glasse barth on feuerbach

Harvard Divinity School

Barth on FeuerbachAuthor(s): John GlasseReviewed work(s):Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Apr., 1964), pp. 69-96Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1508778 .

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BARTH ON FEUERBACH

JOHN GLASSE VASSAR COLLEGE

POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK

IN view of the fatefulness of Ludwig Feuerbach for religion in the modern world, it is curious that recent theologians have written so little about him. For the most widely effective critiques of religion in our time, those by Marx and Freud, are both variations on a theme that received its classic expression not from them but from him. Yet Karl Barth is the one major theological figure of today who has explicitly concerned himself with Feuerbach over the years.' Even if Barth had no other bearing on our situation than this, his reflections on Feuerbach would merit the attention I propose to give them by considering three questions: (i) Who is the Feuerbach with whom Barth has been concerned? (2) How has Barth responded to him? (3) Has he answered him?

I

The first of these questions may simply inquire into the identity of the figure to whom Barth has oriented his response; or it may take the form of wondering whether Barth, for all his forthright- ness in confronting Feuerbach, has indulged in tilting with a straw man.

Whatever the shape of this query, it is patent that the definitive expression of his concern with the man, a lecture delivered in 1926, shows Barth seeking to attend faithfully to Feuerbach himself.2

' This aspect of the present theological situation is reviewed in Werner Schilling, Feuerbach und die Religion (Miinchen, I957), pp. 134-137. For earlier theological responses consult S. Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie: Ursprung und Schicksal (Berlin, i931). On Marx and Feuerbach see Klaus Bochmiihl, Leiblich- keit und Gesellschaft: Studien zur Religionskritik und Anthropologie im Friihwerk von Ludwig Feuerbach und Karl Marx (Gbttingen, I961). On Freud see Herman Adolf Weser, Sigmund Freuds und Ludwig Feuerbachs Religionskritik (Bottrop i. W., 1936). Barth himself has written more about Feuerbach than about Marx; about Freud he has been virtually silent.

2"Ludwig Feuerbach. Mit einem polemischen Nachwort," Zwischen den Zeiten 5 (1927), 10-40. Without the "Nachwort," 33-40, this was reprinted in Barth's



70 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

He seems to be listening, while engaged in the act of inviting other members of the guild of Protestant theologians to hear what this outsider has to say. He speaks for this outsider. He speaks as one convinced that, unless the guild now succeeds in hearing effectively a certain question which Feuerbach had posed to the theologians of his own day and which they failed to hear, the out- look for its own theological work is grave. But the attentiveness of Barth's listening is not occasioned solely, I suspect, by his view of its urgency for the theological enterprise at a certain juncture. For his talk of Feuerbach also betrays an attraction to this anti- theologian whose stance he finds "more theological than that of many theologians." 3 And the Menschlichkeit of Barth has a manifest resonance with this man who said what he thought at cost to himself and to his family.

This quality of listening seems to have led Barth to probe beneath the words of Feuerbach, in search of the intention that informs his thought. He finds it to be an overwhelmingly positive intention, "as positive as that of any theologian," he remarks. For all the negations with which Feuerbach confronts theologians, he strikes Barth as "no mere skeptic and nay-sayer." 4 When he claims that he denies only in order to affirm, Barth agrees. He stresses this, in dissent from a tendency among theological in- terpreters (Elert, for one) to suppress this positivity of Feuer- bach's intention.

What matters more, of course, is the substance of what Barth's Feuerbach affirms. He affirms the real man. This is the whole man, whom Feuerbach defines as a sensuous, material being, on

Die Theologie und die Kirche (Zollikon-Ziirich, 1928), pp. 212-239. The "Nach- wort" had been occasioned by Wilhelm Bruhn, Vom Gott im Menschen: Ein Weg in metaphysisches Neuland (Giessen, 1926). Two English translations of the lecture itself have appeared. The first, by James Luther Adams, is in the Torchbook edition of Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, translated by George Eliot, introductory essay by Karl Barth, foreword by H. Richard Niebuhr (New York, 1957), x-xxxii. The second rendering is Chapter VII of Karl Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920-1928, translated by Louise Pettibone Smith, with an introduction (1962) by T. F. Torrance (London & New York, 1962). The following references to the essay will cite the text of Die Theologie und die Kirche as TK.

"TK, 212. English renderings can be found on p. x of Adams' and p. 217 of Smith's translations. Hereafter, these will be appended to the TK reference in this fashion: "TK, 212 (ET, x/217)." Most quotations will be taken from these translations, although an occasional rendering will be revised.

4Ibid., 219 (ET, xiv/222).



BARTH ON FEUERBACH 71

the one hand, and, on the other, as a being who exists only in community. Barth elucidates both aspects with relish. Without stinting the sensuous, physical being that is part of the world, Barth nevertheless takes care to observe that the stomach involved in the notorious "Der Mensch ist was er isst" is, after all, the human one. His delineation of the social structure of this humanity brings out Feuerbach's concept of the I-Thou dialogue. Only when theological understanding obscured the reality of this sensuous, social man, then, did Feuerbach deny theological misunderstanding of God (as different from man) or its misunderstanding of man (as half-animal, half-angel). Barth remarks that this denial is no less decisive for the Idealist hypostatization of human reason into abstract Reason or of the human self into the trans- cendental Ego. In other words, he keeps clearly in view Feuer- bach's conviction that the fate of Idealist philosophy parallels the fate of Christian theology.

But this way of defining man does not quite reach what Barth discerns to be the finally decisive factor in Feuerbach's pattern of affirmation and negation. That is rather his apotheosis of man as such. Beneath his description of man Barth detects a certain judgment about the human status.

When he identified God with the essence of man, he paid God the highest honor that he could possibly bestow; indeed, this is the strange Magnificat that Ludwig Feuerbach intoned for "the good Lord." 5

Here, then, is what Barth finds at the heart of Feuerbach's positive intent: "man is not only the measure of all things, but also the epitome, the origin and end of all values." 6 Barth adds that this persuasion is, in its own way, no more demonstrable than is revelation itself.

If this venture in apotheosis is what finally underlies Feuer- bach's negations of theology, Barth is also concerned to point out that it also grounds his notably affirmative attitude toward religion. Even when Feuerbach observed men coping with their de- sires and fears and ideals by hypostatizing the law of their struggle

5Ibid., 220 (ET, xv/223). 6Ibid., 237 (ET, xxviii/235). On Barth's judgment of the justification of this

assertion, cf. ibid. with TK, 213 (ET, x-xi/217-218).




in theological illusion, he "did not condemn all this; he by no means estimated it cheaply. On the contrary, he said 'Yes' to it, and praised it." 7 He honored this religious quest, that is to say, on one condition - that its mystery be acknowledged to be man himself, who is, after all, regarded by Feuerbach as the true ens realissimum. So Barth, the enemy of religion and friend of theology, portrays Feuerbach as an enemy of theology who is the friend of religion. He remarks that this feeling for his subject sets Feuerbach off from Voltairean, Enlightenment critics of religion. It is true that Barth also finds a certain ambivalence in this attitude: like Strauss and Nietzsche, Feuerbach strikes him as a man that suffered all his life from Christianity.8

But none of these is the most prominent feature of the Feuer- bach who has engaged Barth over the years - not his positive intent, nor his description and apotheosis of man, nor his appreciation of religion. What does stand out as the most telling feature of Barth's Feuerbach is a certain question. It is the question that Barth hears him propound to theology in the modern age. As he reads him, Feuerbach is the man whose query does nothing less than locate the Achilles heel of modern theology - of Schleiermacher's critics no less than of Schleiermacher himself and his followers. Faced with this overriding significance, Barth dismisses his less flattering impressions of Feuerbach: that his message is "something extraordinarily, almost nauseatingly triv- ial," 9 for example, and that even his shrewd interpretations of theology at times betray a certain ineptness.

What, then, is this question that Feuerbach posed - the one

7Ibid., 221 (ET, xvi/223).

S Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik, III/2 (2. Aufl.; Zollikon-Ziirich, 1959), 287 (ET, 240). Hereafter, any volume of this Dogmatik will be cited as KD; quotations will be from the authorized translation, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh & New York, 1936-). Although Barth is sensitive to the variety of Feuerbach's attitudes toward religion, theology, and Christianity, he makes no use of the developmental interpretation of that variety, 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. See TK, 213 (ET, xi/218) and Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert: Ihre Vorgeschichte und ihre Geschichte (2. Aufl.; Zollikon-Ziirich, 1952), 484 (ET, From Rousseau to Ritschl [London, 1959], 355). On development in Feuerbach's thought see Gregor Niidling, Ludwig Feuerbachs Religionsphilosophie (Paderborn, 1936), and Claudio Cesa, Il giovane Feuerbach (Bari, 1962).

9TK, 226 (ET, xix/227).




that Barth, out of a sense that it was missed by most who should have heard it in the last century, now raises for Feuerbach in the very midst of the guild of theologians? It will not do to say simply that it is posed by Feuerbach's reduction of theology to anthropology. For it is characteristic of Barth's way of hearing the question that it becomes audible only as that reduction comes to bear upon the method of modern theology - in fact, upon no less than three different levels of that method. The first is the particular point at which theologians choose to begin their work. Among modern theologians this took the form of asking, first of all, "whether and in what measure religion, revelation and the relation to God can be interpreted as a predicate of man." 1o

Barth finds this anthropocentric way of raising the initial question about God to be merely a consequence that flows from a predicament confronting such theology on a deeper level, on the level of strategic posture.

This formulation of the problem was brought about by the em- barrassing situation - the "apologetic corner" - into which modern theology, with decreasing power of resistance, has allowed itself to be pushed."

Theologians found themselves in this corner as a result, in turn, of choices they had made in responding to the rise of a belief that defines modernity in several realms of culture, a certain belief in humanity. It was "a conceited and self-sufficient humanity" that provoked their fatal theological response, a belief in human competence that made man himself the measure of all things. Incidentally, Barth's studies in intellectual history have given considerable attention to the career of this cultural mutation.12

In this context, then (of a theological starting-point, dictated by a strategic predicament, prompted, in turn, by a cultural prov- ocation), Barth states the question that makes Feuerbach worth hearing. It is a question of

10Ibid., 226 (ET, XX/227). " Ibid. That modern Protestant theology has been vulnerable to Feuerbach's critique of religion, because of its basic methodological commitment, is a theme that had been developed fully by Kurt Leese in Die Prinzipienlehre der neueren systema- tischen Theologie im Lichte der Kritik Ludwig Feuerbachs (Leipzig, 1912). Barth does not refer to this work in his discussions of Feuerbach in either TK or KD.

'Notably in his Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert.




whether the theologian, when he thus formulates the problem, is not after all affirming the thing in which the ascent of humanity seems to culminate in any case, namely man's apotheosis.13

Barth concludes:

The question was asked by a godless man, but it was asked. And a truly penetrating Christian judgment on the nineteenth century, instead of crossing itself with horror at the idea, should regard the asking of just this question so pointedly as one of the few wholly satisfactory achievements of the period.14

That this corrective question came "not from love but from hatred of Church and theology" does not matter; for, after all, "the good God has many times used such Assyrians and Babylonians for calling Jerusalem to order." 15

Here, then, is Barth's Feuerbach in outline. He is pre-eminent- ly the author of Das Wesen des Christentums; for the view of God characteristic of that book conditions Barth's reading of later works by Feuerbach, and it informs his definition of the issues that Feuerbach posed. How adequate this image is can best be determined when we finally consider whether Barth has answered him. For the moment, let us proceed to the second main question.

II

How has Barth responded to Feuerbach? I would suggest that the four-and-a-half decades of his dialogue with Feuerbach ex- hibit two major phases. The first reached definitive expression in the nineteen-twenties; the second, in the nineteen-fifties.

Turning to the former, first, it is evident that certain features of this phase have already been noted above. For one thing, Barth took Feuerbach seriously. Moreover, he agreed with him. In fact, he went beyond mere passive agreement by using Feuer-

13Ibid., 486 (ET, 358). Cf. TK, 226 (ET, xx/227). That the content of the question changes at a later stage in Barth's reflections on Feuerbach will appear below (n. 42).

14 TK, 208 (ET [Smith], 213). Unlike the foregoing quotations from TK, this comes from the lecture, "Das Wort in der Theologie von Schleiermacher bis Ritschl," not from "Ludwig Feuerbach."

' Ibid., 207 (ET, 212).




bach's views to further his own. If we examine how Barth did this, I think we will find that he developed some of Feuerbach's ideas even more radically than Feuerbach himself had.'"

Consider the salient feature of his image of Feuerbach, the question he heard him propound to modern theology. What is this, if it is not an interrogatory form that Barth gave to his own agreement with the way in which Feuerbach read the history of Protestant theology? As the one who long ago discerned where the starting-point of Luther's successors had to lead, Feuerbach appeared to Barth as

a not very crafty but slightly keen-eyed spy [who] let out the esoteric secret of this whole priesthood, urbi et orbi, "Theology has long since become anthropology." 17

What more could Barth have asked? But he found further contentions of Feuerbach's to champion,

and he used them to criticize theology and the Church in his own time. He urged that Feuerbach occupied stronger ground than Lutherans do when he reversed the relation of dependence between God and man and justified this reversal by appealing to Luther, especially to his "heaven-storming Christology" of the communicatio idiomatum. Unless the relation of man to God is kept unconditionally irreversible under every circumstance, by invoking "the Calvinist corrective" (Finitum non capax infiniti), Barth warned that the Feuerbachian conclusion would remain "a thorn in the flesh of modern theology." is Again, Barth urged that

1 The main themes of this first phase receive definitive expression in two of Barth's lectures: "Ludwig Feuerbach," originally delivered in the summer of 1926, and "Das Wort in der Theologie von Schleiermacher bis Ritschl," delivered in the fall of 1927. Both are included in Die Theologie und die Kirche. The main re- statements of these themes are to be found in (i) allusions to Feuerbach in Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, i. Band, Die Lehre vom Worte Gottes: Pro- legomena zur christlichen Dogmatik (Miinchen, 1927); (2) the chapter on Feuer- bach in Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (1947 and 1952); and (3) allusions to Feuerbach in Die kirchliche Dogmatik, especially in volumes 1/2, II/I and 2, 111/2, and IV/I (1938-1953).

Apparently the earliest reference to Feuerbach of any consequence appears in "Der Glaube an den pers6nlichen Gott," Zeitschrift fiir Theologie und Kirche 24 (1914), especially 87-88. Allusions to Feuerbach entered Der

Rtimerbrief only through revision of the first edition into the second, and they have remained identical since. Compare, especially, pages 219-221 of the second edition (Miinchen, 1922) with 190-192 of the first (Bern, 1919).

1•TK, 228 (ET, xxi/228). 18Ibid., 231 (ET, xxiv/231).




Feuerbach's anti-spiritualist anthropology shows decisively that for Christians to be concerned with the human spirit alone is to be drawn into an apotheosis of man; and that is an evasion of the real God. Furthermore, Barth invoked Feuerbach's affinity with the socialist workers' movement, an affinity the more noteworthy because Feuerbach himself struck Barth as such a bourgeois man. This politico-economic affinity shows that, so long as the Church fails to reform its ethics by breaking with the bourgeois social corollaries of its Idealist ideology, it will proclaim nothing but the illusion Feuerbach exposed.

But Barth's agreement did not end here. He went on to defend Feuerbach against theological counterattacks. For example, certain theologians had attacked his interpretation of religion as illusory projection by appealing to religious experience, in particular to an allegedly objective reference of the religious consciousness. On behalf of Feuerbach, Barth argued that this counterattack could not be sustained. For the one who could turn even the quite ponderable religion of Luther to his own purposes should have no difficulty with latter-day appeals to religion at its best, even with its allegedly objective reference. Moreover, such appeal to the specifically religious consciousness is, in its own way, as indemonstrable as an appeal to revelation. But even if this counterattack on Feuerbach's theory of religion should be sustained, Barth argued that it would still fail by missing the real mark. For to aim at Feuerbach's theory of religion is to be diverted by a merely derivative feature from strik- ing the really constitutive factor in his position. That is his anthropology, not his theory of religion. As Barth read Feuerbach, the root of his whole position is a vision of man as "not only the measure of all things, but also the epitome, the origin and end of all values." Of this root of the matter Barth concluded: "anyone who is not able to laugh in his face at this point will never get at him with whining or with angry criticism of his views of religion." 19

This laugh in the face marks the point where Barth finally broke his alliance with Feuerbach. Having agreed with his reading of the story of Protestant theology, having urged his criti-

l Ibid., 237 (ET, xxviii/235).




cisms 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. This about- face surely poses the question of how he could legitimately have expected to exempt his own position from the Feuerbachian critique by which he had cut down his opponents. For each act of affirming Feuerbach had deepened the peril in which Barth had placed himself - the peril that his Feuerbachian sword might turn out to be two-edged. How he sought to turn that peril can be seen by considering how Barth dealt with the issue on which he finally broke with Feuerbach.

The issue central to their disagreement was this: Is it really possible to identify the nature of God with the nature of man? On this issue the strategy which shaped Barth's polemic against Feuerbach was to adduce considerations that rule out the legit- imacy of identifying the real God with the real man.

How did he execute this grand strategy? One interpretation holds that Barth excluded the divine-human identity by affirming that God is "wholly other" than man and by concluding that no comparison is possible between such incommensurable terms. So Hartshorne and Reese reduce his early response to this single "measure of desperation": "God is wholly other than man and in no rationally explicable relation to him, either as like or as different." 20 However faithful it may be to one theme in Der R6merbrief (second edition), this reading has two flaws. Barth himself did not, in fact, rely on it in any of his several discussions of Feuerbach; furthermore, what he did write about Feuerbach exhibits a significantly different approach.

As a more accurate account of the first phase of Barth's polemic against Feuerbach, then, I would suggest the following thesis. Barth implemented his strategy of precluding divine- human identity by showing that God and man differ radically. He did this by placing two main barriers in the way of Feuer- bach's attempt to establish that identity. One was a certain view of man; the other, of God. Of these two, the one on which he

o Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chi- cago, 1953), p. 448.




relied decisively, and which he developed more amply, was the view of man. It was a negative, general anthropology. Consider these two lines of his rejoinder, beginning with the anthropological one.

Feuerbach could identify deity with humanity, Barth argued, because he could deify man; and this apotheosis of man was possible, because he failed to acknowledge fully two marks of our humanity that have become evident to us in the twentieth century, evil and death. For all his advance over his contemporaries in the anthropological realism that his sensuous man, involved in I-Thou relations, represented, Feuerbach remained, like his contemporaries, a child of their century, not of ours. He was a Nichtkenner of death and a Verkenner of evil (here Barth followed Hans Ehrenberg in expression as well as in

thought). And he suggested that both of these blind spots followed from another limit to Feuerbach's realism about man - his affirmation of an "essence of man" that is still an abstraction, far removed from the concrete reality of a solitary individual

(as Max Stirner had contended). For all of Feuerbach's abhor- rence of high-flown spiritualism and abstraction in Hegel, Barth seems to suggest that a trace of such idealist abstraction finally holds Feuerbach back from achieving his own intention of know-

ing and affirming the real man. At this point, Barth carried forward Feuerbach's own drive for realism about man even more

radically, until the human condition itself showed that to identify the essence of God with the essence of man is "the illusion of all illusions." 21 By what method did Barth propose to achieve this more radical development? By thinking as a solitary individual, he said in the mid-twenties. Here was a manner of thinking that could be counted on to overcome our forgetfulness of evil and of death. It would thereby disclose how ludicrous is the attempt to confuse the Deity with oneself. Beneath the nominalism of this

21TK, 237 (ET, xxviii/235). In its sharpest form this charge commits Barth to asserting that Feuerbach at times identified God not only with the essence of the human species but even with the individual man. The assertion is explicit in Die protestantische Theologie im i9. Jahrhundert, p. 489 (ET, 361); it may be implied in TK, 238 (ET, xxix/236). This is another point at which it is evident that Barth has not employed a genetic interpretation of variety in Feuerbach's thought (cf. supra, n. 7). On the relations to Feuerbach of Stirner (1806-56) and Ehrenberg (1883- ) see S. Rawidowicz, op. cit.




reliance upon an existentialist mode of thinking, then, it is significant that Barth's prescription appealed to anthropological considerations that were available to anyone. This contrasts sharply with the christocentric method by which he makes his later response to Feuerbach.

Barth culminated his delineation of the death and the evil of the solitary man by identifying the final limit of man with his religion. "Even in our relation to God, we are and remain liars." 22

Here, again, we find that Barth developed a Feuerbachian critique more radically in the course of using it. For he employed Feuer- bach's negative account of theology (as distinguished from his markedly positive view of religion), in order to develop his own negative interpretation of human religion. Because that dark view of our piety capped his view of man, Barth held that to acknowledge the lie in our best faith is the acid test of whether we have actually attained the ground that remains impregnable to Feuerbach, the crucial ability to laugh in his face.

This, then, is the weapon that Barth cautioned one not to use against Feuerbach, unless one had already been struck by it himself. Perhaps this allusion to a double-edged sword suggests how Barth could afford to make knowledge of man a condition of knowledge of God at a time when he was waging war against anthropocentric method in theology. For knowledge of man functioned as a negative condition of knowing God, a condition that ruled out at least one kind of idol. This, in turn, suggests how Barth could survive his own critical use of Feuerbach. For even though the man that sins and dies strikes a mortal blow to the Feuerbachian dream of identifying God with him, this negative anthropology need not imperil one who has denied from the outset that man is God. Is there an asymmetry between the situa- tions of Feuerbach and of Barth, then, whereby the same weapon is fatal to one but not to the other?

So much for the view of man that Barth placed in the path of Feuerbach during the first phase of his response. It was a negative anthropology, rather than a positive one; and it was based on general considerations, rather than christological ones.

'TK, 239 (ET, xxix/237). Cf. Der Rimerbrief (second and subsequent edi- tions), Ch. XI.




The second prong of Barth's early rejoinder was a certain view of God. He realized, of course, that an apotheosis of man was only part of Feuerbach's secret, given the way that some understanding of God, as well as man, is presupposed by an affirmation of their identity. In the case of Feuerbach, Barth noted that this involved a stress on the humanness of God. Time and again, he showed how Feuerbach justified this by appealing to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, especially to the Lutheran formulation of the interchange of divine and human attributes in Jesus Christ. But it is significant that the explicit polemic of Barth against Feuerbach in the nineteen-twenties did not counter this humanizing of God by dwelling on the divine term of the contrast between God and man by which he precluded their identity. To be sure, the "infinite qualitative difference" between humanity and deity hovered in the background, and the essays on Feuerbach usually closed with an appeal to the grace of God. However, these allusions to the divine term of the contrast remained sketchy and peripheral, compared to an ampler development of the human term, reviewed above. Even Barth's appeals to the grace of God were often expressed by delineating the sin of man and the lie of man's religion.23 This accent on anthropology was noteworthy not only in view of the positive commitment that his dissent from Feuerbach's solely human deity entailed. It was all the more so, because the properly theological level of his own position was more fundamental to his intention. After all, those were the years when he strove to turn theology from the words of men about themselves to the Word of God about Himself.

Here, then, are the main lines of the first way that Barth responded to Feuerbach, in the years when he felt that "thorn" most keenly. By championing Feuerbach's negative criticisms, as well as his positive thesis, Barth incurred the peril of having this sword turn on his own position. We have seen how he chose

"3Cf. TK, 2IO-211 (ET [Smith], 215-216), and ibid., 239 (ET, xxix/237).

My argument throughout this section refers to Barth's early, explicit discussions of Feuerbach, not to other contexts in which he undoubtedly reversed the emphases in question. Orientation to the latter may be what led Rawidowicz to invert the two emphases (Rawidowicz, op. cit., pp. 365-367). Schilling agrees with the present reading (Schilling, op. cit., p. 136).




to turn that threat by appealing mainly to a realism about man that made deification of him merely laughable. This appeal to considerations that are available to anyone who thinks as an existing individual evidently had the merit of disputing Feuerbach before a court of appeal that was acknowledged by them both, unlike appeals either to revelation or to religious consciousness. Moreover, as Barth understood the position of Feuerbach, anthropology was basic to its structure, and, accordingly, anthropological adequacy could be decisive for the vindication of the whole.

But were not these strengths of the response yoked to certain inadequacies? Ignoring those that can be dismissed as mere lapses in exposition,24 it may be that one inadequacy is entailed in the negative cast of the anthropology on which Barth relied. If polemical exigencies made evil and death definitive of our humanity, how could Barth do justice to its positive features, which Feuerbach affirmed and celebrated? More fundamentally, how could Barth come to terms with that belief in human capa- bilities that he had seen as the occasion behind modern errors in theological method? Could it be that its impertinence had tricked him into saying a simple "No" to this constitutive feature of modernity, so that his own theology was really no less determined by it (albeit negatively) than was the one he had seen driven into an apologetic corner? In short, had he not backed into an apologetic corner of his own? A second inadequacy may lie on the other side of his strategy, where Barth intended to appeal to the God who is so radically other than are we that to consider identifying Him with our kind is impertinent. Did not the "infinite qualitative difference" of this God actually restrict Barth to talk about man, as when Barth had delineated the grace of God by showing forth the sin of man? If so, did this not obscure the divine term of the contrast? Access to that term was a condition of being able to laugh at the Feuerbachian reduction of theology to anthropology, and, given his intention of appealing

24 E.g., his polemic might be charged with ignoring a target that Barth himself had identified as essential for any adequate attack on Feuerbach, namely Feuerbach's theory of salvation (TK, 219-220 [ET, XiV-XV/222--2231). But this criticism ignores the manifest bearing on Feuerbach's soteriology of the critique that Barth does make of his identification of God with the man that commits evil and dies.




finally to the Word of God, a crucial condition. In short, may not Feuerbach have been right, after all, about Barth's response, as Barth insisted that he had been right about so many other theologians? Was his own theology, as well, anything other than anthropology? If these questions about the first way in which Barth responded to Feuerbach have any force, this force may well derive from his failure to achieve a desideratum that he had nevertheless succeeded in stating as one mark of an adequate rejoinder. That was to work in a direction in which Feuerbach's insinuating question could not even arise.25

III

If we inquire how Barth dealt with Feuerbach, after the nineteen-twenties, one reply might be that he has simply continued to repeat himself. So Werner Schilling, who has perhaps written more about the subject than anyone, contends that Barth's later discussions of Feuerbach retain the same inadequacies that marred his earlier response and that even Volume IV/2 of Die kirchliche Dogmatik merely unveils consequences of the same dialectical dogma that has determined Barth since World War I.26 But I suspect that this reading can be sustained only by deprecating, if not denying, certain innovations.

Over against this emphasis on continuity of response to Feuer- bach, therefore, it would be possible to stress the disjunction of a later stance from an earlier one. By underscoring the methodological break-through in Barth's essay on Anselm and its con- structive consequences for dogmatics,27 one might suppose that

21Ibid., 227 (ET, xxi/228). 26 Werner Schilling, Glaube und Illusion: von gegenwiirtiger Theologie und

evangelischer Glaubensbegriindung (Miinchen, 1960), pp. 28-41. Although they do not go as far as Schilling's denial of significant change in Barth's response to Feuerbach, the following studies do present that response as being of one piece: Rawidowicz, op. cit., pp. 365-367 (note early date of publication, 1931); Jan M. Lochman, "Von der Religion zum Menschen," Antwort: Karl Barth zum sieb- zigsten Geburtstag am io. Mai 1956 (Zollikon-Ziirich, 1956), pp. 596-609; and H. Richard Niebuhr, "Foreword" to the Torchbook edition of Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York, 1957), vii-ix.

27 Karl Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum: Anselms Beweis der Existenz Gottes (Miinchen, 1931; ET, London & Richmond, Virginia, 196o). On its significance for Barth see Hans W. Frei, "Niebuhr's Theological Background," Faith and Ethics, ed. Paul Ramsey (New York, 1955), especially pp. 40-53.




Die kirchliche Dogmatik exhibits an entirely different way of dealing with Feuerbach. Whether this consisted solely in adopt- ing a new polemic in place of the old one, or whether it meant simply ignoring Feuerbach (after all, Barth had at last found a God who is for man and thus no longer needed even to laugh in Feuerbach's face), this expectation of sheer discontinuity would be contradicted by two features of the relevant texts. In the first place, most volumes of this Dogmatik continue to repeat facets of the response that Barth had developed in the nineteen-twenties (and to this the view of Schilling does do justice). For example, Barth continues his polemical use of Feuerbach's reduction of theology to anthropology, wherever he sees symptoms of what he takes to be the fundamental malaise of modern Protestant theology.28 In the second place, although significant variations do appear (and thus tell against Schilling), it is noteworthy that these do not determine Barth's discussions of Feuerbach until some twenty years and four volumes after the inauguration of Die kirchliche Dogmatik. They do this decisively when Barth

finally turns, in the nineteen-fifties, to the nearness of God to man in Reconciliation. Then he fulfills his own observation of years before that the Feuerbachian question becomes acute when- ever the nearness of man and God is taken seriously.

Accordingly, I would suggest that what Barth has written about Feuerbach can be understood most adequately by means of this thesis: among the innovations that appear clearly in Parts 2

and 3 of Volume IV, three converge to constitute a second phase

2"Whether it be Gogarten's call to begin theology with anthropology (KD, I/I [7. Aufl.; Zollikon-Ziirich, 1955], 132 [ET, 1451), or Augustine's argument to the Trinity from human consciousness (ibid., 362 [ET, 3941), or Protestant orthodoxy's methodological parity between the revealing of God and the reasoning of man (KD, 1/2 [5. Aufl.; Zollikon-Ziirich, 196o], 7 [ET, 7]), or its interpretation of divine revelation on the basis of human religion (ibid., 316 [ET, 290]), or whether it be the Idealist quest for God beyond the world's space and time (KD, II/I [4 Aufl.; Zollikon-Ziirich, 1958], 525 [ET, 4671), or a false deduction from the classic Christian understanding of the vocation of man (KD, IV/3, Zweite Hilfte [Zollikon-Ziirich, '959], 647 [ET, 564]), this polemical use of Feuerbach follows the same formula. The formula runs: (a) the way from "x," the position under attack, to Feuerbach's conclusion may be long, and (b) it may run counter to the intention of proponents of "x," but (c) "the continuity of the way cannot be disputed" (KD, 1/2, 7 [ET, 7]). In short, Barth still uses a Feuerbachian reading of the history of theology and philosophy to explicate systematic implica- tions of a Feuerbachian cast.




in Barth's response to Feuerbach.29 Let me take up these three innovations in order of their increasing importance.

One is a different diagnosis of why modern theology has been so vulnerable to Feuerbach. Formerly he had held that its im- prisonment in a hopelessly exposed apologetic corner stemmed from a source external to theology. Theologians had retreated to that position in response to the rise of a belief in human capaci- ties that was at once alien to Scripture and of modern provenance. Now, however, he is inclined to stress a source internal to theology itself and, furthermore, of earlier vintage than the Enlightenment. This was an apotheosis of the humanity of Jesus Christ in old Lutheran Christology, which led, Barth contends, to a later, consequent extension of that apotheosis to humanity in general. This reading of what he calls "the distinctive modern transition from theology to speculative anthropology" reflects his growing appreciation of the import of the Protestant Scholastics; it is but one of the several catastrophes he has come to attribute to them.30 But this shift of emphasis in his diagnosis of the vulnerability of modern theology to Feuerbach is minor, compared to a second change.

The second innovation is Barth's confrontation of Feuerbach with a positive anthropology based on Christology. Although he had joined Feuerbach in acknowledging the whole man, existing in relation, we have seen that his early decision to attack Feuer- bach's deification of man by dwelling on evil and death as definitive marks of humanity had tempted Barth into a kind of nay- saying about man. Now, however, we find him affirming the positive predicates of man more forthrightly than his negative ones and even exalting the human status. This enables Barth to deal affirmatively with the positive contention beneath Feuerbach's negation of theology, as well as with the Renaissance attitude toward man which informs modernity. This is an advance,

"'The frame of reference of this thesis is explicit discourse about Feuerbach. Thus its claim that the themes constituting a second phase enter that context decisively in Volumes IV/2 and IV/3 does not intend to deny that these same notions have appeared in earlier Volumes of KD, in other contexts. Where that has occurred, a time-lag is evident between Barth's adoption of the idea and his bringing it to bear on Feuerbach.

30KD, IV/2 (Zollikon-Ziirich, 1955), 88-91 (ET, 81-83).




especially in view of his own judgment of the importance of these considerations in the strength of Feuerbach's position. But it does raise the question of whether Barth can really afford such an advance. Had not he himself insisted for years that such exaltation of man leads inexorably to a Feuerbachian conclusion?

His secret, of course, is the basis on which Barth now rests this new affirmation of humanity. That basis would not be ap- parent to one who followed his earlier injunction to decide if Feuerbach's man is the real one by thinking as a solitary individual about human evil and death. For Now Barth proposes to rest his view of man solely on the gracious act of God himself in exalting the humanity of Jesus Christ to fellowship with him. The point at which the humanity of all men is exalted is Jesus Christ, the true man. Apart from him, the human essence is dis- torted by sin and, accordingly, it cannot disclose how it has come into its own in him.

This exaltation comes to human essence in the person of Jesus of Nazareth who is the Son of God. It does so once, but once and for all, in this One. It does so in Him in a way which is valid and effective for all who are also of human essence, for all his brothers.31

In what, then, does this exaltation consist?

It is human essence, but effectively confronted with the divine, in the character with which it is invested by the fact that God willed to be and become man as well as God, so that without itself becoming divine it is an essence which exists in and with God, and is adopted and controlled and ruled by Him.32

Again, as the Son of God

adopts it, making it His own existence in His divine nature, He does not deify it, but He exalts it into the consortium divinitatis, into an inward and indestructible fellowship with His Godhead, which He does not in any degree surrender or forfeit, but supremely maintains, when He becomes man.33 31 Ibid., 130 (ET, 117). The contrast between this exaltation and Barth's former

invoking of the human negativities against Feuerbach here rests, in turn, upon a displacement of the older appeal to any solitary individual who is honest with himself (cf. supra, n. 21). That has been displaced by an appeal to but one individual and, furthermore, by an explicit doctrine of the essence common to Him and to all men.

32Ibid., 97 (ET, 88). 'Ibid., iii (ET, ioo).




In sharp contrast to his former avoidance of the hypostatic union of humanity and deity in Jesus Christ, Barth now locates the crucial exaltation of man precisely in that union, interpreted as a mutual participation of the divine and human essences of Jesus Christ.

How, then, does he prevent this from leading to Feuerbach's conclusion? By two main means. One is by maintaining a distinction between exaltation and deification. Even when exalted to the right hand of God, the humanity of the true man is not deified; it remains creaturely. Thus Barth still maintains "the Calvinist corrective," which prevents worship of the humanity of Jesus Christ and, with it, he still insists, Feuerbach's reversal of divine-human relations.34 But this distinction presupposes a more fundamental position, his securing the sovereignty of God in all of this. The exaltation of man toward God remains derivative; it follows upon a prior act of divine condescension to man. The basic Subject of this twofold movement in Jesus Christ remains the Son of God. And Barth elucidates this fundamental security in his doctrine of the eternal, divine election of man in grace.

With the divine freedom and initiative thus anchored, Barth finds himself free to affirm not only the exaltation of man toward God; he even dwells on "the humanity of God" himself. In contrast to his earlier stress upon the "death line," which cut across the "infinite qualitative difference," his discourse about the humanity of God now says a remarkable number of the very things that Feuerbach had said about the "human God." 5 But with crucial differences, of course. The "humanity" of this God is hardly the "human God" of Feuerbach. Exaltation of man to fellowship with God is not deification. Nor could the way that

'From the Lutheran sector on Barth's right flank, this security appears to Schilling to have been bought at the cost of the heart of the Christian understanding of redemption and the sacraments, to say nothing of Jesus Christ. Even though Barth has relinquished his former ban on every formulation of the communicatio idiomatum (KD, IV/2, 83 [ET, 75]), his abiding polemic against any formulation that deifies humanity leaves Schilling unconvinced by his restatement in terms of "confrontation" and "mutual participation." See Schilling, op. cit., pp. 29-41. ' Cf. Karl Barth, Die Menschlichkeit Gottes (Zollikon-Ziirich, 1956; ET, Richmond, Virginia, 1960) with Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, hrsg. von Werner Schuffenhauer (II BMinden; Berlin, 1956; ET, New York, 1957), especially Ch. V in the German edition or Ch. IV in the English.




Barth lets God affirm man be confused with Feuerbach's pro- posal that we ourselves affirm an inherent identity between our humanity and deity. It is not an inherent possession of our own, nor is it to be achieved by our act. It is rather an event, the event of our being rescued from sin and death. As such, it consists solely in grateful reception of what another has done for us at a juncture so critical that we could not help ourselves.

None of these contrasts eradicates, however, the traces of Feuerbach's affirmation of man that still inform Barth's own anthropological yea-saying. When he rejects the way Nietzsche affirmed humanity "without the neighbor," he maintains that the form of humanity is to be with another; and this means to be with a neighbor whose real otherness Barth knows Feuerbach took far more seriously than did either Nietzsche or Stirner. Knowing that, he declines to be embarrassed that Feuerbach (with Confucius and Buber) was among "the wisest of the wise of this world" who also saw something of the form of co-humanity dis- closed in Jesus Christ.36 He indicates the otherness at stake here

by using the category "Thou," without needing to remind its devotees, as he formerly had, that this notion was guilty of an

original association with a certain reduction of theology to illusory projection.37 Despite this power of the second innovation to assimilate Feuerbach's positive position, however, it still does not dispose of his negative contentions.

The third feature of Barth's later response is more pertinent to those, and, of the three innovations, it is the most fundamental. It involves a shift of the ground on which he finally rests his

polemic against the main negative contention of Feuerbach, the reduction of theology to illusory projection. In the nineteen- twenties his argument against that reduction had relied decisively upon the condition of man. Although essential to his strategy, references to God remained strangely peripheral and undeveloped.

36KD, 111/2, 333-334 (ET, 277-278). 7 KD, 1/2, 46-47 (ET, 41-42). It is important to note that Barth here uses

the I-Thou category within horizontal relations, for we shall not find him relying decisively on it in his rejoinder to Feuerbach's reduction of the vertical relation. On the present issue he uses Feuerbach against Stirner (op. cit.), although we saw that he had used the latter against the former on another issue in the 1920's (supra, n. 20).




Now, however, that appeal to the human condition has receded to the periphery, and he makes his central appeal to the character of God himself. The occasion for explicating this fully is a remarkable eruption of the Feuerbachian question about theological illusion. It breaks out, with a force with which it had not in thirty years, in Part 3 of Volume IV of Die kirchliche Dog- matik, after Barth has traced the two grand movements of Recon- ciliation which occur in Jesus Christ (from God to man, in IV/I, and from man to God, in IV/2). The question 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 at- tributing these to him. More precisely, the question is about the basis for affirming that Jesus Christ really does reveal God.38

Barth's reply locates that basis in what he calls "the manifest radiance" of the assertion that Jesus Christ reveals, a radiance that stems finally from the very character of the God who reveals himself in the life of Jesus Christ. Rather than appealing to considerations external to this intrinsic radiance itself (that way lies Feuerbach's conclusion), Barth proceeds by exhibiting re- spects in which the life of Jesus Christ is "the manifest declaration of God." 39 For example, the meaning of the assertion itself holds that the acting Subject of the life of Jesus Christ is the God who is eloquent and radiant in himself. He is Son, as well as Father, that is to say; and what the Triune God is in his own life, he is also in his revelation to us. Again, this God who acts in Jesus Christ is gracious in himself, and such grace inherently involves disclosure, self-impartation, revelation. On the basis of this gracious radiance of his own, then, he manifests himself to us.

The salient point is that Barth restricts himself to this proce- dure of showing forth the meaning of the assertion itself. He does so in the persuasion that this is what deals decisively with

` KD, IV/3, Erste Hilfte (Zollikon-Ziirich, 1959), 78-86 (ET, 72-78).

39Ibid., 86-95 (ET, 78-86). Together with that cited in the preceding note, this passage is of capital importance, because here Barth deals more directly and extensively than ever before with Feuerbach's charge that theological discourse involves illusory projection. The polemic of this passage against bases for rejoinder, other than Barth's present one, shows how he carries forward the old negative side of his anthropology in the service of his new rejoinder.




the Feuerbachian question about whether Jesus Christ reveals anything other than our own projecting. For, when the meaning of the assertion is really grasped, Barth contends that two conse-

quences follow for that skeptical question. It is displaced, so that it does not even arise; and it is replaced by the real question, which Feuerbach's reply cannot answer.

On the one hand, Barth argues that this rejoinder sets aside Feuerbach's question as one we are not at all obliged to raise, even in the name of sincerity with ourselves or of honesty with others. For, when we see the radiance in Jesus Christ for what it is, Feuerbachian suspicions and doubts evaporate. If we were to raise this skeptical question, Feuerbach's own answer would be inevitable. For who would ask it? We would, and this would presuppose that we possess the basis and competence to answer it; and this, in turn, would confine us to ascribing to Jesus Christ no more than we first had ascribed to ourselves. So Barth concludes:

Immunity against the type of answer given by Feuerbach to his own questions begins with the recognition that these are not our questions and we are quite unfitted to play the role of questioners.40

Again, for what would we be asking, if we were to raise his question? For a demonstration from something external to "the majestic declaration of God" itself. But this would mean that,

to prove the truth to be such, we must first treat it as though it were not, and then try to recognize it as such when we have found motives for doing so other than the fact that it really is the truth! This is nonsensical.41

Here Barth serves notice that he now relinquishes to Feuerbach even the ground he had claimed against him in the nineteen- twenties. In addition to religious experience, he now lets go the thinking of the solitary man about the human condition, which

4o Ibid., 80 (ET, 73). On this and on the preceding page Barth derives Feuer- bach's skeptical question from concerns especially characteristic of Bultmann-- concern for the problem of our own existence, e.g., and for honesty with ourselves and with others. Even though he does not name him, may these not be points at which Barth's response to Feuerbach evinces the intensive, if quiet, debate with Bultmann which Barth owned in his foreword to KD, IV/i? The same can be said of KD, IV/3, Zweite Hilfte, 647 (ET, 563-564). ' Ibid., 82-83 (ET, 75).




he had still retained as ground decisive for an alternative answer to Feuerbach's own skeptical question. But this is merely ancil-

lary to the more fundamental, radical renunciation, his relinquish- ing that question itself, which, for over four decades, he had

sought to answer differently than Feuerbach had. This surrender could also be regarded, of course, as the consummation of the

quest for a standpoint for which the skeptical question of Feuer- bach does not even arise. This was a desideratum that Barth had stated over three decades before.

On the other hand, Barth grants that there is, nevertheless, a real question at issue. His point is that the real question is not asked by us; it is rather propounded to us. We do not ask if

Jesus Christ is really Truth. Instead, it is we who are asked whether his presence and action do, in fact, give substance to our confession of him. Do we ourselves act according to his revelation? It is a question of our legitimation, not of his. For "when we confess Him, He Himself is the One who asks. Hence we do not have to answer ourselves or other men; we have to answer Him." 42

With this major theme of Volume IV determining the state of the question in this way, is there anything at all that can still be said about Feuerbach? There is this. If we have been freed to acknowledge the radiance of God in Jesus Christ, we have been freed to make grateful confession of it.

And in this case our confession will not lack substance, solidity and weight. Nor will it lack veracity. Then there will be the desired demonstration of the content of our presupposition and assertion, and therefore its establishment and vindication.43

42 Ibid., 84 (ET, 77). Italics mine. For perspective on this whole section devoted to disposing of Feuerbach's very question, it is worth noting that the content of that query has shifted since the first phase of Barth's listening. What he had heard Feuerbach ask in the 1920'S was whether the starting-point of modern Protestant theology did not issue in an apotheosis of man. (Cf. supra, n. 13.) In 1959, however, the operative query had become a skeptical one about God: Is he really anything other than wishful projection of our finite selves? In short, Barth has continued to employ a rhetoric of question and answer to make his own assertions about what Feuerbach affirmed. In the transition from the first to the second phase of his dialogue, however, the precise reference of that rhetoric has shifted from one contention of Feuerbach to another.

43 Ibid.




Then, Barth adds, we "need to be afraid of no Feuerbach." But there is one condition: "The only thing is that we must not be ashamed to be like children." 44

Here, then, is the final rejoinder to Feuerbach, the basis on which Barth now intends to turn the edge of the critique that otherwise convicts theology (including his own) of illusory projection. If there is a triumph, here, it is clear that he intends it to be a triumph of the grace of God alone.

As to this argument of Barth's, does it not beg the question from the outset? Is it not circular? To these very questions his own explicit reply is, "Exactly!" He goes on to acknowledge that the method of his argument is modelled upon the method that informed Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof.

The point of our whole exposition is positively: Credo ut intelligam, and polemically: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." ... [In this light,] 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.45

If Feuerbach should deny that Barth's rejoinder eludes vicious circularity by virtue of some virtuous kind of circularity, what, then, would Barth have left to say? That Feuerbach is a fool, when Barth is echoing Anselm's use of Psalms 14 and 53. How- ever, when his utterance is controlled, instead, by his own sense of the liberating gift of the divine radiance, his ad hominem argument acquires a different quality. It suffuses a charge of evasion with pity:

How sad it is that the worthy Feuerbach, like so many other un- believers and believers, seems not to have had any knowledge of this freeing and freedom, and thus seems to have interpreted the glory of God as the self-glorification of man, and the light of the life of Jesus Christ merely as the shining of a light supposedly immanent in man himself, and finally, therefore, to have evaded rather than accepted encounter with it.46

From derision in the name of human evil and death, then, Barth has turned to pity in the name of the divine liberation of man to eternal life.

" Ibid., 94 (ET, 85). 45Ibid., 95 (ET, 85, 86). 4 Ibid., 91 (ET, 82-83).




IV

Before taking up the final question of how adequately Barth has answered Feuerbach, it may be worth pausing to recollect briefly the two phases of his response. I have suggested that a two-phased reading does more justice to what Barth has written about Feuerbach than does either of two other possible accounts -that his response remains essentially the same throughout four-and-a-half decades, or that it falls into two stances that differ on all counts. It is important to note that what I have called the second phase does not differentiate itself from the first on every issue that had been dealt with in the preceding one; several positions established in the nineteen-twenties continue to appear throughout discussions of Feuerbach in Die kirchliche Dogmatik. These include the judgment that Feuerbach's description of man as social, material, and involved in nature is true and important; that much theology is really anthropology and illusory projection, as religious experience and the history of theology show; that Feuerbach's position rests finally on a faith that is not philosophically demonstrable; and, incidentally, that there are ad hominem arguments against it, although Barth declines to rest his case on these. It is within a context of abiding persuasions such as these that the second phase of his response differs from the first. It differs both by way of agreement and of disagreement. On the one hand, the late phase extends Barth's agreement with Feuerbach even further. Now he exalts our humanity, and even dwells on the humanity of God, in ways he had fought against in the early phase. In method he comes to agree that even general, anthropological considerations, by which he had contested Feuer- bach in the first phase, do tell in favor of his opponent, as he had already agreed that appeal to the religious consciousness does. On the other hand, where he finally disagrees with Feuerbach Barth shifts his strategy of justification. Instead of attempting to refute the assertion of divine-human identity by showing the disparity of man and God, especially by dwelling on human limitations, he argues in the second phase that letting God bear his own witness to the veracity of his self-disclosure is the only response to Feuer- bach's thesis legitimate for the Christian. Any other rejoinder




leads to Feuerbach's skeptical conclusion. Whatever the com- patibility of these two stances may finally be, it is noteworthy that traces of them both are present in each phase of Barth's response to Feuerbach. Elements of the second phase had been adumbrated in his early discussions of Feuerbach; and his former strategy of justification continues to play a subsidiary role in the current phase.

This recapitulation of the response brings us to our final question: Has Barth answered Feuerbach?

In so far as this is an issue of whether he has met Feuerbach at his most characteristic and formidable, or whether he has been guilty of tilting with a straw man, my judgment is that Barth has acquitted himself well in confronting the leading substantive propositions that Feuerbach asserts but not in dealing with Feuerbach's arguments for them.47

The latter becomes evident when we probe to the core of the matter and ask how telling is the response of Barth to Feuerbach at those points where their agreement gives way to disagreement, and centrally over whether God and man are identical. Here it is plain that Barth has not answered him in the straightforward sense of "answer." On those issues over which they contend Barth has not refuted the major types of argument for Feuerbach's leading theses,48 nor has he established his own, positive counter- claims,49 all on grounds that Feuerbach himself would acknowl-

4 The main limit of this twofold claim pertains to its first half, about substantive contentions; and that limit is set by the indifference of Barth to development in Feuerbach's thought. For example, the view of God he attributes to Feuerbach, and to which he orders his own response, rings truer to Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) than it does to Vorlesungen iiber das Wesen der Religion (1851). In the latter work Feuerbach viewed God not so much as the essence of man as the essence of Nature. (See Niidling, op. cit., pp. 181-183; cf. supra, n. 8 and n. 21.) If it is really the early Feuerbach whom Barth has confronted, then, it can still be said that Barth has the merit of meeting his opponent where Feuerbach is generally acknowledged to be at his best.

48 Far more telling than his ignoring of particular arguments is the fact that Barth has yet to respond to a type of argument which Feuerbach regarded as important for the support of his thesis about theological illusion: the rational argument that exhibits the self-contradiction of theological assertions. As Barth himself acknowledged, one of the two parts of Das Wesen des Christentums is devoted to this type of argument. (Cf. TK, 220 [ET, xv/222-223]. The passage suggests that he minimizes the import of this type by judging its negative conclusion to be less fundamental to Feuerbach's position than his positive assertions.)

9 Even if his early recourse to human individuality, evil and death had sus-




edge.50 In one respect Barth may have approximated this model of polemic more closely in the first phase of his response and in another respect more nearly in the second; but the main point is that in neither phase has he conformed to its canons of justification.51

Of course, Barth has never committed himself to this polemical model. Increasingly, it has seemed to him a way of falling prey to Feuerbach in the very attempt to resist him, and his failure to meet its requirements is a side-effect of his attempt to employ a different style of dialectic. What the latter is could only be shown adequately by tracing his ways of contending with a variety of opponents. But, in relation to one of the indispensable figures, we have seen Barth's drive beyond the details and the negations of a position to its core of affirmation and, beneath that, to its methodological root. We have seen the pains he takes to break with his opponent at that root, rather than at a mere consequence of it. Still, he has elucidated such consequences, or simply asserted them. We have also seen his stress on positive over negative

tained his refusal to deify man, this did nothing to justify his further, positive contention that God is radically other than man. For over four decades his discussions of Feuerbach failed to state clearly his grounds for supposing that his talk of God was anything other than illusory projection. Finally, by adapting Anselm's argument to the case of Feuerbach in 1959 (cf. supra, n. 39), Barth rid himself of this central omission. He accomplished this, incidentally, just before Schilling charged him with having failed to do so (Schilling, op. cit., p. 75). (There may have been a hint, it is true, in TK, 239 [ET, xix/237], echoed in Die protestantische Theologie im I9. Jahrhundert, 489 [ET, 361]; and his point was evident in other contexts.)

3o In the first phase of his response it is true that Barth disputed Feuerbach on terrain that they both acknowledged, anthropological realism; and he has from first to last agreed with Feuerbach that appeal to religious experience and to the history of modern Protestant theology supports Feuerbach's conclusions about theological illusion. But the 1959 clarification of christocentric revelation as the basis for denying that illusion (cf. supra, n. 39), to say nothing of its attendant dismissal of Feuerbach's skeptical question, makes it clear that the second phase of Barth's rejoinder gained internal coherence at the expense of losing contact with the standpoint of his opponent. It did so not only in basis for argument but also in taking the opponent's central assertion (i.e., his "question") seriously. This latter loss of contact was more thoroughgoing, to be sure, in Barth's profession than in his practice. For the passage devoted to ignoring that "question" is by far his longest on Feuerbach in over thirty years.

51 This is the polemical ideal in the light of which Schilling taxes Barth with either having evaded Feuerbach or having remained naive about an adequate rejoinder (Schilling, op. cit., pp. 74-75). His own alternative is a critique of the illusionist theory on the basis of an objective moment of the religious consciousness.




dialectic - at least in the case of this outsider to whom Barth has said "Yes" in the course of saying "No" to accredited members of the theological guild. Whatever the details of its execu-

tion, however, this dialectic of his is not intelligible as an "answer" to Feuerbach. It is rather an assertion, elicited by an entirely different source and justified thereby. In its culminating phase, at least, this affirmation of divine condescension and human exaltation in Jesus Christ encounters Feuerbach only in passing. In that encounter it gathers up some of his persuasions and reorients them to its own center. For the rest, it does not bother to dispute them at all, even though it may differ. For it seeks to let God vindicate himself by "the manifest radiance" of his own witness to himself.

For those to whom that radiance is not manifest, however, the Feuerbachian charge of theological illusion would appear to confine Barth's modes of response to a dilemma. Either his negative anthropology prevents deification of man but leaves the accusa- tion of illusion about God untouched, or his 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 and Barth cannot acknowledge Feuer- bach's skeptical question. What restricts the Barthian rejoinder to these alternatives, of course, is his rejection of sources of knowledge of God other than christocentric revelation. His critiques of the religious consciousness and of natural theology thus constitute cardinal presuppositions of his response to Feuerbach. As such, both would require examination before comprehensive- ness could be achieved in the assessment of Barth on Feuerbach.

Short of pursuing these further inquiries, however, it is still possible to see that to read Barth and Feuerbach together is to venture down one of the several roads that converge at the problem of religious knowledge, as this bears on contending views of the divine transcendence. Whatever else Barth's reflections on Feuer- bach may accomplish, they do make it clear that, unless the religious consciousness or natural theology can be effectively revisited, in the face of Barth and its other critics, Feuerbach will continue to present two alternatives to theologians concerned with the public forum. One is to agree that God is man, and no more.




The other is to suffer a certain thorn, which will remain in the flesh.

To be sure, another option remains. But Barth would be the first to say that it is a live one only for those prepared to find vindication through losing the justifications by which other alternatives stand.



glasse barth on feuerbach

Documents

cambridge university press

infinite qualitative difference

die kirchliche dogmatik

harvard divinity school

allegedly objective reference

harvard theological review

jesus christ reveals

modern protestant theology