A Farewell to All That

In a remarkably candid, remarkably elegiac autobiography, Charles Darwin notes the revolution in his own thinking that the discovery of natural selection brought about in him. In his young adulthood, he writes, “the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelly, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays.” ¹ He reports an intimate delight with the plastic and musical arts in those years; and still, in his old age, he considers them the “higher aesthetic tastes.” But now, all that has fallen to the dust. “I cannot endure a line of poetry: I have tried to lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that is nauseated me.” Music and painting bring no joy but rather remind him of the work that now consumes him. Darwin is puzzled by this loss, even rueful: “The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.” But his mind now, it seems, is a “kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts”; and that is that. For Darwin the naturalist, it is a farewell to all that.

We may wonder just how a person loses a taste or reception to an early passion. It is a common, if the somber note in most human lives: we just lose our own way back to an old pleasure, an old idea, and an old love. We understand it still, perhaps, but now from the outside. We cannot in truth explain the loss, though we usually have our reasons. It may not cause nausea, exactly; but what was once warm with life now is cold, sterile, and alien. The melody just stops. Truth is of course compulsive; we cannot look away from something that now claims us as true. And that may drive all before it, making the old not simply passé but false. That may prompt a final reckoning with the passions of one's former life, an elegy, and leave-taking of something that once fired one's imagination and intellect, but can do so no longer.

I wonder if something of this kind has unfolded in the religious and spiritual passions of Bruce Marshall. I most certainly do not think his mind has become “a kind of machine for grinding out general laws!” But the art form that is the work of Karl Barth has evidently become alien, external to him and his Catholic commitments. He has reasons, of course, and those must be taken seriously. But the air of the old love lost animates this entire essay. An unmistakable air of the valedictory sweeps over Bruce Marshall's essay, a final arrangement of those building blocks before they are finally put away, pillars once so sturdy, so vital, in the crucible that forged Marshall as an exemplary theologian of the Christian faith. Marshall wants us to know that as a true son of the Church, he simply cannot receive or hear the Church Dogmatics as proper Nicene theology. The rhythm and dynamism, the music of Barth's theology, now leaves him cold, it seems. And just why that is, is the mystery of our life under the Providentia Dei. But I think we can say that Karl Barth, once a giant in Marshall's pantheon, must now be certainly put away.

He is grateful, he says, for the early years with Barth under the remarkable tutelage of Hans Frei, but grateful in that manner of one who says: Now that I am a man, I put away childish things. Karl Barth, once admired in Catholic circles, invited as ecumenical peritus to Vatican II, author of the most daring and captivating and brilliant multi-volume Christian systematics of the modern era, must now be seen in this elegiac light as simply non-Nicene, an errant on central truths of the Christian faith, the Doctrine of God and the Doctrine of Salvation. Marshall's own brilliant Trinity and Truth gave us a glimpse of how Barth might undergird a scholastic, analytic theological program, and it has a lasting influence in analytic theology to this day. But the tone of this current essay, however, we assess the arguments advanced, remains a rueful but firm leave-taking. It really is a farewell to all that.

Now how did we come to this place? I think the mechanism that drives this valediction comes in Marshall's poignant conclusion. There he reports on his dissertation research that comprised the major systematicians of the modern era, Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, read in tandem with Thomas Aquinas. “From Rahner I never expected much guidance,” he reports, and in this way, he offers an odd bit of continuity between the instruction given at Yale and the current reaction in some quarters of the Catholic world; neither considers Rahner an exemplary theologian. For my own part, I think the dismissal of Rahner from the inner courtyard is a profound loss to theology; he is a remarkable systematician of the Nicene faith. But more vital still to the conclusion Marshall reaches is his report on his early theological searching: He would write down some of his theological thoughts, and “go to both of them [Barth and Thomas], looking for answers to the questions I had.” Barth, he says, writes a “great farrago of words,” one after another—a telling and rather a pitiless summary, I would say, of the exquisite and passionate language of the Church Dogmatics—and at the end, he “was rarely sure what Barth's answer to my question was, still less what precise reasons I might have for thinking his answer a good one.” Post tenebrae, lux: “I could always find in Thomas answers to the questions I was asking, from how we can intelligibly believe that God died on the cross to whether we should eat a Eucharistic host if it bleeds before our eyes … Answers were invariably on offer, clearly stated, backed up with reasons (often compelling ones) and connected in illuminating ways to other questions and answers.”

I think this autobiographical note, as he styles it, serves also as a programmatic one: Theology is about answers. Now I too admire and often covet answers in theology, and I relish a fine, clear, and persuasive argument in defense of Christian teaching. Thomas indeed offers answers to almost any question, and I too turn to him for a precise summary, a crisp notation of opposing positions, and a reply that rests upon fundamental axioms of the faith and incorporates, wherever possible, the objections, seen in a new light. I also share what I take to be Marshall's interest in the more straight-forward metaphysical reading of Thomas. Though deeply attractive to me on other grounds, the apophatic reading of Thomas that springs from great interpreters such as Pieper and Turner, and that is now expressed powerfully in the theology of Karen Kilby, has never won me over as a partisan. Like Anselm, whom I read as a forceful argumentative metaphysician, Thomas Aquinas seeks a clear and well-established position in doctrine and in morals and offers an argument from entailment or from convenientia that sets forth Christian teaching with wonderful firmness. I see why a young theologian, who began to read in the analytic philosophical tradition, would find answers of these kinds attractive and compelling.

All the same, it does not seem to me that “answers” are an exhaustive form of proper Christian teaching. I don’t think Karl Barth was intending to give answers, certainly not of a scholastic vein; he had another program in view. Barth, I believe, considered Christian theology principally an act of hearing and responding to Holy Scripture. In my view, the via media attributed to Barth in Marshall's essay—the narrow road between lifeless orthodoxy and pulpy Liberalism—was never Barth's own. He may be “orthodox and modern,” in the phrase of a distinguished Barth interpreter, but Barth's life-work I believe was never aimed at either of these ideals. The revolution he forged after a thorough schooling in post-Kantian Liberalism is uniquely his, uniquely Biblical. He hears the viva vox in the Bible, and with Biblical realists such as the Blumhardts ringing in his ears, Barth begins to write theology that follows the pattern and dynamism of Holy Writ. Like Thomas, then, Barth was a Doctor of the Sacred Page, but he took a step further than did Thomas in this school. Barth believed proper dogmatics was the act of acknowledging, reporting, and expressing the movement of Almighty God in Holy Scripture; and only that. This was his version of the Reformation sola Scriptura. Hans Frei spoke of this as a “leisurely unfolding of the inner logic of Christian belief,” a phrase I can well imagine formed part of Marshall's early years under Frei's direction. Such a program does not yield tidy or plain or crisp answers.

We follow the history of ancient Israel, we outline its struggles, failures, and deliverance; we re-describe the humility of the Son of God in His fearful forward striding toward Golgotha; we reflect upon that journey for God's ways and works toward a sinful world. We ask, fresh each day, how God will instruct us in proper doctrine; we inquire each time how we might see with renewed hearts how God acts to judge and deliver the rebellious house of lost creatures. This will mean a kind of revisability of all dogmatic positions, a principled openness to correction by the Spirit of the Risen Christ. It will include also a conviction that God will lead the theologian to greater depths of confession and acclamation; the theologian stands at the ready to be questioned in this way and to be sent off with fresh commissions. Now, all this does not mean a theology of the night wherein all cats are grey. Of course, Barth held distinctive positions! The very claims that Marshall disputes in the Doctrines of God and Salvation are particular positions held to be Scriptural and dogmatic in proper Christian teaching. But Barth takes these positions because he believes them to be the pattern of the Bible, and they must be ventured whether we welcome them or no.

Barth holds that a firm tentativeness of just this kind is the dogmatic expression of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith alone. The solas do real work for Barth. In his long discussion of the Federal Theologians, ² Barth scolds the older Protestant scholastics for promoting sola fide in doctrine but not in epistemology or method. It is this failure to grasp that justificatio covers the whole of Christian teaching and the manner of discovering it that leads the older dogmaticians to appeal to natural reason, to notions self-evident and common-sensical, and to arguments built out of the common legacy of European elites in university posts. In this way, the seventeenth century paved the way for the Enlightenment rationalists, a theological and historical judgment Barth held his whole life long. This is a radical program. Barth does not simply hold that theology rests upon revealed truths and upon the authority of Scripture, though to be sure he holds this in common with Thomas. Nor is he simply making a distinction, however complex, as did Thomas, between faith and reason. Rather, Barth believed that all forms of knowledge—categories, arguments, entailments, foundations—were justified through grace by faith alone.

What is assumed as a metaphysical argument in earlier theologians must pass through this fiery cauldron of justification; the very structure of human thought must be forged anew by the assault of grace upon the pride of human knowers. It is easy to imagine that Barth is simply giving way to Kantian scruples here. And most certainly Kant was an important philosopher to the young Barth! And it is also true that Barth like other intellectuals of the inter-war years incorporated a new-found uncertainty about the canons of rationality, sometimes at great cost. But I think something far deeper is underway here. We know truths about God because they are revealed to us; true. And we study the Holy Scriptures to follow the flight of this Holy Spirit; also true. But the Logos of God casts in the shade all our rationality, judges it, and renews it in costly grace; and that relativizes all our means of knowing and all our metaphysical certainties. Just this is the revolution in Barth's thought that is worked out in scholastic detail in his book on Anselm. It is an argument that undoes itself. It relativizes—but it does not make all knowledge irrational or illogical. On the contrary! Barth holds that the highest ratio is God Himself, and to receive His Truth is to receive the clearest light of reason. But we must take our premises, our arguments, our conceptuality, and our conclusions to Thermopylae, the final fiery and mortal testing of all human reason by the Intellectual Judge who is God.

An “answer” in Barth's theology, then, is an act toto caelo distinct from the answer we find in the medieval Schoolmen. Perhaps it is better, in the end, to say that Barth does not intend to give answers, and does not imagine he is the sort of being who could. This is the odd air we sometimes breathe in the Church Dogmatics of a theologian who reports what he sees, whether he actually likes it or no, or endorses it as his own. Barth is not disingenuous; far from it! Rather he is moving the center of theological epistemology out from the creature to the Creator, and this entails, Barth thinks, a willingness to say things in theology that are offensive to us and overthrow all our pieties and confidences. Because God is true, they must also be true; but we may not be able to say how that is so. Recently some Barth interpreters have picked up the resonance of this language with Thomas’ famous discussion of analogy in Q 13 of the Prima Pars. And certainly, formal patterns converge here. But Barth makes of theology a “following after,” a testimony, not an argument, and its center must always remain in God alone. This is why Barth never tires of saying that we cannot know the meaning of a term prior to its use by the Lord Christ. In His Spirit, Christ gives definition and definite shape to the creaturely words we use; and prior to that sovereign act, we have no tools at hand at all.

It is this reliance upon free justification that undergirds Barth's Doctrine of God. The elements that Marshall adduces about subordination and superordination are indeed startling elements of CD IV/1, and it would be a daring theologian who would agree with Barth here with an easy conscience. I myself find these teachings unpalatable and unpersuasive, and I agree with Marshall that it is exceedingly difficult to see how Arian subordinationism is warded off properly here. But this is exactly Barth's point! Our objections to his position are his allies, not his opponents. He says throughout this section that this is a difficult, a shocking, a puzzling position; that no earthly philosopher would cotton to such an idea; that it undermines all the tidy ways we have understood Nicaea. But this is what Holy Scripture teaches, Barth says, and we must dare to report and take seriously what we have been shown. Marshall's objections, ones I share, rest upon common-sense notions of equality and of nature; for Marshall, they sum up the arguments—the answers—about the Divine Simplicity that God is. But such objections will not stand for a moment under Barth's cauterizing. Don’t complain to me! he will say. I am a herald of this Gospel and woe betide me if I do not preach it. The shining truth of the Gospel demands that we must affirm God's Being is in His Act. This is the radicality of the sola fide doctrine in Barth's hands, and it is a heroic act of bullet-biting.

What Barth has done in the Church Dogmatics, it seems to me, is to show that Nicene orthodoxy can take other forms than doctrinal answers. As a good Thomist, Marshall unfolds and defends the Nicaean homoousios with the categories and arguments of the Summa. One simply leads to and is properly defended by the other. But this relation is not in truth one of identity. The Reformers looked back behind the university theologians to the Fathers of the Church and saw there a Nicene Symbol that was simply a re-description of Holy Scripture. The Bible spoke of the Beloved Son, begotten of the Father; it testified to a nativity from a Virgin, a Passion under a Roman procurator, a victorious rising on the third day, and to a Holy Spirit. The struggle great classicists such as Hanson or Ayres or McGuckin relate is one of proper exegesis of these cardinal texts, often drawn from Israel's Scriptures. Of course, this struggle involved argument! What is the nature of Divine Begetting? How is the Passion of the Son related to the majestic Sovereign Changelessness of God? If we speak of Three in God, how? But these clashes of interpretation and exegesis can be plausibly described as skirmishes over the way Holy Scripture speaks about God, in His Royal Inner Life, and in His gracious turning toward us. For this reason, the Reformers said, the non-Scriptural terms evoked in Nicaea could be justified as truly Biblical. It was this conviction, and not the particular arguments advanced by Athanasius or Augustine or the Cappadocians, that made these Biblical theologians confident that Nicaea was true and credible Church teaching. Such conviction led these Protestant teachers through the searing trials of rationalism, preserving them from the icy charge that the “Trinity was not found in the Bible.” The very distinction Calvin uses between “Biblical idiom,” the way the Bible customarily speaks, and “Church idiom,” the vocabulary of Conciliar dogma, simply rehearses this underlying conviction. We can rest easy if technical theological terms are not found in Holy Writ; it's the pattern, the movement of Inspiration and Incarnation that lies at the heart of the Nicene Creed; everything else is dependent upon it. Barth is heir to this tradition, and he believes that Nicene orthodoxy is a confession of the Son of God who went into the far country for us and for our sake. That this confession will lead us to positions that sound very strange, very taxing to our Ecclesial ears, is simply the sharp edge of the Sword of the Living God; it kills to make alive.

Something quite different is underway, I believe, in Marshall's second diagnosis, that Barth is un-Nicene in his teaching on the Salvation of sinners. Here we are not working our way through a Doctrine of God that contains something old made new, and something startlingly new claimed to be old, as old as Israel's fruitful hills. Rather in this section of Marshall's argument, we find ourselves in the deep thickets of the cause of grace, a sustained and complex quarrel among the Latin descendants of Augustine. Marshall says that Barth has made us “spectators” to our own redemption because the Divine determination to be for us in Christ is done apart and beyond us, untouchable by our own petty rebellions and refusals of grace. Marshall does note the long section in CD IV/3 on the Prophetic Work of Christ, and the commission He stirs up in us to follow, to witness, and to serve. He might have mentioned too the long sections devoted to the Work of the Holy Spirit in each of the part volumes dedicated to the Doctrine of Reconciliation. But even with these additions, I think Marshall would find the doctrine there inadequate to overcome his original verdict, for the ways of God in mercy toward sinners, in Barth's doctrine, are completed in the Eternal Counsels of God and enacted in time on the Roman cross. Something has taken place in Christ, in His obedient humanity, that is, for us, but also our substitute; this firm Christological reading of justificatio et sanctificatio makes Marshall confident that Barth has undermined the cardinal point of Salvation, that we, the sinner, are judged, corrected, and enlisted in our own redemption. Barth's teaching, Marshall thinks, is universalism in all but name, and in just this way violates the final dignity of the human person—her power to say no, irrevocably no. There must be consequences, perhaps eternal ones, to our decisions; if not, we remain mere “spectators” to the Divine Games carried out in Jerusalem.

Now, as Marshall knows, this is an old criticism of Barth, expressed by both Catholic and Protestant divines. And I too have felt the strain placed on the Doctrine of Sanctification by Barth's unwavering displacement of the sinner by the obedient Christ. But I think Marshall's is another strong mis-reading of Barth, governed by magisterial doctrinal commitments. Barth does not hold that we simply look on, while Christ goes His lonely way to the Cross. It is true, Barth says, that He “crowds us out”; He takes our sin for His own and stands in our place. There are passages too in Barth, slender but powerful, where he draws near to the venerable Reformed teaching that Christ undergoes the wrath of God against sin, a strong substitutionary doctrine. But in those same sections in CD IV/1, Barth carefully underscores that Christ “does away with us,” that sin and the sinner “really are dead,” burned to the ground by the Fiery Passion of the Son of God. Something—the main thing—happens to us in the Passio Christi; we have died with Christ. Our life now is the vivificatio under the command of the Spirit of Christ; we are His and placed in His service.

Of course, Barth knows the problem any Christian has with these strong claims of Christ's Personal Work: our own slothful, deceitful, and foolish life. A full Doctrine of Salvation requires a kind of “error theory” here. We must be able to plausibly account for the state of Christian lives, excepting those of great sanctity, that we see and inhabit each day. Marshall follows the traditional Catholic teaching here: By little and by little we work out our salvation under the varying gifts of grace, growing in love day by day. But Barth follows Protestant dogmatics here, and holds that Christians remain sinners while justified. All Christian life is a dying to sin and rising to the life of the Kingdom, utterly dependent upon grace, turning our eyes not to our own deeds but to Christ who alone saves. Barth did not hold to a universalism that relaxed this profound struggle for obedience, any more than did Rahner in his much discussed, much maligned teaching of the Anonymous Christian. Barth told his critics that he most certainly acknowledged and feared the reality of hell; the solitude of eternal separation from God filled him with proper Christian dread. He adamantly respected the human act of refusal. His remarkable exegesis of Judas in CD II/2 tells us that. And, Barth used the idiom of “decision” and “costly discipleship” every bit as much as did Bonhoeffer or Bultmann and his school. He knew the central mystery of Christ was that He was his Lord; and no servant is above his Master.

A Doctrine of Salvation or Reconciliation of this kind demands a vivid sense for the mystery of corporate realities, a life enclosed in Adam and in the Eschatos Adam. It is a register found more readily in de Lubac than in Garrigou-Lagrange, in Augustine and the Fathers than in most scholastics, Protestant or Catholic, in Erich Auerbach rather than Charles Hodge as readers of Holy Scripture. What happens in the humanity of Christ happens to us and for us, and that is true whether we recognize the truth of grace or no. Barth's position, then, is a metaphysical, not epistemic soteriology, and it follows I believe from his relentless and ambitious Christocentrism. That something can be extra nos and all the while intra nos is the very force of the Pauline insistence upon life “in Christ.” These differences seem to me to belong to the varying and competing schools of Augustinianism; I do not believe them to be Church-dividing or a foundational repudiation of Nicene orthodoxy.

So Barth in my book is vindicated as fully Nicene in both Doctrines of God and Salvation, though in a distinctly Reformed and proudly Protestant fashion. I respect Bruce Marshall's own decisions in faith and his most proper defense of his new Ecclesial home. But I wish for him less of the valedictory, less of the cutting of tethers to his own past. Barth remains one of the living voices of the Church Catholic, and though Balthasar never persuaded him to become a Roman Catholic, Barth offers all who read him a vision of Christian teaching suffused with and made urgent by the torrent of the living voice of Scripture, come majestically to earth in the One Lord, Jesus Christ. I wish Bruce well in his journey; and hope he will visit his old homes again, from time to time, with thanksgiving but also for refreshment and instruction in our common faith. Sometimes a farewell can be simply auf Wiedersehen, and the music and old enchantment can speak again. Though it seems that the old fire was not re-kindled for Darwin, it may be so for Marshall. I for one hope that is so.