Revelatory Positivism? Barth’s Earliest Theology and the Marburg School

Written by S. Fisher Reviewed By John Webster

Simon Fisher here offers us an important monograph on a neglected area of Barth studies. The book is a very detailed attempt (the detail betrays the thesis origins) to trace the influence of Marburg philosophy of religion on the very early work of Barth, before his movement into the ‘dialectical’ phase of his theology in the middle of the second decade of the present century. Whilst we have been accustomed to think of this dialectical phase as ‘early Barth’, Fisher suggests that the earlier material is of some significance in understanding what is happening at the beginnings of Barth’s theological pilgrimage. Though Barth’s early work has been something of a centre of controversy for the last fifteen years or so (largely over the issue of Barth’s early socialism and its relation to the theological motivations of dialectical theology), his earliest liberal writings on philosophy of religion have been scarcely noticed. Dr Fisher’s book seeks to make good the omission.

The book falls into three blocks of material. There is, first, an exposition of the religious philosophy of the neo-Kantian philosophers of Marburg, where Barth himself studied and was much influenced by the philosophy of figures like Cohen and Natorp. Although Marburg philosophy has been explored as a background to Bultmann, its significance for Barth is rarely recognized, and Fisher’s exposition is one of the first attempts to relate the material in English. His account is very detailed and accordingly rather dense: the inattentive might easily miss some of the threads of the argument. Next, he offers a critical exposition of aspects of the thought of Wilhelm Hermann, the Marburg systematic theologian long recognized to have had a deep influence upon Barth. It has often been pointed out that it was from Hermann that Barth came to grasp the importance of the integrity of theology as an autonomous discipline (though Hermann’s arguments would later cause Barth much trouble). In an often severely critical account, Fisher interprets Hermann via what he regards as the metaphysical confusions and inadequacies of Ritschl, stressing Hermann’s positing of a religious given, a revelatory experience through which he had hoped to secure theology against the idealism of his philosophical colleagues. Third, Fisher expounds some very early essays by Barth on the theory of religion. Once again, the account is very dense—perhaps too dense, given the rather slight character of the Barth texts and their somewhat marginal position in the Barth corpus. The argument is rounded off (as the title promises) by a look at the issue of ‘revelatory positivism’, Bonhoeffer’s famous charge against Barth, and some considerations of the relation of revelation to culture.

The great strength of the book is its immensely careful scholarship, both in examining the details of the texts to which it gives attention and in setting them in their cultural and intellectual contexts. Fisher is too careful a scholar to be satisfied with the polemics or casual characterizations which have often marred English-language writing about Barth. Nevertheless, the general impression left by the book is that it is a little too cramped, a little too restricted to detailed commentary, and does not really allow itself to address wider issues with sufficient fluency. It might, for example, have been very fruitful to examine Barth’s earliest material in the light of current ‘post-liberal’ readings of his work (such as those offered by Frei or Lindbeck) in which Barth’s theology of revelation and his epistemology are receiving fresh interpretations. That said, Fisher’s work sets high standards of meticulous scholarship, and readers should be grateful for a book which not only traces a neglected part of the intellectual background to contemporary theology but also extends their sense of what is happening in the most complex and ramified theological oeuvre of the century.


John Webster

Wycliffe College, Toronto