Theology as conversational event: Karl Barth, the ending of 'dialogue' and the beginning of 'conversation'

Modern Theology 19:4 October 2003 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

THEOLOGY AS CONVERSATIONAL EVENT: KARL BARTH, THE ENDING OF “DIALOGUE” AND THE BEGINNING OF “CONVERSATION”1 JOHN C. McDOWELL Introduction An argument is as, or even perhaps more, revealing for what it omits as what it includes. Feminist and Liberationist theologies have rightly been suspicious of discourses making claims to being “natural”, “self-evident”, or “rational” when probing reveals that they operate at the level of ideology, and therein too easily exclude accounts that could disrupt the apparent naturalness of their particular telling of the story. That process of naturalisation makes these ways of telling the stories of the world, nations, and social and political groups, part of the fabric of the cultural-linguistic shape of the storytelling so that language users who are informed by these stories lose any sense that things could be told or imagined differently. The stories, then, appear as “true”, are divorced from the particular contexts they once inhabited, and serve specific interests. Yet languages, for instance, are not examinable, dissectable and frameable as stable or static entities. Language-use by those less familiar with, or even unfamiliar with, the specificities involved in the rules of any particular speech can modify that language at even its grammatical core. In this event the “other” is brought into conversation to destabilising effect. Conversation, then, can induce a disruption and modification of grammatical patterns, and can robustly remind one of the situatedness and even fragility of any given language-use.

John C. McDowell School of Divinity, New College, Mound Place, University of Edinburgh, EH1 2LX, Scotland © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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It is not uncommon, however, to hear the complaint that despite the voluminous nature of his writing, Karl Barth’s performance omits something vital to the health of theology, particularly one claiming attention to “public” places. James Barr’s comment is representative of one kind of objection. Barth, he says, “paid little attention to other people’s opinions”.2 This way of stating the problem somewhat leaves Barr vulnerable to the lazy reposte of listing occasions when Barth does approve of, cite, or discuss the ideas of other thinkers. Such a strategy of simple proof-texting is both frivolous and leaves Barr’s core suspicion fatally undamaged. The Barth of Barr’s account is one locked in his own theological world without feeling the need to be responsible to those who disagree with him. Hence, the audacity of the man is supposedly illustrated by the Gifford Lectures on natural theology at Aberdeen University in 1937–38 in which he deliberately ignores that theme and asserts that “no such subject existed to be discussed”.3 His theology, it would seem, illegitimately secures itself from critique, polices its narrow location assiduously and only lets in a few carefully vetted others when convinced that they can be useful. In contrast, through John Milbank’s distinction between dialogue and conversation in the context of interreligious communication it becomes possible to critique Barr’s understanding of “conversation” in a way that serves to hear Barth, and what it entails for theology to be “conversational”, significantly differently. Indeed, I will argue that “conversation” is an appropriate metaphor to apply to what Barth was doing with his theology. Conversation as “Man’s Invention”? Theological Seclusion Barr’s concern is for the integrity of God’s creation. Natural theology, that which he feels Barth unwisely denied, manifests creation’s testimony to grace since it is the very “pre-existing natural knowledge of God that makes it possible for humanity to receive the additional ‘special’ revelation”.4 The echoes of Emil Brunner here suggest that Barr’s Barth is a generalisation from the early 1930s. This suspicion is further suggested by the comment that Barth’s theological accent was an extreme reaction to a particular political situation. The factor that brought the question of natural theology into the centre seems to have been political. . . . Reacting to its [viz., rising German Nazi movement’s] impact, he diagnosed the disastrous developments in Europe as the natural culmination of a long process of the history of ideas, especially theological ones. Start along the line of natural theology, he thought, and sooner or later you will end up with something like the “German Christian” (DC) movement. . . . And thus from the beginning he taunted Brunner with having given comfort to the DC and having had favourable reviews in the Nazi press. Brunner was playing into the hands of Hitler.5 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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Several features of Barr’s observation are worthy of note. In the first place, the geometric image (the issue being brought into the centre) suggests that the issues were already contentious (to be brought into the centre they must already have been, at the very least, on the periphery). Indeed in an accompanying footnote Barr makes it clear that “Barth’s polemic against natural theology was conditioned purely by political controversies.” Rather, “these political circumstances acted as a catalyst for the theological disagreement which soon broke out”.6 Here he is right. The recent study of the BarthBrunner relations by John Hart emphasises that Barth had been suspicious of Brunner for a decade by this time. In fact, Hart argues, late in 1920 “a parting of the way seemed likely. But, after reading Romans II, Brunner appeared to adopt Barth’s radical dialectic.”7 Moreover, Barr’s feeling that Barth’s reaction was an extreme one encouraged by the politics of the time is why he progresses to a defence of the legitimacy of natural theology, and this he does on grounds not unlike those of Brunner himself (scripture, especially Romans 1–2; and the Protestant Reformers). Here two things are detectable—firstly, Barr feels that the problem with the form of Barth’s reaction lies with his theology; and secondly, ironically, as shall be argued later with respect to articulating the ways in which Barth can be described as a conversational theologian, he does not see what was theologically at stake for Barth. In other words, Barr cannot appreciate what it is that makes Barth suspicious of Brunner to the point of responding with the Nein!8 Therefore that Barth later admitted to having brought “natural theology back in by way of Christology” is less admired than criticised as a calamitous inconsistency. It would require the dismantling of his earlier theology built, as it was according to Barr, on the non-negotiability of the denial of natural theology.9 Moreover, Barr finds it disturbingly ironic that Barth’s writing depends upon “some kind of non-revealed intellectual structure that provided the necessary assumptions” which contradicts the pretension to “an independent and purely theological position deriving exclusively from revelation”.10 Furthermore, according to Barr, Barth never took the time to notice differentiations within the theologies sweepingly categorised as “natural theology” because he perceived the German situation “as a final manifestation of natural theology”.11 Put starkly, Barth was exegetically biased, determined in his reading by his theological conviction and productive, therefore, of a “travesty of exegesis, indeed a denial of exegesis” that undermines “the ideal of historical objectivity”.12 In other words, he seems to have fallen foul of John Webster’s warning about rummaging through good texts “for ‘insights’ to shore up some proposal or other” instead of studying them “in such a way that they provoke by subverting”.13 Barth, the prophet to culture, has lost his prophetic edge and uncritically succumbed to an a priori modus operandi bolstered by a powerful totalitarian © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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“propagandist” policing of theological rhetoric. This Barr describes—somewhat ironically it must be observed given the manner of his own particular account of Barth—as the “domineering aggressiveness and militancy of Barthian discourse”.14 Because of his conviction that “There was no common ground on which to stand”, Barth can simply refuse to converse “on equal terms” with those with whom he disagreed. By way of illustration, a comment of Barth’s written to Bultmann is noteworthy in this regard. I can only repeat that your well known attachment to Heidegger (not because he is Heidegger but because he is a philosopher, who as such has nothing to say to and in theology) you have done something that one ought not to do as an evangelical theologian. And if you ask: Why not? I can only answer you, not with an argument, but with a recitation of the creed.15 Any instances of actual conversations that Barth had, then, would have to be assessed either as little more than thinly veiled monologues, or as practice outrunning theory. Quite simply, the weight of Barth’s theology crushes any spaces for conversation. So, the manner of his refusal to converse is itself akin to Nazi ideological style, and its attendant “inability to use openminded and reasoned forms of discussion, [all too] easily led on to a dependence on rhetorical and propagandist means of persuasion”.16 This refusal to dialogue is regulated by the fact that, according to Barr, Barth closes theology in upon itself, thus preventing it being thinkable, from becoming public. This worries the Clark Pinnock of a 1977 paper, for instance. Pinnock worries that Barth disallows public articulation of the Christian rationale of the Christian witness to revelation. The problem here becomes one of rationally uncheckable claims to revelation, something that Bonhoeffer’s charge of “revelatory positivism” had earlier adverted to. According to Pinnock, a claim echoed by Barr, The theologian and the atheist are engaged in a shouting match: one says, “Religion is man’s invention!”, the other “No, it’s not!” Barth offers us no help in resolving the question of who is right.17 This, then, is “one of the most vulnerable points in [Barth’s] whole theological system, and that exposes his entire work to repudiation by all who are not yet convinced by the Christian claims”.18 The implication for Barr, and also Richard Roberts, is more serious than that, however. It fatally wounds Barth’s whole theological “system” [Barr]. The context of Roberts’ own sophisticated critique is his desire to promote a theologia viatorum, a repentant and kenotic theological thinking within the terrain of the contemporary human condition and public discourse. However, predicated on a weakness in Barth’s account of time, the pivotal theme for Roberts in Barth, this is an approach that Roberts finds distinctly lacking in the Church Dogmatics (hereafter CD).19 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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The first stage in Robert’s strategy traces Barth’s “totalitarian” method, or the fact that his view of “reality” derives from neither metaphysics nor, more importantly for Roberts, the social sciences, but from God’s Self-positing in Christ.20 Following on the heels of Kant’s segregation of philosophical and theological activity into their own discrete spheres, and Hegel’s subsequent Idealist leap over those epistemic boundaries, Barth’s theology after the two editions of Der Römerbrief demands that theological truth is self-posited and self-authenticated, and faith, therein, essentially become the obedient exploration of the given. This, according to Roberts, is a “gigantic celestial tautology, the circulus veritatis Dei”, and an isolating of theology that both comes “dangerously close [to a] collusion between his voice and that of God” which “demands conformity and submission rather than critical investigation”.21 While the second move recognises Barth’s intention to historicise revelation, by virtue of his account of time this too becomes a presuppositionless piece of reasoning with no point of anchorage in the world. This, then, is “a quasi-gnostic afflatus”.22 Barth admittedly does attempt to re-temporalise the eschatological “Now Moment” of the second edition of Der Römerbrief, structuring it through the concrete historical life of Jesus of Nazareth and above all in his forty days after Easter. However, the character of “God’s time”, the prototypical pattern of “real time”, is Boethianly portrayed as the temporal vacuum of “simultaneity”, and therefore an endlessness in a totum simul. Revelation’s non-temporality, then, becomes expressed through the temporally ambiguous conceptuality of Christ’s “contingent contemporaneousness” (kontingente Gleichzeitigkeit) [CD, I.1, 149]. Here the contingency of revelation is not achieved upon the basis of what are normally considered historical acts, but instead undermined by its temporal transcendence that can only be configured as “a temporal docetism”.23 The ontological dogma of the Incarnation loses its roots in the shared and public reality of the world in which we live; it hovers above us like a cathedral resting upon a cloud.24 What emerges from these broad brushstrokes is a portrait of one who utterly failed to engage theologically with what Roberts calls “our commonplace reality”. Barth has “become the entextualised, but no longer context-bound mouth of ‘God’ ”, and therein has provided theology with its own ghettoised “breathing-space” in protected isolation from public scrutiny.25 Pinnock echoes this conclusion to a significant degree when accusing Barth of inflating “a subjectivist balloon” that cannot be distinguished from “fantasy and dream” and which must exist on the same level as any fanaticism which claims, “I have a revelation!” . . . Though it is rational within itself, there is no indication where it touches reality, and so it is impossible to distinguish true revelation from false.26 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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The comment “Though it is rational within itself” is suggestive. Pinnock demands that for theology to be rational a “simple” internal coherence account will not suffice. Something more like the conception of a “commonplace reality” of the sort espoused by Roberts is required in order to make the necessary move, and Barth does not and indeed cannot provide it. However, what is going on underneath these similar sounding complaints requires careful inspecting and differentiation. Pinnock imagines “conversation” (although it is not clear that this word is appropriate for depicting what Pinnock is hoping for) to begin at the end of the process of identifying what it is that constitutes Christian discipleship, or to be the means for evangelism. Pinnock’s critical strategy, then, is less the suggestion that Barth needs to approach theology more “conversationally”, than the complaint that he makes the evangelistic practice of persuasion more difficult “in a pluralistic world with its competing truth claims”.27 Roberts and Barr, on the other hand, imply that “conversation” begins much earlier in the theological process, and thus that “conversation” is more the end in itself than the means. The problem is diagnosed as much more serious than that identified by Pinnock, and terminally so since Roberts and Barr suspect a Barthian exclusivism that is insufficiently attentive to the truthfulness within “competing truth claims”. For Pinnock theology begins—with its strongly defensible identity—by listening to God and then moves out in “conversation”/evangelism (to culture, society, and those outside the boundaries of Evangelical communities). Roberts, on the other hand, seems to reverse this movement. One is culturally embedded in various forms of life that cannot take or receive, in their plurality and diversity, Christian identity as something given but rather something to be established in the event of conversation. Ending “Dialogue” as the Beginning of “Conversation” Roberts sees something similar going on in Milbank as in Barth—a privatising of religious feeling forcing religion and religiosity to vacate the public spaces, and retreat into an uncritical and conservative sentimentality.28 However, Milbank’s work rightly has its suspicions of not only of such an assessment of him but also of the criteria on which that assessment is made— the conception of conversation as dialogue. In 1990 Milbank published “The End of Dialogue” in a collection directly responding to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, edited by John Hick. While Milbank’s target is specifically the pluralist reading of religious dialogue, what he has to say there directly affects the sense of the manner of theology, not merely in terms of its task but also in terms of its nature which shapes and informs that task.29 Dialogue, Milbank complains, is “a profoundly ethnocentric illusion” making globally dominant the values embedded within wider western dis© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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course.30 It assumes a commonly recognised subject matter, “a timeless logos enjoying time-transcending encounters with an unchanging reality”, by both (or all) participants. It assumes, further, that one partner will progress to a sympathetic comprehension of the perspective of the other. One needs to be clear what it is that Milbank is rejecting, lest he be mistakenly understood to be making the arrogant claim of possessing a privileged perspective, or attempting to secure a hiding-place for fear that his theological weaknesses be exposed.31 The very idea that dialogue is a passage for the delivery of truth, that it has a privileged relationship to Being, assumes that many voices are coalescing around a single known object which is independent of our biographical or transbiographical processes of coming-to-know.32 This dialogue obscures the truth-of-difference by departicularising its participants and reforming them as “equal, independently of one’s valuation of what they say”, in other words as “liberal, Western subjects, images of oneself”.33 As Kenneth Surin argues, western pluralism cannot, by its very nature, converse since the pluralist . . . speaks well of the other but never to the other, and indeed cannot do otherwise because there really is no intractable other for the pluralist.34 Consequently, the pluralism of dialogue is only cosmetic, functioning as little more than a surface appearance masking a drive for a universal uniformity. In other words, it is an arrogant fetishisation of a certain locality with its loss of particularised memory—ironically so, given its disapproval of imperialism. And however those contradictions are masked, pluralism tends “to exercise a more stable and effective sort of tyranny by purporting to enshrine power less in force than in natural order, or in principles.”35 Yet that powerplay goes unnoticed. The kind of unacknowledged but underlying will-to-power operative in the Pinnock of 1977 discourse are suggested by his “conversation” beginning at the end of one’s learning, and therefore as a technique of persuasion and argument.36 Pinnock’s Christian self is a very stable one. Consequently it is the case neither that “external” “conversation” plays any formative part in the process of learning, nor that are there suitable reflexive resources for problematising this stability rhetoric. At least at the level of its selfpresentation, its rhetoric unacknowledgedly risks what Archbishop Rowan Williams calls “the tyranny of a total perspective”, that which subsumes all knowing into a framework laying claims to comprehensiveness and finality.37 Such theological closure is, significantly, not available to the later Barth who critiques ideological propositions as “not just a provisional and transitory but a permanent normativity, not just one that is relative but one that is absolute, not just one that is human but one that is quasi-divine”.38 There © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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is something ethically significant in Williams’ and Barth’s descriptions— insight into ideology’s closure of the possibilities of “seeking, questioning, and researching” highlights the fact that what characterises the powerrelations (propaganda, totalitarian coercion and manipulation, certain apologetic strategies) through which these claims are predominantly expressed is their incapacity for conversation. One steps back from the risk of conversation into a position of (imagined) invulnerability by displaying the real subject matter as a strategy for the retention or accrual of control (either through serving the dominant power, or by legitimating the slave-tobecome-master trajectory). So Barth continues: What they [viz., ideologies] have to push systematically is their own excellence and usefulness, and by way of background they must show how utterly valueless and harmful their rivals and opponents are.39 Here are shades of CD I.1 where Barth speaks in an eschatologically nuanced way of theology as a “penultimate” discipline, “a work of critical revision and investigation of the Church’s proclamation in view of the divine verdict”, yielding all too human fallible and uncertain results [CD, I.1, 83]. As such, theology is necessarily fallible, fragile, broken, discoloured by sin, and resistant to all conceptual foreclosures or “systematisation”.40 Embracing this recognition of one’s proper eschatological locatedness will render to theology’s broken words the proper service of a humble witness, remind any theologia gloriae of its prematurity, and indicate that it is no more privy than any other discourse to some kind of presuppositionless life.41 A finished account of theology as the container of all Truth would make theology noneschatological. And yet an ethics that includes self-testing through doubt does not have to assent to the belief that all discourse is necessarily as ideologically regulated, and therefore as free, as any other from the constraints of seeking the best forms of ideolo-clasm.42 Barr’s model of conversation appears to differ somewhat from that of Pinnock—conversation is the means of attaining the truth, but that this movement necessitates that one check one’s particularities at the door and dialogue “on equal terms”. Language of “objectivity” and a critique of a “presuppositioned” reading of the scriptures leaves him open to the accusation that he is evading the sociality of knowing, or our learning about how we learn. That, then, renders him vulnerable to Milbank’s critique of modernity’s dialogia. Dialogue as “Man’s Invention” and Theology as Conversational “Mistakes”, Barth declares, “arise when only a part of a sentence is heard.”43 And, given that six million words are not easily digested, Barth’s manifold perspectives are not readily graspable. Hence, there is a certain poignancy in his lament that © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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I do not expect anyone to agree with me—still less that he say nice things about me. But . . . without presumption I might expect that they had first informed themselves about me and therefore had read me.44 Barth certainly hopes to be given a fair hearing. However, he feels that a failure to listen attentively to him characterises a number of critiques, those of the “hasty theological journalism” of his sloganisers.45 No doubt fuel is provided by the fact that Barth’s texts are so slippery, often taking away with one hand what he appears to present with the other.46 An explicit statement Barth makes about theological conversation suggests, when teased out, that not only does Barr fail to listen to him precisely because he presupposes different conceptions of what “conversation” means, and consequently of what it entails for theology to be “conversational”, but that Barth could agree with Milbank’s assessment of conversing beyond “dialogue”. You speak of conversation, but what does this mean? Conversation takes place when one party has something new and interesting to say to the other. Only then is conversation an event. One must say something engaging and original, something with an element of mystery. The Church must sound strange to the world if it is not to be dull. . . . We may read philosophers (and we should!) without accepting their presuppositions. We may listen respectfully (I have a holy respect for a good philosopher!). We can learn much from philosophy and science. But as theologians we must be obedient to the Word.47 Several things are noteworthy about this set of comments. In the first place, Barth’s interest in presuppositions betrays an interest in the particularity and difference that makes conversation possible. We do not converse because we share a common foundation, and can trade variations upon that agreed theme, but because we are different. Barth’s reiteration of his commitment to determinatively ecclesial presuppositions is not a refusal of conversation, any more than is his recognition of the different presuppositions of the philosophers. Conversation involves difference, and the awareness of difference—neither the suppression nor the simple “celebration” of difference, but a willingness to take it seriously. Put differently, Barth is aware of the fact that any conversation is always between a particular someone and a particular someone else; there can be no a-temporal or a-contextual conversation in which the conversation partners leave behind the concrete particularities of who they are in order to dialogue in “objectivity”. Barth’s unembarrassed reliance upon presuppositions which are not shared, but which need not isolate, could be compared with Harnack’s 1923 complaint that Barth was “unscientific” in his work—a complaint which seems to conflate a reading guided by unshared presuppositions with a relativistic free-for-all. For Harnack, apparently, if there can be no obviously © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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objective reading of a text, then its meaning fragments into the chaos of readers’ private preferences.48 Only a hermeneutical objectivity grounded in universally shared assumptions can free readings from potential nihilism and for public discussion, interaction, and assessment. Barth’s response exposes the unacknowledged presuppositions in Harnack’s own position. “I think I owe it to you and our listeners”, he says, to confess that I do consider my answers open to debate, but that still for the time being and until I am shown a better way I reserve all else to myself. Nonetheless, your objections cannot deter me from continuing to ask along the line of those answers.49 Barth here subverts Harnack’s own accusations by accusing him of not listening and of methodological parochialism—the “science” of theology may be broader than Harnack had imagined, but he seems strangely unprepared to entertain any voices different from his own. Harnack’s theology, then, is the one that is closed. Quite simply, his approach fails to be attentive to, and respectful of, the Sache of the text but instead forces a reading that is “a hostile act in which the interpreter victimizes the text”.50 The dead letter of the text is captured, possessed, dissected and then left in pieces as if those projects constitute either the interpretative act or exhaust the hermeneutical performance.51 Even so, Barth continues in a generous vein. I would like to be able to listen attentively in the future to whatever you also have to say. But at this time I cannot concede that you have driven me off the field with your questions and answers, although I will gladly endure it when it really happens.52 It is instructive to compare Barth’s deconstruction of Harnack’s appeal to “objectivity” with Milbank’s ending of “dialogue”. Barth, like Milbank, is unapologetic in naming the theological shape of his own presuppositions, those which set him on the particular path he is following. As the “But” in his claim cited earlier suggests (“But as theologians we must be obedient to the Word”), it is clear that he is not prepared to renege on his commitments. Denying the factors that shape his commitments would be to renounce who he is. As a Christian (and more specifically a Protestant Christian), Barth is committed to a particular way of seeing the world in Jesus Christ, and that is what can make conversation possible—to make possible what Milbank describes as a nonviolent enabling of the other to see the reclassification of “other incommensurable accounts . . . according to . . . [ones] own perspective”.53 That, as shall be demonstrated below, does not preclude Barth’s “faith seeking understanding” from learning from those outside the defined “walls” of the church, past and present. Returning to the quotation from Barth’s Table Talk which began this section, we can in the second place note Barth’s insistence that “The Church must sound strange to the world if it is not to be dull”. Barth’s various ecclesial © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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presuppositions, far from ruling him out of some conversation that begins from conversationalists’ neutrality and “common core”, precisely enable him to converse. So, for instance, it is precisely because he is a Christian that Barth is committed to a particular way of seeing the world in Jesus Christ that recognises and generously admits its indebtedness to those who have spoken within the Christian church, past and present. This is clear not only in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, but also as early as the Preface to the first edition of Der Römerbrief with its talk of history as an honest and uninterrupted conversation between yesterday’s wisdom and the wisdom of tomorrow.54 Nevertheless, and this is vital to appreciating his project, Barth is not satisfied with maintaining any commitment to some supposedly identifiable set of theories or practices that can be carried through time in pristine and immutable condition. He speaks of a conversation between yesterday and tomorrow, not of a sacred deposit delivered yesterday which we are charged to carry through to tomorrow. Hence, Barth can agree in principle with Roberts’ rejection of “The mechanical recapitulation of Christian doctrine merely as items in an inherited belief system, undertaken as though nothing had happened.”55 But something has happened, and still is happening, in the continually fresh coming of God to speech. Barth’s critical re-envisioning of the Reformed doctrine of election in CD II.2 is a good example of resistance to what Roberts calls a “theological necrophilia”, and of attending to how the Reformers might freely speak to theology in the twentieth century.56 A slavish following of the past is not faithfulness to their witness. Barth critiques the Reformers for their decretum absolutum and its justifying deus absconditus on the basis of their insufficient application of their own theological claims about the noetic and ontic significance of Jesus Christ. Thus while he sets himself here against the tradition, he nevertheless feels that he is being faithful to their concerns of explicating the graciousness of the free/sovereign God to which the scriptures testify. In so far as we hold fast to their intention, we think we shall still be in agreement with them when we add at once that the freedom, mystery and righteousness of God in the election of grace must be understood in terms of Christian theology. [CD, II.2, 24] It is this that enables Barth to reshape—radically and christologically—the notion of “double predestination” as God’s self-election to be the God for humanity in Jesus Christ, and humanity to be for God in Jesus Christ.57 Barth’s critique of the Reformers is here more a case of internal correction than a case of an assertion of knowing better because of some God’s-eye perspective. Theologically, what this all amounts to is a recognition that our activity as Christian theologians proceeds only in and by means of a constant depend© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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ence. Moreover, this dependence is itself the fruit of an original, establishing and generative absolute dependence.58 Prayer, in other words, is the origin of conversation, and a theology of grace demands attention to the fact that we converse because we have been conversed with in Jesus Christ; and we listen to the O/other because we listen to God in Jesus Christ. Christ is the divine Word and the human hearing. Finally, for Barth the faith that characterises the church is one that is not only engaged in dialogue with itself but, in listening for God, one that listens for the Word in what may otherwise seem to be strange places.59 Listening to the World’s Judgement on the Church Milbank speaks of the futility of “dialogue” when recognising the incommensurability of perspectives and even of the end of “toleration”. This kind of language appears to encourage a retreat from the public forum in favour of a shouting from one side to the other. That, however, is misleading, as is the worry over his proposal to replace “dialogue” with “mutual suspicion”, because it fails to take seriously the kind of thing that is rejected under the name of “dialogue”—the reduction of differences to the same. Dia-logia, it could be argued, the “through-word”, suggests a sense of the immediacy of truth. This kind of truth is unavailable to Milbank, and indeed to Barth— which partially explains why Barth rightly refuses the simple adoption of the philosophers’ “presuppositions” as his own. The quotation from Barth’s Table Talk further indicates that Barth did not restrict the conversation to which his faith called him simply to the Christian tradition. Both in theory and in practice, he displays a willingness to engage with secular philosophy. Specifically “extra-ecclesial” elements can become witnesses to the Gospel, and are perceivable as such in the light of a christological hermeneutic. On this Bruce Marshall correctly argues that Barth’s christocentrism does not stipulate about the details of the process of revelation’s subjective appropriation, since, as Ronald Thiemann indicates, Barth means by the term “revelation” primarily the content of our knowledge of God.60 Barth himself affirmed: No one can say how this is done, not even the most devout and learned theologians of all times have been able to hear the Christmas message.61 All kinds of “extra-ecclesial” claims and facts can become witnesses to the Gospel, and can be perceived as such in the light of a christological hermeneutic. In other words, Barth’s Christian presuppositions provide him with an ear by which he can listen to voices from beyond the explicit pale of faith.62 Bruce Marshall is right to argue that “on his account the range of theological discourse seems unlimited” quite simply because, and here Marshall refers to Barth’s complaints concerning academic theology as a discrete and special faculty, © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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Barth does not distinguish theology from other sorts of discourse primarily by locating a special subject-matter for it, still less by the principled exclusion or rejection of other kinds of discourse. What distinguishes theology is rather the particular way in which it strives to order all discourses: it interprets and assesses them by taking “Jesus Christ as he is attested for us in holy scripture” as its primary and decisive criteria of truth and meaning.63 Barth refuses to divide the world up into incompatible spheres, incommensurable conversations, or radically discrete epochs. Any independence of theology from other academic disciplines, for instance, is little more than a temporary emergency measure and not a legitimation of theological sectarianism.64 Theology’s current academic independence gives theology an honour simultaneously too great (as if it possesses “special keys to special doors”, and has a “despair of the world”) and too small (theology does not then show that what other disciplines say about it derives from “alien principles”, CD, I.1, 6). Barth thus conceives theology as “the science which finally sets this task [talking of God], and this task alone, subordinating to this task all other possible tasks in the human search for truth”. The word “subordinating” is crucial here, for it suggests reading all other disciplines theologically rather than ignoring them in order to do theology. It comes as no surprise, then, to see Barth making positive, ad hoc but critical use of extra-ecclesial anthropologies [CD, III.2]; of Mozart’s music [CD, III.3, 297ff.]; and of the critiques of Christianity by Feuerbach and Overbeck. His use of philosophy is too complex to be reduced to any single systematic scheme.65 Barth deploys philosophy eclectically in the service of theology while intending to take care not to allow it to undermine or overwhelm the particularity of theology’s witness to God in Christ. Thiemann describes this as “the temporary borrowing of a tool to help us better understand the complex meaning of the Christian Gospel”, a shining of a light on our understanding of God’s commerce with the world (and therefore not a rival or even supplement to God in Christ).66 A short reflection on Barth’s use of Mozart underscores just how vital and necessary are theology’s engagements with discourses “external” to the matter of theology. In contrast to von Balthasar, Barth’s primary theologicalaesthetic interest lies more in Mozart’s music (through which he claimed to hear the praise of creation) than in the dramatic arts.67 Certainly an important question could be asked about what this privileging suggests for Barth’s theology. But, at the very least it implies that the critique of Barth as a church theologian unconcerned with explicitly “extra-ecclesial” elements is careless.68 Barth’s use of Mozart was not merely aesthetic, as if it could be trivialised simply as a matter of mere taste or a personal quirk.69 In the second place, it implies that the very concept of the “extra” or “alien” in defining an outside to theology of ecclesial discourse must be handled very carefully © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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lest it suggest that there is anything that does not fall under the claim of the electing, creating, and redeeming God of the world. Speaking of theological significance of Mozart, Barth asks: Why is it that for the receptive, he has produced in almost every bar he conceived and composed a type of music for which “beautiful” is not a fitting epithet: music which for the true Christian is not mere entertainment, enjoyment or edification but food and drink; music full of comfort and counsel for his needs . . . ? [CD, III.3, 297f.] This rhetorical query negates any possibility that Mozart merely impacted upon the scaffolding of Barth’s theology stylistically or illustratively.70 Barth’s was a profoundly theological appreciation of Mozart. Indeed, Barth’s “enthusiasm [for Mozart] is a too-little used index to the whole Barthian theology”.71 So argues Theodore Gill, who recounts an incident when leaving Barth’s study. On noticing portraits of Calvin and Mozart hanging side-byside, Barth announced: “My special revelation [looking at Calvin]. And my general revelation [smiling at Mozart].”72 It would not have been wholly inappropriate to have taken Barth’s words seriously here, and Barth himself suggests the possible direction. In 1958 he wrote: I am not especially gifted or cultured artistically and certainly not inclined to confuse or identify the history of salvation with any part of the history of art. But the golden sounds and melodies of Mozart’s music have been from early times spoken to me not as gospel but as parables of the realm of God’s free grace as revealed in the gospel—and they do so again and again with great spontaneity and directness.73 Mozart as parable! Barth’s earlier claim that “Mozart has created order for those who have ears to hear, and he has done it better than any scientific deduction could” [CD, III.3, 299] seems to echo deliberately Jesus’ closing of his parables (e.g., Matt. 11:15).74 But that Barth could as late as this speak of Mozart as a parable of grace, while continuing to deny “natural theology”, is an important indicator of the fact that Barth does not tightly draw boundaries around the question of those with whom theology may converse.75 Barth’s qualifications on the place and role of cultural particularities, being distinct from and unconfused with God’s grace of revelation while yet being seen potentially as witnesses to grace draw the reader back to his earlier writings. Certainly he had in one sense exploded his earlier theologico-cultural pretensions manifested in his 1910 article, “Die Christliche Glaube und die Geschichte”. There he acclaimed Michelangelo and Beethoven as sources of revelation alongside Paul. Yet, in another sense what he has done is find a theologically-controlled way of reading cultural products.76 What Barth refuses to do is provide concrete examples of this [CD, IV.3.1, 135].77 He even, on occasion, is hesitant to cite Mozart, since “All such phenomena are © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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doubtful and contestable.” An important point is being made here about the necessary reticence appropriate to a theology that entertains consciousness of its eschatological provisionality. In 1948 Barth had come to learn theologically—particularly through his earlier disillusionment with liberalism, but also practically through his disaffected socialistically inspired hopes for Russia—to say that It may well be that even in the best State Christians will never be able to express their gratitude for God’s gift and ordinance except in the form of serious opposition. But this implies that they will never be able to regard and treat even the worst State as wholly diabolical. . . . It [viz., the church] can accompany every political system. But it cannot serve strange gods. It cannot therefore ally itself with any political system, old or new, for better or for worse, just as it cannot oppose any system unconditionally. It can offer absolute and abstract obedience to none but to each only the relative concrete obedience or resistance which it is commanded to offer by the Word of God. The Word of God is not tied to any political system, old or new. It justifies and judges all of them.78 This undergirding sense of the sinfulness of all thought and action (including Christian thought and action) forms a vital piece of negative supplementation to the more positive use of Mozart through the theme of creation. Both of these together form a theology attentive to a plenitude of types of voices, all in order to enable a better understanding of God’s revelation in Christ. So, Barth maintains, “The central affirmations of the Bible are not selfevident . . . Every possible means must be used” to interpret it, and it is in this thematic context that he famously declares: God may speak to us through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really does. . . . God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist, and thus give us to understand that the boundary between the Church and the secular world can take at any time a different course from that which we think we discern [CD, I.1, 55].79 Hence, not only can these “extra-ecclesial” elements witness to God in Christ, they can be heard in an ad hoc fashion (the listening itself, however, can never be properly piecemeal but as broad as possible) as critiques of the ways in which the churches performatively imagine the significance and import of those events.80 As Rowan Williams says, “the church judges the world; but it also hears God’s judgment on itself passed upon it by the world.”81 And that statement opens theology to understanding its place in human thinking in a way that can prevent either its self-secluding escape from thought, or the flowering of the temptation to theological imperialism over the broader projects of human reflecting.82 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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The Virtue of Arguing Michael Higton rightly argues that a fundamental difference of approach obscuring appreciation of Barth’s commitment to conversation is the “assumption that conversation is fundamentally irenic—that it is seen best where friendly agreement flourishes, coupled with a willingness to differ on secondary matters”. Certainly questions need to be put Barth’s occasional practice of conversing through “strident argument”, and Higton admits that Barth “could, from time to time, be as unfair as theologians anywhere in his hasty characterisations and even hastier dismissals of others. But we must beware of stating this too strongly, as if Barth’s willingness to argue, and to argue hard, were itself a sign of failure.” Donald Allen and Rebecca Guy speak for many when they take conflict, including argument, as “generally mark[ing] the failure of social relations”, and therefore as a social pathology.83 But such a rejection of argument can only function as a regulative mark where religious beliefs and practices are reduced to bland differences in matters of private taste (spoken of in a neutral language) about which it would be tasteless to “kick up a fuss”. Such a rejection can only function where religious practices, and indeed the shape of all our politics and ethical practices, are removed from the dangerous ultimacy of worship to the local subjectivities of consumer choice. In other words, the rejection of argument, of serious disagreement, is possible only for a pluralism where all is allowed because nothing is taken seriously, and where nothing resists our interpretative advances because all has been denied its own particular form of selfunderstanding.84 Barth’s thought is resistant to this repressive tolerance, this easy and lazy pluralism which lets differences lie. The mark of a “failure of social relations” would be found in Barth not where he argues or engages in conflict (though we may sometimes regret his tone) but only where he would cease to believe that someone is worth arguing with or contradicting. For Barth it is evident that engaging in argument means both maintaining that the differences between his interlocutor and himself are real, and affirming that these differences matter.85 At his best, as is apparent in places in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, he displays a serious willingness to entertain, think through, and converse with an alternative point of view, and not to rest content with surface differences but to chase these down into the deep theological divisions that underlie them. Disarmingly, when musing on the implications of the comment that “there is no past in theology”, Barth maintains that: Only the heretic, indeed only the arch-heretic, the one who is totally lost even for God’s invisible Church, could really belong to the past and have nothing more to say to us. And we are in no position to identify such arch-heresy. Not even among avowed pagans, much less among Jews or © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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suspect, even very suspect, Christians. All heretics are relatively heretical, so even those who have been branded heretics at one time or another and condemned for their avowed folly and wickedness must be allowed their say in theology. The theology of any period must be strong and free enough to give a calm, attentive and open hearing not only to the voices of the Church Fathers, not only to favourite voices, not only to the voices of the classical past, but to all the voices of the past.86 Barth’s determination to let his disagreements with others be thoroughly theological is not—or, at least, not always—a sign that he simply wishes to assess other thinkers according to his own arbitrarily narrowed and imperiously imposed standards, and dismiss those failing to meet them. Rather, he regards it as his duty to think through their claims from within his own frame of reference, and not in the terms of some supposed neutrality. Because only in that way can he reach a genuine and (even self-)critical encounter with them, and only in that way can he genuinely be open to being challenged by them. Indeed, it is just such a Christian approach to conversation that can, in the language of Milbank, provide resources for agreementbeyond-mere-toleration, conversation that is constituted through the blending together of differences and not their denial or suppression. Something of this is can be sensed in Bernard Lonergan’s articulation of the rules of Christian conversation: “Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible”, and, one should add, be loving, and if necessary, change.87 Yet, William Placher’s qualification is crucial: while “Serious dialogue indeed requires openness to change, . . . it also demands a sense of how significant changing one’s faith would be.”88 The resultant sense of the unavoidable urgency and seriousness with which we must enter conversation from our particular theological position, and the willingness to think through other claims and ideas theologically, accompanies and substantiates Barth’s understanding of the fallibility and frailty of his own theology. However much his beguiling rhetoric sometimes lends itself to a sense of his theology’s impervious strength, his work is never wholly without an awareness of its own partial nature, and of its own necessary failure. This sense is, in a hidden way, firmly present in (not just despite) his most trenchant theological grapplings with those with whom he disagrees. In our formation as listeners to the Deus dixit we have learned to hear distortedly; we must therefore constantly return to our source, and become aware of our own pre-conscious, unconscious, and even conscious temptations to idolatry—and that means both being open to challenge, and being challenging.89 This is why Barth is able to announce to Harnack: I do not intend to entrench myself in those positions in which you, honoured Sir, . . . have seen me, simply because I know how frightenly relative everything is that one can say about the great subject which occupies © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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you and me. I know that it will be necessary to speak of it in a way quite different from that of my present understanding.90 Something of the sense of the honesty of this generous and (self-)critical approach may be found in a comment made towards the end of Barth’s life: Being truly liberal means thinking and speaking in responsibility and openness on all sides, backwards and forwards, toward both past and future, and with what I might call total personal modesty. To be modest is not to be skeptical; it is to see what one thinks and says also has limits. This does not hinder me from saying very definitely what I think I see and know. But I can do this only in the awareness that there has been and are other people before and alongside me, and that still others will come after me. This awareness gives me an inner peace, so that I do not think I always have to be right even though I say definitely what I say and think. Knowing that a limit is set for me, too, I can move cheerfully within it as a free man.91 That Barth did not engage with everyone and everything theologically is, in the end, testimony to the limitations of time and resources, and perhaps even to the range of conversations that Barth chose to become involved in. Moreover, that he did not necessarily understand equally well all those with whom he did engage does not undermine his sense of openness to, and respect for, others. It testifies, on the contrary, to the partiality and fragility of his all-too-human hearing. However, while the details of these absent conversations, and those conducted less well than we would like, may pose important questions about the manner of Barth’s actual practice, they do less to indict his theology of conversation. As David Ford argues, “there is only a limited number of exchanges any guest can take part in, and nobody needs to know what is going on in every conversation.”92 Nevertheless, “I do not see how theology which is related to a God who relates to everything and everyone can in principle limit its questions and conversations.”93 In principle, at least, there is no external perspective that cannot be re-created and integrated within Barth’s theological perspective, and that then means that there is a real sense in which, theologically speaking, there can be no proper “externality” to the universal scope of the theological imagination. Conclusion “Modernity”, if Milbank is correct, sets the rules for what dialogue must be outside of, or beyond, specific conversations. Whether that be in the form of interreligious or even ecumenical dialogue, or dialogues between theology and science, theology and philosophy, and so on, the point remains that these rules are arbitrary when universally projected—the imperialising of local rationalities and conversations.94 “Dialogue”, in other words, may prove to © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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be too ideological a discourse for theologians to participate in, too steeped through with a modern capitalist value-system, and thus too easily preventative of the truth-of-difference. If Barth is to be considered a conversational theologian, then “conversation-talk” requires a radical deconstruction in order to become sensitive to his concerns, subverting it at the very point of its denial of otherness by locating its internal tensions and lacunae.95 This deconstruction would subsequently refuse to set these rules universally, and therefore prior to conversational performances, but would require them to emerge from the midst of conversation while emphasising the importance of the setting and particularity of both conversationalist and (spontaneously) produced conversation. This is not to say that conversations do not require certain patterns and rules of constraint, if only to prevent moments of persuasion from degenerating into manipulation and propaganda (the ideological abuses of argument). But it is to admit that, if our engagements are to remain truly conversational, then these rules must not be externally imposed but allowed to arise from within the types of person-to-person encounters we have come to name as “conversation”.96 Christianity, in brief, seeks to bring to the surface the submerged assumptions of Western traditions of “dialogue”. And it does so by offering something different, something more responsible than difference—“for respecting the otherness of the Other”—and something far richer than mere tolerance, something that is achieved, paradoxically, “only through insisting on the finality of the Christian reading of ‘what there is’ ”.97 Then, at last, a conversation is established, which is itself the goal of true desire, and not a debate about truth, in the manner of “dialogue”.98 Such a responsible project would respect the eschatological reservation that qualifies all our living as provisional. It would provide the very selfreflexiveness and constraint that lies at the heart of Christian life.99 Theological truth-telling can never speak of a given, nor be closed in an unredeemed world, a world in which anyone’s seeing takes place through dirty and obscuring glasses, and where human sinfulness itself weaves its distorting effect on human perspectives on the Truth. The theological sense of conversation—with its participation in the triune God’s ways with the world—and Ricoeur’s notion of the silence of hearing that is distinguishable from dumbness,100 suggests an important qualification to the way the metaphor of “conversation” is used. Dia-logia (the movement through the word) is replaced suitably with con-versus (a turning towards or with another), for the very root metaphor of conversation reminds us that the purposes of conversations are usually more than mere informationsharing.101 As J. L. Austin astutely remarks, “There is something which is at the moment of uttering being done by the person uttering.”102 “A conversation is ‘something’—‘a performance’.”103 For instance, conversations can be © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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therapeutic, they can be relation-forming, playful, celebratory, erotic, and so on. There is an ethics of conversation, something like that displayed by Martin Buber as a living “towards the other”.104 It is particularly in this ethical agency that theology “goes public” for the healing of the world. Theology, then, is most truly itself when it interrupts self-indulgent silences in the name of the God whose joyful sounds are those of peacemaking. It speaks properly when it attends to the dehumanising power-relations operative within our conversations and witnesses instead to their healing in the peace of the Gospel. Though needing to be read in its context, one can admit that the negativity of Milbank’s preference for “mutual suspicion” over “dialogue” is misleading. He intends to value a securing of harmony through, and not as a subversion of, difference; perform a continuous conversation not bound by the Socratic constraints of dialogue on a neutral common topic; and learn constantly to receive Christ again, from the unique spiritual resources of other cultures. These are manifestly all ways of continuing the work of conversion, although there is no guarantee of conversational success or of persuasion. Perhaps it would be more apposite to claim here that one has not only to be suspicious, but also suspicious of being suspicious so as to present an alternative to consumer society. This conversation, an act in which we can only ever be “apprentices”,105 is a risk of self-exposure, as unpredictable conversation between people always must be when personal autonomy and responsibility are respected. Not only is there the possibility that the conversation partners could turn venomous, or that we succumb to temptations to totalise the face of the other by overlaying our own image on her or his face, but that we may be discomforted and further destabilised by the shining of a light on the spaces we inhabit and things we value.106 “Conversation” may prove, then, to be too limited a metaphor for what it is that theologians think that theology is and does. But while Milbank—with his intellectualist couching of “conversation”—seems not to observe this, there is much in Barth that does. In particular, Barth’s notion of being before the other with its image of fellowship regulating inter-human knowing [see CD, III.2, 243–274] challenges the adequacy of the metaphor. Nevertheless, the theme of “theology as conversation” (and not merely theology in conversation) may give some sense to other metaphors by indicating their direction—a conversation for the sake of the healing of the world, the best public service that communities of hope, as learning the discipleship of conversationalists, can render to a world growing increasingly tired and cynical. What theology can do is resist any premature closure of the practice of conversation by asking “whose public” are we speaking of while reminding questioners of the formed nature of their own commitments. In locating the importance of Barth’s practice of doing theology conversationally one could advertise the important candidates-for-conversation© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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partner with whom he did not converse, but should have. (Of course, our determination of who these are depends to a great extent upon what it is that we value). But while that will suggest what directions may be pressed for taking the painful yet joyful, educational step of identifying Barth as a theologically interesting and perennially important conversation-partner,107 it should not evade the importance of conversation for him, both in theory and in practice. NOTES 1

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My thanks especially are due to Dr. Mike Higton for his sagacious comments on this paper and also for his contribution to a shorter co-authored piece which I cite in places: Mike A. Higton and John C. McDowell, “Introduction: Barth as Conversationalist”, in Conversing With Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming). James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991 Delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 131. Barr, p. 7. Barr, p. 1. Barr, pp. 10f. Barr, p. 10 n10. John Hart, Karl Barth vs. Emil Brunner: The Formation and Dissolution of a Theological Alliance, 1916–1936 (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2001), p. 207. While he underplays the important theological content of many of Barth’s worries, Gary Dorrien claims that “in the [dialectical theological] movement’s early years, Barth was wary of Brunner for reasons that, at first, had more to do with differences in personality and style than with substantive theological disagreements.” Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology Without Weapons (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), p. 108. This failure to appreciate the sense of what is theologically at stake for Barth in Brunner’s pamphlet is accentuated by Barr’s thesis that it was Barth’s prior theological commitments that determined his incapacity to hear that Brunner was not developing a theology even potentially sympathetic to the German Christians. See Barr, p. 13. Citation from Barth in A. Szekeres, “Karl Barth und die natürliche Theologie”, Evangelische Theologie Vol. 24 no. 5 (1964), pp. 229–242 (p. 229). Barr, pp. 128f. Barr, p. 11. “[I]t was the internal theological development in Barth’s mind that caused him to perceive the German situation in terms generated by his own theology, and therefore to see it as a final manifestation of natural theology.” “[I]t is the judgement of people who see the entire world and its history very much through the glass of their own particular theology.” Barr, pp. 116f. Barr, pp. 38, 20. John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), p. 9. Barr, p. 131. Barr fails to substantiate his impressions (developed from the Barth of the Barth-Brunner dispute of the 1930s) by substantive and detailed exegesis of Barth’s writings. Karl Barth, Karl Barth-Rudolph Bultmann Letters 1922–1966, edited by Bernd Jaspert, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), p. 65. Barr, p. 116. Clark Pinnock, “Karl Barth and Christian Apologetics”, Themelios Vol. 2 (1977), pp. 66–71 (p. 70). Anthony Flew cites Barth as asserting that “Belief cannot argue with unbelief: it can only preach to it.” See God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. 9. Barr, p. 38: “Barth is shouting down every contrary opinion, defying anyone to think or say anything other than what he thinks and says, inventing specious forms of words to bring the text into conformity with his views.” Pinnock, p. 66.

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John C. McDowell Richard Roberts discovers in the Römerbrief, and its Sitz im Leben in the “first postmodernity”, precisely the rudimentaries of the theologia viatorum. See A Theology on its Way? Essays on Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), pp. 196ff. Richard H. Roberts, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications” in S. W. Sykes (ed), Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 88–146 (pp. 123, 132). Richard H. Roberts, “The Ideal and the Real in the Theology of Karl Barth” in New Studies in Theology 1, eds. Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes (London: Duckworth, 1980), pp. 163–180 (p. 165); 1991, xv; cf. Pinnock, p. 70. A similar account of Barth’s “totalitarian” method can be found in Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1985), p. 16; Richard Crigg, Theology as a Way of Thinking (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), pp. 39–48. For a critique of Pannenberg, here, see Paul D. Molnar, “Some Problems with Pannenberg’s Solution to Barth’s ‘Faith Subjectivism’ ”, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 48 (1995), pp. 315–339. Roberts, 1979, pp. 144f. Roberts, 1980, p. 177. Roberts particularly notes that the temporal character of Barth’s treatment of the “Resurrection-time” is problematic, a freeing from temporal enclosure (CD, IV.1, p. 313). This is further encapsulated in Barth’s discussion of election, for herein the fulcrum is shifted from incarnate history to eternal decision (1979, p. 120). It is not time per se, upon which attention must be concentrated, but eternity as the temporal plenum from which time takes its reality (1979, p. 108). So Barth argues that election is something that “happened to and not in their human nature and its possibilities, to and not in their human history and its development” (CD, II.2, p. 321). Roberts, 1979, p. 145. Roberts, 1991, p. 175. Similarly, see Stephen H. Webb on a Barthian lapse into the Protestant scholasticism of a stable authorial voice, over-confident logocentrism, authoritarian position, and closed system. Refiguring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl Barth (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 153. Pinnock, p. 71. Roberts, 1979, p. 145: “the Incarnation . . . hovers above us like a cathedral resting upon a cloud.” Pinnock, p. 66. On Roberts’ assessment of Milbank, see “Theology and the Social Sciences” in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Twentieth Century, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 700–719, especially pp. 709–711. Paul Lakeland, echoing a phrase from Raimundo Panikkar, claims that “Milbank’s manifesto is a shameless reassertion of the premodern superiority of Christendom” Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), p. 68. John Milbank, “The End of Dialogue” in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), pp. 174–191. Milbank, p. 177. Roberts believes that Milbank privatises the range and scope of theological conversations. See “Theology and the Social Sciences” in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 700–719; “Article Review: Transcendental Sociology? A Critique of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory Beyond Secular Reason”, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 46 (1993), pp. 527–535. Cf. Ian Markham, Truth and the Reality of God: An Essay in Natural Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 39f. Milbank, p. 177. Similarly, Glyn Richards, Towards a Theology of Religions (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 156. Milbank, pp. 177f. Kenneth Surin, “A ‘Politics of Speech’ ” in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), pp. 192–212 (p. 200). Milbank, p. 181. Something of this is detectable in a comment of Don Carson’s to the effect that “It is crucial that we learn the gospel and proclaim it. But it is also vitally important to understand that the people to whom we speak bring with them their own particular prejudices, back-

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grounds and biases. . . . [W]e must address the cultural presuppositions of our hearers so that we do not unwittingly obscure the gospel.” Don A. Carson, “The Worldview Clash”, Southern Cross Quarterly (Summer, 1998), reprinted www.focus.org.uk/carson.htm. Are not Christians also equally culturally embedded, and the way the Gospel is heard, received, and then proclaimed to others coloured by that embeddedness? The church is too close to, and bound up with, its host cultures for it ever to be able to declare itself (its truth and truthfulness) over against those cultures. As Graham Ward argues, “Christian utterance is constructed out of the cultural materials at hand. It is not homogenous but always hybrid, improvised and implicated in networks of association which exceed various forms of institutional, individual or sectarian policing. Furthermore, since Christians are also members of other associations, networks and institutions, what is both internal and external to Christian identity (and its continuing formation) is fixed.” Graham Ward, “Barth, Hegel and the Possibility for Christian Apologetics” in Conversing With Barth, Mike A. Higton and John C. McDowell (eds), (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming). Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 3. This makes ideology sound more like a matter of rationalisation, of ideas imagined to be infallible that consequently evade self-critical testing of their genetics, interests, and exclusions of the interests of others, than a matter of the very constitution of social subjects themselves. Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV.4 Lecture Fragments, trans. George W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), p. 224. Terry Eagleton rightly warns, however, that one person’s bondage and rigidity is another’s freedom and open-mindedness. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York and London: Verso, 1991), p. 4. Barth, 1981, p. 227. See, e.g., CD, I.1, p. 83. As human constructs, theological language and meaning occupy a space that is to be continually set in motion through fresh openness to the self-giving of the Word. See CD, I.1, pp. 12, 258ff. Certainty and assurance cannot pertain to any human endeavours, but can only be obtained momentarily in fresh renewals of the revelatory event. See CD, I.1, pp. 15, 27, 65, 203, 300. Eagleton argues that the claim that all discourse is ideological erases any sense from the term “ideology” since it requires that we can hope “that in any particular situation you must be able to point to what counts as non-ideological” (Ideology, p. 9). Karl Barth, Karl Barth’s Table Talk, ed. John D. Godsey (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), p. 63. Karl Barth, “Foreword to the English Edition” in Otto Weber, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: An Introductory Report on Volumes I/1-III/4 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953), p. 8. Barth, 1953, p. 8. Significantly Gordon Clark, approaching the CD with the expectation (or at least desire) to discover a coherent system, puzzles over a thinker who “seems to hesitate to affirm that theology is systematic and logical” and yet whose “actual practice is often explicitly systematic”. Gordon Clark, Karl Barth’s Theological Method, second edition (Hobbs, NM: The Trinity Foundation, 1997), pp. 63, 66. Barth, 1963, p. 19. See Adolf von Harnack in H. Martin Rumscheidt (ed.), Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth-Harnack Correspondence of 1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 39. Barth in Rumscheidt, 1972, p. 40. Mark C. Taylor, “Text as Victim” in T. J. J. Altizer (ed.), Deconstruction and Theology (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1982), p. 65. See Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. of sixth edition by Edwin C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 7. Barth, in Rumscheidt, 1972, p. 52. Milbank, p. 189. This notion of conversation qualifies Milbank’s appeal to the “incommensurability” of narratives. For instance, he claims that the religions remain “different accounts of Being itself or ‘what there is’ ” Ibid., p. 189. Barth, 1968, p. 1. Richard H. Roberts, “Theology and the Social Sciences” in The Modern Theologians, David F. Ford (ed.), second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 700–719 (p. 716).

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56 Roberts, 1996, p. 192. 57 “Primarily God elected or predestinated Himself” (CD, II.2, p. 162). 58 This admission erases George P. Schner’s comment that “conversation” accords an active role to the theologian “over the receptive moment of the religious attitude, an obvious debt to modernity’s emphasis on rationality as constructive”. George P. Schner, “Metaphors for Theology” in John Webster and George P. Schner (eds.), Theology After Liberalism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 3–51, p. 30. 59 This ‘broadening’ of the places of listening and conversation lead Barth to refigure the image of church. See particularly Barth, 1981. 60 Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 148f.; Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press 1991), p. 84. 61 Barth, Christmas, trans. Bernhard Citron (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1959), p. 25. 62 For an examination of this in the context of explicating Barth’s critique of natural theology see John C. McDowell, “A Response to Rodney Holder on Barth on Natural Theology”, Themelios Vol. 27 (2002), pp. 32–44. 63 Bruce D. Marshall, “A Theology on its Way? Essays on Karl Barth. By Richard H. Roberts [a Review]”, Journal of Theological Studies Vol. 44 (1993), pp. 453–458 (p. 456). Cf. Ingolf Dalferth, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 120f.: “[Barth] unfolds in a painstaking and detailed way a theological perspective of universal inclusiveness which incorporates and reconstructs the shared and public reality of our world within theology; and he achieves this by interpreting it theologically within the frame of reference provided by the christological exposition of the eschatological reality described”. 64 The pragmatics of this temporary measure raise a question over Graham Ward’s reading of Barth, put in the form of a rhetorical question, “Doesn’t Barth’s description of research conducted on the basis of ‘determining principles’ sound like the academic rationale for distinct and jealousy guarded faculty boundaries in a post-Berlin university?” (in Higton and McDowell). Ward does qualify this by recognising that in practice “His is now a ‘selfenclosed’ discursive reflection”. 65 Barth, “The First Commandment in Theology” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986), pp. 63–78. 66 Thiemann, p. 82. 67 See, e.g., CD, III.3, pp. 297ff. Any appraisal of Barth’s theological use of the aesthetic needs to counter the common, but seriously misinformed, understanding of the christocentricity of Barth’s account of revelation. God speaks one Word, but the manner of that Word’s coming to our speech cannot be confined to, although it is primarily bound to, the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. That humanity, Barth makes clear, is that which regulates one’s reading and assessment of these words. 68 But as Eugene Rogers argues, “The biblically system hermetically sealed off against the world is a parody of Barth, opposing his Christology.” Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 155. Much more satisfactory and provocative is Hans Frei’s description that “there was in Barth a self-conscious secularity of sensibility”. “Karl Barth—Theologian” in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 172. Barth’s perspective is far removed from any simple Christ-against-culture model, since it is not a denial of “the secularity of the world but is instead a reinterpretation of it theologically in the light of the presence of Christ and the world of meaning which it carries with it”. 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 (p. 30). 69 It is true that Barth mused that the angels sang Bach carefully in public, but sang Mozart at home for fun. Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, trans. C. K. Pott (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986), p. 23. Moreover, Barth does not seem to have let this infuse his sense of what worship is, declaring his logocentrism late in life, for instance: “the church building is intended to be the site of the preaching of the Word of God and of the prayers of the assembled congregation. . . . [Worship] in the strict sense © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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of the word— . . . [is] prayer, preaching, baptism, and Holy Communion.” “Protestantism and Architecture”, trans. Louise R. Ritenour, Theology Today Vol. 19 (1962), p. 272. Several commentators have observed how an almost musical sense of style and timing pervades the CD. See T. F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910–1931 (London: SCM Press, 1962), pp. 23ff.; George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 28; John Bowden, Karl Barth (London: SCM Press, 1971), p. 24. Theodore A. Gill, “Barth and Mozart”, Theology Today Vol. 43 no. 4 (1986), pp. 403–411 (p. 404). Gill, p. 405. Karl Barth, How I Changed My Mind, ed. John Godsey (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1969), pp. 71f. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, pp. 33f.: “What he translated into music was real life in all its discord. But in defiance of that, and on the sure foundation of God’s good creation, and because of that, he moves always from left to right, never the reverse.” Geoff Thompson, however, claims that Barth’s Mozart texts draw a distinction between “parable” and “Gospel”; whereas in IV.3.1, §69.2 Gleichnis “is synonymous with Gospel”. Consequently, Thompson asserts that Barth was primarily interested in Mozart’s capacity to listen to and hear creation, and not in his ability to “reveal” “. . . As Open to the world as any theologian could be . . .”? Karl Barth’s Account of Extra Ecclesial Truth and its Value to Christianity’s Encounter with Other Religious Traditions (unpublished Ph.D Thesis, Cambridge, 1995), Appendix C. However, (1) Barth appears to claim for Mozart a special divine inspiration [Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, p. 27]. Therefore, the resultant music would be an inspired witness. (2) In practice, Barth’s high regard for Mozart’s music sets the latter almost on the plane of theological sainthood, raising theological questions about creation itself. He even in 1968 suggested, albeit slightly tongue-in-cheek, that Mozart be beatified if not canonised. Cited in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1976), p. 493; cf. CD, III.3, p. 299. (3) Why would Barth use a key term, such as Gleichnis, in such a contrary way in a short time-period (1956–59)? (4) The text cited above from 1958 clearly calls Mozart a parable of grace. See How I Changed My Mind, pp. 71f. Barth is often accused of permitting natural theology to enter in by the back door. See, e.g., Emil Brunner, “The New Barth: Observations on Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Man”, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 4 (1951), pp. 123–135; Robert Palma, Karl Barth’s Theology of Culture: The Freedom of Culture for the Praise of God (Allison Park, PA: Pittsburgh Theological Monographs, Pickwick Publications, 1983), p. 75; Ray S. Anderson, “Barth and a New Direction for Natural Theology” in John Thompson (ed.), Theology Beyond Christendom: Essays on the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986), pp. 241–266. This kind of move, according to Marshall, is a suggestion that supposedly “alien” discourse “has a legitimate and traceable location within the community’s comprehensive vision of the world.” Bruce D. Marshall, “Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Universe of Truths” in Bruce D. Marshall (ed.), Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 69–102 (p. 74). Barth famously states that “God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really does” (CD, I.1, p. 55). However, he follows this with an injunction, “But, unless we regard ourselves as the prophets and founders of a new Church, we cannot say that we are commissioned to pass on what we have heard as independent proclamation.” Barth, Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings 1946–52, trans. E. M. Delacour and S. Godman (London: SCM Press, 1954), pp. 81, 86; cf. p. 98. For Barth, of course, this carefully delineated sense of political unfinalisability does not justify Christian political passivity. “The Church cannot live in permanent retreat, however pleasant its dreams as it sleeps away its mission to mankind. If the Church must remain free, above the changing political systems, this very freedom necessarily implies that the Church should participate in these events” (p. 89). Later in CD IV.3 Barth articulates the sense of this in terms of what he calls “the little light of creation” (CD, IV.3.1, §69.2).

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John C. McDowell The very eventfulness of grace in Barth requires careful handling so as not to disrupt the direction in which he moves towards a “secular sensibility”. It can, if not qualified, suggest an occasionalism (a charge put by Bonhoeffer) and that is, then, not too far removed from a modified (because it is still heard through mediating elements) revelational immediacy (a charge made by Moltmann), and again that the created order functions merely as a backdrop for grace (a charge levelled by Hendrikus Berkhof). Overplaying the eventfulness of grace prevents an adequate reconceptualising of theology beyond the kinds of dualism that seems to render all events of grace arbitrary interruptions into creaturely existence. Rowan Williams, p. 330. Marshall expresses this well when articulating the implications of any theological “absorbing the world”: “consider all discourse, and therefore all possible truth, to make a claim upon the community’s scripturally normed project of interpretation and assessment” (Marshall, 1990, p. 77). “The point of theological undertakings funded by this metaphor [viz. ‘absorbing the world’] is precisely not, as the objection suggests, to replace the world with the scriptural text, or to treat the text as a means of escape from within the world, but to interpret the world (all of it) through the text. Since we know the open-ended engagement with whatever truth claims are being made in the times and places in which the Christian community exists. This engagement is open-ended in at least two ways: it is always a necessary task, and it is always an incomplete task” (Marshall, 1990, p. 84). Donald E. Allen and Rebecca F. Guy, Conversation Analysis: The Sociology of Talk (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), p. 239. See William Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), p. 81. Cf. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (London: SCM Press, 1987), p. 23. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1972), p. 17. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York, NY: The Seabury Press, 1972), p. 231. Placher, p. 149. Marshall notes that a refusal to fix stable interpretative criteria can critically respond to a certain form of the charge of theological fideism—that of an imperialistic foreclosure of conversation. Yet that refusal to stabilise the criteria is still to be differentiated from any notion that all of our beliefs are put at hazard whenever we enter into conversation with those who hold beliefs different from our own. Even so, “Christians surely ought to be prepared for the possibility that encounters with alien belief systems may give them good reasons to give up or revise at least some of their beliefs, even if there is no external standard for deciding when this should happen or which beliefs should be changed” (Marshall, 1990, p. 90). Barth, 1972, p. 52. Barth follows his opening remarks in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century with the claims that “Of course, there is no method, not even a theological one, by means of which we can be certain of catching sight of theology. In this way, too, it can escape us, because we are inadequate to the task it poses” (p. 15). Characteristically, however, Barth cannot let the matter rest there and comments on the risky, but necessary, venture of theology. Karl Barth, “Liberal Theology—An Interview” in Final Testimonies (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), pp. 34ff. David F. Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 271. David F. Ford, “Salvation and the Nature of Theology: A Response to John Webster’s Review of Self and Salvation: Being Transformed”, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 54 (2001), pp. 560–575 (pp. 566f.). Ronald Wardhaugh, How Conversation Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 7: “In order to participate in conversation, you must be a willing party to a certain worldview. . . . You may have reservations about certain matters, but unless you are prepared to meet others on common ground and ignore differences which can only be divisive there is little hope that any kind of communication will occur.” Cf. Allen and Guy, p. 11. But it may be the case that the only commonality that is required is the willingness to engage in conversa-

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tion. As Placher observes, “particular conversations can start from whatever their participants happened to share and go from there” (Placher, p. 12). A genuine pluralism does not force us all to share the same assumptions, but it finds ways in which we can talk with one another. As Milbank makes clear in his monumental Theology and Social Theory, “even the most radical Western notions of justice and freedom”, and for the purposes of his paper—dialogue—are merely secular shadows of those learned from liberalism’s Christian past (particularly, for Milbank, the past/tradition that is seen to be at its best in Aquinas), and as such are not well served by secularity. Christians have reasons internal to their traditions for conversation—therefore there is no need for them to look for universally justifying reasons to converse or rules to guide their conversational performance before the conversation has even begun. As mentioned earlier, Christians must insist that human activity is dialectically in constant dependence, and that dependence is recognised as being the fruit of an originatory, establishing and generative absolute dependence. Prayer, then, forms the beginning point (logically speaking) of the theological conversations of those who witness to humanity in Christ’s having been conversed with, and simultaneously having listened to the O/other. Milbank, pp. 188, 189. Tolerance is a good start, being better than violent forms of disagreement. However, it is only a start and is shallow unless enriched. As Ian Markham suggests, “We need to move beyond tolerance, to active engagement and concern in the life of others.” See Ian S. Markham, Plurality and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 188. Yet, there is a danger lurking in the active voice of Milbank’s idea of out-narration—it can, if left unchecked, render the process of listening to what is truly other unspeakable. Romand Coles discovers the trouble in the limits that Milbank ascribes to the Holy Spirit: “What if the Holy Spirit, as ‘indefinite spiritual response,’ as ‘radically external relationality’ partially exceeds the Church? . . . Might not the Spirit’s response lie in multiplicitous realities with no such Christian selfconsciousness?” “Storied Others and Possibilities of Caritas: Milbank and NeoNietzschean Ethics”, Modern Theology Vol. 8 no. 4 (October, 1992), pp. 331–350 (p. 349). Milbank, p. 189. Pinnock’s sense of creation, by contrast, is insufficiently eschatologically nuanced. He seems to secure Christian identity so as to open avenues of apologetic argument with those whose identities are formed elsewhere, and yet who can, with a little bit of coaxing, see from the universe the unambiguous hand of God. However, as David Burrell argues, we are never in a secure place either to argue down another, or even to know another. See David B. Burrell, “Friends in Conversation” in Eric O. Springsted (ed.), Spirituality and Theology: Essays in Honour of Diogenes Allen (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1998), p. 29. Paul Ricoeur: “To keep silent is not the same as to be dumb, however. To keep silent is to let things be said by others. Silence opens a space for hearing.” “On Accusation” in Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 61–79 (pp. 73f.). Pace Allen and Guy, p. 240. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 60. Wardhaugh, pp. 39f. For example, two people in a village discussing the morning’s weather are performing much more than providing information. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Collins, 1961), p. 47. Burrell, p. 33. Burrell, p. 36: “[W]e are all called to a radical ‘unknowing’ in the face of the offer of divine friendship extended to us, and so stimulated to let go of our endemic desire to protect our own life, reputation, and opinions.” One needs to remember, however, the partialness of the conversational metaphor with reference to texts. On this, see Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (London: SCM Press, 1988), p. 6.

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