Karl Barth (1881-1968)

According to the will of their benefactor, the Gifford lectures were to promote the study of natural theology in Scottish universities. In Aberdeen in 1937-8, however, Barth criticised this theme, and commented instead on the Scots Confession of 1560. Natural theology, the attempt to know God apart from revelation, and that which underpinned many ‘apologetic strategies’, is a theologically mistaken enterprise. In Jesus Christ we know the trinitarian God as the ‘Subject’ of our knowing (i.e., it is through God’s initiating agency that we know). Since God is not an ‘object’ in the way other things are, God cannot be known in the same way as other objects. Therefore theological rationality remains relatively (not absolutely) independent of other forms of rationality.

That does not mean that Barth drew a contrast between God and world, faith and reason, in a manner simply describable as ‘irrationalist’. His theological account of rationality called into question the legitimacy of any (1) general view of rationality that does not take seriously the sinful perspectives of our knowing, (2) account of knowing that imagines God as an ‘object’ perceivable through human striving.

Instead of natural theology Barth proposed that "the best apologetics is a good dogmatics", and maintained that revelation defends itself [Table Talk, ed. J. D. Godsey (Edinburgh and London, 1963), 62]. Through the agency of the trinitarian God we have come to know God, in a life-involving faith; explaining this faith to others involves describing who Christians believe in, and presumably providing testimony to the possibility of this knowing; so that others may be encouraged to ‘see things the way I [or better, ‘we’, since knowing is social] do’.

The manner of Barth’s ‘faith seeking understanding’ (learned largely from Anselm) suggests further that this involves ways of detailed and thoughtful critiquing others, while humbly acknowledging one’s own fragility, and constantly testing one’s own beliefs. But that Barth is not promoting any simple ‘internal coherence’ perspective on the truth of Christian belief, is most readily detectable in his theological love of Mozart; his eclectic practice of learning and appreciating insights gained from the likes of Heidegger and Sartre, among others; his later reflections on creation’s "little lights" [Church Dogmatics, IV.3.1, §69.2]; and his earlier claim that

God may speak to us through Russian communism, through a flute concerto, through a blossoming shrub or through a dead dog. We shall do well to listen to him if he really does so [Church Dogmatics, I.1, 60].

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 14 volumes (Edinburgh, 1956-1975)

K. Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation: Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560, trans. J. L. M. Haire and I. Henderson (London, 1939)

K. Barth, ‘Revelation’, in John Baillie (ed.), Revelation (London, 1937), 41-81

K. Barth, Table Talk, ed. J. D. Godsey (Edinburgh and London, 1963)

K. Barth and E. Brunner, Natural Theology (London, 1946)

I. U. Dalferth, Philosophy and Theology (Oxford, 1988), ch. 10

T. J. Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford, 1999)

T. A. Hart, in Regarding Karl Barth: Essays Toward a Reading of his Theology (Carlisle, 1999)

G. Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York and Oxford, 1994)

B. McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realist Dialectical Theology (Oxford, 1995)

J. C. McDowell, Hope in Barth's Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy (Aldershot and Burlington, 2000)

T. F. Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh, 1990)

J. Webster, Barth (London and New York, 2000)

John C. McDowell

Edinburgh

Nov. 2001