The latest episode of @WTravisMcMaken's podcast series on the Göttingen Dogmatics stimulated me to reflect on the differences between Barth, Bultmann, and Gogarten, something I've been spending a long time pondering over the past year while writing a synthetic treatment of DT.

Here's the link to the latest episode for those interested: http://derevth.blogspot.com/2021/01/barths-gottingen-dogmatics-4-man-and.html

A point that comes through in the episode, which finds confirmation in my research on the differences between Barth and Bultmann on hermeneutics, is the different ways that each of them understand the contemporaneity of revelation. And this pertains to Gogarten as well.

The standard textbook analysis of Barth and Bultmann—which I adhered to in my early work—is that they both shared a contemporary account of revelation in the 1920s, in which the God-human encounter occurs here and now, hic et nunc.

According to this account, they diverge in the late 1930s as Barth becomes increasingly interested in history (Geschichte), while Bultmann remains focused on the present-tense encounter.

This account is not wrong, but it's overly simplistic.

From the start, Barth and Bultmann have two different understands of the hic et nunc contemporaneity. For Barth, revelation is contemporaneous because it is eternal and timelessly identical, and thus historical differences are irrelevant to revelation. Every moment is the same.

For Bultmann, revelation is contemporaneous because, while it has the same material content (i.e., new life), it is formally and concretely related to each particular moment in history and thus requires translation to each person's situation. It embraces historical difference.

This explains the disagreements between them that surfaced in the debates over Romans 1922, and it carries forward into the demythologizing debate in the 1940s/50s. Barth emphasizes the general humanity of Christ; Bultmann emphasizes the historical situation of people today.

While I have not explored this in my published work, I think we can say that Gogarten is even more interested in historical particularity than Bultmann. He studied under Troeltsch, rather than Herrmann, and this difference is profound in how he develops his project.

For Gogarten, revelation takes place strictly in the I-Thou encounter, an encounter that is fully embedded in historicity. He has much less interest in talking about revelation at all. For him, questions of history and responsibility are everything.

We can order the three main dialectical theologians like this:

Barth --> dialectic of timeless eternity and the temporal moment
Bultmann --> eternity in a correlational dialectic with history
Gogarten --> dialectic of historical responsibility

Framed this way, we can understand why Gogarten embraced the German Christian movement in the early 1930s. He was so focused on the historical particularity of the moment that talk of God's word coming in and through Volkstum made sense to him. He could not see the problem.

Later, after his disillusionment, Gogarten abandoned the project of finding God's law within history and instead embraced a theology of secularity, which also makes sense on these terms.

All of this reinforces the point that dialectical theology is not just one thing. Trying to synthesize all this into a coherent project is challenging but not impossible.

End thread