Barth's Theology of Interpretation

Donald Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317176077
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Through his single-minded insistence on the priority of the Bible in the life of the church, Karl Barth (1886-1968) decisively shaped the course of twentieth-century Christian theology. Drawing on both familiar texts and recently published archival material, Barth's Theology of Interpretation sheds new light on Barth's account of just what it is that scripture gives and requires. In tracing the movement of Barth's earlier thinking about scriptural reading, the book also raises important questions about the ways in which Barth can continue to influence contemporary discussions about the theological interpretation of scripture.

Chapter 1 Discoveries and Developments

DOI: 10.4324/9781315568751-2

This chapter surveys Barth’s reflections on biblical interpretation from 1917, when he delivered the Leutwil address on ‘Die neue Welt in der Bibel’, up through 1924 and the prolegomena of the Göttingen Dogmatics. It does not pretend to provide a complete account of the early development of Barth’s hermeneutics, still less of his theology as a whole. Rather, it is a survey in which the choice of texts and the mode of their exposition strictly serves the goal of providing an orientation to the theology of interpretation developed in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics.

The chronological and material limitations of the survey follow from this aim: Texts that may be of decisive importance in a genetic treatment of Barth’s theology as a whole will not be considered here, while other texts not always discussed in works with broader genetic interests feature prominently. Similarly, while I have tried to give some sense of the progression of Barth’s thinking, I have generally preferred extended conceptual paraphrase to close circumstantial description of the texts that do pass under review.

But it may be that precisely as a self-consciously partial and tendentious survey the reading developed here can incidentally contribute to the broader debate over Barth’s theological development. Within its self-appointed limitations, it can highlight a significant continuity in Barth’s theology during this period—namely, Barth’s intense engagement with scripture, an engagement that issued both in material theological decisions and in methodological reflections on the interpretation of the Bible. Without pursuing a more comprehensive historical study, it would be too much to say precisely how Barth’s reading of scripture relates to the other factors that influenced the development of his thinking during this period. But on the basis of the following exposition one may well suggest that a balanced account of that development must give due consideration to Barth’s sustained engagement with the Bible, and further observe that such consideration has not always been extended in treatments of this theme.

That is to say, we need to be aware of what Helmut Kirschstein has called a widespread ‘relativization of biblical hermeneutics’—a factoring out of the complex of scriptural appeal and interpretative reflection—in some prominent strands of Barth interpretation. Kirschstein is especially interested in the socialist and historicist readings of Barth most closely associated with F.-W. Marquardt and Trutz Rendtorff.¹ But we can easily detect a corresponding move in much recent Anglo-American work on the ‘postmodern Barth’, with its own tendency to decline Barth’s theological interests into instances of some more general cultural and philosophical resonance (the candidates range from Weimar expressionism to poststructuralist philosophy).² Such attempts to align Barth’s theology with more fashionable trends in contemporary intellectual culture can be enormously suggestive, and they have served to generate interest in Barth where it might not otherwise be expected. But one suspects that in much talk of the ‘postmodern Barth’ the adjective is of far more interest than the noun. In any case, one can sometimes observe in studies with strong comparative interests a certain impatience with some of the particularities of Barth’s theology, not least his exegetical determinations and the accounts of scriptural authority that attend them.

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¹ See Kirschstein, Der souveräne Gott, pp. 8–23.

² See, among many others, Richard H. Roberts, ‘Barth and the Eschatology of Weimar: A Theology on its Way?’, in A Theology on its Way? Essays on Karl Barth (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 169–99; Isolde Andrews, Deconstructing Barth: A Study of the Complementary Methods in Karl Barth and Jacques Derrida (Frankfurt a/M, 1996); Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge, 1997).

That said, the marginalization of the scriptural impulse in Barth may well prove more influential where it is less programmatic. We might think here, for example, of Bruce McCormack’s widely regarded 1995 study of Barth’s early intellectual development,³ in which McCormack carefully tracks Barth’s movement away from the idealist trajectory of nineteenth-century liberalism towards a nuanced theological realism. The result is a fluent account of Barth’s theological maturation, but one in which some important aspects of Barth’s own self-definition remain largely unexplored. Others have stressed the need to accord a higher profile to Barth’s historical and ethical material from the 1920s, and with them to Barth’s discovery and articulation of a distinctively Reformed theology.⁴ For our own purposes, it is especially important to observe how scriptural reading and commentary tend to remain peripheral in McCormack’s account. Thus, for example, Barth’s early sermons are mined for traces of movement in his theological convictions, but there is no real reflection on the significance of the fact that they are sermons, finally inexplicable without reference to the particular forms of scriptural engagement they entail. Again, the exegetical lectures from Göttingen and Münster play no significant role; nor do important early lectures such as ‘The New World in the Bible’ and ‘Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas’. And, perhaps most obviously, McCormack’s reading of Barth’s Römerbrief seems to suggest that the form of the book is relatively unimportant for an understanding of its intention. Concretely, McCormack fails to address at any length the interpretative questions raised by Barth’s claim that his Römerbrief was in fact a commentary—a genuine exercise in biblical exegesis.

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³ Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford, 1995).

⁴ See esp. John Webster, ‘Barth’s earlier theology: some unfinished tasks’, in Barth’s Earlier Theology. Four Studies (London, 2005), pp. 1–14.

‘The purpose of this book’, Barth wrote in his 1932 preface to Hoskyns’ English translation of the sixth edition of the Römerbrief:

neither was nor is to delight or to annoy its readers by setting out a New Theology. The purpose was and is to direct them to Holy Scripture, to the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, in order that, whether they be delighted or annoyed, whether they are ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected’, they may at least be brought face to face with the subject-matter of the Scriptures.⁵

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⁵ Barth, Romans, p. x; cf. p. ix: ‘My sole aim was to interpret Scripture.’

And much earlier, on reading a draft of Brunner’s review of the first edition, the subtitle of which spoke of Barth’s theological ‘program’, Barth responded:

‘A program?’ Is it really? [Paul’s] Romans itself certainly isn’t. And my book at least doesn’t want to be one. But by that you mean to say it is the blueprint of a new theology? Then the story of the suffering of Romans can start afresh.⁶

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⁶ Barth to Brunner, 18 December 1918, in Karl Barth–Emil Brunner Briefwechsel 1916–1966, ed. Eberhard Busch et. al. (Zürich, 2000), p. 40.

In the light of these and similar statements from Barth, McCormack’s assertion that the first Römerbrief was ‘the writing of a new theology in the form of a biblical commentary’⁷ at least requires quite careful qualification. And much the same could be said of McCormack’s survey of the influences on Barth’s decision to essentially rewrite the Römerbrief for the second edition, a survey that ignores Barth’s claim (made in response to Jülicher’s critique of the first edition) that a fundamental impetus behind the revision was a more extensive and intensive study of the Pauline letters:

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⁷ McCormack, Dialectical Theology, p. 138; cf. p. 182: ‘The first edition of Romans represented Barth’s first major effort at an explication of his new theology.’

Some reference must … be made here to the circumstances which have led to an advance and to a change of front. First, and most important: the continued study of Paul himself. My manner of working has enabled me to deal only with portions of the rest of the Pauline literature, but each fresh piece of work has brought with it new light upon the Epistle to the Romans.⁸

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⁸ See McCormack, Dialectical Theology, p. 216–40; cf. Römerbrief 1922, p. vii (ET 3), in view of Adolf Jülicher’s complaint that ‘the other letters of the apostle appear in this commentary on Romans even more seldom than in any other of which I know. But is a Paul really to be understood completely by one of his letters, as an Augustine perhaps by the conclusion of his Confessions?’ (‘A Modern Interpreter of Paul’, in The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, ed. James M. Robinson, trans. Keith R. Crimm (Richmond, 1968), pp. 72–81 (74)). The effects of McCormack’s orientation appear, for example, in his claim (pp. 231–2) that ‘the discovery of Overbeck’s posthumously published writings must be seen as the decisive impetus leading to the elaboration of [Barth’s] new model of eschatology’ in the second Römerbrief. But Kirschstein (Der souveräne Gott, pp. 91–2) seems more nearly correct in arguing that one must see Barth’s work on 1 Corinthians 15—work that had occupied Barth for a year before his discovery of Overbeck—as ‘the “key” to a radicalized understanding of Paul’ in this text.

None of this calls into question the genuine significance of McCormack’s achievement. But it may serve to remind us that as we continue to work towards a rounded account of Barth’s earlier theology, we need also to view Barth as a reader, and more specifically as a reader of scripture. ‘It is no coincidence, but of the most profound material necessity, that [the time immediately following Barth’s break from liberalism] is a determinedly exegetical period, [and that] the first documents of this theological and theological-historical revision are interpretations of scripture’.⁹ And although our interest here is not simply in tracking Barth’s early exegetical work or the ways in which his reading of scripture influenced his developing theology, we will atte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Discoveries and Developments
• 2 History and the Politics of Interpretation
• 3 Revelation and the Grounds of Interpretation
• 4 Hearing and Obeying the Word of God
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index