Abstract
Aptly titled, Rustin Brian’s Covering Up Luther is about both veiling and unveiling. Brian begins with an image of Barth’s home library where an ornately decorated rug hung over a section of shelved books. Behind the rug was what Barth referred to as ‘Pandora’s Box’—the works of Martin Luther with whom Barth shared many theological convictions while rejecting his understanding of God as the Deus absconditus.
Brian claims Barth ‘made an intentional decision to distance himself from the theo-logy of Martin Luther’, believing that Luther’s Deus absconditus (hidden God) presented a ‘devastating end toward which Protestant Reformed theology was headed, or had in fact already arrived at’ (p. 2). With an aim of appropriately representing Barth, Brian presents two overarching arguments. First, the Deus absconditus became the ‘dominant theological position of modernity’ accomplished through ‘the utilization of the logic of dialectic’ (p. 3). As such, modernity is marked by an epistemology of difference and a cosmology of nominalism whereby God is exceedingly transcendent, named but otherwise unknown (‘nominalism’ from Latin nomen, name). Secondly, Brian argues the logic of dialectic is contradictory to Barth’s Christology, which highlights the revelation of God and ‘reveals a fundamentally non-competitive relationship between God and creation’ (p. 3). But substantiating these claims is no small feat. It places Brian in opposition to much of Barthian scholarship, including leading Barth scholar Bruce McCormack.
Brian grounds his argument in Barth’s later, or ‘mature’, theology, demonstrating Barth’s use of a logic of paradox rather than dialectic. Building from the common understanding of Barth as a proponent of the sharp distinction between God and the world, Brian does not seek to collapse Barth’s distinction between God and the world but rather to show the paradoxical nature of that distinction through Barth’s Christology. The crux of Brian’s argument is appropriately located here, because for Barth ‘theology is Christology’ (pp. 111, 161). The paradox of the Gospel demonstrates the error of dialectic thinking as Brian identifies Emmanuel as the refusal of the God/creation expanse. Barth affirmed ‘God was God and the world was the world’, but in Jesus, neither conflict nor synthesis of the two was achieved (p. 161). Instead, Jesus was something entirely different, ‘radically contrary to all the rules of human understanding and logic…the impossible possibility, the absurd possibility of the absurd’ (pp. 161–62). In other words, Brian finds Barth to still be amiable towards the Deus absconditus; however not in the sense of an unknown God, but ‘the unknown and yet fully revealed God’ (p. 71).
Among the implications of Barth’s logic of paradox is an assertion that ‘there is no conflict in God, only reconciliation’ (p. 116). According to Brian, Barth envisions reconciliation as the ‘paradoxical fabric of all things’; the true nature of the relationship between God and creation, eternity and temporality, God and us, is defined by God’s divine love which ‘spans the untransversable expanse’ (p. 116). Ultimately, Brian’s suggestion of Barth’s logic of paradox unveils the complexities in Barth’s theology. As Barthian scholarship has long emphasized, Barth maintains an expanse between God and creation, yet at the same time, the subject of Barth’s theology is not the expanse, but the reconciling Christ who spans it.
Just as theology is Christology for Barth, so are, Brian claims, ethics and ecclesiology (p. 172). Brian concludes his text by addressing Barth’s lasting influence for Christian ethics and ecclesiology, providing an intriguing engagement with the latter by outlining the implications of Barth’s Christology for catholicity and describing possible ecumenical connections to Roman Catholicism through the shared rejection of the Deus absconditus. Unmentioned by Brian (to some surprise given his Wesleyan convictions) is the value of a Barthian logic of paradox for Methodists and Wesleyans. Inheritors of Wesley’s theology sometimes stand adrift amongst other Western, particularly Protestant, theologies. While Wesley was unabashed about God’s sovereignty and human sinfulness, he also emphasized the grace-empowered human capacity (and responsibility) to participate in God’s reconciliation of the God-creation expanse. Presiding notions of Barth’s emphasis on human depravity and the otherness of God may affirm the former but neglect the latter in Wesley. For Wesleyans with a Barthian leaning, the discrepancy between Wesley’s and Barth’s anthropological assumptions remains paramount. Intended or not, Brian’s work opens new possibilities for Wesleyan engagement with Barth by overturning the predominant God-world divide in Barth.
Similarly, for most recipients of formal theological education, Barth is all but synonymous with dialectical theology and neo-orthodoxy. I recall my first introductions to Barth being his critique of natural theology and the immanence of God, with his infamous and unabashed Nein! Indeed, God as transcendent ‘Wholly Other’ still defines popular understandings of Barth’s theology. And while these overarching themes remain evident in Barth’s theology, Brian demonstrates how Barth is more complex than such categories alone suggest. In this regard, Brian’s text is invaluable for a broad range of readers who may need to see Barth beyond the caricature often painted.
At the same time, readers may find it interesting how Brian so easily dismisses ‘Barth, the dialectical theologian’, as found in the famous 1934 Barth-Brunner debate, in lieu of Barth, the ‘mature’ analogical theologian, who wrote How I Changed my Mind (published posthumously in 1966). Brian does note Barth’s own statement that, more than the ‘much-read brochure Nein!’, his 1931 work Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum was among the books he regards as ‘written with the greatest satisfaction’, and wishes it received more attention (p. 74). Nevertheless, the limited critical engagement with Barth’s Nein! illuminates the importance of understanding Barth in context. Brian undoubtedly shares this concern, but chooses to lean more on Barth’s autobiographical statements than the social and historical contexts which shaped Barth’s theology—the opposite, Brian suggests, to McCormack who believes Barth’s context plays a ‘much greater role than Barth himself will admit’ (p. 44). Irrespective of the potential warrants of Brian’s argument, more deliberate engagement with the relationship between Barth’s theology and his context would both aid the reader and likely support Brian’s argument for the situated nature of Barth’s dialectical theology. It may be, for example, that Nein! remains a testimony to Barth’s contextualized theology—a passionate response to natural theology on the eve of Hitler. And so it is equally worth asking how Barth’s ‘mature’ theology reflects similar contextual underpinnings.