I have long loved the elegant verse of David T. W. McCord, "Books fall open, / you fall in, / delighted where / you've never been." Sometimes that's even true. (A poet with a day job, McCord also raised millions for Harvard as director of the Harvard College Fund.)
Several months ago a book fell open for me, one that I had long known about but never really read: Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans. I started to read it not long after I resolved to nurture my knowledge of Greek by reading some New Testament daily. I chose Romans because it was there (and because I read much of it for a seminar with the late great Prof. Christian Beker): it demands attention, is linguistically difficult, and seems to be found in the midst of every major turn in Christian history, such as Martin Luther and Karl Barth.
I also chose Barth because I also have access, courtesy of Princeton Theological Seminary Library, to the German text of Barth's second edition, 1922, which open the way for so-called "dialectical theology" and a decisive turn from previous liberal Protestantism by many German-language writers. So I could exercise my Greek, Latin (I read parallel in the Nova Vulgata) and German, languages that I spent a lot of time and effort learning when I was an undergraduate, and which I do not wish to lose at this later stage of my life.
Little did I realize, when I began this project in 2019, that it would become so timely. I began Romans exactly because I have been so dismayed by the slow slide into fascist authoritarianism underway in my native country. (I hesitate to call it my home any longer; I live here as a resident alien.) I had some inkling that it has something to say to my condition. I was little prepared for how much it had to say.
Barth's book came out in successive editions in 1919 (finished in the last days of the War, December 1918), and a second edition in 1922, as well as other later minor alterations, clarifications, and republication, with an English translation by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns in 1933. The Epistle to the Romans established Barth's early reputation as a disruptor; the second edition in particular critiqued (or bulldozed) the cultural liberalism of the Protestant theology of his teachers at Marburg and elsewhere. The term "dialectical theology" which arose in the early 1920s highlighted frequent use of paradoxical formulations and polar opposites by several writers (Barth, Gogarten, and Brunner prominent among them) and was always --given the prominence of "dialectic" among the heirs of Hegel, and especially Marx--something of a misnomer. There is a very great amount of distinguished scholarship regarding the origins and development of "dialectical theology" in the 1920s and the disagreements of its original proponents as time went on (and especially in the 1930s), and I do not intend to rehearse any of that here.
My focus instead is how unexpectedly contemporary the second edition of Barth's Epistle to the Romans now seems to be, despite its readily apparent and important differences with the present moment. I am enough of a historian to remember and acknowledge that history does not repeat itself, or even often rhyme (in words erroneously attributed to Mark Twain), but somehow sometimes retains a certain metrical force, like blank verse in iambic pentameter. Or in Yogi Berra's reputed words, "It's like déjà vu all over again."
When reading the German second edition (available in the Karl Barth Digital Library, or via Hathitrust here (Vorsicht: Fraktur!), I immediately felt great sympathy for the late Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, translator (13th Baronet of Harewood, County Hereford, and Dean of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). Sir Edwyn faced the daunting challenges of Barth's German which intentionally pushes beyond normal boundaries with multiple-compounded words, neologisms, paratactic paragraph-long sentences, and now-obscure references to contemporaneous events and well-known persons. Sir Edwyn's English version of the German sixth edition (1928) unavoidably presses Barth's free-range German into Oxbridge English, and the language of the Authorized Version. He inadvertently misses or minimizes Barth's Sprachspiel or playing with the language in an attempt to demolish over-familiar and well-worn phrases bearing the echoes of discredited theologies, politics, and cultural outlooks. On the other hand, following Barth's German too closely would nearly completely obfuscate his meaning and significance for English readers, and linguistically daze them.
Barth's German is variously playful, allusive, hortatory, monitory, and nearly aphoristic. (I will give examples in succeeding blog entries.). It reminded me less of the weighty German of Barth's later Kirchliche Dogmatik than of writers associated with German "expressionism:" Georg Büchner (especially Woyzeck, adapted for Alban Berg's opera), Frank Wedekind (Lulu plays, the basis of Berg's opera, and Frühlings Erwachen or Spring Awakening, source of the 2006 musical), Franz von Unruh (especially Opfergang, anti-war drama written during the Siege of Verdun/Schlacht um Verdun). I also thought of writers associated with the Austrian Jugendstil, especially Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Georg Trakl (associated with Der Brenner, influential in the revival of Kierkegaard in German-speaking lands, and a link via friendship to Ludwig Wittgenstein). The influence of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are especially prominent in Barth's second edition of Romans, and has been studied thoroughly.
Barth used his expressive, nearly expressionist language to torpedo the discredited cultural, Protestant hegemony represented above all by his (respected) teacher Wilhelm Herrmann. A "Lutheran Neo-Kantian," Herrmann taught Barth to speak of God dialectically or in opposites: dogmatic/critical, Yes/No, veiling/unveiling, objective/subjective, in line with an emphasis upon the religious experience of the individual (from Friedrich Schleiermacher). So Barth did not repudiate everything that Herrmann taught him. But—Herrmann was one of the 93 signers of Manifesto "To the Civilized World" (An die Kulturwelt: Ein Aufruf), which unequivocally supported German militarism and military actions in 1914, specifically including the "Rape of Belgium" (in essence confirmed by later scholarship despite certain Allied fabrications). Herrman was not the only prominent Protestant theologian to sign An die Kulturwelt: so did Adolf Diessmann, Adolf von Harnack, Adolf von Schlatter, and Reinhold Seeberg (father of Erich Seeberg, the eventual Dean of the "German Christian" Protestant theological faculty in Berlin during the National Socialist régime). So Barth's demolition of the language of liberal Protestantism extended his cultural critique of discredited, compromised, fatally flawed accommodation of liberal Protestant theology with German militarism. Barth's citizenship and employment as a Swiss pastor allowed him both access to the German linguistic community and freedom from German war-time censors, however sympathetic the officially-neutral German-speaking Swiss may have been to the German side, and their consequential anxiety of about any kind of wartime dissent.
Barth began his project of demolishing the whole discredited line of Protestant piety focused on individual experience (and accompanying social and political irrelevance) in 1919 but by 1922 his second edition reflected his dismay with the disaster then unfolding in revolutionary Russia as it morphed into the early Soviet Union. Barth's demolition extended both to the right (socially mainstream, bürgerlich Protestantism), to the left (red to redder socialism), and the Roman Catholicism already susceptible to revanchist or restorationist, imperialial-fascist fantasies in Austria, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere). Safe in stable Switzerland, he nevertheless experienced (with the rest of Europe) the disorienting political and cultural shock of imperial crackup, and the cowardice of German wartime leaders, especially the Kaiser, Tirpitz, and Ludendorff. Nor did economic disaster spare Switzerland: the general strike (Landesstreik) in November 1918 strained civil society more than any time since the Sonderbund war of 1847-1848. The H1N1 "Spanish" influenza epidemic 1918-1919 hit Switzerland very hard, and the inadequate official response brought the nation to the brink of civil war.
Barth wrote his second edition, then, in a lightly industrialized (weaving) town in the midst of entrenched economic disaparities, national and international political dysfunction, and pandemic. This is not the same world as 2019-2020, but it seems eerily adjacent. Even more, the collapse of a public theological or religious rhetoric associated with denuded assumptions of political, cultural hegemony and the thorough discrediting of its moral authority (in Europe then), can only remind one of the cultural bankruptcy of American evangelicalism now, so thoroughly colonized or even weaponized by the current chaotic American régime. In America in 2020, as in Europe in 1922, all these deteriorating conditions reflect both acknowledged and unacknowledged wounds and diseases left festering for decades.
Barth's response was vigorous social critique and withering theological appraisal reflected his wide reading and wide-ranging cultural allusions that extend far beyond normal academic theological discourse. He speaks with a preacher's or prophet's voice, not the voice a professor (although he is certainly academically well informed). The world of his text —what it presumes, upon which it comments, whose pretensions it exposes—will be the content of further blog entries.