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A Theology of Liberation in Barth's Church Dogmatics IV/3
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
In his Massey lectures, Charles Taylor offers an efficient critique of modernity's overarching concern with individual freedom: ‘In a flattened world, where the horizons of meaning become fainter, the ideal of self-determining freedom comes to exercise a more powerful attraction. It seems that significance can be conferred by choice, by making life an exercise in freedom, even when all other sources fail. Self-determining freedom is, in part, the default solution of the culture of authenticity, while at the same time it is its bane since it further intensifies anthropocentrism. But this… deeply subverts both the ideal of authenticity and the associated ethic of recognizing difference.’2 Similarly, for Karl Barth, the failure of liberalism is not simply its conceptual failure to represent God in aseity, but also its failure to provide a framework in which truly authentic human action could be imagined. As John Webster puts it: ‘Even at the furthest reaches of his protest against anthropocentric deduction of God to a function of human piety, consciousness or moral objects, Barth is attempting to safeguard not only the axiomatic divinity of God, but also the authenticity of the creature.’3 Liberal belief in the ostensive freedom of self-determining choice, unhampered by heteronomous authority, fails also to recognise the deep power of the implicit heteronomies of liberal culture. What is required, according to Barth, is a thoroughly theological exploration of human freedom: it is only within humanity's true horizon, which is the reconciling work of God through Jesus Christ, that true liberation can be experienced and pursued.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2000
References
1 The author wishes to acknowledge her indebtedness to John B. Webster's inspiring teaching on the subject of Barth's theological ethics.
2 Taylor, Charles, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991), p. 69Google Scholar.
3 Webster, John B., Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 33Google Scholar.
4 Here, I am deliberately using Wittgenstein's identification of meaning as shared use. The meaning of liberation can only be understood within the ‘horizon of meaning’ or form of life (Lehensform) in which it is used. The problem with liberal approaches to the notion of liberation, is that in its failure to explore the properly Christian use of the term, it resorts to the general, worldly rise of the term, which has come to mean unchecked self-determining freedom.
5 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, volume IV, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, eds. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark), III, p. 493Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., p. 535.
7 Ibid., p. 481.
8 Ibid., p. 607.
9 Ibid., p. 544.
10 Ibid., pp. 544, 545.
11 Ibid., p. 608.
12 Ibid., pp. 616, 617.
13 Ibid., p. 619.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 621.
16 Ibid., p. 645.
17 Ibid.
18 Gollwitzer, Helmut, ‘Kingdom of God and Socialism’, in Karl Barth and Radical Politics, ed. and trans. Hunsinger, George (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), p. 96Google Scholar.
19 CD IV/3, p. 648.
20 Ibid., p. 663.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p. 652.
23 Ibid., p. 647.
24 Ibid., p. 648.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. 651.
28 Ibid., p. 652.
29 Ibid., p. 653.
30 Ibid., pp. 665, 666.
31 Ibid., p. 668.
32 Ibid., p. 667.
33 CD I/2, p. 265.
34 Ibid., p. 670.
35 Ibid., p. 671.
36 CD III/4, p. 534.
37 Webster, John B., Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 56Google Scholar.
38 CD IV/3, p. 674.
39 Ibid., p. 674.
40 Ibid., p. 675.
41 Ibid., p. 678.
42 Ibid., pp. 679, 680.
43 Gollwitzer, Helmut, ‘Kingdom of God and Socialism’, p. 98Google Scholar.
44 Although Harrison limits her critique of Barth to his early writing, especially the second edition of the Epistle to the Romans, during the period of Barth's socalled dialectical theology, this critique still is useful in our investigation of one of Barth's later pieces of writing, for he never repudiated his original understanding of the ethical task as response to a sovereign command. It is precisely this ‘Divine Command Ethics’, to use Harrison's term, with which she contends.
45 The irony of this statement is formidable indeed, when one considers that the persons which Harrison identifies as practitioners of ‘Divine Command Ethics’— these ‘increasingly powerful men’—were Bonhoeffer and Barth. The ‘increasingly powerful’ status of Dietrich Bonhoeffer might well he contested in light of the circumstances of his death. A similar objection to this construal of Barth is explicit in Eberhard Busch's careful biography, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. Bowden, John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976)Google Scholar.
46 Harrison, Beverly Wildung, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Robb, Carol S. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 35Google Scholar.
47 Ibid, pp. 35, 36, 37.
48 See, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr's rather smug critique which follows along some of the same lines as that of Harrison: ‘… Barth's above-the-battle Christian witness becomes faintly relevant to those of us who take our moral responsibilities in this world seriously and find no way of fulfilling them without engaging in hazardous political judgements’. Niebuhr, Reinhold, ‘Barth's East German Letter’, The Christian Century 86 (21 December 1969), p. 1662Google Scholar.
49 CD IV/3, p. 663.
50 CD IV/2, p. 544.
51 See, for example, the utilitarianism of Beverly Harrison's approach to theology in feminist praxis: ‘We need liberating spirituality (call it ‘authentic religion’, if you will) because we require not only a relationallyjust, nonexploitative society that respects our needs but also an ongoing rebirth of vision, imagination, and hope for cosmic inclusivity. We need human cultures and societies that manifest and sustain aesthetic sensibility, diversity, beauty, and moral passion. We need a spiritual reorientation that encourages love, reverence, and appreciation for all that is creative in nature and in human life and culture. Making the Connections, p. 260. In this rather Romantic approach to theology, or more properly, spirituality, the aesthetic ideal (which is not differentiated substantially from God) serves as a Muse offering the inner and imaginative resources needed to cultivate and celebrate human creativity. It is not self-evident that such privatisation and spiritualisation of transcendence offers any hope whatever for transcending the real, material, bodily suffering of women and other victims of systematic oppression.
52 Barth, Karl, Römerbrief (Second edition), cited in Helmut Gollwitzer, ‘Kingdom of God Socialism’, p. 93Google Scholar.