What Makes Barth's thought Dialectical?

Since Bruce McCormack's work on Barth, one should read Barth less as a representative of neo-orthodoxy and more of a modern/orthodox thinker.  Kenneth Oakes recently even sees no problem in calling him orthodox/liberal because of Barth's continual use of the theoretical format he learned from the Neo-Kantians and Wilhelm Herrmann specifically.

McCormack has insisted that Barth was a dialectically critical-realistic (Realdialektik) theologian.  God's existence is the transcendent real that humans come in contact in a dialectically veiled/unveiled revelation with God as both the Object (Sache) and Subject of the matter.  Barth interpreter Paul La Montagne lists 7 points to illustrate what exactly this means:

1. Barth takes God's existence and God's self-revelation for granted.
2. His theology is nonfoundationalist (not anti).
3. His theology is critical and self-critical (This is a KEY point often ignored by Barth's readers).
4. We cannot speak of God, but we refer to God in our theology.
5. Our knowledge of God is mediated and indirect.
6. Our language of God is fallible; it is actualistic witness at its best.
7. Theology as a science is of a hypothetical character.

What does a non-totalizing Hegel look like?

Just to add what the non-totalizing Hegel sounds like, see how Clayton Crockett describes Hegel's dialectic:

"The Hegelian dialectic “works” by not working, by breaking down and exposing the gap that persists between reality and our ideals. It’s not that the dialectic gets reality to become our ideal; it’s that the dialectic shows how reality IS the irreducible gap within our ideals themselves."

"What the dialectic does is show us the split between what religion promises in an ideal way and what it can actually accomplish, as well as the gap between the actual state of political affairs and what the political is theoretically supposed to accomplish. This gap is internal to philosophy, to religion/theology, and to politics itself. And the Hegelian dialectic is the process that propels us to think about these problems in a complex, historical, contextual, abstract and concrete way. But we have to free ourselves from the modern progressive view that Hegelian Absolute Knowledge simply overcomes the Kantian antinomies AND the postmodern critique of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge as this devouring monster. We never escape the interrelated nexus of problems that we call philosophy, religion and politics, and we need to return to Hegel to understand this nexus, but we never return to Hegel in any simple or positivistic fashion."

Barth's and Zizek's little Hegeling: Dialectic with no Synthesis

Hegel is making a little comeback in some circles. He is an extraordinary thinker. However, most consider him the guy who collapses all differences into an all-encompassing identity. The post-structuralist philosophers attacked this Hegelian form where the dialectic started with a thesis then dealt with its antithesis only to become resolved by a synthesis. It is such a neat, tidy system.

Theologians have resisted the way Hegel seemed to move the act-being of God into a progressive movement within human consciousness (that erases transcendence). Barth had a professed love/hate relationship with Hegel. First, he admitted loving to do a little Hegeling. However, second, Barth ridicules Hegel for his bombastic attempt to encompass all thought to human reason. Most of Barth's commentators notice this love/hate relationship as well. Since Barth seemed to reject the modern tradition (which led into liberal theology) then he mostly has no place for Hegel.

Nevertheless, what if Slavoj Zizek is right that Hegel has no neat and tidy synthesis? Zizek writes that "far from being a story of its progressive overcoming, dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the failure of all such attempts-- 'absolute knowledge' denotes a subjective position which finally accepts 'contradiction' as an internal condition of every identity. In other words, Hegelian 'reconciliation' is not a 'panlogicist' sublation of all reality in the Concept but a final consent to the fact that the Concept is 'not-all'." Here Zizek rejects the textbook presentation of Hegel that past thinkers like Kojeve presented.

What I claim is that as Zizek's Hegel leads to human knowledge that embraces negativity, does not Barth's veiled/unveiled dialectic lead to the same conclusion? Many of the commentators, in light of McCormack's work, note that Barth never did abandon his dialectic. Barth pronounces a dialectic Yes/No to all human thought. There is grace and judgment that must stay in tension. Thus, Barth rejects both a synthesis and a diastasis when it comes to philosophical/theological thought.

It is clear that Barth is not a deconstructionist in that there is still a veiled content to his theology supplied by the revelation of Christ, the Word of God. But even this supplied, external revelation is presented as a veiled/unveiled dialectic. So one can move forward in doing theology and philosophy but it will always have a pinch of negativity to it; I would say that there is only so much of the infinite that we the finite can take. Even when Barth moves ahead with his wonderful doctrine of election, which has grace at its center, he still must pronounce a No to the way we have handled this calling or tried to cover over this grace with structures of the No-God.

So, when commentators write that Barth's dialectic is not Hegelian because it does not have a synthesis, one might reply that Zizek's Hegel might be closer to Barth than he would have liked. In short, when Barth wrote that Hegel is the Protestant Thomas Aquinas and that the future may belong to him, he may have been more right than he knew.

Barth's Dialectic: 1 of the hinges

I absolutely loved Terry Cross's book on Barth's dialectic in the Doctrine of God where he makes a good case, following Bruce McCormack, that Barth never simply abandoned his dialectical thinking after the Anselm book.

Cross notes that Barth has a number of uses for the dialectic, but what I thought was most helpful was the way he used the idea of the door and hinge to explain Barth's thinking. The door is the Word of God. The hinges are analogy of faith (correspondence) and the dialectic. In fact, the dialectic keeps the use of the analogy of faith humble and human. So even though Barth moves more toward the fact that the God-Man, in the historical movement of Christ, fixes the gap between humans and God, the human side of that fact is still veiled. Because God has spoken humans can now speak of God, yet in a dialectical way; thus, I would say we are commanded to be heralds and witnesses to the Event of revelation, yet we are in essence limited witnesses.

Barth seems to have never abandoned the idea of the veiling/unveiling of God's self-revelation. In other words, God reveals and is hidden in revelation. Even in the person/work of Christ this is a fact. For example, the primary mover of revelation in the life of Christ is the resurrection where the "It is finished" of the cross is revealed to Christ's followers. Without the resurrection, we would be in the dark that God had reconciled the world on the cross. Now Badiou, for instance, sees the resurrection on its own merit without a need of dialectic; the Event of the resurrection fashions a new subject like Paul in light of its revelatory action. Zizek rightly criticizes Badiou's optimistic thought for being too much of a theology of glory without the dialectic of the cross. I think Barth, because of the dialectic, is not in need of such chastening.

So Barth's theological theme that grace is revealed through Jesus Christ is a consistent message throughout his corpus. The dialectic serves as a way that limits the teleological movement found in the Christian narrative. There is definitely some end and goal to the work of Christ, yet we are merely witnesses to it and our job is to be open and faithful to that witness and not to try to bring into fruition by our own merits.