Engaging with Barth

Many years ago (correction: many, many years ago), I thought it would do my soul some good to enrol in a Masters degree in theology. Whether or not this was a good idea is something that I will leave for discussion between God, my wife and a succession of long-suffering employers who are convinced to this day that it was worth their time to push me on in that direction.

For reasons equally obscure, I chose, as one of three prerequisite subjects, to read up on the theology of Karl Barth. He was and is a towering figure in modern Protestant theology, and in the years since I first began to read him, I’ve come to realize how impossible he is for evangelical theologians to ignore. Even for those Protestant Christians who don’t know him by name, his ideas about God and the Bible have had a massive effect on the way Christians think. You can love him or hate him—quite likely, you will find yourself doing both—and he has written so much, it is enough to keep you both loving and hating him for many a decade.

So when I noticed earlier this year that a group of evangelical theologians had banded together to write Engaging With Barth (edited by David Gibson and Daniel Strange), I promptly ordered my own copy and sent another off to a friend to review. That friend has written his review, and it will eventually see the light of Briefing day, so I’m not planning to duplicate his work here. But having now read a good deal of the book, and while hatching plans to read a good deal more, I’ve collected together some quotes that I hope will get a few more readers interested in picking it up for themselves. If you are anything like me, you will be tempted to read the quotes and assume you’ve got the book covered. Don’t do that! The conclusions and various bits and pieces I’m quoting really only work if we accept that they are carefully worked through with reference to Barth himself, the laws of logic, and above all, Scripture. The only way you can tell whether this has been done is to read the book.

In the meantime, here are some selected and preliminary bits and pieces culled from various chapters. They are not a substitute for reading the book, but they should prime the pump for what to expect:

Many readers, when they come upon statements that overthrow their beliefs, that offend common sense, that seem to involve contradiction, cannot believe the author really meant such a thing—especially if the author has impressed them with his science and subtlety, and even more if the author is prestigious! … Such statements abound under Barth’s pen, for example that demons are real but have no being; that eternal life is no life continuing after death; that an event that happens once for all happens, for that reason, ‘on several occasions’. The combination of Barth’s commanding tone with a style ‘full of reversals, upsets, conundrums and surprises’ tends to paralyze further inquiry.

(Henri Blocher, p.22.)

Not that Blocher sees this as a particularly good thing. Comparing Barth’s doctrinal system to a cathedral, Blocher hints at his unease when he says “If hanging in the air, even grandiose cathedrals are not safe enough as places of worship” (p. 45).

However much Barth may have felt he was departing from the Reformed tradition in the Gottingen Dogmatics, it was nothing compared to the colossal shift that appears in II/2 of the Church Dogmatics.

(David Gibson, p. 136.)

Gibson looks closely at Barth’s treatment of Romans 9-11, and despite having some things to praise, expresses a serious concern (p. 161):

… Barth’s overall thesis—that the election of Jesus is imaged in the election of the community with the attendant result that none in the community can be separated from the love of God in Christ—exerts such a pressure that the details of the text have distorted under its weight. Rhetorically powerful and compelling in its intensity, Barth’s argument is not the direction in which Romans 9 points.

Digging below the layers of scholarly etiquette, Gibson’s message is blunt: on the extremely important subject of predestination and election (an area where Barth self-consciously departs significantly from Reformed theology), he gets one of the basic biblical texts dealing with the subject quite wrong. On a related subject, later on in the book Oliver Crisp has a devastating chapter on Barth’s doctrine of reprobation and hell, in which he comments that “[T]aken as a whole, Barth’s doctrine [of reprobation and hell] seems to be neither consistent, nor coherent”. Part of the difficulty here, as Crisp works to show, is that if Barth’s understanding of election is correct, then he has left open not just the possibility that hell is empty, but that heaven is as well!

A determination to take the humanity of Scripture seriously … led Barth to reject any suggestion of biblical infallibility or inerrancy while at the same time strongly maintaining the authority of Scripture over church and reason. Barth wrote of the ‘vulnerability of the Bible’ acknowledging without embarrassment that ‘its capacity for error also extends to its religious or theological content’. Generations of evangelical theologians have reacted in horror …

(Mark Thompson, p.193: on Barth’s still-liberal view of Scripture.)

Michael Ovey worries that Barth, despite his protests, has either fallen into the trinitarian heresy of modalism, or left the question in confusion:

[Barth’s] reflexive ideas seem to fall within patristic notions of modalism, while Barth’s repudiation of modalism rests on a definition that is differently drawn from the patristic sources, with no real discussion of this difference. (p. 230)

Ovey’s concerns are as cautiously worded as they come, but there is no denying that he raises a question mark over a most basic area of Barth’s theological understanding, for Barth’s understanding of God himself comes under a shadow.

Garry Williams is not at all happy with Barth’s explanation of what Jesus did on the cross, observing on page 243 that Barth’s view

… sounds very similar to some presentations of penal substitutionary atonement, but is in fact quite different. When we look more closely, we find that Barth qualifies the role of punishment in the atonement and disagrees with the classical idea of satisfaction.

Again, this is courteous language that apparently softens the blow of a serious concern: that Barth significantly misrepresents the work of Christ on the cross at possibly its most central point.

The various evangelical contributors to this volume (and I haven’t quoted all of them) have between them managed to cover an awful lot of ground. Casting further afield, I picked up a random quote from one reader who was hoping that this book would put an end to the occasional trench warfare between Bible-believing theologians and Karl Barth. But when you actually read this collection of essays, it seems far more likely that this book will inflame evangelical anxieties rather than quieten things down. And if the theologians who have contributed have done their job accurately and well, this is as it should be. For if they are right, Barth is a far greater danger to Christians wanting to know and trust God than other, more obviously false teachers.

Look for a review of this book in The Briefing in coming months.