The postmodern realism of Barth's ethics

Scottish Journal of Theology

Volumn 57, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 269-286

  Haddorff, David W ^a  

^a ST JOHN'S UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 62949090702     PISSN: 00369306     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0036930604000213     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Walter Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993);
2. Stephen H. Webb, Refiguring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl Barth (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991);
3. Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
4. Isolde Andrews, Deconstructing Barth: A Study of the Complementary Methods in Karl Barth and Jacques Derrida (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996);
5. and William Stacey Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997).
6. Nigel Biggar, The Hastening That Waits: Karl Barth's Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
7. Also see N. Biggar, 'Barth's Trinitarian Ethic', in John Webster (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 212-27.
8. See especially Johnson, Mystery of God, pp. 153-83.
9. For a classic description of Barth's theological realism, see Ingolf U. Dalferth, 'Karl Barth's Eschatological Realism', in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 14-45.
10. For the most thorough discussion of Barth's early theological realism (or 'critical realism'), see Bruce McCormick, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909-1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
11. Barth's theology, says Graham Ward, provides a 'critique of modernity by repudiating the secular and the metaphysics of nihilism intrinsic to secularism'. Graham Ward, 'Barth, Modernity, and Postmodernity', in Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, p. 291.
12. Even though modern epistemological realism has been stripped of its credibility by postmodern critics, it is not reality itself but anthropocentric theories about reality that have been deconstructed. Regarding this point, Albert Borgmann says: 'the postmodern theorists have discredited ethnocentrism and logocentrism so zealously that they have failed to see their own anthropocentrism'. Strangely, this makes many so-called postmodernists not fully post-modern. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 116ff.
13. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T. Thompson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), p. 868.
14. Modern ethics, following Kant, operates on the basis of universal moral rules, principles, and procedures, whose adherents must simply believe them to be true because they are rational. It further presumes that because moral persons are rational, objective, and autonomous, they also have a 'good will', which enables them to obey these universal moral maxims. In other words, if 'I know the good, I should simply be able to do it'. In this way, modern ethics distanced itself from the traditional theological account of ethics, which provided persons with a language that enabled them to: (1) seek to do the good; (2) accept responsibility for their evil actions; (3) when they fail, seek to be forgiven and reconciled to God and others. This pattern allows persons to experience both the bondage to sin and guilt as well as the freedom to act and be forgiven. Ignoring the language of sin/repentance and redemption/ responsibility, the failure of modern secular reasoning promises a life free from sin and guilt, free from tradition-bound social institutions, and free to self-legislate a 'new beginning' for morality. As Zygmunt Bauman writes: 'The modern project postulated the possibility of a human world free not only from sinners, but from sin itself; not just from people making wrong choices but from the very possibility of wrong choice.' Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), p. 4.
15. K. Barth, 'The Christian's Place in Society', in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. 272-327.
16. John Webster nicely summarizes the importance of this document: 'The doctrinal material here is certainly rudimentary, devoid of the Christological depth and richness of later work. But already there is a pattern of argument to which Barth will return many times in later treatments of ethics: the eschatological "otherness" of God's action in Christ in fact liberates human action from the dehumanizing effect of having to be the bearer of the kingdom of God, taking from its false absolutism, whether of "Yes" or "No".' John Webster, Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 22.
17. For an excellent discussion of Barth's early moral thought, see the first two chapters in this book, pp. 11-64. For a good description of his ethics within the current social and cultural context, see Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 24-74.
18. Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 282.
19. K. Barth, 'The Problem of Ethics Today', in The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 149.
20. K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 2nd edn, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). Indeed, it is God's grace as judgment that stands in contrast to any scheme or theory of anthropocentric ethics. 'Grace is the axe laid at the root of the good conscience' (p. 430).
21. K. Barth, Ethics, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York: Seabury Press, 1981).
22. Regarding this work, John Webster writes: 'Barth's Ethics is a strikingly anti-modern text. In its own way, it is as subversive of some of the axioms of modernity as is the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Like those philosophical figures, Barth does not make interiority fundamental to what it means to be human.' Webster, Barth's Moral Theology, p. 42.
23. Barth, Ethics, p. 45.
24. See Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1937), pp. 111-21;
25. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 277-85.
26. Suffice it to say, Barth's theology of divine command differs from Brunner and Bonhoeffer, in that the latter pair attempt to establish moral principles from the 'orders' and 'mandates' of creation. In Barth's view this embodies a kind of natural theology. Furthermore, the principle locus of Barth's command theory occurs under the doctrine of reconciliation and not creation, as with Brunner and Bonhoeffer. For a good discussion of these differences, see Biggar, The Hastening That Waits, pp. 54ff .
27. K. Barth, The Christian Life, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 4.
28. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 2/2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), p. 550.
29. This is the principal argument of the excellent book: John Webster, Barth's Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
30. Biggar, The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, p. 215. On the one hand, viewing Barth's ethics as eudaemonistic seems inconsistent with his claim that theological ethics begins solely with God's Word, and not with any philosophical or theological ethical theory of 'human flourishing', such as is found in Aristotelian or Thomistic ethics. On the other hand, Biggar reminds us that eudaemonism, broadly conceived, refers to any ethical theory that simply claims that the good or the right is consistent with the good of humanity. Unlike Kant, who claims persons do good for no other reason than 'respect' for the moral law, Barth's qualified eudaemonism asserts that through the grace embodied in God's freedom to be with and for humanity in Jesus Christ, persons have the freedom to choose the human good.
31. For a good discussion of Barth's understanding of ethical deliberation, see Gerald McKenny, 'Heterogeneity and Ethical Deliberation: Casuistry, Narrative, and Event in the Ethics of Karl Barth', in The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000), pp. 205-24.
32. For a careful comparison between Derrida's and Barth's ethical thought, see Johnson, The Mystery of God, pp. 21-6.
33. See Sabian Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983);
34. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1987);
35. and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988);
36. and most importantly, David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations for Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
37. In addition, see Simon Blackburn, 'How to be an Ethical Antirealist', in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 12 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 361-76.
38. Robin Lovin, 'Christian Realism: A Legacy and its Future', Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (2000), pp. 3-18.
39. Barth, The Christian Life, p. 3.
40. See Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 3ff.
41. For an excellent description of Barth's 'moral ontology', see Webster, Ethics of Reconciliation, pp. 214-30.
42. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 4/4, trans. G. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1969), p. 146.
43. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4/3 first half, trans. G. Bromiley(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961), p. 115.
44. For an excellent discussion of Barth's understanding of 'secular parables of truth', see George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 234-80.
45. Barth, Church Dogmatics 2/2, p. 524.
46. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/2, p. 368.
47. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993).
48. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 11.
49. At the beginning of a lecture in the late 1950s, Barth wrote: '"Theology," in the literal sense, means the science and doctrine of God. A very precise definition of the Christian endeavor in this respect would really require the more complex term "The-anthropology". For an abstract doctrine of God has no place in the Christian realm, only a "doctrine of God and of man", a doctrine of the commerce and communion between God and man.' Karl Barth, 'Evangelical Theology in the Nineteenth Century', in The Humanity of God, trans. J. N. Thomas (Richmond, KY: John Knox Press, 1960), p. 11.
50. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 3/2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), pp. 250-1.