Karl Barth: Against Hegemony

Karl Barth: Against Hegemony. By Timothy J. Gorringe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 313 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The explosion of secondary works on Karl Barth seems to have no limit, and this book by Timothy Gorringe is one of the best. While fully engaged with the wide range of Barth studies, Gorringe agrees with F. W Marquardt that the key to Barth's thought is the fact that he never really broke with the socialist aspirations of his youth. Gorringe makes this case better than any other English-speaking scholar by placing Barth in the context of radical political thought. The result is a brilliant exploration of Barth's work that transcends the genre of exposition.

Gorringe sets the tone for his book by comparing Barth's rejection of all worldly powers to Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Gorringe's approach suggests that we can tell what kind of theologian Barth is by imagining the company he could have kept. All of the comparisons Gorringe makes are with leftist thinkers, from Leibnecht to Lenin. Usually he draws only a loose network of associations, but sometimes he makes bolder claims: "The doctrine of God thus plays an analogous role in the Dogmatics to Marx's famous vision of liberated labour in Capital" (p. 147).

Most helpfully, Gorringe surveys Barth's work not just chronologically but also in terms of his political and social context. Barth's first edition of Romans was written during the optimism of socialist revolution and revised during the beginning of Weimar chaos. His theory of ethics as obedience to divine command needs to be understood as a response to the rise of fascism. His great theology of creation, written between 1942 and 1951, is a bold attempt to affirm that doctrine in spite of Auschwitz.

Gorringe produces some startling parallels, such as the suggestion that Barth was working out a dialectic of the Enlightenment similar to Adorno and Horkheimer's. And he is sensitive to the fact that Barth frequently rejected the idea that theology can be wedded to a political ideology. Nevertheless, Gorringe goes too far in surrounding Barth with a host of radicals, an ironic constraint on this thinker of freedom. Certainly, Barth's theology always had political implications, some more obvious than others. But an implication is not a necessary conclusion. True, Barth was no idealist. He was a thoroughly modern thinker, immersed in the problems of freedom and history. But for Barth God should make a difference for politics by calling into question the very possibility of all ideologies.

Some day the history of theology in the twentieth century will be viewed as a series of mistaken and inadequate interpretations of Karl Barth. That our resistance to Barth is weakening is a measure of the declining influence of a certain kind of humanism on modern theology. Just as existential theology-- long since expired-represents the culmination of one prong of this humanism, liberation theology-with its rapidly disintegrating synthesis of Marxism and theology-represents the other prong. In the aftermath of the socialist ideal, Barth can provide clues for a genuine theology of politics. The question is this: is his critique of hegemony an expression of leftist dreams of a stateimposed egalitarianism or is it a fundamental questioning of all political theology, and thus a revaluation of the very polarization of left and right?

Gorringe wants to use Barth to revive liberation theology, which would do more good for that movement than for Barth's legacy. This reading of Barth is too narrow, but Gorringe is right that Barth leads not to political quietism but instead to the demand to rethink politics from the perspective of God's own action in the world.

STEPHEN H. WEBB

Wabash College Crawfordsville, Indiana

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2001
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