“As a Tangent Touching a Circle”: Karl Barth and Dialectical Theologians Rethinking Time After 1918

Abstract

Like many scholars and intellectual groupings after World War I (WWI), Karl Barth and dialectical theologians called for a “new time”, which encompassed the hoped-for arrival of a new society, new ethics, a new man, and for them most importantly, a renewal of Christianity against its nineteenth-century versions. All of this was not possible for them, this chapter argues, without literally and radically rethinking and remaking time itself, the meanings of temporality and historicity. This momentous task was at the centre of the thought and activities of Zwischen den Zeiten (“between the times”) circle—as they sometimes called their venture—taking this name from the journal they co-founded in 1923. I will in particular seek to demonstrate that for Karl Barth and his peers, anti-historicism as a theological or cultural critique would always remain insufficient and instead, what they felt compelled to do was to nothing less than intervene with the perceived circular structure between (1) the ontological framework based on history as continuity and causality, (2) methodological and epistemological claims of the historical nature of all knowledge, (3) political ideology of progress, and (4) ethics of historical relativism. I also want to highlight the significance of the activity of thinking in tandem as a grouping, which was particularly palpable in their joint tackling of as convoluted a challenge as historicism proved to be.