{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is aware that Christians, on the rare occasion they give thought to such matters, do not think of themselves as nihilists. He apologizes for disturbing them and promises to move on from this topic as soon as possible.}
“Our life is illusion; the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God.” (Karl Barth)
“The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.” (Karl Barth)
Despite Christianity’s openly declared contempt for the world, Christians found themselves stuck with living in it. Having been catapulted to power and respectability by Constantine, Church authorities made the best bargains they could with what Paul had described as the world’s “powers and principalities,” becoming, in relatively short order, one of those very powers. The Church’s worldly triumph required reinterpretation of certain scriptural passages, but Christian apologists were up to the task. The nihilism at the heart of Jesus’ and Paul’s gospel was discretely ignored, though it never went away.
To make a long story short, Christendom lasted until it didn’t. Whatever claims to the contrary had been made by Christian authorities—or, for that matter, by Jesus himself—Christianity could not forever resist the currents of History. In the nineteenth century, challenged by the Enlightenment, Protestant theologians began rethinking their Weltanschauung, while Catholics dug in their heels against the modern tide. The former eventually arrived at “liberal” theology, which mixed the social gospel with a humanized Jesus while hoping to immanentize the eschaton; the latter (Catholics) thumbed their nose at Enlightenment and conceded the pope infallibility. Then came the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and what might be called the Disillusionment of the West.
Toward the end of the war, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, following the lead of Soren Kierkegaard, scandalized and provoked his Christian brethren by reminding them of the nihilism concealed beneath the cover of their respectable bourgeois religion. According to J. Gresham Machen, Barth insisted that “God is not another name for the totality of this world; and he is not to be found in any experience of man. He is, with respect to this world, the "completely Other," the One who is incommensurate with anything that can possibly enter into the life of man. Such is the stupendous dualism between the world and God that is at the root of the thinking of Karl Barth.” Nothing in this world connects us to Barth’s God; God may deign to reach out to us or to reveal his will—or he may not, and if he chooses not to do so, there is nothing we can do about it.
In Barth’s view, not even Christianity could bridge the gap between human and divine. Walter Lowrie, following Barth, put it this way: in our religious rituals and language, “We are thinking not of God but of man; as Barth says, while we thought we were speaking about God, we were merely ‘saying Man with a loud voice.’” Ludwig Feuerbach had made the same point in the nineteenth century, but on behalf of atheism; Barth, on the other hand, wanted to force Christians to confront the emptiness of their earthly existence, including their faith. As Karen Leslie Carr puts it, “For Barth, ‘Faith is no possession, rather it is a void; God is nowhere present in history, rather the truth points us only to his total absence; Jesus’ message lay not in his superior knowledge of God but in his cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In short, for Barth, ‘Religion possesses no solution to the problem of life; what it does is to disclose the truth that the problem cannot be solved.’” People long for security, foundation, and assurance, but none of that is to be had in this life. People crave God but God is not in the world: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here.”
Carr continues: “For Barth the issue was, how do we even make sense of the inchoate mess that is our existence? How can we claim to know anything about God at all, when ‘the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God?’ God is so far removed from our experience that one is driven to question his very existence. Barth wrote, ‘Our world is formless and tumultuous chaos, a chaos of the forces of nature and of the human soul. Our life is illusion: this is the situation in which we find ourselves.’”
Was Barth a nihilist? Only in the sense that he pinned all earthly hopes on a God who cannot be known unless he chooses to reveal himself; mortal existence, in Barth's theology, has no value in and of itself. That is a hard gospel to preach, and a harder gospel to accept.
-----------------------------------------
Karen Leslie Carr quotes from The Banalization of Nihilism.
God is forever out of reach, and yet we keep reaching...
Posted by: |