I’ve been reading Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, a book surprisingly oft-read decades ago. [For the scholars out there, I’m using the paperback edition published by Oxford University Press in 1968.] Barth’s writing and thinking style is still more discursive than mine, and he is probably still more intense than I am at my best. Or worst by modern standards. I suspect this makes this book a very difficult obstacle course for most readers.
I’ll assume in this entry that Barth is correcting errors in modern liberal theology, man-centered theologies that rival pagan thought in their attempts to see man as the center of things. As modern thinkers would have it: man can ascend to God by His own powers, human beings have automatic entry to Heaven if they are good by human standards, and human thinkers can claim to truly understand God or even His Creation.
This creates some moments of awkwardness in a religion in which truths were given to us in historical time, by way of historical events. Tradition has it that our very existence is a gift and life after death is a super-added gift and not a basic right of men. Tradition has it that we are bound to live under God’s judgment, by His standards, and that leaves us entirely dependent upon His mercies. Tradition has it that Job was right — man can wonder and can even confront God with His questions but, when all is said and done: God is God. Let’s let Him do what only He can do and we’ll struggle to do our best under the conditions He gives us.
Barth also has some problems with this tradition business. No Christian thinker between St. Paul and Luther is treated with much respect. This is natural for a radical Protestant, since tradition is too Catholic. Heck, Augustine of Hippo was a bishop who wore vestments and celebrated the Mass! I mention this issue because it will play a role in my follow-ups but first I’ll return to Barth’s heroic efforts to defend the tradition that God is, in some sense, the all-powerful Other. I qualify that statement only because tradition also tells us that God did reach down to us, did send His Son to empty Himself and to become a man for our sake. I’ve pointed to the error that Barth seems to be making, and perhaps the error that Luther made, but, for now, I’d like to speak of the truths which Barth defended with so much energy.
Before we can understand the great gift of Jesus Christ, we have to understand the infinite chasm between us and God, the distance which only He could travel. And He did. And Barth knows He did, but he seems to underestimate the effect, writing as if that chasm has not yet been bridged when he should be writing about the Son of God who is the bridge. As I’ll argue in later posts, Barth makes exactly the mistake that he accuses so many others of making: he abstracts Jesus of Nazareth who was a rather concrete, in fact — flesh-and-blood, Son of God. Jesus seems at times to become only a talking point while Barth goes about an exegesis of St. Paul’s “Letter to the Romans” which smells of Deism to my Catholic nostrils. Not all Deists are Enlightenment secularists — some are followers of the Plato of “Timaeus” who saw God as so radically Other that He could not even be aware of Creation. Creation was so beneath God. The chasm between God and Creation had to be filled with the demiurge in Plato’s theology or with angels and demons in some forms of Christian Deism.
In any case, it’s important that we understand what our true situation is with respect to the God who lies on the other side of His own decision to Create — so to speak. We are nothing and God is everything. The Almighty is the 6000 pound Other and He can sit where He wishes to sit. Oddly enough, the Lord of all that exists can also conquer by refusing to exercise His power.
The Son of that 6000 pound Totally Other became incarnate in human flesh, becoming a baby who nursed at the holy breasts of a young Jewish woman named Mary. Barth considers this emptying of Self to be itself a sign of the radical all-powerfulness and Other-ness of God. And he’s right though he doesn’t seem to think it wise, at least on his first sweep through modern territory, to try to explain this.
Barth is on to something. He has the scent of a great truth and tries to squeeze it into the form of a great Paradox. He begins to talk as if nothing can be a truth if it doesn’t point to that Paradox. But he admits in various ways that the Paradox itself is a human thought and thus… False.
What’s going on? A clue comes from his few but strategically important references to Kierkegaard. It’s interesting that Barth uses the very dissolution of all into God as being the way that God gives value to the individual… And he simply tells us “(Kierkegaard!)”. [See page 116.]
Kierkegaard! indeed. Is this the Kierkegaard accused by Etienne Gilson of having good instincts about the importance of existence and yet developing an unbalanced existentialism which denied the importance of substance? That agrees with my general impression of Kierkegaard’s thought from reading several of his major books, but I have to admit that Kierkegaard — Luther and Barth as well — lived their lives to tell us they appreciated the richness and goodness of God’s Creation.
Let’s be fair to Kierkegaard and note that he died in his early forties, one short of the decade that Plato considered the beginning of philosophical insight and wisdom. Kierkegaard accomplished a lot. And Barth was younger than that when he wrote “Epistle to the Romans”, still a bit younger at the time he made his last revision/rewrite of the book.
We are likely seeing, in both Kierkegaard and the young Barth, a rebellion against untruths and also truths gone so stale as to be untruths. Would an older Kierkegaard have returned to a balanced respect for substance? As I noted above: in his life, Kierkegaard showed a respect for the goodness of substance from the viewpoint of creatures. But he had no story or worldview, as I call it, in which God’s radical Other-ness and the goodness of Creation form a coherent whole. Luther and Barth were in the same boat.
If Kierkegaard lived longer, would he have retained his insight that substance exists only in a shadowy way, a way that is quite secondary to the existence of God, but have come to realize that substance does exist — as an object of God’s Love? Barth lived to write many books in his later decades. Did he regain a more balanced outlook? For that matter, did he gain the use of some language that would have allowed him to see he is speaking of the God who is an Act-of-being and would have also allowed him to see that the Creator made beings of substances, objectified acts-of-being, that they might share — however lightly — in His own Act-of-being? And maybe the Son of God took on human flesh that we might share in God’s being in a richer way? Maybe there was always the potential, if not the actualization, that Luther and Kierkegaard and Barth might have seen that salvation is real and not just a matter of God overlooking the sins of an inherently depraved creature?
I’m not sure if I’m making too much of Barth’s occasional, but dramatic, references to Kierkegaard. If I’m seeing something true about Barth’s thought, then it makes a little sense of those Catholic observers (dismissed by Barth himself in a preface to a later edition of “Epistle”) who saw Barth as being a shadow Thomist of sorts. He might have been wise to follow up on the hint, but Gilson as well as Alasdair MacIntyre have claimed that only a few Catholic thinkers had regained a truer understanding of St. Thomas’ thought by the time Barth was writing Epistle to the Romans (1920s).
I’m still a little less than halfway through Epistle and my interpretation of Barth’s ideas might change radically — and I’m inclined to make an effort to read his later works. With that heavy qualification, I’ll claim that Barth, like Kierkegaard before him, is halfway towards the Thomistic understanding of ‘existential acts’ as being not just some accident of substance, but being rather something preceding substance — that is, as some quantum theorists have dimly seen: substance comes into being as the result of relationships. Without this all-important insight to form an analogical ascent to some understanding of God, the radically Other Himself remains a mystery and His own self-revelations in the Bible and in nature have to be shunted aside.
In his funny way, Kierkegaard seems to have been primarily a theologian and only secondarily a philosopher. The young Barth would have had no part of philosophy as far as I can tell, though he was a well-educated man — far more so than I am — and his learning affected even his efforts to deny the value of learning. As theologians, the insights of Luther and Kierkegaard and Barth into the inadequacies of substantialist, or essentialist, views of reality would have led them to make a primal scream of sorts: No, God is not stuff. He is radically other.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have the hard-headed appreciation for concrete reality, for God’s Creation, that St. Thomas had. That great Dominican preacher and thinker was able to speak respectfully of Creation even as he developed a sophisticated view of God’s nature, and non-nature as Barth would have pointed out.
I know I have an inclination to read other thinkers in a way useful to the development of my own ideas. Gilson said that St. Thomas was more highly skilled than any other major thinker at this trick of making others say what he needed them to say to make his point. The reader can beware.
The reader can also beware that Barth has caught my interest and also revived my interest in Kierkegaard. There are not enough hours in the day to accomplish all I feel called to do. And there are my other responsibilities, along with my currently fruitless search for a way to make a living while continuing my non-academic research and thinking and writing.
I will certainly write about Barth at least once more as I continue reading Epistle to the Romans, but I might go on to read some of his later works and also to continue my readings of Kierkegaard’s books. Yes, beware. I might need to write much more about those who enter the porches of Christian existentialism and refuse to go into the main part of that building.