and who is to be proclaimed as such in the world” also Holy Spirit—the “God who in his own freedom, power and love makes himself present and applies himself?”20 Just as his Church Dogmatics moves in grand dialectical oscillation (a torrent of pages on Jesus the Lord as servant succeeded by the same torrent on Jesus the servant as Lord), he now imagined his entire thought as part of a similar dialectic. Thus—if I may ofer a possible extension of his idea— the first act of Barth’s insistence on God’s free choice and promise to be present to us in Christ (coupled with recognition that the Christian religion deserves no presumption of that presence) could be balanced by a second act that affirmed God’s freedom to be present and active without restriction (coupled with specific recognition that the religions are theaters for that freedom).21 In his address at Mozart’s bicentennial celebration, Barth noted the perplexity of some at this evangelical theologian who began each day looking for inspiration to Mozart the Catholic and Freemason. He ofered

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only “the general reminder that the New Testament speaks not only of the kingdom of heaven, but also of parables of the kingdom of heaven.”22 Parables are stories, whose significance begins with the par ticular story that they are. They do not express a wider significance by being translated into a moral or a conclusion that could have been stated to begin with apart from them. In that sense, it is crucial that they not be turned to something other than what they are. It would be wholly in keeping with Barth’s approach to his theological and antitheological interlocutors to extend that same sense of delight and apprenticeship to the religions. For Christians, the kingdom of heaven cannot be other wise than as it is made known in Jesus Christ. Barth will resist at every step moving from this statement to the apparently closely neighboring one that Jesus Christ is an instance of the kingdom of heaven, known on some other grounds. Christians are those who believe themselves party to a covenant in which God will be faithfully present with them in Christ. But they live that real ity in the midst of two great dialectical movements. In one movement, the parables of Christian scripture and religion become the occasion of life-giving revelation alongside the scandal of religion in general with its many conditioned faces (including the Christian one). In another movement, the religions are parables which are occasions for God to be freely present and active, alongside the scandal of a Christian religion that is empty when leaned upon as a source of superiority, control, or defense against the false religion of others. This is a paradoxical position from which to practice comparative theology. From Barth’s perspective, it has the virtue of being exactly the same position in which all theology is done, and it situates the comparative task in the work of theology proper. If Barth purposely lived his intellectual vocation primarily through the first movement, many of us influenced by him may be called to live primarily through the second. And if my understanding of Barth’s dream is at all accurate, this book is a major step toward fulfilling his hope. Notes 1. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). 2. Karl Barth and Clarence K. Pott, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 20. 3. Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 4.

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4. Rowan Williams, “Not Being Serious: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth,” http:// rowanwilliams . archbishopofcanterbury.org /articles .php /1205 /not - being - serious -thomas-merton-and-karl-barth. Merton and Barth died on the same day in 1968. 5. Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 247–248. In context, Merton clearly intends the “After Barth” to indicate that his suspicions agree with those of Barth. 6. Quoted in Williams, “Not Being Serious: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth.” 7. Ibid. This is Williams’s summary statement of Merton’s text. 8. The thoughtful essays by James Farwell and Lai Pan-Chiu in this volume expand the possibilities for this engagement of Barth’s thought with Buddhism, possibilities Merton already experienced. 9. See, for instance, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). See also John Thatamanil, “Comparative Theology after ‘Religion,’ ” in Planetary Loves, ed. Stephen  D. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); “How Not to Be a Religion: Genealogy, Identity, Wonder,” in Common Goods: Economy, Ecology and Political Theology, ed. Johnson-DeBaufre, Catherine Keller, and Elias Ortega-Aponte (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 10. This is the argument Garrett Green advances for Barth’s relevance to theologies of religion. See his introduction in Karl Barth and Garrett Green, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 11. See the foreword to this volume in reference to his book Hindu God, Christian God. See also the “Response to Part I” in regard to Barth’s par ticu lar relevance for scripture-based comparative discussion. 12. Chapter 5 is an excellent example of that dynamic. 13. At the least, this requires rejecting a law of inverse proportion between the vitality of comparative theology and the quantity of confessional commitment in its participants. It does not at all preclude debate over which ways of formulating that commitment may prove most productive for interreligious learning. 14. See Barth and Green, On Religion, 87. 15. And supplementing it may heighten interreligious conflict as readily as dispelling it. It is this vein of thought in Barth—the constancy of focus on Christian identity as rooted in relation with God in Christ—that informed the theology of religious pluralism I developed in S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). Just as the value of Christian faith is not based on a list of goods separate from Christ or for which God’s action in Christ is only a dispensable instrument, so salvation is not a package of goods denied to those without the Jesus password. Salvation is the good of that relation itself, without denigration or denial of the self-described goods of other fulfillments, whose realities demand Christian theological understanding. 16. An arguably major exception here is Judaism. It is in line with my opening examples to point out that one of Barth’s students, Paul van Buren, developed a notable theology of “the Jewish-Christian Reality” well in advance of the contemporary comparative theology movement and built on major Barthian themes in doing so. See Paul Matthews Van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish- Christian Reality (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995).

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17. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background & History (London: S.C.M. Press, 1972), 427. 18. Referenced, for instance, in Chapter 4. 19. This was an afterward to a collection of Schleiermacher’s writings. See “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher,” in Karl Barth and Dietrich Ritschl, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982). 20. Ibid., 278. 21. It will be noted that Barth is loath to credit other religions as constant structures of spiritual truth, but he is equally resistant as regards Christianity. In this respect, he can easily make common cause with the skepticism about “religions” as homogenous entities or structures. 22. Barth and Pott, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 57.

ACK NOW L E­ DGMEN T S

This project emerged from lively conversations between the two of us at the Comparative Theology seminars of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in the summers of 2012 and 2013. We are deeply grateful to the Luce Foundation for funding these seminars, to the AAR for sponsoring them, and to John Thatamanil for his organization and mischievous leadership. Thanks too are due to the faculty of those seminars who led us in such fruitful discussion, many of whom contributed to this volume: Frank Clooney, Mark Heim, Anant Rambachan, Najeeba Sayeed-Miller, and Devorah Schoenfeld. In addition, we are grateful to all the participants in the seminars, who supported and challenged us as we dreamed: Kim Connor, John Dadosky, Jeanine Diller, Kathleen Fisher, Todd Green, Adam Gregerman, Melanie Harris, Trina Jones, Marianne Moyaert, Elaine Padilla, Stephanie Phillips, Marc Pugliese, Shelly Rambo, Ria van Ryn, Mary Veeneman, and Beatrice Wallins. Our first conversations with Fordham University Press were with editor Helen Tartar, whose early support of the project made its publication possible. We are grateful that she agreed to accept the project even before the essays were written, and we join many others in grieving that she died too soon. Through the editorial process itself, we benefited from the support of Richard Morrison and John Garza, who brought the volume through multiple revisions to its final form. Neither of us could have done this work without the support of our academic institutions. Martha especially thanks Columbia Theological Seminary for sabbaticals in spring 2013 and fall 2017, which bookended this work. Christian especially thanks Bethel University and the Alumni Associate for funding for travel related to the project in 2014,

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Acknowledgments

and for providing a forum where I was able to present an outline of the project to my faculty colleagues in 2016. Finally, of course, we owe debts of gratitude to our families for putting up with our unlikely preoccupation with Barth and comparative theology for so long. Chris, Miriam, and Fiona Moore-Keish and Julie, Jonah, and Elijah, we thank you for your patience and good humor. We would also like to thank Abbey Kisner for providing editorial assistance as the project was being completed.

CON T RIBU T OR S

chris boesel is associate professor of Christian theology at Drew

Theological School in New Jersey. His work focuses on Kierkegaardian and Barthian approaches to confessional Christian faith and its relation to progressive ethical commitments to social justice in dialogue with liberation theologies and postmodern philosophies. He is the author of Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith, Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham. francis  x. clooney, s.j., is the Parkman Professor of Divinity and

professor of comparative theology at Harvard Divinity School. He directed the Center for the Study of World Religions from 2010 to 2017. Christian T. Collins Winn is associate professor of theology and

chair of the theology department at the Global Center for Advanced Studies College Dublin. His publications include “Jesus Is Victor!” The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth and several articles, chapters, and edited collections exploring the theologies of Christoph Blumhardt and Karl Barth, the theopolitical meaning of the kingdom of God, and the relevance of pietism for contemporary theology. victor ifeanyi ezigbo is professor of contextual theology and world

Christianity at Bethel University. He is the author of Re-Imagining African Christologies and Introducing Christian Theologies: Voices from Global Christian Communities. james farwell is an Episcopal priest who teaches liturgical and sacra-

mental theology, comparative theology, and the theology of religions at

268 Contributors

Virginia Theological Seminary. His research and writing focus on Holy Week, the Eucharistic prayer, and issues in Buddhist-Christian engagement and practice. tim hartman is assistant professor of theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. He holds a PhD in theology, ethics, and culture from the University of Virginia and is currently completing a manuscript that constructively engages Karl Barth and Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako. s. mark heim is the Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. His books include Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, and Crucified Wisdom: Christ and the Bodhisattva in Theological Reflection. paul knitter is the Emeritus Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World

Religions, and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, New York, as well as emeritus professor of theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. His long theological career has been devoted to promoting interreligious dialogue and a Christian theology that would support such dialogue. pan- chiu lai is associate dean of arts and professor of religious studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research areas include Chinese Christian theology, interreligious dialogue, systematic theology, and environmental ethics. martha L. moore- keish is the J.  B. Green Professor of Theology at

Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology and Christian Prayer for Today and has been engaged in ecumenical and interreligious theological reflection from a Reformed Protestant perspective. peter ochs is Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at

the University of Virginia. His most recent books are Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews and The Free Church and Israel’s Covenant.

Contributors

269

marc  a. pugliese is associate professor of theology at Saint Leo Uni-

versity, where he teaches primarily in the graduate theology program. His research areas include philosophical theology, doctrine of God and Trinity, science and religion, and comparative theology. joshua ralston is lecturer in Muslim-Christian relations at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, and the cofounder and director of the Christian-Muslim Studies Network, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. anantanand rambachan is professor of religion at Saint Olaf Col-

lege, Northfield, Minnesota. His most recent book is A Hindu Theology of Liberation. randi rashkover is associate professor of religious studies at George

Mason University. She is the author of Freedom and Law: A JewishChristian Apologetics and Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise. kurt anders richardson is associate professor of Abrahamic studies

at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics. One of the founders of Society for Scriptural Reasoning and Comparative Theology study groups in the American Academy of Religion, Richardson’s research focus is in the comparative theology of the Abrahamic traditions with a forthcoming volume in comparative messianism. john  n. sheveland is professor of religious studies at Gonzaga Uni-

versity. He is the author of Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika and a number of articles on various themes in comparative and interreligious theology. mun’im sirry is assistant professor of theology at the University of

Notre Dame in Indiana. He is the author of Scriptural Polemics: The Qur’an and Other Religions.

nimi wariboko is Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Bos-

ton University and the author of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Comparative Theology

Thinking Across Traditions

series editors Loye Ashton and John Thatamanil Hyo-Dong Lee, Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude: A Comparative Theology for the Democracy of Creation Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion Michelle Voss Roberts (ed.), Comparing Faithfully: Insights for Systematic Theological Reflection F. Dominic Longo, Spiritual Grammar: Genre and the Saintly Subject in Islam and Christianity Francis X. Clooney and Klaus von Stosch (eds.), How to Do Comparative Theology S. Mark Heim, Crucified Wisdom: Theological Reflection on Christ and the Bodhisattva Martha L. Moore-Keish and Christian T. Collins Winn (eds.), Karl Barth and Comparative Theology