[Part 4: Continuation of my comments upon reading Barth’s “The Epistle to the Romans”, Oxford University paperback, 1968]
On page 437, Barth claims: “As an act of thinking [thinking of eternity] it dissolves itself; it participates in the pure thought of God, and is therefore an accepted sacrifice, living, holy, acceptable to God.” Barth — who has not explicitly proposed a view of the human mind in “The Epistle to the Romans” — seems to imply a view of the human mind that is more ‘spiritual’ than that consistent with modern empirical knowledge. Once we take modern empirical knowledge seriously, we can question if Barth’s speculation is possible. The human brain, quite finite, interacts with finite environments and somehow forms a mind which is capable of conceiving of infinity and eternity. I’m not sure in what sense we think of eternity, beyond a concept more analogical than direct, but the very fact that we even know about eternity is unexplained at this time. I’ve implied a solution in some of my writings: all truths which God put into Creation are manifested in the strange stuff which lies on the other side of the so-called Big Bang, maybe more than one phase away from this phase. Since our universe, including us, are shaped from that stuff, we somehow have some access to it, perhaps by extrapolating from our finite and particularized universe. You might say we can see the stuff from which we’re made as through a glass darkly. Maybe. And it’s also possible we know of eternity only by thinking processes essentially the same as those of negative theology: we progressively strip away the limitations of finiteness and arrive at some adorned concept of ‘eternity’.
A still deeper problem is that Barth misspeaks the true difference between God and creatures in most of his commentary though it seems he’s quite aware of that difference. God is the Creator who truly exists and creatures exist by way of a gift. Eternity vs. temporal, infinity vs. finite, are secondary matters. Most of the God-centered men and women I know don’t have high intellectual gifts or ambitions, nor are they necessarily gifted in the arts of contemplation — perhaps because they don’t have the time to develop those skills fully. In any case, most God-centered men and women do realize that all they have here and will have if they get to Heaven, is a gift that is unearned. And the first of those gifts is existence, mortal life to perhaps be followed by the gift of unending life in Heaven. This insight leads a thinker near a more complete existentialism but that is perhaps a problem since that more complete existentialism leads to a sacramental universe and even the Sacraments.
I don’t necessarily object when a thinker knows his conclusions before he constructs his arguments, but the weakness of many of Barth’s arguments should have told him that a Kierkegaardian or Lutheran existentialism can’t support much of anything just because it can’t support any sort of explanation, or story, that includes this universe or human nature as they are known empirically. Eschewing the need to understand man other than…existentially, whatever that means, he, a man, didn’t know what he could know and, as could be predicted, Barth knew falsely. Even what he knew about God was wrong just because he refused to know God’s Creation — somehow imagining that a creature can know about God directly though even his knowledge of God is some sort of non-knowledge in a dialectical train of thought.
All existence is freely-given by God, and that includes the existence of stars and other non-living things. But we have no reason to believe that such flimsy things as stars or even entire galaxies can subsist on their own. This tells us that there is an existential element in the very dirt upon which Barth trod, in the very blood-cells which flowed through his body. We can call that existential element an act-of-being. What’s important is that only God can execute such an act. Only God can manifest the truths from which concrete being is shaped, however many steps there might be to that process. Only God can do the main part of that shaping, though we can speak of inertia and freedom of movement by which He gives some share in this work even to the physical stuff of His Creation. In Scholastic terminology, God is the Primary Cause, and He set in motion secondary causes which allow a freedom appropriate for creatures. We have to remember that those secondary causes are His agents and also that He showed quite clearly in the Incarnation of His Son that He is able and willing to directly set in motion those secondary causes. At the same time, we must see that He did distance Himself in some sense from His Own Creation. We can only guess this was for the purpose of allowing some small amount of freedom to His creatures.
In various writings, I’ve speculated on a possibility that would bring coherence to our understanding of Creation in light of modern physics and also in light of the viewpoint of St. John the Apostle: relationships are primary to stuff. In fact, God’s love for Creation brought it into existence from nothing and His love for this particular universe shaped it from the raw stuff of manifested truths. We also can participate in these secondary acts of creation, that is — shaping, by the relationships we form with each other and with the things or living creatures of God’s world. The world can make sense and we have no need to descend into the abstract and paradoxical sort of talk which fills many of the pages of Barth’s “The Epistle to the Romans”.
There is a great problem with Barth’s perhaps unconsciously chosen strategy of betting his faith, and the faith of his students and disciples, partly upon gaps in empirical knowledge. Those gaps might close up and all of a sudden that sort of faith is resting upon a rapidly flowing sand. Barth’s claim that theology and physics and other fields of knowledge are completely separate and not reconcilable is plain wrong. It also is a modernistic position that plays into the hands of those who’ve turned theology and religious practice into quaint hobbies to be restricted to one rarely-used room in a man’s house.
Let me summarize my view of Barth’s thought by putting forth an understanding of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ which is radically different from the understanding of Barth. It reunites all the fields of human perception and life and knowledge and belief which were separated in the early Modern Age.
The drama on the Cross involved God and the human nature of the Son of God. Given God’s desire to tell a story in which man developed from apes in a universe of stars and magnetic fields and frogs and volcanoes, the opening of Heaven to men had also to be a story which developed over time and had a climax. We can’t understand why God brought the story to a climax with such brutal treatment of Jesus Christ, but we can speak more intelligently than Barth did, with far less paradoxical language than he used. We can speak of a God who is pure Existence, His Own Act-of-being, the Supreme Act-of-being. We can speak of substance that is brought into being by acts possible only to God, brought into being once and then for each instant that substance exists. We can speak of quarks and electrons and stars and black-holes. We can speak of bacteria become colonies of single-celled creatures become fish become rats become monkeys become men. We can speak of those men as being battlegrounds where order tries to establish itself against disorder only to decay towards a state of utter death.
We can speak of these things because these are the things which are created by God, loved by God, to take part in this story which is a world. It’s in speaking of these things that we follow the Biblical injunction to imitate God. It’s in speaking of these things that we mortal men try to see the world in what is a vast array of confusion to our limited vision. It’s in speaking of these things that we mortal men struggle to think the thoughts that God wished us to have.
It’s not that we can construct a coherent story just from empirical knowledge because stories have purposes and we know of God’s purposes only by way of revelation. With the aid of both empirical knowledge — physics and chemistry and biology and history and so forth — and revelation, we can tell some plausible version of the story God is telling, we can even set the various Christian mysteries in context.
Understand those mysteries? Not all of them for sure, because some of them, including the Crucifixion, are probably raw facts. God simply told the story He wished to tell and there’s no logic that will tell us why the Almighty One chose that way of bringing His chosen friends into eternal life, certainly not lawyer-logic dealing with atonement, certainly not dialectic logic that glories in accepting contradictions. Nor can we really understand why He took such a liking to apish creatures, before we were even conceived. There’s no accounting for God’s taste because He has absolutely infinite knowledge of all possible possibilities and the absolutely free-will to choose among those possibilities and the absolute power to manifest His preferences in a world.
Men have a responsibility to try to understand, with the knowledge available to them, the story that God is telling, a story that includes those stars and volcanoes, as well as a few vicious rattlesnakes and timid rabbits. The Bible carries human versions of some parts of that story, parts which tell us much about God’s purposes in telling this particular story. A thinker like Barth, while claiming to need no natural philosophy, brings an incoherent mish-mash of a philosophical system to his theological, or ‘existential’, efforts to understand… Something. I don’t know what because Barth’s attitudes and thinking techniques exclude any possibility of trying to understand the story God is telling in the real world. Barth has some Abstractions in his head and he uses them to negate the world of God. If the choice is between those Barthian Abstractions and knowledge gained from studying God’s Creation in the context of Christian revelation, I’ll go with the second option.