Radicalizing Barth:
Helmut Gollwitzer’s Public Theology and Its Postcolonial Implications
Abstract:
In this paper, I investigate Gollwitzer’s theology to clarify his prophetic stance on public theology and its postcolonial implications. It is crucial to elucidate his critical theory of capitalist revolution and historical materialist conception in relation to Karl Barth. I employ narrative anticipation to analyze Gollwitzer’s eschatology concerning the role of the Holy Spirit (as down payment or Angeld). Gollwitzer’s reflection on God and emancipation opposes Eberhard Jűngel’s assertion that God’s being is in the process of ontological becoming. Gollwitzer’s advocacy for Black theology, furthermore, is a critical component in his thesis on capitalist revolution and colonialism. In its relationship to God and emancipation, the biblical language is living, critical, and dynamic in nature. The comparative study of religions and their public relevance can be facilitated, therefore, by his insights into the immanent critique and effective history of those on the margins.
Introduction
In God for a Secular Society Jűrgen Moltmann asserts: “There is no Christian identity without public relevance, and no public relevance without theology’s Christian identity” (Moltmann, God for a Secular Society, 1). Later in the context of public significance, he introduces Gollwitzer as a prominent political theologian who questions the reality of capitalist crime against humanity and advocates for the revolution of life (ibid., 51).
While Gollwitzer was rooted in the Lutheran tradition, he was not defined by any one tradition and considered Karl Barth to be his most important teacher. He was actively engaged in the Confessing Church by opposing National Socialism which was aided and abetted by “German Christians.” He was also an important exponent of Jewish-Christian renewal, combatting Anti-Semitism alongside his pupil and friend F.W. Marquardt, a provocative figure who offered a prophetic utopian portrayal of the radical Barth in the aftermath of Auschwitz. Gollwitzer’s sociopolitical interventions warrant the following five approaches to his public theology.
First, I will examine his seminal study of the capitalist revolution in relation to class struggle from above, as exemplified in the military regime of Chile. I enter into discourse with the aim of clarifying the capitalist revolution and a structural theory of imperialism, addressing a social theory of late capitalism and the legitimacy of the state. In this regard, it is critical to transcend Marx’s insufficient understanding of the state,
on one hand, and to integrate Barth’s public theology and political ethics on the other.
Second, I address Gollwitzer’s theology of life-meaning, in which he synthesizes Barth with Tillich. I examine how God works as the source of emancipation in Gollwitzer’s theological reflection on God as totaliter aliter, as well as Tillich’s method of correlation as the prophetic framework of God and democratic socialism. This perspective on God, freedom, and emancipation transcends Jüngel’s attempt to integrate
God into a Trinitarian ontological framework in accordance with Hegel and Heidegger.
Third, Gollwitzer’s perspective on historical materialism in comparison with Barth provides a heuristic strategy, which I examine through a constructive elucidation of effective history (Walter Benjamin). Gollwitzer’s creative approach to historical materialism is articulated through his thesis on capitalist revolution and a structural theory of imperialism, while being juxtaposed with Barth’s position on bureaucracy and reification.
Fourth, Gollwitzer’s understanding of God facilitates an exploration of the relationship between creation and eschatology while highlighting the irregular aspects of God’s grace in the world. I interpret his eschatology by employing the lens of the anticipatory role of the Holy Spirit.
Fifth, it is essential to focus on theology and race through immanent critique within Gollwitzer’s theology of the living word of God. James Cone’s Black theology is a critical component in Gollwitzer. In this line and direction biblical language transcends Marxist understanding of language when overdetermined by economic infrastructure or Russian nationalism.
I conclude by evaluating Gollwitzer as a cardinal example for public theology and civil society initiatives with postcolonial implications. It is significant to integrate his insight into an immanent critique and dynamic effective history aimed at the construction of public theology in the comparative study of religions.
I. World Economy and Hegemony from Above
In 1972 during the era of Allende in Chile, the Christians for Socialism movement convened its conference in Santiago. Liberation theology emerged in this setting as the inaugural expression of postcolonial theologies, contesting centuries of colonial exploitation and economic dependence on Europe and the USA. Its motto was reflected in the preferential option for the poor, and an economic theory of dependence significantly supports a critical analysis of the unequal relations between the metropolis and the periphery.
Given the background, Gollwitzer’s approach to the world economy retains a postcolonial or a neocolonial character which allows for the interrogation of the global dynamics of the capitalist revolution within the centralized framework of the metropolis in terms of its semi-periphery and periphery. This pertains to his structural theory of imperialism, which critiques the capitalist revolution as a global phenomena and the systemic injustice and brutality inherent within it.
During the period of the totalitarian regime, the ultima ratio arises for the dissolution of parliamentary democracy due to the detriment of capitalist interests. Consequently, a fascist dictatorship, as evidenced in the case of Chile, can be instituted. In fact, Salvador Allende was a socialist politician elected as President in the political system of liberal democracy. The capitalist state was susceptible to the threat of military fascism, as exemplified by the actions of Chile’s armed forces which were backed up by the American CIA during the Nixon administration against the Allende government (“Lehrstűck in Chile,” Gollwitzer, Die kapitalistische Revolution, 132-3).
As a result, democratic socialism was obstructed and replaced by a military coup under General Augusto Pinochet, a fact that reveals a true parallel to the German experience of National Socialism in 1933. To be sure, during Pinochet’s dictatorship, a variant of neo-liberalism was implemented and bolstered, employing the assistance of Milton Friedman at the Chicago School of Economics.
Gollwitzer perspicaciously identified this brutal crime as an instance of class struggle from above, reflecting the dominance of the privileged in the erosion of democracy, civil society initiatives, and social justice. In this political context, Gollwitzer’s prophetic theology turns on the relationship between the Christian Gospel and emancipation delineating societal relations and global structures as the root causes fraught with injustice and violence.
Discourse Clarification: Capitalist Revolution
Gollwitzer’s theory of global capitalism embodies post-Eurocentric relevance and examines the structure of imperialism within the neocolonial world order. This aligns with the work of a Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, an advocate of peace and conflict studies.
The postcolonial experience is marked by a delicate form of structural violence and its logics: exploitation, division, and infiltration pertaining to a complex global reality. Gollwitzer supplements military power that underpins the postcolonial condition (ibid.,42). This political economic strategy can be applied to analyze the interdependence between the metropolis, the semi-metropolis, semi-periphery, and periphery within the neoliberal regime of world system. Gollwitzer’s structural type of imperialism analyzes the neo-imperial order as it follows decolonization.
In my view, core zones such as metropolis can be compared to a vast archipelago, which is found everywhere on the globe. There is still a periphery in the midst of the centers, just as metropolis exists in the periphery. This phenomenon can be designated in terms of stratification, inequality, class/status struggle, racism, and exclusion.
Gollwitzer acknowledged that the political elites on the periphery are interconnected with the elite of the metropolis through common economic interests, cultural influences, the education of offspring, and military support. They are detached from advocating for the interests of their own people, while pursuing their specific agendas in alignment with the power elites in the center. The elites of the periphery adapt to a life style that alienates them from local tradition and the masses. The imperial order of things in the postcolonial environment is associated with capitalist world system, characterized by hegemony and competition among metropolis nations (ibid., 44-7).
Power elites function as influential agents in the governance of social formation. It is characterized by stratification across various fields, including politics, economics, culture, education, and employment opportunities. Power elites govern public spheres within civil society from the periphery while defining the postcolonial condition. Gollwitzer, however, does not harshly dismiss Weber’s thesis of inner-worldly asceticism and the capitalist spirit in early capitalism. To the contrary, he posits that inner-worldly waste is a prerequisite for survival condition of capitalism (ibid., 53). As a corollary, Marx anticipated Weber’s thesis in the context of capital accumulation through the theory of abstinence. The modernized capitalist is capable of perceiving accumulation as renunciation of pleasure (Capital I: 740-1).
A theory of abstinence in the Protestant ethic and its capitalist spirit is clearly seen in Marx’s critique of the Christian character of accumulation in the context of European colonialism. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates’” (ibid., 742). Although Marx misfires in his critique of Torah and prophetic justice, it is noteworthy to see that his wholesale attack is historically embedded within the mercantilist practice of colonial injustice and slave trade in the international affairs; it depicts Christian character of capital accumulation through plunder, pillage, and murderer.
Capital aims at acquiring or utilizing power to amplify inner-worldly expenditure or waste by expanding the broad markets to the impoverished strata. Furthermore, technological rationality is fundamental to capital accumulation and expansion. Thus, a theory of abstinence may be relevant to the survival and progress of capitalism through market extension beyond national borders. Capitalists are revolutionary, exerting “the great civilizing influence of capital” in a cosmopolitan context through production, exploitation, and exchange (Die kapitalistische Revolution, 62).
To be sure, the capitalist revolution has facilitated rationalization, secularization, and emancipation, enhancing the living standard, public welfare, eradication of starvation, management of pandemics, overall health improvement. Numerous welfare programs arise from the organization and mobilization of capital to advocate for improved conditions inside capitalism.
This pertains to the capitalist contribution to the great civilizing influence in the phase of late capitalism and its legitimacy. Nonetheless, decolonization has altered Euro-American imperialism into a deleterious form rather than eliminating it. Capitalism as revolution refers to scientific and technological advancement and secularization in nature.
The neo-imperial order of things is defined by a complex interplay of capitalist revolution, power relations, material interests, and mode of information in the communication networks. Natural science assumes a form of medical religion, shaped by the prevailing discourse of biopolitics and the authority of physicians, doctors, and bureaucrats.
Gollwitzer posits a correlation between capitalism and natural science, enabling the industry to utilize natural science. Scientific rationality and its technological achievements undermine the sustainability of enduring sources of fertility. An ecological crisis is bound to the market economy, since industry exploits nature and resources through “an exact, calculating, objectifying investigation of nature” (ibid., 59).
The State and Late Capitalism
Gollwitzer contends that the state has competence of reforming the capitalist order to promote humanization and safeguard the common good; it prioritizes the social welfare system over the class and party interests, while also serving as the manager of scientific research during crises (ibid, 81).
The alternative ‘reform or revolution’ has become abstract, as these are not mutually exclusive. He attends to Barth’s perspective on the relationship between the civil state and the church, as articulated in “The Christian Community and the Civil Community” (1946). This text exemplifies the integration of political ethics with public theology avant la lettre, prior to its formal recognition.
Barth posits that the church shares in the political responsibilities of the civil community which is an operation of a divine ordinance. Church’s subordination (Rom 13.1) has less to do with “being subject” to the state, rather than the fact that Christians should fulfill their obligations to establish, sustain, and maintain the civil community. Subordination pertains to the performance of political co-responsibility, benefiting the civil community.
The Christian stance in the political realm denotes a direction and a line derived from the Kingdom of Christ. The church should then prioritize the marginalized and impoverished segments of society, and its primary concern should be directed towards the socially and economically disadvantaged and vulnerable strata of the impoverished. The church also should choose the socialist possibility that promises the highest degree of social justice (thesis 17).
Gollwitzer’s democratic socialism is indebted to Barth’s thought on the relationship between the state and the church, in which the church must stand for social justice and adopt numerous socialist possibilities in order to achieve the maximum amount of economic justice (McMaken, Our God Loves Justice, 177).
This perspective pertains to a distinct aspect of public theology, providing moral guidelines and counsel for a socially responsible and a sustainable economy system. The economy fundamentally exists to serve people and promote ecological sustainability, and human freedom coupled with responsibility leads to an emancipation that culminates in a solidarity-based democratic society.
In my view, the crisis tendencies within capitalist order of things are examined through intellectual domains including scientific-technological revolution, bureaucratic governance, and ideological interpellation (power discourse). The dominant discourse regulates and solidifies social formation and stratification through communication networks and information modalities inside media environments.
In a biopolitical era, the discourse paradigm is interconnected with biopolitical governance and medical system, which relate to the economic, political, and the socio-cultural system. These realms provide the constellation of social relations, each possessing its own distinctive system and innovation. The political sovereignty has a paramount function within architectural structures, since it is the top layer in directing and integrating the intermediate market layer with the foundational layers of material existence (economics) (Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 24).
II. Life Meaning and Upright Walking
Gollwitzer addresses the decline of humanity under global capitalism and its related transgressions, advocating for the revolution of life that emphasizes the transition of a human being caught in ‘the flawed nature’ (Krummes Holz: crooked timber) toward the ‘upright path’ (Aufrechter Gang). He interrogates the significance of life, as God’s promise serves as the foundation of life’s meaning, a meaning in which human being exists inside the flawed nature (Kant’s description of humanity), yet strives towards the upright path (Ernst Bloch’s characterization of humanity).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer significantly influenced Gollwitzer’s theology and the meaning of life. He argued that no God of gaps or working hypothesis can be justified apologetically in a mature world. The word of the cross is deemed folly and a stumbling block to the erudition of the learned, yet it embodies the divine power for those who are being saved (1 Cor 1:18-19).
In the prophetic framework of theologia crucis, the question of life’s meaning is tangibly potent amid the diverse realities of human existence. Gollwitzer, following Bonhoeffer, underlined the following assertion: “The non-biblical concept of meaning is just a translation of what the Bible refers to as the promise” (Krummes Holz-aufrechter Gang, 42).
God and Emancipation
Gollwitzer’s theology is first of all grounded in the biblical testimony of God, YHWH as totaliter aliter, who is revealed in Jesus Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit. This God cannot be objectified nor ontologized in a philosophical sense. Moreover, along with Barth’s doctrine of God, Gollwitzer adopted the work of Martin Buber and Kornelis Miskotte. In their reading, God comes to us as “Thou Objectivity” in the event of grace and confession of faith.
Gollwitzer’s stance opposes Jüngel’s efforts to comprehend Barth’s Trinity through an ontological framework of God a la Heidegger. God’s essence is not in the process of being; but rather, God, who loves in freedom, is the transforming reality that materially changes all things and everything inside all things. According to Gollwitzer, the fact that “God IS” recognizes divine coming through the word and Holy Spirit, signifying the renewal and transformation of society, humanity, and the world in an entirely distinct manner. The existence of God in the Trinitarian sense is indeed less concerned with ontologically abstract “becoming,” as illustrated in Jűngel’s book God’s Being is in Becoming.
This interpretation, furthermore, tends to bypass Barth’s elucidation of God, the Wholly Other, as the Wholly Transformer. Jűngel deviates from Barth and aligns himself with Karl Rahner’s rule that the economic trinity is the immanent trinity and vice versa (Jűngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, 507).
Nonetheless, the God of Israel is the God of freedom, imparting divine life of grace and emancipation as the novum in God’s coming into human history, all while maintaining the sanctity of the divine Name and freedom. God’s existence as the One coming reveals God’s free and loving relationship to creation, revelation, and resurrection. The aseity of God in the trinitarian life serves as the basis for the immanent critique of human experience or projections about God’s salvific drama throughout history (Rom 11:33).
God cannot be fully comprehended without this relational aspect of God, who transforms humanity, society, and the world through revelation, reconciliation, and resurrection. To be sure, the state of the world is to be renewed, Status mundi renovabitur. This perspective can be clearly observed in Gollwitzer’s article on “Kingdom of God and Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth.” Barth implores Western Christianity to maintain a “leftist” orientation. The church fundamentally supports the victims of the social order of class society to advocate for their cause (Hunsinger, ed. and trans. Karl Barth and Radical Politics, 56).
At this point, I redefine Gollwitzer’s practical solidarity with the victims in terms of a politics of recognition whereby practical solidarity is enhanced in the lives of citizens by mutual respect and organic solidarity with others. The politics of recognition elucidates the relationship between recognition of collective identities and the individual authenticity—encompassing gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or sexuality—as a regime aimed at interrogating (problematization) the survival of cultures (Taylor et al. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition).
Principle of Prophetic Socialism
In Krummes Holz-aufrechter Gang, Gollwitzer acknowledges the distinctions in theological models and discourse between Barth and Tillich. Inheriting Barth’s approach, Gollwitzer integrates Tillich’s socialist principle and method of correlation into his public discourse in dealing with the significance of life as both religious and real-existential inquiries.
Gollwitzer asserts that Tillich grounds his theology in the contemporary human condition and interprets the Christian message through a philosophical and theological procedure that correlates questions and answers. The distinction between him and Barth resides in their theological epistemology and research, but they share significant commonalities in presenting the Gospel as a response to fundamental human questions and sociopolitical circumstances.
Barth’s dismissal of the human question as a starting point is unfortunately misconstrued as a theological repudiation of engagement with genuine human questions within the sociopolitical context. The theological pursuit of meaning is a hermeneutical method for reading the Bible and it is fundamental to Reformation theology about sin and forgiveness (Krummes Holz-aufrechter Gang, 34).
Similar to Barth, Tillich turned to the movement of religious socialism following the First World War and the German revolution in 1919. His stance initiates a novel synthesis of Christianity and social frameworks by aligning Christian prophetic ethics with socialist economic justice.
After Tillich became a professor of theology and philosophy at Frankfurt (1929-1933), he facilitated a new chair of social philosophy for Max Horkheimer, who was appointed as the director of the Institute of Social Research. Tillich complements the proponents of critical theory at the Frankfurt School on the examination of prophetic rationality, sociocultural dynamics, and emancipation (Tillich, Socialist Decision).
Gollwitzer contends that Christ and Prometheus are neither mutually exclusive nor contradictory in terms of prophetic socialism. Prometheus was a mythic symbol and martyr for the young Marx, indicating that Prometheus in the Marxist calendar is not necessarily denounced as anti-Christian. As a point of fact, Gollwitzer’s efforts warrant a reconsideration of historical materialism.
III. Historical Materialist Inquiry and Effective History
Gollwitzer reconstructs historical materialism as a social scientific method for comprehending the relationship between idea and practice. He was captivated by Friedrich Engel’s elucidation of historical materialism in a letter to Joseph Bloch (dated September 21/22, 1890). “When someone comes along and distorts this [materialist conception of history] to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former question into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase…The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of superstructure…all these exercise an influence upon the course…There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which finally…the economic movement asserts itself as necessary.”
As a matter of fact, Marx elaborates his view of historical materialism in the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy: “…The social, political and intellectual life process in general is conditioned by the mode of production of material life. In the developed forms of the productive forces through natural science, or technological advancement, a conflict would occur in its relationship with the existing relations of production at the rational level in administration, rational organization, and distribution. When such conflict turns into fetters, an epoch of social revolution begins.”
Marx’s theory of social formation is articulated as a system with an organic hierarchical entirety, integrated inside levels or instances of the social structure or stratification. The advancement of natural science or technology is essential for the shift from existing social relations to new ones. Each level of superstructure is not merely determined by economic infrastructure; rather, it is assigned distinct temporalities and practices, each with its own rhythm, specificity, and punctuation. Various histories—political, religious, ideological, philosophical, or scientific—maintain relative independence while simultaneously being interdependent.
These histories are not merely subsumed under economic factors but actively engage with other elements within the socio-historical context, influenced by relations of relative effectiveness throughout their entirety. This comprehensible ensemble of social relations directs and stimulates economic development.
In fact, Max’s shortcoming can be seen in his inability to analyze rational organization, specialization, differentiation, and bureaucratic governance. State power exerts jurisdiction over all persons within its administrative region and legitimizes the application of physical force and coercion as stipulated by the established government.
In Weber’s definition, “legal order, bureaucracy, compulsory jurisdiction over a territory and monopolization of the legitimate use of force are the essential characteristics of the modern state” (“Politics as a Vocation”, From Max Weber, 78). Democracy conflicts with bureaucratic governance, which as an instrument of primary power, wields power through legal authority and by qualified experts. The Soviet Union reinstated the Taylor system, along with military and workshop discipline, embracing elements that Bolshevism opposed as bourgeois class institutions.
Bureaucratic dictatorship persists in this post-revolution era, disrupting the dictatorship of the proletariat and preventing democratic society. Weber’s concept of purposive rationality and bureaucratic governance has been included into the critique of instrumental reason in Nazism and Stalinism, as articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno (Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action 1: 366-70).
However, Weber tends to justify the impersonal authority of bureaucracy and its functional administration as a repressive apparatus that legitimizes physical force and violence on the human body as a political institution. In opposition to such repression, there exists a democratic civil society that is rationalized, specialized, and differentiated, encompassing social institutions, religious communities, and citizen initiatives in solidarity. Civil society and its democratic initiatives serve as arenas of resistance and conflict by intersecting with the logic of capital accumulation, national-popular hegemony imposed from above, and the colonization of civil society and life-world.
A social scientific theory of social formation encompasses a plurality of instances characterized by its approach to effective history, which emphasizes the articulation of diverse social fields and behaviors as dislocated and absent, namely subaltern counter publics.
The effective history supports a postcolonial stance focused on assessing the disruption and appraising the dislocation of colonial histories and cultures within an anamnestic politics; it fosters hope in the past that contrasts with the linear progression of time, specifically the Eurocentric conception of time (Benjamin, “These on the Philosophy of History,” VI).
Gollwitzer and Barth: Capitalist Revolution and Nihilism
With the effective history in mind, I examine Gollwitzer’s understanding of a materialist conception of history in comparison with Barth. Gollwitzer focuses on multiple relations or reciprocal determination, asserting that intellectual, religious, or ideological spheres can unfold in alignment with economic interactions and development (Gollwitzer, “Bemerkungen zur materialistischen Bibellektűre,” in Umkehr und Revolution. 244-265).
Similarly, Barth scrutinizes materialist theory, asserting that its significance is contingent (per accidens) rather than essential (per essentiam) (Church Dogmatics III/2: 387). For Barth, historical materialism is not primarily concerned with economic reductionism or necessity in an essential sense; instead, it interacts with intellectual spheres that significantly shape the economic system through an inordinate empty desire of capitalist revolution.
Barth, of course, examines laissez-faire capitalism, wherein the revolution of empty and inordinate desires occurs in a nihilistic form of capitalism characterized by a disposition towards the accumulation of possessions. This represents an insatiable lust for superabundance and material possessions which is the overflow of nothingness (CD III/4: 538).
Barth acknowledges the bureaucratization of the relationship between employer and employee within a framework of capitalistic nihilism. Inhuman labor conditions are evident in state socialism where Marxist utopianism emulated the American Taylor system. The alienation and reification of human thought and action resulted in the comprehensive bureaucratization of human existence. Human relationships transform into abstract, anonymous connections, and human existence is misused as a thing. The entity of thing encompasses the peripheral of existence, including food products and support in material, spiritual, technical, civilizational, and cultural domains. These are apparatuses and fixtures upon which human life and existence rely (CD IV/3.2: 667).
Under the dominion of these things, co-humanity is diminished, becoming a mere object, being transformed into an instrument and resource for private interest and egotism. Bureaucratic governance inherently tends toward antagonism, oppression, and exploitation of others (CD IV/2: 434-37).
Drawing upon Barth’s critique of capitalism, Gollwitzer advances a social scientific analysis of capitalist revolution through the lens of the structural theory of imperialism which carries postcolonial implications. His concern is to regulate the worldwide upheaval generated by capitalism as a nihilistic revolution. The impetus for growth is driven by competition and the need for expansion and capital accumulation to achieve additional profit.
Research in natural sciences and technology, coupled with the expansion of trade and the emergence of a global market, have profoundly influenced the shift from feudalism to the capitalist mode of production. It leads to the exploitation of natural resources among those who capitalize on the world market, imparting a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in all nations. An ecological crisis is intrinsically linked to the market economic system through industry which employs natural science for the exploitation of nature. Global interdependence, however, especially in its positive and negative factors, necessitates a collective sense of responsibility.
The principle of responsibility contests the particularistic system of thought that endangers people and nature. Particularistic thought pertains to the exercise of dominance through the security of material privilege, employing symbolic and intellectual aggression, including limited warfare. The argument ‘Socialism or Barbarism’ is still valid today (Die kapitalistische Revolution, 66).
IV. Creation, Eschatology, and Irregular Grace
The capitalist revolution and its technological rationality have plunged the life of creation into ecological disaster. God’s creation of the world has been mistreated and exploited for technological calculations and its purposes. Technological rationality, in its restless advancement, clashes with a biblical rationale of God’s creation as a divine Yes to living creatures, as well as the significance of Sabbath.
Gollwitzer responds to this technological rationality. He appeals to the biblical narrative of creation and its affirmation in God’s declaration of its goodness. The world’s potential finds its ground singularly in God’s gracious will, responding to the self-deification of the world and human self-autonomy. A human being created in the image of God implies that divine love is manifested in human existence, participating as God’s partner in gracious covenant or as God’s collaborator.
Moreover, as collaborators with God, we bear a universal responsibility for sustaining the life of creation, which has entered a phase of ecological survival marked by a form of catastrophe. These conditions have led to the degradation of the earth’s enduring sources and the depletion of worker’s lives (Die kapitalistische Revolution, 66).
On the other hand, evolution does not contradict creation, since the last as the telos is already proclaimed in the beginning; consummation (glorious) is related to creation (good). No biblical narrative of creation exists without eschatology, and vice versa.
Creation is an eschatological concept associated with God’s telos or future, and it has nothing to do with the ultimate freezing of tremendous entropy into nothingness. In the context of creation, a new form of life emerges from the old in a qualitative leap that opposes an eternal recurrence (Krummes Holz-aufrechter Gang, 222).
Gollwitzer asserts that creation as grace is not yet complete, but is progressing towards to ever greater glory. It is a struggle against all impediments to salvation, reservation, and consummation of the creature in the kingdom of God. Human hope or prolepsis participates in the anticipation of the coming kingdom of God through the presence of the Holy Spirit. God is the name of the promise and simultaneously the realization of that promise. The eschatological horizon converts Christian faith into the hope, signifying a future realization of that faith.
The deposit of the Holy Spirit therefore highlights the anticipated Messiah, foreshadowing the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, wherein the apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and earth is interwoven with God and the Lamb of God (Rev. 21-22).
Gollwitzer’s eschatology allows for an understanding of anticipatory discourse as having a vivid impact on Christian discipleship in the presence of the risen Christ. A narrative prolepsis (Jn 5:25) is structured and interwoven into the synthesis of the present and future, implying the future within present or the present future.
As to the meaning of this future, God in Jesus Christ makes faith and hope available to us, anticipating the future experience that is empowered by the Holy Spirit. The biblical term witness (martyr) refers to an eschatological outlook. The goodness of God, which the Holy Spirit brings us as a deposit, corresponds to
the goodness of creaturely reality (Krummes Holz-aufrechter Gang, 335).
It is significant for Gollwitzer to move in the approximation towards fulfilling the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This biblical position shapes Gollwitzer’s theology of hope as practical discipleship in realizing God’s promise as a vivid present in our midst. The role of the Holy Spirit is to awaken human hope in anticipation of what is to come in the future through its deposit (Angeld), which guarantees the promise.
In addition to the anticipatory role of the Holy Spirit and practical discipleship, Gollwitzer’s theological style is characterized by an irregular framework that interprets the word of God in an unmethodological, chaotic, freelancer-like, and occasional manner. His theology of hope is founded on promise, emphasizing practical involvement in fulfilling the promise in anticipation of it in the present time.
This perspective confronts theological complacency and erroneous intransigence. The irregular style, rooted in Luther’s thought-form, is concerned with the living and emancipatory power of God, whose Word encompasses the church, creation, and the world.
The unconventional position enables Gollwitzer to creatively synthesize totaliter aliter (Barth) and method of correlation in conjunction with the socialist principle (Tillich). His intriguing argument clearly states: “the wholly other God desires a wholly other society” (Pangritz, Der ganz andere Gott will eine ganz andere Gesellschaft).
V. Theology, Race, and Immanent Critique
The radical nature of Gollwitzer is further recognized in the validity he ascribes to James Cone’s argument that whites fail to take black people seriously within white theologies. He argues that “[i]n white theology …the black person does not appear” (Gollwitzer, “Why Black Theology?,” 42).
His position is a reminder that colonialism and the slave trade were undertaken within a European Christian context, with racism being intertwined with colonialism and the Christian civilizing mission. Cone contends, in fact, that American white theology characterizes Christianity as congruent with white racism, particularly evident within conservative southern circles. Because white theology is also indifferent to the suffering of Black individuals inside liberal northern circles, although liberals discuss the inevitability of progress in Western civilization, they do so at the expense of Blacks who were enslaved and colonized to ensure progress.
In the disguise of progress, social Darwinism dominated American politics, society and culture. Social Darwinism is founded on the colonial theory of white supremacy, characterized by the racist sentiment expressed in the white man’s burden. Moreover, the racial theory of social Darwinism takes an inroad to anti-Semitism in the Third Reich, as well as state socialism in the former Soviet Union. In contemporary America, sociobiology, a resurgence of old social Darwinism, has emerged as a rationale for racial hierarchy and sexism through a genetically determinist view of life.
In reconstructing historical materialism as a social critical theory, Gollwitzer does not overlook Marx’s deficiencies regarding race; class cannot be dissociated from race in social stratification. Marx’s major failure lies in his overemphasis on class, which detracts from the pursuit of racial justice. In contrast to Marx, a category of race is an essential factor in social, cultural, and political relations within social stratification, as well as in the global dynamics among the metropolis, semi-periphery, and periphery.
Marx’s vulnerability is seen in his affinity with Darwinian theory of progress based on struggle for existence and survival of the fittest in society and culture. Marx’s dialectical method in its social formation dispenses with an analysis of racial hierarchy in the social cultural stratification, which is intertwined with colonial policy and economic surplus.
The Jim Crow laws and apartheid in South Africa exemplify the modern racial supremacy, segregation, and animosity. As a result it is helpful to see how Karl Barth, James Cone and Deitrich Bonhoeffer form a bulwark of immanent critique of white racism. James Cone, for instance, in keeping with his own context, asserts provocatively that “I remember Bearden because it is the place where I first discovered myself—as black and Christian.” (Cone, Risks of Faith, ix).[1]
To be sure, Cone argued that his “turn to blackness was an even deeper conversion-experience than the turn to Jesus.” (ibid., xxi). This stance against whiteness had its precedent not merely in Jim Crow, however, it had a paradigm in the theology of Karl Barth; for Cone had a profound awareness that Barth preached the cross and initiated a Copernican revolution in European theology. Likewise, during his studies at Union (1930-1931), Bonhoeffer demonstrated a remarkable interest in African American history, literature, and the history of lynching (The Cross and the Lynching Tree., 42,157).
In fact, Barth contends that radically different people must be acknowledged for cultural particularity and orientation, thereby dispelling the blatant arrogance of Western people who suppress and domesticate the gospel “in all its radical uniqueness and novelty” (CD 4/3.2:875).
Accordingly, Gollwitzer contends that if the Christian church fails to oppose racial segregation or the eradication of apartheid, it cannot be considered the church of Jesus Christ. He advocates for Black theology against white supremacy and Eurocentric standpoint with recourse to the Pauline text. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).
Gollwitzer furthermore characterizes the capitalist revolution as the revolution of the white Protestant principle (namely the English and the Dutch), which achieved worldwide triumph. It initiated in a new era of slavery and scientific racism persisted in the neocolonial form of exploitation and domination up until today. The Reformation and its Protestant churches were unprepared to fully embrace racial justice (Gollwitzer, “Why Black Theology,” 38-41).
Theology and church can be vulnerable to racial injustice and religious violence by endorsing alliance among the gospel, colonialism, and racism—accommodating the gospel to the interests of the dominant and the exploitative institutions. This intricate problem appears to pose a significant threat to public spheres in a democratic pluralist society. When properly interpreted, however, the Gospel of the kingdom of God serves as the source for the immanent critique against detrimental effects of the church’s accommodation to the dominant and privileged.
The Word of God: Living, Critical, and Emancipatory
Gollwitzer posits that a theology of grace is not separated from a theology of human freedom. A genuine freedom is born of God’s grace, which is divine, abundant love. Creation embodies merciful love, for Amor Dei non invenit, sed creat suum diligibile (God’s love does not discover its object but creates it—Martin Luther) (Gollwitzer, Krummes Holz-aufrechter Gang, 225).
According to Gollwitzer, therefore, the relation between ideas and material interests underscores the importance of language in his critical and emancipatory exegesis of Scripture. One of the major limitations in Marx’s writings is found in the failure to articulate the essential meaning of language as social discourse. Contra Marx, language or biblical narrative is a rather autonomous phenomena, located between the economic basis and the intellectual domain.
In theological deliberation of revelation as speech event, the theology of the living, emancipatory word of God cuts across the constraints of the Marxist version of language as class ideology. The relationship between discourse and power seems to establish cultural hegemony with a universal thought-language in the former Soviet regime.
Language, as an element of class ideology, undermines its authenticity, becoming into a tool of ideological interpolation. Instead, it becomes entrenched in an ethnic-racial context, in which Russian is ideologically elevated as a universal language, reflecting Russian chauvinism.
On the contrary, biblical language is living, critical, and liberating in prophetic discourse, while Jesus’ secular discourse of parables elucidates the meaning of the gospel in relation to the coming kingdom of God as manifest among us. Religious discourse contrasts with ideological interpellation in relation to the Russian universal language, as well as American Christian nationalism.
Gollwitzer concurs with Max Horkheimer’s view of religion and the significance of immanent critique. Horkheimer paved a path to religion as a longing for the Wholly Other, which plays a critical role in changing the status quo. Religion in this regard plays a significant role in constructing the sociocultural realty through prophetic discourse and rationality, as it pertains to God the Wholly Other.
Moreover, Gollwitzer identifies religious discourse of social protest against oppression and adversity in the prophet’s engagement with societal issues and in Jesus’ solidarity with the impoverished (Lk 4:18). Jesus’s proclamation of the Prophet Isaiah’s text encompasses a jubilant message (glad tiding) regarding conversion (metanoia) to the impending kingdom of God, aligning himself with public sinners and tax collectors.
Aside from its ideological function (the detrimental effect of the alliance between throne and altar), religious language maintains a liberating impact by actualizing the relation between ideas and material interests for the practical, emancipatory realization of the meaning of the gospel. The prophetic component and Torah justice require us to engage in deliberate exegetical work through careful attention to the living voice of God (viva vox evangelii).
Gollwitzer elucidates the word of God as constant in order to enhance the understanding of the Gospel within a social hermeneutical frame, employing prophetic exegesis to address socio-historical life settings. He integrates a dimension of the immanent critique into biblical exegesis. The intention of the biblical text is clarified through the dialectical relationship between ideas and material interests in dealing with power relations; hence, social location, political interests, and power structure can be examined in the critique of ideology.
The significance of the critique of ideology finds its locus in Barth, who asserts that the reality of impersonal forces or lordless powers unleashes the rebellion against the gospel of reconciliation; it possesses a degree of autonomy, independence, and superiority over against humanity. The ethics of reconciliation contradicts any political absolutism, as exemplified by Leviathan, Fascism, and state socialism, as well as the economic dominance of mammon and its ideological interpellation (Christian Life, 215-6).
Thus, Barth’s ethics of reconciliation aligns with Bonhoeffer’s incomplete ethics of reconciliation, enhancing Bonhoeffer’s prophetic dimension by opposing lordless powers and impersonal forces. At this juncture, Gollwitzer emphasizes Barth’s characterization of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s line and orientation in relation to Eberhard Bethge’s biography of Bonhoeffer: “ethics―co-humanity―servant church [prophetic diakonia]―discipleship―[democratic] socialism―peace movement―and, all in all just political engagement” (Barth, Briefe 1916-1968, 404).
Epilogue from Constructive Reflection
To implement Gollwitzer in the context of public theology and postcolonial implications, I have examined his prophetic theology and capitalist revolution in conjunction with Barth and Tillich, while incorporating his advocacy for Black theology. State and civil society assumes a cohesive role through citizen initiatives in alliance with the subaltern, and in connection with reform and revolution. This perspective is essential to public theology, which promotes politics of recognition among the counter public of the subaltern, alongside political counsel and ethical guidelines for the common good to the state.
The word of God is a living, critical reality. It is liberating in nature, and biblical discourse should be invested in dealing with ideas, material interests, and power relations. Public theology, in fact, is established paradigmatically upon a discourse that interacts with multiple realities, including sociopolitical and sociocultural frameworks on behalf of the gospel of the kingdom of God.
To explicate this truth I utilized Gollwitzer’s insight into irregular thought-form, immanent critique, and effective history in order to advance the comparative study of religions, drawing upon Barth’s comparative reading of Reformation theology of grace and Shinran Buddhism in Japan. God may be pleased to awaken the Christian church through irregular, extraordinary ways of divine communication in the reconciled world, including other religions.
Public theology investigates the religious construction of social and cultural reality, critically problematizing how religious discourse is entangled with material interests, power relations, and bureaucratic reification. A social scientific study of religions seeks to retrieve religious contribution to prophetic ethics and conducting an immanent critique of detrimental effects of the religious status quo; it explores a new model of alternative modernities to transcend the impasses of laissez faire modernity and pathology of the clash of civilizations (Chung, Constructing Reality in Comparative Theology).
Public theology (theologia publica) seeks to advance the common good through public affairs or societal institutions (res publica) within civil society. In the modern democratic framework, civil society is defined as res publica, which includes nongovernmental organizations and institutions. Public theology safeguards citizens’ interests and will in conjunction with the counter public among the subalterns, who are exposed to postcolonial predicaments. The realm of civil associations, alongside the integrity of life-world and the rights of earth, is defended against the dominance of political society (the state) and the privileged strata of economic society (bourgeois dominion) entrenched within the Empire throughout late capitalism.
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