BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION SERIES: PART 8
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Karl Barth (1886–1968) was a Swiss-born pastor, professor, and theologian whose career was primarily in Germany. He was educated in the liberal German theology of his time but became concerned with the outbreak of World War II and how many church leaders and liberal theologians supported the Nazi regime. He therefore initiated a theological movement away from liberalism into what is now called neoorthodoxy. Barth emphasizes the complete unknowable nature of God and uses a dialectical approach to explore seemingly contradictory or paradoxical metaphysical teachings in the Bible. Barth recorded his theology in his massive Church Dogmatics (thirteen volumes and more than 6 million words), which is considered one of the one of the most important theological works of the 20th century.
Barth performed extensive, careful, scholarly, and impressive exegesis. This said, Barth in all of his writings never describes his general hermeneutical approach. Nevertheless, one can make a confident inference, starting with Barth’s understanding of a threefold form of the Word of God: as Jesus Christ; as the apostolic and prophetic witness through Scripture; and as the faithful interpretation of Scripture and proclamation of the Church to its members. With this background, the following description of Barth’s hermeneutics is taken from a journal paper by Peter Oulton.
Reading: Again what Barth spoke of were three moments of exegesis: observation, assimilation, and between these, meditation or reflection. ‘‘To this reflection,’’ writes Barth, ‘‘corresponds dogmatics, as the theological task which along with exegetical and practical theology is laid upon the Church in its mission and proclamation.’’ For Barth, ‘‘It is at this central and transitional point between the question of the origin and that of the method of Christian proclamation that there obviously emerges the really critical theological question, that of its actual content.’’ In Barth’s discussion of the second element in the activity of exegesis, the reason he believes universal participation in interpretation is essential to a critical appreciation of textual meaning becomes evident. As Barth describes what necessarily occurs in that moment identified as meditation or reflection,
“In an exploratory way we attribute to that which confronts us, . . . one or other of the possibilities of meaning already known to us through our philosophy—without regard to the fact that this something as such is not already there in the text and as such is not an object of our observation, but is very properly added in our own mind… —for after all it is we who observe.”
On account of this disposition toward self-deception, none can independently claim certainty to understand the Word. Yet, neither are they absolved of their responsibility for the Word, its proclamation […] Therefore, insofar as dogmatics has as its object Christian proclamation, which is the aim of scriptural exegesis, the critical hermeneutical task follows, or at best accompanies the act of ‘‘listening’’ to the Word of God in the context of its manifold interpreters. It is this identification of the critical work of hermeneutics with the dogmatic tasks that is Barth’s answer to the question of rival interpretations and the critical element of his hermeneutic […] Barth’s principle hermeneutical insight was that in reading Scripture each reader is both inevitably biased and, given that his interpretations have theological significance, theologically engaged. Moreover, he recognized that the inevitability of human fallibility required, as the sole genuine safeguard against biased interpretation, for each interpreter to be given opportunity to share in the context of a community of disciplined readers in openness and readiness to revise his findings in the light of others’ interpretations both past and present. [Peter Oulton, “Understanding as a Liturgy of the Whole Church: The Critical Hermeneutics of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Volume 1, Part 2,” Toronto Journal of Theology, 30/2, 2014: 220]
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