The Church as Israel and Israel as the Church: An Examination of Karl Barth's Exegesis of Romans 9:1–5 in "The Epistle to the Romans" and "Church Dogmatics" 2/2

Abstract

Abstract The prefaces to Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans highlight Barth's desire for his commentary to be judged as a genuine piece of biblical interpretation. Likewise, in the preface to Church Dogmatics 2/2, Barth suggests that the viability of his reworking of the Reformed doctrine of election stands or falls on its strength as a reading of Scripture. Recent interpreters of Barth have rightly attempted to take seriously Barth's desire to be assessed as a biblical interpreter and have begun to engage his theological exegesis accordingly. Building on that work and pressing beyond it to look at a specific textual test case, this article (1) sketches Barth's reading of Rom 9:1–5 in The Epistle to the Romans, (2) compares the reading there to the later treatment of this text in the Church Dogmatics 2/2, and (3) suggests a model for understanding Barth's exegetical efforts that avoids both dismissing him as an "eisegete" as well as unqualifiedly praising his interpretive efforts. The concept of the "double agency" of biblical text and theological interpreter offers a heuristic model for plotting Barth's widely differing readings of Rom 9:1–5 on a spectrum of divergent realizations of the semantic potential of the biblical text. In the Romans commentary, the agency of the interpreter threatens to overwhelm that pf the text, while in the Church Dogmatics the agency of the biblical text exerts more obvious influence as Barth attempts to wrestle seriously with Paul's references to Israel in their historical particularity.