BEYOND THE SUBLIME: THE AESTHETICS OF THE ANALOGY OF BEING (PART TWO)

This essay, the second half of a larger work, offers a constructive proposal for a theological aesthetics based upon a theological ontology of the analogia entis. The doctrine of the analogia entis, as articulated most famously by Erich Przywara, S. J., has been the subject of much criticism; however, the essay attempts to defend the doctrine, specifically, against the criticisms of Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. The essay then offers a précis of Przywara's actual doctrine—beyond typical characterizations of it—with a view to the possibility it offers for a theological aesthetics and, specifically, for a genuinely theological account of the relationship between the beautiful and the sublime.     

The Analogia Entis as a Standard of Catholic Engagement: Erich Przywara's Critique of Phenomenology and Dialectical Theology

The purpose of this article is to introduce the reader to the twentieth‐century Jesuit, Erich Przywara (1889‐1972), who was arguably the most brilliant and prolific Catholic philosopher, theologian, cultural and literary critic of the 1920s and 1930s, but is known today more by association with his friend Edith Stein or his protégé Hans Urs von Balthasar than for anything he wrote. Rather than focusing on any single work, however, this article focuses on his early understanding of the analogia entis as a synthesis of the teaching of Augustine, Thomas, and the IV Lateran Council, and on his subsequent deployment of the analogia entis as a Catholic standard in response to the dialectical theology of the early Barth and the phenomenology of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, respectively. Looking back to Vatican I and anticipating Vatican II, it is clear that Przywara was in the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s engagement with the modern world. What remains to be considered today, aside from his immense contribution to modern theology, is the merit of his responses to Barth and Heidegger at this time, e.g., his claim that dialectical theology, instead of being a corrective to modernity, was only a symptom of its fundamental imbalance, and that phenomenology, rather than overcoming or displacing a Catholic metaphysics of the analogia entis, is fulfilled in the ontological openness signified by it.     

Natural theology in the light of logic,semantics, and metaphysics

In recent Anglophone theology, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of analogia entis. Several theologians from various confessional backgrounds have discussed the meaning of this concept and revisited the earlier debate between Karl Barth, Erich Przywara and Hans Urs von Balthasar that took place almost one hundred years ago. Barth famously took the concept as the doctrine that prevented him from ever becoming a Catholic. Recent debate has charted the possibility of reinterpreting the older debate and overcoming misunderstandings across confessional borders. The first reason for the discussion is thus ecumenical, while the second reason is providing the Christian Churches with a tool that helps them to stand against the tides of secularism. I argue that analogia entis is not likely going to provide us new opportunities in ecumenism, yet it may help us to unearth and understand both some confessional differences and common concerns.     

The Twofold Life of the Word: Karl Barth's Critical Reception of the Extra Calvinisticum

Though the extra Calvinisticum has played an historically important role for Christology, the doctrine has been criticized not only by Lutherans and modern Christologies ‘from below’ but by some Reformed thinkers as well. This article examines the place of the extra in dogmatic thinking about the incarnation: specifically, Karl Barth's critical response to his own tradition. After examining the differences between Lutheran and Reformed construals of the relationship of the Logos asarkos to the Logos ensarkos I take up Barth's views on the extra, which over the course of his career moved from enthusiastic affirmation to a sharp critique. Finally, I suggest that Barth's mature Christology retains the best of both Protestant positions by correcting a critical inconsistency in Reformed thought. He does not reject the doctrine of the Logos asarkos, but he does suggest a way in which this is related to the life of the Logos ensarkos that marginalizes the former. Barth is right not to discard the extra, but also that it has been misused in how it is deployed in dogmatic theology.     

BARTH AFTER KANT?

Barth consistently comments on Kant's importance for his early thought in his autobiographical sketches, letters, and even more explicitly in his 1930 lectures on Kant in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Interestingly, however, little attention has been paid to these latter lectures on Protestant history in the secondary literature. In part, this oversight has been due to the manner in which Barth's theology has been thought to overcome Kant's influence much earlier on in his intellectual development. Hence, although commentators such as Merold Westphal, Simon Fisher and Bruce McCormack have developed keen interest in Kant's influence upon Barth's early work, even engaging Barth's Neo‐Kantian context in great detail, my contention is that Barth's later interpretation of Kant is crucial to his intellectual development, and gives further insight into Barth's legacy for contemporary theology today. My aim in what follows is to refigure the relationship between Barth's early appropriation and critique of Kant, and the more onto‐theological issues at stake in his later Protestant history lectures. In so doing, we can begin to discern in Barth, not an abandonment or disregard for the metaphysical questions of being, but rather, the call to face them all the more rigorously.     

A ‘Glaring Misunderstanding'? Schleiermacher,Barth and the Nature of Speculative Theology

Both Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth attempted to keep Christian dogmatic theology free from abstract philosophical speculation. However, Barth thinks that Schleiermacher is guilty of the very speculative theology to which Schleiermacher is so averse. This article will defend the claim that Barth misreads Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre, such that Schleiermacher's theological method and formulations are just as anti‐speculative as Barth's. To defend this claim, this article examines what Barth considers to be speculative theology as well as his accusation that Schleiermacher is guilty of such speculative proposals. After considering Barth's challenges, this article defends Schleiermacher's methodology and theology as anti‐speculative. Finally, several additional accusations against Schleiermacher (those of Bruce McCormack and Thomas Curran) are overcome.     

Definitive,Defective or Deft? Reassessing Barth's Doctrine of Baptism in Church Dogmatics IV/4

Karl Barth's doctrine of baptism articulated in Church Dogmatics IV/4 is due for reassessment. Interpretation of this part of Barth's intellectual legacy has been conceptually determined by unresolved tensions within the Reformed tradition's sacramentology and by a widespread notion that Barth shifted from one side of this tension to the other over the course of his career. This article contests that notion and argues that Barth's doctrine of baptism is more sophisticated than often thought. By developing the concept of ‘paradoxical identity’ as a way to describe how Barth thinks about the relation between divine and human action, this article sheds new light on the value of Barth's work in Church Dogmatics IV/4.     

Friendship and Being: Election and Trinitarian Freedom in Moltmann and Barth

This article constructs two responses to Moltmann's critique of Barth's doctrine of divine freedom in Trinity and the Kingdom, a first on the basis of Barth's programmatic treatment of divine freedom in II/1 of the Church Dogmatics and a second on the basis of Bruce McCormack's reading of Barth's doctrine of election. It shows why the Barth of II/1 must dismiss Moltmann's concern for the priority of God's loving relationship to the world while Barth as interpreted by McCormack can accommodate it. Finally it observes the significance of this twofold defense for mapping Barth onto the terrain of modern theology.     

KARL BARTH AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

It is commonly held that Karl Barth emphatically rejected the usefulness of philosophy for theology. In this essay I explore the implications of Barth's theological epistemology for the relationship and proper boundaries between philosophy and theology, given its origin in Barth's theology of revelation. I seek to clarify Barth's position with respect to philosophy by distinguishing the contingency of its offence from any necessary incompatibility. Barth does not reject philosophy per se, but the way in which philosophy is typically conducted. This is made explicit through an analysis of Barth's censure of the uncritical acceptance in theology of modernist philosophical presuppositions. I nuance Barth's response to a collection of philosophical assumptions that are rarely distinguished in theological literature. Finally, I highlight a representative instance of Barth's reflections on philosophy in relationship to theology, to demonstrate that the criterion for evaluating the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and methods in the service of theology is the same criterion by which theology is itself evaluated.     

Relocating Barth's Theology of Culture: Beyond the ‘True Words’ Approach of Church Dogmatics IV/3

Barth's writings present two discrete approaches to culture and attempts to link the two overlook Barth's rationale for isolating them. Though interpreters of Barth's theology of culture typically turn to CD IV/3, I argue that this material is not the place to look for insights into his analyses of cultural forms (e.g. the Mozart essays), but is better understood simply as a necessary extension of his doctrine of the Word – identical in content and context to his remarks against theology of culture in CD I/1. Instead, Barth's eschatology provides us with greater insights into his theological approach to culture.     

Karl Barth and God in Creation: Towards an Interfaith Dialogue with Science and Religion

Is our neo-orthodox interpretation of Karl Barth correct? Does Barth's theology provide an opportunity to promote creative, equable dialog with natural science and religious pluralism? In this article, I contend that Barth's theological language of analogy, eschatology, nature, and Sabbath integrate with and complement scientific explanations.     

Karl Barth and the Purification of Divine Simplicity

Johnson investigates Karl Barth's critical appropriation of the doctrine of divine simplicity. While Barth is critical of traditional formulations of the doctrine, he understands himself to be refining the doctrine rather than rejecting it. Barth notes that Scripture attributes a diverse set of perfections to God in describing his salvific actions. These diverse perfections, however, have a fundamental unity: God does not contradict himself, but rather his perfections describe his unified, trustworthy agency. For this reason, we can know that in God's inmost being, God is not self‐contradictory but utterly unified or simple in his self‐fidelity. Johnson points out that a key element of Barth's doctrine of God is that it can never be the mere deduction of an abstract, transcendent entity; rather, it must begin with the transcendent God's relationship to creation, and therefore must begin with Jesus Christ, who reveals the true being of God. Johnson identifies three guidelines for speaking of Barth's doctrine: each one of God's perfections must be seen as perfections of his one divine being; God's one being does not exist above and behind his revealed perfections; and God's revealed perfections are essential to his divine nature. On this basis, Johnson explores what Barth has to say about the relationship between God's freedom and his self‐fidelity, including as this regards his freedom to live his one eternal life for us.     

A Reappraisal of Karl Barth's Theological Development and his Dialogue with Catholicism

This article offers a distinct account of Barth's theological development, one that has an eye toward both the historical record and the contemporary debates about the systematic and ecumenical implications of his theology. It establishes that, from the second edition of Romans until the end of his career, Barth's theological development occurs as a series of internal adjustments in four stages along a single christological trajectory. Barth's dialogues with Catholic theologians play a pivotal role in this development, because these dialogues help him arrive at some of his most important insights. Taken together, these conclusions help us push beyond contemporary divisions between historical and systematic readings of Barth's theology and reframe the dialogue between Barth and Catholic theologians.     

SONYA & RASKÓLNIKOV – TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE ORIGIN OF BARTH'S DOCTRINE OF SIN AND GRACE1

This paper examines the origin of Barth's understanding of sin and grace in his reading of Dostoevsky in 1915. It is essentially the theological portrait of Sonya & Raskólnikov (Crime & Punishment) that regrounds Barth's understanding of sin and grace in an orthodox forensic model, which in turn develops into the mature doctrine we see in Die Kirchliche Dogmatik IV. The young Barth is exposed to many influences in his move away from nineteenth‐century neo‐Protestant liberal theology (characterized by a sociological‐humanistic model of sin). Mediated by his theological colleague Eduard Thurneysen, Dostoevsky is one such influence amongst many. Barth's reading has a profound effect on him: sin becomes defined by and in relation to God –eritis sicut deus. This sublapsarian perspective can then be discerned in his seminal paper ‘Die Gerechtigkeit Gottes’, delivered within months of his reading of Crime & Punishment, particularly in the Dostoevsky motif of the Tower of Babel (this reading occurs five to seven years prior to the generally accepted period of the influence of Dostoevsky). Barth's understanding then develops through his study of Romans (Der Römerbrief ) and by rediscovering a traditional approach in the Reformed Confessions in the 1920s; however, it is his reading of Crime and Punishment that initiates this model of sin and grace.     

"DEPRIVE THEM OF THEIR PATHOS": KARL BARTH AND THE NAZI REVOLUTION REVISITED

The role of Karl Barth's theology during the church struggle after the Nazi revolution in 1933 has been endlessly debated. I argue, first, that there is more continuity between “1925”, “1933”, and “1938” than most commentators have granted and that Barth never promoted an apolitical option. Second, I maintain that his theological imagination was restrained by the practices and structures of German (and European) Protestantism and his own acceptance at this time of a Christendom order. The church that his theology presupposed did not really exist.     

Attending to the Sabbath: An Alternative Direction in Karl Barth's Theology of Prayer

Most accounts of Karl Barth's theology of prayer focus on the active dimensions of prayer, as prioritized in the formal sections on prayer in the Church Dogmatics. This leads to the suspicion that Barth has little time for the contemplative and reflective dimensions of prayer. This article will complement the existing approaches by broadening the scope of inquiry from the formal prayer‐sections into other, less obvious areas of the Dogmatics to uncover an alternative, contemplative, direction in Barth's theology of prayer. It will suggest, therefore, that attending to his rich but often‐neglected account of the Sabbath affords the opportunity to begin the work of reassessing Barth's relation to the contemplative tradition.     

Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor

Maximian logoi or the “principles” of created being are often virtually identified with Platonic ideas or forms. This assumption obscures what is distinctive about Maximus's concept of the logoi. I first note two metaphysical peculiarities of his doctrine, and then propose that these only make sense if we follow Maximus's own directive to read the logoi through Christology proper – that is, as describing creation as the Word's cosmic Incarnation. This suggests, in creative tension with a good deal of twentieth‐century philosophical theology, that the God‐world relation is not fully exhausted by the analogia entis: Maximus divines a still deeper hypostatic (not natural) identity between Word and world that actually generates natural difference – for perhaps the first and only time in the history of Christian thought. Here I assay a first step toward retrieving that relation.     

A Broken Engagement: Reassessing Barth's Relationship to Kierkegaard on the Grounds of Subjectivity and Preaching

Despite Barth's initial appropriations of Kierkegaard, he famously discarded the Dane from the theological ‘canon’ due to the latter's alleged anthropocentric subjectivism. Yet Kierkegaard was himself a preacher and polemical homiletician, seeking merely to appropriate the objective truth of the proclaimed word. Barth's Basel prison sermons reveal this same endeavour to render the eternally significant message temporally significant for his hearers. In Kierkegaard's Christendom, a corrective focus on subjectivity was the only way to remain faithful to the ‘objective’ truth of the gospel. Barth and Kierkegaard are juxtaposed here not in contrast (as Barth might have preferred) but in affinity, in that both sought to evoke the dialectical subjectivity of objectivity through preaching.     

The Consubstantial Otherness of God: Divine Simplicity and the Trinity in Hans Urs von Balthasar

Martin explores divine simplicity according to the twentieth‐century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. She grants that Balthasar does not provide a traditional presentation of the attribute of divine simplicity. In his doctrine of the Trinity, Balthasar emphasizes such themes as distance, “hiatus,” and infinite difference, none of which seems to promise a robust doctrine of divine simplicity. Indeed, some have suggested that Balthasar's Trinitarian theology does not allow for traditional claims about divine simplicity. Martin argues, however, that one finds in Balthasar's Trinitarian theology the doctrine of divine simplicity, assumed as an internalized starting point and rooted in his understanding of the analogia entis. This can be seen, for example, in his various engagements with Aquinas as well as with contemporary thinkers such as Gustav Siewerth and Erich Przywara. Likewise, when addressing the issue of whether the Trinitarian Persons can be “counted” according to our normal understanding of number, he insists with Evagrius that God is simple. In the same context, he similarly draws upon Plotinus, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Tertullian, Ambrose, and Aquinas. Martin therefore gives particular attention to the Theo‐Logic and to Balthasar's affirmation in his Trinitarian theology of the points that the divine Persons are fully God, the divine attributes are identical with each other in God, and the distinction of Persons has to do not with three parts of God but with opposed subsistent relations.