1. The Problem of Religion in Theology
Personal note: This section appears in this blog out of order (I was next intending to take up I/1/ §7, The Word of God, Dogma, and Dogmatics). An explanation for this departure seems appropriate.
In 2012 I became unwillingly involved in a particularly galling example of hypocrisy, one super-charged with a version of high-octane (even flamboyant) Christian religion. One element of this galling example involved telling serious untruths to children and then piling on further defensive lies and attempts to intimidate them. Another element involved a significant abuse of their parents’ trust, and a third involved an unwise attempt to maintain a facade of normal business while refusing to acknowledge public perception of reality. It is inappropriate to specify more of this sorry episode. If one, however, wishes to find evidence supporting Karl Marx’s theory of false consciousness which regards religion as a diversion from the miseries of exploitation, a diversion which serves the interests of capitalists, one need look no further than St. Thomas Episcopal Church, New York.
In the time since that episode I have wrestled with the gap between the proclamation of the Christian church and the realities of power and money in the church, and the sometimes (often-times) disastrous consequences of that contradiction. I have questioned my own involvement as a member of the Episcopal Church, and that episode left me with an enduring allergy to the so-called “catholic” emphasis in the worship and theology of some congregations. My younger son, alas, has come to identify Christianity with evasion and hypocrisy, and has embraced rhetorical adolescent atheism with fervor. Meanwhile my involvement as a librarian in a university affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church has certainly sensitized me to the profound challenges facing its lay members (as well as their enduring faith) in light of media reports of abuse by clergy in recent decades.
Consequently, the problem of religion in theology –how to evaluate religion as a human reality amongst others–has come to the forefront of my thinking. My private wrestling with religion has diluted my commitment to continuing to read Barth, as evidenced in the long gaps between entries in this blog. Barth’s devastating critique of religion in light of the event of God’s revelation as attested by Holy Scripture has become both acutely pertinent to my own thinking, and a way forward with this project. But now with the help of Barth’s crisp clarity and bracing critique, I am finding my way forward again.
Twelve years ago (2001), I smelled “religion” as one element in the smoke arising from heinous deeds of terrorism. The hypocrisy of the publicly religious (those “scribes who like to walk around in long robes,” Luke 20:46) is certainly less violent but hardly less damning.
The problem of religion in theology arises from the fact that the revelation of God does indeed encounter humans as “a real and possible determination of human existence” and consequently “bears the aspect and character of a human phenomenon.” (I/1/281)
In this Chapter (§17) Barth not only takes on a cluster of controversial questions, but also responds vigorously to one of the important criticisms of his theology: that in so emphasizing the Word of God as extrinsic to humans, he minimizes or reduces the human role in Christian proclamation to the point where it hardly matters –a critique given expression in Reinhold Niebuhr’s charge of “transcendental irresponsibility” (a phrase which first seems to occur in an editorial essay, “What the War is Doing to Religion,” Christian Century, 1917 34:49, p. 6). At Princeton I remember Barth’s emphasis on the transcendent Sovereignty of God was satirized in a variation on a now-dated hymn, “Sit down, O men of God / His Kingdom will He bring / Whenever it may please his will / You cannot do a thing.” Kenneth Barnes has written about the “social quietism” that put German church leaders at odds with the ecumenical community in the Life and Work movement (an early ecumenical movement, see Nazisim, Liberalism, and Christianity: Protestant Social Thought in Germany and Great Britain 1925-1937, p. 59).
In §17 Barth takes on this criticism, as well as the controversial question of the relationship of the Christian religion to other religions –his chapter title speaks of religion’s (or religions’) abolition. This is a strong word that leads a sharp critique.
This question is of such importance to the long-term viability of this reading project, that I will devote several extended blog entries to it. This one concerns the first section of the first heading in §17, “The Problem of Religion in Theology.”
This section 1 (“The Problem of Religion in Theology”) is in essence an extended historical study book-ended by the introduction and fundamental claims Barth advances. In the Study Edition (2010) this section occupies 20 pages (pp. 81-100) or pages 280-297 of the original Thomson translation, 1936. The extended historical study occupies pages 83-94, slightly over one half of the chapter; given the 5 other inset notes, the notes are arguably three fifths of the chapter. The extended note requires multiple blog entries —the four entries that follow this one.
“The event of God’s revelation has to be understood and expounded as it is attested to the Church of Jesus Christ by Holy Scripture. It is within this concrete relationship that theology has to work” (I/2/280). Barth specifies his basis of his remarks in this concrete religion because the following discussion involves the claims that the relationship is more general or philosophical, and less than concrete.
This revelation, both its reality and its possibility must be sought “both of them in God, and only in God.”(ibid.) Insofar as Holy Scripture is the only valid testimony to revelation, it requires commitment to the statement “that as an event which encounters a human,” this event represents a self-enclosed circle. The objective and humanly subjective elements of revelation, its potentiality and actuality, “is the being and action of the self-revealing God alone” (ibid.) But this event encounters a human or humans (Mensch) really, and consequently the event has “at least the form of human competence, experience, and activity.” As a real determination of human existence, it has an aspect and character of a human phenomenon, “something that can be grasped historically and psychologically.” (I/2/281)
As a human phenomenon comparable with other human phenomena, revelation as actuality for humans thus introduces the problem of “religion.” “‘Christianity’ or the ‘Christian religion’ is one predicate for a subject which may have other predicates.” (ibid.) The phenomena of the Christian religion are then singular, but not unique, a species within a genus which may have other species. Since this seems to be a direct challenge to unique and determinative Revelation, “We have to recognize the fact calmly, and calmly think it through.” (ibid.) “Calmly” is not an adjective/adverb that Barth uses frequently..
The importance of this thinking for Barth is evidenced in his referral to the self-enclosed circle, “as an event which encounters man, this event represents a self-enclosed circle.” (I/2/280) Whenever “circle” appears in Barth it is a signal of great importance (“as a tangent touches a circle”) because the Revelation and Concealment of the Sovereign God is necessarily self-referential. Like the Euclidean postulate, it simply is, has this quality –but somehow humans have to describe and proclaim it, and that necessarily involves human phenomena which can be compared and contrasted with other human phenomena.
Barth sketches a view of religion as a human phenomenon which begins with a point of view entirely different from his own: that of the historian of religion, and in particular Edvard Lehmann (1862-1930), a Danish historian of world religions who founded that subject at Copenhagen and Lund and later taught for 3 years at the Kaiser Friedriech-Wilhelms Universität Berlin (now the Humboldt University). Lehmann worked during the so-called “encylopedic” era of his academic discipline, and Barth glosses his views (from Lehmann’s article in a characteristic Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte). That Barth would go so far astray from his own point of view indicates the seriousness with which he is trying to give a hearing to his critics.
Lehmann’s summary (via Barth) is essentially: everywhere and always humans seem to revere some kind of Other or Supreme Absolute, and go seek to sanctify and order human life through individual and social striving towards an existence characterized by qualities from a Beyond. This reverence takes concrete form in the images of deities and cultic customs and practices that establish a relationship with the Other, and texts which concretize the cult: Testaments, Vedas, Tripitakas, Qu’ran, etc. (That this view is deeply offensive to many adherents of those varying groups seems quite beside the point here.) Similar concerns mark all these writings: the beginning and end of creation; the origins and destiny of humans; religious law (custom), transgression, and redemption. Although possibly a high and exalted form, Christian “piety” is on a scale with all these images, cults, texts, and pieties. (I/2/281-282).
Barth responds (in the following paragraph, I/1/282): To “allow that there is this whole world” (a generous admission, insofar as Lehmann’s main point seems well grounded in evidence!) is (for Barth)
“is to recognize that in His revelation God has actually entered a sphere in which His own reality and possibility are encompassed by a sea of more of less adequate, but at any rate fundamentally unmistakable, parallels and analogies in human realities and possibilities. The revelation of God is actually the presence of God and therefore the hiddenness of God in the world of human religion.” (ibid.)
That which is divinely unique, continues Barth, is “humanly only singular.” (ibid.) The hiddenness of the Word in religious (Christian) phenomena means that “the divine uniqueness of that content cannot be perceived directly” (insofar as the phenomena could have other contents).(I/2/283) Here we are once again on familiar ground: the Word cannot be perceived directly, but only via humanly-mediated text (Scripture) and the human activity of proclamation: preaching via indirection, a thoroughly Kierkegaardian motif.
As a historian, I find Barth’s delineation of the difference between human singularity and divine uniqueness to be very helpful –and there is more than can be said. Because the following long note requires its own blog entry, I eschew further comment until that I have more thoroughly read and absorb that note.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020