1. The Problem of Religion in Theology (extended note, part 4)
To recap: Barth has traced the concept “religion” from Thomas Aquinas on down to Johannes Franciscus Buddeus and Salomon van Til, “doughty” theologians who would not have welcomed the historical consequences of their own fateful reversal of revelation and religion, with the effect that human religion or religious interest is a predetermined condition of the receipt and appraisal of revelation, Christian revelation in particular. As Barth concludes, “Revelation has now become a historical confirmation of what man can know about himself and therefore about God even apart from revelation.” (I/2/289—290)
Barth begins his conclusion: “There is no need to tell in detail the sad story of more recent Protestant theology.” (I/2/290). Buddaeus and van Til and others of that generation were all men “of admitted piety . . . . They knew how to safeguard in their theology the full rights of revelation, at any rate in appearance.” But their safeguards soon gave way: in the theology of Christian Wolff, “the so-called Neologians” of the 18th century, and Kant, which reduced “religio naturalis to an ethica naturalis, and ultimately reject[ed] revelation, except as the actualising of the powers of moral reason.”(ibid.) Quickly Barth passes on to Schleiermacher (“religion as feeling [as] the essence of theology”) and on to Hegel and David Friedrich Strauss, for whom both “Christian and natural religion are only a dispensable prototype of the absolute awareness of philosophy purified by the idea.”(ibid.) In Ludwig Feuerbach natural religion becomes simply “the illusory expression of the natural longings and wishes of the human heart.” Next Ritschl taught that the Christian religion “must be regarded as revealed and true,” because in it of the supreme value of human life over against the sensible nature of the world “is most perfectly realised.” Finally Barth passes quickly to Ernst Troeltsch, whom Barth regards as instructing the theologian to enter “hypothetically” into the phenomena of religions so as to make the comparative assessment that Christianity “is relatively the best religion at any rate for the time being and probably for all conceivable time.”; “. . . and finally there came that tumultuous invasion of the Church and theology by natural religion whose astonished witnesses we have been in our day.”(ibid.)
So, from a sermon-like scholarly note whose text (I/2/284) was taken from Paul de Legarde, the intellectual progenitor of Alfred Rosenberg, we arrive at the German Christians –at the point of this writing (1931-1932) preparing to seize control of the German regional churches, especially the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union. Neo-Protestant theology was all, according to Barth, a variation on a simple theme, clearly introduced by Buddeus and van Til, that revelation has to be understood in the light of religion. Even “conservative” theologians and movements (confessional, biblicist, supra-naturalistic) have made such concessions to this prevailing outlook that they “cannot be regarded as a renewal of the Reformation tradition.”(I/2/291) (This is a direct challenge to the German Christians.) Barth’s final example of the consequences of this reversal of religion and revelation cited Reinhard Seeberg, who in the first volume of his dogmatics (1925) “calmly remarks” that:
. . . it might have been better to write a “philosophy of religion” instead of a dogmatics; but interested philosophers and historians would, of course, take it in that way without sharing his particular theological presuppositions. Weighing all the circumstances, we must regard an utterance of this kind as a more significant and serious symptom than the very worst pages in the books of a Strauss or a Feuerbach. It shows that at the end of the period which started with Buddeus theology had lost any serious intention of taking itself seriously as theology.(ibid.)
Weighing all the circumstances: which would be this particular case: Reinhold Seeberg, a staunch German nationalist, was highly critical of the Weimar Republic and defended a unique, redemptive German role in the world. Reinholdwas father of Erich Seeberg, successor to Karl Holl in the same Protestant faculty of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University Berlin. The younger Seeberg was already well known as a member of the Nazi party (NSDAP), and the Nazis appointed him as Dean of his faculty in 1933 (by which time his father had retired). While the elder Seeberg emphasized the social nature of the church, a theme developed by his student Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the younger Seeberg was essentially a scholarly light-weight who owed his position to his family connections and politics. Thus Reinhold Seeberg’s concession amounted to a complete capitulation to the German Christians: he had lost any serious intention of taking the revelation of the God of Israel seriously. His son completed this fateful work. (See Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, New York: Knopf, 2014, pp. 163 and 174-175.)
In many ways the note that occurs after the next paragraph of the main text (I/2/291-292) completes Barth’s long note (or really: scholarly article). That intervening paragraph simply asks why the development Barth so laboriously delineated must be judged negatively. His response is characteristically two-sided: the “new” Protestant theologians regarded themselves as heralds and practitioners of the free investigation of the truth even in matters relating to God “legitimately and by commission.”(I/2/291) Those who opposed them simply would not go so far in accepting theological revisions and consequences, but remained on the same axis of understanding that religion will provide the criteria for the assessment and acceptance of revelation. Barth notes that against the proposition that “the truth must be freely investigated even in the field of theology there is nothing to be said,” and those who would oppose such a claim not only cut very poor figures, at bottom “howling with the wolves.”(ibid.)
“The motive for resisting the reversal of religion and revelation ought not to be the fear of its consequences,” (ibid.) from Kant and Schleiermacher to Strauss, F. C. Baur, or the history-of-religion school. The theologian cannot fear the consequences “and repudiate them less it is perfectly clear that we are not cooperating” in this reversal. (I/2/292) For the reversal leads to the German Christians, and the substitution of the Führerprinzip for revelation: a very serious heresy. “We are defenceless against the “German Christians” of own time unless we know how to guard against the development which took place in van Til and Buddeus.” (ibid.)
Read now at some historical distance from Nazi Germany (where Barth was still writing and teaching in Bonn until finally fired and exiled in 1935), his refusal to cooperate with the reversal of religion and revelation still rings very powerfully. In North America, where civil religion (“America first”) almost swamps every Christian community and where obeisance to the gods of nation, liberty, and capitalism are so completely required that refusal to bow to them seems daft and anti-social, Barth is a very sharp reminder that revelation decisively sets the boundaries and critique of religion (“civil” and “Christian”), not the other way around.
Christian fundamentalists simply inhabit a point of the spectrum of religion-judging-revelation and do not effectively challenge it. The superficial fulminations of a pseudo-intellectual such as Eric Metaxas count for nothing here. Challenge might have come from various “emergent,” “emerging,” or “occupy” figures, but those energies have been dissipated in the fog of social media and the persuasive religion of technologism: “there’s an app for that,” one imagines of religion, “so why bother with churches?” Whether effective challenge can arise from “young, restless and reformed” Calvinists is difficult to determine, beholden as they are to the “Christian” right. Barth remains a lonely voice, but not a wrong one.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020