Abstract
Karl Barth was deeply ambivalent about his intellectual debt to Søren Kierkegaard. While he acknowledged Kierkegaard’s influence on his own theology, by the early 1920s Barth had become increasingly critical of the great nineteenth-century Danish theologian’s work. Indeed, when a book entitled Søren Kierkegaard und Karl Barth was published in 1925, Barth remarked that he could ‘only grin painfully’ at the thought of a work that examined his relationship to Kierkegaard. So why, Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance ask themselves in their new volume on precisely this topic, should they risk evoking a posthumous ‘painful grin’ from Barth (p. 357)? Their answer is that there are certain key insights in the work of both Kierkegaard and Barth which they believe have a fundamentally important contribution to make to contemporary theology and ecclesiology.
Beyond Immanence argues that the same overarching concern dominated the work of both Kierkegaard and Barth. Both men believed that certain ‘secular’ philosophical assumptions, stemming from Enlightenment thinking, had resulted in a form of liberal, culturally defined Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus). The Torrances contend that Kierkegaard and Barth are linked primarily by their distinctive determination to stand ‘against the cultural endeavour to wed Christianity to the bankrupt agendas of this sinful world’, and to help Christian theology find a way of transcending and challenging such a distortion (p. 14).
The book, a product of a well-orchestrated father-and-son collaboration, does an excellent job of showing that for both Kierkegaard and Barth the fundamental theological problem lies with those who emphasize immanence at the expense of transcendence when discerning God’s relationship to the world. This semi-Pelagian approach treats our immanent conceptions and agendas as foundational. However, all such human–Godward methodologies ‘reflect a de facto repudiation of God’s gracious movement towards us in Jesus Christ’ (p. 361).
At the heart of the book lies an analysis of a shared set of proposals for addressing and resolving this crisis in Christian theology which the authors call the ‘Kierkegaard–Barth Trajectory’ (KBT). According to the KBT, the Incarnation demonstrates par excellence the God–humanward movement of God’s grace and makes it possible to discuss God in a way that is genuinely ‘objective’ and not obscured by anthropocentric presuppositions.
Much of the writing is vigorous and fast-paced. The Torrances describe how both Kierkegaard and Barth fought valiantly to overcome the Kulturprotestantismus of their day. Kierkegaard struggled to introduce authentic Christianity into a society dominated by bourgeois values and Hegelian idealism, while Barth strove to demonstrate how natural theology, Romanticism and National Socialism had enslaved the gospel in service to the German Volk. Both thinkers were united in the belief that human ideologies must be ‘submitted to the critique of God’s initiative in Jesus Christ rather than the other way around’ (p. 359). While these points are clearly and crisply made, the book would have benefited from some acknowledgement of the existence of similar initiatives to the KBT that lie beyond the confines of Protestant theology. Among Roman Catholic theologians, for instance, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) was at great pains to reject anthropocentric approaches to the Christian faith. For Balthasar, our intellectual and moral lives must be centred squarely on God (theo-drama) rather than on ourselves (ego-drama).
Although this volume deals admirably with the way in which Kulturprotestantismus corrupted theology and ethics in the past, it sadly fails in its aim of showing how the critique afforded by the KBT applies to our contemporary theological and ecclesiastical context. This is regrettable, because the churches of today certainly need to be subjected to such a critique. Nonetheless, this is a work of impeccable scholarship, and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Barth.