The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth
Alan J. Torrance & Andrew B. Torrance
Eerdmans (2023). 393 pp.
Alan and Andrew Torrance’s book Beyond Immanence is a collaboration between father and son, the former having previously published on Barth and the latter on Kierkegaard. The major premise of the work is that Kierkegaard and Barth demonstrate a clear theological trajectory—the Kierkegaard-Barth Trajectory (KBT)—that informs how theology engages culture. Both theologians developed and furthered this trajectory over and against the idealisms of their day, which were beset with immanentist tendencies. A minor premise of the book is that the mature Barth’s divergence from Kierkegaard was misguided and based on a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard’s thought. Had Barth understood Kierkegaard better, he would have realized that Kierkegaard had the resources that Barth thought he had to find in other places.
Chapters 1 and 2 are mirror images of chapters 3 and 4, with the first two considering Kierkegaard’s cultural context and then his theological rebuke of his culture and the second two considering Barth’s cultural context and then his own constructive theology. In chapter 1, Torrance and Torrance locate Kierkegaard against the backdrop of Danish Christendom. Kierkegaard’s work emerges as a criticism of Danish Christianity which, influenced by Hegelian idealism, conflated God’s agency with historical progress and therefore the church with Danish society.
Chapter 2 explores the “anti-Hegelian” elements in Kierkegaard’s work, specifically the infinite qualitative distinction between the Creator and his creation, Jesus Christ’s role as divine incognito, the role of paradox in Christology, and the mediation of Christ. Against the immanent theologies of his day, Kierkegaard believed that God’s transcendence meant that we could not know him unless he made himself known to us, which he does in the incarnation.
Paralleling the first chapter, chapter 3 explores the theological and cultural context in which Barth’s theology emerges at the beginning of the twentieth century Germany. In Barth’s context, Christianity is beholden to neo-Kantian idealism, reducing the theological task to what can be empirically known. For Barth, such a priori assumptions about what can and cannot be true amounts to the captivity of theology to Enlightenment rationality. The turn towards immanence is particularly concerning for Barth in his own context because of the role that nationalism and civil religion plays in the German church struggle.
In the fourth chapter, Torrance and Torrance cast Barth’s vision for a free theology, i.e. a theology that is not captive to Enlightenment presuppositions. Free theology always begins at the beginning and then “thinks after,” moving from God’s self-disclosure towards interpretation. For Barth, the beginning is the resurrection as it is testified to in the Bible. Free theology is the task of the church. As such, it is both free from beginning with cultural presuppositions and free for cultural engagement and academic dialogue with other disciplines.
Chapter 5 moves from the parallels between Kierkegaard and Barth towards a clear account of how Barth’s theology appropriates Kierkegaard. In Barth’s early theology, especially Romans II, Barth is especially influenced by the anti-Hegelian concepts that were introduced in chapter 2: the infinite qualitative distinction, the divine incognito, and the moment especially. First, infinite qualitative distinction challenges the immanentism and natural theology that is prevalent in post-Enlightenment Protestant theology. Because God and humans exist on infinitely different qualitative terms, there is no possibility of an analogy of being between humans and God. Knowledge of God is utterly impossible unless God does something from his end to reveal himself to humans. Second, God does just that in the incarnation. In the incarnation, the vertical insects the horizontal; God intersects human history as the “divine incognito” and reveals himself to humans. Third, this intersection of the vertical and the horizontal—of time and eternity—is “the moment.” The moment, in Kierkegaardian terms, is a decisive point in time when God encounters an individual in such a way as to deliver them into truth, i.e. into a relationship with him. For Barth, the moment is best described as God’s self-revelation that he is with us and for us in the person of Jesus and the gracious response that it elicits.
At the end of chapter 5, the minor premise of the book comes to full term. All along, Torrance and Torrance point out the places where Barth did not have to depart from Kierkegaard. Chapter 2 presents Kierkegaard’s theology as Christocentric, moving beyond his negative assessment of culture Christianity towards a positive Christological account of the mediation of Christ. At the end of chapter 3, Torrance and Torrance present a case for Barth as Kierkegaard’s theological heir over and against the presumed heir, Bultmann. Bultmann is generally supposed to be Kierkegaard’s theological heir on account of his existentialism; however, his dependence on neo-Kantian idealism means that his conception of faith is one that requires “fictional living,” or living “as if.” In contrast, Barth, like Kierkegaard before him, believes that God really encounters humans and that humans can really know God. For this reason, Barth is a better fit for the title of Kierkegaard’s theological heir and their combined work comprises a theological trajectory—the KBT. Finally, chapter 5 concludes this line of reasoning by exploring how Barth eventually abandons Kierkegaard’s language of paradox because of concerns that paradox was a purely negative concept. Torrance and Torrance argue that Barth misunderstood Kierkegaard’s theology; otherwise, he would have seen that he and Kierkegaard continued to share the same Christological commitments.
The major premise—that the KBT demonstrates a theological engagement with culture that overcomes the problems created by immanence in idealism—comes to term in chapter 6. Thus far, Torrance and Torrance have made a compelling case that Kierkegaard and Barth share several basic theological convictions. Chapter 6 puts the KBT side-by-side with the immanentist theological trajectory that it seeks to overcome. The KBT is fleshed out in three main theses: (1) God establishes fellowship with humanity in a unique act of self-revelation, (2) this event has decisive significance for how we think and talk about God, and (3) the fellowship established between God and humans reconciles and redeems humankind, establishing an on-going relationship (pp. 243–44). The KBT is opposed by an immanentist trajectory that takes its starting point as the nature grace model. From this starting point, it is assumed that all humans have universal access to knowledge of the moral law. The incarnation is not a unique act of God’s self-revelation. It stands alongside of other revelations that inform our view of God and the world he created. According to Torrance and Torrance, these competing trajectories are on full display in the Barth-Brunner debate over natural theology.
Barth’s insistence upon the freedom of theology (ch. 4) means that theologians must refuse to give a priori consideration to ideological, philosophical, epistemological, or pragmatic concerns. Emil Brunner thought this to be a mistake because he worried that it foreclosed on the possibility of apologetics. For Brunner, Christians engaged the secular world by finding a “point of contact” that served as common ground. In Brunner’s case, this was the imago Dei. Humans, created in the image of God, share a natural capacity to know God in some natural way. Grounding his position in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, Brunner believed that he was on firm theological ground. To the contrary, Torrance and Torrance argue that, influenced by modern theology, he reversed the direction of his thought in a manner that Aquinas and Calvin would not have recognized. The nature-grace model in Aquinas still gives priority to God over and against contingent creation. Further, Brunner’s interpretation of Calvin’s duplex cognitio (two-fold knowledge of God) and sensus divinitatis (sense of the divine) fail to recognize that Calvin’s thought qualifies these capacities by the clause “if Adam had not sinned.” The immanent theologies of post Enlightenment Protestantism lose sight of the effects of sin and reverse the directionality of their thinking, working from creation to the creator instead of from the creator to his creation. Barth’s theology, in contrast, is a grace-nature theology, moving from God’s self-revelation towards knowledge of creation and ethics.
The implications of the KBT are manifold. The primary implication is there are not other sources of revelation alongside Jesus Christ. The danger of Brunner’s position was evident in the claim of the German Christians that God’s plan for human history was being worked out in the destiny of the German people. This line of thinking is repeated in the historical examples of American slavery and segregation, South African Apartheid, and generally wherever natural reason is used to make arguments regarding race, gender, and sexuality. In these cases, cultural assumptions are often rendered “natural” and therefore divinely ordained even as they produce competing claims. Both the Declaration of Independence and Apartheid South Africa are cut from the same epistemic cloth.
Chapter 7 briefly explores how the KBT holds its ground among contemporary theological and philosophical trends. First, the KBT helps biblical scholars and theologians to avoid the “theologistic fallacy,” or the tendency to interpret Scripture historically in its own context and then try to theologize from the text to our own context in a manner that often proves to be arbitrary. Because the KBT claims that God reveals himself in Jesus Christ and in scripture as it attests to Jesus Christ, contemporary readers do not have to work to make God contemporaneous. God bridges that gap himself. Second, Torrance and Torrance point to the rise of externalist accounts of epistemology and semantics in recent philosophy as examples of compatible ways of engaging culture without compromising prior theological convictions about God’s self-revelation.
In sum, the argument of the KBT is that appeals to knowledge of God from claims regarding God’s immanence in creation are problematic because they reverse the direction of interpretation. Instead of working from God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ towards knowledge of God in creation, they seek knowledge of God from creation directly and then constrain God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ by what they presume to know about God from other sources. In Kierkegaardian terms, this is an epistemological problem to the extent that it repeats a basically Socratic understanding of knowledge and makes Jesus’ teachings more determinative than Jesus himself. This is a theological trajectory that stretches as far back as Athanasius and runs through Calvin.
Beyond Immanence is a crucial contribution to contemporary Protestant scholarship. At a time when there is a resurgence of interest in scholasticism and the natural law tradition in Reformed thought, Torrance and Torrance challenge theologians to clarify the direction of their thought. If you operate from a nature-grace model, then you are forced to clarify not just what you know but the terms on which you know what you know. Thomists and neo-Calvinists, who will no doubt disagree with Torrance and Torrance’s thesis, will at least be challenged to parse out the ways in which their thinking is infected with Hegelian or neo-Kantian idealism and its immanentist epistemological commitments. The church as a whole will be challenged to rethink how it engages the public square without ceding too much ground for the sake of finding common ground. Pastor Theologians will play a crucial role in helping Christians clarify their Christological commitments over and against competing sources that claim to know who God is, who were are, and how we are to live.
David Hunsicker (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a pastor at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Dunedin, FL. He is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
