"Why Barth Needed Hegel: Apologetics and Reformed Theology"

Plenary Address by Graham Ward
Respondent: James Olthuis

[This is Ward’s abstract from the handout materials:

“Taking the work of Karl Barth, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how theological discourses cannot be divorced from wider cultural politics. The desire then, by Barth, for a pure dogmatic theology purged of the influence of other social and cultural sciences--paradigmatically summed up in ‘philosophy’--is a dangerous chimera that has the effect of depoliticising theology. The first step in the movement towards such a dogmatic theology, for Barth, is the denial of any apologetic function for theology. This is the heart of Barth’s misgivings about Schleiermacher and Hegel. But this paper argues that the theological discourse is always engaged in an apologetics because it is always culturally and historically informed. Barth’s attack on Hegel therefore betrays an inadequate understanding of theological discourse. In fact Barth needs to give Hegel adequate depth to his own dialectical theology and to avoid the dualisms that are so antithetical to a theology founded upon the incarnation. To recognise theology’s embeddedness is to recognise the cultural and historical as themselves transits of grace.”]

[Here are my notes of his presentation:]

The World and God’s relationship to it: the role of theology as a discursive practice, and the theologian with respect to the operation of God in the operations of the world.

Christian Apologetics: why does it matter?
context, for whom, what purpose, whom addressed

Meaning is only known with respect to Christ

Public truth: evangelical and doxological. Christian mission is to disseminate good news and bring about transformations.

Makes manifest polity of Christian gospel. Christological task--redemptive work of Christ;
otherwise, it is an exercise in navel gazing.

Reflexivity can’t be telos of the task.

Christian Apologetics: no unmediated access to Word. The basis of engagement of Word with world depends on the character of both. Immersion in words and works of Word and context--here’s the risk: in understanding the world, theology understands itself.

The revelation of Christ comes before foundations of world.

Being situated in the world particularly, the theologian takes up her task with the resources of tradition and through what is historically available.

Faith seeking understanding, constituted in cultural negotiation between revelation and signs of times.

Neither can be accessed without the other. The secular world is never confronted as such without first being constructed as an order from standpoint of Christian difference, and the other way around.

Examine Barth: opposing dogmatics to cultural project, but dialectical method performs his own wrestling between relation with Word and world.

Theology speaks from faith to faith. But unbelief needs to be taken seriously, so theologian compromises self (a la Barth) when presents self to educated of religion despisers in role they establish. [[not sure I got this]]

This genuine apologetics recognized by effectiveness--event of faith. Word of theology empowered and blessed by God as witness of faith. Can’t be prescribed or planned for. Unbeliever overhears conversation internal to faith.

Theological apologetics must examine why and how it can speak, without ceasing to be theological.

Barth: have nothing to do with militarism, capitalism liberalism, etc.
Barth’s eschatological fervor was reactive and addressed to those who betrayed the evangelium.

The fact that Christians do act in the world (even if graced) means they cannot be inoculated against involvements in monarchism, patriotism, etc. Barth’s radical separatism betrays an inadequate dialectical thinking. It doesn’t account for what Christians do.

Barth needs to give more nuanced acts of history, agency, power, so he can reflect more on method of his discourse and think through relations between dialectic and salvation,
dialectic as utter contradiction with dialectic as process.

Kierkegaard and Hegel.

Synthesis as factual origin and end for Barth and Hegel structurally, but Barth has to consider time and eternity as a paradox.

This comes later for Barth with trinitarian God, creation, reconciliation doctrines.
You can see the interplay of dialectical strategy in the 2 editions of Barth’s Romans.

Later: church and unbelief (paganism, hedonism)--two loci
Then, the church qualifies: struggles to be the church, heresy struggles. Heresy must attack the church which is not sufficiently the church.

Positions under constant negotiation. Our own understanding of the being of the church, is not the only one.

Divine certainty is never human certainty.

Christian dogmatics speak in antithesis of faith to unbelief. border, lack of common presupposition--no apologetics.

But then, degrees of unbelief.

So, divine correspondence to: Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief.

When is faith without unbelief?

Who judges when an event of faith has taken place? How are degrees of faith and unbelief calibrated?

Why is it that human theology, working within Word of God, has no human security in Word of God?
Barthhas 4 answers:

1 (theological): nature of difference in divide between gracious addresses of God in Jesus to creation

2 (theological): free grace of God can be given or refused. God’s logic.

3 (anthropological): the human need to speak in and of faith, from anthropological prius of faith. This is associated with 2 above, but this mimetic human being activity of human speaking is an act of human appropriation. It is constantly in question, because it is by nature fallible and stands in need of criticism, correction, amendment, repetition.

4 (anthropological): Fallenness, the inadequate means and partial delivery of truth.

Barth’s assumptions about theology:
1) there is a pure ahistorical truth being pursued through these means.

2) there are better and worse appropriations of this truth, measurement of which is ahistorical.

3) obedience to that word would lead to consensus and agreement on all matters of doctrine.

Barth is emphatic that theological inquiry is blessed or idle in discursiveness-
Christian speech is tested by conformity to Christ, so that which dogmatics investigates is Christian utterance.

This renders theological inquiry a self-enclosed circle of concern. So theol takes itself seriously, and dogmatics has to be apologetic.

Apologetics is an attempt to show that the determining principles of philosophy etc. do preclude tenets of theology.

But, critical intervention: discourse is fundamental to dogmatics and apologetics. Who can police the boundaries of a discourse? Who can ensure the self-enclosure when constitution of that enclosure is a question of language and representation?

Do we presuppose the radical separation of different discourses?

For Barth, there has never been a philosophia Christiana--if one , not the other.

However, if discourses are not bounded, if they always exceed institutional contexts, than an apologetics can proceed without theologian necessarily renouncing her theological function.

As Kathryn Tanner recently observed: contemporary cultural anthropology argues against the claim that Christians have a self-contained culture.

Christian apologetics is constructed out of cultural materials at hand. Christians are members of other associations as well. . . there are fluid externalities.

In his process, Barth deconstructs his own work.

For Barth, theology is self-defining to protect itself from other disciplines, but his own writing demonstrates how such categories can’t be discrete. He employs categories (knowledge, understanding etc.) and refers to Plato Aristotle, Kant, Heideger, Anselm, Aquinas, other sciences, social, psychological---he can only define a particular form of protestantism on the basis of shared vocabulariess and categories that stand outside his thesis’s other. His own is not self-enclosed.

Christian theology cannot be completely systematized and can’t stake out limits of what is in and outside Christ. Theology is a cultural activity, dialectic implicated .

Here Barth encounters Hegel. Hegel poses the challenge of a relationship between philosophy and theology--reason vs trinitarian procession.

For Barth, everything that seems to give theology splendor appears to be honored by philosophy in a way better than theologians themselves.

The language Barth uses, “this is how it seems,” is telling. Barth was never sure about Hegel and heterodoxy.

Hegel proclaims the possibility of a philosophia christiana. Barth’s reading of Aquinas is wrong, and his reading of Hegel more a post-Hegelian dialectic.
But, the notion of God as actus purus demonstrates how close Hegel and Barth can come.

While Barth condemns Hegel’s univocity of Geist and reason, he recognizes a great unfulfilled promise.

There is something promising here: trinitarian-informed reflectivity. Hegel’s reminder of the possibility that truth might be history. Theology’s knowledge is only possible as self-moved knowledge--truth--participation. Barth likes this, a history of God’s own self-veiling. Reminds theology of the contradictory nature of its own knowledge. Barth says that Hegel must have been thinking of the creator of heaven and earth (whether or not he realized it).

Barth notices:
1) history

2) theology as a discursive practice participating in a covenant of grace as a theme of history

3) the need for theology to be reflexive about its own practice, since words of people are never the same as the Word of God.

For Barth, the separate existence of theology signifies an emergency measure on which church has resolved amidst a refusal of the other side’s. It is a temporal specificity, a response to a culture and moment when the theological is despised. It is a dogmatics in opposition to apologetics, a cultural product in need of amendment!!

By the end of WWII, Barth on history and participation and biblical witness: we speak always as men (not angel and Gods). give new reflection: thus we have to reckon on human factors, with views and style ( of biblical writers). . .[[I lost the thread of this sentence]]

The biblical witness, the commitment of God who informs, does not transcend history at every point and leads to an understanding of biblical discourse as culturally and psychologically determined. It is connected to conditioning factors of age and environment.

This recognition of the cultural embedendess of biblical discourse points to the fact that theological witness can not be entirely self-reffering and enclosed. It borrows and uses, and engages in cultural negotiations. Barth even employs Schleiermacher’s category of divination for hermeneutics.

It is the covenant of grace that is the theme of God’s history. Time is in God. The truth of God’s word is eternal but also always highly specific. There are no timeless truths. Truth concretely temporally. (This is Barth on biblical writing, but it must apply to theology as well.)

Christianity tells God’s story where the thologian is situated--the theologian who reads the signs of the times in terms of grace--cultural negotiations always.

This not cultural relativism, but we can’t transcend cultural determination. We can’t get distilled, pure theological discourse.

Barth forges a dialectical method that brings together Kierkegaard’s dialectic (synchronic) with the diachronic dialectic of Hegel (truth as history).

The synchronic and diachronic supplement each other in the work of theology in respect to the world.

In Church Dogmatics IV 3.2. there is the call of Christ to all humanity. He seeks a third way beyond synthesis.(beyond the Hegel of the formula Barth assumes is Hegelian). So Barth offers Christian community the reality and truth of the grace of God addressed to the world in Jesus Christ. Christian community is enjoined to speak of world of Jesus Christ while recognizing that Jesus Christ is not a concept which man can think out of himself, define with precision, and display mastery over. This is the problem of this antithesis.

The fallible Christian community as bearer and witness of better hope, testifies to the work and Word of God as a new thing, and seeks to participate in the unfolding of that new world, seeks to produce and perform that new thing. Christian discourse is the practice of transformative hope executed in the name of Christ, disseminated through the world, because the Word of Christ is implicated in other communities and other practices. To particpate in others is not prima facia theoolgical, because of Jesus Christ’s trancendence and immanence. We are members of other bodies. [[mba: I am not entirely sure about this]]

It is because Christians are involved in monarchism, patriotism, etc. that the work and words of the living communitye extend into the deepest and darkest immanence in testament to and in performance of a new thing, new relation. This is a movement in, through, and beyond the church and the church’s endless cultural negotiations.

It is teleologically [[or theologically, not sure]] driven. A positive dialectic, tracing and performing the march of God in the world (a la Hegel). [[probably teleological]]

On this basis, an apologetics not settled on defining itself against the rest of the world can proceed.
Thus, theology is made, it’s a cultural operation, where “cultural” understood as a transit of grace (a la Hegel).

[[mba residual response: there are just as many problems with discernment and policing of in-world as there are with attempts to be exclusive of world. Who determines what is the operative understanding of world and Word, and not confusion of word and World?]]

RESPONSE: James Olthuis:

(Didn’t see the paper ahead of time, don’t have much to say in response.)

Guess I’m set up as the yes-man? Is this setting the tone for discussion between Reformed thinking and RadOx.

My basic response is, Did you think we would say no?. . . .

Ward: It’s always a matter of discernment, of cultural negotiations. The medieval monks, like Pseudo-Dionysius, talked about hierarchies and anagogy, but never said where they were (themselves) on the ladder, because in a transitive grace, you can never tell, you always have to discern where you are. Within any context, that cultural discernment is always negotiated with respect to all the other operations, and you won’t arrive at pure certainty about whether you are in grace or not.

[[mba--but this doesn’t address community functions of practice]]

Ward: I am not like Caputo and Derrida, because I still speak in and use the grammar of my faith, within specific church/cultural practices. I am thinking always within that framework. Caputo's new book on Radical Hermeneutics, this felicital nominalism is just plain WRONG.

??James K. A. Smith (Jamie): We know that the NT church had the Spirit. . .

Ward: Sure, tell me where your Geist ends and Holy Sprit begins.

[[mab: if there is no security in knoweldge of God, so theolology is always procedural--do we share that procedure with the secular?]]

[[mba: there is an interdependence of utterance on other disciplines-- but how to maintian Christian particularity too?]]

The dichotomy between immanence and transcendence is wrong, that’s why reintegration (Barth and Hegel) is necessary. That was modernity’s place of starting (public/private distinction). Rejection of that leads to asserting how they need each other.

If the Reformed tradition is so situated within the logics of modernity, how can it think I’m right?

[[lots of anti Princeton-Barthianism coming from Ward here]]

Dogmatic theology sets itself up as timeless system and enormous truthclaims, but these are rhetorical claims, must always be seen in terms of whom they are trying to persuade and why.

How to determine a Christian action: (see above)

?? Are there places where the Word becomes more transparent in our lives and practices?

Ward: I have trouble with . . .. conforming to the image of Christ is a difficult hermeneutical act, not simple. I see all things in Christ, there’s a distinction between Christ and pneumatology, but I wouldn’t want to reify those differences. Does Calvin? Is he tritheistic? He’s not a systematic theologian, a rhetor.

?? Would Mainline Protestantss be as open to Apologetics as Rad Ox and Reformed?

Ward: Catholics don’t buy into the logics of modernity that there is such a division between transcendence and immanence. There’s a distinction but not division.

[[mba: This is a key RadOx and de Lubac point]]

Protestants don’t seem to like apologetics--as if there is a sneaking suspicion that Tillich did it (badly) and we don’t want to? We can have a genuine theologically-based apologetics, that doesn’t say that the secular and sacred is just a set of exchangable signs (as do Caputo and Tillich.)

Want to develop Christian philosopohy and Christian liberal theory (ugh) Christian political poesis.

I’m worried about depoliticization. [[mba: I sense this is Ward’s theme about wariness of sectarianism as inappropriately separated from “politics,” of his perception of Hauerwasian community practice.]]

Theology is a discursive practice--not just what I’m doing, it’s what liturgists do, any kind of performative action is a theological action. The task for those who write academic theology is to make certain clarifications where possible and open up new suggestions and new modes of Christian reasoning or thinking (which have maybe been forgotten) and need to be re-introduced. I’m not informing Christian discernment. [[mba: I worry about this wariness of formation, seems inaccurate, as well.]]

To point to some of complexities involved: As a pastor I’ve come across too many people formed in certain positions who believed they could find answers in the Bible. It’s more complex than that. That’s a good complexity, it’s formation--a process of discernment, an act of grace.

Posted by Margaret at September 15, 2003 08:48 PM