









































233

POSTER

Defining Digital Theology
Barthian Reflections on the Role of 
Open Access and Electronic Publishing 
in the Theological Toolkit
Race MoChridhe 
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

ABSTRACT As a student member of the Atla Press Coordinating Council, 
the presenter has spent the past eight months evaluating, developing, and 
implementing digital tools to support the Press’s initiatives in open access 
scholarship. This session frames those efforts in the context of theology’s 
status as a “minor participant” (Hutchings 2015) in the digital humanities 
as well as the emergence of a trans-disciplinary domain increasingly 
identified as “digital theology” (Phillips 2014). Drawing on Anderson’s 
(2018) analysis of theology’s disciplinary distance from the main body of 
digital humanities work, the presenter outlines a case for the distinctive 
primacy of digital publishing tools and open access commitments in 
digital theology, as compared with the broader suite of research tools 
and methods that constitute the “cultural capital” (Schroeder 2016) of 
digital humanities as generally understood. Particular attention is paid 
in this regard to Karl Barth’s vision of a “proclamation-centered” (Hector, 
2015) theological method as the basis for an ecclesiological critique of 
closed access publication models. 



234  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

Anderson examined digital humanities not just as a toolkit but as 
“cultural capital” arising from its community of practice, elaborating 
how theologians and biblical scholars “exist at the ‘margins’ of 
the digital humanities,” separate from a culture around “tools for 
linking data, mapping, network analysis, text mining, and visualizing 
information that are fueling digital scholarship in other disciplines.”1 
While theologians are very active in digital libraries/archives, these 
are increasingly seen as the low-hanging fruit of the field as software 
like Omeka reduces the need for coding skills, and the relative absence 
of theology from the lists of projects driven by computational analysis 
results in a cultural divide among practitioners.

A division between theology and the humanities is not a new idea, 
however. For Karl Barth, theology was the discipline by which the 
church holds itself accountable for the integrity of its proclamation, 
ensuring that the word it preaches remains identical with the Word 
given by God in Christ Jesus and conveyed through the apostolic tradi-
tion.2 Crucially, this meant that theology “does not have to begin by 
finding or inventing the standard by which it measures. It sees and 
recognizes that this is given with the church.”3 To submit theologi-
cal inquiry to the standards of evidence or the methodological rules 
of either the humanistic or the scientific disciplines was, for Barth, 
a violence against the unique nature of theological inquiry—a nature 
necessitated by the transcendentally unique nature of its object. 
“Theology along these lines,” he wrote in his Church Dogmatics, refer-
ring to theology practiced according to the academic standards and 
methods of the humanities or the sciences, “must be flatly disowned 
as theology. … Whatever may be the concept of science [Wissenschaft, 
which in German includes the humanities], this object of knowledge 
cannot be handled in this way.” Many scholars, including Hector, 
have therefore opined on the need for a Barthian theology to have 
an ethnographic component that can keep theological work closely 
connected with the pastoral and proclamational life of the church in 
its varying contexts. The other half of that communication, however—
i.e. the mechanisms by which the work of theologians is transmitted 
back to the church to produce “accountability”—has been relatively 
neglected in the literature.



Poster 235

Meanwhile, Anderson and Squires examined the religious rhetoric 
and motifs in open access advocacy, observing that:

[w]hen academics draw on this [religious] tradition … they do 
so rhetorically, without methodically addressing substantive 
historical connections or analogical correspondences. …[W]e  
identify a theological imaginary operating in open access 
discourse rather than a proper theology.4

The question is thus invited, is there a “proper theology” of open 
access? And, if so, does it have a special role to play in defining digital 
theology, as distinct from its general presence in digital humanities?

From a Barthian perspective, an argument can be made that “digi-
tal theology” should not be understood as a sub-discipline of DH, but 
rather as a distinct field of endeavour. While theology certainly draws 
upon the computational tools that define DH, actual use patterns 
of those tools in studies such as those of Hutchings, Anderson, and 
Schroeder suggest that they are far less central to theological work 
than to humanities disciplines. The robust representation of theol-
ogy in digital library and archives projects might therefore be better 
understood as reflecting the centrality to digital theology of toolkits 
and cultural practices that foster engagement with ministerial profes-
sionals and broader faith communities—a significance that differs 
qualitatively from the town-and-gown outreach of the humanities, 
insofar as theology is not simply benefitted by, but actually defined by, 
such engagement. Within the scope of Barth’s understanding of the 
discipline, if the outputs of theological work are not available to the 
church to critique its proclamation on a practical level, the work done 
is not theology at all. The emerging digital theology community may 
therefore benefit from considering OA as constitutive of its commu-
nity of practice in a fashion parallel to, but distinct from, that in which 
computational analysis has formed the core “cultural capital” of DH.



236  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

ENDNOTES

1 Clifford Anderson, “Digital Humanities and the Future of 
Theology,” CURSOR_ 1 (2018, July 24). https://cursor.pubpub.org/
pub/anderson-digitalhumanities-2018.

2 K. W. Hector, “Theology as an Academic Discipline: Reconciling 
Evangelical Theology and Theological Encyclopedia,” in Karl Barth and 
the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-Year Perspective, edited 
by C. B. Anderson and B. L. McCormack (William B. Eerdmans 
Publishing Company, 2015), 93.

3 Quoted in Hector, “Theology as an Academic Discipline,” 94.
4 Talea Anderson and David Squires, “Open Access and the 

Theological Imagination,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 4 
(2017).

https://cursor.pubpub.org/pub/anderson-digitalhumanities-2018
https://cursor.pubpub.org/pub/anderson-digitalhumanities-2018

