Karl Barth, Christian Humanist

I’m afraid I’ve been spreading a vicious lie about my favorite theologian, Karl Barth, for several years now, and I feel I need to clear the air a bit. I brought it up on the very first episode of The Christian Humanist Podcast (TCH if you’re me; the CHP if you’re Nathan Gilmour or teach at Bethel University), and I go into more detail in this post from two summers ago.

The lie: Karl Barth did not believe in what Calvinists call “general revelation,” and more specifically, that he distrusted Christian humanism and thought it a quest at best quixotic and quite possibly heretical. Turns out, this may not be true.

I should admit straight out that I have not read as much Barth as I should. I’ve been through Helmut Gottwizer’s 260-page selection of the three-kabillion-page Church Dogmatics several times, and I’ve read The Humanity of God and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. Hardly enough, it’s true, to make me an expert. (It may not even be enough for me to call him my favorite theologian, but I’m going to anyway.)

I think I make a pretty good case for my position in the post linked to above, both defending my position that he mistrusts natural theology and, in the sequel, giving a few historical reasons why that might be the case. I may only have half of the story, however, as I’m realizing as I make my way through Ralph C. Wood’s The Comedy of Redemption. Wood seems to have read every word Barth ever wrote five or six times and devotes two full chapters in his book on American novelists to the other great Swiss theologian, and he says I’m wrong:

It is a commonplace to say that Karl Barth’s work is Christocentric. It is even more conventional to dismiss his theology as antihumanistic. The aim of this chapter is to show that, while the former is incontestably true, the latter is demonstrably false. Barth’s theology of culture, far from being misanthropic, has a profound regard for humanity and all its works. Yet it is not built upon our native longing for God. Barth makes a radically evangelical estimate of human creation, rooting it in the Gospel’s own unapologetic claim that God in Christ has shown himself to be ineluctably for us rather than against us.

As usual, I have overstated the case, though it’s good to know that I’m at least following the crowd in my misreading of Barth. The major counterexample is Barth’s deep love for Mozart. He apparently began and ended every day by listening to a Mozart record, and “Barth’s study contained a picture of Mozart that was hung—as Barth always pointed out—at a slightly higher level than Calvin’s.” The theologian saw Mozart’s music as a major signifier of God’s grace and wrote what is apparently a very famous essay about him. According to Barth, the composer

heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time—the whole context of providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway. Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the shadow.

(To which I say, whatever. I’ve never liked Mozart very much, even though he appears to be the official composer of Christian existentialism, between Barth’s adoration of him and Kierkegaard’s long essay in Don Giovanni in Either/Or. I still like Beethoven, Chopin, and Erik Satie better.)

It is important that Barth is talking about Mozart and not, say, Bach. (According to Wood, in fact, Barth believes that “Mozart . . . is content to play while Bach is determined to preach. The angels may perform Bach when they are before the throne of God . . . but when gathered unto themselves it’s always Mozart.”) Finding theology in Bach would be easy; his music is full of theological themes. But not Mozart, who “did not intend his music, at least not his secular work, to resound with the praise of God’s prevenient grace.”

So Barth is finding echoes of faith in a work meant for a secular audience and written by a person who (by all accounts) was thoroughgoingly secular. This is, in fact, the task of the Christian humanist as I define it—to “demonstrate[] what surprising echoes of the Gospel can be heard within human creation whenever it is not made the basis for faith in God.” Barth’s trouble comes when we start with the secular work and try to move toward the Bible; this cannot be because “Only by first hearing God’s unique and saving Word spoken in Christ can we later catch its worldly resonances.”

This explains Barth’s antipathy for what he calls, in the Church Dogmatics, “Christian humanism.” The Christian humanist moves from the world to the Gospel instead of vice versa and is thus in danger of building Towers of Babel. Wood calls Barth “a humanist Christ rather than a Christian humanist. In the latter formulation, the noun always overwhelms the adjective.” (I disagree, incidentally, which is why the podcast is still called TCH instead of THC.)

But Wood’s final thoughts in the chapter are worthwhile to anyone who considers him- or herself a Christian humanist or a humanist Christian or whatever else:

Hence Barth’s refusal to set a so-called Christian humanism in opposition to scientific, existentialist, Marxist, or other humanisms. Because they are all abstract programs, says Barth, Christian faith must not seek to compete or to compare itself with them. The Gospel, Barth insists, differs from all humanisms not in degree but in kind. It “is neither a principle, not a point of view, nor a moral philosophy. It is spirit and life, a good message of God’s presence and work in Jesus Christ. It does not form some Front or Party either, not even for the sake of a certain conception of man. It forms congregations, and these exist for service among all men.”

Wise words from Barth, as usual—words that all Christian scholars in the humanities should take to heart to avoid moving in the wrong direction. Sorry for the confusion.

Freedom and Responsibility

Christian existentialism has no particular affinity with Calvinism or the Reformed Tradition. Of the eight major Christian existentialists (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Marcel, Jaspers, Barth, Tillich, and the Niebuhr brothers), only Barth comes from a Reformed background. (Kierkegaard and Tillich were Lutherans; Dostoevsky was Russian Orthodox; Marcel and Jaspers were Catholic; and the Niebuhrs were members of the no-longer extant German Evangelical Synod.) It's not that hard to see why, I suppose: Existentialism involves the ultimate freedom of man, and Calvinism is famously caricatured as "that predestination denomination"--which it is, at least to some extent.

But I'm an existentialist for the same reason I'm a Presbyterian, which is that Karl Barth was and I agree with him on just about all of the major issues. (And I did before I'd ever read him, thanks to the popularization of his theology in Frederick Buechner's books.) And so there must be a synthesis (a bad word for Barth, of course) here; there must be a way to believe in predestination and the ultimate freedom of man.

I found it on my third reading of Church Dogmatics: A Selection. (I still have neither the money nor the guts to read the Dogmatics in their entirety, which I suppose makes me disingenuous when I say that I agree with Barth on just about all of the major issues.) Mankind, as a creature, has a special type of freedom, a freedom which God the Creator does not have: the freedom of alienation. This alienation manifests itself, at least when I talk about it, in three ways: alienation from oneself, alienation from one's fellow-creatures, and alienation from God. God cannot, by His very nature, be alienated:

it is a mark of created being as distinct from divine that in it conflict with God and therefore mortal conflict with itself is not ruled out, but is a definite possibility even if it is only the impossible possibility, the possibility of self-annulment and therefore its own destruction.

This "impossible possible," this possibility for alienation and indeed annihilation, is what our freedom would look like if we held it up to the light. But this freedom is indeed ours, and we are able (and most of the time, willing and ready) to exercise it.

But Barth is not Heidegger. A mere exercise of our freedom is not sufficient to end alienation--indeed, most if not all expressions of human freedom lead only to further alienation. (For a great example, head over to John Updike's Rabbit, Run, which the author has said he fashioned as an object lesson from Barth and Kierkegaard.) We have the ability to choose, but because we are (as Plato says) fundamentally stupid and (as Calvin says) fundamentally perverse, we will choose a Tower of Babel over the Living God every single time. Our freedom leads not to Being but to Nothingness.

The solution, then, is to recognize that our freedom is real but still illusory--that is, we are free but it's not actually a good thing to act on that freedom. (In this sense, our freedom is that of Adam in the Garden; we can choose to eat from the tree or not to eat from it.) Our freedom is an attempt to be like God, and indeed, "From the very first man as such has continual illusions about himself. He wants to be more than a creature." The problem is that he isn't more than a creature.

And so it is that the Christian must relinquish his freedom. The Christian, according to Barth, is defined by his acceptance of his own contingency: "Of all creatures the Christian is the one which not merely is a creature, but actually says yes to being a creature." He submits himself to God's sovereignty (which Barth, good Calvinist that he is, believes will take precedence in the end anyway) and recognizes that this is the dignified and proper place for him, that "it is the glory of the creature to be lowly in relation to God."

Now, I recognize that this in no way solves the age-old problem of the connection between man's free will and God's sovereignty, but it does explain how the Christian existentialist can believe in ultimate freedom and ultimate sovereignty. You just can't put them on the same level. You end up like the canaries at the top of this post. You're able to leave the cage, but you don't--because you recognize that the cage is not a place of imprisonment but the place you belong.

Karl Barth and I Make Nice

If Barth had not been placed in a certain era and culture, would his views on general revelation have been more magnanimous? The ferocity with which he attacks it was spurred by a particularly sinister historical and theological event:

The Evangelical Church in Germany was unambigously and consistently confronted by a definite and new form of natural theology, namely, by the demand to recognise in the political events of 1933, and especially in the form of the God-sent Adolf Hitler, a source of specific new revelation of God, which demanding obedience and trust, took its place beside the revelation attested in Holy Scripture (Church Dogmatics II.1)

Then again, that demand has been a near-constant in the history of Christendom, from the divine right of king to George W. Bush's implications of God's mandate on his presidency.

So does general revelation, as Barth suggests, necessarily demand preference over specific, that is, Christological revelation? It makes sense to me. Christianity does not come naturally--that's what Christ means when He says the road is narrow. The beauty and the beast of Christ's calling is that it goes completely against our nature. We don't want to surrender our (illusory) control over our lives; we don't want to turn the other cheek or carry the cross or love our enemies or do any of the things we're commanded to do. In fact, Barth argues that we can't do these things, that God must do them for us.

General revelation, however, is our attempt to maintain our control over the universe. If reason (and I'm particularly concerned with reason here) is an expression of and avenue to God equal to His Word, Christ, then we don't need Him, or at least we need Him less. Most evangelicals, I suspect, would be loathe to put any sort of general revelation above the Bible, but so-called "natural theology," in its attractiveness, adaptability, and popularity, almost has to take precedence over biblical theology. Our instinct is to seek the easy way, and general revelation can pave eight-lane freeways.

We see this most evidently in the evangelical co-opting of rationalism. My Bible-college alma mater sponsors a so-called "Philosophy Club" message board, though I suspect more theology than philosophy is discussed. A frequent topic of conversation is logic's role in theology and the universe. For reasons I don't understand at all, the majority of the amateur philosophers on the board maintain that the Lord must operate within the bounds of reason--after all, our universe is subject to logic, and God made our universe. Sounds like a non-sequitur to me; I'm a Barthian and therefore believe that God is Wholly Other, that we can know nothing about Him that He does not reveal to us.

And so maybe I overshot my criticism and conflict with Barth. I certainly agree that logic--the most basic form of natural theology--can't really tell us anything about God and, furthermore, that this type of logical theorizing demands privilege over specifically Christian revelation. And yet I'm uncomfortable discounting non-Christian thought entirely. I wonder if God has not revealed Himself beyond the strictures of Hebrew theocracy and the life of Christ. Such a thought is far more liberal than Barth, who's more conservative than his evangelical critics assume.

But more on that tomorrow.

My Fist-Fight with Karl Barth

I generally follow Karl Barth on theological matters, but as I reread Helmet Gollwitzer's selections from Church Dogmatics, I find myself arguing with him on the subject of general revelation (which he calls "natural theology"). I'm not sure I'm exactly breaking from him yet--but I'm struggling.

Not only does Barth disbelieve in general revelation (as distinguished from the specific revelation of God we get through the life of Christ as attested to in the Bible), he views it as just another "Tower of Babel," a work by which man futilely attempts to commune with God:

Natural theology is the doctrine of a union of man with God existing outside God's revelation in Jesus Christ. It works out the knowledge of God that is possible and real on the basis of this independent union with God . . . But this means that in actual fact God becomes unknowable to him and he makes himself equal to God. (Church Dogmatics II.1)

All this fits in, of course, with Calvin's doctrine of total depravity--really extended in Barth's case to absolute depravity. If man is absolutely fallen, he cannot in the final analysis trust in his logic, his emotion, or his will. The only thing worth trusting is God's revelation, that is, the Word of God, that is, Jesus Christ.

But I've grown a little dissatisfied with Barth on this issue. Maybe that's a product of my reading Plato and admiring certain parts of him, or maybe its my attraction to the broader vision of mythology offered by Chesterton, Lewis, and Milton, but I am no longer content with Barth's pessimism toward anthropology, and I think this dissatisfaction stems from the sticky wicket of total depravity.

The doctrine is sometimes confused with absolute depravity (which again, I think Barth holds to)--in other words, all men are depraved, but each man is not completely depraved. But there's a different, as this passage from the Canons of Dordt, that famous argument against Arminianism, suggests:

The result of the fall is total depravity or corruption. By this is meant that every part of man is rendered corrupt . . . There was no part of his nature that was not affected by sin. (III, IV, Article 4)

The Canons make it clear, mind you, that this definition does not mean that man is entirely helpless; he still has "glimmers of truth." So the magnanimous view of world religions offered by Chesterton and Lewis is pretty much compatible with traditional Calvinism. But Barth extends Calvin's principle. In The Word of God and the Word of Man, he says that these glimmers of truth make man try to reach God; that is, they give him an inborn religious impulse like the one St. Augustine describes in the first paragraph of the Confessions. However, Barth cautions that this religious impulse is inextricably twinned by humanity's complete inability to follow it properly, to learn truths about God's nature. (This pair of doctrines, incidentally, was the "unsupportable" argument of the massive and excised John Updike chapter of my thesis.) Thus, mankind is impotent to save itself, and all its attempts to do so are bound to fail; only God's Word, Christ, revealed through the Bible, has the power to save or to reveal. Barth out-Calvins Calvin, or at least takes him to his logical conclusion.

Using my first post on Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" as a representative of the more charitable view that other religions prefigure Christianity, let's see if Barth is really saying something so different. He says that man has a religious impulse So far, so good. All societies have their theologies, even if those theologies are secular, like the National Socialism of 1930s Germany or the god-free ethics of most of modern-day Europe. In Milton's poem, the Greek pantheon exists to prefigure Christ's birth, but they mysteriously fall silent and die away once the Word actually becomes Flesh. That sounds like an expression of Barth's second principle, that religious impulses lead only to failure. The religious structure created by the Greeks falls to pieces in the face of God's true revelation, just as Barth says all Towers of Babel are doomed to do.

And yet I do not think Barth is really saying the same thing as Milton (and Lewis, and Chesterton)--I think the idea that the Greek pantheon got even part of the essence of God right would stick in his craw. After all, for Barth, manmade religious structures are not putts that are a few inches off; they swing straight into the water hazard. The magnanimous system depends on general revelation; Barth denies any revelation other than Christ. I wonder if Frederick Buechner, that student of both Barth and Lewis, finds some way to bridge that gap. I need to comb through his catalogue.

It's Karl Barth week here at Ladder on Wheels. Later this week, I'll post about exactly why Barth so distrusts general revelation and why he may well be right; then I'll defend him against the common Evangelical critique that he hates the Bible.