Correlating Sobornost: Conversations between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition

By Scott A. Kirkland and John C. McDowell

The diaspora of scholars exiled from Russia in 1922 offered something vital for both Russian Orthodoxy and for ecumenical dialogue. Liberated from scholastic academic discourse, and living and writing in new languages, the scholars set out to reinterpret their traditions and to introduce Russian Orthodoxy to the West. Yet, relatively few have considered the works of these exiles, particularly insofar as they act as critical and constructive conversation partners. This project expands upon the relatively limited conversation between such thinkers with the most significant Protestant theologian of the last century, Karl Barth. Through the topic and in the spirit of sobornost, this project charters such conversation. The body of Russian theological scholarship guided by sobornost challenges Barth, helping us to draw out necessary criticism while leading us toward unexpected insight, and vice versa. This collection will not only illuminate but also stimulate interesting and important discussions for those engaged in the study of Karl Barth’s corpus, in the Orthodox tradition, and in the ecumenical discourse between East and West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781506401935

Book preview

Introduction

Hindsight reveals the tragic failure to encounter otherness in and through the cosmic redemptiveness of God’s work of making God’s people friends, involved in an entreaty for particularity, such as that found in Otto Dibelius’s intensive appeal in 1925 to responsibility for the local neighbor. The church, he claims,

cannot be an international society of a Christian sort, but a community that builds itself up out of the nations, in which every national group comprehends Christian faith in its own way and stamps it with its own style. The commitment to love the neighbour makes the national community (Volkgemeinschaft) the obligation of everyone, since for us the brother in one’s own people is always the neighbour.[1]

In a statement that would demand consideration of Karl Barth’s account of election, Vladimir Lossky claims that Only one nature exists, common to all men, although it appears to us fragmented by sin, parcelled out among many persons.[2] Keen, however, to disassociate this commonality that is expressive of the ontological grounding of all things redemptively in God’s gift of the Son and Spirit from any abstract universality, he speaks of a properly ordered complete harmony of catholic diversity.[3] It is in such a harmony of persons in ontological irreducibility—the reason that Barth, for instance, so opposed a glib ecumenical toleration of others’ differences that was not shaped by the covenantal work of God in Christ—that conversation operates, and it enacts a bearing forth of the likeness appropriate to creatureliness of the self-communicative presence of the plenitudinous one in whom all things have their being and end.

Such an ecclesial performance for Barth demands at least three sensibility-determining conditions. In the first place, there has to be a sense of ecclesial fragility, weakness, and distortion that consequently requires intensive self-evaluation and criticism. So he claims in The Church and the Churches of 1937 that the church’s performance has itself been a hindrance to the hearing of its message . . . a bewilderment to its less attentive hearers, in such a fashion as to necessitate that one of the church’s tasks tasks is to exercise self-criticism, to purify itself from any element which is foreign to its origin and essence, and which . . . it ought not to tolerate.[4] The pressure for a more appropriately faithful witness to the truth that God is entails that certain things cannot be done or said, and the church has to perennially learn to be able to tell the difference.[5]

In the second place, he explains, while a concern for the one christic body is compelled because of the nature of the task of living as the body of Christ, the oneness appropriate to it is insufficiently considered in terms reducible to unity in itself.[6] The oneness of the church is not that of simple numerical singularity or uniqueness, nor is it about ethical and social ideals of uniformity, mental harmony and agreement. Unsurprisingly, then, Barth opposes the adequacy of the notion of tolerance in and of itself for testifying to the witness of a Christ-founded difference-in-unity. The concept of tolerance originates in political and philosophical principles which are not only alien but even opposed to the Gospel.[7] Instead, Barth’s vision of ecclesial unity is of a type of ecclesiological ecumenism that confesses Jesus Christ as the oneness of the Church that enables there to be a unity within which there be a multiplicity of communities, of gifts, of persons, within one Church, while through it a multiplicity of Churches are excluded.[8] Grandly, he claims, the Church is the existential form of the Kingdom of Christ in the interim between the Ascension and His second coming.[9] That entails that while purity and unity are not to be expected, and any attempts at proclaiming their existence are to be tested in the most rigorous of ways, they remain an enduring task to be sought after in response to a directing vision as yet unfulfilled.[10]

In the third place, Barth resists the pressures to claim (idolatrously) a universalist finality for a singular particularity. We can listen to Christ, he argues, only in our own Church.[11] By this he does not mean that one type of church can hear and proclaim Christ while another cannot, which those who spoke like Martin Dibelius asserted. The stress is not on the particularity of church here, as implicit in the fact that Barth would have been aware that the our that incorporates his reading audience could possibly be denominationally diffuse but on the particularity of one’s own. So he suggestively continues by claiming that the listening cannot come on any neutral ground above or outside the severed Churches (note the plural—Churches—here).[12]

Suppose a Church to be taking the step of relinquishing its own particular confession for one which it will hare in union with others. Such a step ought in no circumstances to be an act of confessional weakness, an assertion of indifference to its faith and apprehension. Rather, the Church should feel itself called, instructed and summoned, in its special place and responsibility, to act with seriousness in the power of an enhanced, not of a diminished faith. So and not otherwise should it be led past its own particularity towards oneness.[13]

It is important to remember that this is 1937 and that Barth has been for several years now demonstrating in practice the importance of the witness to the necessity of particularity against pressures on the church to surrender its individuality in the face of the desire for national or international union.[14] Confessing the lordship of Jesus the Christ entails that only through its faith can and must a living Church know itself to be called to abandon its separateness.[15] Consequently, Barth insists that the surrender of particularity into the unity of otherwise disunited particulars must not imply the abandonment, in one iota, of anything a church believes it necessary to assent in a certain way and not otherwise. The step away from a particular to a common confession must have no taint of compromise, or of an assent to forms and formulae of union that would camouflage division without transcending it.[16]

Instead, in the surrender of separation only one thing must be abandoned, namely a failure in obedience to Christ, hitherto unrealised.[17] Disunity must, then, be redeemed, not glossed over and conveniently ignored, what Barth calls a juggling with the facts.[18] Proper theological attention to what Christian talk of unity might mean in the not yet cannot avoid debate and disagreement (in and through attempting to carefully hear and assess from, and apply to, one’s own particular perspective).

Of course, it hardly needs to be observed that with regard to the sobiranie (gathering) of God’s people the task facing churches in the contemporary West is markedly different from, but certainly no less totalizing than, the colonization of their witness by a Volkisch gospel of blut und boden (blood and soil). The fragile and difficult performance of responsibility to the conditioning witness to the God who makes all things well in sobrannosť (gatheredness) through Christ in the Spirit takes place instead under the conditions provided by cultures that are becoming increasingly cynical about any future of humanity as a common humanity, and that increasingly dissolves the discipline of conversation and learned argument with strident monologues.[19] Our society in every aspect, according to Walter Brueggemann, has a determined bent toward thinness and monologue that robs life of freedom and newness, miracle and forgiveness, possibility and reconciliation.[20] But not only the grasping of power by the few—contemporaneity involves an intensification of the atomization of individuals, generating an all too vicious circle of narcissistically celebrating individuation that dissolves a sense of common responsibility. According to Miroslav Volf, for instance, By rendering relationships ‘fragmentary’ and ‘discontinuous,’ it [viz., postmodernity] fosters ‘disengagement and commitment-avoidance.’[21] However, this fragmentation or, to use an image of Zygmunt Bauman, liquefaction of society and selfhood, Lossky would argue, entails that humanity cannot flower fully and grows impoverished, ending in non-being, the negation of creation, and of God.[22] To confess with Lossky that human beings are . . . responsible for the world, and with Sergei Bulgakov that All human beings belong to Christ’s humanity, and consequently that "all humanity belongs to the Church," then, is to necessarily take a countercultural position of hope.[23]

***

Now let us speak further about the particular volume being presented here. The silver age of Russian theological scholarship was crushed by a series of revolutions, which forced many Russian Orthodox scholars into exile. Yet, the diaspora of scholars offered something vital not only for Russian Orthodoxy but also for ecumenical dialogue. That is, under new conditions, liberated from the constraints of Western scholastic academic discourse, methodology, and concepts that were pervasive in Orthodoxy,[24] and living and writing in new languages, those in exile set out to reinterpret their own traditions and to introduce Russian Orthodoxy to the West.

The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, for example, has done a tremendous service at drawing Russian Orthodox and Anglican scholars together for rich and careful dialogue. Nevertheless, relative few have considered the works of the Russian Orthodox exiles, particularly insofar as these figures act as critical and constructive conversation partners. A project such as this will expand on the much-needed and relatively limited conversation between some of the best Russian thinkers, including contributions in literature, philosophy, and theology, with the most significant Protestant theologian from the last century, Karl Barth.

The scholarship produced after the Russian Orthodox diaspora marked a return to patristic sources drawing particularly from the Eastern fathers of the fourth century and Byzantine theology. Moreover, interest in German idealism, the sophiology of Vladimir Solovyev, as well as Russian culture and literature was evident in the various modes of discourse taking place. Accordingly, a panoply of contributors emerged, including Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, Sergius Bulgakov, Nicholas Zernov, Alexander Schmemann, and Nicholas Berdyaev. Many others, not named, have also been critical for the development and emergence of Russian thought for Russia and in (or critical of) the West. The output from these scholars was diverse and significant.

One of the central principles that guided the theology and social thought of the Russian Orthodox exiles was sobornost.[25] The concept of sobornost is difficult and untamed by simple deduction. In the inaugural volume on the journal Sobornost, V. Illyin introduced the term, stating,

One cannot interpret the Russo-Slavonic word "sobornost by any one equivalent word or expression, for it stands for a whole complex of meanings. The word sobornost" conveys the fundamental peculiarities of the structure of the Church of Christ, but simultaneously it expresses the actual spiritual atmosphere in which-members of the Church exist—viz. the spiritual oxygen, if we may put it that way, which they inhale and through which they are united.[26]

Yet Aleksei Khomiakov, taking his lead from the Slavonic origins of sobornost,[27] labored to elaborate on the term, which conveys the particular harmony between unity and freedom. Accordingly, the term used by the Slavophiles in the early nineteenth century served the idea adopted by many in a struggle against bourgeois values and Westernization, which, among other incompatible ideas, included those notions of unity without freedom or freedom without unity. Khomiakov, for example, acutely criticised Catholicism, which puts foremost the formal principle of unity.[28] Accordingly, with such a principle in place, freedom is rendered as a static illusion rather than a living, breathing possibility. In this vein, the literary works of Solovyev, as well as those of F. Dostoevsky, A. Herzen, N. Gogol, and L. Tolstoy, are of particular note. Dostoevsky, for instance, without being well versed in formal theological discourse, under the influence of Slavophile ideals, offered a vision of human life and relation deeply grounded in the spirit of sobornost. His vision of what it means to inhabit the world together is swept up in the movement definitive of Russian life and thought.[29]

Respectively, in his essay The Russian Idea Nicholas Berdyaev presented sobornost as the foundation of Russian philosophy and theology, articulating it as the organic union of freedom and love, community.[30] For Berdyaev, Sobornost is a living organism; the people of the Church live in it.[31] It is actualized as community[32] and is opposed to the Cartesian dogma; instead of the formula I think, we think is proper.[33] That is to say, "[sobornost] implies the idea of an assembly, not necessarily gathered in some place or other, but existing virtually without a formal gathering. It is unity in plurality.[34] It expresses the idea of one and many in unity; in this it is the one word that contains the entire profession of faith."[35] Yet sobornost is much more: as Robert Bird has suggested, commenting on the absence of the word in the writings of the Slavophiles, one must not "mummify or fetishize [sobornost] as a key word or slogan."[36] It is, for Russian Orthodoxy, a living word that must be enfleshed and lived rather than encoded and domesticated.

Elaborating on the breadth and depth of the living word sobornost, one might consider, for example, the way(s) it has been considered in service to and as a description of the church. Sobornost belongs to the very image of the church, which is knowable as an object of reason, while also experienced as an obligation to be discharged. As Vasily Zenkovsky has commented, Orthodoxy has been opposed to the language uniformity found in Roman Catholicism, has permitted each Orthodox country to develop unique features. The use of native tongues in the liturgy, sermons, holy books, and education brought out these national features, which history in turn deepened and strengthened.[37] Accordingly, sobornost became one of these particular words nurtured in the context of the Russian church. It is not to be considered a principle that obliges mere assembly, or solidarity, or brotherhood, or the like. It is opposed to particular forms of ecclesial authoritarianism. It is also opposed to the modern liberal preoccupation with self-sufficient individualism. It is not a term to be known by absolute rationalism or codified by static legalism. It is to be practiced in the conciliar efforts that offer a true sense of community, of that living and organic unity which reconciles the conflicting claims of freedom and obedience.[38] As such, sobornost challenges one to consider anew a radical sense of community, where dispossession and the creative capacity of the individual are realized with the whole, which may work together, with Christ, and common mind, toward a reconciled future. In this it is the force or power generative of (re)conciliation.[39] It is inherently ecclesial, positively ecumenical, necessarily political, and altogether moral—and the essays in this volume demonstrate such breadth.

Consider, for example, the range of scholarship that this volume traverses, exploring the correlations, both strong and weak, between Barth and the Russian Orthodox tradition as we gather around in the spirit or are inspired by the idea of sobornost. First, opening the collection, Paul Valliere offers some reflections on the nature and shape of sobornost in light of the forthcoming 2016 gathering of Orthodox leaders. Valliere traces the historical and semiotic beginnings of sobornost via an expert exposition of a creedal commitment to catholicity. Expounding the rich elasticity of sobornost, Valliere offers us several avenues for conversation with Barth’s ordering of church law. What emerges is both a Barth and an Orthodoxy committed neither to oligarchic forms of ecclesial power nor to a crude democratization of the church’s fellowship and witness. Rather, we see a robust commitment to a Spirit-filled submission to, and sobornost in, the generative law of Christ.

Continuing in the spirit of Valliere’s contribution, Antoine Arjakovsky offers some pertinent reflections on the complex political and theological arena that is the ecumenical movement. Pointing to the oft-lamented Christomonism of Barth and Florovsky, Arjakovsky argues this opens the way for what he considers to be a genuinely Trinitarian, personalist, and sophiological doctrine of sobornost. Here we see a strong doctrine of the unity of the church grounded in a strong pneumatological realism. Consequently, political-ecclesial negotiations that set to one side this theological reality in order to maintain a form of ecclesial civility are held under intense scrutiny. As such, Arjakovsky wants to see a genuinely radical vision of sobornost give shape to the ecumenical movement’s negotiations, as risky a practice as this may seem.

The late Fr. Matthew Baker’s essay explores the relationship between Barth and Florovsky further. Despite commentators seeing points of convergence between the two, during their respective careers they remained highly critical of each other. Fr. Baker reconstructs this complex historical space in order to gain an appreciation of this mutual criticism, the heart of which is the impact of eschatology on ecclesiology. This disagreement manifests itself in various doctrinal areas and crucially anticipates many of the debates in contemporary literature exploring the impact of German idealism on Barth’s thought, particularly given Florovsky’s concerns regarding this same impact in the thought of Bulgakov. However, Fr. Baker does locate some fundamental points of convergence between Barth and Florovsky: their christocentrism and the particularly strong prominence of revelation and theology as an exercise in fides quaerens intellectum.

Brandon Gallaher explores the complex and controversial terrain of the Trinity and divine freedom controversy in Barth studies through an exposition of Bulgakov’s Trinitarian theology. Expositing Bulgakov’s antinomic (or dialectical) logics, and against Florovsky, Gallaher argues that Bulgakov’s sophiology is rigorously Trinitarian and christocentric. This allows him to notice significant points of convergence between Bulgakov and Barth’s logics, particularly at the point at which these logics refuse any resolution of divine freedom in a voluntarist understanding. Gallaher is able, therefore, to recommend a dialectical vision of divine freedom grounded in the necessity of divine action for creation housed by a thoroughgoing Trinitarianism and christocentrism.

Taking Vladimir Lossky’s reflections on the problems of Cartesian subjectivity as his jumping-off point, John C. McDowell offers some reflections on the nature of divine subjectivity in the contested territory of CD I.1. Commentators have perennially worried that Barth’s language of Seinweise and God’s threefold self-repeating I concedes too much territory to German idealist forms of subjectivity. McDowell offers an attentive rebuttal to such criticisms, pointing to the sophisticated ways in which Barth is skillfully using idealist language against itself.

Scott A. Kirkland seeks to explore the relationship between Barth’s doctrine of election and its philosophical background with the aid of Vladimir Lossky’s rejection of forms of Cartesianism in his doctrine of the Trinity. Kirkland shows how Barth’s doctrine of election arises as a rejection of forms of Cartesian theological rationality inherited from the seventeenth-century Reformed Orthodox. Lossky’s notion of ecstatic personhood then serves as an impetus to examine the relationship between Barth’s christocentrism and his rejection of any vision of the isolated ego. Thus Kirkland concludes with some constructive remarks on the nature of the creature’s repetition of God, that is, her divinization.

Andrew Louth offers us a mature walk through the question of analogy in Orthodox and Western theologies. Louth notes the curiosity that Orthodoxy, like Barthianism, has little time for a notion of the analogia entis. This shared disinterest is not of necessity a site for agreement, as Louth shows by expanding his engagement to the breadth of the Western Catholic tradition. Here we see Barth’s concerns are native to the soil in which they arise, in reaction to Erich Pryzwara. However, the Orthodox lack of use for analogy as a conceptual tool does not arise on such polemical territory. Yet what Barth does do is provide stimulus for thinking through exactly why Orthodoxy has no developed doctrine of analogy—the secret to which might seem to lie in more ancient differences of perspective.

Ashley Cocksworth provides a fascinating tour through the work of Barth in relation to the enigmatic Nicholas Berdyaev, highlighting, in the midst of serious disagreement, the potential for fruitful convergence when it comes to questions of prayerful spiritual performance. Barth and Berdyaev were both, as Cocksworth shows, deeply invested in forms of spirituality that give shape to political/ethical performance. As such, Cocksworth is able to draw the two into an unlikely conversation concerning the very shape of the mystical itself, undoing the particularly unhelpful readings inspired by Frederich Heiler and providing a road forward explicitly oriented toward the formation of the whole human subject in participation in God.

Continuing with the trend of exploring the relationship between ethical/political commitments and spirituality, D. Stephen Long and Richard J. Barry IV bring Barth’s political theology into dialogue with Vladimir Solovyev through the mediating figure of Fyodor Dostoevsky. At first glance, Solovyev’s nationalistic Slavophilism may seem to have little to do with Barth’s radical criticism of the nation-state, particularly in the early dialectical period in which Barth was reading Dostoevsky. However, Long and Barry creatively and with sensitivity to context uncover points of interesting convergence between Barth and Solovyev. While Barth would indeed be concerned with many elements of Solovyev’s concept of the all-unity, Long and Barry show just how Solovyev’s calls for a free theocracy form a political iconoclasm when taken seriously. Thus through the mediation of Dostoevsky a fruitful space is opened up in which the two figures might become conversant.

David J. Dunn and Joshua B. Davis take us further into political-theological territory through an exploration of the political theologies of Barth and Sergius Bulgakov. While admiring Barth’s christocentrism and his political sensitivity, Dunn and Davis detect in Barth a particular proclivity toward abstraction in Barth’s doctrine of election, which consequently makes a set of alienated social relations the normative context for ethical determination. Bulgakov offers a therapy for Barth’s alienated subject as he grounds Christ’s action not in the overcoming of alienation but in a primordial divine humanity, and likewise Barth offers a helpful corrective to Bulgakov, whose sophiology is ill-equipped to deal with the problem of evil in social relations.

Finally, Ashley John Moyse expounds sobornost as opening up a moral space within which human being might flourish. Moyse reads Barth as concerned to disavow any form of principled moral decision making that might detract a priori from the particular moral encounter in which the subject is given to act. As such, Barth finds a home amid the conceptuality of sobornost as the space within which each agent is given to the other (both divine and human). Human agency is, therefore, unable to be construed in competitive terms but can only be spoken of as formed in an inextricably particular set of (ecclesial) relations to which the subject is given to be responsible.

As you might see, this volume does labor to explore the correlations and conversations between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox tradition. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate, perhaps necessary, to respond explicitly to the questions germane to the collection: Why Karl Barth? Why Russian Orthdoxy? In haste we might offer the response why not? Yet such a response would be insufficient for most, perhaps all.

To be sure, in some sense the idea of the volume was birthed through particular interaction with Russian theological and philosophical scholarship. Specifically, it arose from researching for another project. In this exercise, while cloistered in the corner of a dark office in an academic building, we found ourselves intentionally exploring both complementary and critical conversations between Barth and others whose ontologies preclude atomized anthropologies and isolated forms of moral discourse. The writings of Nicholas Berdyaev came to the fore, and we discovered that there might be room for conversation. Specifically, the concept of sobornost was elaborated in Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea, among other works, and persistent study revealed his subsequent interest, both critical and approving, in Barth’s theology.[40] Through this detour in our research and our conversations the correlation between the conceptions, or in the spirit, of sobornost and both the ecclesiology and ethics of Barth seemed fitting for further study.

And we were right. That is to say, we later discovered the proposal to pursue this anthology was no unique idea. In fact, in his 1933 publication Der Weg der dialektischen Theologie durch die kirchliche Welt, Adolf Keller positively directed that there might be few limits to the possible theological cooperation between Karl Barth and Russian Orthodox theology. Unfortunately, in the many decades since Keller’s publication, few have sought to test such cooperation and scholarly limits. Accordingly, through the topic and in the spirit of sobornost, this project committed to charter such discourse while exploring both complementary and divergent matters. As you will discover, complementary discussions may be initiated through not only Karl Barth’s Trinitarian theology, which so defines the project he undertook, but also his moral and political theology, which understands the other as indissoluble partner, with whom one not only lives with but also for. Barth’s theology is a theology grounded in the actuality of the nature and mission of God. Therefore, God, in Christ and through the Spirit, participates in our human life, encountering humanity not as an overlord or an atom but as a partner who grants us permission to participate in his task—the transfiguration of the world. Sobornost, introduced above, suitably offers an interesting conversational ground by which Barth might engage with Russian Orthodoxy—and vice versa.

Yet Barth’s work is particular to his own Reformed tradition. Even though Barth was very much an ecumenical theologian who insisted that theological discourse must be catholic, his work inevitably grew on Reformed soil. Accordingly, there are many doctrinal loci where theological divergence may be located, including the following: the relation of nature to grace, the shape of Trinitarian dogma, his understanding of participation, and the relation of time and eternity. To be sure, the body of Russian theological scholarship guided by the spirit of sobornost will certainly challenge Barth, helping us to draw out necessary criticism while leading us toward unexpected insight. There is then not only space enough for disagreement and criticism but also for constructive theological dialogue that may provide avenues for novel and creative scholarship and for new ecumenical ground to be chartered. However, Barth might also be able to do the same for Russian orthodox theology.

This collection of essays intends to stimulate not only interesting but also important discussions for those engaged in the academic study of Karl Barth’s corpus, in the Orthodox tradition, and in the ecumenical discourse between East and West. More that this, this collection hopes to stimulate further discussion and exploration of the conversations between Karl Barth and the Orthodox tradition.

---

Cited in Robert T. Osborn, The Barmen Declaration as a Paradigm for a Theology of the American Church (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 67. ↵

Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, trans. Ian Kesarcodi-Watson and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978), 125. ↵

Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, trans. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 179. ↵

Karl Barth, The Church and the Churches (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 11, 12. ↵

Barth is concerned that "any persons who think they possess, or are the Church, must look away from the array of the many Churches in a quest for the one Church" (The Church and the Churches, 17). The clear implication is that God’s unifying truth is something that the churches only very partially and fragilely, yet really in their quest, participate in. ↵

Ibid., 18. ↵

Ibid., 43. Barth has some rather strikingly critical things to say about the ecumenical movement of the day and of its ways of fostering a kind of ecclesial federalism: The union of the Churches is too great a matter to be the result of a movement, however cautious and far-sighted. Church union is a thing which cannot be manufactured, but must be found and confessed, in subordination to that already accomplished oneness of the Church which is in Jesus Christ (I48). ↵

Ibid., 19. It is important to recognize the importance of the period in which Barth was saying this—this plea for a differential unity is a radical response to the conformist political, cultural, and religious unity demanded by the then-performed Nazi ideology. Yet any potential for a free-for-all is also negated in Barth’s concern to emphasize that we have no right to explain the multiplicity of Churches as an unfolding of the wealth of that grace which is given to mankind in Jesus Christ, divinely purposed and therefore normal (27). This, he continues, looks too much like an evasion from having to face the question that Christ confronts us with, and from having to listen for his answer. Perhaps, one could say, for Barth it is a refusal to face the appropriate difference that Christ generates. ↵

Ibid., 33. ↵

Ibid., 34. ↵

Ibid., 58. ↵

Ibid., 58. ↵

Ibid., 50–51. ↵

Ibid., 51. ↵

To the British churches during World War II Barth recounts how in the early days of the German church conflict, he had learnt there that it is impossible to make any impression on the evil genius of the new Germany by seeking to refute it on the ground of Natural Law, by confronting its evil and dionysian doctrine of man and society with a humane and apollonistic one. Instead, our resistance to Hitler will be built on a really sure foundation only when we resist him unequivocally in the name of peculiarly Christian truth, unequivocally in the name of Jesus Christ. Anything less—arguments based on natural law, for instance—are Janus-faced. They do not lead to the light of clear decisions, but to the misty twilight in which all cats become grey. They lead to—Munich (Karl Barth, A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland [London: Sheldon, 1941], 17, 18). ↵

Barth, The Church and the Churches, 51–52. ↵

Ibid., 52. ↵

Ibid., 54. ↵

Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 188. ↵

Walter Brueggemann, Dialogic Thickness in a Monologic Culture, Theology Today 64 (2007): 322–39, at 324. What we are witnessing is a drift, a propelled drift, toward fascism, the notion that there is only a single preferred option on every decision before us. In the process of reductionism all human thickness is lost and all dialogic possibility is forfeited. The mood is one of meanness, fear, aggressiveness, certitude, privilege, and entitlement in which there is no more generative interaction (329). ↵

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 21, citing Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 156. ↵

Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 128, 132. ↵

Ibid., 71; Sergei Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002), 266. ↵

Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part 1. In The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, edited by Richard S. Haugh, translated by Robert L. Nichols, Vol. 5 (Belmont: Nordland, 1979), 37, 85, 121. See also his paper Western Influences in Russian Theology, presented to the First Congress of Orthodox Theology at Athens in 1936.  ↵

Pavel Tulaev offers a linguistic analysis of the word sobornost. Tulaev offers not only a basic indication of the root sobor but also the particular cultivation of meaning in the Christian, specifically Orthodox, tradition, while tracing its origin here to Slavic teachings of the ninth century and the translation of καθολικος from the Council of Nicea (325 CE) by Cyril and Methodius, and the subsequent appreciation of the concept by Alexsei Khomiakov (Pavel Tulaev, "Sobor and Sobornost," Russian Studies in Philosophy 31, no. 4 [1993]: 25–28). Accordingly, for some, this translation as the respective origin of the term/concept of sobornost may be the result of a happy accident—what Vasily Zenkovksy calls a stroke of genius (Vasily V. Zenkovsky, The Spirit of Russian Orthodoxy, The Russian Review 22, no. 1 [1963]: 43). Tabor Sabev also offers a brief history of the origins and meaning of sobornost in his essay The Nature and Mission of Councils in Light of the Theology of Sobornost, The Ecumenical Review 45, no. 3 (1993): 262–63. ↵

V. Ilyin, The Nature and the Meaning of the Term "Sobornost," Sobornost 1 (1935): 5. ↵

Although Khomiakov never used the term explicitly per se, his labors aligned with the Slavophile school, which was opposed to the influence of Western ideology and culture (Zenkovsky, Spirit of Russian Orthodoxy, 43). Ultimately Slavophilism was grounded by a particular emphasis on enfleshing, if you will, the living word sobornost (Boris Yakim and Robert Bird, eds., On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader [Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books, 1998], 7–8). ↵

Zenkovsky, Spirit of Russian Orthodoxy, 43. ↵

See, for example, the figures of Alyosha and Father Zozima who are set in contrast to Ivan in The Brother’s Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brother’s Karamazov. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990]). The idyllic Russian monastic life is deliberately counterpoised with Ivan’s insidious ‘westernising’ nihilism. Chiefly characteristic of Zozima’s teaching is the constitutive character of mutuality and relation. ↵

Nicholas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, trans. Reginald Michael French (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 162. ↵

Yakim and Bird, On Spiritual Unity, 332. ↵

Ibid., 329. ↵

Berdyaev, Russian Idea, 161. ↵

Yakim and Bird, On Spiritual Unity, 139. ↵

Tulaev, "Sobor and Sobornost," 28. For the original, see A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1900), 2:312–13. ↵

Robert Bird, General Introduction, in On Spiritual Unity, 8. ↵

Zenkovsky, Spirit of Russian Orthodoxy, 38. ↵

Kallistos Ware, Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, no. 2–3 (2011): 219. ↵

Sabev, Nature and Mission of Councils, 264. ↵

Some of this might be seen here in a mediated correspondence between Barth and Berdyaev through their mutual friend Fritz Lieb: The Letters of Nikolaj Berdjajew to Fritz Lieb, ed. Klaus Bambauer, which can be found at http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/bambauer/Fritz_Lieb.html (accessed September 2012). ↵

Historical Theology

1

The Conciliar Fellowship of the Church in Karl Barth and Modern Orthodox Theology

Paul Valliere

Writing in The Christian Century in 1958, Karl Barth expressed a hope that turned out to be prophetic. What if from the Vatican or from Geneva, he wrote, instead of meaningless generalities a prophetic-apostolic word of repentance and peace were to be heard one morning? One hardly dares to hope for such a thing. But perhaps such a thing, or a similar thing, could still occur before the end and the new beginning of all things. Why exclude such a possibility?[1] Shortly thereafter, in January 1959, John XXIII announced his intention to convene a general council of the Roman Catholic Church. The council that followed in 1962–65, whatever its shortcomings, was surely a prophetic-apostolic word of repentance and peace. The event inspired Barth to visit Rome in 1966 for conversations with Vatican leaders. His pilgrimage to the abode of the Apostles ranks as one of the most significant ecclesial encounters of his long career.[2]

The hope that Barth expressed in 1958 did not include the Christian East, at least not explicitly. A few Orthodox churches belonged to the World Council of Churches in Barth’s day, but it would be stretching the point to suppose that he was thinking chiefly of them when he mused about Geneva. References to Orthodox Christianity are rare in his works. Yet Barth was an ecumenically minded theologian, and ecumenically minded theologians in our day would not pass over the Orthodox world in silence when contemplating the future of Christianity. So it is not out of place to apply Barth’s expression of hope from a half-century ago to a recent development in the Orthodox world: the announcement by the heads of the Orthodox churches that they intend to convene a worldwide Orthodox council in the spring of 2016.[3] Since a worldwide council of Orthodoxy has not assembled in more than a millennium, the Holy and Great Council scheduled for 2016 will be at the very least a newsworthy event. Whether it will be a charismatic event—Spirit-filled and evangelical—cannot be predicted. But one may hope for such an outcome.

Theological reflection on conciliarism is a way of lending substance to that hope. In this essay I explore how the modern Orthodox concept of sobornost and Barth’s ecclesiology, considered together, shed light on the conciliar practice of the church. My point of departure is the set of ecclesial values that Barth and Orthodox theology hold in common. The first of these is the ecclesial orientation of Barth’s thought generally, his commitment to a church dogmatics, a commitment that accords well with Orthodox theology even if the Orthodox would deem Barth’s experience of the church to have been impoverished by his Protestantism. Second, the communal sensibility that pervades Barth’s ethical vision agrees with the spirit of Orthodoxy. When Barth writes that the Christian community, as distinct from secular communities, is not content with anything less than a total common and reciprocal responsibility, and that this fellowship in the true sense of the term aims to be a true life-fellowship or communion, and in the last resort cannot be achieved even in part without the total self-giving of each to all, he states an ideal that is essentially the same as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ethic of universal responsibility.[4] The Trinitarian basis of Barth’s understanding of Christian fellowship—his grounding of the community in the supreme fellowship of the Three Persons[5]—provides another link with Orthodox theology, even though Barth’s Trinitarianism was marred by his defense of the filioque.

On the Orthodox side, Barth’s theology of grace finds a counterpart in Orthodoxy’s recognition of the radically gracious character of the fellowship of the church. Orthodox Christians are as emphatic as Protestants in affirming that the church is a community of grace, not law. We leave aside for the moment the patristic