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God is revealed, but stays hidden

Peter Forster enjoys unfolding elements of Barth’s theology

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Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology
Sung Wook Chung, editor

Paternoster Press £14.99 (978-1-84227-354-8)
Church Times Bookshop £13.50

NEARLY 40 years after his death, interest in Karl Barth is stronger than it has been for a generation. Here a dozen leading scholars from the Evangelical tradition assess various aspects of Barth’s theology from what might be termed the “open conservative” wing of Evangelicalism. This is a well-written, stimulating book, in which the writers emerge as critical friends to Barth.

One of the reasons for the contemporary renaissance in Barth studies has been a growing appreciation of the fact that, in some respects, his thought anticipated what is now known as post-modernism. Barth is seen in philosophical terms as both critic and child of the Enlightenment, open to a modern world-view, but always basing his thought in a narrative structure around the single but mysterious foundation in Christ.

The earlier Barthian stress on God’s otherness, and upon human finitude and fallenness, thus informs his later work to a greater degree than used to be acknowledged. Most recent writers on Barth have emphasised the consistency of his theology, from the earlier to the later work. Barth certainly asserted the reality of God, but he always opposed any positing of God as an object of human enquiry or knowledge. God is always subject, the one whose grace is sovereign.

But if Barth rejected the nihilistic or subjectivist sides of post-modernism, he did believe that knowledge of God could not be separated from the whole activity of the Church, and our participation in its distinctive patterns of thought and language. Hence the title of his major work, Church Dogmatics. The dialectic that the God who reveals himself remains always and also the hidden God provided a constant, if evolving, thread in his theology, and is correlated here with aspects of Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy.

Several of the authors lay emphasis upon Barth’s underlying creativity. He was an innovator, who tended to fashion his own distinctive thought-patterns rather than use traditional patterns as such.

He always had an unconventional streak: a pastor for 12 years, he broke on to the theological scene with relatively little formal theological education. He was proud to be Swiss. While clearly writing from within the Reformed tradition, he was also an ecumenical theologian. At his graveside in 1968, Hans Küng claimed him as one of the spiritual fathers of the Second Vatican Council.

Besides a rather predictable puzzling over Barth’s doctrine of scripture, Evangelicals have found his doctrine of election difficult to understand, still less to assimilate. For Barth, first and foremost, God chooses himself, in Jesus Christ, and in this way encloses humanity in God’s own humanity. The authors of this book, along with many other Evangelicals, have deduced that Barth was therefore a universalist, but the truth was subtler.

This aspect of God’s being — the God who is love — became increasingly prominent in the later Barth, and emerges here as his response to Bonhoeffer’s brilliant early critique: that Barth favoured the sovereignty of God over us to the solidarity of God with us.

This book gives ample evidence of the enduring importance of Karl Barth. But, as with all the other books about Barth, it is no substitute for the real thing: reading Church Dogmatics itself.

Dr Peter Forster is the Bishop of Chester.

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