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Before Analogy: Recovering Barth's Ontological Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
What is the nature of Barth's development over the 1920s? Barth himself understood this period as his “apprenticeship,” and cites his 1931 book on Anselm as a significant juncture in moving beyond this stage in his thinking. Barth's emphasis upon both change and continuity lies at the heart of the discrepancy between two prominent interpreters of his theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bruce McCormack. On the surface it appears as though their disagreement centers around Barth's employment of dialectic and analogy in his theology. However, our thesis is that this focus conceals the ontological strategies Barth's multifarious uses of analogy and dialectic always implied. Although McCormack is right to suggest that Balthasar's depiction of a shift from dialectic to analogy is inadequate, in the end McCormack's account of Barth's development over the 1920s conceals as much as it reveals. The following essay attempts to demonstrate the kinds of insights which can be made of the past accounts of Barth's development which focused on the transition from dialectic to analogy. Far from relegating these accounts to the sidelines, McCormack's work helps us see all the more clearly just what was at stake in figures like Balthasar's work. By looking past McCormack and Balthasar's respective periodizations of Barth's development, a clearer focus upon Barth's theological ontology can begin to take place.
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- © The author 2009. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
References
1 For Barth's own account see, Barth, Karl, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923–24, trans. Ritschl, Dietrich (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 263–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Frei, Hans W., “The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth 1909–1922” (Doctoral Dissertation, Yale, 1956), 87ffGoogle Scholar, Jüngel, Eberhard, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 25Google Scholar, Torrance, Thomas Forsyth, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931 (London: SCM Press, 1962), 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Webster, John, The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, McCormack, Bruce L., Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 21Google Scholar.
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5 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Oakes, Edward T. (San Francisco: Communio Books, Ignatius Press, 1992), 64ffGoogle Scholar.
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7 Ibid., 93.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 24.
10 Ibid., 94.
11 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F., trans. Bromiley, G. W., vol. III.4 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1962)Google Scholar, xii/KDvii.
12 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 53 citing KDI.1, 252.
13 Wigley, Stephen, “The von Balthasar Thesis: A Re-Examination of von Balthasar's Study of Barth in the Light of Bruce McCormack,”Scottish Journal of Theology 56, no. 3 (2003): 359CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Barth, Karl and Thurneysen, Eduard, Karl Barth-Eduard Thurneysen: Briefwechsel 1921–1930, vol. 2 (1973), 190Google Scholar translated in, O'Meara, Thomas F., Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 103Google Scholar.
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18 This is a note in the Translators Preface regarding a comment made by Dr. Ambrosius Czáko in Przywara, Erich, Polarity: A German Catholic's Interpretation of Religion, trans. Bouquet, Alan Coates (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), vGoogle Scholar.
19 O'Meara, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World, 104.
20 Ibid.
21 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, xiii/KDviii.
22 Przywara, “Tradition,” 177, cited in, O'Meara, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World, 207, n47.
23 Beyond the work of Balthasar there have been a number of other key studies which address the degree to which Barth's criticism of Przywara's analogia entis relate to Roman Catholic theology, or whether there is a more thoroughgoing compatibility between Barth's theology and Roman Catholic thought which could continue the ecumenical debate Przywara so hoped for. See for instance, Chavannes, Henry, The Analogy between God and the World in Saint Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth (New York: Vantage Press, 1992)Google Scholar, Bouillard, Henri, The Knowledge of God (London: Burns & Oates, 1969)Google Scholar. As well, most recently, a conference was held in Washington DC entitled, “The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Anti-Christ or the Wisdom of God?” April 4–6, 2008 at the John Paul II Cultural Center where a number of papers were given in anticipation of the forthcoming English translation of Przywara's book, Analogia Entis.
24 Chavannes, The Analogy between God and the World in Saint Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, 4.
25 Niels C. Nielsen Jr., “Przywara's Philosophy of the Analogia Entis,”Review of Metaphysics 5 (1952): 600–601. Chavannes, The Analogy between God and the World in Saint Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, 150.
26 Translated into English as, Przywara, Polarity: A German Catholic's Interpretation of Religion, For the German original see, Erich Przywara, “Religionsphilosophie Katholischer Theologie (1927),” in Religions-Philosophische Schriften (London: Johannes-Verlag, 1962), Hereafter cited as RKT.Google Scholar
27 Przywara, Polarity: A German Catholic's Interpretation of Religion, 25/RKT397.
28 Ibid., 23/RKT396.
29 Ibid., 26/RKT398.
30 Ibid., 29/RKT400.
31 Ibid., 22/RKT395.
32 “Przywara accepted Husserl's phenomenological analysis as conclusive proof that human knowledge has its first basis in and is directed to a comprehension of being in its richness and depth … and insists with Heidegger on the temporal, existential givenness of all knowledge in its particularity.” Nielsen Jr., “Przywara's Philosophy of the Analogia Entis,” 602, cf, Erich Przywara, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,”Stimmen der Zeit CXV.
33 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 172/KD178. citing Przywara in Stimmen der Zeit, 1928, p. 105.
34 Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, 195.
35 Ibid.
36 Barth, Karl, “No! Answer to Emil Brunner,” in Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth, ed. Fraenkel, Peter (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), 71Google Scholar.
37 Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, 196.
38 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 31.
39 O'Meara, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World, 134.
40 Ibid.
41 “It is not formulas that are battling one another (analogia fidei against analogia entis) but two ways of understanding the one revelation of God, each taking the measure of the other. And if we simply have to substitute formulas for the kind of hard work set before us, then we can sum up the issue using this formula: (1) Barth's way of understanding God's revelation in Christ includes the analogy of being within the analogy of faith; and (2) the way the Catholic authors we have been citing understand the christocentricity of God's plan for the world allows the analogy of being to gain its density and concreteness only within the wider analogy of faith (understood in the widest possible sense).” Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 382.
42 bid., 60.
43 Ibid., 61.
44 Ibid., 65.
45 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 2.
46 Frei, “The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth 1909–1922”, 138.
47 Ibid., 139.
48 Ibid., 140.
49 Ibid., 139.
50 Ibid., 171–72.
51 Karl Barth, “Ludwig Feuerbach (1920),” in Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920–1928 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 217Google Scholar.
52 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 10.
53 Ibid.
54 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 82–83.
55 Ibid., 84.
56 Frei, “The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth 1909–1922”, 174.
57 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 70 citing Römerbrief II.
58 Wigley, “The von Balthasar Thesis: A Re-Examination of von Balthasar's Study of Barth in the Light of Bruce McCormack,” 358.
59 Bouillard, The Knowledge of God, 123.
60 Ibid., 125–26. See also Rogers, Eugene F., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God, Revisions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995Google Scholar), Chavannes, The Analogy between God and the World in Saint Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth.
61 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 2.
62 Migliore, Daniel L., “The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion,” ed. Barth, Karl (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), xviGoogle Scholar.
63 This is a term adopted by Frei. “Barth's much more radical realism in this volume is non-ontological. He tried, at that time, to speak of God as one who is related to his creation as absolute origin [Ursprung]” Frei, “The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth 1909–1922”, 189.
64 Barth, Karl, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, ed. Sauter, Gerhard (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1927), 1Google Scholar.
65 Frei, “The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth 1909–1922”, 190.
66 Ibid., 197.
67 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 86.
68 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 28.
69 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 1.
70 A good example of McCormack's influence can be felt in Terry L. Cross, Dialectic in Karl Barth's Doctrine of God (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 3. “With the introduction of Bruce McCormack's study on the development of Barth's thought, it has become a truism in Barth studies that after 1920 Karl Barth was always a dialectical theologian – not only in his ‘purely’ dialectical period (the 1920s) but also in his ‘purely’ analogical period (the 1930s and beyond).”
71 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 2.
72 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 116–17, 124.
73 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 3.
74 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 93.
75 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 3.
76 Ibid.
77 ngrid Spieckermann, Gotteserkenntnis: ein Beitrag zur Grundfrage der neuen Theologie Karl Barths (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1985), 140–43, Michael Beintker, “Unterricht in der chrislichen Religion,” in Verküdigung und Forschung: Beihefte zur ‘Evangelische Theologie’, ed. Gerhard Sauter (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1985), 46, McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 9.
78 Spieckermann, Gotteserkenntnis: ein Beitrag zur Grundfrage der neuen Theologie Karl Barths, 143, Michael Beintker, Die Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths: Studien zur Entwicklung der Barthschen Theologie und zur Vorgeschichte der “Kirchlichen Dogmatik”, Beiträge zur evangelischen Theologie; Bd. 101 (München: C. Kaiser, 1987), 261–62, McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 10.
79 In Eberhard Jüngel, “Von der Dialektik zur Analogie: Die Schule Kierkegaards und der Einspruch Petersons,” in Barth-Studien (Zurich: Benziger Verlag, 1982)., Eberhard Jüngel reorients the location of the shift from dialectic to analogy to 1924 in Barth's “Church and Theology” which was a response to Erik Peterson's “Was ist Theologie” Erik Peterson, “Was ist Theologie?,” in Theologische Traktate (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1951)? Jüngel is commended by McCormack insofar as he deemphasizes the importance of Anselm and 1930 for Barth's development. In the end however, he is not immune to the pervasive influence of Balthasar's thesis and therefore falls under McCormack's critique. So too, would the following studies be implicated in McCormack's critique for their interest in arguing that Barth's theology became critically realist in 1930 and not earlier. Steven G. Smith, The Argument to the Other: Reason beyond Reason in the Thought of Karl Barth and Emmanuel Levinas (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983), 162, 166, Stephen H. Webb, Re-Figuring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl Barth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 157, Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931, 133, 182, Frei, “The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth 1909–1922”, 194. See McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 5–6.
80 Beintker, Die Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths: Studien zur Entwicklung der Barthschen Theologie und zur Vorgeschichte der “Kirchlichen Dogmatik”, 38–39.
81 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 163.
82 Beintker, Die Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths: Studien zur Entwicklung der Barthschen Theologie und zur Vorgeschichte der “Kirchlichen Dogmatik”, 113.
83 Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (Erste Fassung 1919), vol. 2, Gesamtausgabe (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1985), 167ff.
84 Beintker, Die Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths: Studien zur Entwicklung der Barthschen Theologie und zur Vorgeschichte der “Kirchlichen Dogmatik”, 115.
85 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, 67.
86 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 163.
87 Ibid., 14.
88 Ibid., 20.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., 21–22.
91 McCormack, Bruce L., “Grace and Being: The Role of God's Gracious Election in Karl Barth's Theological Ontology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. Webster, J. B. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 66–67.
93 Ibid., 67, citing, Spieckermann, Gotteserkenntnis: ein Beitrag zur Grundfrage der neuen Theologie Karl Barths, 72–82.
94 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 181–82.
95 Barth, How I Changed My Mind, 42–43.
96 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 15.
97 Ibid., 442.
98 Spieckermann, Gotteserkenntnis: ein Beitrag zur Grundfrage der neuen Theologie Karl Barths, 228–29.
99 Ibid., 11ff.
100 Jeffrey C. Pugh, The Anselmic Shift: Christology and Method in Karl Barth's Theology (New York: P. Lang, 1990), 103.
101 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 11.
102 “The one weakness in Spieckermann's otherwise brilliant analysis lies in her understanding of the role played by the Anselm book in Barth's development … But if Fides quaerens intellectum is not connected in some way with the emergence of so-called “analogical thinking” (because the ‘turn to analogy’ occurred at a much earlier point in time), then the logical question to ask is: why continue to attach so much importance to it? Spieckermann's answer is that the Anselm book sets forth a ‘revision of method’ based upon a clear distinction between the ‘ontic’ and the ‘noetic’ rationality of the object of theology (and the priority of the former over the latter). But that answer, as we shall see, is a problematic one because such a distinction was presupposed earlier (though it was not set forth in those precise terms).” Ibid., 9–10.
103 For a more detailed account of the onto-logic of Barth's explication of Anselm's Proslogion 2–4, see, Stanley, Timothy, “Returning Barth to Anselm,”Modern Theology 24, no. 3 (2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
104 McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936, 9.
105 Ibid., 10.
106 Ibid., 375, Beintker, “Unterricht in der chrislichen Religion,” 46.
107 Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4/KD2.
108 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (London: Collins, 1967), 44.
109 Ibid.
110 Ward, Graham, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42, n 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
111 Beintker, Die Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths: Studien zur Entwicklung der Barthschen Theologie und zur Vorgeschichte der “Kirchlichen Dogmatik”, 230–38.