The Word of God and the Human Word

Barth, Cone, and the Dialectic of Divine Freedom

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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 third 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 US and to what extent might Barth’s theology function as an anti-racist resource?

I ended the last post with a question and a warning. The question: In asserting that “[God’s] Word is our [the black community’s] word; his existence, our existence,”¹ is James Cone asserting the kind of identity between the Word of God and the human word that Barth understands to be forbidden by the freedom and sovereignty of the Word of God itself, placing the Word of God under the authority of the creature and at its disposal? I noted that, as a firewall against any such possibility, Barth points to what he believes to be the dialectical movement of the Word of God itself, wherein the Yes of God’s unqualifiable and irrevocable self-giving to the creature in Jesus through the Spirit is always accompanied by a divine No that prevents that divine Yes from passing over into a natural creaturely possession and possibility.

The warning: There is a danger implicit in the asking of that very question—that is, in my asking it, in any white theologian asking it—while (a) presuming to be sufficiently equipped with Barth’s theological warning about and corresponding dialectical resistance against any such identity between the Word of God and the human word; and that (b) in being so equipped we hold the appropriate theological knowledge and authority to instruct black theological voices on the dangers of idolatrous identification with the divine, and to police their theological work to keep it safe from such catastrophic errors. The danger is not only that, in doing so, we attempt the very control and mastery over the freedom of divine self-giving we say we are guarding against, but that we are also enacting the white supremacy so characteristic of normative Anglo-European Christian history that Cone and other black theological voices so clearly reveal and so justly condemn. It is in relation to just this kind of Barthian enactment of Christian white supremacy that this series of posts is asking the question: Is it essentially inherent to Barth’s theological vision—or not?  

So, in humility, with not a little fear and trembling, and much fervent prayer that we might be freed of all such presumption, we proceed to the question: Is Cone asserting the kind of identity between the Word of God and black human words and actions that Barth believes delivers the freedom of the Word of God into the hands of creaturely possession? As I hinted at in the conclusion of the last post, Cone’s response to this question is dialectical, involving a yes and a no—so that “God’s No and Yes can be spoken” and heard.²

Here is Cone: “The black experience is a source of the Truth but not the Truth itself. Jesus Christ is the Truth and thus stands in judgment over all statements about truth. But having said that . . . There is no truth in Jesus Christ independent of the oppressed of the land—their history and culture.”³ This is Cone’s dialectical movement between the Word of God and black human words and actions. The latter are not in and of themselves, by some natural, socio-historical capacity and possibility, identical with and so an enactment of the Word of God. However, when and where the Word of God is freely spoken and enacted—by God: “from God’s initiative alone”⁴—in the here and now of a racist USA, it speaks in and through, and so unites itself to and is identified with, black human words and actions prophetically denouncing and resisting that demonic racist system. In the event of this concrete speaking and acting, the Word of God that is God for the creature in Jesus becomes—and is—a black human word. Cone acknowledges that God may act for all in Jesus Christ through the Spirit. Still, the concreteness of that act—of that history, event, and relation—means that God acts for all only in and through a very particular historical movement: the last—or in Barth’s words, the “denied” and “deprived”⁵—becoming first!

Cone, again: “This is the dialectic of Christian thought: God enters into the social context of human existence and appropriates the ideas and actions of the oppressed as God’s own. When this event of liberation occurs in thought and praxis, the words and actions of the oppressed become the Word and Action of God. They no longer belong to the oppressed. Indeed, the word of the oppressed becomes God’s Word insofar as the former recognize it not as their own but as given to them through divine grace.”⁶ Cone is well aware “of the ideological dangers when God’s struggles are identified with human actions.”⁷ And in the face of such dangers, he employs his own dialectical movement between (a) affirming the identity of the Word of God—in the concreteness of Jesus Christ in the Spirit—with revolutionary black human words and actions that can and do occur in a racist USA (the yes); and (b) witnessing to the impossibility of that identity ever becoming a natural creaturely possibility or possession because it is always a gracious act of divine freedom (the no).

In light of this dialectic of yes and no, it is clear that the identity between the Word of God and black human words and actions asserted by Cone—as real and socio-historically concrete as that identity is when it does occur—is not the kind of identity that Barth is worried about.

In fact, it resembles the kind of identity between the Word of God and the human word that Barth himself asserts.      

Wait, that can’t be right! Doesn’t Barth reject any and all identity between the Word of God and the human word? Well (we say again, with Cone—and with Barth), yes and no.

Yes: Barth is infamous for his allergy to any naturally occurring identity between the Word of God and the human word; an allergy driven by Barth’s fundamental concern to respect the divine freedom which he sees as absolutely essential to the goodness of the gospel. To be faithful to the goodness of the gospel, we must insist on divine freedom from the creature, that is, on the freedom of the Word of God from any and all possession by the human creature wherein it is presumed to be at our disposal and under our control.

But no: we must continually remind ourselves that, for Barth, the whole point of respecting this divine freedom is to bear faithful witness to the goodness of the gospel. And the goodness of the gospel, for Barth, lies wholly in the fact that, in the Word of God enacted once and for all in the concrete history, event, and relation that is Jesus Christ in the Spirit, God and the creature have indeed met in profound, indissoluble unity! And they are promised to continue meeting, in contingent events of divine freedom, whenever that Word, enacted concretely once for all there and then—in the denied and deprived colonial reality of manger and cross—speaks and acts again, here and now.

For example, Barth believes God speaks and acts in and through the thoroughly human and so sin-bound words and actions of scripture and proclamation—indeed, “through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog,” if and when God so wills—in an event of divine freedom wherein those sin-bound human words and actions become the Word of God in the very occurring of that event.⁸ Indeed, for Barth, the Word of God itself is nothing other than this unity of God with the creature in the concrete history, event, and relation that is God for us in the poor, brown-skinned, colonized, arrested, jailed, and legally executed (in the name of “law and order”) body of Jesus—though Barth all too often leaves out these material dimensions of the concreteness of God-for-us-in-Jesus that he is equally as often so insistent upon.

The goodness of the gospel, then, is the other side of divine freedom itself: God’s freedom for the creature in the concreteness of Jesus Christ in the Spirit. For Barth, it is the dialectic of divine freedom itself that prevents the Word of God from ever becoming a human possibility or possession (the No) while nevertheless—indeed, first and foremost!—asserting the most radical identity between the Word of God and human words and actions (the Yes). The Yes (and No) of this divine-human speaking and acting is always the speaking and acting of the denied and deprived one—indeed, the crucified/lynched Jesus of Nazareth, in the power of the Spirit—for and with the denied and deprived and against the privileged and powerful. For the sake of all, yes—but only in and through the last becoming first!

It is Cone, then, that comes to the aid of white Christians informed by Barth—and Barth himself, as we will see—with the needed corrective dialectical remedy. It is Cone’s insight that the radical Christological concreteness asserted by Barth necessarily implies the equally radical identity of the Word of God—i.e., God with, for, and as the creature in the denied and deprived Jesus of Nazareth—with the black human words and actions of the denied and deprived in a racist USA. It is because the identity between the Word of God and the human word that occurs in the Yes of divine freedom for the creature constitutes such a scandalously insoluble and irrevocable unity, albeit solely on the grounds of and in the event of free divine speaking and acting, that the dialectical No of divine freedom from the creature is so critical. And it is only in the light and on the ground of this divine Yes that the accompanying No becomes necessary and is given its particular, circumscribed meaning.

The corrective remedy provided by Cone makes visible how white interpretations of Barth tend to emphasize the No of divine freedom from human words and actions.⁹ This emphasis can hide how, in the here and now of a racist USA, the goodness of the gospel news about God’s freedom for the creature in Jesus is not only enacted in and through black human words and actions resisting the sin of white supremacy, but is in itself, from all eternity, a black divine Word.

For next time: Given Barth’s resonance with Cone in relation to both Christocentric concreteness and the dialectical movement of divine freedom, why does he appear to stop short of recognizing the consequent blackness of the Word of God itself made so clearly visible by Cone?

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1. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, revised ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1997), 65.

2. Ibid., 89.

3. Ibid., 31. The latter two emphases are mine.

4. Ibid., 89.

5. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, trans. T. Parker et al (Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1957), 386–87; My emphasis.

6. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 90; My emphasis.

7. Ibid., 92.

8. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, trans. G. W. Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (London, UK: T&T Clark, 1975), 54. For scripture and proclamation as the dependent forms of the Word of God, see 88–124.

9. This move is central to the primarily white theological work linking Barth to postmodern philosophy and its apophatic effects. See Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Walter Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993). I have done it, too! See Chris Boesel, “The Apophasis of Divine Freedom: Saving ‘the Name’ and the Neighbor from Human Mastery,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, ed. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010).