Christiane Tietz
Oxford University Press
2021
"At this very time we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Protestantism, the breaking of that bubble of 'Bible-Christianity.'" (Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman)
“The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.” (Karl Rahner SJ)
Barthianism is Dialecticism dressed in Calvinist drag. And considering what Christiane Tietz has disclosed about Karl Barth's private life in her 2021 biography Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict, we can no longer take his gesticulated words at face value, let alone give him the benefit of the polygamous doubt. It is now clear in hindsight that his thirty-year long deliberate engagement in adulterous spousal abuse (what Tietz describes as the troubling “Ménage à Trois” between him, his wife Nelly Barth, and his mistress/assistant Charlotte von Kirschbaum), is nothing but the reductio ad absurdum of the “White Whale” (his Kirchliche Dogmatik) that is now beached and continues to rot on the sinking sand of modern protestant theology.
In fact, Barth’s mother demonstrated far more theological discernment than he did when she confronted him about his domestic triangle and asked: “What good is the most discerning theology when it suffers a shipwreck in your own home?” His dialectical handwaving about what he called the notgemeinschaft (the "emergency association" between him, his wife, and his mistress), and his all-too-convenient use of what he called a “boundary case” as applied to the seventh commandment (neither marital fidelity nor adultery), clearly demonstrate that it is (almost) good for nothing, except perhaps to show how absurd it is.
For example, in a letter to Nelly in which he attempts to explain how their notgemeinschaft is an instance of an ethical "boundary case" he writes: “each one - bound and not bound in a particular fashion with the other two - has a special place, a special security, but also a special burden and pressure, without having to end our marriage legally and outwardly, and without having to deny and suppress that which connects me to Lollo.” How sentimental of him ("Lollo" was his pet name for his mistress). And how dialectical of him (there is no either/or here, only neither/nor). I leave it to the reader to assess the persuasiveness of this disturbingly self-serving apologia for adultery. "Your problem does not become my emergency" comes readily to mind as the appropriate response.
Barth tried and failed to theologically justify the "permanent crisis" of the ménage à trois he forced his wife and his mistress to endure for over thirty years while the three of them lived and moved and had their being under the same roof (along with his and Nelly's five children). And to add intimate insult to ironic injury, the three of them were ultimately buried together in the same "family” plot in the Hörnli Cemetery in Basel, Switzerland, according to Barth's wishes.
Tietz's biography could be used to both condemn Barth's polygamy and defend his theology. His critically realistic dialectical narrators have used versions of this divide and conquer strategy ever since Eberhard Busch intimated about Barth's intimacy with his mistress in his 1976 biography Karl Barth: His Life From Letters and Autobiographical Texts. However, Tietz's book can be put to much better use.
The real value of her work consists in giving us very serious pause over whether the entire vocabulary of Barth's theology is still worth using. His abuse of words like "emergency association" and "boundary case" suggests not. To borrow and theologically apply Gottlob Frege's context principle from his Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik is helpful here: one must never ask for the meaning of a theological word in isolation, but only in the context of a dogmatic system. Hence the reductio.
You shall know them by their fruits, and not by their own version of the Institutes (speaking of Calvinist drag). Of course, Barth's dogmatics is not the only protestant instance of this brand of dialectical absurdity. Tillich's apologetics also suffers from a similar ultimate concern in the shadow of his sadomasochism (but I digress).
