ABSTRACT
In the last chapter I illustrated how a ‘Nietzschean’ semiotics can function within a theology of language such as Barth’s. Nietzsche’s semiotics, it may be remembered, is grounded in his fundamental ontology, his doctrine of will-to-power. I will now illustrate the same process functioning within the mechanics of Barth’s anthropology, as once again, a persepctival epistemology and semiotics will be seen to be rooted in a fundamental ontology. Of course, as was clear in the last chapter, the Nietzschean account never has the final word in Barth, being opposed always and at once by the reality of God, encountering the world finally and definitively in Christ and the Trinitarian procession of divine being which seizes human being in the revelatory process. Such revelation is not an epistemological occurrence for Barth, it is an ontological one, and this fact needs to be clear, in this chapter as in the last, to properly understand the moves Barth is making. A place can not be found in orthodox Christian theology for an account of the semiotic and ontological situation which was illustrated in Chapters 1 and 2 by virtue of an unqualified adherence to the neoDarwinism or the radical relativism that Nietzsche, in this book, has been shown to incorporate. As seen in the last chapter, however, the process by which Nietzsche, alone within secular thought, grounds a relativism in an ontological situation has a correlation in and only in Christianity, where, as we have begun to witness, the ontological situation of fallenness is the condition in which the radically perspectival semiotics of post-Babel fallenness is grounded. As we also saw in the last chapter, if fallenness is the grounds for such a semiotics then redemption, made possible through the grace-filled election of humanity in Christ and the Triune God’s Selfexpression in revelation, is the grounds for opposing it. Moreover, as the redemptive process is ongoing, unfolding toward final beatific sanctification, then Nietzschean semiotics, manifest as a central element of our fallen state, can not be ignored by a ‘purely’ theological account, nor consigned to an account of humanity pre-Christ. It is, rather, the concomitant reality of human being in the world and this tension, proper to the scriptural juxtaposition of sin and its other, drives a theology of language, as will be seen, toward an ethics of active participation.
