The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality [1 ed.] 0198753128, 9780198753124

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The Ordering of the Christian Mind Karl Barth and Theological Rationality

MARTIN WESTERHOLM

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Martin Westerholm 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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To my parents, whose lives make the ordering of divine peace appear attractive: ‘And let our ordered lives confess / the beauty of thy peace.

I could hardly hold it against the wider academy if it did not greet the appearance of another book on Barth’s theology with trumpets and cham­ pagne. We are well past the point at which the emergence of monographs on Barth could be compared to a steady stream; reference to anything less than a torrent would hardly do justice to the scholarly struggle that is required simply to keep a head above water. It is easy to imagine the harried theologian who is less than pleased to find one more book about Barth to read; it is easy, too, to imagine the baffled practitioner of some other discipline who cannot under­ stand theologians’ unending fascination with the work of past figures like Barth. Why do theologians invest so much labour in understanding past work? Why do they seem incapable of taking a single step forwards without retracing dozens of steps that have been taken by others? I have suggested elsewhere that the answer to these questions may have something to do with the way that theology requires its practitioners to familiarize themselves not only with the material content of Christian teach­ ing, but also the habits of mind that allow this teaching to retain its proper shape.1 As Barth will seek to teach us at some length over the course of this study, theological affirmations are in continual danger of being deformed and inverted as a result of the forms of thought within which they are embedded. It is all too easy for an affirmation of God’s difference from creation or of the justification of the sinner through grace alone to be inverted by ways of thinking about God’s being and activity that flatten out the difference between the divine and the creaturely. This danger means that theological work requires schooling in and conditioning by habits of thought that permit these affirmations to retain their proper shape; study of the work of the past is formative for contemporary work in part because these habits of thought may fruitfully be learned by attending to the ways that others have proceeded. This study amounts to an attempt to reconstruct the patterns of thought that one of the greats of the theological tradition deploys in an effort to allow Christian teaching to retain its proper shape. It should be conceded, however, that Barth is, for many, an unlikely source of instruction in this sphere. Barth inherited a tradition that he took to be functionally Pelagian because, whatever it said within the narrow bounds of its theology of justification (and it is instructive to be reminded that, within this sphere, it is usually to be found saying all the right things), its forms of thought suggested that human beings 1 See Martin Westerholm, ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 17.3 (2015), 249-51.

viii

Preface

are able to move towards God on the basis of resources that they themselves possess; a hasty but still influential reading of Barth suggests that he counters this tradition with so totalizing an account of divine activity as the strict basis of the knowledge of God that no room is left for an account of theological habits of thought to develop. The most common criticism of Barth’s work is that it is grounded in an unsustainable conception of theological reasoning. In opposition to this notion, I aim to show that Barth works through a sophis­ ticated account of the movements of thought within which God may appear as God, grace may appear as grace, and creaturely thought may fulfil its proper end in positioning human knowers to acknowledge truth. This study aims, in brief, to present the account of Christian thought that Barth develops in the hope that it will facilitate fresh consideration and appreciation of his work. Much else will be said about the aims and procedures of this study in the Introduction. At present, a few words of thanks are in order, the necessary brevity of which leaves them rather embarrassingly incommensurate with the scale of the debts that they acknowledge. This work began as a doctoral dissertation completed under the supervision of John Webster at the Univer­ sity of Aberdeen; considerable gratitude for overseeing this project is due first to him. That a finer supervisor—more generous with his time, perceptive in his comments, and patient with the fits and starts of a doctoral project—might be found is inconceivable to me, and John has remained a reliable source of support and mature Christian intelligence in the time since the completion of my dissertation. Further thanks are due to others who contributed to my original disserta­ tion. I, along with a host of others, was a beneficiary of a wonderfully cooperative community in Aberdeen; thanks are owed to Don Wood, Phil Ziegler, Brian Brock, and Tom Greggs, who consistently made the fostering of a supportive research environment a priority in their work. That there is enough of the hermit in me that much of this study was penned in the seclusion of my home office does not mean that I did not benefit in myriad ways from the theological community at Aberdeen. Thanks are due, too, to Paul Nimmo, a new arrival in Aberdeen just as I was departing, and to Karen Kilby, who graciously examined this work and who have proven to be unfail­ ingly supportive in a host of ways since. Both the dissertation and monograph versions of this project were com­ pleted in feverish periods of activity after I had taken up a teaching position at the University of St Andrews. Initial completion of the dissertation was possible because Mark Elliot graciously covered the first several weeks of a graduate seminar that I was to teach; Mark has since been an enormously supportive Head of School, allowing me, for instance, to arrange a day conference on Barth’s exegesis that I trust was of enough benefit to others to qualify as more than a personal indulgence. That a conference of this kind could be organized around intellectual resources in both systematic theology

Preface

ix

and biblical studies that are present at St Andrews itself testifies to the depth and breadth of the theological talent there, and to the generosity of the faculty in giving of their time and energy. Thanks are due, finally, to family, to my wife Jenna, whose enthusiastic embrace of a move to Scotland and graceful patience with the unpredictabil­ ities of academic life testify to the extraordinary gift that she is to me; to little Evie, whose mere existence is the source of a delight that is the decisive refutation of any notion that I would have been happy as a hermit; to my in-laws, who are embarrassingly generous with us and whose willingness to pay regular visits to Scotland eased some of the regret of being away from home; and to my parents, whose lives are the basis of the force that the logic of this study has for me. This study trades on the supposition that there is something compelling about a life ordered in correspondence to a vision of divine peace. This supposition carries weight for me in part because of the way that it shaped a sanctifying form of life in the home in which I was raised. It is an honour to be able to dedicate this study to my parents.

Contents xiii

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 1 10

Aims Procedure

1. Theological Reasoning Reconsidered: Karl Barth and the Question of Well-ordered Christian Thought 20 1.1. 1.2. 1.3.

Introduction The Question of the Ordering of Thought The Elements of the Ordering of Thought

20 23

41

Part I: Paul, Faith, and the Question of the Ordering of Christian Thought 2. Paul and the Problem of the Ordering of Thought 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4.

Introduction The ‘Metaphysics of the Bible’ Sin and the Problem of Disordered Thought Conclusion

3. Resurrection and the Ordering of Christian Thought 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4.

Introduction Barth’s Earlier Theology of the Resurrection Resurrection and the Ordering of Christian Thought Conclusion

63 63 67 73 85

87 87

90 115

134

Part II: Anselm, Understanding, and the Question of the Ordering of Christian Thought 4. The Question of the Ordering of Thought between Paul and Anselm Introduction The Integrity of Faith and the Ordering of Thought The Ordering of Thought in Barth’s Dogmatics during the 1920s 4.4. The Question of Faith Seeking Understanding 4.5. Conclusion 4.1. 4.2. 4.3.

139 139 142 156 172 177

xii

Contents

5. Anselm, Understanding, and the Ordering of Christian Thought

179 179

Introduction The Movement from Faith to Understanding in Fides Quaerens Intellectum 5.3. Understanding, Freedom, and the Ordering of Thought

181 205

Conclusion

229

5.1. 5.2.

Works Cited Index

235 247

Abbreviations ADT

Karl Barth, Die Auferstehung der Toten

KD

Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik

FQI

Karl Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum

RB

Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief 1922

UCR

Karl Barth, Unterricht in der christlichen Religion

Introduction AIMS

Study of the history of theology is aided considerably by the way that the reflection of particular periods clusters around certain central themes. Much that is essential to the Patristic tradition may be grasped by tracing the development of Trinitarian and Christological thought; significant move­ ments in medieval theology may be approached through questions regarding the sacraments; and the theology of the Reformation may be charted by following the emergence of differing accounts of the significance and conse­ quences of the notion of justification by faith. A number of problems might reasonably be presented as the central theme of the modern tradition quite generally: the knowledge of God; the relation between God and the world; the relation between Christ’s historical life and present reality. Yet, when we approach twentieth-century reflection more particularly, it may be that one consequence of the shadow that Karl Barth casts over subsequent theology is that the movements of this century are best traced through the question of theological reason. The centrality of this question is, as Gary Dorrien puts it, a reflection of Barth’s place as the decisive figure with whom all other twentieth­ century theologians had to deal, and the remarkable degree to which responses to his work cluster around a single worry; namely, that the course he charts for theology undercuts the integrity of theological inquiry because it is not accompanied by an adequate account of the activities of human reason.1 In one form or other, concerns regarding the conception of theological reasoning that underwrites Barth’s work have been central to theological discussion in the hundred years since he, as a little-known Swiss pastor, set his hand to a new interpretation of Pauline theology. Distinctively twentieth­ century theology began with the publication of Barth’s Römerbriefi its ‘major event’ was the ‘post-war explosion’ and subsequent maturation of Barthian

1 Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 131.

2

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

thought.2 The list of theologians that Dorrien is able to assemble around the worry that the Barthian revolt reflects an underdeveloped account of theological reasoning reads like a who’s who of twentieth-century theology. Bultmann, Brunner, Tillich, Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer, and Pannenberg appear on Dorrien’s list;3 these critics’ descriptions of Barth’s project furnish twentieth­ century theology with some of its most famous notions. Tillich echoed a number of earlier judgements in describing Barth’s work as a naive form of ‘neo-orthodoxy’.4 Bonhoeffer launched a thousand ships of criticism through a cryptic reference to Barth’s ‘positivism of revelation’.5 Pannenberg systematized William Bartley’s depiction of a ‘retreat to commitment’ into a broader account of the modern tradition in which Barth’s work appears as a continuation of nineteenth-century ‘faith subjectivism’.6 The freight and validity of these claims remain points of contemporary contention;7 one would not need long in a university library to supplement this set of famous charges with lesser-known criticisms that quickly make up in bulk what they lack in widespread notoriety. Dorrien sums up a judgement that unites a diverse range of thinkers by referring to the notion that ‘Barth led modern theology into a ghettoizing revelational positivism’.8 The regularity with which theologians orient themselves in relation to Barth’s work by suggesting that it reflects an inadequate conception of theo­ logical reflection elevates the question of theological reasoning to a decisive position in the comprehension and adjudication of twentieth-century the­ ology. For theologians today, grappling with the legacy and ongoing potential of this theology requires coming to terms with Barth’s conception of theo­ logical reason. A decisive division in contemporary thought is marked out by differing evaluations of this conception. On one side stand those who suppose that, whatever distance one might wish to take from Barth on particular questions, his conception of the principles of theological inquiry remains a

2 See Domen, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 454-9. 3 Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt, 131. 4 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I (London: Nisbet & Co., 1953), 5-6, 47, 68. 5 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 8, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Christian Gremmels et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 363-4. 6 See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology I, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), 43-8; cf. W. W. Bartley, The Retreat to Commitment (New York: Knopf, 1962). 7 The seminal contemporary account of Barth’s theological development is intended to counter the notion that Barth may fairly be described as ‘neo-orthodox’ (McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), vii, 23-8); a recent engagement with Barth and Bonhoeffer points out that an entire monograph could be devoted to the ways that Bonhoeffer’s reference to Barth’s revelational positivism has been interpreted (Greggs, Theology Against Religion (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 56); the most recent treatment of Barth’s account of theological reasoning seeks to question the notion that a ‘faith subjectivism’ is operative in Barth’s work (D. Paul La Montagne, Barth and Rationality (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade: 2012), 202-12). 8 Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt, 131.

Introduction

3

model for contemporary work. For thinkers of this stripe, Barth ‘is the one person in the modern era who actually grasped what it is to do theology’, and if there are those who do theology after Barth, it is because ‘he has shown us that it is possible, and what it looks like’.9 On the other side stand those who hold that, for all of the particular points on which one might learn from Barth, the principles of thought that undergird his work must be left behind. One leading figure in contemporary consideration of Christian reasoning speaks colourfully of Barth’s work as an ‘analytically self-guaranteeing’ ‘tautotheology’ that confines itself to the logical development of notions that are simply taken as given.10 Another suggests that Barth’s thought does not gener­ ate anything ‘that would count as knowledge’ because it turns on the ‘self-guaranteeing’ logic ‘of the children’s hymn allegedly cited by Karl Barth when asked for a one-sentence summary of his theology: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”11 So what are contemporary thinkers to do in face of this division? How are contemporaries to orient themselves in relation to Barth’s conception of theological reasoning, and to the mountain of criticism to which it has given rise? Does Barth’s work continue to present a model for contemporary theological inquiry? Or does the integrity of this inquiry require a turn away from Barth’s conceptions? This study undertakes two tasks in face of these questions. It aims, first, to facilitate fruitful consideration of the legacy and ongoing potential of Barth’s work by developing a new account of Barth’s understanding of the proper movements of theological reason. It aims, sec­ ondly, to present a defence of Barth’s work by showing that his understanding of Christian reasoning is both theologically weighty and spiritually bracing. A few introductory comments about each of these aims are in order. The first is that my attempt to facilitate consideration of Barth’s account of Christian reasoning is underwritten by the conviction that comprehension of this account remains underdeveloped. Barth scholarship is among the most active guilds within contemporary theology; yet it ought not to be surprising that, in important respects, the task of elucidating Barth’s thought remains in its infancy. That, after centuries, new things continue to be learned about the work of Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin suggests that it would in fact be strange if adequate accounts of all facets of Barth’s theology were to be found. Ill-health put an end to Barth’s work scarcely fifty years ago; Barth left behind a corpus that equals any in scope and complexity. Important aspects of his corpus have yet to be published; others have but recently been made available,

9 See Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Introduction’, in Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason, ed. P. H. Brazier (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2008), 9. 10 Janz, The Command of Grace (London: T. & T. Clark, 2009), 38-54. 11 George Pattison, The End of Theology and the Task of Thinking about God (London: SCM Press, 1998), 21-2.

4

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

and remain largely untouched. It is only in the last decade or so that decisive questions have been posed regarding the content and consequences of Barth’s theological ontology, and in the last two decades that wider discussions have been shaped by the acknowledgement that—gasp\—Barth may have some­ thing to say about human moral activity at all. That adequate comprehension of Barth’s account of theological reasoning in particular may not be fully developed is hardly surprising. The evolution of scholarly comprehension of Barth’s moral theology is instructive in considering the limitations that attend contemporary under­ standing of Barth’s modes of reasoning. For much of the twentieth century, it was widely supposed that Barth’s emphasis on the sovereign activity of God left little room for an account of the shape and significance of the work of human agents. More patient mining of Barth’s corpus in recent years has put this notion to rest, and contemporary study of Barth’s moral theology shows considerable vitality; yet an analogous concern persists in treatments of Barth’s account of human reasoning activities in particular. Critical treatments of Barth’s work generally suppose that an account that so stresses revelation as the principle of theological inquiry cannot leave space for an adequate description or deployment of human reasoning. As in earlier treatments of Barth’s ethics, a broadly competitive idiom is assumed in which insistence on the primacy of the divine is taken to leave little space for the activities of the human. In perhaps the most sophisticated contemporary rendering of the concern, Barth’s theology is taken finally to be ‘antirational’ because emphasis on the authority of divine revelation forces Barth to appeal to miracle’ to ‘exempt’ theological reasoning from the ‘normal and naturally exacting rigors, limitations and critically defining functions of reason’.12 On these terms, Barth’s account of the principial place of divine activity for theological inquiry requires a final marginalization of human reasoning activity, for divine activity simply precludes the operation of the human. The result is the positivism and faith subjectivism that critics have long taken to mark Barth’s project.13 Theologians cannot escape a positivism that appeals to principles that cannot themselves be verified. They find themselves caught up in a subjectivism in which it is only the venture of faith that permits these principles to be acknowledged in their authority. Barth studies to date have not proven especially resistant to the charge that, finally, Barth’s emphasis on revelation leaves little to be said about the concrete activities of theological reasoning. In dealing with questions of rationality, the mountain of scholarly literature that exists on Barth’s work tends to rely on somewhat worn concepts that function more like blunt tools than precise instruments in anatomizing his work. Broadly Barthian-sounding 12 Janz, The Command of Grace, 101-6. 13 See here Janz, The Command of Grace, 38-54, 101-6.

Introduction

5

emphases on the objectivity of theological inquiry and on the need to ‘think after’ the revelation of God—Barth’s famous nachdenken—are in ready circu­ lation; but, unless handled with considerable care, these notions can appear quite quickly to confirm critics’ fears. At worst, they suggest a straightforward subordination of the activities of human thought in which the divine does simply run over the human. At best, they indicate a general orientation that is appropriate for theological reasoning, but they tend not to supplement this indication with a descriptively dense account of the practices of theological inquiry. What does it mean to ‘think after’ revelation? What kind of activity is involved in this movement? Those who insist most strongly that a theological objectivism grounds the rationality of Barth’s work do so on the basis of theological commitments that tend to obscure these questions from view. T. F. Torrance, for instance, argues that in fact Barth’s work is the very paradigm of the rational because it gives primacy to the object; yet, as we shall see, he argues that Barth’s insistence on this objectivity reflects the adoption of a theology of justification as the basic pattern for Christian thought.14 Following the structure of this pattern, the question of the proper activity of human reason is obscured by emphasis on the sovereign sufficiency of divine activity. The result is a measure of tension between an affirmation of the ‘ineradicable’ place of human subjectivity in judgement, and gestures towards a ‘bracketing’ of the subjectivity of the knower, which otherwise ‘obtrudes into our theories’ and ‘gets in the way of the object’.15 The most materially developed accounts of what it means to ‘think after’ revelation have tended to be presented in treatments of Barth’s understanding of theological dialectics. Careful parsing of the dialectical structures that are involved in Barth’s attempt to follow revelation has been the hallmark of important works in Barth scholarship;16 the most recent treatment of Barth’s account of theological reasoning seeks to show that the critical realism that is generated by the dialectical structures of Barth’s thought corresponds fairly closely to norms that are operative in a range of other disciplines.17 These works have, however, lessened the capacity of an emphasis on dialectic to furnish an account of theological reasoning by shifting the meaning of the term. Bruce McCormack’s landmark study of Barth’s development famously insists on the consistently dialectical character of Barth’s theology; but McCormack draws from the earlier work of Michael Beintker to propose that Barth’s

14 Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), 39, 57-8; God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 68. 15 See e.g. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931 (Edinburgh: T. 8c T. Clark, 2000), 187-8; God and Rationality, 40-4. 16 See McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology; cf. Michael Beintker, Die Dialek­ tik in der ‘dialektischen Theologie’ Karl Barths (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1987). 17 See La Montagne, Barth and Rationality, especially the account of the grounding of Barth’s critical realism in his dialectical understanding of revelation, pp. 113-34.

6

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

theology is dialectical not primarily because of its forms of reasoning, but rather because of the understanding of revelation that is its basis.18 McCormack holds that, properly understood, the term ‘dialectic’ indicates that God is only ever indirectly identical with the creaturely reality through which he unveils himself. To describe a theological project as ‘dialectical’ is, on these terms, primarily to insist that its claims are marked by a non-finality that is grounded in a lack of direct identity between creaturely realities and the truth of God. It is this non-finality that interests D. Paul La Montagne in his attempt to show that the critical realism that McCormack identifies as the decisive Denkform of Barth’s work mirrors the repudiation of notions of ‘absolute’ truth in a range of contemporary disciplines.19 La Montagne’s treatment of Barth’s conception of rationality reflects the way that, through the influence of McCormack’s work, the term ‘dialectical’ has come to say more about the mood in which theological claims are made than about the mode of reasoning through which they are derived. To date, the deployment of notions like objectivity and dialectics in Barth scholarship has not gone especially far to counter the perception that Barth’s theology of revelation marginalizes the activities of human reason. This leaves contemporary readers with something of a narrow set of resources on which to draw in seeking to grasp Barth’s conception of theological reasoning. Whereas, through the 1980s and 1990s, Barth’s work was set in relation to a veritable panoply of forms of thought,20 the development of a more rigorous form of Barth scholarship since 1990 or so has imposed a measure of discipline on the field that has left in place two broad conceptual rubrics within which to parse noetic questions in Barth’s work: the kind of strongly realist reading that Torrance develops, which inclines readers to suppose that insistence on a noetic objectivism does the work that is required in the sphere of an account of reason; and the kind of critically realist reading that McCormack develops, which inclines readers to suppose that the work that is to be done in relation to questions of reason is best done by thinking through the dialectical logic of Barth’s theology of revelation. Broadly speaking, contemporary Barth schol­ arship is divided between these two readings; at this point they have come, on the one hand, to mark out fixed positions from which Barth’s advocates and critics fire at each other without advancing towards decisive engagement; and,

18 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 11-20; cf. Beintker, Die Dialektik in der ‘dialektischen Theologie’ Karl Barth, 29-59. 19 La Montagne, Barth and Rationality, 73-4. 20 See e.g. the various attempts to link Barth’s work to postmodern thought. William Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1997); Isolde Andrews, Deconstructing Barth: A Study of the Complementary Methods in Karl Barth and Jacques Derrida (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996); Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

____________________________________________________________________________

Introduction

7

on the other hand, to mark out sometimes contentious divisions amongst sympathetic readers of Barth. Recent work suggests that there is at least some danger that, for all of the ways in which contemporary Barth scholarship flourishes, it tends to emphasize well-established patterns of thought that contribute to ‘retrenchments’ of established oppositions between Barthians and their critiques and amongst Barthians themselves.21 In face of this situation, my project aims to facilitate ongoing consideration of the legacy and contemporary potential of Barth’s work by developing a new account of Barth’s conception of theological reasoning. This task involves moving beyond aspects of Barth’s thinking that familiar notions like realism and critical realism, objectivity and dialectics permit us to chart, and opening up new avenues of inquiry by deploying a new set of questions and categories. I hope to show that these questions and categories permit us to trace an entire constellation of principles that are foundational to Barth’s work, and that have not figured prominently in assessments of it. In developing an account of this constellation, I hope to help consideration of the merits of Barth’s work to progress beyond calcified lines of conflict. Cursory indication of the questions and categories that are central to this study may be given here for the sake of orienting the reader; a more sustained treatment of these matters will occupy us in Chapter 1. To begin with, I propose that a twofold shift in question underwrites Barth’s conception of theological reason. First, consideration of the relation between God and creatures causes him to reframe the question of reason itself. Barth holds that God and creatures stand in a distinctively moral relation, and so the question of the activities of theological reason must be understood as a moral inquiry into the proper ordering of creaturely thought. Because knowledge of God is rooted in correspondence between divine and creaturely forms of activity, the activities of thought that are implicated in the knowledge of God must be considered in terms of their correspondence to the activity of God. Secondly, consideration of the difference between God and creatures causes him to reframe the question of truth. Barth holds that the absolute qualitative difference between God and creatures means that the problem of truth must be understood as a question of the possibility of grasping the truth of God without reducing God to an element in the world. Because God is not one more item within the creaturely sphere, the question of the possibility of acknowledging divine truth is properly given primacy over critical inquiries into the truth value of particular Christian claims. In sum, then, Barth holds that the peculiar dynamics associated with the difference and relation between God and creatures means that reflections on

21 See the comments that open D. Stephen Long’s Saving Karl Barth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 1-4.

8

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

theological reasoning ought not to be determined by epistemological inquiries into the activities of thought that permit true claims to be distinguished from false, but rather by moral inquiries into the activities of thought that are ordered in correspondence to the activity of God, for it is through activities of this kind that the truth of God may be acknowledged without reducing God to an element within the creaturely sphere. These shifts in questions of reason and truth are basic to the argument of this study; I aim to show that comprehension and fair evaluation of Barth’s work cannot take place where his foundational reconsiderations of the questions that are proper to theo­ logical inquiry are not taken into account. With these conceptions of Barth’s questions in place, I aim next to give an account of his positive conception of the movements of theological reasoning by deploying a set of conceptual categories that position us to describe formative features of his account of human thought. These categories are ) the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of reason. In brief, the question of the standpoint of thought is the question of a perspective constituted by a set of principles; the question of orientation is the question of the way that \ thought may regulate its activities within a particular standpoint; and the l question of freedom is the question of the mastery that thought may claim in relation to its objects. The conception of the ordering of thought that Barth develops through the use of these categories can be summarized in a series of claims. First, Barth comes to hold that well-ordered thought issues from the standpoint of the resurrection, which is to say that it takes the reality of the eschatological subject, attested in baptism, as the first principle of its activities. Second, Barth suggests that, from this standpoint, Christian thought takes its orientation from attention to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with whom the eschatological subject exists in indirect identity, and from the confession of the Church, which is spoken over the believer in baptism. Third, Barth supposes that the task of Christian thought is to apprehend the necessity that is characteristic of the realities witnessed to in the Christian confession by virtue of their grounding in God’s self-fidelity, and to allow this necessity to shape its own freedom so that its possibilities correspond to God’s self-determination. Such, in highly compressed form, is the conception of the ordering of thought that will emerge in this study. By reconsidering the questions that shape Barth’s work and the categories in which Barth develops an answer, this study aims in its descriptive function to make possible fresh evaluation of his conception of theological reasoning. The second aim of this study is then to go beyond the descriptive and to defend the argumentative claim that, far from precluding a careful account of the activities of human reason, Barth’s emphasis on divine activity as the basis of theological inquiry grounds a J theologically weighty and spiritually bracing conception of the proper move­ ments of theological reasoning. I aim to show that Barth recognizes the

Introduction

9

importance of the ordering of human thought not only to the integrity of theological science, but also, more broadly and more significantly, to the moral and spiritual orientation of the human subject. He gives attention to the movements of theological reason because he recognizes that the activities of thought are foundational to creatures’ disposition in their relation to God. His attempt to work through an account of the ordering of thought that corres­ ponds to the activity of God produces a compelling account of theological reasoning. Clear stipulation of the nature of the defence that I intend is required at this point in order to establish its parameters. In their most common form, sympathetic treatments of Barth’s account of reason have tended to relate Barth’s principles to the principles of other disciplines in order to show that the former mirror movements that are considered rational in the wider sphere of human inquiry. T. F. Torrance, for instance, famously defends Barth’s work by deploying the notion of a noetic objectivism as a master concept in Barth’s theology, and arguing that Barth’s objectivism compares favourably to the methods of modern physics.22 More recently, D. Paul La Montagne defends Barth by deploying ‘critical realism’ as the conceptual key to Barth’s theology and showing that Barth’s critical realism resembles patterns of thought that issue from recent developments in mathematics.23 A mediating procedure of this kind offers a useful approach to Barth’s thought because it brings with it clear criteria for success: if Barth’s work can be shown to mirror principles that are accepted in other spheres of inquiry, then it may be considered rational. The procedure is, however, not unproblematic, for its orientation towards the comparative tends to constrict attention to the range, scope, and origin­ ality of Barth’s conception of the ordering of thought. I therefore aim not to establish parallels between Barth’s account of Christian thought and wider norms of rationality, but rather to attend with care to his texts and to show the cogency and consistency of the principles that he develops. I wish to show the kind of problem that drives his reflections, the kind of solution that he gives, and the way that this solution is related to other conceptions of rational reflection. Consideration of these matters will involve extensive en­ gagement with his intellectual heritage and with his critics; but my primary interest remains in his texts themselves as primary sources in which a striking account of the ordering of thought emerges. The attempt to develop a new description of this account means that my defence of Barth functions primar­ ily in terms of a depiction of the cogency and consistency of the notions that Barth develops.

22 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 179-80. 23 La Montagne, Barth and Rationality.

10

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

PROCEDURE

My inquiry into Barth’s conception of theological reasoning will be structured around two questions that attract attention to two engagements that form Barth’s thinking. The first question is how Barth’s account of well-ordered thought is shaped by his interpretation of Christian faith. The second is how Barth’s account is shaped by his conception of faith’s movement to under­ standing. We shall see over the course of this study that the first of these questions is largely coextensive with the question of the noetic consequences of a theology of justification, and the second with the question of the noetic consequences of a theology of sanctification; but, for the most part, I shall speak of these questions in terms of the noetic consequences of faith and of the understanding of faith, for it is on these terms that Barth himself considers matters most explicitly. Attention to the corollaries of faith and of the move­ ment from faith to understanding will direct our attention to the engagements with Paul and Anselm that were central to Barth’s work during the 1920s and into the 1930s. I intend to concentrate on this material for a number of reasons. The first is that one of my aims is to defend the genetic claim that it is in engaging with Paul and Anselm that Barth makes a number of his decisive decisions regarding the proper ordering of Christian thought. It is through careful engagement with Paul’s letters that Barth comes to think that the moral question of the ordering of Christian thought is properly given primacy in the noetic sphere. A particular conception of the ordering of thought then begins to emerge from Barth’s consideration of the noetic corollaries of Paul’s account of faith, his theology of justification, and his understanding of fellowship with Christ. These aspects of Paul’s thought lead Barth to ask how the believer may comprehend the declaration of justifying grace, and to borrow patterns of thought from philosophical idealism in order to show that this may happen as the believer takes up a standpoint in the reality of the eschatological subject. In turning to Anselm’s work, Barth is then concerned that the conception of human understanding that he inherits from the idealist tradition is incompat­ ible with thought that occupies the standpoint of the eschatological subject. He develops a conception of theological understanding that hinges on the reorder­ ing of the freedom of thought in conformity to the activity of God. Barth’s work on Anselm stands together with his work on Paul in the development of his account of the ordering of Christian thought. The latter offers an account of the ordering of thought in light of the reality of faith; the former offers an account of the noetic consequences of faith’s movement to understanding. The second reason for attending to Barth’s work on Paul and Anselm is an extension of this genetic point. Tracking the emergence of Barth’s account in this earlier work allows us to understand the concerns that ground Barth’s concepts, to trace where decisive decisions are made, and to follow the reasons

Introduction

11

for them. Whereas, in Barth’s later work, his basic conceptions are largely presupposed and we are not given to peer into their inner workings, consid­ eration of his work on Paul and Anselm allows us to encounter them as they are being developed, and where their presuppositions stand rather more available to scrutiny. The result is an opportunity for greater clarity in the presentation of Barth’s presuppositions, and also for the development of a set of hermeneutical principles through which Barth’s more mature work may be read. One of the outcomes of this study is an account of a movement of thought that emerges from Barth’s engagement with Paul and Anselm and that is then characteristic of the Church Dogmatics quite generally. The final reason for considering Barth’s treatments of Paul and Anselm is that, apart from their significance for Barth’s account of Christian thought in particular, these texts are significant moments in Barth’s thinking that con­ tinue to evade adequate scholarly treatment. A number of reasons may be given for this. In the case of Barth’s work on Paul, the chief reason to be cited is neglect. While the landmark second edition of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (referred to hereafter as Romans IE) is the object of a mountain of scholarly literature, Barth’s expositions of 1 Corinthians, Philippians, and the more recently published lectures on Ephesians have not registered in any substan­ tive way in scholarly treatments of Barth’s work. This is unfortunate, for each of these texts articulates a significant aspect of Barth’s thought; each ought to be permitted to shape how Romans II is understood. Barth’s treatment of 1 Corinthians, for instance, presents the basis and logic of the theology of the resurrection that is the characteristic feature of Barth’s thought as he is writing Romans IL Comprehension of the latter work has been hampered by under­ developed understandings of the way that it is shaped by a theology of the resurrection that Barth develops through engagement with 1 Corinthians 15. Similarly, a lack of recognition of the account of divine presence that Barth formulates through his lectures on Ephesians, and of the account of the believer’s union with Christ that is articulated most clearly in his exposition of Philippians, has meant that the constructive principles that Barth derives from his study of Paul more generally have been almost wholly ignored. In the case of Barth’s study of Anselm, a lack of scholarly understanding cannot be attributed to neglect. Fides quaerens intellectum (referred to here­ after as FQI) numbers amongst the most cited parts of Barth’s corpus; it is, moreover, a piece through which Barth has exerted considerable influence. Efforts have been made to show how the argument of FQI shapes the work of some of the major figures of twentieth-century theology: Hans Frei in America, T. F. Torrance in Britain, and Eberhard Jiingel in Germany.24 By 24 See Stephen D. Wigley, ‘Karl Barth on St. Anselm: The Influence of Anselm’s “theological scheme” on T. F. Torrance and Eberhard Jiingel’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 46.1 (1993), 79-97; Mike Higton, Christ, Providence and History (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 225-6.

12

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

way of Barth, ‘ Anselmian theology’ has become a designator for an entire class of theology that seeks to be accountable to the Church and to aid the Church in its accountability to God.25 Yet, the attention that FQI has received does not assure that it has been understood. In part, ongoing struggles with its content are a function of the difficulty of the text itself. Speaking from the perspective of a sophisticated layperson, John Updike writes that FQI is, ‘even for a piece of theology, uncommonly tedious, replete with untranslated passages of Latin, English words like “ontic,” “noetic,” and “aseity,” and non-stop sentences of granitic opacity’.26 Speaking from within the guild of specialized readers of Barth, Colin Gunton suggests that ‘the book on Anselm is arguably the most difficult, or obtuse, of Barth’s works’.27 In part, too, difficulties with FQI are a function of the peculiar form that attention to the text has tended to take. For much of the last century FQI has been a central player in a dramatic account of the way that Barth, in his own words, shook off the last vestiges of philosoph­ ical and anthropological grounding for theology and was enabled to move forward with a properly theological dogmatics.28 This claim has ensured that FQI receives considerable attention; yet Barth explains neither the nature of the philosophical vestiges that supposedly clung to his earlier work, nor how reading Anselm enabled him to leave these vestiges behind. His statement has thus invited all manner of interpretations, many of which draw from FQI without attending to the text in any significant way. Perhaps because of the difficulty of Barth’s argument, scholars have tended to construct developmen­ tal hypotheses based on other points in Barth’s corpus before turning to FQI to find a line or two that appear to confirm their theories. In this way, references to Barth’s work on Anselm multiply without significant advances in under­ standing taking place. I aim to redress the imbalance created by these developmental readings by offering a study that seeks, in the first instance, to address conceptual rather than developmental questions. The heavily diachronic readings that are de rigueur amongst Barth scholars have yielded considerable insight; yet they tend to attract attention to an entrenched set of categories that obscure important features of Barth’s thought. My aim is to break free from this set by making a half-turn towards the synchronic, inquiring in the first instance into the conceptual significance of Barth’s work on Paul and Anselm. One advantage of this approach is that we are positioned to move beyond

25 See Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘What New Haven and Grand Rapids Have to Say to Each Other’, in Seeking Understanding: The Stobb Lectures, 1986-1998 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 263-5. 26 John Updike, ‘Faith in Search of Understanding’, in Assorted Prose (London: Deutsch, 1965), 174. 27 Gunton, The Barth Lectures (London: T. & T. Clark, 2007), 53. 28 Barth, How I Changed My Mind (Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1966), 42-3.

Introduction

13

developmental readings that see the contrast between the bombastic critique of Barth’s work on Paul and the irenic positivity of his study of Anselm as the problem that is to be explained. In opposition to this notion, I hope to show that, on a conceptual level, these two moments stand in a single stream of reflection. Barth’s study of Anselm is best thought of as working out an account of theological understanding that comports with a Pauline conception of Christian faith. Barth sees the adoption of a new noetic standpoint as a necessary corollary of Paul’s account of faith; his study of Anselm works out what it means to move to understanding from the standpoint of faith. Con­ sideration of this latter movement requires a systematic consideration of theological reasoning that might appear to function in a different register than Barth’s more ad hoc considerations of the noetic consequences of Pauline theology; yet I aim to show that Barth’s work on Paul and his engagement with Anselm are fundamentally of a piece. Barth’s inquiry into theological under­ standing is directed by an interest in the ordering of Christian thought that is operative at key points in his reading of Paul. Recognition of the continuity between Barth’s work on Paul and his study of Anselm is one of the benefits of the conceptually oriented inquiry that I undertake here; but it is important that I intend only a half-turn towards the synchronic, for new elements in an account of Barth’s theological develop­ ment are among the consequences of the argument presented here. These elements are of material significance in grasping the account of theological reasoning that I intend to develop; but two deflationary comments are in order about their place in the study as a whole. The first is that I do not wish to foreground developmental material any more than is demanded by conceptual exposition, for my primary aim is to contribute to broader understandings of Barth’s work rather than to feed the fascination with developmental questions that marks much specialised commentary on Barth. While I aim to show, for instance, that Barth’s study of Anselm makes a substantial contribution to the conception of theological inquiry that shapes the Church Dogmatics, this claim is not intended to revitalize a dramatic ‘turn’ narrative in which FQI is taken to mark a decisive breaking-point in Barth’s thought. Conceptions of this kind can be of some heuristic value in structuring a presentation of Barth’s work; but they risk obscuring as much as they reveal by levelling out the fluidity and the multifaceted nature of Barth’s development. Concern for the way that developmental accounts can obscure the sheer complexity of Barth’s work leads to the clarification, secondly, that I do not intend to set up a new ‘model’ of Barth’s development that competes with existing models. My reticence here reflects the perception that the lesson to be learned from debates about Barth’s development is that this development can likely accommodate as many models as scholars can think of questions to pose. While the classic opposition between the accounts offered by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bruce McCormack continues to serve as a starting-point for

14

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

a number of engagements with Barth’s work,29 comprehension of its signifi­ cance requires the recognition that it consists primarily in different answers to different questions, von Balthasar’s engagement with Barth centres around questions concerning the theology of creation and the relation between divine and creaturely being.30 These questions are bequeathed to von Balthasar by his teacher, Erich Przywara, who famously depicts Barth’s theology as typical of a modern tendency either to collapse the divine into the creaturely or to negate the creaturely in face of the divine.31 von Balthasar stands with Przywara in supposing that Barth’s early theology is crippled by its reliance on an idealist ‘framework’ that lacks a theology of created nature, and thus understands the relation between God and creatures in terms of a dialectic of identity and difference.32 Without an account of created nature as a distinctive counterpart that stands in analogical relation to the divine, creatures are depicted as standing ‘in God’ in ‘immediate union’ in creation, and as falling away from God into sheer contradiction and non-being in sin.33 They are left teetering ‘between total identity with the Creator, without distance or mystery, and a falling away from him in absolute non-being’.34 Lost in this stark dialectic is any possibility of giving a positive account of the incarnation. With no account of created nature in place, the creature is understood only as the antithesis of the divine, and the union of the divine and the creaturely can only be spoken of as paradox.35 For both von Balthasar and Przywara, the early Barth’s reliance on idealist categories produces a defective account of creation that cannot support a theology of the incarnation. von Balthasar supposes that this difficulty persists in Barth’s thought into the late 1920s. Though, by 1927, Barth has hit on the right formal startingpoint by devoting his ‘whole strenuous effort’ to thinking on the basis of the 29 See e.g. D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth-, ‘From the Hidden God to the God of Glory: Barth, Balthasar, and Nominalism’, Pro Ecclesia, 20.2 (2011), 167-84; Keith Johnson, ‘A Reappraisal of Karl Barth’s Theological Development and his Dialogue with Catholicism’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 14.1 (2012), 3-25; Timothy Stanley, Protestant Metaphysics after Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade, 2010); John Webster, ‘Balthasar and Karl Barth’, in Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 241-55; Stephen Wigley, ‘The von Balthasar Thesis: A Re-examination of von Balthasar’s Study of Barth in the Light of Bruce McCormack’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 56.3 (2003), 345-59; Reinhard Hütter, ‘Between McCormack and von Balthasar: A Dialectic’, Pro Ecclesia, 8.1 (1999), 105-9. 30 This point has been usefully foregrounded in Long’s Saving Karl Barth. 31 See, most famously in Barth studies, Przywara, ‘Gott in uns oder Gott über uns? (Immanenz und Transzendenz in heutigen Geistesleben)’, Stimmen derZeit, 105 (1923), 343-62. 32 It is the foundation of this shortcoming in categories inherited from German idealism that causes von Balthasar to devote chapters to the roots of Barth’s thought in German idealism, and to idealism’s relation to conceptions of revelation. See The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 191-247. 33 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 65-71. 34 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 66. 35 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 72.

Introduction

15

Word of God, he does not immediately refine his theology of creation.36 He continues to speak of creation as contradiction, still ‘overpowered’ by a theopanistic ‘ideology’ marked by a monistic protology and eschatology.37 ‘Barth does not yet state clearly and emphatically that creation is not a contradiction in itself but rather is first of all a legitimate, good and divinely willed counterpart to God.’38 It is this shortcoming that von Balthasar sup­ poses is addressed through Barth’s study of Anselm. Anselm teaches Barth to understand God’s existence as an absolute existence that provides a kind of ‘parenthesis’ within which all that is not God exists as ‘analogous being’.39 The turn to analogy is, quite concretely, a development in the theology of creation. When von Balthasar speaks of a shift from dialectic to analogy, he points readers towards growth in Barth’s work from a tendency to devalue creaturely being by narrating its relationship to the divine in terms of a dialectic of identity and difference, to a willingness to affirm the goodness of creaturely being as ‘real and true’ being that exists in analogy to, and not contradiction of, the divine.40 von Balthasar’s interest in FQI focuses on the way that appro­ priation of Anselm’s work positions Barth to develop a distinctively Protestant theology of analogy that opens new possibilities for ecumenical dialogue.41 In contrast to von Balthasar’s interest in conceptions of God and creation, McCormack’s work centres around the human Denkform that corresponds to the formal structure of the event of revelation. McCormack uses the term ‘dialectic’ to refer not to idealist tendencies in the theology of creation, but rather to the Realdialektik of the event of revelation itself.42 It indicates that God is only ever indirectly identical with the creaturely elements through which he unveils himself. McCormack is entirely successful in showing that, considered in terms of the conceptual corollaries of this understanding of revelation, a great deal of continuity is visible in Barth’s development; yet this demonstration is not a refutation of von Balthasar’s thesis so much as an answer to a different question. The appearance of a refutation is groun­ ded in the assertion that ‘what von Balthasar meant by “turn from dialectic to analogy” was a turn from a particular Denkform (by which he meant especially “dialectical method”)’; but this is a misjudgement that constricts

36 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 93. 37 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 91-4. 38 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 91. 39 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 144-5. 40 von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 144-5. 41 It is for this reason that the lengthy section in von Balthasar’s book that deals with Catholic theology—a section that is wholly neglected by Barth scholars—focuses primarily on Catholic understandings of nature, and that it is the question of nature and grace that occupies von Balthasar in his concluding comments on rapprochement between Catholicism and Protestant­ ism. See The Theology of Karl Barth, 251-389. 42 See e.g. McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 16-18.

16

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

McCormack’s capacity to make sense of von Balthasar’s work.43 It positions him to conclude only that von Balthasar makes a category mistake in con­ trasting dialectic, understood as a theological method, with analogy, under­ stood on Barth’s terms as a form of correspondence between divine and human activity.44 In truth, an account that, with von Balthasar, inquires into Barth’s theology of created nature and uses the term ‘dialectic’ to describe idealist tendencies in thinking about creation may find good grounds for speaking of concrete advances in Barth’s thinking.45 An account that, with McCormack, concentrates on Barth’s theology of revelation and uses the term ‘dialectic’ to describe the formal structure of God’s self-impartation will find good grounds for holding that Barth’s thought is remarkably stable from the early 1920s onward. The common use of the terms ‘dialectic’ and ‘analogy’ obscures the fact that differing models of Barth’s development are generated by considering different questions that draw attention to different facets of Barth’s theology.46 A range of scholars have sought to hold the accounts offered by von Balthasar and McCormack together so that the ecumenical fruit of von Balthasar’s work is not lost; the key is to recognize the differing questions that are being posed.47 The result of this recognition is that caution is called for in the kinds of claims made by systematic accounts of Barth’s development. Accounts of this kind ought to be self-conscious about the limits associated with the particular questions that they pose, the way that these questions are situated in relation to questions that others have posed, and the degree to which it is appropriate to take a particular question as the focal point for a systematized model of

43 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 16, cf. 273-4. 44 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 18-19. 45 This is not to say that von Balthasar is right in his account of Barth’s development. His description of the problem in Barth’s early work is too uncritical in its adoption of Przywara’s polemically driven account, his description of the way that these problems linger into the late 1920s is crippled by a lack access to much of Barth’s earlier work, and his interpretation of FQI rests on extracting a single line from its context and treating it as confirmation of the claims that he wishes to make. 46 The same point may be made regarding the accounts offered by Hans Frei and T. F. Torrance. Frei uses the notion of a ‘turn from dialectic to analogy’ to describe what in fact he understands as a turn from a ‘non-ontological’ phase during which Barth understood theology as a critical science that does not make claims about that which truly is to a ‘radical’ realism grounded in the view that theology may make positive claims because faith is always coordinated with its object (see ‘Niebuhr’s Theological Background’, in Paul Ramsey (ed.), Faith and Ethics (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 40-51). Torrance uses the notion to describe a shift from the ‘subjective-idealistic theology’ of neo-Protestantism, which assumed that the proper object of theological inquiry is a religious experience that must be given a rational interpretation through conceptual forms borrowed from philosophy and ethics, to a form of thought that sees the task of theology as tracing the rationality that the Word of God possesses in itself (see Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 181-7). 47 See e.g. Long, ‘From the Hidden God to the God of Glory: Barth, Balthasar, and Nomin­ alism’; Reinhard Hütter, ‘Barth between McCormack and von Balthasar: A Dialectic’.

Introduction

17

Barth’s development. I will come in Chapter 1 to an account of the way that my concerns are situated in relation to questions that others have posed. For now, I note simply that I avoid a systematized developmental model in part because, while I aim to show that consideration of the ordering of thought is central to Barth’s work, I do not think that it is a master question that ought to be permitted to determine a full interpretation of Barth’s development. Barth engages too many questions on too many different fronts to suppose that one set of questions holds the key that unlocks all doors. I am thus content to unfold the developmental consequences of an account of Barth’s conception of Christian thought without attempting to construct an overarching narrative. These consequences will perhaps hold a certain interest for specialized readers of Barth, but my primary aim is to offer an argument that is of use to a broad readership that seeks to come to grips with Barth’s account of theological reasoning. In sum, then, I propose to structure this inquiry by attending to Barth’s work on Paul and Anselm in order to show how faith, and faith’s growth to understanding, shape Barth’s account of the ordering of thought. Compre­ hension of this procedure may be aided if we conclude this introduction with an outline of the construction of the study. My argument begins with an attempt to frame the question of well-ordered thought in Chapter 1. This chapter documents the shifts through which Barth makes the questions of the moral ordering of creaturely thought and of the acknowledgement of divine truth basic to his work. It then introduces the notions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of reason as the conceptual categories in which Barth works through a response to these questions. Two comments are in order about these categories. The first is that I make them central to this study not because there is some independent standard by which they can be seen to be determinative of the functioning of human ratio, but rather because they emerge from attention to Barth’s texts as elements that are central to his thinking. Their value for this study is heuristic; they permit us to chart decisive features of Barth’s thinking that have otherwise received little attention. The second point is that, while these categories do not have normative force, their heuristic value is not accidental, for their usefulness in synthesizing tendencies in Barth’s work reflects his roots in a particular tradition. In the form in which they are deployed by Barth, these categories are basic to the tradition of modern reflection that follows from Kant’s work. In the interest of positioning us to chart Barth’s similarities to and departures from the modern tradition, I introduce the notions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought in Chapter 1 by showing how they are made foundational for modern reflec­ tion through Kant’s critical turn, and how they shape theological work between Kant and Barth. After introducing to the question of the ordering of thought in Chapter 1, I propose to develop Barth’s conception through a two-part exposition. Part

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The Ordering of the Christian Mind

I will consist of two chapters that treat Barth’s earlier engagements with the apostle Paul. These chapters show how Barth’s understanding of Christian thought is shaped by reflection on the noetic consequences of Paul’s account of faith. The first will draw from Barth’s work on Romans and 1 Corinthians in order to show that Barth assigns considerable moral and spiritual weight to the ordering of creaturely thought. This chapter sets the terms of the problem within Barth’s reading of Paul by showing that Barth tends to narrate Paul’s descriptions of sin as manifestations of disorders in thought. Barth interprets the moral and spiritual disorder that Paul depicts in Romans 1 as an expres­ sion of the difficulty that follows when human thought is not structured by the recognition of the difference between God and the world. Barth then interprets Paul’s account of the dissension in the church in Corinth as a manifestation of the way that Christian faith is distorted when it is coordinated with thought that orders its activities around the customary standpoint of human reasoning. These inquiries show that study of Paul leads Barth to consider Christian reasoning primarily in terms of the moral question of the ordering of Christian thought, and to think through an answer primarily by considering the way that faith in the resurrection reorders Christian thinking. Chapter 3 picks up on this conclusion and treats Barth’s account of what it means for thought to be ordered by faith in the resurrection. This chapter begins with a detailed consideration of Barth’s theology of the resurrection itself. I show that this theology stands at the heart of his earlier work, and that it hinges on an unusual analogy between a human act of judgement and the formal structure of the resurrection. Equipped with an understanding of the peculiar notions that this analogy generates, I move to consider Barth’s account of the way that faith in the resurrection reorders Christian thought. I show, first, that Barth suggests that this faith requires the believer to take up a noetic standpoint grounded in the reality of the eschatological subject—that is, the new creature who is found in Christ. I then show, secondly, that thought that occupies this standpoint takes its orientation from the life of Christ, for the reality of Christ is constitutive of the space in which the eschatological subject is found. I show, thirdly, that these notions bring with them a new conception of the freedom of Christian thought, for Barth understands the proclamation of the resurrection as the proclamation of a divine lordship that reshapes the possibilities of human freedom. The turn from Chapter 3 to Chapter 4 is a turn to the second part of this study. In Part II, I inquire into Barth’s conception of the way that Christian thought is reordered by the movement from faith to understanding. This inquiry involves two chapters that centre around Barth’s engagement with Anselm. Chapter 4 traces the continuity between Barth’s work on Paul and his study of Anselm. It begins with an objection to the account of the ordering of thought that emerges from Barth’s work on Paul, and shows how Barth thinks through a response to this objection by drawing on Paul and Anselm together.

Introduction

19

These figures are paired in Barth’s 1927 Christliche Dogmatik in helping Barth to see that objections articulated by his neo-Protestant interlocutors rest on premises borrowed from Kant that Christian thinkers may properly reject. Paul and Anselm stand together on one side of a division that separates a theology of the Word of God from a self-referential theology that neoProtestantism grounds in appeal to Kant. The final consequence that Barth draws from this division is that a theology of the Word of God requires a conception of human understanding that stands apart from notions inherited from the post-Kantian tradition. I aim to show that Barth supposes that the need for this conception is grounded in Paul’s account of faith, and that his Anselm book can be seen as the development of this account. It is this claim that I carry over into Chapter 5. Chapters takes up the task of describing the movement from faith to understanding that Barth traces in FQI. I show, first, that Barth grounds the inquiry of FQI in a theology of baptism that serves to locate the discussion within the eschatological standpoint that he identifies through his reading of Paul. This theology fills out the account of the standpoint and orientation of Christian thought that we encounter in Chapter 3.1 then proceed to show that the inquiry of FQI presents a conception of understanding that is commen­ surate with this standpoint. Barth’s account hinges on the notion that under­ standing consists in a moral and spiritual movement through which Christian thought is brought into conformity with the activity of God. Understanding is found where believers apprehend the necessity that belongs to the being and activity of God and allow this necessity to reshape the freedom of their thought in a movement of sanctification. By showing how these notions are developed in FQI and deployed in the Church Dogmatics, I show that Barth’s work is marked by a concern to understand Christian thought in terms of the moral ordering of noetic activity that is proper for creatures, and that it presents a weighty account of this ordering by considering the noetic consequences of faith and faith’s movement to understanding.

1 Theological Reasoning Reconsidered Karl Barth and the Question of Well-ordered Christian Thought

1.1. INTRODUCTION Critical consideration of the legacy and ongoing potential of the theology of Karl Barth is central to theological inquiry today. Barth’s work was formative of a new theological horizon in the aftermath of the First World War; a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, expressions of discontent with Barth’s work issue from parts of the theological field, but there are no signs of a shift away from this horizon that is any way comparable to the transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century theology that is signalled by Schleiermacher’s work, or from nineteenth- to twentieth-century thought that is signalled by Barth’s. Barth’s theology remains a central point of reference for contemporary work; a cursory glance around the theological landscape reveals a cluster of figures united by the attempt to think ‘with and beyond Barth’,1 a cottage industry that concerns itself with considering the possibilities presented by Barth’s work to evangelical theology in particular,2 and a host 1 The phrase is used in Nigel Biggar’s ‘Hearing God’s Command and Thinking About What’s Right: With and Beyond Barth’, in Nigel Biggar (ed.), Reckoning with Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 101-18; it has come to serve as a watchword for a host of others. See e.g. Paul Dafydd Jones, ‘On Patience: Thinking With and Beyond Karl Barth’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 68.3 (2015), 273-98; John L. Drury, The Resurrected God: Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology of Easter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 12; W. Travis McMaken, The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 277; Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology and Phil­ osophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 255. 2 See e.g. Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson (eds.), Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2015); William J. Abraham and Christian T. Collins Winn (eds.), Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade, 2014); Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson (eds.), Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011); David Gibson and Daniel Strange (eds.), Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (London:

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

21

of constructive theologians who mine resources from Barth in all areas of theological inquiry. The aim of this study is to contribute to consideration of the legacy and potential of Barth’s theology by developing a new account of his conception of theological reasoning. Attention to this conception is central, for the reception history of Barth’s theology makes plain that the strongest concerns regarding his work are directed at its fundamental rationality. I suggested in the Introduction to this study that the regularity with which theologians have responded to Barth’s work by questioning its rationality elevates the question of theological reasoning to a decisive place in the comprehension of twentieth-century theology. We saw, too, that contemporary thinkers continue to echo these concerns, speaking, for instance, of Barth’s work as a self-guaranteeing ‘tauto-theology’,3 and claiming that it does not generate anything that counts as knowledge because it mirrors the logic of a facile children’s hymn.4 This study undertakes two tasks in face of widespread critiques of Barth’s account of theological reasoning. The first is descriptive. Guided by the conviction that assessment of Barth’s work is impeded by underdeveloped conceptions of this account, I aim to develop a new understanding of its contours that facilitates responsible consideration of Barth’s theology. The second is then argumentative. I aim to show that fuller understanding permits us to see that Barth offers a theologically weighty and spiritually bracing account of what I will call well-ordered Christian thought. In the Intro­ duction to this study I gave a broader description of these two aims, and of the procedure that I adopt in pursuing them; but I gave only passing indications of what I intend in speaking of the question of the ordering of thought. It is the task of framing this question that I propose to take up in this chapter. Careful attention to the terms of the question itself is important for a number of reasons. The most general concerns the difficulties that attend the sphere in which it moves. What I call the question of the ordering of thought is a species of the inquiries treated under the question of reason. As such, it belongs to a sphere marked by considerable ambiguity. To speak of reason is to employ a conceptual shorthand for a nexus of processes that have proven resistant to summation and normative description. Where philosophy after Nietzsche did not do away with the notion of reason, reducing it to more primordial—and sometimes more sinister—drives, the variety of the forms in which it seeks to reframe noetic questions testifies to the depth of its convic­ tion that the Enlightenment tradition had not positioned itself to inquire into reason in a fruitful way. If there is a premise shared by philosophical critics of Bloomsbury, 2009); Sung Wook Choo (ed.), Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008). 3 Janz, The Command of Grace, 38-54.

4 Pattison, The End of Theology, 21-2.

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The Ordering of the Christian Mind

Enlightenment thought as diverse as Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty, it is that more fundamental probings of a range of factors—being, language, presence, consciousness—are required before noetic questions may fruitfully be posed. Persistent concern over the last century regarding the posing of the question itself makes plain that attention to the problem is not misplaced. A more particular reason for attending to the problem has to do with the nature of the argument that I intend to make. This study functions in part as a defence of Barth’s account of Christian thought; but my argument will be primarily positive and constructive rather than polemical and defensive. Rather than seeking to rebut charges against Barth’s work by comparing his conceptions to principles borrowed from wider spheres of inquiry, I propose to attend closely to Barth’s texts and to offer a positive reconstruction of the account of the ordering of Christian thought that they present. Established conceptions of reason—if such things are to be found—are thus not to be presupposed as a standard against which Barth’s work may be measured; instead, attention to the terms that Barth himself sets is crucial. One of the aims of this study is to show that careful attention to these terms positions us to see that Barth makes one of his most distinctive contributions by pushing readers to consider the kinds of question that are properly basic to consider­ ation of theological reasoning. The first task of this chapter is thus to introduce the questions that guide Barth’s reflections. I take up this task by drawing from elements in Barth’s corpus in order to show that a twofold shift in question is operative in his thought. First, on the basis of his understanding of the peculiar relation between God and creatures, Barth comes to reframe the question of theologic­ al reasoning in moral terms. Barth supposes that, in its proper form, the relation between God and creatures consists in analogical correspondence between a divine act of self-giving and a responsive human act of faith. Within the bounds of this relation, to ask about the proper movements of theological reasoning is not to ask how Christian thought may be brought into conformity to some philosophical or scientific ideal, but rather to give a moral and spiritual account of the ordering of thought that corresponds to the activity of God. It is to develop something like a Christian ethics regarding the particular activities of the mind. Secondly, on the basis of his understanding of the qualitative difference between God and creatures, Barth is led to a further shift through which the question of truth is also refigured. Barth supposes that God’s difference from creatures means that the question of the possibility of an acknowledgement of truth that does not eliminate this difference is properly given primacy in the theological sphere. Barth’s recon­ sideration of the question of reason is thus accompanied by a reconsideration of the question of truth. I aim to show that these moves are foundational to his work; I introduce them under the rubric of the question of the ordering of

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

23

thought, which I adopt as a description for the peculiarly moral inquiry that shapes Barth’s account of theological reasoning in particular. Equipped with a conception of the questions that Barth poses, the second task of this chapter is then to introduce the concepts through which Barth develops a conception of the ordering of thought. I aim to show over the course of this study that Barth develops his conception by working through accounts of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought. I introduce these notions in this chapter by showing the way that they are passed down to Barth through the modern tradition quite generally. Treatment of the way that they are used in modern thought provides a useful backdrop against which Barth’s use may be understood.

1.2. THE QUESTION OF THE ORDERING OF THOUGHT

Divine Relation and the Question of Reason The aim of this first section is to introduce a reconsideration of the basic form of the question of reason that is operative in Barth’s work. That this recon­ sideration is rooted in study of Paul that Barth undertook during and after the First World War is a point to which we shall attend in Part I of this study; but an introduction to it can perhaps best be provided by considering aspects of Barth’s work from the late 1920s and early 1930s that reflect the assimilation of study of Paul into his thinking. A line of thought that is useful for us begins from Barth’s conception of the analogy of faith. In Church Dogmatics I, Barth considers the kind of corres­ pondence between the divine and the creaturely that makes possible intelli­ gible human speech about God. Barth aligns himself with the classical tradition generally in acknowledging that the divine and the human must share some ‘commonality’ if speech about God is to possess a basic coherence; but he famously rejects the Catholic notion that this commonality is rooted in an analogy between divine and human modes of being.5 To ground the intelligibility of speech about God in an analogy of being is, for Barth, to presuppose a ‘continuity’ between the divine and the creaturely that permits God to be known by disinterested human reflection apart from an act of divine self-communication.6 Concern for the primacy of revelation in the knowledge of God leads Barth to suggest that this knowledge is grounded not in an 5 Barth, KD LI, 251-2; English translation [henceforth ‘ET’], 238-9. 6 See KD LI, 250-7; ET, 238-44; Keith Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T. & T. Clark, 2010), 158; cf. Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25-6.

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The Ordering of the Christian Mind

analogy between divine and human being, but rather in an analogy between divine and human activity. He writes that, properly understood, a theology of analogy concerns ‘not a being that the created has in common with the Creator... but rather an activity, the human decision that in faith is similar to the decision of the grace of God’.7 ‘Commonality’ between the divine and the human is found where creaturely activity is so shaped by faith that it corresponds to the activity of God, a response of obedience that is analogically related to God’s act of self-giving. Drawing from Romans 12:6, Barth refers to this correspondence as the ‘analogy of faith’.8 He suggests that Paul has a correspondence of this kind in mind when he writes that, in the knowledge of God, it is in fact a ‘being known by God’ that is decisive.9 Barth’s account of the analogy of faith is important for him in preserving the primacy of divine activity in the knowledge of God; but it has a further importance for us because it also makes a form of human activity irreducible for this knowledge. On Barth’s terms, God is known only where a union of a divine gift and a human response of faith brings human activity into corres­ pondence with divine. Barth objects to the analogy of being in part because it places knowledge of God outside of a sphere that is marked out by faith and makes it accessible to disinterested ‘onlookers’ whose mode of being and activity is irrelevant to their knowledge.10* For Barth, the notion that the knowledge of God is available outside of a particular determination of human activity violates a basic distinction between theoretical and theological truth. In earlier lectures on ethics, Barth writes that knowledge of God must be distinguished from the ‘general and theoretical’ knowledge that is operative in other sciences, for the ordering of the knower’s thought and activity is irrelevant to knowledge of mathematical sums and historical data, but it is decisive for knowledge of God.11 The self-determination of the knower is to be bracketed in the activities of thought that ground the assertions that two and two are four, or that the German Empire was founded in 1871; but, in the knowledge of God, the shaping of thought itself by the self-determination of the knower is in fact ‘the important thing, the only important thing’, for ‘the truth of God... reveals itself in the concrete event of our own conduct’.12 Because God is known only where a human mode of activity corresponds to God’s revealing activity, knowledge of God cannot be conflated with modes of knowledge that are unaffected by the ordering of the human subject’s activity.

7 KD 1.1, 252-7, ET, 239-43. 8 KDI.l, 257; ET, 243-4. 9 KD 1.1, 257; ET, 243-4; cf. Galatians 4:8-9; 1 Corinthians 8:2-3, 13:2. 10 KD LI, 252; ET, 239. 11 Barth, Ethik I (1928), ed. Dietrich Braun (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1973), 103-8; ET, Ethics, ed. Dietrich Braun, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 63-6. 12 Ethik I, 103-8; ET, 63-6.

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

25

Barth’s turn from the analogy of being to the analogy of faith thus has as one of its extensions a distinction between the sphere of theoretical reason and the sphere to which knowledge of God is proper. The former is marked by operations of thought that are indifferent to the self-determination of the knower; it is the sphere of judgements that one subject may pass on to another without regard for the way that comprehension of them is conditioned by particular acts and decisions. The latter, by contrast, is marked by judgements of the ‘knowledge of faith’. This knowledge is grounded in a disposition of the subject that is rooted in both divine and human decisions; it is, for Barth, ‘a special knowledge, distinct from the knowledge of all other objects, outstand­ ing in the range of all knowledge’ by virtue of‘the difference and uniqueness of God as its object’.13 As the science that aims to further this ‘special knowledge’, theology is, on Barth’s telling, distinguished from the wider sphere of human science. It is set apart from the theoretical sciences by the demand for faith as a condition of its functioning.14 Barth is keen to insist that ‘an assertion of the independence of theology in relation to other sciences cannot be proved to be necessary in principle’, for an assertion of this kind would amount to a ‘despair’ that gives other forms of thought over to a necessary faithlessness; but it is ‘unavoidable in practice’ as an ‘emergency measure’ in face of the sinful human refusal to order thought generally in accordance with faith.15 Attention to Barth’s assertion of the independence of theology has become increasingly common as the influence of the modern tradition on his thought has come to be acknowledged.16 Distinctions between theoretical reasoning and the sphere in which theology operates are typical of the work of Kant, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Herrmann; whereas engagements with Barth in the 1980s and 1990s often treated Barth’s conception of the independence of theology as an anticipation of post-liberal or even postmodern accounts of the irreducibility of differing perspectives, more recent work suggests that it is better understood as a reflection of Barth’s place in the modern ‘independence of religion’ movement.17 The point is important for us because it is identifi­ cation of the independence of theology that leads Barth to reconsider the proper movements of theological reasoning. Barth, no less than his modern predecessors, insists on the distinctiveness of theological reasoning; he, no less than they, is thus required to consider the proper movements of this form of thought. Barth famously gives expression to the gap that exists between theology and the norms of theoretical reasoning by suggesting that even the 13 KD II.l, 14; ET, 15. 14 KD LI, 18-19; ET, 18-19. 15 KDI.l, 3-5; ET, 5-7. 16 See Kenneth Oakes’s recent Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy; McCormack, ‘Reve­ lation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective’, in Orthodox and Modern (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2008), 21-39. 17 See e.g. McCormack’s ‘Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth’, in Orthodox and Modern, 109-65.

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The Ordering of the Christian Mind

theologian’s assent to the law of non-contradiction requires the qualification that the theologian may have to accept claims that appear contradictory to theoretical reason and are resolved only through reference to divine activ­ ity.18 As he puts it in early work on Paul, the law of identity, ‘A=A’, which is often taken to be the basis of human reasoning generally, must be qualified in theological reckoning because the divine act of justification means that ‘A=not A’, the sinner is said not to be a sinner.19 That God acts from outside of the world and produces states of affairs that appear to contradict the realities that may be acknowledged on worldly terms means that a ‘classical’ understanding of the norms for scientific reasoning is subject to qualification in the theological sphere.20 If a conception of the proper movements of theological reflection cannot simply be imported wholesale from the theoretical sphere, then the question that Barth faces is where an alternative conception maybe found. We shall see later that the modern tradition offers differing accounts of the regulation of theological reasoning; at present, it is decisive for us that Barth develops an account of theological reasoning by inquiring into the movements of thought that correspond to the activity of God. Guided by the notion that correspond­ ence between divine and human activity is the key to the knowledge of God, Barth asks how the activities of thought itself may be ordered in a way that permits God to be known. This inquiry comes then to have a distinctively moral form because of the kind of activity that Barth takes to be constitutive on the human side of the analogy of faith. The argument of Church Dogmatics I in particular is determined by the notion that revelation is always a revelation of a divine lordship, and that obedience is the fundamental attitude on the human side that corresponds to the ‘claiming’ and ‘commandeering’ of the creature by the Lordship of God.21 Within the broader structure of the analogy of faith, Barth brings obedience to the fore as the basic form of human activity that grounds the knowledge of God; because it is the sine qua non of this knowledge, he takes it as the clue to an account of the proper movements of Christian thinking. A distinctively moral inquiry into the procedures of Christian thinking emerges in Barth’s work because he takes obedience as the key to the knowledge of God. The effects of Barth’s emphasis on obedience are felt throughout the Church Dogmatics as a whole, and in Church Dogmatics I and II in particular. In these volumes, Barth considers a host of questions that are staples of inquiries into theological reasoning: theological method, the nature of the knowledge of God, the relation between theology and broader conceptions of science, the

18 KDI.l, 7-8; ET, 8-9. 19 Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, in Erklärung des Epheser- und des Jakobusbriefes 1919-1929, ed. Jörg-Michael Bohnet (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2009), 59. 20 KD LI, 7-8; ET, 8-9. 21 KD LI, 155-8, 216-20; ET, 149-53, 198-210.

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

27

balance of freedom and authority under which the human knower stands, and so on; but these questions are reshaped because of the theological frame­ work within which they are situated. They are not approached by considering a demand for universal necessity in judgement, or the criteria for scientific inquiry generally; instead, Barth takes the obedience that is the proper response to revelation as the clue to the movements of theological reasoning. Barth writes that ‘the absolute requirement of the obedience of faith’ for the knowledge of God has as one of its corollaries the need for ‘a basic mode of thinking and speaking that corresponds with this obedience of faith’.22 His engagement with noetic questions is decisively determined by his attempt to give an account of this mode of thinking. He takes the notion of obedience as the clue to the relation between theology and broader notions of science,23 the particular character of theological statements,24 the formal structure of a theological inquiry,25 the proper method of dogmatic study,26 the balance of freedom and authority that marks inquirers’ relation to their sources,27 and the form that the ideal of actualized theological cognition would take.28 Barth thus develops accounts of the basis, procedure, and end of theological reason­ ing by considering the conceptions that correspond to the obedience of faith. Obedience is, for him, so decisive for the proper functioning of Christian thought that, within the sphere of the theological, the questions of knowledge and truth are finally reducible to questions of obedience. In Church Dogmatics II, Barth writes simply that ‘knowledge of God is obedience to God’, and he insists that the identity between the two not be watered down by construals that suggest that obedience is simply a condition or corollary of knowledge of God.29 ‘Observe: we do not say that knowledge of God may also be obedience, or that of necessity it has obedience attached to it, or that it is followed by obedience. No: knowledge of God as knowledge of faith is in itself and by a necessity of its nature obedience.’30 In Church Dogmatics I, Barth creates a similar identity between obedience and truth; again, obedience is the decisive term. He writes that the theologian is not to be understood as a pupil who seeks to grasp the teacher’s thought, but rather as a servant who seeks to grasp the master’s intentions. Accordingly, in the sphere of theological work, ‘the question of its obedience includes that of its truth. But the question of its truth can only be put as the question of its obedience.’31 What do we encounter here in the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics? Critics have suggested that these volumes reflect a typically modern obsession with noetic questions that causes the moral and spiritual drama of sin and 22 24 26 27 28 30

KD 1.2, 912; ET, 816. 23 KD 1.1, 3-5; ET, 5-7. KD LI, 286-7; ET, 271. 25 KD 1.2, 962-90; ET, 860-84. KD 1.2, 954-63; ET, 853-61. KD 1.2, 505-10, 598-602, 741-4; ET, 457-61, 538-41, 661-3. KD 1.2, 848-51; ET, 758-60. 29 KD II.l, 26-7; ET, 26. KD III, 26-7; ET, 26. 31 KD 1.1, 290-1; ET, 274-5.

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redemption to be reduced to an epistemological movement of ignorance and cognizance.32 Barth scholars have been dismissive of this view; but in truth it reflects an initial moment of perceptiveness. Moral and noetic questions are indeed brought together; the key, though, is that far from subordinating the moral to the noetic, Barth has reframed the noetic in moral terms as a result of the recognition that knowledge of God is inseparable from obedience to God. The arrangement that results can perhaps best be explained by situating Barth’s work in relation to Kant. Barth follows Kant in the first instance in separating the sphere in which knowledge of God is found from the sphere of theoretical reasoning; but he then departs from him in identifying the clue to the proper movements of reason within this sphere. Whereas Kant takes the ideas of freedom and of the moral law as the clues to the ordering of thought within the sphere of practical reason, Barth takes the idea of obedience as the clue to the proper movements of thought within the theological sphere. Church Dogmatics I is similar to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason in deriving an account of theological reasoning by deduction from a particular master concept; differences arise because Barth takes a theological account of obedi­ ence as this concept in the place of an idealist account of autonomy. The importance of this shift in leading Barth away from conventions that mark much post-Kantian thought is a matter to which we shall attend throughout this study. For the time being, it is important for us because it grounds a distinctively moral inquiry into Christian thought. To ask about the proper ordering of theological reason is, for Barth, to inquire into the movements of thought that come through obedience to correspond to the activity of God. Barth sums up this notion by writing that the ‘oddity about knowledge of God as compared with other knowledge’ is that it is ‘directed, guided, and ordered’ by obedience.33 The argument of this study turns in the first instance on the claim that comprehension of Barth’s work requires following him through the reframing of the question of reason that we encounter here. I aim to show the way that an intellectually and spiritually compelling account of the movements of Christian thought is derived from Barth’s moral inquiry into theological reasoning. It is important in ensuring a fair hearing for Barth that, at this point in the study, we understand Barth’s shift to this moral inquiry to

32 See e.g. Alister McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 111-12; Rowan Williams, ‘Barth on the Triune God’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), esp. 172, 186-7; cf. Gustav Wingren, Theology in Conflict: Nygren, Barth, Bultmann (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958). 33 Barth, ‘Schicksal und Idee’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930, ed. Hermann Schmidt (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1994), 379; ET, ‘Fate and Idea’, in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt, trans. George Hunsinger (Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick Publications, 1986), 50.

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29

have its basis in a fairly broad conception of the moral character of the relation between God and creatures. I have to this point introduced Barth’s reframing by drawing material from the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics in particular; this material does not always feature Barth at his best; readers familiar with it might be inclined to give up on an account of Barth’s conception of theological reasoning if it requires adoption of Barth’s theology of revelation. Barth’s doctrine of the Word of God is both polemically and architectonically over-determined; a few big ideas are driving Barth’s argu­ ment, and much of the material detail is worked out through deductions rooted in architectonic decisions. Barth’s decision to take obedience as the decisive clue to theological reasoning does not always produce assured results; I have drawn from it here only to introduce the notion that Barth develops a distinctively moral inquiry into theological reasoning. At this point, two presuppositions only must be granted to Barth in order to appreciate the sense of his approach. The first is that, because God is not one more reality within the world, it is necessary to ask how far the procedures that theoretical reason applies to empirical objects are applicable to knowledge of God. The second is that Scripture presents the relation between God and creatures in terms of a moral and spiritual drama that makes moral questions central to relations between God and creatures. A broad understanding of the distinct­ ively moral relation between God and creatures is decisive for Barth’s work on the basis of instincts inherited from Kant and Ritschl, reconfigured through study of Paul, and honed through engagement with the moral theology of the Reformed tradition. If we grant Barth the outlines of this understanding, then we are positioned to move forward with him as he develops his conceptions.

Divine Difference and the Question of Truth An objection to Barth’s procedure might be considered at this point that helps us to give further definition to the terms of this study. The account so far suggests that critics go astray in supposing that Barth reduces the spiritual drama of the gospel to a noetic dynamic of ignorance and cognizance; but some critical reflection is required at this point if the claim that in fact Barth reframes noetic questions in moral terms is to avoid a different form of reductionism. A critic of Barth’s procedure might suggest that, while there is something perceptive about the recognition that thought is an activity that can be approached on moral terms, this recognition will mislead unless it is coupled with the acknowledgement that the excellence of reason is to be defined through consideration of reason’s proper end. Classically understood, the activities of reason are ordered to the end of distinguishing truth from falsehood; the question of their proper functioning is the question of the movements that permit them to fulfil this task. To approach these activities

30

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with some other question in hand is, for the classical thinker, to bring about the frustration of reason by directing its activities away from its appointed end, and to expose human beings to manipulation by clouding their capacity to discriminate judiciously between differing claims. The question for us at this point is how Barth’s turn to consideration of the activities of reason in terms of obedience avoids a reductionism through which the question of truth is lost from view, reason is alienated from itself, and human subjects are left with little protection against ideological manipulation. This question is important for us because concerns about a loss of the question of truth have played a prominent role in the reception of Barth’s work. Wolfhart Pannenberg famously suggests that Barth cannot move from the subjective certainty that belongs to faith itself to a properly objective form of certainty because he refuses to engage in a critical inquiry into the truth of Christian teaching.34 Common criticisms of the apparent fideism and insu­ larity of Barth’s work express similar concerns regarding the deleterious effects of his apparent bracketing of the question of truth. The claim that I wish to develop in response is that Barth’s shift to consideration of the moral ordering of thought is accompanied by, and, in important respects, grounded in, a particular understanding of the problem of the truth. I aim to show that, whereas Barth’s critics suppose that he goes astray by failing to inquire critically into the factual truth of Christian teaching, Barth takes the decisive question in the theological sphere to lie elsewhere. As he understands it, the qualitative difference between God and the world means that the determina­ tive theological question concerns not the substantiation of particular truth claims, but rather the possibility of truth at all. He holds that the danger in the theological sphere is that theologians will undertake an inquiry into truth in a way that eliminates the distinction between God and creatures. The basic question for him is how the truth of God may be apprehended and acknowledged without apprehension and acknowledgement themselves reducing divine truth to a creaturely quantity. An introduction to these notions might again be given through brief consideration of elements in Barth’s corpus, beginning with lectures that Barth delivered in 1929 on the relation between theological reasoning and the perennial opposition between realist and idealist forms of thought. As Barth presents it in these lectures, realism and idealism are fundamental ‘boundaries’ that are made irreducible for human thought by their anchoring in the ‘existential forces’ that determine life as a whole.35 Barth argues that all aspects of life are determined by the interplay of being and activity, and that this interplay gives rise to a fundamental opposition between realist thought, 34 See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology I, 43-52; cf. Theology and the Philosophy of Science, trans. Francis McDonagh (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 265-76. 35 Barth, ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 346-7; ET, 25-6.

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

31

which privileges being as the basis of knowledge, and idealist thought, which privileges activity.36 Crucially, Barth supposes that these opposing forms of thought are accompanied by differing approaches to the question of truth. On the one hand, the realist’s identification of being as the grounds of knowledge means that the question of truth is understood as a question of givenness, for the realist takes it that truth is established as beings give themselves to be known.37 On the other hand, the idealist’s privileging of activity means that the question of truth is understood as the question of the activities of reason that provide a foundation for truth, for idealist thought finds critical distance from the givens of experience in awareness of its own activity, finds in this distance the basis for a concern regarding the reliability of the given, and turns to aspects of its own activity to provide a ‘supreme court’ in which givens may be ‘considered, legitimated... and finally supplied with foundations’.38 On Barth’s construction of the problem, the perennial opposition between realism and idealism thus presents the theologian with differing frameworks for understanding truth. Theologians could follow the realist in privileging being and givenness, and associating truth with immediacy in experience and self-evidence in judgement; or they could follow the idealist in privileging activity, and associating truth with the proper ordering of the world-securing activities of reason. Barth suggests that these two views are important because they are unavoidable aspects not only of human thought but also of the ‘act of living’ as a whole;39 yet he goes on to argue that neither construal is adequate for theology. On the one hand, theology cannot align itself with realism because the presumption that the truth of God may be established through the immediacy of a particular given eliminates the distinction between divine and creaturely being.40 To presume that the truth of God may simply be read off from a particular event or experience is, for Barth, to presume that the understanding of being and causality that is the basis of knowledge generally permits an immediate grasp of the being and causality that are operative in events through which God makes himself known. The realist takes the mean­ ing of the phrase ‘God is’ from the experience of being generally and falls into a ‘demonology’ in which God appears as one agent competing with others for supremacy in the creaturely sphere.41 On the other hand, Barth supposes that, though idealism itself arose from reflection on the particular problem of the knowledge of God, it is no more sustainable a companion for theology than realism, for the presumption that the activities of human reason might themselves secure the knowledge of God effaces the distinction between these activities and the divine itself.42 To jettison all aspects of the knowledge

36 37 39 41

‘Schicksal und ‘Schicksal und ‘Schicksal und ‘Schicksal und

Idee’, Idee’, Idee’, Idee’,

346-7, 355-7, 368-71; ET, 26-7, 32-3, 42-3. 355-7; ET, 32-3. 38 ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 368-71; ET, 42-3. 346; ET, 25. 40 ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 363-8; ET, 38-42. 374-5; ET, 47. 42 ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 379-80; ET, 49-50.

32

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

of God that may not be secured through an operation of reason is to cut this knowledge to the shape of reason’s own activities. Whereas the realist erases the distinction between God and creaturely being and is left with an oppressive ‘demonology’, the idealist erases the distinction between God and human activity and is left with ‘ideology’ in which claims about the movements of the divine are merely projected images of the movements of human spirit.43 For Barth, then, the approaches to truth that are generated by the basic forms of human thought cannot sustain a distinction between the divine and the creaturely. On either realist or idealist terms, inquiries into truth reduce God to the measure of the creaturely. We shall see in Chapter 2 that Barth’s diagnosis of this problem traces back to his early work on Paul, and was central to his attempt to identify appropriate forms of theological reasoning. It is a diagnosis that was shared by a number of thinkers who sought new forms of thought in the wake of the breakdown of neo-Protestant syntheses between theology and philosophical idealism. In an important article that is contem­ poraneous with Barth’s lectures, Gerhardt Kuhlmann argues that the basic problem facing theology is that it is caught between an idealist critique that shows the extraordinary naivety with which theological realism assumes the givenness of the truth of God, and an idealist solution that is marked by an equally extraordinary ‘self-deception’ in which the divine is simply identified with the human.44 We shall return to Kuhlmann’s article in Chapter 4, for it is part of the backdrop against which the importance of Barth’s account of theological understanding may be perceived. For the time being, the point of significance for us concerns the way that Barth’s critique of realist and idealist forms of thought shapes his understanding of the problem of truth. Critics fault Barth for failing to inquire into the truth of Christian teaching as it may be discovered in the givens of history and experience, or substantiated through self-reflective consideration of the movements of spirit; but Barth supposes that either movement eliminates the distinction between the divine and the creaturely. The basic terms of the question of truth will have to be reformu­ lated in the theological sphere in light of the distinction between God and creatures. Barth writes that, just as theological thinking is to be distinguished from ‘general and theoretical thinking’, so the question of theological truth is to be distinguished from a ‘general and theoretical truth’.45 How, then, is the question of truth to be posed? I aim to develop the notion that Barth presents the question of truth as a question of acknowledgement. How can the truth of God be acknowledged without reducing it to an element

43 ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 374-5; ET, 47. 44 Gerhardt Kuhlmann, ‘Zum theologischen Problem der Existenz’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 37 (1929), 28-30. 45 Barth, Ethik I, 103-8; ET, 63-6; cf. KD LI, 285-6; ET, 269-70.

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

33

within creaturely reality? If the two irreducible forms of human thought lead speech about God into demonology or ideology, how may divine truth be acknowledged without transforming it into untruth? This is the question of the very possibility of truth in the theological sphere; it is in important ways more probing and unsettling than the question of the factual accuracy of particular theological claims. We have seen that it was given acute expression in Barth’s grappling with realist and idealist forms of thought in the late 1920s; but it is decisive for his work from the tumultuous days of the First World War. The announcement of a crisis of theology that figures centrally in his early work is an announcement of the crisis that follows when theologians stand back from disputes regarding particular claims and pose the question of the very possibility of theological truth. How may human beings speak of God without taking God under their own ‘management’ and transforming the righteousness of God into ‘the highest of a variety of high ideals’?46 What becomes of speech about God when human beings begin to ask: ‘haven’t we just measured God with our standards, conceived God with our conceptions, wished for a God according to our wishes?’47 It is these questions that Barth wishes to bring to the fore when he characterizes his earlier theology as a whole as an attempt to ‘illuminate’ the true difficulty of theology by consid­ ering the absurd position of the minister who mounts the pulpit under the pretence that he may speak a word that is not reducible to ideology or the demonic.48 ‘What are you doing, you human, with God’s Word upon your lips?’49 ‘As theologians, we are to speak of God. But we are humans and as such cannot speak of God.’50 It is, for Barth, this dilemma that presents the basic question of truth to the theologian: how may the truth of God be acknow­ ledged without being reduced to a creaturely quantity? In sum, then, I have to this point given skeletal descriptions that are meant to illustrate a twofold shift in question that will shape the argument of this study. I have argued, first, that consideration of the peculiar relation that exists between God and creatures leads Barth to reframe the question of reason in moral terms. I have then argued, secondly, that recognition of the difference

46 Barth, ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1929), 10; ET, ‘The Righteousness of God’, in The Word of God and Theology, trans. Amy Marga (London: T. & T. Clark, 2011), 7. 47 Barth, ‘Die neue Welt in der Bible’, in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, 30; ET, ‘The Strange New World within the Bible’, in The Word of God and Theology, 27. 48 Barth, ‘Not und Verheissung der christlichen Verkündigung, 1922’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922-1925, ed. Holger Finze (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1990), 66-73; ET, ‘The Need and Promise of Christian Proclamation’, in The Word of God and Theology, 102-8. 49 ‘Not und Verheissung’, 90, ET, 123. 50 Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie, 1922’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922-1925, 151; ET, ‘The Word of God and the Task of Theology’, in The Word of God as the Task of Theology, 177.

34

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

between the divine and the creaturely causes Barth to present the question of truth as the problem of acknowledging the truth of the divine without reducing it to a creaturely quantity. The relation between these shifts in Barth’s approach to the questions of reason and truth is important to my argument. I aim to show that Barth allows the mode of relation between God and creatures to set the terms of his account of Christian thought because it is the relation that holds the clue to overcoming the problem posed by the difference. Barth comes to hold that it is in the moral and spiritual ordering of creaturely thought itself that the problem of truth finds a solution, for it is in the ordered correspondence of divine and human activity that God and creatures stand in a relation in which each retains its proper integrity. Barth identifies truth with obedience because he supposes that acknowledgement of the truth of God is an event that occurs as human thought orders its activities in accordance with the activities of God. Understood on these terms, Barth’s turn to consideration of the moral ordering of theological reasoning does not skirt the question of truth, but rather allows the question of truth to be resolved.

The Question of the Ordering of Thought and Contemporary Inquiry To this point we have encountered the forms of the questions of reason and truth that are decisive for Barth’s work. Before proceeding to identify the conceptual elements through which Barth develops an account of the ordering of thought, a few comments might be offered here in order to situate the notions that I have introduced within the contemporary landscape. The relation between these notions and three influential oppositions within Barth scholarship is significant. These oppositions run between realist and critically realist readings of Barth, the notions of dialectic and analogy in Barth’s work, and identifications of Barth with pre-modern and modern forms of thought. Contrasts between realist and critically realist readings of Barth are signifi­ cant, first, because of their influence in shaping contemporary debate. I suggested in the Introduction to this study that, at present, consideration of Barth’s basic forms of thought consists largely in variations on a strongly realist reading of Barth that is indebted to the work of T. F. Torrance, and a more critically realistic interpretation that is indebted to the work of Bruce McCormack. Influential debates in contemporary Barth studies have led to firm entrenchments along the lines of this opposition. I wish to suggest that consideration of Barth’s account of the moral ordering of creaturely thought may create space in which interpretations of Barth’s can function apart from these lines.

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

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Initial manoeuvring-room might be found by attending to the theological conceptions in which realist and critically realist readings are grounded, and asking how far these conceptions permit a synoptic view of Barth’s work. The first point that is significant for us in this respect concerns the rooting of Torrance’s realist reading in an account of the noetic consequences of the theology of justification. Torrance is led to identify a ''fundamentally realist’ character in Barth’s work by the supposition that ‘no one since the Reforma­ tion has applied justification by God’s grace alone so radically and daringly to human theologizing as Karl Barth’.51 As Torrance interprets him, Barth sought from the early days of his commentary on Romans to counter the subjectivism of nineteenth-century theology by developing the ‘radical epis­ temological relevance of justification by grace alone’.52 The theology of justi­ fication is, for Torrance, ‘the most powerful statement of objectivity in theology’, and so it provided a useful tool with which to counter subjectivist tendencies in nineteenth-century thought.53 It is significant for us that, as Torrance reads him, the thoroughgoing emphasis on objectivity that Barth derived from the theology of justification also inclined him increasingly in the direction of a strong theological realism. Torrance argues that, in his early work, Barth saw dialectical thinking as the ‘correlate of justification by faith alone, in its epistemological reference’,54 but then came to suppose that privileging dialectical thinking made a particular philosophical and existential operation necessary to the knowledge of God.55 Pressed by emphasis on the theology of justification to avoid an epistemic ‘semi-Pelagianism’ in which human forms of thought cooperate with divine activity,56 Barth shifted from espousing a dialectical movement of thought that acknowledges the interplay of the givenness and non-givenness of God to an affirmation of the objective givenness of the knowledge of God. On Torrance’s telling, this affirmation of givenness constitutes the great breakthrough of Barth’s study of Anselm. Anselm led Barth to affirm that theological understanding is possible because the ‘Truth of God’ is ‘given to us as the object of understanding... the beginning and end of understanding are given to faith’, and so understanding need consist only in ‘moving from what is given to our knowledge into clearer knowledge of it’.57 Torrance supposes that the demand for objectivity in theological reasoning is fulfilled in this emphasis on the givenness of the truth of God, and that this same emphasis grounds the realist character of

51 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 176; God and Rationality, 68. 52 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 176. 53 Torrance, God and Rationality, 68; Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 184. 54 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 88. 55 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 139-43. 56 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 176; Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian, 39, 57-8. 57 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 184.

36

The Ordering of the Christian Mind

Barth’s theology. Torrance argues that, because the ‘given object is God’s self­ giving’, Barth does not end up with a ‘static objectivity’, and his realism is shaped by ‘the more dynamic and critico-idealist style of modernity’, but even so it remains a ‘fundamentally realist theology’.58 In the first place, then, a privileging of the theology of justification as the key to Barth’s form of thought leads to a realist interpretation that stresses the objective givenness of the knowledge of God. Realist interpretations of this kind played an important role in introducing Barth to the English-speaking world and continue to exert decisive influence in some quarters;59 but they have been challenged elsewhere as Bruce McCormack in particular has devel­ oped a programmatic interpretation of Barth’s work that argues that a straightforwardly realist construal of Barth leads readers astray. McCormack argues that a ‘red flag of warning’ must be raised against an English tendency to interpret Barth’s work in terms of a traditional realism, for he supposes that it is where the objective givenness of the knowledge of God is emphasized that Barth’s work is left open to charges of revelational positivism.60 McCormack’s antidote to the apparent positivism of realist interpretations is to point to the operation of a critical realism in Barth’s work. Crucially, McCormack develops this antidote by privileging the theology of revelation rather than the theology of justification as the decisive clue to Barth’s form of thought. As McCormack presents it, the problem that Barth seeks to address is not, in the first instance, the subjectivism of the modern tradition, but rather the philosophical critiques of the knowledge of God that gave rise to this subjectivism in the first place.61 These critiques compel Barth to show, on the one hand, how God may give himself to be known so that knowledge of God consists in more than vain metaphysical speculation, without, on the other hand, becoming a direct given of experience so that knowledge of God is available to human beings apart from a movement of divine subjectivity.62 Barth addresses this task, on McCormack’s telling, through a dialectically structured theology of revelation according to which God attaches himself to an intuitable, phenomenal object

58 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 176, 185-6. 59 See e.g. Kevin Diller’s recent depiction of a ‘unified response’ to theology’s epistemological dilemma that is presented by Barth and Alvin Plantinga, which relies on repeated affirmations of Barth’s acceptance of the givenness of the knowledge of God in order to ground the comparison between Barth and Plantinga (see Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2014)). 60 McCormack, ‘Review: “Barth’s Ethics of Reconcihation” by John Webster’, Modern Theology, 13 (1997), 275; ‘Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth’, 113. 61 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 125; ‘Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective’, 28-31; ‘Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth’, 125. 62 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 207-8; ‘Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective’, 28-31; ‘Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth’, 125.

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

37

in such a way that he is veiled’ in it, and then unveils himself in discrete revelation events by granting individuals the ‘eyes of faith’ required to see the divinity that is veiled in the creatmely medium.63 On these terms, God is only ever indirectly identical with the elements in the creaturely sphere through which he mediates knowledge of himself. God is never simply given in and with a particular creaturely reality; God must ever give himself to be known again; and it is thus proper to acknowledge a critical check on Barth’s theological realism. McCormack writes that Barth’s work is marked by a critical realism that has its ‘real heart’ in his dialectically structured conception of revelation.64 This theology of revelation is ‘constitutive of the overall shape of Barth’s theology’ because it qualifies the mode of divine givenness and anchors the critical element of Barth’s realism.65 In brief, then, we can see that the opposition between realist and critically realist readings of Barth is rooted in identifications of differing theological conceptions as the clue to Barth’s forms of thought. Torrance grounds a strong realism in an account of the noetic corollaries of a theology of justification; McCormack develops a critical check on this realism by thinking through the formal structure of Barth’s conception of revelation. The important question for us at this point is whether either a theology of justification or a particular theology of revelation is so singularly determinative for Barth that concentra­ tion on it allows a full picture of Barth’s forms of thought to emerge. Is either sufficiently expansive to afford a synoptic view of Barth’s forms of thought? I aim to show that readers need not allow themselves to be constricted by an opposition between more classical and more critical forms of realism, for Barth’s engagement with the problems of the acknowledgement of truth and of the ordering of thought is responsive to a wider range of theological categories than either the realist or critically realist readings bring to view. Barth’s conception of the mode of divine givenness is shaped by his reading of Paul and by reflections on Christology, pneumatology, and the theology of the sacraments; his account of the forms of thought that correspond to God’s activity is shaped again by a reading of Paul and by his theologies of God, justification, and sanctification. In developing an account of Barth’s conception of the ordering of thought, I aim to describe this more expansive set of notions in order to move beyond the conceptions issuing from the narrow theological terrain on which realist and critically realist readers pitch their camps.

63 McCormack, ‘What has Basel To Do with Berlin? Continuities in the Theologies of Barth and Schleiermacher’, in Orthodox and Modern, 83. 64 McCormack, ‘Review: “Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation” by John Webster’, 275; Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 274; cf. ‘Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth’, 112; ‘What has Basel to do with Berlin?’, 84-5. 65 McCormack, ‘Review: “Barth’s Ethics of Reconcihation” by John Webster’, 275.

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A second set of introductory comments might be offered in order to situate this study in relation to debates regarding dialectic and analogy in Barth’s work. I suggested in the Introduction to this study that these debates have something of a tortured history, for scholars have tended to use the terms ‘dialectic’ and ‘analogy’ in differing ways. For von Balthasar, to speak of a turn from dialectic to analogy is to point to a shift in Barth’s work from a tendency to describe the relation between God and creatures in terms of an idealist dialectic of identity and difference to a depiction that is structured by a peculiarly Protestant theology of analogy. For Frei and Torrance, to refer to a turn from dialectic to analogy is to indicate that Barth turned to a proper theological realism after an earlier ‘non-ontological’ or ‘subjective-idealistic ’ phase. For McCormack, talk of a turn from dialectic to analogy is incoherent, for dialectic is best understood to refer to the formal structure of Barth’s theology of revelation, while analogy refers to the correspondence between divine and human activity in the analogy of faith. In face of these competing conceptions, one aim of this study is to develop an account of dialectic and analogy in which the two may be seen to be positively and not oppositionally related, the term ‘dialectic’ specifying Barth’s insistence that acknowledge­ ment of the truth of God occurs in a movement, and not just a claim, of reason, and the term ‘analogy’ specifying Barth’s commitment to the notion that this movement takes its proper shape from its correspondence to the activity of God. These claims can perhaps best be introduced by situating them in relation to a shift in the sense of the term ‘dialectic’ that has occurred as a result of the work of Bruce McCormack. McCormack appears as the great advocate of the consistently dialectical character of Barth’s theology; but the question for us is whether McCormack’s account ultimately obscures aspects of Barth’s dialectical theology from view. Barth’s own explicit expressions of affinity for the dialectical tend to occur in contexts in which he points to dialectic as a form of thought that, for all of its inability in and of itself to grasp the truth of God, is at least better suited to acknowledging this truth than alternatives.66 He depicts dialectic as an alternative to forms of thought that threaten to collapse the distinction between God and creatures; but this depiction is downplayed somewhat in McCormack’s work. McCormack emphasizes Barth’s insistence on the inability of all forms of thought to apprehend the truth of God, and argues that ‘dialectic’ is to be understood to refer primarily to the interplay of veiling and unveiling in revelation, a reality that appears to McCormack to be the material ground of Barth’s interest in the dialectical. Crucially, though, it is finally the critical check on a theological realism, and not an account of the proper movement of thought, that plays the most

66

See Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie, 1922’; ‘Schicksal und Idee’.

Theological Reasoning Reconsidered

39

significant role in McCormack’s account of the consequences of the Realdia­ lektik of revelation. In important ways, emphasis on the need for a particular movement of thought appears to drop away. Whereas, for instance, Barth presents the dogmatic loci that structure the Church Dogmatics as differing standpoints of thought, and supposes that it is precisely in a dialectical 'movement of knowledge’ between them, rather than in ‘a construction that unites and harmonizes’ them, that an acknowledgement of divine truth may be found,67 McCormack treats the theology of election in Church Dogmatics II.2 as a master position from which a systematization of the whole may be accomplished.68 The result is something of an undialectical reading of Barth at least insofar as Barth’s sense of the movement that is required if acknowledgement of the truth of God is to occur appears to be marginalized. Recent studies of Barth’s theology reflect the way that, through McCormack’s work, the notion of dialectic has come to be treated as largely synonymous with the notion of critical realism, and to be taken as a qualification not of the movement of thought in which understanding is grounded, but rather the mood in which a particular claim is made.69 My argument aims to restore a sense of the dialectical character of Barth’s work by emphasizing the significance of a movement of thought to theological knowledge and truth. I aim to develop an account of the ordering of thought that emphasizes that a particular movement is essential to an acknowledge­ ment that does not reduce the divine to the creaturely; but it is important that I wish to show that this dialectical movement is positively, rather than inverse­ ly, correlated with a theology of analogy. I will argue that Barth’s sense of the centrality of a movement of thought is irreducibly analogical because the proper shape of the movement in which God is known is determined by considering the movement that corresponds analogically to the activity of God. It is by inquiring into the movements that are analogically related to the work of God that the proper movements of thought are determined. Insistence on this positive correlation between the dialectical and the analogic­ al is crucial, for it means that dialectical identifications of knowledge and truth with movement and event neither drain theological claims of their realism, nor make their content secondary or insignificant. Were the dialectical to be divorced from the analogical, it could lead quickly to functionalized or demythologized conceptions in which the significance of theological claims is taken to lie in the formation of the self rather than the depiction God’s activity; but holding the dialectical and the analogical together means that the descrip­ tive function of theological speech remains of irreducible significance. It

67 Barth, Ethik I, 86-90; ET, 52-4; KDI.l, 962-90; ET, 860-84. 68 See e.g. McCormack, ‘The Doctrine of the Trinity after Barth: An Attempt to Reconstruct Barth’s Doctrine in Light of His Later Christology’, in Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday (eds.), Trinitarian Theology after Barth (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2012), 87-118. 69 La Montagne, Barth and Rationality.

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is from faithful witness to the being and activity of God that human beings learn how to order their movements in correspondence to God’s. On the terms of this study, then, dialectic and analogy are best understood to stand together in specifying the way that divine truth may be acknowledged. On the one hand, this acknowledgement is irreducibly dialectical because it occurs in a move­ ment, and not a claim, of reason. On the other hand, it is irreducibly analogical because this movement is determined in its truth by its correspondence to the activity of God. I aim to show that this positive correlation between the dialectical and the analogical is in place in Barth’s thinking from early on in his development, and remains consistent thereafter. The final point to be made in situating this study within the contemporary landscape has to do with the way that Barth is located historically. The opposition that we have considered between realist and critically realist readings of Barth is in part an opposition between those who suppose that Barth’s work is marked by a return to the categories and conventions of the classical tradition, and those who suppose that it is decisively stamped by modern forms of thought. Whereas Torrance argues that Barth’s realism means that he leaned ‘much more toward the classical Greek theology of the ancient Church’,70 McCormack claims that ‘the phrase “critical realism”, as applied to Barth’s theological epistemology, has the decided advantage over competing alternatives of pointing to the great debt which he owed to the Kantian tradition in philosophy’.71 These differing historiographical judge­ ments are important because questions regarding the continuing fruitfulness of Barth’s work have come to hinge in part on how far Barth may be seen to raise himself above his historical location so that his forms of thought remain important today. In his more recent work, McCormack himself shows an admirable sense of the way that Barth thinks in modern terms without being unduly constricted by modern conventions;72 but his earlier descriptions of the way that ‘all of [Barth’s] efforts in theology may be considered, from one point of view, as an attempt to overcome Kant by means of Kant’ have left some readers convinced that Barth’s work is a narrowly in-house product of the modern tradition that has little capacity to speak to those who do not share its convictions.73 On the basis of Barth’s perceived debts to modern thought, some today suppose that the ‘extraordinary irony’ that attends Barth’s work is that ‘Karl Barth was the greatest theologian since the Reformation, and his work is today a dead letter’.74 70 Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian, 27’. 71 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 466. 72 See e.g. his contrast of Tillich and Barth on this point in ‘Why Should Theology be Christocentric? Christology and Metaphysics in Paul Tillich and Karl Barth’, Wesleyan Journal of Theology, 45.1 (2010), 73. 73 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 465-6. 74 Matthew Rose, ‘Karl Barth’s Failure’, First Things (June-July 2014), 39.

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A further aim of this study is to contribute to historiographical consider­ ation of Barth’s work by shifting attention from a broadly Kantian conception of the problem of the knowledge of God to the more perennial problem of the acknowledgement of divine truth. I aim to show that, for all of the ways that Barth’s engagement with the question of acknowledgement is formed by modern habits of thought, the question itself is perennial, and Barth stands with some of the giants of the theological tradition and with impor­ tant contemporary voices in aiming to give a response. It is, to begin with, scepticism that the truth of God could be acknowledged without being reduced to a creaturely quantity that has driven a number of apophatic projects in the theological tradition. It is, more positively, a concern of this kind that is operative in Augustine’s work, for the magisterial argumentation of the second half of the De Trinitate is propelled by the concern that the mind must be led through a spiritual movement if it is to acknowledge the truth of the Trinitarian confession without dragging God into the creaturely sphere by thinking of the Trinity in terms of a corporeal image.75 It is, finally, a problem of this kind that David Burrell makes central to a reading that shows how Thomas’s work is shaped by the problem of articulating the difference between God and the world without reducing this difference to one more distinction within the world.76 That a significant line of contemporary thinkers have taken up this Thomist question shows that Barth’s own interest in the problem of acknowledgement ought to preserve his work from appearing as a relic that is exhausted by its interest in philosophical critiques emerging from the shores of the Baltic.77

1.3. THE ELEMENTS OF THE ORDERING OF THOUGHT

To this point we have seen that fair consideration of Barth’s conception of theological reasoning hinges on the recognition that Barth reframes the question in two ways. On the basis of an understanding of the relation between God and creatures, he recasts the question of reason as a moral inquiry into the proper ordering of the activities of the mind. On the basis of an 75 See my ‘The Work of the Trinity and the Knowledge of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 15.1 (2013), 5-24. 76 David Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides and Aquinas (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 1-18. 77 See Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Susannah Ticciati, A New Apophaticism (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

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understanding of the difference between God and creatures, he recasts the question of truth as a problem of acknowledging the divine without reducing it to the creaturely. With these notions in place, I propose to shift from an introduction to the question of the ordering of thought, and to devote the remainder of this chapter to treating the concrete concepts that figure most centrally in Barth’s description of the activities of the mind. Preparation for the argument of this study requires not only identification of the kind of questions that Barth asks, but also an account of the particular concepts that figure in Barth’s material description of the activities of thought. There are three concepts in particular that I wish to bring forward in this study as constitutive elements of Barth’s account of the ordering of Christian thought. These are the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought. Understood on the terms on which they are significant for us, the question of the standpoint of thought is the question of a perspective constituted by a set of principles, the question of orientation is the question of the way that the movements of thought are regulated within a particular perspective, and the question of freedom is the question of the degree to which thought either masters or is mastered by the realities that it encounters. These questions are staples of consideration of human reasoning; they are constitutive of the conception of the ordering of thought that I wish to trace through Barth’s work. The task of the remainder of this chapter is to introduce these concepts by treating some of their history. The final preparatory point to be made here is that the identification of these concepts as the constitutive elements of the ordering of thought both is and is not highly contingent. On the one hand, the use of these notions is marked by a measure of contingency, for I do not adopt them because there is some freestanding measure by which they can be seen to be determinative of the functioning of human ratio, but rather because they arise from attention to Barth’s texts as heuristic tools that allow us to synthe­ size important tendencies in Barth’s work. They are central to Barth’s own thinking; they have no worth in themselves beyond the service they provide in allowing us to respond to Barth’s text. Yet, on the other hand, their deploy­ ment is not wholly idiosyncratic, for their usefulness in approaching Barth’s work is reflective of Barth’s roots in a particular intellectual tradition. In the form in which they appear in Barth’s theology, the questions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought are rooted in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and are influential in the tradition of nineteenth-century theology that was shaped by Kant’s thought. The service that they provide in helping us to understand Barth’s work is a reflection of Barth’s roots in this tradition. For all that I aim to develop a reading of Barth that shows that his work is determined by a problem of perennial rather than peculiarly post-Kantian significance, I am keen to ensure that we do not end up with a distorted picture in which Barth’s considerable debts to the modern tradition are ignored. Indeed, I will show at various points in this study that, though Barth’s distance from Kant is

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rather more significant than is sometimes imagined, his proximity to other nineteenth-century figures like Albrecht Ritschl and Isaak Dorner is rather greater. In the interest of laying the groundwork for these demonstrations, I propose to introduce the notions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought by showing how Kant’s work frames a particular concept, and how that concept is taken up in the theological tradition that follows from Kant, before giving a brief indication of the way that the concept is used in Barth’s work.

The Question of the Standpoint of Thought The first topic that I intend to subsume under the rubric of the ordering of thought is the question of the standpoint of cognition. As we shall encounter the notion, a noetic standpoint is best understood as a perspective constituted by a set of principles. Consideration of a broad contrast between a Platonic and an Aristotelian account of the principles and standpoints of knowledge will be useful as a scaffolding around which to build an account of this notion.78 On one side, Plato holds that, properly understood, there is only one standpoint of human cognition, for all human knowledge is grounded in a single principle. To know a thing, for Plato, is to apprehend it in the self­ identity that it possesses by virtue its share in the form of unity (that is, to know justice is not to identify just men or women, but rather to know the principle in virtue of which justice remains identical with itself in these differing appearances); thus the form of unity itself constitutes the principle that is generative and explanatory of all human knowledge.79 Plato holds that the grounding of all knowledge in a single principle means that all knowledge is to be integrated into a single universal science; yet here he is opposed by Aristotle, who holds that inquirers in different branches of the sciences are properly understood to occupy differing standpoints constituted by differing principles.80 For Aristotle, the task of scientific understanding is to compre­ hend a thing in the essential attributes that are proper to it as a member of a particular species or genus. These attributes are demonstrated syllogistically, so that, whereas the person possessed of an unscientific understanding recog­ nizes that a particular bird has wings, the person of scientific understanding knows that this particular bird, qua bird, must have wings, for all fliers have 78 The contrast presented here is suggested by Malcolm Wilson in Aristotle’s Theory of the Unity of Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 3-9. 79 See Plato, Meno, in Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 71e-73a; cf. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), 10-20; Wilson, Aristotle’s Theory of the Unity of Science, 4-7. 80 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1.1-2.

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wings, birds are fliers, and so birds, by definition, have wings.81 Equipped with this conception of scientific understanding, Aristotle’s account of the stand­ points proper to the differing sciences hinges on the claim that syllogistic demonstration can be produced only within the domain of a particular genus or species, for only within this domain are principles found that relate to members of a species essentially. The principles of geometry are sound and reliable, but it is a fallacy to suppose that they may be used to demonstrate the propriety of predicating wingedness of birds, for nothing that they name is constitutive of what it is to be a bird. Given this, Aristotle insists that it is proper to say that geometers occupy one standpoint, that biologists occupy another, and that these differing standpoints enjoy a measure of independence from each other, for the principles of one do not enjoy a constitutive relation to the objects of the other.82 For Aristotle, then, scientific cognition is found where human knowers are cognizant of the principles of their discipline and remain within their particular bounds. This contrast between Plato and Aristotle is useful for us because the tale of reflection on the standpoint of cognition in the modern tradition can be told as a series of variations on the Hellenic question of the proper integration or independence of differing noetic standpoints. The tale begins with the new element that is introduced into consideration of the standpoint of knowledge through Kant’s critical turn. At root, Kant’s turn is grounded in the suggestion that, quite apart from the question of the principles of the particular sciences, there are two metaphilosophical’ standpoints that human knowers may adopt: one constituted by the principle that the thing in itself is the proper object of knowledge; the other constituted by the principle that the phenom­ enal appearance that receives determination through acts of human judge­ ment stands as the proper object of knowledge.83 Kant refers to the former position as ‘transcendental realism’. The founding claims of his work are that the entire philosophical tradition is united in operating from this standpoint, that this standpoint has proven to be untenable because its occupants are unable to address basic questions pertaining to the reality of objects of knowledge and of human freedom, and that the future of a genuinely scientific philosophy depends on a turn to the latter standpoint, which he calls tran­ scendental idealism.

81 See the distinction between the person of experience, who knows that a thing is, and the person of art, who knows the principles that explain why a thing is, in Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh-Lawson Tancred (London: Penguin, 1998), 1.1-3, and book 1 of the Posterior Analytics. 82 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 1.6-7. 83 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A368-9, A490-1/B518-19; cf. Henry Allison, Kant’s Tran­ scendental Idealism, rev. edn. (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 20.

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For our purposes, this form of idealism is best approached through Kant’s claim that it contains within itself a set of irreducibly independent cognitive standpoints that allows it to solve one of the major dilemmas of transcendental realism. This dilemma consists in an inability to reconcile the strict causal determinism that must be affirmed in order to maintain necessity in human knowledge, and the denial of this same determinism that is required in order to maintain the reality of human freedom.84 For Kant, the integrity of human knowledge depends on a necessity grounded in the causal regularity of the system of nature, the integrity of human action depends on a freedom that must deny this causality, and the failure of transcendental realism is evident in its inability to reconcile these competing demands. The transcendental realist must compromise either the integrity of knowledge or the integrity of action. By contrast, Kant supposes that transcendental idealism is able to unite necessity and freedom because it is equipped with two ways in which objects can be thought: first, as appearances constituted in accordance with the formal conditions of human knowing; second, as things in themselves that stand apart from all conditioning by human knowledge.85 Kant writes that the distinction between the appearance and the thing in itself means that the human subject ‘has two standpoints from which he can regard himself and cognize laws for the use of his powers and consequently for all his actions;/zrst, insofar as he belongs to the world of sense, under laws of nature (heteronomy); second, as belonging to the intelligible world, under laws which, being inde­ pendent of nature, are not empirical but grounded merely in reason’.86 Because the self can be thought of in these two ways, it is possible to say ‘of one and the same thing, e.g., the human soul, that its will is free and yet that it is simultaneously subject to natural necessity’.87 Kant supposes that, so long as these two standpoints—the standpoints of theoretical and practical reason— are granted their proper independence, the transcendental idealist is able to accommodate the dual demand for necessity and freedom in a way that the transcendental realist cannot. Kant’s assertion of the mutual independence of theoretical and practical reason is formative for reflection on the standpoint of thought that is under­ taken in his wake. On the philosophical side, Kant’s most influential succes­ sors took their orientation from a perceived need to bring unity to reason. Fichte, for instance, supposes that he alone amongst Kant’s readers recognizes both that Kant takes the activity of the human knower as the principle of his 84 See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4:455-6. 85 It is crucial, for Kant, that even though the thing in itself cannot be known, it can at least be thought (see e.g. Critique of Pure Reason, A104, B146). 86 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:452; see the whole section from pp. 4:450-5 for a discussion of the centrality of the notion of ‘standpoint’ to Kantian thought. 87 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxvii.

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system, and that Kant’s work is incomplete because Kant insists on the irreducibility of theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgement as equiprimordial standpoints constituted by differing modes of this activity.88 As Fichte understands it, in treating these standpoints as irreducible, Kant fails to vindicate philosophy’s standing as a science, for Fichte follows Plato in supposing that genuinely scientific cognition demands that all the claims of reason be traced to a single principle and made part of a universal science.89 Fichte thus takes it as his task to ‘discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge’.90 Through engagement with other readers of Kant regarding the proper nature of first principles, Fichte comes to claim that a genuinely first principle cannot be found within the content of consciousness or the set of the conscious activities of thought, for a first principle must be wholly unconditioned by the activities of reason.91 It must stand outside the set of Tacts’ that can be known; it can be neither proved’ nor ‘defined’.92 As Fichte presents it, a first principle must be the result of a sheer act of‘positing’, else it will not appear as unconditioned and primary 93 That which is posited in this way can be described as the object of an ‘intellectual intuition’, for it enjoys an immediacy to consciousness even though it is not an object of sense perception.94 Fichte describes an intellectual intuition of this kind as ‘the only firm standpoint for all philosophy’, for in it alone are form and matter united in such a way that no distinction between the appearance and the thing in itself arises.95 Since, for Kant, the distinction between the appearance and the thing in itself is the ground of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, in eliminating the former Fichte supposes that he has also eliminated the latter.

88 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Meredith, 1970), I, 444,480-1; The Science of Knowing [1804], trans. Walter E. Wright (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 23-33. 89 Chernor M. Jalloh, Fichte’s Kant-Interpretation and the Doctrine of Science (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1988), 28-31, 54-5. 90 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, I, 91. 91 See Anthony J. La Vopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 193-200; Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 98-100. 92 See Fichte, ‘Review of Aenesidemus’, in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Brazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 60-4; cf., Science of Knowledge, I, 91-2. 93 See Fichte, Science of Knowledge, I, 93-8; Günter Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43-54. 94 For Fichte, the term intellectual intuition defines the mode of presence of those objects that are immediate but not sensory (see e.g. Science of Knowledge, I, 472). 95 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, I, 465-6. It is of course foundational for Kant that human knowledge is confined to empirical rather than intellectual intuition (see e.g. the helpful glossing of Kant’s conception of the human standpoint of knowledge in Beatrice Longuenesse, The Human Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)).

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The particular principle that Fichte posits as the unconditioned standpoint of human knowledge is the absolute spontaneity of the knowing ‘I’.96 The logic that governs Fichte’s account of this standpoint is significant for us, for, at a broadly formal level, it recurs at important points in Barth’s account of the proper standpoint of Christian thought. Fichte is insistent that, as a first principle of reason, the spontaneity of the T can neither be an object of experience, nor, in important senses, can it be subject to direct proof or definition.97 It is thus adopted as principial for thought not because of its intelligibility in itself, but rather because of its explanatory power in grounding the other claims of reason. Fichte supposes that reason takes the principle of identity (that is, the notion that A=A), and with it the unity of empirical consciousness as the givens on the basis of which reflection proceeds; but critical reflection causes reason to see that it is able to hold these realities as true only on the basis of some standpoint lying outside of the empirical consciousness itself. The empirical consciousness is unable to provide the grounds for the grasp of its own unity; thus, reason turns to adopt the standpoint of the ‘absolute “I” ’, for it is from this standpoint alone that it is able to apprehend the unity of consciousness and the validity of the principle of identity. At a highly formal level, the principle that grounds this move is that reason is licensed to adopt the standpoint that allows it to see the truth of the things that it takes to be true. Reason is unable to grasp its unity from within itself; it is thus licensed to adopt a standpoint outside itself in order to understand its own functioning. This principle is crucial for us. In deploying a logic of this kind, Fichte is borrowing from Kant, who argues at points that, though nothing in the empirical sphere suggests the reality of practical reason, this standpoint may be adopted as the perspective from which alone reason is able to see the truth of realities like freedom and morality.98 Both Kant and Fichte suggest that it is proper for reason to adopt the standpoint from which it can see as true that which it takes to be true. We shall come in due time to see that this same principle is central to Barth’s account of wellordered thought. On the theological side, an influential interweaving of the themes of integra­ tion and independence marks the work of Kant’s most famous successor, Friedrich Schleiermacher. In the first instance, Schleiermacher’s work mirrors

96 Fichte, ‘Review of Aenesidemus’, 64; Science of Knowledge, I, 91-9. 97 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, I, 91-2. 98 After his critical turn, Kant appears to have been unsure how best to establish the reality of the standpoint of practical reason. The account given here corresponds best to the strategy that begins by presuming the reality of freedom on the basis of the demand of the moral law and taking up the standpoint of practical reason as the perspective from which alone freedom may be seen as true. For a treatment of Kant’s various strategies for vindicating the reality of practical reason, see Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 16-37.

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Fichte’s in attempting to bring unity to human thought." In his famous Speeches on Religion, Schleiermacher presents metaphysics and morals as opposing poles of human knowledge that correspond to the primal forces’ that shape all finite reality, receptivity, and activity.99 100 As the correlates of particular sides of the finite sphere, metaphysics and morals each offer a partial perspective on reality; yet Schleiermacher makes clear that they do not allow human knowers to grasp reality as a single, integrated whole. He thus asks where the unifying principle’ of reality is to be found, and presents human religion as a third standpoint in which metaphysics and morals find their unity.101 For Schleiermacher, religion is able to unite metaphysics and morals because it is attuned to the way that the universe, understood as the encom­ passing context that allows finite reality to be understood as a unified whole, manifests itself in each apprehension of a finite particular.102 In its essence, religion is a ‘feeling’ that apprehends not just a particular thing but rather the whole network of finite reality that makes this particular what it is. In appre­ hending the particular in terms of the whole, religion apprehends the universe as the encircling context in virtue of which the whole may be grasped as a whole.103 On the one hand, then, Schleiermacher’s work is marked by the same drive towards the integration of human knowledge and experience that character­ izes Fichte’s thought. That religion offers the point of integration is crucial for Schleiermacher, for it serves to show that, in its true essence, religion is an indispensable facet of human life. Yet, on the other hand, Schleiermacher’s depiction of the integrating power of the religious standpoint proved less influential than the assertion of the independence of religion that accompanies it. On the logic of Schleiermacher’s presentation, religion is able to unite metaphysics and morals because it stands apart from them. Its integrating power as the point of unity of human thought and experience is a function of the ‘final independence’ that it enjoys from the rules and conditions that govern human knowledge more generally, as well as from critiques that are grounded in metaphysical or moral reflection.104 It is this account of the independence of religion that proved decisive for the development of modern theology more generally. A host of experientially oriented theologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed Schleiermacher in sheltering

99 For readings of Schleiermacher that emphasize his drive towards unity, see Thandeka, The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Solution to the Problem of Kant’s Empirical Self (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995); Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology: Report of a Personal Journey (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989), 30-49. 100 Schleiermacher, On Religion, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 79-80, 99-101. 101 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 99-102. 102 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 102-5. 103 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 102-5. 104 Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1,1799-1870 (London: Yale University Press, 1972), 63.

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religion from the ‘storms of Enlightenment and Idealist critiques’ in the ‘safe haven’ of religious feeling.105 Philosophical and scientific critique may estab­ lish the need for the revision of religious claims that encroach on the terrain of philosophy or science, but claims of this kind are finally a second-order aspect of religion. The true essence of religion is a first-order experience that the philosopher and scientist cannot call into question. In the end, the Platonic instinct that grounds Schleiermacher’s attempt to bring unity to human experience results in a strongly Aristotelian isolation of theology within a standpoint that functions according to a principle that is insu­ lated from external critique. A different interweaving of the themes of independence and integration is found in the work of Albrecht Ritschl. In the first place, Ritschl’s theology is marked by a typically modern assertion of the independence of theology from the deliverances of science and metaphysics. For Ritschl, Christian faith is grounded in value judgements about the moral worth of the life of Jesus and the universal kingdom that he inaugurates. This means that, on the one hand, it is ‘marked off’ from the ‘domain’ of the ‘knowledge of nature and her laws’, which is silent on morals and value;106 while, on the other hand, it is also separated from the sphere of metaphysics, for metaphysics concerns itself with things qua things at the level of a general ontology that is blind to distinctions in value.107 As Ritschl presents it, religious life arises from the way that the human spirit differentiates itself from nature and seeks to develop its spiritual capacities. Metaphysics is ‘without value’ in this regard, for it knows nothing of ‘distinctions in kind and value between nature and spirit’.108 Equipped with this assertion of the independence of religion from the work of natural science and metaphysics, Ritschl goes on to develop an account of the integration of theological knowledge within the standpoint of dogmatics itself. In reflecting on the systematic unity proper to a science, Ritschl writes that, if theologians are to comprehend Christian doctrine ‘as a totality com­ posed of rightly ordered particular data’, it is imperative that they ‘occupy one and the same standpoint’ throughout their exposition.109 On Ritschl’s telling, ‘traditional theology’ must be corrected on this front, for it begins by ‘taking up a standpoint within either a natural or a universally rational knowledge of 105 John E. Thiel, God and World in Schleiermacher’s Dialektik and Glaubenslehre (Bern: Peter Lang, 1981), 42; cf. McCormack, ‘Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspec­ tive’, 23-7; Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Philosophy and Theology, 22-6. 106 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Develop­ ment of the Doctrine, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macauley, trans. H. R. Mackintosh et al. (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 25; cf. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2, 1870-1914 (London: Yale University Press, 1985), 7-8. 107 Ritschl, ‘Theology and Metaphysics’, in Three Essays, trans. Philip Hefner (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 154-6. 108 Ritschl, ‘Theology and Metaphysics’, 154-6. 109 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 4.

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God’ in speculating about original human perfection and a covenant of works, proceeds by ‘taking up its standpoint on the fact of the universally inherited sin of the human race’ and attempts to deduce from it the necessity of redemption, and only then comes to speak from the ‘standpoint’ of grace in addressing Christ’s person and work.110 Ritschl writes that ‘no system can result from a method which thus traverses three separate points of view in accomplishing the different parts of its task’.111 He supposes that the systematicity of dogmatics demands that each piece of Christian teaching be viewed from the single standpoint of divine grace. This notion leads him to revise classical teaching at a number of points, claiming, for instance, that any appearance of divine wrath must have its meaning ‘reversed’ so that it is in fact understood as a dispensation of grace, and that sin is not known inde­ pendently of the knowledge of forgiveness.112 We have come far enough in surveying modern reflection on the standpoint of theological reasoning that we may say a few words about Barth. Elements in the reflections of each of the thinkers that we have encountered here are found in Barth’s work. First, as earlier comments regarding Barth’s distinction between theoretical and theological reasoning make clear, my study stands in line with recent scholarship that emphasizes the relationship between Barth’s work and the ‘independence of religion’ movement that has roots in Kant and Schleiermacher.113 Second, and perhaps most obviously, Barth’s work mirrors Ritschl’s in insisting on the integration of dogmatic reflection within a single standpoint, so that any attempt to speak from the perspective of nature or law is done away with for the sake of speaking consistently on the basis of revelation and grace. Third, and most programmatically for the balance of this study, I will argue that Barth’s work is marked by the deploy­ ment of Kantian and Fichtean logic in the development of the notion that Christian thought is to be ordered around the standpoint of the eschatological subject. In treating Barth’s reading of Paul, I hope to show that Barth addresses acute problems regarding the comprehension of eschatological reality by presuming with Kant and Fichte that thought is licensed to adopt the stand­ point from which it can see as true the things that it takes to be true. Equipped with this idealist principle, Barth supposes that, though the eschatological is unintelligible to a customary mode of human reasoning, believers who assent to its reality are permitted to adopt a standpoint from which they may reckon with it. This conception leads to an account of Christian thinking in which the eschatological rather than the empirical subject is taken as the principle 110 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 4-5. 111 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 4-5. 112 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 323-7. 113 See Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy; Bruce McCormack, ‘Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective’, 21-39; Neil Macdonald, Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000).

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of thought, and a Pauline cogitor, ergo sum—I am known, therefore I am—takes the place of a Cartesian cogito, ergo sum, as the founding rule of Christian thought.

The Question of the Orientation of Thought The second element that I wish to treat as constitutive of Barth’s account of the ordering of thought is the question of orientation. This question concerns the regulation of the movements of reason within a particular standpoint. It is essential to an inquiry into the ordering of thought wherever theologians assert the independence of religion or revelation, for this assertion demands that particular attention be paid to the way that theological reflection may be normed. How, if theology stands in at least partial independence from the procedures of theoretical reason, may its activities be governed? The need for this second question comes to the fore through Kant’s own work, for Kant recognizes that, if practical reason stands apart from the activities of theoret­ ical reason, then it is necessary to ask how human knowers are to orient themselves from this second standpoint. The premise of Kant’s emphasis on orientation is that acts of thought are comparable to movements through space in that both depend on points in relation to which they can be regu­ lated.114 Kant supposes that theoretical reason finds these points ready to hand in the conditions that ground its cognition of objects; but these principles are of no use to practical reason, which moves not in the sphere of the cognition of objects but rather in ‘the immeasurable space of the super-sensory realm’.115 In its independence from theoretical reason, practical reason steps beyond the ‘frontiers of experience’ into sheer, objectless ‘space’. Kant thus holds that practical reason is in danger of finding itself as disoriented as those who move in a dark room in which the furniture has been rearranged, and of falling into mere fancy because it lacks any means of regulating its activities.116 Kant’s solution to this difficulty is to suppose that practical reason takes its orientation not from the objective principles that ground the cognition of phenomena, but rather from subjective principles constituted by the needs of reason. For Kant, the key to the orientation of practical reason is granting that reason is justified in assuming those states of affairs on which its own functioning depends.117 Kant writes that thinkers are ‘justified in assuming’ certain states of affairs ‘because reason needs to make this assumption’. He

114 Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 238-9. 115 Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’, 241. 116 Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’, 239-40. 117 Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’, 241-2.

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goes on to claim that, where this justification is acknowledged, ‘the right need of reason supervenes as a subjective ground for presupposing and accepting something which reason cannot presume to know on objective grounds, and hence for orientating ourselves in thought’.118 This notion constitutes the guiding principle of Kant’s account of practical reason.119 The use of this principle is significant for us as an extension of the kind of logic that grounds the standpoint of practical reason. As we saw earlier, Kant’s account of the adoption of the standpoint of practical reason is grounded in part in the principle that reason is to adopt the standpoint that allows it to see as true those things that it affirms as true. We can see now that, once this standpoint is adopted, orientation is found by presuming the principles that reason needs in order to facilitate its functioning. The role that reflection on the orientation of reason plays in modern theology has not been treated as widely as the role played by consideration of the standpoint of thought. In seeking to address it, we can proceed by asking how Schleiermacher and Ritschl, the figures in whom we encountered asser­ tions of the independence of religion, approach the problem of orientation. Schleiermacher is significant for us in this context because he presents an account of the orientation of theological reason that is no less programmatic for modern thought than his identification of the independence of the reli­ gious standpoint. The general pattern for this account is laid down in his early Speeches. As we saw earlier, Schleiermacher’s primary concern in this early work is apologetic. He wishes to respond to the cultured despisers of religion by showing that their criticisms touch only accidental manifestations of religion and not its true core. Confronted by criticisms of human religiosity, Schleiermacher orients himself by identifying feeling as the true essence of religion, and then deploying this account of religion’s essence as a tool for distinguishing elements that are proper to religion from metaphysical and moral accretions.120 Within the sphere of religion as a whole, it is an identi­ fication of the essence of religion that stands as the principle of orientation. In Schleiermacher’s later Glaubenslehre, the terms on which he conceives of the problem of orientation have shifted, but the basic structure of his solution remains the same. The concern of the Glaubenslehre is dogmatic rather than apologetic. In place of a concern to defend the field of human religiosity as a whole, Schleiermacher wishes to give an orderly account of the system of Christian doctrine, understood as a system of expressions of specifically Christian states of consciousness.121 Taken on these terms, his task is to 118 Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’, 240-2. 119 See Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking’, 244-6; cf. Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, 5:122-34. 120 See the patterns of argument we traced earlier in Schleiermacher, On Religion, 96-105. 121 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. D. M. Baillie et al. (London: T. & T. Clark, 1999), §30-1.

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distinguish genuinely Christian modifications of self-consciousness from the movements of religious consciousness more generally, and dogmatic formu­ lations that express Christian ‘states of mind’ from the merely speculative. Confronted with this task, Schleiermacher returns to the orienting strategy of his earlier work. He deploys an account of the essence of the thing that he wishes to understand in order to orient himself within its manifestations. Schleiermacher writes that identifying the essence of Christianity amounts to ‘showing the element which remains constant throughout the most diverse religious affections within this same communion’, and thus permits the identification of states of Christian self-consciousness that admit of dogmatic description.122 Quite generally, Schleiermacher supposes that the modifica­ tions of a Christian self-consciousness are distinct because they are all related to cognizance of a God-forgetfulness and of a redemption that is accomplished in Christ.123 More particularly, Schleiermacher summarizes his conception of the essence of Christianity by claiming that ‘Christianity is a monotheistic faith, belonging to the teleological type of religion, and is essentially distin­ guished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.’124 Schleiermacher’s work is programmatic in modern theology in turning to an account of the essence of Christianity as a means of providing orientation for dogmatics. The formulation of accounts of this kind was a cottage industry in German theology in particular from the time of Schleiermacher well into the twentieth century. It is found in a particularly influential form in the work of Albrecht Ritschl. Ritschl is significant for us because his account of the essence of Christianity is governed by the conviction that Schleiermacher’s definition is too general to be of real use in orienting theology. As Ritschl presents it, Schleiermacher is insufficiently clear in distinguishing the ‘special characteristic’ of Christianity from its ‘generic’ religious qualities. Thus, rather than provid­ ing concrete points of reference for Christian theology, Schleiermacher fades into a ‘neutral idea of religion’ and an ‘abstract monotheism’.125 The difficulty is rooted, on Ritschl’s telling, in Schleiermacher’s failure to take his ‘final bearings’ from the study of history. For Ritschl, Schleiermacher’s experiential emphasis allows him to recognize the spiritual side on which Christianity is constituted by its grounding in the redemption accomplished in Christ. Yet Ritschl supposes that Schleiermacher shares with the theological tradition generally an underemphasis on the moral constitution of Christianity, which is made clear in study of the development of the Christian faith in contrast to other religions. As Ritschl presents it, neglect of historical study issues in

122 123 124 125

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §11. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §11.3. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §11. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 9.

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neglect of Christianity’s place as the perfect moral religion’.126 Ritschl sup­ poses that it fell to Kant to recognize the ‘supreme importance’ of the Kingdom of God as an ethical community.127 For him, then, an account of the essence of Christianity must supplement Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the experience of redemption with historical study and Kant’s moralism. He offers a revised account of the essence of Christianity that he claims is ‘indispensable’ for systematic theology as a tool for orienting itself within its particular standpoint: Christianity, then, is the monotheistic, completely spiritual, and ethical religion, which, based on the life of its Author as Redeemer and as Founder of the Kingdom of God, consists in the freedom of the children of God, involves the impulse to conduct from the motive of love, aims at the moral organization of mankind, and grounds blessedness on the relation of sonship to God, as well as on the kingdom of God.128

The accounts of the essence of Christianity to which Schleiermacher and Ritschl turn to orient their work fell out of favour as the concerns associated with the dialectical theology movement gained prominence in Germany in the 1920s. Barth’s own ambivalence towards the exercise is in part a function of the fact that, rather than supposing that theologians need points of orientation that facilitate a critical inquiry into the truth of the Christian confession, he holds that this confession itself provides points of orientation for thought that seeks to grapple with the Word of God. This is the case in two ways. In the first place, Barth supposes that the primary task of dogmatics is to provide orien­ tation for the preacher who faces the task of proclamation. Rather than guiding the Christian through the varying manifestations of religious con­ sciousness, dogmatics is to lay out ‘border posts and anchor buoys’ in order to orient the preacher who seeks to proclaim the Word of God.129 Barth writes that theology seeks to teach the believer ‘to orientate his thought as rigorously as possible within the message entrusted to the church’, in part through the identification of dogmas as principles that guide theological reflection.130 Secondly, and more centrally for the argument of this study, I hope to show that Barth refers believers to the content of the Christian confession as a means of orientation for thought that is ordered around the standpoint of the eschatological subject. I suggested earlier that one of the claims of this study is

126 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 9-10. 127 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 11. 128 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 13-14. 129 Barth, Unterricht in der christlichen Religion I, ed. Hannelotte Reiffen (Zürich: Theolo­ gischer Verlag Zürich), 23 (hereafter referred to as UCR); ET, The Göttingen Dogmatics, ed. Hannelotte Reiften, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 17-18; cf. KDI.l, 81; ET, 79. 130 Barth, ‘On Systematic Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 14.3 (1961), 227.

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that, for Barth, well-ordered Christian thought operates from the standpoint of the eschatological subject, that is, the new creature who is found in Christ. I hope to complement this demonstration with an account of the way that Barth provides for the orientation of Christian thought by showing, first, that Christ himself is constitutive of the space in which the believer moves in such a way that the believer is oriented by Christ’s life and activity; and, second, that Barth uses a theology of baptism to suggest that the content of the Christian confession is determinative for the thought of believers who seek to think from the standpoint of the new subject in Christ. On Barth’s telling, to adopt the standpoint of the eschatological subject is to allow baptism to constitute the starting-point of thought, for baptism stands as the sign of the promise in which the eschatological subject is real for the believer. Well-ordered Christian thought then takes the content of the Christian confession, which is spoken over the believer in baptism, as its points of orientation as it seeks to appre­ hend the reality to which the promise points.

The Question of the Freedom of Thought We turn finally to the question of freedom as an element in the ordering of thought. That this question should be relevant in this context is due almost entirely to the influence of Kant. Whereas, in one form or other, reflection on the standpoint and orientation of thought has been central to much of the Western tradition, it is Kant who develops a programmatic association between the question of freedom and human reasoning. Kant deploys two concepts in particular that are significant for us: spontaneity and autonomy.131 To speak of spontaneity is, for Kant, to refer to the capacity of the human agent to be self-initiating, that is, to start a new causal sequence in time without being determined by what has come before. To speak of autonomy is then to refer to the capacity of rational agents to direct the exercise of their spontaneity in accordance with laws that are given in and with reason itself. These notions are significant in an account of the ordering of thought because of the role that they play in Kant’s account of human judgement. Vindication of the objectivity of human judgement numbers among the central tasks of Kant’s epistemology. Kant stands with David Hume in denying that concepts like causality and necessity are given in sense experience itself; yet he does not wish to follow Hume in concluding that they are thus expressive of nothing more than subjective convention or habit. His proposal is that these concepts possess an objectivity that is rooted in the conjunction of 131 For an account of their interrelationship see Henry Allison, ‘Autonomy and Spontaneity in Kant’s Conception of the Self’, in Idealism and Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 129-42.

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spontaneity and autonomy in human judgement. Two claims ground this proposal. The first is that judgements are properly seen as products of the spontaneity of human understanding, for they involve acts of synthesis through which unity is imparted to sensory intuition and concepts are applied to appearances.132 Kant writes that the unity of intuition and appearances ‘can never come through the senses’, and human beings are thus unable to conceive of the combination of sense data ‘without having previously combined it ourselves’ in an act of spontaneity.133 This identification of a unity that is imparted to knowledge by the activity of the mind constitutes the ground for the presence of concepts like causality in knowledge; yet the question that is then raised is how a synthesis brought about by the activity of the human subject can possess objective validity. Are judgements not confined to irredu­ cible subjectivity because they are grounded in the activity of the individual human knower? Kant responds to this worry by claiming, secondly, that human judgements are acts of autonomy—that is, they are carried out in accordance with laws that are given in the understanding itself. In the opening sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant establishes the irreducibility of a set of condi­ tions that determine the possibility of human knowledge.134 He then argues that these conditions constitute laws in accordance with which human under­ standing executes its acts of synthesis. On his telling, these laws serve to ensure the objective validity—that is, the universal necessity—of the movements of the understanding. Because judgements are carried out in accordance with laws, they cannot be said to be the products of subjective custom; and, because these laws are given in the understanding itself, their determinative role in judgement does not reflect a fall into heteronomy. They reflect the self-legislating character of reason, which grounds the objectivity of human cognition. The influence of Kant’s account of the spontaneity and autonomy of human judgement is immense. At present, we will be best served by a treatment of a particular line of influence that issues from the notion of autonomy in particular. We have seen that Kant supposes that the autonomous—that is, the self-legislating —character of the understanding is the ground of the objectivity of human judgement. This supposition represents a particular application of a pattern of argument that is decisive for Kant’s philosophy as a whole. In the sphere of practical reason, Kant’s attempt to identify a ‘universally binding’ moral principle hinges on a turn from an identification of a particular object of the will—pleasure, happiness, the good, the will of God— as the ground of a moral law to the identification of a law that ‘determines the 132 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B129-32. 133 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B129-30. 134 The establishment of these conditions is the primary task of the Transcendental Analytic.

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will a priori’ because it is given in the structure of moral reason itself.135 As Kant presents it, the attempt of previous philosophers to take the former approach stands as the ‘occasioning ground of all the errors of philosophers with respect to the supreme principle of morals’, for it ensured that they would produce contingent principles that are not universally binding.136 As Kant understands it, in both practical and theoretical philosophy, the concepts of necessity, objectivity, and rationality belong together because they all hinge on adherence to principles that reason gives to itself on the basis of its own structures, activities, and needs. At other points in his work, Kant bolsters his depiction of the significance of autonomy to human knowing and doing with appeals to self-legislation as proper to the dignity of rational agents.137 The combined force of Kant’s philosophical and anthropological accounts of autonomy made the concerns associated with this notion formative for modern theology. We can trace this dynamic by considering the prominence of the problem of appropriation in post-Kantian theology. On the terms on which it is significant for us, the problem of appropriation is the problem of the conditions under which Christian faith comports with the dignity of human agents as autonomous centres of judgement. The basic concern that is raised by Kant’s philosophy is that, as it is traditionally understood, faith appears to belong to the sphere of heteronomy, for it calls believers to affirm realities that exceed the capacities of reason, and to adopt a notion of divine command as a guiding norm of the moral life. The movement of Christian faith appears as a movement into subjectivity, irrationality, and something less than full, rational agency. The question that Kant raises is how Christian faith may be appropriated with rational integrity. Engagement with this question is foundational for an entire tradition of post-Kantian theology. In making it programmatic for the prolegomena to his dogmatics, Helmut Thielicke claims that every fresh theological inquiry since Kant has been guided by the problem of appropriation.138 The influence of this question is visible in those who follow Kant in associating faith with practical reason and constructing an account of religion as an appendage of the moral life, as well as in those who follow Schleiermacher in making Christian faith a matter of an experience that corresponds to possibilities that are native to the constitution of the human subject. A response to it

135 See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:33, 64-5. 136 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:64-5; cf. the account of ‘Heteronomy of the will as the source of all spurious principles of morality’ in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:441-5. 137 See e.g. Kant’s famous essay on the nature of enlightenment, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Practical Philosophy, 17-22. 138 For what follows, see Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1974), 23-75.

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was worked out in a form that is significant for us in the peculiar synthesis of Kant and Schleiermacher that is present in the work of Wilhelm Herrmann. Herrmann was perhaps the most independently minded member of the Ritschlian school before its breakdown during the first decade of the twen tieth century.139 Broadly speaking, he retained the Kantian moralism that was characteristic of Ritschlian thought, but replaced Ritschl’s historical interest with an adaptation of Schleiermacher’s experientially driven account of Christian faith. The resulting blend of Kant and Schleiermacher was decisive for his thinking about the problem of appropriation. Herrmann thematizes this problem in an account of the way to religion’, a central theme in his thinking that is given neat summary in a treatment of what Herrmann calls ‘adult Christianity’.140 As Herrmann presents it, adult Christianity is found where human beings have been awakened to what is in effect Kantian moral­ ity, have come to see their inability to fulfil its demands, and then find hope and strength in the revelation of Jesus.141 The key, for Herrmann, is that this hope is not grounded in assent to propositions about Jesus, for faith under­ stood as assent represents an ‘act of violence’ against the self and a fall into heteronomy.142 Instead, Herrmann supposes that hope is found in the reve­ lation of the presence of Christ in the believer. The faith implanted in children is perfected ‘in the consciousness that God communes with us by the Person of Jesus’.143 Herrmann is clear that this revelation and faith are independent of the realities that are accessible to philosophical and scientific analysis, and so the independence of the standpoint of religion remains secure; yet he argues that there is continuity between human perception of the good and the revelation of Jesus that permits Christian faith to avoid the fall into heteron­ omy. Herrmann writes that God ‘can be none other than the Personal Vitality and Power’ of the good that is known through moral reflection. This corres­ pondence is, for Herrmann, a ‘marvelous fact’ confirmed by the person and work of Jesus.144 That God ‘corresponds exactly’ to the human hope in and vision of the good is sufficient, as Herrmann understands it, to establish that the believer does not fall into heteronomy in participating in the existential community of Christian faith.145

139 The breakdown of the Ritschlian school will be treated briefly at the beginning of Chapter 5. 140 See Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, trans. J. Sandys Stanyon (London: Williams & Norgate, 1906), 119-24; cf. Herrmann, Systematic Theology, trans. Nathaniel Mickelem, Kenneth Saunders (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927), 34-8. 141 Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 119-21. 142 Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 123. 143 Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 117. 144 Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 121. 145 Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, 121.

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There is a great deal more to be said about the role that reflection on the question of appropriation played not only in modern theology generally but also in the concerns that typified the Marburg theology in which Barth was schooled. Herrmann’s reflections were taken forward by Wilhelm Heitmüller, one of Herrmann’s younger colleagues; they play a formative role in the work of Rudolf Bultmann, who, like Barth, undertook his schooling in Marburg while Herrmann’s influence was at its peak. I propose, however, to postpone treatment of these matters until Chapter 4, when a set of objections raised against Barth’s work will provide occasion for revisiting the constellation of concepts that we have encountered here. At present, then, it remains only to conclude this introduction to the question of the ordering of thought with some brief comments about the account of the freedom of thought that I hope to trace in Barth’s work. My aim will be to show, first, that, through study of Paul’s theology of the resurrection, Barth develops an understanding of divine lordship that causes him to depart from the concerns associated with Kant’s account of autonomy; second, that Barth replaces the notion of autonomy with the notion of obedience as the key to an understanding of Christian freedom, and that this leads him to a radically revised conception of theological understanding. Whereas Kant supposes that understanding is achieved where the activity of thought is shaped by the autonomy of reason, Barth supposes that understanding is achieved where the activity of thought is shaped by the obedience of reason. Through study of Anselm, Barth comes to argue that to understand the being and activity of God is to allow these realities to bring the freedom of human thought into conformity with themselves, shaping the possibilities of human freedom to conform to the reality of God in a movement that represents the noetic side of a theology of sanctification.

Part I

Paul, Faith, and the Question of the Ordering of Christian Thought

2 Paul and the Problem of the Ordering of Thought 2.1. INTRODUCTION

Karl Barth, the most acclaimed theologian of the twentieth century, first made a name for himself as an interpreter of the apostle Paul. While serving as a minister in a small industrial town in Switzerland, Barth wrote a commentaryon Romans that earned him the offer of a position as an honorary professor at the University of Göttingen. Before taking up this position, Barth rewrote the commentary in eleven short months. The new edition, published in 1922, catapulted him to theological stardom. Leading figures in New Testament studies reviewed the work; invitations to give lectures poured in; and highprofile disagreements with the senior statesman of German theology fol­ lowed.1 In his new capacity as honorary professor of Reformed theology, Barth continued his work on Paul. He devoted a good deal of his teaching to Pauline material; his next two book-length publications were studies of Paul that issued from his lecture courses, a treatment of 1 Corinthians, published in 1924, and an exposition of Philippians, published in 1927.2 After 1927 Barth’s published work centred around constructive dogmatics, but Barth continued to teach biblical material, and the commitments worked out in his earlier engagements with Paul remained central to his thinking. That Barth found in Paul a decisive conversation partner appears an improbable development against the backdrop of his education. The most formative part of Barth’s schooling took place in Marburg, at the time an influential centre of liberal neo-Protestantism.3 Kant and Schleiermacher were

1 See the exchange between Barth and Adolf von Harnack that took place during the spring and into the summer of 1923 (available in Revelation and Theology, ed. and trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)). 2 In addition to his lectures on 1 Corinthians and Philippians, Barth lectured on Ephesians during the winter of 1921/2, and on Colossians during the winter of 1924/5. 3 See Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1975), 33-52.

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the ‘guiding stars’ of his student years.4 Barth attached himself to the peculiar synthesis of Kant and Schleiermacher found in the work of Wilhelm Herrmann, the leading neo-Protestant theologian at Marburg. Having com­ pleted his studies, Barth began work as a minister in Switzerland a ‘convinced Marburger’ who lacked a sense of the worth of the Bible.5 His preaching and teaching were marked by an experiential and moralistic religiosity that downplayed the role of Scripture. In confirmation lessons delivered during his first years as a minister, Barth suggests that the importance of the prophetic figures of the Old Testament lay in their religious personalities, that the New Testament is to be understood as a depiction of a life and not a collection of teachings, and that the Christian life consists in experiential encounter with God and in following in the moral pattern of Christ himself.6 Much ink has been spilled in attempts to tease out the timing and nature of Barth’s shift away from these notions inherited from Kant, Schleiermacher, and Herrmann. Barth himself offers differing accounts of this shift. One, which finds considerable support in his essays, sermons, and confirmation classes, is that this shift grew out of a heightening sense of the importance of Scripture and an adoption of the apostle Paul as the guide to Scripture’s meaning. Reflecting later on the movements of his thinking, Barth writes that his work as a minister required him to read the Bible, that a new ‘existence’ began for him as he came to see that the Bible is a good and worthwhile book, and that the God presented in Paul’s letters is more inter­ esting than the God of Kant.7 Barth came to see Paul as an opponent of a bourgeois Kantian religiosity. In a series of sermons delivered at the beginning of 1914, Barth depicts the Rome to which Paul writes as an embodiment of Kantian morality and liberal ideals, a capital of culture, religion, and morality that strives towards the establishment of a universal kingdom.8 As Barth presents it, the founding conviction of Paul’s teaching is that he must oppose this kingdom because he has something of infinitely greater value to offer. Paul is not ashamed of his gospel because it outstrips the wisdom of the world.

4 Barth, ‘On Systematic Theology’, 225. 5 Barth, ‘Die dogmatische Prinzipienlehre bei Wilhelm Hermann’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922-1925, ed. Holger Finze (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1990), 551-2; ET, ‘Principles of Dogmatics According to Wilhelm Herrmann’, in Theology and Church, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (London: SCM Press, 1962), 238-9; ‘Gespräch mit Mennoniten (13.12.1967)’, in Gespräche 1964-1968, ed. Eberhard Busch (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1996), 432. 6 Barth, Konfirmandenunterricht 1909-1921, ed. Jürgen Fangmeier (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1987), 10-16, 46, 60-9. 7 Barth, ‘Entretiens de Bievres’, in Gespräche 1963, ed. Eberhard Busch (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2005), 409; ‘Gespräch mit Mennoniten (13.12.1967)’, 432. 8 Barth preached on Romans 1:16 for six weeks at the beginning of 1914. For what follows see ‘11. Januar: Römer 1,16 (I)’, in Predigten 1914, ed. Ursula Fähler and Jochen Fähler (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1999), 13-21.

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Barth asks his listeners how they will situate themselves in relation to this man, who stood against the crown and centre’ of human culture and accomplish­ ment and was not ashamed. He himself came increasingly to identify with Paul and to treat him as a reliable guide to the meaning of Scripture.9 The task of the next two chapters of this study is to consider the account of the ordering of thought that emerges from Barth’s attempts to learn from Paul after he turned away from the conceptions of his teachers.10 A word may be helpful here in order to situate this task within the development of the study as a whole. In Chapter 11 introduced the shifts in Barth’s thinking that lead him to approach questions of theological reasoning in moral terms, and to reframe the question of truth in the theological sphere as a question of acknowledge­ ment. I suggested that, in thinking about the proper movements of reason, Barth is best understood to develop a conception of the moral ordering of Christian thought, and I presented a set of concepts that I will treat as constitutive of the notion of well-ordered thought. My aim now is to give an account of Barth’s conception of well-ordered thought, a task that will unfold over two parts. In the first, which includes this chapter and the next, I hope to show how Barth’s engagement with Pauline theology leads him to consider questions regarding the activities of thought in distinctively moral terms, and thus to reconsider the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of Christian thought. In the second, which includes the final two chapters of this study, I hope to show how Barth’s engagement with the work of Anselm, and with Anselm’s conception of theological understanding in particular, leads him to deepen his conceptions of the standpoint and orientation of thought, and to give special attention to a distinctively moral inquiry into the freedom that is proper to theological reasoning. The task of the present chapter is to trace the emergence of a concern for the ordering of thought in Barth’s early work on Paul, and to establish the stakes of this concern by showing that, as Barth understands it, Paul regards it as a matter of irreducible significance for the Christian life. In the first place, I aim to show that it is study of Paul that leads Barth to reconsider the basic form of the questions of reason and of truth. This demonstration is significant because the Pauline origins of these reconsiderations is basic to Barth’s understanding of their integrity and import. We saw in Chapter 1 that Barth’s shift to moral

9 Barth, ‘On Systematic Theology’, 226. 10 I intend to speak of Barth’s ‘earlier’ theology in the same general sense in which John Webster uses the term to describe Barth’s work in the 1920s (see Barth’s Earlier Theology (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005), 1). The texts that will receive most attention in this chapter and the next—the second edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans, completed in September, 1921; Barth’s lectures on Ephesians, delivered during the winter term of 1921/22; and Barth’s exposition of 1 Corinthians, published in 1924—belong to a fairly well-defined portion of this period, each having roots in study undertaken during the last years of Barth’s work as a minister in Safenwil and pre-dating Barth’s first attempt at constructive dogmatics in 1924.

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consideration of the ordering of thought is rooted in his identification of obedience as the root of the knowledge of God, and in the notion that the ‘absolute requirement’ of obedience for the knowledge of God has as one of its corollaries the need for ‘a basic mode of thinking and speaking that corres­ ponds with this obedience of faith’.11 Crucially, Barth goes on to write that the ‘mode of thinking’ that is determined by the obedience of faith can be described as a ‘biblical attitude’ because it has its ‘prototype and example in the attitude of the biblical witnesses themselves’.12 As Barth understands it, in turning to consideration of the ordering of creaturely thought in distinctively moral terms, he is following the pattern for consideration of Christian reason­ ing that is laid down in Scripture itself. It is the task of this chapter to show the way that a conception of the proper form of inquiry into Christian reasoning emerges through Barth’s early engagement with Paul. In addition to showing that Barth’s concern for the ordering of thought has its roots in the ‘paradigm’ of the biblical witnesses, this chapter aims, secondly, to show the stakes of this concern by demonstrating that, as Barth understands it, Paul makes the question of the ordering of thought decisive for the integrity of Christian life. Barth sees in Paul’s letters a complex account of the way that the ordering of human thought is bound up with the moral and spiritual disposition of the human person as a whole; he supposes that Paul’s ministry reflects a basic concern to root out moral and spiritual defect by correcting underlying disorders in thought. In his treatments of significant portions of Paul’s letters, Barth supposes that the ordering of thought is Paul’s decisive concern. Barth appropriates the moral question of the ordering of thought as a formative element in his own work because he sees it as a central concern of Paul’s ministry. The argument of this chapter will unfold through three steps. I propose to begin by laying out a contrast between differing orientations of thought that is formative of Barth’s expositions of Paul. This contrast runs between the critical thinker’s emphasis on the limitations of knowledge to the phenomenal and an eschatological ordering of thought that considers the phenomenal in relation to its origin and end; it provides us with an important hermeneutical key to Barth’s interpretation of Paul as a whole. Equipped with this key, I intend in the second and third sections of this chapter to treat decisive passages in Barth’s work on Paul in which Barth brings the moral question of the ordering of thought to the fore. The first is found in the 1922 edition of Barth’s Römerbrief. In treating the latter half of Romans 1, Barth presents the disorder of sin as a manifestation and consequence of moral and spiritual disorder in thought. Barth points to Paul’s understanding of the ‘imprisonment of truth’ (Rom. 1:18) as a consequence of human disobedience

ii

KD 1.2, 912; ET, 816.

12

KD 1.2, 912; ET, 816.

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in thought, and the cause human enslavement to sin. He comes to hold that acknowledgement of the truth requires a moral reordering of creaturely thought through repentance and worship. The second is then found in Barth’s 1924 exposition of 1 Corinthians. In this text, Barth interprets Paul’s account of the discord in the church in 1 Corinthians 1-4 as a manifestation of the discord that follows from a failure to order Christian thinking in correspond­ ence to the activity of God. On the terms that Barth presents, disorder in thought leads to the imprisonment of the truth of God, the enslavement of human beings to the content of the phenomenal world, and the reduction of Christian faith itself to an act of self-projection. This picture serves to show how the noetic comes to be approached through the moral, and to introduce the problems to which Barth’s conception of the ordering of thought purports to be a solution.

2.2. THE ‘METAPHYSICS OF THE BIBLE’

I intend to begin by tracing a contrast that emerges in Barth’s early work between two different orientations of thought: thought that is guided by a principled commitment to grasping phenomena in their empirical immediacy; and thought that is formed by a commitment to grasping phenomena in terms of their origin and end. This contrast is significant for us as a hermeneutical key to Barth’s reading of Paul, and as a formative element in Barth’s concep­ tion of the ordering of thought. We shall see in this chapter that Barth supposes that the difficulties that concern Paul in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 1-4 issue in part from a human tendency to fix on the immediate and to occlude the relation between the immediate and its origin and end. He takes it that one of the basic principles of Paul’s teaching is that human thought is not ordered in correspondence to the reality of God when it privileges the imme­ diate, for a privileging of this kind occludes the eschatological from view. We shall see later that this principle is decisive for Barth’s own work, for he takes it that the opposition between the modern Glaubenslehre and his own theology of the Word of God issues in part from a contrast between thought that is fixed on the immediate and thought that seeks to comprehend phenomena in terms of their origin and end. We can approach this contrast by way of Emil Brunner’s review of the first edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans.13 As a whole, this review is

13 Brunner, ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth: An Up-to-Date, Unmodern Para­ phrase’, in James M. Robinson (ed.), Keith R. Crim (trans.), Beginnings of Dialectical Theology (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1968), 63-71.

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unreliable as a guide to Barth’s text;14 yet Brunner hits on a point that is important for us in observing that one of the most striking features of Barth’s commentary is a turn away from neo-Protestant oppositions between faith and metaphysics in favour of the positive development of what Brunner calls ‘the metaphysics of Paul and of the Bible’.15 As Brunner presents it, the principle of this metaphysics is that the content of the phenomenal world, and the divine acts that occur in this sphere in particular, are to be understood not in terms of their empirical immediacy, but rather in terms of their beginning and end in God. Where, for Brunner, neo-Protestantism deploys an emphasis on the occurrence of divine acts within the empirical sphere as a basis for the identification of religious experience as the ground and limit of the knowledge of God, Barth resists this psychologizing move by emphasizing that God’s acts are to be understood not by considering the experiences that stand to the right and the left of these acts on the horizontal plane of history, but rather by considering what lies behind these acts on the vertical plane. God’s work is to be understood in terms of its ‘“beginning” in God and “end” in God’, rather than in terms of its effects in the creaturely sphere.16 In suggesting that Barth is committed to understanding the empirical in terms of its origin and end, Brunner identifies a feature of Barth’s thinking that will be with us throughout this study. In Barth’s work in Safenwil and Göttingen, this mode of understanding serves, negatively, as a tool for criticizing attempts to divinize creaturely realities as secure loci of divine presence,17 and, positively, as a means of moving believers to responsible action and to praise of God by bringing them to see their lives as situated in a great movement between the origin and end of creaturely life in God.18 We encounter a concrete instance of its application in a lecture on the righteous­ ness of God that Barth delivered in January 1916. This lecture is not, as Keith Johnson claims, concerned with the epistemological question ‘how is God known’.19 It is rather, as McCormack observes, a meditation on two wills, and, more significantly for our purposes, a meditation on two different orientations of thought.20 Barth presumes that the righteousness of God is known as the ‘deepest, innermost, surest fact of our lives’. His question is what kind of attitude human beings will to take to it.21 The question of attitude is in part, as 14 See McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 181; Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, 464-5. 15 Brunner, ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth’, 68. 16 Brunner, ‘The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth’, 68. 17 See e.g. ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6; ET, 4; and especially ‘Der Christ in der Gesellschaft’, in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, 45-7; ET, ‘The Christian in Society’, in The Word of God and Theology, 48-9. 18 See Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 77-8. 19 Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, 18. 20 See McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 132. 21 Barth, ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 5; ET, 3.

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McCormack suggests, a question of the will, but bound up with it too is a foundational question regarding the ordering of human thought. Barth won­ ders not only whether human beings will order their action in accordance with the righteous will of God, but also whether they will order their thinking in a way that corresponds to the righteousness of God. Far from considering the epistemological ‘how is God known?’, Barth asks the moral: ‘how is thought to be ordered in a way that corresponds to the reality of God?’ This question comes to the fore through the contrast that Barth develops between the voice of critical reason and the voice of conscience. To begin with, Barth presents critical reason as a faculty of the penulti­ mate that blinds the human knower to the movement of the kingdom of God. The self-appointed limitations of critical reason leave it so oriented towards the immediate that it is unable to recognize that the immediate is not the ultimate. Critical reason grasps ‘the temporal but not the final, the derived but not the original... what is human but not what is divine’.22 The consequence of this fixation on the penultimate is that critical reason cannot attend to the eschatological. It cannot recognize that though, in its immediacy, history consists in an unbroken stream of unrighteousness, freedom from the distress and disorder of unrighteousness may be found by looking beyond the immediate to the eschatological kingdom of God.23 Critical reason occludes any vision of ultimacy; it terminates, on Barth’s telling, in a monistic vision of history, a resigned acceptance that history has ‘always been like this and must always stay like this’.24 Barth argues that, under the influence of this homogenizing vision, human beings have come to confuse the sojourner’s tent with their homeland, the phenomenal with the final.25 They are lost in the immediacy of reform, sanitation, methods, culture, and religion, and fail to perceive the righteousness of God.26 They do not order their thinking in correspondence to the eschato­ logical reality of God. Barth’s lecture on the righteousness of God presents a suggestive critique of critical reason as a mode of thought that blinds human beings to the eschato­ logical. It is important, however, that we resist the urge to over-expound its appearance in this early essay. Barth’s comments at this point reflect not a systematic conception of the consequences and limits of critical reason, but rather an instinctive sense of the suffocating effects of a mode of attention that confines itself within the phenomenal. This sense receives more mature articulation in Barth’s 1924 exposition of 1 Corinthians, which is marked by a thoroughgoing opposition to the historical monism that results when critical

22 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 5; ET, 3. 23 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 5; ET, 3. 24 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6-7; ET, 5. 25 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 14; ET, 11. 26 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 9-10, cf. 14; ET, 7, cf. 11.

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reason is permitted to confine attention within the phenomenal.27 In treating 1 Corinthians 15, Barth argues that a monism of this kind results when Paul’s teaching about the resurrection is shunted into a theological siding as an expression of a future state of affairs that does not impinge on and disrupt the present order.28 As Barth presents it, this error is pervasive, afflicting firstcentury Corinthians, modern Troeltschians, and even the leading lights of the Reformation.29 Among the causes of this error is, on Barth’s telling, a con­ ception of the scope of reason that confines human attention within the bounds of the phenomenal. This comes to expression in Barth’s interpretation of the questions of 1 Corinthians 15:35: ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ Barth treats these questions as the objections of a critical thinker who wishes to deny the intelligibility of the resurrection on the grounds that human thought is restricted to a phenomenal sphere in which nothing but corporeal life is known.30 For Barth, this denial issues in a monism in which present life is pictured as an uninterrupted whole and any ‘beyond’ is spoken of as a mere prolongation of this life that fits comfortably within a totalizing, self-enclosed world-view.31 Barth’s response to this pos­ ition draws rather gleefully from the fact that Paul addresses the questioner of verse 35 as a fool. Barth argues that only the fool seeks ever to remain within the bounds of the phenomenal, for comprehending life as a whole requires the consideration of an origin and end of life that is not given within the bounds of life itself. Just as a seed and a plant are understood by recognizing that they are appearances of a single life that is not reducible to either phenomenal quantity, so human life is comprehended by recognizing that it is part of the movement of a single life—the resurrection life of Jesus—that is not reducible to the appearances of phenomenal history.32 Barth claims that, were human knowers to confine themselves to the intuitable, the eschatological would be eliminated as a qualification of all that is known, and human beings would be left without a picture of life as a whole.33 For Barth, then, comprehension of creaturely life requires a mode of thought that does not attend strictly to the phenomenal, but rather compre­ hends that the ‘meaning and engine’ of the movements of life is a movement

27 See Die Auferstehung der Toten (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag München, 1926), 57-71; ET, The Resurrection of the Dead, trans. H. J. Stenning (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 101-24. 28 ADT, 57-71; ET, 101-24. 29 See Barth’s comments on the ‘curtain of time’ in Die Theologie Calvins 1922, ed., Hans Scholl (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1993), 96-8; ET, The Theology ofJohn Calvin, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), 71-4. 30 Borrowing language from Kant, Barth asks how we are to understand a resurrection life for which we have a concept but cannot have any intuition (ADT, 110; ET, 184-5). 31 ADT, 67; ET, 117. 32 ADT, 111; ET, 186-7. 33 ADT, 111; ET, 186.

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towards life that intersects the phenomenal from above.34 Returning to Barth’s early lecture on the ‘Righteousness of God’, we see this principle at work in Barth’s comments on the voice cf conscience. In contrast to critical reason’s fixation on the penultimate, conscience appears as the voice of the ultimate that is attuned to the ‘final and most profound essence’ of all things.35 Barth suggests that it is the righteousness of God that enjoys this position of ultimacy, for God’s righteousness is the source from which human beings come and the end towards which they move. In calling attention to this origin and end, conscience draws human beings away from critical reason’s absorp­ tion in immediacy, which prevents them from attending to the life-giving announcement that behind the up and down of joy and sorrow stands a goal that is higher than human changes in fortune, for it is measured on the scale of eternity.36 Whereas critical reason denies that there is anything beyond the phenomenal surface of history and leaves human beings to despair in face of the unrighteousness of the world, conscience interrupts human reflection about the phenomena of history with the ‘blast of trumpets from another world’.37 It restores the eschatological dimension to human consideration of God, self, and world, unmasking the idols that human beings make for themselves and exposing human moral projects as so many towers of Babel. It orders the activities of human thinking in correspondence to the reality of God. It is common at this point in treatments of ‘The Righteousness of God’ to observe that Barth’s account of conscience appears to represent an awkward holdover from his liberal education, an uncharacteristic identification of an immanent locus of divine presence that would drop away as Barth’s thinking matures. This observation underplays, first, the discontinuity between liberal thought and Barth’s understanding of the way that conscience interrupts moral and religious feeling;38 and second, the way that Barth’s notion of conscience represents an ordering of thought that remains a consistent feature of his work. The basic movement associated with Barth’s conception of conscience is a shift through which human beings acknowledge that, if they are to order their thinking in accordance with the reality of God, they must turn from the critical thinker’s privileging of the intuitable to attending to the origin and end of the given. This notion recurs in the famous Tambach lecture that Barth delivered at a conference of religious socialists in September, 1919. Barth opens this lecture by recapitulating the picture that we encountered in ‘The Righteousness of God’. He claims that human beings are confronted by 34 Barth speaks of a ‘movement in life toward life’ and of a movement behind life that intersects the movements of life in his Tambach lecture. See ‘Der Christ in der Gesellschaft’, 40, 45; ET, 42, 47. 35 Barth, ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 5-6; ET, 3-4. 36 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6-8; ET, 4-6. 37 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6; ET, 4. 38 See e.g. ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6; ET, 4.

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reason is permitted to confine attention within the phenomenal.27 In treating 1 Corinthians 15, Barth argues that a monism of this kind results when Paul’s teaching about the resurrection is shunted into a theological siding as an expression of a future state of affairs that does not impinge on and disrupt the present order.28 As Barth presents it, this error is pervasive, afflicting firstcentury Corinthians, modern Troeltschians, and even the leading lights of the Reformation.29 Among the causes of this error is, on Barth’s telling, a con­ ception of the scope of reason that confines human attention within the bounds of the phenomenal. This comes to expression in Barth’s interpretation of the questions of 1 Corinthians 15:35: ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ Barth treats these questions as the objections of a critical thinker who wishes to deny the intelligibility of the resurrection on the grounds that human thought is restricted to a phenomenal sphere in which nothing but corporeal life is known.30 For Barth, this denial issues in a monism in which present life is pictured as an uninterrupted whole and any ‘beyond’ is spoken of as a mere prolongation of this life that fits comfortably within a totalizing, self-enclosed world-view.31 Barth’s response to this pos­ ition draws rather gleefully from the fact that Paul addresses the questioner of verse 35 as a fool. Barth argues that only the fool seeks ever to remain within the bounds of the phenomenal, for comprehending life as a whole requires the consideration of an origin and end of life that is not given within the bounds of life itself. Just as a seed and a plant are understood by recognizing that they are appearances of a single life that is not reducible to either phenomenal quantity, so human life is comprehended by recognizing that it is part of the movement of a single life—the resurrection life of Jesus—that is not reducible to the appearances of phenomenal history.32 Barth claims that, were human knowers to confine themselves to the intuitable, the eschatological would be eliminated as a qualification of all that is known, and human beings would be left without a picture of life as a whole.33 For Barth, then, comprehension of creaturely life requires a mode of thought that does not attend strictly to the phenomenal, but rather compre­ hends that the ‘meaning and engine’ of the movements of life is a movement

27 See Die Auferstehung der Toten (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag München, 1926), 57-71; ET, The Resurrection of the Dead, trans. H. J. Stenning (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 101-24. 28 ADT, 57-71; ET, 101-24. 29 See Barth’s comments on the ‘curtain of time’ in Die Theologie Calvins 1922, ed., Hans Scholl (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1993), 96-8; ET, The Theology ofJohn Calvin, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), 71-4. 30 Borrowing language from Kant, Barth asks how we are to understand a resurrection life for which we have a concept but cannot have any intuition (ADT, 110; ET, 184-5). 31 ADT, 67; ET, 117. 32 ADT, 111; ET, 186-7. 33 ADT, 111; ET, 186.

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towards life that intersects the phenomenal from above.34 Returning to Barth’s early lecture on the ‘Righteousness of God’, we see this principle at work in Barth’s comments on the voice cf conscience. In contrast to critical reason’s fixation on the penultimate, conscience appears as the voice of the ultimate that is attuned to the ‘final and most profound essence’ of all things.35 Barth suggests that it is the righteousness of God that enjoys this position of ultimacy, for God’s righteousness is the source from which human beings come and the end towards which they move. In calling attention to this origin and end, conscience draws human beings away from critical reason’s absorp­ tion in immediacy, which prevents them from attending to the life-giving announcement that behind the up and down of joy and sorrow stands a goal that is higher than human changes in fortune, for it is measured on the scale of eternity.36 Whereas critical reason denies that there is anything beyond the phenomenal surface of history and leaves human beings to despair in face of the unrighteousness of the world, conscience interrupts human reflection about the phenomena of history with the ‘blast of trumpets from another world’.37 It restores the eschatological dimension to human consideration of God, self, and world, unmasking the idols that human beings make for themselves and exposing human moral projects as so many towers of Babel. It orders the activities of human thinking in correspondence to the reality of God. It is common at this point in treatments of ‘The Righteousness of God’ to observe that Barth’s account of conscience appears to represent an awkward holdover from his liberal education, an uncharacteristic identification of an immanent locus of divine presence that would drop away as Barth’s thinking matures. This observation underplays, first, the discontinuity between liberal thought and Barth’s understanding of the way that conscience interrupts moral and religious feeling;38 and second, the way that Barth’s notion of conscience represents an ordering of thought that remains a consistent feature of his work. The basic movement associated with Barth’s conception of conscience is a shift through which human beings acknowledge that, if they are to order their thinking in accordance with the reality of God, they must turn from the critical thinker’s privileging of the intuitable to attending to the origin and end of the given. This notion recurs in the famous Tambach lecture that Barth delivered at a conference of religious socialists in September, 1919. Barth opens this lecture by recapitulating the picture that we encountered in ‘The Righteousness of God’. He claims that human beings are confronted by 34 Barth speaks of a ‘movement in life toward life’ and of a movement behind life that intersects the movements of life in his Tambach lecture. See ‘Der Christ in der Gesellschaft’, 40, 45; ET, 42, 47. 35 Barth, ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 5-6; ET, 3-4. 36 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6-8; ET, 4-6. 37 ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6; ET, 4. 38 See e.g. ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 6; ET, 4.

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the problematic nature of human life and society and are tempted to view history as a self-enclosed whole that is ‘without windows to the kingdom of heaven’;39 but a voice again emerges that brings relief from the tyranny of the phenomenal by witnessing to an origin and end that stands beyond the immediate. Barth claims that the presence of the Christian in society— construed as the presence of Christ in, above, behind, and beyond Christian believers—stands as a voice of the promise that society is not left to itself.40 The Christian in society witnesses to the interruption of the present order that issues from the origin and end of all things. What has occurred here in Barth’s Tambach lecture is that the contrast between thought oriented towards the immediate and thought oriented towards the eschatological remains, but Paul’s ‘Christ in us’ has taken the place of the liberal-sounding ‘conscience’ as the voice that calls human beings away from absorption in immediacy to an understanding of the world grounded in the ‘metaphysics of the Bible’. The reality of the Christian—which Barth, borrowing a bit of logic from Augustine, argues is presupposed in the very act of inquiring into the reality of the Christian—stands as a sign of promise, hope, and light from above.41 At this point, then, we can see that there is a good deal of continuity between ‘The Righteousness of God’ and Barth’s Tambach lecture. Both are concerned with an ordering of thought that breaks the oppressive hold of the phenomenal by understanding phenomena in terms of their origin and end. Both are thus formed by a contrast between thought oriented to the immediate and thought that orders its principles in accordance with the reality of God. We encountered this same opposition in Barth’s 1924 exposition of 1 Corinthians; as we shall see over the course of this study, the contrast is formative of Barth’s theology as a whole. At present, we can note that it allows us to identify important lines in Barth’s thinking by showing that consider­ ation of the ordering of Christian thought leads Barth to reject the restrictions that accompany certain versions of a Kantian account of cognition.42 We shall see in Chapter 4 that, by 1927, consideration of the mode of understanding that is proper to faith leads Barth to conclude that theologians must be ‘astonished’ by the ‘barriers of the Kantian theory of knowledge’ and simply leave them behind.43 We can see at present that this astonishment is formative even of Barth’s early work, for his lectures and commentaries are shot through with consternation at the moral and spiritual blindness of the critical thinker. On his terms, this thinker’s restriction of attention to the phenomenal enslaves 39 Barth, ‘Der Christ in der Gesellschaft’, 33-6; ET, 35-9. 40 ‘Der Christ in der Gesellschaft’, 33-4; ET, 35-6. 41 ‘Der Christ in der Gesellschaft’, 33-9; ET, 35-41. 42 It is important that, at this point in his thinking, Barth in fact understands Kant to stand in continuity with Plato in commending a mode of thought ordered by attention to the origin and end of the phenomenal. 43 Barth, Die Christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1927), 96-7.

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human beings to the unrighteous will of the world by obscuring the origin and end of the creaturely and the movement of resurrection life. Critical reason prevents human beings from recognizing that relief from the unrighteousness that marks the surface of history is found not in a quintessential^ modern turn inwards, but rather in attention to the interruption of the present order that comes from the one who is the creature’s origin and end. Barth makes clear that the strictures developed by the critical thinker must be left behind; it is crucial for us that it is moral and spiritual consideration of the ordering of thought that grounds this conclusion. Already in his account of the voice of conscience in 1916 and of‘Christ in me’ in 1919, he is considering the ordering of creaturely thought on moral and analogical terms. He is inquiring into the activities of thought that correspond to the creatureliness of the knower and the reality of an eschatological judgement that interrupts the phenomenal from outside itself.

2.3. SIN AND THE PROBLEM OF DISORDERED THOUGHT

Sin and Disordered Thought in Romans 1 Equipped with an understanding of the orientation of thought associated with Barth’s conception of the ‘metaphysics of the Bible’, we may turn to Barth’s earlier treatments of Paul. My aim here is to show that the ordering of thought emerges in these treatments as a matter of central significance for human life because it is a crucial element in the moral and spiritual orientation of the creature as a whole. We can trace this dynamic, first, in the treatment of Romans 1:18-21 that frames the concerns of Romans II. Here Barth fires a withering opening salvo: ‘God! We do not know what we say when we say this word.’44 This claim announces a central theme of Barth’s commentary. The argument of Romans II turns on the notion that Paul is concerned about a forgetting of the transcendent alterity of God that results from a sinful reversal of the relationship between God and creatures. Barth draws this notion from Paul’s descriptions in Romans 1 of a human failure to honour God as God, of an exchange of the glory of God for the images of created things, and of an inversion through which human beings have come to worship creatures rather than the Creator. The indictment of human idolatry that appears in these verses stands as one of the dominant motifs of Barth’s discussion. That which

44 Barth, RB, 19; ET, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 42.

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is of interest to us is the way that Barth’s account of the basis and conse­ quences of this idolatry centres around a description of a disobedient disorder of human thought. Barth gives himself space to foreground the question of the ordering of thought by drawing his conception of idolatry, not from the references to images and to the worship of creatures that appear in Romans 1:23 and 1:25, but rather from an imaginative account of the ‘impiety and unrighteousness’ that Paul depicts as the objects of divine wrath in Romans 1:18. In the first edition of his commentary on Romans, Barth gives a straightforward transla­ tion and description of these terms;45 but in Romans II he brings the question of the ordering of thought to the fore through something of a loose translation of Paul’s phrase. He translates Paul’s ‘impiety and unrighteousness’ as some­ thing closer to ‘irreverence and insubordination’.46 As he presents it, the ‘irreverence’ that concerns Paul is a failure to recognize the difference between the Creator and the creature. Barth describes this failure by speaking of the way that human beings presume to know what they mean when they say ‘God’. Human beings act as if the meaning of the term is clear; in so doing, they license themselves to approach God on terms of familiarity, and presume that they can order their relationship with the divine in the same way that they order their relations to the creaturely.47 The presumption that the divine is no different from the creaturely is their irreverence. The peculiar way in which human beings relate to the creaturely then ensures that this irreverence issues inevitably in insubordination. As Barth presents it, human relations generally are characterized by an exercise of mastery through which human beings subordinate all that they encounter to their own ends. When, in their irrever­ ence, they presume that their relation to God may follow this general pattern, they become insubordinate, for they claim mastery over God. God comes to be treated as a tool that stands in service to human ends. Belief in God amounts to human beings seeking to justify, enjoy, and honour themselves. Barth concludes that what the irreverent and insubordinate call God is in truth nothing other than themselves.48 Barth explains the loss of the sense of the distance between God and creatures that results in irreverence and insubordination by suggesting that 45 Paul’s phrase here is äcreßetav Kai aBcKiav. See Barth, Römerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1985), 24. 46 RB, 19-20; ET, 42-3. Barth’s phrase here is ‘Ehrfurchtslosigkeit und Unbotmäßigkeit’. Hoskyns does considerable disservice to readers in his translation of Barth’s text, for he substitutes the English of the King James Version for Barth’s own translation of Romans and thus obscures the fact that Barth often makes his argumentative move through idiosyncratic renderings of the Greek. 47 RB, 20-1; ET, 44. Barth recapitulates the content of his conception of irreverence in addressing Paul’s account of knowing sin by way of the law in Romans 7 (see RB, 246; ET, 243-4). 48 RB, 21; ET, 44.

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it follows when human beings attend to the serpent’s claim that they shall be as God. It is no accident that Barth invokes the Genesis story at this point, for he sees the effacing of the distance between God and creatures as a kind of original sin from which the broader disorder of sin flows. Barth treats Paul’s description of humanity’s failure to honour God as God in Romans 1:18-21 under the title ‘Cause’. He then treats the moral and spiritual disorder that Paul depicts in Romans 1:22-32 under the title ‘Effect’.49 Where traditional Protestant readings present the depiction of the sinful condition in these latter verses as an attempt to establish the depth of human guilt and the subsequent impossibility of reconciliation by any human act, Barth suggests that Paul is in fact depicting the disorder that issues from the original act of forgetting God. It is this causal relationship between the idolatry of verses 18-21 and the disorder of verses 22-32 that Barth sees reflected in the threefold ‘therefore God gave them up’ that structures these latter verses. It is the nature of the causal link that Barth thinks is in play here that is significant for us. Where Paul’s ‘therefore God gave them up’ appears to suggest that an act of divine agency is the causal link between human idolatry and the discord of sin more broadly, Barth chooses to present the disobedience of disordered human thought as the key to this connection. Barth’s shift to an emphasis on the ordering of thought has its basis in his interpretation of Paul’s claim that, in sin, human beings have ‘imprisoned’ the truth.50 Barth treats this claim as a description of the noetic consequences of the original act of idolatry. As he presents it, truth comes to be imprisoned through sin because the mind ceases to order its activities in accordance with its creatureliness. The serpent’s promise tempts the mind to forget that it is creaturely; the mind then seeks to make itself the master of God and puts itself in God’s place. The result is that the mind comes to be able to think of God only within the bounds of its self-knowledge. Barth writes that, because human beings have come to think of themselves as God, they cannot think of God more highly than they think of themselves.51 Acknowledgement of God in his difference from the creaturely is excluded because thought that claims mastery over God comes to be conditioned by the possibilities of self­ reflection. The categories and possibilities of the mind are recalibrated through the insubordination of sin, and human thought is left without capacities other than those grounded in self-reflection. Barth describes this development as an adjustment of the ‘measure’ of truth, for truth comes to be measured by that which human beings can think of themselves. He identifies this adjustment as

49 Barth’s terms here are Ursache and Wirkung. These subheadings appear in a chapter entitled ‘The Night’. Hoskyns renders the two subheadings ‘Its Cause’ and ‘Its Operation’. 50 See Romans 1:18. Paul’s term here is KarexovToov, usually rendered ‘suppress’, or ‘hold down’. Barth renders it ‘hold in captivity’ (RB, 21; ET, 44). 51 RB, 21; ET, 44-5.

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the ‘imprisonment’ of truth to which Paul refers, for it renders impossible an apprehension of God in his infinite difference from all else that is known.52 The truth of God is ‘converted into untruth’ because it is thought within the framework of categories derived from human self-reflection.53 At this point, then, we can see that Barth’s reading of Romans 1 brings a moral and spiritual concern for the ordering of the activities of thought to the fore. Barth supposes that thought that submits to the temptation of the serpent and does not order its activities in accordance with its own creatureliness ends up imprisoning the truth of God by excluding the thought of God in his difference from the self. Our task now is to see the way that Barth presents the imprisonment of the truth of God in disordered human thought as the basis of the discord that Paul presents in verses 22-32. Barth introduces his treatment of these latter verses by claiming that corrupted action issues from disordered thought.54 He goes on to offer a psychologized account of the nature of this causal connection. This account turns on the notion that those who take their awareness of themselves as the norm of their thought of God are left without the protection offered by an under­ standing of God in his difference from the world against the demonic side of nature, history, religion, and desire. All aspects of the creaturely sphere possess a demonic potential in which they can be mistaken for the reality of God and made objects of a fetishized form of worship when they are apprehended in thought that is not ordered by the recognition of the difference between God and the world. Where this occurs, realities within the world are apprehended not in the contingency and relativity that they possess in relation to their origin and end, but rather as inescapable neces­ sities that exercise a demonic hold on human beings. Barth writes that, under these conditions, human beings become the ‘slaves’ and ‘play-things’ of nature, culture, history, and their own religious imaginations. With nothing higher preventing them from absolutizing these relatives, human beings enslave themselves to that which they deem highest; they subject themselves wholly to the demonic side of the phenomenal.55 It is then, on Barth’s telling, that human life is marked by the corruption and discord that Paul presents in Romans 1:22-32. Barth sums up his construal of the logic of these verses by writing that, when God and the world are confused, life’s necessities are exchanged for their ‘demonic caricature’, the ‘questionable merges with the absurd. Libido becomes everything; life becomes erotic without remainder. When there is not a closed border between God and human beings, a final inexorable barrier and limit, then the border between the “normal” and the perverse is opened.’56

52 RB, 22; ET, 45. 55 RB, 30; ET, 52 -3 .

53 RB, 22; ET, 45. 56 RB, 30; ET, 52-3.

54 RB, 26; ET, 49.

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For Barth, then, the thoroughgoing corruption of creaturely life depicted in the last section of Romans 1 is a consequence of moral and spiritual disorder in creaturely thought. Whereas Calvin argues that this corruption comes about because a ‘provoked and incensed’ God responds to human idolatry by casting sinners ‘headlong into various courses which lead to perdition and ruin’,57 Barth traces it to a distortion of thought that is the first effect of human idolatry. What we see in this inversion is something of a surprising natural­ ization of Paul’s description of sin. In drawing a causal link between the disorder of human thought and the corruption of life more generally, Barth has drawn upon Paul’s references to God’s ‘giving over’ of sinners to the consequences of their activities; yet his account refers not to a divine activity but rather to the way that existential disorder follows a distortion of creaturely thought. In characterizing the disorder depicted in Romans 1:22-32, Barth has constructed an account of the subjection of human life to the demonic; yet here too he offers not an account of the activities of particular spiritual agencies but rather a description of the way that the phenomenal presents itself to distorted thought. In both cases, Barth traces a movement that issues naturally from thought that is disordered by sin. The disordering of thought is thus brought to the fore and made a decisive component of the moral and spiritual corruption of sinful human life. We can sum up the line of Barth’s interpretation of the latter half of Romans 1 by saying that human beings have inverted the order of the Creator and creature, and, in so doing, have come to take their understanding of them­ selves as principial for their thought about God. Even in thinking about God, they occupy a noetic standpoint grounded in their own self-reflection. The adoption of this standpoint leads to a double imprisonment. The truth of God is imprisoned in the categories of human self-reflection and can only appear as untruth. Human beings then find themselves fettered to worldly contingencies that they cannot separate from the necessities of God. The disordered thought in which truth is imprisoned thus stands at the root of a disordered life in which human beings are imprisoned. On this construal of Romans 1, the questions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of human thought emerge as matters of considerable existential significance, for thought that occupies the standpoint of self-reflection, is oriented towards the immediate, and claims the freedom to master God in the way that it masters all else that is known, issues in the moral and spiritual plight that concerns Paul in Romans. The peace with God that consists in the ‘appropriate ordering of 57 See Calvin’s comments on Romans 1:24 in his commentary on Romans {Romans and Thessalonians, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), 33-4), as well as his claim in the Institutes that Romans 1:28 shows us that God is the ‘special author of his own vengeance’, with Satan serving merely as God’s minister (Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 1.18.2).

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the relationship between human beings (as human beings!) and God (as God!)’ is nowhere to be found.58 What is required, then, on Barth’s telling, is that human beings allow their thinking to be reordered through learning again what it means to say ‘God’. Barth proposes that a reordering of thought is the concrete form that repent­ ance takes and the key to enabling a new form of human life.59 For him, this reordering of thought is associated with coming again to think of eternity.60 As he puts it more specifically in his lectures on Ephesians, it is a matter of learning again what it is to say ‘God’.61 It is important for us going forward that we recognize that Barth thinks that learning to say ‘God’ is a matter of learning to say ‘resurrection of the dead’. In Romans II, Barth argues that the resurrection is the concrete criterion by which the true God is distinguished from idols.62 In his exposition of 1 Corinthians, he suggests that the phrase ‘resurrection of the dead’ is a summary of Paul’s understanding of the word ‘God’.63 The centrality of the resurrection as the clue to releasing the truth of God from imprisonment is a point we shall return to in Chapter 3. Barth’s treatment of Romans 1 introduces the concerns that ground the landmark second edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans. Consideration of these concerns permits us to frame the question of this study in two ways. In the first place, we have seen that Barth brings a moral and spiritual concern for the proper ordering of creaturely thought to the fore. Barth’s peculiar reading of Paul’s text manifests a decisive concern for the structures and practices of human thought; but his concern is not, as others have suggested, determined by modern questions regarding the possibility of the knowledge of God, but rather by concern for the moral ordering of the activities of thought. Barth depicts the way that human thought is distorted when, following the suggestion of the serpent, its activities are no longer structured in accordance with its own creatureliness. His solution turns on a reordering of thought rooted in an understanding of the word ‘God’ that reminds human knowers what it is to think as creatures. Both the problem that he identifies and the solution that he proposes are useful for us in seeing that Barth supposes that noetic questions must be framed in moral terms. The activities of thought are elements in the moral and spiritual orientation of the creature in relation to God. Where they are not ordered in accordance with the creatureliness of the knower and the eschatological reality of God, they ‘imprison’ the truth of God in creaturely categories. Beyond pointing to Barth’s shift to consideration of the activities of thought in moral terms, the concerns that emerge in Barth’s treatment of Romans 1

58 59 60 62

RB, 138; ET, 151; cf. Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 72. RB, 460; ET, 436; cf. Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 153-4. RB, 460-2; ET, 436-8. 61 Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 136. See e.g. RB, 12, 20; ET, 37, 43. 63 ADT, 115; ET, 192.

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permit us to frame the question of this study in a second sense by bringing with them an important reconsideration of the question of truth. I suggested in Chapter 1 that Barth’s shift t? consideration of theological reasoning in moral terms is bound up with a shift from concern for the establishment of truth to concern for the acknowledgement of truth. Barth is criticized for eschewing the task of establishing the truth of particular theological claims; but the concern for the ‘imprisoning’ of the truth of God that structures Barth’s treatment of Romans 1 shows that Barth is concerned for the prior question of the very possibility of acknowledging divine truth. This concern turns on the notion that the ‘measure’ that human being bring to the task of establishing truth serves only to ensure that the God of whom human knowers speak is cut to the size of a creaturely reality. At this point in his work, Barth depicts this dynamic in dramatic rather than conceptual terms; but his account anticipates closely the more disciplined critique of attempts to estab­ lish the truth of God that emerge in the lectures on realism and idealism that we encountered in Chapter 1. As we saw there, attempts to establish truth through either realist or idealist patterns of inquiry efface the distinction between the divine and the creaturely. In both his early and later work, Barth supposes that the question of establishing truth must give way to a rather more unsettling question regarding the capacity of the human knower to acknowledge truth at all. A final point is important for us here in order to grasp the register in which Barth’s thought is moving. Barth has described an imprisonment of truth that results from a fundamental opposition between the categories in which human beings seek to understand God and the reality of God himself. It would be possible to give a highly conceptualized account of this dynamic, aligning Barth with those who suppose that opposition between human categories and the reality of God calls for a form of apophaticism, or the rejection of classically realist understandings of the reference of theological language; but it is important for us that Barth himself aims to shift the register in which the problem is considered. Barth is not developing an account of a necessary opposition between human thought and divine reality based on a priori consideration of the structure of human thought; he is instead suggesting that the truth of God is imprisoned in human categories a posteriori as a result of sin. He has offered what is quite self-consciously a depiction of the noetic consequences of human sin. The tension that exists between the categories of human thought and the reality of God is not a fate irreducibly inscribed in the structure of human thought, but rather a product of sin. This means that the solution to the apparent tension between human thought and divine reality is not conceptual but rather penitential and doxological. In seeking to draw out Paul’s own solution to the problem, Barth does not develop an account of the limits of human reasoning, or a new theory of the reference of theological language, but turns instead to accounts of repentance, worship, and love. It is

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these notions that are decisive in Barth’s account of the way that the reality of God is set free from its imprisonment in a distorted understanding of truth. Drawing from Paul’s comments on the renewal of the mind in Romans 12:2, Barth speaks of repentance as an act of thought that, in its very self­ dissolution, is the proper worship of God, and sets the truth of God free.64 Repentance is an element in a moral and spiritual reordering of creaturely thought that begins to overcome the consequences of sin. In effecting a spiritual reordering of creaturely thought, it begins to heal the tension between creaturely thought and the reality of God. In so doing, it begins to position human knowers once again to acknowledge the truth of God as a reality that stands beyond all creaturely quantities.

Disorder in Thought and the Corruption of Faith in 1 Corinthians 1-4 We turn to a second treatment of the problem of the ordering of thought in Barth’s earlier interpretation of Paul, focusing now on the exposition of 1 Corinthians that Barth published in 1924.65 This text will play a central role when we come to give an account of the theology of the resurrection that Barth sees as the basis of well-ordered Christian thought; yet, before we come to the solution that Barth proposes, we will be well served to give further attention to the problem. Barth emphasizes the question of the ordering of thought not only in considering Paul’s depiction of human sin in Romans 1, but also in discussing Paul’s attempt to address the turmoil in the church in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 1-4. Barth’s discussion of this material draws on a number of themes that we have encountered already. The main line of Barth’s inter­ pretation may be laid out in brief. Barth’s basic claim in treating the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians is that factionalism has come to mark the church in Corinth because the Corinthians treat their faith as the object of the kind of fetish that Barth describes in his treatment of Romans 1. Barth’s comments on Romans 1 turn on the principle that the phenomena of nature, history, and culture come to be fetishized when God is no longer acknowledged in his difference from the world. His construal of 1 Corinthians 1-4 applies this same principle to the religious sphere. Barth argues that the phenomena of human religious life come to be fetishized when God is no longer acknowledged in his difference from human religious activity. In the case of the Corinthians, Barth holds that this fetishism has 64 RB, 460-1; ET, 436-7. 65 This text is based on a lecture course that Barth delivered during the summer of 1923.1 will say a few words about the history of Barth’s engagement with 1 Corinthians at the beginning of Chapter 3.

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come about because, in Paul’s words, the ‘testimony about Christ’ was con­ firmed amongst them even as they were enriched in all speech, knowledge, and spiritual gifts.66 In face of the apparent co-inherence of the ‘testimony about Christ’ and the gifts that they received, the Corinthians have come to fixate on the gifts themselves as the elements that are truly significant within the reality of Christ.67 They have made the exercise of these gifts the object of their religious devotion to the point that the ‘testimony about Christ’ has been reduced to an object of energetic human activity.68 Rather than acknowledging that everything that they have is received from God, the Corinthians have abstracted their faith from its origin and fixated on its phenomenal presence.69 This presence has itself become the object of their faith. The ‘primary failing’ of the Corinthians is the ‘boldness, assurance, and enthusiasm’ with which they have come to believe in their own faith rather than in God himself.70 For Barth, this failing grounds the factionalism of the Corinthian church, for, where faith is fetishized, it is inevitable that the leaders with whom the Corinthians associate the experience of their faith should themselves be fetishized to the point that supporters of Peter, Paul, and Apollos find them­ selves at loggerheads. The core of Barth’s exposition of 1 Corinthians 1-4 is thus straightforward enough. Barth deploys patterns of argumentation that are common in his earlier work in order to suggest that Christian faith is distorted when it is considered in its immediacy rather than in terms of its origin in God. Past treatments of The Resurrection of the Dead have tended to focus on this account of the corruption of faith; but it is important that we recognize that this account is part of a wider network of interpretive moves through which Barth traces the deformation of the Corinthians’ faith to a disorder in thought that Barth takes to be Paul’s concern in 1 Corinthians as a whole. This disorder consists in the occupation of a noetic standpoint from which it is inevitable that Christian faith will turn in on itself and the Christian life will be made a matter of individual ‘spiritual heroism’.71 Barth develops this notion in an argument that we can trace through three steps. The first step turns on a particular construal of the role that the theology of the resurrection plays in Paul’s thinking as a whole. As Barth presents it, the account of the resurrection of 1 Corinthians 15 is imperfectly described as Paul’s eschatology, for this characterization appears to reduce teaching about the resurrection to one piece of material doctrine alongside others.72 A conception of this kind will not do, on Barth’s telling, because the signifi­ cance of Paul’s theology of the resurrection lies not only in material teaching but also in the establishment of a framework within which Christian teaching 66 See 1 Corinthians 1:5-7. 67 ADT, 2-4; ET, 13-16. 68 ADT, 4; ET, 15. 69 ADT, 5; ET, 18. 70 ADT, 3-4; ET, 15. 71 The phrase is taken from ADT, 3; ET, 15. 72 ADT, 62, cf. 2; ET, 109, cf. 6.

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as a whole is to be understood. Barth writes that, rather than speaking of Paul’s resurrection theology as his eschatology, we ought to describe it as his ‘methodology’, for it presents the formal principle that constitutes the ‘stand­ point’, ‘position’, and ‘paradigm’ around which Christian thought is to be ordered.73 It discloses the ‘focal point’, ‘background’, and ‘presupposition’ of Paul’s thought.74 Comprehension of the ‘standpoint’ constituted by this ‘pre­ supposition’ is crucial, for Barth claims not only that Paul’s letters to the Romans, Philippians, and Colossians are ‘incomprehensible’ apart from the ‘sharp accent’ that they receive in its ‘light’,75 but also that the integrity of the Christian life hinges on a moral ordering of thought in accordance with it. Barth writes that faith, doctrine, and moral seriousness are nothing apart from thought that is ordered in accordance with the standpoint of the resur­ rection.76 Paul’s theology of the resurrection is thus to be understood as the formal principle that points to the right ordering of Christian thought. The second step in Barth’s argument consists in a particular construal of the nature of the tension between Paul and the Corinthians. On a straightforward reading of 1 Corinthians 15, it appears that Paul wishes to respond to the Corinthians’ scepticism regarding the resurrection of the dead; but, having claimed that the significance of Paul’s theology of the resurrection is as much formal as it is material, Barth suggests that Paul’s concern with the Corinthians ought not to be reduced to a dispute over the credibility of a particular aspect of teaching. As he presents it, the tension between Paul and the Corinthians is best described as ‘formal’, or ‘methodological’, for the Corinthians share the vast majority of Paul’s teaching but they do not allow the resurrection to provide the framework within which this teaching is understood.77 The Corinthians affirm the proclamation of salvation, the need for faith in the forgiveness of sins, and the ‘supernatural’ character of baptism; but they do not take the resurrection as ‘principial’ for their understanding of this affirmation.78 ‘They do not think from this stand­ point.’79 This, for Barth, is the primary concern motivating Paul’s letter. As Barth presents it, the principle of unity running through the ‘great conglom­ eration’ of instruction and rebuke that makes up 1 Corinthians is Paul’s attempt to bring the Corinthians to think from the standpoint of the resur­ rection by showing how their questions regarding church unity, sexual ethics, food sacrificed to idols, spiritual gifts, and so on are refigured when seen from this standpoint.80 Paul wishes ‘to show how one must think from the stand­ point of Jesus’.81 Barth suggests that, apart from the reordering of thought around this standpoint, it is in a sense incidental whether the Corinthians

73 76 78 80

ADT, 62, 57; ET, 109, 101. 74 ADT, 1; ET, 5-6. 75 ADT, 1; ET, 5-6. ADT, 108; ET, 182. 77 ADT, 65-6; ET, 114-15. ADT, 64-6, 88; ET, 112-15, 150. 79 ADT, 88; ET, 150. ADT, 1-2; ET, 6-7. 81 ADT, 110; ET, 184.

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affirm the resurrection or not, for their confusion about the nature of the Christian life makes plain that they do not occupy the standpoint constituted by the resurrection.82 For Barth, then, the question that is at stake in 1 Corinthians is a question of the proper ordering of Christian thought. As Barth understands it, Paul’s central concern is the noetic standpoint occupied by believers. Paul wishes to guide the Corinthians into moral and spiritual consideration of the way that their thinking may be ordered in correspondence with the activity of God; failure to order their thinking in this way is, for Barth, the root of the moral and spiritual difficulties that plague the Corinthian church. The centrality of the problem of the ordering of thought in Barth’s thinking is plain at this point; the third step in Barth’s interpretation contributes further to framing his concerns by showing that, as we have seen at a couple of points so far, his conception of this problem is bound up with a reconsideration of the question of truth. In giving an account of the centrality of the resurrection to Christian thinking, Barth folds his account of the differing standpoints occupied by Paul and the Corinthians into a contrast between concern for the establishment of truth, and concern for the acknowledgement of truth. The first of these views emerges in Barth’s account of the standpoint occupied by the Corinthians. As Barth presents it, the Corinthians fail to think from the standpoint of the resur­ rection because they suppose that the resurrection raises the problem of the establishment of truth. They understand the resurrection as one historical event amongst others that must be shown both to be true and to be relevant for their lives. Because the resurrection appears to occupy a time and place that is separated from the reality of their own fives, the Corinthians suppose that neither its veracity nor its relevance are apparent, and so they do not take the resurrection as the principle of their thought, but seek instead to establish its truth. They are, on Barth’s telling, the first in a centuries-long tradition of readers who interpret Paul’s references to witnesses of the risen Christ as an attempt to establish its truth,83 and they suppose that some act of confirmation, mediation, and appropriation is required if they are to see this event as true and relevant.84 Confronted by Paul’s insistence on the centrality of the resurrection to Christian thought, they are able only to inquire into the truth of the resurrection and ask: what has it to do with us?’85 The second view, which privileges the question of the acknowledgement of truth, emerges through Barth’s depiction of Paul himself. Barth argues that, in contrast to the Corinthians, Paul thinks from the standpoint of the resurrec­ tion because he recognizes that the resurrection is a truth of a particular sort by virtue of its grounding in an act of God. Barth writes that the ordering of Paul’s thinking hinges on the notion that to speak of the resurrection of Christ is to speak of a divine act, and that it is thus to speak of a truth that is set apart 82 ADT, 65; ET, 113. 83 ADT, 75-8; ET, 130-5. 84 ADT, 88-9, 66; ET, 150-2, 116. 85 ADT, 89; ET, 151.

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by the peculiar ‘range’, or ‘scope’, that it possesses.86 As an act of the eternal God, the truth of the resurrection possesses a ‘range’ through which it is not localized and confined to a point in history. It is not contained by history in such a way that its occurrence at one point may appear dubious or irrelevant in another; instead, it opens a ‘new eternal history’ that is determinative of the entirety of the history in which the Corinthians stand.87 Barth writes that, because the resurrection is an act of God, it ‘applies’ to the whole of history in such a way that the miracle of God in Christ is ‘immediately and simultan­ eously’ the miracle of God ‘to us’.88 For Barth, the peculiar ‘range’ of the truth of the resurrection means that the question of truth itself must be reframed. In relation to this event, the problem of truth is a problem of acknowledgement, for the danger that confronts human knowers is that they will approach the resurrection in a way that folds it back into a worldly form of history and makes of it one event amongst others. Barth supposes that Paul thinks from the standpoint of the resurrec­ tion in order to position himself to acknowledge its truth. By contrast, Barth proposes that the Corinthians do not think from this standpoint because they concern themselves with the establishment of its truth. Barth describes the opposition between these positions as an ‘either-or’ that is the central concern of Christianity in general and of the ordering of Christian thought in particu­ lar.89 As he presents it, either the resurrection possesses a truth that is qualitatively different from the truth of historical events generally and requires the reordering of Christian thought so that its truth can be acknowledged, or, if it is treated as one more event requiring critical substantiation, then assent to its truth can consist only in a projection of human activity and ideals. Barth illustrates this latter notion by arguing that the Corinthians have come to believe in their own faith rather than in God because their attempts to establish the truth of the resurrection reduce this event to one occurrence amongst others, an event that can be shown to be true and relevant for believers only on the basis of their own activity. On his terms, if believers fail to recognize the way that the question of truth is itself reframed by the reality of the resurrection, then they are left with a purely self-referential account of their assent to its reality. Taking aim at Ritschlian thought, he argues that faith is left to find its basis in judgements about Christ’s resem­ blance to the divine that express no more than human ideals.90 The resurrec­ tion becomes one historical event alongside others, the gospel presents one more set of assertions that await adjudication, and any affirmation of this event or this gospel amounts to a projection of the believer’s own activity and ideals.91 If Christian thought and Christian inquiry into truth are not 86 ADT, 88-9; ET, 151. 88 ADT, 88-9; ET, 150-1. 90 ADT, 91-2; ET, 155-6.

87 ADT, 88-9; ET, 150-1. 89 ADT, 89, 10-11; ET, 152,26. 91 ADT, 90-2; ET, 154-8.

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reordered by the peculiar quality of the truth of God, ‘then Feuerbach is right. Then [religion] is to be explained as no more than wishful human dreaming.’92

2.4. CONCLUSION The aim of this chapter has been twofold. I have sought, first, to show that Barth’s shifts to a moral inquiry into Christian reasoning and to consideration of the question of truth as a question of acknowledgement are rooted in his earlier studies of Paul. In his later work, Barth depicts these shifts as elements in a ‘biblical’ mode of thinking that is exemplified by the biblical witnesses themselves. We can see now that Barth’s understanding of their operation in Paul’s thought in particular is rooted in study of Romans and 1 Corinthians that was formative of his thinking in the aftermath of the First World War. Barth sees in Romans 1 an account of a sinful disorder in thought that ‘imprisons’ the truth of God and ensures that any truth that is established through critical inquiry is a creaturely quantity. The question that remains, on his telling, is how Paul’s conception of the ‘renewal of the mind’ reorders thought in a way that permits the truth of God to be acknowledged at all. Similarly, in treating 1 Corinthians, Barth supposes that Paul is concerned about a self-referential turn in the Corinthians’ faith that follows from attempting to establish the truth of the resurrection rather than participating in the reordering of thought through which the truth of the resurrection may be acknowledged. Barth presents 1 Corinthians as an extended exercise in bringing the Corinthians to think from the standpoint of the resurrection so that they might come to acknowledge the truth of God. The second aim of this chapter has been to show the stakes of the question of the ordering of thought. We have seen at this point that, for Barth, this question is of decisive moral and spiritual significance. Barth sees the discord that Paul depicts in Romans 1 as a function of a disorder in thought through which the imprisonment of the truth of God in creaturely categories serves in turn to fetter human beings to the demonic side of nature, culture, and history. He presents the turmoil of the church in Corinth as a function of a selfreferential turn in Christian faith that follows when believers do not share in the reordering of thought brought by the resurrection. Barth’s works on Romans and 1 Corinthians represent his two published monographs and his most substantial creative endeavours from a seminal period in his theological formation; in both, the proper ordering of creaturely thought comes to the fore as a decisive concern of the Christian life. This concern is a central feature of 92

ADT, 92; ET, 157.

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his thinking that ought to shape assessments of his conception of theological reasoning. An important question needs to be considered in concluding this treatment of the formation of the question of the ordering of thought through Barth’s study of Paul. We have seen that, for Barth, the cogency and significance of shifts to moral consideration of noetic questions and to understanding the problem of truth as a problem of acknowledgement is derived in part from its rooting in Scripture; but Barth’s work leaves ample scope for the critic to ask how far Barth’s expositions of Paul present disciplined exegesis that illumin­ ates Paul’s thought, and how far they are constructive appropriations of Pauline themes for the sake of making Barthian points. The significant point for us in face of this question is that, in terms of developing an interest in the moral ordering of Christian thought, Barth’s perception of the overarching logic and concerns of Paul’s work may be more faithful than his treatment of exegetical details. His account of the ‘imprisoning’ of truth through the ‘irreverence and insubordination’ of human knowers is more reflective of his concerns than the precise letter of Romans 1:18; but recent Paul scholarship indicates that Barth is fundamentally faithful to Paul in approaching noetic questions in moral and spiritual terms. Contemporary Pauline scholarship emphasizes that, for Paul, the question of theological reasoning ought to be seen as a question of ‘theo-ethical reasoning’, for Paul understands the noetic, moral, and spiritual to be ‘inherently related’.93 Paul understands Christian thinking in terms of a spiritual movement towards a capacity to apprehend the peculiar truth of God; the question of theological reasoning is a moral one because knowledge of God depends on appropriate response to God.94 These contemporary notions suggest that, for all of the idiosyncrasies of his work, Barth’s turn to consideration of theological reasoning in terms of the moral ordering of creaturely thought rests on a faithful apprehension of the basic form of Paul’s theology. It reflects the formation of Barth’s thought in the school of Pauline theology.

93 See J. G. Lewis, Looking for Life: The Role of ‘Theo-Ethical Reasoning’ in Paul’s Religion (London: T. & T. Clark, 2002); Andre Munzinger, Discerning the Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3-17. 94 Ian W. Scott, Paul’s Way of Knowing (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2006), 19-23.

3 Resurrection and the Ordering of Christian Thought 3.1. INTRODUCTION At the broadest level, the argument of Chapter 2 showed the centrality of the question of the moral ordering of creaturely thought in Barth’s earlier inter­ pretations of Paul. Barth concerns himself with modes of thought that cor­ respond to the creatureliness of human knowers and to the peculiar character of the truth of God; he presents the concern as a matter of decisive significance for the Christian life. In treating Romans 1, Barth suggests that the primary consequence of the self-assertion of sin is a disorder in thought through which human beings take their knowledge of themselves as the ground and norm of their thought about God. The result is the imprisonment of the truth of God in creaturely categories and the enslavement of human knowers to contingent phenomena that they cannot separate from the divine. In treating 1 Corinthians, Barth argues that Paul’s chief concern is to alter the cognitive standpoint from which the Corinthians consider their faith. As Barth presents it, the Corinthians have come to believe in their own faith rather than in God because their principles of thought do not allow them to understand faith as a reality that is grounded in God. For the Barth of both Romans II and The Resurrection of the Dead, the integrity of the Christian life hinges on the moral and spiritual integrity of Christian thought. Material encountered in Chapter? also serves to frame the particular question that we must consider in this chapter. In his earlier work, Barth is consistent in pointing to the resurrection as the key to the proper ordering of Christian thought. In Romans II, the resurrection comes to the fore as the criterion through which believers learn to say ‘God’ in a way that frees the truth of God from imprisonment in disordered thought. In The Resurrection of the Dead, the resurrection is presented as the formal key to Christian truth, the standpoint that believers must adopt if they are not to reduce Christianity to an exercise in self-projection. The task for us in light of these statements is to consider the conception of the ordering of thought that issues from Barth’s

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earlier theology of the resurrection. Doing so allows us to follow Barth as he works through Paul’s account of what it means for Christian thought to be ordered in accordance with the reality and activity of God. The conceptions that Barth works out in this context are of decisive significance, for they ground his later proposals; much of what he says later consists in variations on these earlier notions. Consideration of the conceptions that emerge in conjunction with Barth’s earlier theology of the resurrection takes us to the heart of Barth’s thinking during his last years as a minister in Safenwil and his time as an honorary professor in Göttingen. Much of my treatment of Barth’s theology of the resurrection will concentrate on the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15 that is presented in The Resurrection of the Dead, published in 1924; but it is important in setting the stage for this chapter that we note that Barth’s engagement with 1 Corinthians 15 pre-dates this study,1 for the theology of the resurrection that we find in The Resurrection of the Dead is characteristic of Barth’s work throughout the first half of the 1920s. Barth undertook a detailed study of 1 Corinthians 15 after Romans I was published in December 1918;2 in January and February 1919 he took more than a hundred pages of notes on this chapter and wrote a short, thirty-two-page commentary.3 This material provided the framework for his Tambach lecture, delivered in September, which, as we saw in Chapter 2, draws from 1 Corinthians 15 in developing a conception of the resurrection as a power that initiates a move­ ment through history in which both affirmation and criticism of the social order may have a place.4 Instrumental though the Tambach lecture was in introducing Barth to the theological public in Germany, it hardly reflected his last word on the theology of the resurrection. In a letter to Thurneysen written in November 1919, Barth announced that he had spent several days more studying 1 Corinthians 15. He compares the wisdom that it unlocks to the sting of an electric ray, and says that he came finally to a standstill and intends to move on to other parts of the New Testament that do not burn so terribly.5 Yet Thurneysen

1 For a brief history of this engagement see Nina-Dorothee Mützlitz, Gottes Wort als Wirklichkeit: Die Paulus-Rezeption des jungen Karl Barth (1906-1927) (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Theologie, 2013), 99-100. 2 Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, 108. Barth also devoted time to Acts and Ephesians. 3 See ‘Barth, 15. Januar 1919’, ‘Barth, 17. Februar 1919’, in Karl Barth-Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel, Band 1:1913-1921, ed. Eduard Thurneysen (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1973), 310, 320; cf. Mütlitz, Gottes Wort als Wirklichkeit, 100-3. 4 Barth delivered an unpublished lecture on ‘Christian life’ on 9 June, 1919. He mentions to Thurneysen that, having been invited to fill in for another speaker, he wrote the lecture in one night on the basis of material on 1 Corinthians 15 and Colossians 1 that he had already developed (‘Barth, 10. Juni 1919’, in Barth-Thurneysen I, 333). This lecture in turn provided the basis for Barth’s Tambach lecture. 5 Barth, ‘Barth, 11. November 1919’, in Barth-Thurneysen I, 350.

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would not allow him to avoid the chapterdong. Thurneysen wrote in Decem­ ber asking Barth to bring his notes on 1 Corinthians 15 when next he visits, for Thurneysen had devoted more time to the chapter himself and had come away convinced that the final truth is hidden behind its veil.6 Whether anything came of this request is unclear. What is certain is that 1 Corinthians 15 figures prominently in a new theology of the resurrection that is present in Barth’s lecture on ‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’, delivered in April 1920. Here the essential features of the theology that would characterize Barth’s thinking through the first half of the 1920s are present. Barth speaks of the resurrection as a new embodiment that comes about through an exchange of the predicates of an old, perishable self for the predicates of a new, imperishable self. He associates this new embodiment with the work of the Holy Spirit, and presents the resurrection, not as the source of a move­ ment that drives through history, but rather as an event located in an ‘indivisible, atemporal, eternal, and present twinkling of an eye’.7 These notions are foundational to Romans II, completed in September 1921, and remain in place in The Resurrection of the Dead, published in 1924. As we shall see, it is in this latter work that the exegetical basis of these concepts is made explicit. That these features appear in a lecture in April 1920, after Barth spent considerable time studying 1 Corinthians 15, and that their exegetical basis then appears in Barth’s 1924 treatment of 1 Corinthians 15, makes it reasonable to suppose that what we encounter in this latter work is an articu­ lation of the theology of the resurrection that Barth developed during the winter of 1919/1920, between the lectures on ‘The Christian in Society’ and ‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’. In between 1920 and 1924, Barth speaks of the theology of the resurrection contained in 1 Corinthians 15 as the ‘presuppos­ ition’ of Christian theology,8 the ‘essence’ of Christianity,9 the entire content of the Bible, and the meaning of the whole of human existence.10 In considering this theology, we are dealing with the material centre of Barth’s thinking during this period. My treatment of the conception of the ordering of thought that accompan­ ies Barth’s theology of the resurrection will proceed through the following stages. I propose to begin with something of an extended exposition of this

6 Thurneysen, ‘Thurneysen, 12. Dezember 1919’, in Barth-Thurneysen I, 358. 7 Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen, Einsichten und Ausblicke’, in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, 94-7; ET, ‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’, in The Word of God and Theology, 96-8. This shift is broadly reflective of the difference between the first and second editions of Barth’s commentary on Romans. Commentators have tended to ignore Barth’s own claim that further study of Paul was the primary reason for rewriting his commentary (see RB, xiii; ET, 3). 8 Barth, ‘Barth, 16. Februar 1921’, in Barth-Thurneysen I, 469. 9 Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 107-8. 10 Barth, ‘4. April (Ostern): 1. Korinther 15, 50-58’, in Predigten 1920, ed. Hermann Schmidt (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2005), 126.

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theology itself. This exposition is necessary, first, because this theology is highly idiosyncratic; secondly, because, despite its centrality to Barth’s thought, it remains poorly understood. Once we are equipped with a grasp of this theology, I shall proceed to consider the way that it forms Barth’s understanding of Christian thought. I will argue that Barth’s theology of the resurrection shows that well-ordered thought is to occupy the standpoint of the eschatological subject who is found in Christ, and that this standpoint brings with it significant reconsiderations of the orientation and freedom of theological reasoning. Barth’s thinking on each of these points deepens as his thought matures, but the account of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought that he develops through his earlier theology of the resurrection remains foundational to his later work.

3.2. BARTH’S EARLIER THEOLOGY OF THE RESURRECTION The first task of this chapter is to lay out the theology of the resurrection that grounds Barth’s earlier work. This task is best approached through careful consideration of Barth’s treatment of 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, which is the decisive passage from which he derives his earlier theology of the resurrec­ tion. It is one of the signal failures of past presentations of Barth’s earlier thinking that his treatment of this passage has gone almost wholly unex­ plored.11 This treatment is divided into two parts. Though he does not make the association explicitly, these two parts correspond to expositions of the formal structure and the material content of the resurrection. Barth inter­ prets 1 Corinthians 15:36-44a as an exposition of the form of the resurrec­ tion event, and 1 Corinthians 15:44b-49 as an exposition of the entities that are involved in this event.

11 The omission is understandable since this treatment represents one of the most convoluted stretches of reasoning in Barth’s earlier work. Nathan Hitchcock cites a couple of statements from Barth’s exposition of this passage; Nina-Dorothee Miitzlitz gives a cursory summary of it; but neither follows the logic of Barth’s presentation (see Hitchcock, Karl Barth and the Resur­ rection of the Flesh (Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick, 2013); Mützlitz, Gottes Wort als Wirklichkeit, 120-3). Dale Dawson skips over this passage entirely (see The Resurrection in Karl Barth (Aidershot: Ashgate, 2007)); David Mueller offers a brief summary that skips over the crucial material in Barth’s interpretation of w. 36-7 (see Foundation of Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation: Jesus Christ Crucified and Risen (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 103-8). To my knowledge, the lone substantive treatment of this section is found in a review essay published by Rudolf Bultmann in 1926, to which we shall return throughout this exposition.

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1 Corinthians 15:35-44 and the Form of the Resurrection A new line opens in Paul’s discussion of the resurrection with the posing of a question in 1 Corinthians 15:35: ‘But someone will object, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’” The question might appear rhetorical, but Barth claims that Paul is giving voice to the objection of an interlocutor who is opposed to the theology of the resurrection generally and seeks to clothe this opposition in a legitimate epistemological modesty by casting doubt on the conceivability of the resurrection.12 In its general form, the notion that Paul faces questions regarding the intelligibility of the resur­ rection is common amongst biblical scholars;13 yet Barth goes on to give this notion a particular form that shapes his exposition in important ways. Barth presents the epistemological worry in the terms of a critical thinker who will not grant the intelligibility of realities that exceed the bounds of the phenom­ enal. This thinker appeals to the putative limits of human knowledge and asks how human beings are to affirm a mode of being that is separated from every given mode of being by death. ‘What sort of being is it that is separated from this known, given being by death, that is thus the end of all being that is known and given?’14 Borrowing language from Kant, Barth claims that the sceptic’s question is how we are to comprehend a life for which we have a concept but no perceptual data.15 Barth’s consideration of this question is a point of considerable significance for us. As we saw in Chapter 2, Barth sets himself apart from important elements within neo-Protestantism by claiming that a critical reason that confines attention to the phenomenal enslaves human beings to nature, culture, and history. In place of the critical thinker’s account of the limits of reason, Barth commends an eschatologically conditioned ordering of thought through which the phenomenal is understood in terms of an origin and end that is not itself given. This conception gives Barth space to respond to the hopelessness that he sees as the result of the self-enclosed world-view of the critical thinker; yet Barth recognizes that the critical thinker could respond that Barth’s conception of an eschatological ordering of thought is reduced to incoherence because it oversteps the limits of human knowledge. The critical thinker might wonder what exactly it means to consider the phenomenal in relation to an origin and end that are not given. Does this suggestion amount

12 ADT, 110; ET, 185. 13 See Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth: The Resurrection of the Dead’, in Faith and Understanding I, ed. Robert Funk, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (London: SCM Press, 1969), 87-8, and Anthony Thiselton’s list of the scholars endorsing this reading {The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 1262). 14 ADT, 110; ET, 185. 15 ADT, 110; ET, 185.

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to any more than empty gesturing that violates a basic understanding of the limits of human knowledge? Barth takes up this question by following Paul’s response to the sceptic of 1 Corinthians 15:35. Barth’s interpretation of this response is significant for us in framing his conception of the questions of truth. Building on notions that we encountered in Chapter 2, Barth supposes that Paul’s response does not take the form of apologetics that seek to establish the truth of the resurrection. Paul does not ‘philosophize’ in order to substantiate truth, for attempts to substantiate the reality of the resurrection ensure only that what is substantiated is a projected image of human principles and ideals. Paul thus seeks to show how the reality of the resurrection is to be understood.16 He takes up a concern for the acknowledgement of truth by inquiring into a reordering of thought that makes it possible for this truth to be apprehended by human knowers. He does so, on Barth’s telling, through a series of analogies that are intended to ‘create space in thought’ for acknowledgement of the resurrection.17 The discussions of the sowing of the kernel and of differing kinds of bodies that occupy Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: 36-41 are, for Barth, propaedeutic exercises aimed at reordering his readers thought so that they might be positioned to acknowledge the truth of the resurrection. Barth’s construal of these analogies provides the basis for his earlier under­ standing of the resurrection; but it is important that his understanding is determined by two odd exegetical moves. The first is that Barth does not direct his attention to the content of Paul’s analogies, but rather to the nature of the act of thought through which the analogies are understood. The second is that Barth then claims that it is this act of thought, or judgement, that Paul means to present as an analogy for the resurrection. The result of these two moves is that Barth constructs his account of the form of the resurrection through consideration of the form of the judgement through which human beings comprehend the resurrection. Barth’s initial shift to consideration of the judgement through which the resurrection is understood emerges from his handling of 1 Corinthians 15:36-7. Here Paul does not mince words in responding to the sceptic. He writes: ‘You fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.’ He then speaks of the contrast between the seed that is sown as a ‘bare kernel’, and the body that is to be. Barth takes these comments as an indication of the intelligibility of talk of the resurrection. As he understands it, the growth of a plant from a seed shows that ‘the most primitive process’ of the natural world presents the kind of‘invisible transition’ from old life to new life that the sceptic wishes to claim is incomprehensible.18 Barth writes that, despite the doubts of the sceptic, ‘everyone sees’ that the seed finds new life in the plant 16 ADT, 109-11; ET, 184-6. 18 ADT, 111;ET, 186.

17 ADT, 110, 113, 117; ET, 184, 190, 195.

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even though the point’ at which the seed takes on this life is itself not visible. His question, then, is what it means that human knowers are able to transcend the bounds of the intuitable in identifying the plant as the new life of the seed. ‘The seed comes to life. Everyone sees that. But what does that mean?’19 Borrowing a derogatory from Paul, Barth’s suggests that this means that only a fool remains with the ‘directly intuitable’, for this commitment elim­ inates any understanding of life as a whole. The single life in which the seed and the plant are united is understood only by synthesizing differing sensible objects—on the one hand, the seed; on the other, the plant—in order to grasp the seed as the origin of the plant and the plant as the end of the seed.20 The critical thinker deems this life unintelligible; but Barth argues that ‘only a fool would refuse to make use of this incomprehensible synthesis on the grounds that here a creative and therefore an unintuitable synthesis is made’.21 To fail to make this synthesis is to understand the seed and the plant only in their phenomenal immediacy, apart from their origin and end. This, for Barth, is the very root of foolishness. It is the error that he identifies as the basis of the elimination of eschatological hope in his essay on ‘The Righteousness of God’, and of the enslavement of human beings to the demonic side of the creaturely in his treatment of Romans 1. Barth takes the sceptic of 1 Corinthians 15:35 to condemn human knowers to a spiritual blindness that eliminates hope and enslaves them to the phenomenal. By contrast, Barth understands Paul’s account of the seed and the plant to open space for the renewal of hope by showing that a proper understanding of creaturely existence is a matter of comprehending the immediate in terms of the origin from which it comes and the end towards which it moves. Later in his treatment of 1 Corinthians 15, Barth writes that the one who denies this is a fool who does not understand that the relative is an indication of the absolute.22 In a first sense, then, Barth deploys Paul’s discussion of the seed and the plant in order to show that well-ordered human thought is constituted not by adherence to the limits set by a critical account of human reason, but rather by an eschatological ordering of thought that considers the absolute from which phenomena come and towards which they move. This eschatological ordering is crucial for Barth because it positions human beings to acknowledge the truth of the resurrection. Paul’s discussion of the seed and the plant serves a propaedeutic function in helping human beings to see that their ordinary habits of judgement point towards an ordering of thought that permits the truth of the resurrection to be acknowledged. Crucially, Barth supposes that the eschatological ordering of thought towards which these analogies point is alone the ordering that corresponds to the creatureliness of knowers. Crea­ tures come forth from God and move towards God as their final end; to move 19 ADT, 111; ET, 186. 21 ADT, 113; ET, 189-90.

20 ADT, 111; ET, 186-7. 22 ADT, 117; ET, 195.

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from thought that restricts itself to the immediate to an apprehension of the immediate in relation to its origin and end is to come again to think in a way that corresponds to the creature’s relation to God. It is, as we saw in Chapter 2, to be set free from a tendency to enslave oneself to the phenomena of nature, culture, and history by grasping these realities in their creatureliness. The account of the reordering of thought that we encounter here issues from a shift in Barth’s work through which the significance of Paul’s analogy of the seed and the plant is taken to lie in the act of judgement through which the analogy is understood. It is the implications of readers’ capacity to make sense of Paul’s analogy by recognizing that the seed is the origin of the plant and the plant the new life of the seed that captures Barth’s interest. That which is significant for us now is the recognition that Barth’s shift to consideration of this capacity is determinative for his understanding of the resurrection as a whole. From his initial account of the way that Paul’s analogy points to an eschatological ordering of thought, he goes on to ground his theology of the resurrection in the claim that the judgement through which the analogy is understood is an ‘image’ of the resurrection itself.23 ‘Synthesis in thought is a self-evident necessity just like the synthesis of appearances in experience. It is also an image—only an image, but an image nonetheless—of the resurrec­ tion.’24 This claim is the key to Barth’s earlier theology of the resurrection. The kind of judgement that makes it possible to understand the resurrection is taken as the clue to the reality of the resurrection itself. Barth develops his theology of the resurrection through consideration of its intelligibility; his guiding question is: ‘how do we come to establish a necessary, continuous connection between past and present, between this and that appearance of the same thing?’25 Two features of Barth’s description of the judgement that permits this connection to be acknowledged are decisive for his theology of the resurrec­ tion. The first is his description of the act that is involved in identifying the plant as the new life of the seed. Barth argues that, at root, this identification involves an act of synthesis in which the knower establishes an identity between differing sensible objects. Barth asks what it means that everyone sees that the plant is the new life of the seed; his answer is that ‘we establish seed and plant as identical’.26 He writes that we ‘establish’ continuity between differing appearances of the same entity, and that we affirm the ‘identity’ of old

23 ADT, 113; ET, 189-90. 24 ADT, 113; ET, 190. My translation here is somewhat loose. Barth’s text reads: ‘Wie die Verknüpfungen der Erscheinungen in der Erfahrung, so ist auch die im Denken eine selbstver­ ständliche Notwendigkeit, auch sie nur ein Bild, aber immerhin ein Bild der Auferstehung’. 25 ADT, 112; ET, 187. 26 ADT, 111; ET, 186. Barth’s key terms here are setzen and Identität. These terms are ubiquitous in Barth’s earlier treatments of Paul, and are usually used in a quasi-technical sense associated with his theology of the resurrection.

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and new appearances of the same thing.22 This notion of the establishment of identity furnishes Barth with a conception of the form of the resurrection that grounds his earlier treatments of Pauline theology. Barth’s claim throughout the early 1920s is that the resurrection involves the establishment of an identity between differing entities: the sinful subjects that human beings are now and the new, eschatological subjects that they are not yet. In The Resurrection of the Dead, Barth writes, for instance: ‘The dead! That is what we are. The resurrected! That is what we are not. But the resurrection involves precisely this, that that which we are not is established as identical with that which we are/27 28 In the same way, in Romans II, Barth speaks of the resurrec­ tion as the ‘establishment’ of ‘identity’ between the new creature that I am not and the old subject that I am.29 These claims determine Barth’s earlier theology as a whole. They have their basis in the suggestion that the judgement through which the resurrection is comprehended is itself an analogy for the resurrection. The second feature then emerges from Barth’s treatment of 1 Corinthians 15:37-42. Barth understands these verses as a series of exercises in training the mind in the kind of judgement required to establish identity between differing quantities. As he presents it, the further discussion of the seed and the plant in verses 37-8 shows what is involved in establishing identity between appear­ ances of the same entity in different moments of time; the discussion of differing kinds of flesh, bodies, and glory in verses 39-42 shows what is involved in establishing identity between different species of the same genus in the same moment in time.30 The first of these discussions is of particular significance, for it includes the claim that tracing continuity between differing appearances across time requires the acknowledgement of an ‘unintuitable critical point’ in which one entity passes over into the other.31 For Barth, the intelligibility of a relationship of identity between differing entities hinges on the notion that there is a point at which the ending of one is united with the beginning of the other. This union cannot occur in anything more substantial than a ‘critical point’ that lacks temporal extension, for otherwise it would be neither a true end nor a true beginning, but acknowledgement of this moment is necessary because the possibility of identity between different phenomena hinges on the notion that there is a point at which they are united. For Barth, this ‘critical point’ is not an object of experience, but it must be affirmed as a transcendental condition of comprehending the unity between that reality that passes away and the reality that comes into being. Human knowledge of this point remains undetermined because it is understood transcendentally rather than empirically; but Barth argues that if, unlike the critical thinker, his 27 ADT, 112; ET, 187-8. 28 ADT, 62; ET, 108. 29 RB, 136-7, 192-8; ET, 149-50, 197-202. 30 See here ADT, 112-14; ET, 187-91. 31 ADT, 112; ET, 187-8.

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readers are not blind when they encounter the natural and spiritual worlds, they will apprehend this critical point as the turning between the old and the new.32 This concept of a critical moment in which the old is made new is decisive for Barth’s theology of the resurrection. At the heart of this theology is the claim that the resurrection is located not in an unknown future but rather in the ‘unintuitable critical moment’ that Barth has posited as a condition of understanding the unity between differing appearances of a single entity. This notion is common in The Resurrection of the Dead, as well as in the second edition of Barth’s Romans commentary. In this earlier work, Barth refers regularly to the ‘critical moment’ of the resurrection, and develops the notion of a futurum resurrectionis as a location of the resurrection that is distinct from past, present, or future.33 For Barth, this moment occurs in time, but it stands apart from the causally interconnected nexus of events that constitutes history. It stands in no temporal, causal, or logical connection with other events in the world. It is the absolutely new.34 Equipped with this account of the ‘location’ of the resurrection, we can sum up Barth’s conception of the form of the resurrection by saying that the resurrection consists in the establishment of an identity between differing quantities in an ahistorical critical moment. Barth supposes that comprehending Paul’s analogy of the seed and the plant requires recognizing that human knowers establish an identity between differing phenomena, and that this act presupposes a critical moment in which the phenomena are united. He then claims that this act of judgement is an ‘image’ that allows us to see that the resurrection itself is a divine act of establishing identity between differing realities in an ahistorical critical moment. It is this latter conception that is crucial for us going forward; but the question that we face before proceeding is what we are to make of the oddity of its derivation. As an exegetical move, Barth’s decision to derive the form of the resurrection from consideration of the judgement through which human beings apprehend analogies for the resurrection is unsustainable. As a conceptual move, Barth’s privileging of the act of comprehension as the clue to the reality itself reduces his account of the resurrection to an idealist construct. Why, then, does Barth approach matters in this way? The answer is crucial to comprehending Barth’s earlier work. Interpreters have generally supposed that Barth’s talk of a critical moment that is discon­ tinuous with other moments in time is intended as a polemical tool with which Barth seeks to ‘clear the ground’ of neo-Protestant identifications of human activity with the reality of God.35 ‘Ground-clearing’ is taken to be the decisive task of the peculiarities of Barth’s theology of the resurrection; but this 32 ADT, 114; ET, 191. 33 RB, 223, 296-7; ET, 223, 289. 34 RB, 94; ET, 112. 35 See Johnson, ‘A Reappraisal’, 7-9; McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 245.

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emphasis on the critical side of Barth’s work presents at most half the story. Barth makes plain in his earlier works that the historical monism of the religious sceptic must be denied just as strongly as the religious immanentism of the liberal. As we saw at the beginning of Chapter 2, one of the primary targets of Barth’s polemics from at least 1916 onwards is a monism that supposes that the existing order is left untouched by the reality of the resur­ rection. In Barth’s 1916 lecture on ‘The Righteousness of God’ and his 1919 Tambach lecture, this concern manifests itself in Barth’s criticisms of the hopelessness engendered by the notion that life in time is unaffected by the movement of the kingdom of God. In Barth’s lectures on Calvin, delivered in 1922, this concern manifests itself in the claim that the great failure of Reformation theology is that it does not allow the ‘curtain of time’ to be set alight by the ‘flame’ of eschatological judgement.36 In The Resurrection of the Dead, published in 1924, this concern takes the form of withering criticisms of a ‘historical monism’ that results when eschatology is identified with an unknown future, a ‘life there’ that fits neatly within a ‘satisfying, comprehen­ sive world view’ as the future correlate of a ‘life here’.37 One of the unifying principles of his thought between 1916 and 1924 is the desire to show that eschatological reality is not consigned to the future but is instead operative in the present. Quite apart from an exercise in ‘ground-clearing’, Barth seeks consistently to give positive grounds for hope by showing that history is not left at the mercy of an unbroken stream of unrighteousness. Criticism of the liberal’s false hope is balanced with repudiation of the sceptic’s hopelessness. It is the task of combating historical monism by showing how eschatological reality impinges on the present that is accomplished by locating the resurrec­ tion in an ‘unintuitable critical moment’. The result of this decision is that Barth is able to present a fully dehistoricized eschatology in which the resur­ rection ceases to be a matter of an unknown future and is made instead a matter of a critical moment that is equally near to and equally far from all moments in time. The resurrection is presented not as an event that has yet to arrive in some chronological sense, but rather as an event that hovers over each moment in time. All notions of chronological futurity, which open the door to a present indifference towards the eschatological, are stamped out of talk of the resurrection. This dehistoricizing move is foundational to Barth’s earlier thought; we shall return to it throughout this chapter. For now, we can conclude this section by observing that the dehistoricized eschatology that follows from Barth’s decision to take a human act of judgement as an analogy for the resurrection is the determinative characteristic of the phase in Barth’s thought that runs between 1920 and 1924. The conception of the form of the resurrection that we have encountered here first appears in Barth’s 1920

36 Barth, Die Theologie Calvins 1922, 96-8; ET, 71-4.

37

ADT, 66-7 ET, 116-17.

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lecture on ‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’, after he had devoted considerable time to studying 1 Corinthians 15.38 It then persists until Barth’s turn to dogmatics lectures necessitated the abandonment of this dehistoricized eschatology. As I hope to show later, this latter shift reflects the limitations of Barth’s dehistoricized eschatology, which brought with it an elimination of the distinction between reconciliation and redemption that was untenable from the standpoint of a systematic dogmatics.

1 Corinthians 15:44-9 and the Material Content of the Resurrection Equipped with a conception of the form of the resurrection, Barth goes on to interpret 1 Corinthians 15:44-9 as a presentation of the material content of the resurrection event. Given the conception of the formal structure of the resur­ rection that he has developed, the important question for him concerns the identities of the entities that are to be established as identical in the ‘critical moment’ of the resurrection. As he presents it, we find the answer in verses 44-6. In verse 44, Paul writes that what is sown is sown a crcopta i/wxlkov, a phrase usually rendered as ‘natural body’.39 He then adds that this first entity is raised a crcop-a TTvevptarLKov, a phrase rendered almost universally as ‘spiritual body’. Barth’s theology of the resurrection hinges on the identities of these two realities. His first move in explicating their meaning is to reject any interpretation that is constructed around a soul-body dualism. He claims that the Corinthians misunderstand the resurrection because they presume this dualism, and thus conclude that Paul means to teach that, after the death of the physical body, the soul lives on and is raised in a new, spiritual body. A number of significant points are at stake for Barth in rejecting this position. To begin with, Barth sees this dualist construal as an instance of the eschato­ logical monism against which he sets himself, for the eschatological ‘beyond’ is presented as a kind of extension of this life, a life ‘there’ that stands beside life ‘here’.40 Secondly, Barth argues that the notion that the soul is redeemed apart from the physical body produces a painfully denuded vision of redemption. It is in the body in particular that human beings experience the curse and sting of sin; thus, redemption is not real and true if it does not reach the body itself.41 Thirdly, in a point to which we shall return later, Barth holds that if we do not 38 See e.g. Barth, ‘Biblische Fragen, Einsichten und Ausblicke’, 94-5; ET, 96-7. 39 It is also rendered ‘animate body’ by Calvin, for instance, as well as by others (see e.g. Fitzmyer, First Corinthians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 595; cf. Calvin, The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. John Fraser (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996)). As we shall see, Barth remains quite close to Calvin in his construal of the contrast in verse 44. 40 ADT, 66-7 ET, 116-17. 41 ADT, 118; ET, 196-7.

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acknowledge the redemption of the body, then the resurrection loses its capacity to reorder human thought through an understanding of what it means to say ‘God’. Comprehension of the term ‘God’ requires the recognition that God’s work reaches creatures in their corporeality. For Barth, then, a proper understanding of what it is to say ‘God’, as well as of reconciliation and redemption, depends on the affirmation that the body is not left behind in the resurrection. The question for us now concerns the positive account that Barth gives of the contrast in verse 44. The decisive factor shaping Barth’s answer is a decision to interpret verses 44-6 in such a way that the contrasts that runs through these verses—the crco^ua i/jv%lk6v and crco/za TTvev/xarLKov of verse 44; the living soul (0tr\p7V £cocrav) and the life-giving spirit (rrvcvpia ^coottolovv), and the first and last Adam of verse 45; and the spiritual (jrvev/juiTLKov) and the psychological (iJjvxlkov) in verse 46—are treated as different expressions of the same opposition.42 The primary effect of this decision is that Barth interprets the crco/za i/jvxlkov and oojpca Trvevptatlkov of verse 44 in light of the contrast between the living soul of the first Adam and the life-giving Spirit of the last Adam that appears in verse 45. We see this decision at work, first, in Barth’s account of the oco^ua i/jvxikov. This phrase is commonly rendered as ‘natural body’, and could be taken to refer to the body apart from the soul; yet, on the basis of the notion that this phrase is parallel to the ‘living soul’ of verse 45, Barth translates Paul’s phrase as something closer to ‘soul-ful body’ (seelischer Leib'). He claims that it must be taken to refer to the whole human person, the ‘perceiving, thinking, willing human consciousness in its attachment to the bodily organism’.43 For Barth, the crdj^ua i/jvxikov is to be understood as the whole human person, both body and soul. Just what Barth means by soul here requires careful consideration. Bultmann argues that Barth’s exegesis fails because Barth does not develop an account of the Pauline aaifjua, or body;44 but, in actual fact, Barth insists that the body simply is what human beings are, and thus ends up occupying

42 In relation to 1 Corinthians 15:44-5, it is otherwise not uncommon for scholars to see the reference to the first and last Adam in verse 45 as something of a diversion from the flow of Paul’s argument (see de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), 129; Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987), 787). 43 ADT, 117; ET, 195. The English translation of Barth’s text consistently renders Barth’s seelischer Leib as ‘natural body’. It must, of course, be conceded that English lacks a good equivalent for Barth’s expression. 44 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth: The Resurrection of the Dead’, 89-90. Bultmann’s worry is that Barth ends up treating the body as a formal concept that may be instantiated in either mortal or immortal substance. He argues that, on these terms, mortality is not essential to what human beings are, and resurrection ceases to be a miracle that corresponds to a true transformation. The problem, as Bultmann seems to be aware, is that Paul himself speaks of different kinds of bodies in a way that appears to make it difficult to argue that mortality is necessary to the concept of a body.

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the same ground as Bultmann.45 For Barth, the real work that needs to be done is specifying what Paul means in describing the body as i/jvxlkov. His first claim is that the soul cannot be identified as the source of the life of the body, for this would appear to grant the ‘living soul’ of verse 45 the same function as the ‘life-giving spirit’. In place, then, of an account in which the body is presented as a predicate of the life of the soul, Barth presents the soul as a predicate of the body.46 For him, the body is the subject that a person is; the soul is an aspect of the life of the body. It is in giving material content to the description of this aspect that the association between the living soul and the first Adam in verse 45 becomes crucial. In light of this reference to humanity’s sinful progenitor, Barth claims that the soul is best understood as the nexus of interests and desires that shapes the creature’s life of sinful self-possession. He then goes on to describe the crcu^ua fv^tKov as a whole as the life of the ‘old man, myself, insofar as I am not God’s but rather my own’.47 It is the mode of being of those who live for themselves and thus know only a life of creatureliness within the nexus of possibilities that marks this world.48 In Romans II, Barth speaks of this as the life of the ‘old subject, the I of this humanity in this world’,49 which is lived in a naive absorption in the possibilities of this world.50 The question for us now is how we are to understand the reality named alongside the ocup,a i/jvxlkov in verse 44, the aco/aa rrvevfiartKov that is to be raised. Barth’s account of this quantity hinges on the claim that the spirit to which Paul refers in speaking of a spiritual body is not a human spirit, ‘not our little bit of spirit and spirituality’, but rather God’s spirit.51 Bultmann objects that it is not possible to derive the notion that the spirit in question is the spirit of God from Paul’s text;52 but Barth again finds support for his construal in the contrast that Paul draws in verse 45. As Barth understands it, the ‘spiritual body’ of verse 44 is paired with the ‘life-giving Spirit’ of verse 45, a phrase that Barth, like Calvin, associates with the vivifying work of the Holy Spirit. For him, then, Paul’s odo^a TTvev/aarcKov does not indicate a new spiritual substance in which the soul is later to be clothed, but rather the whole human person standing under the direction of the Holy Spirit. In place of the creature’s life of self-possession, we have the life of the creature who submits to God. Barth writes that, as a crco^ta rrvev^arLKov, I become God’s in just the same sense in which I am otherwise my own.53 It is at this point that it is important that Barth has described the soul not as a constitutive part of the human person, but rather as the sinful life of self­ possession, for his descriptions of the (joo/xa rrveviiartKov and of the last Adam hinge on the notion that the Holy Spirit takes the place of the soul that

45 46 49 52 53

See ADT, 116-17; ET, 193-6; RB, 297; ET, 289. ADT, 119; ET, 198. 47 ADT, 119; ET, 198. 48 ADT, 119; ET, 198. RB, 173; ET, 181. 50 RB, 299; ET, 291. 51 ADT, 116; ET, 193-4. Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth: The Resurrection of the Dead’, 91-2. ADT, 118; ET, 196.

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characterizes the oco/^ca i/ivxlkov. Barth writes that God’s spirit ‘steps in’ to the place of the human soul.54 He describes the human soul as a ‘place holder’ for the spirit of God.55 Were the scul constitutive of the human person, Barth would find himself with a variation of an Apollinarian Christology, and, correctively, an underdeveloped account of reconciliation in which there is some part of the human person that is not assumed by Christ. As it is, however, Barth has described the soul of verse 44 as the sinful life of self­ interest; it is this that Barth suggests is not present in Christ, and is replaced by the Spirit of God in the risen human person. In place of an Apollinarian Christology, Barth ends up with the anhypostatic-enhypostatic Christology of his mature thought, for he goes on to interpret the reference to the ‘life-giving Spirit’ of verse 45 to mean that it is the presence of the divine that gives life to the second Adam. Christ’s humanity does not have life in itself, but is rather given life through the presence of God.56 At this point, then, we can see that, for Barth, the contrast that is in play in verse 44 is the contrast between the full human subject as it is guided by the self-absorption of sin, and the same human subject as it stands under the lordship of the Holy Spirit. Barth has ended up with a construal of the contrast between the oajp.a f v^lkov and the aatpta nvevptartKov that closely resem­ bles Luther’s account of the flesh and the spirit as ‘contrary guides’ that war for supremacy in the human subject.57 Equipped with this understanding of the entities involved in the resurrection, the task for us now is to bring the formal and the material together in a preliminary account of Barth’s theology of the resurrection. The task appears straightforward enough. Formally, Barth has claimed that the resurrection consists in the establishment of identity between differing entities in an ahistorical critical moment. Materially, he takes it that the entities involved are the whole person as it stands under the direction of the disordered desires of the sinful life and that same person under the guidance of God’s Holy Spirit. As a starting-point, then, we can say that the resurrection consists in the establishment of an identity between the sinful

54 ADT, 118; ET, 196 . 55 ADT, 119; ET, 198 . 56 ADT, 118; ET 197. 57 See, most famously, Luther’s comments on Galatians 5:16-17 in Lectures on Galatians 1535, trans. Jaroslav Pelikan, in Luther’s Works, Vol. 27, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1964), 63-77. Luther himself does not think that it is the distinction between flesh and spirit that Paul has in mind in 1 Corinthians 15:44, choosing instead to see the contrast between the oa>pa fvyLKov and the crai/aa irvevparLKOV as a contrast between a terrestrial physical body that must attend to corporeal needs and an eschatological physical body that is wholly satiated by the presence of God (Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, trans. Martin H. Bertram, in Luther’s Works, Vol. 28, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1973), 189-90). Barth’s account of the ocApua i/jvxlkov and the aa>pa TTvevpan-Kov appears to mirror Calvin’s, for Calvin speaks of this as a contrast between a life determined by the soul and a life determined by the Holy Spirit, but Calvin speaks of the soul as a constituent part of the human person that gives life to the body rather than as the life of sinful self-interest (Calvin, The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, 337-8).

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subject that lives in the form of Adam, and the new creature that is guided by God’s Holy Spirit. As Barth puts it in his introductory comments on 1 Corinthians 15, what occurs in the resurrection is that that which human beings are not is established as identical with that which they are.58 This comes about through an act of divine judgement in which God attributes the predicates of the new creature to the old creature in an act of ‘new predication’.59 For Barth, this new determination of the human person is the resurrection.60 Barth’s description of the resurrection as an act of divine judgement in which the predicates of the new creature are attributed to the old creature is decisive for his earlier theology. We are positioned now to see that his theology of the resurrection corresponds much more closely to a traditional theology of justification than to a classical understanding of the resurrection. Barth pre­ sents the resurrection not as the raising to new life of the physically dead, but rather as the attribution of new predicates to the spiritually dead. He describes this attribution as a ‘creative’ divine act that produces a new mode of existence within the bounds of the life of a single human subject.61 We are thus presented with an eschatology that has contracted in scope. A future resur­ rection of the body has dropped away. We have instead a new mode of human existence in time that is generated by a divine judgement of justification. Recent scholarship suggests that the preponderant interest of Barth’s earlier work is describing this new mode of eschatological existence.62 Recognition of this shift to an eschatology consisting of a judgement of justification is crucial, for it permits us to see the logic of Barth’s derivation of the form of the resurrection from the form of an act of judgement, and to trace the theological lineage of the concepts that Barth employs. To speak, first, of the logic of Barth’s account of the resurrection, we can see that he turns to consideration of a human act of judgement because the reality that he wishes to understand is itself an act of judgement. Barth wishes to grasp the structure of God’s judgement of justification; he takes the human act of recognizing continuity between different appearances of the same entity as an analogue of the divine act of creating continuity between different modes of the same existent: the sinful life of the believer, on the one hand, and the believer as justified before God, on the other. This analogy drives the eschat­ ology through which Barth is thought to break from the liberal tradition. It provides the basis on which he is able to associate eschatology with an ahistorical critical moment that is the crisis of all moments in time.

58 ADT, 62; ET, 108 . 59 ADT, 113, 114-15; ET, 190, 192. 60 ‘This new predication is the “resurrection of the dead’” (ADT, 114-15; ET, 192). ‘This new predication... is the resurrection of the body’ (RB, 298; ET, 291). 61 See ADT, 112-13; ET, 188-90. 62 See Christopher Asprey, Eschatological Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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But, though the concepts that Barth uses are widely associated with his departure from liberal neo-Protestantism, it is worth noting that these con­ cepts owe a good deal to Barth’s liberal forebears. In considering God’s act of justification through analogy with an act of human judgement, Barth has reached back and retrieved a central aspect of Ritschl’s theology of justifica­ tion. Barth’s description of the resurrection as a ‘creative’ divine act through which a new mode of human existence is produced through the attribution of new ‘predicates’ to the sinner matches the theology of justification that Ritschl develops. Ritschl, too, speaks of justification as a ‘creative act’ of the divine will through which a new ‘predicate’ is attributed to the human subject, and the human subject comes to enjoy a new mode of existence in time.63 More significantly, the very notion that the theology of justification can be approached through consideration of forms of judgement is indebted to Ritschl. Ritschl suggests that the form of the divine declaration of justification in particular must be understood through analogy with different acts of judgement, for every act of will is analogous to an act of judgement, and ‘a creative act of divine will in particular can only be understood in this form’.64 He puts the point to work in insisting that, whereas the Pietist tradition understands justification as an analytic judgement that simply acknowledges the merit of faith, the judgement of justification is properly viewed as syn­ thetic, for a new subject is created through the attribution of a genuinely new predicate.65 It is this same analogy trading on the same logic that Barth puts to work in developing his theology of the resurrection. Perhaps most significantly, for both Ritschl and Barth, the importance of an account of justification lies in the new mode of existence that the divine act of justification creates in time. At this point in his work, Barth stands with Ritschl, Herrmann, and other leading voices within the neo-Protestant trad­ ition in supposing that the divine work of reconciliation has its end not in an eschatological kingdom that will be inaugurated when history will have run its course, but rather in the constitution of a new mode of human existence within time. Description of the ordering of thought becomes central for Barth because he sees this reordering as a decisive element within this new mode of existence. Where Ritschl emphasizes spiritual freedom through faith in providence as central to the new mode of Christian existence in time, and Herrmann stresses a form of inner communion with God, Barth foregrounds a reordering of thought, and thus of life, that follows from learning again to say ‘God’. Learning to say ‘God’ is crucial, for Barth, because acknowledgement of the difference between God and creatures possesses extraordinary critical force in countering immanentized conceptions in which an eschatological 63 See Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 79-80. 64 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 80. 65 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 80-4.

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mode of existence becomes a settled condition that may be understood and evaluated through self-analysis. It brings freedom from the tendency to fetishize nature, culture, and history that Barth describes in his treatment of Romans 1, and from the tendency to fetishize religious activity that Barth describes in his treatment of 1 Corinthians 1-4. These critical gestures repre­ sent a departure in important respects from the tradition that Barth inherited; but they remain within the broader horizon of the assumption that the subjective correlate of God’s justifying work is a new mode of temporal existence. Barth’s attempt to describe an eschatological mode of existence extends neo-Protestant projects in important ways even as it tries to compen­ sate for their limitations.

Resurrection and Eschatological Presence The question that remains for us in preparing to treat the conception of the ordering of thought that accompanies Barth’s account of eschatological exist­ ence concerns the relationship between the creative divine act that grounds an eschatological mode of being and the lives of concrete human subjects in time. Barth’s aim in dehistoricizing the resurrection is to show that eschatological reality is not a feature of an unknown future or abstract ‘beyond’, but rather a factor that makes a concrete difference to life in time; but the question for us is how it is able to make a difference. In what way is it present in order to make a difference? This question can be approached through the question of eschato­ logical realization, for to say that eschatological reality makes a difference in time is to say that it is not so deferred that its presence is not felt. The question of eschatological realization poses problems for Barth for two reasons. The first is that his dehistoricized eschatology leaves him without recourse to the temporal categories traditionally used to address the tension between that which is accomplished and that which is deferred in reconcili­ ation. Where much of the theological tradition addresses the question of eschatological realization by way of an account of the tension between the ‘already’ aspect of the accomplishment and the ‘not yet’ aspect of the con­ summation of reconciliation, Barth sets himself against any account of eschatological consummation as something fundamentally future. To locate the resurrection in the future is, for Barth, to give the present over to a monistic view of history; thus, Barth turns away from the notion that the eschatological ‘not yet’ indicates a temporal gap between present and future, choosing instead to claim that it indicates a metaphysical gap between time and eternity.66 For him, the resurrection is found not in a temporal future but

66

ADT, 88-9; ET, 151-2.

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rather in an unintuitable critical moment that is equally far from and equally near to all moments in time. This notion allows him to disrupt the historical monism that results from ‘relegating’ eschatology to the future; yet it means that he cannot rely on temporal categories as tools for clarifying the degree to which eschatological reality is realized. The second reason that Barth struggles to specify the degree to which eschatological reality can be spoken of as realized has to do with a narrowing of dogmatic scope that comes about through his decision to interpret the ozu/za TTvev/jLaTLKov that is to be raised as the human subject under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The result of this decision is that the distinction between a present application of reconciliation through the presence of the Holy Spirit and a future consummation of reconciliation through the resur­ rection of the body drops away. Barth makes clear that, for him, the presence of the Holy Spirit is revelation, reconciliation, and resurrection, all of which exist together in the critical moment of the futurum resurrectionis. This means that, where Paul differentiates between the presence of the Holy Spirit as a first fruit of reconciliation and the resurrection as the future consummation of reconciliation, Barth brings these two together. The presence of the Holy Spirit is synonymous with the resurrection.67 The distinction between reconciliation and redemption has been collapsed; Barth appears to be left without dogma­ tic categories through which to distinguish eschatological realization from eschatological deferral.68 The cumulative effect of these two factors is that Barth struggles in his earlier work to address the question of divine presence in time. Barth cannot deny divine presence without giving history over to the very monism that he aims to combat; but, having made Spirit, revelation, reconciliation, and redemption virtually synonymous, it appears that he cannot say that God is present without conceding the real presence of full eschatological consumma­ tion. He has few conceptual resources for identifying a mode of presence that is not immediately the full presence of eschatological fulfilment; he appears to be trapped in the kind of dialectic of identity and difference that von Balthasar identifies as the characteristic feature of his early work. This raises the concern that Barth cannot in fact give an account of the basis of the Christian’s mode of existence at all, for the divine appears to be unable to come into contact with time.

67 See e.g. Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 90. 68 Michael Beintker argues that, in differing forms, this elision is typical of Barth’s early work. Beintker suggests that, in Romans I, redemption is collapsed into reconciliation; in Romans II, reconciliation is collapsed into redemption; while, in between, Barth’s Tambach lecture repre­ sents a brief intermezzo during which the employment of the regna naturae, gratiae, and gloriae allows Barth to differentiate between reconciliation and redemption (see Der Dialektik in der ‘dialektischen Theologie’Karl Barths, 121-6, 150-6).

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Barth’s primary strategy in face of this conceptual limitation is rhetorical. In place of temporal distinctions between present and future or dogmatic dis­ tinctions between reconciliation and redemption, Barth uses the dramatic dialectics for which his earlier work is famous in order to express the tension between eschatological accomplishment and deferral. By claiming, for instance, that the new creature is always the creature that believers are not, though believers are these creatures by faith, except that faith itself is a predicate only of the new creature that believers are not, and so on, Barth seeks to capture the peculiar tension that Paul sees between the continued existence in the flesh of those who know new life in the Spirit. Readers are made to feel the tension that eschatological reality produces in time; yet this rhetorical strategy raises the suspicion that Barth understands eschatology not as a determinate reality that frees human beings for a new mode of existence, but rather as a negation that reduces human speaking and doing to paradox or nullity. The dehistoricized eschatology that Barth deploys in order to give grounds for hope in face of the unrighteousness of history—‘we live by knowing that there is actually something else out there besides unrighteous­ ness’!69—comes to be construed as an assault on all that occurs in time. How then can Barth ground an account of the reordering of thought as an element in the believer’s eschatological mode of existence? Different scholars give different accounts of the way that Barth comes to be able to give a positive account of divine presence in time, von Balthasar argues that Barth’s early inability to give an account of divine presence is rooted in an underdeveloped theology of created nature, and is remedied around 1930 when Barth comes to see creaturely being as a positive counterpart to the divine.70 McCormack suggests that the early Barth struggles to describe the presence of the divine because of the critical strictures of his dialectical conception of revelation, and that he moves beyond this limitation in 1924 by developing a Christology that shows how the divine may be present in time without becoming a predicate of history.71 These accounts are perhaps helpful in thinking about Barth’s theologies of creation and revelation; but they are insufficient as accounts of Barth’s solution to the problem of divine presence. Three points are important for us in considering the account of divine presence that comes to ground Barth’s account of the reordering of Christian thought. The first has to do with a general understanding of divine presence that is rooted in Barth’s exegesis of Ephesians. The second has to do with the way that this general conception produces a shift in Barth’s understanding of the force of temporal language in Paul’s letters. The third is then the way that the general conception grounds a notion of the believer’s union with Christ 69 Barth, ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, 5; ET, 3. 70 See e.g. von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 64-72, 144-5. 71 See McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 327-8.

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that is decisive for Barth’s account of eschatological existence in time in general, and the ordering of Christian thought in particular. The first point that is important for us concerns an understanding of divine presence in time that emerges in lectures on Ephesians that Barth delivered in 1921-2. Barth gave these lectures during his first semester in Göttingen, imme­ diately after he finished writing Romans II. In them, he identifies a notion of divine presence that became foundational to his theology in Göttingen and remained a stable feature of his work. This notion emerges from his reflections on Ephesians 1:13. In this verse, Paul describes believers who await their eschatological inheritance as sealed to) TTvevp^an, rfs eTrayyeXtas toi ayla), a phrase commonly rendered as ‘sealed with the promised Holy Spirit’. Here Paul gives a concrete description of the condition of believers in time. They have heard the ‘word of truth’; they anticipate an eschatological ‘inher­ itance’; in the meantime, they are ‘sealed’ by the Holy Spirit. This description of believers’ relation to the eschatological provides a natural occasion for Barth to reflect on the way that eschatological reality is present. In his comments on this verse, he sets himself against the common notion that Paul’s phrase is to be translated ‘sealed by the promised Holy Spirit’, and thus understood as a reference to the Paraclete whose coming is promised by Christ. He argues instead that the structural parallel between Paul’s reference to rw Trvev/jLaTL TYjS eTrayyeXias tw dycco and the reference to tov Xoyov rrjs aXydetas in the same verse means that the two phrases ought to be understood in the same way. Just as the latter phrase is understood to refer to the ‘Word of truth’, so the former phrase ought to be understood to refer to the ‘Spirit of promise’. On this understanding, Paul’s reference to rep TTvevfaarL rfjs enayyeXias to> ayta) is meant to indicate a necessary correlation between the concepts of Spirit and promise.72 The Spirit is always present as a bearer of promise; promise is always present through the work of the Spirit. For Barth, the identification of this correlation is advantageous because it permits the recognition that the term promise identifies a mode of divine presence that stands between absence and eschatological fulfilment. The notion that he develops is that to have God’s promise is to have the reality that is promised in a spiritual mode that is proper to life in time. Barth writes that to be ‘sealed with the Spirit of promise’ means that that which is promised is present in an indirect but real way. ‘To those who are sealed in this way, the future for which they hope is already present.’73 ‘Whoever has the promise, truly has it, and the Holy Spirit with it.’74 Presence in the mode of promise is not presence in fulfilment—indeed, to want fulfilment in place of promise is to want something other than the gifts of God, which are present in time only in 72 Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 128. This construal ofPaul’s rd) rrvevparL rrjs errapyeXtas ra> ay ho remains constant in Barth’s thinking; see e.g. KD 1.2,130; ET, 118; KD IV. 1, 744; ET, 666. 73 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 129. 74 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 128.

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the mode of promise75—but Barth writes that ‘God gives people his promises in such a way that, simply because they are the promises of God, people are as sure of them as if they were already fulfilled’.76 Barth will go so far as to say that the presence of the Spirit, of the resurrection of the dead, and of sonship together with Christ are ‘experienced’ in time so long as we are clear that they are experienced ‘as promise’.77 The account of promise that Barth develops in response to Paul’s reference to the ‘Spirit of promise’ became an enduring feature of his work. It stands as one of the most significant theological developments associated with his time in Göttingen. After its initial appearance in Barth’s lectures on Ephesians, it was solidified through lectures in Göttingen on Reformation controversies regarding the sacraments. As Barth presents it, these controversies amount to debates about divine presence in time.78 In his lectures on Zwingli, Barth suggests that the question of sign and signified in the sacraments is a cipher for the question of promise and fulfilment, and that this latter question is in turn a stand-in for the question of the presence of the eternal.79 Barth’s claim in these lectures is that, in time, the presence of the eternal God can be grasped only as promise.80 This suggestion draws from earlier lectures on Calvin in which Barth argues that it fell to Calvin to develop the right concept of the presence of sacramental reality in the mode of promise, for Calvin possessed a clearer sense of the antithesis of time and eternity than the other Reformers. ‘No Reformer is shaped by the opposition between time and eternity as strongly as he is. For him, what we as Christians can be and have is wholly and exclusively promise, promissio, and nothing more. Those who truly have the promissio as the gift of the Holy Spirit have everything that we can have here and now.’81 According to Barth, Calvin alone recognized that promise is the ‘supreme and proper form in which God now draws near to us’.82 Engagement with Reformation debates about sacramental modes of pres­ ence consolidated a notion of promise as a form of presence that would not drop away when Barth turned from the dehistoricized eschatology that marks his earlier readings of Paul. Barth’s dogmatics lectures in Göttingen bear ample testimony to a shift from the eschatology of his earlier work on Paul to a more conventional futurist eschatology. The earlier work had collapsed reconciliation and redemption, identifying the presence of the Holy Spirit with

75 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 87, 103-4. 76 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 129. 77 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 87, 103-4. 78 See e.g. Barth, Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften 1923 (Zürich: Theolo­ gischer Verlag Zürich, 1998), 246-59; ET, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, trans. Darrell L. Guder and Judith J. Guder (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 2002), 157-66. 79 Barth, Die Theologie Zwinglis 1922/1923, ed. Matthias Freudenberg (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2004), 304. 80 Die Theologie Zwinglis, 292. 81 Barth, Die Theologie Calvins 1922, 168; ET, 125. 82 Die Theologie Calvins, 234-5; ET, 175.

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the resurrection and denying that Christ’s parousia is something different alongside his resurrection.83 The dogmatics lectures that Barth began in 1924 separate out the presence of the Spirit and the resurrection, and acknowledge redemption as a distinct, third mode of Christ’s presence for which believers continue to wait;84 yet they also reflect the continuing usefulness of the notion of promise as a description of a mode of divine presence. Barth writes, for instance, that, because believers live in this world, God’s presence in revelation cannot be more than a matter of promise, and that to reach out for more than promise is to deny both human creatureliness and God’s alterity.85 Returning to the same set of notions in lectures on the Holy Spirit delivered in 1929, Barth writes that ‘in God’s revelation the Holy Spirit is actually present. We will say eschatologically present, present as the Spirit of promise.... We must understand this presence eschatologically, i.e., as the presence of promise.’86 Deploying this same set of concepts in a Christmas sermon delivered in 1930, Barth suggests that life in time corresponds to life lived in promise, and so even Christ’s advent does not indicate the ‘dissolution and resolution’ of promise through fulfilment, but rather the promise becoming ‘perfect, unam­ biguous, and powerful’.87 As a first point, then, we can see that the theology of promise that Barth develops in conversation with Paul and Calvin provides him with the kind of notion of divine presence that is frequently thought to be absent from his work. As early as 1921, Barth understood divine presence in a way that would continue to characterize his thought. This understanding of a positive mode of divine presence is important for us, first, because, as we shall see later, the notion of promise came to specify a mode of divine givenness that forms Barth’s account of the ordering of thought apart from the opposing construals of the realist and the critical realist; secondly, because it provided the founda­ tion for Barth’s positive descriptions of an eschatological mode of existence in time. We see this come to fruition in a conception of the believer’s union with Christ; but a second, mediating step is required in the argument in order to show how this coming to fruition works. We may follow this mediating step by returning, at this point, to The Resurrection of the Dead, and considering the way that Barth’s theology of promise comes into play in conjunction with 83 See e.g. ADT, 99; ET, 167. 84 Barth, Unterricht in der christlichen Religion III, ed. Hinrich Stoevesandt (Zürich: Theolo­ gischer Verlag Zürich, 2003), 439-40; cf. ‘Auferstehung’, Zwischen den Zeiten, 5 (1927), 202-5. 85 Barth, Unterricht in der christlichen Religion II, ed. Hinrich Stoevesandt (Zürich: Theolo­ gischer Verlag Zürich, 1990), 395-6; UCR III, 419-26. 86 Barth, ‘Der heilige Geist und das christliche Leben’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930, ed. Hermann Schmidt (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1994), 512-13; ET, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, trans. R. Birch Hoyle (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 60-1. 87 Barth, ‘Verheissung, Zeit—Erfüllung [Weihnachten] 1930’, in Predigten 1921-1935, ed. Holger Finz-Michaelsen (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1998), 591-8.

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Christology in an initial sense in Barth’s treatment of 1 Corinthians 15:22-3. In these verses, Paul takes up again a discussion of Adam and Christ as figureheads of different modes of life and suggests that all shall be made alive in Christ just as all have died in Adam, but that there is a proper order to this making alive: first Christ, then believers. This description of the raising of believers ‘in Christ’ leads Barth to reflect on believers’ fellowship with Christ in a way that is programmatic for his account of the Christian life; the complication is that it requires him to do so while accounting for the futurity that is implicit in Paul’s reference to an order of first and second. Paul is clear in identifying the resurrection of believers with Christ as a future state of affairs. This identification appears to prevent Barth from drawing on this section of Paul’s text in any meaningful way, for Barth has set himself against any account in which the eschatological is made a matter of a temporal future for which believers wait in time. How, then, can Barth give an account of the believer’s relation to Christ while taking account of the element of futurity that Paul builds into this relation? Barth addresses this problem through a novel construal of Paul’s use of temporal categories. He executes a subtle shift through which he treats these categories as descriptions of modes of presence rather than as designations of chronological ‘locations’. The principle that grounds this construal is estab­ lished in Barth’s lectures on Ephesians, in which Barth deflects the futurity that marks Paul’s discussion of the inheritance prepared for believers by suggesting that temporal categories possess a ‘necessarily pictorial quality’ when they are used in speech about God.88 Barth argues that, because speech about God is speech about the eternal from within time, what Paul describes as a past action of God’s could just as easily be described as present or future, and, when Paul describes an action as future, he could just as naturally describe it as present or past.89 Paul ‘pursues eschatology’ whether he speaks of occurrences ‘before the foundation of the world’ or of realities for which believers hope.90 Understood on these terms, temporal language appears to be emptied of any real significance; but Barth suggests that temporal categories remain an important component of Paul’s thought because they allow him to describe different modes of presence. This notion emerges through Barth’s reflections on the presence of the ‘Spirit of promise’. In treating Ephesians 1:13, Barth claims that the promise of the Spirit means that the future is present in such a way that the usual concept of the future ‘breaks’ and the ‘pictorial quality’ of temporal descriptions of the divine is revealed.91 Barth argues that Paul’s references to an eschatological future cannot be treated as if they were references to a temporal future, for the eschatological is present in a way that 88 Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 129-30. 89 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 107-8. 90 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 108. 91 Erklärung des Epheserbrief'es, 129-30.

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the temporal future is not; but speech about the temporal future is not inapposite because it remains useful as a means of qualifying the mode in which the eschatological future is present. As Barth puts it in addressing 1 Corinthians 15:23, Paul describes a temporal future in order to make clear that he speaks of something that ‘in time is only ever to be grasped as promise’.92 Deploying the same strategy in dealing with Paul’s claim that ‘we shall bear the image of the man of heaven’, Barth writes that Paul’s use of the future tense indicates that hope is the mode in which believers relate to the realities that he describes.93 Believers do not see themselves bearing the image of the man of heaven, and indeed they cannot confuse themselves with those who do bear this image, but they relate to it in hope as the proper mode of apprehension of that which is present as promise.94 Barth thus comes to suggest that Paul’s temporal language does not describe different chronological ‘locations’, as if describing the resurrection as future indicates that it is located in a part of time that is not present now, but rather serves to specify the mode in which it is present in time. On these terms, to describe a reality as future is to indicate that it is present objectively in the mode of promise, and apprehended subjectively through hope rather than sight. Barth’s later work bears ample testimony to his tendency to think in these terms. In lectures on ethics, for instance, he writes: eschatological truth is truth as the future in the present.... The distinctive feature of eschatological truth as such is its presence not in the future but as the future.... The future as such is not absent, and therefore we cannot say that what it brings, our own future reality, is absent.... It is the future in the present. We have the content. We are what we shall be.... We have this in promise. Having in promise is the having which characterizes this object, our future reality.95

To this point, then, we have seen, first, that Barth develops the notion that promise indicates a mode of divine presence in time; secondly, that Barth argues that Paul’s language about the future is intended to indicate realities that are present in the mode of promise. The third step that we must take now consists in seeing the way that Barth’s notion of the presence of eschatological reality in the mode of promise leads him to an understanding of an indirect identity with Christ. This notion of indirect identity with Christ is decisive for us because it grounds Barth’s descriptions of the reordering of Christian thought as a central element within the believer’s eschatological mode of existence.

92 ADT, 99; ET, 167. 93 ADT, 121; ET, 201. 94 ADT, 121; ET, 201; Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 129. 95 Barth, Ethik II1928/1929, 366-7; ET, 465-6.

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Christology is inseparable from Barth’s theology of the resurrection as a result of his decision to interpret the contrast between the acopta i/jv\lk6v and the ocujica ttvcv/jloltlkov of 1 Corinthians 15:44 in light of Paul’s discussion of the living soul of the first Adam and the life-giving spirit of the last Adam in verse 45. The consequence of this decision is that, in the same way that the life of the adopta i/jvxlkov is spoken of as a life lived in union with the first Adam, so the resurrected life of the oco/xa irvevptaTLKov is spoken of as a life lived in union with the last Adam. In his exposition of 1 Corinthians, Barth describes the resurrection event as a coming into ‘direct identity’ with Christ.96 In Romans II, he speaks of the resurrection as ‘the completion of the identity between Christ and me’.97 Resurrection is marked by identity with Christ; but Barth is not prepared to say that eschatological existence in time involves the fulfil­ ment of this identity. His theology of the resurrection thus presents him with the task of balancing the realization and the deferral of the specifically Christological side of his eschatology. How far is the union with Christ of resurrection life accomplished in the lives of believers in time? This question might appear to demand of Barth a further deployment of the dialectics that characterize Romans II; but what occurs instead is that Barth deploys his conception of promise as a mode of divine presence in order to depict Paul’s various references to ‘being in Christ’ as expressions of an indirect identity with Christ. Two texts may be treated here in brief in order to trace this dynamic. In commenting, first, on Paul’s assertion that believers ‘shall bear the image of the man of heaven’, Barth falls back on his reinterpretation of the force of temporal language in Paul’s work and argues that Paul’s use of the future ‘shall’ indicates that the believer’s relationship to Christ is a matter of promise and hope rather than of ‘continuity’. Paul’s use of the future tense indicates that there can be no talk of the realization of direct identity with Christ within time; but it also points to a presence of this identity in a mode that cannot be reduced to a mere ‘mathematical function’.98 Barth goes on to claim that the ‘helpless expression “indirect identity’” is the most apt characterization for believers’ fellowship with Christ in this mode.99 This same notion then appears, secondly, in Barth’s lectures on Philippians. In commenting on Paul’s claim that, for him, to live is Christ, Barth suggests that Paul means to describe the condition of one who lives in a ‘fellowship with Christ’ that is separated from fulfilment by an eschatological ‘not yet’, one who lives ‘according to the Spirit’ even in the ‘garment’ of flesh, ‘checkmated’ by the presence of eschatological reality ‘but not yet taken off the board’.100 His

96 ADT, 119; ET, 198-9. 97 RB, 323; ET, 313. 98 ADT, 121, cf. 119; ET, 201, cf. 198-9. 99 ADT, 121, cf. 119; ET, 201, cf. 198. 100 Barth, Erklärung des Philipperbriefes (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1947), 38; ET, The Epistle to the Philippians, trans. James Leitsch (London: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 39.

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description here matches his description of the presence of resurrection life in the mode of promise in The Resurrection of the Dead. He again describes this fellowship of the believer with Christ as an ‘indirect identity’.101 Crucially, he goes on to suggest that this notion stands at the heart of Paul’s thought, appearing in a wide range of Paul’s formulations including Paul’s descriptions of the hiddenness of believers’ lives in Christ with God (Col. 3:3), of the life of Jesus in the believer’s body (2 Cor. 4:10), of the life of the inward man (2 Cor. 4:16), of the new creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17), and of the life that believers no longer live to themselves (2 Cor. 5:15).102 For Barth, each of these expres­ sions is a description of the indirect identity with Christ that belongs to believers by virtue of the presence of eschatological reality in the mode of promise. Indirect identity with Christ, ‘being in Christ’, is, for Barth, the presence of resurrection life on this side of the line of death. It is resurrection life present now in the mode of promise. Barth’s deployment of the notion of an indirect identity with Christ as an expression of the presence of resurrection life in promise is crucial to his thought. This notion provides him with a mediating category in which he feels remarkably comfortable giving positive descriptions of an eschatological mode of existence within time. We have seen that the attempt to describe the form of life that is constituted by the eschatological presence of God is one of the central preoccupations of Barth’s earlier expositions of Paul. The notion of indirect identity with Christ provides the sphere in which Barth’s descriptions

Barth’s description of this condition is significant because it matches his description of the crw^ua rrvevpanKov in The Resurrection of the Dead. Barth’s lectures on Philippians were first delivered in Göttingen during the summer of 1924, were repeated in Münster during the winter of 1926-7, and were then published. It might appear inappropriate to draw from these lectures, given that the published version postdates Barth’s turn away from the dehistoricized eschatology that marks the other works that I have treated; yet the move is unproblematic, for even the published version reflects all of the impulses of the earlier tendency in Barth’s thinking. Barth continues to resist the suggestion that Paul thinks of eschatology and the resurrection as future states of affairs rather than realities that impinge on life in time. In face of Paul’s claim that he wishes to depart to be with Christ (Phil. 1:21, 23), Barth is at pains to argue that the ‘usual interpretation’, according to which Paul looks ‘to a better life in the beyond’ and ‘hopes to be united with Christ in a life after death’, cannot possibly be right, for Barth takes it that Paul’s claim that to live is Christ means that a mode of union with Christ is already present now (Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 36-7; ET, 38). Barth argues that the ‘gain’ that Paul sees in death is to be understood as an increase in the ‘honouring’ of Christ of which Paul speaks in Philippians 1:20 (Phil. 1:21). He suggests that the advantage of this interpretation is that it prevents readers from having to wonder about the change that has come over Paul’s eschatology since he penned 1 Corinthians 15, which, it is clear, Barth continues to construe as an articulation of a dehistoricized eschatology (Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 38; ET, 39). These claims show that, whatever developments are to be identified in Barth’s thinking, his lectures on Philippians belong to the same mode of thought as his work on Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Ephesians. 101 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 36, 38; ET, 37, 39. 102 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 35-6; ET, 37.

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settle. Perhaps because, as he understands it, the right kind of indirectness is built into this notion through the theology of promise, Barth is strikingly positive in his deployment of the notion of‘being in Christ’ as the basis for an account of the believer’s moral life. He is happy to allow ‘be what you already are in Christ’ to stand as the basic rule of Christian ethics.103 He writes that ethics with a Pauline orientation can bear no title other than ‘exhortation in Christ’,104 and that this exhortation can be presented in straightforward indicatives because in Christ there is no ‘should’ but only ‘being and fulfil­ ment’.105 Recent scholarship suggests that Barth’s earlier conception of the eschatological mode of existence floats free of Christological grounding;106 yet it is in fact the Christological side of his theology of the resurrection that allows Barth to move beyond a conception of eschatological reality as critical negation and to see it instead as the basis of positive moral description. It is, as we shall see, this side that permits Barth to move to consider the proper ordering of creaturely thought. Equipped with this recognition, we have come far enough in Barth’s earlier theology generally that we may turn to consider his account of the ordering of Christian thought. We saw in Chapter 2 that Barth points to the resurrection as the key to a moral and spiritual reordering of human thought. We have now encountered the theology of the resurrection that grounds Barth’s understand­ ing of this dynamic, the questions regarding the presence of the eschatological in time that this theology generates, and the conceptions of divine presence and of the believer’s union with Christ that permit Barth to address these questions. In his early work on Paul generally, Barth deploys his understand­ ing of God’s presence in the mode of promise and of the believer’s union with Christ as the basis of a thoroughgoing redescription of the constitution of the human moral subject. It is crucial for us that we recognize, first, that Barth develops a new account of the ordering of Christian thought as an element within his description of the believer’s eschatological form of life; secondly, that this account falls in the same moral register as Barth’s description of the reconstitution of the human subject generally. Barth seeks to describe the ordering of Christian thought that corresponds to the presence of resurrection life in the mode of promise. The latter half of this chapter will now trace this description by considering Barth’s account of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of Christian thought.

103 See Barth Römerbrief 1919, 227; RB, 204; ET, 207; Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 100-1, 154. 104 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 50; ET, 52. 105 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 48; ET, 50. 106 See e.g. Asprey, Eschatological Presence, 164-93; Johnson, ‘A Reappraisal’, 12-13.

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3.3. RESURRECTION AND THE ORDERING OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

Resurrection and the Standpoint of Christian Thought An account of the proper standpoint of Christian thought is a central pre­ occupation of Barth’s earlier expositions of Paul. This might seem an odd interest to take to Paul’s letters, but Barth makes it central to his work because he supposes that it is central for Paul. We encountered this notion in one form in Chapter 2, in Barth’s suggestion that 1 Corinthians as a whole consists in Paul’s attempt to bring the Corinthians to think from the standpoint of the resurrection. We saw there that Barth supposes that a shift in the standpoint of thought is required if believers are to understand Christian faith as anything other than an exercise in individual spiritual heroics. As Barth understands it, Paul is positioned to acknowledge the truth of the resurrection because he allows its reality to reorder his thinking, while the Corinthians’ God is nothing but a projection of their own religious activity because the resurrection is not determinative of the formal orientation of their thought. We encounter the notion that Paul himself takes an interest in the stand­ point of Christian thought in another form in Barth’s construal of Paul’s recurring commendations of particular modes of ‘reckoning’. In Philippians 3:7-10, Paul speaks of‘reckoning’ all things as loss for the sake of life in Christ; in Romans 3:28, he writes that believers are to ‘reckon’ that human beings are justified by faith apart from works of the law; in Romans 6:11, he instructs his readers to ‘reckon’ themselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. These references attract Barth’s attention as attempts to articulate principles that shape the standpoint of Christian thought. They are important for us in the first instance because they allow us to continue to track the nature of Barth’s concerns. One of the basic proposals that runs through this study is that Barth’s interest in the ordering of Christian thought brings with it a shift from a concern for the establishment of truth to a concern for the way that truth may be acknowledged. In treating Barth’s earlier engagements with Paul’s theology, I have tried at points to indicate the way that this shift reflects Barth’s perception of the pattern for Christian inquiry that is laid down in Paul’s work. We saw this dynamic at work in Chapter 2 in Barth’s treatments of Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 1—4; and earlier in this chapter in his const­ rual of Paul’s response to the sceptic whose question comes to the fore in 1 Corinthians 15:35. We now see it at work again in Barth’s construal of Paul’s references to particular modes of ‘reckoning’. As Barth understands it, Paul reflects on Christian forms of ‘reckoning’ because of a concern for the condi­ tions under which the truth of his teaching may be acknowledged. Paul wishes to teach his readers that, having been justified through a sovereign declaration of God, they are free from sin and may order their lives around the eternal

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rather than the temporal; but he recognizes that his readers are enmeshed in time, subject to continual temptation, and accustomed to reckoning with their moral and religious activity as the basis of their standing before God. Their thought is formed by principles and experiences that are incommensurate with the acknowledgement of the intelligibility and veracity of Paul’s teaching. As Barth understands it, then, Paul’s letters contain not only first-order proclamation, but also second-order reflection on the principles through which this proclamation may be acknowledged. Paul seeks to replace the principles of his readers’ customary mode of reckoning with principles that are commensurate with the content of Christian proclamation. In so doing, he seeks to affect a shift in their cognitive standpoint so that they might acknow­ ledge the truth of God. As Barth understands it, in orienting his work around the questions of the ordering of thought and the acknowledgement of truth, he is pursuing a properly Pauline line of inquiry. The notion that emerges as Barth turns to give a positive account of the standpoint of Christian thought is that believers are to move from the standpoint of the empirical subject to the standpoint of the eschatological subject who is found in Christ. We can follow the articulation of this notion by attending to Barth’s engagement with Paul’s descriptions of the believer’s mode of reckoning. Barth’s treatment of Philippians 3:7-10 offers a fruitful point of departure, for it introduces both the Christological side of Barth’s account of the standpoint of thought and the rule that governs this account more generally. In these verses, Paul speaks of being found in Christ and of knowing the power of the resurrection. He writes that, for the sake of these things, he reckons all else as loss. Barth takes these words as an expression of the way that the indirect identity with Christ that accompanies resurrection life reorders Christian thought. It is striking, for him, that Paul does not say that things that he once saw as gain now seem less important, or have become matters of indifference, but have in fact come to appear as loss.107 On Barth’s telling, we see in this statement that Paul’s union with Christ has affected a complete change in his mode of reckoning. The reality of Christ has become the principle that constitutes the standpoint from which Paul thinks. A ‘decisive, superior, victorious factor has stepped into the centre’ of Paul’s thought and ‘holds the arms of the balance, after they have changed their places, conclusively in their new position’.108 Because Christ lives ‘vicariously’ for Paul, Paul can say that ‘my outlook is grounded not in me but in the object of my knowledge’.109 Paul finds his own life ‘arrested and confiscated’ by Christ through indirect identity with him. The result is that

107 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 96-7; ET, 97. 108 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 97; ET, 98. 109 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 36, 97; ET, 37, 98.

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Paul occupies a new standpoint from which all that he reckoned as gain now appears as loss. This description of the way that ‘being in Christ’ alters the standpoint of Paul’s thought is typical of Barth’s earlier work. In his lectures on Ephesians, Barth writes that, through his indirect identity with Christ, Paul’s thought has come to resemble a wheel that no longer revolves around its natural centre.110111 At an earlier point in his exposition of Philippians, in speaking of Paul’s claim that, for him, to live is Christ and to die is gain, Barth writes that what we see in Paul’s indifference towards the antithesis of life and death is that all that Paul knows has been ‘placed in the space of a wholly other kind of informa­ tion’.111 With these comments, Barth is gesturing towards the notion that the reality of Christ constitutes a new standpoint that reorders Christian thought. The question for us concerns the basis on which Barth thinks that this comes about. Barth offers a number of rhetorically powerful depictions of the reordering of life and thought that results from the believer’s indirect identity with Christ; yet we might wonder whether this identity is as transformative as Barth imagines. Why should being united with Christ demand as one of its corollaries a wholly new mode of reckoning? Barth presents a way of thinking about this question in a further set of comments on Philippians 3:7-10. In these verses, Paul’s description of what it is to be united to Christ is not restricted to the observation that all else is now reckoned as loss, but includes as well the assertion that this union is marked by the possession of a righteousness that issues not from one’s own activity but rather from the faithfulness of God. This identification of divine activity as the principle of the believer’s existence in Christ is crucial for Barth as the identification of the ground of the reordering of Christian thought. As Barth presents it, Paul’s dismissal of human activity as a basis for the believer’s union with Christ implies that this union cannot be comprehended from the noetic standpoint to which human beings are accustomed. ‘Customary’ human thought takes the activity of the human subject as the principle in light of which even the phenomena of the religious life are understood;112 human beings refer to their own activity in understanding what is the case, and to their own set of possibilities in determining what could be the case. The consequence of these habits of thought is that believers are poorly positioned to come to grips with their union with Christ, for this union has no basis in their own effort and activity. Eschatological reality has the activity of God rather than the activity of the human subject as its principle. Thought that wishes to reckon with fellowship with Christ must thus turn away from its customary standpoint. 110 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 59. 111 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 34-6; ET, 36-7. 112 RB, 93; ET, 111; Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 100-1; ET, 100-1; ADT 1-4; ET, 13-19.

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Barth’s account of the alternative perspective that is to be adopted by faith is then guided by the rule that believers are to adopt the standpoint that allows them to see as true that which they take to be true. Barth supposes that, if faith finds itself unable to apprehend the eschatological reality that it takes to be true from one cognitive standpoint, then it is to seek out another. His suggestion is that the appropriate standpoint is found by considering the ontological principles that ground the reality that is affirmed in faith. We see this suggestion at work in Barth’s claim that divine activity ought to serve as the constitutive principle of Christian thought because it is this activity that grounds the eschatological reality that believers affirm in faith. Barth writes that ‘it is not on the strength of human but rather on the strength of divine faithfulness that what man knows in faith to be true and real is in fact so’.113 He goes on to say that ‘if man sees... that as lost he is righteous, that in giving himself up he can take comfort in the righteousness of God, then he sees himself.. .from the standpoint of God’.114 The logic of this claim is decep­ tively straightforward. Because faith assents to the veracity of a reality that is grounded in the activity of God alone, it must adopt a standpoint constituted by this activity. Faith thus amounts, on Barth’s telling, to adopting God’s point of view. Barth writes that the ‘positive thing’ that happens in faith is that believers come to see from the standpoint of God.115 The same conclusion grounded in the same line of reasoning is operative in Barth’s treatment of Paul’s uses of the language of reckoning in Romans. In Romans 3:28, Paul instructs believers to reckon that they are justified by faith apart from works of the law. Barth’s comments on this verse are constructed around a systematic contrast between differing noetic standpoints: on the one hand, the ‘standpoint of religion’, which is constituted by a ‘customary’ mode of reckoning that takes human activity and experience as principial; on the other, the ‘“standpoint” of Jesus’, which is constituted by a ‘wholly new’ mode of reckoning that takes the activity of God as its principle.116 Barth’s basic claim is that to instruct human beings to reckon that justification occurs by faith is to instruct them to shift from the standpoint of religion to the standpoint of Jesus, for only thought that takes divine rather than human activity as the principle of its comprehension is able to reckon with a justifi­ cation that issues from divine activity alone.117 Barth then goes on in a further treatment of Paul’s language of reckoning to emphasize that faith itself is the ground of this shift in standpoints. In Romans 6:11, Paul instructs his readers to reckon themselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. Barth again presents the adoption of this mode of reckoning as

113 114 115 116

Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 102; ET, 102. Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 102; ET, 102. Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 101-2; ET, 101-2. RB, 93; ET, 111. 117 RB, 93; ET, 111.

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a basic shift in the believer’s perspective; he then adds a new element into the discussion by claiming that this shift constitutes a ‘test’ of the degree to which the ‘venture of faith’ has been ‘dared’. For Barth, it is of the essence of faith to grant the truth of realities that can be seen as true only from God’s point of view; the degree to which the believer thinks from the standpoint of God is therefore indicative of the degree to which faith itself is real. Barth writes that faith means ‘seeing what God sees, knowing what God knows, reckoning as God reckons’.118 ‘Insofar as we believe, we venture to know what God knows.’119 In sum, then, we can see that Barth grounds the claim that faith affects a reordering of Christian thought by arguing that it is only through this reordering that believers are able to reckon with the content of faith at all. The ‘arms of the balance’ of human reasoning change their place and are ‘held conclusively in their new position’ because it is only through this repositioning that believers are able to acknowledge the truth that they affirm in faith.120 Faith lives in light of realities that a self-referential mode of human reckon­ ing cannot apprehend; it allows itself to be guided towards a reordered form of thought by consideration of the noetic standpoint that corresponds analogically to the activity of God. As Barth understands it, this reordering of thought issues from the principle that believers are to adopt the standpoint that permits them to see as true the realities that faith takes to be true. This rule is formative of Barth’s conception of the ordering of Christian thought; the notions that accompany it here will recur at various points through the remainder of this study, for it plays a decisive role in helping Barth to think through the question of truth under­ stood as a problem of acknowledgement; but it is important in considering its initial appearance that we not to turn a blind eye to the fact that Barth might appear to have grounded an account of the standpoint of Christian reasoning in a dangerously self-reinforcing form of fideism. How is thought to be held accountable if it is given license to adopt the principles that it needs in order to acknowledge the truth of otherwise incomprehensible states of affairs? Are believers not cut off from rational discourse with unbelievers if their thought is ordered not by accepted principles of reason but rather by idiosyncratic principles that issue from the content of faith itself? There are three comments to be made in the face of these worries. The first is that, though it appears to invite fideist abuse, the principle that grounds Barth’s account of the reordering of thought is of weighty philosophical lineage. I devoted space in Chapter 1 to showing that the notion that knowers are to adopt the standpoint that allows them to see as true that which they take

118 RB, 203-4; ET, 206-7. 119 RB, 144; ET, 155. 120 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 97; ET, 98.

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to be true is the principle that Kant deploys as the basis of his conception of practical reason, and that Fichte then appropriates in his account of the transcendental ‘I’.121 To speak, briefly, of Kant, we saw that the task of defending the reality of freedom is formative of his transcendental turn. Kant acknowledges that the content of phenomenal experience and the prin­ ciples of the exact sciences testify against the reality of human freedom; but he exploits the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal in arguing that freedom is still to be affirmed as a ‘fact of reason’, and that consideration of the question of freedom is then to take place from the standpoint of practical reason, for it is from this standpoint that the affirmation of freedom may be seen as true.122 As we have seen, Kant then suggests that practical reason finds its orientation in considering its own needs, permitting itself to take as true that which it needs to presume in order to facilitate its functioning. Kant does not hesitate to license human thought to adopt the principles that are required to acknowledge states of affairs that it takes to be true. It is this same logic that Barth deploys in grounding the comprehension of eschato­ logical reality. Barth holds that an eschatological reality that is not grounded in human activity and experience is to be affirmed in faith; he acknowledges that a reality of this kind is unintelligible to a mode of thought that is accustomed to referring to human activity as the principle in light of which phenomena are to be understood. He handles the difficulty that this presents by suggesting that faith may adopt a new standpoint constituted by the principles that are required for the acknowledgement of the truth that it affirms. Kant and Barth are thus both to be found establishing particular standpoints by deploying transcendental inquiries into the conditions that permit a particular reality to be conceived. The second point to be made is that, in deploying a transcendental logic of this kind, neither Kant nor Barth presume that human thought is free to construct cognitive standpoints around principles that are themselves ground­ less. Both suppose that the principles that are taken as true must themselves be defensible. Kant suggests that, though the dictates of theoretical reason speak against the reality of freedom, this reality is rationally affirmed on the basis of the moral law and the spontaneity of human understanding. Barth suggests that, though it stands apart from the content of human experience, eschato­ logical reality is properly affirmed on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus. On

121 Important differences must, of course, be acknowledged here since, as we shall see, Kant defines freedom as his point of departure as a ‘fact of reason’, while Barth has taken the resurrection as a fact of faith as his starting-point. I mean in this context only to show that, on a formal level, Barth’s account of a standpoint constructed around the resurrection mirrors Kant’s account of a standpoint constructed around freedom. 122 It is worth noting again that, as I mention in Chapter 1, Kant’s strategy for establishing the reality of freedom and practical reason appears to have fluctuated; it is only one version that I present here.

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Barth’s telling, it is Christ’s resurrection that points to the eschatological reality that believers take as the principle of their thought. This is made clear in Barth’s comments on the shift in standpoints that allows believers to reckon themselves dead to sin. As part of these comments, Barth describes the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the revelation and perception’ of the eschato­ logical subject around whom Christians are to order their thinking. Barth writes that ‘the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the revelation and perception of this new person, the person of God’s good favour’.123 He goes on to write that the ‘power of the resurrection is precisely the knowledge that it gives of the eschatological subject who is found in Christ.124 Understood on these terms, we can see that, for Barth, the shift in noetic standpoints that accompanies Christian faith is not arbitrary or uncontrolled, but is rather grounded in the resurrection of Jesus. The third point to be made is that, in suggesting that the comprehension of eschatological reality calls for a basic shift in the standpoint of the knower, Barth is best thought of as borrowing logic from Kant in order to address an epistemological question that causes much of the Protestant tradition to lapse into psychologism. The problem of the comprehension of the eschatological is acute for Barth because he subjects the entire content of eschatological reality to the discontinuity between human activity and God’s judicial declaration that marks a typically Protestant account of active justification; yet it is a problem that is faced by Protestant thought more generally. In inquiring into the identity of the subject who is able to reckon with the reality of justifica­ tion,125 Barth puts his finger on a point of difficulty for theologies that affirm that the justification of the sinner is wholly discontinuous with what human beings experience, are, and do. Much traditional Reformed theology seeks to address this difficulty from the standpoint of ‘customary’ human reasoning by claiming that eschatological reality enters the sphere of human experience in a ‘passive justification’ that includes a ‘subjective feeling of grace in the con­ sciousness of the man justified by faith’;126 in the nineteenth century, Franz Hermann Reinhold von Frank and others attempted to construct theological systems around a foundational experience of new birth, deducing a system of doctrine from a consciousness of the experience of grace.127 Frank anticipates

123 RB, 204; ET, 206. 124 RB, 204; ET, 206. 125 RB, 277; ET, 271. In differing forms, the claim that reflection on the theology of justification is central to the forms of thought that Barth develops is commonplace in Barth scholarship. See Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 51, 88; Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, 26, 108; ‘A Reappraisal’, 7-25; La Montagne, Barth and Rationality, 154. 126 Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 555; cf. Francis Turretin, Institutes ofElenctic Theology, Vol. 2, ed. James T. Dennison, trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: P. 8c R. Publishing, 1993), 669. 127 Franz Hermann Reinhold von Frank, System of the Christian Certainty, trans. Maurice Evans (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886), 89-146.

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Barth in suggesting that Christian theology is to function from the stand­ point of the eschatological new subject; but, for Franke, this subject is known empirically on the basis of a Christian experience of new birth. This empir­ ical account of the standpoint of the eschatological subject causes Frank to lapse into a psychologism that marks more traditional accounts of passive justification, and that Barth takes to be characteristic of the anthropocen­ trism of nineteenth-century thought more generally.128 In opposition to traditional attempts to preserve the customary standpoint of the knower in the face of the declaration of justification, and more modern attempts to treat the standpoint of the eschatological subject as a standpoint that may be adopted empirically, we have seen that Barth borrows the logic that grounds Kant’s account of practical reason in suggesting that believers may adopt the standpoint of the eschatological subject transcendentally, that is, by identi­ fying this standpoint as the conceptual condition of the comprehension of content of faith. We can sum up the conception of the standpoint of Christian thought that emerges from Barth’s earlier theology of the resurrection by drawing from Barth’s comments on Paul’s language of being ‘known by God’. In 1 Corinthians 8:1-3, Paul writes that those who imagine that they possess knowledge do not know as they ought to know, while those who love are known by God. Barth suggests that, with this contrast, Paul is again presenting two standpoints of thought, one constituted by the ‘logic’ of human ‘self­ thinking’, and the other constituted by the ‘logic, consequences, and certainty’ of the knowledge and activity of God.129 The fundamental opposition that emerges in these comments is the opposition at which Barth has been driving all along, namely, the opposition between the ‘logic and consequences’ of the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum, and the logic of the principle that Barth presents as its Pauline counterpart: ‘cogitor, ergo sum, I am known, therefore I am’.130 Barth holds that reckoning with the proclamation of justification and resur­ rection requires a turn from thought grounded in either the empirical or the transcendental subject to thought grounded in the eschatological subject whose reality is constituted by the fact that it is known by God. For him, well-ordered Christian thought occupies the standpoint of the eschatological subject, the crtfya irvev/xartKov whose life is present now in the mode of promise. From this standpoint, the being, knowledge, and activity of God are taken as the principles in light of which Christian teaching is understood more generally, for the being and activity of God are the sole principles of the reality of the eschatological subject.

128 See e.g. Barth, Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften 1923, 219-20; ET, 140; UCRI, 11; ET, 9. 129 ADT, 23; ET, 46. 130 ADT, 23; ET, 46.

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Resurrection and the Orientation of Christian Thought To this point we have seen that Barth supposes that the theology of the resurrection shapes Christian thought by showing that believers are to think from the standpoint of the eschatological subject who is found in Christ. For Barth, the adoption of this standpoint grounds the possibility of reckoning with the resurrection; yet it raises questions about the way that Christian thought is to be regulated and normed. Barth’s account suggests that Christian thought enjoys a measure of independence from the norms generated by the reflections of ‘customary’ human reason. Where Fichte supposes that the principle of identity, ‘A=A’, is a proposition ‘accepted by everyone and that without a moment’s thought’131 that is the basis of the canons of rational thought, Barth suggests that the validity of this principle is not absolute, for the proclamation of justification asserts that ‘A=not A’, the sinner is not reckoned as a sinner but is rather reckoned as righteous.132 For Barth, the logic of this reckoning is grasped only from the standpoint of the resurrection, and occupants of this standpoint cannot ‘gulp down’ the logical norms that govern human thought generally,133 for they affirm states of affairs marked by a logical tension that is addressed only by describing the free activity of God.134 The standpoint of the eschatological subject thus stands at one remove from the governing principles of ‘scientific’ human thought. The Christian thinker ‘ought to know what he is about’ when he transgresses these principles; yet he ought also to accept that ‘he cannot help transgressing them’ in remaining true to the subject of Christian thought.135 In light of this transgression, the question for us is how Christian thought is to regulate its movements. To what canons does it appeal in undertaking its reflections? How does it avoid falling into caprice in the reflections that it undertakes from the standpoint of the eschatological subject? The questions that we encounter here are the questions that I introduced in Chapter 1 in speaking of the orientation of thought. As we saw there, the question of orientation is the question of the points by which reason regulates its movements so that they do not resemble the clumsy stumbling of one who seeks to navigate a dark room. In the form in which it is significant for us, this question has its roots in Kant’s description of the potential for disorientation that follows when reason takes up a second standpoint alongside theoretical reason and finds itself operating in a space that, from the perspective of the

131 Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, I, 92-3. 132 Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 59. 133 In response to a description of the rules to which theology must submit if it is to qualify as a science, Barth suggests that theology cannot swallow these norms as a take-it or leave-it proposition, for theology has the resurrection of Jesus as its constituting principle (Busch, Karl Barth, 207). 134 KD LI, 7-8; ET, 8-9. 135 KD 1.1, 7-8; ET, 8-9.

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theoretical, appears ‘full of utter darkness’.130 We saw in Chapter 1 that Kant addresses the issue by suggesting that, whereas theoretical reason takes its orientation from the conditions that ground the possibility of objective judge­ ments, practical reason takes its orientation from its own ‘subjective needs’, accepting the reality of the things it must presume in order to carry out its functioning.136 137 The question for us now is how Barth handles the question of the orientation of thought from the standpoint of the eschatological subject. We can approach this question by considering two notions that are rooted in Barth’s Christology. These notions address the question of orientation on both a material and a formal level. Both may be treated relatively briefly, for both build on concepts that we have encountered already. The first is a corollary of Barth’s depiction of the relationship of identity between the eschatological subject and Christ. It consists in the notion that Christian thought finds its material points of orientation in the life and work of Jesus Christ. This dynamic comes to the fore through Barth’s treatment of the first part of Philippians 2. Paul opens this chapter with a series of instructions to the Philippians—be of one mind and love, do nothing from rivalry or conceit, attend to the interests of others—that are then followed by his well-known description of Christ’s self-emptying, death, and exaltation. Barth argues that comprehending Paul’s sequence of ideas hinges on the recognition that his discussion takes place from the standpoint of the eschatological subject who is found in Christ. Barth writes that Paul’s reference to ‘being in Christ’ in Philippians 2:5 provides the hermeneutical key to the passage as a whole, for it identifies fellowship with Christ’ as the ‘reality’, ‘order’, ‘place’, and ‘space’ within which Paul’s discussion occurs.138 This recognition is principial for the comprehension of the whole, on Barth’s telling, because it allows the reader to see that Paul’s famous ‘Christ hymn’ is intended to describe the ‘space’ in which believers stand, illuminating the fixed points in relation to which they are to orient themselves in approaching Paul’s ethical instruction. Barth describes the ‘Christ hymn’ as a ‘lifting of the curtain’ through which the ‘reality’ that constitutes the Christological standpoint is made known.139 For Barth, Paul’s recounting of Christ’s activity, from his eternal sharing in equality with God to his eschatological exaltation, orients believers by showing the ‘background’ against which their lives are set and the principles that are

136 Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, 240-1. 137 The principle that Kant deploys, according to which the ‘need’ of reason constitutes a ‘subjective ground for presupposing and accepting something which reason cannot presume to know on objective grounds’, is an instance of the logic that reason may adopt the standpoint that allows it to see as true that which it takes to be true (see ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, 240-1). 138 Barth, Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 57-8; ET, 59-60. 139 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 58; ET, 60.

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formative of the ‘space’ constituted by Christ.140 As Barth understands it, Paul sees Christ’s life as the establishment of the daws’ that norm the life and thought of those who are found in him, and so, in recounting the history of Christ’s activity, Paul is giving an account of the fixed points in relation to which believers are to orient themselves from the standpoint that they take up in Christ. To begin with, then, Barth suggests that Christian thought takes its orien­ tation from material Christological description. Barth is clear that Paul does not seek to orient the believer through facile moralizing or the construction of a religious ‘ideology’, but rather through a series of Christological ‘indicatives’ that reconstitute the believer’s sense of the actual and the possible.141 As Barth presents it, it is above all a particular conception of actuality and possibility that determines the orientation of human thought; on his terms, ‘customary’ human thought struggles to acknowledge the truth of claims regarding the resurrection and justification because it is oriented by a sense of the way that the actual is shaped by human activity, and the way that the possible is rooted in the capacities possessed by human agents.142 Crucially, a new sense of the actual and the possible is then presented by Christ’s history. It is Christ’s resurrection above all that shatters the conception of the possible that shapes ‘customary’ human thought and brings the believer to adopt the standpoint of the eschatological subject. The history of Christ’s being and activity then presents the fixed points from which the occupants of this standpoint take their orientation. Christ’s history is determinative of the contours of this standpoint because the reality of the eschatological subject is constituted by its identity with Christ. It is the things that are actual and possible for the eschatological subject in Christ that constitute the points of orientation for Christian thought. The second Christological notion that determines Barth’s thinking about the question of orientation builds on the principle that we encountered at the beginning of Chapter 2 in speaking of the ‘metaphysics of the Bible’. As we have seen at a number of points in the last two chapters, one of the recurring features of Barth’s earlier work is a contrast between thought that is oriented towards the immediate by an insistence on the inability of human thought to transcend the phenomenal, and thought that is oriented towards the origin and end of the phenomenal by the proclamation of the resurrection of the dead. This contrast determines Barth’s conception of the formal orientation of thought. It comes to stand as an indication of the way that believers are to relate to the content of Christ’s history as a result of its relation to Barth’s understanding of the mode of Christ’s presence in time. 140 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 58; ET, 60. 141 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 66; ET, 68. 142 RB, 93; ET, 111; Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 100-1; ET, 100-1; ADT 1-4; ET, 13-19.

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We can trace this dynamic by considering Barth’s handling of Colossians 3:1-3.143 In these verses, Paul claims that believers’ lives are hidden with Christ in God, and that believers are thus to seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Barth takes these claims to indicate that the mode of Christ’s presence is determinative of the formal orientation of Christian thought. He works out these connections, first, by associating Paul’s reference to the hiddenness of believers’ lives with Christ in God with the presence of resurrection life in the mode of promise;144 secondly, by associating Paul’s claim that believers are to seek the things that are above with his own notion of considering phenomena in terms of their origin and end.145 These associations ground the claim that the presence of Christ in promise demands that that which is found in Christ be apprehended in terms of its origin and end. Promise requires this mode of apprehension because realities that are present in promise do not become the possession of the one who receives the promise, but are instead to be apprehended by looking to the giver.146 Christ’s presence in promise is not to be understood by considering the experience or activity of the believer, but rather by considering its origins in God, from whom it has its ‘basis’, ‘truth’, ‘legitimacy’, and ‘meaning’.147 Realities that are present in promise must thus be understood in terms of their origin; Barth goes on to suggest that they must also be understood in terms of their end, for the notion of promise derives its intelligibility from its pairing with the notion of fulfilment, and is thus to be grasped in terms of the end towards which it points. Barth argues that hope is the appropriate mode of apprehension of that which is promised, because hope is marked by an expectation of an end that is not yet realized. For Barth, then, because the reality of Christ is present to believers in the mode of promise, Christian thought is to take its formal orientation from the principle that that which it receives is to be understood not in its immediacy but rather in terms of its origin and end. Barth’s account of promise as mode of presence that forms a distinctive orientation of thought is crucial for us in charting concepts through which we might move beyond the opposition between realist and critically realist read­ ings of Barth. We saw in Chapter 1 that oppositions between these readings 143 These verses have an important place in Barth’s thinking, though the degree to which this is the case is difficult to determine because Barth’s lectures on Colossians from the winter of 1924-5 remain unpublished. 144 See e.g. Barth, ADT, 99; ET, 167; Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 35; ET, 37. 145 This notion is clearest in Barth’s treatment of Reformed sacramental theology, which we shall treat in Chapter 4. For the time being, see ‘Suchet, was droben ist! Kolosser 3:1-2, 3 June, 1923’, in Predigten 1921-1935, 55-64. 146 This point is again tied to the sacramental side of Barth’s thinking about the mode of God’s presence, which we shall encounter in Chapter 4. 147 Barth, Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 110, n. 1; ET, 109-10, n. 50; Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 124.

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are rooted in differing accounts of the theological category that determines Barth’s forms of thought. The realist is led to privilege the objective givenness of the truth of God by taking the theology of justification as the decisive clue to Barth’s form of thought; the critical realist comes to emphasize a critical check on this realism by privileging the formal structure of Barth’s theology of revelation as the clue to Barth’s thinking. I suggested in Chapter 1 that perhaps neither concentration on a theology of justification nor fixation on the formal structure of revelation permits a view of Barth’s work that is sufficiently synoptic to allow an adequate account of his forms of thought to develop; we have seen now that, through consideration of Paul’s pneumatology and Reformed sacramentology, Barth develops a notion of promise as a mode of divine presence that is identical with neither the givenness of the realist nor the non-givenness of the critical realist. It is a mode of presence that gives the immediate a weight that is commensurate with the quality of relation that exists between the giver and the recipient of the promise; it cannot be reduced to epistemological categories like the given and non-given, for promise is a moral and relational category that cannot be considered apart from the commerce between differing agents. At this point in his earlier work, Barth supposes that the notion of promise specifies a mode of presence that the believer may reckon with positively so long as the believer’s thought is formed by the injunction that the realities that are grasped are to be understood strictly in relation to their origin and end in God. We shall see later that promise as a specification of a mode of promise is the basis of a form of theological understanding in which apprehension of the object is conceived of not in terms of the given and non-given, but rather in terms of the moral and spiritual formation of creaturely life in accordance with the promise of the Creator. In sum, then, we can see that Barth addresses the question of orientation by suggesting that Christian thought finds material points of reference in the content of Christ’s life, and is guided on a formal level by the rule that what it finds in Christ is to be understood in terms of the source from which it comes and the end towards which it moves. Christ constitutes the space in which believers find themselves in faith, and so thought that will correspond to this space must look to Christ for its orientation. But Christ is himself present in the mode of promise, and so Christian thought must understand Christ not by attending to any element of the creaturely sphere in its immediacy, but rather by attending to the origin and end of Christ’s activity in God. Coupled with the notions that we encountered in treating Barth’s account of the standpoint of thought, we can see at this point that Barth’s earlier conception of Christian thought is strongly determined by Christology. For Barth, Christ’s resurrec­ tion grounds the noetic standpoint that the believer takes up in faith; Christ’s history presents the material points of reference that orient those who occupy this standpoint; and Christ’s mode of presence shapes the formal orientation

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of Christian thought. The questions of the standpoint and orientation of Christian thought thus find their answers in Christology. The task for us now in concluding this chapter is to consider the question of freedom as the third element that constitutes Barth’s the conception of the ordering of thought.

Resurrection and the Freedom of Christian Thought In turning to treat the shape of the freedom of Christian thought, we are turning to a question that finds its answer not in the Christological side of Barth’s theology of the resurrection but rather in Barth’s reflections on the way that the resurrection teaches believers to say ‘God’. These reflections are central to Barth’s earlier expositions of Paul, and to Barth’s construal of Paul’s theology of the resurrection in particular. As we saw in Chapter 2, Barth holds that the conviction that guides much of Paul’s work is that ‘we must learn just this: to know what we say when we say God’.148 This claim is formative of Barth’s construal of Paul’s theology of the resurrection, for Barth supposes that, for Paul, ‘it is wholly without doubt that the word “resurrection of the dead” is nothing other than a transcription of the word “God” ’.149 Barth seeks in his exposition of Paul’s theology of the resurrection to show how this theology teaches believers to say ‘God’. It is in seeking to bring this aspect of Paul’s resurrection theology to the fore that the question of the freedom of thought is raised, for Barth supposes that learning to say ‘God’ is primarily a matter of learning to acknowledge that God is Lord, and that comprehension of the lordship of God shapes the believer’s understanding of the proper freedom of Christian thought. I propose to approach the constellation of concepts formed by Barth’s conception of what it is to say ‘God’, his theology of divine lordship, and his account of the freedom of Christian thought by comparing the shape that this constellation takes under the influence of Barth’s earlier theology of the resurrection and the shape that it takes in Barth’s theology of the Trinity in Church Dogmatics LI. My aim, in so doing, is to show that the theology of the resurrection determines Barth’s conception of the interaction of divine and human freedom in revelation in his early work in the same way that the theology of the Trinity determines it in his later work. This demonstration serves, first, to add clarity to the exposition of Barth’s earlier theology by providing a contrast through which it can be understood; second, to show that, though elements in the theology of the resurrection that we are consid­ ering would drop away as Barth’s thinking matures, the contours of Barth’s

148 Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 136.

149 ADT, 115; ET, 192.

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conception of the freedom of the knower in relation to God remained con­ stant. The theology of the Trinity stepped gradually into the gap that opened at the centre of Barth’s thought when Barth’s abandonment of a dehistoricized eschatology meant that the theology of the resurrection could no longer ground his understanding of the structure of the relationship between God and creatures.150 We can approach these claims by treating the interplay between the concept of lordship and the theology of the Trinity in Church Dogmatics LI. This interplay emerges, first, through Barth’s assertion that the notion of divine lordship is the proper basis of the theology of the Trinity. Barth identifies the claim that ‘God reveals himself as the Lord’ as the ‘root’ of the theology of the Trinity, for this claim points to the internal differentiations in the being and activity of God that stand as the condition of God’s lordship in revelation.151 For God to be Lord in revelation is for him to give himself to be known without that knowledge passing out of his control and becoming the inde­ pendent possession of human knowers. This is possible, on Barth’s telling, because, in his triune being, God stands as the act, content, and effect of revelation. God is not a speaker whose words are different from what he is and pass into the control of another; rather, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God is the revealer, the revelation, and the revealedness of his own Word. God’s being as Trinity allows him to remain Lord in all aspects of revelation. The affirm­ ation of God’s lordship in revelation thus grounds the affirmation of God’s triune being for the latter is a condition of the former. It is God’s being as Trinity that allows God to give himself to be known without ‘giving himself away> . 1 52 Acknowledgement of divine lordship thus stands on one side as the basis of Barth’s theology of the Trinity; but Barth goes on to further his reflection on the interplay between divine lordship and the theology of the Trinity by pointing to the latter as a condition of a proper understanding of the former. An understanding of divine lordship is as dependent on a theology of the

150 A number of parallels between Barth’s earlier theology of the resurrection and his later theology of the Trinity suggest themselves immediately. Whereas the earlier Barth points to the resurrection as the material centre of Christian proclamation, the Barth of Church Dogmatics LI points to the doctrine of the Trinity as the ‘decisive and controlling’ centre of dogmatics (KD LI, 319; ET, 303). Whereas the earlier Barth claims that the resurrection is central in part because it teaches believers to say ‘God’, the Barth of Church Dogmatics LI claims that the theology of the Trinity determines whether the term ‘God’ is used appropriately (KD 1.1, 317-18; ET, 301). Whereas the earlier Barth thinks that the resurrection holds the key to saying ‘God’ in part because it establishes the sheer alterity of God as a reality that cannot be placed on a Une with the content of the world, the Barth of Church Dogmatics LI thinks that the theology of the Trinity is properly criteriological for true speech about God because, as Schleiermacher himself grants, this particular doctrine cannot be made comprehensible as an articulation of Christian self­ consciousness (KD 1.1, 319; ET, 303-4). 151 KD 1.1, 320-5; ET, 304-8. 152 KD IV.l, 202; ET, 185.

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Trinity as the theology of the Trinity is on an understanding of divine lordship. Barth develops this new claim by suggesting that the Trinitarian heresies identified by the early Church amount to different strategies for evading the lordship of the God who reveals himself. Barth supposes that the subordinationist reduces the revealing God to the kind of subject that human beings may master by separating the revealer from true divinity, while the modalist directs attention to an abstract point of unity that stands behind the modes of being in which God reveals himself.153 On both accounts, the revealing God is demoted from a position of lordship and opened up to ‘objectifying’ movements through which the T of the human knower can ‘assert itself’ and divine subjectivity is ‘assimilated’ into human subjectivity.154 In face of this movement, Barth argues that the theology of the Trinity serves a ‘polemical’ function in which it unmasks human evasions of divine lordship by showing that the true God is present in revelation. The theology of the Trinity shows that there is no gap between the ‘whole being, speech and action’ of God ad extra and God’s being and essence ad intra.155 It shows that revelation is a faithful act of ‘self-interpretation’ on God’s part in which God is present as the one he is.156 The notion that emerges from Barth’s reflections on the interplay between the affirmation of divine lordship and the theology of the Trinity is that learning to say ‘God’ is a matter of learning to say ‘sovereign presence’. The doctrine of the Trinity emerges from reflection on the sovereignty of God in revelation and serves to show how the sovereign God is present in his own irreducible subjectivity. It thus shows how it is that God may be both our God, that is, one who remains sovereign and is never subsumed into a nexus over which human beings are the masters, and our God, that is, one who in full sovereignty is yet present to the creature as the one he is.157 It is this dual affirmation of sovereignty and presence that Barth thinks is crucial in deter­ mining whether human beings say ‘God’ in accordance with the critical standard offered by the theology of the Trinity. For Barth, the ‘decisive and controlling concern’ of the theology of the Trinity is to ensure that the notions of revelation and of God are held together in such a way that the notion of revelation is never understood apart from a recognition that it is the sovereign God who reveals himself, and that the notion of God is never understood apart from a recognition that the sovereign God genuinely does make himself present.158 Barth claims that Christian theology ‘can only be an exercise in the movement’ between the affirmation that ‘God is the revealer’ and ‘the revealer is God’.159

153 155 157 159

KD LI, 401-3; ET, KD LI, 403-4; ET, KD 1.1, 403-4; ET, KDI.l, 400-1; ET,

381-2. 383. 382-3. 380.

154 KD LI, 402; ET, 381. 156 KDI.l, 328-9; ET, 311. 158 KD LI, 400-1; ET, 380.

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For Barth, then, the theology of the7 Trinity shows whether the ‘allimportant term “God”’ is used in a way that is ‘appropriate to its object’ by showing that to speak faithfully or God is to name one who is both our God and our God.160 This notion qualifies the freedom of human thought by showing that God is not one in relation to whom the knowing T may claim mastery. Knowers are not free to objectify God and to make their experience of the divine a function of their own activities and possibilities. To encounter God is to come to know that one stands under a lordship that precludes a human tendency to interpret phenomena in terms of a ‘comprehensively explicated self-understanding of human existence’.161 It is to discover that one’s own existence is not the clue to the structure of the ‘nexus of being’ in which the divine is encountered;162 it is to see that one may follow Barth’s course in the Church Dogmatics in taking obedience in the face of divine lordship as a clue to the ordering of creaturely thought. That which is significant for us now is the recognition that the conception of sovereign presence that grounds this reordering of the freedom of thought is characteristic not only of Barth’s Trinitarian theology but also of Barth’s earlier theology of the resurrection. We can trace its appearance in Barth’s earlier thinking by following the way that the proclamation of the resurrection qualifies Barth’s understanding of the lordship of God. Barth identifies the phrase ‘resurrection of the dead’ as a ‘transcription’ of Paul’s understanding of the term ‘God’.163 He goes on to suggest that ‘resurrection’ is summative in this way because it is in fact a ‘transcription and concretion’ of the claim that ‘God is Lord’.164 It is ‘the proclamation that God is the Lord become wholly concrete’.165 What we encounter in this claim is the same centrality of the notion of divine lordship in understanding the term ‘God’ that marks Church Dogmatics I. The difference is that here it is the theology of the resurrection, rather than the theology of the Trinity, that serves to specify what it means to speak of God as Lord. The theology of the resurrection accomplishes this task for the early Barth in precisely the way that the theology of the Trinity does for the later Barth; it shows that God must be understood as one who is present to and sovereign over the human subject, and by exposing human attempts to avoid this presence by reducing the lordship of God to an abstract concept. Barth’s first move in expounding this dynamic is to identify a series of ‘pious ideas’ of divine lordship that are in fact ‘evasions’ of God’s sovereign presence.166 Drawing on notions that are central to the liberal tradition, Barth suggests that to understand divine lordship in terms of history, spirit, or life is to drain the claim that ‘God is Lord’ of all force, for it is to locate God’s

160 KD LI, 317-18; ET, 301. 161 KD 1.1, 35-6; ET, 36. 162 KD 1.1, 35-6; ET, 36-7. 163 ADT, 115; ET, 192. 164 ADT, 115; ET, 192. 165 ADT, 115; ET, 192. 166 ADT, 115; ET, 192-3.

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lordship on a level of generality that stands apart from the existence of the concrete human person. Barth writes, for instance, that to speak of God as the Lord of history is to reduce God’s sovereignty to an abstract fate from which human beings enjoy a critical distance.167 It is to speak of a lord upon whom one can gaze dispassionately and from whom one can then take one’s leave. Barth writes that, because ‘I am not the world, nature, or history’, to speak of God’s lordship in terms of these concepts is to introduce a barrier between this lordship and one’s own particular existence.168 Applying the same principle more widely, Barth suggests that to speak of God as the Lord of spirit is to locate God’s rule in a sphere that is set apart from the corporeal world in which human beings live, and that to speak of God as the Lord of life is to speak of a God who rules over a conceptual abstraction in which the individ­ ual’s life is lost ‘as a drop in the sea’.169 As Barth presents it, each of these construals of the phrase ‘God is Lord’ represents the deployment of a general concept as a means of denying God’s concrete presence as Lord. The neoProtestant who speaks of God as the lord of history or of spirit is little different from the subordinationist and the modalist, for the former, like the latter, seeks to evade the sovereign presence of God. What is required, on Barth’s terms, is a dogmatic principle that, like the theology of the Trinity, unmasks these evasions and points to God’s sovereign presence to creatures. It is at this point that Barth considers the way that the phrase ‘resurrection of the dead’ transcribes and makes concrete the claim that ‘God is Lord’. As he presents it, the proclamation of the resurrection determines what it is to speak of God as Lord because, in speaking of the resurrection of the body in particular, it speaks of the act in which God lays claim to believers in their concrete existence. Where, for Barth, the suggestion that God is Lord of the world or of nature is abstractive because ‘I am not the world, nature, history’, the proclamation of the resurrection of the body is the proclamation of God’s irreducible presence as Lord because ‘I am body’.170 Drawing from the notion that body is what human beings are, Barth argues that the proclamation of the resurrection of the body eliminates the spaces into which human beings might withdraw in order to evade God’s sovereign presence. Barth writes: God is the Lord of the bodyl Now the question of God is posed acutely and inescapably. The body is the person, I am the body, and this person, this I, is God’s. Now for the first time I have no hiding place before God... I cannot retire to a reality that is secured against God.171

Barth goes on to claim that the ‘critical sharpness’ and ‘highest hope’ that is characteristic of Paul’s understanding of what it is to say ‘God’ first emerges

167 ADT, 115; ET, 192-3. 169 ADT, 115; ET, 193. 171 ADT, 116; ET, 193.

168 ADT, 115; ET, 192-3. 170 ADT, 115-16; ET, 193.

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when believers see that it is in the particularity of their bodily existence that they are claimed by God and ‘bound’ to him.172 That believers know the sovereign presence of God in this ‘concrete sense’ is, on Barth’s telling, the ‘absolutely new’ element that emerges from the proclamation of the resurrec­ tion of the body.173 Barth sums up his understanding of the significance of the resurrection by writing that, while the Christian identification of God as Lord of the body might appear to expect less of God than the identification of God as Lord of history or spirit, the Christian in fact expects more simply because his God is ‘not an abstraction, not an object, not an opposite number, because his God is really and immediately present to the reality of man in the concrete sense—to man as ocop-a’.174 At this point, then, we can see that, for the earlier Barth, the theology of the resurrection teaches believers to say ‘God’ by leading them to understand the irreducible concreteness of God’s sovereign presence. In pointing to sovereign presence as the key to the notion of divine lordship, and thus to an understanding of God, the theology of the resurrection occupies the place in Barth’s earlier reflections that would later be filled by the theology of the Trinity. Equipped with this recognition, we are positioned to bring this chapter to a close with some brief comments on the implications of Barth’s understanding of what it is to say ‘God’ for an account of the proper freedom of human thought. In both his earlier theology of the resurrection and his later theology of the Trinity, Barth’s development of the notion of divine lordship includes as one of its aspects an attempt to shape believers’ under­ standing of the proper freedom of human thought by establishing that God’s presence is the presence of one who is Lord. This notion is important for us, first, in providing a basis on which obedience comes to the fore in Barth’s account of theological reasoning. We saw in Chapter 1 that Barth replaces the Kantian suggestion that the notion of freedom is the clue to the ordering of thought with the suggestion that it is in fact the notion of obedience that is foundational. We shall see later that this difference plays a significant role in setting Barth’s work apart from elements in the post-Kantian tradition; for the time being, it is important for us that, from the early days of his work on Paul, Barth’s emphasis on the notion of obedience as the decisive clue to wellordered thought is grounded in the supposition that understanding what it is to say ‘God’ involves an apprehension of the sovereign presence of one who is Lord. These notions are then important, secondly, for the way that Barth secures an emphasis on divine lordship and human obedience by appealing to the pneumatological side of his theology of the resurrection. As we saw earlier,

172 ADT, 116; ET, 193. 173 ADT, 117-18; ET, 196. 174 Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 116; ET, 115-16.

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pneumatology is implicated in Barth’s account of the resurrection because Barth supposes that the life of the eschatological subject is characterized by the presence of the Spirit as its determinative centre. Barth writes that, in the resurrection, the Holy Spirit ‘steps in’ and takes the place of sinful self-interest as the guiding principle of the believer’s activity.175 This notion grounds Barth’s attempt to reshape Christian understanding of the freedom of thought by showing that God remains the sovereign subject of the knowledge of God. It takes its decisive form from Barth’s handling of 1 Corinthians 1-2. Barth’s first move in treating these chapters is to suggest that Paul’s famous discussion of the cross, the wisdom of God, and the wisdom of the world shows that God must remain the subject of the knowledge of God, for the knowledge of God is bound up with a revelation in the cross that, construed through the lens of human wisdom, is converted into foolishness.176 For Barth, the true content of a Pauline theologia crucis is the acknowledgement that God alone is the subject of the knowledge of God.177 Barth’s second move is then to draw from Paul’s assertion that God’s Spirit alone plumbs the depths of divine wisdom in order to suggest that it is the Holy Spirit, present to the believer in the resurrection, who brings the knowledge of God. Commenting on the conceptual pair formed by Paul’s claims that the Spirit searches the depths of God and that believers possess the mind of Christ, Barth writes that the eschatological subject who exists in indirect identity with Christ is one who, through the presence of the Spirit, ‘has the knowledge in which God is not only the object but also the subject’.178 On these terms, God makes himself known without that knowledge passing into the control of the human knower. God is known through the presence of the Spirit to the eschatological subject; knowledge of God can therefore not be interpreted in terms of the knower’s own move­ ments. Christian understanding of the freedom of thought is reordered, for it is taken out of the sphere in which reference to the autonomy and spontaneity of reason gives licence to the knower to claim mastery over the object of knowledge. In relation to God, human knowers are prevented from asserting their own subjectivity as the basis of their knowledge. They find that they stand under a lordship made manifest in God’s exclusive claim to stand as the proper subject of the knowledge of God.

3.4. CONCLUSION The aim of Part I of this study has been to trace the conception of the ordering of Christian thought that emerges from Barth’s earlier engagements 175 ADT, 118-19; ET, 196-8. 176 ADT, 7; ET, 20. 177 ADT, 7; ET, 20. 178 ADT, 10; ET, 25-6.

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with the apostle Paul. We have seen that study of Paul’s work leads Barth to a new understanding of both the question and the answer that are proper to consideration of the activities of thought. In the first place, engagement with Paul shapes Barth’s understanding of the question of theological reasoning, for Barth sees in Paul’s letters an inquiry into the moral ordering of crea­ turely thought that is driven by a concern for the acknowledgement of truth. As Barth understands it, Paul is concerned for the activities of thought as decisive elements in the creature’s orientation to God. He worries that these activities have come to be ordered in a way that precludes the acknowledge­ ment of Christ’s work of reconciliation. He supposes that thought is accus­ tomed to ordering itself through consideration of human activities and possibilities as if human subjects were lords over the sphere in which they find themselves. This ordering of thought precludes acknowledgement of the truth of a reconciliation that is rooted in divine activity alone. It ensures that any truth that is established by the human knower is a projection of the self’s own activities; it imprisons the truth of God within creaturely categories, enslaves human beings to the contingencies of the finite world, and reduces faith itself to an exercise in self-projection. In face of this situation, Barth supposes that Paul’s work presents a moral inquiry into proper ordering of Christian thought. In addition to helping Barth to reframe the question, engagement with Paul also points Barth to an initial set of answers. Barth sees in Paul’s work an account of a new mode of Christian reckoning that is the noetic side of the act of faith itself. This new mode of reckoning includes a shift from a standpoint constituted by reference to human activity to a standpoint constituted by reference to divine activity. This shift is, on Barth’s telling, ingredient in the act of faith itself, for it is the move through which faith positions itself to apprehend the truth of the realities to which it assents. Having taken up a new standpoint in faith, Barth supposes that Christian thought finds its orientation through reference to Christ’s history and to the mode of his presence in time, and finds the shape of its freedom in the conception of God’s lordship that is grounded in the proclamation of the resurrection. The notions that we encounter here are formative for Barth’s work. The basic picture of a shift in noetic standpoints that is brought about by the response of faith, an orientation found in attention to Christ, and a reshaping of the freedom of human thought through encounter with the God who is Lord remains foundational to Barth’s thought. The task for us going forwards is to trace the way that this picture is filled out as Barth’s own thinking matures. Though the broad lines of Barth’s account would not change, the picture that we encounter here is in some ways underdeveloped. It is reliant on an idiosyncratic theology of the resurrection; it lacks a foundation in a broader understanding of important elements of Christian teaching. I aim to show in Part II of this study that it matures above all through consideration of faith’s

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movement to understanding. Engagement with Pauline theology has led Barth to an initial conception of the ordering of Christian thought in accordance with a particular account of Christian faith. In Part II, I hope to trace the way that this conception of the noetic corollaries of a Pauline account of faith is extended by appropriation of Anselm’s conception of understanding.

Part II Anselm, Understanding, and the Question of the Ordering of Christian Thought

4 The Question of the Ordering of Thought between Paul and Anselm 4.1. INTRODUCTION Careful study of Paul’s letters in the aftermath of the First World War led Barth to the conviction that Christian faith has a thoroughgoing reordering of human thought as one of its corollaries. Faith, for Barth, involves living in light of the resurrection of Christ, the justifying declaration of God, and an eschato­ logical reality that sets the curtain of time aflame. ‘Customary’ modes of human reckoning struggle to apprehend the truth of these realities, for this truth is rooted in divine activity alone, while ‘customary’ modes of reckoning take the resources of human thought and activity as a ‘measure’ of truth. Christian faith must therefore bring with it a reordering of thought through which the realities that are determinative for faith maybe acknowledged at all. Barth comes to suggest that thought occupies the standpoint of the eschatological subject, allows itself to be oriented by the realities introduced into history by Jesus Christ, and understands its own freedom in light of the sovereign presence of God will be ordered in a way that permits it to reckon with God’s activity as the reality that is constitutive of the space in which it lives and moves and has its being. All this the earlier Barth sees as the content and consequences of Paul’s teaching. Paul served as Barth’s ‘special guide’ to the new world revealed in Scripture as Barth moved away from the convictions inherited from his teachers; but work on Paul was not the last word on Barth’s theological contributions. A transition to university teaching in the early 1920s moved Barth into a sphere that called for careful engagement with the great figures and central doctrines of the Christian tradition. As a result of this transition, Barth’s work shifted over the course of the 1920s from interpretation and appropriation of Pauline thought to the development of a full Christian dogmatics. This shift brought with it a set of questions that will occupy us in the second part of this study. What kind of intellectual work may be taken up from the standpoint of faith? What kind of movement is proper to thought that is reordered by the justifying declaration of God?

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The aim of this chapter is to introduce the questions that will occupy us in the second part of this study. These questions centre around the way that Barth’s account of well-ordered thought is shaped by a conception of the movement from faith to understanding. In treating Barth’s expositions of Paul in the first part of this study, my concern was to show how a faith formed by the resurrection shapes Barth’s conception of Christian thought. I propose now to turn to Barth’s engagement with Anselm in order to ask how thought is to be ordered in light of faith’s movement to understanding. Anselm is as natural an interlocutor for Barth on the question of understanding as the apostle Paul is on the question of faith. I hope in the second part of this study to show that Barth’s engagement with Anselm leads him to fill out and deepen the conceptions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of Christian thought that he first develops through engagement with Paul. This deepening involves consideration of the kind of movement that Christian thought may undertake. It brings with it reflection on the way that the standpoint and orientation of thought that are associated with the eschatological subject are made real for the believer through a theology of baptism; but it is concen­ trated primarily in reflection on the proper freedom of Christian thought. As we shall see, Anselm leads Barth to conceive of the movement from faith to understanding in terms of a reshaping of the freedom of thought in a movement best thought of in terms of the sanctification of the mind. Where faith moves to understanding, the believer comes to see that the activity of God possesses a necessity that brings every aspect of the believer’s life into conformity with itself by making even the thought of its negation inconceivable. In its emphasis on the conformity of Christian thought to the activity of God, Barth’s account of the reordering of thought through theo­ logical understanding can be thought of as the noetic side of a theology of sanctification that corresponds to the account of the noetic consequences of a theology of justification that was central to Barth’s work on Paul. Crucially, the conformity of Christian thought to God through understanding leads finally to a correspondence between divine and human activity in which the truth of God may be acknowledged. I propose to begin the exposition of these claims by using this chapter to frame the problems that Barth takes up in his study of Anselm. I aim to do so by treating the continuity between Barth’s work on Paul and his study of Anselm that can be traced through some of Barth’s dogmatic material from the 1920s. I hope to show that consideration of this dogmatic material allows us to see that the question of theological understanding is made pressing for Barth by the account of the noetic consequences of faith that he develops through work on Paul. This account leads Barth away from a conception of understanding that marked elements in the neo-Protestant tradition; Barth comes to see that his opposition to this tradition is rooted in part in its assumptions regarding the nature of understanding, and that the objections

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that he faces from his neo-Protestant interlocutors rest on a failure to grasp what it would mean to move to understanding from the standpoint of Christian faith. I hope to show that, whereas others have tended to see a decisive contrast between Barth’s earlier work on Paul and his later work on Anselm as a puzzle to be explained, these two aspects of Barth’s thought stand in straightforward continuity. Barth’s engagement with Paul reflects a concern for the ordering of thought in accordance with faith; Barth’s work on Anselm reflects a concern for the ordering of thought in accordance with faith’s movement to understanding. These two aspects of Barth’s work are part of a continuous line of reflection through which a compelling account of the ordering of thought develops. My treatment of the way that Barth’s conception of the ordering of thought in accordance with Pauline faith leads over the course of the 1920s to the question of understanding will proceed through three sections. The first will consider Rudolf Bultmann’s objection to the account of faith that we encoun­ tered in Barth’s earlier treatments of Paul. This objection introduces a concern regarding the integrity of Barth’s theology that will figure prominently in the remainder of this work. Bultmann’s concern is the apparent abstraction that is introduced into Barth’s theology by his insistence on thinking from the standpoint of the eschatological subject; it is typical of long-standing concerns regarding Barth’s positivism, theological insularity, and fideism. I aim to show that Barth thinks through the assumptions that ground these concerns through historical study of Reformation theology, and that this study is then formative of his conception of the task of dogmatics during the 1920s. The second section of this chapter will treat aspects of Barth’s dogmatic work from the 1920s. This section will begin with a treatment of the concep­ tion of dogmatic science that marks both Barth’s Göttingen and Münster dogmatics; it suggests that Barth’s earlier dogmatic work is set apart from the Church Dogmatics by a conception of the task of theology that stands in close proximity to conceptions inherited from Schleiermacher and Ritschl. It then shows how the question of theological understanding comes to the fore as Barth thinks through responses to criticisms of his theology of the Word of God. In his 1927 Christliche Dogmatik, Barth takes up the theme of Bultmann’s objection and argues that what is required is a new account of the understanding of faith. He makes the question of understanding central by presenting it as a key to thinking through the difference between his work and the work of his critics. Crucially, he begins to develop his own conception by drawing from his earlier exposition of Paul and by appealing to Anselm. Paul and Anselm come together in his thinking as advocates of an ordering of thought that stands opposed to the idealism of the liberal tradition. We shall see that it is the conception of the ordering of thought that Barth derives from his interpretation of Pauline faith that pushes him towards Anselm in search of a corresponding model of understanding.

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The third section of this chapter will then introduce debates about the nature of the understanding of faith that emerged in Germany during the late 1920s. Barth was not alone in the 1920s in supposing that a rethinking of theological understanding was required in the wake of neo-Protestant reliance on idealist habits of thought. His interest in the question did not arise in a vacuum: the understanding of faith was a point of some controversy in Germany during the late 1920s; Barth’s study of Anselm represents an attempt to show how the understanding of faith is to be conceived after the breakdown of idealism.

4.2. THE INTEGRITY OF FAITH AND THE ORDERING OF THOUGHT

Bultmann on Appropriation and the Integrity of Faith We can frame a set of questions that will be significant for us in the second part of this study by considering Bultmann’s objection to the account of faith that we encountered in Part I. The opposition between Barth and Bultmann is, on many tellings, the decisive division in twentieth-century theology;1 yet, before their high-profile disagreements during the 1940s and 1950s, Barth and Bultmann were contemporaries who shared a similar schooling at the great centres of liberal theology in Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg.2 Study at Marburg proved particularly influential for both, for Wilhelm Herrmann was a formative influence on the early work of both figures. Held together by convictions inherited from Herrmann, Barth and Bultmann were associates in the dialectical theology movement of the 1920s.3 During these years, Bultmann wrote article-length responses to the 1922 edition of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and to Barth’s 1924 exposition of 1 Corinthians. A concern emerges in these two pieces that is helpful for us going forward.

1 James Smart treats the opposition between Barth and Bultmann as exemplary of the ‘divided mind’ of modern theology; T. F. Torrance refers to it as the ‘great water-shed of modern theology’ (The Divided Mind of Modern Theology: Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, 1908-1933 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967); Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 206-7). Other scholars have suggested that it is, in fact, Herrmann and Troeltsch who represent the basic alternatives open to modern theology, with Barth and Bultmann representing variations within Herrmann’s school (see e.g. Hendrikus Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, Christophe Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians (Zurich: TVZ, 2005)). 2 The two first met in Marburg in 1908 at social evenings arranged by Martin Rade, the editor of a leading journal of liberal theology (Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians, 31). 3 A dynamic spelled out in Christophe Chalamet, Dialectical Theologians, and Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy.

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Bultmann’s concern is best understood as a species of his criticism of liberal theology more generally. Bultmann sees Barth’s work not as a repudiation of the liberal tradition, but rather as a correction within it that, for all of its merit, ultimately fails to overcome the basic deficiency of liberal theology itself.4 This deficiency consists in an inability to explain the nature of Christian truth. The question of Christian truth, as it was inherited by Barth and Bultmann, had its roots in Kant’s claim that theological statements belong to a fundamentally different category, or class, than statements about empirical objects in the phenomenal sphere. Kant supposes that a thoroughgoing distinction is required between claims about empirical objects and claims about morality and religion, for the former presuppose strict causal determinism as a condi­ tion of their objectivity, and the latter presuppose freedom as a condition of their intelligibility. In face of this tension, Kant sought to delimit the spheres of theoretical and practical reasoning as differing kinds of judgement that are to be evaluated through different criteria. His notion of the independence of religious judgements from the theoretical judgements of the natural sciences proved enormously influential; similar attempts to distinguish different kinds of truth claims were operative in a number of decisive works in the modern tradition. These attempts derived their force quite generally from concerns to show that claims about morality and religion are not threatened by changes in scientific understandings of the natural world. They gave rise to controversy regarding the nature of theological truth claims that shaped the context in which Barth and Bultmann were schooled. The particular controversy that was formative for Barth and Bultmann arose from Ritschl’s addition of a historical component to Kant’s account of the moral character of religious truth. Ritschl famously supplements Kant’s religious moralism with the notion that Christian truth in particular is also irreducibly historical. Christian teaching is appropriated subjectively through judgements about the moral value of the history of Christ and his Church; but it has its objective ground in this history itself.5 The emphasis on historical study that issued from this conception led to debates regarding the relation of history and faith that brought an end to the Ritschlian school. In 1898, Ernst Troeltsch argued that consideration of the principles of historical study leads to the conclusion that nothing that is known historically can be known absolutely. For Troeltsch, historical events may be understood only in causal relation to and conceptual analogy with other events; thus, the under­ standing of an event that is derived from historical study is conditioned by understandings of other events in a way that reduces all historical claims to

4 Bultmann, ‘Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement’, in Faith and Under­ standing I, ed. Robert Funk, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (London: SCM Press, 1969), 28. 5 See Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 8-13.

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relativity.6 On these terms, if Christian truth is to be identified as historical, then it must be acknowledged to be relative. In effect, Troeltsch used consid­ eration of the principles of historical study to reassert the division between historical and absolute truth claims that Lessing had suggested more than a century earlier. A number of younger theologians were won over by Troeltsch’s work; but not all were convinced. In a famous series of lectures delivered in 1900, Adolf von Harnack reasserted the absolute nature of Christian truth.7 Meanwhile, quite apart from the opposition between Troeltsch and von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann had come to represent a revised form of Ritschlianism in which Christian truth is taken out of the sphere of the historical and made a matter of inner, experiential communion with God.8 Barth and Bultmann were students in Germany during the first decade of the twentieth century while debates between these camps were at their height. The question of the nature of Christian truth remained formative for Bultmann in particular throughout his career. During the 1920s, Bultmann’s work was marked by an attempt to take a conception of the essence of faith as the clue to the nature of Christian truth. Study of Paul had led Bultmann to a concep­ tion of faith as the free self-commitment of obedience; a number of Bultmann’s early essays were then guided by an attempt to deploy this conception as a critical standard against which proposals regarding the nature of theological truth could be measured. His objection to the liberal tradition as a whole, and to Barth’s corrective more particularly, was that neither succeeded in providing an account of truth that is commensurate with this understanding of faith. On the side of liberal theology, this concern comes to expression in a critique of the ‘historical interest’ that Bultmann sees as the decisive feature of liberal theology.9 As Bultmann presents it, liberal theology is defined by a turn to the study of history in an attempt to ground faith in a historically credible picture of the ‘real figure of Jesus’.10 This historical picture was meant to take the place of the sterile orthodoxies parroted by conservative theolo­ gians; but the difficulty, for Bultmann, is that the principles that ground historical study prevent it from providing a basis that is commensurate with the essence of faith. Echoing Troeltsch, Bultmann argues that the study of history presupposes that historical events exist within an interconnected web of relations that renders them comprehensible.11 The difficulty is that the

6 See Troeltsch, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology’, in Religion in History, trans. James Adams (Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark, 1991), 11-32. 7 See von Harnack, What is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (London: Williams & Norgate, 1902). 8 See esp. The Communion of the Christian with God, first published in 1886. 9 Bultmann, ‘Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement’, 29-30. 10 Bultmann, ‘Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement’, 29-30. 11 Bultmann, ‘Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement’, 31-2; cf. Troeltsch, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology’, 16-17.

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interrelatedness that renders events intelligible also renders them relative, for all events are conditioned by the realities that bring them into being and by the analogies with other events that permit them to be understood. Troeltsch claims that the principle of interconnection ‘displays everything as condi­ tioned by everything else’;12 Bultmann tells us that ‘no road can be found out of the unending inter-relatedness’ that is presupposed by the study of history. On his telling, then, ‘no single epoch and no single person can claim absolute significance’.13 Bultmann concludes that the inability of historical study to present phenomena of absolute significance means that liberal historiography is barred from providing a basis for faith, for the self-involving commitment of faith ‘wills’ to attach itself to truth that is absolute.14 The liberal tradition gives an inadequate account of the nature of truth because this account is not commensurate with the essence of faith. Bultmann’s critique of liberal theology is instructive in considering his treatment of Barth, for the two are marked by the same argumentative pattern. Where, in dealing with liberal theology, Bultmann holds that consideration of the essence of faith shows that Christian truth cannot be treated as historical, in turning to Barth, Bultmann argues that consideration of faith shows that Barth’s corrective is inadequate because it reduces Christian truth to an object of speculation. This notion emerges first in Bultmann’s response to Romans II. Guided more by his own interests than by the content of Barth’s text, Bultmann argues that Romans II must be approached through the question: ‘in what does the essence of faith consist?’15 Drawing on Barth’s strident assertions of the absolute difference between the reality of God and experience in the world, Bultmann holds that Barth rightly seeks to set faith apart from the phenomena that can be subjected to religious psychologizing; but Bult­ mann goes on to argue that Barth errs in guarding against psychologism by describing faith as a work of God that exists ‘beyond consciousness’.16 As Bultmann understands it, it is proper to distinguish faith from the activities of consciousness that are ‘understandable psychically and historically’;17 but it is still imperative to maintain that faith is a reality in consciousness. A denial of faith’s presence in consciousness is just as destructive as the affirmation that faith is comprehensible psychologically, for faith that is not something

12 Troeltsch, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology’, 17. 13 Bultmann, ‘Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement’, 35. 14 Bultmann, ‘Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement’, 31. 15 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans in its Second Edition’, in The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, 100-1. 16 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 110. To this point in his article, Bultmann has cited a range of texts from RB that describe faith as a reality that is wholly set apart from any conscious experience. 17 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 111.

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‘definite and precise’ in my consciousness is a speculative abstraction towards which it is possible to be indifferent, and indifference is the antithesis of the commitment of faith.18 Based on these claims, Bultmann concludes that Barth’s separation between the reality of faith and the concrete content of life destroys the essence of faith, for it reduces faith to a speculative abstrac­ tion. He describes Barth’s account of faith as a reality ‘beyond consciousness’ as a ‘speculation and an absurd one at that’.19 He concludes that faith must be ‘distinguished from the object of any speculation’ just ‘as strongly as Barth (with full right!) has separated faith from every psychic process’.20 Bultmann goes on to develop the charge of speculation by objecting to Barth’s claim that faith is a predicate of the eschatological rather than the phenomenal subject. His comments here show that Barth’s use of a broadly Kantian logic in ordering Christian thought around the standpoint of the eschatological subject leaves Barth vulnerable to concerns raised regarding Kant’s own work. As we saw in Chapter 3, Barth’s work mirrors Kant’s in deploying a logic according to which reason is permitted to construct standpoints around claims that are taken as true even though they cannot be seen as true from the standpoint of theoretical reason. Kant relies on this logic in developing the transcendental and practical perspectives; Johann Hamann famously claims that Kant’s reli­ ance on these perspectives shows that he has fallen into speculation, for the unknown subject that occupies Kant’s transcendental standpoint amounts to ‘a windy sough, a magic shadow play, at most’.21 Similarly, Barth deploys this logic in developing a standpoint grounded in the acknowledgement of the justifica­ tion of the sinner, which is never a matter of experience, and Bultmann refers to the subject of this eschatological perspective as an ‘astral body’ that ‘seems comic’ and leaves him ‘cold’.22 Returning to the theme of speculation, Bultmann writes: ‘what is the meaning of the talk about my “ego” that is not my ego?... Is not this alleged identity between my perceptible and imperceptible ego not in reality a speculation that is Gnostic or anthroposophic in nature?’23 Returning to his worries about indifference, Bultmann writes that ‘talk of the relationship of my ego to higher worlds, relations that are really beyond my consciousness, are matters of total indifference to me’.24

18 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 112. 19 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 110. 20 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 112. 21 J. G. Hamann, Metakritik über den Purismus der Vernunft, cited in Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, 58. This is ironically a criticism of Kant for which Barth has some sympathy. His 1922 lecture entitled ‘The Problem of Ethics Today’ includes a critique of the abstractness of the Kantian ethical subject (see ‘Das Problem der Ethik in der Gegenwart’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922-1925, 116-20; ET, ‘The Problem of Ethics Today’, in The Word of God and Theology, 146-9). 22 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 112. 23 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 110. 24 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 110.

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At this point, then, we can see that, for Bultmann, Barth’s attempt to protect faith from liberal psychologizing leads him into the same difficulty faced by liberal theology itself. Barth is no more successful in providing an account of Christian truth that is commensurate with the essence of faith than the Ritschlian tradition. Where Ritschlian thought reduces Christian truth to relativity by rooting it in history, Barth reduces it to speculative abstraction by separating it from that which is real in the believer’s life. Reinforcing the same point, this latter objection recurs as the leading motif of Bultmann’s treatment of Barth’s exposition of 1 Corinthians. In this piece, Bultmann argues that Barth’s privileging of 1 Corinthians 15 as the key to 1 Corinthians as a whole leaves Paul’s theology of ‘last things’ indistinguishable from the speculations of first-century mystery cults, for it is only through the account of love that Paul offers in 1 Corinthians 13 as the subjective side of eschatological reality that Paul’s account of last things is made a ‘reality in the life of Christians’ rather than an ‘object of speculation’.25 For Bultmann, eschato­ logical teaching must concern the concrete reality of individual existence lest it appear as ‘mere dogmatism or speculation’.26 Bultmann’s account of the speculation into which Barth has fallen is important for us in beginning the second part of this study. A series of comments regarding this account will be helpful for us going forward. The first point to be made is that Bultmann’s worry expresses the conceptual core of common criticisms of Barth’s positivism, fideism, and theological insularity. As Regin Prenter presents it, the crux of concerns regarding Barth’s positivism is that Barth presents Christian truth as an abstract datum for ‘mere accept­ ance’ without showing how it comes into relation to life in the world.27 As Paul Moser presents it, the crux of concerns regarding Barth’s fideism is that Barth separates Christian truth from human experience in such a way that this truth is immune from verification.28 As R. H. Roberts presents it, the crux of concerns regarding Barth’s theological insularity is that Barth’s theology amounts to a ‘gigantic celestial tautology’ that ‘hovers above us like a cathedral resting on a cloud’ because Barth does not address the ‘shared and public reality of the world in which we live’.29 These charges amount to restatements of Bultmann’s concern about Barth’s putative separation between the content 25 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth: The Resurrection of the Dead’, 78-81. 26 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth: The Resurrection of the Dead’, 70. 27 Prenter, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth’s Positivism of Revelation’, in Ronald Gregor Smith (ed.), Martin Rumscheidt (trans.), World Come of Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 105. 28 Paul K. Moser, The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Re-examined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100-4. 29 Roberts, ‘Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 145; ‘The Ideal and the Real in the Theology of Karl Barth’, in A Theology on its Way? (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), 61.

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of Christian proclamation and the lived experience of human subjects. We can sum up this concern in a single notion by borrowing Bernard Lonergan’s account of the extrinsicism that results from speaking of a particular reality without asking how it is real for me.30 Lonergan describes this extrinsicism as a kind of self-forgetfulness in which one’s own experience and judgement play no role in determining what one affirms. It is a self-forgetfulness of this kind that a host of readers has presented under different labels in claiming that Barth separates Christian truth from what human beings experience as real. The danger, as these readers see it, is that the self-forgetfulness of the extrinsicist amounts to abdicating one’s responsibility as a centre of judgement and falling into an inauthenticity in which one’s affirmations diverge from what one experiences and understands.31 The second point to be made here is that worries about Barth’s putative extrinsicism are bound up with one of the basic problems of modern theology. An extrinsicism of the kind described by Lonergan is the ill that modern theologians have sought to avoid by devoting attention to the problem of appropriation. As it has emerged in the modern period, the problem of appropriation is the problem of retaining the authenticity of the self as a centre of judgement in assenting to Christian truth. Helmut Thielicke identifies this problem as the central theme of modern theology;32 he claims that every fresh theological inquiry over the last two centuries has been generated by the question of the possibility, presuppositions, and conditions under which the Christian gospel can be appropriated in a way that allows the individual’s experience and understanding to accord with the reality of faith. The veracity of this judgement is clear enough in light of modern attempts to ground the affirmation of theological truth in history, ethics, or experience. To bypass attempts of this kind is, for Thielicke, to renounce the cultural adulthood that is the legacy of the Enlightenment and to fall back into an immature authori­ tarianism that transmits tradition without coming to grips with its meaning in the modern world. The third point for us concerns the theological significance of the worry about extrinsicism. As a historical judgement, Thielicke’s account of the place of the problem of appropriation in modern theology is perceptive; yet his formulation of the problem is not the most felicitous, for it obscures the theological point that is at stake by annexing the matter to a selfcongratulatory view of the cultural adulthood of contemporary human beings. 30 Lonergan’s account here is a description of a position that he does not himself espouse. See Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method 1, ed. Robert M. Doran and Robert C. Croken (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 108-11. 31 Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method, 108-22. 32 For what follows, see Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, 23-75. Thielicke is a helpful conversation partner here because he constructs his entire prolegomena around the problem of appropriation.

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The theological significance of the problem is best seen by returning to Bultmann’s treatment of Romans II33 In this treatment, Bultmann argues that the question of appropriation derives its significance from the way that it preserves the distinction between law and gospel in relation to the reality of faith itself. Echoing concerns that were central to Herrmann’s work, Bultmann claims that faith and obedience are in continual danger of becoming matters of the compulsion of law rather than of the freedom brought by the gospel, for it is not self-evident that the obedience of faith is distinct from the acts of will that mark obedience to the law, and faith itself becomes a mere act of will when it is understood as assent to the teaching of the Church. Drawing from the historical work of Wilhelm Heitmüller, a colleague of Herrmann’s in Marburg, Bultmann argues, first, that this danger is rooted in shortcomings in Paul’s own thought, in which the distinction between the obedience of faith and the obedience of works is undeveloped; second, that the great significance of Luther’s work consists in the development of an account of appropriation through which Pauline faith is distinguished from a work of the law.34 As Bultmann presents it, Luther recognizes that obedience no less than works is ‘dead’ if it is not accompanied by ‘personal appropriation’ through which the object of faith imprints itself on the believer’s life so that this obedience is responsive rather than assertive. The key, for Bultmann, is that Luther is enabled to fill the gap that exists in Paul’s thinking because he constructs his work around the subjective question of appropriation: ‘how do I get a gracious God?’ Guided by this ‘how’ question, Luther came to see that the appropri­ ation that must accompany obedience consists in an act of ‘free selfcommitment’ brought about by the impression of God’s activity on the believer’s life. For Bultmann, the problem of appropriation is of ‘decisive significance’ because it alone draws theology away from an extrinsicism that reduces faith to a pharisaical act of will. The final point for us here concerns the role that a particular conception of human freedom plays in this construal of the problem of appropriation. Hovering around the margins of Bultmann’s account is the notion that, in its assertion of the need for Christian truth to make itself real for me so that I may act with ‘inner veracity’, the problem of appropriation is rooted in Kant’s conception of freedom as autonomy.35 This relationship is not accidental, for Bultmann’s construal of the question is heavily influenced by Herrmann, who thematizes the problem of appropriation within a system that owes a considerable debt to Kant.36 The programmatic connection between a 33 For what follows, see Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 113-14. 34 See Heitmüller, Luthers Stellung in der Religionsgeschichte des Christentums (Marburg: Eiwert, 1917). 35 Bultmann, ‘Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans’, 114. 36 See the discussion of Herrmann and the problem of appropriation in Chapter 1, as well as The Communion of the Christian with God, 119-24.

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modern notion of autonomy and the problem of appropriation is developed at length by Thielicke, who tells us that the problem of appropriation has been unavoidable in the modern tradition since Kant ‘discovered’ the notion of autonomy.37 Kant’s account of this notion pushes believers to ask how they may participate in Christian faith while retaining their dignity as self­ legislating centers of judgement. It serves, in Thielicke’s words, to introduce a ‘veritable maze of new problems’ to theology; but it is crucial for Thielicke that this development did not represent a ‘shaking’ and ‘unsettling’ of the theological tradition from without, for the notion of autonomy is not a foreign imposition on Christian thought but rather the further development of the Pauline and Reformation antithesis between ‘servile obedience’ and the ‘free­ dom of a Christian’.38 Properly understood, attempts to show how human agents may retain their dignity as free, self-legislating agents are natural extensions of the Pauline and Lutheran concern to distinguish faith from the compulsion of law. Kant’s understanding of autonomy appears, on Thielicke’s terms, as an extension of a biblical understanding of Christian freedom. The question of appropriation is nothing more than the ‘Reformation dialectic of law and gospel taken up in another way’.39 It is the logical development of the interpretation of Christian freedom in light of a modern understanding of autonomy. It is this connection between Kant’s conception of freedom as autonomy and the modern question of appropriation that I began to develop in Chapter 1 in introducing the question of freedom as an element in the ordering of thought. In Chapter 1,1 introduced the notions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought as the constitutive elements of the ordering of thought by showing how each of these notions shapes the modern tradition. At that point in the study I put off the task of providing a detailed account of the question of freedom on the grounds that later discussions would provide a vantage-point from which the force of the question could be seen more clearly. Encounter with Bultmann’s work positions us now to see the importance of the question of freedom. This question stands at the root of the most common criticisms of Barth’s work, for it is the notion of freedom understood in terms of autonomy that funds worries about the putative extrinsicism of Barth’s theology. These worries will be central to the third part of this study. One of the basic claims that I wish to develop is that Barth is best understood to deal with these worries by developing a highly ramified account of the movement from faith to understanding. Drawing from a conception that he developed in engaging with Paul’s theology of the resur­ rection, Barth comes to give an account of the way in which Christian truth is

37 Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, 38. 39 Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, 38-9.

38 Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, 38-9.

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real for the believer by giving an account of what it means to understand this truth in the full ‘range’ that it possesses by virtue of its rooting in the will of God. At the heart of this account is a conception of the way that thought comes to be reordered by theological understanding in such a way that a kind of inauthenticity threatens, not when the question of appropriation is bypassed, but rather when this question is thematized as if it were conceivable that Christian truth might not be real for the individual. I aim to show that the contrast between these notions turns finally on a contrast between thought that orders its activities in accordance with a conception of autonomy, and thought that orders its activities in accordance with a conception of obedience.

Barth on Appropriation and the Integrity of Faith The aim of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for this demonstration by considering how the question of theological understanding comes to the fore through Barth’s dogmatic work during the 1920s. It will be worth our while to approach this consideration by way of a contrast that Barth develops between Lutheran and Reformed theology in his 1923 lectures on the Reformed confessional statements, for this contrast serves to introduce a conceptual constellation that is central both to Barth’s response to Bultmann’s objection and to his wider work during the 1920s. Barth’s lecture course on the theology of the Reformed confessions is one in a series of courses on Reformation theology that Barth gave during the first years of his teaching in Göttingen. Seeking to fill gaps in his own theological knowledge, Barth lectured on the Heidelberg Catechism (winter 1921-2), the theologies of Calvin (summer 1922), Zwingli (winter 1922-3), and the Reformed confessions (summer 1923), before turning his hand to lectures on Schleiermacher during the winter of 1923-4. One of the consistent features of these early lectures is the development of systematic contrasts between Lutheran and Reformed theology. In his lectures on the Reformed confessions, this tendency issues in a comparison between the way that Lutheran and Reformed theologians orient themselves in dealing with soteriological questions. The starting-point for this comparison is the claim that Lutheran and Reformed theologians are united because they maintain, over against the old church’, that God and faith ‘belong together’.40 Barth suggests that this assertion, taken from Luther’s ‘Larger Catechism’, represents the fundamental insight that both Lutheran and Reformed theolo­ gians urged against Roman Catholicism.41 For him, this assertion stands at the heart of the Reformation; yet he goes on to argue that Lutheran and Reformed

40 Barth, Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften 1923, 128; ET, 81. 41 See here UCR I, 207-11; ET, 169-71.

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theologians are led to differing construals of this ‘belonging together’ because they pose different questions that are reflective of two different conceptions of the proper ordering of Christian thought. In speaking, first, of Lutheran theology, Barth claims that Luther’s primary question is the subjective ‘how’ question that Bultmann argues is of ‘decisive significance’ for Christian theology. Barth echoes Bultmann in holding that Lutheran theology is best understood through the question: ‘how can I get a gracious God?’; yet where Bultmann claims that this question helps Luther to fill a gap in Paul’s thinking about faith, Barth presents it as a ‘narrowly religious’ question that is reflective of a deleterious orientation towards immediacy that is typical of Lutheran theology more generally.42 According to Barth, Luther is led to this ‘how’ question by a conviction regarding the pastoral inadequacy of ‘Roman doctrine’, which failed to comfort the Chris­ tian soul by showing how one may acquire a gracious God.43 Confronted by a soul in need of succour, Luther develops an aversion to theological accounts that move attention away from the sphere of flesh and blood in which the struggle for faith occurs. The result is the orientation of Lutheran theology as a whole towards the immediate, an orientation that Barth sees reflected in Luther’s ‘how’ question, in the ‘law-sin-faith’ nexus generated by this question, and in the Christological and sacramental positions of the Lutheran Church. Barth holds that, where Reformed Christology and sacramental theology take their shape from Paul’s instruction to believers to ‘seek the things that are above’, both the genus majestaticum of Lutheran Christology and the Lutheran insistence on the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the sacraments represent attempts to ensure that theological attention does not stray from the immediacy of God’s presence in the world.44 For Barth, Lutheran thinking about soteriology and the belonging together of God and faith is wholly shaped by the orientation towards immediacy expressed in the ‘how’ question. Identification of this orientation is decisive for Barth both as a means of understanding the Lutheran tradition and as a way of showing how this tradition sowed the seeds for the emergence of nineteenth-century neo-Protestantism. Four things about the constellation that results from this orientation strike Barth as significant. The first is that the problem to which a solution is sought in soteriological reflection is located immanently in the unrighteousness of the sinner 45 The second is that, because the problem is found in the anthropological sphere, the answer, too, moves

42 Barth, Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften 1923, 112-13, 127-8, 169, 170, 242; ET, 71-2, 81, 107, 108, 155. 43 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 112; ET, 71. 44 Barth, Die Theologie Zwinglis, 290-2; Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 261-5; ET, 167-70. 45 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 113; ET, 72.

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along an axis that is located within this sphere. Luther asks how the sinner may find a gracious God; his answer moves on an axis running horizontally between human faith and human work.46 The third point of significance is then that, having come to emphasize faith as the solution to the sinner’s predicament, Luther offers an account of the ‘belonging together’ of God and faith in which faith is the determinative term. Drawing from Luther’s famous claims that to have faith is to get a gracious God, and that to believe truly is to have a true God, Barth argues that Luther presents faith as the subject to which a true or false God is associated as a predicate of faith’s own activity.47 God and faith thus ‘belong together’ in a movement in which the anthropological pole is determinative. The fourth point of significance is then that the anthropological emphasis generated by the Lutheran ‘how’ question leaves Lutheran theology unable to fill the pastoral role that it sets for itself, for the comfort of the Christian soul is nowhere to be found so long as the Christian’s reception of a gracious God is subject to the ebb and flow of human faith.48 At this point, then, we can see that, for Barth, there is a self-defeating element present in Lutheran thinking about faith, for Luther’s concern for the sinner leads him to emphasize an immediacy that places too much pressure on the believer’s faith. The ‘belonging together’ of God and faith breaks apart because it hangs on the integrity of human activity. The terms in which Barth depicts this Lutheran failure are harshly critical; it is worth noting, first, that Barth retracts his critical assessment of Luther’s account in his dogmatics lectures in Göttingen and Münster;49 second, that the harshness of his presentation may well have been shaped by a reaction against the work of Georg Wobbermin, a colleague of Barth’s in Göttingen who was in the midst of an attempt to appropriate Luther’s account of the ‘belonging together’ of God and faith for a theological project that placed itself in a line running from Luther through Kant to Schleiermacher.50 Wobbermin presents God as the objective correlate of the subjective movement of faith, a presen­ tation to which, as we shall see, Barth was at pains to respond through the 1920s.

46 Barth, ‘Reformierte Lehre, ihr Wesen und ihre Ausgabe’, in Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, 200; ET, ‘The Substance and Task of Reformed Doctrine’, in The Word of God and Theology, 223. Barth delivered this lecture in September 1923, shortly after the completion of his lecture course on the theology of the Reformed confessions. 47 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 127-8; ET, 81. Barth is citing here from Luther’s exposition of the first commandment in his larger catechism. 48 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 191-2, 197; ET, 122, 125. 49 See UCR I, 13-14; ET, 10-11; Christliche Dogmatik, 98-9. 50 Wobbermin wrote a three-volume systematic theology, with volumes published in 1913, 1922, and 1925, but see, more accessibly, ‘Wie gehören für Luther Glaube und Gott zuhause?’ Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 36 (1928), 51-60; ‘Gibt es eine Linie LutherSchleiermacher?’ Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 39 (1931), 250-60.

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Having spelled out the dilemma that attends the Lutheran conception of God’s relation to faith, Barth goes on to argue that Reformed theology is characterized by a different conception of this relation that is reflective of a different question and a fundamentally different ordering of thought. Where Luther asks how a human being is saved, Barth argues that the primary question for Reformed theologians is who it is that saves sinners.51 As Barth understands it, this shift is not accidental, for it issues from Calvin’s rejection of the Lutheran emphasis on immediacy in favour of the application of the principle that phenomena are best understood in light of their origin and end.52 Calvin is set apart from Luther, on Barth’s telling, because his work is informed by the interest of a genuine Renaissance humanism in understand­ ing human life in its totality. Rather than seeing Christianity as the answer to the ‘narrowly religious’ question of the salvation of the sinner, Calvin sees it as the answer to the classical question of the good for human life in the whole of its movement from origin to end.53 For Calvin, then, soteriological reflection must be integrated into the account of the origin and end of creaturely life that is given in the doctrine of God.54 Barth argues that this integration is typical of Reformed theology as a whole, which recognized that the ‘human’s way of salvation’ must be understood in terms of its 'beginning and end’, and thus took Luther’s problem of the ‘path to salvation’ out of theological ‘isolation’ and worked it into theology proper.55 For Barth, then, attention to the origin and end of the movement of reconciliation allows Reformed theology to move from the ‘anthropological’ perspective associated with the Lutheran ‘how’ question to the theological perspective that is opened up by asking who it is that saves sinners.56 On Barth’s telling, this shift inverts each of the facets of Lutheran theology that we encountered earlier. To begin with, where Lutheran theology turns attention to the human by emphasizing the impurity of the sinner as the problem to be addressed, the Reformed place the emphasis in the divine sphere by concerning themselves with the insult to God that occurs in human idolatry.57

51 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 127-8, cf. 113; ET, 81, cf. 72. 52 Barth roots this principle in Plato’s influence on Calvin. See Theologie des reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 74-5; ET, 45-6; Die Theologie Calvins, 205-6, 369; ET, 155, 273; Die Theologie Zwinglis, 492-3. 53 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 147-8; ET, 93-4; cf. Die Theologie Calvins, 89—90; ET, 67. In his lectures on Ephesians, Barth suggests that it is no accident that Calvin felt a particular affection for Ephesians 1, for Calvin possessed a peerless appreciation for the importance of the movement that this chapter traces from the origin of creaturely life in the blessings of God to the term of creaturely life in returning praise to God (Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 77-8). 54 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 123; ET, 78. 55 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 123, 119; ET, 78, 75. 56 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 242; ET, 155. 57 Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 114; ET, 72.

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Secondly, where Luther’s answer to the ‘how’ question moves on the horizon­ tal axis between human faith and human work, Barth argues that the Reformed answer to the ‘who’ question moves on the vertical axis between that which is accomplished by God and that which is accomplished by human beings.58 For Barth, this means that the emphasis in Reformed theology falls not on the kind of psychologism required to distinguish faith from other acts of will, but rather on God as the source and basis of faith.59 This generates, thirdly, a different conception of the ‘belonging together’ of God and faith. Where the Lutheran account of this relationship starts from the side of human faith and presents God as an object that faith draws to itself, Reformed theologians insist that faith is significant, not because it is the means through which one acquires a gracious God, but because it is a gift given by God in which God himself is present.60 God thus remains the subject who affects the union between himself and faith.61 Fourthly, this emphasis on God as the source of faith allows the believer to find the comfort that Luther sought, for now salvation rests with God apart from the inconstancy of human faith.62 Faith’s efficacy is rooted not in its capacity to draw a gracious God to itself, but rather in the fact that it is itself a gift of a gracious God. At this point, then, we can see that, for Barth, Reformed theologians’ adherence to the principle that phenomena are to be understood in terms of their origin and end allows them to present an account of the belonging together of God and faith in which the integrity of both God and faith is preserved. The understanding of the relation between God and faith that results is crucial for two reasons. The first is that this understanding provides the beginnings of a response to Bultmann’s criticisms by showing that, on Barth’s terms, something has gone wrong in thinking about faith if the primary concern is to distinguish faith as a human act from other human acts. The second is then that this understanding becomes a formative feature of Barth’s work because it determines his conception of the proper object of dogmatic study through the 1920s. We shall see that, in his early dogmatics, Barth aligns himself with elements in the liberal tradition in supposing that the Reformation notion of a correlation between God and faith presents Christian theology with its proper object; he then proceeds to distinguish himself primarily by insisting that this correlation must be viewed in terms of what I have called the ‘metaphysics of the Bible’. A demonstration of these claims will emerge now as we turn to a treatment of Barth’s earlier dogmatics.

58 59 60 61 62

‘Reformierte Lehre, ihr Wesen und ihre Ausgabe’, 200; ET, 223. Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 114; ET, 72. Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 114; ET, 72. Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 128; ET, 81. Die Theologie der reformierten Bekenntnisschriften, 191-7; ET, 122-5.

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The Ordering of the Christian Mind 4.3. THE ORDERING OF THOUGHT IN BARTH’S DOGMATICS DURING THE 1920S

Barth’s Conception of the Task of Dogmatics A brief word about the progression of Barth’s dogmatic work is appropriate in order to introduce the remainder of this chapter. Barth began to lecture on dogmatics in Göttingen during the summer of 1924 after the apprenticeship that he undertook through the historical and exegetical lectures that he delivered through the early 1920s. He worked through prolegomena to dog­ matics during the summer of 1924, the doctrines of God and of humanity during the winter of 1924-5, and reconciliation and redemption during the summer of 1925 and into the winter of 1925-6, after he had moved to Münster.63 Having taken up a post in Münster, he began the cycle over again, expanding and revising his earlier lectures and expecting this time to publish the results. He lectured on prolegomena during the winter of 1926-7 and published the material as the first volume of a work entitled Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf. He turned to the doctrine of God and lectured on dogmatics through the summer of 1927 and the winter of 1927-8, but this material never made it to publication. He was already making notes for a revision of the prolegomena in 1928; during the summer of 1929, he devoted a sabbatical that was to have been used to prepare parts II and III of his dogmatics for publication to intensive study intended to aid these revisions. The precise point at which he decided to start his dogmatics over is not clear, but, having moved to Bonn, Barth began a third cycle of dogmatics lectures during the summer of 1931 and carried on with it until his retirement in the early 1960s. The material from these lectures is published as the massive and unfinished Church Dogmatics. It is the dogmatic material that Barth develops in Göttingen and Münster that concerns us as we trace the continuity between Barth’s earlier work on Paul and his study of Anselm. The discussion of the belonging together of God and faith that we have undertaken thus far represents a key point from which to approach this material, for the conception of the task of dogmatics that underwrites this earlier work has its ground in Barth’s understanding of this relation. Barth first takes up the question of the task of dogmatic science in the opening pages of his dogmatics lectures in Göttingen; the form in which he treats the question is shaped by the modern emphasis on the problem of appropriation. The force of this latter problem led self-consciously modern 63 Barth himself never prepared this material for publication. It was published in three volumes during the 1980s under the title used for Barth’s lecture course, Unterricht in der christlichen Religion. The first volume-and-a-half of this material is translated in a work entitled The Göttingen Dogmatics.

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theologians to consider whether dogmatics is to be thought of as the attempt to ascertain and present the determining grounds of faith itself, such that faith is the object of dogmatic study, or whether dogmatics ought to be seen as the attempt to raise the knowledge in which the Church places its faith to scientific standing, such that the object of faith is the proper topic of dogmatics.64 In both his Göttingen and Münster dogmatics, Barth takes it that the Reformed understanding of the belonging together of God and faith provides the clue to answering this question. In the opening of his Göttingen lectures, Barth claims that dogmatics ought to be understood as ‘scientific reflection on the Word of God’ because the Word of God represents a ‘mediating term’ that ensures the right kind of ‘correlation’ between God and faith.65 Barth goes on to develop and defend this notion by setting it in contrast to alternative conceptions of the task of dogmatics that reflect a failure to understand the way that God and faith belong together. The first alternative from which Barth distinguishes his theology of the Word of God is a conception of dogmatics as a ‘science of God’. Considerable care is called for in working through Barth’s description of this position. As Barth presents it, a science of this kind is marked by the attempt to ‘ground’ the truth of God through speculative reasoning rather than through the Word that God speaks to faith 66 It is comprised of ‘philosophical-metaphysical’ speech about God that does not attend to the ‘original speaking by God’ that brings forth faith.67 In failing to attend to the Word that God speaks to faith, a ‘science of God’ fails to give faith its place in ‘fixing’ or determining the object of dogmatic study. It thus ‘restricts’ or ‘destroys’ the ‘correlation’ between God and faith.68 It is the severing of the correlation between God and faith that concerns Barth in his criticism of a ‘science of God’; but he introduces a measure of confusion through a pair of underdeveloped historiographical references. He first describes a dogmatics that severs God from faith as a conflation of dogmatics and metaphysics that has become impossible since Kant; he then refers to Thomas Aquinas as a ‘master of metaphysical theology’.69 These claims have created the misleading impression that the target of Barth’s criticism is medieval scholasticism,70 and that Barth employs a historiograph­ ical scheme in which Kant’s work represents the decisive terminus of a metaphysical form of thought that determined the earlier tradition. Both conceptions invert Barth’s meaning. Barth speaks of Thomas in this context

64 This formulation is taken from Julius Kaftan, who wrote a dogmatics on which Barth drew in his Göttingen lectures. See Kaftan, Dogmatik (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1897), 5-6. 65 UCR I, 8-13; ET, 7-11. 66 UCR I, 13; ET, 10. 67 UCR I, 16; ET, 12. 68 UCR I, 12-13; ET, 10. 69 UCR I, 12-13; ET, 10; UCR II, 1; ET, 317. 70 Asprey, Eschatological Presence, 100-2.

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in order to show that in fact Thomas does not develop a ‘science of God’, for, as Barth understands him, Thomas takes the articles of faith as the principles of his work and recognizes that God must speak through these articles if God is to be known.71 Furthermore, if we take Barth seriously in his claim that a ‘metaphysical’ dogmatics bypasses the speaking of God and does not allow faith its place in ‘fixing’ the object, then we must recognize that Kant’s rational religion is much closer to the paradigmatic instance of ‘metaphysical’ theology than to the end of a metaphysical tradition.72 On the terms that Barth has set, the reference to Kant must surely strike us as odd, for Kant’s aim is precisely to break apart the correlation of God and faith so that God might be spoken of within the bounds of reason alone. The upshot of this recognition is that Barth ought not to be taken to be situating himself in the anti-metaphysical tradition of Kant and the Ritschlian school. In opposing a ‘metaphysical’ scientia de Deo, Barth is setting himself against systems of thought that speak of either God or human beings in abstraction from the relation that is created between them by the Word of God.73 For Barth, resistance to this metaphysics is best accomplished through a disciplined Protestant theology that does not break apart the belonging together of God and faith. Barth thus distinguishes his understanding of dogmatic science, first, from a conception in which faith disappears as a factor that conditions human speech about God. He goes on to separate his work from a second alternative that overemphasizes faith as a decisive determinant of dogmatic speech. As he presents it, an overemphasis of this kind is operative in the stereotypically modern claim that dogmatics is to be understood as scientific reflection on faith, piety, and religion. The modern turn to faith as the object of dogmatic study has its ground in a proper recognition of the correlation between God and faith, but it goes astray in supposing that this correlation licenses a reversal through which dogmatics may be undertaken through a consideration of faith itself.74 We shall come shortly to an examination of the logic that Barth sees as the ground of this reversal; for now, we may content ourselves with noting, first, that Barth takes a reversal of this kind to be the result of the ‘Copernican revolution’ through which Schleiermacher normalized the

71 UCR I, 13; ET, 10. This is made clearer in Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik, in which his comments on a scientia de Deo are reproduced almost verbatim, but in which a clarifying sentence is added to explain that the reference to Thomas is intended to show that even the ‘ancients’ who spoke of dogmatics as a scientia de Deo did not use the phrase in the sense that Barth is condemning (Christliche Dogmatik, 87-8). 72 The reference to Kant disappears from the passage in the Christliche Dogmatik in which Barth discusses a scientia de Deo (see Christliche Dogmatik, 87-8). 73 Asprey’s work is helpful here, for he shows that, insofar as there is an ‘anti-metaphysical’ side to Barth’s thinking, it is rooted not in a philosophical empiricism but rather in a resistance to the idolatrous abstractions that human beings construct in order to evade the presence of God (see Eschatological Presence, 14, 29-30, 97-105). 74 UCR I, 13-14; ET, 10-11.

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psychological turn of German pietism and English Presbyterianism;75 second, that Barth’s worry here is that the correlation between God and faith has once again been lost. As Barth understands it, the corollary of the view that faith is the object of dogmatic study is a perception of God as the objective correlate of human acts of faith rather than the acting subject who gives faith. On these terms, the belonging together of God and faith has again been lost, for God is reduced to a projected image of faith’s own activity. For Barth, this second conception of dogmatic science abandons the Reformation correlation and runs into the arms of Feuerbach.76 In opposition to the distorted conceptions of dogmatic science present in both a metaphysical scientia de Deo and a modern Glaubenslehre, Barth takes it that the clue to identifying the object of dogmatics is found in the conception of the belonging together of God and faith that we encountered in his lectures on the Reformed Confessions. This conception neither severs the correlation between God and faith nor seeks to understand it from the side of faith, but rather seeks to understand it in terms of its origin and end in the activity of God. Barth supposes that, in so doing, it ensures that this correlation appears in its proper light. He goes on to suggest that dogmatic science ought to find its object in a reality that contains within itself the structure of this Reformed understanding of God’s relation to faith. It is here that the notion of the Word of God comes to the fore. As Barth understands it, this Word contains the right kind of correlation between the divine and the creaturely, for it is a communicative event from which neither the speaker nor the hearer can be abstracted; yet, it is an event that can be understood in terms of the activity of God alone, for God alone is its speaking subject. For Barth, the Word of God emerges as the proper object of dogmatic reflection because it represents a mediating term’ that ‘secures’ the proper correlation between God and faith.77 Tn the mediating term through which the correlation of God and faith (which the moderns are right to stress and which Luther did not refrain from establishing), i.e., precisely in the mediating term Deus dixit, God is obviously the subject, not man.’78 Thus, ‘if dogmatics is to speak of God, and if as Protestant dogmatics it can do so only in a correlation of God and faith, then there is no doubt that it must find its first, primary and principle theme in this generative basis, in this confidential turning and address of God’.79 The Word of God thus emerges as the proper object of dogmatics because it secures an insight that Barth sees running continuously from the Reformation through the tradition of Schleiermacher and Ritschl, namely, the insight that God and 75 UCR I, 10-12; ET, 8-9. 76 UCR I, 13-14; ET, 11. 77 See Barth’s repeated use of the notion that the Word of God is a ‘Mittelsatz’ that preserves the right correlation between God and faith (UCR I, 13; ET, 10-11). 78 UCR I, 13; ET, 11. The insertion of parentheses here is an attempt to render more readable an awkward sentence in Barth’s text. 79 UCR I, 15; ET, 12.

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faith ‘belong together’. It is itself privileged because it serves to set this correlation in its proper light. A series of comments about the significance of these notions is in order. The first comment is that these notions give grounds for reconsideration of the relationship between Barth’s earlier theology of the Word of God and the putative anthropocentrism of the modern tradition. For all of the weighted rhetoric that Barth deploys against the liberal tradition in his treatments of Paul and his occasional lectures, when he turns his hand to an ordered account of Christian dogmatics, he falls back on instincts formed by the great liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century. He follows his predecessors in locating the centre of gravity of Reformation theology in an account of a correlation between God and faith, and supposing that it is this correlation that Christian theology is to trace. He identifies the Word of God as the decisive theme of Christian dogmatics not because this notion possesses a critical force that allows him to avoid all forms of correlationism, but rather because it allows him to preserve this correlation and to set it in its proper light. The notion of the Word of God permits Barth to understand the correlation between God and creatures in terms of its origin and end in the activity of God rather than in terms of its immediacy in creaturely faith. In turning to a conception of this kind, Barth is set apart from the modern tradition not through a totalizing rejection, but rather through the recovery of a particular form of metaphysics that allows a typically modern point of emphasis to appear in its proper light. This is a metaphysics that, with Plato, Paul, and Calvin, understands phe­ nomena in terms of their origin and end rather than following the modern tradition in privileging the immediate. A form of correlationalism remains in place; but it is refigured through the recovery of a Pauline metaphysics. The point may be illustrated through a brief comparison between Ritschl and Barth. The pairing is important because, on one level, Barth echoes Ritschl quite straightforwardly in establishing the correlation between God and faith as a decisive criterion for theological reflection. In Ritschl’s work, this correl­ ation appears as the key to identifying both the object of theological study, and the form of thought that theology demands. In the first place, Ritschl supposes that Luther’s correlation presents a ‘criterion’ through which the believer is able to identify the God to whom theology ought to attend.80 Traditional proofs of the existence of God are to be dismissed, on Ritschl’s telling, because they lead not to a divine subject who may be seen as an object of faith, but rather to an abstract conception of totality. Anticipating Barth’s own rejection of a ‘metaphysical’ scientia de Deo, Ritschl claims that attempts at a ‘scientific’ proof of God’s existence apart from God’s relation to faith lead not to the God who is the proper object of religious interest but rather to an abstract,

80 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 211-14.

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depersonalized concept.81 Luther’s correlation thus serves in the first instance for Ritschl as the clue to theology’s proper object; it appears again as the clue to the proper form of theological knowledge. In treating Christology, Ritschl argues that the Latin tradition in particular fails to give an adequate account of Christ’s two natures because it seeks to develop this account within ‘the sphere of disinterested scientific knowledge’.82 It is plagued by an ‘inability to distin­ guish scientific from religious knowledge’ and thus fails to recognize that one ought to come to affirm Christ’s divinity on the basis of one’s own trust in his work; but the difficulty begins to be resolved through Luther’s thinking, which establishes the ‘necessary relation’ between God and faith as the key to identifying a properly religious form of knowledge.83 Luther is able to grasp the union of Christ’s two natures because he does not attempt to describe it outside of the correlation between God and faith. He gives due weight to Christ’s humanity through the recognition that it is Christ’s human achieve­ ment in founding the kingdom of God that is the basis of faith; he is then able to give due weight to Christ’s divinity by recognizing that, because God alone is worthy of faith, faith in Christ brings with it an acknowledgement of Christ’s divinity.84 What we find in Ritschl’s work, then, is an approach to dogmatics that establishes a pattern for Barth’s earlier theology in identifying the correlation between God and faith as the criterion through which proper forms of dogmatic thought are identified. Both take this correlation as the clue to the particular kind of theology that they pursue; the distinction between them is a function of the way that this correlation is to be understood. Ritschl is clear that this correlation must be understood from the side of human faith, for faith comes first in the order of knowing and grounds the specifically religious form of judgement that speech about God requires. In Ritschl’s view, critics who see an inversion of theology and anthropology in the claim that faith is the ‘immediate object of theological cognition’ need simply acquire a ‘thor­ ough understanding of the elementary distinction between the ratio essendi and the ratio cognoscendi.85 By contrast, Barth holds that, while Ritschl is right to say that attempts to speak of God apart from faith do represent steps towards an inappropriately ‘disinterested’ scientia de Deo, the relation between God and faith must itself be understood from the side of God because it is divine activity that is the principle of the relation. Faith may come first in the order of knowing, but, unless it is viewed in terms of its origin in the work of God, it is misunderstood. Barth’s work in his historical lectures convinces him

81 82 83 84 85

Ritschl, Ritschl, Ritschl, Ritschl, Ritschl,

The The The The The

Christian Doctrine of Justification Christian Doctrine of Justification Christian Doctrine of Justification Christian Doctrine of Justification Christian Doctrine of Justification

and Reconciliation, and Reconciliation, and Reconciliation, and Reconciliation, and Reconciliation,

214-26. 390-8. 391-8. 363-5, 391-3. 3, 226, 399.

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that, where faith in its immediacy is made the principle of theological reflec­ tion, the quality of faith is made determinative of the kind of God who is known, and faith is prevented from fulfilling its proper function in bringing rest to the sinner. In the end, then, while the early Barth follows Ritschl in adopting Luther’s correlation between God and faith as the clue to the proper object of dogmatic science, he departs from Ritschl in the way that this correlation is to be viewed. He insists that God’s relation to faith must be understood in terms of its origin and end in God. Reconstruction of a particularly Reformed relation understanding of the relation between God and faith during his historical lectures in Göttingen is decisive for his percep­ tion of the proper form of dogmatics. The second point to be made about Barth’s emphasis on the ‘belonging together’ of God and faith in his early account of dogmatic science concerns the distinctions that this account generates between the movements of thought that are typical of Barth’s earlier and later dogmatic work. In both the Göttingen and Münster dogmatics, Barth emphasizes the role that this cor­ relation plays in establishing the proper object of dogmatics. We have seen that, in the Göttingen dogmatics, Barth proposes a theology of the Word of God not as an alternative to theological correlationism, but rather as the ‘mediating term’ that ensures that the correlation of God and faith is under­ stood correctly. This same notion is present in Barth’s Münster dogmatics, which suggests that the theology of the Word of God does not ‘destroy’ the correlation between God and faith, but rather makes clear that the terms in the relation are not ‘symmetrical’, and cannot be reversed.86 In both the Göttingen and Münster dogmatics, this emphasis on the ‘belonging together’ of God is then determinative for Barth’s understanding of the proper movement of dogmatic thought. In both, Barth claims that theological reflection is to move from God as the principle of the fellowship between God and creatures, to human beings as God’s counterpart in the relation of God and faith, and then from this counterpart, now understood in terms of its origin, back to God.87 On this account, the Reformation correlation of God and faith estab­ lishes that God and creatures constitute the poles between which theological reflection moves. This correlation secures the creature’s place as the second pole that is decisive for theological reflection,88 for it stipulates that the creature is necessarily ‘co-posited’ in the Word of God.89 ‘The hearing human is included in the concept of the Word of God just as much as the speaking God.’ In a line that would later cause him considerable dismay, he concludes that the Word of God is therefore ‘only accessible to existentialist thinking’.90 86 Christliche Dogmatik, 87-8. 88 HCl? I, 207-14; ET, 168-73. 90 Christliche Dogmatik, 111.

87 UCR I, 99; ET, 82; Christliche Dogmatik, 108-9. 89 Christliche Dogmatik, 111.

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Matters stand rather differently in the Church Dogmatics. In this latter work, talk of the Word of God as the term that secures the belonging together of God and faith disappears, and with it goes the more general correlationism that marks Barth’s earlier work. Barth no longer claims that an account of revelation requires consideration of the human recipient because of the correlation between God and faith; rather, he claims that subjective reception of revelation must be considered so that an account of the work of the Trinity can completed through a treatment of the work of the Holy Spirit.91 On this scheme, it is the fact that the outer works of God correspond to God’s inner being that demands that the subjective recipient of revelation be considered. Talk of the human recipient of revelation as necessarily ‘co-posited’ in the Word of God as the proper correlate of God’s activity is replaced by talk of the human recipient as ‘contingently included’ in an event that occurs properly amongst the persons of the Godhead.92 On these terms, the ‘correlation’ that determines Barth’s more mature thinking is the ‘correlation’ between God’s inner being and outer works. The Barth of the Church Dogmatics argues that the proper movement of dogmatic thought is a ceaseless oscillation between the affirmations that God reveals himself and that God reveals himself.93 This claim displaces the faithful human creature as one of the poles that determines theological reflection. Rather than claiming that theology traces a movement between God and faith, Barth now establishes God’s being and God’s activity as the decisive poles between which dogmatic thought moves. The result of this shift is that Barth’s mature dogmatics can be described, in the words of Eberhard Jiingel, as ‘a thorough exegesis’ of the claim that God corresponds to himself.94 Whereas the correlationism of Barth’s Göttingen and Münster dogmatics contains important points of continuity with the neoProtestant suggestion that dogmatics follows an ellipse that has God and creatures as its two foci, Barth’s Church Dogmatics take divine being and activity as its decisive concerns. A number of factors are surely involved in this turn to a thoroughgoing theocentrism. Though he wishes to downplay any suggestion that substantial changes occur in Barth’s thinking, Bruce McCormack does point to Barth’s increasing discomfort with the work of Bultmann, Brunner, and Gogarten, as well as to the deteriorating political situation in Germany, as factors that might have influenced changes in Barth’s thinking during these years.95 Keith Johnson departs from McCormack in suggesting that a new phase begins in Barth’s thinking around 1929 as a result of further reflection on the noetic consequences of a theology of justification.96 91 KD 1.2, 222-3; ET, 203-4. 92 KD 1.1, 145; ET, 140. 93 KD LI, 400-1; ET, 380-1. 94 Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming, trans. John Webster (Edinburgh: T. 8< T. Clark, 2001), 35-7. 95 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 441-9. 96 Johnson, ‘A Reappraisal’, 3-25.

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Most helpfully of all, Amy Marga suggests that changes occurred during these years as a result of advances in Barth’s understanding of the connection between revelation, the theology of the Trinity, and God’s self-knowledge.97 It is these latter elements that are most formative of the shift in Barth’s understanding of dogmatic thought that we have encountered here; yet one of the corollaries of the argument of Chapter 5 in particular is that Barth’s study of Anselm must be recognized as a decisive factor in this shift. As we shall see, Barth finds in Anselm’s work a conception of the movement from faith to understanding that involves tracing the correspondence between God’s inner being and outer works for the sake of allowing theological reason to apprehend the necessity that is proper to Christian teaching by virtue of its grounding in God’s self-fidelity.98 Barth understands the apprehension of this necessity as crucial to a moral ordering of Christian thought in accordance with the movement of God.

Appropriation and Understanding We have come far enough in orienting ourselves in Barth’s earlier dogmatics that we may turn to consider the emergence of the question of theological understanding itself. I propose to do so by concentrating on §7 of Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik. This section is a new addition to Barth’s prolegomena in Münster, but it engages the question of the object and task of dogmatics and reproduces much of the material that we encountered at the beginning of Barth’s lectures in Göttingen.99 It is important for us because it represents a point of convergence of a number of the central themes of this study. In it, Barth takes up Bultmann’s question of the reality of Christian truth Tor us’ by considering a broadly Kantian objection to his conception of the object and task of dogmatics. He responds to the objection by drawing on his exposition of Paul and by appealing to Anselm. These discussions serve as a bridge 97 Marga, Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 160-7. 98 The contrast that we encounter here between the correlationism of the Göttingen and Münster dogmatics and the theocentrism that emerges in the Church Dogmatics raises important questions about the way in which the ‘the-anthropology’ of the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics is to be characterized. It may well be that the theocentrism of the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics, in which Barth makes odd-sounding claims about the contingency of the inclusion of human agents in revelation, is itself not the final word on the form of Barth’s thinking, since a form of correlationism reappears in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics. It maybe that these later volumes contain a synthesis of Barth’s theocentism and his correlation­ ism, for, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the theocentric movement of thought that Barth develops through conversation with Anselm is present in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics, but it appears to be accompanied by the acknowledgement that the liberal tradition is at least partially right in pointing to a correlation between God and human creatures as decisive for Christian theology. 99 Material also appears in this section from paragraph 4 of UCRI on ‘Man and his question’.

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between consideration of Barth’s interpretation of Paul and his engagement with Anselm. They show the convergence of the lines of thought associated with each of these figures in Barth’s work. More importantly, they serve to frame the question of the movement of understanding that is proper to faith. Paragraph 7 occurs at a transitional point in the Christliche Dogmatik. Barth takes it that, through the first six paragraphs of the work, he has established that the Word of God is the proper object of dogmatic study; yet he claims that, before he can develop an account of the form of reflection required by a theology of the Word of God, he must take up the questions that are raised by the fact that almost the entirety of Protestant modernity gives a different account of the object and purpose of dogmatic science.100 Barth acknowledges that his theology of the Word of God is set apart from modern conceptions of dogmatics as reflection on faith and religion; he claims that the questions that are raised by this distinction are important because they provide an opportunity for a ‘final and decisive insight’ regarding the Word of God. This insight concerns Bultmann’s question regarding the way that the Word of God is made more than an object of speculation by becoming real ‘for us’.101 Barth writes that his task is to show how the Word of God is real not merely as a ‘logical postulate’ or a hypothetical ‘as if’ but rather as a genuinely ‘given reality’.102 Engagement with neo-Protestantism causes Barth to consider how the Word of God is real ‘for us’ because the suspicion that he faces from his neo-Protestant colleagues is that his refusal to travel the ‘great theological highway’ of the Glaubenslehre necessarily leaves him without a real object of study. This suspicion has its ground in the underlying logic of the neoProtestant position, which appears to exclude the possibility that the Word of God could be real for the believer without immediately necessitating the turn to the Glaubenslehre. Barth offers a consideration of this logic through an engagement with Erich Schaeder, a professor in Breslau whom Barth depicts as a ‘typical neo-Protestant’.103 For Barth, Schaeder’s work is helpful because it makes explicit that the foundational premise of neo-Protestantism is that objects of knowledge are real for human knowers only as objects of conscious­ ness. Barth articulates this premise by quoting Schaeder to the effect that ‘the quantities that we attend to in knowledge are quantities of consciousness; otherwise they are simply not there for us and for our attention’.104 Glossed in Barth’s own words, the premise is that ‘there are knowable realities only as realities of consciousness’.105 Barth claims that he is perfectly willing to grant the ‘weight’ of this ‘axiom’;106 he lays out an argument that appears to show

100 102 104 106

Christliche Dogmatik, 82-3. Christliche Dogmatik, 92. Christliche Dogmatik, 92-3. Christliche Dogmatik, 94-5.

101 Christliche Dogmatik, 82-3. 103 Christliche Dogmatik, 92. 105 Christliche Dogmatik, 94.

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that it necessitates the modern turn to the Glaubenlehre.107 The premises of the argument are, first, that, in order to avoid the abstractions of a metaphys­ ical scientia de Deo, dogmatics concerns itself with a real relationship between God and humanity; second, that it is axiomatic that there are realities for human beings only as realities of consciousness. The consequence of these two premises appears to be that, if the Christian relationship to God is to be a genuine reality for human beings, it must be a reality of consciousness. This consequence in turn appears to demand the conclusion that faith is the proper object of dogmatic study, for faith is the name for the reality in consciousness of relationship to God. Put more succinctly, the argument is that dogmatics studies the Christian relationship to God in the form in which it is real; faith, as a reality of consciousness, is the only form in which relation to God is real; therefore dogmatics must take faith as its object of study. On the logic of this position, any attempt to deny that faith is the proper object of dogmatic science is bound to leave dogmatics without a real object of study, for it is tantamount to denying that the object of study is a reality in consciousness. Barth repeats at a couple of points in his exposition that, from the perspective of neo-Protestantism, the only alternatives left to those who refuse to go the way of the Glaubenslehre are an ‘impossible orthodox faith in authority’, an uncritical’ and certainly unchristian’ metaphysics, or an appeal to some kind of irrational, mystical experience.108 The challenge that he faces from neoProtestantism is to show how the Word of God is real for the believer without either succumbing to neo-Protestantism or falling into authoritarianism, metaphysics, or mysticism. The possibility that is raised by Barth’s neo-Protestant interlocutors is that the extrinsicism that Bultmann identifies in Barth’s work is not accidental, but is instead the inevitable outcome of Barth’s rejection of the modern Glauben­ slehre. Is it perhaps the case that Barth cannot give an account of the reality of the Word of God for believers because an account of this kind could only take the form of a science of faith? It is the train of thought that Barth develops in response to this possibility that brings the question of theological understand­ ing to the fore. Barth’s first move is to suggest that his critics’ objection rests on the view that Kant’s account of theoretical reason is normative for the knowledge of God. The objection derives its force from the axiom that things are real for us only as realities of consciousness; this notion is, Barth argues, appropriated unquestioningly from Kant. Barth develops this sugges­ tion by quoting again from Schaeder, who writes that “‘Kant’s idealist standpoint... is just as valid when the knowledge of God stands in question as when the question concerns the knowledge of the world in nature and history” (I)’.109 The parenthetical exclamation that Barth adds to Schaeder’s 107 See Christliche Dogmatik, 93-4. 109 Christliche Dogmatik, 93.

108 Christliche Dogmatik, 91, 95.

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statement is telling. Barth supposes that the neo-Protestant concedes too much to Kant’s work; the foundational move that launches him into consid­ eration of Paul, Anselm, and the problem of the ordering of thought is the suggestion that to speak of the Word of God is to speak of a reality that must be granted independence from the strictures of Kant’s theory of knowledge. Barth writes that, when the neo-Protestant looks at him and, with a shake of the head, reminds him that that which is not an object of consciousness simply is not a knowable reality, he replies with an equal shake of the head that ‘we hardly speak of an “object” when we speak of “God’s Word”, but rather of the subject that no longer is what it is when converted into an object’.110 He goes on to say that those who understand this will recognize that they cannot pose the question of knowledge without being ‘astonished’ by and moving beyond the ‘barriers of the Kantian theory of knowledge’.111 For Barth, these barriers serve only to prevent the reality of the Word of God from coming into view, and must thus be bypassed.112 Barth’s response to his neo-Protestant critics thus begins with a strong assertion of the independence of a theology of the Word of God from the Kantian assumptions that ground neo-Protestantism. Crucially, its next step consists in an identification of the need to take up the question of theological understanding, for Barth goes on to suggest that the distinction between his work and the conventions of neo-Protestantism amounts to a difference between opposing models of understanding. His fundamental claim is that a theology of the Word of God must distinguish its conception of what it is to say ‘I know’ from the conception that neo-Protestantism appropriates from Kant.113 The neo-Protestant conception trades on the supposition that, if an object is present in consciousness, then it must be conditioned by the possi­ bilities of consciousness, and its appearance can be understood in terms of these possibilities themselves. To say ‘I know’ on neo-Protestant terms is to treat an analysis of the consciousness in which the object is found as the clue to the object’s reality. It appears self-evident to the neo-Protestant that an object present in consciousness may be understood in terms of consciousness itself; but Barth supposes that apprehending the Word of God requires a different conception of understanding rooted in a different standpoint of knowledge. He argues that to say ‘I know’ in the theological sphere cannot mean appre­ hending a particular reality in terms of the activities or possibilities of con­ sciousness, for the Word of God has divine activity alone as its principle. However real it may be for the believer, it cannot be interpreted in terms of the structure of consciousness, for the divine rather than the human is its ground. Were God’s activity to be considered in light of the activities of consciousness, it would be transformed into something other than itself. Divine activity 110 Christliche Dogmatik, 96. 112 Christliche Dogmatik, 96-7.

111 Christliche Dogmatik, 96-7. 113 Christliche Dogmatik, 101-2.

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understood on the terms of the neo-Protestant ‘I know’ would not be divine activity at all. Thus, as Barth understands it, a theology of the Word of God must set itself apart from neo-Protestantism through a new conception of theological understanding. For Barth, then, it is consideration of the nature of understanding that must be undertaken in face of the notion that his work is crippled by a deleterious extrinsicism. What might it mean to say ‘I know’ in a way that is commen­ surate with the peculiar reality of the Word of God? Barth’s foregrounding of this question is crucial for us. To begin with, it is underwritten by a series of notions that allow us to track the way that the themes from Part I of this study are taken up in his dogmatic work, and to show the importance of the question that we are considering in Part II. We saw in Part I that Barth takes Paul’s work to show that the theologian is properly concerned for the problem of truth understood as a problem of acknowledgement. How can the believer apprehend the truth of God without converting it into something other than itself? We can see now that it is concern for this question that grounds Barth’s rejection of the neo-Protestant conception of understanding, for this latter conception precludes the acknowledgement of the truth of God by transform­ ing it into something that is conditioned by human activity. Whereas Barth comes through his study of Paul to suppose that acknowledging the truth of the divine activity involves ordering Christian thought around the standpoint of the eschatological subject, the neo-Protestant seeks to comprehend divine activity from the standpoint of the empirical or transcendental subject, taking the activities and possibilities of consciousness as the clue to the reality of God. The result, for Barth, is that neo-Protestantism apprehends divine activity only as a shadow image of the activities of thought. The question that this raises for Barth concerns a model of understanding that permits the acknowledgement of truth as truth. My aim in Part II is to show that Barth’s conception of the ordering of Christian thought matures through his consideration of the way that faith moves to understanding.

Paul and Anselm in Christliche Dogmatik, §7 The line of argument in Christliche Dogmatik §7 is important for us on a final front because it is the task of developing a new conception of theological understanding that leads Barth to bring Paul and Anselm together. Paul and Anselm emerge as the seminal figures in Barth’s consideration of the ordering of thought contained in a theological T know’. They are important in this context for different reasons. Paul is important, first, because Barth finds the decisive ground for his response to neo-Protestantism in the exposition of 1 Corinthians that we encountered in Chapter 3. As Barth presents it, the need for a reconsideration of the question of understanding has its basis in Paul’s

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descriptions of the hiddenness of divine wisdom (1 Cor. 2:7), of the illusion to which those who imagine that they possess knowledge are subject (1 Cor. 8:2), of the way in which the Holy Sprit alone searches the things of God (1 Cor. 2:10), and of the way in which believers are given to know God by coming to share in the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16).114 For Barth, the theology that Paul develops in these verses cannot be folded into the neo-Protestant understand­ ing of the knowledge of God as a reality of consciousness. The sticking-point is that Paul’s theology pushes us to recognize that God alone is the subject of the knowledge of God. Here, as in Barth’s 1924 exposition of 1 Corinthians, the notion that God’s Spirit alone searches the depths of God comes to the fore. Barth holds that, because the ‘psychical man’—Barth is surely thinking here of the adijua i/jvxlkov of 1 Corinthians 15:44—has no capacity for that which the Spirit brings, human knowledge of God must be illuminated through reference to divine activity rather than through the principles of consciousness.115 In the first place, then, Barth takes it that it is Paul’s letters that disclose the inadequacy of the neo-Protestant conception of theological understanding. Having made this polemical point, Barth goes on to claim that Paul’s repeated references to being ‘known by God’ help to orient us in thinking about a proper conception of the phrase T know’. To grasp what it is to speak of being ‘known by God’ is, for Barth, to grasp what it means to say ‘I know’ on the terms of Paul’s conception of Christian thought. It is crucial for us that Barth does not then go on to work out an account of what is to be ‘known by God’ through exegesis of Paul, but rather by turning to Anselm as an exemplar of this Pauline notion.116 Paul and Anselm are united, on Barth’s telling, in presenting a conception of the ordering of thought that corresponds to the way that believers are known by God. At this point in his work, Barth’s account of Anselm is not wholly satisfac­ tory. The model of theological understanding that Barth sees as the correlate of Paul’s notion of being ‘known by God’ will be worked through in much greater detail in FQI. In the Christliche Dogmatik, Barth draws his presentation of Anselm entirely from the opening chapter of the Proslogion. In this chapter, Anselm seeks to rouse the mind for the contemplation of God through a combination of exhortation, prayer, and praise. The conceptual idiom in which Anselm frames his presentation is distinctively Augustinian. The prob­ lem of contemplating God is presented not as a problem of coordinating divine and human subjectivity, so that God’s place as the proper subject of the knowledge of God is not swamped by the spontaneity of human under­ standing, but rather the problem of the peculiar interplay of presence and absence that results from the rebellion of human sinners against the one in whom they live and move and have their being. Anselm suggests that he 114 Christliche Dogmatik, 102-3. 116 Christliche Dogmatik, 103.

115 Christliche Dogmatik, 102-3.

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struggles to turn his mind to God, in part because he does not know where God is to be found, but in part too because he does not know where to seek for God. God is present everywhere; yet human beings find themselves living ‘far away’ from God in sin. Anselm asks, ‘if you are everywhere why, then, since you are present, do I not see you?’ Given the apparent paradox of his distance from one who is ubiquitous, Anselm must ask to be shown not only where and how he is to find God, but also where and how he is to seek God at all.117 Barth assigns considerable significance to Anselm’s prayer; but his inter­ pretation is rendered somewhat odd by his attempt to bring Anselm into conversation with neo-Protestantism. In face of his neo-Protestant interlocu­ tors, Barth makes much of the perplexity that Anselm expresses, claiming that this perplexity represents the proper alternative to the ‘unheard-of certainty’ of his opponents.118 For Barth, Anselm’s words express the recognition that the seeking and finding of God requires an act of divine self-giving that is wholly discontinuous with anything that is derived from the neo-Protestant’s consideration of the content of consciousness. Commenting on Anselm’s prayer, Barth writes that, ‘at the beginning of the knowledge of the seeking and finding of God stands an instructing of men through God himself for which Anselm knows that he can only pray’.119 Barth presents the assertion of this need for instruction, not as the pessimistic claim of a medieval monk, but rather as an expression of the common lot of sinners.120 For him, it represents an insight that is lost in neo-Protestantism. 121 As a first point, then, Barth finds significance in Anselm as one whose attitude reflects the recognition that God may be known only where God condescends to teach sinners. Barth goes on to claim that Anselm’s prayer merits attention because it shows not only that Anselm possesses a different attitude than practitioners of the modern Glaubenslehre, but also that Anselm finds himself in a rather different position. Barth asserts baldly that Anselm would not pray for an object that is in his consciousness.122 The question that Barth goes on to take up in his treatment of Anselm is just what may be identified as a reality in human consciousness. In addressing this question, Barth turns to the closing lines of Proslogion 1, in which Anselm tells readers that the reality that he seeks to understand is the reality that his heart believes and loves.123 Barth writes that these comments are significant because they

117 Anselm, Proslogion, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, trans. M. J. Charlesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1. 118 Christliche Dogmatik, 98. 119 Christliche Dogmatik, 98. The need for prayer is the point emphasized by Thomas Schlegel and Bruce McCormack in two of the few treatments of this section of Barth’s work (see Schlegel, Theologie als unmögliche Notwendigkeit (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 2007), 208-9; McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 424). 120 Christliche Dogmatik, 98-9. 121 Christliche Dogmatik, 99. 122 Christliche Dogmatik, 98. 123 Anselm, Proslogion, 1.

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show that, while Anselm does not find the object that he seeks to understand within himself, this does not mean that Anselm lacks faith or love. ‘Concern­ ing these, concerning the reality in consciousness of faith and love, there is absolutely nothing lacking in him.’124 Anselm is not engaged in abstract speculation; he is speaking of a reality to which he is related in faith and love; but this reality is not made present to him by the activity of his faith and love. Faith and love make a search for theological understanding possible by providing grounds for it, but not by summoning to presence the reality that is to be understood. This, for Barth, is the logic of Anselm’s assertion that he believes in order to understand.125 What has occurred here is that, confronted by the questions of a neo­ Protestant interlocutor, Barth has converted the rich spatial metaphors that Anselm deploys in order to express the sinner’s predicament into the rather crude question of the content of consciousness. The ‘spatial’ question that ends up dominating Barth’s presentation of Anselm is just what can properly be ‘located’ in human consciousness. Barth’s answer is that faith and love may be said to be present, but neither the object of faith and love nor an under­ standing of it can be claimed as possessions of thought. This assertion leads us back to the question that Barth set out to clarify in Christliche Dogmatik §7. Barth intends this section to offer a ‘final and decisive insight’ into the reality of the Word of God by showing how it is real for believers. He suggests that resolving this question is a matter of thinking through an account of theo­ logical understanding that comports with a Pauline ordering of thought, and he points to Anselm as an exemplar of this mode of understanding; but his account at this point does not move much beyond making an example of Anselm’s unwillingness to equate the presence of faith and love with the presence of the reality that is to be understood. Reference to Anselm as exemplar allows Barth to bring the question of presence to the fore, a devel­ opment that, as we shall see in a moment, was important for subsequent discussions of theological understanding; but he does not offer a welldeveloped conceptual account of the nature of theological understanding. It is fair to ask how far Barth’s reliance on Anselm as an example moves him to an answer to critics’ questions. Barth’s discussion of theological understanding in the Christliche Dogmatik is perhaps best understood to pose a question to which Barth does not yet have a full answer. He comes to see the importance of showing what it means to move to understanding from the standpoint of Pauline faith, for doing so permits a critical questioning of assumptions regarding theological science that lead neo-Protestantism astray; but he does not yet have a strong concep­ tion of this movement. Paul and Anselm emerge as thinkers who offer vital

124 Christliche Dogmatik, 100.

125 Christliche Dogmatik, 100.

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clues to the nature of understanding, but a full conception of the convergence of their thought is not yet in hand. My aim in Chapter 5 will be to show that Barth comes through careful study of Anselm to develop an account of the movement from faith to understanding that comports with a Pauline concep­ tion of faith and that shows how theological truth is real for the believer. Crucially, this account hinges on a moral and spiritual reordering of human thought that is decisive for Barth’s work.

4.4. THE QUESTION OF FAITH SEEKING UNDERSTANDING A final task remains for us in preparing to treat Barth’s study of Anselm. This study develops a complex account of theological understanding after Barth came through engagement with neo-Protestant critics to perceive the centrality of the question; it is important for us in grasping this account that we situate it in its historical context by considering a debate about theological understand­ ing that was sparked by Barth’s engagement with Anselm in the Christliche Dogmatik. A range of thinkers fixed on this engagement as an important moment in Barth’s text; these thinkers shared Barth’s recognition that the question of the understanding of faith was important in the wake of the breakdown of neo-Protestantism, but they disputed the value of the alternative to which Barth sought to point. A series of texts may be treated here that take the question of theological understanding forward from Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik to FQI; these texts serve to show that FQI did not arise in a vacuum, but was rather shaped by concerns that were prevalent at the time. The first text is a review of the Christliche Dogmatik published in 1928 by a Lutheran theologian named Hans Michael Müller. In this review, Müller claims that Barth’s appeal to Anselm serves not to distinguish Barth’s work from modern neo-Protestantism, but rather to show that Barth’s theology is methodologically indistinguishable from Schleiermacher’s.126 Müller holds that Schleiermacher and Barth share a common theological horizon because, together with Anselm, they take the maxim credo, ut intelligam as the foun­ dation of their theology. For Müller, this maxim brings with it two presup­ positions that constitute the horizon in which Anselm, Schleiermacher, and Barth stand. The first is that Christian faith may be taken to be present and real; the second is that there is systematic ‘continuity’ between faith and understanding so that, where faith is real, the possibility of theological

126 For what follows see Müller, ‘Credo, ut intelligam: kritische Bemerkungen zu Karl Barths Dogmatik’, Theologische Blätter, 7 (1928), 169-72.

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understanding is also assured. Müller claims that Anselm, Schleiermacher, and Barth take different routes to securing this continuity;127 but each pre­ sumes it in a way that eliminates the possibility of drawing any real distinc­ tions between their work. Though Barth appeals to Anselm precisely in order to separate his work from neo-Protestantism, Müller supposes that the appeal serves to show that Barth’s work is marked by the same certainty that charac­ terizes neo-Protestant theology. Barth may introduce a note of existential uncertainty through an overwrought reading of the tone of Anselm’s prayer in Proslogion 1; but this uncertainty is not to be taken seriously because it has no basis in Barth’s method. Müller concludes that the certainty that Barth finds so objectionable in neo-Protestantism cannot be countered from within a theology that presupposes faith, but only through the struggle towards faith that marks Lutheran theology. Müller’s review introduces two related questions that are significant for us going forward. The first concerns the possibility of theological understanding. Müller’s question concerns the degree to which faith contains within itself the conditions that make understanding possible. For both the Barth of the Chris­ tliche Dogmatik and for Müller, this question concerns the degree to which the object that is to be understood is present in faith. Barth’s claim in the Christliche Dogmatik is that, where neo-Protestantism views faith as sufficient for theo­ logical understanding because God is present in the consciousness of one who has faith, Anselm denies the sufficiency of faith for understanding because the presence of God stands apart from the reality of faith. Müller’s response is that this distinction is of strictly penultimate significance. Anselm may deny the presence of God in consciousness, but this does not imply that he denies the presence of that which is to be understood tout court; it merely implies that he gives a different account of this presence. For Müller, that which is to be understood is made present for Anselm in the authoritative teaching of the Church. The self-sufficiency of faith for understanding is no less sure for Anselm than it is for Schleiermacher; thus Anselm ought not to be taken as a model for breaking free from the shortcomings of neo-Protestant accounts of understanding. On Müller’s terms, this recognition raises a second question regarding the realities that may be presupposed in order to ground the possibility of theological inquiry. We have seen that Müller holds that distinctions between Anselm, Schleiermacher, and Barth finally collapse because each presupposes a reality that guarantees the possibility of theological understanding. The presence of a presupposition of this kind in Barth’s work is, for Müller, a sign that Barth betrays his own best insights, for he ends up domesticating the 127 As Müller presents it, Anselm secures this continuity by appealing to the authority of the Church, Schleiermacher by appealing to the experience of faith, and Barth by appealing to revelation (see ‘Credo, ut intelligam’, 169-72).

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divine Word within a theological system by allowing himself to presume the reality of revelation as a guarantor of continuity between faith and under­ standing. The question for Müller is how a positive account of theological understanding might be developed without relativizing the freedom and alterity of God. On what terms can faith move to understanding without positing a sufficiency of faith for understanding that shortchanges the sover­ eignty of God? Müller gives an answer to this question in a 1929 study of Luther to which Barth responded in a review. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Barth’s review is crucial to grasping his own approach to the question of faith and understanding. At present, we turn to the way that Müller’s concerns were taken up by others. In an essay published in 1928, Hermann Diem claims that Müller goes astray by presenting all deployments of Anselm’s credo, ut intelligam as methodologically indistinguishable. Müller claims that the use of this notion constitutes a theological horizon shared in common by Anselm, Schleiermacher, and Barth; but, for Diem, Barth’s use of this notion is to be set apart from the others because it is informed by a different conception of the presence of the object in faith.128 Whereas Anselm’s ‘scholastic realism’ and Schleiermacher’s neo-Protestant idealism make it difficult for them to separate the presence of faith from the presence of the object of faith, Barth’s ‘Kant-trained thought’ is equipped with a ‘critical reservation’ through which the object of faith is kept apart from the reality of faith itself. Faith appears in the phenomenal sphere, but the object of faith shares in the principled hiddenness of the noumenal. The possibility of understanding this object is thus not given in and with faith itself. The self-sufficiency of faith for understanding is interrupted, for God must still make himself present if understanding is to be real. Diem thus argues that, however true it may be that Barth echoes Anselm and Schleiermacher in saying credo, ut intelligam, the conceptual structure that underwrites Barth’s statement is sufficiently distinct that Barth is able to locate his work within the horizon of a hopeful waiting on God rather than Schleiermacher’s theological certainty. Diem’s essay is helpful for us because it keeps the question of the mode of presence of the object of faith in the foreground. This is the question that Müller introduces in charging Barth with constructing undue continuity between faith and understanding; it is this same question that Barth takes up in responding to Müller. The question is important for us because it is decisive in contemporary oppositions between realist and critically realist readings of Barth. We saw in Chapter 1 that the opposition between these readings concerns the question of the givenness of the knowledge of God. The realist takes it that there is a fundamental givenness to this knowledge that 128 For what follows see Diem, ‘Credo ut intelligam: Ein Wort zu Hans Michael Müllers Kritik an Karl Barths Dogmatik’, Zwischen den Zeiten, 6 (1928), 520-3.

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enables theological understanding to proceed by moving ‘from what is given to our knowledge into clearer knowledge of it’.129 The critical realist places a check on this givenness by insisting that it is always indirect and requires that God give himself again if he is to be known. The opposition between these positions recapitulates the themes that are developed by Müller and Diem. Müller effectively charges Barth with espousing an uncritical realism that takes the possibility of understanding to be given with faith; Diem aims to resist this charge by suggesting that Barth’s form of thought is sufficiently influenced by Kant that its realism is accompanied by a critical check. Contemporary debates regarding these questions are not new; the important point for us is that, in his response to Müller and in FQI, Barth develops an account of understanding that trades on theological conceptions of presence that are rather more rich than a binary between direct and indirect givenness. As we shall see, he returns to important elements in the theology of promise that we encountered in Chapter 3 in order to show that the question of presence is not to be under­ stood in epistemological terms of givenness, but rather in terms of a moral conception of the nature of the fellowship between God and creatures. Before we come to this material, a third text may usefully be treated in which the terms of the questions posed by Müller and Diem are refigured, and a set of questions emerge that shape the context in which FQI was written. In an influential essay published in 1929, Gerhardt Kuhlmann follows Müller and Diem in identifying the question of the movement from faith to understanding as the question of the possibility of theology itself; yet he argues that the terms on which the latter question are understood need to be reformed.130 He suggests that the question of the possibility of theology is determined not by the question of the presence of the object of faith, but rather by the question of the being of the human inquirers who seek understanding. This question must be posed with ‘fresh urgency’, on Kuhlmann’s telling, because philosophical idealism has left in its wake an account of the principles of human activity that eliminates any possibility of identity between divine and human speech. In insisting that human speech is governed by the laws of human activity, philosophical idealism renders ‘inconceivable’ the ‘orthodox’ claim that divine speech is transmitted through human speech without being transformed into a creaturely quantity; yet, Kuhlmann argues that idealism also fails to offer a coherent alternative because it resorts to denying that the divine spirit is any different from the human spirit. In face of the ‘logical impossibility’ of orthodoxy and the ‘self-deception’ of idealism, Kuhlmann claims that a foundational inquiry into the meaning of human existence is called for in

129 Torrance, Karl Barth, 184. 130 For what follows see Kuhlmann, ‘Zum theologischen Problem der Existenz’, Zeitschriftfür Theologie und Kirche, 37 (1929), 28-30.

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order to clarify what it would mean for believers to move to an understanding of God. The claim that comprehension of the movement from faith to understand­ ing requires a basis in theological anthropology represents a useful point from which to take our bearings in the thought-world out of which FQI grew. Barth was not alone in coming to see the centrality of the question of theological understanding as theologians shifted away from neo-Protestant appropri­ ations of idealist thought. A number of different figures brought this question to the fore; different construals of the relationship between the legacy of idealism and the question of theological understanding serve to define the horizons from which various figures took their orientation. Gogarten and Bultmann took up Kuhlmann’s challenge directly, setting their hands to the task of the anthropological clarifications required to ground an account of the understanding of faith.131 Barth took Bultmann’s response to Kuhlmann as a definitive demonstration of Bultmann’s ongoing dependence on nineteenth­ century forms of thought.132 Dietrich Bonhoeffer attempted to chart a course between Barth and Bultmann, drawing from both Kant and Heidegger in order to construct an epistemology that is commensurate with the primacy of revelation.133 Though Bonhoeffer thought that the criticisms of Barth offered by Midler and Kuhlmann were misguided, he agreed with Bultmann that work needed to be done to clarify the philosophical presuppositions involved in Barth’s form of thought.134 Barth himself was dismissive of Kuhlmann’s article, claiming that it repre­ sents the degradation of dogmatics into anthropology.135 Rather than being drawn into the kind of Heideggerian inquiry that Kuhlmann saw as the antidote to philosophical idealism, Barth took up the question of faith and understanding in conversation with a pre-modern thinker. Consideration of the dogmatic possibilities and procedures that come to light in Anselm’s work was, for him, a useful alternative to an attempt to ground an account of understanding anthropologically. It was a way of making good on the sugges­ tion developed in the Christliche Dogmatik that Anselm presents a model of understanding that comports with a Pauline account of faith. In a review of FQI, Kuhlmann depicts Barth’s engagement with Anselm as a betrayal of Barth’s spiritual circumstances, a disingenuous turn away from the problems

131 See Gogarten, ‘Das Problem einer theologischen Anthropologie’, Zwischen den Zeiten, 7 (1929), 493-511; Bultmann, ‘Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 38 (1930), 339-64. 132 Barth, ‘Bonn: 27 May, 1931’, in Barth-Bultmann Briefwechsel 1911-1966, 114-18; cf. ‘Münster: 5 Feb 1930’, 98-101. 133 See Bonhoeffer’s Habilitationsschrift, completed in 1930, and published as Act and Being, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). 134 Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 25-32, 81-109. 135 See KD 1.2, 888; ET, 794.

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that mark Barth’s juncture in theological history;136 but Barth’s approach proved fruitful as a means of gaining space from idealist presuppositions so that the questions themselves could be refigured. What emerges in Barth’s study of Anselm is an account of theological understanding oriented by a moral and spiritual inquiry into the ordering of thought in accordance with the reality of God.

4.5. CONCLUSION We have covered a considerable amount of terrain in this chapter; it may be useful to conclude by synthesizing the line of thought that runs through the whole. The chapter aims to show how the question of theological understand­ ing comes to the fore in Barth’s work, and to show how the lines of thought that Barth associates with Paul and Anselm converge in addressing this question. I began by examining Bultmann’s claim that Barth’s insistence on thinking from the standpoint of the eschatological subject reduces Christian teaching to a speculative abstraction that is not real for the believer. We saw that this concern amounts to the claim that Barth goes astray in failing to address the modern problem of appropriation, a problem that, on some tellings, extends a properly Pauline concern for freedom from law by incorp­ orating Kant’s conception of autonomy into theological understandings of the freedom of the Christian. We also saw that this concern is representative of a host of common criticisms of Barth’s positivism and fideism. In turning to Barth, we saw that his early lectures on the theology of the Reformed Confessions present the beginnings of a response to these objec­ tions, for they reflect on the way that the integrity of faith is best preserved within the proper correlation between God and faith. On Barth’s terms, Bultmann’s objection rests on the broadly Lutheran supposition that the relation between God and faith must be understood in terms of faith’s immediate presence within human consciousness. Bultmann wishes to under­ stand God’s relation to faith in terms of faith’s immediacy in order to address the Lutheran question of appropriation: ‘how can I get a gracious God?’ Barth supposes, by contrast, that this approach is self-defeating, for it presents the acquisition of a gracious God as conditional upon the quality of the believer’s faith. On these terms, rest and assurance cannot be found. The proper alternative is rooted in a Reformed account of the way that the belonging together of God and faith is to be understood in terms of its origin and end in the activity of God. 136 Gerhard Kuhlmann, ‘Zu Karl Barths Anselmbuch’, Zeitschriftfür Theologie und Kirche, 13 (1932), 269-81.

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This description of the way that the belonging together of God and faith is to be understood within the framework of what I have called the ‘metaphysics of the Bible’ then provides a hermeneutical key to Barth’s dogmatics in the 1920s. Barth turns to the Word of God as the proper object of dogmatics not as a decisive repudiation of all correlation between God and faith, but rather as a way of retaining this correlation in its proper form. The key contrast for him in considering the object of dogmatic study is between a theology that supposes that, because faith is the form in which this correlation is immediate to the believer, the correlation itself is to be understood in terms of human faith, and a theology that acknowledges that this correlation must be understood in terms of its origin and end in the activity of God. Barth adopts a theology of the Word of God in keeping with the principles of this latter view; his neo­ Protestant interlocutors respond that it is the accompanying rejection of the modern Glaubenslehre that is the basis of the speculative extrinsicism that marks his work, for it is only in faith that relation to God is real for the believer. To depart from the conventions of the Glaubenslehre is to make theological extrinsicism unavoidable. Barth’s response is that what is required is a new conception of theological understanding. His account of the ordering of thought that accompanies a Pauline account of faith precludes him from identifying faith in its immanence as the object of dogmatic study; he argues that the notion that this refusal leads to speculative abstraction rests on Kantian premises that are rightly challenged from the standpoint of a theology of the Word of God. It supposes that theological understanding involves apprehending a reality in terms of the anthropological possibilities and activities that ground its presence its con­ sciousness. Rather than thinking from the standpoint of the eschatological subject, the neo-Protestant seeks to move from faith to understanding from the standpoint of the empirical or transcendental subject, and thus precludes the acknowledgement of truth. What is required, on Barth’s telling, is a new conception of theological understanding that comes out from under the constraints of the Kantian critique and allows the Word of God to be acknow­ ledged as a reality that is genuinely grounded in the activity of God. As he understands it, Paul and Anselm are united as figures who present an alter­ native means of framing an account of understanding. For Barth, then, the question of theological understanding comes to the fore through recognition of the tension between the ordering of thought presumed by the neo-Protestant and the ordering of thought that he himself develops through his studies of Paul. During the late 1920s, a series of other thinkers were led to consider theological understanding in the wake of the breakdown of neo-Protestantism. Just how the understanding of faith is to be conceived was a point of considerable controversy; Barth’s conception emerges in his 1931 study of Anselm, to which we turn in Chapter 5.

5 Anselm, Understanding, and the Ordering of Christian Thought 5.1. INTRODUCTION

It may be useful to begin this final chapter with a brief summary of the terrain that we have covered to this point in the study. In Chapter 1,1 introduced the question of the ordering of thought by showing that Barth understands the problem of truth as the problem of acknowledging the truth of God without collapsing the distinction between God and creatures, and that he may be understood to approach a solution by supposing that, because God and creatures retain their proper integrity in a relation constituted by correspond­ ing forms of activity, acknowledgement of divine truth occurs as creaturely thought orders its activities in correspondence to the activity of God. In Chapter 2, I traced the roots that Barth’s concern for the acknowledgement of truth and the ordering of thought have in his early engagements with Paul. Treatment of the way that these concerns are foregrounded in his engage­ ments with Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians serves to show that, for Barth, a shift to concerns of this kind reflects a ‘biblical attitude’ patterned on the interests of the canonical writers themselves. In Chapter 3,1 then traced Barth’s devel­ opment of foundational elements in an account of Christian thought by considering his depiction of the reordering of thought through faith in the resurrection. We saw that Barth holds that the noetic side of the act of faith involves the adoption of the standpoint of the eschatological subject, for faith involves living in light of realities that can be seen as true only by ordering one’s thought around the standpoint of the new creature who is the object of God’s declaration of justification. A mode of thought that corresponds to divine activity takes the new creature who is found in Christ as the constitutive centre of its activities. Because this new creature has its being in union with Christ, believers who think from the standpoint of this creature find the points of orientation for their thinking in Christ’s history and in the mode of Christ’s presence, and also find that their freedom of thought is reordered through the announcement of divine Lordship in the resurrection.

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In Part II of this study, we turned from Barth’s account of the way that faith forms Christian thinking to consideration of the way that Barth takes thought to be formed by faith’s movement to understanding. Chapter 4 frames this latter inquiry by tracing the emergence of the question of understanding as a central concern in Barth’s work. Barth’s critics suppose that he falls into extrinsicism because the commitments that he derives from his reading of Paul prevent him from taking the presence and activity of faith itself as a decisive clue to theological understanding; Barth responds that what is required is a new account of understanding, for the neo-Protestant conception makes the possibilities and activities of consciousness principial for under­ standing, and thus precludes the acknowledgement of realities that are grounded in divine activity alone. Crucially, Barth turns to Anselm to work through a new account of understanding, for Barth sees in Anselm’s work a model of understanding that corresponds to Paul’s conception of the stand­ point of faith; but, in the Christliche Dogmatik, Barth’s account of this dynamic is underdeveloped. It relies on a reference to Anselm as exemplar that raises as many questions as it answers; it sparked a debate regarding the nature of Christian understanding that brought a number of these questions to the fore: how is the understanding of faith to be described in the wake of the breakdown of theological idealism? Is a conception of understanding that presumes undue continuity between faith and understanding implicit in Barth’s work? In what way is the object of faith present so that it may be understood? The aim of this final chapter is to show that Barth’s 1931 study of Anselm develops answers to these questions that are programmatic for his conception of the ordering of Christian thought. Barth’s Anselm book presents an account of theological understanding that Barth takes to be consistent with his account of the noetic side of the act of faith. It shows what it means to move to understanding from the standpoint of faith in part by picking up on the convictions of Barth’s studies of Paul and working through noetic questions in moral terms. It presents a conception of understanding that hinges on the reshaping of the freedom of thought in accordance with the reality that is understood. In bringing the possibilities of human freedom into correspond­ ence with the reality of God, it forms a mode of human activity that stands in analogical relation to the divine and facilitates the acknowledgement of truth. My demonstration of these claims will proceed in two parts. The first will treat in general terms the account of faith and understanding that emerges in Fides quaerens intellectum (FQT). This section involves showing that, on a general level, Barth understands the movement from faith to understanding as a movement from faith’s assent to the factual truth of Christian teaching to a grasp in understanding of the necessity of this truth. It brings with it import­ ant developments in Barth’s conception of the standpoint and orientation of theological reasoning. The second section will then show more particularly

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that Barth thinks of the movement from faith to understanding in distinctively moral terms as a process of reordering the freedom of Christian thought. Barth’s interest in the apprehension of the necessity of Christian teaching is rooted in a conception of the way that this apprehension reorders the freedom of thought by making the being and activity of God the irreducible startingpoint of all that the believer thinks and does. It reshapes the possibilities of thought around the being of God in a moral and spiritual movement of sanctification. I aim to show in closing that Barth takes this movement to be central to the acknowledgement and appropriation of the truth of Christian teaching.

5.2. THE MOVEMENT FROM FAITH TO UNDERSTANDING IN FIDES QUAERENS INTELLECTUM A word about the purpose of FQI is in order as we turn to consider its content. We saw in Chapter 4 that Barth’s depiction of Anselm’s work as a model of theological understanding in the Christliche Dogmatik sparked a debate regarding the understanding of faith in Germany; but this debate was, at most, one amongst a number of factors that lead Barth to detailed study of Anselm. Barth devotes the foreword to the first edition of FQI to addressing its purpose; he writes that the attempt to explain his intentions brings him a measure of perplexity, for he himself recognizes the range and complexity of his motives.1 He makes mention of Müller’s review of the Christliche Dogmatik, of engage­ ment with the philosopher Heinrich Scholz, who first moved Barth to further work on Anselm after a presentation to Barth’s seminar in Bonn, and of a general discontent with the way that Anselm has been handled in intellectual history.2 His worries on this latter score centre on the way that the so-called ‘proof of the existence of God’ in Proslogion 2-4 is usually treated. He writes that the common understanding of this so-called ‘ontological argument’ strikes him as a kind of ‘intellectual insolence’, for it fails to attend both to the full progress of the argument and to what it would mean in the context of Anselm’s theology to ‘prove’ anything at all.3 It is Barth’s perception of these shortcomings that is most formative of the content of FQI. The first half of FQI offers an account of Anselm’s theological programme that is intended to show what it would mean to prove within the context of Anselm’s thought more

1 Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1981), 1; ET, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans, Ian W. Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960), 7. 2 FQI, 1; ET, 7. 3 FQI, 1-3; ET, 7-9.

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generally. The second half is then devoted to a line-by-line analysis of the argument of Proslogion 2-4. The care with which Barth attends to Anselm’s text raises an initial question about the way that FQI is best read. Etienne Gilson observes that Barth handles Anselm’s work with a scrupulousness usually reserved for inspired texts;4 Bruce McCormack suggests that Barth’s concern to expound Anselm’s own thought makes FQI an unreliable guide to Barth’s work.5 Confronted by this latter suggestion, part of my aim in developing the significance of FQI is to show that careful attention to it permits the identification of a movement of thought that is central to Barth’s own work. In the interest of demonstrating this claim, I intend to conduct this presentation of FQI in conversation with Barth’s wider corpus rather than by considering the primary source material on which Barth is commenting. This procedure entails some loss, for, as with Barth’s studies of Paul, there is a great deal to be learned by observing how Anselm’s concepts are transformed in Barth’s hands; yet, within the con­ straints of this project, our primary task is to grasp the way that the movement of theological understanding present in FQI shapes Barth’s own conception of well-ordered thought.

Understanding and the Question that Guides Theological Inquiry We may take a first step towards comprehending Barth’s conceptions by considering the kind of question that Barth thinks is proper to Anselm’s search for understanding. Barth’s opening move in FQI is to argue that Anselm’s theology has its basis neither in a need to prove the credibility of Christian teaching to those outside the Church, nor in a desire to bolster the faith of those inside the Church, but rather in a ‘longing’ for understanding that is ‘immanent’ within faith itself.6 For Barth, it is of the nature of faith to desire understanding, for faith is a gift of the God who is truth itself, and an anticipation of the eschatological consummation in which believers will be given to know this God in truth.7 Barth writes that, for Anselm, ‘credo ut intelligam means: my faith itself and as such is a call to me to understand’.8 On his telling, comprehension of Anselm’s theology generally and his putative proof of the existence of God more particularly hinges on the recognition that Anselm sees no basis for theological inquiry outside of faith’s search for understanding. 4 Gilson, ‘Sens et nature de 1’argument de Saint Anselme’, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age, 9 (1934), 5. 5 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 428. 6 FQI, 14; ET, 16. 7 FQI, 17-19; ET, 18-21. 8 FQI, 16; ET, 18.

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Equipped with this premise, Barth goes on to argue that theologians must confine themselves to a mode of questioning that does not take them outside the bounds of faith’s search for understanding. He argues that theology must have the character of a positive science that seeks to elucidate rather than question the Christian confession.9 The theologian who is guided by faith’s search for understanding is precluded from asking whether the content of the Christian creed is true, for a theology that doubts or denies the content of faith would cease to fulfill its proper function.10 In place of an inquiry into the fact of the truth of the creed, Barth suggests that faith’s search for understanding proceeds by inquiring into the range of the truth of creed.11 Barth writes that ‘the one who inquires into Christian knowledge asks how far it is so, on the basis of the presupposition that it is never for a moment put into question that it is as the Christian believes’.12 This distinction is foundational both to FQI and to Barth’s own work. Barth goes on to claim that ‘the theologian asks how far it is as the Christian believes that it is’, and maintains that ‘the question concerning the “how far”, pushed beyond a definite limit, is transformed into the question concerning the “that”, and therefore theology is made into atheology’.13 Returning to the same themes later, Barth describes Anselm’s procedure in this way: Under the presupposition that it is true: God exists, God is the highest being, is one nature in three persons, became human, etc., Anselm discusses the question how far this is true, and when, in relation to this or that statement of faith, he asks and allows himself to be asked about this ‘how far’, he answers on the basis of the presupposed truth of all the other statements.14

We shall come shortly to an account of what it means for theologians to ask ‘how far’ Christian teaching is true; but it behoves us to consider an important set of conceptions that are implicit in this claim. We might begin by noting that Barth is not breaking new ground in drawing a distinction in Anselm’s work between questions regarding the mode of truth and a theologically deleterious inquiry into the factual truth of Christian teaching. In lectures on the history of the Church, Schleiermacher writes that, for Anselm, ‘with regards to that which is believed in the Catholic Church, one cannot and should not ask whether it is so, but rather merely how it is so’.15 That this distinction should appear in Schleiermacher’s work is somewhat ironic, for Barth deploys it in FQI in part in an attempt to situate his conceptions in

9 FQI, 25-6; ET, 26-7. 10 FQI, 26; ET, 27. 11 I adopt the notion of the ‘range’ of truth as a useful shorthand for Barth’s ‘how far’ question. The term is appropriate because, as we shall see, Barth’s interest in asking ‘how far’ the confession is true is to discover the peculiar ‘range’ of Christian truth that he takes to be presupposed in Paul’s thinking. 12 FQI, 25-6; ET, 27. 13 FQI, 26-7; ET, 27. 14 FQI, 61; ET, 61-2. 15 Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Kirchengeschichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 741.

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relation to Schleiermacher. We saw in Chapter 4 that Müller claims that Anselm, Schleiermacher, and Barth share a common theological horizon because all three ground their work in the maxim credo, ut intelliganr, in opposition to this notion, Barth claims that it should be clear from Anselm’s account of the positive relationship between theological inquiry and the content of the creed that Anselm’s credo, ut intelligam is wholly out of place on the title-page of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre.16 For Barth, Schleierma­ cher strays into ‘atheology’ both in his critical questioning of the truth of the Christian creed and in his apologetic attempts to make Christian teaching plausible to uncommitted human reason. In his earlier lecture course on Schleiermacher, Barth argues that Schleiermacher speaks his ‘decisive word’ when he claims that, in part of its function, theology must take its standpoint ‘above’ Christianity and offer a critical consideration of the content of Chris­ tian teaching.17 In his lectures on the history of nineteenth-century Protestant thought, Barth again makes reference to Schleiermacher’s adoption of a standpoint ‘above Christianity’ for the sake of ‘negotiating’ between Christian faith and an unbelieving culture.18 In a phrase that is determinative for Barth’s reading of Anselm, Barth writes that ‘as long as he is an apologist, the theologian must renounce his theological function’.19 That Barth uses the distinction between inquiries into the fact of Christian truth and inquiries into the range of this truth in order to situate himself over against Schleiermacher suggests that this distinction is not an idiosyncrasy of his reading of Anselm, but rather a feature of his own thought as well. The appearance can be confirmed through brief glances at a few important sections of the Church Dogmatics. In treating revelation in its objective and subjective aspects in Church Dogmatics 1.2, Barth claims that the question of the fact of revelation—that is, the question whether it is true—is addressed by the reality of revelation itself; but he goes on to argue that the question of fact would itself be ‘posed and answered wrongly if it were not followed by the question of understanding’.20 Echoing the conceptions of FQI, Barth claims that the question of understanding takes the form of inquiries into the possibility of revelation that are governed by the question of the range of truth. With regards to the objective possibility of revelation, Barth asks: ‘How far can the

16 FQI, 25, n. 18; ET, 26, n. 1. 17 Barth, Die Theologie Schleiermachers 1923/1924, ed. Dietrich Ritschl (Zürich: Theolo­ gischer Verlag Zürich, 1978), 266-7; ET, The Theology of Schleiermacher, ed. Dietrich Ritschl, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982), 148-9; Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1994), 396-9; ET, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 428-32. 18 Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, 394-6; ET, 428-32. 19 Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, 395; ET, 428. 20 KD 1.2, 29; ET, 26.

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reality of Jesus Christ, i.e., the unity of God and man indicated by this Name, be God’s revelation to man? We assume, i.e., we let ourselves be told by Holy Scripture, that it actually is so. But we should like to know how far it is so’.21 Regarding the subjective possibility of revelation, Barth writes: ‘Man is free for God by the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son. In that consists the reality of revelation. But how can he be free? How far is he so? How far is the work of the Holy Spirit the reality of revelation... ? How far has the Holy Spirit the possibility or power to do this work? We are not asking whether He has it.’22 These same conceptions occur in Barth’s treatment of the knowledge of God in Church Dogmatics IL At the beginning of this volume, Barth writes that he learned the attitude towards the problem of the knowledge and existence of God from Anselm; he refers readers to FQI for clarification of his procedure.23 The themes of FQI are evident most immediately in the question that Barth poses. In the lines prior to his acknowledgment of the influence of Anselm, Barth writes that the question to which he seeks an answer is ‘how far we can know God and therefore speak and hear about him’. He goes on to make clear that ‘it does not concern the question: whether God is known in the Church’.24 Similar uses of the distinction between the question of range and the question of fact recur throughout Barth’s presentation. Barth writes later that ‘the questions that can be placed here legitimately and meaningfully can only run: how far is God known? and: how far is God knowable?’25 He insists that dogmatics cannot ‘retreat’ from the knowledge of God in order to ask ‘whether’ God is known.26 At this point, then, we can see that the distinction between the question of fact and the question of range that informs Barth’s account of Anselm in FQI is a feature of his own work as well. In both, the question of theological understanding is associated with an inquiry into the range of the truth of Christian teaching. Barth’s insistence on this distinction raises important questions regarding the presuppositions that ground his work. The suggestion that the theologian is to ask ‘how far’ the content of the Christian confession is true appears to commit Barth to presupposing the truth of this confession; this presupposition has attracted criticisms from a range of different perspectives. On the one hand, we saw in Chapter 4 that Hans Michael Müller argues that Barth creates undue certainty within his theology by presupposing the reality of revelation and a measure of continuity between faith and understanding. On the other hand, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that Barth sacrifices the possibility of any real certainty in his work because he presupposes the truth of Christian teaching and is thus forced to ground his theology in a notion of 21 KD 1.2, 30-1; ET, 27. 23 KD II. 1, 2; ET, 4. 25 KD II. 1, 3; ET, 5.

22 KD 1.2, 265; ET, 243 (bold type as in the original). 24 KD II. 1, 2; ET, 4. 26 KD II. 1, 3-4; ET, 5-6.

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faith as risk.27 At first glance, Müller’s identification of an undue certainty and Pannenberg’s claim regarding a lack of certainty appear to be in tension; but Müller and Pannenberg are in fact united in an objection of some conse­ quence. The suggestion to which both point is that, in committing himself to asking ‘how far’ Christian teaching is true, Barth insulates his inquiry within the horizon of an artificial certainty that is finally cut off from the genuine certainty that is won through presuppositionless theological inquiry. Debates regarding the presuppositions that are proper to theological in­ quiry have of course been central to the modern tradition since the work of David Friedrich Strauss and the Tübingen school; in one sense, the oppos­ ition between Barth and Pannenberg is simply a recapitulation of the opposition generated by Ritschl’s rejection of Straussian demands for presuppositionless theological inquiry.28 We have encountered formative elements in Barth’s thinking on this question elsewhere: in Chapter 1 in Barth’s conception of the way that inquiry into the truth of Christian teaching on either realist or idealist terms threatens to collapse the distinction between God and creatures; in Chapter 2 in the way that the distinction between inquiry into the fact of Christian teaching and the range of Christian teaching is central to the opposition that Barth constructs between the differing standpoints occupied by Paul and the Corinthians. The material that we encounter in FQI does not position us to develop Barth’s thinking on this topic in any detail; at this point, the question of the presuppositions that shape Barth’s conception of theo­ logical understanding is important for us primarily because it positions us to develop significant aspects of his conception of the ordering of Christian thought. There are three points that are central for us in relation to this topic. The first is that the concrete presupposition that Barth takes as the basis of theological inquiry is the presence of God in the mode of promise. The second is that the presence of promise itself specifies that the standpoint from which the search for understanding occurs is the standpoint of the eschato­ logical subject who is found in Christ. The third is then that we can see through Barth’s study of Anselm that Barth’s conception of the ordering of thought around this standpoint is now filled out with reference to the Christian confession as a key means of the orientation of thought. These points are important because they allow us to situate Barth’s work in relation to the comments of critics like Müller and Pannenberg, and also in relation to binaries that mark contemporary readings of Barth. I propose to turn, first, to an attempt to show that the concrete presuppos­ ition that shapes Barth’s search for understanding is the presence of the object of faith in the mode of promise. We saw in Chapter 3 that study of Ephesians 27 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology I, 41-8; Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 272-3. 28 See Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75-80, 135-62.

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and of Reformation debates about the sacraments brings Barth to hold that promise indicates the proper mode of divine presence in time. That this conception of divine presence should come to the fore in considering the presuppositions of theological understanding ought not to be surprising, for we saw in Chapter 4 that both Müller and Diem understand the question of the presuppositions of theology as the question of the presupposition of the presence of the object of faith. The question for them is how far the object of faith may be taken to be present in and with faith so that understanding is possible. Müller criticizes Barth for presuming the givenness of the reality that he seeks to understand; Diem argues that Barth’s form of thought allows him to deny that God is present in and to faith itself in the way that Schleiermacher presumes. We saw that the debate between these positions is important not only because it contextualizes the inquiry of FQI, but also because it antici­ pates the terms of contemporary oppositions between realist and critically realist readings of Barth. In effect, Müller criticizes Barth for appearing to rely on a realist conception of givenness of the kind that Torrance employs, and Diem’s response anticipates McCormack’s work in suggesting that Barth’s work is sufficiently conditioned by Kant that is equipped with a critical check on assertions of divine givenness. Engagement with Barth’s response to this material allows us to situate Barth in relation to these views. Barth’s own account of the mode of presence that is presupposed by the theologian emerges most clearly in a 1929 review that he wrote of a book that Müller had published that same year. In his book, Müller argues that the ‘unheard-of certainty’ that characterizes neo-Protestantism can only be coun­ tered by a Lutheran theology that does not follow Barth in presupposing revelation, but rather insists on the hiddenness of God and a human struggle for faith.29 Müller argues that theologians ought to separate themselves from the presuppositions that ground Barth’s work; but Barth responds by suggest­ ing that the true difference between his work and Müller’s is grounded not in differing accounts of what may be presupposed, but rather in differing con­ ceptions of the significance of what is presupposed. Barth writes that in fact he and Müller share a common set of presuppositions, for they both locate the relationship between the believer and divine presence on the level of promise’ so that In preaching and in theology it can only be a matter of promise and not of revelation’.30 Both are, on Barth’s terms, theologians of promise; Barth commends Müller in Church Dogmatics I for a perceptive account of the importance of promise as the presupposition of theology.31 The difference between them arises, on Barth’s telling, because Müller fails to see that promise indicates a mode of presence that allows the theologian to reckon with 29 See Barth, ‘Bemerkungen zu Hans Michael Müller’s Lutherbuch’, Zwischen den Zeiten, 7 (1929), 561-3. 30 ‘Bemerkungen’, 565, 562. 31 KD LI, 93-4; ET, 92.

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revelation and not merely with divine hiddenness. Barth argues that Müller treats promise as an ‘absurdity’ that is contrary to all that may be expressed within a theological system, while in fact promise ought to be seen as the basis for a theology that reckons with the fulfilment of God’s presence.32 For Barth, the real presence of God’s promise means that it must be permissible to presuppose the reality of revelation, for promise is emptied of its meaning if it does not have reference to fulfilment. ‘I do not understand... what “prom­ ise” means if it is not promise of the fulfilment.’33 ‘How can one affirm the promise without thereby presupposing the fulfilment?’34 For Barth, the theo­ logian who acknowledges the reality of divine promise is equipped to reckon theologically with the reality of revelation, for ‘if there is a systematic thought of the promise, then to that extent (certainly only to that extent) there is also a systematic thought of the fulfilment’.35 Barth goes on to say that one may ask ‘how’ one is to presuppose revelation, but ‘that’ revelation may be presupposed cannot come into question for those who know the divine promise.36 For Barth, then, promise corresponds to a mode of givenness that may be presupposed as the basis of theological inquiry even though, as Barth insists together with Müller, the reality that is promised is not present in fulfilment. Barth takes this suggestion to be insulated from Müller’s criticisms while also correcting a deficiency in Müller’s work. Müller’s concern is that presupposing the reality of revelation creates straightforward continuity between faith and understanding, and thus grants the theology of the Word of God the same untoward certainty that marks neo-Protestantism. Barth’s response is that a particular form of certainty is proper to a theology of promise, but it remains distinct from the certainty of neo-Protestantism because the latter is the certainty of a self-sufficient Cartesianism, while the former is the certainty of trust in God. Promise gives surety on the basis of the constancy of the giver of the promise rather than the immediacy of the human act of faith. It is grounded finally in divine rather than human activity; it has its basis in the witness to God’s acts in history and in prayer rather than in consideration of the content and activities of consciousness. For Barth, the recognition that the certainty of promise is grounded in God allows Müller’s work to be corrected through the recognition that the proper alternative to the confidence of the neo-Protestant is not a theology marked by uncertainty and struggle, but rather a theology marked by the certainty of trust in divine promise. Barth’s deployment of his theology of promise as a specification of the givenness that is the basis of faith’s search for understanding is of considerable significance as an indication of the shape of his thinking. The encounter between Barth and Müller is in effect an encounter between the maturing Barth and the kind of destabilizing dialectic that is commonly identified in his 32 ‘Bemerkungen’, 567-8. 35 ‘Bemerkungen’, 566.

33 ‘Bemerkungen’, 565. 36 ‘Bemerkungen’, 565.

34 ‘Bemerkungen’, 566.

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own earlier work. We have seen that von Balthasar attributes the emphasis on paradox and struggle in Barth’s own early work to an idealist dialectic in which the creature is understood to stand in the distance of absolute difference from God everywhere but in punctiliar moments in which all distance collapses and the creature stands in sheer identity with God. We have also seen that, though von Balthasar’s emphasis on idealist influences is inflated, there is some truth to the general concern, for the dehistoricized eschatology of Barth’s earlier work makes it difficult for him to identify a mode of divine presence that stands between absence and the foil presence of eschatological consummation. This difficulty is significant for us here because it is precisely the weakness that Barth sees in Müller’s book. Barth tells us that Müller consigns the Christian to the struggle for faith because Müller has no term between a moment of divine ‘decision’ in which divine activity and human faith and experience are ‘iden­ tical’, and the distance, hiddenness, and paradox that mark all other moments in time.37 Müller’s work is marked by the kind of dialectic of identity and difference that threatens Barth’s earlier work. It is telling that, confronted by this pattern of thought, Barth seeks to develop the consequences of the notion of promise as the proper term for indicating the mode of God’s presence to creatures. I argued in Chapter 3 that it is in the notion of promise as a mode of divine presence, and not in an account of analogy, Christology, or the structure of revelation, that Barth finds the conceptual tools required to specify the mode of God’s presence to creatures; this suggestion is borne out by the material that we encounter here. Just as, in Chapter 3, we saw that it was identification of the notion of promise that positioned Barth to give positive description of eschatological existence in time, so here we see that Barth’s account of faith’s search for understanding rests on the claim that it is the presence of the divine in the mode of promise that the theologian presupposes. This theology of promise is central to Barth’s work. In pieces that are contemporaneous with his response to Müller, he writes that God’s presence is to be understood ‘eschatologically, i.e., as the presence of promise’,38 and that life lived in time corresponds to life lived in promise.39 In the Church Dogmatics, Barth writes that proclamation is ventured in obedience on the basis of the promise,40 that it can speak of God only in the form of promise,41 and that dogmatics itself proceeds on the basis of promise.42 Barth goes on to argue that the notion of promise specifies the ‘form’ in which God is present in the Old Testament covenants,43 and to defend Calvin’s suggestion that Christ’s coming does not indicate the replace­ ment of promise as the mode of presence with which believers reckon in

37 38 39 41

‘Bemerkungen’, 561, 563. Barth, ‘Der heilige Geist und das christliche Leben’, 512-13; ET, 60-1. Barth, ‘Verheissung, Zeit-Erfullung’, 591-8. 40 KD LI, 73; ET, 71-2. KD LI, 93-4; ET, 92. 42 KD LI, 16; ET, 17. 43 KD 1.2, 90; ET, 82.

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time.44 The Church Dogmatics continue to reflect the lesson that Barth learned through his early work on Calvin: ‘what we as Christians can be and have is wholly and exclusively promise, promissio, and nothing more. Those who truly have the promissio as the gift of the Holy Spirit have everything that we can have here and now.’45 Promise is the ‘supreme and proper form in which God now draws near to us’.46 It is, decisively, the presence of divine promise that Barth identifies as the basis on which the theologian does not pose the question of the fact of truth, but instead inquires into the question of the range of truth.47 At this point, then, we can see that Barth’s identification of faith’s search for understanding with the ‘how far’ question of the range of truth rests on the presupposition of promise as a mode of divine presence. Barth’s emphasis in the Christliche Dogmatik on the importance of an account of theological understanding raised questions regarding the mode in which the object of faith is present so that it may be understood; Barth’s answer turns on deploy­ ing this theology of promise. This recognition is crucial for us in situating Barth’s work in relation to contemporary readings. We saw in Chapter 1 that realist and critically realist readings divide over the question of the givenness of the knowledge of God. Under the pressure of the objectivism apparently demanded as a noetic corollary of the theology of justification, the realist gives a strong account of the way that ‘the Truth of God... is given to us as the object of understanding’.48 Guided by a particular construal of the formal structure of revelation, the critical realist insists on a principled non-givenness of God even in revelation that ensures that God is never given directly to be appropriated by the human knower.491 suggested earlier that I aim to escape a binary of given and non-given by asking how far a full a picture of Barth’s conceptions is able to emerge through emphasis on either a theology of justification or an account of the formal structure of revelation. We can see now that attention to other aspects of Barth’s work permits an account of the presence of the object of faith that is not reducible to an opposition between givenness and hiddenness. Barth comes to a conception of promise as a mode of divine presence through consideration of the eschatology and pneumatology that are operative in Ephesians 1:13, the injunction that Christian thought is to ‘seek the things that are above’ in Colossians 3:1, and Reformation debates regarding the sacraments. It is this conception that anchors his account of faith’s search for understanding.

44 45 46 48 49

KD 1.2, 81, 130-1; ET, 74, 117-18. Barth, Die Theologie Calvins 1922, 168; ET, 125. Die Theologie Calvins 1922, 234-5; ET, 175. 47 KD II.l, 4; ET, 5-6. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to his Early Theology, 184. McCormack, ‘Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth’, 159.

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This conception is important because it opens space in which an account of the ordering of thought can be developed on more expansive terms than are operative in classical and critically realist readings of Barth. The range of concepts employed in these latter readings is determined by consideration of a binary of givenness and non-givenness; the bounds of this binary determine the bounds of the concepts that come into view. By contrast, I aim to show that Barth’s notion of promise as a specification of a form of presence opens space in which a wider set of concepts may operate. This is the case in part because Barth uses expansive description of the way that thought orders its activities in relation to that which is present in promise in order to specify the contours of this conception of presence, and in part because the notion of promise facilitates a shift through which the discussion may be taken up in a moral register. Whereas realist and critically realist considerations revolve around the question of the epistemological force that a theological claim possesses based on its capacity to give the truth of God, Barth’s notion of promise grounds an account that is concerned to specify the moral and spiritual force that Christian teaching exercises in shaping Christian thought. We shall see that Barth’s conception of theological understanding involves allowing the content of the Christian con­ fession so to determine thought that its negation is inconceivable, not because the words of the confession contain the truth of God within themselves, but rather because they point to the promise of a giver whose word is sure. As a first point, then, consideration of Barth’s ‘how far’ question leads us to see that his account of theological understanding rests on the presupposition of the presence of the divine in the mode of promise. We shall see that this conception allows a range of important conceptions to develop; but we might wonder more concretely why the presupposition of divine promise involves a restriction of theological questioning in relation to the Christian confession in particular. Why does this presupposition bring with it the general notion that the believer may ask only how far a particular statement of faith is true? This question brings us to a second point that involves important clarifications regarding the standpoint and orientation of thought that are operative in Barth’s search for understanding. We may approach this point by considering the relation that Barth develops between his theology of promise and a particular account of the significance of baptism. Barth introduces the notion that baptism is significant in considering the presuppositions of theology through his comments on the conditions under which Anselm thinks that theology is done. In expanding on the claim that theologians may only ask ‘how far’ Christian teaching is true, Barth writes that this restriction is rooted in the fact that theological work has faith as its presupposition, and faith is ‘related to the Credo of the Church into which we are baptized’.50 This

50

FQI, 25; ET, 26.

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reference to baptism is crucial for Barth in expressing the way that the faith that founds theological work is constituted. Barth suggests that this faith is not indeterminate and contentless; rather, it is determined by a relationship to the creed that is established through baptism. It asks only ‘how far’ the Christian confession is true because it is itself constituted in part by relation to this confession. Barth does not expand on this suggestion in FQI; but, in presenting baptism as a factor that forms faith by relating it to the confession of the Church, he is deploying a notion that has been central to his thinking since his dogmatics lectures in Göttingen. In these earlier lectures, Barth deploys the notion of baptism as a way of countering the claim that religious experience provides the foundation for theological reflection. As part of a critique of psychologizing theologies of experience, Barth suggests that medieval theologians were not wrong to identify the corporate faith of the Church as a factor that sustains the faith of the individual.51 He goes on to argue that those who emphasize religious experience would do well to remember that, as infants, they were addressed by the Church in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in baptism. The confession of the Church was spoken over them ‘without any confusion with experience being able to slip in’.52 Barth writes that ‘we (fortunately!) did not experience our own baptism, but we are baptized’.53 That there is this “‘we are” without experience’ is, for Barth, indicative of the possibility that dogmatic reflection may take the witness of the Church rather than individual experience as the formative factor in its work. The notion that Christian baptism is formative of the proper ordering of theological reasoning is then a recurring feature of Barth’s work through the 1920s. It is important for us that it is decisively tied to Barth’s understanding of the problem of truth as a problem of acknowledgement. I have suggested throughout this study that Barth’s work is marked by the view that the decisive theological question of truth is the question of acknowledging the truth of God without converting it into a creaturely quantity. That which is of interest to us now is the recognition that Barth supposes that an ordering of thought that is determined by baptism is formative of the believer’s capacity to acknowledge this truth. The groundwork for this notion is laid in a lecture that Barth delivered in 1927, in which he develops a distinction between thought that takes birth as its starting-point, and thought that roots itself in Christian baptism.54 Barth’s aim is to contrast the structures of a Cartesian conscious­ ness, which takes the fact of its own existence as the foundation of reflection and the measure of truth, and the commitments of a theological consciousness

51 UCRI, 81; ET, 67. 52 UCR I, 81; ET, 67-8. 53 UCR I, 81; ET, 68. 54 Barth, ‘Gottes Offenbarung nach der Lehre der christlichen Kirche’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930, 236-8; cf. ‘Rechtfertigung und Heiligung’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930, 67-8.

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that takes the word spoken to the believer in baptism as the ground of its reflection. The notion towards which he moves is that only thought that functions in this latter mode is positioned to acknowledge the truth of God. This notion then comes to expression most clearly in the Christliche Dogmatik, in which Barth deploys the notion of a consciousness formed by baptism in order to show how grace may genuinely be acknowledged as grace. He argues that, if the truth of grace is considered in accordance with the patterns that mark inquiries into truth generally, it will be converted into a creaturely quantity, for human thought generally is characterized by a Cartesianism that establishes truth by bringing an object of knowledge into conformity to anthropological possibilities of knowledge.55 By contrast, Barth supposes that thought that turns from the ‘Cartesian’ standpoint to the standpoint of a ‘sacramental self-knowledge’ formed by baptism is positioned to acknowledge the truth of a word of grace that is spoken by God alone, for it orders its activities in accordance with the word of promise that is spoken to it.56 It starts with this word as the basis of its thinking rather than seeking to work towards it through Cartesian patterns of thought. On the terms that Barth presents here, it is through the ordering of thought in accordance with the promise that is present in baptism that the believer is positioned to acknowledge the truth of grace. Barth comes in Church Dogmatics 1.2 to explain that he would no longer refer to baptism as a sign of the proper ordering of Christian thought, for references to a ‘sacramental self-consciousness’ had led critics to claim that he had fallen in with a deleterious set of Catholic conceptions; but he goes on to make clear that these references were meant only to point to an ordering of thought that makes possible an acknowledgement of the truth of grace.57 In earlier lectures on ethics, Barth insists that the ‘epistemological significance’ of baptism consists only of the fact that it is a ‘sign of promise for our thinking’ that gives to believers the ‘gift’ of beginning with grace.58 To take baptism ‘seriously’ in its ‘epistemological significance’ is to acknowledge that ‘I should know myself as one to whose existence it belongs to think from the standpoint of grace, i.e., to begin with the knowledge of God himself, whatever my experience and the givens of my self-knowledge might be’.59 Baptism is a ‘gift’ precisely because it brings freedom from the tyranny of one’s own existence and experience as a measure of truth. Cartesian thinking is spiritu­ ally oppressive because it does not permit grace to appear as a benevolent divine gift, but rather cuts it to the shape of its own being and activity. To order one’s thinking in accordance with baptism is to find ‘comfort’ because it positions the believer to acknowledge grace as grace.60 55 Barth, Christliche Dogmatik, 297-301. 56 Christliche Dogmatik, 298, 301. 57 KD 1.2, 225-6; ET, 205-6. 58 Barth, Ethik I, 175-6; ET, 105-6. 59 Ethik I, 175-6; ET, 105-6. 60 Ethik I, 175-6; ET, 105-6.

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These comments are crucial for us in grasping Barth’s conception of the presuppositions that shape the theological search for understanding. Barth’s reference to the way that baptism shapes Anselm’s approach to theological inquiry reflects a pattern of thought that is operative in his wider work. It is a pattern that takes the problem of the acknowledgement of truth as its central theme, and works through an account of the way that divine truth may be acknowledged without being transformed it into a creaturely quantity by reconsidering the ordering of creaturely thought. Barth learns this pattern through his study of Paul; he takes it in his earlier work that Paul enjoins believers to think from the standpoint of the eschatological subject, for it is the eschatological subject who is addressed by God in the judgement of justification, and so thought that orders its activities in correspondence to God’s is to think on the basis of this subject. The account of baptism that we have encountered here represents a development of this same line of thought. To share in the ‘sacramental self-consciousness’ constituted by baptism is, for Barth, to think from the standpoint of the eschatological subject, for baptism is concretely a sign of the promise of the reality of the new creature who is found in Christ. As Barth has presented it, baptism is a sign of the reality of a subject who is not reducible to the ‘experience’ and ‘selfknowledge’ of the empirical subject in time, but is rather grounded in the activity of God alone.61 It is a sign of the reality of the eschatological subject who is known by God rather than the empirical subject who is known through self-reflection. As a second point, then, we find a further clarification of the presupposi­ tions that are operative in Barth’s commitment to the ‘how far’ question of theological understanding in the notion that the search for understanding occurs from the standpoint of the eschatological subject. It presumes the presence of the object in the mode of promise; it positions itself to acknow­ ledge this presence as a reality that is genuinely rooted in divine activity by thinking from the standpoint of the eschatological subject who is constituted by divine activity. This point is crucial, for Barth uses it to clarify the contours of the notion of promise as a mode of presence. That realities that are present in promise are apprehended from the standpoint of the eschatological subject shows that this mode of presence does not correspond to a form of givenness that the empirical subject may apprehend and appropriate. Baptism is, for Barth, a ‘sign of promise’ and not an indication of a ‘fulfilment’ through which the empirical subject is presented with God in his givenness and thus given ‘power over the Lord of baptism’.62 Whereas both the classical and critical realist concern themselves with the question of givenness from the standpoint of the empirical subject, Barth builds added depth into his conception of

61

Ethik I, 175-6; ET, 105-6.

62 Ethik I, 175-6; ET, 105-6.

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promise by specifying that realities that are present in promise are apprehend­ ed from the standpoint of an eschatological, or sacramental, form of thought. But, again, what are we to make of the concrete presupposition of the truth of the Christian confession that is also implied by Barth’s ‘how far’ question? Barth links the faith of the believer to the confession of the Church in FQI by way of his theology of baptism; but the relation between these elements is not clear. Has the claim that Christian thinking positions itself to acknowledge grace as grace by thinking from the standpoint of the eschatological subject come to serve as a way of slipping a positivistic confessionalism through the back door? The key point for us in concluding an account of Barth’s ‘how far’ question is that Barth is best understood to be pointing to the confession not as a set of claims that contain the truth of God within themselves, but rather as the means of orientation for thought that operates from the standpoint of the eschatological subject. The question of orientation is, as we have seen, the question of the way that thought may guide and regulate its movements from a particular standpoint; we saw in Chapter 3 that, in his earlier work, Barth supposes that the identity that exists between the eschatological subject and Christ means that thought that operates from the standpoint of this subject takes its orientation from Christ’s history and the mode of Christ’s presence. That which is significant for us now is the recognition that Barth’s under­ standing of the ‘epistemological significance’ of baptism expands his concep­ tion of orientation by pointing to the content of the confession as a means of orientation for Christian thought. It is baptism that brings eschatologically ordered thought into relation to the Credo-, baptism is concretely a sign of promise and not an indication of fulfilment.63 As we saw in Chapter 3, realities that are present in promise demand an ordering of thought in which knowers do not rest in the phenomenal quantities by which they are confronted, but rather seek to apprehend the movement of God that is the origin and end of the immediate. That the confession of the Church accompanies the promise of baptism does not mean that, in its phenomenal immediacy, it presents a final resting-place for theological reasoning; instead, it presents points of orienta­ tion that guide Christian thinking in its attempt to apprehend the divine reality that is the origin and end of the given. It is this emphasis on the orienting role of the Christian confession that is present in Barth’s usual comments on the role of confessional claims. In the Göttingen Dogmatics, he writes that Christian dogmatics seeks to lay out ‘border posts and anchor buoys’ in order to orient Christian thought in relation to the kerygma;64 in lectures on ethics, he describes doctrinal loci as the ‘great orientation points’ of Christian thinking;65 in the Church Dogmatics, he describes dogmatic claims as no more than ‘signs’ of a reality that stands beyond them.66 In a range of 63 See e.g. Ethik I, 175-6; ET, 105-6. 64 UCR I, 23; ET, 17-18; cf. KD 1.1, 81; ET, 79. 65 Ethik I, 86-7; ET, 52. 66 KD LI, 13; ET, 14.

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different discussions, he supposes that, where truth occurs, it involves the movement that thought undertakes under the orientation of dogmatic claims, and not the identification of these claims as the terminus of theological attention.67 In sum, then, we can see that Barth’s assertion that faith’s search for understanding is guided by the ‘how far’ question of the range of truth is grounded in a highly ramified account of the proper ordering of Christian thought. Debate regarding the nature of theological understanding in Germany in the late 1920s concerned the mode in which the object of faith may be presumed to be present to the believer. Barth’s delimitation of the search for understanding to an inquiry into the range of truth rests on the presupposition of the presence of the object in the mode of promise, and also on conceptions of the standpoint and orientation of Christian thought that correspond to the notion of promise. For Barth, the theologian asks ‘how far’ the creed is true because assent to the proclamation of grace issues in a shift in the standpoint of Christian thought, and the baptismal promise of the reality of grace relates this new standpoint to the Christian confession. This confes­ sion provides the points from which thought derives its orientation. These points are not more than landmarks that guide Christian thought in its attempt to apprehend the truth of God; but they are not less than witnesses to the reality of grace. Barth supposes that Christian thought cannot abstract itself from these points without returning to a self-grounded standpoint from which it will always apprehend something other than grace.

Understanding and Necessity Equipped with this account of the claim that faith’s search for understanding is guided by the ‘how far’ question of the range of truth, the task for us now is to inquire into the meaning of this question itself. Barth’s insistence that the theologian is confined to posing this particular question is a prominent feature both of FQI and of Barth’s own dogmatics; yet it is a question that has received little attention from Barth’s readers. Michael Beintker claims that Barth’s ‘how far’ question indicates an attempt to deepen the knowledge of faith;68 Bruce McCormack suggests that this question corresponds to an inquiry into the meaning of a particular statement of faith in the context of the wider creed;69 Henri Bouillard argues that it points to the need to see the difference between 67 Ethik I, 86-7; ET, 52; KD 1.2, 962-90; ET, 860-84. 68 Beintker, ‘. alles Andere als ein Parergon: Fides quaerens intellectum’, in Michael Beintker, Christian Link, and Michael Trowitzsch (eds.), Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921-1935) (Zürich: TVZ, 2005), 111. 69 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 429.

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Christian truth and other truth claims.70 None of these claims quite follows the line of Barth’s thinking. We can make an approach to the ‘how far’ question of theological under­ standing by considering Barth’s account of the goal of Anselm’s search for understanding. Barth’s clearest statements about the movement from faith to understanding identify this movement with the apprehension of the necessity of the truth of the Christian confession. In his exposition of Proslogion 2, Barth writes that, for Anselm, to understand means ‘to recognize the necessity of this statement of faith, the impossibility of its denial’.71 Earlier on, in his exposition of Anselm’s method, Barth equates Anselm’s search for understanding with a search for necessity in the knowledge of faith that is achieved through appre­ hension of the rationality and necessity of the object.72 Barth writes that, ‘by the roundabout investigation of the rationality and necessity of the object, the Anselmic search for understanding concerns the noetic necessity that lies behind noetic rationality’.73 Earlier still, in a discussion to which we shall return shortly, Barth claims that, for Anselm, the task of theology is to apprehend the actuality of the truth to which faith assents as a moment in its ‘inner necessity’.74 Through apprehending this ‘inner necessity’, Barth argues that Anselm wishes to lead the believer to understand the actual as the necessary. He writes that, in seeking to bring believers to understand the content of their faith, Anselm wishes to lead believers ‘to think that which is precisely as that which is unable not to be’.75 Barth’s identification of the apprehension of necessity as the proper task of theological understanding is a point of considerable significance for us, for the account of the ordering of thought that Barth develops in FQI hinges on the way that the apprehension of necessity shapes the freedom of Christian thought. Despite its centrality to the argument of FQI, it has been widely ignored.76 It is significant, first, because it shows that, when Barth claims that Anselm asks ‘how far’ a statement of faith is true, he means that Anselm inquires into the necessity of the truth of that statement. Barth confirms this connection in his initial elucidation of the question of the range of theological truth. He introduces this question by claiming that theology is transformed into ‘atheology’ when the question of the range of truth is pushed to the point 70 Bouillard, Karl Barth: Parole de Dieu et existence humaine (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1957), 146. 71 FQZ, 104-5; ET, 102. 72 FQI, 52; ET, 53. 73 FQI, 52; ET, 53. This is a loose rendering of one of the more awkward sentences in FQI. 74 FQI, 27; ET, 28. 75 FQI, 52; ET, 52. 76 Gordon Watson’s articles on FQI are an exception here. Watson rightly points out that Barth thinks that Anselm’s search for theological understanding is a search for a comprehension of the necessity of the object of faith; but he does not expand on the significance of this claim. See ‘A Study in St. Anselm’s Soteriology and Karl Barth’s Theological Method’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 42 (1989), 493-512; ‘Karl Barth and St. Anselm’s Theological Program’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 30 (1977), 31-45.

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that it becomes a question of fact; he then argues that, for Anselm, the task of theology at the limit marked by the question of range is to inquire into the ‘inner necessity’ of Christian teaching.77 He writes that the theologian who inquires into the range of the truth grants the factual truth of the Christian confession and then seeks to understand the ‘facticity’ of this truth ‘as a • • • 7 moment in its inner necessity. As a preliminary point, then, we can see that Barth holds that, for Anselm, the task of theological understanding is to grasp the necessity that is proper to the object of faith. The question for us at this point is how we are to understand the notion of necessity that Barth thinks is at play in Anselm’s work. This question is best approached by considering the relationship that Barth sees in Anselm’s thought between the concept of necessity and the concept of rationality. Barth notices that one of the idiosyncrasies of Anselm’s work is that Anselm often treats necessity and rationality as synonymous and interchangeable.79 In the opening chapter of Cur Deus Homo, Anselm takes it as his task to show by what ‘ratione or necessitate’ God became man.80 Further on, Anselm’s interlocutor in Cur Deus Homo claims that the question in which they are involved concerns how Christ’s death can be shown to be rational and necessary.81 On the basis of these comments, Barth takes the relationship between necessity and rationality as the clue to understanding the noetic necessity that is the end of Anselm’s search for understanding. He offers a fourteen-step analysis of the relationship between these two terms; this ana­ lysis introduces the notion of conformity to law as the tertium comparationis in light of which the identity of rationality and necessity is comprehensible.82 As Barth presents it, rationality and necessity are interchangeable because both express a thing’s relation to law. On the ontic side, the necessity and rationality of the object of faith are both grounded in the conformity of the being and essence of the object to law. On the noetic side, the necessity and rationality of the knowledge of the object of faith both consist in the apprehension of the conformity of the being and essence of the object of faith to law.83

77 FQI, 27; ET, 28. 78 FQI, 27; ET, 28. 79 FQI, 48-9; ET, 48-9. Barth cites a number of Anselm’s texts here that give solid grounding to his claim. 80 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, in Anselm: The Major Works, 1.1. 81 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, 1.10. 82 See FQI, 49-52; ET, 49-52. In the course of working through these steps, Barth introduces the idea that, for Anselm, the ontic has priority over the noetic. A number of scholars have fixated on this claim as the key feature of FQI; yet it is in reality a subsidiary theme that is introduced for the sake of clarifying the relationship between rationality and necessity. It plays a minimal role in Barth’s analysis. See here e.g. Manfred Josuttis, Die Gegenständlichkeit der Offenbarung. Karl Barths Anselm-Buch und die Denkform seiner Theologie (Bonn: H. Bouvier & Co., 1965); Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology. 83 FQI, 49-52; ET, 49-52.

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At root, then, Barth holds that, for Anselm, the necessity that is sought in theological understanding is the conformity to law of the being of the object of faith. Whereas faith assents to the factuality of the object of faith, understand­ ing seeks to grasp the conformity to law that is the ground of the being and essence of this object. On the terms that Barth establishes in FQI, this means understanding the object in relation to the knowledge and will of God. In commenting on the relationship between the object of faith and the human mind, Barth introduces the knowledge and will of God as the ground of the rationality and necessity of the object of faith, and of the possibility that this rationality and necessity are apprehensible for human knowers.84 Barth writes that the rationality and necessity of the object of faith are given by God when the object is brought into being in accordance with God’s perception of its fittingness, while human apprehension of this rationality and necessity is given by God in occasional moments of divine revelation.85 This account of the grounding of the necessity of the object of faith in the knowledge and will of God shows that, when Barth claims that, for Anselm, understanding consists in apprehending the actuality of the article of faith as a moment in its inner necessity, he means that understanding consists in apprehending God’s understanding of the object and the ratio of the actualization of the object’s being and essence. Where this occurs, God’s own understanding of the object is encountered as the ground of the necessity that faith seeks in trying to move to understanding. At this point, then, we can see that Barth suggests that faith moves to understanding by grasping the necessity that is proper to the object of faith by virtue of its grounding in the knowledge and will of God. The task for us now is to treat briefly the role that a conception of this kind plays in Church Dogmatics in order to show that the concepts that we encounter in FQI are genuine features of Barth’s own thinking. We can begin with the account of the nature of Christian knowledge that Barth gives in the prolegomena to the Church Dogmatics. Echoing the identification in the Christliche Dogmatik of a need for a distinctively theological account of knowledge, Barth writes in Church Dogmatics 1.1 that the concept of knowledge used in relation to the Word of God cannot be a general concept taken from knowledge of other objects.86 The account of knowledge that he goes on to develop mirrors the movement from contingency to necessity that is presented in FQI. Barth writes that, in relation to the Word of God, knowledge indicates a movement of ‘confirmation’ in which the reality that is known becomes an irreducible aspect of the believer’s life.87 Barth speaks of this confirmation as a movement from a contingent apprehension of the reality of the object to an acknow­ ledgement of the necessity possessed by the object. In theological knowledge, 84 FQI, 45; ET, 45. 86 KD 1.1, 198; ET, 190.

85 FQI, 46-7; ET, 46-7. 87 KD 1.1, 195-6; ET, 188.

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the reality that is known ‘moves from a contingent to a necessary, from an outer to an inner determination of [the knower’s] own existence’.88 Drawing on concepts that we shall come to shortly in FQI, Barth associates the necessity that is found here with a shaping of the freedom of the believer who knows the Word of God. Barth argues that knowledge in the sense that is appropriate to the Word of God does not exist where human knowers retain the ‘freedom to pull back into themselves’ and possess themselves as an independent basis from which ‘to affirm, to place in question, or to deny’ the reality of the object that is known.89 For Barth, the necessity that marks the knowledge of the Word of God is a necessity in which thinking can only begin with the truth of the reality of the object that is known.90 We shall come later to treat the significance of Barth’s association of the necessity that marks knowledge of the Word of God with the freedom of the knower. At present, two further texts may be considered in order to illustrate the role that necessity plays in the Church Dogmatics. These texts serve to introduce rules that govern Barth’s conception of the necessity that the believer apprehends in theological understanding. The first occurs in Barth’s treatment of the incarnation in Church Dogmatics 1.2. As we saw earlier, this treatment includes a consideration of the objective possibility of revelation that is governed by the ‘how far’ question of theological understanding.91 Barth’s discussion makes clear that this consideration is intended to move believers from an acknowledgement of the facticity of revelation to an under­ standing of the necessity in which this fact is grounded. Barth proceeds by coordinating conceptions of the human need and divine possibility that are made manifest in revelation in order to show that there is a sense in which it is proper to say that the miracle of the incarnation ‘had to take place’, that is, that the incarnation is marked by a divine ‘must’.92 Barth aims, in other words, to identify a necessity proper to God’s activity in the incarnation; yet his attempt is informed by the perception of a shortcoming in a number of classical Christologies. Barth suggests that we are warned by examples from the theological tradition that an attempt to grasp the necessity of the incarnation might well appear to impose a necessity on God, as if God were constrained by his character to act for the redemption of creatures.93 Citing Athanasius, Barth argues that we go astray if we find ourselves affirming that, because of his own goodness, ‘it was necessary that God not allow men to be carried off in destruction’.94 In opposition to this notion, Barth wishes to insist that the incarnation is an act of divine freedom that does not rest upon ‘any necessity 88 KD LI, 195; ET, 188. 89 KD 1.1, 195-6; ET, 188. 90 KDI.l, 195; ET, 188. 91 This is the material encountered earlier on the objective possibility of revelation in KD 1.2, §13.2. 92 KD 1.2, 34-6; ET, 30-3. 93 KD 1.2, 148-9; ET, 135. 94 KD 1.2, 148; ET, 135.

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in the divine nature’.951'he question for him, then, is how to give an account of the necessity that is proper to theological understanding without appearing to project a necessity onto God. Barth responds to this question by developing a rule that governs the deployment of the notion of necessity in the Church Dogmatics. This rule is that ‘the actual will of God as it is visible in the event of his revelation’ is to be honoured as the ‘source and essence of all necessity’.96 The point of this rule is to establish that no necessities external to God’s will impinge on God’s activity, for all necessity is consequent to determinations of divine volition. With this rule in place, Barth is positioned to make clear that the search for theological understanding consists not in an attempt to determine what is necessary for God from some standpoint other than revelation, but rather in an ‘acknow­ ledgement’ of the things that God’s actual will shows that he himself‘obviously held as necessary’.97 This attachment of theological reflection to the will of God as the source and essence of necessity is foundational for Barth. He affirms its force in his account of the divine attributes in Church Dogmatics II. 1, in which he writes that God’s freedom is the ‘basis’ of our necessities.98 He comes then to annex this notion to the language of divine self-determination that figures prominently in the later volumes of the Dogmatics. In treating the theology of creation, Barth writes that God’s act of creation is a ‘necessity’ constituted by the fact that, from all eternity, God determines himself to love the world in Jesus Christ99 In treating the theology of reconciliation, Barth writes that the journey of the Son into the far country is marked off from the ‘contingent events of nature or destiny’ as well as from any ‘arbitrary’ divine act by a ‘necessity’ grounded in the fact that this event is the fulfilment of God’s self-determination. This event takes place in the ‘inner necessity of the freedom of God’ in ‘divine fulfilment of a divine decree’.100 In the first place, then, the attempt to apprehend the necessity of the articles of Christian teaching amounts to an attempt to trace the movement of divine freedom. The theologian who seeks to understand the content of the Christian confession seeks to understand how this confession manifests God’s exercise of his freedom. That which is significant for us now is the recognition that, in presenting the search for theological understanding in these terms, Barth does not think that he is departing from Anselm. Where he criticizes Athanasius for offering an account of the incarnation that appears to impose a necessity on God, Barth writes that there appears to be a similar error in Anselm’s work, but Anselm’s intent at least is right, for Anselm is consistent in presenting necessity as a secondary concept that follows from God’s free will.101 This claim echoes Barth’s work in FQI, in which he identifies a primacy of the will 95 KD 1.2, 148; ET, 135 . 96 KD 1.2, 41; ET, 37. 97 KD 1.2, 41; ET, 37. 98 KD II.l, 583; ET, 518. 99 KD III.l, 54; ET, 51. 100 KD IV.l, 212-13; ET, 194-5. 101 KD 1.2, 149; ET, 135.

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of God in relation to all ratio and necessitas as a key feature of Anselm’s work.102 For Barth, then, the notion that the search for the necessity of Christian teaching is a matter of following the divine will is a genuinely Anselmic notion; but it is also a notion that raises as many questions as it answers. Does the identification of necessity with the actual will of God mean that, in speaking of necessity, we are in the sphere of an arbitrary exercise of divine power? Is the concept of necessity not emptied of meaning if it rests on nothing more than a free exercise of divine will? We can treat these questions insofar as they bear on our purposes by considering a second rule that governs Barth’s conception of necessity. This rule may be seen in Barth’s treatment of Christ’s humanity as a being-for his fellow human beings in Church Dogmatics III.2. After introducing the ‘orien­ tation’ of Christ’s being to his fellow human beings, Barth claims that the ‘final and highest’ step in the exposition consists in seeing that Christ’s being-for his fellows is not simply a matter of fact to be believed but rather a necessity to be apprehended in understanding. Theological understanding is again associated here with an apprehension of necessity; the distinction between the factual and the necessary occurs at this point because Barth is worried that realities that are purely factual can be interpreted as nothing more than expressions of a ‘contingent’ or ‘capricious’ divine decision.103 Barth acknowledges that there is something mysterious about Christ’s relationship to his fellow human beings; he is worried that this mystery will be taken to mean that there is finally a great contingency and capriciousness at the heart of God’s activity. In response to this worry, Barth seeks to show that Christ’s being-for his fellows is not a ‘mere fact’ but rather a necessity that is ‘full of meaning and wisdom’.104 He does so by arguing that Christ’s peculiar mode of being is demanded by his work, and his work is not a matter of ‘contingency or capriciousness, but rather of the mystery of the purpose and wisdom of God’ because in this work God is faithful to himself.105 Barth’s claim is finally that Christ’s being-for his human fellows may be apprehended as a theological necessity because it is grounded in God’s self-fidelity. Barth writes that ‘there is freedom in God, but no caprice’, and so we may recognize the meaningfulness of the necessity of the fellow-humanity of Jesus because it ‘rests on the freedom of God in which there is nothing contingent or capricious but in which God is true to himself’.106 With these words, Barth introduces the second rule that governs the attempt of theological understanding to apprehend the necessity of Christian teaching. This rule is that the freedom of God may be seen as the ‘source and essence’ of necessity without emptying the notion of necessity of meaning 102 FQI, 51; ET, 51. 103 KD III.2, 260-3; ET, 218-20. 104 KD III.2, 260; ET, 218. 105 KD III.2, 263; ET, 220. 106 KD III.2, 260; ET, 218.

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because, in his freedom, God is true to himself. This notion, too, is founda­ tional for Barth. To observe just one further example from the Church Dogmatics, it is this notion that governs Barth’s conception of the necessity that he seeks to uncover in God’s redeeming work. In the account of Christ’s work in Church Dogmatics IV. 1 that we touched on a moment ago, Barth takes up the question of the necessity of this work in part because he is again worried that the mystery of God’s activity might evince a capriciousness or even contradiction in God, for, in Jesus Christ, God enters the contradiction of human creatures against himself.107 In face of this worry, Barth offers a strong reaffirmation of God’s self-consistency. He argues that the necessity that theological understanding finds in the work of the Son is grounded in the fact that there is ‘no contingency, no whim’ in God, but rather a faithfulness to himself that is made manifest in what God actually does.108 As Barth puts it earlier in Church Dogmatics IV. 1, Christ’s atoning work is a ‘necessary hap­ pening’ because it is the ‘great act of God’s faithfulness to himself’.109 At this point, then, we can see that the apprehension of necessity that is the aim of theological understanding consists not simply in grasping how Christian teaching reflects the movement of divine freedom, but also in grasping how the movement of divine freedom reflects God’s faithfulness to himself. To apprehend the necessity of Christian teaching is to apprehend the grounding of this teaching in God’s self-fidelity. In concluding our treatment of this dynamic, we might usefully revisit the suggestion from Chapter 4 that the movement of thought that characterizes the Church Dogmatics is set apart from the movement that is typical of Barth’s earlier Göttingen and Münster dogmatics. We saw in Chapter 4 that, in the Göttingen and Münster dogmat­ ics, Barth’s decision to take the Reformation correlation of God and faith as the clue to the proper object of dogmatic science leads him to suggest that the basic movement of theological reasoning involves moving between God and creatures as two terms in a relation. We saw also that a different notion is operative in the Church Dogmatics, for in this latter work Barth proposes that the poles between which theological reasoning traces its movement are not God and faith, but rather God’s being and God’s activity. It is this proposal that grounds Eberhard Jüngel’s famous claim that the Church Dogmatics as a whole can be understood as a ‘thorough exegesis’ of the claim that ‘God corresponds to himself’;110 we can see now that this movement of thought in the Church Dogmatics trades on the conception of theological understand­ ing that is developed in FQI. Barth claims in the Christliche Dogmatik that an account of theological understanding is of decisive significance; but he does not yet have one in place. In FQI, he lays the groundwork for the notion that

107 KD IV.l, 202; ET, 185. 109 KD IV.l, 50-1; ET, 48.

108 KD IV.l, 202-12; ET, 185-95. 110 Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming, 36.

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the movement of understanding that corresponds to the standpoint of faith involves moving between God’s being and God’s activity for the sake of apprehending the necessity that is proper to the content of the Christian confession. Theological reasoning traces its course between God’s being and God’s activity for the sake of discovering the necessity that is the goal of theological understanding. The movement of thought developed in FQI is thus an essential ingredient of the movement that grounds Barth’s subsequent dogmatics. The decisive question for us in concluding the first half of this chapter is why Barth is interested in the notion of necessity. A search for necessity in knowledge is typical of much modern epistemological inquiry; the question for us is whether Barth is caught up in a quixotic quest for epistemological certainty. The question can be posed by considering the relation between Barth’s theology and an earlier project that had a considerable impact on his work. One corollary of the account of theological understanding that I have traced here is that Barth ought to be acknowledged to have drawn a good deal for his account of theological understanding from the work of Isaak Dorner. Barth first became acquainted with Dorner’s work in the late 1920s; he immediately expressed appreciation for Dorner’s attempts to avoid the various identity theologies that marked the latter half of the nineteenth century.111 Barth gave further attention to Dorner’s work as part of his lectures on modern Protestant theology between 1929 and 1930; Dorner’s influence on Barth’s reading of Anselm is clear. In his own System of Christian Doctrine, Dorner anticipates the central concepts of FQI in identifying an impulse to understanding that is internal to faith,112 speaking of this understanding as a move from an immediate, factual certainty that belongs to faith to a grasp in understanding of the ‘internal truth and necessity’ of Christian teaching,113 claiming that understanding comes to apprehend this necessity by recognizing the way that God’s works manifest his self-fidelity,114 identifying the ‘inner coherence’ of Christian teaching as a clue to the apprehension of this necessity, and describing this apprehension as a grasp of ‘truth as truth’.115 The

111 See Barth, ‘Das Wort in der Theologie von Schleiermacher bis Ritschi’, in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930, 211-13; ET, ‘The Word in Theology from Schleiermacher to Ritschf, in Theology and Church, 214-15; cf. the account of Barth’s relation to Dorner in Sang Eun Lee, Karl Barth und Isaak August Dorner: Eine Untersuchung zu Barths Rezeption der Theologie Dorners (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), which traces the history of Barth’s engagement with Dorner without addressing similarities between Dorner’s programme and the notions spelt out in FQI. 112 Isaak August Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, trans. Alfred Cave and J. S. Banks (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1880), 19. 113 Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, 19, 177, 179. 114 Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, 180. 115 Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, 22, 32. A notion that, as we shall see, figures prominently in FQI.

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conception of theological understanding that is developed in FQI appears, on one level, to be appropriated fairly straightforwardly from Dorner; the shift that we encounter between the ccrrelationist movement of thought of the Göttingen and Münster dogmatics and the guiding interest in divine self­ consistency of the Church Dogmatics can be understood on one level as a shift from a form of thought inherited from Ritschl to a form of thought influenced by Dorner. The important point for us concerns the differing ends that Dorner and Barth seek. On one side, Dorner aims to uncover the necessity that Christian teaching possesses by virtue of its rooting in God’s self-fidelity for the sake of bringing certainty to faith and equipping believers for effective apologetics.116 On the other side, I aim in the second half of this chapter to show that Barth’s interest in the notion of necessity is grounded in a concern for the moral ordering of Christian thought. Barth is concerned to trace the way that Christian witness to divine activity brings the freedom of Christian thought into conformity with itself so that the movements of human thought mirror the movements of God. At root, Barth supposes that faith’s search for understanding consists in an attempt to bring human thought into corres­ pondence with the activity of God so that the knower stands in the relation in which the truth of God may be acknowledged.

5.3. UNDERSTANDING, FREEDOM, AND THE ORDERING OF THOUGHT

Understanding and Freedom in Barth’s Reading of Proslogion 2-4 The conception of the movement from faith to understanding that we have encountered to this point can be summarized as follows. The act of faith consists in part in assent to the truth of Christian teaching as a witness to a reality that is not given in and with this teaching itself. This act of assent brings with it a shift in the believer’s noetic standpoint, for the believer lives in light of realities that cannot be comprehended from the standpoint of the empirical or transcendental subject. The standpoint adopted by faith then determines the set of questions that is open to the theologian. The theologian may not ask whether a statement of faith is true, for this question precludes the acknow­ ledgement of the truth of God, but is instead tasked with inquiring how far a statement of faith is true. This question corresponds to an attempt to com­ plement faith’s assent to the facticity of the truth of the Christian confession 116 Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, 19-20.

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with an apprehension of the necessity that this truth possesses by virtue of its grounding in God’s self-consistency. To borrow language from FQI, faith’s search for understanding amounts to the attempt to grasp the facticity of Christian truth as a moment in the inner necessity that it possesses as a manifestation of the determination of God’s will. This, in highly synthetic terms, is the movement of thought that is rooted in FQI and developed through Barth’s own dogmatic work. It provides a her­ meneutical key to a good deal of the Church Dogmatics by pointing to the movement that Barth wishes to trace in showing the correspondence between God’s being and God’s activity. The question for us now concerns the con­ ception of the ordering of thought that emerges from this movement. A fuller understanding of the content of FQI is worthwhile in its own right; but its relevance for us is rooted in its centrality to Barth’s depiction of well-ordered thought. We have seen already that reflection on theological understanding leads Barth to further specification of his conceptions of the standpoint and orientation of Christian thought. My aim in the remainder of this chapter is to show that Barth’s account of theological understanding is underwritten by a particular concern for the ordering of the freedom of Christian thought. I hope to show that Barth takes the apprehension of the necessity of Christian teaching to be the goal of theological understanding because he sees this apprehension as an element in a spiritual movement through which the freedom of Christian thought is reshaped in correspondence to the movement of divine freedom. I intend to show that, on Barth’s terms, understanding consists in a reordering of the freedom of Christian thought in a movement that is best thought of as the noetic side of the sanctification of the believer. We can approach these conceptions by tracing the way that a concern for the freedom of Christian thought emerges in Barth’s interpretation of Anselm’s famous argument regarding the existence of God. An interpretation of this argument occupies the second half of FQI after a lengthy treatment of Anselm’s theological programme in the first half of the work. This earlier treatment is intended to shed light on the argument regarding the existence of God in Proslogion 2-4. Barth’s interpretation of this latter argument in particular is important for us because Barth sees the argument as an applica­ tion of the general notion that theological understanding consists in grasping the necessity of Christian teaching; but he then makes two moves in his treatment of this argument that are decisive for his reading of Anselm as a whole. First, he suggests that the conclusion of the argument shows that the necessity that theological understanding seeks is aimed at reordering the freedom of Christian thought; second, he argues that in fact the argument is a paradigm of Anselm’s theological method generally, and so Anselm’s theo­ logical programme as a whole is to be understood as an attempt to reshape the freedom of Christian thought.

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Barth opens space for the question of understanding to come to be con­ nected with the question of freedom through three key inversions of trad­ itional readings of Proslogion 2-4. In the first place, he proposes that Anselm’s argument aims not to convince unbelievers of the existence of God, but rather to bring believers to understand God’s existence. Through the first half of FQI, Barth has developed the notion that Anselm’s theology has no goal other than nurturing the understanding of faith; in accordance with this notion, Barth suggests that the argument of Proslogion 2-4 is to be seen as an attempt to make the existence of God ‘comprehensible’ rather than ‘credible’.117 As he understands it, Anselm wishes to lead his readers in the ‘special movement of thought’ that is required to understand the existence of God.118 This shift from the notion that Anselm seeks to prove to the notion that Anselm seeks to understand is crucial, for it allows Barth to move the argument of Proslogion 2-4 into the sphere of concerns that are decisive for his own thinking. We saw in Chapters 2 and 3 that Barth supposes that an attempt to teach believers what it is to say ‘God’ is at the heart of Paul’s theology. That Barth aligns Anselm with this Pauline interest then inclines him to foreground the question of the freedom of thought in his reading of Anselm, for, as we saw in Chapter 3, he supposes that, on the terms that are set by Paul, understanding the existence of God means submitting to the reshap­ ing of the freedom of thought that accompanies God’s revelation of himself as Lord. The key to Barth’s interpretation of Proslogion 2-4 is the suggestion that, for Anselm as for Paul, the ‘special movement of thought’ in which an understanding of the claim ‘God is’ is contained involves submitting the freedom of thought to the lordship that is proper to God. Barth opens further space for the question of the freedom of thought to come to the fore through a second inversion of traditional readings, this one centering on Barth’s account of what it means for Anselm to inquire into existence. As his work is traditionally understood, Anselm treats existence as synonymous with actuality, and thus supposes that proving the existence of God is a matter of establishing the claim that God is actual. Read in this way, the argument of Proslogion 2-4 turns on a straightforward binary of possibility and actuality. Anselm is taken to establish the possibility of a being called God by pushing his readers to acknowledge the intelligibility of the idea of thatthan-which-nothing-greater-can-be-conceived; he then argues that it belongs to the peculiarity of this being that, if it is possible, it must also be actual, for it could not fail to be actual and remain that-than-which-nothing-greatercan-be-conceived. The existence of God is thus established because it has been shown that the actuality of that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-beconceived must be affirmed.

117

FQI, 80; ET, 78.

118

FQI, 93; ET, 92.

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Barth separates himself from this construal by proposing that Proslogion 2-4 is to be read not in terms of a simple binary of possibility and actuality, but rather in terms of a threefold distinction between possibility, actuality, and existence. Barth draws this notion not from the Proslogion itself, but rather from Anselm’s attempt to explain how God exists through and out of himself in the Monologion.119 As part of this attempt, Anselm distinguishes between essentia, esse, and existens, and suggests that the relation between these terms is the same way as the relation between the terms ‘ “brightness,” “to brighten,” and “something that is bright”’. Setting up this parallel is important for Anselm because it allows him to argue that God may be understood to exist in and through himself in the same way that brightness brightens in and through itself;120 but Barth bypasses the terms of Anselm’s parallel and suggests instead that the distinction between essentia, esse, and existens is to be understood as a distinction between possibility, actuality, and existence.121 His interest in deploying this distinction is to present a version of the argument of Proslogion 2-4 that is responsive to the challenges of philosoph­ ical and theological idealism. On his telling, Anselm’s argument is shaped by the recognition that the question of existence must be set apart from the question of actuality because actuality may signal nothing more than the being of the object as an idealist construct of thought. Actuality ‘could belong to an object in such a way that its being is merely presupposed in an act of human thought’, and so the question of existence must be established as a distinct, second question so that the phrase ‘God is’ is not taken to mean ‘this being is a presupposition of my own acts of thought’.122 On Barth’s telling, Anselm treats the question of existence as a ‘special question’ that stands apart from the question of actuality.123 It requires a ‘special movement of thought’ that cannot be collapsed into the customary movements of either the realist or the idealist. Barth has argued in his ‘Fate and Idea’ lectures that neither the realist nor the idealist deploys a movement of thought that permits the acknowledge­ ment of the truth of God. It is important now that Barth sees in Anselm’s work a ‘special’ form of thought that is able to overcome this difficulty by separating the question of existence from the question of actuality. The key, as we shall see, is that Barth comes to treat the ‘special’ question of existence as a question of the freedom that is proper to thought in relation to a particular reality. The third point that is significant for us in tracing the way that the question of freedom comes to be central concerns not Barth’s account of Anselm’s conception of existence generally, but rather his account of Anselm’s concep­ tion of the existence of God in particular. Barth further separates himself from traditional construals of Proslogion 2-4 by suggesting that Anselm’s chief 119 See here FQI, 92; ET, 90. 120 Anselm, Monologion, in Anselm: The Major Works, 6. 122 FQI, 92-3; ET, 90-2. 123 FQI, 92-3; ET, 90-2.

121 FQI, 92; ET, 90.

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interest lies in an elucidation of the ‘special’, or ‘particular’, mode of existence that is proper to God. Conventional readings suppose that Proslogion 2 establishes the veracity of the statement ‘God is’, and Proslogion 3 merely repeats this proof; but Barth argues that Proslogion 2 is something of a preparatory exercise that shows that God shares in a ‘mark’ of the mode of existence that is typical of things in general, and that Anselm’s real interest lies in pointing in Proslogion 3 to the ‘special’ mode of existence that belongs to God alone.124 Barth writes that Proslogion 2 serves to show that God shares in the mind-independence that is the ‘mark of true existence’ in creaturely things; yet Barth goes on to insist that, for Anselm, this point does not take up the true problem of the existence of God, for it does not touch the way that ‘the Creator stands over against the thought of the creature’.125 The particular existence that belongs to God is not yet addressed. This, for Barth, is the task of Proslogion 3. As Barth presents it, Anselm leads believers to understand what it is to say ‘God is’ by considering the shape of the freedom of Christian thought in relation to God. In Proslogion 3, Anselm argues that a God who may not be thought not to exist is greater than a God who may be thought not to exist; thus, those who understand that God exists as that-than-which-nothinggreater-can-be-conceived find that they ‘cannot think of Him as not exist­ ing’.126 To understand the being of God is to understand that God may not be thought not to exist. At a mundane level, Barth supposes that the notion that God may not be thought not to exist represents the discovery of the kind of necessity that is sought through Anselm’s programme generally, and so, in reaching this end, Anselm has executed a movement that conforms to his theological method; yet, Barth goes on to fill in this conclusion with moral and spiritual colour that is decisive for his conception of the ordering of creaturely thought. He does so by presenting this conclusion as a claim about the shape of the freedom of thought in relation to God. As he understands it, the notion that God may not be thought not to exist sets God’s existence apart from creaturely existence by identifying it with a peculiar form of necessity in which it reorders the freedom of human thought. On the one hand, the contingency that marks creaturely existence generally means that creaturely realities do not constrain the freedom of the mind, for the contingent encounters thought as true in fact, but leaves thought free to conceive of other possible worlds in which other states of affairs obtain. Thought may pull back from things that are true in fact and order its activities in light of hypothetical states of affairs that it finds preferable. Human freedom generally is rooted in a capacity to imagine states of affairs and causal outcomes other than those that are contingently true. That which is true in fact leaves the freedom of thought

124

FQI, 132-8; ET, 129-35.

125

FQI, 132-3; ET, 130.

126 Anselm, Proslogion 4.

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largely untouched. That which is true by necessity, on the other hand, brings the mind into conformity with itself by rendering incoherent the thought of worlds in which this truth does not obtain. Where truth is necessary, all of the mind’s possibilities must conform to it. It cannot be excluded from any of the mind’s imaginative worlds; the mind recognizes that its freedom is limited because the capacity to envision the negation of a necessary reality is not included in its set of possibilities. It can think and act only in the light of this reality. It is this state of affairs that Barth thinks is indicated in Anselm’s claim that God may not be thought not to exist. As Barth presents it, this claim shows the unique way in which God exists by showing that there is a necessity to God’s existence that bends the freedom of human thought into conformity with itself. Barth writes that Anselm’s argument shows that God is ‘the one in relation to whom thoughts are not free’, for God is ‘the one who makes even the thought of his non-existence impossible’.127 This notion is then developed with considerable force at the climax of his argument. Barth takes the closing lines of Proslogion 4 as an occasion to ask what it is to know God. ‘What does it mean to know—to know and to recognize God himself?’128 This is the question that has been with Barth since the diagnosis of the pathologies that follow from a failure to grasp what it is to say ‘God’ that marks his reading of Paul. His answer is that to know God is to stand in the reordering of the freedom of thought to which Anselm points. Barth writes that to know God consists ‘concretely’ in ‘human beings allowing God to be God in their thought. Precisely in their thought, precisely as the limit of their freedom of thought.’129 He goes on to say that ‘all piety and morality are meaningless, have nothing to do with God, can still be atheistic or become so again if they do not reach to the establishment of the absolute limit on this innermost, most intimate sphere of freedom’, for where thought imagines that it remains free in relation to God it may be sure that it is dealing with an idol that it may master. As Barth presents it, understanding the existence of God in Anselm’s sense consists in human beings coming to know God as the Lord of thought in the same way that ‘the true ox knows its master and the true donkey its master’s manger’.130 It is to stand under the ‘constraint of the knowledge of the existence of God’ and to acknowledge that thought cannot detach itself from God as a spectator but must rather begin its thinking with the reality of God.131 These comments are the rhetorical high-point of FQI, the climax of Barth’s argument, and a crucial moment in his thinking. Barth injects a turn of speed into his language that conveys something of the existential force of an understanding of the existence of God. For all of the ‘granitic opacity’ of the 127 FQI, 154; ET, 152. 128 FQI, 172; ET, 169. 129 FQI, 172; ET, 169. 130 FQI, 172; ET, 169. Barth is quoting here from Isaiah 1:3. 131 FQI, 172; ET, 169.

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‘Scholastic idiom’ of FQI,132 there is real verve to Barth’s writing here; to fail to grasp the sheer energy of this conception of understanding is to jeopardize any chance of grasping the moral and spiritual freight that Barth sees in Anselm’s argument. This freight is crucial, for, on one level, Anselm’s conclusion regarding the inconceivability of the non-existence of God does not appear to carry a great deal of weight. Barth acknowledges that, as the work of a detached reasoner proceeding ‘from pure reason’ in a ‘universal debating hall’, Anselm’s argument possesses little power to persuade;133 but Barth is keen to ensure that neither Anselm’s work nor his own are understood on these terms. As he presents it, Anselm’s argument is undertaken not as the free inquiry of a self-sufficient human reasoner, but rather as the work of a creature who seeks to understand the Creator. Barth writes that the key to grasping Anselm’s description of God as that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-conceived is the recognition that this formulation is not generated by a knower standing before an object of knowledge, but rather by a creature standing before the Creator in prayer.134 It derives its validity from the moral and spiritual force that it possesses as an expression of the folly that would characterize the creature’s attempt to conceive of something greater than the Creator. It captures the great ‘logical-moral absurdity’ that is present where creatures proceed as if they were capable of ascending in thought to a place above the Creator.135 Barth goes on to write that the claim that God may not be thought not to exist does not indicate a ‘physical’ impossibility, but rather an ‘impos­ sible possibility’ marked by the basic confusion regarding creatureliness that is manifest in the rebellion of sin.136 His aim, in so doing, is to show that it is the moral and spiritual dynamics of the creature’s relationship to the Creator that ground Anselm’s argument. Kant claims that traditional construals of the ontological argument fail because they do not specify ‘the conditions that make it necessary to regard the non-being of a thing as absolutely unthink­ able’;137 Barth suggests that Anselm specifies these conditions by showing that it is the peculiar dynamic of the relation between Creator and creature that grounds his argument. Anselm is, on these terms, not offering an ontological argument, for he is not reasoning in the realm of pure concepts, but is instead aiming to lead believers through a moral and spiritual movement into a form of thought that is commensurate with their fellowship with the Creator. It is finally the moral interest in the ordering of creaturely thought that undergirds his interpretation of Anselm and determines the conceptions that he derives from it. We shall come in a moment to see that the interest in the formation of the freedom of thought that guides Barth’s interpretation of Proslogion 2-4 132 Updike, ‘Faith in Search of Understanding’, 174. 133 FQI, 62-8; ET, 62-8. 134 FQI, 79; ET, 77. 135 FQI, 155; ET, 152-3. 136 FQI, 155, 161; ET, 153, 158. 137 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A592-3/B620-1.

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provides a key to Barth’s conception of Anselm’s method as a whole, for this interest is operative in Barth’s understanding of Anselm’s method generally; but before turning to this material, it is important that we say a few words in order to show that the concepts that Barth introduces here are significant for his own thinking and not merely idiosyncrasies of his reading of Anselm. We can do so by considering the way that Barth’s reading of Proslogion 2-4 allows him to progress in his understanding of the form of human thought that is the correlate of God’s peculiar mode of being. We have seen that Barth’s inter­ pretation of these chapters is shaped by the legacy of theological idealism; this framing of the question is crucial, for it allows Barth to sharpen a set of notions that he had articulated but a year earlier. In his lectures on realism and idealism, Barth argues that because theology possesses no categories of thought other than those used in human reflection more generally, it cannot escape the bounds of the perennial opposition between realism and ideal­ ism.138 He argues that what is required of theology is a dialectical movement between these forms of thought, for both permit an aspect of the reality of God to be expressed, but both also distort important facets of Christian teaching. Theologians must stand with the realist who confidently says ‘God is’ if they are not to fall into mystical silence;139 but they also require the critical correction of the idealist, who questions the confidence with which the realist supposes that the meaning of the claim ‘God is’ is self-evident from familiarity with creaturely being more generally.140 Barth claims that idealism arises from reflection on the concept of God in particular and poses critical questions regarding the realist’s confidence in order to protect ‘theology’s object from being confused with other objects’;141 but theology cannot simply align itself with idealist thought, for idealism asserts the significance of the activities of thought as the basis of its criticism of the realist, and ultimately subordinates God’s life to the movements of creaturely spirit. The presentation of theology’s relationship to the opposition between realism and idealism that we encounter in these lectures allows us to see that, as Barth’s understands it, the argument of Proslogion 2-4 stands in a complex relationship to theoretical idealism. Readers might be inclined to agree with Herrmann Diem that Kant’s influence on Barth’s work means that Barth’s forms of thought must be separated from Anselm’s pre-modern realism; but Barth’s own description of the relationship between realism and idealism shows that he understands Anselm’s work as a critically chastened enterprise. As Barth presents it, the mark of a pre-critical realism is confidence that the meaning of the phrase ‘God is’ is self-evident, while the aim of

138 See Barth, ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 344-92; ET, 25-61. 139 ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 359-60; ET, 35. 140 ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 370; ET, 43-4. 141 ‘Schicksal und Idee’, 374; ET, 47.

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Proslogion 2-4 is to lead believers in the ‘special movement of thought’ that will allow them to progress beyond an unexamined understanding of the being of God. On the one hand, then, Barth supposes that Anselm’s argument is shaped by the same critical concern to distinguish the being of God from all other being that marks theoretical idealism; yet, on the other hand, this initial correspondence between Anselm’s work and idealist concerns does not mean that Anselm may comfortably be numbered amongst the idealists, for we have seen that Barth also interprets Anselm’s argument as a response to questions issuing from idealism itself. Barth’s interpretation of Anselm’s conception of existence is informed by the worry that the idealist leaves God under the control of the human knower by failing to distinguish between the genuine existence of God and the actuality that the notion of God might possess as a presupposition of thought. This latter point is crucial, for Barth’s framing of the question of existence in terms of the questions raised by idealist thought allows him to move towards a positive account of God’s peculiar mode of being beyond a mere dialectical interplay of the real and the ideal. Rather than oscillating between the realist’s unreflective ‘God is’ and the idealist inversion ‘God is not’,142 the argument of Proslogion 2-4 leads to a positive account of the distinction of the being of God from all other being. This distinction turns on the peculiar way in which God’s being reshapes the freedom of human thought. Believers learn to say ‘God is’ in a critically corrected sense by learning to allow the reality of God to shape all of the possibilities of their thought. Whereas, on Barth’s telling, created being leaves the freedom of human thought untouched, the reality of God brings human thought into conformity with itself by establishing limits on this ‘innermost, most intimate’ sphere of freedom. In leading Barth to this conclusion, Anselm helps Barth to give an account of a movement of thought that corresponds to the mode of God’s existence beyond the dialectical pairing of realism and idealism that marks the ‘Fate and Idea’ lectures. Comprehension of the force of this development is dependent upon the recognition that Barth associates this way of understanding the being of God with Anselm’s conception of God’s aseity. In FQI, Barth writes that God’s mode of being ‘raises itself above’ the general mode of creaturely being because it is wholly grounded a se, in itself, and thus stands beyond the framework of the opposition between the real and the ideal.143 It is in response to this aseity that a ‘special movement of thought’ is generated in the form of a reshaping of the freedom of the mind. Whereas Barth’s ‘Fate and Idea’ lectures suggest that the opposition between realism and idealism is irreducible even for human thought about God, Barth comes in part through study of Anselm’s 142 A move that Barth himself had employed at various points during the 1920s. See e.g. ADT, 19; ET, 40. 143 FQI, 144; ET, 141.

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work to see that divine aseity means that a positive account of the distinctness of the being of God may be given apart from reliance on a dialectical movement between the realist’s affirmation and the idealist’s negation. This latter dynamic is reflected in the doctrine of God that Barth presents in Church Dogmatics IL In treating the being of God in this volume, Barth again suggests that the opposition between nature and spirit, the real and the ideal, has a proper place in theological reflection, for God’s acts of revelation must occur within the movement of nature and spirit if they are to be real for human creatures;144 but Barth goes on in this context to make clear that the distinction between nature and spirit is in fact of penultimate significance, for both of these quantities are aspects of the created sphere, and so a theology that is conditioned by the distinction between Creator and creature will recognize that this latter distinction is more fundamental.145 For Barth, the distinction between nature and spirit must be relativized in thought about God, for both nature and spirit are finally traceable to movements of human reason, while thought about God is informed by the contrast between the movements of human spirit and the free movements of the divine.146 It is, for Barth, the freedom of God as the one who is wholly self-moved that sets the being of God apart from all that is marked by the interplay of nature and spirit. Returning to the themes outlined in FQI, Barth claims that it is this freedom that the classical tradition spoke of as the aseity of God, and that this aseity is appropriately apprehended not in thought that oscillates between the real and the ideal, but rather in thought that has escaped the metaphysical’ opposition between these quantities and has broken through to a ‘theological’ mode of thought that is marked by the determination of thought’s very possibilities by the existence of God.147 Referring to the argument of Proslogion 2-4 in particular, Barth claims that the mode of being that is proper to God is reflected in the way that Anselm shows that the being of God excludes even the thought of God’s non-existence, and constitutes itself as ‘the point of departure which no thought can bypass or elude’.148 Barth writes later that Anselm shows that T prove and confirm my awareness of the divine character’ of God by showing that ‘in my function as a thinker I behave in harmony with what I assert I know about God. My thinking itself and as such—if I think in this attitude—is a thinking moulded and penetrated by the transcendent reality of God to the extent that it is a thinking in obedience to this God.’149 At this point, then, we can see that Barth presents the argument of Proslo­ gion 2-4 as an exercise in shaping the freedom of Christian thought by

144 KD II. 1, 297-305; ET, 265-72. 145 KD II. 1, 298; ET, 266. 146 KD II. 1, 301-2; ET, 269. 147 KD 11.1, 339-43; ET, 302-5. The opposition between ‘metaphysical’ and ‘theological’ thought in this context occurs at KD II. 1, 298; ET 266. 148 KD 11.1, 343; ET, 305. 149 KD III.l, 413; ET, 361.

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bringing believers to understand the ‘special’ way in which God exists. On these terms, understanding the existence of God appears as a movement through which the freedom of human thought is chastened, made docile, and reshaped around the reality of God. This conception is foundational to Barth’s thinking, for it allows him to give a positive account of the form of thought that apprehends the distinctive being of God. Barth’s work retains a dialectical character insofar as a particular movement remains essential to a mode of thought that does not reduce the truth of God to a creaturely quantity; but this movement is understood now not as an oscillation between realist and idealist conceptions, but rather as a moral and spiritual reshaping of the freedom of thought. That Barth has here identified a standpoint beyond a dialectical opposition of the real and the ideal will be important for us later in turning to the question of truth. For the time being, we can note that, in allowing Barth to give a positive account of the distinction between divine and creaturely being, the notions that we encounter here permit him to fulfil a task that stands at the heart of his reading of Paul, namely, the task of learning what it is to say ‘God is’.150 We saw in Chapters 2 and 3 that Barth supposes that what Christians require is to learn again to say ‘God’. At the beginning of the positive account of the doctrine of God in Church Dogmatics II, Barth claims that the task of learning to say ‘God is’ is the ‘hardest and most extensive task of Church dogmatics’.151 His subsequent development of the claim makes plain that he learned much on this front from his study of Anselm.

Understanding and Freedom in Barth’s Account of Faith Seeking Understanding Our task now is to recognize that Barth’s interpretation of Proslogion 2-4 as an exercise in shaping the freedom of creaturely thought establishes a pattern that Barth takes to be typical of Anselm’s conception of the movement of under­ standing more generally. It is crucial for us that Barth reads Anselm’s depic­ tion of what it is to understand the existence of God in particular into Anselm’s conception of theological understanding more generally, for this means that the concern for the reshaping of the freedom of thought that emerges in relation to the former is also formative of the latter. We saw earlier that Barth supposes that the movement from faith to understanding in general is a movement through which the believer apprehends the necessity possessed by an article of faith by virtue of its grounding in God’s self-fidelity. Our task now is to see that the apprehension of this necessity is aimed at the same reshaping of human thought that Barth takes to be proper to human thought 150 See e.g. Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, 136.

151

KD II. 1, 288; ET, 257.

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about the being of God generally. Once this recognition is in place, we will be positioned to conclude by considering Barth’s account of the appropriation and acknowledgement of Christian truth. We can approach the role that Barth gives to the question of freedom in relation to Anselm’s account of understanding more broadly through a series of cryptic comments that run through the first half of FQI. These comments are important for us because they set the conception of the movement of thought that Barth develops apart from the conceptions on which classical and critically realist readings of Barth rely. In treating Anselm’s conception of the possibility of theology, Barth argues that, for Anselm, it is possible for believers to move from faith to understanding because faith itself is never devoid of an element of understanding.152 As Barth presents it, Anselm holds that faith is founded in part on the apprehension of the ‘nexus of meaning’ present in Church speech, and the movement to understanding is possible because it involves only a change in ‘range’ and not in ‘kind’.153 It is these comments that T. F. Torrance makes basic to a realist reading of FQI, for he supposes that they show that the movement from faith to understanding is simply a matter of drawing out and making explicit the understanding that is given in and with faith, ‘a moving from what is given to our knowledge into clearer knowledge of it’.154 This realist construal of the programme of FQI is com­ mon; but it involves passing over the concrete description of the movement from faith to understanding that Barth gives at this point in his exposition. Having asserted that a form of understanding is always implicit in faith, Barth writes that faith involves not only the apprehension of the cognitive content of Church proclamation, but also assent to this content on the basis of the recognition of its truth.155 He then goes on to say not that theological understanding involves developing the grasp of Christian teaching that is present in faith, but rather that it involves ‘traversing’ what he calls the ‘middle-distance’ between faith’s recognition of Church proclamation and faith’s assent to the truth of this proclamation.156 As he presents it, the element of understanding that is present in faith is, for Anselm, a condition of theological inquiry, but it is not the element that theologians are to develop in seeking to move from faith to understanding. Rather, Barth claims that the task of theological understanding is to trace the movement between recogni­ tion and assent as ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ points that are already present in faith. Barth writes: ‘When faith seeks understanding, it can only be a matter of traversing the middle distance between the recognition that has already occurred and the assent that has also already occurred.’157 He goes on to tell us that, ‘just because the beginning and end of understanding are already given 152 KD II.l, 23; ET, 24. 153 KD 11.1, 23; ET, 24. 154 Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 183-4. 155 FQI, 23-4; ET, 24-5. 156 FQI, 23-4; ET, 24-5. 157 FQI, 24; ET, 25.

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in faith, because in the understanding that is sought it is only a matter of traversing the middle distance between recognition and assent, this under­ standing itself is a solvable problem and theology is a possible task’.158 These references to a spanning of the middle distance between recognition and assent are cryptic and could easily be ignored were it not for their recurrence at another key point in Barth’s argument. In treating Anselm’s conception of the ‘way’ of theology, Barth writes that grasping what Anselm means in speaking of understanding requires attention to the literal meaning of the term. Borrowing a notion from Thomas Aquinas, Barth argues that Anselm’s use of the term ‘understanding’—intelligere—reflects the root sense of the word as a ‘reading into’—intus legere.159 According to Barth, under­ standing, for Anselm, issues from reading. It is achieved through faithful attention to the confession of the Church that, on the one hand, commits itself to thinking in accordance with the content of the creed, yet, on the other hand, does not content itself with the conceptual surface of the confession but rather seeks to penetrate from the ‘outer text’ of the human words to the ‘inner text’ of the divine truth to which these words witness.160 It is these comments that McCormack fixes on in order to show that, in opposition to Torrance’s construal, the properly critical realism that accompanies Barth’s theology of revelation remain in place in FQI-,161 yet, in this passage too, Barth’s thoughts are moving in a different direction from his interpreters’. In describing the movement of intelligere, Barth gives his attention to what he calls an ‘appro­ priation’ in which believers come to understand ‘truth as truth’.162 Crucially, he then returns to the notion of traversing the distance between recognition and assent, presenting the movement of ‘appropriation’ as a genuine ‘passing through’ of the ‘middle distance’ between recognition and assent. In full, Barth writes that to understand means ‘genuinely to pass through this middle distance (between recognition and assent) in the appropriation of the truth, and therefore to understand the truth as truth’.163 At this point, then, we can see that, at important junctions in his work, Barth describes the movement from faith to understanding as a bridging of the gap between recognition and assent. These comments are central to Barth’s treatment of Anselm’s theological programme, for they show that the interest in the question of the freedom of thought that marks Barth’s reading of Proslogion 2-4 is characteristic of his account of the question of understanding as a whole. The connection can be seen by considering the locus in Anselm’s corpus from which Barth derives his references to the gap between recognition

158 159 160 161 162

FQI, 24; ET, 25. FQI, 40; ET, 40; cf. Thomas, Summa Theologica IIaIIae.8.1 sed contra. FQI, 40-1; ET, 40-1. McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 429-31. FQI, 40; ET, 40-1. 163 FQI, 40; ET, 40.

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and assent. Where Barth introduces the notion of bridging this gap in understanding, he offers a footnote suggesting that we must attend to the closing lines of Proslogion 4 in order to grasp its meaning.164 It is these lines that we encountered earlier in treating Barth’s interpretation of Proslogion 2-4 as an exercise in shaping the freedom of Christian thought. Here Anselm claims that those who understand the existence of God understand that God may not be thought not to exist. It is in response to this claim that Barth offers his account of the way that the existence of God comes to stand as the limit of the freedom of Christian thought. This account is pivotal in illuminating the terms on which his references to a bridging of the gap between recognition and assent are to be understood. The gap between recognition and assent is the gap of freedom, the gap between theoretical reason’s acknowledgement of what is and practical reason’s consideration of what ought to be. As Barth presents it, the gap between recognition and assent is bridged in believers’ understanding of the existence of God because this understanding brings with it the recog­ nition that God may not be thought not to exist. Where the mind cannot conceive of the non-existence of a particular reality, it does not possess the freedom to consider whether or not to grant this existence its assent. A gap between recognition and assent is present in relation to all contingent states of affairs, for the negation of the contingent is entirely conceivable and the mind is thus free to conceive of alternative worlds and to withhold its assent from that which is; but this freedom does not characterize the mind’s relationship to the necessary, for the necessary cannot be excluded from any of the mind’s imaginative worlds. The mind can think and act only in the light of realities that encounter it as necessary. The gap between recognition and assent is thus eliminated because the mind does not have the freedom to withhold its assent. Barth’s depiction of the way that the existence of God is understood as the freedom of thought is reshaped so that the mind cannot even conceive of the non-existence of God is crucial in shedding light on the conception of understanding that emerges from FQI generally. From it, Barth derives the notion that a bridging of the gap between recognition and assent is charac­ teristic of Anselm’s conception of understanding as a whole. The key concept that allows Barth to connect the particular argument of Proslogion 2-4 to the structure of Anselm’s conception of understanding more broadly is the notion of necessity. As we saw earlier, Barth argues that Anselm’s method as a whole consists in an attempt to apprehend the necessity that is proper to each piece of Christian teaching so that it can be said of this teaching in general that it may not be thought not to be. Barth writes that Anselm’s aim is to recognize the facticity of a statement of faith as a moment in its inner necessity so that he may ‘think that which is as that which may not be thought not to be’.165 In

164

FQI, 24; ET, 25.

165

FQI, 27, 52; ET, 28, 52.

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making this claim, Barth is suggesting that Anselm’s attempt to bring believers from faith to understanding is marked by the same movement of the reorder­ ing of freedom that he sees in Proclogion 2-4. He is treating Anselm’s attempt to establish that, properly understood, God may not be thought not to be as paradigmatic of Anselm’s general attempt to show that, properly understood, Christian teaching articulates realities that may not be thought not to be. For Barth, Anselm’s desire to lead believers from assent to the factual truth of Christian teaching to apprehension of the necessity of this truth amounts to an attempt to show that, by virtue of its grounding in the divine will, Christian teaching shares in the peculiar necessity for thought that characterizes the confession of God’s being. Understood on these terms, to ask ‘how far’ an article of Christian teaching is true is, for Barth, to ask how far it reshapes the freedom of the mind by encountering the theologian with a necessity that reflects its rooting in God’s will. It is at this point, then, that the rationale for Barth’s interest in the apprehension of necessity as the proper end of theological understanding comes into view. We came through the first half of this chapter to see that Barth identifies theological understanding with a movement from faith’s assent to the truth of Christian teaching to an apprehension of the necessity that this teaching possesses by virtue of its rooting in God’s self-fidelity. We saw that, in significant respects, these notions appear to be appropriated from Isaak Dorner, and to raise questions about whether Barth’s search for necessity is an iteration of a modern quest for epistemological certainty; we can see now that, to the contrary, Barth’s interest in necessity is rooted in a concern for the moral and spiritual ordering of creaturely thought. Apprehension of the necessity of Christian teaching in understanding serves to reorder the freedom of creaturely thought by leading believers to see that they cannot conceive the non-existence of the being and works of the Creator. The necessity in which Barth is interested is not a strictly noetic quantity that is rooted in rigid conceptual deduction, but rather a moral quantity that is grounded in the creature’s relation to the Creator. In effect, Barth appears through his study of Anselm to translate Dorner’s conception of the search for understanding as a search for necessity into the moral register that he takes to be decisive for Paul’s thinking. Anselm’s discussion of the believer’s inability to conceive of the non-existence of God provides a way for the necessity that Dorner identifies as the goal of theological inquiry to be understood in moral terms. Barth takes Anselm to show that a grasp of the necessity of Christian teaching brings the freedom of thought into conformity with the reality of God. That this conception of necessity translates the project of theological understanding into the moral register of Pauline thought is confirmed in Barth’s description of the movement from faith to understanding in Church Dogmatics I. In a line that bears out the whole thrust of the reading of FQI that I have offered, Barth writes in Church Dogmatics I that Anselm’s credo, ut intelligam ‘does not

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imply transition from faith to another genus but rather a bringing into captivity of every thought to the obedience of Christ’.166 Understanding is concerned fundamentally with a reshaping of the ‘innermost sphere’ of Christian freedom in conformity with the reality of God.167

Understanding and the Ordering of Christian Thought I suggested in the introduction to this study as a whole that, quite apart from the significance of FQI for Barth’s account of the ordering of thought, this text merits consideration because of the degree to which it resists scholarly com­ prehension. Scholars have tended to pick piecemeal at the text, selecting a passage or two that appear to confirm a pre-established set of conceptions. By contrast, I have tried in this chapter to trace a line of thinking that runs through the text as a whole, and subsumes within itself the decisive features of Barth’s interpretation. These features include the repeated identification of theological inquiry with the ‘how far’ question of the range of truth, the repeated suggestion that this ‘how far’ question corresponds to the attempt to uncover the necessity that is proper to Christian teaching, the notion that this necessity is properly understood in terms of the inability of the knower to think its inverse, the interpretation of this inability in terms of the moral and spiritual formation of the freedom of Christian thought, and the interpretation of Anselm’s claim that God may not be thought not to exist in terms of this conception of theological inquiry. This reading shows how Barth’s account of Anselm’s method frames Barth’s reinterpretation of Proslogion 2-4 by show­ ing that Barth sees this latter argument as a particular instance of Anselm’s broader attempt to show the necessity of Christian teaching; it also shows how Barth reads the particular conclusion of Proslogion 3 back into Anselm’s theological method more generally by interpreting the necessity that Anselm seeks in terms of a reshaping of freedom as believers come to grasp the being and activity of God as that which may not be thought not to be. We have seen the way that the themes from this inquiry spread out and influence other aspects of Barth’s corpus. It is this line of thought that constitutes the central spine of FQF, other aspects of the text exist as appendages to it. Equipped with this account of FQI, we are positioned to move towards a conclusion to this investigation by drawing together a range of topics that have opened up over the course of this study. We might begin by treating a further element in Barth’s argument in FQI that serves to confirm the inter­ pretation offered here, to show how FQI relates to Barth’s earlier reading of Paul, and also to indicate how Barth situates himself in relation to the concerns 166 KD LI, 86; ET, 84; cf. 2 Corinthians 10:5. 167 FQI, 153, 172; ET, 150, 169.

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that we encountered in Chapter 4. This element consists in a systematic contrast that Barth constructs between Anselm’s work and the work of Gaunilo of Marmoutier, a contemporary of Anselm’s who wrote a response to the Proslogion and to whom Anselm, in turn, replied. The starting-point for this contrast is Barth’s claim that the opposition between Anselm and Gaunilo is rooted in differing attitudes towards the question of the freedom of thought. Barth argues that, whereas Anselm’s aim in Proslogion 2-4 is to establish that the reality of God reorders the freedom of Christian thought, Gaunilo seeks to show that he retains his freedom in relation to the existence of God. Barth writes that the ‘curious passion’ of Gaunilo’s response to Anselm is aimed at retaining space for the possibility that God may be thought of as a mere idea that does not constrain the freedom of his thought.168 The ‘feverish activity’, ‘the whole pathos’ of Gaunilo’s effort is intended to show that he is not compelled to submit his freedom to the necessity to which Anselm points.169 For Barth, the assertion and defence of this freedom is the entire object of Gaunilo’s reply to Anselm.170 Barth goes on to suggest that we see Gaunilo’s attempt to defend his freedom operative in the notion of understanding that he employs. As Barth presents it, Gaunilo abandons the moral and spiritual richness of Anselm’s conception of understanding in favour of a notion that is ‘wholly different’.171 Barth claims that Gaunilo treats understanding as ‘synonymous with a scire that, for one reason or another, is a certissime scire, a ‘knowing with cer­ tainty’.172 This shift from thinking about the problem of understanding in terms of the shaping of freedom to conceiving of it in terms of noetic certainty is decisive, on Barth’s telling, because it brings the question of understanding within a sphere over which the human knower retains control. To connect the question of understanding and the question of certainty is to suggest that a search for understanding can take place only within the framework of a ‘general doctrine of necessary thoughts’ that will finally be ‘grounded in the necessity of the thought of one’s own existence’.173 Barth argues that it is just this move that we see in Gaunilo’s comments on Proslogion 3. In response to Anselm’s claim that God may not be thought not to exist, Gaunilo turns to consider his thought of his own existence. He claims that he knows with ‘absolute certainty’ that he himself exists, and that this certainty leaves him unsure whether he is able to think of his own non-existence; but, if he can, then no argument could produce such certainty regarding the existence of another that he could not think its non-existence, and, if he cannot, then in fact there is nothing special about the existence of God, for it is not distinctive of this existence that it cannot be thought not to exist.174 168 FQI, 97; ET, 96. 169 FQI, 97-8; ET, 96. 170 FQI, 97; ET, 96. 171 FQI, 139; ET, 136. 172 FQI, 139; ET, 136. 173 FQI, 140; ET, 137. 174 See here Gaunilo, Pro Insipiente 7, quoted by Barth, FQI, 138-9; ET, 135-6.

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Barth claims that Gaunilo’s attempt to think through his understanding of the existence of God by considering his certainty of his own existence makes his fundamental ‘standpoint’ clear.175 In submitting his thought of the exist­ ence of God to the conditions of his thought of his own existence, Gaunilo shows that he stands ‘where Descartes later stood’.176 What emerges in Barth’s contrast between Gaunilo and Anselm is a contrast between differing concepts of understanding that are finally reflective of differing noetic standpoints. On the one hand, Barth presents Gaunilo as an occupant of the standpoint of selfreferential certainty that Barth takes to be characteristic of Descartes, Kant, and the neo-Protestant tradition.177 As Barth presents it, the conception of understanding that Gaunilo deploys is commensurate with this standpoint because it is a conception that allows him to retain the freedom of the knower in the face of that which is known. Because understanding is spoken of as knowing with certainty, the self-referentiality of the cogito stands as the foundation of thought because it provides a measure by which the certainty that is sought in understanding may be gauged. On these terms, nothing can be more foundational to thought than its awareness of its own existence as the ground and norm of its activity. The knower’s own existence is established as the bedrock of thought to which retreat is made in considering the status of knowledge. On the other hand, Barth holds that, in seeking to understand Christian teaching as a witness to realities that may not be thought not to be, Anselm occupies the standpoint that typifies Paul’s ministry, and that Barth depicts in directing believers to order their thinking around the standpoint of the eschatological subject. Since the Christliche Dogmatik, Barth has seen Anselm as an exemplar of a mode of inquiry that is shaped by occupation of the standpoint that corresponds to Paul’s conception of what it is to be ‘known by God’. What Barth adds to this perception in FQI is a presentation of Anselm’s conception of understanding as the conception that best corresponds to this standpoint. Anselm’s conception of understanding is commensurate with the standpoint of the sacramental self-consciousness because it does not involve an attempt to ground claims to knowledge in an account of self-referential certainty; instead, it speaks of knowledge where the freedom of the mind is

175 FQI, 138; ET, 135. 176 FQI, 140; ET, 137. 177 Michael Beintker argues that Barth intends Gaunilo to stand as a representative of Gogarten and Brunner (‘... alles Andere’, 113); but it is likely that Barth is casting his net a good deal wider. In a text from which Barth drew heavily in preparing FQI, Alexandre Koyre suggests that Gaunilo’s work anticipates and reflects all the criticisms of Anselm’s argument that have been offered. Koyre devotes a lengthy appendix to his book to defending Hegel’s claim that Gaunilo is the ‘Kant of ancient times’, and suggests that the basic impulses of the Cartesian and Kantian traditions are present in Gaunilo. Barth’s own depiction of Gaunilo suggests that he has an entire tradition in mind in this way. See Koyre, L’Idee de Dieu dans la philosophic de St. Anselme (Paris: E. Leroux, 1923), 212, 231-40.

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reordered by the reality that is known. On this model, understanding is present where thought not only begins with the reality of God, but also allows this reality to constitute the space in which it functions so that it cannot understand itself apart from this reality. It does not turn to its own possibilities and activities in order to apprehend the content of its knowledge; instead, it allows itself to be brought into conformity with the reality of God. It recog­ nizes that, insofar as the non-existence of God cannot be conceived, the thought of God’s existence is more fundamental than the realities of its own self-reflection, and it orders its possibilities accordingly. The account of theological understanding developed in FQI thus corres­ ponds to the conception of the ordering of thought in accordance with a Pauline conception of faith. Engagement with neo-Protestant thought in the Christliche Dogmatik led Barth to see the importance of working through an account of understanding that comports with the standpoint of Pauline faith; he finds an account of this kind in Anselm’s work. It is important for us that, for all that FQI establishes a pattern of thought that is formative of the Church Dogmatics, it also represents a deepening of conceptions laid down in Barth’s earlier work on Paul. In treating The Resurrection of the Dead in Chapter 2, we saw that Barth supposes that 1 Corinthians as a whole is shaped by a contrast between Paul’s willingness to think from the standpoint of the resurrection because he recognizes that the truth of the resurrection possesses a range’ in which it is wholly determinative of his life and thought, and the Corinthians’ refusal to think from this standpoint because they do not acknowledge this range and ask of the resurrection: ‘Is it true? What has it to do with us?’ It is this same contrast that Barth supposes is operative in the opposition between Anselm and Gaunilo. On one side, Anselm’s search for understanding is an attempt to apprehend the peculiar ‘range’ in virtue of which Christian truth reshapes the freedom of thought. Anselm shows the kind of movement of intelligence that is proper from the standpoint of faith, and Paul may be seen to model the results of a life that is shaped by an Anselmic conception of understanding. Barth writes in his commentary on Philippians that Paul’s discussions of ‘concrete, earthly matters’ like the sending of Epaphroditus ought not to be overlooked, for they illustrate Paul’s ‘theological thoughts’. They show how things appear ‘when someone not only thinks these thoughts, but rather, because they are necessary and true thoughts, must constantly live in their shadow and can never get away from them in his concrete deci­ sions’.178 It is this conception of thought moulded by the true and necessary thoughts of the gospel that Barth sees as the end of theological understanding. On the other side, Gaunilo stands with the Corinthians in seeking to retain his freedom of thought and asking: ‘Is it true? What has it to do with me?’ The

178 Barth, Erklärung des Philipperbriefes, 78; ET, 80.

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peculiar reality to which these figures assign an all-determining ‘range’ for their thinking is their own being and activity, which serves as a measure of the true and the relevant. Barth supposes that the Corinthians and Gaunilo are finally precluded from acknowledging the truth of God because they approach it from the outside and measure it against a self-referential conception of truth and value. They end up in an ideology in which they believe in their own faith rather than God because they are able to understand their faith only as a movement that is rooted in the conformity of Christian teaching to their activity and ideals.179 In terms that Barth uses in the Church Dogmatics, they exemplify an ‘untheological type of thinking’ that asserts its freedom over against the being of God and seeks to move towards this being through its own inquiries into possibility, truth, and value.180 Barth argues that ‘every­ thing that is described as “God” ’ on the basis of this mode of thought ‘cannot possibly be God’.181 Recognition of the contrast that runs through Barth’s work on Paul and Anselm and into the Church Dogmatics represents a useful point from which to draw this discussion to a close. This contrast stands at the root of questions from critics who are concerned about what is lost when the questions: ‘Is it true? What has it to do with me?’ are displaced and primacy is instead given to the question of the range of truth. We saw in Chapter 1 that critics object to the way that Barth appears to marginalize the question of the truth of Christian teaching; we saw in Chapter 4 that critics also object to a bypassing of the modern question of appropriation: ‘What has it to do with me?’ I suggested in Chapter 1 that Barth is best understood to reframe the question of truth as a question of acknowledgement; and that he is best understood to approach the question of appropriation through a highly ramified account of theological understanding. Comments on the relation between the conception of understanding that we encounter here and the questions of acknowledge­ ment and appropriation will allow us to conclude this study. Turning, first, to the question of acknowledgement, the morally and spir­ itually freighted conception of theological understanding that we have encountered here is significant because Barth sees it as a decisive element in a form of thought that may acknowledge the truth of God without reducing it to a creaturely quantity. From the early days of his grappling with the position of the minister who seeks to speak of God without falling into demonology or ideology, Barth was concerned for the very possibility of theological truth. He comes to address this question in part by relying on the conception of understanding that he develops through his work on Anselm. In Church Dogmatics I, he considers the way that a grasp of the truth of God becomes

179 ADT, 90-2; ET, 154-8. 181 KDII.l, 5; ET, 6-7.

180 See e.g. KD II. 1, 68-9, cf. 6-8; ET, 63-4, cf. 7-9.

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possible for human beings; he proposes that the notion of ‘acknowledgement’ provides the best description for the peculiar disposition in which this occurs.182 Acknowledgement invo’ves, in the first place, a form of knowledge in which the reality that is known ceases to be a ‘contingent and outward’ determination of human existence and becomes instead a ‘necessary and inward determination’ so that knowers ‘must begin by thinking of the truth of its reality. Face to face with this truth, they can no longer withdraw into themselves in order to affirm, question, or deny it thence.’183 Acknowledge­ ment thus involves ‘a control, a necessity’, of the kind that Barth identifies with Anselm’s account of understanding; but it is important for Barth that it means ‘not only subjection to a necessity, but adaptation to the meaningful­ ness of this necessity, approval of it, not just involvement in it but acceptance of it’.184 This movement of adaptation and acceptance occurs through an act of obedience on the part of the knower, a movement of human selfdetermination that corresponds to the determination of God.185 It involves the reality that is known ‘bending’ the knower’s thought and bringing it ‘into conformity with itself’ by virtue of the obedience of the knower.186 On these terms, the question of the possibility of theological truth turns on a conjunction of knowledge and obedience. Barth’s criticisms of realist concep­ tions of the givenness of theological truth prevent him from identifying truth with knowledge in itself; he takes it that, when Paul contrasts knowledge that ‘puffs up’ and a love in which believers are ‘known by God’, Paul means to show that knowledge ‘in itself’, apart from a moral movement of the knower, is nothing, and that what is required instead is knowledge in conjunction with a love that allows the very freedom of the knower’s thought to be shaped by the reality that is known.187 It is the moral movement corresponding to know­ ledge that is, for Barth, the ‘positive element’ in which acknowledgement of the truth of God occurs.188 Barth’s descriptions of acknowledgement as an attitude in which knowledge and obedience join and the object is permitted to bend Christian thought ‘into conformity with itself’ reflect the conception of understanding that he derived from study of Anselm. Anselm’s concep­ tion of understanding is central to the acknowledgement of truth because it is shaped in its very structure by the notion of obedience. On Anselm’s terms, obedience is not a second moment that stands apart from the act of knowledge itself; instead, the form of the act of knowledge is itself determined by obedience. Understanding is a moral and spiritual movement in which the truth of God is apprehended by a mind that recognizes that the will of the Creator has the force of law for the creature, and thus grasps that the reality that it encounters possesses the force of necessity. Understanding is marked by 182 See KD LI, 206, 213-14; ET, 198, 204-5. 183 KD 1.1, 195-6; ET, 188. 184 KD LI, 214-15; ET, 205-6. 185 KD LI, 215; ET, 206. 186 KD LI, 215; ET, 206. 187 ATD, 22-3; ET, 44-6. 188 ATD, 23; ET, 46.

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a bridging of the middle distance’ between apprehension in knowledge and assent in obedience precisely because obedience itself determines the form of theological understanding. On Anselm’s terms, the intellectus fidei is a form of knowledge that is never a mere knowledge ‘in itself’, but is always the morally and spiritually determined ‘acknowledgement’ in which the truth of God is possible for human knowers. Because it is determined in its very form by an act of obedience, Barth writes in Church Dogmatics I that Anselm’s conception of understanding amounts to a ‘bringing into captivity of every thought to the obedience of Christ’.189 Barth repeats at a number of points in the Church Dogmatics that Anselm’s work models a form of thought that genuinely grasps the ‘divine character’ of God’s existence because it is a ‘thinking in obedience’.190 Two final comments might be made about this conception of understanding. The first is that it derives its peculiar force as an element in the resolution of the problem of the acknowledgement from the way that it reflects the conceptions of the analogy of faith. I suggested in Chapter 1 that Barth sees the problem of the acknow­ ledgement of truth posed by the difference between God and creatures, and turns to an account of the moral ordering of creaturely thought to find resolution because he supposes that the proper relation between God and human creatures consists in ordered correspondence between divine and human activity. We may see now that the conception of theological under­ standing that Barth derives from his study of Anselm permits the acknow­ ledgement of the truth of God because, through obedience, it rests on an ordering of the activities of thought in correspondence to the activity of God. It presupposes thought that adopts the standpoint of the eschatological subject as the movement in thought that corresponds to the reality of divine justifi­ cation. It presupposes thought that takes the reality of Christ and the content Christian confession as the key to its orientation as the movement in thought that corresponds to the presence of God in promise and the sacramental witness to this promise in baptism. Finally, it presupposes thought that permits its freedom to be shaped by the being and activity of God as the movement that corresponds to the divine work of sanctification. Barth’s account of the way that the freedom of thought is shaped by understanding mirrors his conception of the way that Christian life is ‘determined’ by the sanctifying word of grace that is spoken by God.191 It also reflects his account of the way that believers grow in conformity to Christ because, in their union with him, they find a lord in relation to whom one cannot say ‘at least our thoughts are always free and remain free’, for he is a lord of life from whom ‘one can no longer withdraw oneself’ even in thought.192

189 KD LI, 86; ET, 84; cf. 2 Corinthians 10:5. 190 See KD III.l, 413; ET, 361. 191 Ethik I, 177-9; ET, 106-8. 192 KD 1.2, 289-95; ET, 265-70.

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The second point to be made here concerns the question of appropriation. The line of inquiry in Part II of this study began with Bultmann’s claim that Barth reduces the Christian gospel to a speculative abstraction because he insists that Christian understanding is to occur from the standpoint of the eschatological subject. We saw that Bultmann’s objection anticipates the common concern that Barth goes astray because he eschews the modern question of appropriation; we then saw that Barth himself proposes that the question of the reality of Christian truth for the believer is best approached by considering the nature of theological understanding. We have reached a point now from which Barth’s alternative may be grasped. Barth comes to hold that the movement of appropriation is built in to the movement of under­ standing, for understanding means apprehending Christian teaching in the moral and spiritual force through which it closes the gap between recognition and a subsequent moment of appropriation. Drawing on the terms of his conception of understanding, Barth writes that the movement of appropri­ ation occurs as believers come to think the truth of God ‘from inner impulse and necessity, just as we think something because we must, because we cannot not think it, because it has become a fundamental orientation of our whole • ) 193 existence. Barth’s approach to the question of appropriation is finally determined by his conception of the way that the truth of God is acknowledged only in a form of thought that is itself determined by obedience. Barth supposes that thought that takes questions of appropriation and obedience to stand as second moments alongside an act of recognition itself is unable to apprehend the truth of God without falling into demonology or ideology, for the movement from one moment to the other will be a movement of autonomous deliber­ ation in which the gospel is measured against human possibilities and ideals. For him, the key to a form of thought that preserves the integrity of the truth of God is the determination of the act of thought itself by obedience. I suggested in Chapter 1 that Barth stands together with Kant in setting the sphere of theological cognition apart from the sphere of the theoretical, but that the two then diverge because Kant takes the notion of autonomy as a clue to the proper movements of reason within the theological sphere, while Barth takes the notion of obedience. It may be that it is finally this difference that lies at the root of the divide between Barth and a number of his critics. We saw in Chapter 4 that the question of appropriation becomes central in a typically modern form where theological understanding is informed by a Kantian conception of autonomy. Perhaps the decisive question bequeathed to con­ temporary thought by the oppositions that surround Barth’s work concerns the freedom in light of which the structure of theological understanding is to

193

KD 1.2, 826; ET, 736.

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be determined. Does theological inquiry operate in accordance with a form of freedom that is determined by an account of obedience, or does it take its shape from a conception of freedom that is determined by an account of autonomy? I have tried in this study to show the cogent and coherent conception of the ordering of thought that Barth develops based on the supposition that the biblical witness points to a mode of inquiry that falls decisively along the former lines.

Conclusion Critical consideration of the theology of Karl Barth is central to attempts to assess the conceptual resources that are available to theology today. Barth’s work was formative of a new theological horizon in the early decades of the twentieth century; some fifteen years into a new century, it remains a decisive point of orientation for contemporary inquiry. The question of theological reasoning occupies a decisive place in assessments of the fruitfulness of Barth’s thought today, for the most common criticism of Barth is that his theology is not shaped by an adequate description or deployment of this reasoning. Adolf von Harnack gave early articulation to this concern in referring to Barth’s theology as an exercise in a credulous naivety that could flourish only where reason and scholarship have been wholly denigrated.1 A series of memorable notions was then used over the course of the twentieth century to depict this naivety: neo-orthodoxy, revelatory positivism, faith subjectivism. Still today, the perception that reliance on the logic of a facile children’s hymn prevents Barth’s work from generating anything that ‘counts as knowledge’ informs evaluation of his work in significant quarters.2 The aim of this study has been to facilitate comprehension and fair adju­ dication of Barth’s work by developing a new account of Barth’s conception of theological reasoning. In so doing, I have sought to show that this conception is theologically and spiritually richer than is generally supposed. The first step in this attempt has been to clarify Barth’s perception of the fundamental questions that are to be posed regarding Christian thought. Whereas both Barth’s critics and his sympathizers have tended to orient evaluations of his work around comparisons between his principles and the principles of other disciplines, I have argued that Barth presents rather more original reformula­ tions of the basic forms of noetic questions than contrastive inquiries are positioned to acknowledge. Barth echoes much of the modern tradition in

1 See the letter that von Harnack wrote to Erik Peterson on 22 June 1928, in ‘Correspondence with Adolf von Harnack and an Epilogue’, in Erik Peterson, Theological Tractates, ed. and trans. Michael Hollerich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 15-16. 2 Pattison, The End of Theology and the Task of Thinking about God, 21-2.

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supposing that the peculiarity of the object of theology and of the subjective disposition in which this object is known means that theological inquiry is conducted in accordance with norms that enjoy a measure of independence from the general principles of theoretical reasoning; Barth holds that, whereas theoretical reasoning engages with objects that submit to prior structures of human understanding and are indifferent to the particularity of the subject­ ivity of the knower, theological reflection engages with a reality that brings with it the conditions of its comprehension and is not known by thought that is not itself determined by the act of faith. Two reconsiderations of the basic questions that proper to the theological sphere emerge in Barth’s work. First, reflection on the difference between God and creatures leads Barth to recast the basic terms of the problem of truth. Critics have supposed that Barth falls into a positivism and faith subjectivism because he fails to orient his work around an attempt to establish that which may be considered true; but Barth’s work is shaped by the recognition that classical approaches to the establishment of truth struggle to avoid collapsing the distinction between the divine and the creaturely. The realist’s equation of truth with givenness reduces God to one more participant in the horizon of creaturely being; the idealist’s insistence on the grounding of truth through the activities of reason collapses the distinction between the divine and human activity. Neither alternative will do for Barth, for study of Paul’s letters in the midst of the upheaval surrounding the First World War left him acutely aware of the way that nature, culture, and history come to be fetishized when the truth of God is reduced to a creaturely quantity. Concern for this dynamic leads Barth to stand in a venerable line of theological reflection that concerns itself not with the question of the givenness or the grounding of truth, but rather with the more unsettling problem of the very possibility of theological truth. The crisis of theology that shapes Barth’s early work is the crisis of a discipline that has come to see that there is no obvious way for it to speak of its proper object without falling into ideology or the demonic. The question of truth is, for him, the question of how the truth of God may be acknowledged without being reduced to a creaturely quantity. Equipped with a conception of the way that the question of truth is reconfigured by God’s difference from the world, Barth comes, secondly, to reconsider the question of reason through consideration of God’s relation to the world. Barth supposes that, in its proper form, the relation between God and creatures consists in analogical correspondence between a divine act of self-giving and a human response of obedience. Because it is in this moral fellowship that God and creatures are related without loss of integrity on either side, Barth takes this fellowship as the clue to a form of thought that appre­ hends the truth of God without collapsing the divine into the creaturely. Barth thus supposes that the proper question regarding the activities of reason is the question of their moral ordering in correspondence to the activity of God. The

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decisive question for Christian inquiry into theological reasoning is not ‘what activities of reason permit me to establish the truth of a particular claim?’, but rather ‘how may the activities of thought be ordered in correspondence to the activities of God so that the truth of God may be acknowledged?’ Whereas Kant, for instance, turns to conceptions of freedom and morality as the clues to the well-regulated activities of thought within the sphere of the knowledge of God, Barth turns to a conception of obedience as the proper creaturely correlate of the revelation of God. He comes to hold that truth itself is an event that occurs where thought follows the witness of Christian teaching and, in obedience, orders its activities in correspondence to the activities of God. The first claim of this study is that comprehension and fair adjudication of Barth’s work requires recognition of the way that consideration of God’s difference from and relation to creatures leads Barth to reconsider the basic forms of the questions of truth and reason. I show that Barth takes this reconsideration to correspond to a biblical form of thought that is modelled on the attitude and concerns of the biblical witnesses themselves. With these notions in hand, the bulk of this study is then devoted to working through Barth’s positive account of the moral ordering of creaturely thought, a task that is taken up by developing Barth’s accounts of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of Christian reasoning. We saw that Barth begins to deploy these categories in his early work because consideration of theologies of the resur­ rection and of justification in particular led him to suppose that customary modes of thought were inadequate for the apprehension of realities that are rooted in divine activity alone. Summary of the positive conception of the ordering of thought that Barth develops might be made by drawing a line of argument that begins from the justification of the sinner and runs through the various elements that we have encountered. Barth sees the theology of justification as a call to reflect on the proper ordering of Christian thought because the declaration of justification disrupts a customary mode of reasoning in which human activity, experience, and possibilities are taken as the principles that ground the work of reason. The judgement of justification reveals the being and activity of a God who acts from beyond the possibilities known to human beings; positioning oneself to acknowledge this judgement without transforming it into a reality that is secretly grounded in human activity requires a reordering of Christian thought. In its noetic aspect, the act of faith consists in the adoption of a standpoint from which reason may reckon with the truth of the realities that shape the life of faith. Faith is an act of ‘seeing what God sees’ for the sake of allowing the truth of realities that are grounded in God alone to appear to thought. In particular, because God reckons with believers not as old, sinful subjects in time, but rather as new creatures in Christ, thought that orders its activities in correspondence to the activity of God takes the reality of the eschatological subject who exists in identity with Christ as its principle. This

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subject has its reality wholly through the activity of God; the thought of those who adopt this standpoint is thus governed by the axiom cogitor, ergo sum, ‘I am known, therefore I am’. It is ordered concretely around a self­ consciousness constituted by baptism as a sign of the promise in which the eschatological subject is real for the believer. Through the gift of baptism it enjoys freedom from the tyranny of a mode of reckoning that allows its bounds to be determined by immediate experience, and thus knows no escape from the trials and struggles of life in time. From the standpoint of the eschatological subject, Christian thought takes its orientation from the life and activity of Jesus Christ, and from the realities to which the Christian confession gives witness. Christ’s life orients Christian thought because Christ is himself constitutive of the space in which believers have their being, and it is the realities that Christ establishes as actual and possible that are actual and possible for the believer. The eschatological subject exists in direct identity with Christ; believers in time stand in an indirect identity with Christ that corresponds to the presence of eschatological union in the mode of promise. The Christian confession gives further orientation to believers’ thought because it witnesses to the promise in which union with Christ is present for the believer. It is made constitutive of the believer’s faith through baptism, which stands as the sign of divine promise and of the freedom that this promise grants to believers to take grace as the principle of their thought. This confession offers no more than points of orientation, ‘border posts and anchor buoys’ that direct Christian thought through its witness to a reality that is not reducible to the content of particular proposi­ tions; but these points of orientation provide concrete witness to the pattern of divine activity to which Christian thought is to come to conform in faith. Having adopted the being and doing of God as its principles, Christian thought finds the right ordering of its freedom in allowing this freedom to be shaped by the necessity that marks the being and activity of God. Believers encounter this necessity as they move in prayer from faith’s assent to Christian proclamation to an understanding that this proclamation attests realities that possess the weight of necessity because they are rooted in God’s self-fidelity. Apprehension of this necessity is not a matter of uncovering an epistemic certainty in which Christian thought rests, but rather of moulding thought itself in correspondence to the activity of God by acknowledging the moral and spiritual impropriety of situating oneself outside of this activity by conceiving of its inverse. In allowing their freedom to be shaped by an understanding of and obedience to this necessity, believers find their thought taken captive to Christ in a movement of sanctification. It is this line of reasoning, beginning with God’s act of justification and ending with the sanctification of Christian thought in obedience to Christ, that I have sought to trace in giving an account of Barth’s conception of the ordering of thought. This line presents an account of the activities of reason

Conclusion

233

that is worked out through a moral inquiry into the movements that stand in analogical correspondence to the work of God. In depicting the acts that stand within this correspondence, it shows how the obedience that is the basis of the acknowledgement of the truth of God is to be found. It is a line of thought that permits reason to fulfil its proper task in resolving the problem of truth, understood as the problem of acknowledging divine truth without collapsing the distinction between the divine and the creaturely. Development of these notions is intended to aid readers of Barth to break free of stale impasses that have developed in recent scholarship. It shows how, in its use of the notions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought, and in borrowing patterns of thought from figures like Kant, Ritschl, and Dorner, Barth’s work is rooted in the modern tradition while also taking up questions regarding the acknowledgement of divine truth that are central to the theological tradition as a whole. It shows how Barth’s thought is both dialectical in its insistence that acknowledgement of truth is rooted in a particular movement, rather than a particular claim, of thought; and that it is also analogical in insisting that this movement is determined by corres­ pondence to the activity of God. It shows that, in some respects at least, debates between realist and critically realist readings of Barth are of penulti­ mate significance, for neither an account of a mode of thought determined by a theology of justification nor an account determined by a particular concep­ tion of revelation offers a sufficiently broad perspective on Barth’s work. This opposition hones in on a narrow question of givenness understood in epis­ temological terms; I have tried to show that Barth refigures questions of givenness as questions of the moral and spiritual force of Christian teaching as an expression of God’s self-fidelity and a witness to the presence of the divine in the mode of promise. For Barth, the question of understanding is not what kind of epistemological force can my claims have based on the mode of givenness of the divine’, but rather what kind of moral force does Christian teaching have to bring my life into conformity with itself on the basis of its witness to the presence of God in promise?’ Where readers follow the logic of this latter question and of the elements that constitute Barth’s answer, they may be positioned to recognize that Barth’s work possesses an intellectual and spiritual cogency capable of contributing to reflection on the principles of theological reasoning today.

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The Ordering of the Christian Mind

subject has its reality wholly through the activity of God; the thought of those who adopt this standpoint is thus governed by the axiom cogitor, ergo sum, ‘I am known, therefore I am’. It is ordered concretely around a self­ consciousness constituted by baptism as a sign of the promise in which the eschatological subject is real for the believer. Through the gift of baptism it enjoys freedom from the tyranny of a mode of reckoning that allows its bounds to be determined by immediate experience, and thus knows no escape from the trials and struggles of life in time. From the standpoint of the eschatological subject, Christian thought takes its orientation from the life and activity of Jesus Christ, and from the realities to which the Christian confession gives witness. Christ’s life orients Christian thought because Christ is himself constitutive of the space in which believers have their being, and it is the realities that Christ establishes as actual and possible that are actual and possible for the believer. The eschatological subject exists in direct identity with Christ; believers in time stand in an indirect identity with Christ that corresponds to the presence of eschatological union in the mode of promise. The Christian confession gives further orientation to believers’ thought because it witnesses to the promise in which union with Christ is present for the believer. It is made constitutive of the believer’s faith through baptism, which stands as the sign of divine promise and of the freedom that this promise grants to believers to take grace as the principle of their thought. This confession offers no more than points of orientation, ‘border posts and anchor buoys’ that direct Christian thought through its witness to a reality that is not reducible to the content of particular proposi­ tions; but these points of orientation provide concrete witness to the pattern of divine activity to which Christian thought is to come to conform in faith. Having adopted the being and doing of God as its principles, Christian thought finds the right ordering of its freedom in allowing this freedom to be shaped by the necessity that marks the being and activity of God. Believers encounter this necessity as they move in prayer from faith’s assent to Christian proclamation to an understanding that this proclamation attests realities that possess the weight of necessity because they are rooted in God’s self-fidelity. Apprehension of this necessity is not a matter of uncovering an epistemic certainty in which Christian thought rests, but rather of moulding thought itself in correspondence to the activity of God by acknowledging the moral and spiritual impropriety of situating oneself outside of this activity by conceiving of its inverse. In allowing their freedom to be shaped by an understanding of and obedience to this necessity, believers find their thought taken captive to Christ in a movement of sanctification. It is this line of reasoning, beginning with God’s act of justification and ending with the sanctification of Christian thought in obedience to Christ, that I have sought to trace in giving an account of Barth’s conception of the ordering of thought. This line presents an account of the activities of reason

Conclusion

233

that is worked out through a moral inquiry into the movements that stand in analogical correspondence to the work of God. In depicting the acts that stand within this correspondence, it sho ws how the obedience that is the basis of the acknowledgement of the truth of God is to be found. It is a line of thought that permits reason to fulfil its proper task in resolving the problem of truth, understood as the problem of acknowledging divine truth without collapsing the distinction between the divine and the creaturely. Development of these notions is intended to aid readers of Barth to break free of stale impasses that have developed in recent scholarship. It shows how, in its use of the notions of the standpoint, orientation, and freedom of thought, and in borrowing patterns of thought from figures like Kant, Ritschl, and Dorner, Barth’s work is rooted in the modern tradition while also taking up questions regarding the acknowledgement of divine truth that are central to the theological tradition as a whole. It shows how Barth’s thought is both dialectical in its insistence that acknowledgement of truth is rooted in a particular movement, rather than a particular claim, of thought; and that it is also analogical in insisting that this movement is determined by corres­ pondence to the activity of God. It shows that, in some respects at least, debates between realist and critically realist readings of Barth are of penulti­ mate significance, for neither an account of a mode of thought determined by a theology of justification nor an account determined by a particular concep­ tion of revelation offers a sufficiently broad perspective on Barth’s work. This opposition hones in on a narrow question of givenness understood in epis­ temological terms; I have tried to show that Barth refigures questions of givenness as questions of the moral and spiritual force of Christian teaching as an expression of God’s self-fidelity and a witness to the presence of the divine in the mode of promise. For Barth, the question of understanding is not what kind of epistemological force can my claims have based on the mode of givenness of the divine’, but rather what kind of moral force does Christian teaching have to bring my life into conformity with itself on the basis of its witness to the presence of God in promise?’ Where readers follow the logic of this latter question and of the elements that constitute Barth’s answer, they may be positioned to recognize that Barth’s work possesses an intellectual and spiritual cogency capable of contributing to reflection on the principles of theological reasoning today.

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Index Abraham, William J. 20 acknowledgement 17, 22, 29, 30, 32-4, 37, 39-41, 67, 75, 79, 83-6, 92, 103, 116, 119, 120, 135, 146, 168, 179, 181, 192-4, 205-6, 216, 224-8, 230-1, 233 Allison, Henry 44, 55 analogy 14-16, 22, 23-7, 38-40, 119, 226, 230-1, 233 Anselm 10-13, 15, 17, 18-19, 59, 65, 136, 140-2, 156, 164-5, 167, 168-74, 176-8, 179-228 Anderson, Clifford 20 Andrews, Isolde 6 appropriation 57-9, 148-51, 156-7, 177, 181, 216,224-8 Aquinas, Thomas 3, 41, 157-8, 217 Aristotle 43-4, 49 Asprey, Christopher 102, 114, 157, 158 Athanasius 200, 201 Augustine 3, 41, 72 autonomy 55-8, 59, 149-51, 177, 227-8 baptism 8, 19, 55, 82, 140, 191-6, 226, 232 Bartley, W. W. 2 Beintker, Michael 5, 6, 105, 196, 222 ‘belonging together’ of God and faith 151-5, 156-63, 177-8, 203-4 Berkhof, Hendrikus 48, 142 Biggar, Nigel 20 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 2, 176 Bouillard, Henri 196-7 Brunner, Emil 2, 67-8, 163, 222 Bultmann, Rudolf 2, 59, 90, 91, 99, 100, 141, 142-51, 152, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 176, 177, 227 Burrell, David 41 Busch, Eberhard 63, 88, 123 Calvin, John 3, 77, 97, 98, 100, 101, 108, 109, 151, 154, 160, 189-90 Cartesian 51, 122, 188, 192, 193, 222 Chalamet, Christophe 142 Choo, Sung Wook 20 Christliche Dogmatik 19, 72, 141, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164-72, 173, 176, 178, 180, 181, 190, 193, 199, 203, 205, 222-3 Church Dogmatics 11, 13, 19, 23, 26-9, 39, 128-31, 141, 156, 163-4, 184-5, 187, 189-90, 193, 195, 199-205, 206, 214-15, 219-20, 223-6

Collins Winn, Christian 20 Colossians 63, 82, 88, 126-7, 143, 190 Corinthians, First 11, 18, 24, 63, 65, 67, 69-70, 72, 78, 80-5, 87, 88-104, 110-15, 122, 134, 142, 147, 168, 169, 179,223 critical realism 6, 7, 9, 34-7, 39, 40, 109, 126-7, 174-5, 187, 190-1, 194, 216, 217, 233 critical reason 69-70, 71, 72-3, 91-3, 95

Dawson, Dale 90 de Boer, Martinus 99 Derrida, Jacques 22 Descartes, Rene 51, 122, 222 dialectic 5, 6, 7, 14-16, 35, 36-7, 38-40, 106, 188-9, 215, 233 Diem, Hermann 174-5, 187, 212 Diller, Kevin 36 Dorner, Isaak August 43, 204-5, 219, 233 Dorrien, Gary 1, 2, 68, 146 Drury, John L. 20 Ephesians 11, 63, 65, 78, 88, 106, 107-8, 110, 113, 117, 154, 186, 190 eschatological subject 8, 10, 18, 19, 50, 55, 90, 116-22, 123, 124, 133-4, 140, 141, 146, 168, 177, 178, 179, 186, 194-6, 226, 231-2 extrinsicism 148-50, 166, 168, 178, 180 Fee, Gordon 99 Feuerbach, Ludwig 85, 159 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 45-7, 48, 50, 120, 123 fideism 30, 119, 141, 147, 177 Fides quaerens intellectum 11-13, 18, 164, 169, 172, 175-8, 180-229 Fitzmyer, Joseph 98 freedom 8, 10, 17, 18, 19, 23, 42, 55-9, 65, 77, 90, 114, 128-34, 135, 139, 140, 149-50, 177, 179, 180-1, 197, 199-200, 205-28, 231-2, 233 Frei, Hans 11,16,38 Gaunilo 221-4 Gibson, David 20 Gilson, Etienne 43, 182 Gogarten, Friedrich 163, 176, 222

248

Index

Göttingen Dogmatics 54, 107, 108, 141, 156-64, 178, 192, 195, 203, 205 Greggs, Tom 2 Gun ton, Colin 3, 12 Hamann, Johann 146 Heppe, Heinrich 121 Herrmann, Wilhelm 25, 57-9, 64, 103, 142, 144, 149 Heidegger, Martin 22, 176 Heitmiiller, Wilhelm 59, 149 Higton, Mike 11 historical monism 69-70, 97, 98, 104-5 Hitchcock, Nathan 90 Holmes, Stephen 3 Holy Spirit 89,99-102,105-10,112,129,131, 133-4, 163, 169, 185, 190, 192 Hume, David 55 Hütter, Reinhold 14, 16

idealism 10, 14-16, 28, 30-4, 38, 44-6, 50, 79, 96, 141, 142, 174-6, 180, 186, 189, 208, 212-15, 230 independence of theology 25, 48-52, 58, 123, 143, 229-30 Jalloh, Chernor 46 Janz, Paul 3, 4, 21 Johnson, Keith 14, 23, 68, 96, 114, 121, 163 Johnson, William Stacy 6 Jones, Paul Dafydd 20 Josuttis, Manfred 198 justification vii, 1, 5, 10, 26, 35-7, 102, 103, 118-22, 123, 125, 127, 139, 140, 146, 163, 179, 190, 226, 231,232, 233 Jüngel, Eberhard 11, 163,203

Kaftan, Julius Wilhelm 157 Kant, Immanuel 17, 19, 25, 28, 29, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44-5, 46, 47, 50, 51-2, 54, 55-7, 58, 59, 63-4, 70, 72, 91, 120-2, 123-4, 133, 143, 146, 149-50, 153, 157-8, 164, 166-7, 174, 176, 177-8, 187, 211, 212, 222, 227, 231, 233 Kosch, Michelle 47 Koyre, Alexandre 222 Kuhlmann, Gerhardt 32, 175-7

La Montagne, D. Paul 2, 5, 6, 9, 39, 121 La Vopa, Anthony 46 Lash, Nicholas 41 Lee, Sang Eun 204 Lessing, Gotthold 144 Lewis, J. G. 86 Lonergan, Bernard 148-9 Long, D. Stephen 7, 14, 16

Longuenesse, Beatrice 46 Luther, Martin 101,149,151-5,159,160,161, 162, 174

Macdonald, Neil 50 Marga, Amy 164 McCormack, Bruce 2, 5, 6, 13-16, 20, 25, 34-7, 38-9, 40, 49, 50, 68-9, 96, 106, 163, 170, 182, 187, 190, 196, 217 McGrath, Alister 28 McKenny, Gerald 23 McMaken, W. Travis 20 Menke-Peitzmeyer, Michael ‘metaphysics of the Bible’ 67-73,91-4,125-7, 154-5, 160, 161-2, 178 Moser, Paul 147 Mueller, David 90 Müller, Hans Michael 172-6, 181, 184, 185-9 Munzinger, Andre 86 Mützlitz, Nina-Dorothee 88, 90 nachdenken 5 neo-orthodoxy 2, 229 neo-Protestantism 16, 19, 32, 63, 68, 91, 103-4, 131-2, 140-2,152, 163,165-76, 177, 180, 187, 188, 222 Nietzsche, Friedrich 21 Oakes, Kenneth 20, 25, 49, 50, 142 obedience 24, 26-9, 30, 34, 59, 66, 131, 133, 144, 149-50, 151, 189, 214, 220, 225-8, 230-3 objectivism 5, 6, 7, 9, 35-6, 127, 190 orientation 8, 17, 18, 19, 23, 42, 51-5, 65, 67-73, 77, 90, 114, 123-8, 135, 139, 140, 150, 179, 180, 186, 191, 195-6, 206, 226, 231-2, 233

Pannenberg, Wolfhart 2, 30, 185-6 Pattison, George 3, 21, 229 Paul 1, 10-13, 17, 18, 23, 29, 32, 37, 51, 59, 63-6, 70, 73-86, 87-136, 139, 140, 141, 149-50, 152, 156, 160, 164-5, 167, 168-72, 177-8, 179, 180, 182, 186, 207, 210, 219, 222-4, 225, 230 Peterson, Erik 229 Philippians 11, 63, 82, 112-13, 115-19, 124, 223 Pinkard, Terry 46 Plato 43-4, 46, 49, 72, 154, 160 positivism 2, 4, 36, 141, 147, 177, 195, 229,230 Prenter, Regin 147 promise 107-14, 122, 126-7, 175, 186-96, 226, 232, 233 Przywara, Erich 14, 16

Index

249

‘range’ of truth 83-5, 151, 183-6, 190, 197-8,223-4 realism 6, 7, 30-4, 34-7, 40, 79, 109, 126-7, 174-5, 186, 187, 190-1, 194, 208, 212-15, 216, 217, 225, 230, 233 resurrection 8, 11, 18, 59, 70, 73, 78, 80-5, 87-136, 139, 140, 150, 179, 190, 223, 231 Ritschl, Albrecht 25, 29, 43, 49-50, 52, 53-4, 58, 84, 103, 141, 143-4, 147, 158, 159, 160-2,186, 205, 233 Roberts, Richard 147 Romans 1, 11, 18, 24, 35, 63-8, 73-80, 82, 85-9, 93, 95, 96, 104, 113, 115, 118-19, 142, 145, 179 Rorty, Richard 22 Rose, Matthew 40

Thielicke, Helmut 57, 148-50 Thiselton, Anthony 91 Thurneysen, Eduard 88-9 Ticciati, Susannah 41 Tillich, Paul 2, 40 Torrance, Thomas F. 5, 6, 9, 11, 16, 34-7, 38, 40, 121, 142, 175, 187, 190, 198, 216, 217 Trinity 128-31, 132, 133 Troeltsch, Ernst 70, 142, 143-5 truth 7, 8, 22, 27, 29-34, 38-40, 42, 79, 83-5, 92, 115-16, 119-21, 135, 140, 143-7, 168, 179, 183-6, 191-6, 205-6, 214-15, 216, 223-8, 230-1 Turner, Denys 41 Turretin, Francis 121

sacraments 1, 37,108, 126,127,152,187,190, 194, 195, 222, 226 sanctification 10, 19, 37, 59, 140, 181, 206, 226, 232 Schaeder, Erich 165, 166 Schlegel, Thomas 170 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 20, 25, 47-9, 50, 52-3, 54, 57, 58, 63-4, 129, 141, 151, 153, 158, 159, 172-4, 183-4, 187 Scott, Ian W. 86 Scholz, Heinrich 181 Smart, James 142 standpoint 8, 10, 13, 17, 18, 19, 23, 42, 43-51, 55, 65, 77, 81-5, 90, 114, 115-22, 123-5, 127, 135, 139, 140, 141, 146, 150, 167, 168, 177-8, 179, 180, 186, 191, 194-6, 205, 206, 222-5, 226, 231-2, 233 Stanley, Timothy 14 Strange, Daniel 20 Strauss, David Friedrich 186 subjectivism 2, 4, 30, 57, 229, 230

understanding 10, 13, 17, 18-19, 59, 65, 136, 140-2, 150, 151, 164-78, 179-228 Updike, John 12,211

Tauto-theology 3, 21 Thandeka 48 Thiel, John 49

von Balthasar, Hans Urs 13-16, 38, 105, 106, 189 von Frank, Franz Hermann Reinhold 121-2 von Harnack, Adolf 63, 144, 229 Ward, Graham 6 Watson, Gordon 197 Welch, Claude 48 Webster, John viii, 14, 65 Westerholm, Martin vii, 41 Wigley, Stephen 11, 14 Williams, Rowan 28 Wilson, Malcolm 43 Wingren, Gustav 28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 22 Wobbermin, Georg 153 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 12

Zachhuber, Johannes 186 Zöller, Günter 46 Zwingli, Huldrych 108, 151