Abstract
Scott Thomas Prather has written a helpful contribution to the study of the theology of the powers (‘exousiology’) in Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder, and its relation to political and economic power. Originally a dissertation, the book’s strengths are the descriptive summaries of Barth’s and especially Yoder’s theologies of the powers, and a brief application of mammon’s structural power to capitalism. The weaknesses of the book are that this aforementioned analysis of mammon is truncated, as it’s pushed to the last chapter of the book, and more importantly, that the author’s critical analysis of Barth’s exousiology remains fundamentally problematic.
Generally speaking, the author admits that neither Barth nor Yoder offers a complete treatment of the powers. Whereas Barth’s discussion of the powers is ‘easily overshadowed’ by other doctrines, Yoder’s ‘less systematic’ treatment fails to offer a ‘concise statement of the doctrinal import of the powers’ (p. 2). Although both theologians provide a theological framework for a contemporary exousiology, Prather clearly prefers Yoder to Barth, as he labors to show how Barth’s approach remains a ‘hidden promise’ until completed through a Yoderian perspective. Most basically, the author’s criticism is similar to those who claim that Barth’s doctrine of the church lacks ‘concreteness’ in its sacramental and confessional identity. Likewise, Barth’s exousiology fails because, given his other doctrinal commitments about evil as nothingness, he cannot affirm a ‘historical-structural’ viewpoint of one’s ‘captivity and subjection’ to the powers (p. 8). In contrast, Yoder’s theology affirms the ‘powers as socially structuring forces’ that perpetuate oppressive idolatries through particular social and political structures (p. 6). What this implies is that Barth’s view limits a substantive structural analysis of structural evil, whereas Yoder’s account of the ‘fallenness’ of the powers locates corporate sinfulness in the structures themselves, which demands a theological critique.
Prather’s selective study of Barth’s exousiology begins by looking at three particular texts: Barth’s 1938 essay: ‘Rechtfertigung und Recht’ (Justification and Justice); Barth’s discussion of evil as nothingness and the angelic powers in CD III/3; and Barth’s formal discussion of the lordless powers in CD IV/4 fragments, The Christian Life. Rather than seeing the ‘demonic powers’ as ‘created and fallen’, Barth claims they stand under God’s reconciling work of divine justification, which makes the powers pseudo-realities defeated in Christ’s victory of reconciliation. Prather’s description of Barth’s exousiology is straightforward but incomplete, namely it lacks the dialectical nuance that comes with wider reading in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. In this discussion, for example, the author does not refer to Barth’s actual discussion of the powers in CD II/1—in relation to divine perfections, and in CD III/4—in relation to his ethics of creation, where the powers are presented as a revolt against both divine and human freedom. In both cases, the powers revolt against God’s sovereignty of grace and freedom, but in the end are defeated by the triune God who loves in freedom. Whereas for Barth the divine resolution is more important than the conflict, the author concentrates so heavily on the conflict and the ‘structural evil’ of the powers that he neglects the divine power of reconciliation accomplished by the triune God.
In chapter 2, the author presents Yoder’s ‘structural exousiology’ by looking at a variety of Yoder’s works, which demonstrates his greater familiarity with Yoder than Barth. Here he contextualizes Yoder’s early work in relation to Reinhold Niebuhr and to Hendrik Berkof’s important 1953 book, Christ and the Powers. For Yoder the powers are ‘created but fallen’ (not reconciled) structures of evil that stand under the lordship of Christ. This description of Yoder is also straightforward, but unlike the chapter on Barth does not involve an internal critique. Prather defends Yoder against the charge of sectarianism, when he claims humanity is not ‘hopelessly trapped within a web of inevitably inhuman powers’, but can be ‘transformed … in relation to the power of God in Christ, as structural servants of God’s grace toward creatures’ (p. 102). Although short on details of what this ‘transformation’ looks like in practice, he rightly presents Yoder as someone who stands ‘for the nations’ and not ‘against the nations’.
In chapter 3, the tone shifts, as an apparent, friendly dialogue between the two theologians becomes a monologue in which Barth’s theology is repeatedly corrected by the author’s Yoderian account. The crucial difference, says the author, is that Barth affirms a confessional ‘knowledge’ of God’s reconciliation as an ‘ontological-personal’ reality that revolts against ‘the power of the powers directly’, whereas Yoder affirms a confessional ‘dynamic process’ of God’s reconciliation as an ‘historical-structural’ reality that revolts against ‘evil in its concrete activity’ (pp. 153, 159; emphasis original). Hence, Barth’s ‘metaphysical account … inadequately captures the social (and thus political) form of the new humanity God constitutes in Jesus’ (p. 107; emphasis original). This means that Barth cannot offer a ‘sociopolitical form of Christ’s new humanity’ that stands in ‘separation from the world’ (p. 150). Prather’s selective reading of Barth continues to reveal more about his own understanding of the ‘separation’ of the church from the world, than about Barth’s theology, which is always more dialectical, nuanced, and sophisticated than is found in the book’s arguments. The central problem occurs when Prather says too much, as, for example, when he claims ‘Barth’s metaphysical account’ of ‘the doctrine and ethics of reconciliation conceives the Christian confession as a form of “knowledge” that subjectively conforms the church’s life-history to that of Jesus Christ’ (p. 153). This statement contradicts Barth’s own theology on many levels, as it denies the objective, all-pervasive, liberating power of reconciliation and participation in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Prather’s comment subjectivizes revelation, overemphasizes human agency, and marginalizes the actions of Holy Spirit for the world, all of which Barth would reject. It is not the church in its ‘socio-political form’ (i.e. polis), but the divine power of the Spirit, that gathers, upbuilds and sends the Christian community—as the historical form of Christ’s bodily existence—into the world as a witnessing community of resistance against the powers. Moreover, it is odd to claim that Barth has a ‘metaphysical account’ of the ‘doctrine and ethics of reconciliation’. To claim this rightly, one would need to offer a comprehensive view of Barth’s theology, as well as to challenge the view of most Barth scholars who argue that Barth is ‘anti-metaphysical’, neither of which the author attempts to do.
This trajectory continues in the next chapter, where Prather treats Barth’s political theology and the power of Leviathan. He claims that Barth ‘veers towards ordained-institution language’ which denies the ontological fallenness of the state, which in turn makes the ‘demonic state’ only a ‘myth’ or ‘exception’ in relation to the ‘ideal or normative’ function of the state (p. 177). In Prather’s judgment, which often appears more Hauerwasian than Yoderian, Barth’s ‘chistocentric grammar’ cannot detach itself from its other commitments to magisterial Christian political thought, where he presents a ‘spherical casting of the church-world distinction’, which ontologizes the state and pushes the substance of state power toward the ‘metaphysical plane’ (pp. 185–86). Ironically such a statement disregards Yoder’s own more favorable discussion of Barth’s political thought in his book Karl Barth and the Problem of War and other important essays on Barth. Yoder details a shift in Barth’s thinking from his 1938 essay ‘Justification and Justice’ to, a decade later, Church Dogmatics III/4 and the 1946 essay ‘Christian Community and the Civil Community’. Yoder further argues that this moves Barth away from an ‘ontological’ view of the state, toward a post-Constantinian and pluralistic ‘civil community’. Whereas Yoder sees this shift as positively significant, Prather never mentions it, which ironically places Prather’s Yoderism in conflict with Yoder himself. Since Yoder, both in writing and speech, often acknowledged his debt to Barth, it would be more constructive for the author to elucidate this positive framework regarding Yoder’s relationship to Barth than to set up virtual rivalry between the two theologians.
Since this rivalry is one-sided, moreover, the author is unable to offer a critical engagement with Yoder’s thought, as seen through the lens of other kinds of Christian political ethics—Barthian or otherwise. For example, there is no discussion of Oliver O’Donovan’s political theology, or of other Christian political ethicists in the Augustinian, Thomistic, Lutheran, Anglican, or Reformed perspectives who present a challenge to Yoder’s critique of Constantinianism. Evidently the author sees no need to engage this thought since he already rejects Barth’s apparent ‘ontological-institutional’ view of the state. Yet such a critical discussion would make for a more ethically and theologically enriching book. Even Barth’s dialectical, open-ended argumentation, which for many interpreters remains a strength of Barth’s thought, is a problem for the author. This is evident when he discusses my book on Barth’s ethics along with essays by Christopher Holmes and Kathryn Tanner, in all of which Barth’s theological ethics refuses to identify ‘God’s reign with any particular historical movements’ (p. 219). This argument of Yes and No may appear ‘inconsistent’ to someone who seeks a Yes or No answer, but its ‘non-ideological’ commitment is rooted in its ‘theological’ Yes/No judgment. Although Barth critiques the power of ideology, he emphatically argues for human rights, democracy, economic justice, peacemaking, constitutional rule of law, and against Nazification, militarism, nationalism, neo-liberal capitalism, and nuclear proliferation. In CD III/4, he calls for the ‘counter-movements’ that stand against the powers that disrespect life and the human community, which explains why Barth’s political thought has influenced actual political movements, such as the US civil rights and South African anti-Apartheid movements, and some versions of liberation theology.
In the last chapter, the author situates Barth and Yoder closer together in his discussion of mammon, economics, and capitalism. Rejecting what he calls the ‘conservativism’ of the ‘Anglicized-evangelical Barth’, as developed by the aforementioned authors and others involved in Anglo-American Barth studies, Prather looks to Friedrich Marquardt’s study of the early socialistic writings prior to 1920. Here the author finds a more radical Barth that contrasts God’s power that ‘sustains and humanizes creaturely life in and through Jesus’ humanity’ with the corrupted ‘power-structure and the mode of social relations it entails’ in the ‘in-built inequality and inevitable injustices of the capitalist order’ (pp. 227–28). Although he admits Barth does not equate socialism with God’s rule, the young pastor rightly demonstrates the antithesis between idolatry of capitalism and the community of resistance within and outside the church. Unlike the ‘obscurity’ of the ‘mature Barth’, the red pastor of Safenwil ‘declares freedom from Mammon’s rule as necessarily involving the overturning of this dominative structure relation’ (p. 233). It is interesting that for all of his criticism of the ‘mature Barth’, the author looks to a youthful Barth, not the mature Yoder, for his development of a concrete historical community of revolt.
In the beginning of the book, Prather argues that although it is not principally about the ‘archetypal modern power’ of mammon and capitalism ‘it has been written with an eye towards its implosion’ (p. 1). That is, although not presenting a theological critique of capitalism as such, Prather claims that ‘contemporary capitalism’ is a ‘manifest disaster, spiritually and sociopolitically’, largely because it is empowered by mammon’s destructive power (p. 1). This shift toward a theological and ethical critique of mammon is not developed in any substantive way until the last chapter, where the author creatively sketches a view of what an ethics of ‘revolt’ may look like in practice. This discussion continues in a vibrant—but very short—meditation on the Katrina disaster and power of capitalism, namely how political and economic power (Leviathan and mammon) led to victimization of the poor of New Orleans. Although the book’s ending is strong, it remains rather unfinished and somewhat disconnected from the rest of the book. In conclusion, those readers interested in Yoder’s thought will not be disappointed with this offering, but those more interested in Barth or in sustained critique of mammon’s power behind capitalism will want more from this book.