Karl Barth’s weighing and rejecting of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology based on the ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ is a well-known story in modern theology. Even though there has been considerable effort to correct Barth’s assessment, the (mis)characterization of Schleiermacher persists as a theologian who was only interested in the human experience of God rather than the reality of God independent of human experience. This paper does not intend to enter directly into debates on whether Barth read Schleiermacher correctly or which theologian’s theological method is preferable. Instead, this paper seeks to marshal resources from both Schleiermacher and Barth to delineate an understanding of human freedom as a function of humanity’s radical dependency.
The paper will proceed by brief rehearsals of Schleiermacher’s and Barth’s understandings of human freedom in dependence. In so doing, we will discover that for all their differences, there is a clear family resemblance between their Christologically-inflected accounts of human freedom. As such, a repair of the theological rift between the two modes of theologising represented by these two luminaries is addressed obliquely rather than directly. However, the paper’s main aim is to offer a constructive account indebted to both while pressing forward the radicality of their claims of a Christologically informed freedom in dependence which begins to trace an ordering of dependencies on God, other humans, and creation.
Schleiemacher’s claims about human dependence and freedom are foundational in the The Christian Faith. In what one might describe as a religious (Christian?) phenomenology in the early paragraphs, dependency and freedom are posited as receptivity and self-initiated activity (Empfanglichkeit und Selbsttätigkeit), respectively (§4.1). These two aspects of human experience are intertwined in such a way as to make one without the other unintelligible. Importantly, while these various experiences of relative dependence and freedom can be derived from experiences of and reflection on the world, they are not identical to an awareness of absolute dependence or freedom even if they arise from these experiences of relativity (cf. §4.4, 5.1). As such, coming to an awareness of absolute dependence requires the experience of redemption in Christ (cf. §62.3) who is uniquely unburdened by the sin which might dilute the ‘potency of his God-consciousness’ (§94). This potency is such that in Christ the absolute dependency and its corresponding freedom is just that, absolute, and as such is capable of redeeming others towards the same experience in Christ. Regardless of what type of Christology is at play here, the person and work of Christ are crucial for articulating the sort of dependence and freedom made possible for other human beings through him.
Barth’s own reflections on human freedom in dependency are dispersed throughout his Church Dogmatics, and it is repeatedly characterized as freedom established in dependency (cf. I/2, 720; II/1, 670; IV/3, 941). However, it receives its Christological concentration most clearly in III/2 (§44.1 and 45.1), where Barth’s treatment of Jesus as ‘Man for God’ and ‘Man for Other Men’ eschews thinking about humanity in general terms by insisting that in Jesus one is confronted with the ‘real man’. When one’s attention is reoriented towards discovering the truth of humanity in the person of Christ, one finds that this particular human is placed ‘wholly at the disposal of God’ (III/2, 64) with Jesus’ acknowledgement of divine dependence during his wilderness temptation serving as a paradigmatic example (III/2, 67-8). And so, in Christ, one discovers that human being ‘is the being which is for God’ (III/2, 71). In this regard, the sort of Christologically informed freedom that Barth is describing is ‘the freedom lived out and exercised in the act of responsibility before God, or it is not freedom’ (III/2, 196).
These all too brief summaries of Schleiermacher and Barth on freedom in dependence suggests that there are formal, if not material, similarities between their Christologically grounded anthropologies. To discover the true nature of humanity, generally, and its freedom found in dependence, specifically, then one must look to the truly human Jesus of Nazareth. Guided by these insights, I want to press further the notion of Jesus’ radical dependency as characteristic of his revelatory humanity in the Gospel accounts. Likewise, these gospel depictions prompt further trinitarian reflection in that they not only indicate the Son’s dependent relations economically but immanently as well. And finally, while there is a fundamental orderedness to this Christologically grounded freedom-in-dependence (God, humanity, creation), following both Schleiermacher and Barth in their respective ways, one can and should query whether these different sorts of dependencies are mutually informing.
This paper aims to be a constructive exploration of dependence as fundamental for any Christian account of human freedom. Towards these ends, both Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth offer abundant resources for thinking about the relation between dependency and freedom. Pairing these two might seem, at first glance, an exercise in inevitable frustration, but it will become clear that there are similarities in the form and substance of their Christological instincts for theological anthropology. Both men insist that true humanity is not found by first making observations on human freedom generally and then moving to think about how Jesus fits that pattern, but rather they insist that one only understands human freedom in considering how Jesus is the unique revelation of true humanity. In taking cues from both men, this paper presses further the question of freedom in dependency by attending to biblical, trinitarian, and systematic considerations.