Читать книгу Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference - Chris Boesel - Страница 10

In the previous chapter, I outlined three distinctive features of a faith that takes Abraham as a model. Two were structural. The first, God is distinct from all creation as sovereign Lord over all creation, and the second, relation to that God, in faith, is “prior to” and determinative of all historical, ethical relations.1 The third was substantive, entailing singular content. This God is the God of Abraham, the God who elects to bless all the nations through his and Sarah’s seed, through the lineage given birth to in the promised, and beloved, Isaac. I also gave a brief sketch of what a Christian faith that takes Abraham as a model might entail. To recap in biblical shorthand, the Church’s confession of faith—that salvation (of the nations) is in Jesus Christ (the promised seed of Abraham) and therefore, “from the Jews”—grounds and determines the Church’s understanding of and relation to the neighbor, including the Jewish neighbor. It is fairly clear that there is a little something here to offend everyone, the nations and the Jewish neighbor both. And perhaps quite rightly. Indeed, this is one of our questions: is offense necessarily identical with damage? I went on to suggest that the theology of Karl Barth could be taken as an example of this understanding of Christian faith. In this chapter and the next I will attempt to make good on that suggestion.

This will require doing the following. In this chapter I will demonstrate how certain assumptions of Barth’s theological vision and method, assumptions that he understood to guarantee the unalloyed goodness of the gospel news, entail both the structural and substantive elements of a faith that takes Abraham as a model, thereby constituting a form of interpretive imperialism in relation to the neighbor, to every neighbor, indeed, to the whole of creation. As such, so the argument will go, Barth’s assumptions serve as an example of the kind of Christian theology that many contemporary theologians critique as inherently unethical and attempt to remedy for the sake of the Jewish neighbor. As I have suggested earlier and will show in later chapters, this critique is grounded in ethical instincts formed and informed by the fundamentally modern instincts expressed by Hegel and others and given a particular, determinate shape more recently by Said. In the following chapter, we turn our attention to how Barth’s theological affirmation of Abraham comes by way of a displacement that casts the shadow of interpretive imperialism “back” upon the children of Abraham in a particular way, resonant of the long traditions of Christian supersessionism and anti-Judaism.

Taken together, then, these two chapters attempt to tease out the paradoxical situation in which a certain Christian affirmation of Abraham would appear to result in an ethically problematic (imperialistic) relation to the children of Abraham. Understanding the theological logic of this paradox—the inseparable link of affirmation and displacement—is key to understanding the challenge facing any genuine attempt at Christian responsibility in relation to the Jewish neighbor. My thesis, of course, contends that there is a contemporary corollary to this paradox: the attempt to remedy Christian faith for the sake of the children of Abraham occurs by way of a polemical (and imperialistic) rejection of Abraham. This second paradox is, at least in part, a result of a failure to fully understand the first, especially in regard to the interlocking web of Christian doctrine. But that is the concern of yet further chapters.

The “One Voice” of Revelation

Barth’s theology is often described as a theology of the Word, or a theology of revelation, and not without good reason. A quick sketch to get us up to speed (reader be warned, things move quickly in the following pages). Deus dixit; God speaks. This is the fundamental building block of both the method and content of Barth’s theology. It is, for Barth, to begin at the beginning. “In the beginning,” God speaks. But the Word then spoken, it is important to note, is not, for Barth, “Let there be light!” Rather: “Jesus Christ!” What a strange (and problematic) thing for God to say. And what a strange (and problematic) time for God to say it (problematic because, as we shall see, in both the content and timing of this divine shout all the ins and outs of the central problem of this book are already on the table before us). Nevertheless, as God’s primal speech act, this Word, “Jesus Christ!,” is just that, both act and speech, both a doing and a communication. It calls forth a relation of communion between God and an other, the human being—“Immanuel, God with us.” It also constitutes God’s self-giving self-disclosure to the creature by and through which She makes Herself known—“Hear this: I am with you.”2 For Barth, it is this first and decisive Word that is the reason for all the mighty and wondrous words—“Let there be . . . !”—that bring forth creation. As the Word of God, Jesus Christ is “God’s decree and God’s beginning. He is so all-inclusively, comprehending absolutely within Himself all things and everything, enclosing within Himself the autonomy of all other words, decrees and beginnings.”3

For Barth, faith is what happens when God speaks and is heard. And the knowledge of God (and of the creature) given in the divine speaking and human hearing of this Word, “Jesus Christ!”—i.e., the event of revelation—is then, for Barth, the subject of theology. He understands theology to be first and last a discourse of faith upon the knowledge of faith. Consequently, the primary obligation for such a theology must be to listen to the “One Voice” of revelation that is heard and known only in faith, in distinction from the cacophony of voices comprising human history, however compelling or urgent they may appear to be.4

The One Voice of revelation addresses us with a divine Word that we cannot address to or speak by ourselves. We can only hear it, receiving it as it is given to faith. It is a voice, then, that stands over against all human voices, of both self and the neighbor; it addresses us in stark distinction from all voices of human self-understanding and self-definition. This is not to say that the Christian theologian does not also listen to the voices of human history, both past and present. It is, however, to say that the One Voice of revelation heard and known in faith decisively determines the meaning and significance of all the other voices competing for a hearing—voices that Christian theology is free to hear and engage under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and, indeed, is bound in obligation to hear and engage in Christian freedom. But more of that later.

For now, we simply note that it is no surprise, given the above, that Barth begins his Church Dogmatics with the doctrine of the Word of God. Systematically speaking, the Word of God is both the method and the content, the subject matter, of Christian theology. The epistemological questions of method—How do we know God? Where do we begin? On what ground? With what source?—are not separable from the soteriological question of content—What is it that God has said and done (and continues to say and do)? What is the news? And is it good?

With regard to method: Deus dixit; God speaks.

One is immediately struck by the two structural elements of the interpretive imperialism entailed in the Kierkegaardian rendering of the faith of Abraham. (1) Barth distinguishes the obligation to the One Voice of divine address from all other obligations to all other voices laying hold of us in the vast multiplicity of historical relations. (2) He irreversibly subjects the latter to the former with regard to ontological priority and interpretive authority for Christian faith and theology. Again, this is not to say that the latter are ignored, silenced or shut out, but that they are only heard and interpreted in the hearing of the former, whose particularity consists in its essential distinction from human voices speaking a word that is essentially our own. These structural elements constitute a general interpretive imperialism in relation to all human self-understanding and self-definition grounded apart from and independent of the One Voice of revelation. We can hear an echo of Kierkegaard’s language regarding Abraham in Barth’s assertion that “God’s Revelation is a ground which has no higher or deeper ground above or below it, but is an absolute ground in itself . . . from which there can be no possible appeal to a higher court.”5 As constituted by and in the event of revelation, faith would appear to be “the highest” in relation to the ethical.

With regard to content: what does God say when God speaks?

To say God speaks is to imply that God says something (as distinct from both nothing and everything), that God speaks a particular, determinate Word that is to be heard by a particular, determinate addressee. As we shall see, this is precisely why the ethical desire of the contemporary theological alternative represented by Ruether would prefer that God keep quiet; it proceeds upon the assumption of universal divine presence rather than the particularity of divine speech.6 For it is this implication (Deus dixit implies determinacy) that runs us directly into the substantive element of Abrahamic interpretive imperialism, the element of singular content. The singular Word of God spoken for and to the human creature7 (that is the source of faith and the authority for theology) is the divine-human reality of the one Jesus Christ, whose concrete humanness entails the Jewish flesh of the children of Abraham.8 And this is really the source of all the trouble. The One Voice of revelation that addresses a divine Word to us distinct from all human words that we can speak for and to ourselves, that addresses us from outside of all human self-understanding and self-definition, does so within history as a part of history. The outside (the primal eternal Word: “Jesus Christ!”) shows up on the inside (Jesus, from Nazareth, circa 1–33 AD). The One Voice, distinct from the cacophony of historical voices, addresses us from within that cacophony as part of that cacophony. Again, what a very strange and problematic way to proceed.

The Threefold Form of the “One Voice”

Doctrinally, Barth “seeks understanding” of the unaccountable mystery of God’s revelation by way of the Christological formula of Chalcedon.9 Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine, two natures, united yet unmixed in one person. The two natures of the one Jesus Christ constitute not only the soteriological event of reconciliation between God and the human creature; it also constitutes both the event and means of communication between God and the human creature of the good news of that reconciliation (“I am with you”). God speaks God’s Word to the human ear and heart in the human vernacular, so to speak. God’s Word for and to us does not drop out of the sky and fall directly into our heads, transparent and in the raw.10 God’s Word comes to the creature in creaturely form, and is therefore a Word that is to be heard (and known, believed, confessed) by the creature in her or his creaturely form, as creature; it is spoken to and heard by the particular human addressee in her or his historical situation. The point is, after all, divine-human communion. The human partner is to remain “fully human” in this relation, the integrity of the creature respected, honored, and in tact, rather than breached, violated. There is no mixing of natures in some bizarre, cosmic work of divine alchemy. Weird science, no; unaccountable mystery of divine freedom, yes.

The outside shows up on the inside. “This ‘God with us’ has happened. It has happened in human history as a part of human history. Yet it has not happened as other parts of this history usually happen.”11 Teasing out the logic of this “Yet” is the key to understanding what Barth is up to with regard to the One Voice of revelation.

First, within human history as a part of human history. Revelation has happened primarily and once for all within history as the part of history known as the life, death, and resurrection of the person, Jesus Christ. But for Barth, revelation has happened, and continues to happen, in a secondary and dependent way, within history as two particular parts of history known as the Bible, the scriptural witness to that primary event, what the Church calls the Old and New Testaments, and secondly, the Church’s proclamation of that primary, once for all event on the basis of that scriptural witness. The primary event of revelation that is identical with the person of Jesus Christ, what Barth calls the Word of God revealed, “is the form that underlies the other two.” Both scripture and proclamation, therefore, “renounce any foundation apart from that which God has given once for all by speaking.”12 And this once for all speech, this decisive divine Word, is the divine-human person of Jesus Christ. However, Barth goes on to say, the primary event of revelation that has taken place in Jesus Christ “is the very one that never meets us anywhere in abstract form. We know it only indirectly, from Scripture and proclamation. The direct Word of God meets us only in this two-fold mediacy.”13

Second, yet not as other parts of human history. Yes, God’s Word always finds our ears and hearts in the form of a fully human word—particular, historical, concrete; spoken within the cacophony of history as part of the cacophony of history. Yet, it never ceases to be fully divine—God’s own Word spoken to the creature that the creature cannot speak for or to his or herself.14 In the free event of revelation, the creaturely, human phenomena of scripture and proclamation become truly and fully God’s Word, divine speech. Both “the human prophetic and apostolic word” and “the word of the modern [i.e., contemporary] preacher” constitute “a human word to which God has given Himself as object . . . a human word in which God’s own address to us is an event,” a human word that “is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that he speaks through it.”15 And as such, as God’s Word, it is a particular Word that determines and comprehends all other words; it is a particular part of human history that determines and comprehends the whole of human history.

This is what Barth calls the threefold form of the Word of God. God’s eternal Word for and to us that is the person of Jesus Christ addresses us and meets us within human history as a part of human history, in the form of scriptural witness to and Church proclamation of Jesus Christ. It is not, then, to be sought elsewhere—above or beneath history, or as the whole of history, or as indiscriminately suffusing history and/or the cosmos.16 And here again, there is offense enough for everyone. While the particular, fully human words of scriptural witness and Church proclamation only become God’s Word to us when God freely chooses to speak through them in the event of revelation, it is nevertheless these particular human words through which God speaks. Consequently, it is this outside showing up on the inside—in the seed of Abraham, in the Jewish flesh of Jesus Christ as confessed by the Church—that causes all the trouble for us moderns (and postmoderns), who are concerned both about imperialistic discourse in general and the Church’s interpretive imperialism in relation to Jews and Judaism in particular. In the confession of the Jew, Jesus Christ, as the one Word of God for and to the human being, we cannot escape the fact that the world, the nations, all of human, and indeed, non-human created reality receives its meaning through the lens of Abraham and the history of Israel. Neither can we escape the fact, then, that Barth’s doctrine of revelation, with Jesus Christ as the content of the revealed Word, is organically linked to the doctrine of election.17 It is this doctrinal “perfect storm”—the folding together of revelation, Christology, and election in Barth’s fundamental theological assumptions—that constitutes the structural and substantive elements of the interpretive imperialism entailed in an understanding of Christian faith that takes Abraham as a model. (One might be tempted to include ecclesiology in this portentous doctrinal convergence, especially given that the primary activity of the Church, proclamation [in Barth’s view], constitutes one of the three forms of the Word of God that is Jesus Christ. This organic link is very real in Barth’s thinking, but it is a strictly ordered link, whereby the life and activity of the Church are strictly dependent upon the living reality of Jesus Christ, rather than identical to it. We will revisit this in our reading of Ruether, who does indeed include ecclesiology in her own analysis of the perfect doctrinal storm of Christian anti-Judaism; and that analysis and its resultant remedy, I will argue, is worse off for that interpretive decision.)

We will proceed, then, by focusing on a reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, in order to trace the consequences of this doctrinal “storm.” For it is his doctrine of election that offers the clearest example of how the very goodness of the news of Jesus Christ for the world (as the one—albeit threefold—Word of God spoken in the event of revelation) necessarily entails the apparent ethical bad news of Abrahamic interpretive imperialism in relation to both the nations, generally speaking, and, more specifically, the children of Abraham in the particular relation of the Church to Israel. This paradoxical turning of the Abrahamic interpretive imperialism of Christian faith “back” upon the children of Abraham is the inevitable consequence of the fact that the irrevocable affirmation of Abraham and Israel in the perfect storm of revelation, Christology, and election comes by way of their displacement by the one Jesus Christ from whom they receive their meaning. This displacement is all the more pronounced by the fact that the one Jesus Christ is confessed (as Messiah of Israel and Lord of all creation) by the Church. This radicalization of the displacement, wherein Abraham and Israel appear not only to receive their meaning through the particular lens of Jesus Christ, but through the lens of the Church’s confession of Jesus Christ, raises the specters of traditional supersessionism and anti-Judaism in Barth’s theology.

In the remainder of this chapter, then, we will look at how Barth understands the Abrahamic interpretive imperialism (in relation to all neighbors) entailed in the folding together of revelation and Christology with the doctrine of election to guarantee the wholly unalloyed goodness of the Gospel for all. In the following chapter, we will continue with our reading of his doctrine of election, using Barth’s pattern of the threefold form of the one revelatory Word, Jesus Christ, to mark the particular ways the Abrahamic interpretive imperialism entailed therein turns back to cast a distinctive shadow upon the children of Abraham. Our ultimate concern will be how and to what extent this shadow undermines the goodness of the news.

The “Perfect Storm:” Guaranteeing the Christian Gospel as “Unalloyed Good News” for All