Abstract
Drawing on a criticism of Karl Barth’s theology made by Ludwig Wittgenstein, I begin to present the case for understanding Barth as a speculative theologian. I consider some potential arguments against reading Barth as a speculative theologian and against my choice of texts. I point to some fundamental epistemological problems with the contemporary approach to Barth’s theology. I argue that there is room for skepticism in relation to the current consensus in the secondary literature and argue for a revision of the “dogmas” that shape the majority of current readings; in particular, I question whether Barth is best described as a “realist” and argue that Barth’s concrete theological practice makes the issue of “realism/anti-realism” largely irrelevant.
We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.
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- 1.
Ludwig Wittgenstein , Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 85.
- 2.
This is not, of course, to say that Wittgenstein’s view of what constitutes legitimate progress in a given field of inquiry is the only relevant standard. There might be other ways of measuring innovation and change, but for our purposes here Wittgenstein’s approach provides a nice starting point.
- 3.
Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief 1922 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2011), 450.
- 4.
Sebastian Rödl , Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), vii.
- 5.
“It is the principal thought of German Idealism that self-consciousness, freedom, and reason are one.” Rödl , Self-Consciousness, 105.
- 6.
Peter Widmann, Thetische Theologie (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1982), 124.
- 7.
See for example G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 52, 93, and 176–9 in particular.
- 8.
Ibid., 176.
- 9.
Karl Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum (London: SCM Press ltd, 1960), 30 (emphasis mine).
- 10.
Ludwig Wittgenstein , Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001), 164.
- 11.
Ibid., 167.
- 12.
Of course, there are purposes for which it is less useful and purposes for which it is more useful. I could imagine that it is less useful for the purpose of pastoral care, than for addressing the issue of the relationship between exegesis and doctrinal constructs.
- 13.
For Wittgenstein there is an important relationship between the dawning of an “aspect” and an actual breakthrough in a given discipline. As he writes in Culture and Value in an aphorism from 1931: “Das eigentliche Verdienst eines Kopernikus oder Darwin war nicht die Entdeckung einer wahren Theorie, sondern eines fruchtbaren neuen Aspekt.” Wittgenstein , Culture and Value, 18.
- 14.
Barth, Fides Quaerens, 11.
- 15.
A few comments on McCormack’s “Realism”: it is not given that McCormack’s theological “Realism” coincides with the current use of the concept “Realism” in the discipline of philosophy. McCormack uses Immanuel Kant’s distinction between things as they appear and things-in-themselves to argue that “true reality” is beyond the reach of human thought. See Bruce McCormack , Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140, 141. He implies that something’s being “objective” means that it stands completely outside the scope of human conceptual mediation. “Objectively real,” as McCormack understands it, means beyond the reach of our conceptual faculties (and so not inter-subjective ) as well as beyond the realm of appearances in space and time: “a standpoint lying beyond this world, history, and human possibilities” (130). “Reality” is not to be equated with our everyday experience of the world and the things in it (chairs, tables, etc.). McCormack denies that this reality beyond appearance and experience is “ideal”: it is neither an ideal (formal, conceptual) nor an appearance or an experienced object. In light of these negative definitions, what does it mean to be “objectively real”? McCormack implies that something is “real” when viewed “from God’s position.” He argues that Barth attempts to “think from a standpoint lying in God Himself and therefore, from a standpoint lying beyond this world, history, and human possibility.” (130). We are presented with a limited, human, conceptual sphere on one side and a non-conceptual “reality” on the other, and then have to describe how these two distinct spheres match up from some third point of view, which is neither that of human concept-users nor that of “reality” (God): a “view-from-nowhere,” which invokes a position that we cannot occupy (neither human nor divine; not conceptually mediated, but apparently thinkable, describable). This entails beginning from positive accounts of knowledge that it is difficult to see how we could obtain (an immediate divine position). McCormack’s realism sounds distinctly Platonic. “The truly ‘real’ is the wholly otherness of the Self-revealing God in comparison with whom the empirical world is mere shadow and appearance” (130). The main difference appears to be that Plato presents positive philosophical arguments for the existence of this supersensible reality, whereas McCormack invokes a “Kantian” distinction between “appearance” and “reality,” subtracts appearance, and posits that the remainder is “objectively real reality.”
- 16.
McCormack , Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 18.
- 17.
“[M]aterial questions in dogmatics are seen to control and determine the shape of the development. Whatever changes occurred in Barth’s method were simply a reflex of decisions made in areas of eschatology, Christology and the doctrine of election . From a genetic point of view, those material questions have to be regarded as having decisive importance”; McCormack , Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 23. Barth’s theological development is thus measured by how successful he is at making orthodox dogmatic formulations correspond to the extra-conceptual reality of God’s revelation and being.
- 18.
“Verstehts du, was da gemeint ist mit dieser merkwürdigen neuen realen Dialektik?” Karl Barth, Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe: Karl Barth – Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel, Band II: 1921–1930 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1974), 178. Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik IV,3 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1980), 486.
- 19.
In the secondary literature on Barth’s theology, the concept of Realdialektik first appears in Micheal Beintker’s book on the role of dialectics in Barth’s dialectical theology, which is where McCormack encounters it and subsequently takes it over. Michael Beintker, Die Dialektik in der ‘Dialektischen Theologie’ Karl Barths (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1987), 31. Beintker takes the concept from Alwin Diemer’s basic introduction to philosophical dialectics in the series, Elementarkurs Philosophie. Alwin Diemer, Elementarkurs Philosophie – Dialektik (Vienna: Econ Verlag, 1976). In this book Diemer expands on Realdialektik twice (122 and 130–1). He discusses it in greatest detail in his account of the philosophy of the Schopenhauer disciple, Julius Bahnsen, whose largely incoherent book on the topic is now forgotten. There is a further mention in his account of the writings of Nikolai Hartmann, whose work has suffered much the same fate. See also Julius Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch in Wissen und Wesen der Welt (Leipzig: Th. Grieben’s Verlag, 1882) and Nicolai Hartmann, “Hegel und das Problam der Realdialektik”, in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter & Co., 1957). Throughout its history, the sense of the concept has appeared to be either largely obscure or downright contradictory.
- 20.
McCormack defines Realdialektik as “a dialectical relationship between two magnitudes or states of affairs which are objectively real prior to human knowledge of them” (Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 270). How are we to understand this definition of “dialectic”? Take a mountain and a valley on a planet in an uninhabited solar system in a parallel galaxy as “two magnitudes” that are “objectively real prior” to our knowledge of them. What does it mean to describe their relation as “dialectical”? Conceptually, there is an analytical relationship between a mountain and a valley, but what would it mean to subtract the conceptual form of this relation and then speak of a “dialectic ”? McCormack also invokes the notion of “a static dialectic” (269). Again, the use of the term “dialectic” seems misplaced here: how can two things that do not interact be in a “dialectical” relationship? On a careful reading it becomes very hard to make sense of one of McCormack’s core explanatory terms.
- 21.
It is hard to locate a comprehensive presentation or summary of how McCormack views Barth’s use of Kant’s philosophical framework in Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. There one has to assemble a picture from various comments and premises spread over a broader account of Barth’s intellectual development. Fortunately, McCormack has given a more succinct presentation of the issue in the paper “Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective: Karl Barth’s Theological Epistemology in Conversation with a Schleiermacherian Tradition.” See Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids,: Baker Academic, 2008). I read the more fragmented account of the relationship in Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology in light of the general presentation of the issue in this essay, which was published three years after the intellectual biography.
- 22.
However critical McCormack’s Barth is on other issues, he appears uncritical in his acceptance of the Kantian philosophical framework (as McCormack understands it). “He [Barth] took for granted the validity of Kant’s epistemology as set forth in the First Critique, as well as the success of his attack on metaphysics.” McCormack , Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 245.
- 23.
Ibid., 135.
- 24.
McCormack writes: “Light is cast on this event, a power is exercised, so that without setting aside or altering the human cognitive apparatus as described by Kant, the limitations inherent to that apparatus are transcended. The unintuitable God is revealed to faith through the medium of an intuitable event. Revelation reaches its goal in the human recipient, and knowledge of God is realized.” McCormack , “Revelation and History,” 30. What does “knowing” (Erkenntnis) mean here? The only answer that the subject can give to the question of why the subject has this particular belief is the claim that God has made it so (by means of his “power”)—full stop. This appears arbitrary: the subject’s claim to knowledge hinges completely on God’s immediate impartation of a particular conviction directly in the subject independent of any actual relation to the object or event involved. (The answer to the question why one knows it to be true is the claim that God’s power made it so. End of explanation.) Thus the “epistemological framework” that McCormack invokes boils down to the human subject encountering an object or event and God imparting the subjective conviction that this object or event reveals God’s being. The reason for holding the belief is strictly subjective, since the subject cannot give any objective reasons or invoke features of the object (its mode of givenness) as justification for holding the belief . The way the object or event is given to the subject does not contribute anything to the subject’s knowledge.
- 25.
This is one aspect of Barth’s “actualistism,” which along with “Realdialektik” is one of McCormack’s central explanatory terms. According to McCormack , Barth’s “actualistic” concept of God’s being is derived from Hermann Cohen’s philosophical anthropology: “For Hermann Cohen, the founder of Marburg neo-Kantianism, the human simply is the sum total of his or her lifetime of knowing activities. Expressed more expansively: the human is what he or she does. It was but a short step from here to reflection upon the divine nature as actualistic—a point which Barth would begin to ground christologically just two and a half years after publishing his second Romans.” McCormack , “Introduction,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 12. In other words, Barth bases his concept of God on a neo-Kantian anthropology and then, subsequently, justifies this move christologically.
- 26.
Bruce McCormack , “Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92–110.
- 27.
Oakes’s account of the Fides Quaerens Intellectum itself appears dismissive. He describes it as “basically an introduction to Anselm’s theology” with an “idiosyncratic reading of Proslogion 2–4” attached. Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 173.
- 28.
Ibid., 174.
- 29.
Later in his book, Oakes explicitly writes in a different context: “One should usually be hesitant in the face of Barth’s autobiographical reflections, and this one is no exception.” This dismissive attitude is a direct result of the influence of McCormack’s intellectual biography from 1995. Ibid., 193.
- 30.
Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T & T Clark, 2010).
- 31.
See Bruce McCormack , “Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth: Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology ,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 109–65.
- 32.
For a critical account of such a “sideways-on” picture of knowledge, see John McDowell , Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 34–6.
- 33.
As A. C. Grayling points out, “Realism” as an epistemological thesis is essentially congenial to relativism and skepticism . See An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 320. In my view, Grayling’s philosophical critique also applies to McCormack’s theological “Realism.”
- 34.
Barth, Römerbrief, xx.
- 35.
McCormack traces this development back to Eberhard Jüngel’s influential essay “Von der Dialektik zur Analogie: Die Schule Kierkegaards und der Einspruch Petersons,” from Barth-Studien (Zürich and Cologne: Benziger Verlag, and Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus Gerd Mohn, 1982), 127–79.
- 36.
McCormack refers to the above quote from the preface to Romans II as the locus classicus for any account of Barth’s “Realdialektik.” According to McCormack , it is this passage, which demonstrates that Barth explicitly distinguishes between the limited conceptual sphere and the dialectics of the real reality behind the biblical texts and prioritizes the latter over the former. McCormack , Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 11.
- 37.
I think that this important point goes missing in McCormack’s work, where the search for a real reality behind appearances takes center stage. The assertion that Barth is writing “a new theology in the form of a biblical commentary ” misses the fact that Barth’s book is a biblical commentary , and that this is not merely a convenient form for presenting new doctrinal reflections. McCormack , Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology, 138. Of course, the form of Romans I and II is that of biblical commentary , but it is of utmost importance to recognize that their matter is the actual argument made in Paul’s text.
- 38.
Barth, Römerbrief, xviiiff.
- 39.
Barth, Der Römerbrief, xix.
- 40.
Ibid., xix.
- 41.
Perhaps we could draw an analogy to the entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who was convinced that the Iliad was “really about” a place, Troy, and managed to destroy much of the archaeological treasure that he discovered by digging past the layers that might actually bear some historical relation to Homer’s Ilion.
- 42.
Barth, Der Römerbrief, xx.
- 43.
A notable exception is Bent Flemming Nielsen’s brilliant book Die Rationalität der Offenbarungstheologie—die Struktur des Theologieverstandnisses von Karl Barth (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1988). My own work is an attempt to draw out some of Nielsen’s implicit suggestions concerning Barth’s theology and the relationship between theory and praxis, subjectivity , German Idealism, and speculation. In short, without whom not.
- 44.
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1979), 17.
- 45.
By contrast, in Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, McCormack does not cite the single passage in Barth’s texts in which “Realdialektik” occurs.
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Baark, S. (2018). The Speculative Aspect. In: The Affirmations of Reason. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70793-8_2
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