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On God's Ontic and Noetic Absoluteness: A Critique of Barth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Robert Brown
Robert Brown
Affiliation:
Philosophy DepartmentUniversity of DelawareNewark DE 19711USA
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Extract

Karl Barth's formidable attack on all forms of natural theology is one of the major events in twentieth-century religious thought. He anathematized every effort by unaided reason to conceive adequately of the nature of God or to demonstrate God's existence. To him all are disguised attempts to ‘domesticate’ God in the circumscribed and self-serving world of human interests. Those theologians who are dissatisfied with this dimension of Barth's thought sometimes criticize it, but more often find it easier just to ignore him and go their own ways. Those philosophers who are interested in provoking a confrontation with Barth find it difficult to penetrate the confessional circle and establish a point of contact which the defenders of Barth's prohibition of natural theology would themselves be constrained to acknowledge.

My contention is that there is such a point of contact open to theological and philosophical critique, one which previous critics have overlooked. The argument is organized around five theses. They are:

1. The foundation of Barth's position on God's knowability lies in Church Dogmatics II, 1. Here he declares that God's noetic absoluteness derives from his ontic absoluteness (pp. 310f). To the critical eye this spurious derivation appears to be a non sequitur rather than an acceptable statement of logical entailment or of metaphysical or theological necessity.

2. Barth fails to support the derivation with convincing exegetical arguments of the sort required to override its conceptual weakness. This is a rather surprising circumstance for one who strives to rest his entire theology on revelation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 33 , Issue 6 , December 1980 , pp. 533 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1980

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References

page 533 note 1 Pagination and subsequent quotations are from the English translation by T. H. L. Parkeret al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957).

page 535 note 1 I do not deny the significance of Barth's early rejection of natural theology in the famous polemic, Nein! Antuiort an Emit Brunner (Theologische Existenz Heute, No. 14, 1934), and of the fascinating discussions of natural theology elsewhere in II, 1, or the value of the remarkable and difficult book: Anselm: Fides quaerens intellectum, trans, by Robertson, Ian (London: SCM Press, 1960)Google Scholar. However, I view the statements of II, 1, pp. 310–311 as expressing Barth's rock-bottom position on God's absoluteness and consequent knowability, and these other much-studied texts as specific applications of this basic position.

page 542 note 1 For details, see Kristeller, Paul O., The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) pp. 146–170.Google Scholar

page 543 note 1 A second instance (there are of course many more than these two) of a concept of God as ontically but not noetically absolute, appears in another author who is not a subject of sustained criticism by Barth. The example is from Schelling's treatise, The Ages of the World (English translation by de Wolfe Bolman, Frederick Jr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1942)Google Scholar. Herein Schelling presents a speculative doctrine of God's eternal being portrayed as the dynamic process of a free, self-conscious, self-sufficient life. Schelling's God in Ages (although perhaps not in some of his other works) has a perfectly actualised transcendent being, so that he is ontically absolute in the fullest sense. Schelling underscores this point with a heavy stress on the unqualified freedom of God's decision to create a world, a choice not motivated by any lack on God's part which needed to be remedied. Yet Schelling's ontically absolute deity is also rationally knowable, both by a speculative vision of his ontological constitution, and (in Schelling's later works) by a philosophical interpretation of the structures of the cosmos and of the mythological and religious systems of human history.

page 544 note 1 There are of course more aspects to Barth's conception of God's freedom than the one point under analysis here, and I am not questioning these other features of the doctrine in this paper. See the article by Hendry, George S., ‘The Freedom of God in the Theology of Karl Barth’, Scottish Journal of Theology 31.3 (1978), pp. 229–244CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hendry isolates five different meanings of ‘freedom’ in Barth's theology. While praising Barth's efforts, he concludes that: ‘… it is impossible to construct a system with the concept of freedom because of the possibilities of equivocation in the concept’ (p. 244). Hendry's five meanings do not directly embrace a ‘freedom to remain unknowable’ of the sort I am attributing to Barth's thought. However, Hendry's focus is on interrelations between the doctrine of God's being and the doctrine of election, and not on the question of natural theology.

page 545 note 1 See for example, Dowey, Edward A., The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952)Google Scholar, who finds a basis for natural theology in Calvin.

page 547 note 1 I have not discussed one major cause of Barth's intense dislike for natural theology. The Nazis distorted Christianity terribly in depicting it as fulfilled in their demonic brand of racist totalitarianism. Barth's critique of the ‘German Christians’ and his account of the necessity for the Barmen Declaration of 1934 (II, 1, pp. 172–178) is one of the most justifiably famous passages in the Church Dogmatics. For him natural theology presupposes a point of contact between God and humans which lies under human control and which opens the door to a denial of God's unique revelation in Christ. Barth's judgment that the church should abjure natural theology is the consequence of a heroic struggle against its demonic misuse. But this judgment is nonetheless a practical one, properly made on a case-by-case basis. Certainly natural theology can be grossly misused. But that it has been misused does not establish that all natural theology is erroneous or that it must necessarily in all instances distort the understanding of revelation.

Two other points also need mention here. First, to discredit Barth's position on God's noetic absoluteness would not automatically show that we are able to formulate an appropriate natural theology. In particular, it would not establish the credentials of all or any one of the traditional philosophical proofs for God's existence. Most especially, it would not translate into the fatuous contention that if natural theology were a possibility we should expect God's existence to be directly obvious to everyone. The second point concerns a familiar contention about the superiority of faith to knowledge. Some theologians stress the risk and trust involved in faith. A genuine faith would be unnecessary, even impossible, were one already to possess the certainty of rational knowledge of God. Therefore they argue that God deliberately withholds from people the ability to know him by natural reason specifically so that they may have the unhindered opportunity to approach him in faith. Whatever may be the merits of this line of argument against natural knowledge of God, Barth himself does not use it. Therefore I did not consider it in the paper. I suspect Barth would lump it with those other positions which begin, not as they should with the nature of God, but instead with supposed human conditions for successful apprehension of God.