The Karl Barth Blog Conference is still in high swing over at Der Evangelische Theologe. Today David Congdon’s excellent article has been published which deals with Karl Barth’s opposition to liberal historicism as it relates to the Romans commentary. My own response to David has also been published. Here is a bit of my conclusion in an attempt to extend David’s argument:
As we have seen, what lies at the heart of Barth’s critique is the way in which liberal historicism circumscribes God, rendering God as a teleological positing of history. Barth’s apocalyptic Christology utterly forbids any such teleological frame of reference. God can never be identified as the “absolute” which “arises out of the progress of history” as its telos. As such, Barth’s attack on liberal historicism arises out of a fundamental concern that God never become a predicate of any earthly-historical reality.
This is the point I wish to expand on, even if only briefly. The claim I wish to introduce is that Barth’s attack on liberal historicism and his vigorous critiques of Roman Catholicism are of a piece. As we have seen, Barth’s attack on liberal historicism was rooted entirely in his concern that God not become objectified within an immanent, ideological frame. I would like to argue here that it is precisely the same concern that grounded his objections Roman Catholicism. For Barth the Roman Catholic construal of the church as the effective mediator of grace, and indeed, of Christ’s presence elides the singularity and freedom of Christ in precisely the same way as liberal historicism. For Barth, the Catholic perspective on how the office of Christ is exercised through the office of Peter is unacceptable precisely in that it turns the church into a kind of entelechy which makes Christ’s own agency a predicate of the historical-institutional church.
In a way that may seem ironic to many readers of contemporary theology today, Barth construes Roman Catholic holism and liberal historicism as two sides of the coin. Both, in different ways seek to securely “place” God within a stable framework and in doing so objectify God in a way that Barth found extremely dangerous. In a quest to secure God’s givenness from within a stable historical framework, both Catholicism and liberal historicism resist accepting the grace of God which comes to us not as a given, but as an apocalyptic gift. Whether or not one accepts Barth’s critiques of Catholicism and liberal historicism (and I think they have purchase), it is certainly vital that we all remain attuned to the ideological temptations that beset all attempts to do theology. The gift is ever vulnerable to our attempts to turn it into a possessed given. And in resisting this temptation the witness of Barth is a vital one indeed.
Please direct any comments to the original post over at Der Evangelische Theologe.
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