the struggle (part 4): reconstructions of karl barth's cd i/1 §1.1

Rina Castelnuovo, "Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Israel, 28 September 2005" (2005) [photograph]

if the struggle for Truth refuses to worship at the altar of the truths-of-the-present-moment, this is because one must take seriously the contradictions within human existence which modernity idolatrously tries to obscure: either through its blind trust in the saving power of technologies (whose accomplishments one has no wish to deny) or the ahistorical self-descriptions of political liberalism and capitalism. the struggle exists; desire drives humanity precisely because the world is not-yet-Whole. it is a response to human brokenness. thus we cannot presuppose we know, always, already, what constitutes wholeness short of its realization, which is our on-going task. and so, the struggle, born of this universal human brokenness and refusing to resign itself to the way things are, acts in the hope of reconciliation-to-come.

there are no secrets, no shortcuts. instead the question of Truth centers on a constant attentiveness to our own being, our own history, which cannot be judged by any external and transcendent standard. we do nothing else but describe ourselves, constantly, through our history, activity and in our brokenness, and in so doing seek the Whole, present-as-hope within those actions.

-LoA

faith (an engagement with karl barth's cd i/1 §1.3)

faith and hope point beyond the present moment and thereby recognize that the Truth is not yet realized in its wholeness. thus faith is the orientation of one’s action towards the Truth-which-is-our-Future. our lives must be lived out of that engagement with the Truth. and yet, just as Truth is not some past event, something given as a fact and possessed to be used as a tool, neither is faith something we can have as our own for it is only given as Truth gives itself in freedom. faith, then, is the event in which humanity is made the mediation of the Truth-which-is-its-Future. this must be insisted against every humanism. because there is nothing which humanity does not receive as gift, one can hardly talk of the Future as the highest impulse of human self-realization. of itself, humanity is nothing and humanism is nihilism: the empty pride of insisting on our own being. the Truth cannot be realized as something that humanity possesses, but as that which claims all of humanity as its own. no method can master the Truth in its free character as event. it is never ours, but takes us as its own by the gift of faith.

-LoA