McDowell, John C. - Theology As Conversational Event - Karl Barth, The Ending of 'Dialogue' and The Beginning of 'Conversation'. 19 (2003) PDF

Modern Theology 19:4 October 2003
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
THEOLOGY AS CONVERSATIONAL
EVENT: KARL BARTH, THE ENDING
OF “DIALOGUE” AND THE
BEGINNING OF “CONVERSATION”1
JOHN C. McDOWELL
Introduction
An argument is as, or even perhaps more, revealing for what it omits as what
it includes. Feminist and Liberationist theologies have rightly been suspi-
cious of discourses making claims to being “natural”, “self-evident”, or
“rational” when probing reveals that they operate at the level of ideology,
and therein too easily exclude accounts that could disrupt the apparent nat-
uralness of their particular telling of the story. That process of naturalisation
makes these ways of telling the stories of the world, nations, and social and
political groups, part of the fabric of the cultural-linguistic shape of the story-
telling so that language users who are informed by these stories lose any
sense that things could be told or imagined differently. The stories, then,
appear as “true”, are divorced from the particular contexts they once inhab-
ited, and serve specific interests.
Yet languages, for instance, are not examinable, dissectable and frameable
as stable or static entities. Language-use by those less familiar with, or even
unfamiliar with, the specificities involved in the rules of any particular
speech can modify that language at even its grammatical core. In this event
the “other” is brought into conversation to destabilising effect. Conversation,
then, can induce a disruption and modification of grammatical patterns, and
can robustly remind one of the situatedness and even fragility of any given
language-use.
John C. McDowell
School of Divinity, New College, Mound Place, University of Edinburgh, EH1 2LX, Scotland
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350
Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
484 John C. McDowell
It is not uncommon, however, to hear the complaint that despite the volu-
minous nature of his writing, Karl Barth’s performance omits something
vital to the health of theology, particularly one claiming attention to “public”
places. James Barr’s comment is representative of one kind of objection.
Barth, he says, “paid little attention to other people’s opinions”.2 This way
of stating the problem somewhat leaves Barr vulnerable to the lazy reposte
of listing occasions when Barth does approve of, cite, or discuss the ideas of
other thinkers. Such a strategy of simple proof-texting is both frivolous and
leaves Barr’s core suspicion fatally undamaged.
The Barth of Barr’s account is one locked in his own theological world
without feeling the need to be responsible to those who disagree with him.
Hence, the audacity of the man is supposedly illustrated by the Gifford Lec-
tures on natural theology at Aberdeen University in 1937–38 in which he
deliberately ignores that theme and asserts that “no such subject existed to
be discussed”.3 His theology, it would seem, illegitimately secures itself from
critique, polices its narrow location assiduously and only lets in a few care-
fully vetted others when convinced that they can be useful.
In contrast, through John Milbank’s distinction between dialogue and con-
versation in the context of interreligious communication it becomes possible
to critique Barr’s understanding of “conversation” in a way that serves to
hear Barth, and what it entails for theology to be “conversational”, signifi-
cantly differently. Indeed, I will argue that “conversation” is an appropriate
metaphor to apply to what Barth was doing with his theology.
Conversation as “Man’s Invention”? Theological Seclusion

Barr’s concern is for the integrity of God’s creation. Natural theology, that
which he feels Barth unwisely denied, manifests creation’s testimony to
grace since it is the very “pre-existing natural knowledge of God that makes
it possible for humanity to receive the additional ‘special’ revelation”.4 The
echoes of Emil Brunner here suggest that Barr’s Barth is a generalisation
from the early 1930s. This suspicion is further suggested by the comment
that Barth’s theological accent was an extreme reaction to a particular politi-
cal situation.
The factor that brought the question of natural theology into the centre
seems to have been political. . . . Reacting to its [viz., rising German Nazi
movement’s] impact, he diagnosed the disastrous developments in
Europe as the natural culmination of a long process of the history of
ideas, especially theological ones. Start along the line of natural theol-
ogy, he thought, and sooner or later you will end up with something like
the “German Christian” (DC) movement. . . . And thus from the begin-
ning he taunted Brunner with having given comfort to the DC and
having had favourable reviews in the Nazi press. Brunner was playing
into the hands of Hitler.5
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003
Theology as Conversational Event 485
Several features of Barr’s observation are worthy of note. In the first place,
the geometric image (the issue being brought into the centre) suggests that
the issues were already contentious (to be brought into the centre they must
already have been, at the very least, on the periphery). Indeed in an accom-
panying footnote Barr makes it clear that “Barth’s polemic against natural
theology was conditioned purely by political controversies.” Rather, “these
political circumstances acted as a catalyst for the theological disagreement
which soon broke out”.6 Here he is right. The recent study of the Barth-
Brunner relations by John Hart emphasises that Barth had been suspicious
of Brunner for a decade by this time. In fact, Hart argues, late in 1920 “a
parting of the way seemed likely. But, after reading Romans II, Brunner
appeared to adopt Barth’s radical dialectic.”7
Moreover, Barr’s feeling that Barth’s reaction was an extreme one encour-
aged by the politics of the time is why he progresses to a defence of the legiti-
macy of natural theology, and this he does on grounds not unlike those
of Brunner himself (scripture, especially Romans 1–2; and the Protestant
Reformers). Here two things are detectable—firstly, Barr feels that the
problem with the form of Barth’s reaction lies with his theology; and secondly,
ironically, as shall be argued later with respect to articulating the ways in
which Barth can be described as a conversational theologian, he does not see
what was theologically at stake for Barth. In other words, Barr cannot appreci-
ate what it is that makes Barth suspicious of Brunner to the point of respond-
ing with the Nein!8
Therefore that Barth later admitted to having brought “natural theology
back in by way of Christology” is less admired than criticised as a calami-
tous inconsistency. It would require the dismantling of his earlier theology
built, as it was according to Barr, on the non-negotiability of the denial of
natural theology.9 Moreover, Barr finds it disturbingly ironic that Barth’s
writing depends upon “some kind of non-revealed intellectual structure that
provided the necessary assumptions” which contradicts the pretension to
“an independent and purely theological position deriving exclusively from
revelation”.10
Furthermore, according to Barr, Barth never took the time to notice dif-
ferentiations within the theologies sweepingly categorised as “natural the-
ology” because he perceived the German situation “as a final manifestation
of natural theology”.11 Put starkly, Barth was exegetically biased, determined
in his reading by his theological conviction and productive, therefore, of a
“travesty of exegesis, indeed a denial of exegesis” that undermines “the ideal
of historical objectivity”.12 In other words, he seems to have fallen foul of
John Webster’s warning about rummaging through good texts “for ‘insights’
to shore up some proposal or other” instead of studying them “in such a
way that they provoke by subverting”.13
Barth, the prophet to culture, has lost his prophetic edge and uncritically
succumbed to an a priori modus operandi bolstered by a powerful totalitarian
“propagandist” policing of theological rhetoric. This Barr describes—some-

what ironically it must be observed given the manner of his own particular
account of Barth—as the “domineering aggressiveness and militancy of
Barthian discourse”.14 Because of his conviction that “There was no common
ground on which to stand”, Barth can simply refuse to converse “on equal
terms” with those with whom he disagreed. By way of illustration, a
comment of Barth’s written to Bultmann is noteworthy in this regard.
I can only repeat that your well known attachment to Heidegger (not
because he is Heidegger but because he is a philosopher, who as such
has nothing to say to and in theology) you have done something that
one ought not to do as an evangelical theologian. And if you ask: Why
not? I can only answer you, not with an argument, but with a recitation
of the creed.15
Any instances of actual conversations that Barth had, then, would have to be
assessed either as little more than thinly veiled monologues, or as practice
outrunning theory. Quite simply, the weight of Barth’s theology crushes any
spaces for conversation. So, the manner of his refusal to converse is itself
akin to Nazi ideological style, and its attendant “inability to use open-
minded and reasoned forms of discussion, [all too] easily led on to a depend-
ence on rhetorical and propagandist means of persuasion”.16
This refusal to dialogue is regulated by the fact that, according to Barr,
Barth closes theology in upon itself, thus preventing it being thinkable, from
becoming public. This worries the Clark Pinnock of a 1977 paper, for instance.
Pinnock worries that Barth disallows public articulation of the Christian
rationale of the Christian witness to revelation. The problem here becomes
one of rationally uncheckable claims to revelation, something that Bonhoef-
fer’s charge of “revelatory positivism” had earlier adverted to. According to
Pinnock, a claim echoed by Barr,
The theologian and the atheist are engaged in a shouting match: one
says, “Religion is man’s invention!”, the other “No, it’s not!” Barth offers
us no help in resolving the question of who is right.17
This, then, is “one of the most vulnerable points in [Barth’s] whole theologi-
cal system, and that exposes his entire work to repudiation by all who are
not yet convinced by the Christian claims”.18 The implication for Barr, and
also Richard Roberts, is more serious than that, however. It fatally wounds
Barth’s whole theological “system” [Barr].
The context of Roberts’ own sophisticated critique is his desire to promote
a theologia viatorum, a repentant and kenotic theological thinking within the
terrain of the contemporary human condition and public discourse.
However, predicated on a weakness in Barth’s account of time, the pivotal
theme for Roberts in Barth, this is an approach that Roberts finds distinctly
lacking in the Church Dogmatics (hereafter CD).19
The first stage in Robert’s strategy traces Barth’s “totalitarian” method, or

the fact that his view of “reality” derives from neither metaphysics nor, more
importantly for Roberts, the social sciences, but from God’s Self-positing in
Christ.20 Following on the heels of Kant’s segregation of philosophical and
theological activity into their own discrete spheres, and Hegel’s subsequent
Idealist leap over those epistemic boundaries, Barth’s theology after the two
editions of Der Römerbrief demands that theological truth is self-posited and
self-authenticated, and faith, therein, essentially become the obedient explo-
ration of the given. This, according to Roberts, is a “gigantic celestial tau-
tology, the circulus veritatis Dei”, and an isolating of theology that both comes
“dangerously close [to a] collusion between his voice and that of God” which
“demands conformity and submission rather than critical investigation”.21
While the second move recognises Barth’s intention to historicise revela-
tion, by virtue of his account of time this too becomes a presuppositionless
piece of reasoning with no point of anchorage in the world. This, then, is “a
quasi-gnostic afflatus”.22 Barth admittedly does attempt to re-temporalise the
eschatological “Now Moment” of the second edition of Der Römerbrief, struc-
turing it through the concrete historical life of Jesus of Nazareth and above
all in his forty days after Easter. However, the character of “God’s time”, the
prototypical pattern of “real time”, is Boethianly portrayed as the temporal
vacuum of “simultaneity”, and therefore an endlessness in a totum simul.
Revelation’s non-temporality, then, becomes expressed through the tempo-
rally ambiguous conceptuality of Christ’s “contingent contemporaneous-
ness” (kontingente Gleichzeitigkeit) [CD, I.1, 149]. Here the contingency of
revelation is not achieved upon the basis of what are normally considered
historical acts, but instead undermined by its temporal transcendence that
can only be configured as “a temporal docetism”.23
The ontological dogma of the Incarnation loses its roots in the shared
and public reality of the world in which we live; it hovers above us like
a cathedral resting upon a cloud.24
What emerges from these broad brushstrokes is a portrait of one who utterly
failed to engage theologically with what Roberts calls “our commonplace
reality”. Barth has “become the entextualised, but no longer context-bound
mouth of ‘God’ ”, and therein has provided theology with its own ghettoised
“breathing-space” in protected isolation from public scrutiny.25
Pinnock echoes this conclusion to a significant degree when accusing
Barth of inflating “a subjectivist balloon” that cannot be distinguished from
“fantasy and dream” and which must exist
on the same level as any fanaticism which claims, “I have a revelation!”

. . . Though it is rational within itself, there is no indication where it
touches reality, and so it is impossible to distinguish true revelation from
false.26
The comment “Though it is rational within itself” is suggestive. Pinnock

demands that for theology to be rational a “simple” internal coherence
account will not suffice. Something more like the conception of a “com-
monplace reality” of the sort espoused by Roberts is required in order
to make the necessary move, and Barth does not and indeed cannot provide
it.
However, what is going on underneath these similar sounding complaints
requires careful inspecting and differentiation. Pinnock imagines “conver-
sation” (although it is not clear that this word is appropriate for depicting
what Pinnock is hoping for) to begin at the end of the process of identifying
what it is that constitutes Christian discipleship, or to be the means for evan-
gelism. Pinnock’s critical strategy, then, is less the suggestion that Barth
needs to approach theology more “conversationally”, than the complaint
that he makes the evangelistic practice of persuasion more difficult “in a plu-
ralistic world with its competing truth claims”.27
Roberts and Barr, on the other hand, imply that “conversation” begins
much earlier in the theological process, and thus that “conversation” is more
the end in itself than the means. The problem is diagnosed as much more
serious than that identified by Pinnock, and terminally so since Roberts and
Barr suspect a Barthian exclusivism that is insufficiently attentive to the
truthfulness within “competing truth claims”.
For Pinnock theology begins—with its strongly defensible identity—by lis-
tening to God and then moves out in “conversation”/evangelism (to culture,
society, and those outside the boundaries of Evangelical communities).
Roberts, on the other hand, seems to reverse this movement. One is cultur-
ally embedded in various forms of life that cannot take or receive, in their
plurality and diversity, Christian identity as something given but rather
something to be established in the event of conversation.
Ending “Dialogue” as the Beginning of “Conversation”

Roberts sees something similar going on in Milbank as in Barth—a privatis-
ing of religious feeling forcing religion and religiosity to vacate the public
spaces, and retreat into an uncritical and conservative sentimentality.28
However, Milbank’s work rightly has its suspicions of not only of such an
assessment of him but also of the criteria on which that assessment is made—
the conception of conversation as dialogue. In 1990 Milbank published “The
End of Dialogue” in a collection directly responding to The Myth of Christian
Uniqueness, edited by John Hick. While Milbank’s target is specifically the
pluralist reading of religious dialogue, what he has to say there directly
affects the sense of the manner of theology, not merely in terms of its task
but also in terms of its nature which shapes and informs that task.29
Dialogue, Milbank complains, is “a profoundly ethnocentric illusion”
making globally dominant the values embedded within wider western dis-
course.30 It assumes a commonly recognised subject matter, “a timeless logos

enjoying time-transcending encounters with an unchanging reality”, by both
(or all) participants. It assumes, further, that one partner will progress to a
sympathetic comprehension of the perspective of the other.
One needs to be clear what it is that Milbank is rejecting, lest he be mis-
takenly understood to be making the arrogant claim of possessing a privi-
leged perspective, or attempting to secure a hiding-place for fear that his
theological weaknesses be exposed.31
The very idea that dialogue is a passage for the delivery of truth, that it
has a privileged relationship to Being, assumes that many voices are coa-
lescing around a single known object which is independent of our bio-
graphical or transbiographical processes of coming-to-know.32
This dialogue obscures the truth-of-difference by departicularising its par-
ticipants and reforming them as “equal, independently of one’s valuation of
what they say”, in other words as “liberal, Western subjects, images of
oneself”.33 As Kenneth Surin argues, western pluralism cannot, by its very
nature, converse since
the pluralist . . . speaks well of the other but never to the other, and
indeed cannot do otherwise because there really is no intractable other
for the pluralist.34
Consequently, the pluralism of dialogue is only cosmetic, functioning as little
more than a surface appearance masking a drive for a universal uniformity.
In other words, it is an arrogant fetishisation of a certain locality with its loss
of particularised memory—ironically so, given its disapproval of imperial-
ism. And however those contradictions are masked, pluralism tends “to
exercise a more stable and effective sort of tyranny by purporting to enshrine
power less in force than in natural order, or in principles.”35 Yet that power-
play goes unnoticed.
The kind of unacknowledged but underlying will-to-power operative in
the Pinnock of 1977 discourse are suggested by his “conversation” begin-
ning at the end of one’s learning, and therefore as a technique of persuasion
and argument.36 Pinnock’s Christian self is a very stable one. Consequently
it is the case neither that “external” “conversation” plays any formative part
in the process of learning, nor that are there suitable reflexive resources
for problematising this stability rhetoric. At least at the level of its self-
presentation, its rhetoric unacknowledgedly risks what Archbishop Rowan
Williams calls “the tyranny of a total perspective”, that which subsumes all
knowing into a framework laying claims to comprehensiveness and final-
ity.37 Such theological closure is, significantly, not available to the later Barth
who critiques ideological propositions as “not just a provisional and transi-
tory but a permanent normativity, not just one that is relative but one that
is absolute, not just one that is human but one that is quasi-divine”.38 There
is something ethically significant in Williams’ and Barth’s descriptions—

insight into ideology’s closure of the possibilities of “seeking, questioning,
and researching” highlights the fact that what characterises the power-
relations (propaganda, totalitarian coercion and manipulation, certain apolo-
getic strategies) through which these claims are predominantly expressed is
their incapacity for conversation. One steps back from the risk of conversa-
tion into a position of (imagined) invulnerability by displaying the real
subject matter as a strategy for the retention or accrual of control (either
through serving the dominant power, or by legitimating the slave-to-
become-master trajectory). So Barth continues:
What they [viz., ideologies] have to push systematically is their own
excellence and usefulness, and by way of background they must show
how utterly valueless and harmful their rivals and opponents are.39
Here are shades of CD I.1 where Barth speaks in an eschatologically nuanced
way of theology as a “penultimate” discipline, “a work of critical revision
and investigation of the Church’s proclamation in view of the divine
verdict”, yielding all too human fallible and uncertain results [CD, I.1, 83].
As such, theology is necessarily fallible, fragile, broken, discoloured by sin,
and resistant to all conceptual foreclosures or “systematisation”.40 Embrac-
ing this recognition of one’s proper eschatological locatedness will render to
theology’s broken words the proper service of a humble witness, remind any
theologia gloriae of its prematurity, and indicate that it is no more privy than
any other discourse to some kind of presuppositionless life.41 A finished
account of theology as the container of all Truth would make theology non-
eschatological. And yet an ethics that includes self-testing through doubt
does not have to assent to the belief that all discourse is necessarily as ide-
ologically regulated, and therefore as free, as any other from the constraints
of seeking the best forms of ideolo-clasm.42
Barr’s model of conversation appears to differ somewhat from that of
Pinnock—conversation is the means of attaining the truth, but that this
movement necessitates that one check one’s particularities at the door and
dialogue “on equal terms”. Language of “objectivity” and a critique of a
“presuppositioned” reading of the scriptures leaves him open to the accu-
sation that he is evading the sociality of knowing, or our learning about how
we learn. That, then, renders him vulnerable to Milbank’s critique of moder-
nity’s dialogia.
Dialogue as “Man’s Invention” and Theology as Conversational

“Mistakes”, Barth declares, “arise when only a part of a sentence is heard.”43
And, given that six million words are not easily digested, Barth’s manifold
perspectives are not readily graspable. Hence, there is a certain poignancy
in his lament that
I do not expect anyone to agree with me—still less that he say nice things
about me. But . . . without presumption I might expect that they had first
informed themselves about me and therefore had read me.44
Barth certainly hopes to be given a fair hearing. However, he feels that a

failure to listen attentively to him characterises a number of critiques, those
of the “hasty theological journalism” of his sloganisers.45 No doubt fuel is
provided by the fact that Barth’s texts are so slippery, often taking away with
one hand what he appears to present with the other.46
An explicit statement Barth makes about theological conversation sug-
gests, when teased out, that not only does Barr fail to listen to him precisely
because he presupposes different conceptions of what “conversation”
means, and consequently of what it entails for theology to be “conversa-
tional”, but that Barth could agree with Milbank’s assessment of conversing
beyond “dialogue”.
You speak of conversation, but what does this mean? Conversation takes
place when one party has something new and interesting to say to the
other. Only then is conversation an event. One must say something
engaging and original, something with an element of mystery. The
Church must sound strange to the world if it is not to be dull. . . . We
may read philosophers (and we should!) without accepting their pre-
suppositions. We may listen respectfully (I have a holy respect for a good
philosopher!). We can learn much from philosophy and science. But as
theologians we must be obedient to the Word.47
Several things are noteworthy about this set of comments. In the first place,
Barth’s interest in presuppositions betrays an interest in the particularity and
difference that makes conversation possible. We do not converse because we
share a common foundation, and can trade variations upon that agreed
theme, but because we are different. Barth’s reiteration of his commitment
to determinatively ecclesial presuppositions is not a refusal of conversation,
any more than is his recognition of the different presuppositions of the
philosophers. Conversation involves difference, and the awareness of dif-
ference—neither the suppression nor the simple “celebration” of difference,
but a willingness to take it seriously. Put differently, Barth is aware of the
fact that any conversation is always between a particular someone and a par-
ticular someone else; there can be no a-temporal or a-contextual conversation
in which the conversation partners leave behind the concrete particularities
of who they are in order to dialogue in “objectivity”.
Barth’s unembarrassed reliance upon presuppositions which are not
shared, but which need not isolate, could be compared with Harnack’s 1923
complaint that Barth was “unscientific” in his work—a complaint which
seems to conflate a reading guided by unshared presuppositions with a
relativistic free-for-all. For Harnack, apparently, if there can be no obviously
objective reading of a text, then its meaning fragments into the chaos of
readers’ private preferences.48 Only a hermeneutical objectivity grounded in
universally shared assumptions can free readings from potential nihilism
and for public discussion, interaction, and assessment.
Barth’s response exposes the unacknowledged presuppositions in
Harnack’s own position. “I think I owe it to you and our listeners”, he says,
to confess that I do consider my answers open to debate, but that still
for the time being and until I am shown a better way I reserve all else
to myself. Nonetheless, your objections cannot deter me from continu-
ing to ask along the line of those answers.49
Barth here subverts Harnack’s own accusations by accusing him of not lis-
tening and of methodological parochialism—the “science” of theology may
be broader than Harnack had imagined, but he seems strangely unprepared
to entertain any voices different from his own. Harnack’s theology, then, is
the one that is closed. Quite simply, his approach fails to be attentive to, and
respectful of, the Sache of the text but instead forces a reading that is “a hostile
act in which the interpreter victimizes the text”.50 The dead letter of the text
is captured, possessed, dissected and then left in pieces as if those projects
constitute either the interpretative act or exhaust the hermeneutical perfor-
mance.51 Even so, Barth continues in a generous vein.
I would like to be able to listen attentively in the future to whatever you
also have to say. But at this time I cannot concede that you have driven
me off the field with your questions and answers, although I will gladly
endure it when it really happens.52
It is instructive to compare Barth’s deconstruction of Harnack’s appeal to
“objectivity” with Milbank’s ending of “dialogue”. Barth, like Milbank, is
unapologetic in naming the theological shape of his own presuppositions,
those which set him on the particular path he is following. As the “But” in
his claim cited earlier suggests (“But as theologians we must be obedient to
the Word”), it is clear that he is not prepared to renege on his commitments.
Denying the factors that shape his commitments would be to renounce who
he is. As a Christian (and more specifically a Protestant Christian), Barth is
committed to a particular way of seeing the world in Jesus Christ, and that
is what can make conversation possible—to make possible what Milbank
describes as a nonviolent enabling of the other to see the reclassification of
“other incommensurable accounts . . . according to . . . [ones] own perspec-
tive”.53 That, as shall be demonstrated below, does not preclude Barth’s “faith
seeking understanding” from learning from those outside the defined
“walls” of the church, past and present.
Returning to the quotation from Barth’s Table Talk which began this section,
we can in the second place note Barth’s insistence that “The Church must
sound strange to the world if it is not to be dull”. Barth’s various ecclesial
presuppositions, far from ruling him out of some conversation that begins
from conversationalists’ neutrality and “common core”, precisely enable him
to converse.
So, for instance, it is precisely because he is a Christian that Barth is com-
mitted to a particular way of seeing the world in Jesus Christ that recognises
and generously admits its indebtedness to those who have spoken within
the Christian church, past and present. This is clear not only in Protestant
Theology in the Nineteenth Century, but also as early as the Preface to the first
edition of Der Römerbrief with its talk of history as an honest and uninter-
rupted conversation between yesterday’s wisdom and the wisdom of
tomorrow.54
Nevertheless, and this is vital to appreciating his project, Barth is not sat-
isfied with maintaining any commitment to some supposedly identifiable
set of theories or practices that can be carried through time in pristine and
immutable condition. He speaks of a conversation between yesterday and
tomorrow, not of a sacred deposit delivered yesterday which we are charged
to carry through to tomorrow. Hence, Barth can agree in principle with
Roberts’ rejection of “The mechanical recapitulation of Christian doctrine
merely as items in an inherited belief system, undertaken as though nothing
had happened.”55 But something has happened, and still is happening, in the
continually fresh coming of God to speech.
Barth’s critical re-envisioning of the Reformed doctrine of election in CD
II.2 is a good example of resistance to what Roberts calls a “theological
necrophilia”, and of attending to how the Reformers might freely speak to
theology in the twentieth century.56 A slavish following of the past is not
faithfulness to their witness. Barth critiques the Reformers for their decretum
absolutum and its justifying deus absconditus on the basis of their insufficient
application of their own theological claims about the noetic and ontic signifi-
cance of Jesus Christ. Thus while he sets himself here against the tradition,
he nevertheless feels that he is being faithful to their concerns of explicating
the graciousness of the free/sovereign God to which the scriptures testify.
In so far as we hold fast to their intention, we think we shall still be in
agreement with them when we add at once that the freedom, mystery
and righteousness of God in the election of grace must be understood in
terms of Christian theology. [CD, II.2, 24]
It is this that enables Barth to reshape—radically and christologically—the
notion of “double predestination” as God’s self-election to be the God for
humanity in Jesus Christ, and humanity to be for God in Jesus Christ.57
Barth’s critique of the Reformers is here more a case of internal correction
than a case of an assertion of knowing better because of some God’s-eye
perspective.
Theologically, what this all amounts to is a recognition that our activity as
Christian theologians proceeds only in and by means of a constant depend-
ence. Moreover, this dependence is itself the fruit of an original, establish-

ing and generative absolute dependence.58 Prayer, in other words, is the origin
of conversation, and a theology of grace demands attention to the fact that
we converse because we have been conversed with in Jesus Christ; and we
listen to the O/other because we listen to God in Jesus Christ. Christ is the
divine Word and the human hearing. Finally, for Barth the faith that char-
acterises the church is one that is not only engaged in dialogue with itself
but, in listening for God, one that listens for the Word in what may other-
wise seem to be strange places.59
Listening to the World’s Judgement on the Church

Milbank speaks of the futility of “dialogue” when recognising the incom-
mensurability of perspectives and even of the end of “toleration”. This kind
of language appears to encourage a retreat from the public forum in favour
of a shouting from one side to the other. That, however, is misleading, as is
the worry over his proposal to replace “dialogue” with “mutual suspicion”,
because it fails to take seriously the kind of thing that is rejected under the
name of “dialogue”—the reduction of differences to the same. Dia-logia, it
could be argued, the “through-word”, suggests a sense of the immediacy of
truth. This kind of truth is unavailable to Milbank, and indeed to Barth—
which partially explains why Barth rightly refuses the simple adoption of
the philosophers’ “presuppositions” as his own.
The quotation from Barth’s Table Talk further indicates that Barth did not
restrict the conversation to which his faith called him simply to the Christ-
ian tradition. Both in theory and in practice, he displays a willingness to
engage with secular philosophy. Specifically “extra-ecclesial” elements can
become witnesses to the Gospel, and are perceivable as such in the light of
a christological hermeneutic. On this Bruce Marshall correctly argues that
Barth’s christocentrism does not stipulate about the details of the process of
revelation’s subjective appropriation, since, as Ronald Thiemann indicates,
Barth means by the term “revelation” primarily the content of our knowl-
edge of God.60 Barth himself affirmed:
No one can say how this is done, not even the most devout and learned
theologians of all times have been able to hear the Christmas message.61
All kinds of “extra-ecclesial” claims and facts can become witnesses to the
Gospel, and can be perceived as such in the light of a christological
hermeneutic. In other words, Barth’s Christian presuppositions provide him
with an ear by which he can listen to voices from beyond the explicit pale
of faith.62 Bruce Marshall is right to argue that “on his account the range of
theological discourse seems unlimited” quite simply because, and here Mar-
shall refers to Barth’s complaints concerning academic theology as a discrete
and special faculty,
Barth does not distinguish theology from other sorts of discourse pri-
marily by locating a special subject-matter for it, still less by the princi-
pled exclusion or rejection of other kinds of discourse. What
distinguishes theology is rather the particular way in which it strives to
order all discourses: it interprets and assesses them by taking “Jesus
Christ as he is attested for us in holy scripture” as its primary and deci-
sive criteria of truth and meaning.63
Barth refuses to divide the world up into incompatible spheres, incommen-

surable conversations, or radically discrete epochs. Any independence of
theology from other academic disciplines, for instance, is little more than a
temporary emergency measure and not a legitimation of theological sectarian-
ism.64 Theology’s current academic independence gives theology an honour
simultaneously too great (as if it possesses “special keys to special doors”,
and has a “despair of the world”) and too small (theology does not then
show that what other disciplines say about it derives from “alien principles”,
CD, I.1, 6). Barth thus conceives theology as “the science which finally sets
this task [talking of God], and this task alone, subordinating to this task all
other possible tasks in the human search for truth”. The word “subordinat-
ing” is crucial here, for it suggests reading all other disciplines theologically
rather than ignoring them in order to do theology.
It comes as no surprise, then, to see Barth making positive, ad hoc but criti-
cal use of extra-ecclesial anthropologies [CD, III.2]; of Mozart’s music [CD,
III.3, 297ff.]; and of the critiques of Christianity by Feuerbach and Overbeck.
His use of philosophy is too complex to be reduced to any single systematic
scheme.65 Barth deploys philosophy eclectically in the service of theology
while intending to take care not to allow it to undermine or overwhelm the
particularity of theology’s witness to God in Christ. Thiemann describes this
as “the temporary borrowing of a tool to help us better understand the
complex meaning of the Christian Gospel”, a shining of a light on our under-
standing of God’s commerce with the world (and therefore not a rival or
even supplement to God in Christ).66
A short reflection on Barth’s use of Mozart underscores just how vital and
necessary are theology’s engagements with discourses “external” to the
matter of theology. In contrast to von Balthasar, Barth’s primary theological-
aesthetic interest lies more in Mozart’s music (through which he claimed to
hear the praise of creation) than in the dramatic arts.67 Certainly an impor-
tant question could be asked about what this privileging suggests for Barth’s
theology. But, at the very least it implies that the critique of Barth as a church
theologian unconcerned with explicitly “extra-ecclesial” elements is care-
less.68 Barth’s use of Mozart was not merely aesthetic, as if it could be trivi-
alised simply as a matter of mere taste or a personal quirk.69 In the second
place, it implies that the very concept of the “extra” or “alien” in defining
an outside to theology of ecclesial discourse must be handled very carefully
lest it suggest that there is anything that does not fall under the claim of the
electing, creating, and redeeming God of the world. Speaking of theological
significance of Mozart, Barth asks:
Why is it that for the receptive, he has produced in almost every bar he
conceived and composed a type of music for which “beautiful” is not a
fitting epithet: music which for the true Christian is not mere entertain-
ment, enjoyment or edification but food and drink; music full of comfort
and counsel for his needs . . . ? [CD, III.3, 297f.]
This rhetorical query negates any possibility that Mozart merely impacted
upon the scaffolding of Barth’s theology stylistically or illustratively.70
Barth’s was a profoundly theological appreciation of Mozart. Indeed, Barth’s
“enthusiasm [for Mozart] is a too-little used index to the whole Barthian
theology”.71 So argues Theodore Gill, who recounts an incident when leaving
Barth’s study. On noticing portraits of Calvin and Mozart hanging side-by-
side, Barth announced: “My special revelation [looking at Calvin]. And my
general revelation [smiling at Mozart].”72 It would not have been wholly
inappropriate to have taken Barth’s words seriously here, and Barth himself
suggests the possible direction. In 1958 he wrote:
I am not especially gifted or cultured artistically and certainly not
inclined to confuse or identify the history of salvation with any part of
the history of art. But the golden sounds and melodies of Mozart’s music
have been from early times spoken to me not as gospel but as parables
of the realm of God’s free grace as revealed in the gospel—and they do
so again and again with great spontaneity and directness.73
Mozart as parable! Barth’s earlier claim that “Mozart has created order for
those who have ears to hear, and he has done it better than any scientific deduc-
tion could” [CD, III.3, 299] seems to echo deliberately Jesus’ closing of his
parables (e.g., Matt. 11:15).74 But that Barth could as late as this speak of
Mozart as a parable of grace, while continuing to deny “natural theology”,
is an important indicator of the fact that Barth does not tightly draw bound-
aries around the question of those with whom theology may converse.75
Barth’s qualifications on the place and role of cultural particularities, being
distinct from and unconfused with God’s grace of revelation while yet being
seen potentially as witnesses to grace draw the reader back to his earlier writ-
ings. Certainly he had in one sense exploded his earlier theologico-cultural
pretensions manifested in his 1910 article, “Die Christliche Glaube und die
Geschichte”. There he acclaimed Michelangelo and Beethoven as sources of
revelation alongside Paul. Yet, in another sense what he has done is find a
theologically-controlled way of reading cultural products.76 What Barth
refuses to do is provide concrete examples of this [CD, IV.3.1, 135].77 He
even, on occasion, is hesitant to cite Mozart, since “All such phenomena are

doubtful and contestable.” An important point is being made here about the
necessary reticence appropriate to a theology that entertains consciousness
of its eschatological provisionality. In 1948 Barth had come to learn theologi-
cally—particularly through his earlier disillusionment with liberalism, but
also practically through his disaffected socialistically inspired hopes for
Russia—to say that
It may well be that even in the best State Christians will never be able
to express their gratitude for God’s gift and ordinance except in the form
of serious opposition. But this implies that they will never be able to
regard and treat even the worst State as wholly diabolical. . . . It [viz., the
church] can accompany every political system. But it cannot serve
strange gods. It cannot therefore ally itself with any political system, old
or new, for better or for worse, just as it cannot oppose any system
unconditionally. It can offer absolute and abstract obedience to none but
to each only the relative concrete obedience or resistance which it is com-
manded to offer by the Word of God. The Word of God is not tied to any
political system, old or new. It justifies and judges all of them.78
This undergirding sense of the sinfulness of all thought and action (includ-
ing Christian thought and action) forms a vital piece of negative supple-
mentation to the more positive use of Mozart through the theme of creation.
Both of these together form a theology attentive to a plenitude of types of
voices, all in order to enable a better understanding of God’s revelation in
Christ. So, Barth maintains, “The central affirmations of the Bible are not self-
evident . . . Every possible means must be used” to interpret it, and it is in
this thematic context that he famously declares:
God may speak to us through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a
blossoming shrub or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really
does. . . . God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist, and thus
give us to understand that the boundary between the Church and the
secular world can take at any time a different course from that which we
think we discern [CD, I.1, 55].79
Hence, not only can these “extra-ecclesial” elements witness to God in
Christ, they can be heard in an ad hoc fashion (the listening itself, however,
can never be properly piecemeal but as broad as possible) as critiques of the
ways in which the churches performatively imagine the significance and
import of those events.80 As Rowan Williams says, “the church judges the
world; but it also hears God’s judgment on itself passed upon it by the
world.”81 And that statement opens theology to understanding its place in
human thinking in a way that can prevent either its self-secluding escape
from thought, or the flowering of the temptation to theological imperialism
over the broader projects of human reflecting.82

The Virtue of Arguing

Michael Higton rightly argues that a fundamental difference of approach
obscuring appreciation of Barth’s commitment to conversation is the
“assumption that conversation is fundamentally irenic—that it is seen best
where friendly agreement flourishes, coupled with a willingness to differ on
secondary matters”. Certainly questions need to be put Barth’s occasional
practice of conversing through “strident argument”, and Higton admits that
Barth “could, from time to time, be as unfair as theologians anywhere in his
hasty characterisations and even hastier dismissals of others. But we must
beware of stating this too strongly, as if Barth’s willingness to argue, and to
argue hard, were itself a sign of failure.” Donald Allen and Rebecca Guy
speak for many when they take conflict, including argument, as “generally
mark[ing] the failure of social relations”, and therefore as a social pathol-
ogy.83 But such a rejection of argument can only function as a regulative mark
where religious beliefs and practices are reduced to bland differences in
matters of private taste (spoken of in a neutral language) about which it
would be tasteless to “kick up a fuss”. Such a rejection can only function
where religious practices, and indeed the shape of all our politics and ethical
practices, are removed from the dangerous ultimacy of worship to the local
subjectivities of consumer choice. In other words, the rejection of argument,
of serious disagreement, is possible only for a pluralism where all is allowed
because nothing is taken seriously, and where nothing resists our interpre-
tative advances because all has been denied its own particular form of self-
understanding.84
Barth’s thought is resistant to this repressive tolerance, this easy and lazy
pluralism which lets differences lie. The mark of a “failure of social relations”
would be found in Barth not where he argues or engages in conflict (though
we may sometimes regret his tone) but only where he would cease to believe
that someone is worth arguing with or contradicting.
For Barth it is evident that engaging in argument means both maintaining
that the differences between his interlocutor and himself are real, and affirm-
ing that these differences matter.85 At his best, as is apparent in places in
Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, he displays a serious willing-
ness to entertain, think through, and converse with an alternative point of
view, and not to rest content with surface differences but to chase these down
into the deep theological divisions that underlie them. Disarmingly, when
musing on the implications of the comment that “there is no past in theol-
ogy”, Barth maintains that:
Only the heretic, indeed only the arch-heretic, the one who is totally lost
even for God’s invisible Church, could really belong to the past and have
nothing more to say to us. And we are in no position to identify such
arch-heresy. Not even among avowed pagans, much less among Jews or
suspect, even very suspect, Christians. All heretics are relatively hereti-
cal, so even those who have been branded heretics at one time or another
and condemned for their avowed folly and wickedness must be allowed
their say in theology. The theology of any period must be strong and free
enough to give a calm, attentive and open hearing not only to the voices
of the Church Fathers, not only to favourite voices, not only to the voices
of the classical past, but to all the voices of the past.86
Barth’s determination to let his disagreements with others be thoroughly
theological is not—or, at least, not always—a sign that he simply wishes to
assess other thinkers according to his own arbitrarily narrowed and imperi-
ously imposed standards, and dismiss those failing to meet them. Rather, he
regards it as his duty to think through their claims from within his own
frame of reference, and not in the terms of some supposed neutrality. Because
only in that way can he reach a genuine and (even self-)critical encounter
with them, and only in that way can he genuinely be open to being chal-
lenged by them. Indeed, it is just such a Christian approach to conversation
that can, in the language of Milbank, provide resources for agreement-
beyond-mere-toleration, conversation that is constituted through the blend-
ing together of differences and not their denial or suppression.
Something of this is can be sensed in Bernard Lonergan’s articulation of
the rules of Christian conversation: “Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reason-
able, Be responsible”, and, one should add, be loving, and if necessary,
change.87 Yet, William Placher’s qualification is crucial: while “Serious dia-
logue indeed requires openness to change, . . . it also demands a sense of
how significant changing one’s faith would be.”88
The resultant sense of the unavoidable urgency and seriousness with
which we must enter conversation from our particular theological position,
and the willingness to think through other claims and ideas theologically,
accompanies and substantiates Barth’s understanding of the fallibility and
frailty of his own theology. However much his beguiling rhetoric some-
times lends itself to a sense of his theology’s impervious strength, his work
is never wholly without an awareness of its own partial nature, and of its
own necessary failure. This sense is, in a hidden way, firmly present in
(not just despite) his most trenchant theological grapplings with those with
whom he disagrees. In our formation as listeners to the Deus dixit we have
learned to hear distortedly; we must therefore constantly return to our
source, and become aware of our own pre-conscious, unconscious, and even
conscious temptations to idolatry—and that means both being open to chal-
lenge, and being challenging.89 This is why Barth is able to announce to
Harnack:
I do not intend to entrench myself in those positions in which you, hon-
oured Sir, . . . have seen me, simply because I know how frightenly rela-
tive everything is that one can say about the great subject which occupies
you and me. I know that it will be necessary to speak of it in a way quite
different from that of my present understanding.90
Something of the sense of the honesty of this generous and (self-)critical

approach may be found in a comment made towards the end of Barth’s life:
Being truly liberal means thinking and speaking in responsibility and

openness on all sides, backwards and forwards, toward both past and
future, and with what I might call total personal modesty. To be modest
is not to be skeptical; it is to see what one thinks and says also has limits.
This does not hinder me from saying very definitely what I think I see
and know. But I can do this only in the awareness that there has been
and are other people before and alongside me, and that still others will
come after me. This awareness gives me an inner peace, so that I do not
think I always have to be right even though I say definitely what I say
and think. Knowing that a limit is set for me, too, I can move cheerfully
within it as a free man.91
That Barth did not engage with everyone and everything theologically is, in
the end, testimony to the limitations of time and resources, and perhaps even
to the range of conversations that Barth chose to become involved in. More-
over, that he did not necessarily understand equally well all those with
whom he did engage does not undermine his sense of openness to, and
respect for, others. It testifies, on the contrary, to the partiality and fragility
of his all-too-human hearing. However, while the details of these absent con-
versations, and those conducted less well than we would like, may pose
important questions about the manner of Barth’s actual practice, they do less
to indict his theology of conversation. As David Ford argues, “there is only a
limited number of exchanges any guest can take part in, and nobody needs
to know what is going on in every conversation.”92 Nevertheless, “I do not
see how theology which is related to a God who relates to everything and
everyone can in principle limit its questions and conversations.”93 In princi-
ple, at least, there is no external perspective that cannot be re-created and
integrated within Barth’s theological perspective, and that then means that
there is a real sense in which, theologically speaking, there can be no proper
“externality” to the universal scope of the theological imagination.
Conclusion
“Modernity”, if Milbank is correct, sets the rules for what dialogue must be
outside of, or beyond, specific conversations. Whether that be in the form of
interreligious or even ecumenical dialogue, or dialogues between theology
and science, theology and philosophy, and so on, the point remains that these
rules are arbitrary when universally projected—the imperialising of local
rationalities and conversations.94 “Dialogue”, in other words, may prove to
be too ideological a discourse for theologians to participate in, too steeped

through with a modern capitalist value-system, and thus too easily preven-
tative of the truth-of-difference.
If Barth is to be considered a conversational theologian, then “conversa-
tion-talk” requires a radical deconstruction in order to become sensitive to
his concerns, subverting it at the very point of its denial of otherness by locat-
ing its internal tensions and lacunae.95 This deconstruction would sub-
sequently refuse to set these rules universally, and therefore prior to
conversational performances, but would require them to emerge from the
midst of conversation while emphasising the importance of the setting and
particularity of both conversationalist and (spontaneously) produced con-
versation. This is not to say that conversations do not require certain pat-
terns and rules of constraint, if only to prevent moments of persuasion from
degenerating into manipulation and propaganda (the ideological abuses of
argument). But it is to admit that, if our engagements are to remain truly
conversational, then these rules must not be externally imposed but allowed
to arise from within the types of person-to-person encounters we have come
to name as “conversation”.96
Christianity, in brief, seeks to bring to the surface the submerged assump-
tions of Western traditions of “dialogue”. And it does so by offering some-
thing different, something more responsible than difference—“for respecting
the otherness of the Other”—and something far richer than mere tolerance,
something that is achieved, paradoxically, “only through insisting on the
finality of the Christian reading of ‘what there is’ ”.97
Then, at last, a conversation is established, which is itself the goal of true
desire, and not a debate about truth, in the manner of “dialogue”.98
Such a responsible project would respect the eschatological reservation
that qualifies all our living as provisional. It would provide the very self-
reflexiveness and constraint that lies at the heart of Christian life.99 Theo-
logical truth-telling can never speak of a given, nor be closed in an
unredeemed world, a world in which anyone’s seeing takes place through
dirty and obscuring glasses, and where human sinfulness itself weaves its
distorting effect on human perspectives on the Truth.
The theological sense of conversation—with its participation in the triune
God’s ways with the world—and Ricoeur’s notion of the silence of hearing
that is distinguishable from dumbness,100 suggests an important qualifica-
tion to the way the metaphor of “conversation” is used. Dia-logia (the move-
ment through the word) is replaced suitably with con-versus (a turning towards
or with another), for the very root metaphor of conversation reminds us that
the purposes of conversations are usually more than mere information-
sharing.101 As J. L. Austin astutely remarks, “There is something which is at
the moment of uttering being done by the person uttering.”102 “A conversa-
tion is ‘something’—‘a performance’.”103 For instance, conversations can be
therapeutic, they can be relation-forming, playful, celebratory, erotic, and

so on.
There is an ethics of conversation, something like that displayed by Martin
Buber as a living “towards the other”.104 It is particularly in this ethical
agency that theology “goes public” for the healing of the world. Theology,
then, is most truly itself when it interrupts self-indulgent silences in the
name of the God whose joyful sounds are those of peacemaking. It speaks
properly when it attends to the dehumanising power-relations operative
within our conversations and witnesses instead to their healing in the peace
of the Gospel. Though needing to be read in its context, one can admit that
the negativity of Milbank’s preference for “mutual suspicion” over “dia-
logue” is misleading. He intends to value a securing of harmony through,
and not as a subversion of, difference; perform a continuous conversation
not bound by the Socratic constraints of dialogue on a neutral common topic;
and learn constantly to receive Christ again, from the unique spiritual
resources of other cultures. These are manifestly all ways of continuing the
work of conversion, although there is no guarantee of conversational success
or of persuasion. Perhaps it would be more apposite to claim here that one
has not only to be suspicious, but also suspicious of being suspicious so as to
present an alternative to consumer society.
This conversation, an act in which we can only ever be “apprentices”,105 is
a risk of self-exposure, as unpredictable conversation between people always
must be when personal autonomy and responsibility are respected. Not only
is there the possibility that the conversation partners could turn venomous,
or that we succumb to temptations to totalise the face of the other by over-
laying our own image on her or his face, but that we may be discomforted
and further destabilised by the shining of a light on the spaces we inhabit
and things we value.106
“Conversation” may prove, then, to be too limited a metaphor for what it
is that theologians think that theology is and does. But while Milbank—with
his intellectualist couching of “conversation”—seems not to observe this,
there is much in Barth that does. In particular, Barth’s notion of being before
the other with its image of fellowship regulating inter-human knowing [see
CD, III.2, 243–274] challenges the adequacy of the metaphor. Nevertheless,
the theme of “theology as conversation” (and not merely theology in con-
versation) may give some sense to other metaphors by indicating their direc-
tion—a conversation for the sake of the healing of the world, the best public
service that communities of hope, as learning the discipleship of conversa-
tionalists, can render to a world growing increasingly tired and cynical. What
theology can do is resist any premature closure of the practice of conversa-
tion by asking “whose public” are we speaking of while reminding ques-
tioners of the formed nature of their own commitments.
In locating the importance of Barth’s practice of doing theology conver-
sationally one could advertise the important candidates-for-conversation-
partner with whom he did not converse, but should have. (Of course, our
determination of who these are depends to a great extent upon what it is
that we value). But while that will suggest what directions may be pressed
for taking the painful yet joyful, educational step of identifying Barth as a
theologically interesting and perennially important conversation-partner,107 it
should not evade the importance of conversation for him, both in theory and
in practice.
NOTES
1 My thanks especially are due to Dr. Mike Higton for his sagacious comments on this paper
and also for his contribution to a shorter co-authored piece which I cite in places: Mike
A. Higton and John C. McDowell, “Introduction: Barth as Conversationalist”, in Convers-
ing With Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
2 James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991 Delivered in the
University of Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 131.
3 Barr, p. 7.
4 Barr, p. 1.
5 Barr, pp. 10f.
6 Barr, p. 10 n10.
7 John Hart, Karl Barth vs. Emil Brunner: The Formation and Dissolution of a Theological Alliance,
1916–1936 (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2001), p. 207. While he underplays the important
theological content of many of Barth’s worries, Gary Dorrien claims that “in the [dialec-
tical theological] movement’s early years, Barth was wary of Brunner for reasons that,
at first, had more to do with differences in personality and style than with substantive
theological disagreements.” Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology
Without Weapons (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), p. 108.
8 This failure to appreciate the sense of what is theologically at stake for Barth in Brunner’s
pamphlet is accentuated by Barr’s thesis that it was Barth’s prior theological commitments
that determined his incapacity to hear that Brunner was not developing a theology even
potentially sympathetic to the German Christians.
9 See Barr, p. 13. Citation from Barth in A. Szekeres, “Karl Barth und die natürliche
Theologie”, Evangelische Theologie Vol. 24 no. 5 (1964), pp. 229–242 (p. 229).
10 Barr, pp. 128f.
11 Barr, p. 11. “[I]t was the internal theological development in Barth’s mind that caused him
to perceive the German situation in terms generated by his own theology, and therefore to
see it as a final manifestation of natural theology.” “[I]t is the judgement of people who
see the entire world and its history very much through the glass of their own particular
theology.” Barr, pp. 116f.
12 Barr, pp. 38, 20.
13 John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1998), p. 9.
14 Barr, p. 131. Barr fails to substantiate his impressions (developed from the Barth of
the Barth-Brunner dispute of the 1930s) by substantive and detailed exegesis of Barth’s
writings.
15 Karl Barth, Karl Barth-Rudolph Bultmann Letters 1922–1966, edited by Bernd Jaspert, trans.
Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), p. 65.
16 Barr, p. 116.
17 Clark Pinnock, “Karl Barth and Christian Apologetics”, Themelios Vol. 2 (1977), pp. 66–71
(p. 70). Anthony Flew cites Barth as asserting that “Belief cannot argue with unbelief: it
can only preach to it.” See God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. 9. Barr, p.
38: “Barth is shouting down every contrary opinion, defying anyone to think or say any-
thing other than what he thinks and says, inventing specious forms of words to bring the
text into conformity with his views.”
18 Pinnock, p. 66.

19 Richard Roberts discovers in the Römerbrief, and its Sitz im Leben in the “first postmoder-
nity”, precisely the rudimentaries of the theologia viatorum. See A Theology on its Way?
Essays on Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), pp. 196ff.
20 Richard H. Roberts, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications” in S. W.
Sykes (ed), Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp.
88–146 (pp. 123, 132).
21 Richard H. Roberts, “The Ideal and the Real in the Theology of Karl Barth” in New Studies
in Theology 1, eds. Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes (London: Duckworth, 1980), pp.
163–180 (p. 165); 1991, xv; cf. Pinnock, p. 70. A similar account of Barth’s “totalitarian”
method can be found in Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans.
Matthew J. O’Connell (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1985), p. 16; Richard
Crigg, Theology as a Way of Thinking (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), pp. 39–48. For a
critique of Pannenberg, here, see Paul D. Molnar, “Some Problems with Pannenberg’s
Solution to Barth’s ‘Faith Subjectivism’ ”, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 48 (1995), pp.
315–339.
22 Roberts, 1979, pp. 144f.
23 Roberts, 1980, p. 177. Roberts particularly notes that the temporal character of Barth’s
treatment of the “Resurrection-time” is problematic, a freeing from temporal enclosure
(CD, IV.1, p. 313). This is further encapsulated in Barth’s discussion of election, for herein
the fulcrum is shifted from incarnate history to eternal decision (1979, p. 120). It is not
time per se, upon which attention must be concentrated, but eternity as the temporal
plenum from which time takes its reality (1979, p. 108). So Barth argues that election is
something that “happened to and not in their human nature and its possibilities, to and
not in their human history and its development” (CD, II.2, p. 321).
24 Roberts, 1979, p. 145.
25 Roberts, 1991, p. 175. Similarly, see Stephen H. Webb on a Barthian lapse into the Protes-
tant scholasticism of a stable authorial voice, over-confident logocentrism, authoritarian
position, and closed system. Refiguring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl Barth (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 153.
26 Pinnock, p. 71. Roberts, 1979, p. 145: “the Incarnation . . . hovers above us like a cathedral
resting upon a cloud.”
27 Pinnock, p. 66.
28 On Roberts’ assessment of Milbank, see “Theology and the Social Sciences” in David F.
Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Twentieth Century,
second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 700–719, especially pp. 709–711. Paul Lake-
land, echoing a phrase from Raimundo Panikkar, claims that “Milbank’s manifesto is a
shameless reassertion of the premodern superiority of Christendom” Postmodernity: Chris-
tian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), p. 68.
29 John Milbank, “The End of Dialogue” in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Recon-
sidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1990),
pp. 174–191.
30 Milbank, p. 177.
31 Roberts believes that Milbank privatises the range and scope of theological conversations.
See “Theology and the Social Sciences” in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians,
second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 700–719; “Article Review: Transcendental
Sociology? A Critique of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory Beyond Secular Reason”,
Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 46 (1993), pp. 527–535. Cf. Ian Markham, Truth and the
Reality of God: An Essay in Natural Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 39f.
32 Milbank, p. 177. Similarly, Glyn Richards, Towards a Theology of Religions (London: Rout-
ledge, 1989), p. 156.
33 Milbank, pp. 177f.
34 Kenneth Surin, “A ‘Politics of Speech’ ” in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Recon-
sidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1990),
pp. 192–212 (p. 200).
35 Milbank, p. 181.
36 Something of this is detectable in a comment of Don Carson’s to the effect that “It is crucial
that we learn the gospel and proclaim it. But it is also vitally important to understand that
the people to whom we speak bring with them their own particular prejudices, back-

grounds and biases. . . . [W]e must address the cultural presuppositions of our hearers so
that we do not unwittingly obscure the gospel.” Don A. Carson, “The Worldview Clash”,
Southern Cross Quarterly (Summer, 1998), reprinted www.focus.org.uk/carson.htm. Are not
Christians also equally culturally embedded, and the way the Gospel is heard, received,
and then proclaimed to others coloured by that embeddedness? The church is too close
to, and bound up with, its host cultures for it ever to be able to declare itself (its truth and
truthfulness) over against those cultures. As Graham Ward argues, “Christian utterance
is constructed out of the cultural materials at hand. It is not homogenous but always
hybrid, improvised and implicated in networks of association which exceed various forms
of institutional, individual or sectarian policing. Furthermore, since Christians are also
members of other associations, networks and institutions, what is both internal and exter-
nal to Christian identity (and its continuing formation) is fixed.” Graham Ward, “Barth,
Hegel and the Possibility for Christian Apologetics” in Conversing With Barth, Mike A.
Higton and John C. McDowell (eds), (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
37 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 3. This makes ideol-
ogy sound more like a matter of rationalisation, of ideas imagined to be infallible that con-
sequently evade self-critical testing of their genetics, interests, and exclusions of the
interests of others, than a matter of the very constitution of social subjects themselves.
38 Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV.4 Lecture Fragments, trans. George W.
Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), p. 224. Terry Eagleton rightly warns, however,
that one person’s bondage and rigidity is another’s freedom and open-mindedness. See
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York and London: Verso, 1991), p. 4.
39 Barth, 1981, p. 227.
40 See, e.g., CD, I.1, p. 83. As human constructs, theological language and meaning occupy
a space that is to be continually set in motion through fresh openness to the self-giving of
the Word. See CD, I.1, pp. 12, 258ff. Certainty and assurance cannot pertain to any human
endeavours, but can only be obtained momentarily in fresh renewals of the revelatory
event.
41 See CD, I.1, pp. 15, 27, 65, 203, 300.
42 Eagleton argues that the claim that all discourse is ideological erases any sense from the
term “ideology” since it requires that we can hope “that in any particular situation you
must be able to point to what counts as non-ideological” (Ideology, p. 9).
43 Karl Barth, Karl Barth’s Table Talk, ed. John D. Godsey (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and
Boyd, 1963), p. 63.
44 Karl Barth, “Foreword to the English Edition” in Otto Weber, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmat-
ics: An Introductory Report on Volumes I/1-III/4 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953), p. 8.
45 Barth, 1953, p. 8.
46 Significantly Gordon Clark, approaching the CD with the expectation (or at least desire)
to discover a coherent system, puzzles over a thinker who “seems to hesitate to affirm that
theology is systematic and logical” and yet whose “actual practice is often explicitly sys-
tematic”. Gordon Clark, Karl Barth’s Theological Method, second edition (Hobbs, NM: The
Trinity Foundation, 1997), pp. 63, 66.
47 Barth, 1963, p. 19.
48 See Adolf von Harnack in H. Martin Rumscheidt (ed.), Revelation and Theology: An Analy-
sis of the Barth-Harnack Correspondence of 1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1972), p. 39.
49 Barth in Rumscheidt, 1972, p. 40.
50 Mark C. Taylor, “Text as Victim” in T. J. J. Altizer (ed.), Deconstruction and Theology (New
York, NY: Crossroad, 1982), p. 65.
51 See Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. of sixth edition by Edwin C. Hoskyns
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 7.
52 Barth, in Rumscheidt, 1972, p. 52.
53 Milbank, p. 189. This notion of conversation qualifies Milbank’s appeal to the “incom-
mensurability” of narratives. For instance, he claims that the religions remain “different
accounts of Being itself or ‘what there is’ ” Ibid., p. 189.
54 Barth, 1968, p. 1.
55 Richard H. Roberts, “Theology and the Social Sciences” in The Modern Theologians, David
F. Ford (ed.), second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 700–719 (p. 716).

56 Roberts, 1996, p. 192.

57 “Primarily God elected or predestinated Himself” (CD, II.2, p. 162).
58 This admission erases George P. Schner’s comment that “conversation” accords an active
role to the theologian “over the receptive moment of the religious attitude, an obvious debt
to modernity’s emphasis on rationality as constructive”. George P. Schner, “Metaphors for
Theology” in John Webster and George P. Schner (eds.), Theology After Liberalism: A Reader
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 3–51, p. 30.
59 This ‘broadening’ of the places of listening and conversation lead Barth to refigure the
image of church. See particularly Barth, 1981.
60 Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 148f.; Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The
Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press 1991), p. 84.
61 Barth, Christmas, trans. Bernhard Citron (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1959),
p. 25.
62 For an examination of this in the context of explicating Barth’s critique of natural theol-
ogy see John C. McDowell, “A Response to Rodney Holder on Barth on Natural Theol-
ogy”, Themelios Vol. 27 (2002), pp. 32–44.
63 Bruce D. Marshall, “A Theology on its Way? Essays on Karl Barth. By Richard H. Roberts [a
Review]”, Journal of Theological Studies Vol. 44 (1993), pp. 453–458 (p. 456). Cf. Ingolf
Dalferth, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 120f.:
“[Barth] unfolds in a painstaking and detailed way a theological perspective of universal
inclusiveness which incorporates and reconstructs the shared and public reality of our
world within theology; and he achieves this by interpreting it theologically within the
frame of reference provided by the christological exposition of the eschatological reality
described”.
64 The pragmatics of this temporary measure raise a question over Graham Ward’s reading
of Barth, put in the form of a rhetorical question, “Doesn’t Barth’s description of research
conducted on the basis of ‘determining principles’ sound like the academic rationale for
distinct and jealousy guarded faculty boundaries in a post-Berlin university?” (in Higton
and McDowell). Ward does qualify this by recognising that in practice “His is now a ‘self-
enclosed’ discursive reflection”.
65 Barth, “The First Commandment in Theology” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays
and Comments, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986),
pp. 63–78.
66 Thiemann, p. 82.
67 See, e.g., CD, III.3, pp. 297ff. Any appraisal of Barth’s theological use of the aesthetic needs
to counter the common, but seriously misinformed, understanding of the christocentric-
ity of Barth’s account of revelation. God speaks one Word, but the manner of that Word’s
coming to our speech cannot be confined to, although it is primarily bound to, the human-
ity of Jesus of Nazareth. That humanity, Barth makes clear, is that which regulates one’s
reading and assessment of these words.
68 But as Eugene Rogers argues, “The biblically system hermetically sealed off against the
world is a parody of Barth, opposing his Christology.” Sexuality and the Christian Body:
Their Way into the Triune God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 155. Much more satisfactory and
provocative is Hans Frei’s description that “there was in Barth a self-conscious secularity
of sensibility”. “Karl Barth—Theologian” in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 172. Barth’s perspective is far removed
from any simple Christ-against-culture model, since it is not a denial of “the secularity of
the world but is instead a reinterpretation of it theologically in the light of the presence
of Christ and the world of meaning which it carries with it”. Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Karl
Barth’s Eschatological Realism” in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 14–45 (p. 30).
69 It is true that Barth mused that the angels sang Bach carefully in public, but sang Mozart
at home for fun. Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, trans. C. K. Pott (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986), p. 23. Moreover, Barth does not seem
to have let this infuse his sense of what worship is, declaring his logocentrism late in life,
for instance: “the church building is intended to be the site of the preaching of the Word
of God and of the prayers of the assembled congregation. . . . [Worship] in the strict sense

of the word— . . . [is] prayer, preaching, baptism, and Holy Communion.” “Protestantism
and Architecture”, trans. Louise R. Ritenour, Theology Today Vol. 19 (1962), p. 272.
70 Several commentators have observed how an almost musical sense of style and timing
pervades the CD. See T. F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology
1910–1931 (London: SCM Press, 1962), pp. 23ff.; George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth:
The Shape of His Theology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 28; John
Bowden, Karl Barth (London: SCM Press, 1971), p. 24.
71 Theodore A. Gill, “Barth and Mozart”, Theology Today Vol. 43 no. 4 (1986), pp. 403–411
(p. 404).
72 Gill, p. 405.
73 Karl Barth, How I Changed My Mind, ed. John Godsey (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press,
1969), pp. 71f. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, pp. 33f.: “What he translated into music was real
life in all its discord. But in defiance of that, and on the sure foundation of God’s good
creation, and because of that, he moves always from left to right, never the reverse.”
74 Geoff Thompson, however, claims that Barth’s Mozart texts draw a distinction between
“parable” and “Gospel”; whereas in IV.3.1, §69.2 Gleichnis “is synonymous with Gospel”.
Consequently, Thompson asserts that Barth was primarily interested in Mozart’s capac-
ity to listen to and hear creation, and not in his ability to “reveal” “. . . As Open to the world
as any theologian could be . . .”? Karl Barth’s Account of Extra Ecclesial Truth and its Value to
Christianity’s Encounter with Other Religious Traditions (unpublished Ph.D Thesis, Cam-
bridge, 1995), Appendix C. However, (1) Barth appears to claim for Mozart a special divine
inspiration [Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, p. 27]. Therefore, the resultant music would be an
inspired witness. (2) In practice, Barth’s high regard for Mozart’s music sets the latter
almost on the plane of theological sainthood, raising theological questions about creation
itself. He even in 1968 suggested, albeit slightly tongue-in-cheek, that Mozart be beatified
if not canonised. Cited in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobio-
graphical Texts, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1976), p. 493; cf. CD, III.3, p. 299.
(3) Why would Barth use a key term, such as Gleichnis, in such a contrary way in a short
time-period (1956–59)? (4) The text cited above from 1958 clearly calls Mozart a parable
of grace. See How I Changed My Mind, pp. 71f.
75 Barth is often accused of permitting natural theology to enter in by the back door. See,
e.g., Emil Brunner, “The New Barth: Observations on Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Man”, Scot-
tish Journal of Theology Vol. 4 (1951), pp. 123–135; Robert Palma, Karl Barth’s Theology of
Culture: The Freedom of Culture for the Praise of God (Allison Park, PA: Pittsburgh Theologi-
cal Monographs, Pickwick Publications, 1983), p. 75; Ray S. Anderson, “Barth and a New
Direction for Natural Theology” in John Thompson (ed.), Theology Beyond Christendom:
Essays on the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications,
1986), pp. 241–266.
76 This kind of move, according to Marshall, is a suggestion that supposedly “alien” dis-
course “has a legitimate and traceable location within the community’s comprehensive
vision of the world.” Bruce D. Marshall, “Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Uni-
verse of Truths” in Bruce D. Marshall (ed.), Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation
with George Lindbeck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 69–102
(p. 74).
77 Barth famously states that “God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute
concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really
does” (CD, I.1, p. 55). However, he follows this with an injunction, “But, unless we regard
ourselves as the prophets and founders of a new Church, we cannot say that we are com-
missioned to pass on what we have heard as independent proclamation.”
78 Barth, Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings 1946–52, trans. E. M. Delacour and S.
Godman (London: SCM Press, 1954), pp. 81, 86; cf. p. 98. For Barth, of course, this care-
fully delineated sense of political unfinalisability does not justify Christian political pas-
sivity. “The Church cannot live in permanent retreat, however pleasant its dreams as it
sleeps away its mission to mankind. If the Church must remain free, above the changing
political systems, this very freedom necessarily implies that the Church should partici-
pate in these events” (p. 89).
79 Later in CD IV.3 Barth articulates the sense of this in terms of what he calls “the little light
of creation” (CD, IV.3.1, §69.2).

80 The very eventfulness of grace in Barth requires careful handling so as not to disrupt the
direction in which he moves towards a “secular sensibility”. It can, if not qualified, suggest
an occasionalism (a charge put by Bonhoeffer) and that is, then, not too far removed from
a modified (because it is still heard through mediating elements) revelational immediacy
(a charge made by Moltmann), and again that the created order functions merely as a
backdrop for grace (a charge levelled by Hendrikus Berkhof). Overplaying the eventful-
ness of grace prevents an adequate reconceptualising of theology beyond the kinds of
dualism that seems to render all events of grace arbitrary interruptions into creaturely
existence.
81 Rowan Williams, p. 330.
82 Marshall expresses this well when articulating the implications of any theological “absorb-
ing the world”: “consider all discourse, and therefore all possible truth, to make a claim
upon the community’s scripturally normed project of interpretation and assessment”
(Marshall, 1990, p. 77). “The point of theological undertakings funded by this metaphor
[viz. ‘absorbing the world’] is precisely not, as the objection suggests, to replace the world
with the scriptural text, or to treat the text as a means of escape from within the world,
but to interpret the world (all of it) through the text. Since we know the open-ended
engagement with whatever truth claims are being made in the times and places in which
the Christian community exists. This engagement is open-ended in at least two ways: it
is always a necessary task, and it is always an incomplete task” (Marshall, 1990, p. 84).
83 Donald E. Allen and Rebecca F. Guy, Conversation Analysis: The Sociology of Talk (The
Hague: Mouton, 1974), p. 239.
84 See William Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), p. 81.
85 Cf. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (London: SCM Press,
1987), p. 23.
86 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans.
Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1972), p. 17.
87 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York, NY: The Seabury Press, 1972), p. 231.
88 Placher, p. 149.
89 Marshall notes that a refusal to fix stable interpretative criteria can critically respond to a
certain form of the charge of theological fideism—that of an imperialistic foreclosure of
conversation. Yet that refusal to stabilise the criteria is still to be differentiated from any
notion that all of our beliefs are put at hazard whenever we enter into conversation with
those who hold beliefs different from our own. Even so, “Christians surely ought to be
prepared for the possibility that encounters with alien belief systems may give them good
reasons to give up or revise at least some of their beliefs, even if there is no external
standard for deciding when this should happen or which beliefs should be changed”
(Marshall, 1990, p. 90).
90 Barth, 1972, p. 52. Barth follows his opening remarks in his Protestant Theology in the Nine-
teenth Century with the claims that “Of course, there is no method, not even a theological
one, by means of which we can be certain of catching sight of theology. In this way, too,
it can escape us, because we are inadequate to the task it poses” (p. 15). Characteristically,
however, Barth cannot let the matter rest there and comments on the risky, but necessary,
venture of theology.
91 Karl Barth, “Liberal Theology—An Interview” in Final Testimonies (Grand Rapids, MI:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), pp. 34ff.
92 David F. Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), p. 271.
93 David F. Ford, “Salvation and the Nature of Theology: A Response to John Webster’s
Review of Self and Salvation: Being Transformed”, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 54 (2001),
pp. 560–575 (pp. 566f.).
94 Ronald Wardhaugh, How Conversation Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 7: “In order to
participate in conversation, you must be a willing party to a certain worldview. . . . You
may have reservations about certain matters, but unless you are prepared to meet others
on common ground and ignore differences which can only be divisive there is little hope
that any kind of communication will occur.” Cf. Allen and Guy, p. 11. But it may be the
case that the only commonality that is required is the willingness to engage in conversa-

tion. As Placher observes, “particular conversations can start from whatever their partici-
pants happened to share and go from there” (Placher, p. 12). A genuine pluralism does
not force us all to share the same assumptions, but it finds ways in which we can talk with
one another.
95 As Milbank makes clear in his monumental Theology and Social Theory, “even the most
radical Western notions of justice and freedom”, and for the purposes of his paper—dia-
logue—are merely secular shadows of those learned from liberalism’s Christian past (par-
ticularly, for Milbank, the past/tradition that is seen to be at its best in Aquinas), and as
such are not well served by secularity.
96 Christians have reasons internal to their traditions for conversation—therefore there is no
need for them to look for universally justifying reasons to converse or rules to guide their
conversational performance before the conversation has even begun. As mentioned
earlier, Christians must insist that human activity is dialectically in constant dependence,
and that dependence is recognised as being the fruit of an originatory, establishing and
generative absolute dependence. Prayer, then, forms the beginning point (logically speak-
ing) of the theological conversations of those who witness to humanity in Christ’s having
been conversed with, and simultaneously having listened to the O/other.
97 Milbank, pp. 188, 189. Tolerance is a good start, being better than violent forms of dis-
agreement. However, it is only a start and is shallow unless enriched. As Ian Markham
suggests, “We need to move beyond tolerance, to active engagement and concern in the
life of others.” See Ian S. Markham, Plurality and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), p. 188. Yet, there is a danger lurking in the active voice of
Milbank’s idea of out-narration—it can, if left unchecked, render the process of listening
to what is truly other unspeakable. Romand Coles discovers the trouble in the limits that
Milbank ascribes to the Holy Spirit: “What if the Holy Spirit, as ‘indefinite spiritual
response,’ as ‘radically external relationality’ partially exceeds the Church? . . . Might
not the Spirit’s response lie in multiplicitous realities with no such Christian self-
consciousness?” “Storied Others and Possibilities of Caritas: Milbank and Neo-
Nietzschean Ethics”, Modern Theology Vol. 8 no. 4 (October, 1992), pp. 331–350 (p. 349).
98 Milbank, p. 189.
99 Pinnock’s sense of creation, by contrast, is insufficiently eschatologically nuanced. He
seems to secure Christian identity so as to open avenues of apologetic argument with
those whose identities are formed elsewhere, and yet who can, with a little bit of coaxing,
see from the universe the unambiguous hand of God. However, as David Burrell argues,
we are never in a secure place either to argue down another, or even to know another. See
David B. Burrell, “Friends in Conversation” in Eric O. Springsted (ed.), Spirituality and
Theology: Essays in Honour of Diogenes Allen (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press,
1998), p. 29.
100 Paul Ricoeur: “To keep silent is not the same as to be dumb, however. To keep silent is to
let things be said by others. Silence opens a space for hearing.” “On Accusation” in Alas-
dair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 61–79 (pp. 73f.).
101 Pace Allen and Guy, p. 240.
102 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
p. 60.
103 Wardhaugh, pp. 39f. For example, two people in a village discussing the morning’s
weather are performing much more than providing information.
104 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Collins, 1961),
p. 47.
105 Burrell, p. 33.
106 Burrell, p. 36: “[W]e are all called to a radical ‘unknowing’ in the face of the offer of divine
friendship extended to us, and so stimulated to let go of our endemic desire to protect our
own life, reputation, and opinions.”
107 One needs to remember, however, the partialness of the conversational metaphor with ref-
erence to texts. On this, see Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Expe-
rience and the Knowledge of God (London: SCM Press, 1988), p. 6.

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Modern Theology 19:4 October 2003

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

Conversation as “Man’s Invention”? Theological Seclusion

“propagandist” policing of theological rhetoric. This Barr describes—some-

The first stage in Robert’s strategy traces Barth’s “totalitarian” method, or

on the same level as any fanaticism which claims, “I have a revelation!”

The comment “Though it is rational within itself” is suggestive. Pinnock

Ending “Dialogue” as the Beginning of “Conversation”

course.30 It assumes a commonly recognised subject matter, “a timeless logos

is something ethically significant in Williams’ and Barth’s descriptions—

Dialogue as “Man’s Invention” and Theology as Conversational

Barth certainly hopes to be given a fair hearing. However, he feels that a

ence. Moreover, this dependence is itself the fruit of an original, establish-

Listening to the World’s Judgement on the Church

Barth refuses to divide the world up into incompatible spheres, incommen-

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

The Virtue of Arguing

Something of the sense of the honesty of this generous and (self-)critical

Being truly liberal means thinking and speaking in responsibility and

be too ideological a discourse for theologians to participate in, too steeped

therapeutic, they can be relation-forming, playful, celebratory, erotic, and

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

56 Roberts, 1996, p. 192.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

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