3. True Religion (Part 1)
All the preceding content in §17 is preliminary to Barth’s key statement: “we can speak of ‘true’ religion only in the sense in which we speak of a ‘justified sinner.'” (I/2/325) The balance of Barth’s discussion of the revelation of God as the abolition of religion must be seen through this lens. There may be but a short bridge from Barth’s discussion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous, tentative vision or inquiry into “religionless Christianity” towards the end of Letters and Papers from Prison, but that is another discussion.
This 35-page section shows a definite outline of the Barth’s material. If by “true religion” Barth intends us to mean a religion which has the property of truth inherent and immanent in it, then religion is most certainly idolatry –no religion “can only become true, i.e., according to that which it purports to be and for which it is upheld.” (I/2/325). What makes the revelation of God true as the Christian religion is entirely an opus alienum, “only in virtue of a reckoning and adopting and separating which are foreign to its own nature and being.”(ibid.) Just as no human can stand before God as any other than a sinner, so religion stands before God as untrue, and deserving of the judgment of death. But “Revelation can adopt religion and mark it off as true religion.” (I/2/326) By abiding strictly with analogy to the unmerited and extrinsic justification of sinners (and not just a metaphorical analogy), one can say that the Christian religion can be (or is from time to time) the true religion.
Is Barth merely making a semantic show here? Hardly: in discussing the non-necessity and weakness of religion, Barth did not exempt the Christian religion from the discussion –on the contrary, he often seemed especially to mean the weakened and denatured Evangelical and Reformed Christianity of the liberal theology in which he grew up. “[I]t is our business as Christians to apply this judgment first and most acutely to ourselves: and to others, the non-Christians, only in so far as we recognise ourselves in them.” (I/2/327) Barth summons one of his familiar “journey” metaphors: “At the end of the road we have to tread there is, of course, the promise to those who accept God’s judgment, who let themselves be led beyond their unbelief. . . .This exalted goal cannot be reached except by this humble road.” (ibid.) A knowledge of the Christianity religion necessarily stands under the judgement on unbelief, and that judgement affects all of Christian practice: worship, theology, doctrine, social life, and the arts. “[A]ll this Christianity of ours, and all the details of it, are not as such what they ought to be and pretend to be, a work of faith.”(I/2/327) Without that judgment, all our religion is a disregard of divine admonitions and consolation, a setting up a Babylonian which cannot be pleasing to God. (I/2/328)
Barth’s evidence supports his insight from Old and New Testaments, culminating in the apostolic witness in I Corinthians 13, “if for the concept of “love” we simply insert the name of Jesus Christ.” (I/2/330) (Note that Barth’s interpretive move would be contested fiercely by many New Testament scholars.) Paul cites the familiar evidence of Christian life in his time: tongues, prophecy, mysteries, radical giving, martyrdom — “it is said that it helps the Christian not at all, absolutely not at all, if he [sic] has not love. For love alone never fails.” Such a life is indirect reflection in a mirror only. At the heart of the apostolic witness, “Christianity could not be more comprehensively relativised in favour of revelation, which means a crisis even for the religion of revelation.” (I/2/331)
Such relativizing does not make the Christian faith weak or infirm. It does not rely upon a Christian’s self-consciousness of such relativizing, or from an attempt to distinguish a Christian identity from a non-Christian. The natural limitations of self-consciousness are coherent with the natural delimitations of the Christian religion by divine revelation. “[T]he very security of our being and activity, and therefore our security in relation to men, rests absolutely upon our willingness in faith and by faith to renounce any such securities.” (I/2/332). The German text, however, places this emphasis differently:
Nicht nur unsere Sicherheit vor Gott, sondern gerade auch die Sicherheit unseres Seins und Wirkens und also auch unsere Sicherheit im Verhältnis zu den Menschen beruht schlechterdings darauf, daß wir uns solche Sicherungen im Glauben und durch den Glauben verboten sein lassen. (KD I/2/363)
–That we leave to be as forbidden to ourselves such securities in faith (belief), and through faith. The human act of renunciation is far more visibly powerful here in the German.
Barth’s scriptural example here is a rare and fascinating discussion of St. Paul’s “remarkable” indirect reference to his own experience in 2 Corinthians 12. Without doubt, Paul speaks “very personally of his own most intimate religious experience,” (I/2/332) his visions and revelations, and hearing “unspeakable words.” Although he refers to “this man” three times, there can be little doubt that he means himself, purposefully deflecting his experience from his personality: “he puts a space between himself and this man.” (ibid.) This thorn in his side, representing Satan in some way, is not what Paul wants to frighten away by invoking the name of Jesus Christ; he now sees “the order in the power of which he is held outside the circle of these experiences: at the place where Christ dwells beside him, i.e., in his weakness.” (ibid.) What, exactly is this weakness? It is what remains when his religious experience has been subtracted from him, or set aside: humiliations, emergencies, persecutions. Barth concludes, “And in Paul we can see how the real security of his being and activity, the power of his decision, the strength of even his outward position, the whole energy of his religious self-consciousness in relation to that of others, is rooted in the fact that he let everything, the Christian religion, and in concreto his own specific “revelations,” be most definitely limited by revelation, by the Lord Jesus Christ: for “when I am weak, then am I strong.”(ibid.)
In dialogue with non-Christian religions (and even in dialogue with Christian traditions), the Church (ecclesia, not the institution) “can never do more harm than when it thinks that it must abandon the apostolic injunction, that grace is sufficient for us.” Religious self-consciousness is only mist, a reed, that must necessarily slip through our fingers; to respond to other traditions on the basis of religious self-consciousness is to renounce the Christian’s birthright, which is grace. Unless Christianity has humbled itself by openly and freely receiving the gift of grace, it can never speak with power. By neglecting the delimiting of religious self-consciousness and necessary and prior reliance upon grace, Christianity has made great difficulties for itself. Barth traces these in three stages:
- The early church, which held one great advantage as religio illicita or ecclesia pressa –it was forced into the position of apostolic weakness. But in comparing Christianity with the ancient Colossus with feet of clay, in the apologetics of the second and third centuries, “can we altogether avoid the painful impression that what we have here—as though the persecuted can only regard themselves as spiritually undeserving of the external pressure brought to bear on them—is, on the whole, a not very happy, a rather self-righteous, and at any rate a not very perspicacious boasting about all those advantages of Christianity over heathen religion which were in themselves incontestable but not ultimately decisive?”(I/2/333) Even then Christian apologists tended to downplace or de-emphasize the distinctive Christian reliance upon grace. “Both materially and formally that which is centrally and uniquely Christian was abandoned or replaced.” (I/1/334) Only “the might of spiritual poverty and the power of revelation” constantly re-appeared despite Christian confusions, “and the truth of Christianity spoke and shown forth.”(ibid.) But the way was paved for further declension.
- The apostolic situation disappeared in the whole period dominated by the idea of Corpus Christianum. Through alliance with the elite, the Church increasingly became a second world power. (Note the distinctive 1930s language of political dominance.) “Christianity was moulded according to a definite universal, intellectual-moral-aesthetic form, which made possible, and inevitable, the complementary formation of all kinds of particular national Christianities, each with its own particular national-religious self-consciousness.” (ibid.) . The evidence of grace was not destroyed, “But it did so in the Church only against the Church (i.e., against the tendency which dominated the Church, against the proud but treacherous idea of the corpus christianum.”(I/2/235) The Church placed more emphasis in its contest with Islam upon its own glory than upon its reliance solely upon grace.
- In the modern period, with the fresh collapse of the unity of the Church and state, western humanity “come of age,” “can now dispense with its teacher—and as such official Christianity had in fact felt and behaved.” (I/2/335) . With no hint of repression (was Barth listening to minority voices in Europe?), Christianity is now forced on the defensive. Christian faith is now assigned a proper place as “a useful and usable force for education and order in the service of the new secular glory of Western man.”(sic! ibid.) While early Protestantism was persecuted for proclaiming such reliance upon faith, that was by now long ago.
Barth concluded:
Therefore it all amounted to this: that within the general anthropological concept, recognised by the non-Christian world as well, the particular “nature of Christianity” should be reliably disclosed and declared at the same human level, from the same viewpoints and on the plane of the same arguments used by those who thought that they could dispense with it, i.e., in the area of human and humanly perceived advantages and disadvantages, strong points and weak points, probabilities and improbabilities, hopes and fears. . . . But Christianity was now represented as a better foundation for philosophy and morality, as a better satisfaction of ultimate needs, as a better actualisation of the supreme ideals of modern man, than any of its various competitors. Just at this time and on these presuppositions, and supported by the Jesuits and the Protestant Pietists, there was a comprehensive re-adoption of the missionary task of the Christian Church. The result was a fresh confrontation of Christianity with the non-Christian religions. It was inevitable that both the mission and the confrontation should suffer most heavily from the fact that the sending Church was itself seeking its strength at a different point from where it could be found. (I/2/336)
Christianity, by surrendering its truth to the “fluctuations of modern man,” is then regarded as absolutely authoritarian, or individually romantic, “now liberal, national, or even racial” (fighting words in 1930s Europe).(ibid.) But it does not rely upon “the truth of God which judges and blesses, and which it continually claimed to be according to the original and strangely enough unsilenced documents of Christianity.” (ibid.) Any such victories in these fluctuations is Pyrrhic. The powers of “heathen religions” (I do not believe that Barth means simply non-Christian religions, but the active heathenism of racist Nazi ideology) are such that “it might become an ever more burning question, whether from the very standpoint of its existence as such, of its validity and task in the world, Christianity does not have cause to give a body blow to its own secularism and heathenism, which means–for everything else is secular and heathen–to set its hope wholly and utterly on grace.” (I/2/337) And so is the way paved for the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
One of Barth’s most laconic lines “We must not allow ourselves to be confused by the fact that a history of Christianity can be written only as a story of the distress which it makes for itself.” (ibid.) The story of Christianity, from the God of Israel, to Jesus and his apostles, to the Reformation, can be perceived “the attempt which the Christian makes, in continually changing forms, to consider and vindicate his [sic] religion as a work which is in itself upright and holy. But he continually feels himself thwarted and hampered and restrained by Holy Scripture, which does not allow this, which even seems to want to criticise this Christian religion of his.” (ibid.) Barth clearly sees the the contradiction in the heart of historical Christianity:
. . . . the history of Christianity, as distinct from that of other religions, is the story of that part of humanity, which, as distinct from others, has existed only as the part which of grace lives by grace. In the strict sense there is no evidence of this throughout the whole range of Christianity. What is evident is in the first instance a part of humanity which no less contradicts the grace and revelation of God because it claims them as its own peculiar and most sacred treasures, and its religion is to that extent a religion of revelation. Contradiction is contradiction. (ibid.)
The history of Christianity is then the history of sin committed with a high hand, in the name of revelation, to deny revelation and not delimit religious self-consciousness. “The statement that even Christianity is unbelief gives rise to a whole mass of naive and rationalising contradiction. Church history itself is a history of this contradiction. But it is this very fact which best shows us how true and right the statement is. We can as little avoid the contradiction as jump over our own shadow.”(I/2/337-338)
Barth will go on to describe a correct view of the truth of the Christian religion, upon which I will comment in the succeeding post.