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At some point in my sermon preparation I turn to Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. This time Brevard Childs’ commentary on Exodus pointed me to Barth’s reading of the golden calf incident in Ex 32. I’ve never understood how theology professors assign readings in the Dogmatics and tell their students to skip over the small print material—they call the small print “footnotes.” (You need to flip through a volume to see how Barth organizes his writing). This is a drastic mischaracterization. The small print is usually the most interesting stuff. That’s where Barth does his Scriptural exegesis, which is the heart of his project.

His exegesis of Exodus 32 is beautiful. You should read it: Church Dogmatics, IV/1, 425f. Below are some highlights.

Barth turns the bull into an image of Israel creating a god in it’s own likeness. The bull “is the essence of the people.” The golden calf is a product, a manufactured good—God is commodified:

the bull as a symbol of virility and fertility, signifying the essence of the people’s power as a people… Israel itself was this bull, defiantly standing on its short thick thighs and feet, tossing and threshing its tail. But Israel in a divine eschatological and hypostasising itself, and therefore its god. And Israel, too, in the divine form constructed and manufactured by itself…. This was the breach of the covenant, and Israel regarded it as the supreme fulfillment of the covenant, an act of concrete religion. (427-428)

Moses and Aaron are divergent models for mediated God to the people. For Barth, Aaron stands in for the director of a national church, the church of the establishment. He’s a Feuerbachian priest/politican, turning the people’s desires into a god. The voice of the people becomes the voice of God. Barth highlights the ambivalence of the “priestly art” and liturgy: “a neutral activity.” Getting liturgy right doesn’t mean you are in the clear. Liturgy can mislead:

[Aaron] is the man of the national Church, the established Church. He listens to the voice of the soul of the people and obeys it. He is the direct executer of its wishes and demands… He himself ‘fashions’ the bull before which they see themselves and cry: ‘These be thy gods, O Israel’... a little miracle… The priestly art as such—building altars and celebrating liturgies and ordering and executing sacrificies and proclaiming feasts of the Lord—is a neutral activity which can turn into the very opposite of all that is intended by it…. He has simply accepted the vox populi as the vox Dei and acted accordingly. (429)

What will the people do in the absence of Moses? The people feel abandoned. They feel the absence of God. Israel needs to fill the void. So they fill it with their own creativity. Playing the part of God (creating something out of the nothing), they create a god. In the passage above, Barth calls the emergence of the golden bull “a little miracle” (reminds me of Carl Schmidt’s stuff on sovereignty and political miracles):

Is it not obvious that in these empty hearts, in the place which was left empty and was now shown to be empty, there had to rise up this snorting and stamping and tail-threshing bull, the picture of their own vital and creative power as a people when let to themselves and controlling their own life? (430-431)

Moses, it turns out, is old news. He’s out of fashion. As Barth puts it, “Moses was passé.” Aaron ushered in the new and improved religion, which turns out to feed Israel’s egoism (Augustine’s incurvatus in se). While I love this last passage the most, I also wonder if there’s a way to reposition immanance and transcedence that makes his same point while appropriating both:

The time has come to move over from mediacy, and the regime of mediation in the form of a charismatic praying alone and hearing and authoritatively proclaiming only the Word of God, to the immediacy of the people as such, and man as such, to God, the regime of their own mediation and therefore of their own divinity. The time had come to take seriously the immanence of God, a concession being made to His undeniable transcendence by the setting up of an image which would inspire confidence from the very first because it was its own creation, the refleciton of Israel and the Israelite. Moses with his Yahweh who stood so high above Israel and stooped down to it did not need to return, and would be better not to return. Moses was passé. The age of the bull, a new epoch in the religious and political history of Israel, had now dawned, and for this epch Moses had no message. (432-433)

Enough Barth. Now to figure out a sermon!