Christianity and Barthianism

As noted in a post earlier his week, Barth sees Kant’s philosophical program as an opening for the biblical theologian to do his own thing on his own basis by his own methods, without paying much of any attention to reason. Milbank wonders if this doesn’t leave a “certain liberal residue, a certain humanistic deposit.” For Barth, it is possible to “recognize certain features of the created order – whether ontological or epistemological – in their pure finitude, without reference to any ratio of finite and infinite, as well as certain features of the fallen created order, which it nonetheless fails to decipher as fallen.”

Milbank goes on,

“The danger here is, as is well exemplified in Barth, that if we fail to redefine being and knowledge theologically, theological difference, the radical otherness of God, will never bee expressible in any way without idolatrously reducing it to our finite human categories. Hence Barth is confined to a Christomonism, in which Christocentricity reduces to a focus on an enormous black hole, so radically other that it cannot be at all pictured or conceptualized as the new characteristic practice of the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And, worse still, Barth’s continued and heterodox reduction of Christ’s personal, and expressively imaging, character to a mere conveyance of the Paternal will betrays the fact that he projects God as the supreme instance of what a post-Kantian philosophy, as Fichte correctly realised, must logically understand human existence to be: namely, a willed positing of reality without other constraining grounds of necessity. Thus, while the Barthian claim is that post-Kantian philosophy liberates theology to be theological, the inner truth of his theology is that by allowing legitimacy to a methodologically atheist philosophy, he finishes by construing God on the model, ironically, of man without God.”