Karl Barth on the Idolatry of Religion

The idolatry of religion

Barth identifies a religious impulse in human beings:

There seems always and everywhere to be an awareness of the reality and possibility of a dedication, or even a sanctification of the life of man, on the basis of an individual or social striving, which is almost always and everywhere referred to an event which comes from beyond. As a result, the representation of the object and aim of the striving, or the origin of the event, has always and everywhere been compressed into pictures of deities, with almost always and everywhere the picture of a supreme and only deity more or less clearly visible in the background. 4 Human beings need truth above and certainty within themselves, both of which they think they can know, Barth claims. 'Since the need is there, have not the starry heaven above and the moral law within long since brought this truth and certainty into the range and realm of [man's] perception?' The path to idolatry is then a short one: 'To 3 'For the divine worship may be given either to whom it ought to be given, namely, to the true God, but "in an undue mode", and this is the first species of superstition; or to whom it ought not to be given, namely, to any creature whatsoever, and this is another genus of superstition … For the end of divine worship is in the first place to give reverence to God, and in this respect the first species of this genus is "idolatry", which unduly gives divine honour to a creature.' (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. satisfy this need, he steps out in a bold bid for truth, creating the Deity according to his own image-and in a confident act of self-assurance, undertaking to justify and sanctify himself in conformity with what he holds to be the law.' 5 Thus far we might find a broad consensus on the religious development of humankind between Durkheim, Feuerbach, and Christian theologians of many stripes. Yet at this point Barth makes a decisive break with virtually all his predecessors and contemporaries, a break that is fundamental to his theological method. Feuerbach saw a progressive development in religion from lower forms to higher: pantheism gives way to polytheism, polytheism to monotheism, and monotheism becomes ever more rationalistic, before necessarily giving way [top of page 215] to atheism. 6 Apart from the last step, many Christian theologians have seen merit in this account: it seems historically reasonable, and affects a certain charitable tolerance towards earlier beliefs, while making clear the superiority of the Christian religionat least, so long as later religious movements are ignored or otherwise discounted.

Emil Brunner, at one point a good friend of Barth's, is one example of a theologian who takes this progressivist line. Brunner makes the reasonable claim that human beings can know to some extent through creation without the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit. This natural knowledge is partial, dim and darkened by sin, resulting in a misrepresentation of God, and the worship of idols. Brunner affirms that it stands in need of revelation to correct it and point more clearly to the true God. 'Nein!' is the one-word title of the tract Barth wrote in response to Brunner's work, which ended their friendship. 7 Barth considered that the approach to natural theology Brunner had adopted threatened to lose all the ground they had established together against the prevailing trends of liberal German theology. The polemical tone of the work includes many rhetorical questions, one of which addresses the issue of idolatry directly: 'Is it his opinion that idolatry is but a somewhat imperfect preparatory stage of the service of the true God?' 8 Barth's negative answer to this question rests on his belief that the revelation of God in Christ means the abolition and re-establishment (Aufhebung) of religion, rather than the redirection Brunner seems to envisage. 9 The intensity with which Barth sees this arises from his engagement with Romans 1:18-32, the key New Testament text on idolatry. He calls this section of the 1922 edition of his explosive commentary, 'The Night', and on verse 23 comments:

They changed the glory of the incorruptible-for an image of the corruptible … They had lost their knowledge of the crevasse, the polar zone, the desert barrier, which much be crossed if men are really to advance from corruption to incorruption … Once the eye, which can perceive this distinction, has been blinded, there arises in the midst, between here and there, between us and the 'Wholly Other', a mist or concoction of religion in which, by a whole series of skilful assimilations and mixings more or less strongly flavoured with sexuality, sometimes the behaviour of men or of animals is exalted to be an experience of God, sometimes the Being and Existence of God is 'enjoyed' as a human or animal experience. In all this mist the prime factor is provided by the illusion that it is possible for men to hold communication with God or, at least, to enter into a covenant relationship with Him without miracle-vertical from above, without the dissolution of all things, and apart from THE truth which lies beyond birth and death. 10 The message of Barth's Romans is that God's wrath is directed against all those who seek to deny or overcome the 'infinite qualitative distinction'-Barth's citation of Kierkegaard-between God and humanity. God is the 'Wholly Other' and all we can know of God comes from our wandering over the cratered battlefield where God has passed by. With this grenade, Barth sought to bring down the edifice of 19 th and early 20 th century German theology that followed Schleiermacher in charting a way to God starting with religious experience. Barth witnessed to how this focus on the human leads to all manner of murky relationships between religion and nationhood, culture, race, and language. The experience he recounts as most formative was seeing virtually all his former theological teachers sign up to a public letter in support of Kaiser Wilhelm's war policy in 1914. 11 To claim in this context that religion can be more than a witness to the void between the 'Wholly Other' and humankind 'is a shameless and abortive anticipation of that which can proceed from the unknown God alone. In all this busy concern with concrete things there is always a revolt against God. For in it we assist at the birth of the "No-God", at the making of idols. There is an exegetical hurdle in making good the claim that God cannot be known in part through creation apart from revelation. From the Romans 1 passage, verse 20 suggests that all persons are without excuse because God's invisible qualities are clearly visible in the world. Barth recognizes that this verse has been used as an opening to 'every kind of natural theology' but claims that this is to take the verse out of its context. The passage 1:18-3:20 stresses that Jews and Gentiles alike stand under the judgement and grace of God. But this is so only because of the revelation of God in Christ, a revelation that is presupposed by Paul throughout the passage. This is not therefore an abstract statement about the heathen; 'Paul does not know either Jews or Gentiles in themselves and as such, but only as they are placed by the cross of Christ under the promise, but also under the commandment of God'. 14 It is through Christ, not through the world in itself, that God's eternal power and nature are revealed.

Similar issues arise in Acts 14:15-17, where Paul tells the crowd in Lystra that God did not leave the nations without testimony to himself, and Acts 17:16-31, Paul's proclamation to the Athenians that he will make known the unknown god they have been worshipping through idols. Again, Barth argues that Paul is not referring to some independent knowledge of God derived from creation, but the situation all persons are placed in by the revelation of God in Christ.

The link between natural theology and idolatry is most clear in relation to the question of how directly God may be known by humankind. In Romans, Barth cites Kierkegaard in explication of 1:4a, 'and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Holy Spirit': 'Now, Spirit is the direct denial of immediacy. If Christ be very God, He must be unknown, for to be known directly is the characteristic mark of an idol.' 15 When, therefore, we make the mistake of supposing direct communication with God is possible there emerge all those intermediary, collateral, lawless divinities and powers and authorities and principalities (viii. 38) that obscure and discolour the light of the true God. In the realm of romantic direct communion-in India, for example-these divinities are thrown up in the most extravagant numbers. Wherever the qualitative distinction between men and the final Omega is overlooked or misunderstood, that fetishism is bound to appear in which God is experience in 'birds and fourfooted things' and finally, or rather primarily, in the 'likeness of corruptible man-Personality, the Child, the Woman-and in the halfspiritual, half-material creations, exhibitions, and representations of His creative ability-Family, Nation, State, Church, Fatherland. And so the 'No-God' is set up, idols are erected, and God, who dwells beyond all this and that, is 'given up'. 16 In the Church Dogmatics II/1, Barth returns to this theme. The encounter of human beings with God is always mediated by a part of created reality, which does not become God, but represents God 'in so far as it is determined, made and used by God as His clothing, temple, or sign' 17 . The recognition that no knowledge of God is immediate, Barth terms the conditio sine qua non for faith:

At bottom, knowledge of God in faith is always this indirect knowledge of God, knowledge of God in His works, and in these particular works-in the determining and using of certain creaturely realities to bear witness to the divine reality. What distinguishes faith from unbelief, erroneous faith and superstition is that it is content with this indirect knowledge of God. 18 Faith stands or falls with this appreciation of the 'clothed objectivity of God', 19 which Barth acknowledges as an insight of Luther's. 20

The exegetical hurdle here seems higher than the previous one. Barth claims it is a mistake to interpret the recurrent formula 'And God said' as proof that the Bible allows revelation of God without the veil of God's works. Barth There can be no progressive development of religion, therefore, as Feuerbach and Brunner envisage. This does not mean, however, that Barth considers that the Christian religion should be placed in a category separate and distinct from all others.

Here he cites Strauss on the foolishness of Christian theologians who fail to acknowledge the historical background to the development of their religion: 'Because the fruit is now before us, separated as ripe fruits usually are, from the twig and stalk which bore them, it is supposed not to have grown on a tree, but to have fallen direct from heaven. What a childish idea!' 23 Barth avoids Strauss's criticism in recognizing that '"Christianity" or the "Christian Religion" is one predicate for a subject which theology his critique is no less severe, claiming that the problem is not just in relation to natural theology, but errors in the doctrine of God:

We reject this because it is a construct which obviously derives from an attempt to unite Yahweh with Baal, the triune God of the Holy Scripture with the concept of being of Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy. The assertion that reason can know God from created things applies to the second and heathenish component of this concept of God, so that when we view the construct on this side we do not recognise God in it at all, nor can we accept it as a Christian concept of God. 27 Barth therefore follows Luther and Calvin in applying the condemnation of idolatry to the Christian religion. 'What we have here is in its own way-a different way from that of other religions, but no less seriously-unbelief, i. e., opposition to the divine revelation, and therefore active idolatry and self-righteousness.' 28 He recognizes, however, that the problem of religion cannot be avoided. We act as receivers of images of God, and as creators of counter images. 29 This activity is inevitable and necessary, and there is no special virtue in iconoclasm:

Of course it is inevitable and not without meaning that in times of strong Christian feeling heathen temples should be levelled to the earth, idols and pictures of saints destroyed, stained glass smashed, organs removed: to the great distress of aesthetes everywhere. But irony usually had it that Christian churches were built on the very sites of these temples and with materials taken from their pillars and furnishings … This goes to show that while the devaluation and negation of what is human may occasionally have a practical and symbolical significance in detail, it can never have any basic or general significance. 30 Christians are, then, inevitably engaged in the human religious activity of religion, with its very real dangers of idolatry. How can they be sure their religion is true? This question seems crucial given Barth's blistering critique of all forms of religion alongside his recognition that religion is human activity in response to God's revelation. How is the religion Barth endorses to escape the charge of idolatry that all Barth does not, therefore, mean to deny that religion can be true: indeed, he asserts that 'Christianity is the true religion'. But for a religion to become true is possible only on the same basis that sinners can be justified: it is a possibility that is dependent on the grace and revelation of God. 40 Therefore these alerts and tests, either individually or collectively, will not be able to function as an objectively clear measure by which Christians could establish their righteousness or unrighteousness.

To provide such a measure would have been a contradiction of Barth's position, since the very search for such an unassailable judgement shows the character of our religion to be self-righteousness and idolatry. There is no refuge from the question of whether our worship is true, or whether it is subject to the prophetic judgement Isaiah or Amos pronounced on their contemporaries. Barth's alerts and tests aim to keep us aware of the constant pitfalls into which we may fall in our religious life, not to provide support for our endemic preoccupation with self-justification.

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The idolatry of nations

Idolatry is therefore a religious problem: it is a turning from the God who reveals Godself in Jesus Christ, the attempt to grasp at revelation, to anticipate it, to talk about God instead of listening to God. 41 Yet Barth was always alert to how the consequences of idolatry went far beyond the religious sphere. In 1922, in his Romans commentary, Barth showed how the dead idols human beings fashion attain an ironic life of their own in their power over us:

The images and likenesses, whose meaning we have failed to perceive, become themselves purpose and content and end. And now men have really become slaves and puppets of things, of 'Nature' and of 'Civilization', whose dissolution and establishing by God they have overlooked. 42 If this was clear in 1922, it became clearer in the years that followed. Timothy Gorringe, in his valuable study placing Barth's theology in its social context, traces the idolatrous tendencies of German National Socialism. In 1928 Goebbels said of Hitler that 'many are called but few are chosen': he was the only man capable by Protestantism', but believed that simply to address this consequence in isolation would be to no avail. The first requirement must be to do theology rightly:

we cannot be afraid of the consequences and repudiate them unless it is perfectly clear that we are not co-operating in that reversal of revelation and religion. To put it concretely, we are defenceless against the "German Christians" of our own time, unless we know how to guard against the development which took place in van Til and Buddeus, and even earlier. 44 For this reason, the 1934 Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church, which Barth drafted, was not primarily a denouncing of opponents, but a creedal affirmation of authentic faith. Its first article puts Barth's insistence on the priority of revelation, and his rejection of alternative sources of knowledge of God, in context: "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me" … Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

We reject the false doctrine that the church could and should recognize as the source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures, and truths as God's revelation. 45 The intimate connection Barth saw between theology and politics is further made clear in his discussion of the divine perfections, Church DogmaticsII/1, composed in 1938-9. Under the heading 'The Unity and Omnipresence of God', Barth observes: every genuine proclamation of the Christian faith is a force disturbing to, even destructive of, the advance of religion, its life and richness and peace … No sentence is more dangerous or revolutionary than that God is One and there is no other like Him … It was on the truth of the sentence that God is One that 44 Gorringe comments that this text shows Barth's profound conviction 'that God constitutes our reality, and cannot therefore be ultimately contradicted '. 47 It would be absurd, I believe, and the greatest contrast with the politically engaged theology of Barth, for theologians to meditate soberly on the relationship between theology and politics in 1930s Germany, without also pausing to reflect on the possibility of an idolatrous politics in our day. For today, as then, world events are dominated by those who take religion seriously, by the Al Quaida terrorists engaged in a campaign of mass murder in the name of Islam, and by the heads of state of the US and the UK, who led the campaign against them in Afghanistan, and who used it as a springboard to beginning a new conflict with the old adversary of Iraq. There is obviously no moral equivalence between current US and UK foreign policy and the policies of the Nazi Germany, but this does not mean that there is no comparison to be made between the use of religious language in the two cases. Should we not marvel at the way Christian language is invoked in US presidential addresses, just as we have in the speeches of German politicians before World War II? In the State of the Union address preceding the Iraq war that began in 2003, George Bush stated that the United States of America has 'been called to a unique role in human events'. Faced by enemies who 'embrace tyranny and death as a creed', America stands for a different choice, 'freedom and the dignity of every life'. It will 'overcome evil with greater good', 'lead the world towards the values that will bring lasting peace', and it has discovered again that 'God is near'. 48 In more muted tones these themes were echoed by the British Prime Minister, who also believes in a battle of good versus evil embodied in the conflicts between nation states. 49 If we are to learn from Barth's vision of the relationship between theology and politics, we should not rush to repudiate particulars sentiments, or offer our political judgement on particular policies, or particular UN resolutions. Our first tasks as theologians are to reflect on the theological meaning of the words used in such debates, to ask about the nature of the theology that gives rise to them, and to question whether the churches to which we belong are engaged in a faithful, or idolatrous witness.

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