Into the Far Country

Karl Barth and the Modern Subject

Scott A. Kirkland

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781506401379
• eBook ISBN: 9781506401386
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Into the Far Country is an investigation of Karl Barth's response to modernity as seen through the prism of the subject under judgment. By suggesting that Barth offers a form of theological resistance to the Enlightenment's construal of human subjectivity as "absolute, " this piece offers a way of talking about the formation of human persons as the process of being kenotically laid bare before the cross and resurrection of Christ. It does so by reevaluating the relationship between Barth and modernity, making the case that Barth understands Protestantism to have become the agent of its own demise by capitulating to modernity's insistence on the axiomatic priority of the isolated Cartesian ego. Conversations are hosted with figures including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams, Gillian Rose and Donald MacKinnon in the service of elucidating an account of the human person liberated from captivity to what Barth names "self-judgment, " and freed for creative participation in the super-abundant source of life that is the prayerful movement from the Son to the Father in the Spirit. Therefore, an account of Barth's theology is offered that is deeply concerned with the triune God's revelatory presence as that which drives the community into the crucible of difficulty that is the life of kenotic dispossession.

1

“Complete Autarchy”: Self-Determination, Absolutism, and the Politics of Enlightenment

We are all in a process of dying from this office of Judge which we have arrogated to ourselves.

Karl Barth, CD IV/1

“What Is Enlightenment?”

In 1784, three years after the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant responded to a question posed by Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner in the monthly journal Berlinische Monatsschrift. This famous response was “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?).^[1] Kant’s answer to this question is the most famous articulation of the Enlightenment project by a contemporary. For Kant, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed minority.”^[2] Enlightenment is humanity’s coming of age, its emergence from the shackles of forms of dogma and control set in place by the “guardians”—those who impose restriction and fear on one’s ability to exercise one’s faculties of understanding. Enlightenment has less to do with knowledge or understanding, and more to do with the courage to exercise one’s faculties of reasoning and so to be formed as a rational, enlightened subject. Therefore the challenge is: “Sapere aude!” “Have the courage to make use of your own understanding!”^[3]

This use of one’s reason is “free” and “public.” The particular duty of the scholar in the public sphere is to display this. Already here we see an assumed secularity of reason, in that the “private” commitments of a particular community are set at odds with the “public” scholarly exercise of a universalised reason. This is illustrated clearly in Kant’s attitude toward “revealed” religious narratives, in contradistinction to “natural” religion.^[4] In this way Kant embodies the problem Barth locates in enlightened humanity, a humanity that has made itself “absolute,” and so beyond existential question. Subject to no authority but that of its reason, and therefore (negatively) “free” for itself:

For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of anything that could even be called freedom: namely, freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear from all sides the cry: Donot argue! The officer says: Do not argue but drill! The tax official: Do not argue but pay! The clergyman: Do not argue but believe! (Only one ruler in the world says: Argue as much as you will and about whatever you will, but obey!) Everywhere there are restrictions on freedom. But what sort of restriction hinders enlightenment, and what sort does not hinder but instead promotes it?—I reply: The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among human beings; the private use of one’s reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted without this particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. But by the public use of one’s own reason I understand that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers.^[5]

Kant’s critical project is both the climax and chastening of the Enlightenment’s positivism. Barth notes several historical moments that are significant for this particularly self-reflective moment: (1) Galileo and Copernicus were right; “Man is . . . the centre of things ..... the world was even more properly so his world! It is paradoxical and yet it is a fact that the answer to his humiliation was those philosophical systems of rationalism, empiricism and scepticism which made men even more self-confident.”^[6] An anthropocentric universe replaced the geocentric universe. (2) The paradox Barth sees embedded in the growth of colonialism, the exploration of the “frontier” lands: “piety was practised at home, reason was criticised, truth made into poetry and poetry into truth, while abroad slaves were being hunted and sold. The absolute man can really do both.”^[7] (3) The rise of communications, travel, newspapers, the salon culture, journals of philosophy and art, and so forth. “Europe, its countries and its cities, became smaller, more easily seen as a whole, more easily penetrated. And so man too grew in this space in the sense that he unmistakably became more and more master of his existence, though the space too grew larger and larger.”^[8] (4) Importantly, alongside the development of modern science—which had been stalled after the Renaissance by the so-called Wars of Religion—Barth identifies a unifying philosophy: “A capacity for thinking which was responsible to no other authority than himself. This free thought he once more finds related to nature which was just as freely observed. . . . Logic, observation and mathematics were the three decisive elements of the absolute power now disclosed in science.”^[9] All of this is in the background to what Barth names “enlightened absolutism”—humanity’s absolute determination of the shape of its self and environment.^[10] This is both a sociocultural and (formally) political reality embodied in the absolute princes and revolutions that engulf Europe at the end of imperial rule.

In this chapter we begin a process of rereading Barth’s work in relation to the kind of stable Kantian subjectivity identified in the introduction. Bruce McCormack suggests that after Barth has come to terms with the Reformed anhypostasis-enhypostasis distinction (1924), he has overcome the Kantian epistemic problematic, but he has done so precisely “by means of Kant.”^[11] That is to say, God is conceived as apprehensible without being intuitable. This is also why McCormack rejects any hint of “divinization” in Barth.^[12] God is not intuitable to us in the face of Jesus as such, but he is intuitable as he, by the Holy Spirit, “commandeers” our knowing faculties. So McCormack can claim, “If the idea that the work of the Holy Spirit completely reorients our thought without altering our rationality is theologically defensible, then it will not be incoherent to say that God ‘commandeers’ the human knowing apparatus described by Kant without altering it.”^[13] This deliberately leaves the knowing apparatus of the Kantian subject untouched. Yet, we might ask, is this distinction between “thought” and “rationality” defensible in Barth’s early work? This distinction would seem to drive a wedge between revelation and reason to the extent that revelation is always already ordered by our rationality—functioning as something of a datum organized by our faculties of intellectual judgment. It is precisely the point at which McCormack thinks Barth’s genius is displayed—overcoming Kant by means of Kant—that I want to contest as most problematic. For this does not genuinely overcome Kant, but rather submits to him. Indeed it would seem that Kant has once again “created space” for “religion.”^[14]

Having garnered fame for the publication of his Der Römerbrief in 1919 (and a second edition in 1922) and The Word of God and the Word of Man in 1924, Barth emerged as a theological giant. The late 1920s through the early 1930s were a period of intense reflection as Barth cleared the ground for the eventual publication of CD I/1 and the lifetime of work that would develop out of that enormously ambitious project. Several large texts, lectures, and abandoned dogmatic projects lie along the way.^[15] Key to much of this work is the way Barth rethinks his relationship with the Enlightenment project and its child, modernity. McCormack’s genealogy makes much of Barth’s christological developments; however, he does so largely in isolation from Barth’s broader concern to construe humanity under the conditions of the Enlightenment. This section will explore the background that will help us to see more clearly what Barth is attempting to accomplish in CD I/1. The simple argument I will mount here is that Barth locates the problem of theological knowing in modernity in the turn to the subject. The beginning of an antidote to this is faithful obedience to gracious divine self-disclosure, undoing the theologically problematic modes of thinking from a center in the self in both modern idealism and realism. In this sense, both idealism and realism are read as symptomatic of the one historical-theological problem: the “absolutism” of Enlightenment humanity. The principal question Barth asks himself as he proceeds in the development of his dogmatic project is: What does it mean to articulate human agency and rationality as formed by revelation, rather than as providing the condition for the possibility of revelation? As we shall see, revelation and rationality cannot function in different spheres for Barth. This distinction begins a movement of noetic (and ontic) dispossession that shapes Barth’s entire oeuvre to the extent that he finds himself unable to accept the terms of the turn to the subject.

This chapter will first pay particularly close attention to Barth’s thick description of “absolute” humanity, showing how he is simultaneously setting an historical and theological stage upon which to consider the problems facing modern theologians in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (PT) lectures. I will then move to an examination of Barth’s idiosyncratic, and in many ways oddly conceived, problematization of modern idealism and realism in Fate and Idea in Theology. Finally,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: “Against Innocence”: Barth, Neo-Kantianism, and Modernity’s Pelagianism
• “Complete Autarchy”: Self-Determination, Absolutism, and the Politics of Enlightenment
• Particularity Regained: Kenōsis, Obedience, and Christology
• In Via: Toward a Pedagogy of Discipleship
• Resurrection, Life in Divine Plenitude: Trinity, Judgment, and Apophasis
• Postscript: Persuasion, Overdetermination, Repetition
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects