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142 six Barth How to Speak Nevertheless about God— The Analogy of Faith In his critique of onto-theology, Heidegger quotes 1 Corinthians 1:20, ‘‘Has not God let the wisdom of this world become foolishness?’’ links this wisdom to what Aristotle calls first philosophy and he calls onto-theology, and then asks, ‘‘Will Christian theology make up its mind one day to take seriously the word of the apostle and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness ?’’ (WM/1949, 276). Apparently he had not kept up with his theological reading and was unaware of Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans (whose first and importantly revised second edition appeared in 1919 and 1922 respectively ) and Church Dogmatics (which began to appear in 1932). For it would be hard to find a theologian closer to Paul’s heart on this point than Barth. In fact, he goes so far as to lump science and history and philosophy and theology (!) together as sites in which the world not only ‘‘exists side by side with God,’’ but ‘‘has taken His place, and has itself become God,’’ resulting in the ‘‘deified world’’ of ‘‘Nature and Civilization, Materialism and Idealism, Capitalism and Socialism, Secularism and Ecclesiasticism, Imperialism and Democracy’’ (ER 52). In each of the two towering texts just mentioned, God’s transcendence in Barth 143 its epistemic mode is utterly pivotal. It is not for developmental reasons that I look at both the early and later Barth, for I agree with those who see more continuity than discontinuity between the two.1 It is rather because in the first case the primary opponent is liberal Protestantism, while in the second the battle is waged at least as much against Roman Catholicism and permits us to bring Barthian thought into direct engagement with Thomistic thought. The different formulations of God’s epistemic transcendence are at least as much due to different debate partners as they are to developmental changes. In both cases Barth sees himself as a kind of successor to Augustine in his defense of divine grace and freedom against the Pelagians. One might say that for Barth modernity is epistemic Pelagianism.2 His early protest is against the quintessential modernity of the theological tradition in which he had been trained, stemming from Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Troeltsch, and his own teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann, namely that it sought to make the human subject the ground and basis of our knowledge of God.3 Anticipating Levinasian language, we can say that in any such theology Barth sees the reduction of the other (God) to the same (human being). Or, to put it in Feuerbachian terms, theology becomes anthropology. ‘‘God Himself is not acknowledged as God and what is called ‘God’ is in fact Man’’ (ER 44).4 Barth insists that ‘‘one can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice’’ (TM 196). He finds liberal Protestantism to be guilty of these faults in two often closely intertwined ways: first by making religious experience the basis of theology, as in Schleiermacher, and second by making historical knowledge (of Jesus) the ground of our knowledge of God.5 Our affective and cognitive capacities are taken to be the bridge by which we pass over from the human to 1. See Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 134, 244 (henceforth abbreviated as CRDT), and G. C. Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Harry R. Boer (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1956), p. 10. 2. In discussing these two texts I will draw on other writings that are properly associated with each. 3. See McCormack, CRDT 130, 182, 207. 4. Berkouwer writes that Barth ‘‘is convinced that the whole of modern Protestant theology stands or falls with its subjectivistic point of departure and that its anthropology, which forms the background and foundation of its entire structure, stands essentially defenseless against the criticism of Ludwig Feuerbach, because man is more central in that theology than the power and sovereign grace of God.’’ Triumph, p. 167. Cf. ER 122, and for explicit references to Feuerbach, pp. 236 and 316, along with more extended discussions in ‘‘Ludwig Feuerbach,’’ in TC and ‘‘Feuerbach’’ in PT. 5. A glimpse of what bothers Barth on this second score can be seen in a book on Ritschl’s theology. A chapter entitled ‘‘A System Rooted in the...

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