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Reappraising Barth's Theology
By Daniel L. Migliore

ANY history of twentieth century theology will be largely the story of the revolutionary work and influence of Karl Barth. Energetic pastor for ten years in a small Swiss village, courageous resistance leader of the church against Nazism, brilliant biblical interpreter, Christo-centric church theologian, lover of Mozart's music-his stature can be measured only by comparison with other theological giants like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin.

I

Barth set a new agenda for theology, but he had no interest in founding a school of Barthianism. He considered every theology including his own-to be in need of continuous reform. While in his early work he spoke of God as "wholly other," he later balanced this emphasis with the theme of "the humanity of God." To Barth, theology was a venture of "faith seeking understanding" which had to be undertaken again and again in response to the biblical witness to God's sovereign grace in Jesus Christ. Although he was the author of nearly a thousand books and articles, his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, remained unfinished in thirteen volumes. He liked to tell the story of Pablo Casals who, when asked why he still practiced his cello four or five hours each day at the age of ninety, replied, "Because I have the impression I am making progress."

As both critics and admirers have recognized, Barth's theology is not without its problems. His understanding of the relationship of man and woman, however progressive it might have been for his own time and place, is hardly adequate for today. His work has also been criticized for lacking a theology of nature strong enough to address the ecological crisis of our time and for failing to develop an adequate doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit in the church, human culture, and other religions.

Nevertheless, the church can still learn much from Barth as it wrestles with current issues of faith and practice. One testimony to this fact comes from South Africa. The Rev. Nico Smith, a white clergyman in South Africa who has withdrawn from the Dutch Reformed Church in that country to serve in the black community, credits much to Karl Barth for his change of attitude toward apartheid. Two decades ago, Barth addressed this question to him: "Will you be free to preach the gospel even if the government in your country tells you that you are

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preaching against the whole system?" Other critics of the apartheid system in South Africa, including Allan Boesak, John de Gruchy, and David Bosch, continue to find theological insight and encouragement for political resistance in the work of Barth.

II

For three days in April, 1986, Princeton Seminary held a Karl Barth Symposium to celebrate his centennial birthdate and to reappraise his theological legacy. The purpose of the Symposium was not to promote nostalgia but to explore whether and to what extent the theology of Barth can be of help to theology and the church today. Princeton was an appropriate place for this special occasion. The influence of Barth's theology continues to be strong at the Seminary, the Church Dogmatics is still read and analyzed in classrooms, and Barth's prophetic opposition to Nazism, which reverberates in the great Barmen Declaration of 1934, is still studied and pondered as a powerful Christian witness against the idolatry of nation and race.

Princeton's associations with Barth are personal as well as theological. Former President John A. Mackay, a good friend of Barth, is said to have given him his first English lessons. Professor E. G. Homrighausen was among the first to translate Barth's early writings into English. Another former President, James I. McCord, now Chancellor of the Center of Theological Inquiry, was Barth's host when he lectured to standing-room-only crowds in Princeton University Chapel in 1962 on his only visit to the United States. The influence of Barth's theology was also unmistakable in the early decades of THEOLOGY TODAY. Among the articles in the first issue (April, 1944), there appeared a digest of the Römerbrief under the title, "A Theological Watershed."

From the lectures, responses, and presentations of the Symposium, we have selected several for this special issue of THEOLOGY TODAY. In the lead article, "Barth, the Trinity, and Human Freedom," Professor Colin Gunton of King's College, London, contends that Barth's grounding of human freedom in the freedom and transcendence of the triune God represents an immense achievement and that criticisms of Barth are often mistaken because they simply repeat Enlightenment and Pelagian assumptions about human freedom. At the same time, Gunton acknowledges that such criticisms have their justification insofar as they point to a trinitarian and especially pneumatological deficiency in Barth's theology.

Professor William Werpehowski of Villanova follows with a careful study of the importance of biblical narrative in Barth's ethics. Taking Barth's analysis of suicide as a test case, Werpehowski's fresh reading of Barth brings his work into lively conversation with two major contributors to Christian ethics in recent years, namely Stanley Hauerwas and James Gustafson.

In a provocative article, "Barth and Textuality," Professor George Lindbeck of Yale University argues that theologians become culturally

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interesting only when, like Barth, they go about their business of "redescribing the world in biblical categories," rather than pursuing some sort of "apologetic conformity to an establishment or nonconformist advocacy of an anti-establishment."

Professor Michael Welker of Tübingen University deftly handles the difficult topic of "Barth's Theology and Process Theology." He tries to move beyond the standard and seldom illuminating caricatures with which Barthian and process theologians confront each other and toward an open and possibly mutually corrective dialogue.

Finally, Professor Theodore Gill of John Jay College in New York offers, in his own inimitable style, a winsome interpretation of Barth's life-long love of Mozart. To Barth, Mozart's music says a Yes that overcomes the No, and in hearing his incomparable musical dialectic, "one can live."

Able responses to the Symposium lecturers are provided by Professors Cynthia Campbell (Austin Theological Seminary), George Hunsinger (Bangor Theological Seminary), Ronald Thiemann (Harvard Divinity School), and Marjorie Suchocki (Wesley Theological Seminary).

III

As most of the material in this issue will attest, doing theology is serious and demanding business. It is well to be reminded, therefore, that for Barth theology was not primarily a heavy burden but a joyful activity. While it is certainly correct to speak of his theology as Christ-centered, to say that it was rooted in a life-long, uninterrupted conversation with the Bible, and to note how important prayer was in his life and theology, all such characterizations of Barth's work would still miss something essential if they overlooked his remarkable freedom and playfulness. Laughter was deeply etched in Barth's theology and spirituality. He was a theologian with a rare sense of humor.

Humor often arises from the experienced discrepancy between reality and appearance, from the distance between what we pretend we are and what others know us to be, or between what others imagine us to be and what we know of ourselves. Humor thrives on incongruity, disproportion, the sometimes bizarre disparity between assumptions and facts, protocol and performance, the imagined past and the real past, the awaited future and the experienced present. The quality of humor-whether it is harsh or gentle, destructive or humanizing-depends on whether these contradictions and incongruities are held to be eternal and inescapable or provisional and redeemable.

If disproportion and incongruity are the stuff of humor, the life of faith and the work of theology are fields ripe for the harvest, a fact that seems to have been more readily apparent to the children of the world than to theologians. Witness Woody Allen's description of God as an underachiever; or the prayer of Tevye, the poor milkman in Fiddler on the Roof asking God kindly to bestow the undeniably high honor of election for once on some other people than the Jews; or the unlikely

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defense of God by Yossarian's lady friend in Catch 22 who, although herself an atheist, is so shaken by Yossarian's devilish indictment of God's ineptness or malevolence that she breaks into tears and retorts: "I don't believe in God, but the God I don't believe in is a good God."

As theologians go, Barth was uncommonly appreciative of the rightful place of humor in human life in general and in Christian life in particular. He wondered why the modern apologists for the uniqueness of humanity, who had forgotten the meaning of the creation of men and women in the image of God, had never even mentioned the fact that apparently human beings are the only creatures who laugh. For Barth, humor was a symptom of being human, and it frequently found expression in his conversations and actions.

As a preacher, Barth could acknowledge that some of his sermons were real clinkers, like the one on the sinking of the Titanic which he later noted was as great a disaster as the original event. In the midst of the German church struggle, indeed in the midst of his trial for refusing to practice the Nazi salute at the beginning of his classes, Barth suggested to the court that like Socrates many centuries earlier he actually deserved a reward rather than a punishment from his fellow-citizens. The gesture was of course a complete failure, as one might have expected in the dreadfully humorless world of Nazism.

Barth was also able to laugh about his work as a theologian, recognizing that every theology is a human endeavor with all the limitations and need of continuous revision which this implies. He remarked that when he got to heaven, he would want to have a long conversation about theological method with Schleiermacher-say, for a couple of centuries. He imagined that the angels giggled among themselves when they saw old Karl pushing his cart-load of Church Dogmatics.

Recalling Barth's humor is not a human interest ploy or a curiosity of merely biographical significance. It is certainly not intended to obscure or trivialize the thunderous prophetic criticism which Barth often directed against both church and society in the name of the Word of God. The point is that Barth had not only a sense of humor but a theology of humor, and it was of a piece with his whole theology and practice of Christian freedom in response to the grace of God. His theology of humor can be briefly summarized as follows. First, humor for Barth is often and perhaps primarily self-directed. "Humor is the opposite of all self-admiration and self-praise" (CD III/4, p. 665). There is, in other words, such a thing as Christian freedom to laugh at ourselves, to recognize the incongruity and disproportion between the sinners we still are and the saints we prematurely claim to be, and thus to recognize ever and again the miracle of our being graciously accepted, valued, and honored by God. When one can laugh at oneself, then one can also rightly laugh at others-never bitterly or cynically, never in the superficial spirit of carnival or the poisoned laughter that expresses hatred for, or superiority over, another.

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Second, for Barth true humor, far from being an escape from the realities of suffering and evil in the world, is "laughter amid tears." True humor "presupposes rather than excludes the knowledge of suffering" (Ethics, 511). As the child of suffering, humor takes suffering seriously but refuses to give it the last word. It is remarkable, Barth observed, how fundamentally humorless the rich and powerful and self-satisfied of this world are, and how, by contrast, genuine humor often flourishes among the poor. The refusal to become resigned to the reign of suffering and death in the world has enormous personal and political significance.

Third, and most decisively for Barth, humor is grounded in the grace, faithfulness, and promise of God. Humor is part of the freedom which is ours to exercise, thanks to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It is a sign of liberation and release rather than bondage and resignation. Grace creates "liberated laughter," laughter made possible by the memory of God's faithfulness, the present foretaste of God's new creation, and the hope in the fulfillment of God's promises. To put this another way, humor for Barth is rooted in the glory and beauty of God and is an expression of the delight and pleasure which the God of the gospel evokes in human life. The grace of God in Jesus Christ is beautiful, and it radiates joy and awakens humor (II/1, p. 655).

Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between the time of humor and the time of unambiguous joy. Joy is experienced now, but not continuously or totally. "Joy is anticipatory," it has an "eschatological character" (III/4, p. 377). Humor, like art and human play generally, is oriented to God's future, and can only be properly understood in that context. In Jesus Christ, God's mighty Yes to us has been spoken, and this event signals the beginning of the end of the contradictions of Yes and No, of life and death, of friendship and enmity. Barth's humor points beyond irony or satire, and certainly far beyond ridicule or gallows humor, to the free laughter of children and friends in God's new creation.

So understood, humor is different from, though intimately related to, joy. Joy arises out of the partial presence of the promised Kingdom which has erupted in Christ and in the work of his Spirit. Humor arises out of the still partial presence of this Kingdom, leaving the undeniable incongruity and disproportion between what we and the world still are and what God's grace in Jesus Christ promises that we and the world shall yet become. Joy will find its fulfillment in God's new heaven and new earth; humor belongs to a world between the times.

IV

Barth's theology of the radiantly beautiful grace of God in Jesus Christ and his theology of humor are inseparable. If in the midst of the hard realities of our world we attend to the gracious promise of God, how can humor be missing from Christian life, spirituality, theology, or ethics? If as the Apostle Paul says, where sin abounds, grace super-abounds (Rom. 5:20), is that not cause for joy and a touch of humor? If

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God gives life to the dead, brings into existence things which were not, promises rejuvenation to the old and withered, is that not cause for a laugh, as Sarah spontaneously laughed (Gen. 18:12)-and surely riot altogether derisively?

We are suggesting that one of Barth's lasting contributions to church and theology may just be this spirit of play and humor born of confidence in God's grace. His playful spirituality encourages us to look for the inbreaking of the Kingdom elsewhere than in the uptight and self-righteous ideologues of the right and the left who find it impossible to laugh at themselves and intolerable to be laughed at, to question every so-called spirituality and spiritual renewal that seems unable to give people room to play, to turn away from every theology that takes itself with supreme, oppressive seriousness and ascribes infallibility to its own pronouncements.

As we know, Barth lampooned the Barthians who wanted to ape him. That they should want to do that instead of entering fully into their own Christian freedom was, he thought, very humorous indeed. If ever Barth should be designated a Doctor of the Church, he may quite appropriately be named Doctor of Freedom or Doctor of Play-one who helped teach the church to live by grace alone and thus in the freedom and playfulness that grow out of assurance of the sovereign grace of God in Jesus Christ, one who permitted and practiced that graceful humor without which the yoke of Christian discipleship is impossibly heavy rather than unexpectedly light as Christ promised it would be.

All this means that any tribute to Barth, such as we offer in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, had better keep its distance from uncritical adulation and misplaced hagiography. Appropriate tribute to Barth is that we remain close to the subject matter of theology and faith-the surprising, majestic, delightful, sovereign grace of God in Jesus Christ-for that is where Christian freedom and joy-and yes, humor-are rooted.

Daniel L. Migliore
Professor of Systematic Theology
Princeton Theological Seminar, and Director, "Karl Barth Centennial Symposium," April, 1986.

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Karl Barth
1886-1968