Repenting of theology.

Randi Rashkover

Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise

T & T Clark, 2005. 215pp. $130 (hb); $49.95 (pb).

Now that the West no longer situates itself against godless communists, but against other religionists, the relationship between religion and public life has become far more fraught than anything that the Cold War led us to expect. As we grasp at straws to figure out the most defensible role for religion in the public square, we turn to history for exemplary guides. In this revision of her doctoral dissertation, Rashkover argues that in the Jewish and Christian traditions, the theologies of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) and Karl Barth (1886-1968) can serve as role models for a nonfanatic theopolitics. Contrary to what one might at first think, this is not in spite of their theocentrism; it is because of it.

Rashkover opens her book with an excellent and nuanced portrait of the neo-Kantian account of religion found in the Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen's posthumously published Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1918). Cohen was the matrix out of which Rosenzweig and Barth developed, having taught them both at the University of Marburg. Cohen's philosophy of religion marked an advance over Kant's; his account of moral activity as one of acknowledgment of God made the role of God in his system more robust than in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, in which God serves only as a postulate. However, Rashkover shows that Cohen's having remained wedded to rationalism led him into a thicket of problems when it came to thinking through sin and forgiveness. On Cohen's account of a correlation between human and divine reasoning, he implied that human autonomy is sufficient for engaging in the process of repentance--the casting aside of the sinful self and the self's creation of a new way of life. On the other hand, he also implied that, without the sense that God and only God forgives sins, repentance (and therefore progress) could not take place.

Given this antinomy resulting from Cohen's overly conceptualized thinking about God, both Barth and Rosenzweig turned to a mode of theologizing based on revelation as a lived, personal encounter. Nevertheless--and here is the delicious irony that grounds Rashkover's thesis--this theocentrism does not license believers' testimony of God's abiding presence in their lives. Indeed, just the opposite. Rashkover emphasizes that Rosenzweig's account of revelation as divine love of the human in his 1920 Star of Redemption culminates in the believer's repentance (62): "By repenting, the soul acknowledges the reality of a transcendent authority by announcing the absence of this authority within herself." The believer then lives a life of theological desire, a desire for the infinite that takes on a negative and positive dimension. Negatively, theological desire is anti-idolatrous; it orients itself against any and all theological attempts to capture God in a set of propositions. The productive dimension of theological desire is social; desire verifies itself in neighbor-love, in the testimony to the neighbor of the self's fleeting experience of divine love. These two dimensions of Rosenzweigian theology authorize Jews to act as Jews in the public sphere, but also lead to the principle that Jews should always oppose alliances with the finite goals of the secular order (101).

The Barth of the second edition of the commentary on Romans (1922) is structurally similar. Revelation leads to the awareness that the divine order is other than the sinful world; the life of faith is a life of repentance, witnessing to God in the world. And even though one witnesses to God's reconciling power, the necessity of repentance in the early Barth means for Rashkover that Barthian faith is (134) "a strictly practical acknowledgment of a God outside of human consciousness ... God's reality is never fully present to [believers'] thinking." This continues in the Church Dogmatics; there, Barth's Christology, in which God in Himself remains veiled behind the incarnation, allows for a life of witness to a God who is, in crucial respects, absent from mundane reality. In combination, Barth and Rosenzweig show us that communally and theologically thick Jewish and Christian lives--lives of repentance--can allow for religious participation in the public sphere while maintaining the critical distance needed for prophetic speech.

Revelation and Theopolitics will gain notice for being the first extended treatment of both Rosenzweig and Barth together, but in my view its value lies more in its being one of the few works of contemporary theology to suggest that the most intractable, and therefore the most interesting, concepts in twentieth-century theology are those of repentance and forgiveness. Not only does repentance mark the shift from neo-Kantian rationalism to dialectical theology, but Rashkover's readings themselves force Barth and Rosenzweig to repent of their excesses, by turning them toward each other. Reading Barth through Rosenzweig shows the limits of an emphasis on ecclesiology such as one gets in, say, Stanley Hauerwas's reading of Barth in With the Grain of the Universe. Likewise, reading Rosenzweig through Barth tempers the emphasis on humanism that appears in accounts that too hastily make Rosenzweig into a transitional figure between Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.

Whether Rashkover's act of repentance has given us truer pictures of Rosenzweig or Barth remains unclear; intellectual historians might point out that Rosenzweig wrote to Martin Buber in 1923 that almost a decade earlier, his close friend Eugen Rosenstock had "surgically extracted my Barthianism from me." (Nevertheless, this is not necessarily the most believable claim when it comes to the 1920 Star of Redemption.) But she excitingly animates their theologies in the service of her own theopolitical voice. To begin to solve the problems of religion and public life that currently vex the West, theologians across multiple religious traditions will need to show that a connection between theological orthodoxy and political liberalism can be philosophically defended. For this task, Rashkover has shown us why Barth and Rosenzweig are essential resources.