ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at aspects of the construction and function of women's silence in the work of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The act of keeping silent, as philosophers and literary theorists alike have noted, can have a multiplicity of meanings. Both Barth and von Balthasar want to state that woman and her silence are in some way inexplicable, irreducibly 'other'; at the same time, both find it necessary for their theological systems to give a full explanation of woman's silence and its significance. Woman's silence, which accepts man's election, is held in a precarious analogical relation to human acceptance of God's election. In both Barth's and von Balthasar's treatments of the silence of women, we see both a determination of woman as inherently silent and a determination of woman's silence as significant in a particular way for the observers —supposedly the whole Church, but often implicitly limited to men.
