Spirit of God and the Christian Life by Kim JinHyok

Author:Kim, JinHyok [JinHyok Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4514-7981-2
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2014-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

In other words, morality demands the reality of the objects of belief, not vice versa. For Kant, rational faith has a moral foundation. Consequently, theology, which had been traditionally a fundamental source of morality, now needed its fundamental beliefs (couched as dogmas, metaphysics, or theoretical reason) to be grounded in practical reason.

Barth’s praise of Kant’s limit of reason contrasted with his sharp criticism of Kant’s view of faith, which opened a way to interpret religion as a necessary phenomenon of reason.[21] Nevertheless, one should not interpret Barth’s appropriation of Kant in a dualistic way, assuming that he endorsed Kant’s critique of pure reason while rejecting that of practical reason. He also had his reservations about Kant’s view of pure reason: “there is only a small step from Kant’s critique of reason to Schleiermacher’s theology of immediacy.”[22] Barth praised Kant’s appeal to morality because, along with other eighteenth-century thinkers, Kant proposed that “Christianity is not teaching, but life.”[23] This crucial lesson animated Barth to see the inseparable relationships between dogmatics and ethics, while learning from Kant’s view of pure reason the importance of setting the boundaries of reason.

Although Barth’s attitude toward Kant is never straightforward, he was certain of the one fact that whatever one does as a theologian after Kant is done in this great philosopher’s shadow. Accordingly, Barth categorized three possible ways of doing theology after Kant.[24] The first possibility is to construct a theology within a Kantian framework, represented by neo-Kantian Ritschlians. The second method is to extend the Kantian framework, and Schleiermacher was a notable example of this approach. The third way is to offer an alternative to the Kantian framework, as shown by Hegel. Because of his rejection of the Richtlian theology, Barth paid special attention to the last two models.

First of all, Barth claimed that what dominated nineteenth-century theology was, in fact, the voice of Schleiermacher, because his theology laid the foundation for seeking “the truth of God in [one’s] own Christian consciousness or in history.”[25] As a result, when the nineteenth century talked about revelation, it actually talked about humanity.[26] In Barth’s eyes, the psychological side of Schleiermacher found its culmination in Feuerbach’s slogan that “the secret of theology is nothing else than anthropology,”[27] and the historical aspect in Strauss’s claim that “the inquiry must first be made whether in fact, and to what extent, the ground on which we stand in the gospel is historical.”[28] Though Feuerbach and Strauss, each having studied with both Schleiermacher and Hegel, ultimately identified themselves with Hegel, it is interesting that Barth did not align them with Hegel but Schleiermacher.[29]

Secondly, unlike his criticism of Schleiermacher’s framework, Barth’s initial response to Hegel is strikingly positive. In contrast to other nineteenth-century thinkers, Hegel showed that theology should begin with truth, not anthropology, and that truth is not a set of cognitive information but a self-revealing movement.[30] This is the reason Barth categorized Feuerbach and Strauss not under the rubric of Hegel, but under Schleiermacher. Indeed Barth’s theology shares with Hegel’s

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