Karl Barth: Trudging Onward

[Part 3: Continuation of my comments upon reading Barth’s “The Epistle to the Romans”, Oxford University paperback, 1968]

As a passing matter, I noted a hint of modal logic in a passage beginning around the middle of page 324 with: “Thus, before every moment in time, God foreordains… Here is it that we encounter the secret of predestination to blessedness which Augustine and the Reformers represented in mythological form as though it were a scheme of cause and effect, thereby robbing it of its significance.” Near the top of page 325, he explains its significance in powerful terms: “[T]he knowledge of God is eternal and unobservable: it occurs altogether beyond time.” Unfortunately, an insight like this can lead to no richer fruits because of his refusal to settle the philosophical issues which come first when a creature thinks about God. As a result, his philosophical assumptions were hidden to him by his pretense that he was free of the need of any assumptions about the universe, what it is and how it relates to God.

On page 328, Barth asks: “Confronted by God, how indeed can men be other than accused?” To start with, we’re apes and were created as apes by God. If Barth means our natural status is very humble then he’s speaking truly, but he seems to think this world is necessarily and always the world of K (“The Trial”), whereas Kafka — himself a non-systematic existentialist — saw Sacramental Christianity as a possible way to escape this sort of guilt. Not surprisingly, it was a Catholic priest who could offer this escape in “The Trial”.

This is one of the differences between sacramental and non-sacramental Christians: Catholics and Orthodox and some sacramental Protestants believe that God has a sacramental Presence in His Own World and that the Almighty gave His Church objective and effective means of turning towards Him, of re-turning His love to Him. This belief follows from reading the Gospels in a spirit of hope, hope that the Creator was speaking truly when He called His work ‘good’, hope that the world and the creatures it contains must be good if the Son of God Himself enjoyed much about His life on Earth right up to that fateful night of His arrest and abandonment, hope that Jesus Christ was Himself truly a Sacramental unity of God and man.

On page 364, we follow as Barth discusses Romans 2:14 — “Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things of the law.” From this statement of St. Paul’s perhaps overly-optimistic faith in natural law Barth concludes that the Gentiles had long before “been sought and found by the mercy of God, they had entered in His righteousness, shared in His forgiveness, participated in the power of resurrection and obedience…” From St. Paul’s statement of belief in some sort of natural-law, we might more plausibly conclude that God the Creator embedded moral order of some sort in the basic properties of the world. When we look at the discoveries of evolutionary biology, especially regarding social mammals, we see clear signs of the evolution of moral nature — see my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand or my blog-entries The Christian in the World of Darwin or Moving with the Grain of the Universe: Parasites and All for a discussion of the issues we confront in the biological realm and the sorts of reasoning which can easily handle these issues in a Christian manner.

Thomistic existentialism can make sense of both the theological virtues and the moral nature of man the physical animal. Centuries before neurobiologists and evolutionary theorists got into the act, Aquinas told us that human virtues are embodied virtues. Our virtues are of the flesh, even our love. To speak of embodied virtues in the context of human salvation is to raise issues of sacramental unions, even of Sacraments, but that’s possible only if God is fully present in His Own Creation rather than a Deus absconditus in the strict sense of Luther and Barth. It can be useful to speak of the Deus absconditus even in the context of Sacramental Christianity, but that’s only a manner of speaking. God’s true Presence in all that He creates is the reality and His absence is due to our blindness and deafness, but that blindness and deafness is due to our natural origins and not to any sort of rebellion against God. In blatant contradiction to Barth’s claims, men who overcame that blindness, Elijah and John the Baptist among many, worked hard to discipline their bodies and to learn how to be receptive to the advances of God. To be sure, we don’t know how many might have tried hard to do this and never received any advances from God, but we also don’t know that there have truly been any such men.

Barth deals with this issue on page 429 where he tells us:

In the light of ‘critical’ ethics, ‘inwardness’, ‘soul-fulness’, ‘thought-fulness’, are seen to be either — when regarded from below — merely higher functions of the body, in which case no distinction can be drawn between higher and lower functions that is sufficiently clear to admit of the latter being simply left behind in disobedience; or — when regarded from above — the new man in Christ whence comes precisely that disturbance from which the old man of the body has no means of escape.

I can’t be sure how badly Barth misses on this point, because he hints at greater truths and speaks again in obscure existentialist jargon, but he makes at least two errors:

1. Man after his resurrection isn’t a new type of man but rather a man in whom the moral order of this world is perfected. The imperfect order of this world is not some sort of hints of another world breaking into the chaos of this world. It’s an order produced by the developmental processes of this world, the processes which are part of God’s story. Those processes include the processes explored by physicists and also the processes explored by biologists and chemists and historians and many others.

2. In a sense, those issues of moral order are irrelevant. As Barth notes properly: salvation is an unearned gift. For that matter, our lives in this world are unearned gifts. This doesn’t justify Barth’s claim that we have no right to feel moral indignation at the acts of men like Lenin.

On page 430, Barth opens up a little to reveal he’s partly motivated in all his thought by a need to puncture modern forms of self-righteousness, the ‘weak humanitarianism’ of ‘modern Lutheranism’. The world is a complex story in which all the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang oft a-gley, as Bobbie Burns told us. But it’s a world which encourages us to scheme again and again for good purposes and bad. The problems Barth was facing were problems caused by a mis-match of man’s inclinations and his cosmopolitan situation. One result, which I can’t discuss fully here, is the one foreseen even by the optimistic Adam Smith: certain types of prosperous societies are likely to produce men and women who are genial rather than having a true moral integrity. That was the true cause of the ‘weak humanitarianism’ which Barth saw in the Lutherans of his time, those nice middle-class men who would soon be serving Hitler. It was the true cause of the similar situation Robert McNamara discussed regarding Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet during the war Americans waged against the Vietnamese.

Read the early chapters of the book of Genesis with the hypothesis that the authors of those chapters had an intuition that man was alienated. If you do, you may see the reasonableness of my hypothesis: Those authors explored that intuition and seemed to conclude that our moral ‘fall’ occurred during the build-up of prosperity and the founding of cities. Men have traits that can become virtues or vices under our most natural conditions, but our natural conditions are the small blood-kin communities of the Neolithic Age. Let’s say that period began with the end of a period of major glaciation: 100,000 years ago. Men were selected for their traits as foragers living in situations where they were in constant touch with their leaders, who were likely to be their fathers or grandfathers or maybe uncles. Food was foraged or sometimes agriculture of a nomadic sort was practiced. Game was hunted by small bands of men who were closely related. Weapons and tools and clothing were made by the members of the tribe or else by members of tribes with overlapping migration paths. Human beings have a moral nature suited to dealing with others with whom we’re in constant contact and often closely related to. There are few secrets. Young men remain faithful to their wives unless they get an opportunity with a woman from another tribe if they meet out in the wilderness. Stealing is of no avail when all property is more or less community property and everyone knows exactly what’s in the tent you share with older and younger generations.

Most importantly, there is no way to escape your moral responsibilities for your actions and your words. Human beings have brains which can give rise to powerful minds that can draw abstract principles from practical or embodied moral rules and can adjust to unforeseen circumstances, but thinking is difficult and our adjustments to those new circumstances are never close to perfect. God created a world in which human beings are inevitably alienated in important ways because we’re well-adapted to conditions that no longer exist.

We don’t know how to hold on to our individual moral responsibility once large-scale human institutions form around us and we grow dependent upon them. When we cede our moral responsibilities, legitimate institutions can rapidly decay into Principalities and Powers of the sort which murdered, and still murder, so many innocent human beings in the modern world. This is a problem whenever prosperity leads to population growth and the development of cosmopolitan societies. Evil is magnified through these large-scale institutions even though the servants of those institutions might well be nice human beings trying only to care for their families.

Because of the growth of empirical knowledge in the modern world, we have a chance to understand these problems though I haven’t a clue how I, as one of 300 million Americans, can retain my personal moral responsibility in such a way as to help stop crimes of the sort the American government committed in wars, even in wars that seemed to serve a legitimate purpose. But we have a responsibility to live by God’s story and we can do that only if we try seriously to understand that story rather than treating it as only so much sound and fury we have to endure before God calls us home.

In my efforts to understand that story, we seem to have reached a point where we can move beyond blaming our evil on Satan or speaking of man as being incapable of responding to God’s story in a proper way. I doubt if we can ever solve our problems on this side of the grave, but we have a duty to do what we can. First, we need to make some sense of it all. The partial existentialism of Luther and Kierkegaard and Barth give us no words and no concepts and no narrative strategies to make sense of our universe and to imagine the world which is this universe ordered to God’s purposes.

An updated Thomistic existentialism can provide stories by which we can speak intelligently of our problems and also speak piously of the Creator’s Presence in His own world. That’s literally the crux of it all. We can’t speak…existentially, as if this world will never make sense, moral or otherwise. We have to see the order which is present in this world if we could only see well enough and think well enough to understand. We start by believing that men and God can meet in the time and space of this world. If Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, then all the arguments which dominate the first 400 or more pages of Barth’s commentary are simply wrong. The Son of God united fully with a man born of the womb of Mary.

We are lost if there is any truth in this claim that Barth makes on page 365:

[F]aith is that invisible relation of men — who are not of this world — to God — whom we do not know: a relationship that exists only through the faithfulness of God.

The truths in this statement are almost beside the point and the statement at the whole shows the worst of modernistic religious thought: faith is not objectively grounded and it has nothing to do with the world in which we are born and live. Our relationships with God go to the very core of our being, though we can’t directly perceive He Who is His Own Act-of-being. This we can know if we think clearly: He Who exists necessarily must, in some strong sense, be present in any thing which He creates, any thing which has contingent existence. Our substance is the result of acts-of-being possible only to God.

If Barth’s main point is supposed to be that God in His necessity is pure Existence, purely Transcendental, he’s most certainly right. It’s also a somewhat irrelevant point so far as the drama of salvation goes. The Bible itself has numerous warnings that “God’s ways are not our ways,” but it also tells us that God is working always. He’s active in His own Creation and active in parts of our own beings that are too deep for us to reach — as St. Augustine of Hippo told us. We are dealing now with only a slight variation of the same error which leaves the thinkers in the schools of Luther and Kierkegaard and Barth with a badly cracked philosophical foundation for their theological work.

Let me put it this way:

In my version of God’s story, this universe is shaped from the abstract stuff, the manifested truths, which I called the Primordial Universe. The world of the resurrected will also be shaped from that stuff. That means that — at a very deep level which we can’t perceive directly — we are already made of the same stuff as the perfected bodies of those deemed worthy to participate in the resurrection.

A lack of appreciation for substance is not pious — it slights the work of the Creator Who creates each bit of substance, each speck of time and space, at each instant. It has the odd effect of driving God away from His own Creation, sending Him into Existential realms from which He can invade this universe only in mysterious ways, mostly to inflict His wrath upon us.

Let me consider one more claim by Barth before ending this entry. On page 422, he tells us many things, one of which is:

The word of Paul and the word of Theology has done its work when men are driven by it to ask of God why it is that His Word stands written in no book — not even a ‘table of contents’ — and has been attained by no man.

If the Gospels don’t contain the Word of God, it would seem pretty clear that Christianity is a pack of lies. Against this, I’ll stake my faith in a sacramental world and the Sacraments on the words of our Lord Jesus Christ:

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever.” [John 6: 53-58]

This is the God of Jesus Christ: He Who is so present in His own Creation that He can infuse us with His own Self in such a way that we are re-made into perfected human beings who can share His Life for time without end. This miraculous transformation is carried out by means of the simple fruits of men’s works — after consecration in the Eucharistic Rite given by Christ to the Apostles. Yes, men’s works. The grains and grapes grown by men. The bread and wine which we make from those grains and grapes. Stuff which is filled with God’s Presence just because it’s the result of acts-of-being which can be called acts-of-love. Stuff is the object of God’s active love and comes into being when God freely decides to actively love that particular stuff.

I’ll draw to end here by saying what really bothers me about Barth’s thoughts in this commentary. The job of a thinker in any age is to give the residents of that age words and grammatical constructions to understand the world and its Creator. Barth does not a thing to provide a language to talk about the God of Jesus Christ nor of the Creation of that God. Barth has provided only language to obscure and darken. If St. Paul saw through a glass darkly, Barth would do what he can to make that glass totally opaque.

And there can be a terrible effect on the faith of others. Those men and women of ordinary common-sense will be driven out of Christianity very quickly by this sort of spiritualized rendering of the faith. On the other hand, it will be hard for advocates of skeptical materialism to draw the attention of those who order their thoughts and their actions according to a story which makes some substantial sense of what we know of this universe, this phase of God’s Creation, in light of the purposes of God revealed in the Gospels and the other books of the Bible as well as in the ways of prayer and worship of the Church.