Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Barth: A Chapter in the Jewish Reception of Dialectical Theology
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/688955
ISSN1549-6538
Autores Tópico(s)Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeFranz Rosenzweig and Karl Barth: A Chapter in the Jewish Reception of Dialectical Theology*Daniel HerskowitzDaniel HerskowitzUniversity of OxfordPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of the way in which Jews understood and reacted to dialectical theology, already in the 1920s and 1930s in Weimar Germany, by approaching the instance of the frequent conjunction of Franz Rosenzweig with Karl Barth.1 By examining the manner in which Rosenzweig was understood and situated vis-à-vis Barth in the immediate period after the publication of their respective notable works, Der Stern der Erlösung and Der Römerbrief, this article demonstrates that Jewish thinkers participated in, and responded to, the major theological dispute of the time, namely, the dispute over the promises and perils of the so-called dialectical or crisis theology. * * *The appearance of Karl Barth's explication of Paul's Epistle to the Romans was an event of great significance in the theological landscape of Weimar Germany.2 Breaking from the neo-Kantian and liberal doctrines in which he was reared, in this work Barth attacked the liberal tendency to situate the divine in the realm of history, subjectivity, and the ethical. Formulating his thought through strict oppositions, Barth stressed the fundamental conflict between the temporal and the eternal, the immanent and the transcendent, the sinful and the holy, the divine and the worldly. God, in this account, is utterly transcendent, inscrutable, and contradictory to all human faculties and fields of cultural endeavors. Barth's famous statement best illustrates the core of his theology: "If I have a 'system' then it consists in the fact that I keep what Kierkegaard has called the 'infinite qualitative difference' between time and eternity consistently in mind. God is in heaven and you on earth."3 Not only is humanity cast in a world bereft of God, Barth taught, but God is the negation of the world. In the thundering tone characteristic of this period in his writing, Barth proclaims that our overall ignorance of God perfectly reflects our own condition: "the only thing we are certain of, that which we can demonstrate, is always only the negation, the negativity of the human."4 Alongside the view of Deus absconditus, Barth offered an account of revelation as a vertical, factum brutum eruption from beyond, disrupting the fallen human existence. Outside of revelation, we know nothing of God. It can be said that Barth's entire theology at the time pivots on the insight that "at the beginning of all knowledge of God stands not human self-acknowledgement but God's own knowing, man's being known by God, that is, revelation."5Matching its penchant for binaries, the responses to the Römerbrief were as fierce as they were divided. His theology, with its uncompromising attitude toward divine transcendence and aseity, directly responded to the spiritual needs of the time and stirred much enthusiasm. Reflecting the postwar disillusioned with the liberal, humanistic, historicist spirit that animated the nineteenth-century theological and intellectual climate, Barth's depiction of a world completely fallen away from God gave voice to the ubiquitous sense of despair and overall deterioration that gripped many. Together with a group of theologians such as Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Friedrich Gogarten, and Eduard Thurneysen, a theological movement was established, which had a huge impact on the theologically inclined younger generation in Germany.6Conversely, the radicalism of Barth's view was met by a rising chorus of detractors who perceived it as too one-sided; the decisive disjunction between God and creation was taken to be immensely problematic from a Christian point of view. Indeed, many resisted what they found to be the close semblance between Barth's theological scheme and Marcion's heretical Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott.7 This charge, hardly uncommon at the time, was voiced most notably by Adolf von Harnack, who protested that Barth's Marcionism was negated to the Christian message. "You condemn all Christian pedagogy," Harnack accused, "and sever, like Marcion, every link between faith and the human. In my view you have the example of Jesus against you."8 Barth came under attack also by some of the preeminent theologians and New Testament scholars of the day—Protestant and Catholic alike—who spotted marks of Gnosticism and Marcionism already in the first edition of the Römerbrief, and even more so in the second edition.9 While Barth would admit the comparison was warranted, he would nevertheless conclude, with much justification, that "at the crucial points these agreements break down."10 And yet eventually, also many of his theological allies, such as Paul Tillich, Helmut Thielicke, Emil Brunner, Rudolph Bultmann, and even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, found in his framework an almost impossible emphasis on negativity. Although profoundly divergent, these theologians, each in his own way and for his specific purposes, expressed the view that for all Barth's talk of paradoxes and dialectics, his program was actually a one-sided dialectic of exaggerated transcendence that was not only detrimental to theology but also ultimately alien to the Christian message. * * *Around the same time Barth wrote the first edition of his Romans, Franz Rosenzweig experienced the writing spree that would give birth to his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption. Yet it is more than this chronological fact that led recent studies to note the kinship of intellectual horizon and theological agenda between both thinkers. Considering that Rosenzweig's thinking emerged out of a critical response to the historicism and compromise of God's transcendence that marked the theological efforts of nineteenth-century liberal theology, Amos Funkenstein noted that "Rosenzweig's later theological position was … analogous to Karl Barth's."11 Randi Rashkover, in her expansive book-length comparative study of the two men, regards Barth to be Rosenzweig's "most methodologically similar contemporary."12 David Myers contextualizes Rosenzweig's antihistoricism and primacy of revelation with the surging Weimarian Kulturpessimissmus that was the backdrop of Barth's theology of crisis, as well as with the Offenbarungsglaube of Rosenzweig's converted friend Eugen Rosenstock and cousins Hans and Rudolph Ehrenberg, which influenced him greatly (and predated Barth's Romans by a few years).13 Evidence for this can be found in Rosenzweig's early 1914 essay "Atheistische Theologie," where he expressed dismay for the pervasive tendency to "avoid the idea of revelation."14 In the letter to Rudolph Eherenberg from November 18, 1917, that has come to be known as the Urzelle of the Star, Rosenzweig declares revelation as his "long sought-after philosophical Archimedean point."15 The centrality of revelation is manifested in the Star as well, both structurally—it is discussed in the second book, the heart of the Star—and thematically. Rosenzweig begins his explorations with three irreducible and categorically distinct elements: God, World, and Man. In this initial state, God is completely distinct from Man and World, and Man lives solipsistically in an immanent realm completely bereft of God. This radical gulf between God and Man is breached, in Rosenzweig's narration, by the shattering event of revelation.16 These recent studies, to be sure, did not settle for simply pointing at affinities. As Myers argues, it would be "facile to insist on total harmony between him and his Protestant contemporaries."17 Michael Morgan and Paul Franks note that in some of his writings Rosenzweig "has in mind recent developments in Christian theology and especially the emergence of Barth and radical theology," but his reaction is that of "a genuine worry with Barth and his disciples."18 And similarly, Samuel Moyn sketches their shared intellectual background and itinerary but also stresses Rosenzweig's critical response to Barth.19Yet the juxtaposition and comparison of Barth and Rosenzweig did not surface only in recent scholarship. As we shall see, the juxtaposition and comparison were made already in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany. Indeed, it is of great significance that the association between the two thinkers was first made by Rosenzweig himself. * * *"For many years I was a Barthian myself," Rosenzweig wrote to Martin Buber in 1923, "but almost ten years ago Rosenstock surgically extracted my Barthianism from me."20 The following year, in July 16, 1924, he refers to this early position in a similar fashion, describing to Buber "the entire field of views in which I then lived," before the momentous Umkehr of his life, as "a kind of Barthianism."21 Obviously, for Rosenzweig to be a Barthian per se ten years prior to 1923 is impossible. In 1913 Barth was still bound to the clutches of liberal theology, and the book that would make him a theological referent was yet to be written. But as Benjamin Pollock has helpfully shown, by "my Barthianism" Rosenzweig is most likely denoting his early Marcionist standpoint. Describing his stance from around 1910 up until July 7, 1913, Rosenzweig states that "at the time I was on the best road to Marcionitism [Marcionitismus]."22 In this early stage of his intellectual biography, Rosenzweig held a dualistic worldview that denied the moral and spiritual status of creation and posited an alien God accessible through revelation alone. Redemption, according to this Gnostic position, consists above all in the redemption from the world. The noted event in which Rosenstock "surgically extracted" these glaring views is the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, the momentous event of "conversion" that eventually led Rosenzweig toward Judaism and, effectively, to the philosophical system unfolded in the Star. It is this memorable nightly conversation that brought Rosenzweig to break with his Gnostic outlook and to conclude that "God created the world and [is] not just the God of revelation."23 Thus what can be learned from Rosenzweig's statements to Buber is that from his perspective, any purported kinship with Karl Barth pertains to the philosophical convictions that he surely held, but which ultimately had to be overcome for the Star to become possible. Indeed, referring to the Star, Rosenzweig would claim that "so little could I have written it before 1913 when I myself was still a Marcionist."24 Importantly, by dubbing his early views "Barthianism," Rosenzweig exposes something of the way he perceived Barth's theological program: as a form of Marcionism.As Pollock illustrates, the Star is precisely a rejoinder to the Marcionist worldview. In his words, "the Star elaborates what may be best understood … as the most compelling metaphysical alternative to Gnostic dualism, a metaphysical doctrine that responds to the same concerns expressed in Gnosticism, but which resolves such concerns through dialectical development rather than static opposition."25 According to this reading, the first section of the Star manifests an overall Gnostic position—the three basic elements are presented as utterly distinct and isolated. This state of separation is ultimately shattered, and the remainder of the book is dedicated to the articulation of the relations between God and World through creation, between God and Man through revelation, and between Man and World through redemption. The break from the Gnostic vision in the Star is exemplified not only through highlighting the relational notions of creation, revelation, and redemption but also by the fact that these relational moments themselves are interlinked. The eruptive, miraculous event of revelation has a decisive impact on the World by unveiling its true nature as creation. In turn revelation is disclosed as grounded and proleptically already present in creation. While originating from a chartless distance, in some way, revelation already belongs in the world, in creation, by way of prophetic promise. Similarly, the redemptive future is anticipated in revelation. Redemption is not achieved therefore by overcoming or transcending the world but rather by human effort in the world, toward its fulfillment and the fulfillment of the other nodes of Man and, above all, of God. Ultimately the geometrical shape of the star of David—the star of redemption—is construed by a reconciliation and self-fulfillment of the separated coordinates of God, World, and Man, linked together by creation, revelation, and redemption, themselves interconnected. The Star then holds a confutation to Rosenzweig's initial Gnostic opposition between God and the World. The All, in Rosenzweig's vocabulary, is not torn by an unsurmountable dualism but is rather a plurality developing toward a definitive unity.Furthermore, in contrast to Marcion's demand of Christianity to forfeit all ties with the Old Testament and its zealous deity, Rosenzweig extends an anti-Marcionist position according to which Judaism and Christianity have a shared mission in the economy of redemption. Their complementing roles are illustrated by the image of the star—Judaism is its burning fire, Christianity its ranging rays.26 Thus, just as the identification of the God of creation with the God of revelation responds to the Gnostic position that differentiates between the two, so the purported roles ascribed to the Jews and Christians reflect a response to the demand to cut the ties between the two. Judaism needs Christianity to successfully spread the message of God to the world and guard it from its tendencies toward detachment, and Christianity, with its double parentage of Judaism and paganism, inherently runs the risk of falling back into Marcionism, and hence needs Jews to uphold its monotheistic proclamation. "It was always the hidden enemies of Christianity, from the Gnostics to the present day, who wanted to deprive it of its 'Old Testament,'" Rosenzweig asserts.27 "And as that ever-present struggle of the Gnostic shows, it is the Old Testament, which enables Christianity to withstand its own danger."28 Thus the overcoming of Gnosticism is a dynamic reflected in the different stages recorded in the Star.It should not, however, be understood from this interpretation that the Star is to be read as a theological rejoinder to Barth's exegetical work on Romans. As stated, the compositions of the Star and the first edition of Romans were almost parallel, and the second edition was published three years after Rosenzweig's magnum opus. Yet it is clear that the Star possesses a response to and an overcoming of the Marcionist outlook that Rosenzweig will shortly identify with Barth's theology. Moreover, as we shall now see, in the following years, and to a large degree throughout the 1920s as a whole, Rosenzweig directly confronted Barth's radical theological positions, most often by drawing on his earlier formulations in the Star. * * *In a 1922 letter, Rosenzweig confides to Buber that as he commenced with the project of translating ninety-five poems of the great medieval thinker and poet Jehuda Halevei, he began to read the second edition of Barth's Romans "with admiration for the ability to make so much out of pure negation."29 Rosenzweig, of course, was not unfamiliar with negation. His methodology in the first section of the Star consists of the reduction of each element of God, Man, and World to its infinitesimal nothingness. But this move is followed by a careful reconstruction of the elements through affirming the not-nothing and negating the nothing of the being of each element. Adding to this remark to Buber, Rosenzweig raises the question as to whether Barth "still in fact acknowledges Christ and revelation in the first place?," since "his God, whose only role is to constantly deny itself, must still recognize and protect also against this danger." Rosenzweig questions the commensurability of Deus absconditus and Deus revelatus in such a radically negative theological project. "If Barth is conscious of what he is doing at this point," Rosenzweig determines, "he should arrive at a more versatile concept of God," one that is able to uphold some form of affirmation or positivity.30 Rosenzweig, like many of Barth's Christian retractors and colleagues, found Barth's conception of God all too one-dimensional and exclusively negative.But alongside this limited conception of God, Rosenzweig also found its schematization somewhat dissatisfactory. In a fascinating comment, Rosenzweig compares Kierkegaard with the dialectical theologians and inquires, "why is there such a different feel in Kierkegaard than in Barth and Gogarten?"31 It is, he suggests,surely not merely because he is the original and they are the copies, because there are so brilliant copies, that it is indeed worth to look at them in themselves. But behind every paradox of Kierkegaard one feels the biographical Absurda, and therefore one must believe him. While behind the Barthian colossal negations one feels nothing other than the wall on which they are painted, and this wall is whitewashed—a very immaculate and well-ordered life. And therefore this painting is credible [glaubhaft] to me only as a painting. Not incredible [unglaubhaft], you understand. But still just a casual credibility [Glaubenhaftigkeit]. This thinking is not transparent, everything is already in it, and therefore, nothing more behind it.32Rosenzweig recognizes Barth's and Gogarten's debt to Kierkegaard but nevertheless emphasizes that the personal existential anguish expressed by Kierkegaard grants his "infinite qualitative difference" the genuineness that is required to see it as it is—a truly incredible position of faith. Barth's "colossal negation," on the other hand, appears to be the result of a logical deduction or the requirements of dogma, but lacks the tormented lived-experience of absurdum that this doctrine implicates, and is therefore merely credible.A more elaborated confrontation with the Barthian position is presented in the illuminating comments Rosenzweig added to his translation of Halevi's poem יה אנה אמצאך (God, where shall I find You?), which he rendered, significantly, Der Fern-Und-Nahe. As his comments disclose, Rosenzweig situates this hymn in the context of the current theological controversy over the Marcionist tradition of which he takes Barth to be a representative. Introducing what he considers its central theme, Rosenzweig explains that this hymn "is animated by one particular thought, but it is the last thought that human thinking can grasp, and the first that Jewish thinking grasps: that the faraway God is none other than the near God, the unknown God none other than the revealed one, the Creator none other than the Redeemer. … This thought has been repeatedly discovered anew in the sphere of revelation; and inside and outside that sphere has been forgotten over and over throughout the centuries, from Paul and Marcion to Harnack and Barth. Always discovered anew, always forgotten anew."33 This statement draws on the position Rosenzweig reached in the wake of the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and that is explicated in much complexity in the Star—that "God created the world and [is] not just the God of revelation," as the misconception of the Gnostic dualism between the near and remote God posits. But it is especially worth noticing that Rosenzweig defines the conception of a Fern-Und-Nahe God as "Jewish thinking." This "Jewish" theological understanding is contrasted, and culled as a reply, to Barth's dualism. By drawing a distinction between human thinking and Jewish thinking, Rosenzweig frames Barthianism, the current torchbearer of the Marcion tradition, as still far from reaching the fulfillment of human thought—which Jewish thinking holds from the outset: the unity of the God of creation and the God of redemption, of the transcendent and the immanent. Echoing the view in the Star regarding the universal "Judaizing" of the world in redemption, Rosenzweig insinuates here that the last human thought will, eventually, be the "Jewish" thought of the unison of God.The problem with the tradition culminating in Barth, Rosenzweig continues, is that it is guilty of making the very mistake it accuses all other theologies to have made, namely, the error of determining God's attributes from our own limited knowledge. "We theologians cannot help but make prescriptions for God's conduct out of our knowledge," Rosenzweig argues. "We know that God can be known only in His presence, and at once we make out of this a law of Him: that He does not permit Himself to be known in His absence." However, by articulating this law, we inadvertently but nevertheless intrinsically accede to the pretense of regulating what can or cannot be said of God. "In truth, however, Rosenzweig asserts, "we could easily leave it to Him as to when and how and what of Himself He wants to be known."34 This rebuke is directed against Barth's dogmatism, which seems to force God into its negative formulations. As mentioned above, Rosenzweig's 1914 "Atheistic Theology" is an indictment of the theological trends that highlighted the historical and the ethical only to neglect what he called "the offensive idea of revelation." However, in these remarks on Halevi's poem from a decade later, Rosenzweig targets what can be seen as the opposite state of theological reflection—the state in which the offensiveness of the idea of revelation is borne out to its extreme and granted exclusive theological import. "After a long drought," Rosenzweig describes the current state of theology, "today we have a theology, mostly Protestant, that leaves nothing to be desired as to accuracy. We have it now: that God is wholly other; that to talk about him is to talk him away, that all we can tell is what his effect is on us." Rosenzweig illustrates what in his view is a distorted condition—the "result of this monstrous accuracy"—through a figurative image: "we accurate people today all stand together like children in a circle. One person asserts one accurate point: his neighbor scorns him with an even more accurate statement that this utterance was false because it was accurate. And so it goes around the circle until we arrive back at the first: the whole thing is called theology."35 The result of this ominous situation is that the efforts of theology consist in negation and denial, but little more.In his commentary on another poem by Halevi, which is part of the Yom Kippur liturgy, entitled ימינך נשא עוני and translated as Heimkehr, "Homecoming," Rosenzweig alludes to dialectical theology when he asks with respect to repentance: "Does God or does the human being take the first step? That is a real question, not, as Protestant theologians today would like to believe, a preliminary question already solved."36 The core of the matter lies, for Rosenzweig, in the fact that on the one hand, the Barthian position, according to which the first step is taken by God, is clearly true: "the human always senses his own lack of power whenever he stands before God, and thus necessarily must await and request the first step from God." And yet on the other hand—and here Rosenzweig clearly distances himself from Barth—"at the same time he hears that which he cannot help but hear: that God demands the first step from him, from the human."37 This deliberation demonstrates that for Rosenzweig, the dialectical relation between the human and God surfaces from God but yet it is not a unilateral one; the human has an essential role, her activity is necessary. This is best manifested, for Rosenzweig, in the conversation between the sinner seeking forgiveness and God, "an unending conversation" that reaches a high point in Yom Kippur in the final liturgical moment of Ne'ilah where reconciliation—homecoming—is fulfilled. "At this moment he is as near to God, as close to his throne as human beings can be," Rosenzweig muses.38 In a letter to Buber from February 14, 1923, Rosenzweig expresses his reservations with Barth's conception of God by putting to use Jewish liturgy recited over Yom Kippur, noting that "Barth and Gogarten sing the litany of the refrain מלך עליון, 'the Highest King', throughout the entire year."39 The Barthian God is always only the Highest King, but never a close God.Rosenzweig's clear discontent with Barth's theology notwithstanding, it is important to notice that he does not protest against Barth's view regarding the radical transcendence of God. Indeed, he explicitly says "I do not deny the doctrine of difference [Unterscheidungslehre]" between God and the world.40 Yet Rosenzweig identifies in Barth a unilateral dialectic prioritizing remoteness over proximity which he himself is unwilling to concede. In contrast, he promotes a bilateral dialectic wherein nearness is an essential part of the dialectic; the human-divine relationship is marked by both conjunction and disjunction.41 Describing the conversation between man and God in his comments on "Homecoming," Rosenzweig emphasizes that in it the ultimate distinction between the divine and the human is not beclouded: "the conversation between the two voices continues in that unending distance with which it began."42 And yet despite upholding this distance, Judaism also teaches relationship and contact: "When at other times God's ways are distant from human ways, the way of Israel's God and the way of his people meet at the eternally flaming Sinai. Even today, on this day [of Yom Kippur], when the Jew is wholly human, and his God is wholly Judge of the world, this bridge does not disappear from consciousness."43 For Rosenzweig, as for Barth, the stark rift between God and human is the point of departure for theological reflection; yet unlike Barth, for Rosenzweig it is not also the end point. What Rosenzweig stated in the Star with regards to the difference between negative theology and his own thinking nicely captures his contention with the Barthian perspective. Negative theology takes "the path [that] leads from an existing Aught [Etwas] to Nought [Nichts]"; however, "we do not take this path, but rather the opposite one from Nought to Aught. Our goal is not a negative concept but, on the contrary, a highly positive one."44 Divine transcendence and the unknowability of God is, indeed, firmly embraced by Rosenzweig, yet it is not taken to be the alpha and omega of the human relation to God. "Of God we know nothing," he declares in the Star. "But this not-knowing is a not-knowing of God. As such it is the beginning of our knowledge of him. The beginning, not the end."45 Moreover, as made clear in the aforementioned expositions of Halevi's hymns, the doctrine of divine transcendence does not invalidate the possibility of divine immanence. In Moyn's astute formulation, the difference between Barth and Rosenzweig is that "for Rosenzweig, in the starkest contrast to Barth, transcendence and immanence were not mutually exclusive but mutually necessary."46This point is reemphasized by Rosenzweig in an essay titled "Der Ewige: Mendelssohn und der Gottesname" from July 1929, only a few months before his untimely death. Here Rosenzweig protests against Mendelssohn's decision to translate the Tetragrammaton as "the eternal" (Der Ewige). Betraying the mark of eighteenth-century rational theology, Mendelssohn attempts to convey something of the philosophical essence of God, of "God's necessary existence" or unity. But this scholastic-like concern is alien to the biblical world, Rosenzweig insists. For the people of the Bible, not divine eternity but divine presence and encounter was of primal concern. He thus distinguishes, following Halevi once again, between the pagan god, the "God of Aristotle," and the Jewish God of the Bible, "the God of Abraham."47 In Rosenzweig's understanding, "biblical 'monotheism' does not consist in knowledge of the unity of the divine Being," as is the case with paganism, although to be sure, this "ordinary" conception is presupposed. Rather, it "knows this God in its unity with what is most personally and immediately experienceable."48 The key term for understanding Rosenzweig's perception of the biblical God is "equation" (Ineinssetzung). In his view, as already expressed in his comments on Halevi, the Jewish proclamation is the "Jewish equation of the far [fernen] with the near [nahen], the 'whole' [ganzen] with the 'particular' [eigenen]."49 It is worth noting that the translation of this essay into English renders Ineinssetzung as "fusion," which is not incorrect, although it allows a certain ambiguity regarding what is most essential in Rosenzweig's proposal.50 A unity of fusion can be understood either as the merging of two distinct elements resulting in their disintegration into a third element combining the two, or as the unity of what Rosenzweig in the Star called the relation of "and," which denotes the unison of two distinct elements into a single unity without compromising the identity of each element. The "and" of God and World, for instance, attaches the two elements, but God remains God, and World remains World. It is a unity with difference—which constitutes one of the critical insights of Rosenzweig's New Thinking. But neither of these understandings match what is proclaimed in the present article as the unity of the biblical God. Here the duality does not disappear through mutual incorporation, nor is it maintained intact side by side. Here the manifestation of duality is in truth identity. Hence rendering Ineinssetzung as "equation" seeks to avoid confusion and to stress the unity within God. It should be stressed, nevertheless, that here too Rosenzweig does not deny the radical transcendence of the divine. Rather, he a
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