Ethics in Crisis

Interpreting Barth's Ethics

David Clough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754636304
• eBook ISBN: 9781317141129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Ethics in Crisis offers a constructive proposal for the shape of contemporary Christian ethics drawing on a new and persuasive interpretation of the ethics of Karl Barth. David Clough argues that Karl Barth's ethical thought remained defined by the theology of crisis that he set out in his 1922 commentary on Romans, and that his ethics must therefore be understood dialectically, caught in an unresolved tension between what theology must and cannot be. Showing that this understanding of Barth is a resource for contemporary constructive accounts of Christian ethics, Clough points to a way beyond the idolatry of ethical absolutism on the one hand, and the apostasy of ethical postmodernism on the other.

I
THE ROMANS II CRISIS

CHAPTER 1

Ethics in Crisis

Between the publication of the first edition of Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans in 1919, and the second edition in 1922, Barth saw the need for a complete rewriting of his project. He believed the first edition had retained too much that was nebulous, and gave the dangerous impression of pantheistic relations between God and the world. In the second edition, such passages were expunged, and the text reshaped to enable the sharp proclamation of an uncompromised message:

Our relation to God is ungodly. We suppose that we know what we are saying when we say ‘God’. We assign to himself the highest place in our world: and in so doing we place Him fundamentally on one line with ourselves and with things. We assume that He needs something: and so we assume that we are able to arrange our relation to Him as we arrange our other relationships. We press ourselves into proximity with Him: and so, all unthinking, we make Him nigh unto ourselves. We allow ourselves an ordinary communication with Him as though this were not extraordinary behaviour on our part. We dare to deck ourselves out as His companions, patrons, advisers, and commissioners. We confound time with eternity. This is the ungodliness of our relation to God.¹

In the face of such ungodliness, God’s self-revelation brings not cosy reassurances, but is the event in which human beings are faced with the extent of their presumption and betrayal. They have been worshipping ‘No-God’, an idol born of their own futile hopes with no power to redeem them. In this crisis, everything is put into question by the Gospel that is not one truth among many, but causes the dissolution and establishment of the whole concrete world. This event is the crisis of Barth’s ‘crisis theology’. In this chapter I briefly survey some of the encounters that led Barth to the declaration of this crisis, before turning to an exploration of its ethical aspects.

Signposts on the Way to a Theology of Crisis

Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1886, but spent his childhood in Bern.² His father was a pastor, and his mother the daughter of a pastor, and after being inspired by his confirmation classes Barth chose to study theology first in Bern, and then in Berlin, where he was enthusiastic about the teaching he received from Adolf Harnack, and came across the work of Herrmann for the first time. After six months in Tübingen, his father agreed to let him move to Marburg to study with Wilhelm Herrmann, whom Barth called ‘the theological teacher of my student years’³ and who introduced him to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. After being ordained by his father in 1908, Barth began working on the theological journal Christliche Welt under the leading liberal theologian Martin Rade, while continuing to study in Marburg. In 1909 he became assistant pastor to a German-speaking church in Geneva where he spent two years, before moving in 1911 to become pastor of a church in Safenwil, in the Aargau. Barth was to spend ten years here, until the publication of the first edition of his Romans commentary led to the beginning of his academic career as a professor in Göttingen in 1921.

The Safenwil pastorate was an eventful time for Barth. He spent a great deal of time preparing sermons and confirmation classes, but church attendance was low. After a time, however, he achieved a local notoriety by taking up the cause of the low-paid industrial workers who made up the majority of the wage earners in the village. This led to great concern in Barth’s church committee, and to the owners of the factories and mills resigning from Barth’s church and beginning their own worship associations, but he was undaunted, stating: ‘I regard socialist demands as an important part of the application of the gospel, though I also believe that they cannot be realized without the gospel.’⁴ It was also in Safenwil that Barth met Eduard Thurneysen, with whom he began the biblical studies that led to the commentary on Romans. Through Thurneysen, Barth came into contact with many other theologians and socialist thinkers, and was soon actively involved in meetings and conferences. In the midst of all this activity came the outbreak of the First World War. Barth was disappointed not to be called up to defend the Swiss border, as some of his parishioners were, though he did join the ‘home guard’ and took his turn on duty at night, armed with a rifle. He spoke a great deal about the war in his sermons, until he reports ‘finally a woman came up to me and asked me for once to talk about something else’.⁵ According to Barth, the outbreak of war was a significant moment in the break with his theological past. In 1968 he wrote that it

brought something which for me was almost even worse than the violation of Belgian neutrality – the horrible manifesto of the ninety-three German intellectuals who identified themselves before all the world with the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. And to my dismay, among the signatories I discovered the names of almost all my German teachers (with the honorable exception of Martin Rade). An entire world of theological exegesis, ethics, dogmatics, and preaching, which up to that point I had accepted as basically credible, was thereby shaken to the foundations.⁶

As a result of coming to see this profound problem with the theology Barth received, he began to cast about for a new approach. He observed that ‘the area from which I draw resources for inner concentration and upon which I would gladly rely in working and speaking must be widened and deepened – otherwise I am in danger of coming to a dead end’. Thurneysen suggested they needed a ‘wholly other’ theological foundation, and the next day Barth reports ‘I sat under an apple tree and began to apply myself to Romans with all the resources that were available to me at the time’.⁷ The discoveries he made are reflected in an address he gave in February 1917, ‘The Strange New World within the Bible’⁸ in which he emphasizes that the Bible is not a place to look for human history, morality, or religion, or anything else from a human standpoint. It is God’s word to us: ‘God’s sovereignty, God’s glory, God’s incomprehensible love.’⁹ Alongside political activity in Safenwil in the year that followed, Barth continued to work on Romans, and completed it in August 1918, a few months before the end of the war and the beginning of a general strike in Switzerland. Following the publication of Romans at the beginning of 1919, Barth continued his studies and lectures, and in September of that year gave the lecture ‘The Christian’s Place in Society’ at Tambach in Thuringia, Germany. With the unfolding consequences of the 1917 revolutions in Russia clearly in mind, he pointed to the kingdom of God as ‘the revolution which is before all revolutions’¹⁰ and set out a dialectic of an affirmation and denial of life as thesis and antithesis, to which the synthesis can be found only in God. The lecture made Barth more widely known in Germany, and the copies of Romans that remained – 700 of the original 1,000 – were sold through the German publisher Christian Kaiser Verlag.

In the preface to the second edition of Romans Barth cites the reviews he received in response to this exposure in Germany as one of four reasons for the developments in his position following the first edition. The three others he lists are, first, further study of Paul, second, the work of Franz Overbeck, and third, closer acquaintance with Plato and Kant through the work of his brother, Heinrich, together with attention to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky.¹¹ In relation to Overbeck, Barth refers to an article he wrote with Thurneysen in response to Overbeck’s posthumous publication Christentum und Kultur,¹² entitled ‘Unsettled Questions for Theology Today’.¹³ Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) had been a figure on the margins of Christianity: although he was a theology professor in Basel he was a friend of Nietzsche and harshly critical of contemporary theology. He saw Christianity as fundamentally eschatological, and believed that theology, the ‘Satan of religion’, had betrayed Christianity by its inveterate tendency to become apologetics in order to shine in the eyes of the world. Theology is parasitic on other schools of thought, according to Overbeck, offering as a religious insight that which can be found more successfully elsewhere, and he prophetically railed against theology exploiting Christianity by rushing into opportunistic political alliances with nationalist movements. Schleiermacher is Overbeck’s prime example of a theologian who justifies religion as it is, rather than asking whether it is true. Barth notes that the editor of Christentum und Kultur, Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, chooses to term Overbeck a ‘sceptic’, but Barth and Thurneysen prefer ‘inspired critic’¹⁴ and see his work as dangerous, but also as ‘an inconceivably impressive sharpening of the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”’.¹⁵

The influence of Overbeck is clear throughout Romans II: Barth responds to Overbeck’s fierce critique with an approach to theology that is a radical departure from the established positions of his teachers. The impact of Kierkegaard is also evident, most obviously in the ‘infinite qualititative distinction’ between God and humankind, which Barth cites in the preface.¹⁶ Barth is right to note Kant as an important conversation partner, however, which has particular significance in his ethics for the negotiation he makes between occasionalism and universalism, as we shall see.¹⁷

These are some of the landmarks on the journey that led Barth to realize that the theological crisis he perceived required a crisis theology in response. It is now time to engage with the 1922 edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans in all its strangeness and challenge. I turn first to look at the place of ethics within this theology of crisis, and the significance of this crisis for ethics, before examining in the next chapter how Barth addresses the ethical themes of love and community, and war, peace and revolution, in his commentary.

Ethics and Crisis in Romans II

Barth cites the ethical question as both a key reason for doing theology, and for reading the Epistle to the Romans in particular:

it is our pondering over the question ‘What shall we do?’ which compels us to undertake so much seemingly idle conversation about God. And it is precisely because our world is filled with pressing practical duties; because there is wickedness in the streets; because of the existence of the daily papers; that we are bound to encounter ‘Paulinism’ and the Epistle to the Romans.¹⁸

Elsewhere Barth notes ‘our conversation about God is not undertaken for its own sake but for the sake of His will’.¹⁹ The same concern drives us to an awareness of the world’s great insoluble question and to the realization that God is its solution:

The need of making decisions of will, the need for action, the world as it is – that it is which has compelled us to consider what the world is, how we are to live in it, and what we are to do in it. We have found the world one great, unsolved enigma; an enigma to which Christ, the mercy of God, provides the answer.²⁰

When Paul turns to explicit ethical considerations in chapter 12 of the Epistle, Barth observes,

We are not now starting a new book or even a new chapter of the same book. Paul is not here turning his attention to practical religion, as though it were a second thing side by side with the theory of religion. On the contrary, the theory, with which we have hitherto been concerned, is the theory of the practice of religion … the ethical problem has nowhere been left out of account.²¹

Ethics is therefore part of what drives us to theology in the first place, and its concerns are fully part of both Paul’s conception of theology, and Barth’s own. Yet the relationship between ethics and theology is not straightforward or comfortable. The pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Romans II Crisis
• Part II: Crisis Beyond Romans II
• Part III: Re-reading Barth’s Ethics
• Bibliography
• Index