Derek Woodard-Lehman | Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (original) (raw)

Journal Articles by Derek Woodard-Lehman

This article reassess the role of practical reasoning in Barth’s theology. Frequently, Barth’s ac... more This article reassess the role of practical reasoning in Barth’s theology. Frequently, Barth’s account of practical reasoning is critiqued as incoherent. On the one hand, we are commanded to obey God. On the other hand, a qualitative divide separates God and God’s command from our moral ability to obey and rational ability to discern which actions constitute proper obedience. Such criticisms lose their force when one appreciates Barth’s thick description of the sociality of reasoning found at the end of Volume 1 of the Church Dogmatics. This is because Barth has a covenantal account of the authority of divine command. The good that God does justifies the right that God commands, and authorizes the community’s rational discernment of which actions may best reflect the normative rule of the divine command. The doxastic and pragmatic norms governing the Christian community are discerned through communal practices of scriptural interpretation that incorporate Kantian self-legislation and Hegelian mutual recognition. If confessional authority always derives from divine normativity, and if Christian communal casuistry must be practical only, it is also the case that appreciation of Barth’s account of the subjective conditions of revelation illuminates a kind of oral law tradition within Christian communal life that holds much promise for future developments in Jewish-Christian relations.

This is the Introductory essay for the January 2017 special issue of Modern Theology "The Reasons... more This is the Introductory essay for the January 2017 special issue of Modern Theology "The Reasons of Revelation: Theology After Post-Liberalism."

This paper reflects on Karl Barth’s Gospel- Law thesis as a resource for comparative and construc... more This paper reflects on Karl Barth’s Gospel- Law thesis as a resource for comparative and constructive Jewish-Christian interreligious ethics. Barth, a student of Cohen and a contemporary of Rosenzweig, inverts Martin Luther’s formulation of the relationship between Law and Gospel, and, thus, subverts Luther’s problematic opposition between law and grace. Barth claims that “the Law is the task of the Gospel,” and thus reintegrates the law into Protestant theology and ethics. Doing so, he not only affirms a “third use” of the law. He creates an altogether new third way of approaching the law akin to rabbinic halakha. This paper explicates the development of Barth’s thesis in the Barmen Declaration (1934) and “Gospel and Law” (1935). It delineates those communal practices of confession that he identifies in Church Dogmatics (1938) as fulfilling this task. And it advocates an “apostolic pragmatism” as a fitting Christian counterpart and complement to Peter Ochs’s “rabbinic pragmatism.”

Journal of Religious Ethics, Jan 1, 2008

Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that t... more Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that the “body politics” of Stanley Hauerwas disavows as “constantinian” entanglements such as military service, governmental office, and conspicuous expressions of civil religion. This is especially true with respect to those biopolitical modalities David Theo Goldberg names as “racelessness,” by which material inequalities are racially correlated, thereby allowing whiteness to mediate life and ration death. If, as Hauerwas contends, radical ecclesiology is indeed a theopo- litical alternative to the nation–state’s politics of violence, then it must prove itself resistant to such racialized violence. However, inasmuch as the (largely) uncontested fact of ecclesial segregation recapitulates these broader stratifications and exclusions, the church functions as a passive civil religion and itself participates in the politics of “nonviolent violence.” Thus, Hauerwas must do something that he has been reluctant to do. He must talk about race and racism more directly, specifying how his ecclesiological theopolitics resists such forms of violence; more impor- tantly, he must demonstrate how actual ecclesial congregations instan- tiate such resistance. In short, to be truly nonviolent, Hauerwas’s body politics must become a politics of bodies.

Studies in Christian Ethics, Jan 1, 2008

Read in isolation, H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture is seen to render a settled verdict ag... more Read in isolation, H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture is seen to render a settled verdict against the sectarian anticultural type and in favour of the transformative type. But this ignores the interrelated dialectics of movement and institution, withdrawal and identification, accommodation and transformation characteristic of his critical project. It further occludes Niebuhr’s variegated treatment and deployment of ‘the monastic’ within his larger corpus, and especially in the lesser-known texts such as The Church Against the World. This essay reconsiders Christ and Culture within this broader critical and textual context. It revisits the question posed in ‘Back to Benedict?’: ‘It is worthwhile raising the question, therefore, whether Protestantism can and ought to continue to reject the monastic ideal out of hand’. It retrieves the full valence of hermetic, cenobitic, and mendicant forms of asceticism conflated by Niebuhr’s equivocal designation of ‘monasticism’. In so doing, it argues for a mendicant cultural ethic which can account for the full dialectical range of Niebuhr’s sectarian and transformative types
within the sectarian type itself.

The Bible and Critical Theory, Jan 1, 2011

This essay emerges at the intersection of theoretical and theological interrogations of Christian... more This essay emerges at the intersection of theoretical and theological interrogations of Christian accounts of universality, especially as expressed in the Pauline corpus. Drawing on insurgent interpreters, Daniel Boyarin, John David Dawson, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Douglas Campbell, it explicates an ac- count of dispersive universality that avoids the evacuation of difference and elimination of particularity. On the contrary, rather than requiring others to become identical to us, identity is constructed by becoming identified with others. This alternative politics of identification is announced paradigmatically in the bap- tismal formula of Galatians 3:26-28, and is intrinsically related to Paul’s description of the new life of the Christian in 2:19-20. The unity of Christians in Christ (3:26-28) is constituted by the actuality of Christ living in them (2:19-20). Though as embodied beings the lives of Christians remain in the flesh, such life is now lived in Christ, and by Christ living in them. Individual and social bodies (the life lived in the flesh) are pneumatologically reconfigured within a Christological paradigm (the life lived by faith). Thus, baptism identifies the baptisand with Christ, inaugurates the new life of Christ living within, and initiates ongoing identification with others. The politics of baptismal identification is performative peacemaking; a pneuma- somatics of identity that is simultaneously a body politics and a politics of bodies.

Responding to the incommensurability between the creedal affirmation of the ecclesial unity of on... more Responding to the incommensurability between the creedal affirmation of the ecclesial unity of one Church and the historical existence of many churches, John Howard Yoder and Lesslie Newbigin stand out as towering exemplars of the twentieth century ecumenical movement’s insistence that the absence of visible unity imperils the intelligibility of the gospel of reconciliation and undermines the visibility of the Church. Insisting on the integrity between speech and action, they contend that the Church does not have a mission or an ethic; it is its mission and ethic. Taken together, they suggest an as yet unfinished agenda for ecumenical catholic theology in the twenty-first century. By overlaying their fundamental theological motifs (mission and politics), this essay suggests how the Church might be, and bear its witness faithfully within the present conditions of late modernity. Stated directly, the missionary encounter of Western culture and disavowal of Constantinianism must be predicated on the witness of people and peoples who have always known that European modernity was insufficient, and whose Christianity has always resisted the demonic forces of white supremacy and imperialism. In short, white American congregations and denominations must undertake the costly labor of repentance and visible reunification with those congregations and denominations birthed by the exclusions and oppressions of white supremacist modernity. In so doing, the watching world would not only hear the enunciation of resurrection and reconciliation, but would also see its visible social and political effects.

Edited Volumes by Derek Woodard-Lehman

This edited volume brings together emerging religious ethicists to engage the normative dimension... more This edited volume brings together emerging religious ethicists to engage the normative dimensions of Christian ethics. In addition to a substantive introduction, and a prologue and epilogue by Ted Smith and Celia Deane-Drummond respectively, the volume will be divided into three sections. In the first section, “Scriptural Foundations,” contributors will engage (drawing from both historical and contemporary thinkers) with the scriptural foundations of Christian ethics. In the second section, “Reason and Tradition,” contributors will think through the putative divide between reason and tradition, autonomy and heteronomy. And in the third and final section, “Contemporary Construals,” contributors will offer proposals about the normative characterization of conceptual and practical issues in contemporary religious ethics. Collectively, the volume engages Christian thought in order to make an argument for the continuing relevance of normative methodologies in contemporary religious and theological ethics.

Modern Theology, Oct 2017

The trajectory of twentieth-century theology (both Christian and Jewish) was set by a paradigm of... more The trajectory of twentieth-century theology (both Christian and Jewish) was set by a paradigm of revelation and reason pioneered by Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig, developed by Hans Frei and Leo Strauss, and reiterated by Stanley Hauerwas and David Novak. It is the contention of the contributors to this issue of Modern Theology that the later developments and reiterations in this trajectory are, first, a scholarly misreading of Barth's account of revelation and, second, an overstatement regarding the character of theology as it relates to careful and detailed examinations of human reason. Because post-liberal appropriations of Barth wed Kantian presupposition of God's absolute unknowability with Kierkegaardian assumption of God’s total alterity, they invite charges of fideism and nihilism. These trajectories, thus, undermine human words about God even as they build on Barth's theology of the Word of God.

In order to, first, correct these scholarly misreadings and, second, construct a post-liberal trajectory that is more sensitive to the role of human reason in the reception and interpretation of revelation, contributors stage an encounter between post-Kantian analysis of rational self-determination and the Wittgenstinian turn to ordinary language. Drawing on Hegel, Hermann Cohen, Stanley Cavell, as well as Barth himself, they present a new understanding of the relationship between revelation and theological reflection that begins from the sitz im leben of human language and the interpretation of scripture through negotiation and testing of normative claims and confessional needs within religious communities.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Nicholas Adams – University of Edinburgh
Molly Farneth – Haverford University
Mark James – University of Virginia
Paul Nahme – Brown University
Randi Rashkover (ed) – George Mason University
Elias Sacks – University of Colorado at Boulder
Jonathan Tran – Baylor University
Derek Woodard-Lehman (ed.) – Lutheran Seminary at Philadelphia

Book Chapters by Derek Woodard-Lehman

T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, 2019

Karl Barth is commonly, though regrettably, understood as a conservative figure. Although, Barth ... more Karl Barth is commonly, though regrettably, understood as a conservative figure. Although, Barth famously remarks that the church must “starve the state religiously,” many interpretations of Barth ironically tend to starve the church politically. Some read Barth as the progenitor of an evangelical scholasticism. They take him as a resource for modern trinitarian theology. Others read Barth as the pioneer of a postliberal traditionalism. They take him as the source of an antimodern ecclesiology. Absent from these readings, however, are the socialism of “the red pastor” of Safenwil and the anti-Nazism of the author of the Barmen Declaration. silent is the connection between a theological critique of idolatry and a political critique of ideology. Just as Left Hegelians once sundered Hegel’s radical methodology from his conservative politics, “right Barthians” now sever Barth’s confessional theology from his radical politics.

This chapter gives the lie to these misinterpretations and gives new life to liberative readings of Barth, showing that his explicit theological critique of anthropocentric idolatry is also an implicit political critique of Eurocentric ideology. To do so, it rereads Barth's much neglected pre-war ETHICS lectures where he briefly—but explicitly—addresses issues of racism, capitalism, and colonialism. And it argues that any theology worthy of the name “Barthian” must, with James Cone, name silence in the face of white supremacy as theology’s greatest sin.

The Legacy of the Barmen Declaration: Politics and the Kingdom, 2019

This chapter reevaluates Karl Barth’s contribution to the Barmen Declaration (1934)in the context... more This chapter reevaluates Karl Barth’s contribution to the Barmen Declaration (1934)in the context of his systematic and occasional writings in the decades preceding and following its composition (1923-1946). These earlier and later writings not only bracket Barth’s participation in the German Church Struggle chronologically. They frame his activity in the Confessing Church theologically. In the earlier theological writings, Barth lays out his conception of Reformed confession as a praxis of communal interpretation and application of scripture. He describes this confession- al praxis as a democratic mode of disputation, deliberation, and decision in which the members of the Christian community stand in relationships of mutual authority and reciprocal freedom. It frames Barmen in the context of these writings and Barth’s theology of confession in order to reframe our understanding of the Declaration’s historical significance and contemporary relevance. It lays out how the actual composition of Barmen embodies Barth’s theological conception of conception. It points out that Barth’s role in that composition is greatly exaggerated. It spells out how the Declaration is all the more “Barthian” for it’s being all the less Barth. And it draws out the ways in which Barmen not only is responsive to external sociopolitical features of Nazi ideology, but also is expressive of theopolitical factors internal to Reformed theology. On Barth’s account of Reformed confession, and on my account of the Barmen Declaration, Christianity is an inherently political and intrinsically democratic faith in which what I will call “the politics of Reformed confession” justify Barth’s commitment to the democratic conception of the state that he develops, but does not defend, in his the later political writings.

Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, 2020

Some of the most perplexing questions and vexing issues in Karl Barth’s political theology surrou... more Some of the most perplexing questions and vexing issues in Karl Barth’s political theology surround his judgments about the nation, the nation-state, and nationalism. On one hand, Barth castigates sacralization of Volk (nation) and Reich (nation-state) in Nazi Germany. On the other hand, he articulates reverence for his own nation, Switzerland. These judgments leave most readers lost in confusion. For some readers, these judgments leave Barth mired in contradiction. However, this confusion and contradiction rest on a reading of Barth’s political theology that is incomplete; and, insofar it is incomplete, that reading is incorrect. This paper will fill in the missing pieces to create a complete more picture of Barth’s response to the problem of nations, to correct misunderstandings thereof, and to construct a theology of the nation-sate for contemporary political theology.

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth, 2020

This chapter argues against the familiar consensus that Barth’s relationship to modern moral phil... more This chapter argues against the familiar consensus that Barth’s relationship to modern moral philosophy is oppositional. It demonstrates that Barth appropriates the central insights of his philosophical predecessors and incorporates them into his ethics, even as he anticipates one of the most fruitful developments in contemporary moral philosophy: Stephen Darwall’s ‘second-personal ethics.’ Rather than casting autonomy as sin, he recasts obedience to the Word of God as a form of autonomy. Barth incorporates the rational form of Kantian self-legislation and the social form of Hegelian mutual recognition into his account of subjective reception of revelation. Because Barth does not separate the sovereignty of revelation from the sociality of the church’s interpretation of Scripture and confession of faith, we—Barth’s readers—must not separate his account of hearing the Word of God from his account of hearing the divine command. In fact, we should take his account of subjective reception of revelation as his most fulsome and winsome account of practical reason.

Karl Barth is simultaneously the theologian whose Confessing Church repudiated Nazi anti-Semitism... more Karl Barth is simultaneously the theologian whose Confessing Church repudiated Nazi anti-Semitism and the man who confessed himself allergic to Jews. He condemns anti-Semitism as a heresy only to consign the continued existence of Judaism to theological insignificance. For Barth, “unbelieving” Israel exists only as cut off, in limbo between the covenantal promises to their patriarchs and their promised eschatological restoration. But after Auschwitz, a place-holding Pauline affirmation of eventual restoration seems insufficient. Perpetual deferral is theologically perplexing, as well as ethically and politically paralyzing. The admonition to take the election of Israel seriously fails to clarify what it means to take actually-existing Jews and Judaism seriously. This essay takes up these problems and moves beyond them by, first, rereading of Barth's account of Israel in §34 in order to explain its unintended supersessionism, and, second, reconstructing his ecclesiological formulation of the doctrine of election so that it avoids this supersessionism, more consistently embodies his own best insights, and embraces the actually-existing world-occurrence of Judaism and Christianity.

Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics: Normative Dimensions, 2019

In the wake of Immanuel Kant's philosophical revolution, modern freedom has been defined as auton... more In the wake of Immanuel Kant's philosophical revolution, modern freedom has been defined as autonomy. As Kant puts it in his 1784 essay, "An Answer to the Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?' " modern freedom requires breaking free from the "self-incurred minority" imposed by traditional forms of authority in order to think for oneself and to live a life of one's own. Above all else, it requires breaking with the heteronomous and paternalistic authority of the church and religious tradition. This essay develops and defends Karl Barth's account of Reformed tradition in order to demonstrate that neither the textual authority of scripture and the Confessions, nor the social authority of church, precludes modern freedom. With Barth, it reconceives authority in Reformed tradition as a form of freedom that incorporates Kantian self-legislation and Hegelian mutual recognition. Beyond Barth, it employs this reconception of authority and freedom to illustrate how Reformed practices of pedobaptism and catechism are nothing other than a highly formalized and dramatically ritualized praxis of moral formation meant to bring minors into their majority within the community.

Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics: Normative Dimensions, 2019

This essay introduces a volume that takes up the nature and place of “Christian ethics” within th... more This essay introduces a volume that takes up the nature and place of “Christian ethics” within the wider landscape of “religious ethics.” It, and the contributions it introduces, are motivated by two concerns. First, to clarify the relationship between religious ethics and Christian ethics. Second, to specify the contributions that Christian ethics makes to religious ethics. The overall aim of the volume is to show, rather than say, what normative Christian ethics is and why it matters for contemporary religious ethics. It argues against those who deny that normative Christian ethics can be done apart from Christian faith, as well as those who deny that normative Christian ethics has any part in religious ethics. It argues for normative Christian ethics as a form of religious ethics. It thus provides a modest counterpoint to the “ethnographic turn” in religious ethics, and a complement to descriptive approaches to religious ethics.

Karl Barth in Conversation, 2014

Peace Be With You: Christ's Benediction Amid Violent Empires, 2010

Presentations (Selected) by Derek Woodard-Lehman

Divine command is widely rejected on the grounds that it makes morality both arbitrary and hetero... more Divine command is widely rejected on the grounds that it makes morality both arbitrary and heteronomous. Considered in itself, divine command is absolute will. Whatever God loves is right simply because God loves it. Considered in relation to others, divine command is absolute power. Whatever God commands is obligatory simply because God commands it. Just so, divine command is rejected as a philosophically untenable form of voluntarism, as well as an ethically and politically intolerable form of authoritarianism. Without responding to the entire range of “Euthyphro dilemmas,” and specifically leaving aside issues of voluntarism, I argue that Karl Barth's version of divine command satisfies the conditions for autonomy specified by Kant in the sociohistorical terms specified by Hegel. On his account, divine command is not a heteronomous form of morality. Indeed, for Barth, obedience to divine command must be autonomous.

Giorgio Agamben claims that Auschwitz not Athens, the camp rather than the city is the paradigm o... more Giorgio Agamben claims that Auschwitz not Athens, the camp rather than the city is the paradigm of contemporary politics. Faced with sovereign biopower, the ideals and institutions of the humanist and liberal traditions are impotent. “Rights” endanger the rightless. “Human being” threatens human beings. As such, Agamben calls for a community beyond law heralded by a bizarre ensemble of exemplars: Chinese May protesters, Melville’s Bartelby, and porn star Chloe de Lysses. This essay explicates the sources and structure of Agamben’s sovereign politics of the body. It evaluates the cataclysmic descriptions and messianic prescriptions it generates. And it advocates an alternative democratic body politics of popular sovereignty that draws on the work of Elaine Scarry and Danielle Allen.

Journal of Religious Ethics, Jan 1, 2008

Studies in Christian Ethics, Jan 1, 2008

The Bible and Critical Theory, Jan 1, 2011

Modern Theology, Oct 2017

CONTRIBUTORS:

T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, 2019

The Legacy of the Barmen Declaration: Politics and the Kingdom, 2019

Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, 2020

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth, 2020

Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics: Normative Dimensions, 2019

Karl Barth in Conversation, 2014

Peace Be With You: Christ's Benediction Amid Violent Empires, 2010

“Radical Protestant public theology” is neither a misnomer nor a mistake. Radical Protestant theo... more “Radical Protestant public theology” is neither a misnomer nor a mistake. Radical Protestant theology is not intrinsically sectarian. Public theology is not necessarily Constantinian. Radical Protestant public theology is a form of Christian social criticism whose practical stance embodies both measured cooperation and mitigated opposition, and whose rhetorical style expresses both qualified affirmation and circumscribed condemnation. That such a public theology is not widely in evidence is distressing, but not devastating. Cornel West is a provocative, albeit imperfect exemplar thereof. Considering West as both a Radical Protestant and a Radical Democrat not only makes better sense of his own broad corpus, it also reveals compelling theological, ethical, and political possibilities beyond the moribund alternatives of antidemocratic postliberalism and antireligious liberalism. These possibilities are new democratic vistas and prophetic visions of King’s Beloved Community.

Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics, 2019

The contributors to this volume are motivated by two concerns. First, we want to clarify the rela... more The contributors to this volume are motivated by two concerns. First, we want to clarify the relationship between religious ethics and Christian ethics. Second, we want to specify the contributions that Christian ethics makes to religious ethics. Apart from this Introduction, however, our respective contributions are not methodological essays. Some of us directly address these concerns. For others, these concerns are part of the intellectual landscape that informs our implicit background assumptions. But for all of us, our primary aim is to show, rather than say, what normative Christian ethics is and why it matters for contemporary religious ethics.

Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics

Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that t... more Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that the "body politics" of Stanley Hauerwas disavows as "constantinian" entanglements such as military service, governmental office, and conspicuous expressions of civil religion. This is especially true with respect to those biopolitical modalities David Theo Goldberg names as "racelessness," by which material inequalities are racially correlated, thereby allowing whiteness to mediate life and ration death. If, as Hauerwas contends, radical ecclesiology is indeed a theopolitical alternative to the nation- state's politics of violence, then it must prove itself resistant to such racialized violence. However, inasmuch as the (largely) uncontested fact of ecclesial segregation recapitulates these broader stratifications and exclusions, the church functions as a passive civil religion and itself participates in the politics of "nonviolent violence." Th...

This chapter argues against the familiar consensus that Barth’s relationship to modern moral phil... more This chapter argues against the familiar consensus that Barth’s relationship to modern moral philosophy is oppositional. It demonstrates that Barth appropriates the central insights of his philosophical predecessors and incorporates them into his ethics, even as he anticipates one of the most fruitful developments in contemporary moral philosophy: Stephen Darwall’s ‘second-personal ethics’. Rather than casting autonomy as sin, he recasts obedience to the Word of God as a form of autonomy. Barth incorporates the rational form of Kantian self-legislation and the social form of Hegelian mutual recognition into his account of subjective reception of revelation. Because Barth does not separate the sovereignty of revelation from the sociality of the church’s interpretation of Scripture and confession of faith, we—Barth’s readers—must not separate his account of hearing the Word of God from his account of hearing the divine command. In fact, we should take his account of the subjective rec...

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, 2019

Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics, 2019

Missiology: An International Review, 2010

Scottish Journal of Theology, 2014