Not Far Enough into the Far Country, Part I
The Promise and Eclipse of Barth’s Christocentric Concreteness and Divine Blackness
About the author: Chris Boesel is associate professor of Christian theology at Drew Theological School. His primary interest is the extent to which traditional confessions of faith can be seen to call for progressive socio-political visions and commitments. He is the author of In Kierkegaard's Garden with the Poppy Blooms: Why Derrida Does Not Read Kierkegaard when He Reads Kierkegaard (Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2021) and Reading Karl Barth: Theology that Cuts Both Ways (Cascade, 2023).
This post is the seventh in a year-long series putting Barth’s theology in conversation with black theological voices. Our primary question: To what extent is Barth’s theology complicit in the silence of white Barthians on racism in the U.S. and to what extent might Barth’s theology function as an anti-racist resource.
In my last post I suggested that the promise of Barth’s commitment to radical Christocentric concreteness in all things theological is ultimately eclipsed by the kind of general theological categories he says such a commitment requires we reject. His mature Christology is determined by a general schema of reconciliation as the coming together of two alienated parties: God, on one side, and humanity-in-general, on the other. The passages where he does identify the concrete particularity of Jesus Christ—as God with us in a particular human being, in particular company, living out a particular fleshly, material existence—are prevented from determining his Christology, and his view of reconciliation, in the way his stated commitment to Christocentric concreteness suggests; that is, in the way that would lead him to recognize what James Cone calls the blackness of Jesus—and so of God, and so of the gospel—entailed in and required by that concreteness.
My own promise for this post was to briefly demonstrate the presence of this promise-eclipse dynamic in each of the three parts of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation. Alas, this has proved a self-discipline too far, given my seemingly genetic susceptibility to the siren song of bloated prose. So we will have to settle for a deeper look at “The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country,” in part one of the doctrine. I then leave the interested reader, equipped with these clues, to discover the extent to which this dynamic is a decisive through-line determining the entire doctrine. Believe me, once you’re looking for it, you can’t miss it.
There are two related dimensions of the promise-eclipse dynamic in Barth’s theme of the Son’s journey into the far country: the concreteness of Jesus’s ethnic identity and of his social location. I will look at the first in this post, and the second in the following post.
The Promise, I: “Jewish Flesh”
The first substantial glimpse we get of a radical Christocentric concreteness purportedly qualifying the God v humanity-in-general framing of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation is a reference to Jesus’s Jewish identity. “The Word did not simply become any ‘flesh,’ any man humbled and suffering. It became Jewish flesh.”1 This “prevents the rounding off of the picture of Jesus into a kind of ideal-picture of human existence, which would necessarily degenerate into a free sketch of the man who was and is the Son of God.”2 As God with us in this particular flesh, Jesus was “not a man in general, a neutral man,” but was located in a “specific time and place . . . a definite and limited place, this place and no other . . . within the sphere of this people.”3
This, as we have seen, is precisely what Cone identifies as critical biblical witness to Jesus’s blackness: it is “because he was a Jew, there and then, that we know “Jesus is black” for us today, in a racist USA.4 The Jewishness of Jesus is essential to his blackness because Cone interprets the concrete specificity of the time and place God chooses to show up in the world, embodied in the Jewishness existence of Jesus, in terms of social location within the world, within—and so on particular sides of—the conflictual intra-human historical and social landscape. The specific social location of Jewish existence at the particular time and place of Jesus is under the crushing boot heel of the Roman empire. This places Jesus in the midst of a colonized, poor and oppressed, suffering and persecuted people who—as if that wasn’t enough—have a primal memory of the experience of slavery. Again, to use the words Cone cites from Barth’s doctrine of God in volume two of Church Dogmatics, God shows up in Jewish history on the side of the denied and the deprived, against the privileged and powerful.5
The Eclipse
However, despite this apparent resonance with Cone, this is not how Barth interprets the concrete time and place of Jesus’s Jewishness in his doctrine of reconciliation (and in retrospect, we may now suspect the same to be true of the passage from CD II/1 cited by Cone). Barth does not interpret Jesus’s Jewishness in terms of social location, but in terms of—for lack of a better word—theological location; a theological location that is ultimately divorced from the social in a way that Barth would otherwise critique. More accurately, the Jewishness of Jesus, for Barth, does indeed locate him within and identify him with a suffering and oppressed people at the hands of worldly powers. This is the promise of concreteness that is present in Barth’s text. But this concrete social location does not determine the theological meaning of Jesus’s Jewish identity. For Barth, Jesus’s “existence in the flesh,” ultimately locates him “under the wrath and judgment of God.”6
“The place taken by the one Israelite Jesus . . . is the place of this disobedient son, this faithless people and its faithless priests and kings.”7 In Barth’s theological vision, “the Israelite” is distinctive among the human community as a whole in being “a transgressor of the commandment imposed on him with his election, an enemy of the will of God directed and revealed to him.”8 For Barth, the people of Israel function as a distinctive paradigm of unbelief and disobedience amidst all of humanity. This is not, it is important to say, because they are innately more sinful or evil than the rest of humanity. Barth explicitly rejects this. Rather, it is because, for Barth, they have been distinctively chosen by God, out from amongst all of humanity, as the original receivers of revelation and its promises. It is because of the role conferred upon them by God—so neither innate nor earned; neither to their credit nor to their blame—conferred by God’s free, initiating will, decision, and action calling them out as the elect people of God.
There are two things to note, here.
First, in Barth’s theology, the Jews have a “representative existence” within the drama of reconciliation between God, on one side, and humanity-in-general, on the other.9 Barth’s characterization of Jewish distinctiveness within humanity as a whole, as the disobedient and unbelieving elect, is universalized (in the kind of forbidden move Barth himself calls abstraction or generalization) to represent—and so ultimately disappear into, be replaced by—humanity as a whole, united in universal sinfulness before God. The concreteness of Jesus’s Jewish flesh is deployed to serve the universal significance of the gospel as good news for all flesh, wherein “the Holy One stands in the place and under the accusation of a sinner with other sinners.”10 The concreteness of Jesus’s Jewish flesh is eclipsed by the general frame of reconciliation between God and sinful humanity-in-general. As a result, the location of God in the world in the concreteness of Jesus proves not to be with the victims of the sin of oppression, but with the perpetrators of the sin of unbelief; not with those who suffer injustice, but with those who suffer just punishment.
Secondly—and, historically, with similarly destructive consequences for Jewish bodies in Christendom as the eclipse of divine blackness has for black and brown bodies in white supremacist contexts—Barth’s eclipse of the Christocentric concreteness entailed in Jesus’s Jewish identity employs language resonant with the traditional Christian “teaching of contempt” against Jews. As a result, despite his explicit rejection of any inherently distinctive Jewish sinfulness, Barth’s promise-eclipse dynamic is unable to avoid characterizing the Jewish people as particularly suited to represent humanity as the enemies of God—“transgressor,” “rebellious,” “corrupted,” “lying,” “backsliding,” “perverted”11—justly suffering under divine wrath and judgment. This is a dangerous feature running through Barth’s entire theological corpus that must be addressed and rejected as such.12
The eclipse of the concreteness of Jesus’s Jewish identity by a generalizing move to the universality of sin and the universally human not only forecloses on the promise of that concreteness with regard to the particular social location of God’s incarnate presence in and for the world—e.g., with and on the side of the denied and deprived, against the privileged and powerful—it does so by repeating certain destructive moves of traditional Christian anti-Judaism. Thus far, the promise of Barth’s Christocentric concreteness appears dim indeed, and getting dimmer.
For next time: As mentioned above, Barth does recognize and draw our attention to the social location involved in Jesus’s Jewishness. He eventually returns to this theme with a particular focus, emphasizing that it is “not accidental,” but “of necessity.”13 Does this mean Barth eventually follows through on the promise of Christocentric concreteness to arrive at the blackness of God in and for the world in Jesus through the Spirit?
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol IV, Part 1, ed., G. W. Bromiley, trans., G. W. Bromiley et al (Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1956), 166.
Barth, CD IV/1, 166.
Barth, CD IV/1, 166–167.
James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1997), 123.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. II, Part 1, ed. G. W. Bromiley et al, trans., T. H. L. Parker et al (Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1957), 386.
Barth, CD IV/1, 177, 175.
Barth, CD IV/1, 171.
Barth, CD IV/1, 171. My emphasis.
Barth, CD IV/1, 171.
Barth, CD IV/1, 176.
Barth, CD IV/1, 171.
For a deep dive into the complexity of Barth’s anti-Judaism—and it is complex—particularly in relation to similarly problematic progressive theological remedies, see, Chris Boesel, Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith, Interpretive Imperialism, and Abraham (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008).
Barth, CD IV/1, 176, 190.