Book Review: Karl Barth's Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions

Abstract

Karl Barth's Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions. By Sven Ensminger. London: Bloomsbury TT $29.95 (paper).Scholars working in the theology of religions field often pigeonhole Karl Barth as an exclusivist, because of his insistence on Jesus Christ as the norm and source of revelation and salvation. As Sven Ensminger notes, the pluralist John Hick, who conceives the various world religions as spokes pointing toward one transcendent reality, dismisses Barths corpus as a sublime bigotry inimical to interreligious dialogue and a global ethic (p. 60). Less tendentiously, perhaps, Gavin D'Costa reads Barth as inconsistently combining elements of exclusivism, pluralism, and inclusivism (the view that non-Christians might come to a saving faith in Jesus outside of an explicit faith commitment).Ensminger deconstructs such stereotypes through a careful and close reading of Barth's work. The Swiss Protestant theologian, he notes, never developed a complete theology of religions, despite a stated desire to do so one day. Consequently, interpreters have had to sift through seemingly isolated passages in Barths oeuvre to interpret his approach to non-Christian faiths. A trenchant critique of religion as a source of idolatry (in Church Dogmatics 1/2, par. 17), receives much attention-so much so, in fact, that Barth has sometimes been read as advocating a religionless Christianity similar to the proposal in Bonhoeffer s prison letters. Ensminger, however, drawing upon recent scholarship on this passage, reads it primarily as an intraecclesial critique of a Christian hubris that would cling to revelation as a birthright, rather than as a gift fostering charity toward religious outsiders. Also frequent grist for the mill is a passage from the later Barth (CD TV/3, par. 69) that discerns parables of die kingdom in secular culture-lesser lights outside the church that reflect Christ, the one true light.The key problem, as Ensminger ably demonstrates, is that interpreters have read Barth too narrowly and too selectively, focusing on diese two passages, along with Barths occasional comments on other religious traditions-for example, a fascinating excursus on the role of grace in Amida Buddhism. If one would engage Barth's interpretations of religion, one must read his work as a whole. To that end, Ensminger offers four chapters that deal, respectively, with Barth's doctrine of Christ die one revealer, the foundation for all that follows; his interpretation of the role of religion as the human face ingredient to die reception of revelation; his tiieological anthropology diat stresses the solidarity of all people in sin and grace; and his revisionist account of election as embracing all people, whether they realize it yet or not. …