Karl Barth and Comparative Theology

Martha L. Moore-Keish, Christian T. Collins Winn, Martha L. Moore-Keish, Christian T. Collins Winn

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780823284610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología

Building on recent engagements with Barth in the area of theologies of religion, Karl Barth and Comparative Theology inaugurates a new conversation between Barth's theology and comparative theology. Each essay brings Barth into conversation with theological claims from other religious traditions for the purpose of modeling deep learning across religious borders from a Barthian perspective. For each tradition, two Barth-influenced theologians offer focused engagements of Barth with the tradition's respective themes and figures, and a response from a theologian from that tradition then follows. With these surprising and stirringly creative exchanges, Karl Barth and Comparative Theology promises to open up new trajectories for comparative theology. Contributors: Chris Boesel, Francis X. Clooney, Christian T. Collins Winn, Victor Ezigbo, James Farwell, Tim Hartman, S. Mark Heim, Paul Knitter, Pan-chiu Lai, Martha L. Moore-Keish, Peter Ochs, Marc Pugliese, Joshua Ralston, Anantanand Rambachan, Randi Rashkover, Kurt Richardson, Mun'im Sirry, John Sheveland, Nimi Wariboko

PART IV

Barth and Hinduism

7 God as Subject and Never Object to Us

READING KENA UPANIṢAD WITH KARL BARTH AND ŚAṄKARA

Marc A. Pugliese

Theologians work by at once distinguishing themselves and borrowing from religious others. Indeed, engagement with the religious aliter may contribute to one’s own religious identity. The propinquity of more remote religious others has increased with modern globalization but theologians have always engaged the theologically proximate. At what point does a “religious other” become a “member of another religion,” though?

A pressing question today is whether typologies of “religions” are modern Western colonial inventions. If the boundaries we draw between different “religions” and “traditions” within the same “religion” are more notional than real, then perhaps when Barth engages others in the “Christian tradition” he is thinking “across religious borders.”¹ Barth does periodically interact with more remote religious others but Barth’s interaction—positively and negatively—with those in the broader “Christian” tradition is plentiful. His accentuating and debating differences with religious others while simultaneously arguing for his own positions approach comparative theology’s “apologetic” dimension.²

Thus, perhaps Barth and comparative theology are not as incongruous as they may at first seem. Taking this proposition as plausible, the following brings together Barth and Adi Śaṅkara’s Advaitin reading of Kena Upaniṣad (KeU) in a tentative act of comparative theology. Both affirm that ultimate reality is nonobjectifiable even though the reasons for and implications of these affirmations diverge. These significant differences notwithstanding, Śaṅkara’s reading of KeU could offer insights for Barth’s theology of God’s subjectivity in ways that follow from what Barth expressly says. These insights are tested for their utility in how they serve as responses to criticisms that divine subjectivity in Barth merely serves the purpose of explicating divine Lordship and entails modalism.

Reading Kena Upaniṣad with Śaṅkara

The Upaniṣads comprise part of the Vedas, scriptures that originated in ancient India the acceptance of which defines “Hindu” religious traditions according to a common typology.³ Like the Bible, the Vedas were written diachronically and are diverse in content. Each of the Vedas has four parts corresponding to their chronological development, with the Upaniṣads being the last, and hence Vedānta (“end of the Vedas”). Hallmarks of South Asian religious thought like karma, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, renunciation, asceticism, and yoga, emerge in the Upaniṣads.

Kena Upaniṣad is one of the oldest and most important Upaniṣads, and it likely appeared in its current form in the middle third of the first millennium BCE. It has four parts (khaṇḍas) and, beginning with our experience of subjectivity, infers a transcendent and nonobjectifiable awareness. Our investigation focuses on the first and second khaṇḍas:⁴

KHAṆḌA 1

(1) By whom impelled, by whom compelled,

does the mind soar forth?

By whom enjoined does the breath

march on as the first?

By whom is this speech impelled,

with which people speak?

And who is the god that joins

the sight and hearing?

(2) That which is the hearing behind hearing,

the thinking behind thinking,

the speech behind speech,

the sight behind sight—

It is also the breathing behind breathing—

Freed completely from these,

the wise become immortal,

when they depart from this world.

(3a) Sight does not reach there;

neither does thinking or speech.

We don’t know, we can’t perceive,

how one would point it out.

(3b) It is far different from what’s known.

And it is farther than the unknown—

so have we heard from men of old,

who have explained it all to us.

(4) Which one cannot express by speech,

by which speech itself is expressed—

Learn that that alone is brahman,

and not what they here venerate.

(5) Which one cannot grasp with one’s mind,

by which, they say, the mind itself is grasped—

Learn that that alone is brahman,

and not what they here venerate.

(6) Which one cannot see with one’s sight,

by which one sees the sight itself—

Learn that that alone is brahman,

and not what they here venerate.

(7) Which one cannot hear with one’s hearing,

by which hearing itself is heard—

Learn that that alone is brahman,

and not what they here venerate.

(8) Which one cannot breathe through breathing,

by which breathing itself is drawn forth—

Learn that that alone is brahman,

and not what they here venerate.

KHAṆḌA 2

1 If you think “I know it well”—perhaps you do know ever so little the visible appearance of brahman; there is that part of it you know and there is the part which is among the gods. And so I think what you must do is to reflect on it, on that unknown part of it:

2 I do not think

that I know it well;

But I know not

that I do not know.

Who of us knows that,

he does know that;

But he knows not,

that he does not know.

3 It’s envisioned by one who envisions it not;

but one who envisions it knows it not.

And those who perceive it perceive it not;

but it’s perceived by those who perceive it not.

4 When one awakens to know it,

one envisions it, for then

one gains the immortal state.

One gains power by one’s self,

And by knowledge, the immortal state.

5 If in this world a man comes to know it,

to him belongs the real.

If in this world a man does not know it,

great is his destruction.

Discerning it among each and every being,

the wise become immortal,

when they depart from this world.

Adi Śaṅkara (700s CE) reads KeU from the perspective of the Advaita (“unqualified nondualism”) Vedānta school.⁵ Śaṅkara laconically sums up the Advaita reading as the “great saying” (mahāvākya): “ātman (the innermost self) is brahman (ultimate reality).”⁶ Brahman is ultimate reality. Ātman is the innermost or true self.

For Advaita, the human problem is ignorance (avidyā) of the self’s true nature, which brings suffering. “Realization” that the self is absolutely identical (“nondual”) with brahman is the solution and brings liberation (mokṣa).⁷ Ātman’s existence is self-evident because ātman is self-revealing in our immediate awareness. Ātman is “known” in this sense. What is “unknown” is ātman’s true nature. Brahman is limitless (infinite) awareness, so ātman’s real nature is limitless awareness.

Our ego, or “I-notion” who thinks, feels, experiences, and acts, is due to ātman. The problem is that our I-notion wrongly identifies itself with the body, senses, feelings, and mind. This causes suffering because these are generated, finite, change, and perish. They are always limited and incomplete. By contrast, ātman as nondual with brahman transcends all limits. Limitless fullness is bliss because it lacks nothing.

Hence our problem is not ignorance of ātman’s existence. It is ignorance of ātman’s nature. The goal of scripture study under the guidance of a teacher (guru) is not to establish ātman’s existence, which is self-evident. The goal is to replace our I-notion’s ignorance of ātman’s true nature with the knowledge that it is brahman.

Because brahman is unique, the valid source of knowledge (pramāṇa) of brahman is unique. Brahman cannot be known by perception and processes of reasoning reliant on sense perception. For Advaita the valid source of knowledge of brahman is the words of the Vedas, specifically the Upaniṣads. Brahman “is known from the scriptures alone” (BSBh 2.1.6). Reasoning based on the Upaniṣads is valid knowledge because it has valid grounds.

Why is ātman brahman? The body, senses, and mind with which we confound ātman are both objects and instruments of our awareness. As such they neither are, nor can objectify, awareness. Plus, any attempt to objectify awareness requires another nonobjectified awareness doing the observing (KeUBh 2.1). There is thus always nonobjectified awareness. Only the infinite is nonobjectifiable because everything finite is delimited by a form by which it can be known as an object. Our innermost self (ātman) as nonobjectified awareness is therefore infinite. If ātman and brahman were different they could objectify each other, but they are both nonobjectifiable and infinite. Because there cannot be two infinites and both ātman and brahman are infinite, ātman is brahman. Therefore, ātman’s awareness is brahman’s awareness.

KeU begins with the experience of our subjectivity to arrive at knowledge of ātman’s nature as nonobjectifiable, limitless awareness. For Śaṅkara, when KeU differentiates between awareness and the mind, body, and senses as objects of awareness, it employs Advaita’s teaching method of “distinguishing between seer and the seen” (dṛg-dṛṣya vivēka). KeU identifies the awareness revealed by introspection with brahman. For Śaṅkara, then, KeU teaches that “ātman is brahman.”

In the opening verse (1.1) the disciple asks what moves the mind, breath, and speech, and what joins...