(Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1977). x +217 pp. hb. £IIIIIIIIII. ISBN: 0-664-22094-0

What makes our God-talk talk of God, and not of some other thing that we give the name ‘God’ to? Barth was one of a long line of theologians who strained to make intelligible the need to resist the reduction of ‘God’ to an object of our discourse, an object to be worshipped. Famously in 1922 he spoke of one’s inability to speak of God, and yet of the necessity to do so (presumably lest our worship be given to the creature). What he argues is most appropriate of this tension is a theology that is dialectical, an that a dialectic that constantly makes our theological discourse insecure, makes us ill at ease, while enabling us to hope that we have been set on the way to worshipping truly. In short this ‘period’ of Barth’s writing is characterised by a mood of krisis, of judgment and encounter with the ‘Wholly Other’ who cannot be given to us (whether in our experience, our reason, or our practices of living).

It has taxed the minds of scholars as to what it is precisely that changes with the writing of the Church Dogmatics. Some commentators maintain that Barth, through the study of Anselm and others, lost this earlier mood through his discovery of the theological significance of christology. Now this may sound like a good thing for Christians unfamiliar with this censure, but it puts serious questions at the door of a christological theology (as this is perceived by these critics). The gist of the criticism is that Barth, it is argued, stabilised theology, lost the sense of God as ‘Wholly Other’, and therefore made his own discourse of God, by implication, in a sense infallible and something complete.

Johnson’s valuable study recognises that something has changed: "Upon first encountering Barth’s magisterial Church Dogmatics, the audible strain is, of course, the sonorous harmony of his so-called ‘christocentrism.’" [1] Yet the "first" here is suggestive, and this is where Johnson is important – "there is also a countermelody at work, a tone more sober and restrained, a tone that stands in equiprimordial balance to the other." I am unsure as to the propriety of a see-saw image for musical tonality, or for theology either – the negative way (speaking of God negatively, about what God is not), for example, is better understood as a constant unsettling of and corrective to the mood of the positive way (speaking of God positively) and not as a way of enabling the discovery of some stable and speakable balance, or even middle. Nevertheless, Johnson is making a vital point about Barth – there is much within Barth’s writings that suggest that he continued to be aware of the theological problems with theo-logy or God-talk.

The book is triadically divided into three sections with three chapters comprising the first two sections and two (or three, if one includes the conclusion) in the third. This architecture is sensible for two reasons – it indicates that Barth’s theology is trinitarian rather than ‘christocentric’) [see 13]; and it indicates that human beings and their agency are not incidental to Barth’s theology but rather that God cannot even be considered in the abstract without human beings (the architecture is nicely poised to suggest that the being of human agents is the end of the divine creative agency). However, does this second facet unwittingly suggest that creation is necessary for God, and that the doctrine of God postulates no aseity (Johnson later claims that "the mystery of God’s being must still retain a logical priority over God’s act in history" [75])? Moreover, there could be sensed something odd about the neat division of Barth’s theology into threefold order, since for him the trinitarian perichoresis entails a method that is constantly trinitarian (and therefore there can be no successiveness).

The first section’s postmodern title, ‘Decentering Theology’ is suggestive of ways in which Barth’s theology can converse with much in the writings of certain ‘postmodern’ thinkers such as Derrida. The aim of this is to suggest that God and not human being (whether as reasoner or experiencer) is the proper subject-matter of theology. But what kind of subject-matter, what kind of object, is made clear. Chapter 1 has the odd title ‘In Quest of the God of Theology’ since ‘quest’ suggests primary activity whereas Barth emphasises an originary human passivity as recipient of grace and whose agency is responsive (i.e., follows the movement of divine agency). Johnson fruitfully delineates the sense in which Barth’s theology begins with the self-givenness of revelation, while this givenness always remains a to-be-given. In other words, there is always a more, an excess that evades transcription into a theological system, a ‘not-yet’ at the heart of the ‘already’. This is contrary to all thoughts that God’s givenness is securely given to thought or language, "a built-in corrective" to the dangers of ideology and idolatry.

Chapter 2 (similarly given the odd title, unless of course it is seen as being ironic, of ‘In Quest of a Theology of God’) continues the flavour of this description of the theological enterprise by denying the possibility of any ‘foundationalism’ to Barth – that there is no stable or secure rational principle/fact that is universally accessible and self-evident (the sub-title of the book, Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology is to be read ironically, then). Rather, God’s revelation is a dynamic event whereby God gives God’s-self without ceasing to be the Subject of his revelation by becoming an object given an at our disposal. And this being given occurs through creaturely media which, in some real sense, also serve to obscure and veil the mystery of revelation. This recognition rightly intensifies the eschatologically provisional note of theology in Barth, and therein Barth’s sense of the necessary fragility of theological discourse and the need for conversation with other perspectives and disciplines from one’s own ("Respect for the mystery of God would seem to demand nothing less than a multidimensional approach to the theological task" [37]). What emerges from this is the fact that ‘mystery’ (Barth’s favoured term, ‘event’, has more of a dynamic mobility about it) when predicated of God does not mean something able to be searched and discovered, but that which always evades conceptual capture because of its richness beyond any possible descriptive exhaustion.

Chapter 3 moves into ‘The Mystery of the Triune God’. But, why is the doctrine of the Trinity being read after two chapters broadly dealing with the mood of theology? Of course Barth himself follows this kind of architecture in CD I.1 – but had earlier announced that this was only by way of making a concession to modern readers for their ease of reading. Johnson does not explain his own procedure. He explains well how the doctrine, the construct of the theological imagination, is a shorthand interpretation of who Christians confess this God to be. In other words, the doctrine is not itself directly revealed but is a response to who reveals himself (is not all doctrine a human response?), a confession that God cannot be spoken of other than as simultaneously the Father of his Son in his Spirit (there can be no abstract God-in-Godself that is not trinitarian). Moreover, it is not a difficult speculative description of God’s eternal relationality but the grammatical basis (it sets the rules for speaking and understanding) of the triadic structure of Christian experience.

Part 2 turns to the economics of this trinitarian God – God has elected to be or, with, in and among us. Chapter 4 deals with ‘God "For" Us’ as Creator in CD III (what about God’s self-election in CD II?) and adds the perspective that we cannot know creaturehood apart from Jesus Christ, that decentered selves become human only through a history of "interaction with others" [77], and that Jesus Christ alone has realised his humanity. Chapter 5, ‘God "With" Us’, concentrates on incarnation and reconciliation. Chapter 6, ‘God "In" and "Among" Us’, moves on to themes of pneumatology and redemption. It importantly critiques those who feel that Barth had no time for the Spirit by noting Barth’ proper reticence to say a final word, with the Spirit acting as the way God comes to fruition in his world. Secondly, it challenges the common perception of the Christian life as a gift, claimed as a possession, by noticing that it is a matter of hope (and therefore the constitution of a task of becoming) rather than an immediate attainment. So earlier Johnson had argued that there are no Christians as such (one should add except Jesus Christ), but only the eternal opportunity of becoming Christians [36]; and that "Christian life … [is] a tensive and open-ended existence lived out primarily in the mode of hope. The Christian life is never something self-evident but always something received in the form of an enigma and a task." [125]. Consequently Part 3 is integral to the book’s movement.

The ethical section (Part 3, ‘The Mystery of the Other’) outlines how Barth’s beliefs project ‘rules’ for action. The term ‘rules’, though, can both sound too inflexible (Johnson recognises that theological ethics is incapable of dispensing direct answers to moral questions [154]) and secondly lose the dialectic of practice feeding critically back into theory ("it is ‘action’ that provides the driving force that tests our thinking." [157]). For Barth, theological ethics is a way of preparing one to hear the command of God (in that sense it is not utterly devoid of content and episodic), and that heard only in specific contexts, by way of being concretely open to the ‘other’ (thus while taking a particular shape, its specifics cannot be casuistically determined in advance). The shortest chapter is the last one, Ec-centric Existence and the Centrality of Hope’ [176-183] which may be surprising since hope is declared here to be ‘central and the book’s mood plays on eschatological provisionality.

This really rather short book (I was gasping for more than the 191 main pages of text) does have its weaknesses, or at least areas which require supplementation – more could have been made of Barth’s anti-bourgeois "budding socialism" [7] since this influenced his eschatological perspective; more could have been done on Barth’s account of das Nichtige since here Barth specifically admits theology must unsystematically stammer; more should be made of explicitly reading Barth against the influential past-oriented readings of his work (the likes of Berkouwer, Roberts, Rosato, Jenson and Gunton are not mentioned); finally, while importantly providing an account of the more "sober" mood in Barth underplayed by most commentators, there is a danger that Johnson has over-read him here by understating the mood of theology’s christocentric ‘closure’ and ‘finality’. Nevertheless, Johnson’s is a very timely corrective to many of the critical readings of Barth that have become popular. Firstly, Barth’s theology retains its sense of provisionality even through the Church Dogmatics precisely because God can never be a simple given; secondly, that dogmatics can never leave humanity out (perhaps by envisaging the end of divine agency as some abstract self-glorification of God), but is always a theanthropology and a theo-ethics; thirdly, the Christian life not either an achievement of ours nor a possessed gift, but the gift of a perennial task of becoming witnesses ethically responsible for others; and fourthly, that, at least in principle, Barth’s fragilistic perspective on the theological task enables his to be seen as a conversational theology. This book will, moreover, rightly disrupt both the self-indulgent complacency of much Christian God-talk and worship by asking it whether it illegitimately makes God into an object controllable with thought, worship, action; and short-circuit the logic of any natural theology that reasons toward some ‘object’ called ‘God’.

New College

University of Edinburgh