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Sonderegger

      (on Karl Barth’s Israellehre)

      chapter 3

      The Problem, Part I: The “Perfect Storm” of Christological Interpretive Imperialism

      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),

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