419 - The Spirit as Lord: The Pneumatology of Karl Barth

The Spirit as Lord: The Pneumatology of Karl Barth
By Philip J. Rosato, S.J.
Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1981. 228 pp. $15.75.

It is remarkable to observe how much scholarly study continues to be devoted to the theology of Barth. While it is commonly said that Barth's theology has now lost its influence, his written work still attracts the attention of theologians who find in it a fruitful subject of investigation. Moreover, this interest extends beyond the limits of his own ecclesiastical domain and has acquired ecumenical dimensions. There is probably no church in Europe in which less notice was taken of Barth during his lifetime than the Church of England. Yet one of the most incisive, critical studies of his method came a few years ago from a group of Anglican theologians associated with the University of Durham. Barth has also attracted the attention of Roman Catholics, who were happy to find a Protestant with whom they could have informed discourse on Catholic dogmas. One of the earliest and best one-volume expositions of Barth's thought was written by a Roman Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar. And this interest has been manifested again in the book now under review.

Father Rosato is a Jesuit, who received his early training at Woodstock College, N.Y., and proceeded to write his doctoral dissertation at the University of Tübingen under the direction of Walter Kasper and, to a lesser degree, Jürgen Moltmann.

In his old age, Barth told of a recurrent dream he had of a theology which would be centered on the Holy Spirit rather than on Christ, but which he, like Moses, was permitted to see only from afar. The author of this book disputes the assumption of the dream and undertakes to show that Barth, despite his apparent preoccupation with christology, was also deeply concerned with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and he might as well be described as a pneumatic as a christocentric theologian.

Rosato traces the course of Barth's teaching on the Holy Spirit in great detail through his successive writings, with extensive excerpts from the texts and critical allusions to the people who are the targets of Barth's criticism.

The great opponent with whom Barth was constrained to wrestle was, of course, Schleiermacher, who took the fateful step of introducing a theology that grounds the possibility of faith on the constitution of the human being, and who thus gave nineteenth century theology the anthropocentric turn that reached its apogee in the existential theology of Bultmann. Barth saw in this a betrayal of the fundamental principle

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of the Reformation, which located the possibility of faith solely in God's gracious gift of the Holy Spirit. Luther had written in his Catechism that one cannot by one's own resources attain to a subjective knowledge and realization of the gospel of salvation through Christ, but only by the presence and enlightening power of the Holy Spirit. But Schleiermacher told the cultured people of his time, who despised religion, that if they would only examine their own consciousness of self with its antithetical conjunction of freedom and dependence, they would discover a feeling of absolute dependence, in which "God is given to us in an original way." Faith as the realization of a potential immanent in the constitution of humanity became the leading direction in the nineteenth-century theology; and it has become the accepted view in the modern world that religious faith, whatever its objective reference, is primarily a human experience and is to be regarded as an anthropological fact.

In a geometrical figure of a type Barth was fond of using, the revelation of God in Christ and the reception of this revelation in faith were likened to the two foci of an ellipse, which remain distinct. But Schleiermacher fused the objective reality of Christ with the subjective experience of faith, and thus changed the ellipse into a circle with the subjective focus at the center. Schleiermacher's theology was not for the people of the New Testament or the Reformation, who were wholly dependent on the gift of the Spirit and faith, but for the people of the Enlightenment, who were wholly sufficient to themselves.

Only a few points from the immense amount of material in this volume may be selected for brief comment. In his original treatment of the Holy Spirit in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, Barth presented a vigorous defense of the Filioque (the affirmation in the Creed of the Western church that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son). The original reference of the phrase was to the internal relations of the divine being; but, while Barth defended the doctrine in this context, he was animated also by the more practical consideration that, if the external operations of the Trinity correspond to the internal relations, the rejection of the Filioque would open the door to a possible communication of the Spirit to us humans apart from Christ. In other words, Barth's attitude was not formed out of enthusiasm for the doctrine of the double procession but out of a determination to exclude any communication between God and human creatures that is not centered in Christ.

Von Balthasar offered a suggestive analysis of Barth's "thoughtforms" and their philosophical antecedents. Barth was certainly much influenced by his philosophical heritage, and especially by Kant, Plato, and Hegel (in that order). Thus, the problem of the human subject in face of the redeeming revelation of God in Christ is not dissimilar to that of Kant's knowing subject in face of objective reality; and the Holy Spirit, who opens the human subject to the new reality in Christ, is given primarily, if not exclusively, a noetic role. Regarding the other functions of the Holy Spirit, which are copiously attested in the New Testament,

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Barth is comparatively reticent, lest he should be led to ascribe too much to the believing subject and be diverted into a pietistic subjectivism, of which he was severely critical.

Barth's concentration of theology on Christ, which von Balthasar described as christological constriction, had, as we have noted, the effect of excluding all communication between God and human creatures that was not channeled through Christ. The principal casualty of this constriction was natural theology, but, as Rosato points out, it also detracts from the role of the Spirit in creation as the source of a possible knowledge of God in human creatures. Catholic theology has always made this primordial knowledge of God the condition of the realization of faith in the revelation of God in Christ. This position was dogmatized at the First Vatican Council; it has recently been a major theme with some Catholic theologians, such as the late Karl Rahner, and it has been taken up by some Protestants, notably Pannenberg, who has declared that theology must now be based on anthropology and that the truth of faith in God now rests on our understanding of humanity. Barth, with his eye on the nineteenth century, cherished a profound revulsion against all anthropological theology. He laid the whole emphasis on the soteriological role of the Spirit, and he subordinated any thought of an activity of the Spirit in creation to that. The consequence was that in the drama of reconciliation in Christ the human subject appears as a passive bystander and the Holy Spirit as a deus ex machina.

A further consequence of Barth's concentration on the christological and soteriological functions of the Spirit is that the Spirit is cast in a predominantly retrospective role. The Spirit brings to our remembrance and makes us partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ. But there is not the same sense of the eschatological significance of the Spirit as the power by which God not only brings all things into being but leads them forward to their promised fulfillment. Moltmann's treatment of the Spirit in his recent volume on creation goes some way toward redressing the balance.

Rosato suggests that the one-sidedness Barth shows here goes back to a one-sidedness in his doctrine of the Trinity. Barth's location of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Prolegomena to his Dogmatics commits him to framing it on an abstract model and assigning it a purely originative role. It is a form of the psychological model, in which the function of the Spirit is to form the bond of union between the Father and the Son. In this way, Barth seeks to affirm the opening words of the Bible, "In the beginning God." But God is both the beginning and the end, the first and the last; the unity ascribed to the triune God in the beginning must also be realized in the end, and, as the author puts it, "to the Spirit must be attributed the forward-pointing eschatological task of bringing the Father and the Son, along with all creation, to a not yet achieved unity." The doctrine of the Trinity does not refer to a "Prologue in heaven" before history began; it maintains the shape of faith, which looks to God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who

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created all things in the beginning and who by divine presence and action in Word and Spirit will bring them to their consummation. Whether the author is correct in suggesting that the eschatological role of the Spirit is more clearly recognized than the originative in the pneumatology of the Orthodox Church is a question that remains.

This is an excellent book. The author possesses a thorough understanding of the inner dynamics of Barth's thought and a wide acquaintance with the relevant literature. He is also familiar with Catholic and Orthodox pueurnatology and is able to view the problems in ecumenical perspective. He treats the theme in an irenic manner, and he shows great deference to Barth, presenting criticisms not as censures but as "improvisations," by which he means suggested improvements in the treatment of a profound and elusive problem on which no one can claim to have said the last word. By contrast, he chides Barth with a propensity to regard those who differed from him as adversaries and to engage them in adversarial proceedings rather than "dialogue" with a view to eliciting fresh light on the theology of the Spirit. Rasato brings out the significance of Barth's contribution by bringing him into the dialogue he spurned while he was alive.

When Barth uttered his magisterial "NO" (Nein) to Brunner's plea for natural theology, he opened his preface with the words (quoted from memory), "I am by nature a gentle soul and thoroughly averse to all unnecessary controversy." On a visit to friends in Basel, who had known the Barth family, the present reviewer was told they recalled hearing Barth's mother say of him, "Karl hat eine Kampfnatur" (Karl has a combative nature).

This book is indispensable for any who plan to work in the future on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

George S. Hendry

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey