Abstract
What does it mean to be a ‘post-Holocaust theologian’? The term might be taken to refer to thinkers who reflect in a sustained way on the significance of the Holocaust and share a conviction of the need to re-visit aspects of theological tradition in the light of that. In the context of Christian theology, it could be expected to indicate specific positions with regard to repentance for past and continuing sin by the church against the Jewish people, affirmation of the continuing covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people with a concomitant rejection of efforts at evangelisation, and commitment to dialogue with Judaism in which Christians make it clear they are listening and learning.
The question in the subtitle arises because in important respects Barth appears to fit such a description well, and in other important ways he appears to fit it rather badly. He opposed the antisemitic regime of Nazi Germany in his personal actions and, in the context of the treatment of Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, developed a far-reaching critique of much Christian teaching about Judaism that led him to recognise collusion on the part of the church in antisemitism, call for appropriate repentance, and argue against placing the Jewish people alongside the nations of the world in Christian thinking about mission. Yet Barth did not speak directly of the Holocaust itself in the many volumes of the Church Dogmatics and, while he was clearly aware of contemporary Jewish thinkers, he shows at best only very limited evidence of entering into conscious theological dialogue with them. Moreover, his deployment at certain points of language associated with antisemitism and with the ‘teaching of contempt’ from Christian tradition casts a dark shadow over his contribution to the theology of Christian-Jewish relations; as Hunsinger notes in the Preface, ‘He said some things that ought not to be repeated’ (p. ix). Hence the subtitle.
The value of this book lies in its assembling of a range of scholarly voices on this important question for evaluating Barth’s legacy and continuing relevance. The authors of all nine chapters are in broad agreement that Barth has something to say on these matters that still ought to be heard, but they have contrasting perspectives on what that might be, linked to differing evaluations of how far the common ground extends between his thinking and the characteristic positions of post-Holocaust theology. One critical issue in judging the extent to which Barth can be accounted a post-Holocaust theologian is his attitude to ‘supersessionism’, which might be broadly defined as the denial of a covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people after the coming of Christ. Mark Lindsay, for instance, makes the case briefly and confidently for Barth’s ‘rejection of any form of supersessionism (both economic and punitive)’ (p. 3). The distinction here, from Soulen’s influential analysis, is between seeing Israel as, after Jesus Christ, obsolete in the economy of salvation and holding that God punished Israel for rejecting Jesus Christ (R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, Fortress, 1996, pp. 28–33). That reading of Barth is one with which Eberhard Busch might be taken implicitly to agree, though he does not express it directly in the piece that appears here. Derek Woodard-Lehman, on the other hand, introduces Soulen’s further category of ‘structural’ supersessionism, which points to the way that standard Christian theological reading of Scripture accords only ‘background’ and ‘indecisive’ significance to God’s history with Israel (ibid.). Here he finds Barth clearly guilty (p. 68); his analysis of Barth’s writing in this area then shifts in terminology as it concludes that ‘Though not standard supersessionism, the ecclesiological formulation of Barth’s doctrine of election is, mutatis mutandis, dialectically supersessionist’ (p. 76). In the Preface, Hunsinger presents a different approach again, accepting, in line with David Novak, that ‘“soft supersessionism” is required by the inner logic of the Christian faith’ (p. ix) and suggesting we should not be surprised to find in Barth what is common to Christian theological tradition.
The challenge for contemporary post-Holocaust theology in appropriating Barth’s work might be crystallised in a sentence from a 1933 sermon he preached during Advent (for which John Michael Owen provides an introduction and translation in this volume): ‘That’s what a real Jew cannot understand right up to the present day: That precisely the covenant that God certainly concluded with his people, and with his people alone, has become manifest in that people’s rejection of Christ as the free, undeserved goodness that God wants to do for everyone’ (p. 29). David Demson sets out the case in some detail that Barth’s interpretation of Romans 9–11 underpins his entire understanding of Israel and the church and is, at root, faithful to the ‘real heart’ of the text, in which while ‘Jews who refuse the gospel’ are ‘the paradigmatically disobedient creatures’, ‘The Gentile who is against Jews is the paradigmatically disobedient Gentile’, so that ‘Our Gentile rejection of this people is our paradigmatic rejection of Jesus Christ, but the last word is God’s, not that of our rejection’ (pp. 92–94, emphasis original). This is not supersessionism as normally understood in post-Holocaust theology, but it hardly sounds like the unequivocal rejection of supersessionism either.
Demson’s focus on a better understanding of Barth’s teaching about Israel and the church as the key to its recovery for post-Holocaust theology is paralleled by the broader exposition of Barth’s writings about the Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s in the chapter by Busch, who defends them strongly against charges of residual antisemitism and anti-Judaism. Other contributors to the volume, however, locate his critical contribution to post-Holocaust theology in sources other than his thinking about election. For Lindsay, for instance, it is to be found in the retrospective dialogue that can now be staged between Barth and Jewish theology, evident in the ‘formal similarity between Berkovits’s understanding of the Hester Panim and Barth’s dialectical conception of revelation’ (p. 12). Woodard-Lehman might be speaking for a number of contributors when he urges that ‘We can think beyond Barth, yet still think with and through Barth’ (p. 69); towards the end of his article, he looks to Barth’s writing on ‘“true words” and “other lights” outside the Church’ as giving ‘further Barthian grounds for a Christological affirmation of the Jewish “No”’ (p. 83). Such an appeal to Barth’s broader thinking about truth beyond the church is more fully developed in the chapter by Paul Chung, whose claim that ‘Barth’s position implies an inclusive-universalistic tone with a radical openness to the forms of secularism or pluralistic truth-claims’ (p. 123) would not be accepted by all. In a parallel though different interpretive move, Faye Bodley-Dangelo draws on Barth’s treatment of the neighbour in sections of the Church Dogmatics written during the 1930s to claim that ‘Barth subverts key terms in the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the German Christians by strategically locating the neighbor within a sacramental framework that effaces the ethnic and religious boundaries of the visible church’ (p. 56).
The nature of an edited collection is that readers, while benefitting from the juxtaposition of different voices and views, are likely to need to work rather harder at identifying common threads and pivotal points of divergence than they might in a single-author volume. Some assistance might be expected, however, from the editor. In this case, Hunsinger’s Preface consists mainly of chapter summaries, topped and tailed by some brief comments on the importance of the subject. One has to look into the footnotes for individual chapters to learn that five have been published before (the earliest source cited being from 1989), while one was given as a paper in 1986; the other three, it might be presumed, were specially commissioned for this volume, though they do not comment directly on the earlier material. It is hard to detect any particular logic, chronological or thematic, in the sequence of the chapters, other than a gradual widening of the lens. Philip Rosato’s useful piece on ‘Karl Barth’s Influence on Catholic Theology about Judaism’, which appears as chapter 7, in fact describes his influence on Roman Catholic thought in three areas, Judaism being the first, followed by pneumatology and eschatology in relation to ecclesiology; while the fascinating final chapter by Rudy Koshar, ‘Where is Karl Barth in Modern European History?’, touches only in passing on Barth’s understanding of Judaism, focusing instead on his relation to major currents in social and cultural life.
Hunsinger writes that the essays in this volume ‘are collected in the hope of contributing to the theological conscience of the church’ (p. xi). This will be a valuable resource for those working on the theology of Christian-Jewish relations, as also for scholars of Barth’s writings. It demonstrates the depth as well as the ambivalence of the understanding of Israel in the purposes of God that he forged in proximity to the tragedy and terror of the Holocaust. Readers will have to decide, however, where his principal contribution to a post-Holocaust theology might most truly lie.