Abstract

This dissertation argues for dialectical theology as a critical theory, in light of the global market culture. First, it explores the religion-critique of Karl Barth as a critique of the modern subject in Descartes, Kant, Schleiermacher, Western culture, and capitalism. Second, it explores Dietrich Bonhoeffer's improvements upon Barth's critique through his worldly, social, and non-religious interpretation of Christianity. I explore Bonhoeffer's distinctive critique of the modern subject in the thought of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Through his act/being dialectic, Bonhoeffer's offers a model of immanent critique and reconstruction for contemporary theology. Third, I argue for a postmodern appropriation of these dialectical theologians. To overcome Barth's non-worldly God, I retrieve his trinitarian relationality, the "being in act" formula for revelation, his Christological textuality, and human reiterations or signs of revelation. To overcome Bonhoeffer's formalism, I retrieve his views of the concrete and suspended subject, social and contextual transcendence, Christ as a sociality of difference, and reality as a dialectic of difference. The "divine mandates" of culture, family, labor, church and slaw are redescribed as social spheres of revelation which maintain a dialectic of difference for human existence. Fourth, I extend the program of dialectical theology through a non-foundational appropriation of the Critical Theory of Marx, Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, and Horkheimer. I explore the Frankfurt School's theories of the commodity form, the sacrifice of nature, the dynamic relation between subjectivity and the social totality, negative dialectics, the aesthetics of the dialectical image, and the critique of labor, culture, family, and the state in service of the social whole. Finally, I offer my own reconstruction of theology as the "dialectics of divine desire," which provides a revelational ontology within which Frankfurt tools can be used. In this trinitarian movement toward the particular entity, the commodity form is replaced by the giving or "charis" form, Christ is the unique concretion of God, the social spheres of revelation preserve difference, and the aesthetics of the dialectical image reorient particular things of nature and human labor from the commodity form toward practices of the gift