Reading Karl Barth in Postcolonial Midst:
Hermeneutics of God’s Mission and Speech-Act Theology
Introduction: Postcolonial Challenge and Epistemology
The multiple religious climates of the twenty-first century imply a challenge to Western theology and Christian mission, requiring theological endeavors to be more responsible in this emerging context. The former colonial rule has ended, but the cultural, economic, and scholarly legacy of colonialism still remains in force. If post-colonialism in the hyphenated form refers to a historical period and political independence in the aftermath of colonialism, postcolonialism (or postcoloniality) rather expresses the awakening of the consciousness of the subalterns in matters pertaining to their condition and hybrid nature of postcolonial people in psychological, social-cultural, political and economic realms. Postcolonial theory or theology may entail a therapeutic dimension of historical recovery in the analysis of the colonial past by subverting Western hegemony and dominion in attending biographies of the colonized victims.[1]
This said, a postcolonial theology may become a means of truth telling in the aftermath of colonialism in terms of recognition of non-Western Other and on behalf of solidarity with those subalterized. It seeks to overcome pathologies of Western modernity, that is to say, trans-modernity, transcending limitation of Eurocentric discourse of modernity and its related colonial discourse.
Postcolonial theologians, such as Jonathan Ingleby, seek to elaborate the notion of God’s mission in this framework and aim at overcoming the structure of the legitimation of hegemony under Empire. He advocates a prophetic tradition of the scriptures and other prophetic voices in religion and politics.[2] A notion of interpolation seeks to dismantle the cultural capital of the imperial system imposed upon the colonized. A model of translation in the context of World Christianity is defined as a commentary on this interpolation, in which the indigenous discovery of the Christian religion becomes an arbiter among scholars of World Christianity. Translation relies upon local wisdom and language, transferring authority and voice away from the hierarch/center to the local/peripheral.[3]
Furthermore, a postcolonial notion of re-presentation can be explored within the project of rewriting history. A postcolonial passion for rewriting or re-presenting history calls for a new hermeneutical strategy for deciphering and excavating the non-identical, and the subjugated side of history through an archeological methodology. This archeological heeds the forgotten side of life of innocent victims or the subaltern through the anamnestic reasoning and solidarity.
Concerning a postcolonial interest and epistemology, I am concerned to explore and retrieve Barth’s contribution to this direction. For this task, the first part is to broadly analyze and research Barth’s understanding of God’s mission in postcolonial background and reconciliation in which his theology of God’s mission can be explicated in terms of solidarity with the world and challenge to colonial church. The second part is a study of his hermeneutic reflection of God’s speech-act for postcolonial significance in which Barth’s reflection of irregular theology should be retrieved. The third part shall make some clarification of Barth’s insight into culture and religions. From a phenomenological perspective, I am intrigued by the task of elucidating and critically reinterpreting Barth’s limitations to make them more relevant for postcolonial theology and World Christianity.
The fourth part deals with Barth’s initial contribution to comparative theology, and recognition of World Christianity. Then a critical view of modernist interpretation of Barth comes into focus, while locating his significance in the context of multiple modernities for postcolonial significance. In conclusion I shall review some of postcolonial readings of Barth and advocate for Barth’s significance in terms of prophetic solidarity with massa perditionis (subaltern–minjung) and discourse of parrhesia.
God’s Mission in Postcolonial Background
In the colonial era, mission was practiced as the imposition of the Western missionary agenda upon indigenous peoples. It assumed others as tabula rasa and subsumed or totalized the uniqueness of cultural others into the sameness of the Western missionary agenda. A concept of civilizing mission in the French context demonstrates that the colonizer extended control, seeking to transform the elites of the country into modern citizens. On the other hand, local cultural forms are allowed, in the British context, to remain in place, while they are redeployed for the service of the goals of colonial rule. In different approaches and perspectives, mission has served to create economic, political, religious, and intellectual alliances between the colonizer and the colonized whose natural resources are extracted to support the colonizer.[4]
Against the colonial mission, the shift occurred to God’s own mission and it was accelerated after World War II, in which people were stunned by the Holocaust and the Japanese massacre of Nanjing, a beautiful ancient city in China. Furthermore, China closed its doors to all missionaries in 1950 after establishing a Communist government.[5] This historical background had shaped the ecumenical discourse of God’s mission in the aftermath of colonialism, calling into question the church’s mission during the colonial time.
Barth articulated mission as an activity of God in a paper delivered at the Brandenburg Missionary Conference on April 11, 1932.[6] In his account, mission begins with the divine sending forth of the Son and the Holy Spirit. The term missio is an expression of the doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, the church’s mission must be grounded in the activity of the triune God and in the service of the Word of God. Mission and theology are driven by the free grace of God. God, in God’s own free omnipotence and mercy, shapes a church as a particularly missional church. Mission and theology are built upon the solid rock of God’s election and reconciliation.[7]
The phrase was missio Dei, originally coined by German missiologist and director of the Basel mission, Karl Hartenstein in 1934. Barth’s theology of divine sending became the arbiter of shaping and characterizing the ecumenical discussion of God’s mission in the 1952 meeting of the IMC in Willingen, Germany. Furthermore, God’s mission has become a theological discourse at large and in a global context in which a critical voice of World Christianity reframes the discourse of God’s mission as translation and emancipation against the Western missional church and practices.[8]
However, in the ecumenical and global discussion of God’s mission, scant attention is paid to Barth’s further development of God’s mission in a broader spectrum through hermeneutic of God’s speech-act and God’s reconciliation with the world.[9] This said, it is of special significance to scrutinize the discourse of God’s mission within the framework of speech-act theology and God’s reconciliation. I find this correlation model between God’s mission and reconciliation to be substantial and indispensable for assessing Barth’s contribution to the postcolonial theology and World Christianity.
Totaliter Aliter and Church: Transformation and Reconciliation
Barth characterizes the Trinity in a threefold sense: God’s lordship, God’s love in freedom, and God the Wholly Changing. God who reveals God’s self as the Lord is the One who loves in freedom. More provocatively, the love of the triune God in freedom is the One who changes everything. God’s being shares divine life in the history of Israel and church by way of participation, irruption and transformation.[10] God as the Wholly Other (totaliter aliter) means that God is the Wholly Changing, an identity in which God’s mission finds its prophetic culmination in Christ’s reconciliation with the world.
In Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation (CD IV/3.2 §72 “The Holy Spirit and the Sending of the Christian Community”), Jesus Christ as the living Word of God is the eternal subject of the Gospel. With this principle in mind, Barth challenges a missionary attempt at propagating and defending “any supposed Christian worldview of its own.”[11] Witness to Jesus Christ contradicts a missionary attempt at disseminating, producing, propagating, and defending western culture and philosophical-religious worldviews. In becoming incarnate and reconciling sinful humanity to God, God has established an ontological connection with all humanity through Jesus Christ. By the Holy Spirit, humanity shares in the work of Christ and a church is created. The old things have passed away and all things have become new. This is the work of God who is reconciled in Christ with the world.[12]
In the divine act of reconciliation a new human subject is introduced as the faithful covenant partner of God, namely the covenantal partner of God’s initiative of salvific drama, participating in Christ’s prophetic work against the unreconciled and reified reality of lordless powers. Barth’s prophetic ethic of reconciliation entails postcolonial dimension to overcome the pathology of modernity under empire as critically regards the demonism of politics (Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism) and economy of mammon (late capitalism) grounded in the idea of empire.[13]
Mission as Solidarity with the World
The community as the earthly-historical form of existence of Jesus Christ is his body and each community has its own locality, its own environment, tradition, language, and culture. In the fullness of time God made known God’s mystery to give all things their head in Christ –both in heaven and on earth (Eph 1:9). This is the Magna Carta of the being of the church in Jesus Christ.[14] The life of the church is located between Christ’s reconciliation and the final consummation of God’s kingdom. The church as the living community of Jesus Christ exists in and for the world. The very nature of the church is a missional one, based on the triune God, on Christ’s reconciliation and on the power of the Holy Spirit. Here church is defined as the community of vocation.[15]
The church’s solidarity with the world lies in its active recognition that Jesus Christ, as the Savior of the world, can exist in a worldly fashion,[16] thus it is led into the world by the enlightening power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ attests his reconciliation to us by the Spirit whose power awakens people to living faith and comes again and again as the Lord to make us anew. The church is in becoming again and again by Word and Spirit in which the revolutionary change takes place in our humanity; Christ alters and transforms the whole relation between God and us. ‘God’s being in coming’ is the one who loves in freedom. “God is,” denotes “Alles in allem real veränderdnde Tatsache.”[17] That “God is” has its truth in a real revolution, novum, and transformation of all life-connections. God as the New is this New in historical coming. “God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately…against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it.”[18]
In ecclesiology under missional aspect and reconciliation Barth elaborates the Word to theological subject matter which addresses the specific situations and concrete needs of the world by the power of the Holy Spirit for liberation, peace, and life.[19] In the wonderful liberation of the Christians, transition takes place from the passing of the old and perishing being to the coming of a new and saving being. They come into fellowship with God and solidarity with the neighbor in contrast to the tyranny, the fatal dominion of things over humanity, institutions and machines, gadgets, in case of conflict.[20]
In terms of solidarity with the world, and in pledge and commitment to it, Barth argues that all members of the church participate in the mission.[21] The kingdom of God establishes the exclusive, all-penetrating, all-determining lordship of God in the Word and the Spirit in the whole sphere of creation.[22] Barth contends that in the present situation Christian diakonia should not be prevented from reaching out in a political and social direction. Its proper task should not be neglected.[23]
Sharing itself in solidarity with the suffering of Christ, the Christian mission in affliction is a reflection and an analogy to the suffering of Christ. This is the basis for the church’s solidarity with the world in affliction and suffering.[24] The mystery of divine passion in the torture, crucifixion and death is found in the person and mission of the crucified One.[25]
The Gospel is the good, glad tidings of Jesus Christ, who reveals the great and unconditional “Yes” of the eternal goodness of God to the world.[26] Proclamation of the living Word of the living Lord contradicts appropriation, control, and domestication of the Gospel by dominant philosophical and scientific principles and as a consequence, challenges the inevitable mastering and deformation of the Gospel.[27] Mission has nothing to do with strengthening confessional positions, extending European or American culture and civilization, or propagating one of the modes of thought and life familiar and dear to the older Christian world. Mission presupposes the value of the contributions that other religions and cultures make and is performed by allowing each culture to construct the mission in their own way, psychologically, sociologically, aesthetically, and ethically.[28] Cultural constructions and contributions must be appreciated and taken seriously, eradicating the crass arrogance of western people, who are opposed to the gospel “in all its radical uniqueness and novelty.”[29] The church’s work of mission as service to God’s Word takes the form of serving, both in its commencement and continuation, and this has little to do with mastering and ruling a foreign people in a colonial manner. As Barth provocatively states, “the goal of missions is not to convert heathen in the sense of bringing them to a personal enjoyment of their salvation. Neither at home nor abroad can it be the work of the community to convert men. This is the work of God alone. When God does convert a man by His call, then he does, of course, come to personal salvation, but supremely and decisively he becomes a witness in the world.”[30]
Barth maintains that racially different people must be seen and taken seriously in their cultural particularity and orientation. The church’s witness to the mutual fellowship of the people of the world nullifies an attempt at dividing the church into special white, black or brown congregations.[31] The church does not turn a blind eye to sociological divisions when the prophetic mission is applied to the economic classes with their conflicting interests and ideologies.
As Barth argues, it would be morally questionable and even sick if the church’s mission identified itself with a class, its concerns and its interests; its faith and its ideology; or its ethos with its morality.[32] Mission involves the whole person and so cares for humans in their totality. Education, healing, help, and the needs of all are rightly associated with mission. God’s mission in this regard initiates a postcolonial horizon of God’s mission which reinforces human participation as the covenant partner in Christ’s prophetic history of fighting against the dangerous reality of nothingness and its lordless powers in the aftermath of colonialism.
Barth’s Irregular Theology and Hermeneutical Significance
For the sake of postcolonial significance, I am concerned with examining Barth’s hermeneutic of God’s speech-act. This becomes the driving force for understanding the phenomenology of intertextuality as seen in an analogical theory of secular parables of the kingdom of God. This refers to a teaching of lights and words outside the churchly wall (Lichtenlehre in Church Dogmatics IV/3.1 & 69), in which Barth fully developed his earlier reflection of “The Speech of God as the Act of God.”[33]
For Barth, biblical hermeneutics lies in understanding the Scriptures as a witness of divine revelation. Scripture constituted itself as the Canon, because it imposed itself upon the church as such. The self-imposing of the Scripture was possible in virtue of its content, that is, God’s revelation. Scripture is God’s Word in the form of attestation, witnessing to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.[34] Barth maintains that the Scripture as the witness of divine revelation is a special form of the universally valid hermeneutical principle.[35]
Accordingly, Gadamer appreciates that Barth’s Romans is a hermeneutical manifesto to overcome liberal theology, which differentiates Barth from Bultmann’s program of integration of historical-critical research with biblical exegesis and his dependence upon Heidegger. In Gadamer’s account, Barth’s Church Dogmatics contributes to the hermeneutical problem indirectly everywhere.[36] Certainly Barth paves the way of a special hermeneutics as informed, prescribed by, and concerned with the subject matter of Scripture.
At a deeper level, Barth conceptualizes the revelation in terms of Calvin’s notion of God as the speaking person (Dei loquentis persona). God’s coming to us as a speech-act is of phenomenological experience and hermeneutical significance. The whole creation is the theatre of God’s glory and the recipient and bearer of God’s Word by becoming the ministry of the Word of God.[37] God allows the secular sphere to become the parable of God’s Word in an analogical witness to God’s kingdom, qualifying it as the free, extraordinary communications of Jesus Christ. Barth’s contribution to theological hermeneutics can be found in his reflection of encountering God’s act of speech transpiring between the scriptural world and extra-scriptural world, anticipating the phenomenological horizon of intertextuality between scripture and world.
Barth’s theology of speech-act is not exhausted into ontological, hermeneutical notion of aletheia. Conversely, such an ontological concept needs to be critically elucidated by the life horizon (or subject matter) of divine speech-act. In the Heideggerian notion of aletheia, Barth already acknowledges that such a concept denotes “the manifestation of something hidden, in human ideas, concepts and judgments.”[38] In Barth’s account, however, the notion of aletheia cannot be fully accepted as truth if it is undertaken apart from the event of its being manifested. God’s act in self-revealing first comes into effect, then hermeneutical reflection of it is maintained; “all our hermeneutical skill cannot be brought about by hermeneutical skill.”[39]
More than an ontological hermeneutic, Barth continues his insight into the freedom and mystery of God’s speech-act in his reflection of irregular theology and later doctrine of lights set within reconciliation. Thus, Barth’s notion of irregular theology remains in force. In his reflection of church proclamation as the material of Dogmatics (CD I/1: § 3), Barth already paved a way to the irregular side of dogmatic theology, in which we read: “God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist, and thus give us to understand that the boundary between the Church and the secular world can still take at any time a different course from that which we think we discern.”[40] This extrabiblical material is co-posited with regulative material of preaching and sacrament in becoming a service to a ministerium verbi divini.[41] This perspective leads Barth to affirm dogma as an eschatological concept underlying the distinction between theologia archetypos (God’s own) and theologia ektypos (human agenda). Barth argues that the truth of revelation cannot be established as aletheia (the manifestation of something hidden) in human ideas, concepts and judgments. The manifestation of the truth (aletheia) cannot be comprehended apart from the living God as the Subject of speech.
For this reason, Barth in his conception of dogmatics as a science[42] distinguishes the regulative, rational side (academic theology: theologia scholastica) from the irregular, actualistic event. The latter is characteristic of the irregular side of the word of God as free discussion of the problems which arises for Church proclamation outside the theological school. Barth credits religious socialists, especially such people as J.C. Blumhardt and H. Kutter, to the aphoristic style and prophetic tone of proclamation in this train of irregular dogmatics. In his conception of dogmatic theology in scientific and irregular correlation, Barth maintains that “the historical account and the personal confession of faith in the name of contemporaries can only be means to this end.”[43]
I characterize this correlation model of Barth’s systematic theology (in regular and irregular connection) to be grounded upon the speech-act theology in incomprehensibility of the Word of God. For Barth, as the Lord of the church and the world, the name Jesus Christ nullifies the walls and barriers between the ecclesial sphere and extra-ecclesial world. God’s Word as God’s act means its contingent contemporaneity, and the Word of God makes history,[44] in which faith particularly lives by God’s power before faith and without faith (efficacia verbi extra usum).[45]
To my reading, Barth’s irregular theology sharpens God’s speech-act through the Other in the reconciled world. This is because God cannot abandon any secular sphere in the world, existing outside the walls of the Christian church.[46] Barth maintains that the church has the task of examining closely whether these profane words and lights are in agreement with scripture, church tradition, or dogma and whether the fruits of these words outside Christianity are good and whether their effect in the community is affirmative. This is what Barth calls a supplementary and auxiliary criterion, namely “the fruits which such true words…seem to bear in the outside world.”[47]
This said, Barth’s deliberation of true lights and words as free communications of God, as seen in light of intertextuality, does not necessarily contradict the hermeneutical project of the fusion of horizons. But it critically expands the limitation of ontological hermeneutics, when it comes to Scripture, social engagement, and the cultural world. This perspective leas us to elucidate Barth’s reflection of culture and religion.
Barth, Culture, and Religion
For clarification of Barth’s stance on culture and religion, I am concerned to evaluate Barth’s reflection of culture and religion. In his Amsterdam lecture (1926),[48] Barth explicates a cultural horizon of theology to restore the broken relationship between Creator and creature “by virtue of the unbroken tie of reconciliation.”[49] Barth takes the realm of culture to hold the promise conformed by the gospel of reconciliation, since Jesus Christ in incarnation is the Lord in the whole domain of culture and world. The worldly regime can be a reflection or an analogical witness to the promise of the kingdom of God within the divine act of reconciliation.
In light of reconciliation Barth is not reluctant to critically and constructively assess Aquinas’ dictum that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.”[50] If theologia naturalis intends to speak of nature and culture in more reliable manner, it must not evaporate theologia revelatus in the act of reconciliation. All cultural activity can be seen in striving for “the highest possible evaluation of the goal”[51] in the eschatological anticipation. Barth argues that the church swims along in the stream of culture,[52] standing in solidarity with society and human culture. In Barth’s definition, “the culture is the task set through the Word of God for achieving the destined condition of man in unity of soul and body.”[53] Calling for a prophetic objectivity, Barth endeavors to overcome the dualism between spirit and nature, soul and body, internal religious realm and external social realm. This refers to Barth’s third way to a prophetic-ethical understanding of culture in light of reconciliation under eschatological anticipation, in contrast to liberal or cultural Protestantism.[54]
Barth’s prophetic-ethical approach to culture is well expressed in his doctrine of word of God in Church Dogmatics, in which the problem of culture becomes the problem of being human, existing being indispensable for the theologian. Since theology is a specific cultural activity of humanity, it is sheer nonsense to criticize culture in this regard. “The problem of theology and dogmatics can also be seen as wholly set within the framework of the problem of culture.”[55]
In appreciation of culture, Barth’s correlational reflection between regular and irregular dimension of God’s speech-act is formulated in the following statement: “there can be no question, even in the future, of a real parallelism or coincidence between the doctrine and the life of the Christian and non-Christian religions of grace (however consistent). Instead, certain symptomatic distinctions will be visible here and there, in which the true and the essential distinction can always be preserved.”[56] Barth does not argue against the need for inquiry into non-Christian traditions, rather he finds it significant.
This said, Barth also analyzes the relationship between revelation and religion in dialectical-analogical mode of thought. He makes use of the Hegelian term of Aufhebung (sublation) in regard to religion. Unlike Hegel’s higher synthesis of religion for absolute knowledge, Barth entails polysemy of sublation in singling out religion (selective affinity), suspending religion (religion as unbelief), and upholding in critically and constructively preserving the religion (analogical witness) under the effectiveness of revelation.[57] Through this polysemy of selective affinity between religion and revelation in terms of singling out, suspension, and critical-constructive institution, Barth utilizes and circumvents the Hegelian dialectic in his distinctive manner.
Moreover, Barth’s provocative statement reads for the priority of revelation against the scriptures: “[T]he Veda to the Indians, the Avesta to the Persians, the Tripitaka to the Buddhists, the Koran to its believers: are they not all ‘bibles’ in exactly the same way as the Old and New Testaments?”[58] Further, we read, “In His revelation God is present in the world of human religion.” It is not plausible to hold any ecclesial triumphalistic attitude of Christianity over non-Christian religions. Religion as unbelief is, first of all, applied to Christians and then non-Christians. According to Barth, “The religion of revelation is indeed bound up with the revelation of God: but the revelation of God is not bound up with the religion of revelation.”[59]
Furthermore, Barth’s position “has nothing to do with arrogance towards other religions, but is a call to faithful self-examination.”[60] Indeed, Barth encourages the church to adopt a humble attitude, spiritual poverty, and openness by listening attentively to a very strange, profane voice of God from the world,[61] which remains the driving force in his later teaching of the words and lights (extra muros ecclesiae).[62]
Hence, I characterize Barth’s position in terms of a prophetic, ethical, postcolonial stance which is differentiated from Paul Knitter’s characterization of Barth as the neo-Orthodox representative of the evangelical conservative model.[63] Knitter remains limited in clarifying Barth’s multilayered meaning of revelation in God’s speech-act in his theology of the Word of God.
More than that, in his analysis of revelation and religion(s) Barth scrutinized Pure Land Buddhism in view of the grace religion of the Reformation. In the faith of Amida Buddha, Barth argues that there is “a wholly providential disposition.”[64] Later, he states concerning secular parables of God’s kingdom: “We may think of the radicalness of the need of redemption or the fullness of what is meant by redemption if it is to meet this need.”[65] When we discern a radical human desire for redemption in other religions, when we meet a desire for grace or completeness of redemption in other religions, we hear with humble attitude and openness attentively to what God speaks through the other religions. We should be grateful for the lesson and teaching that this Buddhism provides.[66] This specific Buddhism of grace finds its selective affinity with the grace religion of Protestantism. It is appreciated as one of analogical witnesses to the Kingdom of God, in which we may hear the strange and mysterious voice of God.
Problematization: Culture as Divine Semantic Field
Despite the humble attitude in openness to other religions and cultures, however, I sense that Barth still is left to be desired for conceptual clarity about worldly realms as divine semantics. Certainly, Barth accentuates cultural relevance for theological activity in light of reconciliation, He regards the whole creation as the theatre of God’s glory and the recipient and bearer of God’s Word by becoming the ministry of the Word of God.[67]
I find this insight to be crucial in Barth’s relevance to phenomenological hermeneutics, which needs to be further elucidated in the deliberation of the worldly realm as the semantic field. Thus I problematize limitation of Barth’s insight by elaborating it in phenomenological-hermeneutical framework. It is certain that Barth’s insight implies phenomenology of intertextuality in encountering and experiencing totaliter aliter in God’s speech-act, as transpiring between the scriptural and extra-scriptural world. I characterize this irregular hermeneutic as an indispensable epistemology underlying Barth’s theology of word in a dialectical-analogical mode of thought. Analogical thought in hermeneutical significance becomes the driving force for critically discerning and constructively evaluating cultural realms (analogata) in light of the coming kingdom of God (analogans). A dialectical method supplements conceptual thinking, critical analysis, and constructive arguments in undergirding a critical-emancipatory dimension of analogical theology.[68] God’s speech-act in revelation allows for this correlated method and thought-form, say “analectical” theology; it is driven in approximation toward the divine Truth in renewing limitation of critical, dialectical, realistic approach to Barth.[69]
What is central in the hermeneutical tradition is a notion of fullness of language and dialogue linked to the scriptural text and ontological experience. To say something of something is to interpret in every voice of signifying. In the semantic voice, the signifying word is interpretation in a way that the symbol is the universal dimension. To the degree that we say something is real by signifying it, thus we interpret it.[70]
In Paul Ricoeur’s account, “there is no general hermeneutics, no universal canon for exegesis, but only disparate and opposed theories concerning the rules of interpretation. The hermeneutic field …is internally at variance with itself.”[71] If the hermeneutic field is at variance with itself in the conflict of interpretation oscillating between demystification of the language and recovery of meaning, then ‘to say something of something’ would be transposed upon Barth’s theology of speech act. Here, Clifford Geertz’s phenomenology of culture is helpful because it in deciphers culture as text. A notion of a text goes beyond written materials and documents, even beyond dialogical practice. Geertz is aware of the importance of the theological tradition in the interpretation of nature as theatrum gloriae Dei, that is, a sematic text of God. This theological notion of the world as the stage of God’s glory may be dated back to the interpretatio naturae tradition in the middle ages which culminated in Spinoza attempting to read nature as a Scripture of God. Along this line, Geertz elucidates cultural practice as an assemblage of texts, or an ensemble of text which says something of something meaningful to us.[72]
Geertz’s perspective strikes us as a truism to develop a theory of interpretation in the social, religious context. Conceived from a phenomenological perspective, I maintain that the Scripture and cultural world constitute a single text through which God continues to address through the symbolic system of culture, religion, and people’s life. This perspective helps us to improve on limitations of conceptual clarity in Barth’s theology of God’s speech-act in revelation, furthering his theology constructively for postcolonial theology and World Christianity.
Comparative Theology, World Christianity, and Postcolonial Significance
Barth, in the discussion of the basic form of humanity, finds similarity in reference of Martin Buber, Feuerbach, and Confucius. His theological anthropology appreciates each different angle and description of humanity, although respective description is not the same as theological anthropology. In Barth’s account, “there are approximations and similarities; in this very fact we may even see a certain confirmation.” “Even with his natural knowledge of himself the natural man is still in the sphere of divine grace.” This perspective qualifies Barth’s theological anthropology for undergirding a comparative theology in learning and embracing worldly, i.e. non-Christian wisdom.[73]
In his later stage, Barth took a tremendous interest in the comparative study of religions. Markus Barth reported on his father’s plan of engagement with the history of religion at the Leuenberg conference of 1992, while proposing his father’s plan entitled “The general history of religion.” In consideration of Barth’s plan, Klappert introduces Barth’s research plan in the following way: 1. The relation between Christianity and Judaism; 2. The relation between Judaism and Islam; 3. The relation between Buddhism and Hinduism. This reveals Barth’s interest of world religions concerning Nostra Aetate in the Second Vatican council.[74]
Barth, in his serious study of the sixteen Latin texts of Vatican II, expressed his hope for this renewal and movement to continue. Barth also pays special attention to the matters of Israel and non-Christian religions. Such a confession of guilt in Barth’s view should be extended to Jewish pogroms and Muslims concerning the church’s fatal and deplorable role in the so-called crusades.[75]
Furthermore, Barth’s lecture in a Mustermesse in Basel was held for three hundred students from developing countries, in which he expressed his expectation of discovering a true Christianity in world Christianity: “There may be a religious West, but there is not a Christian West. . . . It could well be that one day true Christianity will be understood and lived better in Asia and in Africa than in our aged Europe.”[76]
Concerning the different forms of the ministry in the context of World Christianity, Barth’s theology of the Spirit is crucial because Lord works in great freedom and in great variety. The diversities of gifts of the Spirit is based on the communion of the Holy Spirit, the same Lord. All differences in the church community rests on the variety of the distributions of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit of charis who is coupled with the unity and integration of His charismata is the Spirit.[77] Against the secularism and sacralisation, Barth gives free reign to the Holy Spirit which may be developed and contextualized in World Christianity.
Actually, the rise of new Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is characterized as the coming of global Christianity for the next Christendom by promoting independence, inculturation, and liberation.[78]
In matters of incultural translation, an inquiry concerning the intertextuality of God’s speech-act helps us prevent the indigenous translation from falling into a crude syncretism or cultural accommodation. Phenomenological horizon of intertextuality can be reinforced in terms of an analogical-dialectical (analectical) framing of similarity-in-difference, without nullifying the zone of untranslatability. “You cannot express some of Plato’s key thoughts in the Hebrew of Jeremiah or even of the Wisdom literature, but you [also] cannot express them in Homeric Greek.”[79] Not to mention: We cannot translate a kerygmatic thought in the Bible into the Totemic system of thought, nor Totemic system of thought into an Asian Confucian moral system.
Despite the experience of incommensurability and the untranslatability of cultural expressions, communication may occur as an adventure, creating open space for the dynamic movement of encounter, tension, and fusion between multiple horizons. This inquiry and procedure facilitates our elaboration of Barth’s theology of God’s speech-act in the regular-irregular correlation by keeping translation from falling into any crude notion of translation reductionism or indigenous syncretism.[80]
Barth, Modernist Interpretation, and Multiple Modernities
Drawing upon the analysis and elucidation of Barth, I find his speech-act theology to be contributing to a new project of postcolonial theology among multiple modernities. The notion of multiple modernities is comprehended in the postcolonial endeavor to break through the malaise of Western modernity in regard to the colonized reality of late capitalism. Barth is critical of an acultural theory of modernity in which modernity is taken as falling prey to danger and iron cage by hubris; it denies human limits and human dependence upon God and placing unlimited confidence in the power of human reason. This asocial theory of modernity can be seen in Weber’s comparative study of modern capitalism and the Protestant ethics.[81]
Given this, it is hard to concur with the modernity-inspired interpretation of Barth, in which Barth dialectically employs the modern consciousness of freedom and autonomy in his theological working through modern autonomy. According to Rendtorf, Barth’s theology expresses “the present status of the history of Christianity under the condition of modernity.”[82] Eberhard Jüngel is in support of modernist interpretation of Barth.[83]
Against this trend. I argue that what is missing in this modernist interpretation of Barth is a critical exegesis of Barth’s irregular theology and analogical relationality of speech-act theology with a strong critique of capitalist modernity, and also with prophetic recognition of other cultures and religions.
Indeed, everything modern cannot be seen as belonging to one Enlightenment package. Against the Enlightenment package error,[84] a notion of multiple modernities entails a project of colonized people involving resources in their own traditional culture and religions for a new practice and innovation. The project of multiple modernities goes beyond a patchwork solution which accepts the power-conferring science and technology of Western modernity into an unchanged way of life. But critical adaptation has to invent their own in interaction with Western culture and religion by bringing about profound changes in traditional ways of life.[85]
This creative adaptation to Western sources and new interpretations of traditional sources of culture, morality, and religion may find in Barth’s theology inspiration and respect for other cultures and religions. Barth incorporates sociality, solidarity, and co-humanity as social critical categories in his own theological framework by challenging bourgeois subjectivity, malaise of Western modernity, and consciousness of Neo-Protestant theology. He takes issue with the Eurocentric modernist culture imbued with Christianity and cuts through the pathology and setback of individual subjectivity toward fellow-humanity in terms of the concept of God’s sociality and the kingdom of God as recognition, transformation, and irruption. Barth transcends the asocial and ahistorical brutality of subjectivity and consciousness of modernity through God, who loves in freedom as the wholly other and completely changing.[86]
This perspective helps us to develop Barth’s thought-form toward postcolonial trans-modernity in which the dialectics of the universal (the regular) and the particular (the irregular) may lead us to create quite different modern cultures and societies, namely multiple modernities “in coalescence of diverse patterns and forms from heterogeneous origins.”[87] Provincializing Western mind may call for rethinking and renewing Western thought “from and for the margins” rather than harshly rejecting it.[88]
Conclusion: Karl Barth in the Postcolonial Landscape and Parrhesia
Mayra Rivera in her book The Touch of Transcendence presents the notion of God as irreducibly Other, who is beyond our grip but not beyond our touch.[89] Rivera’s postcolonial theology of God provides a relational transcendence within creation and between creatures. She acknowledges that the notion of transcendence remains central in Barth’s theology of totaliter aliter. Rivera expresses her affinity to Barth’s critique of liberal, modernist theology in light of God totaliter aliter. However, Rivera takes more into account Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial notion of “beyond,” which expresses more than disillusionment toward contemporary culture. In Rivera’s postcolonial theology of God, however, I sense that there is a paucity of articulating Barth’s notion of totaliter aliter as the revolution of God, as seen in solidarity with the poor in his critique of liberalism and imperialism of World War I.[90] Furthermore, the relational theology in Barth’s sense can be advanced in a postcolonial notion of reconciling transcendence in light of God as the infinite horizon of speech-act in the church and ensemble of cultural texts and the Other.[91]
Jonathan Ingleby advocate a prophetic tradition of the scriptures and other prophetic voices in religion and politics for the postcolonial mission of emancipation, striving to overcome the structure of hegemony and violence in the context of Empire.[92] For the postcolonial notion of God’s mission Ingleby challenges Homi Bhabha’s psychological notion of mimicry, which tends to stabilize the status quo in imitation of Western colonial rationality and practice.[93]
On the other hand, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen draws upon Barth’s theology of reconciliation and he initiates a constructive dialogue with Marion Grau’s postcolonial “Christology of divine commerce.” Kärkkäinen’s reading strategy of Barth seeks to utilize a model in illustration of the mutual conditioning of God’s initiative and human participation as the covenant partner in the gospel of reconciliation. This model is of a postcolonial character in uncovering the complexity of the Western economic alliance with exploitation in a context of neoimperialism. Barth’s objective model of reconciliation completed by the triune God reinforces human participation in Christ’s prophetic work of fighting against the colonizing process of lifeworld under Empire.[94]
Appreciating this postcolonial reading of Barth, I take into account Barth’s preferential option for the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is “partisan of the poor” in anamnestic solidarity with massa perditionis. Swimming against the stream,[95] Jesus establishes his table fellowship with publicans and sinners, calling people out of the massa perditionis to set them at God’s side.[96] Jesus’ solidarity with am ha’aretz and ochlos (in Korean: minjung) “can consist only in the attestation and proclamation” of God’s free grace which means Jesus Christ as the saving revolt of God.[97]
At this juncture, I am concerned with retrieving Barth’s seminal notion of parrhesia for reinvigorating the postcolonial imagination. As Barth argues, in our participation in the veracity of God’s truth, our words become God’s own word, such that it receives the momentum of parrhesia which distinguishes genuine preaching from a mere speaking about God.[98] In parrhesia we live as Christians or as witnesses to the world, in which our life is undercut by the threat of inhumanity and one’s exploitation of one’s neighbor. Christian discourse of parrhesia resists ideologically distorted forms of inhumanity and exploitation.[99] Thus Barth encourages the church to be on the side of the victims of social order and to stand in immanent opposition to systems of social disorder. This sharpens evangelization of the kingdom of God to the proclamation of the protest of God against all ungodlinesss and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth (Rom 1:18).[100]
Similarly, Michel Foucault elaborates parrhesia in contrast to artificial flattery and governmentality. There can only be truth in parrhesia. Thus, parrhesia is the kairos, the occasion in which individuals choose to speak the truth with regard to each other and to challenge the way how to govern people. Parrhesia as a verbal activity implies that a speaker utters his/her personal relationship with truth, in a shameless responsibility to help other people: critique instead of flattery, ethical responsibility instead of self-interest and apathy.[101]
Foucault’s notion of parrhesia against the governmentality can be enhanced and sharpened in Barth’s political parrhesia in undergirding the discourse of God’s solidarity in the socio-critical analysis of the embedment of religious knowledge with an institutionalized power structure. An activity of parrhesia in witness to the truth of the gospel about the Kingdom of God is of a prophetic, ethical, and postcolonial character, providing more space for innocent victims to speak of themselves in the aftermath of colonialism. In the global-critical hermeneutics of intertextuality between the colonizer and the colonized, Barth is appreciated yet also challenged and renewed to serve God’s solidarity with massa perditionis.[102]
[1] Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8. See further Vitor Westhelle, After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-Colonial Theologies (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), xvi.
[2] Jonathan Ingleby, Beyond Empire: Postcolonialism and Mission in a Global Context (Central Milton Keynes: Author House, 2010), 29.
[3] Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids, Michigan/ Cambridge, U.K: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003).
[4] Brain M. Howell and Jenell Williams Paris, Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective (MI, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 209-210.
[5] Classic Texts in Mission and World Christianity, ed. Norman E. Thomas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995), 102.
[6] Karl Barth, “Die Theologie und die Mission in der Gegenwart,” (1932) in Theologische Fragen und Antworten (Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag, 1957), 100-126.
[7] Thomas, ed., Classic Texts in Mission and World Christianity, 105-106.
[8] Against an ecumenical model of God’s mission, see John Flett, The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 12.
[9] David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 382.
[10] We use CD for the abbreviation of Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth, eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F Trance (London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2004).
[11] CD IV/3.2: 837.
[12] CD IV/1: 74.
[13] Barth, The Christian Life, CD IV/4. Lecture Fragments, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1981), 220, 222.
[14] CD IV/1: 665-6.
[15] CD IV/3.2: 682.
[16] CD IV/3.2:773-4.
[17] KD II/1: 289; CD II/1: 258.
[18] CD II/1: 386.
[19] John Thompson, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Karl Barth (Allison, Pennsylvania: Pickwick, 1991), 103.
[20] CD IV/3.2: 667.
[21] CD IV/3.2:784.
[22] CD IV/3.2: 792.
[23] CD IV/3.2: 892.
[24] CD IV/3.2: 637.
[25] CD IV/1: 247.
[26] CD IV/3. 2: 798-800, 805.
[27] CD IV/3.2: 821.
[28] CD IV/3.2: 875.
[29] CD IV/3.2: 875.
[30] CD IV/3.2: 876.
[31] CD IV/3.2: 899.
[32] CD IV/3.2: 900.
[33] CD 1/1: § 5. 4.
[34] CD I/1: 111.
[35] CD I/2: 468.
[36] H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, London: Continuum, 2004), 509, 521.
[37] CD IV/3.1: 164.
[38] CD 1/1: 270.
[39] CD 1/1: 148.
[40] CD I/1: 55.
[41] CD I/1: 58-59.
[42] CD I/1: 277. 275.
[43] CD I/1: 281.
[44] CD 1/1: 145,152.
[45] CD 1/1: 154.
[46] CD IV/3.1:119.
[47] CD IV/3.1:127.
[48] Barth, “Church and Culture,” in Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920-1928, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (London: SCM, 1962), 334-54.
[49] Ibid., 341.
[50] Ibid., 342.
[51] Ibid., 349.
[52] Ibid., 351.
[53] Ibid., 337.
[54] Peter Winzeler, Widerstehende Theologie: Karl Barth 1920-35 (Stuttgart: Alektor, 1982), 341-42.
[55] CD 1/1: 284.
[56] CD 1/1: 344.
[57] Sven Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions (Bloomsbury: T & T Clark, 2014), 51-52.
[58] CD I/2: 282.
[59] CD 1/2: 329.
[60] CD 1/2: 327.
[61] CD I/1: 55.
[62] CD IV/3.1: 110.
[63] Paul F. Knitter, No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 90.
[64] CD 1/2: 340.
[65] CD IV/3.1: 125.
[66] CD I/2: 342.
[67] CD IV/3.1: 164
[68] Certainly we read that Barth states more explicitly the relationship between analogans (God) analogatum (secular forms of parables) just before his death, as obvious in his letter to Bethge’s Bonhoeffer biography: Ethics – co-humanity – servant church-discipleship – [democratic] socialism – peace movement – political responsibility. Barth, Briefe 1916-1968, eds. Jürgen Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt (Zurich: TVZ, 1975), 404.
[69] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909-1936 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 15-16, 18, 24. McCormack tends to undermine a multilayered dimension of theological Sache in God’s speech-act and analogical mode of thought, subsuming it into divine Realdialectik of veiling and unveiling in revelation.
[70] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), 22.
[71] Ibid., 27. 25.
[72] Geertz, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 448-449. 452.
[73] CD III/2: 277.
[74] Klappert, Versöhnung und Befreiung: Versuche, Karl Barth kontextuell zu verstehen (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1994),50.
[75] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 478-85. See further Barth, Ad Limina Apostolorum, trans. Keith R. Crim (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1969), 36-7.
[76] Busch, Karl Barth, 468.
[77] CD IV.3.2: 859.
[78] Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4. 89.
[79] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 375.
[80] Chung, Reclaiming Mission as Constructive Theology: Missional Church and World Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 94.
[81] Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernities,” in Dilip P. Gaonkar, ed. Alternative Modernities (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2001), 174
[82] Rendtorf, “Radikale Autonomie Gottes,” in Trutz Rendtorff, Theorie des Christentums (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus Gerd Mohn, 1972),180.
[83] Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (London: T. & T. Clark, 2001). 137.
[84] Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Gaonkar, 180.
[85] Ibid., 183-4.
[86] Dieter Schellong, Bürgertum und christliche Religion: Anpassungsprobleme der Theologie seit Schleiermacher (Munich: Kaiser, 1975), 109.
[87] Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and The Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 224.
[88] Ibid., 183.
[89] Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 2.
[90] F. W. Marquardt, “First Report on Karl Barth’s Socialist Speeches,” in F. W. Marquardt, Theological Audacities: Selected Essays, eds. Andreas Pangritz and Paul S. Chung (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), 103-122.
[91] For Barth and postcolonial imagination see Paul S. Chung, Postcolonial Imagination: Archeological Hermeneutics and Comparative Religious Theology (Hong Kong: Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 2014), 230-234.
[92] Ingleby, Beyond Empire, 29.
[93] Ibid., 51.
[94] Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Christ and Reconciliation (Grand Rapids, MI/ Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013), 371-372.
[95] CD IV/3.2:581.
[96] CD IV/3.2:586-587.
[97] CD IV/3.2:620; 774.
[98] CD II/1: 231-2.
[99] CD IV/2: 442.
[100] CD III/4: 545.
[101] Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angles: Semiotexte, 2001), 19-20.
[102] For a critical, emancipatory study of Karl Barth seePaul S. Chung, Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008).