1. The Problem of Religion in Theology (conclusion)
The extended note discussed previously really carries the intellectual burden of this chapter. For the rest of the chapter, Barth puts the question of the reversal of revelation and religion in his present context, which was the rising Nazi state. Everything else in this chapter –indeed in §17–but be read with that context in mind.
His service to the church, then, was to identify, fight, isolate, and with God’s grace to overcome the heresy which had crept into the church: that human religion and religiosity determine how revelation is to be understood. Barth granted that the entire (Western) Christian church vacillated on this point in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the Reformers did not vacillate: they were very clear that the decisive word about humans had been spoken in Jesus Christ once for all in every respect. This flew in the face of the German Christians, of course, who wanted to understand Christian religiosity as preparing the way for the Führer, and who wanted to do away with any mention of the God of Israel, and the inconvenient truth that Jesus was a Jew. While a spurious claim could be made at one time that understanding revelation by means of religion represented the free results of scholarly (wissenschaftlich) inquiry, it was most certainly no longer the case by then: Christian dogmatic theology had been debased by smuggling in human religion, and the result was the German Christians.
. . . the decision about man has been taken once for all and in every respect in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is now his Lord, and man belongs to him, and lives under Him in His Kingdom, and serves him, and therefore has all his consolation in life of death in the fact that he is not his own but is the property of Jesus Christ. (I/2/292)
This allusion to the Heidelberg Confession directly countered German Christian claims. Only when this decision has clearly understood could theology rightly become a “free investigation of the truth. Barth meant that [the Reformers] theological thinking had always been and as such could now always be free, “free for its own inexhaustible object.” (I/2/293) Barth reluctantly reproached the older theology for the confusion, because it participated in its own times, but not in the spirit of Calvin, who “was able quietly to incorporate this problem into his discussion and exposition.” I/2/293) — Barth does not say how Calvin did this, alas.
Barth revised the historical claim, often made, that modern Protestant theology “retreated in face of the growing self-consciousness of modern education.”(I/2/294) It was not that it imperceptibly allowed itself to be told by philosophy and history and natural science “what the ‘free investigation of the truth’ really is.”(ibid.) On the contrary, the real catastrophe was that, in the reversal of revelation and religion (so that religion is revelation’s a priori), “theology lost its object, revelation in all its uniqueness. And losing that, it lost the seed of faith with which it could remove mountains, even the mountains of modern humanistic culture. That it lost revelation is shown by the very fact that it could exchange it, and with it its own birthright, for the concept ‘religion.'” (I/2/294)
The decisive, false move is that in this great reversal, “we are in a position to put human religion on the same level and to treat it in the same way as divine revelation. We can regard it as in some sense an equal.”(ibid.) This move “about the necessity and actuality of revelation, can never be more than the melancholy reminder of a war which was lost at the very outset.”(ibid.) Whenever the Church thinks that revelation can be compared or equated with religion, then the Church has not “understood it as revelation. . . . Revelation is understood only where we expect from it, and from it alone, the first and the last word about religion.” (I/2/295). Barth understands a sharp either/or and the slightest concession “at once makes the right answer absolutely impossible.”
For Barth real theology is confessional theology. “If we are theologically in earnest when we speak of revelation, we shall speak after the manner of those passages in the [Heidelberg] catechism.”
It is a matter of Jesus Christ the Lord. It is a matter of man, therefore, only as he is reached by the revelation in order that he may live under Him and serve Him, in order that he may belong not to himself but to Jesus Christ, in order that belonging to Him he may have comfort both in life and in death. (I/2/295)
We are only a page away from the strong affirmation and stern denunciations of the Barmen Confession. “Revelation is God’s sovereign action upon man or it is not revelation.”(ibid.) For Barth such revelation is action: the word spoken by God, not an infallible or inerrant verbal doctrine in Scripture, but a living encounter with a Word who is truly human and truly divine, a person. The concept of “sovereign” however means “that God is not at all alone, that therefore, if revelation is to be understood, man [sic] must not be overlooked or eliminated.”(I/2/295-296) Revelation is not just God’s Word: it is God’s Word spoken to humans. But this by extension means that Christians cannot claim to know and define and assess humans and human religion as it were “in advance and independently.” (I/2/296) Theology is not to consider humans “in any other sphere than that of his Kingdom, in any other relationship than that of ‘subordination to Him.'” (ibid.) There can be no “coordination” of these concepts: revelation must determine whatever is known and assessed about religion.
The only thing we can do is to recount the history of the relationships between the two: and even that takes place in such a way that whatever we have to say about the existence and nature and value of the second can only and exclusively be made plain in the light of the first, i.e. in the course of God’s sovereign action upon man. It is man [sic] as he is revealed in the light of revelation, and only that man, who can be seriously treated theologically. (I/2/296)
The question of religion, then is “uninterruptedly theological: What is this thing which from the standpoint of revelation and faith is revealed in the actuality of human life as religion?” (I/2/296—297) Here Barth also departs from long Catholic tradition: “If we are to maintain the analogia fidei and not to fall into untheological thinking, we must be guided by the christological consideration of the incarnation of the Word as the assumptio carnis. The unity of God and man in Jesus Christ is the unity of a completed event.”(I/2/297) (Note Barth’s event and encounter language again.) Similarly the unity of divine revelation and human religion is that of an event –although in this case it has still to be completed. “As God is the subject of the one event, so too, He is the subject of the other.”(ibid.) By analogia fidei, human “religion is to be considered only as the one [human] who follows God because God has preceded the [human] who hears Him, because he [or she] is addressed by God.”(ibid.) This is the discipline of the christological dogma of the early Church, which then “was still a self-evident presupposition with a real practical importance.”(ibid.)
Barth concludes that God is admittedly and definitely present in His revelation in the world of human religion, but he is present as God the creator and judge, the origin and the goal. God is the Lord of Master of humanity, who Himself judges and alone justifies and sanctifies, and a human being is a human being of God as adopted and received by God in His severity and goodness. “It is because we remember and apply the christological doctrine of the assumptio carnis that we speak of revelation as the abolition of religion.” (1/2/297)
This corrective to the heresies of the German Christians is a challenge to much of the teaching today in departments of religious studies, where “religious studies” sets the agenda for any consideration of Christianity. (As a teacher of passive and uninterested undergraduates, I have fallen into this difficulty myself.) Barth upends the modern, diluted, and customer-oriented vaguely humanistic agenda of 21st century liberal arts teaching with an explosive and decisive reminder of the event and action of God’s revelation upon a human: God’s decision for humans, but indeed God’s decision. The abolition of religion is then a direct challenge to much of the theology of the 21st century, and certainly to any neo-evangelical theology that sees God as a “best friend,” much less the corruptions of the so-called prosperity gospel, or the mindless mob that wishes to make some country great again.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020