2. Religion As Unbelief
The theological evaluation of “religion” must proceed with great charity: it will take the human very seriously, but not the human apart from God per se: rather the human who is intended (whether he or she has heard or not) in the Word of God. It will not evaluate religion as simply humanly structured: “what we have to know of the nature of religion from the standpoint of God’s revelation does not allow us to make any but the most incidental use of the immanent definition of the nature of religion.” (I/2/298) The Christian religion is not the fulfilled nature of human religion; it is not truer, more pure, or more developed than other religions. Rather “through grace the Church lives by grace, and to that extent it is the locus of true religion. . . . We cannot differentiate and separate the Church from other religions on the basis of a general concept of the nature of religion.” (ibid.)
The tolerance that a theological understanding of religion requires towards religion is not the same thing as a moderation of fanaticism or zealous commitment, neither in the sense of Lessing (Nathan der Weise), nor the “rationalistic Know-All –the typical Hegelian belongs to the same category– who thinks that he can deal comfortably and in the end successfully with all religions in the light of a concept of a perfect religion which is gradually evolving in history.”(I/2/299) (Does Barth here refer only to Hegelians and Marxists, or National Socialist apologists as well?) With the trenchant follow-up: “Tolerance in the sense of moderation, or superior knowledge, or scepticism is actually the worst form of intolerance.”(ibid.) The tolerance that Barth seeks “is informed by the forbearance of Christ” –that “religion” has no meaning “in the [human] situation as such, but because [religion] acquires a meaning from outside, from Jesus Christ.” (ibid.) Therefore: “we begin by starting that religion is unbelief. It is a concern, indeed we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man [sic]” (I/2/299—300)
Above all, this affects Christians, who cannot claim any pre-eminence or truth simply on their own. “What happens simply is that man is taken by God and judged and condemned by God. That means, of course, that we are struck to the very roots, to the heart.” (I/2/300) Human greatness does not lie under our judgement, but the judgement of God.
Barth seeks to ground this root-and-branch rejection (Nein!) of human religion in –of course– Scripture. He finds two elements that make this rejection “unmistakably clear.”
First, “revelation is God’s self-offering and self-manifestation.”(I/2/301) Human attempts to know God from a human standpoint are “wholly and entirely futile. . . because of practical necessity of fact.” Barth returns to a central theme:
In revelation God tells man that He is God and as such He is his Lord. In telling him this, revelation tells him something utterly new, something which apart from revelation he does not know and cannot tell either himself or others. . . . [But] this is the very truth which is not available to man, before it is told him in revelation. If he really can know God, this capacity rests upon the fact that he really does know Him, because God has offered and manifested Himself to him. . . . The truth that God is God and Our Lord, and the further truth that we could know Him as God and Lord, can only come to us through the truth itself. This “coming to us” of the truth is revelation. It does not reach us in a neutral condition, but in an action which stands to it, as the coming of truth, in a very definite, indeed a determinate relationship.” (ibid.)
Here Barth continues his theme that revelation is an event, a relationship, and an action –all initiated and enabled only by God. “The genuine believer will not say that he came to faith from faith, but –from unbelief, even though the attitude and activity with which he met revelation, and still meets it, is religion.” (I/2/302)
Human grasping at God is necessarily from a human standpoint a priori and as such contradicts revelation. The human “does not believe. If he did, he would listen; but in religion he talks.” (ibid.) In that case a human “would accept it as a gift; but in religion [the human] takes something for himself.”(ibid.) Hence religion is not cooperation with revelation: revelation does not “link up with a human religion which is already present and practiced. It contradicts it . . . It displaces it . . . as unbelief.” (I/2/303) Barth follows with a long note in which he grounds his insight in the prophets, Acts, and Romans (1.18, not 2.11)
Second, “as the self-offering and self-manifestation of God, revelation is the act by which in grace He reconciles man to Himself by grace. As a radical teaching about God, it is also the radical assistance of God which comes to us as those who are unrighteous and unholy, and as such damned and lost.”(I/2/307) If these words seem harsh, one must always remember that they are framed in the context of the rise of the “German Christians” who sought accommodation with Hitler. “The revelation of God in Jesus Christ maintains that our justification and sanctification, our conversion and salvation, have been brought about and achieved once and for all in Jesus Christ. And our faith in Jesus Christ consists in our recognising and admitting and affirming and accepting the fact that everything has actually been done for us once and for all in Jesus Christ.”(I/2/308) (—And not in any Führerprinzip!)
A second way, consequently, in which revelation contradicts “religion” and religion opposes revelation.
We are in a circle which we can consider from any point of view with exactly the same result. What is certain is that in respect of the practical content of religion it is still a matter of an attitude and activity which does not correspond to God’s revelation, but contradicts it. . . . Where we want what is wanted in religion, i.e. justification and sanctification as our own work, we do not find in ourselves . . . on the direct way to God. . . . On the contrary, we lock the door against God, we alienate ourselves form Him, we come into direct opposition to Him. God in His revelation will not allow [the human] to try to come to terms with life, to justify and sanctify himself. (I/2/309)
Barth only comes to this statement after a long series of leading and rhetorical questions which recapitulate his thinking to this point, starting with, “what is the purpose of the universal attempt of religions to anticipate God?” to “Are sacrifices and prayer and asceticism and morality more basic than God and the gods?” (I/2/308-309) — in other words, the whole chain of logic from a universal human “need for God” to a universal human need to practice religious commitments and observances. This is what Barth directly opposes.
It is the characteristically pious element in the pious effort to reconcile Him to us which must be an abomination to God . . . . Not by continuing along this way, but only by radically breaking away form it, can we come, not to our own goal but to God’s goal, which is the direct opposite of our goal. [i.e., of human self-justification] (I/2/310)
Whenever Barth introduces the metaphor of the circle (as above), he provides a sign that he is very close to the central preoccupation and point of his whole project in the Church Dogmatics — that God in Jesus Christ is the initiator, the event, the relationship, the person, and the fundamental revelation of grace. Barth follows his second point with another long note, summed up in its final sentences:
Sin is always unbelief. And unbelief is always mans faith in himself. And this faith invariably consists in the fact that man makes the mystery of his responsibility his own mystery, instead of accepting it as the mystery of God. It is this faith which is religion. It is contradicted by the revelation attested in the New Testament, which is identical with Jesus Christ as the one who acts for us and on us. This stamps religion as unbelief. (I/2/314)
Religion may have a self-corrective moment, which seems to agree with Barth’s claim, and yet Barth follows his logic to the end: “Religion is always self-contradictory and impossible per se.” (I/2/314) Even the “critical turn” in which religion understands its self-contradiction and impossibility is a moment in religion, in its essential self-centeredness. Such a critical turn does not show religion to be unbelief; even when it attempts to overcome self-idolatry, it is still idolatry and self-righteousness. Religion is called into question by its own two-fold movement “which at root is only one: by mysticism on the one hand and atheism on the other.” (I/2/315.)
Proceeding from the fundamental forms of religion, a conception of a deity and fulfillment of the law, Barth proceeds to deconstruct Kant’s famous aphorism of “the starry heavens above and the moral law within” (der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir) (I/2/315) This means that the human who lives by this aphorism already knows where to turn, and has “long since brought this truth and certainty into the range and realm of his perception.” (ibid.) So this human’s (or man’s) need is “not an absolute need, a strictly needy need, in the face of which he does not know where to turn.” On the contrary, by so turning, this human indicates that the need has already been met, “as he seeks satisfaction potentially at least, in respect of his religious capacity he is already satisfied.” (ibid.) In the 1930s –in the face of widespread economic hardship in Europe– Barth compares this human to “a rich man who in the need to grow richer (which cannot, of course, be an absolute end) puts part of his fortune into an undertaking that promises a profit” (ibid.)(—neatly layering Biblical & social critique).
Barth concludes from this “the ultimate non-necessity about the origin and exercise of all religion.” (ibid.) This kind of religion is “a repetition [NB Kierkegaard!] of something which previously existed without form or activity, but still quite powerfully, as the real essence of religion and to that extent as the peculiar religious possession of man.” (ibid.) This point drives a second one: “in all external satisfaction of the religious need, there is a very definite weakness deriving from the inward satisfaction which precedes it. At bottom, the external satisfaction will never be anything more or other than a reflection of what the man who is and has . . .”(I/2/316). Barth concludes, “these two factors, the non-necessity and the weakness of all religions, constitute the presupposition for that critical turn which plays its specific part in the history and form of more or less every religion.” (ibid.)
Barth then applies his conclusion, and tips his hand about what he *really* is up to in a crucial, throw-away metaphor buried in the fine print.
The religion of man is always conditioned absolutely by the way in which the starry heaven above and the moral law within has spoken to the individual. It is, therefore, conditioned by nature and climate, by blood and soil, by the economic, cultural, political, in short the historical circumstances in which he lives. . . Nations and individuals may move. Races may mix. Historical relationships as a whole are found to be in perhaps a slow or a swift but at any rate a continual state of flux. And that means religions are continually faced with the choice: either to go with the times, to change as the times change, and in that way relentlessly to deny themselves any claim to truth and certainty; or else to be behind the times, to stick to their once-won forms of doctrine, rite and community and therefore relentlessly to grow old and obsolete and fossilised . . . (ibid.)
This passage contains volumes, wheels within wheels. Barth again evokes the Kantian formula and then swiftly evokes by blood and soil (Blut und Boden)–a distinctive and definitive National Socialist phrase. He in essence links the Kantian philosophical, ethical tradition (so influential in Germany!) with the antecedents of National Socialist ideology. His German explicitly uses a number of key propaganda terms to sharpen his contradiction of Nazi ideology:
Die Religion des Menschen wird immer schlechterdings bedingt sein durch die Art. . . .bedingt durch die Natur und das Klima, durch das Blut und den Boden, durch die wirtschaftlichen, kulturellen, politischen, kurz: geschichtlichen Verhältnisse, in denen er existiert. . . . Völker und Einzelmenschen können wandern. Rassen können sich vermischen . . . So kommt es, daß die Religionen um ihr Leben kämpfen müssen, daß sie akut oder chronisch krank werden können. (KD 1/2/345)
“Rassen können sich vermischen—Races may mix.” Barth is hardly subtle here: this is a direct attack. He devastatingly diagnoses the essential weakness of the religion in the face of fascist tyranny and racial ideology. “The link between religion and religious man in his variableness is the weakness of all religions.” (I/2/316) Far more than a (slightly repetitive) theological argument, this is a point political and social critique of power.
The two factors of the non-necessity and weakness of all religions, lead to a “critical turn . . . in the history and form of more or less every religion.”(ibid.) Times change, and make “ancient good uncouth.” The religion of the parents no longer speaks to the children, but seems superfluous, either rigid (“far too stiff”) or even “far to fluid” to feel at home in it. (Does this also summarize the condition of old-line or mainline American Protestant churches in their decline from the 1950s, perhaps reflecting an idealizing of those “ideal” post-war conditions?) This leads to a crisis, a critical turn: this old religious framework becomes an idolatry (as it may have for some American evangelicals in the white supremacist, post-fact moments 2016-2020—A yearning to “make America great again?”). This critical turn calls into question the old forms, or the too-fluid forms, and the impossibility and self-contradiction of humanly-conditioned and -oriented religion becomes apparent. An old religion may die, a new one emerge, but the critical turn is far more significant and reveals human religion first as weak and extraneous, and then as idolatry.
The previous religious desire of human religion, once in play, now becomes actively destructive. “The same non-needy, religious need now seeks its satisfaction in a solemn non-satisfaction” –what an accurate description of “spiritual but not religious!” Amongst others, the attempt to clean up a previous version of a human religion seems far better than a transition to another one; the energy once directed towards fulfillment of the outward law will now be concentrated on the task of inward loyalty. Barths salient commentary, again packed into the note:
This is the new road on which religious man now moves towards the old theoretico-practical goal. He thinks the same thing, but he thinks it quite differently. At least he thinks that he thinks it quite differently. From a lofty watch-tower he looks down fiercely or sadly or indulgently on those who still think quite differently from what he does, but who possibly, probably, do not understand for a moment how very, very differently he now thinks. . . .Is it perhaps that he is mistaken in thinking that his road is so completely new? Still, even if it is in principle only a continuation of the old way, it cannot be denied that there has been at least a very sharp bend in the road. (I/2/318)
This very sharp bend in the road is actually a fork: the false choice between mysticism and atheism.”The difference derives from the relationship to the existing and hitherto accepted or predominant religion.” (ibid.)
On the one hand, “Mysticism means that practically and basically we renounce that religion as regards its expression, externalisation and manifestation . . . . Mysticism means the basic liberation of man from that satisfaction of the religious need which hitherto he has sought ‘outside.'” (I/2/318—319) It is a conserving form of the critical turn: it leaves human religion in peace, and claims “true friendship with God.”(I/2/319) It is “a radical withdrawal from the outwardly religious position.”(ibid.) In renunciation and silence mysticism both accepts and questions the external form, and says “the most dangerous things” about the real identity of God and the ego from the position of ostensible connection with the former religion. The mystic actually needs this form of religion to kick against: he or she “needs it,” “it is the text for his (sic) interpretations.”(I/2/319—320) It give the mystic a point of departure without which the mystic is simply floating at sea.
On the other hand, “atheism might be called an artless and childish form of that critical turn. Atheism means a blabbing out of the secret that so far as this turn involves anything at all it involves only a negation.” (I/2/320) Mysticism quietly says no to previously-known religion; atheism shouts it to the world. “Atheism lives in and by its negation. It can only break down and take away, and therefore it is exposed to the constant danger of finishing at a dead end.”(I/2/321) (One thinks of the dead ends reached functionally either in the old Soviet Union, or the present-day Silicon Valley.) But atheism is also self-deluded: although more energetic than mysticism, but simultaneously more modest, “satisfied to deny God and his law,” it fails to anticipate that other dogmas or ways of certain can take on a religious character at any moment. (Think of the secular rituals of Communist states, or the ritual moments of celebration in app-driven solutionism when a start-up firm funded by venture capital goes public.)
While mysticism is more astute and far-sighted, querying God, cosmos, and individual, negating all systematically and comprehensively, atheism is far more content to accept all the realities (as presently understood) of nature, nurture, history, civilization, and animal and rational existence. (Think of the short-hand journalistic narratives that locate one or another human trait in evolutionary biology, even when the connection is preposterous or distorted.) “Atheism nearly always means secularism. And more than that, atheism usually allies itself with these secular authorities and powers in the conflict with religion, with God and His law. It argues from their existence and validity. It accepts them as irrefutable data.” (ibid.) As such, atheism is the stronger form of the crisis of human religion, more primal and unitary. Intellectually weaker, it is more logical and consistent in its declaration of the weakness and non-necessity of human religion.
But “the danger of sterile negation” contains a crucial flaw.(I/2/322) When all illusion has been shattered, such atheism will have to invent the illusion of atheism as an absolute. When a negation of all religion is complete, what is to prevent new religions from arising, “out of nature and culture and history . . . out of” human “animal and national existence?” (ibid.) This is the plight of Otto Petras (Post Christum, 1936), who foresaw a sort of end of history: All that remains is a venture stripped of every dream: “the venture of a naked and dangerous existence, absolutely sterile and always confronted by death.”(ibid.)
Barth had encountered this kind of life already “certain soldiers in the world war, . . . or in this or that perverted modern industrialist.”(ibid.) (Perhaps Barth had Fritz Thyssen in mind —what would he have thought of Ayn Rand’s John Galt?) The either/or dilemma does not simply disappear, however: “either this new form of existence is simply lived out and not preached by some who gladly surrender to this “master-word.” (I/1/323) Barth again implies the situation of religion in Germany: Machtwort has a strong National Socialist flavor: the commanding word of power would be spoken (in that view) only by the Führer. Atheism is then a private affair, its critical role is finished: there was (in principle) no “atheism” about Hitler’s word. Or: “Or this new form of existence is not only lived out but publicly proclaimed.” But then “some sort of over-world has to be dreamed into it too. And the result of this critical turning against religion is simply the founding of a new religion-and perhaps even the confirmation of an old.” (ibid.) That “founding of a new religion” (“. . . Die Religion ist auch hier die Bildung einer neuen – vielleicht auch die Bestätigung einer alten Religion geworden. KD 1/2/353) is precisely the predicament of the German Christians, at once attempting to hold on to something from Christianity while proclaiming a new divine act in the leadership of the Führer.
Barth summarized (!), “the critical turn against religion signifies in any case the discovery of its weakness and only relative necessity.” (I/2/323.) The critical turn, the realization and declaration of its weakness and only relative necessity (bloß relative Notwendigkeit) that leads to mysticism or atheism, is no solution and no lasting achievement. Both mysticism and atheism wind up bound nevertheless to human religion, because they are its negation. The historically quite improbable (and logically inconceivable) existence of pure mysticism, pure atheism consists in just this: “the negation which is ostensibly only a means to the end, a work of liberation, the dangerous negation- dangerous even to mysticism and atheism-which is so well adapted to bring in religion in one way or another, has now reached its goal.”(ibid.)
The human being who follows this historically improbable path would ultimately be free of God and God’s law, “happy in that formless and unrealised vacuum,” happy alone in a real world beyond thesis and antithesis, within and and without.(ibid.) If this individual exists, or has existed, she or he will have tasted “the great positive” –but what is that really?(I/2/324) Not diametrically opposed to religion (as is frequently and rather superficially claimed), it is opposed to religion “only as the spring is to the river,”
as the root to the tree, as the unborn child in the womb to the adult. It is the quiet religious possession. It is the contemplation of the universe and the creative power of the individual feeling which gropes after it in its nameless and formless and unrealised oneness. (I/2/324)
Far from “halting” religion, such mysticism/atheism will project or clear the way for a new human religion. Here is one of Barth’s short affirmations of a human power: “The power to be in the world and a man, as man’s own power, is identical with the power to devise and form gods and to justify and sanctify oneself. This power, and therefore the great positive beyond all negations . . . “(ibid.) The German text reveals a fascinating contrast to the “master-word” (Machtwort):
Eben das Vermögen, in der Welt und Mensch zu sein, ist ja als des Menschen eigenes Vermögen identisch mit dem Vermögen, Götter zu ersinnen und zu gestalten und sich selbst zu rechtfertigen und zu heiligen. (KD I/2/354)
In German, Vermögen often means property in the sense of assets (vermögend as an adjective means “wealthy”). Barth eschews words that imply the entire vocabulary of power and and ideology of the National Socialists and chooses an expression far more ironic in Basel and Zürich (as financial centers). Humans alone cannot force a “crisis of religion” because humanly-conceived religions, including their mystical and atheistic negations, belong to the “magic circle of religion” –and indeed, the human “asset” of religion-making is exactly their wellspring and departure.(I/2/324) (Note Barth’s return to the ever-evocative metaphor of the circle.)
The real crisis of religion necessary to affect (treffen, or “deal with”) this human power will have to move directly to the central issue: the fabrica idolorum (“the workshop of the idols,” where they are made–and an expression of Calvin’s), and will have to cry Ecrasez l’infame! –with the delightful allusion to Voltaire, who so wished to clear the Enlightenment mind of the old-fashioned superstitions of religion.(ibid.) Calvin versus Voltaire: here they square off. Only by squashing the fabrica will the Lernæan hydra (Sophocles, fragment of Trachiniae) be slain: the human propensity of asset (Vermögen) will otherwise rush in to do what it does: invent new forms of human religion.
The real crisis of religion, an abrogation, can only break in from outside the magic circle of religion and its place of origin, i.e., from outside man. It is only in a quite different antithesis than that of religion and religious ability, only in the light of faith, that the judgment “unbelief, idolatry, self-righteousness” can be made on this sphere and therefore on man as a whole, so that he can no longer flee from one refuge to another. This is what happens in the revelation of God. (I/2/324-325)
Religions develop, religions change, religion as a human activity (fabrica idolorum) always remains; unless the revelation of God breaks in, religion is essentially left at peace. “All the great “friends of God” and “deniers of God” have ultimately attained at any rate to a kind of toleration of religion; proving once again that the mother can never quite deny her child.” (I/2/325)
Just as Barth pointed his critique of religion at German Christians and the “new pagans” of racist, National Socialist ideologies, so there are many potential targets for critique in contemporary American religion.
As regards the former, Bonhoeffer wrote a pointed, perhaps the definitive critique in his reflective essay “After Ten Years,” written in 1943 and hidden in his parents’ house (it emerged after the war, of course, and subsequently published as the opening of Widerstand und Ergebung : Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft or Letters and papers from prison). Bonhoeffer surveys the fundamental distortions and untruths represented by the “reasonable ones,” the moral fanatic, the man of conscience, those who rely upon concepts of duty, and those who proclaim a freedom and private virtuousness. Then who stands fast?
Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action if faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?
This is the disruption of divine revelation of the Word of God, which demands a response.
As regards the latter, this conversation is also relevant to the state and identity of Christianity in America in 2016. The is the religion of reasons, of conscience, of virtue –where are they all now? In particular, both those Evangelicals and Catholics who have followed the New Incumbent (I refuse to write his name: Ecrasez l’infame!) have traded their inheritance for a mess of pottage: they have shown their religion is both not really necessary and certainly very weak.
Those who have stridently proclaimed their “new atheism” have merely blurted out the secret that the religion they criticize is neither really necessary nor very strong (one thinks of Richard Dawkin’s curiously narrow view of what Christianity really is), as have the “mystics” whose trade secret seems to be “spiritual, but not religious,” and seek refuge in any non-Western religious thinking or practice that banishes the western gods whom they failed every really to hear anyway. (One thinks of such events and places as Burning Man, and the numerous semi-mystical “mindfulness” practitioners of the Bay Area in California.)
In the end, what religion in America has become –and almost always been historically–is the fabrica idolorum. Only the Word of God, spoken from the outside and beyond the “magic circle” of American religiosity, can unmask the idols, and speak the Word of Grace and Truth” “and the Word became flesh, and we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.” My own tradition of worship, called Anglo-Catholic (was or is that ever really a very helpful name?) certainly stands liable in the Judgment as much as any other. Only the Word, the event, written, and proclaimed, can save any of us from the human “asset” or propensity to fabricate idols. T’was ever thus.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020