Hodge and Barth in the Stream of Modern Thought

It will be useful to adjust our lens outward from the trees of the prolegomena sections in Hodge and Barth, to the forest of modernity in general. In his Systematic Theology, Hodge was deliberately interacting with the claims of the Enlightenment, every bit as much as he must still distance the Reformed view from the Roman Catholic or Lutheran or Arminian positions. In the case of prolegomena material, that meant exposing the folly of speculative and mystical approaches alike.

In his critique of Rationalism, Hodge maintained a proper office of reason in theology that some today might want to consider rationalistic. For my own part, though I wish he would have used some different wording, it does not appear to be inflating the role of reason beyond its ministerial position. Hodge divides this proper “office” into three: 1. that it is presupposed in revelation communicated to rational creatures to begin with; 2. that it judges the credibility of a revelation; and 3. that it judges the evidence by which revelation is supported. What I suggest is that we read Hodge’s terminology of 2 and 3 in light of 1. Otherwise the natural response will be that Hodge is “putting God (or his Word) in the dock.” In other words, this “judgment” of reason is being used in what Paul Helm distinguishes as reason in the procedural sense rather than in the substantive sense.[1] The latter of these would be a body of self-evident truths, whereas the former respect the faculty and its action. This is not the place to defend the position from there, but only to charitably set forth Hodge’s grammar.

In the shadows of Schleiermacher, Barth understood the field of “nature” to stand in for the secular canons of reason. Although I think Van Til correctly diagnosed Barth’s flight from “scientific” searches for a Jesus of history apart from the Christ of faith,[2] it seems to me that Van Til missed what was most essentially Kantian in Barth’s motive: to shield the content of faith from rational inquiry. What Barth did with the human words of the Bible is not utterly different from what he does with the resurrection, affirming it only in a realm that cannot be poked and prodded.

It is precisely here where we can see why Van Til missed it, for this is a common thread that we find in presuppositionalism and in Barth, namely, the misgiving that nature and reason belong fundamentally to the world and thus outside of revelation. 

One can see how the culprit, for Barth, in the nineteenth century biblical scholarship was its search for the world “behind” the text, whereas he would point back to the world “in” the text.[3] Yet the world behind the text is treated as a monolithic nature. Although it may not be entirely fair to Barth, it is even less fair to the Reformed, that the Anglo-Catholic theologian, E. L. Mascall everywhere made Barth the representative of the Reformed view. Consequently, to take the “Reformed” view was to have a Gnostic view of nature. This shows up first in natural theology, which Barth denied, according to Mascall, principally on the basis of the analogia entis. “Creation as such sets up no point of contact between the creature and its Creator. It is only when God addresses himself to man in revelatory acts which are subsequent to the creation that man can apprehend him” [4].

If Barth contradicted himself throughout the Church Dogmatics, there was a ready answer. In his dialectical theology, the relationship between any A and ~A is always moving forward to a higher synthesis. It is the historical process that we have access to and not to the eternal essence of truth back behind the divine economy. Pious and even genuine rationale for this notwithstanding, the Hegelian influence is noteworthy. This is what assimilates such contradictions. There were two basic differences. First, Barth roots this dialectic in God’s eternal and free decision, while Hegel rooted it in the historical progress toward the Absolute. Second, the substance of the God of Barth’s theology was of a “Reality which is complete and whole in itself apart from and prior to the knowing activity of human individuals” [5].

Implications for the Best Method of Theology

Although Hodge had previously spoken of the facts of a science in need of arrangement by the scientist, he also used language similar to Paley’s watchmaker analogy to say that “the facts of science arrange themselves” (ST, I.18). This is not to take back what he had said before about theological activity, but rather to suggest that the theologian’s subjective arrangement ought to mirror the objective teleology latent in the facts. We must ask, then, whether Hodge is saying that the system of the theologian is a “mirror” of the system of the Bible—differing only in the forms of narrative as opposed to topical—or could he have benefited from the “organic” language used by Bavinck [6] or the “development,” almost as it were, a seed, that Newman [7] had argued for in the Catholic tradition?  

This question brings up another notable criticism of Hodge. Evangelical historians like George Marsden and Mark Noll have spoken of the inductivism of Hodge, and the Princetonians in general, as being not fundamentally different from the Common Sense Realism that was championed by the Restoration Movement on the American frontier in the previous generation. The philosophy itself comes from a lineage of Francis Bacon’s inductivism, John Locke’s tabula rasa, and then finding its completion in the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid of the eighteenth century. What it amounted to was that the mind is in need of no mediating categories when it approaches the objects of its contemplation. The data enters via the senses, and it does so immediately: “one must start with the external world as a perceptual given” [8]. Hodge unquestionably speaks of the theologian in relation to Scripture this way. But is it fair to conceive of his view as an utterly “naked” or “hyper” inductivism?  

It should be pointed out that for Marsden and Noll, Common Sense Realism is to be shunned not primarily because it marginalized the classical categories of realist metaphysics and philosophical thinking in general, but rather because of the way it contributed to the American immediatism and democratization of religious discovery that was too prideful to learn from authoritative community and tradition. While I agree it had the latter effect, I note that this does not tell the whole epistemological story in the account of these two historians.

That said, is Hodge a “hyper-inductivist” in method? He was too clear of a thinker; and after all, he was doing systematic theology. A consistent hyper-inductivist is allergic to systematic consistency. Now from a classical perspective, Hodge is a mixed bag here. On the one hand, his inductivism does not give an account of how the truths of Scripture participate in a larger objective ontology, and yet on the other hand, his positive view of reason and nature offer some clues.

Concerning self-evident truths, Hodge is very much in the classical vein. He rejects that axioms or presuppositions admit no proofs simply because they “require” none. Rather, “self-evident truths may be illustrated; and it may be shown that their denial involves contradictions and absurdities” (ST, I.23). 

This is crucially needed in our day. The notion that because a truth is “self-evidence” it “need” not be demonstrated is a very telling majority opinion. It tells us that the Christian thinkers who have bought into it had rather not think about such things. The assumption is that the only reason one would ever “prove” a thing is because of some anxiety to satisfy the secular itch. In fact, the shoe is on the other foot here, as I have written about elsewhere.

Barth wrote that there are “three circles” of truth to which theology corresponds: “Does Christian utterance derive from Him? Does it lead to Him? Is it conformable to Him?” The first is biblical theology (basis), the second practical theology (end), and third dogmatic theology (content) (CD, I.1.3.). Barth set the tone for Webster and others that theological context matters. That context is as baptized church members with a canon [9]. Whatever else this entails, we can at least see basic agreement between Barth and the Reformed on the priority of exegesis. It may be the closest point of agreement to Hodge. According to Ike Miller, Barth’s method of interpreting John’s Gospel has four key elements: 1. Historical criticism is prolegomena to interpretation, but not its work. 2. Biblical and canonical context has priority over historical and comparative religion context. 3. A “dialectical relationship” between literal-historical-grammatical sense and the theological sense of the text. 4. We should read Scripture with the whole history of the church [10].

Most of this sounds agreeable to the Reformed. However, using the example of John’s use of light as a gateway into Barth’s notion of illumination, there is a sense in which one “point of light” is illuminating in an encountering Jesus (say, with the woman at the well) and then there is the illumination of the present reader. This illumination also encountered John the Evangelist and John the Baptist, yet the Gospel Author even tells us of that latter John, “he was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light” (Jn. 1:8). What emerges out of this exegesis by Barth is none other than an application of his doctrine of inspiration to his biblical treatment of illumination, with all of its distance between the Word and witness. 

Barth himself seemed to recognize the potential for extreme reductionism in his own view: “The personal character of God’s Word is not … to be played off against its verbal character … The personalizing of the concept of the Word of God, which we cannot avoid when we remember that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, does not mean its deverbalizing” [11]. While this is a hopeful caution, a fuller awareness of the problem ought not to have pit the spiritual and soteriological function of God’s revelation against its norming or epistemological function. 

CONCLUDING REMARKS

My own theological method is not simply “closer” to Hodge than to Barth. It is frankly right in line with Hodge and not at all with Barth. My more targeted criticisms of Hodge are nothing more than what I may wish he would have added or subtracted by way of anticipating objections that he could hardly have foreseen. What passes down to us as a naive inductivism, the theologian may take with a grain of salt. It is anachronistic to read into Hodge what he would say to the poststructuralists, for example. That he never heard of them is no strike against his method. 

Reading Barth, side by side, with several of our contemporaries alerts us to how far reaching his influence has been. Even where his view of inspiration is rejected and the influence of liberalism noted, still the allure of Barth in confining theology down into the economy of redemption is seemingly ubiquitous.

Some of that attraction may be the Christological element, while some may be the way in which progeny like Webster offer a kind of unity to the theological disciplines in “theological reading.” For them the Trinitarian economy of redemption offers a framework to be doing systematic and biblical theology in a way that is no longer fractured. It also gives promise that these disciplines need not be “scientific” in the sense of specialized and so removed from the church. It seems to me that our theological imaginations are languishing to the extent that we cannot go outside of the Barthian model for such projects.

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1. Paul Helm, Faith and Understanding (Grand Rapids: Eerdman 1997), 5.

2. Van Til, Christianity and Barthianism, 2-6.

3. Ike Miller, Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020) 75.

4. Mascall, Via Media, 37.

5. Miller, Seeing by the Light, 75.

6. cf. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:428-48, for his contrast between alternative views—including a “mechanical” view—of inspiration.

7. For one such description of Newman, see Allen and Swain, Reformed Catholicity, 34-35.

8. cf. Harry M. Bracken, “Thomas Reid,” in Richard Popkin, ed., The Columbia History of Philosophy (New York: MJF Books, 1999) 481.

9. Miller, Seeing by the Light, 88.

10. Miller, Seeing by the Light, 76-79.

11. Barth quoted in Thompson, “Revelation, Sola Scriptura, and Regenerate Human Reason,” 242.