Barth and Textuality

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BARTH AND TEXTUALITYBY

GEORGE LINDBECK

"The growing awareness of the importance of texts

in our day favors the intertextuality in which all

texts interpret each other on the same level, rather

than the intratextuality [Barth] in which one privi

leged text functions as the comprehensive interpre

tive framework A religion, especially a heavily

textualized religion such as Christianity, can be

expected to survive as long as its Scriptures are not

ignored. It has no future except in its own intratex-

tual world. One may hope that more and more

Christian theologians, whether Protestant or Catho

lic, will soon get the message. "

THIS essay is more about the theological situation in which we

find ourselves than it is about Karl Barth. I could not speak

otherwise even if I wanted to, for my knowledge of him is sadly

second-hand. Yet even second-hand knowledge may perhaps suffice for

a discussion of the effects of changes in context on the understanding oftexts.

The particular Barthian texts I have in mind emphasize textuality

specifically, that of the Bible. It may be helpful to say a word about the

concept before proceeding.

Texts, as I shall use the term, need not necessarily be written: they

may also be transmitted orally, or by ritual enactment, or by pictorial

representations. What is characteristic of them is that, unlike utterances

or speech acts, they are fixed communicative patterns which are used in

many different contexts for many purposes and with many meanings. Intheir written form, texts can have a comprehensiveness, complexity, and

stability which is unattainable in any other medium. This is one reason

why textualized religiousreligions with sacred scriptureshave an

enormous competitive advantage over pre-literature ones. It is also a

reason why it is not altogether absurd to talk, as some literary critics do,

about the priority of the written over the spoken word. This certainly

makes sense in literate cultures. Even in pre-literate ones, so one could

argue, the communal priority of ritual and oral traditions makes them

cognitively and linguistically basic: they indicate the frameworks withinwhich individual utterances are possible or meaningful. When looked at

in this way, it is a mistake to think (in Greek fashion) of spoken words


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(in the sense of situationally specific speech acts) as prior, and of texts assimply their written form. Ifthis were so, texts, like the present utteredword, would have only a single "intended" meaning (as both literalistsand de-mythologizers assume) instead of that multiplicity ofvirtualmeanings with which their employability in varied circumstancesendows them. Barth never speaks oftextuality in this manner, but hisdiscussions ofthe biblical text, it seems to me, cohere with it.

This is not the time or place to analyze these discussions in extenso,but simply to recall some familiar themes. For Barth, as we all know, theactual text ofthe Bible in its wholeness and its details has an importancewhich it is impossible to match, I suppose, in any major theologian sinceJonathan Edwards. In order fully to hear the Word ofGod in Scripture,theologians and the Christian community at large are called upon to

engage in close reading of the entire canon in its typological andchristological narrative unity in ways which are imaginatively rich,conceptually exact, argumentatively rigorous, and forever open to thefreedom of the Word, to new understandings. Historic doctrines, as heputs it in one place, are useful hypotheses and heuristic devices (CD, 1/2,p. 865), not improvements on the text itself. Proof-texting is, therefore,to be avoided, Similarly, the shaping ofexperience, the warming of theheart, is important, but the projecting of our experiences onto the text bypietistic allegorizing must be eschewed. When the text thus controls

communal reading, Scripture can speak for itself and become theself-interpreting guide for believing communities amid the ever-changing vicissitudes ofhistory. It is thus that Christians come to live in "TheStrange New World Within the Bible," ofwhich Barth spoke in one ofthe better known of his early addresses delivered seventy years ago in1916 at the Swiss church in Leutwil. Textuality is not much in evidencein that address, for he had not yet retrieved the Reformation (and,indeed, for the most part, pre-Reformation) way ofreading the Bible Ihave just outlined; but as time went on, the strange new world becomesever more intratextual,firmlylocated within the biblical text itself.

Intratextual worlds can vary greatly even when the texts whichconstitute them are largely the same. The Hebrew Bible as construed bythe later Rabbinic tradition is Torah-centered, whereas Christiansreading the same books emphasize the narratives and give the whole adifferent center, the stories about Jesus. Whatever may be true ofotherintratextual realms, life within the Christian one is life within a story. Itis to listen to the tale the Bible tells, "to learn its rhythms, to follow thetwists and turns ofthe deep laid plot, to tremble at the warnings it has instore and to celebrate the victories it relates." Cross and resurrection

define the really real, the fullness ofGod's own identity. Dying andrising with Christ are not metaphors, but rather the literal truth which


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Barth and Textuality

the eschaton, but yet their resonances are different now that nearly ageneration has passed since the last volume of the Kirchliche Dogmatik.Intratextual Bible reading, one might say, has become intellectuallyeasier, but practically more difficult, and this has consequences for thetheological enterprise. I will try to characterize both the greater easeand the greater difficulty, and also say something about the consequences.

I

The intellectual shift now gaining strength outside theology and thechurch can be usefully compared for our purposes to the change inthought patterns taking place at the time of the Reformation. In boththe later twentieth and early sixteenth centuries, big systems become

unfashionable and particularities increase in popularity. The earliershift is from the medieval scholastic preoccupation with metaphysicsand logic to the humanistic attention to texts and rhetoric, while today anot totally dissimilar textualizing of reality is apparent in figures asdiverse as historians of science, such as T. S. Kuhn, and literarytheorists, such as Jacques Derrida. We find it natural, as previousmodern generations did not, to speak of encoding data, following scriptsin scientific investigations, and inscribing reality in texts. Trope andmetaphor everywhere reign. The sharp divide between Naturwissen-

schaftand Geisteswissenschafthas broken down.In the exact sciences, one speaks of "modelling reality" rather than

"discovering the truth" and, at the other extreme, literary criticismbristles with theories which rival those of the hard sciences in technicalcomplexity. A well-constructed mathematical proof is seen to havestrongly rhetorical features, and a good poem is recognized as possessingits own kind of rigorous logic: a misplaced comma can spoil everythingas can a displaced dot in an equation. One hears rigorous scholarscasually remark with the authority of the commonplace, as I heardrecently, that the epistemological grounding of a physicist's quarks andof Homer's gods is exactly the same. It is rhetorical force rooted in formsof life which gives them different cognitive status (and here, of course,quarks win over homeric gods by a wide margin in our society).

I shall refrain from discussing whether plausibility is lent to thisdenial of universally privileged epistemic and interpretive standpoints byWittgenstein's language games, Quine's webs of belief, or RichardRorty's pragmatism. Whether or not these or other justifications ofcurrent or sixteenth century developments are valid or invalid, the pointis that intellectual climates change, and the ones we are considering are

congenial to close reading and to self-interpreting texts. Not thatRenaissance humanism and modern textuality are the same: for one, the


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treating a classic, whether Christian or pagan, as a perspicuous guide tolife and thought. The only question is whether one is interested in tryingand can make it work.

Not only is the change in climate analogous in the two periods, but

also the character, though not the quantitative distribution, of thetheological responses. Some read Scripture in the newly congenial way,and others on both the right and left refuse to do so and thus becomeisolated from the intellectual mainstream. The conservatives in thesixteenth century were able to retreat to a scholastic ghetto in orderintellectually to legitimize their nonhumanistic treatment of Scripture.The equally nontextual theologies of the radical Reformation were notso fortunate. They had neither scholastic nor humanistic legitimacy and,despite their popular appeal, were ineffective in sustaining long-term

and large-scale communities. Both conservatives and radicals wereintellectually marginal and suffered as a consequence, though in verydifferent degrees.

It is worth mentioning in this connection, that it was not radicalReformation theology, but rather Calvinist intrascriptural textualitylegitimated by such things as Ramist logic, the beginnings of Baconianscience and humanistic rhetorical emphases which proved to have thegreatest revolutionary potential for building community under adversecircumstances in such places as France, Englaiid, and New England.

Related, though not identical, to this community-building power isthe inter-communicative force of Reformation biblical interpretation.One notable example is the way it kept the Lutherans and Reformedtalking to each other. They were sacramentally divided for deephistorical, cultural, and sociological reasons, and yet they were sounmistakably similar in their Way of reading Scripture that theycontinued to take each other seriously as fellow Christians who must belistened to even when it would be less troubling simply to ignore eachother. Despite their sometimes bloody disputes, they constituted a singlecommunity of interpretation to a remarkable degree.

Also notable is the way each of these confessions held togetherwithout any overarching organizational structures, not even the abilityto convoke common councils. (The Synod of Dort was the closest tobeing a general council on either side, but even it was basically a Dutchgathering with some foreigners in attendance, and it happened onlyonce.) Among the Reformed, to focus on them, the Hungarian, Swiss,Dutch, French, Scots, and English churches were totally independentthey even composed separate confessions of faithand yet their fundamentally common hermeneutics kept them in communion even in the

midst offiercearguments.For the first hundred years or so, Reformation Bible reading


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enthusiasms. Yet during the earlier period, the Bible read as a self-

interpreting text has never had greater power except perhaps, and in a

very different way, in the first centuries of the church. (One could also

cite Rabbinic Judaism and certain forms of Islam for non-Christian

parallels.)Yet the textualist critique of the right and left, needless to say, does

not center either on their lack of social power and intercommunicative

force, or on their intellectual marginality. For Barth and the magisterial

Reformers, the basic error of both groups is to deny the authority of the

external word of the text, to deny that Scripture is self-interpreting.

They did not locate the hermeneutical key to the Bible inside the Bible.

They supposed that its theologically and religiously significant sense can

be adequately translated into extra-scriptural concepts and language

whether Aristotelian, mystical, or revolutionary. Stated in modernfashion, their error was to think that the realities of which the Bible

speaks are found in doctrinal, metaphysical, moral, experimental, or

historical domains above, behind, beneath, or in front of the text. The

strange new world, to return to Barth's youthful formulation, is within

the Bible, not somewhere else. Because they thought it was somewhere

else, they resorted to extra-scriptural principles and frameworks of

interpretation: scholastic and ecclesiastical for the conservative^, spiri

tual and popular for the radicals. It made no real difference that one set

of hermeneutical principles was pro-establishment, the other anti-establishment, one favored the oppressors, the other the victims of oppression,

one the status quo, the other the revolution. Both made the Bible captive

to alien forces, cultural in the one case and counter-cultural in the other,

and thus distorted or destroyed the gospel. Behind their differences, they

are identical. As Luther put it, the papists and the Schwrmer are like

two foxes, snarling at each other and pulling in opposite directions, but

tied together by their tails.

For those who favor the kind of Bible reading practiced by Luther,

Calvin, or Barth (and also practiced to a not inconsiderable degree

before the Reformation), contemporary conservative and progressive

opponents of intratextuality naturally look very much like their

sixteenth century counterparts. Protestant fundamentalists and Catho

lic traditionalists read the Bible as a handbook of natural science or as a

collection of doctrinal proof texts. Progressives treat it as a collection of

clues for critically reconstructing history, or as a treasury of symbolic

expressions of religious experience or therapeutic wisdom, or as a text

disclosive of possible ways of being in the world, or as a source of

warrants for individual morality, or social and political action, or

liberating praxis. Thus, captivity to establishment culture or to anti-establishment counter-culture continues, the power to build community


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tive. Nothing even faintly resembling a new Reformation is on thehorizon. Barthians are few in number, and the practice as distinct fromthe theory of intratextual Scripture reading does not flourish evenamong them. Despite an increasingly congenialor at least permissivenontheological climate of opinion, thinking and living within thestrange new world is notably unappealing to most theologians. We needto ask why this is so.

II

Practicality, as we shall see, is the major problem, but there are alsoother difficulties which should first be mentioned. Thefirstis the greatlyincreased intellectual power of progressive modes of thought. Anti-establishment utopianism has moved from exile on the margins in the

sixteenth century to capture the establishment itself in the period ofEnlightenment and after. The mental habits instilled by generations offaith in progress remain powerful even in the face oftwo world wars andthe menace of an earth destroyed. Most theologians, like other people,and quite unlike sixteenth-century folk, look for help to the wisdom ofthe present and the future and discount the past. Thus, Barth'sattempted retrieval of a way of reading the Bible which is in mostrespects thoroughly pre-modern seems hopelessly obscurantist. It isdismissed without a hearing as violating, for example, the canons of

historical criticism, of critical theory, or of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

Further, the de-christianization of Western establishments (even ifnot of the masses in the United States) has proceeded rapidly sinceBarth first spoke of the strange new world within the Bible. Thus, thedominantly progressive theology of the mainline Protestant churcheshas increasingly become anti-establishment (and since Vatican II, thatincludes Roman Catholic theology). The result is a major shift inpolemical fronts rather like that which took place in the early days of theReformation. Luther's battle was at first entirely against the medievalestablishment in religion and theology, and only later did hefindhimselfalso engaged against the anti-establishment forces of the radical Reformation.

Now, from an intratextual perspective, as we have already suggested,systematically anti-establishment theologies, like establishment ones,imprison Scripture in alien frameworks of interpretation, but theirmotivations are likely to be profoundly different. Their interest is not theapologetic one of accommodating to the culturally dominant groups, butrather that of mobilizing the church on behalf of the marginalized.

Further, their appeals to the authority of Scripture in support ofprophetic protest can be vehement. They are in special need of biblical


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sake of nonapologetic, nonconformist church reform and action, the left

resembles Barth and the magisterial Reformers; and yet it may be as or

more dangerously extratextual than old establishments.

When looked at this way, it seems that Barthian theological strategies

need to shift just as did those of the Reformers. His struggle was almost

exclusively against apologetical conformism, and in contrast to Luther

and Calvin, he did little work on the temptations of nonconformist

prophetism. This is unfortunate, for the argument on the left is in some

respects more complex than on the right. The Reformers were, on the

whole, right in their polemic against the establishment theology of their

dayRoman Catholics also now recognize thatbut they were clearly

wrong in rejecting the radical left lock, stock, and barrel. That mistake

must at all cost be avoided. Concern for the victims of oppression cannot

be left to extratextualists.There is another respect in which Barthian theological strategy needs

to be revised which, however, has no real parallel in the Reformation

period. The Reformers did their work from the very beginning in a

humanistic ambiance, while Barth's intellectual milieu was mostly

innocent of the new textualism. He theologically anticipated much of

that textualism, and this is a mark of his genius, but it is also a source of

weakness.

The weakness is comparable to what might have happened if Luther

and Calvin had lived before the dawning of the Renaissance, and yet hadarrived in the course of their Bible study, quite apart from people like

Erasmus, at the importance of knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, the

need for critical texts, and the necessity of rhetorical skill in the

interpretation and application of Scripture. They would have been

tempted to think that humanism was a product of the Bible rather than

something to be assimilated and used biblically. They might even have

talked in rather odd ways about knowledge of revelation in order to

vindicate the scientific, wissenschaftlich, character of their humanism

against regnant scholasticisms.

Perhaps something similar occurred in the case of Barth. Once he has

assimilated insights into the biblical world which are nonbiblical in

origin (even if he happened to be the one to think of them), he seems

inclined at times to suppose they are derived from the Bible. I am told by

those who know better than I that this is a problem with his treatment of

man/woman relations and much ofhis social ethics. He does not seem to

realize the degree to which he is redescribing scripturally the views on

these matters which were his as a bourgeois male Swiss democrat, but

instead tried to derive them substantively from Scripture. Not that he

always makes this mistake. Much of the time it is clear that, for Barth,

living in the world of the Bible is a matter of assimilating extra-biblical


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disturbing frequency, it seems to me, the gears shift, the blik changes,and what has been baptized into the world of Scripture is treated as if ithad been born there.

It may well be that his doctrine of revelation, especially his talk of therationality and self-evidence of the event ofthe knowledge ofGod, is themost damaging instance of this. My colleague, Hans Frei, argues thatBarth's discussion of these matters in 1/1 and 1/2 can be understood asan analysis, without benefit of J.L. Austin and his successors, of the logicof performative utterances, and this I am willing to accept. Yet, in theabsence of something like Frei's explanations, the discussion reads to melike a good job of baptizing bad epistemology. It is as if Barth feltcompelled to provide legitimacy for a way of reading Scripture whichwas illegitimate in his intellectual environment, and therefore cobbled

together a set of notions about knowledge of revelation and abouttheology as science which, to readers less acute than Frei, seem to tradeheavily on mistaken descriptions of knowledge and of science. That initself is unobjectionable. If theologians happen to need an epistemologyand only a purist Wittgensteinian would deny that this mightsometimes be the caseand when only a bad one is available, they havethe responsibility to baptize it as thoroughly as possible. The difficulty isthatat least to the unwary readerBarth seems to think his doctrineof revelation is read off from the biblical world rather than baptized into

it. Thus, those who find the doctrine nonsensical are disbarred fromreading farther. Unable to make sense of what appears to be thefoundation of the whole Church Dogmatics, they stop in mid-course.They do not realize that the heart of the enterprise is a retrieval of theReformation version of the way of reading the Bible which alreadybegins in New Testament writers with their typological and christologi-cal appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that this hermeneuticsis logically independent of the apparent starting point. They neverdiscover the strange new world of the Bible as Barth describes it.

Correcting this fault, the fault of confusing theological baptism withbiblical birth, frees interpreters of Barth from the straight-jacket inwhich some of them, Thomas Torrance for example, seem to beenclosed. Biblically faithful theology can take many more differentforms than they seem to grant. One may inscribe neo-Platonism withinthe biblical text, as did Augustine, or Aristotelianism, as did Aquinas, orlate medieval nominalism, as did Luther, or Renaissance humanism, asCalvin did to a greater extent than Luther; or finally, as Barthtentatively suggested at the end of his life, one may even construeSchleiermacher as giving a biblical rendering of the experiential-expressive world of Romanticism. None of these theologians was fullysuccessful, and none pictured what he was doing as I have done, but to


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Barth and Textuality 369

and there is nothing in his approach to prevent others from trying to do

the same with Whiteheadianism or Marxism. It may, in fact, be an

obligation. God also illuminates through the little lights of creation, as

Barth says in IV/3, and it is not impossible that Whitehead or Marx

may have perceived some of these lights better than Christians. Even if

that is not the case, Christians are commanded to bring all thoughts into

captivity to Christ. Theologians who find some system of thought useful

are thereby mandated to transform and absorb it into the biblical

intratextual world. Thus, the possibility of an, by Barthian standards,

authentically biblical process or liberation theology cannot be excluded

a priori. The current climate of opinion can help. It makes it easier to see

the heuristic value of large-scale systems even in abstraction from their

original truth claims, and how they can be retextualized and redescribed

within another web of belieffor Christians, the biblical one. Thepossibilities are unlimited. It may be that the ancient approach to

Scripture which Karl Barth has renewed will yet provide a powerful

means for promoting that pluralistic unity and resilient flexibility which

by general consent theology badly needs.

HI

Yet the practical difficulties are formidable, and here I think

especially of the loss of familiarity with the Bible which started in the

relatively recent past but has accelerated rapidly in the last generation.We need to look at the phenomenon before we ask what can and should

be done about it.

Barth never confronted the difficulty. In all his work, from the

Leutwil address on, he presupposes an audience which is well-informed

about the Bible however disastrously they misread it. This, perhaps, is

why he seems so optimistic. He seems to think that once people stop

imposing their alien interpretive categories on Scripture, it will be easy

for them to learn to read it as a self-interpreting text. They know it well

enough for that.Whether or not this optimism was ever justified, it is certainly

unwarranted today. Biblical illiteracy has greatly increased, not only in

the society at large, but also within the church. If the data provided by

the Gallup Poll can be believed, our society is not being in the least

secularized nor even dechristianized: more, rather than fewer, people

claim to be Christian and even to have born-again experiences. Yet all

strata are being debiblicized including professedly biblicistic ones.

Robert Bellah and his associates cite evidence in Habits of the Heart

that, beginning in the 'sixties and attaining dominance in the 'seventies,

a kind of therapeutic expressive individualism displaced older and more

biblical idioms in books even from conservative evangelical publishing


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fulfillment." When compared to Billy Graham back in the 'fifties,Bible-thumping TV preachers seem extraordinarily casual about whatthe book actually says. Playing fast and loose with the Bible needed aliberal audience in the days of Norman Vincent Peale, but now, as thecase of Robert Schuller illustrates, professed conservatives eat it up.They do not know enough Scripture to notice the difference.

The Bible, to be sure, is not the only victim of contemporaryforgetfulness. American history, world history, and the corpus ofWestern classics are fading from the collective memory. Yet the Bible isthe chiefloser. It was transmitted, not only directly by reading, hearing,and ritual enactment, but also indirectly by an interlocked nest ofintellectual, literary, artistic, folkloric, and proverbial traditions. As thisheritage fades, so also does scriptural knowledge.

This fading makes impossible two preliminary ways of living in theworld of the Bible. The first is intercommunicative or linguistic. As wehave just seen, the universe of discourse is not as biblical as it once was.There was a time when believers and unbelievers alike shared a commonscriptural language. They could communicate, even when they did notagree, on a whole range of issues on which our society, having lost thelinguistic and conceptual means, perforce remains silent. AbrahamLincoln had available a biblical idiom of judgment, sin, hope, and mercyin which the whole country could be powerfully addressed. This

continued to be true to some extent even in the days of ReinholdNiebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., a mere twenty or thirty years ago.One wonders whether it is still the case in the time of Ronald Reagan.Thus, it has become harder for us as a nation, as Christian communities,and as individuals to live within the linguistic world of the Bible.

Second, imaginative living within the Bible has also become difficult.Intratextuality has vanished even among those who are familiar with thebiblical words. We have forgotten one of the great feats of collectivehuman imagination, the use of figuration and typology to weavetogether into a single narrative-encompassed whole the rich diversity ofcanonical literature from Genesis to Revelation. The story of how thisstructure was undermined by Pietism and post-Reformation orthodoxy,later abetted by historical biblical criticism, has been told by Hans Frei,and the background filled in by Jeffrey Stout, but the imaginativepatterns lived on, as Erich Auerbach has recalled for us, in the greattradition of realistic novels from Jane Austen to Solzhenitsyn. Evenmore completely than typology and narrative, however, we have forgotten how to fill the interstices of the text with playful yet not capriciousmidrashic fancies. Jewish rabbis have much surpassed Christian theolo

gians in this art, but when one turns to poetry, the situation is different.Milton's Paradise Lost, it can be argued, is the greatest piece of

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Martha, a Mary, a Samson, a Solomon, or a Judas. This is quite

different, however, from imaginatively inscribing the world in the

biblical text and troping all that we are, do, and encounter in biblical

terms.

Unbelievers as well as believers once saw the world imaginativelythrough scriptural lenses. Thomas Huxley, the famed propagandist for

Darwinian evolution, spoke repeatedly of justification by verification

rather than faith. The phrase as he used it, historians have noted, was

weighty with imaginative associations with Pauline texts as interpreted

by Protestants. The point is that justification for the scientist also comes

through selfless and submissive openness to the truth whatever it may

be, however hard it may be to accept, except that he hears the word by

verifying, not by faith. Furthermore, much the same traits of probity,

responsibility, and love for humanity flow from this justification byverification as the evangelicals attributed to justification by faith. In

Huxley's day, one might say, the scientific enterprise was carried on in

an imaginatively biblical world even by agnostics and atheists. It is not

clear that the loss of these biblical trappings, trumpery though they

sometimes were, has made either science or scientists more trustworthy

or more humane. The scientific enterprise, like other human works, is

brutish, nasty, and perhaps short when denuded of religious tropes.

Let us then draw together these remarks on the loss of the text. There

was a time when life in the world of the Bible was easier than now. Itseemed quite natural to Wordsworth to write in 1815, "in these

unfavorable t imes.. . the grand store-houses of enthusiastic and medita

tive imagination . . . are the prophetic and lyrical parts of Holy Scrip

tures, and the works of Milton." Nor was it only the imagination of poets

which was nourished by the Bible. Black preachers, for example, were

full of it. In the words of Henry Mitchell: "The black preacher is more

likely to think of the Bible as an inexhaustible source of good preaching

material.... It provides the basis for unlimited creativity in the telling

of rich and interesting stories (about the biblical characters), and these

narrations command rapt attention while the eternal truth is brought to

bear on the black experience and struggle for liberation. The Bible

undergirds remembrance and gives permanent reference to whatever

illuminating discernment the preacher has to offer." If this kind of

midrashic preaching (of which, by the way, Luther was also a master) is

still going on, so much the better, but its future is dim, and the poetic

imagination is clearly not nourished by the Bible as it was in Words

worth's day.

Nor does improvement seem likely. The growing awareness of the

importance of texts in our day favors the intertextuality in which alltexts interpret each other on the same level, rather than the intratextual


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siblings go on to other (and on the whole, perhaps, less edifying) texts.The centrifugal flux of intertextuality has replaced the community,communication, and continuity-constituting power of intratextuality,not only in traditionally Christian lands, but also in literate and

pre-literate societies molded by other sacred texts. This loss of intratextuality is perhaps a more serious part of the global crisis than are thesocial, economic, and political problems to which we more commonlyadvert.

IV

Ifthis is so, if biblical amnesia in both church and society is anywherenear as great as we have suggested, we cannot avoid asking, inconclusion, about the implications for Barth's theological program.

The suggestion I want to advance is that theology and the churchshould do everything possible to practice and encourage culturallyinteresting readings of the text. In this way, they may help, not only thechurch, but also the world. They may induce it to use the language ofZion and thereby render unbelievers a service no less important,perhaps, than are clothing the naked or visiting those in prison. Barthmay not make much of this cultural dimension of the God-willed missionof the church, but he was an eminent practitioner of it.

The chief hope for this mission, needless to say, is that Christian

communities relearn skill in the use of their own tongue. This hope isbiblically mandated, but there are also more worldly reasons for it. Asdebiblicization advances, those for whom the Bible is indeed a guide tothe feet and a light to the path, sweeter than honey and the droppings ofthe honeycomb will be under increasing pressure to form enclaves ofmutual support. As students of history and sociology, both religious andprofane, are well aware, networks of socially deviant groups of thedeeply committed are often the seed-beds ofnew life. It is not unreasonable to hope that what grows from these seed-beds, when and if thathappens, will be ecumenical. In part because of historical criticism, asBarth also recognized, divisive traditional ways of reading the Biblehave been relativized; and the new yet ancient intratextual modeprefundamentalist, preliberal, and preevangelicalgives promise in ourday of being unitive, not divisive.

Meanwhile, the task is to promote whatever interesting ways ofreading the Bible increase familiarity with the actual text. Perhaps weneed to be less jaundiced about the pallid "Bible as Literature" courseswhich avoid all historical-critical questions and theology. They promotebiblical literacy even if not biblical faith. Further, some of the newer

currents of literacy criticism are not all pallid. Midrashic deconstruc-tionist disciples of Derrida practice close and exciting reading of the text

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more important (whether reconstructed history or possible modes of

being in the world). Thus, for example, some practitioners of the new

social history meticulously examine the actual functioning of the text in

all its particularities in the life of biblical and postbiblical communities.

They thereby imprint the text upon the memory and tell us much about

how Christians have lived and can live within the sacred text. Anything,

in short, which makes it easier to live linguistically and imaginatively in

that strange new world is to be theologically encouraged.

Work which does not do so may be technically indispensable for

theological professionals within the church, but it is of no direct help in

living linguistically and imaginatively in a biblical world. This was true

of humanistic skills in the sixteenth centuryknowledge of Greek and

Latin, of textual criticism, of rhetorical theoryand it is also true of

most historical-critical biblical scholarship. Cutting closer to the bone,

however, the same reservation applies to much purportedly Barthian

theology, not to mention other kinds. The function of Barth's theological

descriptions of biblical realities such as cohumanity, the concept of time,

or the doctrine of election is to lead back to the text in much the same

manner as does good literary criticism. To study or use these interpretive

devices in any other way is rather like substituting a Freudian account of

Hamlet's Oedipus complex for the actual reading of the play. That, I

suppose, is why Barth was unhappy with Barthians. Familiarity with the

text is indispensable. Thus, even profane readings of Scripture whichpromote this familiarity are to be preferred to theology, however

edifying or orthodox, which turns attention elsewhere.

In this emphasis on the knowledge of the text even when it is misread,

I am, as it happens, repeating not revising Barth. As he puts it, if only

the Old and New Testament Scriptures are known, they have not in the

long run been reduced to "a mere letter.. . but have continually become

a living voice and word To be sure they have sometimes been almost

completely silenced in a thicket of added traditions, or proclaimed only

in liturgical sing-song, or over-laid by bold speculation, or searched onlyfor dicta probantia in favor of official or private doctrine, or treated

merely as a source of pious or even natural or impious morality, or torn

asunder into a thousand shreds But they have always been the same

Scriptures and the community has never been able to discard them.

Scriptures? A mere book then? No, a chorus of very different and

independent but harmonious voices . . . the Bible has always spoken

afresh, and the more impressively sometimes when it is surrounded by

all kinds of misuse and misunderstanding. That Scripture upholds the

community is not something Christians can fabricate by their ownBible-lectures [readings] and Bible-study, or even by the [Reformation]

Scripture principle but it is something that Scripture achieves of itself


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Theology Today

study it in a new way [may not the new textualism and deconstructionistliterary criticism be such echoes in the outside world?].... It is the HolySpirit who upholds the community But according to the defiant

saying in Eph. 6:17, that 'sword of the Spirit' which protects and defends[the community] is the Word of God.... And so we can only say toChristians who are troubled about the preservation of the community orthe maintaining of its cause . . . that the community certainly cannotuphold itself, but that all the same it is in fact upheld . . . continually inthe hearing ofthis word" (IV/2, pp. 673-5).

The passage I have quoted sounded like a magical incantation thirtyyears ago when Barth composed it, but it now reads like nontheologicalcommonplaces. A religion, especially a heavily textualized religion suchas Christianity, can be expected to survive as long as its Scriptures are

not ignored. It has no future except in its own intratextual world. Onemay hope that more and more Christian theologians, whether Protestantor Catholic, will soon get the message.

V

Yet the end has not been reached. Close reading of Holy Writ andattentive listening to God's word are not identical. The hearing does notoccur without the reading, but it does not happen, so Christians believe,except in the power of the Holy Spirit. Or to use the imagery we have

been employing, it is not enough to dwell within the Bible linguisticallyand imaginatively. Something more is needed for it to become thestrange new world within which believers are called upon to live andtheologians to do their work.

Barth has a way of speaking of this "more" which, if I understand itrightly, is remarkably prosaic. As far I can make out, it is self-referencewhich turns the biblical world into the strange new world. Scripturetextualizes everything, including theologians and the work they do.When this is expressly realized, the God unsubstitutably identified and

characterized in the text, supremely in the story of Jesus, becomes, asBarth says, "the basic text" (IV/2, p. 122).

A comparison may help. Contrast reading a book by an author onesupposes dead, and then reading the same book with the knowledge that,whoever the author is, she is the one who observes what one does and willdecide one's future. The second reading will be more, not less rigorousthan thefirst,but in a drastically different way. All the intellectual toolsemployed before will again be utilized and more besides: one neverknows beforehand what might prove helpful in learning who the authoris, what she likes and dislikes, and how she might evaluate one's work

and character. One will try to look at oneself and one's world throughher eyes so that one can behave appropriately. The text itself will


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interests have been overlooked. After such a discovery, one might be

tempted to glow with satisfaction at one's love of music or be dismayed

at one's dislike of fishing; but one would try not to let these emotions get

in the way of reading. Perhaps the author approves of neither pride nor

shame in such matters. The sensitivity to nuance which only imaginationcan bring would be important in one's study, but only as controlled by

conceptual exactness and argumentative precision. The utmost in objec

tivity is essential: one's future is at stake.

So much for the parable. The application is straightforward. It is

because Barth interprets the text in this matter-of-fact fashion that he

says of living in the strange new world, of reading the Bible in the power

ofthe Spirit, that it has "far more affinities to the comfortable truth that

two and two make four than to the most powerful conceivable, bitter

sweet irruptions from the sphere of the numinous" (IV/2, p. 129).The theological and preaching task, then, as Barth said, is exegesis

and yet more exegesis of the kind we have just described. First comes

identity descriptions of the ever-living and present Lord of the text: that

is, trinitarian and christological doctrine. Only thus can one know who

and what he is and wants for his church. But the worlds in which we live

change. They need to be inscribed anew into the world of the text. It is

only by constant reexplication, remeditation, and reapplication that this

can be done. One can see why Barth regarded theology as the most

flexible yet exacting, the most playful yet serious, of all intellectualdisciplines.

Furthermore, when theologians and preachers go about this task with

competence, they will not only be helpful to the community of faith, but

are almost bound to make the Bible interesting to many of those who are

outside. Like the Athenians, our age is on the lookout for new things; for

new readings of present realities; or, to use a fashionable expression, for

strong misreadings. But strong misreadings of present realities are what

Christians inevitably produce when they interpret present realities

within so deviant a framework as the Bible. They cannot help but violate

conventional construals of the situation on both right and left. That is

why they may prove intriguing to many worldlings providing they are

both unapologetically biblical and unmistakably competent in dealing

with the things the worldlings know.

Fortunately, one does not have to be a Barthian or a self-conscious

intratextualist to do this. Reinhold Niebuhr was not, and yet he was a

great practitioner of the art. Perhaps he would have succeeded even

better in illuminating the American situation of his day if he had been

more adept in the ancient exegetical tradition which Barth renewed. Be

that as it may, we can take him as well as Barth as partial guides. It is bygoing about its own business of redescribing the world in biblical


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376 Theology Today

right and professedly prophetic ones on the left. It is thus by theapparently plodding but intrinsically absorbing task of working with theBible in one hand and the newspaper in the other (to use Barth's phrase)that the theologian can best contribute to church and society.

There is much more that could be said. As for me, I belong to the moreCatholicor, ifyou prefer, medievalwing of the Reformation. I thinkBarth misread the Bible on the sacraments, on the church, and, despitethe good things which he had to say about John XXIII, on the papacy.These differences, however, do not for a moment detract from hisachievement in almost single-handedly recovering for theology thatancient understanding of the Bible as matrix and norm in which thechurch can be renewed, and in which Christians can learn to agree todisagree, not in permissive pluralism, but within the single and authori

tative universe of biblical discourse which is the Word ofGod. It is onlyby conscious and assiduous work from within that biblical universe,quite apart from whether one follows Barth's own descriptions ofit, thatpostliberal theology can perform its task.


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^ s

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Barth and Textuality