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Revelation as apologetic category: a reconsideration of Karl Barth's engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2015

Richard Paul Cumming
Richard Paul Cumming*
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2A7, Canadarichard.cumming@mail.mcgill.ca
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Abstract

This article examines Karl Barth's engagement with the philosophy of religion of Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach proposes that religion is a function of human projection and that the Christian concept of God represents the crystallisation in one objectified subject of all the finite perfections of individual human beings. In Church Dogmatics, I/2, Barth seeks to respond to Feuerbach's critique of Christianity by affirming Feuerbach's critical account of the nature of religion but arguing that, since the original impetus of Christianity issues not from human projection but from God's act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ, Feuerbach's critique of religion does not apply to the Christian faith. Glasse notes that this response, whilst satisfactory to the Christian, would be ‘not intelligible’ to those who do not accept the Christian faith. Furthermore, Barth's apologetic manoeuvre, Vogel claims, entails that Barth is unable to defend the plausibility of the Christian faith on the terms set by secular culture, and that Christian theology is therefore required to abandon any attempt to participate constructively in general public discourse. Vogel recognises that this is a drastic recourse indeed, observing that it would be judicious for Christian theology to seek to elaborate a response to Feuerbach's critique which can stand without requiring the critic to assume the veracity of the Christian faith. This article argues that, by taking into account the role of Feuerbach's earlier work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, for constituting the philosophical impetus of Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, the Christian theologian is able, using Barth's theological anthropology, to provide a response to Feuerbach's critique on Feuerbach's own terms. In Thoughts on Death and Immortality, Feuerbach argues that Protestant Christianity, as the paradigmatic expression of religion, conceives the individual as an absolute being, and that, due to the fact that everyday existence clearly counter-indicates this absolutisation of the human individual, Protestantism posits a second, eternal life, in which the limits bound up with individual existence are eradicated. Using Barth's theological anthropology in Church Dogmatics, III/2 and III/4, this article proposes that Barth concurs with Feuerbach's critique of the absolutisation of the individual, but that he is positioned to deny that this absolutised conception of the individual has anything to do with the Christian faith insofar as he accurately represents it.

Keywords

apologeticsKarl BarthLudwig Feuerbachphilosophy of religionrevelationtheological anthropology
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 43 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2015 

In this article, I shall explore Karl Barth's circumscriptive definition of religion to exclude the event of divine self-revelation in Jesus Christ under the aspect of his engagement with the religious anthropology of Ludwig Feuerbach.Footnote 1 Ludwig Feuerbach was renowned in his era as the progenitor of the projectionist critique of Christianity, according to which religion originates in the projection of humanity's infinitude as a species onto the divine, and the pivotal significance of Karl Barth's engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of Christianity for his theological development has attained widespread acknowledgement among religious scholars.Footnote 2

In their treatment of Barth's engagement with Feuerbach, however, scholars have tended to focus primarily on Feuerbach's magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity (1841), on the basis that this was the oeuvre which decisively informed Barth's appreciation of Feuerbach. Glasse writes that ‘Barth's Feuerbach . . . is pre-eminently the author of Das Wesen des Christentums’,Footnote 3 and in his recent account of the Barth–Feuerbach confrontation, Rodrigues justifies this restricted focus,Footnote 4 maintaining that, ‘in the specific context of the Barth–Feuerbach encounter, the central ideas are contained in Feuerbach's approach presented in The Essence of Christianity’.Footnote 5 On the other hand, Massey proposes that Feuerbach's earlier work, particularly Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), has foundational bearing upon the philosophical impetus of Feuerbach's magnum opus, and that a reconsideration of the Barth–Feuerbach encounter through the prism of his ‘earlier works could significantly enhance an assessment of Feuerbach's criticism of religion . . . [and] Barth's rejection of him’.Footnote 6 Massey contends that Barth paradigmatically misinterpreted Feuerbach's critical project in The Essence of Christianity by neglecting to recognise that it was philosophically informed by the repudiation of the potential infinitude of the human individual undertaken in Thoughts on Death and Immortality and that, consequently, being misinformed about its conceptual impetus, ‘Barth did not totally refute Feuerbach's anthropology’.Footnote 7

The present article will continue the exploration, which Massey initiated, of the potential contribution of Feuerbach's work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, to the assessment of the Barth–Feuerbach debate but, bringing Barth's theologico-anthropological contributions to bear on the discourse, it will yield fundamentally different conclusions concerning the cogency of Barth's theological project qua response to Feuerbach. In the present article, I shall explore Barth's engagement with Feuerbach, thematising Barth's engagement with Feuerbach in terms of the internal and external coherence of the circumscriptive definition of religion which Barth develops in Church Dogmatics, I/2. I shall commence with a demonstration of the internal coherence of Barth's circumscriptive definition of religion, and I shall proceed to argue that, notwithstanding the fact that Barth's later engagement with Feuerbach explicitly renounces the attempt to supply external coherence to his circumscriptive definition of religion,Footnote 8 in the light of Feuerbach's Thoughts on Death and Immortality, Barth's conception of limitation and personhood implicitly supplies an external coherence to his circumscriptive definition of religion qua riposte to the Feuerbachian critique of religion.

The internal coherence of Karl Barth's circumscription of ‘religion’

[Religion] is . . . a matter of an attitude and an activity which does not correspond to God's revelation, but contradicts it. Footnote 9

In this section, I shall outline the principal point of convergence between Feuerbach's and Barth's critiques of religion, first offering a brief overview of the central feature of Feuerbach's projection theory, and then proceeding to remark upon Barth's adaptation of Feuerbach's critique in his theology and the internal coherence of this rhetorical manoeuvre.

Feuerbach elaborates a projectionist conception of religion, conceiving God as the objectification of the human species. He maintains that the Christian concept of God is an ‘anthropomorphism’Footnote 10 and that, in religion, humanity projects its own values onto God: ‘God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth’.Footnote 11 Consequently, Feuerbach argues that ‘the divine being is nothing else than the human being . . . freed from the limits of the individual man’.Footnote 12 Humanity creates God, as it were, in its own image. For Feuerbach, infinitude exists only in the human species, not in the individual, and God as the posited infinite subject is the infinite human species as a whole represented as an individual: ‘he possesses their qualities according to the measure of the species’.Footnote 13

Feuerbach explains his concept of religion using a systolic-diastolic model: in its concept of God, humanity ‘propels his [sic] being into objectivity’, and in turn comes to conceive itself as the object of its own projected, objectified nature.Footnote 14 Furthermore, religious projection is a social, historical process, and the differences between the concepts of God circulating in various societies are rooted in the differences between their respective value systems.Footnote 15

Feuerbach argues, as I have noted, that religion issues not from divine revelation but from the impulse of the human being to project itself into infinitude. In his analysis of religion, Karl Barth accepts the impetus of Feuerbach's anthroparchic account of religion, maintaining that in religion humanity enacts its unbelief by replacing ‘the divine work by a human manufacture’.Footnote 16 Religion is humanity's attempt to grasp the nature of reality for itself,Footnote 17 and it issues not from divine revelation but from humanity's need to create a truth above itself, which is, however, in full agreement with Feuerbach, nothing other than a phantom constructed ‘according to his [sic] own image’Footnote 18 to provide satisfaction to the creative religious agent,Footnote 19 variation between the religions of the world being constituted, just as for Feuerbach, by the diversity of socio-historical configurations.Footnote 20

With such a definition of religion as a function of human projective capacities, the inclusion of the ‘religious’ life of the church within its semantic range, an inclusion which belongs to the very essence of Feuerbach's conception of Christianity, would undermine the professed ‘supernatural’ origin of the Christian faith. Therefore, in order to examine the problem from the standpoint of dogmatics, which, in accordance with Barth's dogmatic-theological scientific framework, by virtue of its very nature as an ecclesial science cannot undertake to undermine the Christian faith, Barth defines religion circumscriptively; that is, he defines religion so as to exclude the ‘religious’ life of the church. This definition enables him to remain faithful to the Christian-confessional approach to church proclamation which, Barth maintains, is incumbent upon the dogmatic theologian on account of her ecclesial situatedness.Footnote 21 Barth accomplishes this by supplying an account of religion which by definition excludes not Christianity as a religion in itself, but the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, the reality of which is, Barth argues, a presupposition of dogmatic enquiry on account of its ecclesial character: ‘knowledge of the Word of God is . . . the presupposition of the Church’.Footnote 22 According to Barth, revelation is the sublation of religion, placing religion under judgement for its arrogant idolatry,Footnote 23 and all human religious endeavour is condemned in the face of revelation, which constitutes the irruption of God into the world and human history as the event of Jesus Christ as the Word of God,Footnote 24 over and against all human inclinations and drives; that is to say, counteracting humanity's inmost tendencies to instrumentalise a self-contrived concept of God for the realisation of its own ends.Footnote 25 On account of the fact that revelation is the sublation of religion, Christianity itself, insofar as it manifests itself as a product of human imagination, stands under the divine condemnation of religion as unbelief,Footnote 26 and Christianity is elevated above the ‘other’ religions only insofar as it becomes the event of divine grace,Footnote 27 which occurs only insofar as it authentically proclaims the ‘name’ of Jesus Christ in its life, becoming ‘the historical manifestation and means of its revelation’.Footnote 28

From Barth's standpoint, this rhetorical strategy is perfectly sensible, as it permits him to acknowledge with Feuerbach the anthroparchic character of religion as well as its illusory nature, while simultaneously satisfying the methodological exigency imposed upon him as a dogmatic theologian by renegotiating the semantic range of the term ‘religion’ to exclude that which is deemed to be the source of the ‘religious’ life of the church (i.e. Jesus Christ).Footnote 29 Such an apologetic would thereby enjoy internal coherence. However, in itself it would conspicuously fall short of attaining to external coherence, as it would simply presuppose that the event of Jesus Christ runs counter to human self-serving propensities and is thus not classifiable as a species of the genus ‘religion’, and this circumscriptive taxonomy of religion could itself be reduced, from the standpoint of the non-believer (i.e. Feuerbach), to the fulfilment of various psychological drives. Therefore, it will be instructive to consider the possibility of attributing an external coherence to Barth's circumscriptive definition of religion.

Karl Barth's renunciation of external coherence in response to Ludwig Feuerbach

Is it really possible to have [our religious confession] today without radically changing either the traditional Christian confession of faith or the contemporary cultural awareness? Barth's answer in his confrontation with Feuerbach is no. The answer is not given lightly. It is given because Barth cannot find an alternative course.Footnote 30

According to Glasse, in Barth's later engagement with Feuerbach's critique of religion in Church Dogmatics, IV/2 and IV/3, the fundamental point of discussion is whether ‘the life of Jesus Christ really reveals God, or whether, in our confession that He is Light, Truth, and Word, we ourselves are merely attributing these to him’.Footnote 31 In the previous section, we witnessed that, on the basis of the dogmatic presupposition of the reality of divine revelation in Jesus Christ, which he classifies as a precondition of dogmatics, Barth argues in his schematisation of religion that the phenomenon of religion intrinsically excludes the event of divine self-revelation in Jesus Christ. As I remarked, however, Barth's circumscriptive concept of religion enjoys internal coherence, but not external coherence: Feuerbach would, in consideration of Barth's critique of religion in Church Dogmatics, I/2, be rhetorically situated to respond that ‘we ourselves are merely attributing’Footnote 32 a revelatory character to the event of Jesus Christ. Such an assessment of the argumentative basis that Feuerbach would possess for a summary dismissal of Barth's circumscriptive definition of religion is confirmed in Church Dogmatics, IV/3, to which we now turn.

Although he deploys a different nomenclature, for Glasse, it is this distinction between internal coherence and external coherence which provides the interpretative key to Barth's later engagement with Feuerbach, in which, as Glasse narrates, Barth relies upon the ‘manifest radiance’ of Jesus Christ instead of ‘appealing to considerations external to this intrinsic radiance’.Footnote 33 The answer to the question of whether Jesus Christ really is the Word of God as opposed to a datum of religious projection is supplied by Jesus Christ himself to the confessing community by divine grace:Footnote 34 in receiving the disclosure of the truly divine character of Jesus Christ, the believer is freed to confess him.Footnote 35 The response to Feuerbach's question is thus that ‘God bear[s] his own witness to the veracity of his self-disclosure’.Footnote 36

Glasse remarks that such a response ‘is not intelligible as an “answer” to Feuerbach. It is rather an assertion, elicited by an entirely different source and justified thereby . . . [which] encounters Feuerbach only in passing . . . for it seeks to let God vindicate himself by “the manifest radiance” of his own witness to himself’. As Glasse notes, such a response clearly lacks external coherence, as ‘for those to whom that radiance is not manifest . . . [Barth’s] affirmation of the reality of the God beyond Feuerbach's divinity of man appeals so exclusively to its own theological circle that Feuerbach could not recognize its authority’.Footnote 37 Significantly, Barth also acknowledges that his response enjoys only an internal coherence in his remarks responding to the potential objection that his repudiation of Feuerbach's critique constitutes a circular argument, in which he not only avers the inherent circularity of his argumentation, but also affirms that, just as the Psalmist states that only fools can deny the existence of God, so it is the case that ‘only fools can say in their heart that this is a circulus vitiosus, as though there could not also be, and in this case necessarily is, a circulus virtuosus as well’.Footnote 38

Such a manoeuvre, which, on account of its circularity of argumentation, results in sacrificing external coherence, is, as Vogel remarks, a perfectly legitimate response on Barth's part. Vogel writes that such a rhetorical strategy reflects Barth's role as a ‘Barthian theologian’; that is to say, it is in accordance with the exigencies of Karl Barth's conception of theological method.Footnote 39 Barth's theology proceeds from the standpoint of faith and, on this account, even to pose the question whether Jesus Christ is truly the event of divine self-revelation would be incompatible with the standpoint of faith and as such would neglect to satisfy the methodological exigencies of Christian theology as an ecclesially based scientific discipline.Footnote 40

The appropriation of circular reasoning may be justifiable for Barth the dogmatic theologian, as Glasse and Vogel maintain, but it does not follow that this procedure is felicitously bereft of wider ramifications.Footnote 41 Vogel details how Barth's unqualified reliance upon a rhetoric of internal coherence, to substantiate his circumscriptive taxonomy of religion in response to Ludwig Feuerbach, ramifies upon the overall position of Christian faith in the wider intellectual culture, arguing that Christian faith, unable to justify its position on the intellectual ‘mainland’, is constrained to ‘remove itself to an island of grace and burn all the bridges that connect this island to the mainland of modern cultural awareness, where the Feuerbachian conflagration is raging, devouring all within sight’.Footnote 42 As Vogel notes, this retreat from the intellectual ‘mainland’ is ‘certainly not a very happy state of affairs’: it is undertaken ‘because Barth cannot find an alternative course’.Footnote 43

Since it would position Christian faith to return to the ‘mainland of modern cultural awareness’,Footnote 44 Vogel writes that to ‘try to formulate a better answer, i.e., an answer on Feuerbach's ground and therefore on the ground of modern cultural awareness, is most commendable’, but that no convincing answer of this type has been forthcoming.Footnote 45 In the next section, I shall endeavour to propound that, by taking into account Feuerbach's critique of the Christian concept of personhood in Thoughts on Death and Immortality, and by setting it in engagement with Barth's concept of personhood, particularly its emphasis on the necessity of limitation for human fulfilment as exposited most fully in Church Dogmatics, III/2 and III/4, the apologetic theologian is in a position to supply such an answer insofar as Barth authentically represents the Christian faith, by demonstrating the evident inapplicability of Feuerbach's critique of religion to the Christian faith as Barth conceives it.

The external coherence of Karl Barth's circumscription of ‘religion’

In its basic form humanity is fellow-humanity.Footnote 46

We have witnessed how Barth's doctrine of religion enables him to renegotiate the semantic range of the term ‘religion’ to exclude the event of Jesus Christ which is constitutive of the existence of the church. However, as noted, without amplification, such an account possesses only internal coherence: it could only enjoy cogency for those locating themselves within the confessional community, because simply to define religion as a human product and then to situate the church's existence within a horizon of revelation as opposed to a horizon of religion is markedly deficient in ad extra cogency without a demonstration of how this could plausibly be the case. Therefore, in this section I intend to indicate how Barth, in his conception of limitation as opportunity, is positioned to supply an external coherence to his reclassification of religion to exclude the event of Jesus Christ.Footnote 47 I shall commence with Feuerbach's critique of the Christian conception of personhood in Thoughts on Death and Immortality, and I shall then proceed to demonstrate how Barth's theology is positioned to assimilate its fundamental impetus, remarking upon how this ramifies upon the possibility of an externally coherent apologetic.

Feuerbach argues that religion issues from a desire for infinitude. The human individual is intrinsically finite, encountering infinitude only in the species as a whole, in whose specimens, that is, in individual human subjects, there is manifested a multitude of finite perfections.Footnote 48 However, since the individual is conceived as the absolute in Protestant Christianity,Footnote 49 and since its finite existence does not correspond to its own sense of absoluteness and infinitude, in Protestantism, the concept of God, which is the infinitude of the human species as a whole rendered objective in the form of otherness, is instrumentalised in order to effectuate, in notion, the fulfilment of the finite individual qua atomised absolute subject. Feuerbach finds a basis for this egoistic representation of Christianity in the founder of Protestantism itself, Martin Luther, who posits a God who was entirely pro nobis; as Harvey paraphrases, Luther ‘regarded faith as that which enables the believer to accomplish anything he/she desires . . . because God is omnipotent and loving, he wishes us to ask for everything that is useful to us. And he will give us everything for which we ask [as] he is, in fact, that being that by definition is for us’.Footnote 50 Consequently, Feuerbach argues that Protestantism is in effect a form of wish fulfilment in which ‘individuals acknowledge a God beyond themselves only in order to possess in him a boundless space in which they can spread out and expand for all eternity their limited, particular, pitiable individuality, without disturbance’,Footnote 51 which means that ‘Protestantism is no longer concerned, as Catholicism is, about what God is in himself, but about what he is for man’.Footnote 52 The manner in which Protestantism actually instrumentalises God for egocentric ends is by constructing a concept of God which the individual utilises in order to fulfil its need for a sense of (1) the ‘freedom of [its] subjectivity from the limits of nature’ and (2) the ‘eternity and infinitude of personality . . . as belonging to already existing individuals’.Footnote 53 Therefore, the belief in personal immortality is said to derive from the frustrated attempts of the human being to fulfil its desires within the confines and adversities of terrestrial existence, which terminates in death.Footnote 54 The egocentric claim of the individual to absoluteness and infinitude, which, according to Feuerbach, is characteristic of the Protestant religion, is continually challenged in terrestrial existence, and immortality is a means of safeguarding this egocentric self-concept. The individual is encountered by others in this life who limit its self-expression, and so there is posited a future post-mortem mode of existence in which these limitations of terrestrial existence will be eradicated: the limitations of finitude indicate that this life ‘is inadequate to the essence of a person’ conceived in Protestant terms, consequently ‘there must exist a second life . . . not determined and restricted by the conflict and dissimilarity of any qualities’.Footnote 55

To recapitulate, the salient points of Feuerbach's challenge to the Christian concept of personhood are:

  1. (1) by positing a God who is purely pro nobis, as Luther does, Protestantism transforms God into an instrument for wish fulfilment;

  2. (2) religion issues from a desire for infinitude which does not exist in this life, and Protestantism, on account of the fact that the individual is encountered by the constraining forces of alterity (i.e. other human beings, as well as natural forces), posits a future eternal existence proper to Protestantism's supreme estimation of the individual, which eventuates in the devaluation of present inter-subjective existence in limitation.

I propose that Barth actually incorporates, and is thus able to ‘immunise’ his theological framework against, Feuerbach's critique of the ‘Christian’ concept of personhood. Barth himself acknowledges that, in the construction of his theological anthropology, there are substantial points of rapprochement between his conception and those of certain secular authors, Feuerbach being one of the authors whose contributions he explicitly recognises in this context, and he does not consider this rapprochement to be an especially pernicious phenomenon. As he writes:

we need not be surprised that there are approximations and similarities. Indeed, in this very fact we may even see a certain confirmation of our results . . . Why should there not be confirmations of this kind? In this context we are not speaking of the Christian in particular but of man in general, and therefore of something which has been the object of all kinds of ‘worldly,’ i.e., non-Christian wisdom. And surely it need not be, and is not actually, the case, that this worldly wisdom with its very different criteria has always been mistaken . . . It would be far more strange if not the slightest trace had ever been found of fellow-humanity, of the humanity of I and Thou.Footnote 56

Let us proceed, therefore, to explore the nature of this theologico-anthropological convergence as it unfolds in the Feuerbach–Barth encounter and its principal ramifications.

In respect of the first point of Feuerbach's critique, Barth incorporates Feuerbach's critique of Luther by concurring with him entirely, writing in his introduction to Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity that, ‘after Feuerbach, one may no longer repeat these things from Luther without some caution’,Footnote 57 and in his article in Zwischen den Zeiten on Feuerbach, he remarks that this was one of the principal strengths of Feuerbach's critique, offering an overview of Protestant theology from Luther to Schleiermacher, in which he indicates many prominent theological currents which were, in Barth's opinion, susceptible to the Feuerbachian critique.Footnote 58

In respect of the second point of Feuerbach's critique, Barth is aware of the same tendency within Protestantism of which Feuerbach despairs, which came to focus exclusively on individual justification, and in his discussion of humanity as fellow-humanity, Barth unequivocally rejects the individualistic viewpoint as a point of departure for theological anthropology. Unlike classical Protestantism as Feuerbach conceives it, which commences from the individual in relation to God, Barth sees the unity of humanity in community as possessing ontological priority: ‘in its basic form humanity is fellow-humanity. Everything else which is to be described as human nature and essence stands under this sign to the extent that it is human’.Footnote 59 For Barth, true humanity is inherently relational: God is understood as the one who loves in freedom, and as the one who in his act of loving freedom creates the world in order to enter into relation with it; humanity's character as being created in the image of God is neither derived from an anabatic ontological analogy nor from a notion of humanity as the Lord of creation, but is grounded in humanity's destiny to exist in relation and thereby to reproduce structurally the internal relations of grace in the Godhead on which it is modelled.Footnote 60 Humanity is created to participate in a human covenant, and in this human covenant is hidden humanity's destiny to participate in a divine covenant.Footnote 61

Consistent with this thoroughly social conception of humanity, in his reflections on the nature of human existence, Barth insists upon the constitutive value of limitation for the fulfilment of the human being. The principal feature of Feuerbach's critique of the Christian conception of personhood is that Protestantism does not esteem terrestrial existence on account of the fact that such existence engenders the finitude of the human subject as a concomitant of a multiplicity of subjects, which finitude is, according to the Protestant conception, incompatible with its exaltation of the human individual to infinitude. Barth conspicuously obviates this criticism by underlining the importance of limitation within the context of humanity's vocation to exist as covenant partner of God and fellow-humanity.

Let us consider this further. In his discussion of limitation as opportunity in Church Dogmatics, Barth specifically denies that infinitude is a property of the realised human individual,Footnote 62 and he originates a positive understanding of limitation, viewing it as a divine gift: as he writes, ‘the man who is limited by Him is the man who is loved by Him’.Footnote 63 God has created humanity for relation, and in view of this purpose, God has created human beings to exist as limited subjects. The limitation which God confers upon humanity is not negative but determinative, giving human beings the capacity to lead the relational existence for which they are constituted, limitation being a precondition for authentically human agency.Footnote 64 As Barth writes: ‘the relativity of human beings is necessary in order that they should be in a position relatively at least to undertake and execute. The constitution of human history is such that we really are beings of this kind’.Footnote 65

Therefore, contrary to the version of Protestantism which so vexes Feuerbach, Barth can be understood to align himself fundamentally with the Feuerbachian critique of the Protestant notion of the infinitude of the individual, by insisting upon the value of finite existence and upon its status as a God-given gift. Barth assimilates this fundamental element of the Feuerbachian critique to his theological worldview, being positioned to concur with Feuerbach that, in religion, the human being does give expression to its desire for infinitude, but affirming that the event of Jesus Christ as revelation cannot be categorised as a manifestation of such a desire, such a desire being instead representative of Nietzsche's concept of realised personhood, ‘the way of humanity without the fellow man’. For Barth, it is in divine revelation that this Nietzschean desire for infinitude expressing itself in human religion is challenged by ‘the figure of suffering man [Jesus Christ]’. Divine revelation demands of the individual in his egocentric quest for self-enclosed infinitude that

he should see this man, that he should accept his presence, that he should not be man without him but with him . . . Christianity places before the superman the Crucified, Jesus, as the Neighbour, and in the person of Jesus a whole host of others who are wholly and utterly ignoble and despised in the eyes of the world . . . It does not merely will that he see Him and them. It wills that he should recognise in them his neighbours and himself . . . Dionysius-Zarathustra is thus called to live for others and not himself. Here are his brothers and sisters who belong to him and to whom he belongs. In this Crucified, and therefore in fellowship with this mean and painful host of his people, he has thus to see his salvation, and his true humanity in the fact that he belongs to him and therefore to them.Footnote 66

In so doing, Barth is suitably positioned to accommodate the fundamental impetus of the Feuerbachian critique of ‘Christianity’, but to respond that what Feuerbach has identified and justifiably condemned is not authentic Christianity, but rather its diametric opposite.Footnote 67 In corroboration of this point, Barth goes on to remark that Nietzsche, unlike most of his contemporaries, including Feuerbach, whom he mentions briefly in this context, senses correctly that the notion of humanity as fellow-humanity in finitude was at the core of the Christian faith, and that, ‘by having to attack it in this form, he [Nietzsche] has done us the good office of bringing before us the fact that we have to keep to this form as unconditionally as he rejected it, in self-evident antithesis not only to him, but to the whole tradition on behalf of which he made this final hopeless sally’.Footnote 68

Therefore, by affirming Feuerbach's account of the anthroparchic conception of religion in the human desire for infinitude, and by counterposing this desire for infinitude against the finitude in relation to which humanity, for Barth, is called in the event of the divine self-revelation in Jesus Christ, Barth is able to immunise his conception of Christian faith against Feuerbach's reduction of the Christian faith to the excrescence of the egocentric yearning for infinitude. This confers an external coherence upon Barth's circumscriptive definition of religion which maintains that the event of Jesus Christ is not to be classified among the ‘religions’ as a function of the self-absolutising idolatry of the human being.

Conclusion

I have explored in this article Karl Barth's engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of religion. I have argued that Barth's rejoinder to Feuerbach secures an internal coherence to the circumscription of the semantic range of the term ‘religion’ to exclude the possibility of the identification of the event of Jesus Christ as an instantiation of human impulses, and that, despite the fact that Barth himself, on perfectly legitimate methodological grounds, retreats from the attempt to supplement this internal coherence with an external coherence, his conception of the fulfilment of the human individual in its vocation to finitude in relation would have supplied this external coherence as it would have positioned Barth to aver that the pernicious impulse to individual infinitude which Feuerbach correctly diagnoses of contemporary Protestantism is extrinsic to, and indeed antithetical to, the true essence of Christianity. That a putative ‘secular’ philosopher such as Feuerbach should authentically witness to the human vocation to fellow-humanity and should polemicise so vociferously against intellectual movements which jeopardise the recognition of this vocation should perhaps not surprise the Christian theologian for, as Barth himself insists, there are

true words which are not spoken in the Bible or the Church, but which have to be regarded as true in relation to the one Word of God, and therefore heard like this Word, and together with it . . . if we recognise and confess Him as the One who was and is and will be, then we recognise and confess that not we alone, nor the community which, following the prophets and apostles, believes in Him and loves Him and hopes in Him, but de iure all men and all creation derive from His cross, from the reconciliation accomplished in Him, and are ordained to be the theatre of His glory and therefore the recipients and bearers of His Word.Footnote 69

That is to say, such a rapprochement between secular (Feuerbachian) and theological (Barthian) discourse as can be detected at this juncture may lend itself to attestation that Jesus Christ is the principle of ‘the revolutionary alteration of the whole reality of the world’.Footnote 70

References

1 I should like to thank Dr Jim Kanaris (McGill University) for his critical comments on the paper on which the present article is based.

2 Rodrigues records e.g. that Lane ‘chega a afirmar que toda a teologia de Barth é uma resposta a Feuerbach’, and that Niebuhr claims that ‘a teologia barthiana’ was ‘uma completa antítese do pensamento feuerbachiano’. Rodrigues, Adriani Milli, ‘Religião, teologia e antropologia: o confronto entre Karl Barth e Ludwig Feuerbach’, Horizonte: Revista de Estudos de Teologia e Ciências da Religião da PUC Minas 7/14 (2009), p. 163Google Scholar.

3 Glasse, John, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, Harvard Theological Review 57/2 (1964), p. 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Glasse views this exclusive preoccupation with The Essence of Christianity as a shortcoming on Barth's part, writing that Barth ‘makes no use of the developmental interpretation [of Feuerbach's works] . . . which has concerned modern students of Feuerbach himself. This parallels Barth's lumping of early and late writings, without discriminating their significances, in designating the capital sources’. Glasse, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, p. 72, n. 8. Vogel issues a mild corrective to Glasse, remarking that ‘actually, judging by the number of references, Barth's Feuerbach is pre-eminently the author of both Das Wesen des Christentums and Die Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft’. Vogel, Manfred H., ‘The Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, Harvard Theological Review 59/1 (1966), p. 33, n. 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Vogel also defends Barth's restriction of his focus to The Essence of Christianity on the basis that Barth's ‘interest in Feuerbach is determined exclusively by the theological aspect’. Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 34.

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5 Ibid., p. 160, n. 7.

6 Massey, James A., ‘Feuerbach and Religious Individualism’, Journal of Religion 56/4 (1976), pp. 368–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid., pp. 380–1. Massey acknowledges the sufficiency of Barth's response to Feuerbach from a theological standpoint, but not for the purpose of an externally coherent apologetic engagement which would answer Feuerbach on his ‘anthropological ground’. This interpretation parallels closely the distinction I shall make in the present article between the internal and external coherence of Barth's response to Feuerbach.

8 Glasse emphasises this point. See Glasse, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, pp. 91–2. On the other hand, Vogel attempts to downplay its significance, arguing that, because Barth is engaging with Feuerbach in his capacity as a dogmatic theologian (in the 1950s stage of encounter), it is ‘incidental and immaterial to the argument’. Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 48. Vogel, however, demonstrates that he is well aware ofthe potentially disastrous consequences for Christian theology of Barth's renunciationof the attempt to supply external coherence, see Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, pp. 49–51.

9 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), I/2, p. 309Google Scholar. Subsequent references to Church Dogmatics will take the following format: CD I/2, p. 309.

10 Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1983), p. 17Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 19.

12 Ibid., p. 14.

13 Ibid., p. 195.

14 Ibid., pp. 29–30.

15 Feuerbach, Ludwig, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 17Google Scholar.

16 CD I/2, p. 302.

17 Ibid.

18 CD I/2, p. 315.

19 CD I/2, pp. 314–15.

20 CD I/2, p. 316. The degree to which Barth adopts Feuerbach's critique of religion is elucidated in his Zwischen den Zeiten article on Feuerbach, in which he writes that Feuerbach ‘mit seiner Religionsdeutung auf der ganzen Linie Recht hat’. Barth, Karl, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, Zwischen den Zeiten 5 (1927), p. 32Google Scholar.

21 As dogmatics is a function of the church which is called into existence to witness to Jesus Christ, CD IV/3, p. 801, dogmatics presupposes that God truly has revealed himself in Jesus Christ: faith is the precondition of dogmatics. CD I/1, p. 22.

22 CD I/1, p. 188. Concretely this means that one can affirm, as Barth does, the idolatrous character of religion, but in addition, that, on account of the nature of dogmatics, one is obliged to adopt as a methodological point of departure the principle that the event of Jesus Christ is the event of divine self-revelation, which necessarily precludes the possibility of accepting the classification of the event of Jesus Christ within the genus ‘religion’ as Barth understands it. As we shall presently see, this decisively informs Barth's later assessment of Feuerbach's critique.

23 CD I/2, p. 326.

24 CD I/1, pp. 134 and 154–5.

25 CD IV/3, pp. 821–2. This polarisation applies paradigmatically to the Christian religion: ‘before the end of all time we cannot expect that the Christian will not always show himself an enemy of grace’. CD I/2, p. 338.

26 CD I/2, p. 327.

27 CD I/2, p. 339.

28 CD I/2, p. 358. Barth's affirmation of the elevation of Christianity above the ‘other’ religions by virtue of its constituting a witness to and manifestation of divine revelation (Jesus Christ) does not mean that, for Barth, true Christianity is identifiable with the visible, institutional church, and so it cannot be adduced in support of a programme of religious exclusivism. As he states: ‘the statement that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God has really nothing whatever to do with the arbitrary exaltation and self-glorification of the Christian in relation to other men, of the Church in relation to other institutions, or of Christianity in relation to other conceptions’, CD IV/3, p. 91. Barth explains that the revelation-bearing community is distinguished from the variety of religious manifestations by the name of Jesus Christ, but that the ‘name’ of Jesus Christ refers, not solely to his nominal designation, but to ‘the very essence and source of all [his] reality’, and that God, as a free subject, not being ‘mechanical . . . is not under any external constraint [and thus] . . . is not bound to what seems to have, and claims reality as Christianity, as Christian doctrine and conduct and institutions, as pursued by ostensibly Christian men or the ostensibly Christian portions of humanity’. CD I/2, pp. 348–9. Barth argues that the glory of God in Jesus Christ is ubiquitous: ‘we do not confine God's glory when we call the Church its provisional sphere. This does not mean that only the Church is its sphere. Rather we shall be both comforted and shamed by the fact that there is no sphere in heaven or on earth which even here and now is not secretly full of the glory of God. It is in the Church that this is known . . . He is the God who is glorious in his community, and for that reason, and in that way in all the world’. CD II/1, p. 677.

29 For information on where Feuerbach and Barth part company, see Glasse, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, pp. 74–7, where he writes that ‘Barth took Feuerbach seriously. Moreover, he agreed with him. In fact, he went beyond mere passive agreement by using Feuerbach's views to further his own . . . [Barth] defend[ed] Feuerbach against theological counterattacks . . . [on] his interpretation of religion as illusory projection . . . [However,] having agreed with his reading of the story of Protestant theology, having urged his criticism against theology and the Church, having repulsed a theological counterattack upon his reduction of theology to illusory projection, Barth finally wished to say “No” to the Feuerbach to whom he had said “Yes” on all these other counts’. Glasse identifies this point at which Barth parted company with Feuerbach as Feuerbach's deification of humanity: Glasse is correct, as he is recapitulating the Barth–Feuerbach encounter of the 1920s, whereas I am concentrating on Barth's engagement with Feuerbach in Barth's construction of his own critique of religion, where the divergence between Barth and Feuerbach eventuates at the point where Barth demurs on the classification of authentic Christianity as a species of ‘religion’. In respect of Barth's later engagement with Feuerbach, it is worth mentioning that, according to Glasse and Vogel, Barth actually retreats from the negative anthropology which characterised his earlier encounter. See Glasse, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, pp. 84–5, and Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 43, n. 27.

30 Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Encounter’, p. 51.

31 Glasse, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, p. 88. Vogel agrees: ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 47, n. 33.

32 Glasse, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, p. 88.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., p. 90.

36 Ibid., p. 92.

37 Ibid., p. 95.

38 CD IV/3, pp. 85–6.

39 Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 41. Whether Barth would have delighted in being designated a Barthian theologian is a different matter altogether.

40 See Glasse, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, pp. 89–91. Vogel agrees, remarking that ‘from the vantage point of the “manifest radiance of God,” Feuerbach's challenge simply evaporates. It simply does not arise’. Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 48.

41 Descartes makes this precise point in his Meditations on First Philosophy in which, in the dedicatory letter to the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, he writes that theological discourse proceeds according to circular reasoning, which is perfectly valid in itself, but whose cogency is limited to those who accept the existence of God and soul, two theses which he intends to establish by the use of deductive reason, which he argues will position the Christian apologist to respond effectively to the intellectual challenge of atheism. See Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 3–4Google Scholar.

42 Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 49. In a post-modern intellectual culture in which the position of Christian theology in the academy is subject to continual challenge, this retreat from an externally coherent apologetic is of particular contemporary significance. Having retreated from the intellectual mainland, it is quite unsurprising that contemporary promoters of the academic role of Christian theology, disarmed of any externally coherent apologetic framework, have recourse to a redefinition of Christian theology ‘as a species of cultural studies’, which redefinition consciously and purposely accidentalises its ecclesial character. Cooey, Paula M., ‘The Place of Academic Theology in the Study of Religion from the Perspective of Liberal Education’, in Cady, Linell E. and Brown, Delwin (eds), Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: Conflicting Maps, Changing Terrain (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 180Google Scholar. See also Sheila Greeve Davaney, ‘Rethinking Theology and Religious Studies’, ibid., p. 150, where Davaney prescribes the acceptance of ‘canons of common argumentation’ as a conditio sine qua non of the participation of Christian theological discourse in the academy. A discussion of the nature and possibility of such canons of common argumentation must be postponed to another occasion, but in the present context it is instructive to note that, according to Barth, theology ‘cannot . . . accept the obligation of submission to standards valid for other sciences’, CD I/1, p. 10.

43 Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p, 51.

44 Ibid., p, 49.

45 Ibid., p, 52.

46 CD III/2, p. 285.

47 I must remark that whether this was ever his intention is beside the point: this section is intended to explore how Barth's work can be understood to function apologetically.

48 Feuerbach, Essence, p. 23.

49 Feuerbach, Ludwig, Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a Thinker, along with an Appendix of Theological Satirical Epigrams, Edited by One of his Friends (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), p. 11Google Scholar.

50 Harvey, Van A., Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), p. 61Google Scholar.

51 Feuerbach, Thoughts, p. 19.

52 Feuerbach, Ludwig, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1986), p. 5Google Scholar.

53 Feuerbach, Essence, p. 184.

54 Feuerbach, Thoughts, p. 6.

55 Feuerbach, Thoughts, p. 12. Cf. Massey, ‘Feuerbach and Religious Individualism’, pp. 369 and 372 where Massey summarises Feuerbach's ‘philosophical critique of modern Christianity’ as guided by the consideration of its ‘individualistic [nature] . . . absolutizing the value of the individual human subject to the extent that the laws of “objective” reality are irrationally denied’. The fact that Massey writes that an interpretation of Feuerbach's later work which takes cognisance of this philosophical foundation ‘qualifies Barth's rejection of him’ supports the argument of the present piece, that this is precisely the juncture at which an assessment of the Barth–Feuerbach encounter is to be conducted.

56 CD III/2, p. 277. According to Barth, Feuerbach, along with the other two authors whom Barth mentions in this passage (Confucius and Buber), are to be considered ‘the wisest of the wise of this world’. CD III/2, p. 278.

57 Karl Barth in Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 62.

58 See Barth, ‘Feuerbach’, pp. 22–30. Massey, ‘Feuerbach and Religious Individualism’, p. 379, confirms this.

59 CD III/2, p. 285. This represents a marked contrast with the decidedly more individualistic approach Barth adopts in his original assessment of the contribution of Ludwig Feuerbach in his Zwischen den Zeiten article, see Barth, ‘Feuerbach’, p. 32.

60 CD III/2, p. 324.

61 CD III/2, p. 320.

62 CD III/4, p. 565.

63 CD III/4, p. 568.

64 CD III/4, p. 570. See also CD III/4, p. 631, where Barth argues that human finitude is necessary for redemption to ‘take effect for us’. This schematisation in fact parallels Feuerbach's conception of the necessity of finite existence. See Feuerbach, Thoughts, p. 77, where he writes that ‘wherever all the conditions required for life are not completely and fully present – and not only the universal elements and matter, but also the determinate form, the measure, the determinate proportion, belong to these conditions – there is no life’.

65 CD III/4, p. 574.

66 CD III/2, p. 241. In consideration of his claim that Thoughts on Death and Immortality represents the philosophical foundation for Feuerbach's critique of religion, Massey's identification in ‘Feuerbach and Religious Individualism’, p. 380, of the conceptual impetus of Thoughts on Death and Immortality as the repudiation of the ‘exalt[ation of] the individual human to identity with the divine’ which Feuerbach detected in contemporaneous Christian discourse, and the fact that Massey issues such an identification as a rejoinder to Barth's interpretation of Feuerbach, forcefully suggest that the self-exaltation of the individual is the basis of the Feuerbachian critique and as such is the proper locus for its evaluation. As such, having argued that Barth dismisses the self-exaltation of the individual as a Nietzschean contrivance fundamentally contrary to the Christian faith, Feuerbach's critique simply cannot apply to Barth's conception of Christian faith. Vogel, ‘Barth–Feuerbach Confrontation’, p. 48, writes that Feuerbach's critique ‘evaporates’ in the face of Barth's appeal to the ‘manifest radiance of God’: it now appears that, even without this recourse, the Feuerbachian critique ‘evaporates’, as Christianity, insofar as Barth constitutes one of its faithful representatives, is misidentified as its target.

67 A hypothetical supposition: if Barth had engaged with Feuerbach's earlier corpus, I expect that he would have been situated to draw these rhetorical implications himself, and in this respect it is regrettable, but contextually understandable that, as I have previously noted, Barth elected to restrict his engagement with the Feuerbachian critique to Feuerbach's later work. These remarks notwithstanding, Barth was aware that he was aligning himself fundamentally with Feuerbach against Nietzsche, and that this constituted a point of polarity between Christian and anti-Christian anthropology, writing in the context of his affirmation of the theologico-anthropological convergence between him and Feuerbach that ‘it need not be, and is not actually, the case, that this worldly wisdom with its very different criteria has always been mistaken, always seeking humanity in the direction of Idealism and finally of Nietzsche, and therefore establishing and describing it as humanity without the fellow-man’, and identifying Feuerbach as one of those few who had succeeded in avoiding this error. CD III/2, p. 277.

68 CD III/2, p. 242.

69 CD IV/3, pp. 114–17.

70 CD IV/3, p. 622.