Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel

Barth's Theological Exegesis of Isaiah

Mark S. Gignilliat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317109532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Today's biblical scholars and dogmaticians are giving a significant amount of attention to the topic of theological exegesis. A resource turned to for guidance and insight in this discussion is the history of interpretation, and Karl Barth's voice registers loudly as a helpful model for engaging Scripture and its subject matter. Most readers of Barth's theological exegesis encounter him on the level of his New Testament exegesis. This is understandable from several different vantage points. Unfortunately, Barth's theological exegesis of the Old Testament has not received the attention it deserves. This book seeks to fill this lacuna as it encounters Barth's theological exegesis of Isaiah in the Church Dogmatics. From the Church's inception, Isaiah has been understood as Christian Scripture. In the Church Dogmatics we find Barth reading Isaiah in multi-functional and multi-layered ways as he seeks to hear Isaiah as a living witness to God's triune revelation of himself in Jesus Christ.

Chapter 1
Barth and the Renaissance of Old Testament Theology in the Early 20th Century

Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to understand the hermeneutical problem of the Old Testament as the problem of Christian theology, and not just one problem among others, seeing that all the other questions of theology are affected in one way or another by its resolution.1

Introduction

In a memorial colloquium held in 1969 at Yale Divinity School entitled Karl Barth and the Future of Theology, Brevard Childs recounts a pair of enlightening and humorous stories about Karl Barth and his approach to Scripture. Childs tells of the situation in which he found himself as a young doctoral student at the University of Basel. There was a ‘Biblical phalanx’ (to use Childs’ words) that would sit in the back of Barth’s lectures armed with their Hebrew and Greek texts to cross-check everything Barth would say. Childs recounts how Barth would occasionally look over at this phalanx and say, ‘Not that I don’t know all about J, E, D, and P,’ and then go on with his lecture as if he could care less.2

In Childs’ estimation at the time, one did biblical studies, and if you could not handle the Hebrew and Greek then you relinquished yourself to dogmatics.3 This reveals the tension that existed in those days between the biblical people and Barth, with Childs firmly situated in the former. The second anecdote by Childs is revelatory of this tension. During the 1952 lectures by von Rad entitled ‘Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament’, Barth was among those in attendance. Childs sat near the back of the lectures feeling as if he were listening to some of the most glorious lectures he had ever heard. When von Rad concluded, Barth turned around in a half-sleepy way to the person next to him and said, ‘Ich habe ihn gar nicht verstanden.’4 Childs found this appalling and felt like saying, ‘Herr Professor, I can explain it all to you.’

In retrospect, Childs now understands the problems underlying von Rad’s appeal to typology. Von Rad’s wedding of typology to an overly historicist tradition-history ultimately fails for Childs.5 Nevertheless, during Child’s student days his understanding was quite different. While Barth was not necessarily opposed to the historical-critical project, he was not paralyzed by it either.6 Nor did he feel von Rad’s need to proximate theological exegesis to the dominant patterns of historical-critical engagement of the Scriptures. The dogmatic nature of Scripture as the viva vox Dei allowed Barth freedom beyond the strictures of the historical-critical project and probably attests to the rationale behind Barth’s demurring from von Rad’s position. Childs concluded his talk at the Yale colloquium by stating admiringly, ‘The breadth and the scope of Barth’s use of all Scripture, Old and New together, is, again, something it seems to me that hasn’t been paralleled since Calvin.’7

As recently as 1991, Paul McGlasson laments the relative lack of detailed attention given to Barth’s exegesis in the CD. He speculates that the reasons for this lack of attention are due to the bifurcation of the theological and biblical disciplines resulting in theologians who were unfit to deal with Barth’s exegesis, and biblical scholars who were unfit to deal with Barth’s theological reasoning. It is worth citing McGlasson in full:

The result is that, for scholars of theology, the work is too ‘biblical,’ while for scholars of the Bible the work is too ‘theological.’ The resulting fate of Barth’s biblical exegesis is in a way not really surprising. At least part of Barth’s reason for doing extended biblical exegesis in the context of Christian theology was to wage a direct assault on the bifurcation of scholarly work into two such separated disciplines. Theology, for Barth, should again be biblical in a technical, disciplined sense, and likewise should study of the Bible be disciplined by confessional theological concerns. The immediate result of this assault on the bifurcation of theological disciplines was that at least this part of Barth’s work simply attracted no scholarly attention.8

Resultantly, Barth’s biblical exegesis in the CD was of little consequence to both biblical scholars and theologians.9 Even during Barth’s day, Childs recounts that most biblical scholars did not take Barth’s exegesis seriously. ‘You read his theology with appreciation, but his Biblical work you might as well leave alone.’10 In this chapter, we will see this appreciation of Barth’s dogmatics and aversion to his exegesis to be the case with Barth’s Old Testament colleague, Walter Baumgartner. A decade after these comments by McGlasson the situation is a significantly different one. Several monographs have been given to Barth’s exegesis both in his commentaries and the CD which reveal a renewed interest in theological exegesis, biblical theology and the organic relationship between exegesis and the dogmatic enterprise. With prophetic insight, McGlasson’s final remarks in his work are, ‘When and if there comes a renewed attempt at the theological exegesis of biblical texts, an encounter with Holy Scripture beyond historical criticism and hermeneutics, Barth’s biblical exegesis will surely be there, ready to hand.’11 That ‘when and if’ is surely a ‘here and now’ in the current climate of renewed interest in reading the Bible theologically.

Even with the affirmation of this renewed interest in theological exegesis and the significant role Barth plays in this enterprise, there is still a lacuna in the landscape. Barth’s reading of the Old Testament has not received the amount of attention it deserves. If one surveys the recent works on Barth’s theological reading of Scripture, it would become obvious that the majority of attention is given to Barth’s New Testament exegesis. This is somewhat understandable from one vantage point simply because the bulk of Barth’s written material that focuses primarily on exegesis, that is the Römerbrief and his biblical studies lectures, are New Testament. Whether it is Romans, Philippians, 1 Corinthians 15, John 1 and the other biblical lectures, our world is the New Testament canon.12

So, for example, when one looks at one of the more recent monographs given specifically to Barth’s exegesis, namely, Richard Burnett’s fine work, Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis, one finds him or herself in the territory of the several Römerbrief prefaces. Burnett gives special attention to Barth’s hermeneutical principles that stand in contradistinction from the hermeneutical tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey as particularly found in Barth’s exegesis of Romans.13 More recently, Bruce McCormack and Francis Watson have both, in their own ways, engaged Barth’s theological exegesis in light of Barth’s commentary on Philippians.14 These examples serve to show the weight of reflection on Barth’s exegesis as primarily New Testament in orientation. The flip side to this coin is that Barth’s Old Testament exegesis has not received the proper attention it is worthy to receive.

There are notable exceptions to the preceding claim. Kathryn Green-McCreight has explored the ways in which Barth reads the plain sense of Genesis 1–3 in CD III.1.15 She brings Barth into discussion with Augustine and Calvin regarding the nature of a ‘plain sense’ reading of the Genesis material. She states, for example, that:

Unlike Augustine, Barth is not advocating a reading of different senses of scripture. Rather, he is saying that within the plain sense reading lies the figurative and prophetic reference to Christ. This figurative and prophetic reference is not added on or read into, but ingredient in the verbal sense ‘by reason of the fact that the Bible gives us God’s own witness to Himself’ and ‘its word in all words is this Word’.16

Greene-McCreight helpfully traces out Barth’s positive view of saga over-against myth as a proper descriptor of the kind of material one is dealing with in the primeval history. As saga, and not myth, the creation narratives demand to be read ad litteram (according to the letter) and in annexation to the forthcoming covenantal materials in the rest of the Pentateuch.

Greene-McCreight has helpfully shown Barth’s appreciation of Old Testament scholars such as Delitzsch, Zimmerli, Jeremias and others, while at the same time showing Barth’s personal outworking of his call for the historical critic to be more critical. More is needed than historical-critical analysis when engaging the creation narratives, and Barth’s sense, according to Greene-McCreight, is ‘intratextual’.17 It is the text which governs the interpretive process rather than historical-critical reconstruction. One of the more salient aspects of Greene-McCreight’s analysis of Barth’s reading of Genesis 1–3 is her highlighting of Barth’s insistence on the priority of ‘the explanation given by the text itself’.18 Where Barth challenges various readings of Genesis in the history of interpretation, it is on the basis of the plain sense of the text itself. Greene-McCreight offers a very helpful reading of Barth’s theological exegesis of the plain senses of Genesis 1–3.

The most significant work on Barth’s Old Testament reading is undoubtedly Otto Bächli’s.19 He has written a full length monograph on the Old Testament in Barth’s CD with special attention given to the ways in which Barth differed from the historical-critical milieu of his day. He engages Barth’s Old Testament interlocutors via the categories of Fathers, Brothers and Sons. These categories represent Barth’s Old Testament teachers, for example, Gunkel, his colleagues, such as Baumgartner and Vischer and those whom he taught, like Zimmerli. The second part of Bächli’s work is devoted to particular instances of Barth’s Old Testament exegesis in texts such as Genesis 4, Leviticus 16, 1 Kings 13, and Job, to name a few. Bächli’s final chapter makes claims about Barth’s hermeneutics in general and about the significant role the Old Testament plays for Barth’s ethic. Bächli’s work is an important contribution to this field of inquiry.

Most recently, Matthias Büttner has written a monograph on the question of theological exegesis and the theological center of the Old Testament in light of Barth’s theology.20 Büttner’s work places Barth in conversation with Old Testament scholars as he seeks to understand how one reads the Old Testament as the first part of the Christian Bible. There is an impressive scope in Büttner’s work, and it is much more than an engagement with Barth’s thought. It is an attempt to establish a theological framework for reading the Old Testament theologically in light of its center: Jahweh is the God of the people of Israel; Israel is the people of God.21 Büttner finds much overlap between this theological center (Mitte) and Barth’s understanding of the Old Testament as the time of expectation. This particular ...