Barth & Race?
So here's an impression I have. It could be wrong. My impression is that generally people who are interested in Barthian kind of interests (Trinitarian studies, etc.), tend not to be very interested in contextual kind of interests (race, gender, etc.). I see this in myself even at times. Here's my question: Why is this the case when Barth's entire theological project was done in the context of issues of race (i.e. German, Arian race) and conflict (WWI & WWII)? Are these just caricatures?
posted by Tom Arthur at 5:04 PM
6 Comments:
James Cone
Wilson,
Tell me more about Cone.
James Cone's early work (A Black Theology of Liberation) was heavily influenced by Barth.
What happened with Barth readers (and with Cone) is that contextual theologians began to draw primarily on author's of their contexts instead of on broadly dogmatic authors (which means white, male authors). This was a criticism thrown at Cone, and what which he accepted and adapted his project to by reading and incorporating Black thinkers and thought (The Spirituals Book, which I recently learned about is an example of this).
If Dwuhlizzle or someone else can correct me, please do.
Wilson (et al),
This is basicaly right. Many Barthians (who shall remain nameless) tend to be what I would describe as "scholastic" in their disposition. By this, they function as historians and curators of doctrine. The enterprise is to preserve, refine, and extend within a realtively set schematic. Think of this as a being much like a really high end sports car museum. You can tune the engines, modify the supsenions, polish the wheels. You can even build new cars. But, you can never drive them.
As Carter once remarked about this project, "This is an enterprise that would make Barth puke." He's spot on. As has been rightly observed, Kirkliche Dogmatiks could easily be translated as Ecclesial Theology (both in the linguistic and conceptual sense). Remember, it was Barth's pastorate at Safenweil that began his profound shift. And, he always considered the sermon as the primary idiom theology. And, he thought prayer was teh most fundamental theological, political, or ethical act. Thus, Barth is deeply invested in practical theology (broadly construed).
The question concerning culture at the Freeman lecture was apt. In the section "Church in World Occurrence" (IV/3.2, ยง72.1), Barth insists that the church exists in "total dependence and total freedom" with respect to the world/culture. Regrettably, most Barthians have embraced the latter. Thus, they are not interested in questions about race, gender, politics, etc. But, in this, they are prfoundly un-Barthian.
Not for nothing, much of my work is, and will be an undoing of this neglect, especially with respect to race.
I appreciate and agree with Derrick's response, but I want to make a complementary observation.
I have been reading Hauerwas' Gifford lectures, which trace the history of theology in the 20th century. Hauerwas focuses on William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, Barth, and Yoder. I am struck by his emphasis on how dominant Niebuhr was from the 1930's through 1971, as least in the U.S. I think we have to put Barth in the context of a world first reacting to the myth of progress and Darwin, recoiling from parts of that especially as a result of the Great Depression and the World Wars. The grand experiments of socialism and the belief in human capacity to achieve a better world dominated much of the century. Intellectuals had to grapple with the theological/philosophical implications of Einstein and Heisenberg.
I think the best explanation of may well be connected with the overwhelming influence of Reinhold Niebuhr before and after WWII. And by this, I mean to apportion responsibility as well to Paul Tillich and Ernst Troeltsch, whose thought and language Niebuhr adopted wholesale and popularized through his own teachings.
Niebuhr cast a long shadow over theological education in the U.S. and defined for many the mainstream in the teaching of Christian ethics from the 1930s to the 1960's. And his students carried on that teaching.
Niebuhr paved the way for the Jesus Seminar by teaching that "the only Jesus we can follow is the Jesus of 'history', and that, therefore, Christian ethics is reducible to what we can abstract from the life of Jesus. (Thomas Jefferson taught the same thing). He wrote in 1927, "Jesus is valuable to the modern Christian because he offers an escape from the theological absurdities of the ancient creeds; meanwhile his ethical and religious idealism will not leave unaffected the lives of those who profess him. In time it may become the instrument of regeneration of Western society."
In Faith and Politics, which is a collection of his essays he published near the end of his life in the 1960's, he wrote: "Today, social responsibilities must be guided by norms, derived from all moral and empirical disciplines. A sacred text or a religiously sanctified tradition of past ages are inadequate guides to the ever-changing human relations of a secular culture."
Niebuhr said, in Beyond Tragedy that "we are deceivers yet true, when we say that God created the world." He taught that biblical stories disputed by science, such as creation narratives, were "permanent myths." He said, in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics "It is the genius of true myth to suggest the dimension of depth in reality and to point to a realm of essence which transcends the surface of history, on which the cause-effect sequences, discovered and analyzed by science, occur."
Hauerwas observes of Niebuhr, "He uses trinitarian language, but operatively the God of The Nature and Destiny of Man remains unitarian."
Perhaps most compelling for me as I compare Niebuhr to Barth and Barthians is Hauerwas's conclusion that "Niebuhr, no doubt, regarded the church as a sociological necessity for Christianity to exist across time, but he did not regard it as an ethical or epistemological necessity. Given his theological perspective, he could not believe that "church" might name a people in service to a God who has set them off from the world. Nor could he see anything other than absurdity in the notion that the existence of such a people is necessary for any account of the truths of faith....His ethics sought to make Christian belief intelligible and even useful within the presuppositions of political liberalism.....he could not help but become the theologian of a domesticated god capable of doing no more than providing comfort to the anxious conscience of the bourgeosie."
All of this is setup for Hauerwas' point that Barth made no sense in a Niebuhrian world, and that world dominated theology for most of the 20th century. Ethics were separated from theology by Niebuhr, and the focus of ethics was on justifying the U.S. position in the Cold War. Barth made no sense until it became evident that we live in a post-Niebuhrian world (or that we live in a time when Niebuhr is demonstrably wrong).
So what then must have been the agenda of the Barthians during that time? It appears that fighting for the premise that Barth was credible at all was job number one. Fighting for the premise that theology and ethics are inseparable was job number two. Fighting for the premise that the church is something other than a historical artifact may well be the current task that dominates the agenda. Relating the Church to the Ecumenical movement before and after Vatican II consumed tremendous energy and, I think, was and is essential.
The Civil Rights movement was certainly funded theologically rather easily from Tillich's Love, Power, and Justice , particularly because the Church was (is) dominated by white male power. That is, I am suggesting that a Stoic humanism using Christian language, because it ironically did not assign contemporary importance to the Church, generated the ethics that sought justice for African Americans from outside the cultural mainstream and thus from outside the mainstream of the Church.
I haven't worked this out yet, but it seems to me that you have first to do the heavy lifting - that Hauerwas, Rowan Wiliams, and Milbank did for us - to go back to Scotus and Kant before you receive the eyes needed to discover in Barth an ecclesiology capable of pursuing social justice issues of race and gender, etc.
I don't think that heavy lifting is done yet. We have been trained to continue that work and must do so, while beginning to point to its implications for how we ought to order our common life together given the fact of pluralism in our societies (which is far greater than in the Niebuhrian world of the early 20th century). That course correction will entail our continual rooting out within ourselves and our culture of this Niebuhrian virus with which most of us reared in the U.S. in the last sixty years are no doubt infected.
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