Not Far Enough into the Far Country, Part II
The Promise and Eclipse of Barth’s Christocentric Concreteness as Ground of Divine Blackness
About the author: Chris Boesel is an 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 eighth in a year-long series examining Barth’s theology in conversation with black theological voices. Our primary question is: 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 previous post, I looked at the first of two levels of what I believe is a promise-eclipse dynamic in Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, focusing on his theme of the journey of the Son of God into the far country. In this dynamic, Barth’s stated commitment to the kind of Christocentric concreteness that leads James Cone to the blackness of God in Jesus Christ (in contexts of white supremacy) is eclipsed by his framing of the doctrine in general categories—what Cone would call a whitening of the gospel. In this post, I look at the second level of this promise-eclipse dynamic.
The Promise, II: “Poor not Rich.”
As mentioned in my previous post, Barth does recognize and draw our attention to the social location involved in Jesus’s Jewish identity, noting that it places him among and identifies him with a people who, according to the biblical witness, are suffering, weak, oppressed, and lowly in relation to dominating powers within history (a people whose historical suffering at the hands of dominating powers is theologically interpreted as primarily the result of its disobedience). But Barth goes further, recognizing and drawing our attention to the social location of Jesus within his formerly enslaved, now colonized Jewish community: Jesus is with and among the lowly on the oppressed margins of his community, inhabiting this social lowliness himself, far from the power and privilege of Herod’s palace and the institutional corridors of religious authority. In this thread of texts, we find the closest resonance to the passage about God’s locating Godself with the denied and deprived against the privileged and powerful (in CD II/1), cited by Cone and from which I have taken my lead in this series.
In Jesus, God “humbles Himself and is lowly . . . amongst us.”1 This social location is the specific place within the world in which God “exists and acts and speaks,” as “One who is weak and impotent . . . the most High in the deepest humility.”2 This Jesus “is poor not rich, weak not strong, One who is a subject not One who triumphs, like the weary and heavy laden.”3 And these weary and heavy laden, “the least of His brethren,” are “the witnesses we must not overlook or ignore, witnesses of the poverty which he accepted.” These witnesses—and so, one assumes, the poverty to which they bear witness—are so essential to Jesus’s identity, “He cannot be had without them,” nor can “God . . . be had without them, nor can reconciliation with him nor conversion to Him.”4 All this—“the lowly existence of the man Jesus”5 and “the communion of the lowly with the crucified Christ”6—Barth repeatedly emphasizes, “is not accidental.”7 It entails no “arbitrariness,”8 nor does it occur “incidentally”9 or by “chance,” but “of necessity.”10
The Eclipse
I want to highlight two things that determine the meaning of these passages. First, a formal but not insignificant point. This entire thread of texts is bracketed in the small print sections (as is the citation by Cone, as well as virtually all explicit naming of the concreteness of Jesus’s identity in communion with the denied and deprived throughout the entirety of CD IV). The small print sections of Barth’s Church Dogmatics are important and include some of Barth’s most creative and powerful theological and exegetical insights. But their function in the overall structure of the Dogmatics is to play a supportive role to the big print sections in which the dogmatic content of Barth’s theology is articulated. They illustrate, explicate, and give historical and exegetical support but do not determinatively impact the dogmatic content of Barth’s doctrine. And more pragmatically, unless one is a Barth scholar, a seminary student with an exam in your Theology of Karl Barth class on Friday, or, sadly, has nothing better to do, one can sometimes be tempted to skip or at least skim these sections. (Okay, this is true for the scholar and the seminary student, as well.)
Second, throughout the immediate context of big print passages in which the heart of this thread is found, Barth addresses the age-old obsession of the Anglo-European Christological theological tradition: the seeming contradiction between the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus. Barth’s concern is to show that while the radical difference between God and the sinful human being must not be compromised (see the No of the dialectic of divine freedom discussed in post #3: freedom from the creature), it is wholly within God’s nature of loving freedom to condescend to become the creaturely other—even the creaturely enemy—for the sake of the creature cum enemy, in a radically kenotic downward movement of humiliation (the Yes of the dialectic of divine freedom: freedom for the creature). For Barth, “the descent to humility which took place in the incarnation of the Word is not only not excluded by the divine nature but signifies its greatest glory.”11 Consequently, God “does not have to be exalted; He can also be lowly . . . And in being lowly He is exalted.”12 For the real meaning of God’s “righteousness,” for Barth, is revealed in God’s “ranging Himself with the unrighteous as one who is accused with them.”13
Despite much innovative contestation of the Anglo-European tradition by Barth, here, he can be seen following that tradition in continually framing the critical theological issue at stake in general terms of God’s relation to sinful humanity as a whole: God, the Most High, on one side, and humanity in general, united in the lowly depths of finitude and sin—i.e., en masse upon the shores of the far country—on the other. In Jesus, God “accepts solidarity with the creature, with man, in order to reconcile man and the world with Himself, in order to convert man and the world to Himself.”14 It is “in the limits of humanity, in our creatureliness, in our humanness, in our sinfulness and mortality”—that is, in the shared, universal condition of sinful human beings before God—that God is with humanity in the incarnation and for the sake of reconciliation.15
This general, binary schema of the God-sinful human relation determines the substantive issue at stake for Barth and the content of his own theological assertions concerning the identity and work of Jesus Christ in the incarnation and reconciliation. This theological framing continually appropriates and redefines the theological meaning of the social location of God’s concrete, incarnate presence and work within sinful humanity in Jesus—i.e., standing on the side of denied and deprived sinners against privileged and powerful sinners, and more importantly, against the sinful structures ordering this division.
Consequently, the victims of sins of social injustice—the denied and deprived—are generally translated into perpetrators of sin as those with whom God is in distinctive solidarity. And when the victims of social sin are lumped together in the same category as those sinning against them in this way, two things happen: social sin is erased from the landscape of reconciliation and we engage in a troubling form of blaming the victim.16
The theological meaning of the poverty that God accepts in Jesus—i.e., the “making poor” involved in the “humiliation” and “condescension” of the incarnation17—turns out not to be determined by the social location of material poverty endured by some human beings, in distinction from material riches and power enjoyed by other human beings. Rather, that social location points away from itself to the substantive theological meaning: the universal human condition shared by both rich and poor. This is a theological poverty suffered by all human beings, rich or poor, simply by being sinful creatures in comparison to the divine. And concerning this poverty, there is a very real sense in which any human being—any flesh—will do. And this functions to render as incidental the very concreteness of Jesus’s flesh—together with the material poverty and lowliness of its social location and those in whose particular company he shares this location—that Barth says is not incidental but “of necessity.”
What turns out not to be incidental but of necessity in Jesus’s social location as lowly amongst us—as poor, not rich, as with and among the least and the last—is its service as witness (note the similarity of this representative function to the “representative existence” of the Jewish people we encountered in the previous post). The lowly social location of Jesus is deployed as witness to the immenseness of the humiliation that God undertakes in becoming a human being as such, in identity with sinful humanity as a whole. It witnesses to the abyssal distance between God, the Most High, and the unfathomable depths of the sinful human creature as such—i.e., between God and the distant shores of the far country. That is, the theological meaning of the distance, within the far country, between the denied and deprived in the colonized ghetto and the privileged and powerful in the emperor’s palace (see my post #6) is relegated to the service of witness to—and so, in the dogmatic content of the big print passages, is ultimately replaced by—the distance between God, on one side, and the far country as a whole, on the other; between God and all of sinful humanity, as a whole and in general.
It is this universalizing move, moving from the concreteness of Jesus’s particular social location within and amongst humanity to a generically human Jesus identified with and on the side of sinful humanity as a whole and in general, and so located nowhere in particular, that allows the unqualifiedly universal embrace of all in Barth’s vision of reconciliation. And it is this universal embrace of Barth’s gospel that has been so theologically liberating for so many white privileged Christians like myself, who have been shaped by and trapped within the destructively narrow and exclusionary categories of evangelicalism and other conservative theologies. But this universal embrace comes by way of an anti-Judaism (see my previous post) that simultaneously risks complicity with what Cone calls white theology in the service of white supremacy. It does so through the eclipse of the promise of radical Christocentric concreteness; a concreteness that is the ground of divine blackness for Cone and is indeed present in Barth, though seemingly undermined and withdrawn at nearly every turn.
For next time: What becomes of the universal embrace of the gospel if, following Cone, Barth would follow through on the promise of radical Christocentric concreteness present in his theology and move in the direction of “becoming black with God”? Put the other way around, does the work of reconciliation accomplished in and through the blackness of God in Jesus through the Spirit—together with its call to a black discipleship—foreclose on a gospel that is truly good news for all?
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol IV, Part 1, ed., G. W. Bromiley, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al (Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1956), 199.
Barth, CD IV/1, 176.
Barth, CD IV/1, 179.
Barth, CD IV/1, 106.
Barth, CD IV/1, 190.
Barth, CD IV/1, 189.
Barth, CD IV/1, 176.
Barth, CD IV/1, 190.
Barth, CD IV/1, 164.
Barth, CD IV/1, 190.
Barth, CD IV/1, 192. My emphasis.
Barth, CD IV/1, 191.
Barth, CD IV/1, 188.
Barth, CD IV/1, 199. My emphasis.
Barth, CD IV/1, 192. My emphasis.
For an extended explication of this theological erasure of the distinction between the sinful oppressor and the sinful oppressed, see Andrew Park, The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993). However, Park drops the “sinful” qualifier in relation to the oppressed in a way that I think both Barth and Cone may want to question.
Barth, CD IV/1, 180.