by Trevor Hart

The past decade has witnessed a burgeoning of new studies on the theology of Karl Barth in the English language, some of which have been highly significant. Regarding Karl Barth is a collection of certain essays that have been presented in various journals and books as the fruit of Professor Hart’s own theological engagement with, and critical admiration of, Barth over this period.

Reading and understanding Barth is a complex affair. Given the labyrinthine nature of the Church Dogmatics, not to mention the sheer mass of numerous other writings that Barth has left to posterity, and their constant self-critique and revision (analogous to the recapitulatio in music composition), it is unsurprising that Barth has been misunderstood and misrepresented by some, and ignored by others. One of the strengths of Hart’s confidently presented compositions is in their generally coherent expositions of certain cardinal themes in Barth. As such, the volume could well serve as an introduction to certain aspects of Barth’s theology, and even as stimuli for further theological reflection that takes Barth seriously as the theological giant that he has been and continues to be.

What might not be immediately apparent from these confidently and clearly presented papers, however, is the ambitiousness of this particular, and indeed any, exploration of Barth’s theology. As mentioned earlier, the volume and style of Barth’s oeuvre does not lend itself to easy comprehension and description, and the fact that these essays cover such a wide terrain in a relatively space of time inevitably entails that their value to Barth scholastics will be limited.

Admitting that, however, immediately confronts one with the significant, albeit merely implicit, fact that the loci style architectonic of an essay collection rightly prevents Hart from attempting to engage in one particular fruitless task that has flawed numerous other Barth studies. That is the simplistic search for a map to navigate the Barthian maze, a single key to unlock all it doors, a transcendental perspective from which to survey the landscape below.

This is not to say, of course, that there are not overlaps between the essays, enabling one to make certain connections between themes. On the contrary, while Barth was opposed to ‘systematisation’ in the sense of a conceptual foreclosure, a closed system, he positively embraced the orderly interrelating of all provisional theological statements and doctrines. What Hart’s essays present is various perspectives on the approach of the God to his covenant human partner. As with Barth’s approach to theology in general, each essay asks and describes Barth’s attempt to provide appropriate descriptions to the questions ‘Who is this God who encounters humanity?’, with the attendant and consequent ‘What is my response to be?’

Essay five explicitly deals with the Trinitarian foundation of all proper God-talk, discussing Barth’s model of the Trinity on the Rahnerian side of the opposition between the models of the latter and Moltmann with his more ‘social’ (and tritheistic’?) understanding of the Trinitarian relations. The conclusion is that a perichoretic perspective that refuses to close these two models from each other is more appropriate (p. 116). After all, one worries that much that passes itself off as theologies of the Trinity illegitimately secure themselves from being engulfed within the impenetrable depths of the One whose dwelling in light is too strong for the creaturely gaze. Hart, however, limits his assessment of Barth to the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics and not the later, with volume IV appearing much less modalistic (whether volume I.1 itself succumbs to modalism is a debated question). Moreover, the question is not asked over the different soils within which the Trinities of Barth/Rahner and Moltmann are nurtured, and whether these should have any proper impact on our talk of God.

Hart, in the opening essay, defends Barth against the charge of a theological Nestorianism that does not take the humanity of the incarnation seriously by indicating the importance of the Word’s having becoming fully incarnate. However, while this theme important in this kind of defence, it nevertheless remains a worry that Barth’s early dogmatics do fall foul of such a charge, in practice. In other words, the details of the Incarnate’s life plays less of a role than arguments about the ontological nature of that One.

The second essay is concerned with how God in Christ is known and proclaimed, focusing on how the dynamic event of the divine initiative of revelation remains distinguishable, and therefore humanly unpossessable, from the kenotic enhumanisation of the Word in Jesus Christ, scripture and proclamation (the last mentioned being more than merely preaching). This consequent veiling of the Word in flesh provides Barth with a necessary self-critical edge, reminding him of creaturely fragility, sinfulness, and divine transcendence even through the salvific divine presence.

Essay six discusses the Trinity and revelation in relation to the issue of pluralism, a useful exercise given the frequently heard complaint regarding a Barthian ‘monism’. The problematic that Barth provides the solution to is explicating and developing a third way, ‘critical realism’ (p. 121), between what Newbiggin identifies as an optimistic objectivism of an empiricist or rationalist variety, and a pluralism that is essentially relativistic and sceptical. This approach appreciates God’s givenness on the one hand, and human sinfulness on the other. It is this perspective, one must add, that enables Barth to declare that theology should not ignore the possibility of God’s speaking in and through surprising places. Nevertheless, does Barth sufficiently put this identified ‘committed pluralist’ epistemology (p. 137) sufficiently into practice? That some critics identify problems in Barth’s accounts of christology and the male-female relation as a problem deriving from Barth’s pneumatology at least entails that this question cannot be side-stepped.

The final essay discusses the nature of talk of God, searching for a way beyond idolatrous univocal and theologically nonsensical equivocal speech about God. While the incarnation is not a licence for theological laziness, since it is as much a veiling as an unveiling of God, it testifies to the fact that God takes the question and its subsequent answer of how human theological words can have any proper referentiality. In saying this, however, it needs to be borne in mind that such language continues to retain difference in its identity, corresponding to the divine veiling in unveiling.

The seventh piece, expanded from its original setting, contains a helpful description of the Barth-Brunner debate of the 1930s. Hart rightly refuses to dismiss Barth’s anti-Brunnerianism as purely a product of the times, as some critics are wont to do, since Barth first voiced suspicions about Brunner in 1929 and not 1934. It is also true, it needs to be added to Hart’s account, that even prior to 1929 Barth had consistently rejected any notion of Creature-Creator continuity, but that he began to focus the attack on the analogia entis from 1929 onwards.

However, Hart problematically concludes that Barth’s theology necessitates the application of Brunner’s ‘formal capacity’, or rather a passive capacity in contrast to an aptitude or predisposition in favour of revelation, in that God reveals to human beings and not inanimate objects or beasts. Barth agrees, Hart admits, but nevertheless continues to suspect Brunner of ‘smuggling in’ some sense of this predisposition. What Brunner in the debate misses, and Hart is guilty here also, is the underlying issue of election. Even a ‘formal capacity’ would set the terms of God’s action in the world and thereby threaten God’s freedom, whereas Barth was affirming that God had elected and created human beings in Christ to respond to his revelation. The ‘point of contact’ is, therefore, a christological and eschatological concept.

During the third essay’s critique Hans Küng’s reading of Barth on justification, Hart rejects the identification of the ‘Real’ with the ‘actual’, as in the models common to both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, through Barth’s preference for a ‘christological ontology’ for justification. In the latter we have been completely justified in Christ, the eschatological One who has realised and fulfilled the covenant in our place, and are set on the way that Christ has opened for us through our response of faith.

As two studies by Professor John Webster have already shown, the paucity of scholarly treatments of Barth’s ethics actually derives from a misunderstanding of ethics nature and place in Barth’s dogmatics. Echoing much within Webster’s work, Hart indicates that for Barth the ethical question, while universal, receives a distinctive treatment from within Christian perspective (p. 75). Barth’s dogmatics serve to ‘map’ and delineate the moral space within which human action occurs as good, arguing that through the one particular historical instantiation of ‘humanity’ (Jesus Christ) good human action is a response to the calling and electing God. It is a virtuous living as those for whom human being has been established as covenantal in Christ. While focusing on Barth’s dogmatic delineation of the moral space, and therefore not focusing on the particularities involved in concrete moral decision making, importantly Hart argues that despite Barth’s critique of casuistry this virtue-ethic of personal formation does not deride or belittle moral reflection in some occasionalistic arbitrariness of the event of God’s command. On the contrary, ‘The command of God [in Christ] encounters us and in doing so creates and sustains human moral subjects capable of making sense of themselves’ (p. 87).

Hart’s volume will undoubtedly provide many students fresh to Barth studies with an affordable compilation that contains much that is digestible and enlightening in their own regarding of Barth. Moreover, it is further testimony to the continuing significance of the most important theologian of this century at the very least.

© John C. McDowell,

Girton College

University of Cambridge

January 2000