Issues: experience and history

To assure a certain impartiality in the choice of issues, I begin with Paul Molnar's wide-ranging study Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology. Molnar's probing analysis of recent theology concludes by summarising four specific tendencies in recent theology that the author judges deleterious.Footnote ¹

At the head of the list stands ‘a thread that runs through this book’, namely an inclination among theologians to elevate experience above ‘the Word of God revealed’.Footnote ² The author readily affirms the importance of experience, but holds that ‘while the doctrine of the Trinity begins with an experience of God in the economy, it nonetheless directs us away from our experience and toward God's Word and Spirit as the source of theological knowledge’.Footnote ³ In effect, experience, yes – but experience needs to be transitive. Experience may feel spontaneous, as if it were its own source, but in Christian theology experience needs to be transitive to ‘God's Word and Spirit’ as the true and ultimate source.Footnote ⁴ In a related passage, Molnar speaks specifically of ‘a trend to begin theology with experiences of self-transcendence’.Footnote ⁵ This sharpens the issue. One would think that an experience of self-transcendence is nothing if not transitive; but somehow in the modern context an ‘experience of self-transcendence’ is read as an experience of the self, specifically experience of the self in the act of ‘transcending’. The weighted focus is on the self; the perspective is one of immanence.

How does this happen? An explanation is implicit in Molnar's second point of criticism. He discerns and indicts a contemporary trend ‘toward making God, in some sense, dependent upon and indistinguishable from history’.Footnote ⁶ In modernity, history is commonly construed as an ongoing process of growth, understood as growth of the individual and/or growth of some larger reality. When this process is accorded theological significance, the effect is to postulate what one might call a realm of immanent self-transcendence.

The absolute incarnate: modernity and Hegel

Imagine a logic that runs somewhat as follows. God is infinite, we are finite. The infinite is limitless, including all things. And yet, on reflection, there is perhaps one thing the infinite does not include, namely the experience of being finite. A timeless Eternity excludes the concrete experience of time; it rebuffs the anguish of mortality. From the perspective of romantic existentialism, there is that in humanity which divinity cannot include, something a lonely infinite might even envy. Thinking our way into this reasoning helps us appreciate that it is not just a facile empiricism that makes experience so central to modern theology.

So let us pursue this logic of immanence somewhat further.Footnote ⁷ From the postulate of a deficit in the Infinite per se, an imperative follows. The Absolute must cease to be the Absolute ‘per se’ and become something more, namely the Absolute united with the finite and temporal; or more exactly, united with the experience of being finite and mortal. Thus one arrives at an implicit formula – finite plus infinite is greater than the infinite alone. Stated theologically, God plus creation is greater than God alone.Footnote ⁸ This sheds light on the tendency just noted to regard God as ‘in some sense, dependent upon and indistinguishable from history’. It is no accident that God should be conceived as dependent on a history that supplies what God lacks; or that God should become ‘indistinguishable from history’, when it is in and through history that God comes to a fuller and, as we shall see in a moment, more concrete self-realisation.

In a third criticism, Molnar takes contemporary theology to task for failing to clearly distinguish ‘the Holy Spirit from the human spirit’.Footnote ⁹ With this, it becomes almost imperative to recall Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (originally translated The Phenomenology of Mind Footnote ¹⁰), where ‘spirit’ announces itself as the very capacity for self-transcendence. This capacity is for Hegel the key to understanding life in the largest sense, the impetus and desire driving all of reality. Properly understood – namely understood conjointly – the operations of God and world reveal that self-transcendence is in truth self-realisation. To claim one's capacity for self-transcendence is to recognise and realise one's own true self as Spirit. The text is Hegel, but one need only recall the common contemporary statement ‘I am not religious but I am very spiritual’ to sense that, for better and for worse, his legacy continues today.

Recalling Hegel highlights an issue that connects the issues Molnar articulates. Hegel's project is driven by a determination to expose and call to account various forms of what Whitehead subsequently called ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. One has a natural, unreflective impulse to rap one's knuckles on the table when calling for something ‘concrete’. The table is hard and palpable, but ‘the concrete’ as a term of reflection refers to the nexus where all things come (more or less) together. The concrete is that locus where the greatest intensity of being resides. For Hegel, world history is the truly concrete, from which even such powerful notions as infinity and eternity are, in truth, abstractions. The world process is in fact the Life apart from which the divine itself can only languish, spectral and unloved.

In his unduly neglected Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Barth asks, ‘Why did Hegel not become for the Protestant world something similar to what Thomas Aquinas was for Roman Catholicism?’Footnote ¹¹ For –

And where is the contemporary Christian who has not heard this same message –’self-confidence, qualified as confidence in God, confidence in God given concrete form as self-confidence’ – breathlessly presented as the very essence of the gospel? Accordingly, the task of confronting squarely the notion of God plus creation or God plus history as being greater than God alone, rather than quietly buying into it, as a number of theologians seem to have done, surely counts as a major issue. It provides the sought-for challenge against which to measure the capacities of apocalyptic. Let us see, then, how the challenge is engaged by Barth himself.

The issue of the concrete

Barth's discussion of ‘The Eternity and Glory of God’ appears rather climactically at the end of CD II/1.Footnote ¹³ The relevance of the text for our concerns is illumined by George Hunsinger's essay ‘Mysterium Trinitatis: Karl Barth's Conception of Eternity’.Footnote ¹⁴ Like Molnar, Hunsinger begins with a diagnosis of recent theology. He speaks critically of what he calls a ‘processional view of eternity’. This view, shared by thinkers as diverse as Ogden, Tracy, Pannenberg, Moltmann and Jenson, holds that ‘eternity . . . requires time for its own self-actualization’ and accordingly that ‘God needs the world, or at least some world’.Footnote ¹⁵ Hunsinger even notes the role of Hegel.Footnote ¹⁶ What Hunsinger calls ‘the processional view’ is clearly related to the quasi-Hegelian logic I have sketched.

How does one counter the intoxicating notion that (to put the matter baldly, but no more so than Barth or Kierkegaard) God needs us in order to become (fully) incarnate – in and through our collective self-affirmation?Footnote ¹⁷ Barth's strategy is to beat the proposal at its own game, attacking its underlying logic. But what, precisely, is the name or nature of the game? To this question Barth shows the answer more than he tells it. The resultant difficulty of interpretation highlights the importance of Hunsinger's essay, the thrust of which is to identify a crucial thesis that guides Barth's thinking, even though Barth himself fails to state it clearly and consistently.Footnote ¹⁸ Barth's dense discussion of God's eternity begins to open up once we understand that ‘Barth presupposes, but does not always make sufficiently clear, that God's Trinitarian life includes a form of beginning, middle, and end.’Footnote ¹⁹ However difficult it is to conceive (the title of the essay is, after all, ‘Mysterium Trinitatis’) Barth postulates a form of time within God's eternity. This intra-Trinitarian time is entirely distinct from, but represents God's ‘readiness’ for, finite time as we know it. Viewing this conceptual move in light of the Hegelian challenge of which Barth was clearly so keenly aware, we begin to see where Barth is heading. The effect of locating time in eternity is precisely to give the lie to the notion that God – the Christian Trinitarian God – lacks something which must be sought elsewhere. In effect, it is part of the good news that God has – already has, always has had – God's own time.

This helps one appreciate the importance Molnar attaches throughout his book to the immanent Trinity. In effect the immanent Trinity, properly understood, is Barth's counter-proposal regarding the actual locus of the authentically concrete. And the struggle over what is to be deemed the authentically concrete is, I wish to suggest, the tacit name of the game. For the concrete is, as noted, the nexus where all things come together, the locus where the greatest intensity of being is found. Hegel's achievement was to fuse nature and history in an all-inclusive process that contains, or brings to concrete realisation, the divine. Per contra, Barth holds that even time – even the process within which such a thing might happen – finds its truest, aboriginal locus and intensity within the God of scripture.

Finally, a word in anticipation of our other key concept, contextualisation. For the heirs of Hegel, to miss out on the march of history is not to have lived. It is to remain a wraithlike abstraction, a shadow of the real. For Barth in contrast, time and history as we know it, the rise and fall of empires, is quite real enough; but its reality is nevertheless that of an abstraction. In a crucial passage, Barth's extended reflection on natural theology in CD II/1 takes a decisive turn. He writes that human beings ‘in and for themselves as independent bearers of an independent predicate, have, by the revelation of Jesus Christ, become an abstraction which can be destined only to disappear’.Footnote ²⁰ To secure the point, Barth fuses abstraction and apocalyptic by remarking matter of factly that our vaunted self-confidence, not to mention our self-existence, is ‘destined only to disappear’. For this reason he stipulates that ‘we have always to take in blind seriousness the basic Pauline perception of Colossians 3:3 which is that of all Scripture – that our life is . . . hid with Christ in God’.Footnote ²¹ The ineluctable implication is that our life, that which is closest to us, is hidden from us. So much for premising theology on what we think, hope or imagine Life to be.

Did Barth abandon apocalyptic?

Tucked away in ‘The Eternity and Glory of God’ is an autobiographical footnote some seven pages long.Footnote ²² In it Barth portrays liberal theology as having fixed upon the presence of God as experienced in the temporal present, aspiring, in Schleiermacher's phrase, ‘[t]o be eternal in a single moment’.Footnote ²³ The theology of crisis countered this exclusionary presentism by affirming what Barth describes as ‘a pure and absolute futurity of God and Jesus Christ as the limit and fulfillment of all time’.Footnote ²⁴ As example Barth cites his early declaration that ‘[a] Christianity that is not wholly and utterly and irreducibly eschatology has absolutely nothing to do with Christ’.Footnote ²⁵ Undoubtedly the theology of crisis was apocalyptic in content, as in tone.

Now it is commonly assumed that Barth subsequently foreswore apocalypticism. However, the nuanced self-critique Barth gives in CD II/1 does not support this notion. The self-critique is of two parts, the first of which is unsurprising. Barth concedes that the theology of crisis may have gone overboard by failing to affirm and find place for the element of truth in the liberalism it opposed. Stressing futurity, it slighted the truth of God's abiding presence, appropriately understood.

But for Barth, acknowledging imbalance does not count against apocalyptic per se. This becomes apparent the moment we turn to the second aspect of the self-critique. Here Barth draws upon scripture to orientate his reflections, and the passage he selects is none other than Paul's exhortation, ‘Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand’ (Rom. 13:11–12). With this astringent summons as guide, Barth concludes not that his theology was too apocalyptic, but that in truth it was not apocalyptic enough! For asserting a ‘pure and absolute futurity’ effectively undercuts the actual lived specificity of time; and in so doing it undercuts Paul's uncompromising insistence upon an hour that is nearer now than it formerly was. The clarion call, ‘the day is at hand’, is stifled. The criterion by which pure futurity is judged lacking is that it fails to do what Barth implies apocalyptic must do: it does not press in upon us.Footnote ²⁶

In the course of his reflections Barth affirms that in the light of historical critical scholarship it has become ‘quite impossible to overlook or deny the fact that Jesus and the apostles themselves had . . . a very different conception of time determined by a direct looking for the coming of a new age’.Footnote ²⁷ Despite the attendant difficulties – and no doubt they are manifold – still, nevertheless, Barth's clear implication is to affirm an utterly radical occurrence that is nearer now than when we first believed.Footnote ²⁸

The need for apocalyptic

Every so often Barth's text turns upon the reader. We find ourselves named, confronted or, as my Baptist students might say, ‘convicted’. Rebutting natural theology, he says of the long-sought answer to the human enigma, ‘we do not press forward to it’. There is no processionalist advance. Entirely to the contrary, it is the answer that ‘presses forward to us’.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, regarding the futurity or ‘post-temporality’ of God, Barth cautions that ‘it is not something that can be seized and handled by us as an instrument or weapon. On the contrary, it seizes and handles us.’Footnote ³⁰ (Upon returning to this passage, I was surprised to find the sentence bore no exclamation point. I knew I had experienced one.) The accustomed business of the mind is to place or contextualise things, to label and handle them. But occasionally it happens that we ourselves are contextualised – placed in an unfamiliar setting that exceeds and relativises us. It is this event that I propose to call contextualisation.Footnote ³¹

Ultimately the event of contextualisation is the work of the Holy Spirit. Theology just tries to reflect that event. The Römerbrief did this by unbridgeable intensity. The Church Dogmatics does it by Mozartian comprehensiveness. For the academic theologian the latter is in many ways more satisfying; but as it happened, the early theology had a marked advantage over the later in achieving or reflecting contextualisation. It had the advantage that it came bundled with existentialism. In Germany, the Römerbrief arrived about the same time as translations of Kierkegaard. In the English-speaking world, Barth arrived in conjunction with another war, along with Heidegger and Bultmann. Subsequently, the necessary distinctions were made, confessional theology and existentialism were disentangled. But as they were, a problem mounted. It was voiced by one of my teachers, who mused that theologically he stood firmly with Barth, but every time he arose to preach he sounded like Tillich. How indeed to convey the existential bite of the gospel without buying into existentialism?

Here again, the answer may be to beat philosophy at its own game. With its determination to face mortality, our being-for-death, existentialism means to describe unflinchingly the concrete reality of human existence.Footnote ³² But to really confront one's being-for-death – what is this but a sort of personal, quasi-internal apocalypse? And by what reckoning is a quasi-internal ‘moment’ more concrete than a world-encompassing, time-consummating public event, however counterintuitive it may be? After all, existentialism owes much to Kierkegaard, whose own context is Christian contradiction and urgency; and it is highly likely that Heidegger read the Römerbrief while working on Sein und Zeit. What if demythologising, which claims the mantle of realism, is in truth an act of abstraction? Is it not possible to propose ‘apocalyptic’ as a fitting name for existentialism's bite – cf. J. B. Metz's call for Christianity ‘with an apocalyptic sting’?Footnote ³³ Is it not plausible that impending apocalypse might trump philosophic phenomenology in power to contextualise?Footnote ³⁴

To summarise the argument thus far, apocalyptic is one of the key ways the gospel contextualises us; and contextualisation is a principal means of responding to some pressing issues of our time. With this, we may claim to have achieved our purpose of making a case for apocalyptic. It remains to sketch some implications.

Being contextualised

A passage in CD II/1 captures what it means to be contextualised. Of faith, Barth writes that it ‘is not . . . a standing, but a being suspended and a hanging without ground under our feet’.Footnote ³⁵ This, one must emphasise, is a description not of doubt but of faith. Much may turn on the unsettling notion that we do not ‘stand on faith’ so much as hang suspended within it.

The problem with many who use the language of apocalyptic is that they seem all too certain of the ground under their feet. Theology along the lines of the Left Behind series appears to be marked by two things, triumphalism and an emphatically articulated timeline. The two go together, the timeline providing the ground on which triumphalism stands. In such theologies futurity is used, as Barth came to realise it should not be, ‘as an instrument or weapon’. For my part, I reckon that apocalyptic so conscripted might better be described not as apocalyptic, but as a form of gnostic dispensationalism. That apocalyptic reduced to prognostication should envision being ‘raptured’ is all too logical. For the notion of being ‘raptured’ guarantees exemption. It is close to being a doctrinal expression of the complacent assumption that one is not, oneself, contextualised by the message one proclaims.Footnote ³⁶

In the Church Dogmatics, the situation is just the reverse. There the language of apocalyptic is seldom in evidence: in the comprehensive index of the Dogmatics the word does not appear. Yet the theology of the Dogmatics seeks constantly, strenuously, to recognise itself as contextualised by the reality of which it ventures to speak. Is this not likely to be the more fitting form of attestation?

There is, however, one passage in II/1 where the classical language of apocalyptic does flash forth. It comes at the very end of Barth's long discussion of natural theology. In the course of the discussion Barth has been relatively patient, but at the end he declares – ‘Over man [sic] as such there is indeed suspended somewhere, as yet invisible to him, the sword of the great and frightful assault of the divine judgment in the exposure of the whole perversity of his appropriated likeness to God . . .’Footnote ³⁷ Hearing the words ‘the whole perversity of his appropriated likeness to God’, one thinks of the failure Molnar laments ‘to distinguish the Holy Spirit from the human spirit’. Or one thinks of the hankering apparent throughout all of theology – liberal, conservative, yours, mine – for an authenticating moment of immediacy or presence, some direct contact with the divine. Natural theology is not some other, out there, over against us. The first reason we need apocalyptic is to counter our own triumphalism, to keep us appropriately off balance.Footnote ³⁸

And this Barth does. He goes on to say that, even if our precious wish were granted, even if we found some point of contact – even that would not avail. ‘Even if it were true, which it is not, we shall certainly not stand in this judgment because we were originally united to God in such a way that we knew [God] immediately. This will be no comfort to us in the unimaginable assault of the divine judgment.’Footnote ³⁹

Apocalyptic renders insurmountable the chastening wisdom that ‘[t]he fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Ps. 111:10; Prov. 9:10). It rescues the theological truth of existentialism, which was earlier conveyed by the classic, now neglected concept of existing coram Deo, ‘before God’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet at the same time, apocalyptic underwrites the Yes of the gospel as well. In his commentary on Galatians in the Anchor Bible series, J. Louis Martyn observes that in several crucial passages having to do with revelation, ‘Paul uses the noun apokalypsis and the verb apokalyptô’.Footnote ⁴¹ Could this etymology be significant? With a sort of second naïveté, Martyn reads Paul as saying that ‘his gospel came into being when God apocalypsed Christ to him’.Footnote ⁴² The RSV translation of Gal. 3:23 is ‘Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed’. Of the verse Martyn writes,

Suddenly theology, which speaks so readily of revelation, stands exposed – exposed to an utterly strange event of God's apocalypsing Christ. Suddenly there is a return of the repressed; the entire vocabulary that theology tends to keep at arm's length – invasion, conflict, powers, triumph – the vocabulary of Christus victor,Footnote ⁴³ presses upon us. What matters, as Paul says, ‘is the new creation’, which is not just a new social order, though that too is importantly implied. It is more nearly as if Paul were saying, ‘Remember the original event of creation? Well, there's been a new one’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This in turn means, as Martyn affirms, that in some very real sense the longed-for transformation has already occurred; in a real sense the apocalypse has already happened! It lies ‘behind’ us as it were. No doubt this is a difficult proposition that needs further reflection; Martyn speaks of seeing ‘bifocally’.Footnote ⁴⁵ But one must acknowledge that, even as a hypothesis, there could hardly be a counter-thesis more devastating to the pretensions of modern quasi-Hegelianism. In the words of Douglas Farrow, Barth ‘could even claim that our present age has its final term behind it, in the cross of Christ. So much for the cult of progress!’Footnote ⁴⁶ Conversely, for those who hang suspended within the event that is Jesus Christ, news of apocalypse accomplished is good news indeed. It means that their hope is firmly grounded, even though they themselves are not. Otherwise put, it means that being suspended, if suspended in Christ, is all the grounding one could need.Footnote ⁴⁷

I conclude by recalling two theological gestures that are fundamental to Barth's mature thought. Traditionally, apocalyptic visions have had the effect of situating time and history within the context of eternity, represented perhaps by a heavenly court, or indeed a divine plan. In effect, by locating time itself within the all-nourishing eternity of the immanent Trinity, Barth accomplishes an analogous gesture. But then there is a second moment. Having gathered time and eternity into the Trinitarian nexus, Barth proceeds in a second gesture to insist that it is this very nexus – that which is most concrete, the immanent reality of God Godself – that invades a captive world in Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁴⁸

We are familiar with Barth's distinction in the early pages of CD II/1 between primary objectivity and secondary objectivity in revelation.Footnote ⁴⁹ The distinction secures the crucial point that, even where scripture does not explicitly say so, revelation is mediated and indirect.Footnote ⁵⁰ But once this safeguard has been secured, Barth immediately stipulates that the secondary ‘is distinguished from the primary objectivity, not by a lesser degree of truth, but by its particular form, suitable for us, the creature’.Footnote ⁵¹ The secondary, worldly, finite objectivity bears no less a degree of truth than does the primary. And by ‘truth’ Barth means nothing less than God's own self-knowing as it occurs within the immanent Trinity.Footnote ⁵² Thus, what stands forth in and through the secondary objectivity is God's ownmost reality – without loss, without diminution. For such an event, ‘apocalypse’ would seem an appropriate term.Footnote ^53, Footnote ⁵⁴