Karl Barth is often identified as a neo-Kantian, or just straight up Kantian in his theological orientation (and methodology). It seems too facile to me to maintain that Barth was somehow a slavish servant of Kant, especially materially. Maybe formally, Barth could be understood to be a Kantian in certain qualified ways. But in the air he breathed to be “Kantian” or neo-Kantian would be like saying that John Calvin et al. was an Aristotelian, or Scotist for that matter. The point being, often, formalities are not the all-encompassing thing in the theological project. Ultimately, what is at stake is what gets produced materially. In other words, it is surely possible for the theologian to be influenced by some intellectual tradition, and at the same time, under the Christian revelational pressures of thought, indeed, trinitarian pressures, to retext the form (in this case, the Kantian one) in a way wherein the kerygmatic reality becomes the conditioning and driving factor even behind the form itself.
The above is rather abstract, indeed. In order, to incarnate my points with a little more flesh and blood, let’s now refer to Eberhard Busch’s discussion on these matters, as that pertains to Kant’s and Feuerbach’s deliverances of a Barthian theology and knowledge of God.
. . . In Barth’s view, what Feuerbach “rightfully objected to” was that in human religion the one who prays, the pious individual does not “get beyond what he himself has thought and experienced,” that all his “attempts to bridge the gap. . . take place within this world.” The interpretation that leads Barth to entertain Feuerbach’s critique of religion is clearly in line with Kant’s critique of the assertion that the knowledge of metaphysical truth is on the same level as experiential knowledge. Once again it is Kant in whose thought Barth finds the intellectual possibility of overcoming Feuerbach’s critique of religion. He does this by advancing the thesis that God is not a hypothesis (of man) only when he is conceived of per se as the “presupposition” (of man). Therefore “God” is not untouched by Feuerbach’s critique when he is generally understood as a metaphysical reality beyond all human hypotheses, but only when he is understood as “the origin of the crisis of all objectivity devoid of all objectivity.” After all this we may assume that Barth is especially influenced by Kant, deepened by Neo-Kantianism but also by Feuerbach’s critique, when he insists in his Epistle to the Romans that God cannot or only supposedly can be recognized as an object of experiential knowledge. And we may further assume that the same influence is in play when Barth now separates himself from Schleiermacher and his own earlier position with the thesis that God can only be “recognized” as the critical boundary of human experience.[1]
Busch, in context, is referring to the earlier younger Barth, and yet, he is also notating that the form of Kant remained continuous throughout Barth’s theological project; indeed, to the very end. So, Barth surely was a Modern theologian under these terms. But as Bruce McCormack has rightly pointed out elsewhere, Barth, just as Busch has inchoately pressed here, flipped the Kantian project on its head by thinking it through the noumenal and phenomenal being grounded in the enhypostasis of the anhypostatic Son becoming flesh in the singular person of Jesus Christ; as such, removing the odor the type of projectile dualism Kant’s theology suffered from.
Conversely, and for the purposes of this post, I think it is interesting to hear some of Busch’s commentary on Barth and his respective positioning within the modern German/Swiss theological and philosophical milieu of his day (at formative points in his own intellectual development). Further, I also think Busch’s clarification on how Barth deployed Feuerbach, even by creatively sponging the Feuerbachian critique of religion through the Kantian possibility for true transcendence, to be very helpful. I have often referred to Barth’s appeal to Feuerbach and Feuerbach’s critique of religion as self-immanent-projection; and as far as that goes (because it cannot go all the way), it is a helpful acid to place on the unhealthy aspects of a pietistic venture. But just as Barth understood—because he was a Christian of no small stature—Feuerbach and Kant were only useful propaedeutics, insofar that they could be deployed as foils against the manmade gods of the philosophers, and even the scholastics.
I’m afraid this whole post has been rather abstract. The necessary context for this offering is reliant on the reader’s own familiarity with these things. Even so, here’s the reduction: knowledge of the genuine Christian triune God is purely contingent on this God Self-disclosing Himself to and for us in the face of Jesus Christ. It is possible, as Barth illustrates, to even use pagans against the appropriation of pagan categories for thinking God. This is what Barth did by using a retexted Kantian form, and a Feuerbachian critique, against “Christian” appropriations of God, categorically, that are too contingent upon speculative discursive reasoning, and the “discoveries” of the various natural theologians throughout the millennia, respectively; going back as far as Genesis 3, into the Antique Greek philosophers, and the whole stream following. Let God be true and every man a liar.
[1] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth & the Pietists, trans. by Daniel W. Bloesch (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 119-20.