Adorno and Potential Questions for Barth's Positivism

The influence of the nineteenth century thinker Soren Kierkegaard was extremely important for figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. Barth uses Kierkegaard's thought, which places a humongous gap between God and humanity, as a context for speaking about revelation coming in from on high to interrupt and judge human knowledge. Now the dynamic attitude of this is like Theodor Adorno's concept of constellation where critical thought allows sudden insights of different phenomena; Adorno was famously pessimistic about the rationalization behind much human thought. However, Adorno's has a immanent critique that would actually distrust Barth's move (see Brittain's Adorno and Theology).

Because, for Adorno, any talk of God as a wholly other betrays the divinity as an abyss. In short, Barth and other dialectical theologians escape from history and concrete analysis by keeping the traditional terms of theology intact. This even led Walter Benjamin to claim that Barth is hiding behind the language of Kierkegaard's existentialism to thus return to the "enchanted circle" of idealistic thought in the language of a positive revelation.

On the other hand, Kenneth Surin in his The Turnings of Darkness and Light (see pages 180–200) in a chapter entitled "Contempus Mundi and the disenchantment of the world: Bonhoeffer's 'Discipline of the Secret' and Adorno's 'Strategy of Hibernation'," sees Barth's move as a potential positive especially against Bonhoeffer's move to see a connection between revelation and saved creation. Barth, of course, sees a disjunction.

Surin claims Barth's theological deconstruction of human thought matches up with Adorno's historico-philosophical deconstruction. Adorno's negative dialectics keeps a diastasis between reality as it seems and what its potentiality is which fits with Barth's own diastasis with revelation versus the world. Surin notes how Adorno had criticized or would even critique Barth's somewhat naive understanding of positive revelation, yet Barth's diastasis makes Barth a thinker of suspicion in line with Adorno and actually against Bonhoeffer's somewhat ambiguous and naive correspondence theory.

Still, in light of this study and others, I am really wrestling with the "positive revelation" from transcendence that touches down here. I am mulling over critiquing this idea in some way through Delueze or some other thinker especially as it regards Barth's ethics.

Part Dos: Not Guilty! Reading Job in Prison

One of the most poignant comments from the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he contemplated life in a Nazi prison for being an accomplice to an assassination plot to kill Hitler is when he says that he loves the Psalms; he read them daily. In addition, more importantly, he also notes that he read Job and that it obviously touched him deeply considering his present condition.

The idea of reading a Psalm a day as a devotional is something I have heard all my life. There are a plethora of commentaries and devotionals written to do such a thing. There is even an addition of the New Testament that charitably includes the Psalms in the back right behind Revelation (because everyone knows that's all a Christian really needs-FAIL).

I honestly think that Christians might be better served reading a daily dose of Job. A number of thinkers have brought out how crucial this book is. I will be looking for the next week on a number of interpretations on Job that I think will help us with our understanding of guilt.

One book I just started is Negri's book The Labor of Job. Like Bonhoeffer, Negri turned to Job as he spent years in an Italian prison for being a subversive toward the Italian government. In that situation, he writes about how Job helped him reformulate his own positions in life. Moreover, like Bonhoeffer, Negri found in a Job a model for someone who is condemned as guilty by his peers even though he stands by his innocence. In fact, he aggressively proclaims his innocence toward his theologian friends and even in the presence of God just like Bonhoeffer and Negri did against the powers that be.

Perhaps the Psalms are not that far away from Job in that there are a number of Psalms where the Psalmists cries out to God for protection against both verbal and physical violence especially because he speaks from a position of innocence. Did not St. Paul say if God is for us, who can be against us? That we no longer have an accuser because we have an advocate with Christ? I think these words of course ring true about our reconciliation with God in Christ but I would also say that when we are unjustly accused in any facet of life we have the freedom like Job, Bonhoeffer and Negri to say we are innocent!