Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God 9780567659668

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For Christy, my wife and beloved companion on this journey

Preface This is not the book I thought that I would write when I arrived in Aberdeen in the fall of 2009. The heart of it remains the same—namely, the conviction that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that Christian theology ought to be able to affirm this basic confession of identity without excessive qualification or metaphysical nuance. But the intended structure and content of this work have been significantly truncated in order to accommodate the necessary word limit of a dissertation. It is no doubt better for being shorter. But, on the other hand, the account of patristic Christology in the first chapter is significantly truncated and more summary than I had hoped it would be. In my original outline this section spanned multiple chapters, allowing for a more thorough defense of the typology of “instrumentalism” and “compositionalism” and, further, the way in which it played out in the christological debates of the sixteenth century. There may be another book in there, but for now the abbreviated argument for fourth-century instrumentalism and the consequences of Chalcedonian and Constantinopolitan Christology must stand. The original project also entailed a broader look at the influences upon Karl Barth’s Christology. I should like to have retained a finished chapter on Friedrich Schleiermacher and Barth’s criticism of Christology in the nineteenth century, and also an unwritten chapter on Barth’s early “dialectical” allies and the consequences of his bold rejection of “natural theology.” As it stands, while I suggest that the “actualism” that characterizes especially Barth’s later theology does not come out of nowhere, its origins—apart from Barth’s theological exegesis—are left unexplored. In the course of this work I have found Karl Barth to be not only a keen theological mind but a true minister of the good news of Jesus Christ. My desire for the publication of this study is to commend Barth’s creative work as profoundly illuminating to questions that still vex believers—or those by which they should not have allowed themselves to cease being vexed. More than that, I hope that by pointing to Barth’s better insights I may exalt the living Jesus, not only the one of whom we speak but the Lord whom we must proclaim. This book began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Aberdeen, and as such it owes its existence to the support and provocation of many. First

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among them is John Webster, who supervised the project with great wisdom, keen insight, and friendship. The freedom that he gave me to make my own way (and occasionally to retreat from the thorns of my own sowing and find a better path) was profoundly liberating. Supervisory relationships require students at times to be selective in the advice they take on board; but after kicking against the goads I learned to trust his instincts as much as my own, and that is a rare thing. Like all good shepherds he knew when to let the sheep go his own way and when to call him back from the precipice. He is to thank for guiding any positive insights in this work, while I alone am to blame for its faults. The community of scholars and friends in Aberdeen are as much to thank, turning what could have been an arduous period of research into a real fellowship of the body of Christ. I should like to thank them all for their insights, their criticisms, and their company, but I will especially mention Adam and Rachel Nigh, Justin and Melissa Stratis, Josh and Emily Malone, Jon and Angie Coutts, Tim and Julie Baylor, Ben Rhodes, Geordie and Sharon Ziegler, Martin and Jenna Westerholm, and Jordan and Krisi Hillebert. Paul D. Jones engaged me in conversation and provided insightful comments on part of the manuscript. Frances Young offered valuable guidance on a longer draft of the material on Athanasius and the fourth century. Donald Wood brought his characteristically penetrating insight to bear on a number of aspects of the project during my time in Aberdeen. Paul Nimmo and Tom Greggs examined the dissertation and provided valuable critical comments, and are to be thanked especially for their keen insights into Barth and the relationship of modern theology to the classical tradition. Bruce McCormack has remained a faithful conversation partner across the pond, and has helped to shape me as a theologian. He and other faculty at my other alma mater, Princeton Theological Seminary—including George Hunsinger and Daniel Migliore—have my deep gratitude. I am also most grateful to Anna Turton at T&T Clark, as well as the other editors of the Studies in Systematic Theology, Ivor Davidson and Ian McFarland, for their warm reception and critical suggestions for improving the work. Portions of the work on Athanasius, Barth on the communicatio idiomatum, and Barth on the extra Calvinisticum previously appeared as essays in Studia Patristica, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, and the International Journal of Systematic Theology. Their publishers—Peeters Publishers, De Gruyter, and Wiley-Blackwell, respectively—are acknowledged with thanks for permission to repurpose this material. Most of all, I was able to undertake and to complete this work only by the unwavering support and love of my family: my son Joshua and daughter Abigail

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spent formative years in Aberdeen, where my youngest son, Micah, was born only weeks before the dissertation was completed. I hope that they will always have something of Scotland in them. My wife Christy committed her whole self to this endeavor without grumbling or doubt, enduring my long hours and patiently sharing me with the Basel master. It is to her that I lovingly dedicate this book.

Abbreviations CA CD DI EF KD PG ST WA

Athanasius of Alexandria, Contra Arianos Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Athanasius of Alexandria, De Incarnatione John of Damascus, De Expositio Fidei Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Graeca Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Martin Luther, Martin Luther’s Works (Weimar Edition)

Introduction

The theology of Karl Barth continues to be much discussed and debated nearly half a century after his death. And it is widely recognized that Christology was the beating heart of Barth’s theological project. Barth himself recognized that this was and ought to be the case, and throughout the monumental Church Dogmatics attempted to elaborate a Christian theology of the Word of God—one that both begins with the history of the incarnate Lord and continually returns to Him for its renewal. His relationships with orthodox antiquity, with philosophy, and with modern, liberal theology are complex; yet, as important as these are, it is Barth’s reading of Scripture that ultimately dictates the shape of his Christology. Barth understood the New Testament’s engagement with the question of Jesus Christ’s identity as multiform. On the one side stand the Synoptic gospels, whose authors emphasize the authentic humanity of Jesus—his birth, human limitations, and his death. The Synoptic tradition asks after his identity “from below,” as it were, starting with the crucified Nazarene: Is this human, Jesus of Nazareth, really the Son of God? On the other side stands the Johannine and Pauline literature, which emphasizes the transcendence of Christ as the very Word of God become flesh, who existed “with God in the beginning” (Jn 1.2) and who entered creation to effect its redemption. The question asked by this tradition is perspectivally “from above”: Is the Son of God really this human, Jesus of Nazareth? These two sets of witnesses to Jesus as the Son of God and Son of Man are not in conflict, but they do stand apart as the magnetic poles of the New Testament—“the twofold course of christological confession in the New Testament.”1 And they have been repeated throughout the history of doctrine, one turned against Docetic and the other against Ebionite forms of Christology, coalescing in the fifth century around the conceptual system of divine and human natures united in a single person. Barth returned multiple times throughout the Church Dogmatics to this contrast within the New Testament. See CD I/2, pp. 13–25 (quotation on p. 15); cf. CD I/1, pp. 180, 403–6; CD I/2, pp. 38, 127, 165–68; CD IV/2, p. 156. Barth’s notion of a “twofold theological school” is further considered in Chapter 2 of the present work.

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These two questions cannot be asked simultaneously—and yet Christian theology must ask them both. Jesus is the Christ and the Christ is Jesus, and “Christology involves the task of giving an account of the one reality described by these two statements.”2 It is this unresolved tension that defines Barth’s own dialectical theology. This later dialecticism is distinct from that of Romans II, by which Barth had sought to attend with Kierkegaard to the radical, ontological distinction between creatures and a Creator who is “Wholly Other” (what Balthasar called the “static” moment of dialectics).3 For the Barth of the Church Dogmatics, dialecticism entails the affirmation of two seemingly irreconcilable truths together, sic et non—pointing past the crisis of the encounter, past the tension between thesis and antithesis, not to a synthesis (as in Hegel) but to a Sache (subject) that finally transcends our mastery of it, that itself determines the content of theological statements, and so requires faith for its real apprehension. In short, “dogmatic thinking is dialectical thinking,” because it is concerned with the activity of the Word of God.4 A Christology of this shape therefore cannot be classified as “from above” or “from below,” Alexandrian or Antiochene, or even as flatly Reformed. Rather, Barth’s great genius in this area is his holding together a cloud of witnesses that seem to be at odds with one another, embracing the distinctives of each but never allowing the one to dominate and subvert the other. This is not methodologically dissimilar from the strategy of the Chalcedonian Fathers, who could answer the mystery of the incarnation only with the rather dialectical formula of a hypostatic “unity in distinction” and “distinction in unity.” And it is for this reason that Barth’s Christology is so difficult to pin down, to identify as Chalcedonian or not, Reformed or not—even orthodox, or not. By examining Barth’s doctrine of the person of Christ in its relation to the history of Christology, this work seeks to identify not only the content of Barth’s Christology but its enduring significance for Christian theology. Our study will move along two lines of inquiry. One is a thematic description of Barth’s mature Christology (the Christology of the Church Dogmatics, with an emphasis on volume IV) and an analysis of its implications. More broadly, the second line CD I/2, p. 127. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, pp. 72–85. On Barth’s dialecticism and influences see further Michael Beintker, Die Dialektik in der “dialektischen Theologie” Karl Barths; and Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. 4 See Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics, vol. 1, pp. 309–12 (quotation on p. 309); Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, pp. 576–85; and Daniel L. Migliore, “Karl Barth’s First Lectures in Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics, pp. 28–32. While the language of dialectic recedes in the Church Dogmatics, the same point is made in the prolegomena (CD I/2, pp. 853–84). 2 3

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considers the relation that this Christology has to that of the classical tradition— by which I mean the Christology of the ecumenical councils and the continental Reformation. I will argue that Barth selectively appropriated the classical doctrine of the incarnation, making use of its concepts and terminology where he felt they suited his convictions about the identity of Jesus Christ as narrated in Holy Scripture. But, insofar as Barth makes use of these ideas, he does so critically— holding them to the fire of the Word’s continuing testimony to the humanity of God. Further, it will become clear that Barth has explicit, theological reasons for this method of critically receptive inquiry. The result is a Christology that is both constructively modern and classically orthodox in character. At the center of both lines of inquiry is the question: How are the eternal Word of God and the divine-human Jesus Christ related? What does it mean for His person that one of the Trinity assumed a human nature and lived a human life? This has presented theologians in the church’s history with numerous, sometimes seemingly insurmountable conceptual difficulties—particularly where they have sought to maintain the identity of Jesus Christ with and as the divine Son of God, and have read the Synoptic gospels through a JohanninePauline lens. My suggestion is that Barth’s Christology enables theologians to engage such issues in a deeply satisfying way, reconciling the manifold witnesses of Scripture precisely at points where the answers of the tradition are lacking. The topic at hand—the history and dogmatic implications of the doctrine of the incarnation—is far-reaching and could lead us in any number of directions, and engage the thought of any number of important figures. It is therefore prudent to establish our own boundaries for exposition and reflection. Our study unfolds in three basic stages. These concern: (1) unresolved issues that persist in traditional attempts to describe the incarnation (Chapter 1); (2) Barth’s own approach and its critical engagement with traditional “Logos Christology” (Chapters 2 and 3); and (3) the way in which Barth’s proposal might finally be judged as consonant with Christian orthodoxy, while also moving beyond its impasses (Chapters 4 and 5). First, I will offer my own critical account of the history of the doctrine of the incarnation in the patristic and early medieval period, in an attempt to demonstrate that the answers provided by the orthodox tradition to a number of basic christological questions are not without problems. Chalcedon simply has not settled the doctrine of Christ’s person for all time.5 The most fundamental question here pertains to the relationship between God the Son Contra F. W. A. Korff, who argued that the Council of 451 says all that should be said about the mystery of Christ’s person. See G. C. Berkouwer, The Person of Christ, pp. 85–97.

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and the God-human, Jesus Christ, or between the Logos and the human nature that He assumed in and for His redemptive mission. Can Christ and the Word be identified as a single subject (one and the same “person”) if their respective ontological constitutions are different—that is one eternal, divine in essence, and simple, and the other temporal, both divine and human, and therefore complex? This issue I call the “identity problem.” I then extend and further illustrate this problem through an historical and conceptual examination of three related facets of Christology: the doctrines of divine immutability, kenosis, and impassibility. The history of these questions, and the variety of attempts to give satisfying answers, show the need for christological reflection that remains active and imaginative. My goal in this first stage of the study is not to deconstruct or otherwise invalidate classical Christology—such a task is not only undesirable but far from my abilities—but rather to show that even a long-revered set of doctrines is not without its limits. Barth rightly insists that classical Christology is not to be derided and set aside by moderns who think they know better than the Fathers. By the early twentieth century it was taken for granted among German Protestantism’s intellectual elite that the two-natures Christology of Chalcedon was inadequate to the task of describing Jesus’ person—and, particularly in light of historical Jesus studies, was in fact misleading. Friedrich Loofs, for example, argued that classical, orthodox Christology is simply irrational—that orthodoxy was influenced by “antiquated conceptions of Greek philosophy” and does not agree with the New Testament.6 More recently Anthony Tyrrell Hanson has argued that an overreliance on the Gospel of John caused the church to formulate a doctrine (of the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity) that has little connection with the historical Jesus.7 Against such views Barth’s orientation to the tradition is reverential, yet also retaining modernism’s critical stance—for the standard of theology, he believed, is not the church’s doctrinal formulae but the Word of God speaking in Scripture. From a Protestant and especially a Reformed perspective this comes as no surprise, since in the absence of a Magisterium doctrine is not taken to be the revealed truth of God but rather the second-order reflection of creatures upon that truth. It is, further, subject to continual refinement and re-expression according to changes in the language, imagination, and needs of a given culture.

Friedrich Loofs, What Is the Truth About Jesus Christ?, especially pp. 168, 176–200. Barth observes this thesis in the work of Adolf von Harnack and Albrecht Ritschl (CD I/2, pp. 654–55). 7 Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, The Image of the Invisible God. 6

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There are times when this change happens gradually and also, as Barth reminds us, times at which what is called for is nothing short of Reformation. The mission of the church is continually to hear the Word of God speaking afresh, and to make that gospel known to the world. When it proclaims the saving presence and passion of God in Jesus Christ, then, it had better be sure that it speaks a word that is living and active. Having thus established the need for continual reflection upon and refinement of christological doctrine, in the second stage of the project I will offer a description and analysis of the mature Christology of Karl Barth, who is in my judgment the most important Protestant theologian of the modern period. I begin in Chapter 2 by examining his formative appreciation for classical “Logos Christology” in the 1920s, especially as expressed by the Reformed tradition. But this was for Barth merely a step on the way, and his stance toward the Christology of the ancient church and of his own tradition grew increasingly critical. This analysis will serve in some measure to connect my own evaluation of the tradition with Barth’s, and to lay further groundwork for the positive use that Barth makes of traditional concepts. It will also give us opportunity to consider the so-called earlier Christology of CD I/2 in some depth, and to draw some conclusions about its continuity and discontinuity with the fuller statement that came later in Barth’s Dogmatics. Barth’s assessment of the Logos concept is vital to understanding his positive account of the Word’s divine-human existence. Following on this contextualization, in Chapter  3 we arrive finally at the positive account Barth gives of Christ’s person. In order to identify those ways in which his constructive work redresses the problems identified in the first part of the study, I have chosen to render a thematic account of Barth’s mature Christology—rather than a comprehensive, genetic description (which would inevitably be longer and leave us with a great deal of material not as immediately applicable to the problems at hand). I suggest four themes (or pairs of themes) basic to Barth’s Christology and most significant to our current task: covenant and election, time and eternity, the communion of divine and human essences in Jesus Christ (communicatio naturarum), and the humiliation and exaltation of the Son of God (status duplex). Here it will be evident that Barth has carefully and critically drawn upon the tradition, not forsaking but rather refining its concepts to better service testimony to the presence and activity of God. This thematic treatment is not suggested as an interpretive scheme for Barth’s Christology as a whole (though I will suggest that the status duplex and communicatio operationum would both be good places to begin such a task) but merely to identify points at which Barth’s thought addresses the identity problem.

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The first part of this study therefore diagnoses the problem; the second lays beside the traditional solutions Barth’s Christology, along with its critical context vis-à-vis the tradition. The third and final stage is to evaluate Barth’s work on two trajectories: its coherence with Chalcedonian orthodoxy, and its effectiveness in addressing the problems inherent in the older accounts. Chapter 4 considers the first of these. I begin by identifying Barth’s understanding of the nature of ecclesial authority in the creeds and confessions—particularly in the Reformed tradition, which strove to listen to the past while (at least in the era of its inception) also resisting on theological grounds any uniform codification. Second, I look at the conceptual apparatus of classical Christology—person, nature, ousia, etc.—and Barth’s reasons for redefining or replacing them with concepts of history, essence, and event. Finally, I take up the question of whether Barth’s Christology may be accurately identified as Chalcedonian, and what it means for Barth to maintain the values of the tradition while giving that Christology a new, and distinctively modern, form. In Chapter  5, I connect the four issues outlined in the first chapter—the identity problem, immutability, kenosis, and impassibility—with the solutions of Barth’s Christology. Barth recognized this issue and affirmed “the identity [Identität] of the Son of God with the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth” as the very root of the problem of reconciliation.8 With some of these doctrines Barth is explicit about how he judges the problem and the solutions offered by the tradition, as well as his alternative; in other cases we must discover the implications that Barth’s work has for them. I will conclude with a brief word on the value of describing Christ’s person and work according to the theme of “the humanity of God.” Such a broad-ranging study must necessarily have limits. This work is not intended to be a comprehensive study of Karl Barth’s Christology, but rather a study in Barth’s Christology. The thematic approach identifies those aspects germane to a particular set of questions raised by the history of doctrine. Because my focus is on Barth’s relation to the classical tradition, other influences upon his Christology—most notably his critical response to the Schleiermacherian tradition, as well as his quiet engagement with Rudolf Bultmann throughout volume IV of the Dogmatics—will, unfortunately, remain unexplored. Even less is this work a complete look at the doctrine’s rich history. In order to demonstrate the thesis, the material in Chapter 1 need only provide brief, textually defensible CD IV/2, p. 19 (KD IV/2, p. 19). See further Paul D. Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, pp. 129f.

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snapshots from the history of Christology. The figures dealt with therein— especially Athanasius, Cyril, and John of Damascus—have been selected because the subsequent development of christological orthodoxy within the Christian churches has proven that these figures are seminal in the development of its doctrine and, more importantly, representative of its accepted positions. In the case of Athanasius, his Christology typifies the sort of pre-Chalcedonian instrumentalism I seek to identify; in the case of John, it is the compositional approach of mature Chalcedonianism. Cyril provides an important transition between the two. In the same way, I will employ the terms “Lutheran” and “Reformed” in a sense that presumes within each a basic consensus on the christological issues under debate.9 I will also rely upon some terminological shorthand in order to describe Barth’s relationship with “the tradition.” I use this term interchangeably with such identifiers as “classical Christology,” “orthodoxy,” and “the ancient church.” While I distinguish between two distinct models of the incarnation within this stream, what I have in mind with these terms is generally the later and more developed Christology of the post-Chalcedon era of the church, East and West. More restricted is my use of the term “Chalcedonian Christology,” which refers to the particular doctrine of the incarnation as a hypostatic uniting of two natures in one person. This is not meant to refer to the doctrinal formulae promulgated by the Council of ad 451 itself (which is further specified by the term “Chalcedonian Definition”), but to summarize the mature form of orthodox Christology as it came to be known and taught in the last ecumenical councils and throughout the medieval and Reformation eras. To those (rightly) concerned with the diversity of theological work done even within the same narrow line, this monolithic category of “the tradition” may seem to be overly generalized. Certainly, for example, we might identify a number of “Chalcedonian” theologians who demur from John of Damascus’s christological summary in important ways. I have two reasons for generalizing in this way. First, the regulative nature of ecclesial councils provides historians of doctrine with moments of coalescence, at which the doctrines promulgated may be reasonably taken as widely (if not universally) influential upon subsequent While acknowledging some disparity between the schools of Johannes Brenz and Martin Chemnitz, The Formula of Concord (1577) provides a sufficient baseline of consensus for Lutheran Christology. For the Reformed, doctrinal consensus—such as with the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum— may be identified with a little more work through the historic confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In both cases, the consensus is rightly subject to further nuancing by the individual theologians of subsequent generations—as, for example, in the Lutheran developments on the nature of kenosis in the 1620s. This will be considered in Chapter 1.

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theological discourse within the boundaries of Christendom. “Chalcedonianism,” broad as it may be, thus speaks to very particular theological positions.10 It was this ecclesially defined Christology that John, in the wake of Constantinople III, sought to articulate and to defend—and that, of course, continued to influence the Christologies of theologians throughout the medieval, Reformation, and modern periods who have sought to be orthodox in their own expressions. Second, because this study is concerned with the thought of one modern figure in particular, there would seem to be some justification in looking at the history of a doctrine in the same way that he did. Though occasionally lacking in sufficient historical nuance Barth, for his part, treated Christology according to the broad categories of the “primitive” view, the Lutheran view, the Reformed scholastic view, and the view of Neo-Protestant liberalism (in addition to interacting with specific theologians from this history). The degree of precision achieved in Barth’s own historical work is open to the judgment of future scholarship. The capitalization of certain pronouns is also worth addressing. I follow the practice of Barth’s English translators in capitalizing pronouns that refer to God or to the divine persons of the Trinity. (No implications of gender are intended.) Pronouns with the referent of “the Son” or “the Word” are thus capitalized. But pronouns with the referent of Jesus Christ, and other ways of identifying the incarnate Son, are left lowercase. (Pronouns within quotations are exceptions, as I have left them unaltered from the original.) This may seem to run counter to my thesis that the two are identical subjects. But it will be necessary to speak of God the Son (particularly with respect to the tradition) sometimes as a strictly divine person and sometimes as the God-human, in order to maintain conceptual clarity. In studying a modern appropriation of the christological tradition, the three stages of this project represent three distinct, if interrelated questions: (1) Does the classical tradition provide an account of the incarnation, particularly as regards the identity of Jesus and the Word, that is altogether coherent and satisfying? (2) Does the Christology of Karl Barth give answers that better address the tensions present in this account? (3) Is Barth’s Christology orthodox despite its divergence in terminology, in exegesis, and ultimately in a theological ontology that eschews metaphysical fixity? The reader may judge that I have succeeded in demonstrating my position on all three of them, or perhaps only on one or two. But while each stage builds upon the previous, they do maintain a relative independence. And so if I have failed to convince that the tradition has its problems, the rest of the presentation may yet succeed in commending the merit of an actualist Christology I offer a definition in Chapter 4.

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such as Barth’s—either as an alternative to orthodoxy or, if the third point has been demonstrated, as a modern expression of the incarnation that indeed stands within the Chalcedonian tradition broadly defined.

Christology and contemporary Barth studies This study attends to insights to be found in the way in which Karl Barth both appropriated the classical tradition and developed a highly original approach to the doctrine of the incarnation. Because it is a contribution not only to the history of Christology but particularly to Barth studies, a word on its place in this growing field is in order. This is especially relevant given the current debates in the guild over Barth’s theological ontology, the true nature of his actualism, and his regard for concepts that have been of great importance in his own tradition (such as the Logos asarkos and the extra Calvinisticum). Although Barth retained a steady anchor in Scripture and the tradition he was creative in his theological imagination, and the resulting output should be appreciated for its originality—a point made forcefully in the work of Bruce L. McCormack.11 But insofar as the actualist reading of Barth may one day be deemed as constituting a school, it will be one that is marked by some diversity.12 For my part, I seek to demonstrate a relatively high degree of consistency between the Christology of the earlier and later volumes of the Church Dogmatics (i.e. that they do cohere as one Christology and not as “Christologies” that stand in developmental tension with one another).13 By granting volume I a greater measure of importance in Barth’s mature Christology, we will be able to make sense of his consistent See Bruce L. McCormack, “Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63.2 (2010), pp.  204–5. The originality of McCormack’s work in fact lies in exploring what he sees as the necessary consequences of Barth’s basic theological decisions, and not in identifying Barth’s theology as actualistic. At least as far back as 1956 this quality of Barth’s theology was appreciated even in the English-speaking world. See George S. Hendry, “The Dogmatic Form of Barth’s Theology,” Theology Today 13 (1956), pp. 305–8; cf. 313–14; cf. Herbert Hartwell, The Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction, pp. 35–37. 12 One need only compare McCormack’s seminal essay “Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology” (in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, pp. 92–110) with his student Kevin W. Hector’s “Immutability, Necessity and Triunity: Towards a Resolution of the Trinity and Election Controversy” (Scottish Journal of Theology 65.1  [2012], pp.  64–81) to perceive the emerging variety of interpretations among Barthians sympathetic with a so-called post-metaphysical interpretation. 13 See especially Chapter 2. This thesis remains a peripheral concern to this work. For McCormack’s argument that the Christology of CD IV displaces the “earlier Christology” of CD I/2, see “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology: Just How ‘Chalcedonian’ Is It?” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, pp. 201–33. McCormack’s position is supported by Jones, The Humanity of Christ—but see there, pp. 66–67. 11

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convictions about God’s freedom and perfection apart from God’s orientation toward creatures. The basic question I seek to engage by putting Barth into conversation with the classical tradition—whether the identity of God the Son is the “Word of God” (conceived of as a Logos asarkos who assumes human nature ad extra) or “Jesus Christ” (the God-human who does not exist apart from his divinehuman unity)—has been articulated with particular sharpness by McCormack. Volume I of the Dogmatics seems to presume the former—that the identity of the incarnate person is most basically the divine Logos—while volume IV argues strongly for the latter. Both christological statements are highly contextualized. Does Barth desire, then, that we should read the later in the light of the earlier, or vice versa? Is Barth’s later argument that there is no Logos but the man Jesus Christ in fact restricted to the doctrine of reconciliation, as Paul Molnar suggests?14 Quite the contrary, as I will argue in Chapter 2 and beyond: Barth’s actualism requires that there is no sense in which the divine Logos is not Jesus Christ, the God-human. Yet this is not because history itself constitutes the person of the Son, but rather because in His free election God determines the Son to be the incarnate one in eternity (Logos incarnandus). That in Himself God may exist otherwise is rendered a deeply relativized counterfactual—true, insofar as it speaks to the divine possibility, but not as it refers to God as God has determined Himself to actually exist. If the present work serves no other purpose, then, it should demonstrate the provocative but extraordinarily fruitful consequence of this—namely, that in the incarnation of the Son the triune God has freely made humanity itself to be essential15 to the divine life. As fundamental as Christology is to Barth’s work, it is remarkable that this particular locus within his thought (as well as its broader implications for dogmatic inquiry) has been relatively little explored. The last half-century has yielded only a small handful of monographs devoted to Barth’s Christology. In his 1970 Bonn dissertation Berthold Klappert focuses upon the importance of the cross and resurrection in Barth’s theology—in contrast to the Christologies of his contemporaries—concluding rightly that for Barth any doctrine of the two natures

Paul D. Molnar, “Can Jesus’ Divinity be Recognized as ‘Definitive, Authentic and Essential’ if It Is Grounded in Election? Just How Far Did the Later Barth Historicize Christology?” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 52.1 (2010), pp. 40–81. 15 I will have occasion throughout this study to use the term “essential” in the sense of “ontologically basic”; in other words, God the Son would not be who He is without His humanity. This is by no means to imply a substantialist notion of an “essence.” Rather, Barth himself employs such language (especially wesentlich), though by it he means something very different than its use within the metaphysics of classical theism. 14

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or two states is derived from the act of atonement (and not vice versa, as Klappert believes the tradition had it).16 In other words, Barth has made the doctrine of Christ’s person inseparable from soteriology, the doctrine of his mediatorial work. In English, John Thompson provides an admirably concise but analytically unambitious description of the Christology of the Dogmatics.17 Thompson’s goal is simply to survey Christology as a central thread running throughout the Dogmatics—to “let Barth be heard”—but without evaluating the merits of Barth’s presentation.18 Charles T. Waldrop’s doctoral thesis argues that Barth maintains fundamentally Alexandrian values in his understanding of Christ—though some sympathies with Antioch are also evident.19 This analysis is questionable and now quite dated in its application of clearly demarcated schools of patristic thought. Most recently, Paul D. Jones has dealt a decisive blow to the tired thesis that Barth’s is a Christology “from above” that underemphasizes the significance of Jesus’ humanity.20 This work deserves a wide readership—but it does not address the question of the relationship of Barth’s Christology to the classical tradition. Most broad introductions to Barth’s thought tend to appreciate individual elements of his Christology without critically engaging the significance of his unique insights in this field.21 These works, understandably, tend to relate the Christology only to the rest of Barth’s dogmatic project. None of them places Barth’s constructive understanding of Jesus’ person in the context of the history of doctrine in order to identify its real originality.22 The present work seeks to fill this gap in Barth studies and in the history of Christology in the modern period. By situating Barth’s work in the context of age-old problems to which he was responding, I hope to demonstrate the real value that his approach has for Berthold Klappert, Die Auferweckung des Gekreuzigten: der Ansatz der Christologie Karl Barths in Zusammenhang der Christologie der Gegenwart. See especially pp. 93–94, as well as the essays collected in Klappert, Versöhnung und Befreiung: Versuche, Karl Barth kontextuell zu verstehen. 17 John Thompson, Christ in Perspective: Christological Perspectives in the Theology of Karl Barth. Thompson relies somewhat heavily upon the analysis of Klappert and Eberhard Jüngel, in particular. 18 Christ in Perspective, p. vii. He does offer a “state of the question” with regard to Barth’s Christology in the 1970s, including a one-page orientation of Barth to the Chalcedonian tradition (pp. 18–19) and a critique of Klappert’s analysis. The latter’s greatest problem, Thompson suggests, is that for all his attention to the atonement he nearly fails to mention the incarnation itself (ibid., pp. 1–19). 19 Charles T. Waldrop, Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Alexandrian Character. 20 Jones, The Humanity of Christ. 21 I have in mind here the older introductory texts by Hans Urs von Balthasar (who published two years ahead of the arrival of CD IV/1), Geoffrey Bromiley, and Herbert Hartwell, as well as the more recent introductions by John Webster and, to a lesser extent, Eberhard Busch. Full citations may be found in the Bibliography. 22 Bruce McCormack has engaged the christological questions at hand more than anyone to date, though he has not yet produced a monograph on the topic. This is sure to be rectified, at least in some measure, by the forthcoming publication of his 2007 Thomas F. Torrance Lectures (on the person of Christ and “Reformed kenoticism”) and 2010 Croall Lectures (on the atonement). 16

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Karl Barth and the Incarnation

the whole of Christian theological inquiry. Only when Barth’s perspective on the work of God in the incarnation is fully reckoned with on its own terms can we understand just how Christology shapes the whole of his dogmatics. Among the early interpreters of Barth’s thought, G. C. Berkouwer is especially noteworthy with regard to the questions taken up in the present work. Berkouwer registered a criticism of Barth’s identification of Jesus Christ with “God Himself,” which Barth did in order to speak of God as the agent of Jesus’ obedience, suffering, and death. Who is it, after all, that this agent is obeying? Who has sent him? Whose will does he seek to do? And who is under a curse, forsaken by God and enduring the wrath of God on the cross? To Berkouwer, the New Testament’s continuous description of the relationship between Jesus and the Father suggests just the opposite conclusion—that although he is vere Deus the person of Jesus is not immediately identical with God.23 Against Barth’s strategy of identification, Berkouwer pleads that the mystery of the incarnation may be left unexplained: In the unfathomableness of this mystery it is revealed that He who is true and eternal God confronts us in the incarnation of the Word as the Servant of the Lord. The very incomprehensibleness of the mystery, however, forbids us to make it the point of departure for a series of conclusions in which the “God Himself ” begins to function in determining the being of God, and that with special reference to His obedience and His suffering. This goes beyond the confession of the deity of Christ and constitutes an attempt to comprehend the incarnation.24

My intent in this work is to counter Berkouwer’s criticism. What he suggests is forbidden is, in fact, my starting point: the confession that the very life and being of God is in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, without all the qualifications entailed by the fact that Jesus bears a nature—humanity— that is thought to be alien to God. It can (and must) be a starting point for theological reflection, according to Barth, because “the Lord as servant” is not an incomprehensible mystery but the reality of God’s gracious existence toward creatures. God has it within His own divine life to do this and to be this—high and low, Lord and servant—without falling into contradiction with Himself.

G. C. Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, pp. 305–12. “The ‘God Himself ’ conception obscures the concreteness of the way of suffering in the course of which Christ can say that He is not alone because the Father is with Him ([John] 16:32) and can later give expression to His agonizing forsakenness” (ibid., p. 306). 24 Berkouwer, Triumph of Grace, pp. 306–7. 23

Introduction

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Berkouwer’s worry rests upon what is perhaps the most basic theological decision underlying Barth’s project: that in Christ “who God is” immanently and “who God reveals Himself to be” in the economy are identical. In this respect, my intent is to work out the radicality of Barth’s doctrine of divine revelation— namely, that what we see in Jesus Christ can be taken as true of God’s own life and not set aside as “merely” human, creaturely, or economic, and therefore not true of who God is in Himself. It is the actualist character of Barth’s theological ontology that warrants such an unconventional interpretation of the person and work of Christ.

Actualism and “metaphysical” theology What is it about this twentieth-century rendering of Christology that enables it to identify new solutions to age-old doctrinal problems? It is because Barth’s theology departs from classical approaches not only in some of the basic conclusions drawn but in how it goes about engaging its subject matter. This actualist approach may be appreciated on two registers: Barth’s methodology and his theological ontology. The first of these is what George Hunsinger describes as one of six “motifs” in Barth’s work: theology is to be explicated with reference to God’s sovereign activity, which is patterned by God’s love and freedom.25 This has implications throughout dogmatics. In terms of ethics, for example, actualism suggests that human activity has its ground and its possibility in a prior, divine act.26 Likewise creaturely realities such as the church, Scripture, and faith are neither self-initiating nor self-sustaining, but events that are established and continually renewed by the divine good pleasure. Barth’s methodology thus follows from his doctrine of revelation: there is no creaturely basis for theological speech, which is only speech after God, who summons creatures to an act of repetition in witnessing to His Word. This task thus begins not with philosophical presuppositions, nor with the creature’s speculation or erection of descriptive categories by which revelation might be understood, but with the event of God’s activity in history—an activity to which Scripture is witness and that has as its telos the very presence of God in Jesus Christ. While this may seem self-evident to Christian theologians, Barth’s theology demonstrates the real and

George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, pp.  32, 58; cf. CD II/1, pp. 257–321. 26 See further Paul Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision. 25

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Karl Barth and the Incarnation

radical consequences of strictly adhering to such a method—and thus exposes the tradition’s occasional failures to engage in its task from this starting point and no other. But because revelation is the utterance of a Word that is God Himself, this epistemology has further ontological implications.27 Barth’s actualistic ontology describes not only revelation but also the being of God in His activity, over against that which is regarded as a speculative essentialism—that is, a God who exists logically prior to and apart from His works. God is therefore not one who acts, but is His activity. God exists in motion, a motion that springs from the abundance of God’s love and is directed toward creatures. God’s being is pure act—a classically Augustinian way of speaking of divine simplicity and aseity, but which Barth insists is to be anchored in that one event in which God has actually made Himself known to creatures.28 “God is” means “God loves,” and all further insights about who God is must revolve around this mystery of His loving.29 Such an ontology suggests that God is the Lord even of His own existence, because God sovereignly wills the activity by which He determines His being.30 (Thus Barth located election within his doctrine of God, not in creation or reconciliation.) God’s self-determination to be God for creatures—the God of the covenant (Lev. 26.12–13)—has the incarnation of the Son as its fulfillment. Actualism therefore identifies both Barth’s methodology and divine ontology because revelation and reconciliation are interdependent. Revelation is reconciliation, and vice versa.31 Revelation is, further, God’s own self-disclosure, which is to say that in Christ God has communicated His own divine life and not merely information about Himself. As Wolfhart Pannenberg puts the matter: “The Revealer and what is revealed are identical. God is as much the subject, the author of his self-revelation, as he is its content.” Therefore the Christ event, the ­divine-

If Hunsinger’s work attends to actualism as a motif of Barth’s theological method, it is McCormack who has emphasized the actualist quality of Barth’s ontology in the English-speaking academy. See Bruce L. McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” in Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives, pp.  210–23, as well as other works in the Bibliography at the end of this study. 28 “Actus purus is not sufficient as a description of God. To it there must be added at least ‘et singularis.’” CD II/1, p. 264. This important qualifier refers to the event of Jesus Christ, which is at once both God’s revelation to and reconciliation with creatures. See also Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming, p. 79. 29 CD II/1, p. 283. 30 Barth insists that God is who He is in His works, but not only in His works. “He is who He is without them. . . . Yet in Himself He is not another than He is in His works.” Therefore Barth can say that “in the light of what He is in His works it is no longer an open question what He is in Himself ” (CD II/1, p. 260, emphasis mine). This implies the problem of counterfactuals, which I will take up in Chapter 2. 31 Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, p. 253. 27

Introduction

15

human life of Jesus, “belongs to the essence of God himself.”32 The theological speech of men and women, therefore, must remain continuously attentive to the history of Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the covenant. Each aspect—God’s selfgiving to creatures in revelation and reconciliation, and God’s own, inner life—is in the dynamic movement of act and giving, never in a fixed form. We must be clear throughout our study of Barth’s thought, however, that actualism is nowhere offered up as a system: it is not a principle, not a newfangled philosophy that stands in competition with others. Eberhard Jüngel soberly reminds us that “Barth’s theology was, from the beginning, an avowed enemy of systems.”33 To seek such a system is counter to the way in which Barth understands Jesus Christ as the incomprehensible Word of God who is affirmed and received only by faith. Rather than a system or a point of departure, Barth’s actualism is the conclusion reached organically from certain decisions about the nature of God and of revelation: God’s being is in act, and revelation is God’s personal presence in Jesus Christ. The essentialism of classical metaphysics is therefore no longer privileged as the way of describing divine and human being, and the nature of their unity in the incarnation. For, rather than offering an alternate form of ontology, Barth aims at de-securing our ontology—at undermining the theologian’s confidence in her own reasonable concepts.34 There is no “point of contact” (Anknüpfungspunkt) in the creature that renders possible her ability to know and to speak of God. Since God remains hidden in His revealing, theology relies upon not only God’s speech but God’s continual speaking. An actualist theology must therefore continually depend upon the divine act, and not upon an established comprehension of being or of divinity as such. Barth’s strategy of revising ancient notions of persons, natures, and substances was based not on a rejection of “Greek metaphysics” per se as a corruption of the gospel, but on an opposition to any attempt to find a nontheological basis for speech about God—including also Enlightenment rationalism and Schleiermacherian self-consciousness, both of which took the human subject as the starting point for theology.35 Insofar as Barth’s project was deliberately “anti-metaphysical,”36 then, his intention was to ground doctrine in revelation as occurring in the history of Jesus Christ, and the witness of the apostles Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, p. 129. If this were not so, Pannenberg says, then Jesus’ life would only veil the active God and thereby exclude His full revelation. 33 Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, p. 27; cf. CD I/2, pp. 868–69. 34 I am indebted to David W. Congdon for this point. 35 See Keith L. Johnson, “A Reappraisal of Karl Barth’s Theological Development and His Dialogue with Catholicism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 14.1 (2012), especially pp. 16–20. 36 The term is Jüngel’s. See his Karl Barth, p. 46. 32

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and prophets to him—and not in creation as such. This is akin to what Barth criticized under the rubric of “natural theology”: every formulation of a system (positive or negative) “which claims to be theological, i.e. to interpret divine revelation, whose subject, however, differs fundamentally from the revelation in Jesus Christ and whose method therefore differs equally from the exposition of Holy Scripture.”37 Thus a “metaphysical” Christology, as I will use the term, is one that structures the doctrine of Christ’s person using concepts drawn from elsewhere than revelation christocentrically conceived, and then fills out the content of this doctrine in a speculative (if logical) fashion. What Barth has done in departing from the sort of metaphysics traditionally employed for theological ends is to relocate the act in which God has His being from the eternal, triune processions to God’s own historicization of His being in the incarnation. This is not strictly a temporal affair, of course: from eternity God decides in freedom to become human, and so the act in which God has His being has both an eternal “moment” and an historical “moment.” The being of God is in the dynamic of the two moments, the dialectic of an eternal decision and its temporal fulfillment. Or, as Jüngel so succinctly put it, the being of God is in His becoming. Actualism is therefore “far more than a motif or a model for interpreting Barth,”38 but extends the commitments of christocentrism and divine sovereignty to ontology, breaking down the distinction between essence and existence, between what God does and who God is. It is the purpose of this project to work out the implications of this for the doctrine of the incarnation.

Karl Barth, “No! Answer to Emil Brunner,” in Natural Theology, pp. 74–75 (emphasis in original). Nimmo, Being in Action, p. 7.

37 38

1

The Identity Problem: Tensions in the Christological Tradition

In order to gauge the significance of Barth’s constructive Christology to the history of dogmatic theology we must survey the various ways in which the Word of God has been related to His assumed humanity in the history of Christian thought. The broad pattern I wish to demonstrate is that, prior to the Council of Chalcedon (451), theologians writing about the incarnation generally favored a model of instrumentalism: the flesh is a tool in the hands of the Word, so that the subject of the life of Jesus Christ (the “person” or hypostasis of the union) is strictly divine. The christological controversies brought about an identifiable shift to a more compositional model: the person is the God-human, Jesus Christ, who exists by virtue of the union of the divine and human natures (or the divine Word and a human nature). Yet the instrumentalist impulse never disappeared altogether, so that even the view of mature Chalcedonianism1 maintained a divine Logos as the subject behind the economy of the incarnation. The events of the fourth through the seventh centuries were deeply formative for the church’s confession. The generations that followed Chalcedon saw a resurgence of pro-Cyriline sentiment in the East, resulting in Constantinople II’s broad condemnation of even non-Nestorian Antiochene theology in 553. This was to be followed by new controversies over the number of energies and wills in Christ (monenergism and monothelitism, respectively). Proponents of this socalled neo-Chalcedonian movement continued explicitly to identify the Word as the person of the union—lest His humanity be overly personalized, or it be inferred that the Son of God only came into existence when he was conceived of This is a generalizing term by which I will refer to the Christology of the first six ecumenical councils and their orthodox defenders, while also recognizing that in each period we find significant diversity in theological priorities and in the interpretation of the councils’ decrees. My use of “mature” points to the importance of doctrinal developments after 451, which I concisely narrate below—inclusive of some of the relevant differences between “Chalcedonians.”

1

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the Virgin Mary. But the vindication of Maximus the Confessor and dyothelitism at Constantinople III (680/81) showed that the more radical Cyrilines would not finally prevail. By the eighth century John of Damascus, summarizing the conciliar faith received from the first six ecumenical councils, favored heavily the language of hypostatic composition. “The very subsistence of God the Word was changed into the subsistence of the flesh,” he wrote, “and the subsistence of the Word, which was formerly simple, became compound.”2 The acting subject of the union is thus no longer the Logos simpliciter but the Logos as He exists in the ontological complexity of divine-human unity—the man Jesus Christ. These two models of impersonal instrumentality and personal composition are in continuity with one another and by no means mutually exclusive, as is demonstrated by the persistence of the language of instrument through the Middle Ages.3 My point is not to argue that the one supplanted the other, but that the consensus of Chalcedon signaled an important shift in how the person of Jesus was identified. Great improvements were here made upon the Christologies of the fourth century, to be certain. Yet, once a full human existence was reckoned to be indispensible to Christ’s metaphysical makeup, it became increasingly difficult for theologians to identify Jesus as “God the Son” without significant, material qualification in their Christologies. The development of Christology had involved a shift from regarding the Lord Jesus Christ as the Word of God making use of humanity to the Word of God joining humanity to Himself. The eternally simple, second person of the Trinity thereby became complex, in that He identified Himself not with the human Jesus (in an adoptionist sense) but fully as the God-human. This move may seem basic, but it is also deeply complicating to the question of identity. For who, now, is Jesus Christ? Is he essentially divine and human? Or is he the simple Logos under the veil of flesh? What emerges from this period of doctrinal development is what I call the “identity problem”: a difficulty in identifying Jesus Christ immediately with the Word of God as one and the same subject, given what appear to be ontological differences between them. This problem underlies additional difficulties with regard to the incarnation. We will consider three of the most prominent of these issues: divine immutability, kenosis, and the Word’s impassibility on the cross. (Other issues could be identified, as well.) My suggestion is that each of these represents a tension within the conceptual structure of classical Christology, in each case reinforcing the identity problem in order to maintain an acceptable level of consistency. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (De Expositio Fidei), in Philip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 9 (hereafter: EF), III.vii; cf. III.xi. 3 In Thomas Aquinas, for example, language of Christ’s humanity as an “instrument” of the Word appears alongside a compositionalist model of incarnation. See ST III, q. 2, a. 4, 6. 2

The Identity Problem

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I begin with a survey of the key period of doctrinal development, in order to illustrate this shift from instrumentalism to composition. Then, for each of the issues under consideration I will briefly consider its history, its theological determination and implications for the person and work of Christ, and finally its contribution to the identity problem. This will take us beyond the patristic and early medieval periods to consider a number of important Reformation and modern insights. Though we are concerned primarily with the theological implications of these issues, a bit of doctrinal history will help to understand not only why the church has reached such conclusions on the being of God in Christ, but also the alternative options that have been tested and rejected. This will provide an important background for our examination of Karl Barth’s Christology and the way in which his modern appropriation disentangles the traditional doctrine of the incarnation from such difficulties—rather than rejecting Chalcedonianism as unfit to the task, as much of modern critical theology has done.

Models of incarnation in the early church One of the tradition’s greatest theological challenges has been the cogent description of how the eternal Word of God is properly to be related to the human person who is the subject of the New Testament narratives and the object of Christian devotion. Pro-Nicenes of the fourth century defended Jesus’ full divinity and equality with God the Father. Against the Arian party they argued that there was no “time when he was not”—that the one to whom the church witnesses, and who it worships, is the eternal Son of God. But just how it is that this one has also come to experience a human birth, life, and death—and all of these in such a way that He did not cease to be divine? A variety of options were suggested by those who have come to be identified with Antiochene or Alexandrian schools, with orthodoxy or heresy, and with approaches “from above” or “from below.”4 We may survey them only briefly before turning to consider the limits of the Chalcedonian solution.

There is also a general consistency of instrumentalism between East and West. Hilary of Poitiers, for example, also suggests that when Christ was beaten and crucified “He felt the force of the suffering but without its pain . . . the suffering which attacked the body of the Lord, without ceasing to be suffering, had not the natural effect of suffering. It exercised its function of punishment with all its violence; but the body of Christ by its virtue suffered the violence of the punishment, without its consciousness”—since Christ did not have “a nature which could feel pain” (De Trinitate 10.23).

4

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Karl Barth and the Incarnation

On one end of the spectrum is the heresy of Docetism: the Word merely manifested in the form of a human person and was not truly human. The person “Jesus” is directly identical with the Word, but possesses only one nature; he is more akin to an angelic messenger than God present in flesh. Ebionitism is found on the other end of the spectrum, suggesting that Jesus is fully human but not actually a divine person. Again, he possesses only one nature. In both cases the basic question of how Jesus and God the Son are related is uncomplicated. These positions are not seriously countenanced by the ancient church, and so need not detain us. A third option also deemed heretical might be located at the exact center of this spectrum: Nestorianism affirmed the full divinity of Christ against the Ebionites and Arians, and his full humanity against the Docetists. But its solution to the problem of unity was to posit two subjects who are related to one another in an intimate, moral union—the divine Word drawing so near to the human that He effectively shares in Jesus’ life experiences. None of these three paradigms satisfied the church because each failed to engage the problem head-on, explaining away the affirmation that the human Jesus is the eternal Son of God. Also on the spectrum, however, were paradigms that commended themselves to orthodoxy and that continue to dominate traditional Christologies. Two broad models of the incarnation held sway in these formative centuries—one largely giving way to the other after the controversies of the fifth century, though its influence continued in important ways. These represent the early church’s efforts to conceive of a satisfying answer to the question of the Word’s relation to humanity within a single-subject Christology—one Lord who is both vere Deus and vere homo.

Eusebius of Caesarea Long before the threat of Arianism, the theological tradition in Alexandria was founded upon Jesus’ divinity as a basic priority. Origen had emphasized the divine Word of God as the real performative agent of the life of Jesus Christ. From the beginning of the fourth century we see the continuance of a moderate Origenism of various stripes, which included opposition to radical forms of Gnosticism, subordinationism, and monarchian modalism.5 In Jesus, one who is Himself God has come among creatures. For a full treatment of Origen and his influence on the later Alexandrians see Christopher A. Beeley, The Unity of Christ.

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Eusebius of Caesarea suggests an instrumentalist model of the incarnation that is less nuanced than that of his more able peers, such as Athanasius. Following Origen, Eusebius suggested that the Word of God became incarnate in flesh in order to make His divine nature perceptible to human beings, assuming the mortal body “as a medium of intercourse with man.”6 The flesh was His instrument “even as a musician uses the lyre to evince his skill.”7 He goes on to speak of Orpheus (of Greek myth) as a musician who used his instrument to tame ferocious beasts, just as the Logos used his instrument to defeat sin. The Word indwelled this body, Eusebius says, yet without any injury to His essential purity from “spiritual contact” with it. The flesh was sufficiently distinct from His person that it neither changed who the Word is, nor defiled Him, nor hindered His work. This way of conceiving the union of Word and flesh further safeguarded the doctrine of divine impassibility—widely accepted by the Fathers. By instrumentalizing the flesh, Eusebius and others were able to affirm the full divinity of Jesus and the reality of his death on the cross, while yet protecting the divine essence from such ignominy. “For let us suppose a lyre to receive an accidental injury, or its chord to be broken; it does not follow that the performer on it suffers.”8 Eusebius does not have the sophistication of Cyril of Alexandria, however, who could affirm the Word’s “impassible suffering” (as we will see below). And so he states that when the instrument is put to death the Word left His body “for a little while,” and delivered it up to death “in proof of its mortal nature.” (It was then the Word, and not God the Father, who raised His body from the dead.9) It is not surprising, then, that Eusebius regards the sacrifice of atonement not as the Word’s offering of Himself, but the offering of His human body. In this, as well as his account of the resurrection, Eusebius clearly regards the flesh as an object upon which the Word acts in order to accomplish salvation. The Word “soon recalled his body from the grasp of death, presented it to his Father as the first-fruit of our common salvation, and raised this trophy, a proof at once of his victory over death and Satan, and of the abolition of human sacrifices, for the blessing of all mankind.”10

Oration in Praise of Constantine 14.1, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 1, pp. 581–610. 7 Oration 14.5. 8 Oration 14.9. 9 Oration 15.6. On the resurrection, see 15.10. 10 Oration 15.13. 6

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On this account the “person” in Jesus Christ is directly identical with the Logos, but humanity is not ontologically essential to Him. We might speculate that the prevalence of instrumental Christologies in the fourth century was indeed the result of pro-Nicenes pressing the divinity of Jesus and his consubstantiality with the Father in opposition to Arian and Eunomian tendencies, particularly as this occurred in an Alexandrian register.11 But other theologians of this era would recognize the unwanted implications of a more strict instrumentalism, and exercise greater care and nuance than we see in the writings of Eusebius. Chief among these is the on-again, off-again bishop of Alexandria.

Athanasius of Alexandria Before the fifth-century controversy introduced the more sophisticated conceptual structure of “one person in two natures,” Athanasius also articulated a Christology that is basically instrumentalist in character.12 On his account the performative agent in the life of Jesus is also the Word of God, who makes use of human flesh to accomplish the atonement. Athanasius affirms this relation through a number of analogies: the body is the instrument or organ (ὄργανον) of the divine Word, taken up from creation and sanctified for His use;13 it is the garment He puts on, not a part of His own being but akin to the priestly dress of the Levites;14 and it is the temple in which the presence of God dwells on earth.15 He also agrees with Eusebius that the Word acted upon His humanity in raising His own body from the dead.16 In each case, the Word stands apart in essence from the flesh of which He makes use. Unlike Eusebius, however, Athanasius appears more sensitive to the limitations of this model, and attempts to compensate through the repeated insistence that this flesh is “His own body,”17 and that the Word ascribed (λέγεσθαι) its

This view of the incarnation is generally consistent among pro-Nicenes of the third century and especially those associated with the Alexandrian school (including, for example, the modalist Marcellus of Ancyra)—though of course there is diversity within this group that our survey must leave unexplored. 12 For a fuller treatment of Athanasius see Darren O. Sumner, “The Instrumentalization of Christ’s Human Nature in Athanasius of Alexandria,” in A. Brent and M. Vinzent (eds), Studia Patristica LII, pp. 129–38. 13 De Incarnatione (hereafter: DI), 43. 14 Contra Arianos (hereafter: CA) II.7. The analogy of the Word donning humanity like clothing is among the most common in the Christology of the early church. 15 CA III.53; DI 9; Ad Adelphium 3, 7. 16 DI 26; cf. 46. 17 See, for example: CA III.41; DI 8. 11

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experiences to Himself as if they were His own.18 These are vital terms that do a great deal of work in Athanasius’ Christology—for he desires to affirm that the mortal experiences of the Word are authentically His. Athanasius opposes the notion that the Word simply came into a human body, firmly rejecting a model of indwelling and insisting time and again that the body of the Word, though an instrument of redemption, is personal—it is “His own body.” This common turn of phrase in Athanasius’ writings suggests his constant attention to the problem that the body might be thought of as an impersonal, animated object.19 Athanasius maintains the impassibility doctrine, yet he does not wish to isolate the sufferings of Jesus in an instrument. And so he turns to the important principle of ascription: all that the Word experiences in the flesh—including growth and ignorance, fear and anguish, suffering and death—are ascribed to His divine person. By virtue of the communicatio idiomatum Athanasius can suggest that pain is proper to the flesh, and the flesh in turn is proper to the Word. Yet because His impassibility is essential to Him, the relationship between pain and the Word is indirect—that is, the body undergoes something that, strictly speaking, the Word does not.20 The Word’s experience of suffering is mediated by the flesh He has made His own. The introduction of a mortal ὄργανον thus does not complicate the Word’s identity; instead, humanity is cast as something receptive to the will and purpose of the divine agent.21 Athanasius’ account is therefore far from Docetic: the Word actively lays claim to such things as ignorance and pathos, while yet remaining in an orientation of preeminence over them. This is perhaps the heart of the instrumentalist affirmation: that when the Word of God enters the sphere of creation He does not make Himself subject to it.22 Because the Creator remains Lord of all, the Word is not subject to His humanity so much as His humanity is subject to the Word. In spite of these attempts to make the instrument of the body personal to the Logos, Athanasius’ questionable exegesis of the New Testament demonstrates the limits against which instrumentalism presses. Where Jesus tells his disciples that he does not know the day of his return (Mk 13.32), Athanasius suggests that the one subject who is the Word in fact does know (since He is God, and CA III.56 (PG 26: 440). Anatolios also notes Athanasius’ use of the terms “appropriated” (ἰδιοποιουμένου) and “transferred” (μετέθηκεν). See Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought, p. 144. 19 See, for example: CA III.41; DI 8. 20 Anatolios defends Athanasius on the grounds of such predication, suggesting that the communication of attributes is sufficient for speaking of the Word’s own suffering, ignorance, fear, etc., without his own subjective possession of those things. See Anatolios, Athanasius, pp. 140–61. 21 On this point see Frances Young, “A Reconsideration of Alexandrian Christology,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 22.2 (1971), p. 113. 22 Cf. DI 17. 18

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coequal with the Father). After He became incarnate, everything the Word said “humanly” is attributable to His humanity. But the Word Himself continued to know all things: “The Son then did know, as He is the Word; for He implied this in what He said, ‘I know but it is not for you to know’ (cf. Acts 1.6–7).”23 Though he is attempting to account for the Word’s self-limitation, Athanasius ends up subverting the Synoptic depiction of Christ’s humanity. Even though the Word is the one who is speaking, when He does so through His humanity He may speak in its limitation—while not actually possessing that limitation in se. While instrumentalism thus has straight-forward benefits in identifying the singular agent in the life of Christ, it proved inadequate in affirming the full range of Jesus’ human existence—not only as physically but mentally and psychologically human. Jesus hungered, thirsted, and slept; wept upon hearing of Lazarus’ death; and agonized over his passion to the point of sweating blood—things Athanasius and others found difficult to predicate of a divine person. It is not surprising that Athanasius never made use of the idea that Jesus possesses a human soul. When the challenge of Apollinarianism prompted him to concede the existence of a human soul at the Synod of Alexandria (362),24 his instrumentalist vision of the incarnation had in large measure reached its end. Also an ally in the pro-Nicene party, Apollinaris had taken the instrumentalist paradigm to what was perhaps its logical conclusion, suggesting that the humanity assumed by the Word had no need of its own soul—since Jesus’ personhood was effectively located entirely on the divine side. As the turn of the fifth century approached, then, the center of gravity in the development of orthodox Christology shifted from the real divinity of the Son toward His complete humanity. If the assumed nature includes a rational soul and not just flesh, one could no longer locate Jesus’ personal subjectivity strictly on the divine side. The impersonal nature of an instrument no longer sat well with how the church was coming to understand the fullness of the Lord’s humanity.

Gregory of Nazianzus Theologians of the late fourth century increasingly regarded the affirmation of Christ’s full humanity and its personal unity with God to be of highest CA III.43, 49. Athanasius makes the critical addition of “I know” in the allusion to Acts 1.7. See Ad Antiochenos 7; cf. R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 451–55. Athanasius and his peers were concerned to argue here, contra Apollinaris, that Christ must have a human soul if “the whole man, body and soul alike,” is to obtain salvation. There is an implication of the human soul in Christ (by way of the negation of its preexistence) also in Ad Epictetum 8.

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importance. This much is evident in Gregory of Nazianzus’ famous dictum “the unassumed is the unredeemed.”25 Whatever it is about the human person that is fallen and corrupted by sin—her body, her soul, her mind and volition—these things Christ must possess in his humanity in order to bring about their healing by uniting them with divinity. It was in large measure because of Apollinaris, and the forceful witness against him by Antiochene theologians, that subsequent generations would attend carefully to the ontology of Jesus’ personhood as both fully divine and human.26 It is at this point, indeed, that the language used for christological description begins noticeably to shift from terms of body and flesh (σμα and σάρξ) toward an increasingly sophisticated notion of a human nature (ϕύσις)—a concept that could accommodate multiple elements of an authentic human existence, including the soul and the more abstract attributes (such as passibility). By 380 the model of the Word’s instrumental relation to His humanity was waning, and theologians sought terms and categories that could bear greater conceptual weight. The Christology of Gregory of Nazianzus was shaped by the homoian debate and the Antiochene controversies of Apollinaris and Diodore of Tarsus. Gregory was among the first to affirm that in the incarnation the Son of God is composite (σύνθετος)—a subject who is at once both divine and human, even anticipating Chalcedon’s later formula of “one person in two natures.” Gregory conceived of the coming together of these two as a sort of “mingling” (μιξις) or “blending” (κράσις)—attempting to recover these terms from Apollinaris’ own disastrous usage.27 The person of this union (ἕνωσις) is no longer the Logos simpliciter, nor a Word making use of a human body, but the Son who exists in the forma servi. In this combination God has been made human and humanity deified (so to speak).28 For Gregory, this manner of speaking of the union was an obvious means of opposing the Christology of Diodore, who he understood finally to be insisting upon speaking of Jesus and the Son as two distinct subjects. There is great progress in the model of composition toward affirming the identity of Jesus and the Word. It is because the incarnate Christ is a composite

Epistle 101.32. Athanasius shows some resistance to this, arguing that the assumed body may not be taken as coessential with the Word of God lest it, as “a distinct entity,” become a fourth member of the Godhead. See Ad Epictetum 9. 27 For example: Orations 38.13: “O new mixture! O paradoxical fusion! The self-existent comes into being, the uncreated is created, that which cannot be contained is contained, by the intervention of an intellectual soul mediating between the deity and the corporeality of the flesh” (translation modified). 28 Epistle 101.21. 25 26

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that He may be “one and the same” Son of God both prior to and in the incarnation. Nevertheless, for Gregory Christ’s basic identity remains in his divinity, since he is not a human being who bears God, but the God-human. It is important to Gregory that this identity remain consistent both before and after the incarnation—since it must be God Himself who has come to save us. He is therefore guided by a crucial asymmetry that exists between God and humanity, even in the christological union.29 Despite Christ’s composite makeup, the reconciling work of God requires the Logos here to maintain a hypostatic priority.

Cyril of Alexandria Gregory’s thought provided a significant influence upon the christological framework of Cyril of Alexandria. Consecrated archbishop in 412, Cyril inherited a serious conceptual challenge: accommodating the Alexandrian christological tradition to the affirmation of the full humanity of the incarnate Son—that the subject “Jesus Christ” is not simply the Word making use of a body, but a person who is himself fully God and fully human. While Cyril’s Christology follows Athanasius at a number of points, it also advances beyond him in significant ways. Because of his incorporation of both instrumentalist and compositional ideas, as well as the later importance of his theology to the consensus of Chalcedon, Cyril is best identified as a transitional figure.30 From 429 to 433 he was embroiled in the Nestorian controversy, in which he denounced the teachings of the new bishop of Constantinople as clearly teaching two subjects (or two Sons) in Christ. Nestorius had studied under Theodore of Mopsuestia, himself a student of Diodore. After Cyril managed to have Nestorius condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431) a period of moderate rapprochement with his supporters followed, in which Cyril and John of Antioch reached a measure of agreement in the Formula of Reunion (433). (Nestorius, however, remained excommunicate and his teachings anathema.)

Beeley, The Unity of Christ, p. 188. Bruce L. McCormack is not wrong to describe Cyril’s Christology as instrumentalist. But although Cyril wished to remain in a broadly Athanasian tradition, his instrumentalism is more complicated and less overt than that of his fourth-century predecessor. See McCormack, “‘With Loud Cries and Tears’: The Humanity of the Son in the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in Richard Bauckham, Daniel R. Driver, Trevor A. Hart, and Nathan McDonald (eds), The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology, pp. 37–68; cf. Cyril, Scholia on the Incarnation, 26.

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It is therefore a guiding principle in Cyril’s Christology that there is one subject (one Son, “one and the same Christ”) and not two. That subject is the divine Word, who in Himself is not human (per Athanasius). On the other hand, the humanity of Jesus is both extensive (not lacking anything, contra Apollinaris) and personal to the Word (not a second Son, contra Nestorius and his teachers). The challenge for Cyril, then, was to articulate a doctrine of union without recourse to the more stark instrumentalism of the fourth century. Cyril follows Gregory in making use of the idea of composition. As a human being is composed of a body and a soul, so in Christ two things (divinity and humanity) come together and result in a “synthesis” (συνηγμένων).31 Composition, further, allows Cyril to continue to stress singularity even on the level of natures: Christ is incarnate “out of two natures,” and now there is “one incarnate nature” (mia physis sesarkomene) after the union, one thing that came out of two.32 Yet here the notion of composition is deployed rather differently than it would be after the Chalcedonian synthesis: it describes not Christ’s hypostasis but only the union of the Word with the nature of flesh. In other words, the Word is not composite, but rather He participates in a “hypostatic” composition. In Himself the Word remains simple and impassible (which Cyril concludes must be the case if divinity is not transformed into humanity). The consequence of this reasoning is that, strictly speaking, the Word is a part of the composition of the God-human—a vital part, no doubt, as the locus of his one hypostasis—but not identical with him. Thus far it would seem that this form of composition will not allow Cyril to free himself from the limits of Athanasius’ instrumentalism. How can Cyril affirm the complete humanity of Christ—including his soul, his ignorance, and his death—while still holding the eternal and impassible Word as the subject of the union? Cyril’s quite brilliant solution to the challenge before him was to suggest that the divine Word exists simultaneously in two ways: immanently, where in the life of God He remains simple; and economically, by virtue of His incarnation. Only one nature is essential to the Word: “His own nature” is the divine nature, and He remains God “in nature and in truth.”33 For Cyril it made Second Letter to Succensus 3. Cyril avoids the language of “mixture,” here regarding it as a confusion of the natures. 32 “The one and only Christ is not twofold even though he is understood as compounded out of two different elements in an indivisible unity, just as a man is understood as consisting of soul and body and yet is not twofold but rather is one from out of both.” Third Letter to Nestorius 8. 33 Third Letter to Nestorius 3; cf. Scholia 4; On the Unity of Christ, pp. 60, 89. Likewise in his First Letter to Succensus (5), Cyril refers to the Word’s transcendent life as “his natural state.” 31

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sense to say that the Logos takes up human nature, the forma servi, only if He remains ontologically other than that form.34 In terms of the identity question, then, it is the Word in this economic life who has been made known to us in and as the God-human, Jesus Christ. The person of Jesus is directly identical with the incarnate Word (Logos ensarkos), but only indirectly with the Word in His abiding, immanent life. This enabled Cyril to affirm that the incarnate Word is a compound person, whose humanity is (with His divinity) ontologically constitutive of His existence—while yet retaining an eternal, unchanged Logos asarkos. Cyril thus conceived of the life of the one Son as existing in two modes.35 One is eternal, His divine life that proceeds from God the Father. Here He has no beginning, and according to Cyril is impassible according to His own nature.36 The second is temporal, His human life born from the Virgin Mary. Here the Son has a beginning and, being fully human, suffers and dies a true death. Instead of Athanasius’ ascription of human properties and experiences to the divine person, Cyril suggests a model of economic appropriation (οἰκείωσις οἰκονομικὴν): the Son takes what is human and makes it His own, actually experiencing it in the economy of the flesh.37 The exegetical difficulties that remained acute in Athanasian Christology—Jesus’ growth in wisdom and stature (Lk. 2.52), his ignorance of certain things (Mk 13.32), his fear and emotional anguish (Mt. 26.36–46; cf. Lk. 22.44)—“these human things are his by an economic appropriation, and along with the flesh all the things belonging to it.”38 There is greater ontological weight here than in Athanasius, for the sense in which the divine agent lives and dies is not merely verbal, but actual in the mode of the economy.39

Unity of Christ, pp. 64, 75. The Cappadocians had used the term tropos hyparxeos, “mode of existence,” rather extensively to define a hypostasis (in distinction from an essence). See, for example, Gregory of Nyssa’s To Ablabius: On Not Three Gods, and Contra Eunomium 2.9. Maximus the Confessor would later adopt this term as well, suggesting that the Word can acquire a new mode of existence (for the economy) while remaining identical to Himself (Difficulty 5: 1049D–1052A). 36 Unity of Christ, pp. 121, 127. 37 Unity of Christ, p. 110. This appropriation is, of course, most important for Christ’s suffering and death: “In the crucified body he impassibly appropriated the suffering of his own flesh and ‘by the grace of God he tasted death on behalf of us all’ (Heb. 2:9).” Third Letter to Nestorius 6. See also Letter to John of Antioch 9. Paul Gavrilyuk identifies the appropriation of human characteristics as a Cyriline doctrine of kenosis. See Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God, pp. 161–67. 38 Unity of Christ, p.  110; cf. Scholia 13. For a full treatment of these difficulties and the tradition’s attempts to make sense of them within a high Christology see Kevin Madigan, The Passions of Christ in High-Medieval Thought. 39 Cf. John A. McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, p. 221. 34 35

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Cyril’s great success as a theologian thus lay in his ingenious ability to reconcile certain Alexandrian values with a robust affirmation of Jesus’ human existence. Following Cyril’s death in 444, his Christology would be adopted with only minor amendment by the Council of Chalcedon and subsequently by the orthodox tradition.

The Council of Chalcedon In its condemnation of Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, and Eutychianism, the Council of Chalcedon advanced significantly beyond the Christology of the fourth century when it described Jesus as “truly God and truly human . . . acknowledged in two natures.” Cyril’s Christology was not adopted wholesale: the bishops struck a balance between the priorities of Alexandria and Antioch and condemned the Cyriline monophysitism of Eutyches. Cyril’s mia physis was implicitly rejected,40 with the compositional strategy now moved from the combination of divinity and humanity into a single nature to the union of divinity and humanity in a single person. This “one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ” was acknowledged to be consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity and consubstantial with us as regards his humanity, begotten both eternally and in time, and “acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation.” With the exception of a few Nestorian and monophysite holdouts, the Definition of Chalcedon became a standard expression of Christology for the church universal. That the “person” of the union is none other than the hypostasis of the Word is a position commonly attributed to Cyril and the Alexandrians—but instrumentalist expressions were by no means incompatible with Antiochene Christologies as well. Before the Formula of Reunion in 433, theologians such as Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia could just as easily suggest that the human Jesus is an instrument of the Logos. Because Jesus is taken to be a complete person, in fact, the Antiochene model would be even more predisposed to depersonalize his relationship to the Word. That these thinkers did not readily

The Council denounced those who introduce “a confusion and mixture . . . mindlessly imagining that there is a single nature of the flesh and the divinity.” Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Volume One: Nicaea I to Lateran V, p. 84. Cyril himself was praised by name and his synodical letters to Nestorius were received by the Council; thus it seems evident that what the bishops condemned under the label of Eutychianism was not precisely what Cyril had taught in terms of a single, incarnate nature.

40

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opt for the language of ὄργανον reflects the fact that their image of the union was one of moral and agential cooperation, not of utility. It is germane to the question of identity that we are pursuing to note here that the grammatical subject of the Definition is “our Lord Jesus Christ.” The point of departure is the same in the creed of Nicaea-Constantinople—not the eternal Logos but Jesus, one who is confessed to be the Son of God. This is not by any means to suggest an implicit Christology “from below” in the creeds. But it is significant that, on the question of the identity of this subject, both presume the human Jesus and then add to him certain confessions about his divinity. To this end Anthony Baxter asks an intriguing question: “Did the Council maintain that the one hypostasis here at stake just is the hypostasis of the divine Son or Word, and is not (at root) human?”41 Is it true that the one hypostasis was not constituted out of the union of the natures, but (as Cyril said) that the one hypostasis of the Word became incarnate? If there is but one Son and not two, must we conclude that this Son is divine and not divine-human? After all, socalled Logos Christology, a Christology “from above” as it continued to grow out of Chalcedon, is not present in the Council’s confession in a definitive fashion. The Definition does speak of Jesus’ eternal begetting by the Father “as regards his Godhead;” and the creed of Nicaea further specifies that the one in question “came down and was made flesh, and became man.” But the grammatical subject of both confessions remains the “Lord Jesus Christ,” the human person whom the Twelve followed and about whom they preached to all nations. If Baxter’s analysis is correct it would seem that the popular view that the one hypostasis of Jesus Christ is the divine hypostasis of the Word is a speculative extension upon Chalcedon42—perhaps one that is justifiable (since the person of the Logos preexists the incarnation, is immutable, and is superior to the humanity) and that certainly carries the support of the Fathers, but also one that is not logically necessary. What are the alternatives, then? If the hypostasis is not that of the Word, it might be that of a created, human subject. Since the church opposed this in more than one form (Adoptionism and Nestorianism), it is not entirely clear what the rejection of the popular view might entail. It is also not immediately evident how any revised portrait could be rendered in a manner faithful to Chalcedon and the other councils. It would clearly have a number of obstacles to surmount, including the preexistence of the Logos, His Anthony Baxter, “Chalcedon, and the Subject in Christ,” in Downside Review 107.  366 (1989), p. 6. Baxter points to Henry Chadwick and Walter Kasper as two modern scholars who agree with his assessment (pp. 11–12). The minimalism of the Definition on the identity question prevents us from too quickly reaching any decisive conclusion.

41

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immutability, and His ontological superiority to the assumed nature. But if the subject of the creeds is “our Lord Jesus Christ,” one who is composited of both divine and human essences, such a portrait is possible at least in theory. (This is what I intend to show in the remainder of this study.) As the content of the Definition was given greater theological precision in subsequent generations it became clear that mature Chalcedonianism would indeed favor a compositionalist model of the incarnation, drifting still further from the instrumentalism that had dominated the fourth century—though without leaving it behind entirely. While many continued to identify the incarnate hypostasis directly with the hypostasis of the Logos (which I take to be a remnant of instrumentalist thinking), orthodox theologians also increasingly came to speak of Jesus Christ in metaphysical terms as a divine-human composite, who is fully God and fully human—and not who he is without either of these natures. Furthermore, this notion of composition proved to have a semantic range broader than its usage by either Gregory or Cyril. The Definition of Chalcedon specified that the two natures remain distinct and integral in their union (undergoing “no confusion, no change”); these two things remain two, even as they make up one, metaphysically complex person. Whereas Cyril had conceived of a single, composite nature, now the language of composition would be used to uphold the Antiochene priority of an essential duality. The Lord Jesus Christ does not merely have two essences (one natural, one accidental), but in a significant way it could now be said that he is these two essences, the result of their hypostatic uniting.

Jesus and the Logos after Chalcedon By the middle of the fifth century the church had accomplished the formulation of a doctrine of Christ’s person that identified him with and as the very Son of God, anathematizing numerous models of incarnation as insufficient to its witness. This view comported with the doctrine of the Trinity and the Creatorcreature distinction, and appeared logically coherent and faithful to the New Testament—or at least it had made significant progress over the exegesis of Athanasius.43 But the consensus of the Council of Chalcedon would not be Athanasius was among many fathers of the ancient church who found it difficult to predicate ignorance to one who is the divine Word of God, so that he interpreted statements such as that in Mk 13.32 to a pedagogical lesson about the reality of His assumed humanity, uttered by the Word for the benefit of his disciples rather than because it was true of His person. “He made this [declaration] . . . as man by reason of the flesh. For this is not the Word’s deficiency, but of that human nature whose property it is to be ignorant” (CA III.43).

43

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without its detractors (particularly in the modern period)—nor could the Fathers claim to have settled the complexities of the hypostatic union in full and for all time. Chalcedon and the later councils left some matters unresolved,44 including implications about the identity of Jesus that perhaps stood at odds with the Fathers’ own intentions. Is the Lord of believers and the head of the church, in fact, not metaphysically coterminous—identical “all the way down”— with God the Son? If Jesus differs from the Logos in essential natures, can he still truly be the same subject? But other matters demanded the church’s attention in the following centuries. Early in the sixth century John Maxentius, Peter the Deacon, and the Theopaschites maintained the Logos as the subject of the union in order to confess the identity of the crucified Jesus with the second person of the Trinity.45 Constantinople II vindicated their position, calling Jesus Christ a “member of the holy Trinity” and agreeing that the subject of the crucifixion was likewise one of the Trinity.46 This council was more overtly Cyriline in its judgments, condemning the Antiochene Three Chapters (including the person and writings of Theodore) in a misguided attempt to appeal to monophysites disaffected by the Council of Chalcedon. It explicitly identified the hypostasis of the incarnate Christ with the second person of the Trinity, favoring “the Word of God” as the grammatical subject of its canons.47 And it further interpreted Chalcedon’s phrase “in two natures” with conciliar affirmation that Christ is composed by the union of two natures—“for one is composed of the two and the two are in one” (Canon 7). Another major controversy still lay ahead for the development of a mature Christology in the Chalcedonian vein. Before we turn to the seventh-century debate over monenergism and monothelitism (whether Christ possesses one or two energies or wills), we must look briefly at a figure who provided the participants of that debate with a significant new concept.

Sarah Coakley suggests that the formula of Chalcedon is minimalist and apophatic, leaving unanswered the metaphysical specifics of what divine and human natures are, what “hypostasis” means when applied to Christ, and if this usage differs from its meaning in a trinitarian context. See Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition,’” in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Incarnation, pp. 162–63. 45 See John Maxentius, On the Incarnation and Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ. 46 Anathema 4, 10 (Tanner, Decrees, pp. 115, 118). 47 For example: “The Word of God has been united to the flesh in a way that pertains to hypostasis” (Canon 5). This was by no means to the exclusion of the phrase “our Lord Jesus Christ,” which also appears. 44

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Pseudo-Dionysius The author once associated with the apostle Paul’s convert, Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17.34), wrote in the late fifth or early sixth century, and was likely a Syrian monk with an enthusiasm for Neo-Platonism. In the sixth century his writings were edited by John, bishop of Scythopolis in Palestine and an orthodox Cyriline. Pseudo-Dionysius is attributed with numerous original contributions to early medieval theology, including the suggestion that Christ has a “new theandric energy.” He was neither human nor non-human; although humanly born he was far superior to man, and being above men he yet truly did become man. Furthermore, it was not by virtue of being God that he did divine things, not by virtue of being a man that he did what was human, but rather, by the fact of being God-mademan he accomplished something new in our midst—the activity [ἐνέργειαν] of the God-man.48

In his Tome to Flavian Leo I had stated that each nature performs the act that is proper to it—the Word doing the divine things and the humanity the human.49 Denys formulates this in precisely the opposite fashion: we might say that the human acts divinely, while the divine acts humanly. He conceives of the activity of Jesus Christ as resulting, in fact, from the common operation of his two natures. Thus the energy from which Christ acts is theandric, “divinehuman.” This is not a third energy alongside the divine and human, but rather an expression of their unity in a vaguely monoenergist scheme. This notion of a composite energy of operation was much the same as the way in which Cyril and the monophysites had identified “one incarnate nature.”50 And so it is no surprise that monoenergists of the seventh century appealed to Denys to support a single energy. (In fact, a variant text may have existed that spoke of “one theandric energy” rather than a “new theandric energy.”51) Against this, Maximus the Confessor would reinterpret Dionysius in a way compatible with a strict dyothelitism, and thereby help to establish him as father of medieval orthodoxy.52

Epistola 4. We will return to this below, under the topic of divine impassibility. 50 On the varieties of monophysitism that existed in the sixth and seventh centuries and the party’s own internal conflicts, see Georges Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century. 51 Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, pp. 52–53. 52 An account of this is in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, pp. 18–23. 48 49

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Maximus the Confessor The leading opponent of monothelitism in the seventh century, Maximus was put on trial multiple times from 655 to 662, finally being convicted of heresy, tortured, and exiled. He was vindicated by the sixth ecumenical council (Constantinople III)—though not mentioned by name—in 681, nearly 20 years after his death. That body promulgated the official church teaching that in Christ there are two natural wills and two energies (or “principles of action”) which, like his two natures, “undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion” but “meet in correspondence for the salvation of the human race.”53 These two wills are therefore not in opposition to one another, but the human will follows and is subject to the divine without resistance. Maximus’ Christology, unlike that of pre-Chalcedonian figures such as Gregory and Cyril, takes compositionalism as its basic paradigm and minimizes the instrumentalist impulse. The christological union “draws his humanity into perfect identity, in every way, with his divinity, through the principle of person (ὑπόστασις); it is a union that realizes one person composite of both natures, inasmuch as it in no way diminishes the essential difference between those natures.”54 It is true that Maximus suggests elsewhere that the hypostasis of the incarnate Son was not “composite”—perhaps because he believes that the human nature was hypostatized in the Son, and not in a new hypostasis that only came into being when the Virgin Mary conceived. Because the hypostasis of the Son already preexisted the union, the addition of a created nature did not result in the one who is simple becoming composite in Himself. Rather, when he became flesh “he became double, so that double by nature, he had kinship by nature with both extremes, and preserved the natural difference of his own parts each from the other.”55 This is not to say that Maximus’ Christology is not basically compositional, however; the context shows that his concern here is to oppose the idea that two natures and wills are “melted down” and recast as one nature and one will, losing their distinction and respective dignities. The composition that Maximus opposes is that of a Eutychian mixing, which surely would do damage to the natures.56

Tanner, Decrees, pp. 128–30. Ad Thalassium 60 (“On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ”), p. 123. 55 Opusculum 3, 73C. This “doubling” of nature, energy, and will is the primary way in which Maximus articulates duality within a single hypostasis. 56 Opusculum 3, 76A, 88B. 53 54

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In keeping with this anti-monophysitism, Maximus took the idea of the “new theandric energy” from Pseudo-Dionysius and interpreted it in a fashion compatible with Chalcedonian dyophysitism and dyoenergism.57 This theandric energy “must not be understood as equivalent to one natural energy, because the word ‘theandric’ signifies not the abolition of the two energies, but merely their unity.”58 The energies are not blended into a tertium quid, then, but provide for the Son to do human things divinely and divine things humanly. With Maximus we see the emergence of the medieval doctrine of communicatio operationum: the energies of both natures are actualized not in isolation but in communion with one another.59 “It made clear then that as man, being by nature God, he acts humanly, willingly accepting the experience of suffering for our sake. And it is again made clear that as God, who is human by nature, he acts divinely and naturally exhibits the evidence of his divinity.”60 Maximus is here concerned with the willing of one person (the incarnate Word) who exists in two natures. Appealing to Cyril, he says that the human will of Christ seeks to will divinely while the divine will seeks to will humanly. The natures and their operative willing are not parallel, but perichoretic: they act not alternately, but always together. According to Maximus, what Denys wished to emphasize with the “new theandric energy” that results from the union is not the singularity of the energy (as if the two energies were mixed together) but “the double energy of the double nature”61—a clearly dyophysite principle. To speak of a “theandric energy” in a singular sense, therefore, is to signify unity without dispensing with the clear distinction of dual energies in Christ’s makeup.

John of Damascus Writing in the mid-eighth century, John arrives on the scene after the christological controversies have run their course. His Exposition of the Orthodox Faith provides a thorough summary of the work of the first six ecumenical

On Maximus’ appropriation of Denys’ “theandric energy” see Louth, Maximus the Confessor, pp. 52–54. 58 Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor, p. 195. 59 The term communicatio operationum is not Maximus’ own, but emerged later in the Middle Ages. 60 Opusculum 7, 84C. This much would seem a justified reading of Denys’ Epistola 4, since he says there that “it was not by virtue of being God that he did divine things, [and] not by virtue of being a man that he did what was human” (1072C). 61 Opusculum 7, 85A. Thomas Aquinas picks up this interpretation of Dionysius in ST III, q. 19, a. 1. 57

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councils, drawing together the threads we have been addressing: Jesus’ full humanity and divinity, his identity with the hypostasis of the Word, his two wills and energies, the theandric manner of their operation, etc. While he is not an especially innovative theologian, we do find in his writings two points that are worth attention. First, John is more thorough in his description of Christ’s personal composition (on a metaphysical register). Heretofore the tradition had been content to describe composition almost exclusively in terms of the divine and human essences, with analogical reference to human composition out of a body and a soul. But John considers the incarnate one to be composed of the divine person plus a human body, mind, and soul.62 The Word thus goes from personal simplicity to complexity in His assumption of a human nature. With the addition of a human body, mind, and soul the subsistence (by which John has in mind the person or hypostasis) of the Word of God becomes the subsistence of Jesus Christ. This is the most formal and programmatic use of compositionalism that we have seen in our survey. Second, John goes beyond Maximus in his discussion of the Dionysian “new theandric energy.” He agrees that this important term ought to be understood in a dyophysite sense: it points to the unity of two energies, without abolishing their distinction. But whereas Maximus had made a careful, anti-numerical designation (so as not to play into monoenergist hands), John applies the number “one” to the theandric energy.63 Of course, John was not mustering a case for a return to monoenergism. Instead, his departure from Maximus on this point signals an implicit relocation of the designation “theandric” from the plurality of energies to the unity and singularity of activity.64 John’s typical method of inquiry is to attend to a specific act of Jesus (such as suffering, to which we will return below) and then to ask after how this arises from both divine and human operations. The term “theandric” thus performs a somewhat different task, one in which John has no qualms about describing theandricism as numerically one. “It is all the same whether we say ‘Christ energizes according to either of His natures,’ or ‘either nature energizes in Chalcedon specified that Christ has “a rational soul and body” (ψυχς λογικς και σώματος). Only later would some theologians make a further distinction between mind and soul in translating ψυχ. 63 EF III.19. On this see Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, p. 203; and Cyril Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, pp. 111–23. 64 Andrew Louth suggests that “activity” is, in fact, a better translation for ἐνεργεία, since in English “energy” suggests only a potential for activity. Andrew Louth, “The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World,” in Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang (eds), Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, p. 66. 62

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Christ in communion with the other.’”65 “The natures energize” is a statement of plural operations, while “Christ energizes” is a statement of singular activity—and these statements are effectively the same. Thus Christ does one thing—calling his disciples, healing blind Bartimaeus, dying on the cross— and is never divided against himself. With respect to energies “theandric” is a term that unites two things, whereas with respect to activity it is a term that shows the diversity of that which is one. This is the sense in which I will make use of the term “theandric”—that is to refer to a mature doctrine of the communicatio operationum, which began with Dionysius and Maximus and came to fruition with the canons of Constantinople III, and more conclusively in the writings of John of Damascus. While it is based upon the conviction of two wills and two natural energies, this doctrine is concerned with the activity that is done by the person in whom these are united: the energies contribute to a single subject acting in a singularly unconfused way. John’s willingness to relocate theandricism from the plurality of energies to the singularity of their actualized activity is, I think, what older dyothelites such as Maximus had finally intended. While the church was right to reject the notion of a single, theandric nature and a single, theandric energy (largely on antiEutychian grounds), it accepted theandric activity vis-à-vis dyothelitism and the communication of operations.

A contemporary question I have suggested that the Council of Chalcedon signaled a threshold at which the orthodox tradition made hypostatic composition to be basic to its Christology, causing the once dominant model of instrumentalism to fade. Later developments, such as dyothelitism and Maximus’ reinterpretation of “theandric” energy and activity, further reinforced this. In the new paradigm Jesus Christ is essentially both divine and human, identical with the hypostasis of the Word only insofar as the Word exists in the mode of economy. While Chalcedon’s compositional approach allowed for a number of problems to be solved (particularly with respect to the place of the human soul, energy, and will), it left others drastically complicated.66 Despite the continued affirmation that the hypostasis of Jesus is the divine hypostasis of the Word, composition made it difficult to affirm that

EF III.19. Such is also the conclusion of Robin Le Poidevin, “Identity and the Composite Christ,” Religious Studies 45.2 (2009), pp. 167–86.

65 66

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God the Word and Jesus Christ are from first to last the same person—since the former retains a more principal and hidden mode of being in which He is not the God-human. This remains evident in contemporary theology. Among modern theologians who adhere to orthodox Christology, the potential of a subjective dissociation of Jesus from the Word often runs undetected beneath biblical affirmations about the person of Christ. Thomas F. Torrance provides a glimpse into the vulnerability of Chalcedonianism on this matter when he writes: Let us note that strictly speaking, we cannot say that Jesus is divine, any more than we can say that God is human. We can say that God has become man, such that he is now also man in Christ, and so we can say that Jesus is man and also God, but to talk about divine humanity is confusion, and a form of monophysite heresy: it is to deny his humanity.67

Torrance’s words may be ill-chosen for his intent (warding off a monophysite blending of the natures), but such a qualification that “we cannot say that Jesus is divine” is by no means extraordinary. A similar point is made by Martin Breidert, who rejects any “Christology of identity” in favor of a “Christology of relation;” as Thomas Thompson summarizes: “Jesus is not God, but God is in some sense in Jesus.”68 Anthony Hanson, a modern critic of Chalcedonian orthodoxy (but a defender of the doctrine of the Trinity), can only conclude that Jesus is not personally identical with the Word but rather “the Word became known in Jesus Christ.”69 In defending a compositionalist model of the incarnation Oliver Crisp concedes that “strictly speaking, God the Son is not Jesus Christ, of course”—but rather God the Son is identical with the person who is “in” Christ.70 Finally, in a defense of divine impassibility Bruce Marshall concludes that the Son’s identity would be no different had He not become incarnate—therefore “the temporal economy of salvation, including the suffering and death of the incarnate Son, is what the triune God does, not who the triune God is.”71 Since Jesus Christ is ontologically bound up in this economy—in his constitution as divine and

Thomas F. Torrance, The Incarnation, p. 187. Thomas R. Thompson, “Nineteenth-Century Kenotic Christology: The Waxing, Waning, and Weighing of a Quest for a Coherent Orthodoxy,” in C. Stephen Evans (ed.), Exploring Kenotic Christology, pp.  99–100; cf. Martin Breidert, Die Kenotische Christologie des 19. Jahrhunderts, pp. 308f. 69 Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, The Image of the Invisible God, p. 120. 70 Oliver D. Crisp, “Compositional Christology without Nestorianism,” in Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill (eds), The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, p. 54. 71 Bruce D. Marshall, “The Dereliction of Christ and the Impassibility of God,” in James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (eds), Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, p. 298. 67 68

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human—Marshall would seem to conclude that Jesus Christ is likewise what the Son does, not who the Son is. Each of these modern qualifications of the nature of the Word’s incarnation is consistent, by and large, with the history of the orthodox tradition. At such unguarded moments we see that, by virtue of the distinction between the immanent and the economic, humanity is regarded as separate from the essence of God the Son. The identity of Jesus and the Word is therefore rendered merely formal, so that Jesus has come to be identified—“strictly speaking”—as the incarnate manifestation of the Son (cf. 1 Tim. 3.16, ἐϕανερώθη ἐν σαρκίς), one who “is” the Son in time but who, because he is human, cannot lay the same claim to the Son’s eternal life. Jesus, then, is strictly the Logos ensarkos and coincident but not identical with the second person of the Trinity.72 To put the matter differently, the Word is fully the God-human Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ is not the fullness of the eternal Word of God. Cyril was certainly aware of this structural problem and attempted to counter it with the repeated affirmation that “one and the same is called Son: before the incarnation while he is without flesh he is the Word, and after the incarnation he is the self-same in the body.”73 Yet he also insisted that “the Word remained in his own proper nature.”74 Cyril took this twofold existence to be proper to the abiding distinction between the natures. But the exclusion of the humanity of Christ from the Word’s immanent life finally prevented Cyril from achieving the unity and continuity of personal identity that he sought. While he affirms that Jesus is fully and essentially human (being a compound person), he presumes also that humanity is not essential to the person who is incarnate. With respect to the Word Himself, humanity is assumed in time and so is contingent. Is there an alternate account to Cyril’s—or perhaps a more sophisticated rendering of the distinction between the Logos-as-God and the Logos-ashuman—that can overcome this implied (and largely unintended) separation between Jesus and the divine life of the Word? Lutheran theologians sought

Thomas Senor observes that this problem is implicit in compositionalist accounts of the incarnation, and further argues that pressing this mereologically (as Brian Leftow does) implies—by virtue of the church’s rejection of Nestorianism—that Jesus Christ is not a “person,” since the one person of the composite Christ is God the Son. See Thomas Senor, “Drawing on Many Traditions: An Ecumenical Kenotic Christology,” in The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, Marmodoro and Hill (eds), p. 97. A further discussion of the identity problem from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy is in Le Poidevin, “Identity and the Composite Christ,” pp. 167–86. 73 Cyril, Explanation of the Twelve Chapters (McGuckin, Saint Cyril, p. 285). Also see Scholia 16. 74 Scholia 24. 72

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better purchase on the identity problem through various strategies of kenosis (examined below), suggesting that the Word set aside or refrained from using some divine attributes in order to experience the limitations of human existence—and to do so fully, not holding back anything of Himself. The Reformed, by contrast, nuanced Cyril’s immanent-economic distinction through the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum.75 Like Cyril, they held that the Word exists simultaneously in two ways: fully incarnate as the human Jesus, and also outside the flesh (etiam extra carnem) as the one who continues to fill and sustain the universe. Also like Cyril, this seems to imply a personal separation between Jesus and the Logos. What is necessary, then, is to more precisely define the way in which these two modes of being are related. This problem of identity in the incarnation has further implications for the doctrine of God and the atoning work of Christ, and our task in the remainder of this chapter is to describe three of these. Rather than asking “How can the divine Word manage to live a human life?” I have sought to inquire into the nature of the incarnation from the other way around, beginning with the narrated life of Jesus Christ and asking “How is it that this human, who is the object of Christian devotion, is actually a divine person?” This is the perspective that Barth associated with the Synoptic witnesses, which in light of the Johannine “high Christology” of the early church stands in need of a new prioritizing.76 Although theologians in both antiquity and modernity appear to be attuned to this dilemma, we cannot conclude that any of the solutions considered thus far are satisfying. Shifting the christological perspective in this manner causes the identity problem to become especially clear—for it is here, where Jesus’ growth, limitations, and suffering are foregrounded, that the humanity of the Word is recognized as something essential to the one who is Lord of the Christian life.

Divine immutability Prior to the modern period the doctrine of God’s immutability was maintained in the orthodox tradition almost without exception. God wills and determines; God acts in, upon, and through creation; and God is even properly thought of as affective, stirred to compassion, even able to change His mind—at least from the The extra was not invented by the Calvinists, but had a long history in patristic theology. See E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology, pp. 34–60. The extra will be taken up in greater detail in Chapters 2 and 5, in the context of Barth’s critical correction of this doctrine. 76 CD IV/2, p. 156; CD IV/1, pp. 159–60, 224. 75

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perspective of the creature (e.g. Exod. 32.7–14). But none of this entails change to God’s essence, God’s being, understood to be that which stands behind and animates God’s loving acts toward creatures. Because God is ontologically both simple and perfect, wanting of nothing to augment or improve His existence, God remains unchanging even as He wills for, acts among, and relates to those whom God loves. This doctrine has proved profoundly determinative for Christology. It seems as though the deep problem of Jesus’ identity might readily be solved by an allowance for change in the being of God the Son—at least change in some small measure. If we could say that the Son turned into the God-human, Jesus, leaving behind His existence in simplicity and perfection, then the doctrinal tensions would be largely sorted. But orthodox theologians have continued to regard immutability as necessary—even accounting for the Word’s becoming flesh—in order to uphold with Chalcedon Jesus’ full and uncompromised divinity. If God is immutable essentially, then the incarnate God remains so or He ceases to be vere Deus. Rather than considering the innovative Christologies of those who reject immutability (including recent process theologians), our task here is to better understand the way in which the tradition has related the incarnation to the doctrine of an unchanging God.

Incarnation by addition The Fathers of the ancient church dealt extensively with what it means for the Word of God to “become flesh” (σάρξ ἐγένετο, Jn 1.14). On the one hand, these theories attempted to reckon with the gospel portrayals of Jesus as eminently human—eating, sleeping, growing in wisdom, not knowing all things, weeping, even suffering and dying a dreadful execution under Roman charge. On the other hand, they recognized that the New Testament also speaks of Jesus’ divine identity as the Son of God, one who bears divine authority on earth, who transcends creaturely finitude, and who is worthy of worship. How are these diverse witnesses to be reconciled in a complete doctrine of Jesus’ identity as the Word-become-flesh? As Athanasius saw it, soteriological pressures require Jesus’ Godhead: only if the Word remains fully divine does His death conquer sin. A number of exegetical options were therefore to be ruled out.77 First, it might be argued that Ad Epictetum 5. This epistle is directed specifically against these Arian misunderstandings of the Word’s becoming. See Sumner, “Instrumentalization,” pp. 129–38.

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the Word changed into a human subject. He who was eternally divine ceased to be so, transforming into a different sort of being (one who is a creature). Clearly this transgresses God’s immutability, since the incarnate Word would no longer be divine, nor bear divine power and authority. Therefore, says Athanasius, “He has become flesh not by being changed into flesh, but because He assumed on our behalf living flesh, and has become Man.”78 Second, it could be that the Word enters into a human body, filling it and animating it (as with Eusebius of Caesarea’s idea of “indwelling”). But this is still not sufficient, for while it may protect the immutability of the divine subject it compromises the full reality of His human existence. And so Athanasius argues that the Word “became man, and did not come into a man.”79 Athanasius could conceive of the incarnation neither as “coming into” man nor as “changing into man”—for, according to Thomas Weinandy, “in both instances it would not be the Son who is truly the subject of all the human actions or experiences.”80 But it is Athanasius’ christological starting point that the Son is so. And so instead, Weinandy suggests, Athanasius’ true position on John 1’s ἐγένετο is best described with the prepositional phrase “come to exist as man,” which is to remain what He is while also becoming something else.81 In short, Athanasius had preserved the doctrine of divine immutability by construing the incarnation as an addendum to the Word. The Word retains the form of God, while at the same time taking on the form or nature of a servant— the human nature (cf. Phil. 2.6–7).82 Under the instrumentalist model this second nature was personal but not ontologically constitutive, since the immutability of the Word provided for His essential independence from the flesh. Thus ascription was necessary: the flesh was taken up and utilized, its attributes and experiences predicated of the Word Himself as if they were His own. The very fact that they must be so ascribed shows that Athanasius regarded the Word as unchanged by the assumption of flesh: they err who believe that the Godhead itself “can receive an addition.”83 When the Chalcedonian tradition later broke with the instrumentalist paradigm in granting full, ontological status to Jesus’ human body and soul in the constitution of his person, theologians were able to retain and make great use Ad Epictetum 8. CA III.30; cf. Ad Epictetum 2. Aloys Grillmeier identifies this statement as Athanasius’ central christological formula, but warns that it “should not, of course, be regarded as an ontology of the hypostatic union” (Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, pp. 326–27). 80 See Thomas Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction, pp. 87–90 (quotation on p. 89). 81 Weinandy, Athanasius, pp. 85–90. 82 Ad Antiochenos 7. 83 Ad Epictetum 9. The triune Godhead, Athanasius says, is “inaccessible to addition or diminution, but is always perfect.” 78 79

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of the notion of an incarnation “by addition.” Augustine wrote that the Mediator is co-mingled with the flesh by the Word of God so as to make a unity between them.84 As John of Damascus put it, the simple divine Word becomes a composite person, and therefore ontologically complex: in the economy He is composed of the divine person plus a human body, mind, and soul. Athanasius’ worry that the assumed body would complicate the divine essence and make for a fourth member of the Trinity (making the “Triad” into a “Tetrad”)85 was proved to be misplaced when theologians after Chalcedon began increasingly to conceive of the human nature in attributive, rather than concrete terms: the Word assumes not simply a material body and a soul that together make up an entity, but rather finitude, passibility, and all the characteristics of what it means to exist as a human.86 Thus, unlike Athanasius, John speaks of the Word’s “becoming” as ontological, so that we may speak even of His “two generations—one from the Father before time and beyond cause and reason and time and nature, and one in the end for our sake, and like to us and above us.”87 Whereas He previously subsisted in the simplicity of the Godhead, the Word now subsists in the incarnate person’s compound nature; and the Word’s unchanged divine essence remains one element of this composition. What He is in His divinity is therefore not altered or diminished, but amended. Drawing upon John, Thomas Aquinas favors this model of compositionalism— that of a whole and one of its parts—over a substance-accident model (as embraced by Duns Scotus).88 According to the latter model, the assumed humanity may be thought to have its own esse, and so Thomas believes it to result in Nestorianism. He prefers a model in which “the human nature becomes part of the larger whole of the person of the divine Word,” so that Christ is a composite person with both divine and human attributes, and “the Word’s original eternal esse becomes the esse of the human nature.”89 Yet the hypostatic union is asymmetrical: from the human side its relationship with the divine nature is “real” and modifying, while

Augustine, De Trinitate 4.13. Ad Epictetum 9. 86 In this respect the Chalcedonian Definition itself brought together both notions of the human nature: it is “a rational soul and body,” as well as a nature with a preserved “property” (ἰδιότητος). For a recent discussion of differing understandings of human nature as either concrete or abstract, see Alvin Plantinga, “On Heresy, Mind and Truth,” Faith and Philosophy 16.2 (1999), pp. 182–93; and Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, pp. 34–71. 87 EF III.7. In this he follows Constantinople II, which proclaimed “two nativities” for the Word of God (Canon 2). 88 See Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, pp. 51–64. 89 Edwin Chr. van Driel, “The Logic of Assumption,” in Evans (ed.), Exploring Kenotic Christology, pp. 265–90 (quotation on p. 272); cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (hereafter: ST) III, q. 2, a. 6, responsio. 84 85

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the divine undergoes no change since its relation to the human nature is one of “reason.” In this way the divine nature participates in the personal event of suffering without being subject to it—for, as a divine work ad extra, the union itself is located on the created side and not within the being of God.90 In explicating their own Christology, Protestant dogmaticians also emphasized incarnation by addition as a means of preserving immutability—necessary, they too believed, to the confession of Jesus Christ as vere Deus. Prolific is the language of the Son of God, with His own unaltered nature, “assuming” or “taking” the nature of men and women from the Virgin Mary.91 Martin Chemnitz clarifies that when humanity is added to the Logos this does not mean that anything is added to the divine nature, as if it were not complete in itself. This is in contrast to the human nature, which receives “above and beyond its own essential properties many preeminent and marvelous prerogatives and dignities” from the divine (the genus maiestaticum).92 A consequence of this union, says David Hollatz, is that both the divinity and humanity of the Logos “can no longer be conceived of as without or away from the other”; they are still distinct and unmingled, but united so intimately that (against the Calvinists) there is no longer a Logos who exists apart from His flesh.93 “As the soul is never without the body, so also the Logos is to be regarded as always in the flesh and never without it.”94 The theological vocabulary of Lutheran dogmatics tends toward the “impartation” of the divine hypostasis or nature to the human nature (and therefore toward an emphasis upon the communicatio idiomatum),95 while the Reformed especially favor language of the Logos’ self-concealment under the ST III, q. 2, a. 7. See also Gilles Emery, “The Immutability of the God of Love and the Problem of Language Concerning the ‘Suffering of God,’” in Keating and White (eds), Divine Impassibility, p. 73. 91 For example: John Calvin’s French Confession of Faith 14 (“Jesus Christ . . . put on our flesh”); John Knox’s Scots Confession 6; The Heidelberg Catechism 35; The Thirty-Nine Articles 2; and The Westminster Confession of Faith 8.2. Despite operating with this model Westminster, curiously, eschews “composition” along with the conversion or confusion of Christ’s two natures. Turretin explains that composition is objectionable if by it we mean that Christ is partially of one nature and partially of the other (which agrees with Thomas’ rejection of mereological composition). See Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 2, p. 312. 92 Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, pp.  157–58; cf. 164–66, 243, 287. Chemnitz is influenced heavily by John of Damascus. The Formula of Concord (to which Chemnitz contributed significantly) assumes a clearly compositionalist account of the incarnation but does not employ the language of addition. See especially The Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord, chapter 8, in Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. 93 David Hollatz, Examen theologicum acroamaticum (originally published in 1707), p. 679 (cited in Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, p. 296). Beyond this, Hollatz warns against speculation of how the hypostatic union is effected. 94 Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, p. 310; cf. Martin Luther, “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper,” in Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (eds), Luther’s Works (hereafter: LW) 37, pp. 206–35. 95 For example: Chemnitz, Two Natures in Christ, pp. 71, 83–84, 281; Solid Declaration 8.61f. 90

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assumption of a human nature or the forma servi—especially when explicating the Christ hymn of Phil. 2 (for reasons that will become clear). According to a broad consensus among the Reformed divines, the second person of the Godhead remains immutable by adding a nature that, while personally united with His own divine nature, does not alter it: the incarnation is to be regarded such that “the human mode of being was added to the eternal mode of the Logos by the assumption of the human nature into its personality without altering the latter.”96 In the doctrine of the incarnation, divine mutability was thus associated with Eutychian confusion, as the Chalcedonian Definition had suggested with its parallel use of ἀτρέπτως (immutabiliter) and ἀσυγχύτως (inconfuse). To suggest that the divine nature could change was to fail to uphold its own distinctive properties, confusing it with the human. The Reformed scholastics therefore found the Athanasian language of humanity as the instrument (ὄργανον) of the Word to be especially attractive.97 Much of the impetus for this was likely sacramental: Lutheranism suggested what appeared to be a change of the bread and wine in the Eucharist by virtue of the ubiquity of Christ’s flesh, and in response the Reformed stressed that the Lord’s divine presence is added to creaturely elements that remain untransformed.98 Likewise, by the sacraments believers are not deified but “engrafted into Christ Jesus.”99 Again, the language here is of addition, so that transformation is explicitly ruled out. The mystical union of men and women with Christ, including the denial of theosis, thus has a christological basis: as the humanity of Christ is added to his divine person, so are believers joined to him while remaining creaturely. Incarnation “by addition” preserves the integrity of both natures by ruling out both divine mutability and human divinization. What is clear is that, in their debates over the communicatio idiomatum and the character of the hypostatic union, Protestant theologians conceived of the doctrine of immutability explicitly in terms of the attributes of the divine nature.100 These attributes—including the Son’s knowledge, power, and ubiquity—are themselves unchanging, since to lose or alter an attribute was to

98 99 100 96 97

Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 417–18. For examples see Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 428–31, 497–98. For example: Second Helvetic Confession 19. The Scots Confession 21. Nature and essence are equivocated in Chemnitz, Two Natures in Christ, pp. 29–30. For further references see Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, pp.  120–22. Here Protestant theology followed Augustine, who believed that “the nature of the Trinity is called simple because it does not have anything that it can lose,” whereas created things “can be deprived of what they have, and can be turned or changed into other qualities and states” (De civitate Dei 11.10).

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alter the divine essence itself. The ground for this elaboration of the patristic doctrine was prepared, at least in part, by the Augustinian and high scholastic view that the essence of God is identical with each of His attributes.101 By the eve of the Reformation the concepts of essence, nature, and attributes lay very close together on the conceptual shelf.102 When describing the incarnation, then, the Reformers and their progeny are just as likely to say that humanity is united with the divine nature as they are to say that it is united with the person of the Logos. This is a subtle but important further erosion of the Fathers’ instrumentalist impulse. For both Lutherans and the Reformed, the doctrine of immutability thus entails that no divine attribute is changed or lost in the incarnation. When wed to immutability, this attributive understanding of Christ’s two natures came to face a deeply pressing, metaphysical problem—now put even more sharply than it had ever been for the Fathers: How can one person be in possession of logically contradictory attributes?

“Addition” and the identity problem Each of the approaches to the doctrine of the incarnation we have considered safeguards (and is indeed determined in part by its orientation to) the doctrine of divine immutability. The more strict instrumentalism of Eusebius and Athanasius holds the humanity of the Word as extrinsic to His being; Cyril specifies that the Word’s becoming is a strictly economic phenomenon; and the compositionalism of the later Chalcedonian-Constantinopolitan tradition tends toward a description of “becoming flesh” as the addition of one essence or nature to the other. In each case, while humanity is necessary to the constitution of the Mediator, it does not touch the divine essence in which the Word of God subsists immanently. Thus the inner life of the triune God remains without change, even as the Word takes on a second nature and becomes compound. Immutability is not a christological problem per se; as we will see, Karl Barth manages to retain this doctrine under very different conditions. It would seem

This is the case, according to Thomas, because God’s essence cannot have accidents (or attributes) that are non-essential or merely potential. ST I, q. 3, a. 6 responsio. See also Augustine, De civitate Dei 11.10 (cf. De Trinitate 1.26; 5.5–6, 11–12; 6.7). 102 Chemnitz, for example, discusses the role of attributes in constituting natures and essences. See Two Natures in Christ, p. 34. 101

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as though the unchanging essence and faithful constancy of God, described in measured and biblical terms, is requisite to the Christian doctrine of God. A God who is mutable in this sense is either potentially fickle and capricious, or is weakened by being dependent upon His own creation. It is questionable whether such a God is capable of overcoming the problem of sin and death. Nevertheless, with respect to the incarnation, immutability does demonstrate the identity problem. Because God is thought not to change in His essence, it seems that the theologian must conclude that God’s becoming human in the person of the Son is necessarily an opus Dei ad extra. It cannot be otherwise, since the compound being of Jesus Christ and the simplicity of the Son are not coextensive. As critics have asked, then, are we any longer speaking of a true incarnation of God and not a theophany?103 Taken from Augustine and standardized particularly by Protestant dogmaticians, the notion of an incarnation by addition is the most sophisticated rendering of this Christology. This draws upon the strong points of the tradition, including Jesus’ composite personhood and the enduring independence of the Word’s divine essence. Here the humanity of the Mediator is entirely authentic, and entirely personal to the Word (something Athanasius was not quite able to achieve in the fourth century). It is essential to Jesus and so to the incarnate Word, though not to the Word as He exists immanently in the life of God. For all its strengths it is at this latter point—the identity problem—that Protestant Christology, too, flags in its inability to make human predications authentically of God the Son. Theologians in the Lutheran tradition recognized this problem and attempted to compensate. Jesus ought to be identified with the Word in His fullness, and not merely as the enfleshed portion of His greater existence. The Word left nothing of Himself behind when He entered into the state of humility and became flesh, and so no other name is given by which He may be known because He is now no other than the God-human, Jesus Christ. This denial of what Lutherans pejoratively called the extra Calvinisticum resulted inevitably in a need to wrestle with the “emptying” or self-limitation of the Word. Under this pressure, and without the same recourse to the Word’s life asarkos, an account of the incarnation had to be rendered that either qualified what it means for God to be without change, or abandoned that ancient doctrine.

For example: H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, p.  244; Isaak August Dorner, Divine Immutability, p. 71.

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Kenosis Rather than maintaining a mode of existence apart from the life of Jesus Christ, Lutheran theologians argued that the Word is found nowhere else than in the Mediator, the man from Nazareth who was crucified and raised from the dead. The respective attributes of human and divine being, however, are incommensurate: finitude and infinity, temporality and eternity, passibility and impassibility, etc. The two natures are not on a sliding scale but are qualitatively different, as far apart as the East is from the West. How then is their coherence possible in a single subject, according to the Chalcedonian pattern, without compromising either humanity or divinity? As a theological interpretation especially of Phil. 2.5–8, the Lutheran solution is that God the Son laid aside or ceased in the use of certain divine attributes in order to make the incarnation metaphysically possible. This is what it meant for Christ to “empty” (ἐκένωσεν) himself and take the “form of a servant” (μορϕὴν δούλου, 2.7). When Jesus was raised from the dead and exalted he laid aside this humility, taking up the divine glory that is rightfully his. By virtue of the communicatio idiomatum, the benefits of divine life were then shared with Jesus’ human nature—making the resurrected Christ omniscient, omnipotent, and (potentially) omnipresent not to the exclusion of his humanity but even in it and with it. Though I have suggested that kenosis is a christological dilemma inherent in the classical two-natures doctrine, it was itself also an attempted solution to the identity problem—one that, at first blush, would seem no less promising than the Reformed extra. Eschewing the less desirable implications of the immanent-economic split, kenotic Christology seems able to identify Jesus directly with the Word without instrumentalizing his humanity. Here the person of the Word is the human Jesus, fully and completely, with nothing of Himself left unincarnate or “behind” the economy. So why has it acquired a bad reputation, particularly with respect to its nineteenth-century forms? Why is kenosis typically judged to be not only a poor solution to the identity problem, but also taken to imply further conceptual difficulties within the doctrine of the incarnation? Need a kenotic account sacrifice divine immutability—as it has often been accused of doing—in order to gain traction against the intransigent problems of classical Christology? After briefly describing this approach in its most prominent forms, I will evaluate it with these questions in mind.

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Three views on kenotic Christology As a consequence of the rejection of the extra Calvinisticum, some form of a kenotic solution was evident from the earliest days of Lutheran theology. In an attempt to mitigate in-house debates in the 1570s, the Formula of Concord rejected any subtraction or diminishment of the divine essence and its properties in the incarnation, allowing for both a voluntary abstention (“He . . . laid it aside”) as well as Luther’s own language of the “concealing” of divine majesty in the state of humiliation (which did not inhibit its occasional use, as in the wedding at Cana).104 But by the early part of the seventeenth century a controversy had erupted between two schools of thought. The Giessen school argued for kenosis as Christ’s renunciation of divine power in his incarnation (κένωσις χρήσεως). These theologians stood in opposition to those of the Tübingen school, who argued for a krypsis or concealed use of divine power in Christ’s state of humility (κρύψις χρήσεως). Arbiters would decide largely in favor of the Giessen position in 1624 (the so-called Saxon Decision), though the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War was more likely responsible for forcing the debate to an abrupt conclusion.105 The two sides were not far apart, by the standards of the controversy two centuries later. The debate concerned whether the incarnate Christ refrained from using his divine power and knowledge (Giessen) or concealed their use (Tübingen). The Giessen position required a distinction between the possession and the use of divine powers.106 The issue here was whether the actualization of the incarnate Christ’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence relied upon his will and activity: Does he continuously know all things, or does he have the potential to know all things if he desires to know them? That is, is his omniscience, etc. a passive state that he continually enjoys or an operatio of which he is capable? If the divine attributes are passive, they do not require a willed action to actualize—rather they are always “on,” so that Christ must exercise them in secret. If the divine powers are active, on the other hand, Christ must exercise his will in order to know a thing, or to be in a place. This had been Martin Chemnitz’s argument for ubiquity: the body and blood of the exalted Christ are not present everywhere but rather everywhere that

Solid Declaration 8.26, 49; cf. 8.25, 64–65, and The Epitome of the Formula of Concord 8.16, 39. Claude Welch, God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Theology, p. 95n.11. Also see Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. I, p. 294. 106 See Welch, God and Incarnation, p. 94n.10; and Isaak August Dorner, History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, vol. II/2, pp. 281–89. 104 105

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Christ willed them to be present (ubivolipraesens).107 The assumed humanity is not incompatible with this mere potential to know all things, and so Christ need only choose to not know all things, exercise all power, or be everywhere present. Following the Saxon Decision, Lutheran orthodoxy’s predominant vision of the divine attributes in Christ’s state of humility was his renunciation or willed nonuse of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. A mere krypsis of divine power was judged an insufficient account of the incarnation. But the kenosis that was advocated in these early generations was by no means as metaphysically extensive as that which emerged in the nineteenth century. Looking back on the Christology of Giessen, Gottfried Thomasius (1802–75) decried the Saxon Decision and argued that this weak form of kenotic renunciation is impossible to maintain. The critical distinction between possession and use of a divine power does not obtain: God’s infinite knowledge and power are not merely potential but at all moments actual, and so in His incarnation the Son had to withdraw and limit Himself. The nineteenth-century kenoticists thus attempted to account for this in such a way that Christ is thought to have divested certain attributes entirely from his person in the state of humility. The most prominent champions of this movement were Thomasius, professor at the University of Erlangen, and Wolfgang Friedrich Gess (1819–91) of Göttingen.108 By the turn of the century kenotic theory had spread to Britain, where its advocates included Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848–1921) and Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936). The movement was sparked by the emergence of historical criticism and its emphasis upon the real humanity of Jesus as a first century Jew, and by the historicizing move in Hegel’s philosophical theology.109 But it is worth noting with Thomas R. Thompson that the kenoticists “did not combine this textual rediscovery of the humanum of Christ in all its observed Chemnitz, Two Natures in Christ, pp. 444, 463–64; cf. Solid Declaration 8.77–8, 92. Thomasius first published Beiträge zur kirchlichen Christologie in 1845, then followed up in 1856 with Christi Person und Werk—accounting for many of his critics’ objections, including the suggestion that he had given up the doctrine of divine immutability. To date only the middle third of the latter work has been translated into English (and that only partially) as Christ’s Person and Work, in Welch, God and Incarnation, pp.  31–101. (Further citations from Thomasius are from this edition.) Gess’s like-minded Die Lehre von der Person Christi arrived on the scene in 1856, and Christi Person und Werk nach Christ Selbstzeugniss und den Zeugnissel der Apostel in 1870. The latter work has been republished under a number of similar titles, and in English as The Scripture Doctrine of the Person of Christ. 109 The latter point is suggested by Bruce L. McCormack, in “Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8.3 (2006), p. 245. It was particularly Johann Ludwig König who suggested a kenotic Christology in Hegelian terms, in his 1844 Die Menschwerdung Gottes als eine in Christus geschehene und in der christlichen Kirche noch geschehende. 107 108

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limitations and development with the growing anti-metaphysical sentiments or lingering creedal skepticism of the day.”110 Rather they attempted to explicate the being of Christ in a kenotic fashion within the boundaries of Chalcedonian Christology—as a coming of the Word of God from above to us below. Thomasius self-consciously desired “to be able to hold fast to [the chief pillars of our church’s Christology] without inner contradiction,” and believed his own solution of divine limitation to be “quite in the middle of the ecclesiastical stream, wholly in the course of the Christological ideas and tendencies of our Lutheran doctrine.”111 The focus of this school is upon the capacity of a human person to possess divine attributes. According to the kenoticists certain of these are incommensurate with the Son’s human existence, suggesting a problem with the incarnation as a metaphysical possibility. (It is worth observing that this took place less than a generation before Wilhelm Herrmann and Albrecht Ritschl called for a theology “without metaphysics.”112) To explain how one who is very God can come to exist as very human, the kenoticists suggested (in a variety of ways) that the Word of God set aside some attributes of divinity in order to bring about His existence as a human agent. Thomasius and Gess are the true advocates of kenosis by divestment. The Son’s entrance into the status exinanitionis is “a divesting of the divine mode of being in favour of the humanly, creaturely form of existence,” according to Thomasius, “and eo ipso a renunciation of the divine glory which he had from the beginning with the Father and exercised vis-à-vis the world, governing and ruling it throughout.”113 But this must not mean the loss of anything that is essential to God; Thomasius, too, affirms the doctrine of immutability and the soteriological need for Christ to be fully God. That which is divested, therefore, cannot be essential to divinity. On the other hand, immutability must Thompson, “Nineteenth-Century Kenotic Christology,” p. 77. Thomasius, Christ’s Person, p. 90. 112 Ritschl’s Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung appeared in three volumes between 1870 and 1874, and the essay “Theologie und Metaphysik” in 1881 (available in English in Philip Hefner (ed.), Three Essays of Albrecht Ritschl). Ritschl’s argument that only Christ himself, as presented in the gospels, can be the epistemological basis for Christian theology was to have particular influence over Karl Barth, and stood in sharp contrast to the sort of metaphysical debates over the “nature” of natures in mid-nineteenth-century German theology. Herrmann was Barth’s own teacher, having published Die Metaphysik in der Theologie in 1876 and Die Religion im Verhältnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit in 1879. 113 Christ’s Person, p. 48. Ernst Sartorius, frequently credited as a forerunner of kenotic Christology, in fact stressed the profundity of the Son’s exinanition but explicitly rejected any loss of divine attributes. See Sartorius, The Doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ, 22; cf. The Doctrine of Divine Love, pp.  21f. He is therefore more properly associated with the Giessen school and the Lutheran orthodoxy of his day. 110 111

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not be defined in such a way that it becomes a severe restriction upon God’s determination of that which He wills to do and to be. In this case immutability would functionally become a divine imperfection, threatening the possibility of incarnation.114 In his interpretation of Phil. 2.7 Thomasius distinguishes himself in two ways. First, he suggests a distinction between God’s immanent attributes (including “absolute power” or freedom, as well as truth, holiness, and love) and God’s relative attributes (His omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence). The incarnate Word retains the former in full; the latter He can relinquish without any change in His being.115 These are not essential to who God is in se because God only possesses them with respect to creation: God is omnipresent, for example, with respect to all the spaces of His created universe; God is omnipotent in contrast to creatures, who are limited in power. This is because, Thomasius believed, all attributes are derived from one’s relations—“modalities of a thing in relation to other being”—and the immanent attributes of God spring from the trinitarian relations.116 Since creation is not essential to God’s being, neither are those attributes He possesses relative to it. If this were not so, then creation would have enhanced God’s being.117 While the divine Word accommodates Himself to creaturely existence, then, “nothing is lacking to him which is essential for God to be God.”118 There is nothing on the side of human ontology, no finitum non capax infiniti, that stands in the way of the Son coming to exist as human, since Thomasius believes that the creation of men and women in the image of God provided for the general possibility of the incarnation: natura humana capax divinae.119 Second, Thomasius suggests that the agent of this self-limitation is the preexistent Christ, the Logos asarkos (because, as the tradition widely attests, it is He who assumes a human nature)—and not the incarnate Christ who already stands within the state of humility. The Logos is “the person-forming principle . . . the ego [Ich] of the divine-human person which has come into being through

Christ’s Person, p. 100. Christ’s Person, pp. 67–74. Thomasius knows that his whole argument, and its orthodoxy, hangs on whether this distinction between immanent and relative attributes obtains. See the response to Dorner in Christ’s Person, pp. 88–101 (especially pp. 96–97). 116 For a discussion of this distinction, which is further clarified in Thomasius’ earlier Beiträge, see Welch, God and Incarnation, pp. 67–69, footnotes 10 and 11. 117 Christ’s Person, p. 73. 118 Christ’s Person, p. 56. 119 Christ’s Person, p. 40; cf. 60–61, 84. This is also why the resurrected Jesus can take up those divested attributes without ceasing to be human: as a “transfigured nature,” his humanity “received nothing thereby that would contradict the essence of the human intrinsically” (ibid., p. 79). 114 115

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him.”120 Since the one who self-limits is the Word in the fullness of His existence, there is no person of the Logos who “surpasses,” “hovers above,” or “lies beyond or behind” the Word who is enfleshed.121 Thomasius thus believes that the Word’s assumption of human essence must also entail a “divesting of the divine,”122 and once He has taken on flesh this act of humiliation is then continued in His human existence—all the way to the cross. Gess provided a more extreme account of kenotic divestment, suggesting the Word’s transformation into a human subject. The eternal consciousness of the Logos is temporarily extinguished, as are His relations to the Father and the Spirit, so that the man Jesus gradually came to an awareness of his divine identity and mission.123 According to Gess the Logos laid all this aside, and with it His omnipotence and omniscience, so that “the flesh and blood which he took upon himself became a determining power.”124 The older distinction between Jesus’ possession and use of divine powers was inconsequential, since the absence of the consciousness of the Logos in the man Jesus meant that whatever was only potential could, in fact, never be awakened and called forth—at least not until his divine consciousness was again realized. Thus there is de facto no difference between nonuse and nonpossession.125 If this were not so—if from the beginning the incarnate Logos recalled His eternal life with the Father and His “ante-mundane glory”—the authentic human development spoken of in Lk. 2.52 would have been false, and His obedience to the Father a foregone conclusion.126 Most noteworthy here for our purposes is that, in contrast to Thomasius, Gess simply denies the immutability doctrine outright.127 Because the Logos is the omnipotent God, the power to suspend His own self-consciousness cannot be denied to Him—“the Logos would not be omnipotent if he had no power over himself.”128 This entails a strict and direct identity of Jesus with the Christ’s Person, p. 56; see further pp. 44ff., especially the exegesis of Phil. 2 on pp. 51–53. Dorner opposed this exegetical move, saying that Lutheran theologians have irrefutably demonstrated that the subject of Phil. 2.5f. is Jesus and not the Logos (Divine Immutability, p. 66n.43). 121 Christ’s Person, pp. 46–47. In the absence of an immanent mode of the Word’s existence, a Calvinist extra, the instrumentalist inclination to identify the Word as the hypostasis of the union is here seized and made to serve the rather anti-instrumentalist priority of the God-human. 122 Christ’s Person, p. 56. 123 See Gess, Scripture Doctrine, pp. 318–20, 340–45, 359–403. So also Jesus’ holiness and his will to subject himself to the Father’s plan developed gradually, since “he learned obedience” (Heb. 5.8). 124 Scripture Doctrine, pp. 344–45. 125 Scripture Doctrine, pp. 322–23. 126 Scripture Doctrine, pp. 352, 374–78. 127 Scripture Doctrine, pp. 329–35. This controversial move he shares with Karl Liebner, who developed his own kenotic theory in Die christliche Dogmatik aus dem christologischen Princip dargestellt. 128 Scripture Doctrine, p. 355. 120

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eternal Word (they are the same “personality”129): without remainder the Logos became the human Jesus, who then gradually realized his divine consciousness and returned to the state he had departed. This is the extreme edge of kenotic forms of Christology which, while not inevitable, certainly carries Lutheranism’s christological priorities to their logical conclusion. Critics of kenotic theory attempted to cut out the heart of the argument: that God’s relative attributes are not essential to Him (Thomasius), and that God is mutable (Gess). Isaak Dorner considers in some depth the proposals of Johann Ludwig König, Karl Theodor Liebner, Thomasius, and Gess, as well as briefly looking at other figures in the school.130 He believes that each kenoticist fails, in his own way, to either preserve immutability or to justify its compromise. But Dorner’s own aim is not to defend the ancient dogma—for he, too, is convinced that there is a “christological problem” inherent in the tradition, which kenoticists are attempting to solve. Dorner therefore offers a reconstruction of the doctrine, one that identifies the unchanging character of God not with His metaphysical being but with God’s “ethical self-identity,” evidenced supremely in God’s love.131 A third approach to kenotic Christology emerged in Britain in the early part of the twentieth century, as an attempt to rehabilitate the work of the previous generation while accounting for the arguments of its critics. Hugh Ross Mackintosh keenly expressed what he saw to be the demands of the incarnation upon Christian doctrine: We are faced by a Divine self-reduction which entailed obedience, temptation, and death. So that religion has a vast stake in the kenosis as a fact, whatever the difficulties as to its method may be. No human life of God is possible without a prior self-adjustment of deity. The Son must empty Himself in order that from within mankind He may declare the Father’s name, offer the great sacrifice, triumph over death . . .132

British kenoticism was intentionally more reserved and less speculative than its continental counterparts, so that—akin to Dorner—“moral and personalistic categories of thought will edge out philosophic and ontological ones.”133 The

Scripture Doctrine, p. 318; cf. similar identity statements on pp. 326, 328, 360. Dorner, Divine Immutability, pp. 49–81. Divine Immutability, pp. 131–95 (quotation on p. 176). Dorner suggests that this understanding of immutability has a basis in the Old Testament (pp. 86–88). On the “christological problem,” see pp. 55f. 132 Mackintosh, Person of Jesus Christ, p. 470. A more detailed introduction to Mackintosh’s moderate kenoticism is in Thompson, “Nineteenth-Century Kenotic Christology,” pp. 87–95. 133 Thompson, “Nineteenth-Century Kenotic Christology,” p. 88. 129 130 131

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incarnation is a moral act for Mackintosh, with the love of God in Christ ultimately determining even what divine omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence are thought to be. He admits that Thomasius’ distinction between essential and so-called relative divine attributes cannot be maintained, though like Gess he questions the legitimacy of the doctrine of immutability. The attributes God has with respect to creation are those which He came to have when creation began; but they are not for that reason any less essential to God.134 The Word, then, must retain all of the divine attributes in order to be fully God—even though God Himself can change. Rather than divestment, to explain kenosis Mackintosh further develops a subtly different point that had been suggested by Thomasius: the Word’s divine powers are “transposed” from actuality to potency (Potenz). “It is possible to conceive the Son . . . as now possessing all the qualities of Godhead in the form of concentrated potency rather than of full actuality, δυνάμει rather than ἐνεργεία.”135 Rather than divesting Himself of divine power, or electing not to make use of it, the incarnate Word displaces His power to the realm of potentiality. This is simply by virtue of the nature of that created existence into which He enters: “When the Eternal passes into time,” for example, “. . . knowledge for Him must take on a discursive and progressive character.”136 The Word could still make use of this power, were He to actualize its potency once again; thus the view is distinct from divestment. But, as He exists in the forma humana, the Word is truly limited in knowledge and power. Despite his affection for Thomasius, it is difficult at this point to distinguish Mackintosh’s moderate kenoticism from the “willed non-use” theory of the seventeenth century. Mackintosh desires to affirm that Jesus is still in possession of all his divine attributes, but that they are not so close at hand to his agency that he is at every moment staving off the flood of knowledge and power natural to him. The attributes are also further qualified along moral lines, such that (for example) omnipotence is not “omnipotence simpliciter” but the power of God to do whatever He may will.137 This is an omnipotence that is deeply conditioned by God’s love for His children. This is the only (and very subtle) difference between Mackintosh and the old Giessen school: that rather than actively willing, 136 137 134 135

Person of Jesus Christ, p. 476. Person of Jesus Christ, p. 477 (emphasis in original); cf. Thomasius, Christ’s Person, p. 96. Person of Jesus Christ, p. 477. Person of Jesus Christ, pp.  477–79. This nuancing of the divine attributes remains important to modern advocates of kenotic Christologies, as well. See, for example, Ronald Feenstra, “A Kenotic Christological Method for Understanding the Divine Attributes,” in Evans (ed.), Exploring Kenotic Christology, pp. 139–64. Thomas V. Morris, though he rejects kenosis, makes a similar argument about just what form of omniscience (or omnipotence, or omnipresence) is “necessary” to God (The Logic of God Incarnate, pp. 99–100).

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moment by moment, not to use his divine power, Jesus is passively refraining from actualizing that which he still possesses but which in the incarnation has been made only potential.

“Emptying” and the identity problem At the end of the nineteenth century there was little room left for a kenotic account of Christ’s person—but for classical Christology the problem of the Word’s self-limitation remained unresolved. The problem that the kenoticists tried to solve was no different from that faced by the Fathers of the church: How can a finite human also be the infinite God? Does the incarnation of the Word not imply some sort of divestment or suspension of His power and knowledge, even if only in the economy? Thomasius believed that “every representation [of the one divine-human person] which does not allow the confession, ‘The man Jesus Christ is God,’ contradicts our Christian consciousness.”138 To fail in this confession is to threaten the doctrine of the unity of Christ’s person. Likewise, in his moral reading of Christology Mackintosh too anticipated our identity problem. He criticized the classical two-natures doctrine for dividing Jesus against himself, importing into the life of Christ “an incredible and thoroughgoing dualism”—suggesting that here “God is not after all living a human life” but “is still holding Himself at a distance from its experience and conditions.”139 Rather than offering kenosis as a solution to this dilemma per se, Mackintosh was willing to dispense with the metaphysical doctrine and look to the gospel history of Jesus. Whether by means of a renunciation, a divestment, or a withdrawal to potency, kenotic Christologies are concerned with reconciling the being of the eternal God in and with the being of the human Jesus. It should be clear that this is not necessarily a replacement for Chalcedonian Christology (though it has been used to that end) but better understood as a way of interpreting Chalcedon—“a quest for a coherent Christological orthodoxy . . . an attempt to eliminate what were considered the debilitating paradoxes of the two-natures model.”140 This is why I have identified kenosis as a tension in classical Christology. More precisely, Chalcedon itself suggests a problem that kenoticists attempt (in a variety of ways) Thomasius, Christ’s Person, p. 37. Mackintosh, Person of Jesus Christ, p. 294. 140 Thompson, “Nineteenth-Century Kenotic Christology,” pp. 109–10; cf. Stephen T. Davis, “Is Kenosis Orthodox?” in Evans (ed.), Exploring Kenotic Christology, and “The Metaphysics of Kenosis,” in Marmodoro and Hill (eds), The Metaphysics of the Incarnation. 138 139

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to resolve—that is, how a single person can possess mutually exclusive attributes without undergoing change. But, because they either deny the immutability of God or strip out God’s more difficult attributes as non-essential, none of the kenotic solutions proposed is acceptable to orthodoxy—leaving the original problem still entrenched in the doctrine of the hypostatic union. In the Lutheran solution, the question of Jesus’ identity with the Word in fact becomes sharper still. The difficulty with kenotic Christology, for all its promise and its faults, is that it attempts to engage that problem on the same metaphysical grounds as that of the classical doctrine—that is as a person possessing an attribute that appears logically incommensurate with a nature. This, its own failure, is the lesson of the history of kenoticism.

Divine impassibility One final topic remains to illustrate the identity problem as congenital to the Christology of the ancient tradition. As we have seen, Cyril posited two modes of the Word of God: His immanent life in the eternity of His relations with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and also His economic life in which the Word entered into creation and took on the form of a servant. Along with the Fathers’ careful attention to the Creator-creature distinction, this funds Cyril’s seemingly paradoxical affirmation that the Word “suffered impassibly”—that is, when Jesus was put to death he both suffered and did not suffer. The event of the cross is thus articulated in conformity to the doctrine of God, which places an important qualification upon the way in which the Word enjoys a human existence: what the Word does He does humanly, or in accordance with His human nature. According to Cyril, experiences such as fear, suffering, and death therefore ought to be predicated of Him only under particular qualification. Statements such as “God wept” or “God was crucified” are therefore theologically legitimate only if it is clear that the subject here is God in the flesh and not God as He exists outwith the incarnation. Within the hypostatic union it is improper to say that the divine nature itself suffers; God does not suffer “nakedly” (γύμνως).141 Suffering and death are distinctly creaturely undertakings; the Word experiences them in and through the created nature and not in the divine life that persists beyond the confines of flesh. Despite Cyril’s insistence that after the incarnation the Word was “no longer without Gavrilyuk, Suffering, pp. 155–56.

141

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the flesh as he was of old before the time of his incarnation”142 he cannot permit that the suffering of the Word is anything but an economic phenomenon: “the suffering belongs to the economy, with God the Word reckoning those things that pertain to the flesh as his very own because of the ineffable union, and yet remaining outside suffering in so far as pertains to his own nature, since God is impassible.”143 It must be the Word and none other who is the subject of Christ’s suffering, says Cyril, but this is possible only in His second mode. This is the great benefit of the modal distinction—it makes sense of the paradox of “impassible suffering:” “Since the manner of the economy allows him blamelessly to choose both to suffer in the flesh, and not to suffer in the Godhead (for the selfsame was at once God and man) then our opponents surely argue in vain, and foolishly debase the power of the mystery.”144 Those who think that the single subjectivity of Christ means that the one true Son of God suffered in His Godhead “do not understand the economy.”145 Like Athanasius, Cyril believes that the Word’s enduring transcendence over suffering makes possible the restoration of the human condition. Christ acts as human without losing who he is as the Son of God. Otherwise we would have no touchstone of divinity to approach. Cyril’s Christology is regarded by many as the definitive word on the topic of impassibility,146 to the unfortunate neglect of subsequent developments in the doctrine of the incarnation and the way in which Jesus wills and acts according to his two natures. In entering first into the history of the doctrine I will attempt to demonstrate that the impassibility of the Word is not properly understood without these later clarifications. In particular we will see that dyothelitism and the communicatio operationum refine or even correct Cyriline Christology in an important way. We must next give close attention to the way in which activities and passions are predicated of the incarnate Son according to one nature or the other—the strategy of reduplication—and the Nestorian danger that lurks there. Finally, I will conclude by evaluating the impact of the Word’s impassibility upon the identity problem.

Second Letter to Succensus 2. Scholia 33; cf. 13, 34–35, and Second Letter to Succensus 2, 4. Unity of Christ, p. 118; cf. 130. Second Letter to Succensus 4. Cyril denies that his own position is theopaschite, while accusing his Nestorian opponents of avoiding the confession “that the Word of God is the Saviour who gave his own blood for us,” saying instead that this is true only of Jesus as a separate and distinct man. 146 For example: Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? and Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God. Both also offer a treatment of impassibility leading up to Cyril. 145 142 143 144

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The cross and the communication of operations As we have seen, the bishops at Constantinople II determined that affirmations such as “one of the Trinity was crucified” are indeed theologically appropriate— for the same reasons Mary may be called Theotokos. However, such statements require clarification of the manner in which he suffered (i.e. humanly). Another century further the challenge of monothelitism prompted the bishops at Constantinople III to affirm that Jesus has two wills and two energies of operation—one human and one divine. In all that he does, both of his natures are involved in ways fitting to each. The Council of Chalcedon had incorporated into its confession Leo’s position on the coordinated activity of the two natures of Christ: “The activity of each form is what is proper to it in communion with the other: that is, the Word performs what belongs to the Word, and the flesh accomplishes what belongs to the flesh. One of these performs brilliant miracles, the other sustains acts of violence.”147 Therefore when Jesus performs an activity (or passively experiences it), this is true of his person but only of one of his natures. Raising Lazarus is therefore regarded as a divine thing to do; and dying on the cross is something very human. Constantinople III reaffirmed this: Jesus “has two natures shining forth in his one subsistence in which he demonstrated the miracles and the sufferings throughout his entire providential dwelling here,” and the difference of these natures is made known “in that each nature wills and performs the things that are proper to it in a communion with the other.” Thus Christ’s two natural wills and energies “meet in correspondence for the salvation of the human race.”148 Leo’s idea implies a parsing of the acts of Jesus so that they are either divinely or humanly sourced—mitigated by the fact that they are then performed by the Word or the flesh “in communion with the other.” The Council reinforced this language while pointing past it to the correspondence of Christ’s two wills and energies (or “principles of action”). This enabled medieval theologians to better comprehend the divine and human natures not as acting subjects in their own right, but as contributing their own proper will and energy to the cooperative act performed by the one person. While Leo’s formula has been allowed to stand, then, with dyoenergism and dyothelitism in view it has been interpreted more in keeping with the theandricism suggested by Maximus.

Leo, Tome to Flavian (Tanner, Decrees, p. 79). Exposition of Faith of the Third Council of Constantinople (Tanner, Decrees, pp. 129–30).

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Indeed, summarizing the orthodox faith a century later, John of Damascus articulated the common operations in such a way that further strengthened the Council’s position—or at least made its intensions more explicit by extending “theandric” language from the energies to Christ’s personal activity, as we have seen. John maintains that although passibility is only proper to the human nature, divinity is in no way absent from the personal activity of suffering (even if it is not moved by it). The Son does not suffer apart from His deity but, we might say, in spite of it. As for other things, such as miracles, John insists that while the divine nature is the efficient cause of wonder-working, both natures cooperate in all that Christ does. He performed miracles in his one subsistence, but there is no sense in which we ought to think of the divine nature as acting alone (any more than the human nature is alone in Jesus’ suffering). Leo’s “in communion with the other” is given much greater force by the communicatio operationum: Christ, then, energises according to both His natures, and either nature energises in Him in communication with the other, the Word performing through the authority and power of its divinity all the actions proper to the Word, i.e. all acts of supremacy and sovereignty, and the body performing all the actions proper to the body, in obedience to the will of the Word that is united to it, and of whom it has become a distinct part.149

In amending Leo’s famous statement John has retained his splitting of “the Word” and “the body” into distinct grammatical subjects—but it is important to recognize that, like Leo, he has in mind the one subsistence as the agent of Christ’s acts. (If it were not so, if “the Word” and “flesh” were themselves taken to be acting subjects, we would find ourselves within full-fledged Nestorianism—something of which Leo was indeed accused by the “neo-Chalcedonian” monophysites.) As with the wills, the energies of both natures are in fact mediated by the person in whom they subsist, and result in a single action—a healing of leprosy, or walking upon the water. When Jesus calls forth Lazarus from the tomb it is divine power that raises him, yet the human voice that commands him to “come forth.” The human energy steps out upon the surface of the water, and the divine energy grants that the feet do not sink. In these and many other examples we can see that the two natures of Christ are energized and cooperate to a single effect. This somewhat obscure explanation of the way in which the God-human acts is critical to the tradition’s continuing defense of the Word’s impassibility. It is surprising, then, that John retreats from this principle of natural co-operation EF III.15.

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when he reaches the cross. By the time he arrives at the locus of Christology (Book III) John has already described the divine essence as immutable and impassible by virtue of its simplicity and perfection.150 This now controls the way in which he conceives of the role of Christ’s divine nature at the crucifixion: The Word of God then itself endured all in the flesh, while His divine nature which alone was passionless remained void of passion. For since the one Christ, Who is a compound of divinity and humanity, and exists in divinity and humanity, truly suffered, that part which is capable of passion suffered as it was natural it should. . . . But the divine part which is void of passion does not share in the suffering of the body.151

John’s vivid analogy is that of an axe hewing a tree standing under the rays of the sun. The fibers of the tree are split but the sunlight remains uncleft, for it is the property only of the tree to be susceptible to the stroke of the axe. In the same way, when water is poured over flaming steel the fire suffers from the water, but it is not the nature of steel to be destroyed by water. Though divinity remains inseparably present in the composite Christ who suffers on Golgotha, it remains passionless in the experience. John’s preference for the compositional model here becomes a justification for the same sort of parsing that Leo had done: de facto, the activity itself (and not only the energy from whence it is born) is only human. What is it that the divine energy is contributing to an act that is supposedly theandric? It is difficult for John to maintain a true communicatio at this point, where the two natures evidently have diametrically opposed properties. He can only conclude that the suffering of the one person is indeed isolated to the passible nature, saying, “His divine nature never endured the Cross.”152 Because his Christology is under the control of a prior notion of God as immovable, John cannot press the common actualization of the Savior’s two energies into the sphere of the Passion. The divine nature is present on the cross but utterly unaffected, adding nothing to the most important act of Jesus’ life—other than the decree that it take place. This act, it would seem, is the one moment that is not theandric. The unity of operations in the incarnation suggests a greater role for the divine nature on the cross than mere passionless presence. The Protestant scholastics See EF I.2–4, 8, 14. John’s view of passibility is shaped by his understanding of movement, not the experience of pain. Passion is the opposite of energy: to have energy is to be self-moved, while passion is one’s movement by another. In another sense, energy is movement in harmony with nature while passion is at variance with nature. See EF II.22–23. 151 EF III.26. 152 EF III.3. 150

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later sought to be more consistent in their use of the communicatio operationum by assigning a real task to the divine nature on the cross—while yet maintaining its impassibility. Turretin, for example, suggested that the divine nature contributes to the one work its value and dignity. Or again: To lay down his life and die and to take it up again and rise from the dead are rightly said of Jesus’ human nature; but the lordship over his life in laying it down and the power to raise himself belong to his divine nature (cf. Jn 10.17–18).153 These later thinkers shared the conviction that suffering and dying are particularly human capacities  — and so the God-human endured these things as man or in his humanity. Such qualifiers distinguish between the natural energies in Jesus’ activity; but are they sufficiently careful in affirming their union and coordination, as well? We turn next to consider the strengths and weaknesses of such forms of predication.

The strategy of reduplication The strategy of reduplication—predicating some things of Jesus Christ qua God and others qua human—owes its origins largely to Leo’s Tome. The Council of Chalcedon follows this when it states that Jesus is “consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity.”154 Reduplication is employed to take advantage of Christ’s duality of natures in order to explain the logical validity of predicating contradictory attributes of the same person. Turretin offers a concise explanation: “Contradictories cannot agree in the same subject, in the same manner and in the same respect. But to be dependent and independent, finite and infinite belong to Christ in different respects . . . the former with respect to the human nature; the latter with respect to the divine.”155 As a Chalcedonian notion, reduplication represents something of a concession to Antioch. It makes use of the duality of natures to explain Jesus’ activity in a dualist way—identifying human acts and divine acts to be, in a logical sense, each distinct from the other nature—even while Christ’s person is singular. In the years before the Council Cyril in fact criticized this way of predicating acts to Jesus according to only one nature: If anyone distributes between the two persons or hypostases the expressions used either in the gospels or in the apostolic writings, whether they are used by the holy writers of Christ or by him about himself, and ascribes some to him as Turretin, Institutes, p. 383; cf. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 445–46. Definition of Chalcedon (Tanner, Decrees, p. 86, emphasis mine). 155 Turretin, Institutes, p. 317. 153 154

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to a man, thought of separately from the Word from God, and others, as befitting God, to him as to the Word from God the Father, let him be anathema.156

Here Cyril is obviously speaking of a consequence of Nestorius’ two persons: one cannot ascribe some actions to the Word and others to the man. But the worry would certainly extend to Leo’s two natures, as well. Cyril’s concern is not that attributes such as passibility are proper to one nature in particular, but that an activity might be predicated of the one Christ in a way exclusive of the other nature. When Scripture says that Christ is ignorant of the day of his return, or stricken with anguish in Gethsemane, or that he paid for the church with his blood, these are always true of his single person. At the end of the road of reduplicative predication appear to be Nestorius’ two subjects. The fact that reduplication was to some degree endorsed by Chalcedon and has since been used as the primary way of explaining the activity of Christ according to his dual natures suggests, however, that this “distribution” may be used in a more or less orthodox fashion. In this context, I suggest, not all prepositional phrases are equal: one must be extraordinarily careful how the person and work of Christ are delimited to a single nature, lest the spectre of Nestorianism creep in. In short, and in keeping with both Cyril’s caution and the communication of operations, one must exercise care to make human or divine predications of Christ in unity with the other nature, and not in exclusion of it. That is the lesson of the seventh century: while energies of operation are natural (and so dual in Christ), the act they together produce is personal (and so single and united). Duality is to be strictly isolated to the natures, and not permitted to reach the level of the person and his activity. To that end let us briefly consider a number of reduplicative formulae, in order to identify ways in which this strategy may be employed with more deleterious effects. 1 Pet. 4.1 offers some precedent when the apostle says that Christ suffered for us “in the flesh” or, literally, “fleshly” (Χριστο ον παθόντος ὑπὲρ ἡμν σαρκὶ). As it lacks a preposition for the dative form of σάρξ, the construction is somewhat ambiguous for our purposes. But literature on the incarnation, both ancient and modern, is replete with phraseology such as “in his humanity,” “according to the flesh,” “by virtue of his humanity,” and “as (or qua) man.”157 Though these are used interchangeably (and usually uncritically), they are by no means linguistically synonymous. To say that an event (such as suffering) takes place in (ἐν) a nature is not the same as to say that it takes place Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius (Anathema 4). Cyril uses the Petrine “in flesh” (σαρκὶ, also without a preposition) throughout his twelfth anathema against Nestorius.

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according to (κατὰ) a nature.158 Is it Christ’s nature or his person that is the agent of performance? It would seem that it is the person and not a nature that acts;159 and so if we agree that passibility is a creaturely attribute then it is proper to say that Christ suffers in his person by virtue of his humanity. That is to say that this nature contributes to his theandric person the ability to feel physical and psychological pain, and to die. On the other hand prepositions such as “in,” when used reduplicatively, locate not simply the attribute of passibility but the event of suffering within the nature itself. To say that Christ suffered in the flesh (or human nature) is not merely to affirm that it is flesh that properly feels pain; this and similar constructions identify one nature, to the exclusion of the other, as the very locus of suffering. Put otherwise: this form of predication suggests that the unio personalis is the terminus a quo of the act of suffering, but the human nature is its terminus ad quem—that is, where the act finally comes to rest. Strictly speaking, it is difficult to acknowledge such usage as compatible with Constantinopolitan orthodoxy.160 It does affirm, however—and this in common with the ancient majority—that the assumed nature is inessential to God the Son. This criticism does not by any means invalidate the strategy of reduplication; but finer precision is necessary. Theologians must further distinguish between the attribute that provides for the reality of an experience and the actual event and its agent. If activity remains on the level of the person, and that person is both divine and human, then the God-human Jesus suffers theandrically by virtue of his humanity. The one nature provides the attribute of passibility, but the experience itself is not undergone in the exclusion of divinity. And the subject of that experience is none other than God the Son—lest we once again run afoul of the identity problem by concluding that if God is impassible then suffering must be restricted to human nature as its locus. Thomas Weinandy employs reduplication in his apology for divine impassibility, stating (with the tradition) that one must specify the manner in

With respect to the nature of men and women, the construction κατὰ σάρξ has precedence most prominently in Romans 8. Creatures live according to the flesh, while sin is condemned in the flesh (ἐν τ σαρκί 8:3). 159 That the nature is a conceptual abstraction and not a subject is emphasized by the Reformed scholastics: “The act of a person cannot belong to the nature which is not a person. And if a personal act belonged to the flesh of Christ, it would actually be a person” (Turretin, Institutes, p. 331; cf. 380, on Leo’s statement). 160 The construct ἐν σαρκὶ. in the New Testament is generally used with reference to the sphere of the mortal world, and not to the Word’s human existence and activity. See, for example: Rom. 8.8–9; Gal. 2.20; Phil. 1.22; 2 Cor. 10.3. 158

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which the Son suffered: He did so as man, that is, in His mode of existence as one who is subject to the full breadth of human experiences. Who is it who truly experiences the authentic, genuine, and undiminished reality of human suffering? None other than the divine Son of God! He who is in one being (homoousion) with the Father. What is the manner in which he experiences the whole reality of human suffering? As man! It is actually the Son of God who lives a comprehensive human life, and so it is the Son who, as man, experiences all facets of this human life, including suffering and death.161

By arguing that the Son suffers as man Weinandy affirms not merely that suffering is a uniquely creaturely activity, but indeed that the Son has a distinct mode of existence that does not (and, indeed, cannot) suffer—for He remains “unconditionally transcendent” even as he is “unconditionally immanent as man.”162 Within His person, then, the event of the cross is psilanthropically isolated to one ontological mode. How should we evaluate the adverbial phrase “as man” (perhaps ὡς ἄνθρωπος)? Taken on its own it appears more ambiguous than “in the flesh” or “by virtue of human nature.” Weinandy clearly wishes to locate the event of suffering in the hypostatic person and not in one nature, and for this reason it appears to be a use fitting with the Chalcedonian formula. It is because the Son has the nature of a human creature that he suffers. On the other hand, one can imagine improper uses of the same phrase “as man.” If it is suggested that Christ exists in two ways, here as man and there as God, then divinity may be excluded from the personal act and the theandric unity surely torn asunder. “As man” risks such an implication— that the human Christ is distinct from the divine Christ. In fact, the two modes of Christ’s existence are not divine and human, as Weinandy intimates: in the economic mode Christ’s existence is never human simpliciter, but only divinehuman. And so for clarity we can only endorse the strategy of reduplication visà-vis the phrases “by virtue of,” “according to,” or “with respect to” the flesh (κατὰ or περί, as well as 1 Peter’s more ambiguous dative).163

Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, p. 201; cf. 204–6. A similar sentiment is in Myk Habets, “Putting the ‘extra’ Back into Calvinism,” Scottish Journal of Theology 62.4 (2009), p. 454: “It is what the Son of God does as man that is salvific. . . . For God to die would make no sense at all’ (emphasis mine). 162 Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, p. 213. 163 I am further conscious of the fact that in reduplication “humanity” and “flesh” may bear different meanings, as well, especially where human nature is defined in terms of a body-soul concretion, rather than as a collection of attributes. How this distinction might further complicate matters is not readily apparent to me in the uses of reduplication I have encountered—for example, no one suggests that suffering “in the flesh” means that Jesus did not suffer in the rest of his humanity, including his soul—though further clarification here is warranted. 161

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What remains, then, is to note the importance of predicating attributes and activities of Jesus Christ on two levels, by means of the communicatio idiomatum. Classical Christology affirms that if human nature has the attribute of passibility, then the person in whom that nature subsists is also passible. The attributes of both natures are rightly attributed to the person of the union—and that realiter and not merely verbalis.164 When the benefits of reduplication have been acknowledged, then, it is vital to also predicate the same of the person of Christ simpliciter. Jesus Christ dies as man—and also Jesus Christ dies. Once again, the point here is that the precision provided by reduplication may not be permitted to imply that the other nature is excluded from the suffering activity. If it does—if we can say only that Jesus suffered as man and not also simpliciter, then the strategy has effectively reversed the direction of the communication of attributes. Rather than speaking of the natures contributing their attributes to the person whose life is narrated in Scripture, those things experienced by the person are parsed back to only one nature as the locus of its real occurrence, its significance, or its effects. Such was the unfortunate statement of a Roman council meeting in ad 382 when it declared that the one who felt the pain of the cross was not God Himself but actually “the flesh and soul which Christ, the Son of God, had taken to himself.”165 It is this strategic reversal that is not justified—which the church indicated in its later development of the operationum. Jesus acts ever theandrically: his divine and human natures, including their respective wills and energies of operation, are involved in everything that Jesus does. This does not mean they are involved in the same way, of course, but that each nature contributes to the one act that which is appropriate to it. The account of impassibility offered by Weinandy, as well as that of Paul Gavrilyuk, is therefore somewhat hindered by their reliance on fifth-century thought. This leads Weinandy to conclude that “within the Incarnation the Son of God never does anything as God. If he did, he would be acting as God in a man. This the Incarnation will never permit. All that Jesus did as the Son of God was done as a man.”166 The intent is clear and commendable— Cyril argued vehemently against Nestorius that this communication was not merely a figure of speech. See Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, pp. 436f., 452–56. The debate was repeated by Martin Luther and Huldrich Zwingli in the early sixteenth century. See Martin Luther, “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper”; Huldrich Zwingli, “Friendly Exegesis, That Is, Exposition of the Matter of the Eucharist, to Martin Luther. 165 Tome of Damasus, in Henricus Denzinger and Adolfus Schonmetzer (eds), Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum, p.  69 (cited in Emery, “The Immutability of the God of Love,” p. 29). 166 Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, p. 205; cf. Paul L. Gavrilyuk, “God’s Impassible Suffering in the Flesh: The Promise of Paradoxical Christology,” in Keating and White (eds), Divine Impassibility, p. 147. 164

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but it is lacking the nuance offered by seventh- and eighth-century theandricism. The Son’s mode of economic life is never merely human. Finally, we can admit that Robin Le Poidevin’s critique hits very close to the mark when he says that the strategy of reduplication, while a convenient formula, leaves the hard work still to be done.167 The one subject Jesus Christ remains both omniscient and limited in knowledge, both impassible and passible. It is no surprise that, despite the availability and reputation of this strategy, theologians have yet found it necessary to move beyond grammar and to seek explanations of an ontological nature, such as kenosis, for resolving what is regarded as a lingering metaphysical paradox. There is thus cause to worry that, within a twonatures Christology, reduplication—even properly used—does inevitably less work than theologians hope.

Suffering and the identity problem Weinandy’s exposition and defense of the Cyriline and classically orthodox position is impeccable. How, then, are we to judge its relative success? We will return to Barth’s critique of impassibility and the way in which his Christology redresses this issue in Chapter 5. Our present concern is with the way in which the doctrine further demonstrates the real and enduring force of the identity problem—despite careful attention to it in traditional Christologies. We have seen that it is necessary to affirm that the subject of Jesus’ suffering and death is the very Son of God. This was Cyril’s primary motivation against Nestorius, so that no room remained for speaking of Jesus and God the Son as if they are not personally identical. Weinandy recognizes the importance of this, demonstrating an attentiveness to the identity problem.168 It would be misleading to say that “because God is impassible it was the man Jesus who suffered”—for this implies that Jesus and the Son are two subjects in a moral union. This would seem to suggest, however, that God has subjected Himself to real suffering. Thus Weinandy’s insistence upon reduplication—that the Son suffered as man—or what Gavrilyuk deems “a qualified divine passibility.”169 This is thoroughly consistent with Cyril, though as we have seen Cyril’s own explanation for the suffering of the impassible God favors the immanent-economic distinction over reduplication. Weinandy attends to this when he states that the Son suffered in Le Poidevin, “Identity and the Composite Christ,” p. 170. Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, pp. 174, 201. See Gavrilyuk, Suffering, especially pp. 159–61, where he suggests an instrumentalist view of the flesh.

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the incarnation, in His “mode of existence” as human.170 Thus Cyril is able to predicate suffering of the divine-human person and not isolate such an event to a nature. The dualism entailed by reduplication is relocated to the Son’s two modes of existing, both within and without the economy of redemption. If we grant that the Son exists in two modes, we should be careful not to identify these simplistically with the divine and human natures—so that He exists humanly here, and divinely there. This is precisely why the strategy of reduplication finally does Christology more harm than good, leaving the real problem of divine-human activity unresolved. There is no mode in which Jesus exists psilanthropically, merely as man. Rather in the economy He exists as the God-human—thus his activity in this mode must be theandric. Positing two modes of the Word does not rule out the need for a reduplicative strategy; since in His economic mode the Word is still divine-and-human, suffering is still to be predicated of Christ qua man. The question of the impassibility of God the Son, who dies on the cross to mediate redemption for humankind, continues to be debated because it is a knotty issue. The fundamental principle of Chalcedonian Christology is the pattern of unity in distinction, and distinction in unity. Where, then, ought Jesus Christ to be described in terms of distinction? Where is dualism properly to be located? I have argued that the tradition’s basic understanding of person and natures requires a distinction between the natural attribute of passibility (which is proper to human nature) and the activity of suffering (which is proper only of the theandric person). Therefore one of the Trinity suffered for us—and He did so by virtue of His personal possession of a passible nature. This, I think, is the best solution that classical Christology can offer. But unless that second nature is essential to the Son Himself, unless His suffering is true of His theandric person and not only of His person isolated to one nature, the identity problem persists—for there is a mode of existence in which the Son not only transcends the economy, but is in fact not human.

Conclusions In this chapter I have sought to diagnose a problem, or cluster of problems, that is inherent within the two-natures Christology of Chalcedon and its orthodox interpreters. The central issue, which I have labelled the “identity problem,”

Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, p. 200.

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is the doctrine’s difficulty with affirming that the divine Son of God and the man Jesus Christ are one and the same subject—because, it seems, they are not ontologically coterminous. For the Son to take on a human nature in time would seem to indicate that this humanity is not constitutive of Him on the level of being. And yet it is certainly constitutive of the composite person, Jesus Christ. This dissonance further suggests, and is illustrated by, three related matters in the doctrine of the incarnation: the immutability of the Word, His kenotic selfrestriction, and His impassibility in the face of the stark reality of Good Friday. These issues, and particularly reduplication in defense of God’s impassibility on the cross, demonstrate ways in which the theologian’s talk of the presence of God in Christ tends to be tempered by an innate sense that divinity and humanity simply do not go together. Unlike much critical work of the past two centuries my intent has not been to dismantle or discredit the orthodox tradition, but rather to point to structural flaws in a doctrine that is, finally, an edifice built by human reason. While I have suggested some avenues for clarification and precision I have left these issues intentionally unresolved. The historical and conceptual summaries provide us with a basic context for analyzing Karl Barth’s approach to Christology as a critical appropriation of the tradition, as well as the ultimate significance of that project. The nature of doctrine as the church’s second-order reflection upon the content of its witness summons theologians never to rest upon their work as complete, as perfect, or as enjoying divine endorsement. This was Barth’s view of theology, as well, and we may now turn our attention to his revision of the doctrine of the incarnation.

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Barth’s Response to Logos Christology

By the time he took up his first academic post as Honorary Professor of Reformed Theology in Göttingen in October 1921, Karl Barth had already registered deep concerns with modern theology and its ramifications for the doctrine of Christ. The Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Protestant liberalism in the nineteenth century was not a continuation of Chalcedon, Thomas Aquinas, or the Reformation, but a new attempt at expressing the identity and significance of Jesus on radically different conceptual soil—one that took anthropology as its starting point and ultimately, Barth believed, as its entire concern. Such revision had been necessary, from the point of view of the nineteenth century, because the church’s doctrine of the incarnation no longer had relevance in a modern world.1 On Barth’s analysis Schleiermacher’s theological system is controlled by two central (and competing) foci, with Christology dependent upon the Christian’s existential experience of God—the former so far subordinated that, Barth worried, Christology may not actually be necessary to the system.2 Barth was thus particularly concerned with the place of Jesus Christ in theology when, in the decade following his break with liberalism, he returned to the well of the sixteenth century in order to teach a course on Reformed theology. Here he found himself not only within the “new world within the Bible” but also among the great theological minds of the Protestant Reformation, and he sought to reestablish a strong connection between the history of the church

Barth’s regard for Schleiermacher is complex, and beyond the boundaries of this study. But it should be noted that, alongside his concerns, Barth’s return to the older Protestantism always included a deep appreciation for this “church Father of the nineteenth century.” Barth believed that nineteenthcentury theology had adopted Schleiermacher’s Christology wholesale—and “without noting the consequences.” See Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 104; also Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 411–59; and “Schleiermacher,” an essay from Barth’s Münster lectures on the history of modern theology, in Theology and Church, p. 192. 2 “This Christology itself is suspect. It breaks in our hands when we touch it. Yet it is a real Christology.” Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 106. See further Barth, Protestant Theology, pp. 444–50. 1

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and contemporary theological discourse. Rather than scorning the tradition of creedal orthodoxy he set about attending to it closely and sympathetically. In so doing he sought to hear the Word of God in Scripture in a way unhampered by modern criticism—though by no means inattentive to it, since he believed that some of the criticisms to which classical Christology had been subjected did carry weight. The truths of Scripture therefore required a restatement more in keeping with contemporary thought forms—not abandoning the theological accomplishments of preceding generations but rather separating them from the thought forms of the era in which they were articulated. In this chapter I turn from my critique of the Logos tradition to Barth’s own reception of it. What becomes immediately evident is that this reception is critical in nature: Barth did not break with NeoProtestantism only to run into the waiting arms of Chalcedon. Passing over the previous two centuries to a repristination of a simpler, pre-critical time was impossible. Rather, he believed it was possible to stay true to the conciliar judgments of the ancient church while giving that Christology a form better suited to the requirements of contemporary dogmatics. What I call “Logos Christology”3 is a broad category used to sum up the whole of the ancient orthodox tradition through the Council of Chalcedon and the early Middle Ages (in contrast to modern Christologies, particularly of an existentialist vein, whose proponents are less concerned with ecclesial orthodoxy). To be certain, a wealth of Christologies populated the fourth and fifth centuries (only a few of which were touched upon in Chapter 1), and attempts to identify wholly discrete schools of thought tend to introduce so many flattened or erroneous readings as to be just as misleading as helpful. So my use of this term requires a bit more clarification. Here Logos Christology has a threefold meaning: first, it refers to the orthodoxy defined by the ancient, ecumenical councils, culminating in the creedal Definition of Chalcedon and further worked out in the theological debates of the early medieval period. This includes the whole of the conceptual schema of vere Deus vere homo, “two natures in one person,” the four key qualifiers of the unio hypostatica doctrine (“without division or separation, without confusion or change”), and Constantinople III’s dyothelitism—as well as the latent metaphysics which fund the ancient church’s descriptions of the incarnation. Second, Logos Christology speaks to what modern commentators

My use of this term as broadly comprehending the christological method of the church prior to the Enlightenment is a concession to generality, drawn in part from Wolfhart Pannenberg (though such use is widespread in contemporary literature). See Jesus—God and Man, pp. 158–68, 283–323.

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have called Christology “from above”—a doctrine of the incarnation that begins with a preexistent divine person (the Johannine λόγος) and describes His becoming human. There are many variations on this approach—some orthodox and some very much not—to which the ancient councils attest. Third, and finally, our use of the term is meant to comprehend both of the major types of a theology of the incarnation identified in Chapter  1: the instrumentalism of the fourth century and the compositional model of mature Chalcedonianism. It likewise comprehends the Alexandrian and Antiochene “schools,” which for all their differences both approached the question of the incarnation from the same, top-down starting point: how did the eternal Logos enter into the sphere of creation? Barth interacts with the Christology of the ancient church at three points. First, he engages Holy Scripture directly as providing the material insight into theological questions. His reading of the prologue to the Gospel of John (as a source of the “Logos” doctrine) will be most significant to our study. As noted at the outset, Barth also contrasts John’s gospel with the Synoptics in a highly suggestive way. Second, Barth interacts with the history and theology of the ancient church that was working its way through doctrinal challenges to arrive at concise statements for Christian belief. We will pay close attention to his comments on the councils and, in Chapter 4, to the conceptual apparatus that they made standard for the discipline—including person, nature, and essence. Finally, Barth enters into conversation with the Lutheran and Reformed traditions and the forms of Christology debated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and beyond), recognizing rightly that there is far more at stake in this era than the metaphysics of the Eucharist. In the present chapter I will consider the regard, both positive and negative, with which Barth held this classical form of the doctrine. Barth’s thought with respect to the Logos as the subject of Christology will be treated in a roughly chronological order, to observe his theological development. It will become clear that in the decades following his break with liberalism Barth grew increasingly critical of the Christology of the ancient church as well. I begin with his lectures in Göttingen and Münster in the 1920s, including his lectures on John 1 (which were later incorporated into the Church Dogmatics). From here the discussion will move to the preliminary Christology of CD volume I, taking up the disputed question of the place of this material in Barth’s mature thought. Here Barth identifies the agent of the incarnation as the Word of God, according to an extended exposition of Jn 1.14. Next, I will take up the matter of the highly relativized place of the Logos concept—in favor of the name Jesus

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Christ—in volume IV, including Barth’s judgments on the Logos asarkos and the extra Calvinisticum. Finally, I conclude with some observations on the ways in which Barth’s approach to the incarnation differs most fundamentally from the instrumentalist and compositionalist views.

The Logos in Barth’s early thought: Lectures in Göttingen and Münster (1921–30) Though signs of Barth’s increasingly critical attitude toward aspects of Logos Christology are evident in the 1920s, by and large the decade preceding his embarkation into the Church Dogmatics is characterized instead by a desire to explore the history of Christian doctrine and receive its better insights. Highlighting the place Barth ascribed to the divine Logos in his lectures in Göttingen and Münster will provide us with contrast material for his later, increasingly critical and actualistic approach to Christ’s person.

Unterricht in der christlichen Religion (Göttingen, 1924–25)4 Having found a wealth of kindred spirits in the pages of E. F. K. Müller’s Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche (1903), Heinrich Schmid’s Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche (1869), and most importantly Heinrich Heppe’s Reformierte Dogmatik (1861), Barth set about explicating the doctrinal consensus of his tradition with great enthusiasm—at a strongly Lutheran institution, no less.5 The Göttingen material represents Barth’s Christology in the moment of discovery, and therefore it is Barth at his least critical. He still relies on Person and Natur language, which he would later critique, and follows the earlier patristic and Reformed pattern of speaking of the performative agent of the life of Jesus primarily as the incarnate Logos. He also embraced the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum wholeheartedly. At this stage of Barth’s thought the Logos is conceptually basic. He is the incarnate one’s authentic yet veiled identity, the person of the unio personalis.6 Hereafter: Unterricht. Full publication details are provided in the Bibliography. Translations from this edition are my own, unless otherwise noted. The first half is available in English as The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. 1 (hereafter: Göttingen). The lectures were originally given between May 1924 and Barth’s departure from Göttingen in October 1925. 5 For an account of Barth’s teaching career in Göttingen, see Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, pp. 291–337. 6 Unterricht III, pp. 36–38; cf. 46–47. 4

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“This individual is the Logos, God’s Son,” Barth wrote. “Caiaphas and Pilate called Jesus of Nazareth ‘Christ’—they misunderstood the meaning of His name. In calling the human person this, without knowing it they called Him the divine person, since besides this he has no other name.”7 Furthermore, the Logos exists both within and without the flesh of Jesus Christ, though not as two different entities. “We may not say that the Logos subsists only in the human nature of Christ,” for to do so would be to deny that He remains divine.8 As a name that contains a divine secret, as it were, Christos itself points beyond the human Jesus to the Trinity. Barth entered the conversation regarding the extra Calvinisticum at a point where the doctrine was long-entrenched in Reformed thought and clearly defendable from the ancient tradition—but still vulnerable with regard to its broader implications for the doctrine of the incarnation, as the Lutherans had effectively demonstrated. Here, in Göttingen, he gives three reasons for his embrace of the extra. First, Lutherans have not made a strong case that the doctrine divides the Word of God in two, one on earth and one in heaven. Second, Barth perceived the Lutheran counter-doctrine of the perichoresis of the two natures as necessarily leading to the ubiquity of the flesh and thus the end of Christ’s real humanity. Third, Barth is satisfied here with John Calvin’s totus/totus principle9—that the Word is “wholly in and wholly outside” the flesh: “The Son is both logos ensarkos and logos asarkos. Do we not have to say this afresh and for the first time truly the moment we speak about the union of God and man in revelation lest we forget that we stand here before the miracle of God? Can we ever have said it enough?”10 Because Barth was so influenced by his work in the classical sources of Protestant dogmatics at this stage, he does not consider any other options than those suggested by the Reformation debate. He is also working under the conviction that God remains Other, remains hidden even in His givenness—

Unterricht III, p. 47. Göttingen, p. 158. 9 Calvin’s two famous statements on the doctrine of the extra (though his work predates the term) appear in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), II.xiii.4 and IV.xvii.30; cf. French Confession (1559), Article 15. Calvin is astonished that his opponents take it as an innovation. 10 Göttingen, pp. 159–60; cf. 156. Paul Molnar cites this as definitive of Barth’s mature view of the Logos asarkos, which is certainly an anachronism. See “Can Jesus’ Divinity be Recognized as ‘Definitive, Authentic and Essential’ if It Is Grounded in Election? Just How Far Did the Later Barth Historicize Christology?” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 52.1 (2010), p. 70. Barth also speaks favorably of the extra in a 1923 essay, suggesting that even when God gives Himself to us in His Word (an unveiling) God retains a “divine caution,” a “hiddenness and sublimity . . . which is never overlooked or diminished” (a veiling). See Karl Barth, “The Substance and Task of Reformed Theology,” in The Word of God and Theology, pp. 227–28. 7 8

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expressed previously in his Romans commentary as an infinite qualitative distinction between the Creator and creatures, and a superiority of the one to the other, which abides even in the incarnate one.11 The forma servi is simply the veil of His divine reality, “His impenetrable incognito,” and His mission is to “translate” men and women beyond the boundary of this human life and into the Kingdom of God.12 And so with respect to the incarnation of the Logos “we have to remember that there are heights and depths in God beyond the incarnation. We have no cause to historicize revelation.”13 The early Barth thus follows the Reformed scholastics in allowing for a measure of discontinuity between the identity of the eternal (preexistent) Logos and that of the God-human, Jesus Christ in his full historicity. The former is certainly known only through the latter, Barth grants, “but he is also the Logos of God beyond his union with humanity, just as the Trinity is more than the incarnation. As the Father is not just the Creator, so the Logos is what he is even apart from Jesus Christ.” When the work of reconciling creation to the Father is done the Logos does not cease to be the incarnate Son, but “his humanity is no longer needed and revelation ends as it began.”14 Here Barth speaks of the humanity of Christ in an instrumentalist sense—as incidental to his true personhood, as a crudity assumed in order to accomplish a task, which could conceivably be set aside without any essential change to the Word. The problem of the doctrine of reconciliation, and so of the identity of the Reconciler, is the problem of the opposition (Gegensatz) between God and humans. Jesus Christ is the triumph of God over this opposition,15 and this is key to Barth’s chapter on the doctrine of Christ’s person in volume III (§28). He expresses the significance of the incarnation for dogmatics in a traditional way—as the doctrine of two natures (Zweinaturenlehre), the unity of God and humanity in Christ’s person.16 Nevertheless, he sees that in Europe in the 1920s this approach is, in fact, countercultural. To teach the doctrine of the ancient church and the Reformation was to subject oneself to the scorn of the modern theological academy. Barth’s subject matter is that around which socalled “positive theologians” stand at the distance of historical detachment,

See Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, pp. 355–57; cf. 276–83. Romans, pp. 279, 282. Even at this early stage, however, Barth is willing to say that this incognito “is not accidental but essential” (ibid., p. 281). 13 Göttingen, p. 154. 14 Göttingen, p. 156. 15 Unterricht, pp. 26, 68. 16 Unterricht, p. 27. 11 12

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“howling like wolves” and hurling derogatory remarks at the center.17 And so he acknowledges that it may seem strange to his hearers that he has followed the path of ancient orthodoxy. His response is that he knows of no better way: If you ask me why I have done this, I reply with the counterquestion whether you know any better way of working it out so as to achieve a positive presentation of the concept of the incarnation. If we want classical, solid, circumspect, and yet also comprehensive definitions of the basic concepts that are in keeping with the dignity of the theme, then whether we like it or not we shall have to tread the paths that were taken by the early church doctrine.18

What Barth would press on to do over subsequent decades is forcefully to answer his own question: Is there any better way of giving a positive presentation of the incarnation? Even at this stage, though, Barth has a light hold upon Chalcedon. Its formulae are helpful, but they themselves are not the gospel. What, then, does the unio hypostatica have to do with the message of Christian proclamation? The doctrine is vital because it speaks of that opposition between God and human beings—not simply of the distinction between God and the human, Creator and creature, but of the crucial divide between God and homo peccator. “Only if there is an overcoming of the opposition of God and man is there an overcoming of the other [opposition] of God and sinner.”19 As the overcoming of the antithesis between God and creatureliness, the incarnation is the grounds for then speaking of Christ’s reconciling work (which Barth does in §29). Finally, it should be noted that here Barth is self-consciously Reformed. The lectures are given as a contrast to Lutheran Christology—which Barth regards as an innovation (particularly with respect to the communicatio idiomatum) doomed to fail just as Eutychian monophysitism failed.20 There seems to be no possibility of harmony between these two Reformation schools on the matter of Christology. Both lay claim to parts of the Chalcedonian Definition. One must decide between the two, and Barth acknowledges that the place from which he speaks is Reformed and not Lutheran: “One cannot be both, as far as I can see Unterricht, p. 27. Göttingen, p. 167. On this point see McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, pp. 327–74, especially p. 350. 19 Unterricht, p. 34. Barth retains this point in CD I/1, saying that the real mystery of the incarnation is not the abrogation of the principle finitum non capax infiniti, but “the abrogation of the other and much more incisive principle: homo peccator non capax verbi divini.” God’s power to establish communicative intercourse with creatures is not called into question decisively by our finitude but “by the fact that we are God’s enemies” (CD I/1, p. 407). 20 Unterricht, pp. 26, 29–30. 17 18

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and understand.” But at least, Barth adds, the decision on the Reformed side has never been understood as exclusive: “Not No, but Yes!”21 The sense of this is that Barth believes that the Reformed may not have it all right in their Christology, but they did well in maintaining an attitude of theological openness while opposing the errors of their opponents. Theirs is a corrective, but not a replacement of one theological system with another, in a definite and exclusionary sense.

Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf (Münster, 1927)22 If the Barth of Göttingen speaks with the ancient Fathers (of natures and hypostases), the Barth of the Münster period speaks with the medieval Scholastics (of filial generation and mission).23 He is still very much concerned with the preexistent subject of the incarnation, the one who reveals God and reconciles humanity to God. But in the prolegomenal Christology of Die christliche Dogmatik (§12, “Gott der Sohn”) Barth is occupied with the language of sonship, and of the relation of God the Son to His Father. The terms “Son” and “Word” serve different purposes, he says, but must interpret one another: “The church has done well to commit itself to just these two terms, and whoever is wise will never deal with one for long without giving it the right form or the right content by the other.”24 Barth discusses Jesus Christ’s identity as the divine Son—God’s “absolutely new, second mode of being”25—on trinitarian grounds. Only God can reveal God (Barth’s sharpening opinions of natural theology lurk in the shadows), and because He is generated by the Father, the Son is Himself God. Thus Christ reveals the Father as His Son, as God “without reductions and restrictions” and not as merely an exalted man.26 That an exalted human cannot reveal God is proven, Barth thinks, by the Reformed maxim finitum non capax infiniti. Further, this revelation is not merely a noetic disclosure, for “revelation is reconciliation. The Word that is raised up among us is the Word of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19).”27 Unterricht, p. 66. Hereafter: Dogmatik. Full publication details are provided in the Bibliography. Translations from this edition are my own, unless otherwise noted. These lectures were given in the winter semester 1926/27. 23 For an account of Barth’s career in Münster, see McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, pp. 375–411. Despite this change of register, McCormack suggests that Barth carried on with the material decisions made in Göttingen, adding little to his dogmatics lectures here that was decisively new. 24 Dogmatik, p. 265. 25 Dogmatik, p. 259. 26 Dogmatik, p. 251. 27 Dogmatik, pp. 253–54. 21 22

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That this Son is also God’s Word, the Logos, is a subsidiary concern that is nonetheless still present here. “The fact is that Jesus, as the Son of the Father, is the one God! He is, therefore, the Word of reconciliation directed to us, and He can therefore only be so because He is originally in Himself: as eternal Word, as the eternal Son of His eternal Father.”28 His identification as Son secures the identity of Jesus Christ in the inner trinitarian relations; it reflects the way in which he is “true God from true God” and therefore able to reveal God. We might say that, for Barth in the Münster period, the title of “Son” is a matter of the divine processions; “Word,” by contrast, speaks to the divine missions. The Word is the Son in His mode of being directed toward us, spoken to us: “Through the Word God knows Himself and gives Himself to be known.”29 But it is not simply that, as if “Word” has only a missional character. Like the Son, in and as the basic identity of the incarnate one, the Word of God “is also the ‘character ad intra’ of this second Person.”30 In the Christology of the Münster period Barth has extended his appreciation for the history of doctrine from the Reformers to Thomas and scholastic theology. With respect to the identity question, he has drawn an important clarification between the concepts of the Son and the Word, and between the way in which the second person of the Trinity exists both eternally in the Godhead and in His temporal mission. Still, these titles retain some degree of priority over the name of “Jesus Christ” in this exposition. To understand the way in which Barth was coming to relate the history of Jesus to “Son” and “Word,” we must take a small step backward to Barth’s exegesis of the prologue to John’s gospel. The more dogmatic Christology of Göttingen and Münster would be combined with this in the Church Dogmatics, resulting in a significantly altered way of looking at the matter of identity.

Lectures on John 1 (1925)31 Barth is famous for abandoning his first two excursions into writing a full systematic theology. His lectures on the prologue to John’s gospel are highly 30 31 28 29

Dogmatik, p. 258. Dogmatik, p. 264; cf. 245. Dogmatik, p. 263. Karl Barth, Erklärung des Johannesevangeliums, available in English as Witness to the Word: A Commentary on John 1. Both texts are based on the 1933 typescript, which ends near the beginning of Barth’s account of John 7. From there it returns to the 1925/26 version. See John Webster, “Karl Barth’s Lectures on the Gospel of John,” in Phillip McCosker (ed.), What Is It That the Scripture Says?, p. 211n.4. In the quotations that follow I have put the transliterated words back into Greek, as Barth had them.

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significant in that they bridge Barth’s thought in the 1920s and the Christology of the Church Dogmatics. He lectured on the Gospel of John in Münster during the winter semester 1925/26, and the material was only lightly revised in 1933 when Barth was called upon at the last minute to offer a New Testament lecture series in Bonn. He continued to revisit this material in subsequent years, editing and transposing whole sections of his commentary (particularly on Jn 1.14) directly into the Church Dogmatics. While of course this does not justify reading the whole of the 1925 material as representative of Barth’s later thought, it will be instructive to analyze the material that made it into the Dogmatics and the way in which Barth uses it in a more immediately theological context. Two examples of this will arise in the remainder of this chapter. We must note at the outset that Barth’s interaction with John’s λόγος is not of the same kind as his interaction with the Christology of the fifth century. Here, Barth is not attending to the doctrinal structures that would be erected around the belief that the divine Word became human; he is merely exegeting Scripture. In this lecture series, and throughout his career, Barth takes Jn 1.14 as Scripture’s most fundamental statement about the nature of the incarnation: ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. Λόγος identifies the One who was with God in the beginning, who was God, through whom all things were made (Jn 1.1–2). Σὰρξ indicates that which He was not but which He became, in order to live the human life that John proceeds to narrate. And between them stands ἐγένετο, the impossible predication, that profound verb that speaks to the unity of two things that could not be more disparate—the being of God the Creator and creaturely existence. We will take Barth’s comments on these three in order. John’s λόγος suggests not an abstract principle but a divine person. To fill this concept with meaning we turn not to Philo or the Mandeans, Barth says, “but exclusively to John himself. That is to say, we rule out intrinsically possible meanings whereby the Logos is essentially and primarily a principle, whether in epistemology or in the metaphysical explanation of the world.”32 This Logos is rather the Lord of heaven who “comes down to the level where creatures are, where the witness is, where the called are, takes his place in their ranks, loses himself as it were among all that and those who might have been the objects of his action, and himself becomes an object.”33 The significance of calling this subject ὁ λόγος is that this Word is address—spoken by God to humankind Witness, pp. 24–25 (emphasis mine). “If Philo in particular was the source of John, then, as Overbeck has shown, John has indeed used this source with a sovereign freedom that renders Philo virtually unrecognizable” (ibid., p. 25). 33 Witness, p. 86. 32

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in self-disclosure and reconciliation (a note carried forward into the Münster dogmatics). “In him God is in the broadest sense speech, address, the Word that comes to us.”34 Thus the Johannine Logos is the “principle” only of revelation,35 and is most basically a person—an agent in whom the fullness of the divine life and subjectivity exist. It is possible to read Jn 1.1–14, however, with too tight a grasp on the personhood and nonprincipality of ὁ λόγος, because in the prologue this subject is clearly functioning as the indicator of another. If the Logos is a person, who is this person? The Logos has significance for John foremost because it points away from itself and to Jesus (something of a reversal of Barth’s regarding Christos as a divine indicator). This concept obviously plays for the author the role of a placeholder [Platzhalters]. It is only the provisional designation of a place which something or someone else will later fill. . . . In the prologue itself the term will recur only once, although then in the important place of v. 14. Later, in the rest of the Gospel, it will never even be thought of explicitly. And in the rest of the New Testament there is only one place where it occurs unambiguously in the absolute use of John 1:1, namely, in the difficult verse Rev. 19:13, where it is said of the rider on the white horse that one of the diadems on his head bears his name. . . . Already in the prologue ὁ λόγος is an unmistakable substitute for Jesus Christ. His is the place which at one and the same time is meant to be occupied, reserved, and delimited by the predicates which are ascribed to the Logos, by the history which is narrated about him.36

Even though ὁ λόγος is the subject of all three clauses in Jn 1.1, in none of them does the emphasis fall upon Him. It falls rather upon what is predicated of the Logos: eternality, unity with God, and identity as God. The temptation of the systematician is to begin to fill out this placeholder with a doctrine of a preexistent Son, a second person of the Trinity. But on Barth’s exegesis John used “Logos” because “his interest focused on Jesus Christ, the content of his Gospel, for whom in this mysterious provisional way he substitutes this concept in the prologue, and who is for him the Revealer.”37 With every word and at every moment in the prologue John is moving toward Jesus of Nazareth, the Witness, p. 26. Witness, p. 25. 36 Witness, p.  23 (translation modified—see p.  27 of the German edition). Bromiley translates Platzhalters as “locum tenens,” which obfuscates the force of Barth’s interpretation. Barth also emphasizes Platzhalters with italics in the German edition. 37 Witness, pp. 25–26. 34 35

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Word in His historical occurrence, the Word who has become flesh. If ὁ λόγος is a placeholder, then John means for us to believe that Jesus was in the beginning with God, and was the light that shone in the darkness. “Every word of the prologue can (and even must) be related to Jesus of Nazareth, for every word is thought out in relation to him, i.e., to the revelation that took place in him.”38 This passage provides us with the first of our two examples of Barth’s use of this lecture material later in the Church Dogmatics. The passage quoted above is repeated in a gently revised form in CD II/2 (p. 96). There, the context is a short exegesis of Jn 1.1–2, by which Barth intends to cast light on the notion of Jesus Christ standing between God and humankind, as both the electing God and the elected human. It is important to Barth’s doctrine of election that the ultimate referent here is Jesus Christ, and not “Logos” or “Son” or “second person.” What John says of the Logos is, in fact, true of the man Jesus as the Mediator. At this point in II/2 Barth defends the fourth-century doctrine of homoousia: Jesus is consubstantial with God the Father, uncreated, and so was in the beginning with God. This is what Jn 1.1 guarantees. What is the alternative? If this can be said only of the person of the Logos, and not of Jesus Christ in all the fullness of the incarnation, then the Christology of the ancient church would require the sort of severe qualification witnessed in Chapter 1: Jesus would not be the divine Son and Word precisely speaking, but the guise under which the one who existed “in the beginning” with God manifests Himself in history. This is the identity problem writ large. Instead, Barth confesses not “the Logos,” but Christ: “What is certain is that [John] had no intention of honouring Jesus by investing Him with the title of Logos, but rather that he honoured the title itself by applying it a few lines later as a predicate of Jesus.”39 Σὰρξ indicates the creatureliness assumed by the Word—but not only this. The flesh that He became (Barth prefers “assumed”40) is fallen flesh, humanity that is under divine judgment because of sin. This σὰρξ includes his becoming human (ἐνανθρώπησις), but Barth believes that this is not the primary issue. What is profound in the becoming is not just that the Word assumed human nature and overcame the opposition between Creator and creature (though this is true). It is also that the flesh taken on by the Son of God is “the servant form Witness, pp. 42–43. Barth will later make the same point with respect to the exordium of the letter to the Hebrews. See CD IV/2, p. 34; and Bruce L. McCormack, “The Identity of the Son: Karl Barth’s Exegesis of Hebrews 1.1–4 (and Similar Passages),” in Jon C. Laansma and Daniel J. Treier (eds), Christology, Hermeneutics, and Hebrews, pp. 155–72. 39 CD II/2, p. 97. 40 See CD I/2, p. 160. He calls the dogmatic statement of the church, ὁ λόγος assumpsit carnem, “more cautious and refined” (Witness, p. 91). 38

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which is proper to human nature under the sign of the fall and in the sphere of darkness, of the fallen and corrupt human nature which needs to be sanctified and redeemed.”41 It must be so, because the Word “has not just pitched his tent [ἐσκήνωσεν, 1.14] on the edge of our sphere of existence but taken up lodging in it. This is what is meant by ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο.”42 He is like us in all ways (save sin alone); and so He is with us, not only in our creatureliness but in our sinconditioned creatureliness—if only temporarily, since it is this very condition that He is on the way to overcoming. At this stage (and arguably later, as well) Barth retains a sense of the flesh as the instrument of the Logos. Unlike Athanasius and the Fathers, however, Barth’s use of instrumentalism is strictly a corollary of his doctrine of revelation. As the Word assumes flesh, he says, “flesh becomes the organ, instrument, or medium of revelation.” But because revelation is “an event, an action of the Word,” the Word makes use of the flesh to reveal Himself without bestowing upon that flesh a revelatory quality or property.43 Instead, the Word sanctifies His flesh, distinguishing it from all the rest of fallen humanity, for this specific purpose and ministry. Flesh is therefore the medium in which God reveals Himself, while remaining veiled therein. For the crowds to look upon Joseph’s son was not to see the Divine fully evident; the knowledge of his identity was a matter of special discernment (Mt. 16.13–20) or extraordinary display (Mt. 17.1–9). The flesh is not revelatory in and of itself but is in service of the Revealer, and “if Jesus Christ does not do this work of his, the σὰρξ can and must conceal, hide, and shut, even though it is the σὰρξ of Christ.”44 Creatureliness is thus made to be a fitting “instrument” of divine revelation,45 but Barth does not mean by this that the humanity of the Word is a utility outside of His personal subjectivity. Εγένετο, finally, “signifies the epiphany, the concrete historical existence of the Word in all its breadth.”46 It is the “equals sign” between the Logos and flesh, that which predicates a complete human existence of God the Word. As Barth had put it in the Göttingen Dogmatics, it is the overcoming of the opposition between God Witness, p. 88; cf. Romans, pp. 275–85, where Barth renders Rom. 8.3 with “in the likeness of sincontrolled flesh.” A full consideration of Barth’s view of the “fallenness” of Jesus’ humanity is in Darren O. Sumner, “Fallenness and Anhypostasis: A Way Forward in the Debate Over Christ’s Humanity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 67.2 (2014). 42 Witness, p. 94. In translating ἐσκήνωσεν Barth argues positively for “to dwell,” “to tabernacle,” and “to lodge” when the incarnation is viewed from different angles. 43 Witness, pp. 91–92. 44 Witness, p.  92. In the same way, “the so-called historical Jesus, abstracted from the action of the Word, is not revelation. The revelatory power and effect of the predicate σὰρξ stands or falls with the action of the subject ὁ λόγος.” 45 CD I/2, pp. 35, 43. 46 Witness, p. 87. 41

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and sinful humankind. This is the equating of two utterly unequal things, wherein nothing is added to the one or taken away from the other.47 We are challenged to “think together” these two concepts, Word and flesh, “definitions of one and the same subject” in spite of their strictly opposite contents.48 But because the Word’s becoming flesh is indeed a paradox, the history of doctrine is filled with failed attempts to rightly explain it. As Barth says again in CD IV/2, the hypostatic union of God and humanity is an impossibility which nevertheless has taken place, and this is its great mystery: “The statement that Jesus Christ is the One who is of divine and human essence dares to unite that which by definition cannot be united.”49 The equation, the predication of flesh to the Logos, however, cannot be reversed. It is never the case that the flesh becomes the Word, or indeed has any concrete existence outwith its predication of this subject. And “the Logos is what he is even without this predicate.”50 As in the Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth is concerned to uphold the independent subjectivity of the Logos on the one hand, and the anhypostatic nature of the flesh on the other. Further, the equation does not result in any change or dissolution of the Word, nor a mixture of the Word into the flesh.51 Barth’s Christology in the 1920s is therefore a theology on its way. On the one hand he takes up the history of the tradition without much criticism; we will see below how the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum illustrates a material divergence between the earlier and later Barth. On the other hand, at this stage he has clearly made important exegetical decisions and set out on a path that he will maintain—especially in the primacy of Jesus Christ, even over the Johannine concept of the eternal divine Logos. At the end of the 1920s Barth’s biblical theology and his historical theology thus stood, somewhat subtly, at odds. Which of these ought to control his christological intuitions? It is in fact Barth’s theological exegesis of Scripture that would soon come to temper and to correct his appreciation of the history of ancient and Reformed dogma.

The Logos and divine freedom: Church Dogmatics I/2 Barth’s regard for Logos Christology in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics is complex. On the one hand, he maintains his nuanced reading of John 1: ὁ 49 50 51 47 48

Witness, p. 91. CD I/2, pp. 159–60. CD IV/2, p. 61; cf. CD I/2, p. 136. Witness, p. 90. Both of these observations are combined into Barth’s third numbered point in CD I/2, p. 136 (§15.2 part I, “The Word became flesh”); cf. 160–61.

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λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο structures the very important §15.2 (“Very God and Very Man”). Barth’s preliminary approach to Christology is here, taken up in the context of the doctrine of revelation and in full recognition that it bears a provisional quality. The incarnation as divine speech (“Deus dixit”) has a specific role to play in prolegomena. But the fuller Christology, including his critical and creative handling of the Zweinaturenlehre, is to come later within the doctrine of reconciliation: We are concerned here with the first basic part of Christology, the part which answers the question: how does the encounter of His revelation with man become real in the freedom of God? The doctrine of the person and work of Christ has its own necessary place within the doctrine of reconciliation, with which we are not yet directly concerned. The first part of Christology, specially called the doctrine of the incarnation, belongs to the doctrine of the Word of God, and so to prolegomena, to the basis of Church Dogmatics.52

What is found here is not a complete doctrine of Christ’s person as an isolated theologoumenon—a “metaphysical” doctrine of person conceived without reference to Christ’s work, as Bruce McCormack has put it.53 If that is what Barth was up to here, we would see a direct account of the Zweinaturenlehre and the two states, which he is consciously reserving for volume IV. (Barth also refers here to the singular “doctrine” of person and work.) Instead, Barth’s insistence upon a “special Christology” in CD I/2 is born from his instincts to root the doctrine of revelation in the person of Christ, so that Christology remains basic to the dogmatic task at every future point: “In the basic statements of a church dogmatics, Christology must either be dominant and perceptible, or else it is not a Christology. That is precisely why there has to be a special Christology, an express doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ,” and here Barth intends to consider this doctrine “only so far as it is absolutely necessary for a complete answer to our question about revelation”—and no further.54 Barth is setting forth his agenda for §15, carefully specifying that the doctrine of Christ’s person is to be considered in this part-volume only insofar as it informs the objective reality of the doctrine of revelation and forms its basis. It is not a complete Christology, not even a complete doctrine of Christ’s person. It is certainly not a doctrine that stands apart from that of the work of Christ. Barth acknowledges CD I/2, p. 3. See Bruce L. McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology: Just How ‘Chalcedonian’ Is It?” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 206–7. 54 CD I/2, p. 123. 52 53

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that the better-rounded Christology must come later: “Everything else that belongs to a complete doctrine of the person of Christ we must put back to the much later context of the doctrine of God the Reconciler.”55 The “special doctrine” of Christ (besondere Lehre) condemned by Barth in CD IV/1 is thus very different from the “explicit doctrine” (ausdrückliche Lehre) for which he calls here.56 In volume I Barth is arguing (against natural theology) that, because Jesus Christ is the singular locus of God’s revelation of Himself, all theology is to be christologically determined “as a whole and in all its parts.” But “one cannot subsequently speak christologically, if Christology has not already been presupposed at the outset, and in its stead other presuppositions have claimed one’s attention.”57 An express doctrine of Christ’s person is necessary, therefore, in the sense that the incarnation itself is dogmatically primary as the movement of God toward creatures. This explains Barth’s strategy of introducing Christology in such a preliminary fashion in CD I/2, knowing that he would return to it in full in volume IV. It is not the case that the younger Barth of volume I advocated an abstract and independent doctrine of Christ’s person.58

A debate in Barth interpretation The relationship between the Christology of CD I/2 and that of volume IV— and whether they are two disparate Christologies—has indeed been a matter of some debate in circles of Barth interpretation. The way in which we relate these volumes on the matter of Christology will determine whether we read Karl Barth as a traditionalist or as a more creative and original thinker. Paul D. Molnar represents the former position. Molnar rejects the suggestion that Barth’s thinking underwent a fundamental change between the writing of CD I/2 and IV/1, arguing for full consistency. The evident turn to actualist language in volume IV is therefore to be read under the qualification of this earlier work.59 CD I/2, p. 124 (emphasis mine). Compare CD I/2, pp. 123–24 (KD I/2, pp. 135–36) and CD IV/1, pp. 122–23 (KD IV/1, pp. 135–36). Barth does use the phrase “besondere Christologie” in both places, but describes this differently in each. 57 CD I/1, p. 123. 58 The more vexing genetic question here relates to Barth’s shift in language from “the Word” to “Jesus Christ” as the primary subject of his Christology between CD I/2 and CD IV/1. See the discussion in CD II/2’s use of the John 1 material, below. 59 According to Molnar, Barth left indicators throughout that this is the case. Most notably, this may be seen in Barth’s insistence early in CD IV/1 (p.  52) that the Logos asarkos is “a necessary and important concept in trinitarian doctrine,” and that “the second ‘person’ of the Godhead in Himself and as such is not God the Reconciler”—in other words, His immanent being is not determined by His history ad extra. See Molnar, “Can Jesus’ Divinity Be Recognized,” pp. 40–42, 69–70. 55 56

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In other words, volume I critically controls the reading of volume IV. In the doctrine of reconciliation the subject is still the eternal Word of God, who need not be the man Jesus and would be who He is without humanity, without creation, without any plan for reconciliation.60 His humanity is an economic phenomenon that cannot be read back into the divine life without jeopardizing Barth’s evidently conventional doctrine of God. McCormack, in contrast, argues that while Barth was consistent in his goal of advocating a “post-metaphysical” theology throughout the Dogmatics, in CD I/2 he suffered a momentary lapse into metaphysical thinking by speaking of the Logos as a subject abstracted from His missional acts (and therefore from His human identity). Volume IV represents Barth’s most mature and fully worked-out position, and I/2 is an earlier stage in his development. It was not until Barth had revised his doctrine of election in CD II/2 that he had the tools to think past the “abstract metaphysical ontology which underwrote the Christology of the Chalcedonian Council”—namely, a thoroughly actualist theological ontology.61 How ought this earlier christological material be read? The problem of Christology and the place it must occupy, Barth says, is indeed the question of who the acting subject of the existence of Jesus Christ is.62 It is a problem because it must answer the question “Who is Jesus Christ?” with an acknowledgment that here revelation remains a mystery. The Word’s becoming is not a metaphysical formula to be deduced, but an event to be recognized. In contrast to Barth’s explicit focus upon Jesus Christ as the name of this agent in CD II/2 and later, here in volume I he is “God the Lord.”63 The Word speaks, the Word acts, the Word prevails, the Word reveals, the Word reconciles. True enough, He is the incarnate Word, i.e., the Word not without flesh, but the Word in the flesh and through the flesh—but nevertheless the Word and not the flesh. The Word is what He is even before and apart from His being flesh. Even as incarnate He derives His being to all eternity from the Father and from Himself, and not from the flesh.64

This statement would appear to contradict an actualist Christology with great force. If this is indeed definitive for Barth’s mature position, it will be impossible 62 63

Molnar, “Can Jesus’ Divinity Be Recognized,” p. 53n.16. McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology,” pp. 207–8. CD I/2, pp. 131–32. CD I/2, p.  131. This does not disappear completely in vol. IV, of course, since it is a perfectly appropriate, alternative way of speaking about the Lord Jesus. See CD IV/1, p.  135; CD IV/2, pp. 46–47. 64 CD I/2, p. 136 (emphasis mine); cf. 414–16. 60 61

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to make the humanity of Jesus Christ ingredient within the very being of God the Son—a gesture Barth clearly makes in volume IV and other writings. God in His second way of being simply would be the Logos, and the life of the Logos in history (i.e. Jesus Christ) a work ad extra. If this is the case, then we must finally conclude that Barth’s approach is not materially critical of traditional Logos Christology, but only formally so. At its most basic, despite the window dressing of “event” and “actualization” in his doctrine of reconciliation, Barth’s Christology would be consonant with the ancient view of the Logos asarkos. Our present task, therefore, is to adjudicate the question of the place of CD I/2 in Barth’s mature thought, since—as both sides of this debate agree—here there is no question that Barth orders himself to the divine Logos as the acting subject of an incarnation, to the same sort of Christology “from above” that characterized his thought in the 1920s. If there is any place that one would seek a Barth who embraces Logos Christology, it is here. But perhaps there is a third interpretive option for the place of CD I/2. McCormack’s argument for genetic development is easy to defend: Barth’s Christology did develop after he first began teaching in 1921, though “the fundamental dogmatic decisions which control even Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2 were already made in 1924/5 in Göttingen,” according to McCormack.65 This is certainly the case, but already in CD I/2 Barth shows evidence that his relationship with classic Reformed Christology had grown more critical—for example, in his remarks about the extra Calvinisticum (considered below). The case I will make is that CD I/2 belongs as much to the later Dogmatics as it does to the early Barth; the changes evident later in the project were already in development here. It must be acknowledged that, if we sacrifice this earlier moment of his Christology as a lapse in concentration, the Dogmatics has suffered not an insignificant loss. A reading that argues for a definitive material consistency across the whole of the Dogmatics is preferable—particularly since on this topic Barth does not seem conscious of any change of mind or decisive theological breakthrough in between volumes.66 Considering Barth’s candid comments about the project in the prefaces, private correspondence, interviews, and the occasional essay, it is difficult to agree with the judgment

McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, p. 375. Barth’s comments on the significance of Pierre Maury’s 1936 lecture on a christocentric doctrine of election are the closest that he comes to this. See Barth’s forward in Pierre Maury, Predestination and Other Papers, pp. 15–16 (cited in McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, pp. 455–58). The lecture itself, however, preceded the publication of CD I/2 by two years, and so it is certain that it took Barth some time to work out the full impact of christocentric election on his larger program.

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that the Christology of volume I was allowed to stand because, by the time Barth had found his critical insight into the doctrine of election in the late 1930s, “beginning again at the beginning” was simply unthinkable.67 With this discussion in mind we turn to a closer examination of the Christology of CD I/2. I will proceed by considering the broader context of Barth’s seemingly anti-actualist focus upon the Logos, including his statements on divine freedom and necessity and, most importantly, the call for a “twofold theological school” which appreciates the best of what the Lutheran and Reformed traditions have to offer the church. A careful reading of §15.2 will make it clear that, even here, Barth desires to be radically christocentric while still tethered to the tradition. Signs of Barth’s commitment to Chalcedon and the Reformed tradition abound—but not in the absence of his desire to move beyond them, while still speaking in solidarity with them. Insofar as the Christology of volume I is a doctrine of the Logos it is because Barth has selected the divine act as his point of departure. And so the Christology we find here will be necessarily “from above”—a description of the movement of God in His second mode of being toward creaturely existence.

Freedom and necessity in the Word’s becoming One commonly sounded objection to the actualist reading is that Barth would restrict the freedom of God by making Him contingent upon the world for the determination of God’s being.68 This would not only abandon the classical tradition’s stress upon God’s aseity and self-funded perfection, but also transgress divine sovereignty with respect to all that is not God. Such cannot be the case for Barth, it is said, since in CD I/2 (and throughout the Dogmatics) he argues deliberately and forcefully for God’s utter freedom and non-contingency. Even in Christology, he says, “Christ is antecedently God in Himself in order that in this way and on this basis He may be our God.”69 If we will not listen to this fact, Barth says, we make Christ’s being God for us into a necessary attribute and destroy the freedom of God in the act of revealing and reconciling. Four observations are in order. First and most basically, Barth says, freedom means that God exercises His will in ways that are not contingent upon the objects of His actions. When God the Word takes on human nature Bruce L. McCormack, “Grace and Being,” in Orthodox and Modern, p. 195. For example: Edwin Chr. van Driel, “Karl Barth and the Eternal Existence of Jesus Christ,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60.1 (2007), p. 54; Molnar, “Can Jesus’ Divinity Be Recognized,” pp. 72–73. 69 CD I/1, pp. 420–21; cf. CD I/2, pp. 135–36. 67 68

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and reveals God’s self to creatures, He does so under no compulsion, being wholly self-moved. “God is in no way bound to man. . . . His revelation is thus an act of His freedom, contradicting man’s contradiction.”70 God’s revelation of Himself is not given in response to humankind’s hostile orientation toward God (as contingency might suggest), but as an overcoming of it. This freedom is required if the acts of God are to be gracious acts, those of a loving Father who desires to create fellowship. Reconciling love has its ground in God’s inner freedom, “and not in fulfilment of a law to which He is supposedly subject.”71 Second, Barth insists that God’s being revealed in flesh is not an evolutionary possibility for creation. (This is one of his criticisms of Schleiermacher and nineteenth-century thought.) The incarnation has no basis in the world; it is not an extension or completion of human nature.72 No, Barth says, the freedom of God means that the Word is the subject of the statement “the Word became flesh.” It is He who acts—not as a human possibility but strictly as a divine possibility. Third, Barth indicates that to affirm the freedom of God is to acknowledge counterfactual possibilities—that the mystery of revelation might have taken place in a different way. Under our first point we might say that God is not required to reveal Himself; here, we would say that the God who does reveal Himself is not required to have revealed Himself in this way. For example, God might well have shown Himself in an Ebionite or Docetic way, or “by some sort of abandonment or diminution of His divinity.”73 What happens in the incarnation is that the inconceivable becomes conceivable—God enters into our world—“but we cannot deny that it might have pleased God to reveal Himself in another way as well.”74 Even if no world had been created at all, Barth says, God would still be God and His Word would still be His Word apart from this becoming.75 Let us not get away from ourselves: such counterfactual possibilities are necessary to hold open the freedom of God, but Barth insists that “it would be senseless to allow the possibility of a reality not actually given (which can 72 73 74 75 70 71

CD I/2, p. 7. CD I/2, p. 135. Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 279; cf. CD IV/1, p. 50. CD I/2, p. 39; cf. 37. CD I/2, p. 39; cf. CD I/1, p. 55. CD I/2, p.  135. This statement is worth contrasting with Barth’s statement in CD II/2  “that once God has willed to enter into [the covenant with creatures], and has in fact entered into it, He would not be God without it” (CD II/2, p. 7). We will explore this notion of God’s self-determination in Chapter 3.

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come up for consideration only if we deviate from the witness of Scripture) to become a rival, so to speak, of the possibility realised in the actually given reality.”76 Docetism has no place at the table, not because it is a form of theophany that is impossible for God but because it is an exegetical falsehood. Counterfactuals may be logically necessary to divine freedom, but because they do not obtain they must not be given serious theological consideration. The impulse toward actualism and the priority given to it are quite evident here: God the Son is particularly Jesus of Nazareth, and He became so out of the freedom of God. Fourth and finally, then, God’s freedom cannot be fully and properly expressed without attention to what God has done. This draws upon the scholastic distinction between God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta) and God’s ordained power (potentia ordinata).77 The former refers to the infinite possibilities that are open to God, the latter to that singular possibility that God actualizes. God is utterly free in both senses; His realization of one possibility and the concomitant elimination of all others is not a restriction on divine freedom but its execution. God would not have power, nor would His power be in His hands, nor would it be the power of the Lord, real power over everything, if it amounted only to His omnicausality (the position we have already rejected), to what He actually chooses and does; if His actual choice and action were not a real decision and did not take place in freedom; if the capacity which He actually uses did not contrast with the different capacity which He does not use. And this being the case, the grace of creation, reconciliation and redemption would not then be grace, but God would be under obligation to the created powers over which He is Lord.78

This point is vital for a Christian doctrine of the incarnation, particularly where such an act is taken to be determinative of God’s being. All counterfactuals are highly relativized, and in actualizing the divine will God is free to make Himself “contingent” upon that which He has chosen—in this case, humanity. This contingency is itself free since the only reason it occurs is because it is ordained CD I/2, p. 39 (emphasis mine). While Barth does observe this distinction, its explicit application to divine freedom and counterfactuals is my own. Barth’s understanding of freedom was profoundly different from the medieval nominalists, from whom the two-powers distinction is borrowed. His doctrine of God, in fact, eschews a concept of God as potentia absoluta insofar as this includes an “almighty divine arbitrariness and independence, bound to no law”—that is, “an abstract absoluteness or naked sovereignty.” See Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion, pp. 112–16; CD II/2, p. 49. 78 CD II/1, p. 539. 76 77

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by the God who is sovereign over all things.79 God is “the One who is free in His love, and therefore not His own prisoner”—and so His particular presence in the Word’s becoming flesh “is itself the demonstration and exercise of His omnipresence.”80 God’s freedom for humankind therefore consists in the dialectic between the life of Jesus Christ as both the objective possibility and reality of revelation.81 The freedom we perceive logically in counterfactuals is subject to the freedom evident in the actuality of Jesus Christ: “When we are told in it that God is free for us here, we are also told restrictively that He is not free for us elsewhere. It limits the freedom of God for us to itself. It tells us that only here, in this manness of God, in the God-ness of this man, is God free for us.”82 This quality of divine freedom Barth calls necessity. The actual state of things, of the being of God in Jesus Christ, controls what dogmatics has to say about the character of God (and not vice versa). In the face of this revelation, of who and what God is in this reality, we can only say that this incarnation of the Word of God “must” be. This is not an absolute necessity, but a necessity that comes from our stance “not above but beneath the reality of revelation.”83 It is a necessity that is conditioned by divine election and grounded in the event of incarnation. Therefore “we no longer need reckon with the possibility that He could have acted differently.”84

Anhypostasis and enhypostasis Barth follows this important section on the freedom of God with a discussion of the anhypostasis-enhypostasis distinction offered by the ancient church—the teaching that Jesus’ humanity has no self-standing existence or personhood apart

McCormack is unwilling to describe God’s freedom in the voluntarist sense as having an innumerable number of options at hand, as he believes Molnar does; rather, freedom in God is “the power to do all that is in God to do. In God, there are no unrealized potentialities.” See McCormack, “Let’s Speak Plainly: A Response to Paul Molnar,” Theology Today 67.1 (2010), pp. 60–61; “Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63.2 (2010), pp. 222– 23. Barth lends support to this reading when he says: “The decisive point is whether freedom in the Christian sense is identical with the freedom of Hercules: choice between two ways at a crossroad. This is a heathen notion of freedom” (Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 37). 80 CD IV/1, p. 187; cf. 194–95. 81 CD I/2, pp. 1–44 (§13). 82 CD I/2, p. 28. 83 CD I/2, p. 35. It was the error of the nominalists, Barth says, to consider that God’s potentia absoluta means that God was free (and is still free) to do everything quite differently—for example, to create a world ruled not by His wisdom and righteousness but by their opposites. See CD II/1, pp. 541–42. 84 CD II/1, p. 541. 79

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from its union with the Logos.85 In this way the early church ruled out a host of heretical ideas, including Nestorianism and various forms of adoptionism. In Barth’s hands, it is a weapon drawn against modern historical Jesus studies: throughout §15.2 he has in view those who attempt to find “a generally illuminating access to Jesus Christ which evades the divinity of the Word,”86 which makes its object “the human nature, the historical and psychological manifestation of Jesus as such.”87 Such a modern Jesus need not be divine, and so he cannot be the object of faith and proclamation. Taking note of this interlocutor, we may finally understand Barth’s decision to here emphasize the divine Logos as the agent of the Christ event. It was in Göttingen that Barth had first taken up the anhypostasis-enhypostasis distinction—“a watershed in his development,” according to McCormack. One result of this move is that “the eternal Son is present in history indirectly, never becoming directly identical with the veil of human flesh in which He conceals Himself.”88 Barth does not mean to suggest that the incarnate Son has no true historical reality, of course. Here in CD I/2, the fact that the humanity of Christ is anhypostatic plays the same role as does Barth’s emphasis upon divine freedom: it stresses that the acting agent of the Christ event is a divine person, and by correlation affirms that the Word of God and Jesus Christ have a singular identity. Anhypostasis asserts the negative, that the humanity assumed does not have existence (or subsistence) on its own, in abstracto, apart from its union with the Word. Enhypostasis asserts the positive, that in the union the human nature acquires its existence, its subsistence, in the life of God the Son. This is part of Barth’s argument against adoptionism, as the man Jesus was “never a reality by Himself,” apart from the Son of God.89 There is no correspondence implied from the human side, no “reciprocal relation between Creator and creature,”90 which is something that Barth perceives to be present in Lutheran Christology.

See CD I/2, pp. 162–65; cf. 150–51. F. LeRon Shults argues that the terms were not used in this way by Leontius of Byzantium, to whom they are commonly credited. See “A Dubious Christological Formula: From Leontius of Byzantium to Karl Barth,” Theological Studies 57 (1996), pp. 431–46; U. M. Lang, “Anhypostatos-Enhypostatos: Church Fathers, Protestant Orthodoxy and Karl Barth,” Journal of Theological Studies 49.2 (1998), pp.  630–57; and Matthias Gockel, “A Dubious Christological Formula? Leontius of Byzantium and the anhypostasis-enhypostasis Theory,” Journal of Theological Studies 51.2 (2000), pp. 515–32. His argument over patristic terminology notwithstanding, Shults does not dispute the material content of the doctrine as used by modern thinkers such as Barth. 86 CD I/2, p. 137. 87 CD I/2, p. 136. 88 McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, p. 366. 89 CD I/2, p. 150. 90 CD I/2, p. 164. 85

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The assumptio is entirely one-sided, and in it the hypostasis of the Logos remains its only subject. Thus the product of these parallel affirmations of anhypostasis and enhypostasis is that the subject of the union is seen to be one and the same both prior to and after the incarnation, both asarkos and ensarkos. As important as this principle is to Barth between 1924 and 1938, Paul Jones is right to assign a rather limited role to anhypostasis and enhypostasis in Barth’s mature Christology as a whole. But it is not the case that Barth moves beyond it.91 In CD IV/2 he proposes the hypothetical argument that the anhypostasis and enhypostasis distinction is superfluous, but concludes that such protest “is without substance, since this concept is quite unavoidable at this point if we are properly to describe the mystery.”92 Such is also the case with the doctrine’s broader importance to dogmatics. McCormack suggests that anhypostasis and enhypostasis allowed Barth to dispense early on with the dialectic of time and eternity without sacrificing that which the dialectic had secured: the ontological distance between God and creation. They further provided Barth with a basis within his Christology for speaking of revelation as occurring in concealment, so that revelation is not directly intuitable even as it occurs objectively within history.93 This clearly colors Barth’s interpretation of the incarnation as God’s assumption of and concealment within a creaturely medium well into the Church Dogmatics.94 As Barth continued to gain critical distance from the dogmatics of classical Protestantism, on the other hand, his anhypostatic-enhypostatic Christology came also to have another function. Barth no longer had to construe the humanity of Christ in a fundamentally instrumental way, as the mere veil under which God is revealed while yet remaining wholly other than it. Instead, anhypostasis and enhypostasis suggested a way in which the Word is indirectly identical with the human Jesus. In his later Christology, then, the distinction came to have a twofold role: to establish God’s essential independence from the creaturely form, and to reaffirm the identity of Jesus Christ and the second person of the Trinity.

See Paul D. Jones, The Humanity of Christ, pp. 25–26. Jones is concerned to counter the argument that Barth’s regard for Jesus’ humanity as anhypostatic leaves it excluded from Jesus’ actual (divine) personhood. This was far from Barth’s intent, and so Jones is right to relativize the importance of the distinction. Here Jones’ analysis on pp. 50–52 is particularly instructive. 92 CD IV/2, pp. 49–50; cf. 91. 93 See McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, pp.  327–28, 361–67. What McCormack has in view here is distinct from the “dialectic” of time and eternity that we will take up in Chapter 3, as a basic aspect of Barth’s doctrines of God and creation running through the Church Dogmatics. 94 For example: CD II/1, pp. 54–57. This indirect identification of revelation and history, in turn, was crucial to the eventual break-up of the dialectical theologians in the late 1920s. See McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, p. 392. 91

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In both cases, the Jesus of modern historical inquiry—a Jesus who could not be identical with the Logos because he could not be divine—was given no quarter. In sum, it is important also to recognize what Barth is not doing here. With his insistence that it is the Word who acts in freedom to become flesh, Barth is not concerned with ruling out any particular theological ontology—such as one that implicates the Word’s eternal being in His human history. Instead, when Barth argues in CD I/2 for the Word’s freedom and divinely sourced existence, he is arguing against all attempts to circumvent Christ’s deity. Here Barth has in view not actualism but the historical Jesus of modern Protestantism. This does not give the actualist reading a free pass, of course—Barth still means what he says about the aseity of the Word. But, having identified why Barth has staked this claim here, we may go on to inquire into his doctrine of the incarnation when it is given within a very different theological locus. Contextualizing Barth’s seemingly anti-actualist remarks in this way will help to explain why, just a few pages later, he seems willing to say that God does not exist for us apart from the humanity of Jesus Christ.

A “twofold theological school” Barth concludes paragraph §15.2 by tracing out two divergent schools of thought with respect to the doctrine of the incarnation. As a matter of shorthand I will call one “Lutheran” and the other “Reformed,” though Barth is clear that they also reproduce the Alexandrian-Antiochene debate of the fifth century in important ways, and that their respective starting points go all the way back to the diversity of the New Testament. The Lutheran position attempts to address the Word’s becoming flesh as “a completed event,” stressing the static aspect of Jn 1.14 (the perfect tense, “having become”). Barth calls this Christology’s ontological reference point: it addresses the objective state of things. The Word’s assumption and possession of a human existence, toward which the prophets had looked in hopeful expectation, has been actualized and is now fact. This is the answer to the question with which Paul and the apostle John approach Christology: “Is the name of Christ, is Christ the Son of God, really Jesus of Nazareth? Yes, it replies; and so with all its might it must maintain that this and no other is His name, that such He is and not something else.”95 As this approach to the incarnation is worked out in the context of Lutheran Christology, we see why that tradition reached the conclusions that it did. The CD I/2, p. 165.

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Word on high descended from His majesty when He became human. There is no longer a Logos asarkos after the incarnation, for if the incarnation is complete then the Word has His life fixed in Jesus Christ. Barth suggests in sum that the Lutherans reversed the enhypostasis of the Word: just as Christ’s humanity has no individual subjectivity apart from the Word, so now the Word has no life apart from His incarnate existence. This allows for some powerful rhetoric: There is no other form or manifestation [of the Word] in heaven or on earth save the one child in the stable, the one Man on the cross. This is the Word to whom we must harken, render faith and obedience, cling ever so closely. Every question concerning the Word which is directed away from Jesus of Nazareth, the human being of Christ, is necessarily and wholly directed away from Himself, the Word, and therefore from God Himself, because the Word, and therefore God Himself, does not exist for us apart from the human being of Christ.96

Barth desires to make this same confession with Luther. But he is worried about what is lost in the Lutheran scheme: “The road which led to this crowning statement is understandable and illuminating. But would it not have been better either not to make it, or to explain it at once by a counter-statement, since it obviously cannot be explained in and by itself?”97 Does this reversal of the enhypostasis venture too much? Does it take account of the freedom, majesty, and glory of the Word of God such that “they are in no way merged and submerged in His becoming flesh”—or vice versa?98 Barth’s worry is that, if the “Word” and “flesh” of Jn 1.14 are mutually conditioning, then either the vere Deus or the vere homo will be taken less seriously, weakened, or altered in meaning.99 Barth finds himself closer to the Reformed position, which he suggests addresses the Word’s becoming flesh as “a completed event.” Here the emphasis is on the dynamic aspect, the active, present tense of “becoming.” The Word has not simply become flesh in a moment, but exists as a continual overcoming of the divide between God and creaturely being. Scripture attests the movement of God “from non-revelation to revelation, from promise to fulfillment, from the cross to the resurrection.”100 This is Christology’s noetic character, just as meaningful and legitimate as the ontological (since the incarnation itself is revelation).

CD I/2, pp. 165–66. CD I/2, p. 167. CD I/2, pp. 166–67. This worry is gone by CD IV/2, and the mutual conditioning of the divine and human essences—or “common actualization”—is the basic way in which Barth understands the hypostatic union. This will be explored in Chapter 3. 100 CD I/2, p. 167. 98 99 96 97

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The incarnation discloses to us the knowledge of God—specifically, the knowledge that God has come to meet men and women in self-giving love. This is the answer to the way in which the Synoptic authors expressed the problem: “whether Jesus of Nazareth is really the Christ, the Son of God.”101 It is a priority among the Reformed to stress, however, that in this event the Word neither ceases to be what He is nor becomes other than what He is. Because this becoming is continual the Word never loses one of these states, never completely passes over from His God-ness. He retains all divine power and majesty, and is not restricted to life in the flesh but continues to fill the universe— the doctrine of the so-called extra Calvinisticum. Rather than condescending to us from His freedom, majesty, and glory, the Reformed testimony is that the Word condescends in these. We seek and find the Word of God in the Lord Jesus Christ, in his birth and his cross, since there alone He has been given to us. But the one we find there is found in His complete transcendence. The contrast with the Lutheran point of view is unmistakable. In spite of Barth’s strong statements earlier in §15.2—that the Word has His being apart from the flesh—it would be premature to conclude that Barth is simply siding with the Reformed in his Christology. He has reservations here, as well. The dynamic-noetic side may fail to conserve adequately the static and ontic element. Has the Reformed position obscured the very point of distinguishing between “Word” and “flesh”—namely, that they are united? And so, Barth says, the Reformed “failed to show convincingly how far the extra does not involve the assumption of a twofold Christ, of a logos ensarkos alongside a logos asarkos, and therefore a dissolution of the unity of the natures and the hypostatic union.”102 If there is a Word who lives apart from His history as a human subject, this Logos asarkos cannot be anyone other than Jesus Christ—not existing alongside the Logos ensarkos, a Word in and for Himself, but in and as Jesus. Barth indeed makes the identification of these two, the Word of God and Jesus Christ, a priority for Christology early on in CD I/2. And he finds his ground in exegesis: the New Testament witnesses to Christ consist “either in the knowledge that God’s Son or God’s Word is identical with a man, with this man, whose name is Jesus of Nazareth [the Johannine-Pauline tradition], or in the knowledge that a man, this man, Jesus of Nazareth is identical with the Son or Word of God [the Synoptic tradition].”103 Because he saw it as positing an

CD I/2, p. 168. CD I/2, p. 170. 103 CD I/2, p. 16; cf. 10–25. 101 102

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essential distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the Son of God, rather than a means of identification, the extra Calvinisticum became the wedge that pushed Barth to be increasingly critical of the Logos tradition as a whole. In this doctrine he saw a failure to follow Scripture and treat the two as one identical subject—for since the Logos does not have a human nature in His mode of existence asarkos, He cannot be Jesus Christ there. The Cyriline distinction between two modes, the Word-in-Himself and the Word-for-us, is not satisfying if the existence of Jesus Christ has been sealed out of a deeper existence of the divine life. Between these two perspectives the difference is primarily due to emphasis. Like the Synoptic and Johannine witnesses, the Lutheran and Reformed traditions do not fundamentally stand opposed to one another in their Christologies. Both contribute something vital, and both risk losing what it is the other would secure. “Christology may have a static-ontic interest, or it may have a dynamicnoetic interest,” Barth concludes—but both give rise to questions that are difficult to answer.104 For the Barth of CD I/2, a synthesis of these interests does not seem possible—for this is exactly what Evangelical theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to accomplish without much success. These are testimonies to the same reality, which do not negate one another even if they are contrary to one another. “Even with the best will in the world to do justice to both sides, we shall in the end have to make our choice”—but in so doing “we would do well to remember that in their original New Testament form the antitheses are not solved. Rather do they mutually supplement and explain each other and to that extent remain on peaceful terms.”105 It is clear from the foregoing study that, in thinking along with the tradition, Barth’s own choice is to side with his Reformed heritage (though he has not done so uncritically). And yet he insists that both testimonies ought nevertheless to be maintained—a dialectical Christology apprehended in “a twofold theological school,” since the reality of Jesus Christ “does not admit of being grasped or conceived by any unitary theology.”106 The question about Jesus Christ, asked by a Christology “from below,” stands alongside the question about the Son of God, asked by a Christology “from above.” The theologian should not side with one in such a way that eliminates all vestiges of the other, or rejects it with finality. Barth found much appealing in the Lutheran approach—particularly the way in which Luther could preach the centrality and Godhood of Jesus Christ free

CD I/2, p. 170. CD I/2, p. 24; cf. 170. 106 CD I/2, p. 171. 104 105

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from any subtle qualification. The static and the dynamic are dialectically held together: “Our task is to hear the second in the first, the first in the second, and, therefore, in a process of thinking and not in a system, to hear the one in both.”107 The practical result of this is that the point of unity between the two approaches, the Johannine and the Synoptic, can only be received by faith.

Conclusions: Barth’s stance in Church Dogmatics I/2 When asked later in his life why he did not begin his doctrine of the Word with the statement “The Word of God is Jesus Christ” and elaborate from there, Barth responded: “That would be an improvement. The Christological character of the Church Dogmatics is perhaps not so clear in volume I as it should be! But, pedagogically, there is a certain advantage in beginning with hesitation and then ending with equation.”108 In volume I Barth emphasizes the divine Word as subject, and the freedom of God in His becoming human, in order to oppose all accounts of Jesus that circumvent his deity—especially the historical Jesus of modern Protestantism. This had been a concern from very early on in his career, since his break with the nineteenth century and its inheritors. This, and not his ontological commitments about the triune God, gives his account of the incarnation as a revelation of the Word of God its proper context. The so-called earlier Christology, a Christology of the Logos, is not a complete doctrine but a “hesitation”—and deliberately so, as Barth knew here that, like John, he was still on his way toward speaking of Jesus Christ. Barth’s seemingly anti-actualist statement quoted above—that “the Word is what He is even before and apart from His being flesh”—is our second example of material transposed from the 1925/33 lectures on John’s gospel into the Church Dogmatics. It is appropriate, therefore, to take this statement in the context of Barth’s affirmation in that earlier text—later reproduced in CD II/2—that this “Word” is a placeholder for Jesus Christ. This name, and not the Logos in and for Himself, is the final word that is yet to be spoken, and in the pages leading up to this statement in CD I/2 Barth insists upon the personal identity of these two.109 That the Word existed “before and apart from His being flesh” therefore speaks not to divine preexistence but to His non-contingency—to the possibility that, because God’s acts are free, the incarnation of the Word might not have

CD I/2, p. 25. Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 30. 109 CD I/2, p. 123. 107 108

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been. But with this place of the Logos in the freedom of God secured, Barth may now dispense with possibilities and speak of the Word who is, the Word who has become human. This is the move from CD I/2 to the later volumes of the Dogmatics. How, then, are we to describe the relationship of this Barth with the Barth of volume IV, who speaks much more freely with Luther of a Logos who has no existence apart from Jesus Christ? There is clear continuity between the christological material in volume I and volume IV. In each, Barth has different things to say about the incarnation and the divine Word largely because he is approaching the subject under different theological rubrics—revelation on the one hand, and reconciliation on the other. In the case of the former, the subject must be the divine Word as the Revealer who makes God known to creatures. In the case of the latter, Barth must stress that the Word is, irreducibly, a human being with a history and a name. And yet we should not lose sight of the fact that, for Barth, revelation and reconciliation occur in one and the same event, and that the Logos and Jesus are one and the same person. There are insufficient grounds to insist that the more actualist Christology of volume IV must be read under the control of a metaphysical subject identified in volume I, as Molnar appears to suggest. And McCormack is right to observe that Barth’s thought undergoes a certain amount of development, and that the actualism that is more evident later in the Dogmatics may be judged to be a far more definitive control. (Barth’s later reference to the tentative nature of volume I, as a “hesitation” anticipating a later “equation,” indicates as much.) But it is not right to conclude that in CD I/2 Barth has simply suffered a lapse into metaphysical thinking, and would not say the same thing again if given the chance: rather “a genuine revision does not amount to a retreat after second thoughts; it is a new advance and attack in which what was said before has to be said again, but in a better way.”110 That Barth grew even more critical of Reformed dogma indicates that his christological center of gravity did shift over the next decade. The Barth of CD I/2 is open to the Lutheran contribution, problematic as he may find it; the Barth of volume IV still recognizes those problems but is now fully convinced by Luther’s words: “I will know of no other Son of God, except Him who was born of the Virgin Mary and has suffered.”111 But Lutherans should not be too eager to lay claim to Barth (nor Reformed to disinherit him). Where two schools of thought

Barth, quoted in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, p. 423. 111 Martin Luther on Jn 6.47, “Sermons on John 6–8,” WA 33, p. 155 (quoted in CD I/2, p. 166). 110

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continued to compete over the proper way to speak about the incarnation, Barth excelled at making no one happy. He remained thoroughly Reformed, and continued to register deep disagreement with Lutheran Christology—namely, the genus maiestaticum and the idea of a perichoretic relationship between the two natures—while also appropriating its better features. His stance in volume I is to advocate both approaches to the incarnation of the Word; but he must do so dialectically, and certainly favoring one over the other, because it has not yet become clear to him how he can affirm both testimonies together within a single doctrine. That he eventually found a way to do so—to combine the best of both into a single, coherent Christology—is the key difference evident in volume IV.

Christological particularism in the later Barth Before taking up the topic of the positive account of Christology that Barth gave in his doctrine of reconciliation, it remains for us to examine Barth’s regard for Logos Christology at his most mature point. The breadcrumbs left along our path through Barth’s development lead us now to his critique of the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum (beginning in the 1940s) and, with it, the notion of a persistent Logos asarkos—the life enjoyed by the Word of God in se apart from the incarnation. This will make it clear just why Barth felt his own presentation needed to give the formulae of the ancient church a different form, why it had to be creative and constructive, and derived unapologetically from the history of Jesus Christ. Barth’s discomfort with the extra and his desire to embrace elements of Lutheran Christology in a twofold theological school grew and intensified as he became more overtly actualist in his approach to Christology. He is not particularly self-reflective about this shift, but as Bruce McCormack has argued, the best candidate for the breakthrough must be Barth’s doctrine of election, which he exposited in CD II/2 (1942).112 Barth argues that Jesus Christ is not only the object of God’s eternal election; he is the subject of that decision as well.113 Here, for the first time, Barth worked out with radical consistency what it means to say that Jesus Christ is the name of the eternal Logos. This was the Lutheran perspective that Barth desired to embrace. He had laid the exegetical groundwork See McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology,” pp. 213–19. Barth revisited the doctrine of election as the “first and final basis” of the incarnation in CD IV/2, pp. 31–36. CD II/2, §33.1. Barth had previously worked this out in a more simplistic form in the Gifford Lectures of 1937/38. See Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God, pp. 69–79.

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for this as early as 1925, suggesting in his lectures on John that the “Logos” of the prologue is merely a placeholder for Jesus and not a someone who exists before and apart from him. This interpretation did not change between 1925 and 1942, as his reuse of this lecture material in CD II/2 attests. By grounding Christology in the notion that Jesus Christ (and not the Logos asarkos) is the electing God, as well as the elected human, Barth was ready to assign the Logos concept a sharply relativized place. In his dialectical Christology, Barth’s clear preference for one of the Protestant schools was blurring.

The Logos as placeholder That the Logos concept is but a placeholder that is filled in and given meaning by the history of Jesus Christ is the single greatest insight from Barth’s 1925 lectures on the Johannine prologue, and he maintains this view throughout his life. This began as a simple exegetical decision: John wishes his readers to see Jesus as the true identity of the one who was with God in the beginning, and who was (and is) vere Deus. He does not mean for readers to conclude that the prior and therefore more authentic identity of this person, whose life he is narrating, is actually the Logos of God—as if Jesus Christ was a mere alter-ego assumed for the economy of salvation. Jesus is basic; “Logos” is a cipher. What emerged from the young Barth’s exegesis would, by 1940, become a fullfledged principle of his dogmatic theology. “Jesus Christ is the content and form of the first and eternal Word of God.” It is Jesus Christ—“not an empty Logos, but Jesus Christ the incarnate Word, the baby born in Bethlehem, the man put to death at Golgotha and raised again in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, the man whose history this is”114—who is the unity of Gospel and Law, the gracious address of God and the gracious claim of God. He is both of these at one and the same time, and by virtue of this unity it is Jesus in all his history who is “the pre-existent Deus pro nobis.”115 If the Logos is a placeholder concept, the corollary to this is that Jesus Christ is not so. He is not a mere principle or economic phenomenon, but the one for whom the concept clears space. He may not be defined strictly as the predicate of another, more basic subject—that is, as the role played by the Word on the stage of history, or the identity given to Him only after He has been born of the Virgin Mary. “Jesus Christ is attested to us by the Old and New Testaments in CD IV/1, p. 53. Also see, for example, Barth’s return to John 1 in CD IV/2, pp. 33f. CD IV/1, p. 53.

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such a way that we are in fact deprived of the possibility of speaking of a further postulate instead of Him,” Barth says. “Jesus Christ is attested to us in such a way that we can say of Him either nothing at all, or, wholly unequivocally, that He is the Lord.”116 It is necessary to speak of Jesus as the most basic identity of God the Son—and therefore as the subject of eternal election—because of the gospel witness. “He, Jesus Christ, is the free grace of God as not content simply to remain identical with the inward and eternal being of God, but operating ad extra in the ways and works of God.” For this reason, Barth concludes, “before Him and above Him and beside Him and apart from Him there is no election, no beginning, no decree, no Word of God.”117 For Barth, this provocative statement requires no further qualification. Jesus is not the name given to the Son qua human but is himself the second person of the Trinity. As a further development upon Barth’s Münster Christology, the name “Son” speaks to the relation; “Word” to the notional concept; and “Jesus” to the living person who is described by both of these. And so Jesus Christ is both the Logos asarkos and ensarkos, the free grace of God in movement toward creatures. But because he has eternally assumed a human existence, theology can no longer speak of a Logos asarkos as a concrete possibility—and certainly not as an independent being. In effect the extra Calvinisticum has been reversed (as least on a logical register), so that the Logos is a concept that has meaning only within the larger reality of Jesus Christ. While this bottom-up approach may seem counterintuitive considering the history of the interpretation of John’s prologue, Barth’s view of the purpose of the Logos concept in John 1 is a rather straight-forward exegesis of the text.118 Furthermore, statements in the New Testament emphasizing the protological, predestinarian character of the death of Jesus (such as Rev. 13.8, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”) are “obviously inexplicable if they are referred to a logos asarkos, and not to the eternal Son of God and therefore also to the Son of Man existing in time . . . the one, whole Jesus Christ.”119 But this interpretation is also true of how Barth understands the Logos concept broadly taken. That is to say, not only in his exegesis of the New Testament but also in systematic theology, Barth regards the Logos as a cipher—a requisite element of doctrine, CD II/1, p. 150. CD II/2, p.  95; cf. CD II/1, p.  622. Charles T. Waldrop’s thesis that the Logos is the more basic person, and the name “Jesus” is used only to denote the activity of the Logos as a human subject, is exactly wrong. See Waldrop, Karl Barth’s Christology, p. 3. 118 For a concise explanation of the exegetical moves see Edwin Christian van Driel, Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology, p. 70. 119 CD IV/2, p. 34. 116 117

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not a person of devotion. This is evident from his excursus on the Logos asarkos in CD IV/1—the great crescendo of his critique of Logos Christology. Because of its significance and its controverted nature it is worth quoting at length: In this context we must not refer to the second “person” of the Trinity as such, to the eternal Son or the eternal Word of God in abstracto, and therefore to the so-called λόγος ἄσαρκος. What is the point of a regress to Him as the supposed basis of the being and knowledge of all things? In any case, how can we make such a regress? The second “person” of the Godhead in Himself and as such is not God the Reconciler. In Himself and as such He is not revealed to us. In Himself and as such He is not Deus pro nobis, either ontologically or epistemologically. He is the content of a necessary and important concept in trinitarian doctrine when we have to understand the revelation and dealings of God in the light of their free basis in the inner being and essence of God. But since we are now concerned with the revelation and dealings of God, and particularly with the atonement, with the person and work of the Mediator, it is pointless, as it is impermissible, to return to the inner being and essence of God and especially to the second person of the Trinity as such, in such a way that we ascribe to this person another form than that which God Himself has given in willing to reveal Himself and to act outwards.120

Such a “second person of the Trinity” who remains asarkos and unrevealed only tempts us to speculate, “to fill with all kinds of contents of our own arbitrary invention” and to make some image of God for ourselves.121 We cannot do this. We cannot go behind the back of Jesus Christ to “reckon with any Son of God in Himself, with any logos asarkos, with any other Word of God than that which was made flesh. According to the free and gracious will of God the eternal Son of God is Jesus Christ as He lived and died and rose again in time, and none other.”122 What does Barth mean, then, when he calls the Logos “a necessary and important concept in trinitarian doctrine?”123 He cannot possibly mean that 122 123 120 121

CD IV/1, p. 52. Ibid. Ibid.; cf. CD III/2, p. 66. This is a driving question in a debate between Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar over this excursus. See McCormack, “Grace and Being,” p. 193; Molnar, “Can the Electing God Be God without Us? Some Implications of Bruce McCormack’s Understanding of Barth’s Doctrine of Election for the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 49.2 (2007), pp. 209–13. Along with Molnar, van Driel understands the phrase “necessary and important concept” to be a ringing endorsement of the Logos asarkos (van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, pp. 94– 95). Early in the debate McCormack expressed an incredulity at Barth’s comment, and could only explain it as either a failure on Barth’s part to see the full implications of his doctrine of election or a shying away from them. More recently, however, he has concluded that in making this statement Barth is only identifying the Logos concept as a placeholder, as he had in CD II/2, p. 96—“but one is probably not wrong to sense that there is something improper about this move.” See “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology,” pp. 219–21, especially n. 49.

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the Logos is the more basic person, the one of whom the name Jesus Christ is predicated—the very opposite of a “placeholder.” Indeed, here Barth is speaking of the system of doctrine. That is where it is proper to speak of the Logos, the second person of the Godhead in Himself, apart from His being the Reconciler of creation. The Logos concept serves the purpose of holding open a place in the doctrine of God—a place for the preexistence of one who is narrated as having a birth and a death, and to insist that God’s movement to humankind in revelation and reconciliation is free, and also eternal. Indeed, as we have seen, the affirmation of divine freedom was one of Barth’s motivations for making the Word the subject of the Christology of CD I/2. That the Word can exist in God apart from His humanity expresses the freedom of the divine act according to God’s potentia absoluta; that the Word does exist in God only with His humanity expresses the freedom of the divine act according to God’s potentia ordinata. God need not will to become human—but God does will this, “to be God for us and not to be God without us.”124 Barth thus regards the Logos as vacuous apart from His historically actualized identity: “The first and eternal Word of God, which underlies and precedes the creative will and work as the beginning of all things in God, means in fact Jesus Christ.”125 John’s prologue, along with Rev. 19.13, is the foundation of Barth’s exegetical justification for christocentric particularism. Even in the mid-1920s Barth was willing to identify Jesus, in all his humanity and historicity, as “with God in the beginning,” as God Himself, as the one through whom “nothing was made that has been made.” This would mean that, at the very least, Barth had the inclination already in 1925 to make Jesus Christ the subject of election— even if he did not yet have the theological ontology to justify it. But Barth was not as interested in ontology as he was in explicating Scripture. When he heard Pierre Maury’s startling lecture on a christocentric doctrine of election at the Calvin conference in Geneva in 1936, then, he was already prepared—at least in theory—to grant this of Jesus Christ based on how he read Scripture. What Barth discovered upon his engagement with the doctrine of election was how to make use of this exegesis in a way that stressed Jesus’ identity with and as the Son of God. Had he not done so—had he followed the example of the classically Reformed doctrine of election—he could not have helped but reinforce the

CD IV/1, p. 7; cf. 411, 738, and CD II/2, p. 176. This is akin to what Barth means when he says that “God alone is God but God is not alone” (The Knowledge of God, p. 35). 125 CD IV/1, p. 51. 124

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subjective division between the elected Jesus of history and the electing Logos of eternity.

Barth’s development on the extra Calvinisticum As we have seen, Barth grew increasingly critical of the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum between 1924 and 1938. This shift—from complete confidence to a disquiet over the fact that the extra raises just as many problems as the Lutheran rejection of it—was only the beginning. With his desire for a “twofold theological school” Barth was prepared for a third option with respect to the extra, though in 1938 he did not yet see its possibility. But by the 1950s he was ready to set forth a fully matured Christology, forcefully arguing in volume IV’s doctrine of reconciliation that Christ’s person is inseparable from his work. The consequence of his rejection of a “special Christology” is that “Christ in Himself, abstracted from what He is amongst the men of Israel and His disciples and the world, from what He is on their behalf,” does not exist and has never existed.126 If this is the case, what place does Barth leave for the Word’s continued life extra carnem? He acknowledges that Calvin’s intent was not to abstract the Logos from the man Jesus, but simply to say that the one who comes to exist as a creature in the forma servi “does not cease to be Lord and Creator and therefore to exist in the forma Dei.”127 Such an existence is not one that is wholly limited by space, time, and flesh. Yet Barth expresses the same disquiet with the extra (or, more precisely, with the Christology that results from it) that he had in CD I/2, conceding that “there is something unsatisfactory about the theory, in that right up to our own day it has led to fatal speculation about the being and work of the logos asarkos, or a God whom we think we can know elsewhere, and whose divine being we can define from elsewhere than in and from the contemplation of His presence and activity as the Word made flesh.”128 Even Calvin tried to reckon with this other “god.” This is Barth’s worry: the acknowledgment that the Word does not leave heaven should not lead us to speak of a Word who has an identity in His divine life that is distinct from Jesus Christ. We may speak of His preexistence, of the undiminished majesty and scope of His divine nature—but after He has come, taken the form of a servant to reconcile us to God, we may not look behind Him

CD IV/1, p. 124; cf. 127–28, CD III/2, pp. 58–61. CD IV/1, p. 181. 128 Ibid. 126 127

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for another Word. “There is no element of His divine essence which the Son of God, existing in human essence, withdraws from union with it and participation in it.”129 In 1924 Barth had confirmed Calvin’s totus/totus conceptualization— that the Word is “wholly in and wholly outside” the flesh. This is now entirely set aside. It is not the Word who has His life wholly within and wholly without the flesh, but the humanity of Christ that is wholly in the divine and the divine that is wholly in the human. Both here and there, the whole is present “after His divine and also after His human nature.”130 This is not a denial of the extra Calvinisticum. Instead, what Barth has done is to reframe the doctrine in terms of a mutual conditioning—not of the two natures, but of the Word’s twofold way of existing, asarkos and ensarkos. Calvin’s “whole Christ” is present in both modes in his wholeness—that is, in his divine-human unity. In this way Barth is able to maintain the sacramental intent of the extra while at the same time forestalling the most minute or well-intentioned separation between the Logosin-himself and the Logos-become-human. When Barth so relativizes the Logos asarkos in CD IV/1 nothing less is at stake than the quality of the economy as a true revelation of the life of God. The sentiment is the same in Barth’s 1947 criticism of Question 48 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which affirms the extra. Barth says: That the deity is “outside,” extra, the humanity of Jesus Christ is correct as a description of the free grace of the incarnation. But post Christum, looking back to the incarnation from where we stand, this statement can only be one of unbelief. If we believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in this one person who is true man and at the same time true God.131

Barth’s conclusion is not to side with the Lutherans against a Logos asarkos—nor with the Reformed in applying the extra Calvinisticum to the hypostatic union.132 He concedes the importance of the extra for preserving the on-going place of the Son in the triune life, but rebukes the consequent implication that this extra

CD IV/2, p. 64. CD II/1, p. 490. 131 Learning Jesus Christ through the Heidelberg Catechism, p. 77. Barth had favorably cited Question 48 of the Heidelberg Catechism in the Göttingen Dogmatics, p. 159; cf. CD I/2, p. 168. 132 Though the extra is itself an ancient doctrine, the Reformed did make a novel application of it. The Fathers were concerned with the simple affirmation that the Son does not leave the throne of heaven because he does not cease to be God; but later Reformed thinkers tended increasingly to take this as an explanation of the relationship between the two natures. See E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology, pp. 23–24. The implication of this is that the extra retained for the Logos a transcendent way of being in which he is not incarnate. 129 130

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carnem is extra Christus. If the Son of God has become a human person, then even God’s existence as human has been made basic to God’s being. Barth’s development on the extra typifies his relationship with the tradition. Early in his career he was consciously seeking to make contact with the traditions of the ancient and Reformation churches and his Christology is, by and large, consistent with the Reformed consensus he found in Heppe and the scholastics. This embrace of the tradition, not only as valuable to contemporary theology but also as authoritative, was a way of standing against liberalism as Barth perceived it. This reception was not uncritical, however, and over time he brought the tools of modern theological criticism to bear upon the received formulations with increasing diligence. And so, for example, we see that whereas Barth had unequivocally supported the extra Calvinisticum in Göttingen, by the late 1930s he has subjected the doctrine to a great deal of scrutiny with regard to its broader implications for Christology, and—while he has not rejected it—no longer finds it satisfying. Finally, in the Church Dogmatics (particularly beginning in the 1940s) Barth makes it clear that, while he has not lost his deep appreciation for the work of his forebears, dogmatic theology is not to be bound to it. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find that by 1947 his attitude toward the extra and the abstract person of the Logos it proclaims had become wholly negative. From our standpoint under revelation, as those who have been reconciled, to speak of Him as other than Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior is an act of sacrilege and unbelief.

Conclusions Because the Word of God and Jesus Christ are identical Barth believed that dogmatics must be dialectical at the point where it inquires into the overlap of Christology and the Trinity, or into the Logos as the acting agent of the Christ event. We have traced Barth’s changing views with respect to Logos Christology through the course of his career. This includes his embrace of the Reformed scholastics and rejection of the Lutheran doctrine, which later softened to a preference for the former while yet advocating the need for a “twofold theological school.” Finally, by volume IV Barth had no hesitation in speaking of the exclusivity of the Word’s life in Jesus, which included a forceful condemnation of the implications of the extra Calvinisticum. Considering the evidence before us, it is clear that throughout his career Barth grew increasingly critical of the ancient Logos tradition—the incarnation

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“from above” of a preexistent Word who maintains His existence extra carnem. There are at least two reasons for this. First, due to the demands of his lecture cycles Barth spent more and more time studying Scripture. His reading, and later theological application, of John’s prologue is decisive for his favoring of the historically particular “Jesus Christ” over the placeholder “Logos” when describing the acting agent of the incarnation. As John Webster observes, “Barth does not simply plunder the Prologue for raw material: what he has to say is exegesis first and foremost and only then conceptual paraphrase.”133 Second, the tone of Barth’s theology became increasingly actualist, and not merely so on a rhetorical register. His reading of Scripture, his willingness to fold the Lutheran testimony dialectically (yet critically) into that of his own tradition, and his radically christocentric doctrine of election each played a part in this shift. If Barth advocated the Reformed view of the incarnation early in his career, only to grow sympathetic with the ability of Lutheran Christology to make Jesus Christ central, then the mature Barth is one who has quite consciously and deliberately transcended the terms of this debate altogether. He no longer sees these two as the only options, but rather draws upon the best of both. The result is that, with Lutherans, Barth affirms the primacy and doctrinal centrality of Jesus, the God-human; and, with the Reformed, he affirms that this Christ is the Son of God from all eternity, and so His incarnation involves no change or diminution of His nature with God and as God. From the incarnation, in other words, the Logos remains asarkos and ensarkos—but it is the latter rather than the former that is more basic to His identity, even if it is temporally subsequent. (This requires an actualist ontology, which will be further explored in the remainder of this study.) In fact, because of its negative impact upon christological particularism, Barth ultimately chooses to denounce the Logos asarkos concept entirely. Soon after the publication of CD IV/1 Barth told a group of students: The incarnation makes no change in the Trinity. In the eternal decree of God, Christ is God and man. Do not ever think of the second Person of the Trinity as only Logos. That is the mistake of Emil Brunner. There is no Logos asarkos, but only ensarkos. Brunner thinks of a Logos asarkos, and I think this is the reason for his natural theology. The Logos becomes an abstract principle. Since there is only and always a Logos ensarkos, there is no change in the Trinity, as if a fourth member comes in after the incarnation.134 Webster, “Karl Barth’s Lectures on the Gospel of John,” p. 224. Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 49.

133 134

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Barth is not denying that the Word retains an exalted and glorified life while He is also in the state of humility, but that this exalted and glorified life is enjoyed in the exclusion of the Word’s humanity. With this critique of the Logos tradition, how does Barth’s understanding of the relationship between the Word of God and His assumed humanity compare to that of the models outlined in Chapter 1? In distinction from both the instrumentalist account and mature Chalcedonianism’s composite person, Barth reverses the priority of the Word-Christ relationship, making the latter the basic subject of Christology. And so Barth’s confession is not that the Word became the man Jesus Christ (though this is certainly proper to say) but that Jesus Christ is the name of this Word who became flesh. His is the real and eternal identity of the Word spoken by God to creatures. Therefore Jesus Christ is eternally God, and God the Word has an eternally human character. This is not something that Athanasius, Cyril, or John of Damascus could ever say. Barth is capable of construing the Word-Christ relationship in immanent and economic terms, as suggested by Cyril. But he insists that these two, the life of God ad intra and ad extra, in se and pro nobis, are identical in content. The divine economy perceivable in the Christ event is a revelation of God’s own self, and so it is identical with God’s self—though it takes place in and with a creaturely medium. The Word is not revealed as God in spite of the creaturely medium He has chosen but with it and as it. In painting the contrasts between Barth and the Logos tradition in such sharp terms we have, by necessity, already anticipated many of Barth’s constructive moves. How is the human nature of Christ made to be ontologically basic— anything more than the medium by which God reveals Himself without compromising God’s life in se? This must be a decisive question as we turn to Barth’s positive account of the incarnation.

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Reconciliation: The Positive Doctrine of Christ

With Karl Barth’s critical reception of the Christologies of the ancient and Reformation traditions behind us, we may turn finally to his own positive account of Jesus Christ. Christology reached to every corner of Barth’s project, and it does not seem possible to do full justice to his magisterial treatment of this locus, nor even to the material in volume IV of the Church Dogmatics, in the span of one chapter. The difficulty of such a task is attested by the paucity of secondary literature that addresses Barth’s Christology as a whole. We instead come to Barth’s mature Christology in the doctrine of reconciliation with a particular set of questions with respect to the incarnation, and inquire after Barth’s solution to the problems found in traditional accounts. Who is the active subject of the life of Jesus Christ? How are this subject’s activities described according to his human and divine natures? Is the humanity of the Son present to the life of God strictly in the economy? In the previous chapter I addressed the debate over how Barth is properly to be read with respect to the matter of the Logos asarkos and the relationship between the immanent life of God and the divine economy, as well as how and to what degree Barth’s thought was subject to development between his first attempt at a systematic theology in Göttingen (1924) and the appearance of volume IV/1 of the Church Dogmatics (1953). Our main interest here is in the incarnation as an historic doctrine, and so rather than enter further into recent disputes over Barth’s theological method, his doctrinal judgments, and the legacy of Barthianism1 I will simply present Barth’s mature Christology and, The modern debate was touched off by Bruce L. McCormack, “Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology,” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 183–200 (originally published in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, pp. 92–110). Among the more important publications since then are: Edwin Christian van Driel, “Karl Barth on the Eternal Existence of Jesus Christ,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60.1 (2007), pp. 45–61; McCormack, “Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Chr. van Driel,” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 261–77; Paul D. Molnar, “Can the Electing God be God without Us? Some

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in the chapters that follow, its impact upon our questions as I see them. My strategy will be to draw out a number of Barth’s major themes and, in the final chapter, evaluate the notion of the relationship between the eternal Word of God and finite humanity in their light. Church Dogmatics volume IV demonstrates that Barth’s Christology (and indeed his theological project as a whole) has taken on a powerfully actualist character. This speaks to both the epistemological and the ontological character of the relationship between eternity and time in Barth’s mature thought— expressed in Scripture in terms of a covenant established by God before creation began. Because God is a self-determined God who has His being in act, the life of the triune God—and especially of God in His second way of being, as Son— includes both eternal and temporal “moments.” The eternal moment is that of election, the primal decision (Urentscheidung) of divine intent; the temporal moment is the outworking (or “actualization”) of that decision. Accordingly, Barth can say: Already in the eternal will and decree of God He was not to be, nor did He will to be, God only, but Emmanuel, God with man, and, in fulfilment of this “with,” according to the free choice of His grace, this man, Jesus of Nazareth. And in the act of God in time which corresponds to this eternal decree, when the Son of God became this man, He ceased to all eternity to be God only, receiving and having and maintaining to all eternity human essence as well.2

By virtue of the incarnation the being of God, including His way of being as the Son, is located exclusively neither at one or the other of these “moments” but in their dialectical relationship. Barth is unduly criticized, and his theology profoundly misunderstood, where this is not appreciated.3 As I will show, because Implications of Bruce McCormack’s Understanding of Barth’s Doctrine of Election for the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 49.2 (2007), pp. 199–222; George Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity: Twenty-five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth,” in Modern Theology 24.2 (2008), pp.  179–98; McCormack, “Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63.2 (2010), pp. 203–24; and Kevin Hector, “Immutability, Necessity and Triunity: Towards a Resolution of the Trinity and Election Controversy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 65.1 (2012), pp. 64–81. Several essays in this debate have been collected in Michael T. Dempsey (ed.), Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology. 2 CD IV/2, p. 100; cf. CD III/2, p. 218. The language of actualism is, of course, not new in volume IV. A decade earlier Barth insisted that what took place in Jesus Christ “was not merely a temporal event, but the eternal will of God temporally actualised and revealed in that event” (CD II/2, p. 179; cf. CD II/2, p. 108—appealing to Augustine as precedent). 3 Edwin Christian van Driel is thus correct in his criticism of Brunner and Berkouwer, who concluded that Barth had relocated the center of salvation history to a pre-temporal eternity and so rendered meaningless the historical outworking of election. See van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, pp.  86–88 (and texts cited therein). This interpretation mistakes actualization for revelation, in the sense of a mere disclosure in time.

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Barth’s mature Christology is informed by this notion at a most fundamental level, it is rightly described as actualist in character—and therein lies its greatest strength in speaking afresh to the ancient problem of God’s becoming a human subject. To demonstrate these claims I will examine four themes (or pairs of themes) in Barth’s later Christology. I begin where Barth begins by identifying the biblical category of covenant as the over-arching context for the whole of the doctrine of reconciliation.4 With covenant is the doctrine of election, which will require an appreciation of Barth’s doctrine of God in Volume II of the Dogmatics as a foundation for Christology. This is not to suggest that the doctrine of God is Barth’s dogmatic starting point, however: even there Barth’s christocentrism plays a decisive role.5 Considering covenant and election together will allow us more fully to explore the idea of actualism as a christological method (whether or not it was one of which Barth was especially self-conscious), and also give our further examination of Christology much needed context. Next I will consider the relationship between time and eternity, particularly as it concerns the life of God with respect to creation and therefore the correlation of the incarnate Son to His eternal existence. With this protological framework in hand we can then enter into the heart of Barth’s Christology, through the themes of the communion (or communication) of divine and human essences in Jesus Christ (communicatio naturarum), and finally the humiliation of the Son of God and the exaltation of the Son of Man (the status duplex). While the focus of this study is on the person of Christ, it bears repeating that for Barth this doctrine is bound up in Jesus’ saving activity. The larger context of the doctrine of reconciliation implicates the ontology of the Mediator in the nature of sin, the justification and sanctification of creatures, the role of the Holy Spirit, the existence and vocation of the church, and the fruit of faith, love, and hope—themes that Barth works out in the later paragraphs of each of CD IV’s part-volumes. Thus Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation is formally structured not only by the status duplex but also by the munus triplex, attending throughout to the offices of Christ as priest, king, and prophet. It will also become clear in our study that Barth’s Christology is deeply intertwined with his doctrine of God. The master themes of volume IV provide Barth with a framework for everything he wishes to say not only about God’s coming to human creatures to turn us from Eberhard Busch relays that Barth had originally thought of titling volume IV “The Doctrine of the Covenant.” See Busch, The Great Passion, p. 51. See CD II/2, pp. 3–5, 80–81. Election forms the basis for an actualist Christology, but the doctrine of election is itself (like the rest of theology) christocentric.

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ourselves and restore us to fellowship with God, but also about the way in which God’s coming to humanity is also his becoming a human subject. In the person of Jesus Christ, Barth believes, humanity has been drawn into the very life of God.

Christology’s formal ground: Covenant and election The biblical category of covenant is the exegetical connective tissue between Karl Barth’s doctrines of election and reconciliation. Thus it is that standing between these two loci in the Dogmatics is the doctrine of creation (volume III), which has the covenant as its “inner basis.” Election is God’s eternal determination for covenant with creatures; covenant is the presupposition of reconciliation; and reconciliation is the fulfillment of that covenant, “the restitution, the resumption of a fellowship which once existed but was then threatened by dissolution.”6 This sequence in turn rests upon the divine motive for election, or what Barth calls the covenant’s own inner basis: the free love of God, God’s eternal decree for relationship with creatures.7 This is no inter-trinitarian pactum, as in federal theology, by which the Father decrees the salvation of the elect and the Son consents to die for their propitiation.8 Instead, it is the gracious work of the one God who elects humanity for Himself and Himself for reprobation and the suffering of atonement. How, then, do the person and work of the man Jesus relate to the eternal being of the triune God? According to Barth, God’s eternal decision to be God for us is “the covenant of the Father with His Son as the Lord and Bearer of human nature,”9 historically realized within creation. Humankind is God’s covenant partner according to the humanity of the Son, decreed in eternity and actualized in time. Barth is thus able to insist that Jesus Christ himself is both the electing God, who determines creatures for fellowship with Himself, and the elected human who goes into the far country to reestablish that fellowship.

The covenant form The covenant takes the form of “God with us,” because in light of the Fall only God Himself is capable of humankind’s requisite response to grace. The man 9 6 7 8

CD IV/1, p. 22; cf. 70–78. CD III/1, p. 97; CD III/2, p. 218. See CD IV/1, pp. 54–66. CD III/1, p. 97.

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who was born in Bethlehem, and crucified on Golgotha, and raised in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea is the relation between God and His covenant people, the unity of God’s gracious address to men and women and God’s gracious claim upon them.10 This relation is irrevocable, “so that once God has willed to enter into it, and has in fact entered into it, He would not be God without it. It is a relation in which God is self-determined, so that the determination belongs no less to Him than all that He is in and for Himself.”11 This leads Barth to the provocative statement that “without the Son sitting at the right hand of the Father, God would not be God.”12 Had God self-determined in a different way He would not be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but “an alien God.” The true God is God only in the movement toward this man, and in Him toward others as His people. If God gives to creatures created space alongside His own, then to the man Jesus God gives even His own space itself—the throne from which God reigns over all things.13 Because the covenant is a relationship grounded in God’s eternal decision but realized in the history of Israel (and, indeed, the history of all creation), and because it is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, it also has the character of event. It is not a fixed something—“a truth which as such has ceased to be event . . . something given apart from the act of God and man”—but exists in its continual becoming and renewal by God.14 This is precisely why covenant is so useful to biblical theology, including Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, as a sort of master concept. Covenant is the term that describes the whole of God’s ongoing relationship with creatures and of creatures’ relationship with God— in both their fidelity and infidelity to Him. But it is only so as the totality of their history. This is initiated by God and God’s promises, and it takes place only as God shows that He is their God and that they are His people. This is the historical actualization of God’s eternal will, that which He intended for creation since before creation. CD IV/1, p. 53; cf. 123, 132, and CD II/2, p. 7. CD II/2, p. 7. 12 Ibid. (modified). The English rendering of wären as “could” is a bit far-reaching here, saying that God could not be God without the relation to His covenant partner. This is not far from Barth’s intent, since there is no possibility that God would be God in any other way once He has determined Himself for this relationship. The logical sequence of God’s “[willing] to enter into it” (first) and His “not [being] God without it” (only subsequently) is important. The intent is not to limit God’s freedom, as können might have suggested, but rather to emphasize that God’s concrete decision to be God in this way (and not in another) is an expression of His freedom. More likely, Barth intended this statement as a trinitarian contrast to Hegel’s infamous remark that “without the world God is not God.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. I, p. 308n.97. 13 CD II/1, p. 487. 14 CD IV/1, p. 23. 10 11

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What, then, is the content of the eternal will of God? It is identical with the election of Jesus Christ, “a divine activity in the form of the history, encounter and decision between God and man.”15 The election of grace is God’s decision for covenant, and so its establishment in eternity is the act by which God determines Himself to be God for us (Deus pro nobis) and determines us to be under the imperative of obedience to our Creator.16 Covenant and election are bound tightly together: election is that eternal and gracious decision by which God “institutes, maintains and directs this covenant,”17 and the covenant describes not only how God will live with creatures but, by virtue of His selfdetermination, just what sort of God He is. God’s presence and activity in the world “are the determination and limitation proper to His own eternal being, so assuredly has He decided for them by the decree of His eternal will.”18 There are no divine decisions that do not rest upon God’s eternal willing, “upon this primal decision made in His eternal being.” If God is Deus pro nobis by eternal decision, then He is so in His very being as God—for “in this covenant He reveals Himself as the One He is, the One who is bound to His own nature, the One who is true to Himself.”19 Already we see that the distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity is to be relativized: the latter reveals the former in truth, and so the two are materially identical. The gracious activity of God ad extra, toward and with and for creatures, is therefore rooted not merely in the being that God “is” (modus essendi) but in the being that God has elected for Himself. The incarnation is thus a postlegoumenon because it rests upon, and is the fulfillment of, the eternal divine counsel.20 Because God elects a human existence for Himself, vis-à-vis the incarnation of the Son that is yet to come, God’s covenant partner is not absent in the eternal moment of His decision: there was never a time when God was not the covenant partner of humanity.21 The love of God—God’s gracious extension of Himself to fellowship with another—is expressed even in this moment when the creation of the other has not yet been realized. God chooses to bind Himself to creatures, Barth says, and in this eternal moment this is already real for God—even while it has yet to be realized in the CD II/2, p. 175. Cf. Exod. 6.7; CD IV/2, pp. 4–5, 499, 562. On this account the establishment of the covenant in time is more properly characterized as its disclosure to men and women—first to Adam and Eve, and later to Abram and all of Israel. 17 CD II/2, p. 9. 18 CD II/2, p. 50. 19 CD II/1, p. 384. 20 CD IV/2, p. 119. 21 CD III/2, p. 218. 15 16

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history of creation and covenant. In God’s free election of grace “He is no longer alone by Himself . . .” In this free act of the election of grace there is already present, and presumed, and assumed into unity with His own existence as God, the existence of the man whom He intends and loves from the very first and in whom He intends and loves all other men, of the man in whom He wills to bind Himself with all other men and all other men with Himself. In this free act of the election of grace the Son of the Father is no longer just the eternal Logos, but as such, as very God from all eternity He is also the very God and very man He will become in time. In the divine act of predestination there pre-exists the Jesus Christ who as the Son of the eternal Father and the child of the Virgin Mary will become and be the Mediator of the covenant between God and man, the One who accomplishes the act of atonement. He in whom the covenant of grace is fulfilled and revealed in history is also its eternal basis.22

What is most remarkable about the way in which Barth works out the being of God in act is that the decision God makes—the way in which He is the One who loves in freedom—is to be God for us, a determination for fellowship with creatures. “God is for man too the One who loves in freedom.”23 He is this first antecedently in Himself, and now for us because God has made creatures to be the object of His loving. The content of the promise therefore corresponds to the being of God: “I will be your God” is, in fact, an ontological statement.24 When He redeems creatures through His free grace, God, who is self-sufficient and under no constraint, “lives in the repetition and confirmation of what He is in Himself.”25 The point at which God and humankind come together in this gracious fellowship is Jesus Christ, himself the fulfillment of the covenant, the Son of God who at his deepest depth of being and from eternity exists in divinehuman unity. This is why Barth’s Christology is so fundamental to everything else he has to say.

Promise and fulfillment The eternal moment of the divine decision is not, of itself, the covenant—nor is the history in which creatures relate to God, of itself, the covenant. Rather, the covenant 25 22 23 24

CD IV/1, p. 66 (emphasis mine). CD II/2, p. 3. CD IV/1, p. 112; cf. CD IV/2, pp. 345–47. CD IV/2, p. 346.

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has its existence in the relation of the two, in the dialectic of God’s promises and their fulfillment. This takes place in the history of the covenant in creation (its “outer basis”): God speaks to His chosen people and summons them to relationship, promising to be their God and to make them great (Gen. 12.1–3; 15.4–7), and later those promises are carried out. A son is promised to Abraham and Sarah, and they wait in uncertain expectation (Gen. 17.16–19; 18.10–14). Yet, without any risk that it might be otherwise, God is faithful: in the fullness of time, the child is born (Gen. 21.1–7; cf. Gal. 4.4). The promise occurs not only in time, however. It also occurs in eternity—especially insofar as it is universal in scope, insofar as God possesses an intention toward those creatures He is to bring into existence. In the eternal decision of election God swears by Himself that He will enter into fellowship with them, and that He will reconcile creatures out of their fallenness, upholding and fulfilling the covenant even though on their part it is broken.26 God predestined us in Jesus Christ as recipients of grace before the foundation of the world, and now has made known to us this will (Eph. 1.9–10). The promise uttered to men and women as God encounters them in their own history is the repetition of this intention, even as the birth of God’s Son is the repetition of His eternal generation. Barth’s actualist ontology bears this form, the form of promise and fulfillment, of divine decision and its historical execution. One hangs upon the other: a decision that does not come to pass is not the decision of a supreme God, and a promise that is left unfulfilled is a lie. But God’s covenant faithfulness takes place in and as “the fulfilment of a decision which underlies and therefore precedes that actualisation, an ‘earlier’ divine decision,” and as “the successful continuation of an act which God had already begun, from the very beginning.”27 The work of God in Jesus Christ is the actualization of the covenant between God and humanity and therefore “the achievement of reconciliation.”28 For Barth this fulfillment is secured by the constancy and the faithfulness of God, who is the Creator of all things and the Lord of all events.29 When God acts or speaks He does so only as the faithful God, and He does so always in a particular direction: “No one can doubt it; He will fulfil His promise. But the Word of God is always aimed! It is not like fireworks, but like a gun that is aimed and shot at a definite time and in a definite situation.”30 Therefore no word from God will ever fail (cf. Lk. 1.37). That which is promised therefore has real existence 28 29 30 26 27

CD IV/1, p. 36. Ibid. CD IV/2, p. 589. CD IV/1, p. 47. Karl Barth’s Table Talk, pp. 34–35.

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even before the moment of its historical actualization, existence in the word and will of the Creator, in the anticipation of its inevitable fulfillment. It exists in the interval between “Let there be light” and “there was light.” Just as God’s covenant relationship has a backward-looking aspect (“I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who led you out of Egypt”), so too does it have a forward-looking aspect (“I will be your God, and you will be my people”).31 This is further guaranteed and given a reality by the way in which God relates to time. What, then, is the promise to which God causes His own being to correspond? God has determined Himself not just for fellowship with men and women, Barth says, but for a human existence in His second way of being. What Barth calls the actualization of the will of God is accomplished in and as Jesus Christ, “in God’s own being and acting and speaking as man.”32 Jesus himself is the covenant in all its fullness.33 The covenant provides not only for an external unity between God and creatures (such as a unity of wills, perhaps), but for an ontological unity through the humanity of Jesus Christ, as well. God elects that this man “should be essentially one with Himself in His Son,”34 and the result of this eternal decision “is manifest [offenbar, i.e. that which is already the case but now made apparent] to us in the existence of this man as attested by Holy Scripture.”35 As we have to do with Jesus Christ, then, we have to do not merely with the Logos acting upon flesh (Eusebius, Athanasius) or with the Logos strictly in an economic mode (Cyril). According to Barth, in Jesus Christ we have to do with the electing God.36 Yet he is also called the beginning of all the ways and works of God, for “from all eternity God elected to bear this name. Over against all that is really outside God, Jesus Christ is the eternal will of God, the eternal decree of God and the eternal beginning of God.”37 He is not only the form but also the content of the first and eternal Word of God, so that beside him there is no other Word. 33 34

Lev. 26.12–13; cf. Exod. 6.2–8, 20.2, Deut. 4.20, 37–8. CD IV/1, p. 36. The Humanity of God, pp. 46–47. CD II/2, p. 11; cf. 175–76. Barth is not an adoptionist, though his language here may sound that way. God is not electing a man, but as the Son is choosing from all eternity to be this man. Thus God calls Jesus and Himself “essentially one.” 35 CD II/2, p. 176 (KD II/2, p. 192). 36 CD II/2, p. 54; cf. 103–16. Barth thought it right to adopt (at least in its intention) the Lutheran view of election as based upon Christology. See CD II/2, p. 75; cf. 80–81, 149–50. It is not the redemptive will of God, generally construed as a decretum absolutum, that forms the basis of election. Rather, “it is Jesus Christ Himself who occupies this place”: not an abstract concept of the God who elects and the human who is elected, nor an inter-trinitarian pact, but Jesus Christ, the electing God and elected human, who is Himself the decree of God and its fulfillment (CD II/2, p. 76; cf. 158). 37 CD II/2, p.  99; cf. 175, where Barth says that “the name and person of Jesus Christ was in the beginning with God.” 31 32

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If this is so, Barth says, then that means further that “the beginning of all things, of the being of all men and of the whole world, even the divine willing of creation, is preceded by God’s covenant with man as its basis and purpose.”38 The promise by which God pledges Himself to humankind and binds Himself as God, and also the command by which God binds humankind to Himself, both take place prior to creation itself. If this covenant of God with creatures includes God’s self-determination for incarnation, then it includes the humanity of the divine Son (in eternity, in the anticipation of its history). Jesus Christ is then the very promise itself—“You will conceive and give birth to a son” (Lk. 1.31)— not merely the instrument or channel of the grace of God, but the grace and the gift itself. He is “the concrete reality and actuality of the divine command and the divine promise, the content of the will of God which exists prior to its fulfilment.”39 Jesus Christ is this in the fullness of his divinity and his humanity, and most especially in the unity of the two. As we turn from this formal shape of the covenant to the material Christology of the Church Dogmatics we will see how Barth works out this divine decision and its actualization in more precise detail. It will help us to understand, for example, how Barth can say that the incarnate Son is divine and human, superordinate and obedient, exalted and humble, both in His eternal existence and in time. This is the basis upon which Barth will speak of the being of Jesus Christ in terms of the mutual coordination and determination of divinity and humanity in and by their union with one another.

The incarnation in time and eternity At the outset of this chapter I indicated that Barth’s actualism points to the dialectic between eternity and time as having an ontological character. This is to suggest that the relationship between the eternal existence of God the Son and the historical life of Jesus Christ is more than that of revelation (the latter disclosing the former, as both temporally prior and ontologically preeminent) or of an activity ad extra. The same should be said of the relationship between the immanent and the economic Trinity. According to Barth, the distinction made between God in Himself and God in relation to the world is not of essential,

CD IV/1, p. 53. CD IV/1, p. 48; cf. CD IV/2, pp. 31–36.

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but heuristic significance: “When we have to do with Jesus Christ we do have to do with an ‘economy’ but not with the kind of economy in which His true and proper being remains behind an improper being, a being ‘as if.’ We have to do with an economy in which God is truly Himself and Himself acts and intervenes in the world.” If this were not so, Barth says, God’s work of atonement in this economy would not be a true atonement.40 The event in which God is God therefore does not exclude the economy, but indeed by the will of God it occurs precisely here. Eternity and time are thus related as the venues of divine promise and its fulfillment, God’s intention and its execution. This is true even with respect to the being of the triune God: God does not exist as the one without the other, intention and fulfillment, but always as the one in relationship to the other—especially with respect to His life as Son. The implications of the time-eternity dialectic for the doctrine of the incarnation are staggering.

Eternity’s relationship to time Time and its relation to eternity is a theme to which Barth returns repeatedly throughout the Church Dogmatics.41 In its broad contours this account is not all that unique: within the Christian tradition it is common to say that God is eternal, neither standing within the procession of linear time nor bound to a succession of stages.42 Since time itself is a creation, God as its Creator stands outside and above it. For Thomas Aquinas this is a consequence of confessing God as immutable and perfect in essence: time is the measurement of movement and change, and eternity describes God’s lack of these.43 But Barth does not stop there. As the eternal One, God’s relationship to time is not that of the Creator who merely reaches into His creation from without in order to effect revelation. God is rather the One who enters into time, not only acting within it as a venue but committing Himself to it. This Barth calls “the time of revelation.” Eternity, on the other hand, is “God’s time.” It is not the absence of time, but rather eternity fully circumscribes and comprehends time (while not being

CD IV/1, p. 198; cf. CD II/1, pp. 260–63, where Barth says that the very essence of God “is something which we shall encounter either at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Saviour, or not at all” (ibid., p. 261). On the “heuristic” significance of the distinction see CD II/1, p. 345. 41 See CD I/2, §14 (“The Time of Revelation”); CD II/1, §31.3 (“The Eternity and Glory of God”); CD III/2, §47 (“Man in His Time”). 42 Cf. Augustine, Confessions, Book 11; City of God, 11.6; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (hereafter: ST) I, q. 10. 43 See especially ST I, q. 10, a. 1–2. 40

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exhausted by it). It is all moments in their totality and simultaneity. Whereas time exists in a sequence of “past, present, and future,” or of “beginning, succession, and end,” God is eternal because in Him “beginning, succession and end are not three but one, not separate as a first, a second and a third occasion, but one simultaneous occasion as beginning, middle and end. Eternity is the simultaneity of beginning, middle and end, and to that extent it is pure duration.”44 On the other hand, eternity is not a vast stretch of temporality within which God exists, an infinite quantity of time of which creation makes up only a part. And it is not something that is fundamentally other than God (for all that is not God we call creation). Eternity is uncreated, and therefore it is the divine essence itself: “He, the living God, is eternity.”45 It is a perfection of His being and a quality of His freedom, freedom from limits imposed by a past that is also “no longer” and a future that is also “not yet.”46 This freedom of God to be eternally constant is what secures the covenant— for the promise made in the past renders certain the fulfillment in the present and consummation in the future, giving these moments a proleptic reality in the divine life. It is “because and as God has and is this duration, eternity,” Barth says, that “He can and will be true to Himself, and we can and may put our trust in Him.”47 The time of creatures stands in clear contrast to this. “Time is distinguished from eternity by the fact that in it beginning, middle and end are distinct and even opposed as past, present and future.”48 The simultaneity of God’s eternal time is unrolled into moments that stand in sequential relation, so that for creatures what is past is no more and what is future is not yet. As an intermediary between the real time of God and the lost time of creatures God provides “the time of revelation.” Here God “has time” for us—and not only has time, but “He Himself is time for us. For His revelation as Jesus Christ is really God Himself.”49 We may even say that God “becomes time” for us, just as God becomes flesh. This third time is fulfilled time, God’s own presence within the bounds of creation. It is fulfilled because in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ time itself “has discovered its origin and its aim.”50 In “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4.4) God takes

46 47 48 49 50 44 45

CD II/1, p. 608 (emphasis mine); cf. CD I/2, p. 50; and Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 10, a. 2, 4. CD II/1, pp. 638–39. Thomas agrees: see ST I, q. 10, a. 2 responsio. CD II/1, p. 608. CD II/1, p. 609. CD II/1, p. 608. CD II/1, p. 612 (emphasis mine). CD I/2, p. 69; cf. CD III/2, p. 459.

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away our time that is broken by the Fall and in its place gives us a time that is genuine. Barth concludes therefore that eternity is the principle of God’s inward freedom, while time is the principle of God’s free activity outwards. Time relies upon the eternity that circumscribes it just as God’s love toward creatures has His inner freedom as its basis. What theology has to say about God’s activity in time (including revelation) is deeply conditioned by God’s supra-temporality— by the fact that all temporal moments are simultaneous to God.

Humanity in God’s eternity From this relation of God to created time Barth draws a startling conclusion for Christology: presuming that God does not change, if God is human in time (i.e. ontologically, in God’s second way of being) then God is human also in the eternity which comprehends time. He is simply this in a different way, in the eternal anticipation of what the Son is to be in the temporal moment. This is not mere potentiality (i.e. a decision waiting to be executed)—for the actualization of that which is merely potential would also be reckoned as change. (This is why the kenotic argument of Thomasius and Mackintosh, suggesting the Son’s withdrawal of divine attributes to a state of potency, will not suffice.) Rather, by virtue of God’s fidelity to Himself it is realiter even in eternity. Thus in an actualist ontology the eternal decision of God to be for us in the incarnation, and the historical realization of that decision in Bethlehem, have equal reality for God in the pre-temporal moment of election. In God’s time, the Son’s historical becoming is already contained within the eternal moment (even as its creaturely temporality has not yet come to pass). And because it is God’s time (and not the “lost time” of creatures) that is real time, the moment of God’s eternal election is, in fact, the more decisive of the two. Thus Barth can say that Jesus Christ—who is both divine and human—is “before all time,” that he is “eternally the Son and the Word of God, God Himself in His turning to the world,” and that “eternity itself bears the name of Jesus Christ.”51 The humility of God the Son that is displayed in the incarnation is thus something new to us but not something new to God,52 who exists simultaneously to all moments.

CD II/1, p. 622. CD IV/1, p. 193. We will consider the humility of the Son under the heading of the status exinanitionis, below.

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Humanity, however, is creatureliness. It is created and is therefore, by definition, that which is not God. The problem is thus not only temporal in nature. Is it at all coherent to speak of a created nature as eternal for God the Son? Furthermore, might we extend what Barth has said about the eternal nature of the incarnation to other aspects of creation, as well? Is creation itself eternally “real” by virtue of God’s decision to create, before He has spoken into the darkness? What of the church? Does it, too, have a preexistent reality? As potentially fruitful as an actualist ontology is to the whole of dogmatics, a word of caution is in order: created things do not exist in eternity, but precisely by virtue of their creation—a divine work ad extra which follows upon God’s election. Past, present, and future are simultaneously present to God—but we cannot deduce from the fact that God knew and willed these things that each one proleptically exists with God in eternity.53 This sort of bizarre, Christianized Platonism would elevate the creature to a coexistence with God and threaten the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Only God has His being in pure activity, and only the creative act of God is constitutive of existence. The decisive moment in which the existence of creatures is constituted, then, is not the eternal but the temporal. The creature’s coexistence with God can be understood only in the sense that she is acted upon, taken up into fellowship with God. This is no less true of the Son’s humanity. Yet the incarnation, and therefore the humanity of Christ, is in this respect unique among all of God’s creations, precisely because it has to do with the very being of God (qua Son)—Jesus Christ, “the firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1.15). Yet his humanity is a medium of revelation.54 Insofar as this may be called “creaturely” we must acknowledge that it is not a thing, a nature or humanum materially construed, but a way in which the Son exists as the brother of human persons and the Mediator of the divine covenant. God is pro nobis et nobiscum, appropriating creaturely existence as His own. As wide as the gap between the Creator and creaturely being is, then, God wills not to maintain that “wholly otherness” as untraversable — for “His own time, eternity, is not so precious to Him, it is obviously not so conditioned in itself, nor is it the case that God has and is eternity in such a way, that He must set it over against our time and keep it far away with the distance of the Creator from the creature.”55 The Creator-creature distinction itself is not set aside, but

CD II/1, pp. 614, 618–19. To guard against such misuse, Barth delimits eternity to three forms: its pre-temporality, supra-temporality, and post-temporality, each of which he says has been privileged at one time or another in the centuries since the Reformation (ibid., pp. 619–38). 54 CD II/1, pp. 19–20; cf. 44–62. God the Son is identical with the person of Jesus Christ but not with the medium of humanity itself, a conceptual challenge that will be further addressed in Chapter 5. 55 CD II/1, p. 616. 53

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qualified by an event in which God wills to become creaturely in His second way of being, and to be so all the way down. Barth’s theological ontology suggests, then, that in the reality of God’s life the three temporal moments of past, present, and future are held together in unity (and indeed transcended). This is what it means for God to be eternal. Grammatically speaking, the Word that is spoken by God “is a present [tense] that is not a present without also being a genuine perfect; and a perfect and a future, the mean [Mitte] of which constitutes a genuine, indestructible present.”56 In the historical moment of Bethlehem the Word is spoken; and this means that in God it also has been spoken and will be spoken. His life as a human, and therefore His created humanity, begins; and this means that for God it also has begun and will begin. “Before” in God does not imply “not yet,” and “after” does not imply “no more.”57 Rather God’s being includes an eternal becoming, a dynamic existence in which God—even God the Son—“continually becomes who he is.”58 The event of God’s being is past, and present, and future, an accomplished fact as well as a future that lies ahead of creatures and confronts them. If the present tense of God speaking His Word in time includes with it the perfect tense of His eternally anticipated humanity, then it also includes the future tense of eschatological hope. God is not only pre-temporal and supra-temporal, Barth says, but also post-temporal, “the eternity toward which we move.”59 The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an “Archimedean point”60 upon which history turns. But recall that the unique event in which God has His being is the act of revelation—and though this occurs in the sphere of history it never becomes fixed there. The divine covenant with humankind thus does not terminate upon the present moment of the incarnation, or the crucifixion, or even the resurrection of Jesus; rather these continue to point forward in time, because “revelation remains revelation and does not become a revealed state.” The being of the church as the object of revelation therefore has a decisively eschatological character, so that its existence as the body of the risen Christ depends upon the fact that the time of recollection is not yet a fulfilled time, even as it participates in fulfilled time.61

CD I/2, p. 52 (KD I/2, p. 58). CD II/1, p. 640; cf. CD III/2, pp. 462–64. Hunsinger, “Mysterium Trinitatis,” p. 193. Hunsinger, “Mysterium Trinitatis,” p. 208. See CD I/2, p. 117. It is the resurrection, “Easter time,” that makes the time of Jesus free from the limitations of creaturely time (CD III/2, p. 464). 61 CD I/2, pp. 118–19. 58 59 60 56 57

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Finally, because God exists as “pure duration” He is eternally constant, as classical theology has defended under the term immutability. This for Barth is a function of God’s freedom—that is, the freedom to be self-conditioned and not to be conditioned by anything that is not God. God “is what He is in eternal actuality. He never is it only potentially (not even in part). He never is it at any point intermittently. But always at every place He is what He is continually and self-consistently.”62 This is what it means for God to be immutable: God is consistent with Himself, with His freedom and love, at every moment. If our theology is to go so far as to call the humanity of Jesus Christ essential to the being of God the Word, we must grant that its reality in the eternal divine intention is more than merely an unrealized potentiality. In God there is no such thing.

Primary and secondary objectivity Our consideration of the eternal God’s relation to created time stands in need of one important clarification. At the beginning of his doctrine of God Barth introduces the language of God’s “primary” and “secondary objectivity.”63 Primary objectivity is identified with God as He knows Himself, and secondary objectivity with God as He makes Himself known to creatures. This distinction would appear to be closely related to the classical distinctions between Creator and creature, between God’s being and acts, and between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity.64 But we should not presume too quickly that Barth is distinguishing God’s objectivity to Himself and to others in the same way as indicated by these other contrasts. In fact Barth criticizes the tradition for making a crucial distinction between being and act, or essence and existence, arguing instead that God’s being is one of pure activity.65 He refuses to prioritize being such that it has essential or causal priority over God’s activity. An implication of this is that God’s primary and secondary objectivities are intimately related—just as the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity are materially identical. They are distinguished “not by a lesser degree of truth, but by its particular form suitable for us, the creature. God is objectively immediate to Himself, but to us He is objectively mediate.”66 CD II/1, p. 494. Barth’s full treatment of divine constancy is in CD II/1, §31.2. CD II/1, §25 (see especially pp. 16–18, 44–62). 64 This appears to be the interpretation of George Hunsinger, who extends the language of primary and secondary objectivity to include the life of the Logos asarkos (primary) and ensarkos (secondary). See Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity,” pp. 191–94. 65 CD IV/2, p. 113; cf. CD II/1, p. 262; CD IV/3, pp. 533–34. 66 CD II/1, p. 16. 62 63

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This close relation and correspondence must significantly inform the way in which God’s objectivities are described as distinct. A traditional notion of the divine economy will hold that God reveals Himself authentically, His secondary objectivity disclosing a primary objectivity that stands prior to and apart from the act of its disclosure. But because for Barth being and act are equally basic and interdependent concepts, we may say that—by virtue of God’s freedom—the divine disclosure of Himself that takes place in the incarnation determines the sort of God He is in eternity. This is all the more important if we confess that the incarnation is a self-giving, an act that both reveals and includes God’s own being as He is present in and to creation. The act of revelation and the content of revelation are indivisible—therefore in his language of primary and secondary objectivity Barth must mean something other than “God as He is in Himself ” and “God as He reveals Himself to creatures.” In truth, this distinction has a strictly noetic function in Barth’s doctrine of God: it serves to specify not how God is but how God is known, that is the knowledge God has of Himself and the knowledge of Himself that God gives to creatures. The being of God is entirely consistent between God-for-Himself and God-for-us; only our knowledge of God varies. Ours is received but not possessed, mediated and not immediate. The distinction between primary and secondary objectivity is thus a corollary of revelation, not of ontology. Because of this, the distinction need not preclude the humanity of the Son from God’s being (though Barth does not observe that possibility here, in CD II/1). God’s primary objectivity is simply God’s self-knowledge, not His inner life, and so it is not flatly synonymous with divine immanence, or with the Creator’s lack of creatureliness, or with a metaphysical being that stands behind the act of revelation. Whatever it is in which God’s being consists—that which God knows in His primary objectivity—is made known to us in a form fitting with our creatureliness. Apart from this act we cannot say what the being of God is, and whether it includes or excludes the humanity of the Son. Thus to say that the Logos is asarkos in God’s primary objectivity may yet allow that He is ensarkos there as well. When, in fact, Barth says that we know God indirectly— not nakedly but clothed under a sign and veil—he follows this with the statement that to look upon this veil (i.e. the humanity of the Son) is to see nothing short of the glory of God (Exod. 33.11–23).67

CD II/1, pp. 16, 19–20.

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In short: when God makes Himself known to us, He makes Himself known— and the identification of Christ’s humanity as a medium of revelation does not preclude its inclusion in the identity of the eternal Son.

“Two essence” Christology and the communication of natures We turn now to consider the way in which God the Son exists within created time, which is the shape of Barth’s doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ in volume IV of the Church Dogmatics. Barth makes extensive use of concepts and terminology from the history of theology, including the communication of natures, the hypostatic union, the two states of Christ (status duplex), and the three offices of Christ (munus triplex). He does so while redefining some terminology from the history of Christology and dispensing with others (highlighted in Chapter 4). For the purposes of the topic at hand, it is important here only to register Barth’s objection to the term “nature” (physis, or in German Natur), which he regards as too static to do justice to what the New Testament narrates as a history.68 In its place he substitutes Wesen—“essence,” or perhaps the less substantialist “existence”—as better capturing the dynamic quality of Jesus’ divine and human life. Rather than as a uniting of natures his Christology is expressed in the language of history and event—“as an actuality, as an operatio between God and man, fulfilled in Jesus Christ as a union of God with man.”69 As with the doctrine of God, the existence of Jesus Christ is to be described as a being in act. Since the Reformation the doctrine of the communication of natures (communicatio naturarum) has encompassed a threefold communication of the human and divine essences in their personal union: the communication of attributes (idiomatum), operations (operationum), and graces (gratiarum). Barth’s extended discussion of the hypostatic union in CD IV/2 picks up and radically extends the communicatio in this classic form.70 He saw modern Protestantism as evading the material import of the unio and communicatio of See CD IV/2, p. 44; cf. 26f., 60–61. Here I will follow Barth’s use of “essence” in place of “nature.” Barth’s exception is his use of “communicatio naturarum” as an overarching term, in keeping with the Reformed tradition. See n. 82, below. 69 CD IV/2, p. 105. 70 Charles Waldrop analyzes Barth’s presentation appropriately under the headings of “Impartation,” “Address,” and “Actualization” (Karl Barth’s Christology, pp.  72–77). Barth most certainly does not reject the communicatio idiomatum and gratiarum as insufficient to the task of describing the hypostatic union, nor does he subscribe to perichoresis as its basic archetype, as Peter Oh suggests (Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology, pp. 41n.4, 73–78). 68

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the two natures because it regarded it as a mere nod to the past, “a shibboleth of so-called orthodoxy,” and not what it truly is: a consequence of what Christian theology affirms about the Son of God.71 To apprehend Barth’s Christology, then, we must examine his recovery of the communicatio naturarum. Through a close examination of Barth’s presentation of the doctrine in §64.2 (“The Homecoming of the Son of Man”)72 we will see that in Barth’s hands the communication of natures is not simply a set of descriptive tools for explaining the mysterium tremendum of the incarnation but is, in fact, principle to his actualist approach to Christology—and even corresponds to the gospel itself.

Communicatio Idiomatum The communicatio idiomatum affirms that, because of the union, all of the divine perfections of Godhead and all that characterizes humanity are proper to Jesus Christ, without limit or reservation.73 He is holy and merciful, omnipresent and eternal—and also limited, mortal, and temporal. In CD IV/2 Barth’s discussion of the sharing of divine and human attributes in the person of Jesus takes place as a response to Lutheranism, where a stress on communication serves as the motor of Christology and, by extension, sacramentology. To Lutherans the communication of attributes implies both the genus maiestaticum (the sharing of divine attributes directly with the human nature itself) and some form of kenoticism, and so it necessitates a Reformed response to each.74 Barth criticizes the genus maiestaticum, but positively he also establishes three principles that support the Reformed construal of the hypostatic union. These three also point ahead to Barth’s own agenda of doing Christology out of the lived history of the Son of God. The first of these principles is common to the history of Reformed dogmatics. In its approach to the hypostatic union Lutheranism tends toward an emphasis upon the union of natures, Reformed theology an emphasis upon the person in whom they are united.75 And so Lutherans may be found to imply that Christ is the result of that union or the medium in which it takes place. But it is the relation of the natures that is foremost. By contrast, for the Reformed the incarnation is

73 74 75 71 72

CD IV/2, p. 60. CD IV/2, pp. 60–116. CD IV/2, p. 73. CD IV/2, pp. 76–77. In this respect, Barth says, the Reformed were “more conservative and less original” (CD IV/2, p. 69).

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strictly the union of the Logos, the divine person, with an anhypostatic human nature. Of course Lutherans would not dispute this; at issue here is where each tradition places its emphasis and not any material dispute. But in Barth’s view the Lutheran position results in a subjectivizing of the natures and a relegation of the hypostatic union to merely preparatory status: in the genus maiestaticum “the main interest now centres on the communion of the natures quite apart from the personal union—if on the basis of it.”76 The person of Christ is the means by which we can talk about the truly interesting thing, which is the perichoretic union of divinity and humanity. Barth, of course, takes the Reformed approach; but his actualism requires even more strict attention to the history of the person, Jesus Christ, for “the doctrine of the two natures cannot try to stand on its own feet or to be true of itself. . . . Neither of the two natures counts as such, because neither exists and is actual as such. Only the Son of God counts, He who adds human essence to His divine essence, thus giving it existence and uniting both in Himself.”77 Second, Barth takes a firm stance against theosis (as he understands it), against any sense in which the union divinizes the human essence. This, he fears, is made inevitable by the genus maiestaticum.78 If the properties of the divine nature superabundantly spill over to the human nature and make it ubiquitous, then it becomes something that is unlike our own humanity in a very important way. Of course we must affirm that in his humanity Christ is just as worthy of worship, just as much instilled with divine power and authority. But for Reformed Christology these are affirmed by the communication of graces, not of attributes—an important distinction that will become evident below. It is unnecessary and improper to deify the temple in which God dwells. “If the human essence of Jesus Christ is deified,” Barth asks, “can He really be the Mediator between God and us?”79 Instead, alluding to Athanasius’ famous dictum Barth says: “God becomes man in order that man may—not become God, but come to God.”80 Finally, and indispensible to Barth’s approach, the faults of the traditional doctrine of communication illustrate the importance of a dynamic construal of the person of Jesus Christ. Barth defines the communicatio idiomatum as “the

CD IV/2, p. 77 (emphasis mine). CD IV/2, p. 66. Barth consciously sides with the Reformed here in giving “priority and precedence to the doctrine of the unio hypostatica over that of the communio naturarum.” 78 CD IV/2, p. 77. 79 CD IV/2, p. 89. 80 CD IV/2, p. 106. 76 77

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impartation of the human essence to the divine, and the divine to the human, as it takes place in the one Jesus Christ as Son of God and Son of Man.”81 Note that this statement does not contain the word “attributes” or “properties” or “idioms,” which would be found in any traditional definition. These are qualities ascribed in abstracto to static natures. Instead it is the human and divine essences themselves that are communicated vis-à-vis the person in whom they are united.82 The Lutheran view of natures and their attributive communication, Barth argues, looks away from the history of Jesus Christ and instead regards the natures and their union statically, in and for themselves. Lutherans commit “the very serious mistake of looking away from the Subject in whom God and man became and are one, from the history in which it took place.”83 As he proceeds to elucidate the threefold communicatio, Barth makes it clear how a non-Lutheran interpretation can in fact succeed in refocusing the doctrine of communication upon the history of Christ’s person, and not on natures construed in abstraction from that history. For Barth, as we will see, in Christ we do not see the coincidence of two natures, nor an interpenetration, nor the transformation of one into the other— but mutual operation and interpretation.84 The divine and human inform and condition one another, not for their separate works but for the single work of doing the Father’s will. And so the communication of natures finally leads us to say that Christ’s person is not distinguishable from his mission.

Communicatio Gratiarum The second facet of the communication of natures in Barth’s treatment is the communicatio gratiarum, which looks at “what is addressed to the human essence of Jesus Christ.”85 The gratiarum for Barth speaks directly to the exaltation of humanity in Jesus. This is why he has chosen to locate his discussion of the communication of natures in CD IV/2, which describes that movement of human exaltation which corresponds to the divine humiliation of IV/1. On the CD IV/2, p. 73. Thus it is that Barth prefers the term communio naturarum or communicatio naturarum to communicatio idiomatum as the master concept that contains all three of the aspects that are considered here. See CD IV/2, pp. 63, 73. Lutheran Christology subsumes the genus maiestaticum, genus idiomaticum, and genus apotelesmaticum under the communication of attributes as the master concept. The apotelesmaticum is equivalent to the communication of operations. What the Reformed typically treated under the heading of the communication of graces Lutheran Christology divides between the maiestaticum and a separate, much more restricted communicatio gratiarum. 83 CD IV/2, p. 80. 84 CD IV/2, p. 106. 85 CD IV/2, p. 73. 81 82

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traditional account the graces are divided into two categories: (1) the grace of his union with the Logos, and (2) habitual graces or charisms.86 The first of these is taken to describe the elevation of Jesus’ humanity by virtue of its being united with one of the Trinity, so that (as Louis Berkhof puts it) “the human nature is elevated high above all creatures, and even becomes the subject of adoration.”87 The second category speaks to specific, created gifts that Jesus receives from the Holy Spirit: gifts of knowledge, steadfastness, power, etc. An important example here is Jesus’ impeccability—his freedom from sin. Though his human nature is like ours, these special gifts set him apart from the rest of humankind.88 While Barth does speak of the same sorts of gifts addressed to Christ’s human essence, he refuses to follow the older dogmatics in their use of the medieval scholastic concept of an infused gratia habitualis, saying that this treats the communication of graces as a status, a fixed possession, rather than a dynamic giving. “But grace is a divine giving and human receiving. It can be ‘had’ only in the course of this history.”89 Whatever is meant by “habit,” it must not mean that these gifts are taken to be a fixed part of Jesus’ makeup anterior to his work. As elsewhere in his theology, then, Barth moves to historicize what theretofore had been taken as an abstraction—even if only to refuse the structural division imposed by habitual grace: “When we abstain, as we ought, from all abstraction, we can see the concrete reality which is an event in Jesus Christ, an event which is both wonderful and simple, infinitely disturbing and infinitely comforting, the communicatio gratiarum which comes to all flesh in His flesh, the exaltation of human essence to fellowship with the θεα ϕσις (2 Pet. 1:4).”90 Barth identifies four forms of the grace addressed to human essence in Jesus Christ. The first is the “grace of His particular origin,”91 by which the divine essence exalts the human to harmony with it. Important for Barth here is the identification of Jesus Christ with the Son of God; they are not two subjects, nor is one merely a fleshly manifestation of the other. The existence of Jesus Christ as man “is identical with the existence of God in His Son.”92 Because the Son of

See Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp.  434–39. For an example of one of Barth’s contemporaries who follows this pattern, see Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 324. Berkhof ’s work first appeared in 1938, and here follows Heppe very closely. 87 Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 324. 88 Heppe states that “these gifts entered Christ exceptionally, not at once but during his humiliation, and only so as not to impair the natural development of his humanity.” “They are exhibited in their complete perfection” only from his exaltation onwards (Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 434–35). 89 CD IV/2, p. 90; cf. CD IV/1, pp. 85f. 90 CD IV/2, p. 103. 91 CD IV/2, pp. 90–92. 92 CD IV/2, p. 90; cf. CD I/I, pp. 436–37; and CD I/2, pp. 16–19. 86

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God becomes the man Jesus of Nazareth, we must say without reservation “that Jesus, the Son of David and Mary, was and is of divine essence as the Son of God, very God, God by nature. The Son of God exists as Jesus exists, and Jesus exists as the Son of God exists. As very man Jesus Himself is the Son of God and therefore of divine essence, God by nature.”93 To say that he receives the grace of his origin is to say that God exists in this way, as the man Jesus Christ. At the same time it is to say that he has no other origin, no human instantiation or source of his generation other than his divine procession.94 Second, Barth speaks of the “grace of the sinlessness of His human essence.”95 This is not to say that Jesus did not have a human nature that is “fallen” like ours, for Christ’s sinlessness “is not sinless in itself.” His human essence “is marked not only by its created and unlost goodness but (in self-contradiction) by sin, so that it is a perverted essence and lost as such.”96 Thus Jesus maintains solidarity with us as our brother. Barth is distinguishing between the common essence shared by all members of the species and the particular humanity Jesus instantiates in the incarnation. He is human, but he is also this human. And so “He is just what we are and how we are. The only difference is that He is it in genuine human freedom.”97 This distinction allows Barth to say that Christ can be without sin—yet as the true human he can bear our sin, and bear it away. Thus it is the communication of grace that makes possible our salvation: Christ is both like us, in our place, yet capable of redeeming us by virtue of his being unlike us. Third, Jesus enjoys the grace of his participation in the trinitarian relations, in both “the good-pleasure of God the Father” and in “the presence and effective working of the Holy Spirit.”98 By virtue of its union with the divine Son, the human essence receives all that the Son has in His perichoretic union with the Father and the Spirit. This does not mean that the Son of Man is deified, or that he becomes a fourth person of the Trinity. “But necessarily He acquires and takes as man the same full share in its being and work in creation as He has in its inward life as God.”99 By virtue of the gratiarum the man Jesus is no less the Son of God, and the Spirit of God no less the Spirit of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1.19).

95 96 97 98 99 93 94

CD IV/2, p. 71. “He is not of Himself. He derives entirely from His divine origin” (CD IV/2, p. 91). CD IV/2, pp. 92–93. CD IV/2, p. 92. CD IV/2, p. 93. CD IV/2, pp. 93–96 (quotation on p. 94). CD IV/2, p. 94.

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Fourth, and finally, the grace addressed to human essence in Jesus “is His qualification to be the organ of the action or work of the Son as the Mediator between God and men, the Reconciler of the world with God.”100 Christ is given the power and authority of his office, made God’s agent in the economy of reconciliation. This is evident in the New Testament where Jesus is seen exercising divine exousia to heal the sick, cast out demons, and chastise Israel’s religious establishment. This is not the power to act arbitrarily with the authority of his divine nature—such as calling upon the angelic host to save his life in the desert or on the cross might have been (Lk. 4.9–11; 23.35–39; cf. Mt. 27.39–44). Those temptations arise from instincts for self-preservation, whereas the power and authority Jesus possessed by virtue of the gratiarum is his power to execute the will and decree of the Father.101 For he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mt. 28.18). The exaltation of humanity in Jesus is therefore inseparable from the divine obedience which Barth has addressed in volume IV/1. Barth’s extension of the communication of natures goes still deeper. The communication of grace applies not only to Jesus’ human nature but to ours as well. It is the concrete working out of the exaltation of the Son of Man and of our human being with him, the humanum of all men and women that is exalted to a unity with God. And so, in Jesus, “our human essence is given a glory and exalted to a dignity and clothed with a majesty which the Son who assumed it and existed in it has in common with the Father and the Holy Ghost—the glory and dignity and majesty of the divine nature.”102 Again, this is not our deification. In the incarnation an unceasing connection is maintained between God and his son Jesus, and thereby between God and us. Christ’s humanity therefore becomes the pretext and condition for all of human worship, prayer, trust, hope, and obedience. By assuming a human nature God has overcome the infinite divide between uncreated and created being. This implicates not only the determination of the human essence by the divine, but even God’s self-determination of divine essence. The exaltation of humanity which corresponds to the humiliation of divinity is the event of self-giving in which God determines His own essence: in the Son “the divine acquires a determination to the human, and the human a determination from the divine. The Son of God takes and has a part in the human essence assumed

CD IV/2, pp. 96–100 (quotation on p. 96). CD IV/2, pp. 97–98. 102 CD IV/2, p. 100. 100 101

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by Him by giving this a part in His divine essence”—and in correspondence “the human essence assumed by Him takes and has a part in His divine by receiving this from Him.”103 In Barth’s construal of the communication of natures, each essence acquires and has its own determination in the other. This does not mean that the two are confused, and Barth guards against this in two ways: (1) the divine and human essences are not identified with one another but rather confront one another; and (2) their mutual participation and determination is reciprocal in nature.104 The divine essence is just as determined in the encounter as is the human. The divine nature “acquires in man its telos. Directed and addressed to human nature, it acquires a form, this form.”105 Therefore the unity of the natures in Christ cannot be thought of as one-sided, says Barth—as the participation of human nature in divine being. Even the divine nature is determined according to God’s embrace of humanity in the incarnation. Under the final aspect of the communication of natures, Barth will work out this mutual determination with greater precision.

Communicatio Operationum Earlier we explored why, in the traditional account of the communication of operations, the church affirmed that both Christ’s human nature and will and his divine nature and will are present and operative in all of his mediatorial acts. “Each nature does that which is appropriate to its distinctive character: dying, for example, in the case of the human; and the establishment of the infinite and universal significance of His death in the case of the divine.”106 But at no point is one nature absent or uninvolved, as if Christ could be split into two subjects at the level of his agency. To affirm this important doctrine within his Christology, Barth must reorient it from natures considered in the abstract to Jesus’ lived history. He thus defines the communication of operations not as metaphysical co-operation but in terms of mutual participation, as “the common actualisation [gemeinsame Verwirklichung] of divine and human essence as it takes place in Jesus Christ.”107 To unpack just what he means by this intriguing phrase “common actualization” and the radical reworking of the communicatio naturarum it 105 106 107 103 104

CD IV/2, p. 70. CD IV/2, pp. 86–88. CD IV/2, p. 87. CD IV/2, pp. 104–5. CD IV/2, p. 73 (KD IV/2, p. 79).

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suggests, we should first recall that for Barth the person of the Word (and not divine nature in abstracto) is the subject of the incarnation. Where the two natures are in view, abstracted from the person, one of them will inevitably be given precedence and priority. This was true of Constantinople III and John of Damascus, who drew from dyothelitism the conclusion that one nature and will (the human) must logically stand in submission to the other, greater nature and will.108 Barth regards the Lutheran emphasis as also tilting in this direction: Christ’s human nature and will must be passive while the divine makes use of it. Conversely, Barth says, by emphasizing the person the human essence is not instrumentalized but rather seen to be an obedient participant, not made use of but rather active, “determined and controlled” by the real subject of the atonement, who is Jesus Christ, the divine Son.109 It is in this context that Barth makes some of his most strongly actualist affirmations. Barth sees the communication of operations as the clear and natural motive for the expression that the being of God the Son is in His act: the mutual operation of the two natures in Christ is nothing other than the actualization of his divine-human being. On the traditional reading, Christ is a divine-human person who acts both divinely and humanly. The logical order is material to the ontological question: first the being of the Mediator is grounded in the union of the two natures, then that being acts in the world according to those natures. This ordering relies upon the ancient tradition’s basic metaphysical commitments, wherein the being of the Son is concretely defined according to known categories of “divine,” “human,” “nature,” and “person” before he can be thought of as a subject who acts or is acted upon. Being, in other words, logically precedes act.110 While the incarnation is both preceded and followed by a dynamic movement, at its center it is ruled by “the great calm of a timeless and non-actual being and its truth,” so that it is itself “a kind of a great phenomenology of the relationship between the Logos and its two natures, or between the two natures themselves.”111 But for Barth the activity

John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III.18. John does, however, speak of the voluntary obedience of the human to the Father’s will in a way that Barth would surely have found agreeable. 109 CD IV/2, p. 104. We certainly cannot say that the man Jesus is “a mere puppet moved this way and that by God. He is not a mere reed used by God as the instrument of His Word” (CD II/2, p. 178). 110 A recent defence of this approach, based upon the doctrine of divine transcendence as establishing the ontological otherness of God and humankind, can be found in R. Michael Allen, The Christ’s Faith, pp. 120–21. 111 CD IV/2, pp. 105–6. This “calm” at the heart of the doctrine was reproduced in the doctrine of the work of Christ as two static and successive states, Barth believes. 108

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of the Mediator is constitutive of his being: person and work are mutually grounded, held together by the dialectic between God’s eternal decision and its execution in time. The being of Jesus Christ, the unity of being of the living God and this living man, takes place in the event of the concrete existence of this man. It is a being, but a being in a history. . . . Jesus Christ is not what He is—very God, very man, very God-man—in order as such to mean and do and accomplish something else which is atonement. But His being as God and man and God-man consists in the completed act of the reconciliation of man with God.112

The communication of operations not only describes the works of the Mediator but has ontological significance for him. Thus Barth can say that “Jesus Christ is the atonement”113 and mean by that statement something not merely rhetorical, but deeply ontological. Finally, we return to the “common actualization” of the divine and human essences, the loud punctuation with which Barth concludes this section. Here Barth is deliberate in maintaining the Chalcedonian pattern of unity and distinction. On the one hand, he stresses the inseparable unity of the essences, their coordination and coincidence in both movement and telos: Common actualisation means that what Jesus Christ does as the Son of God and in virtue of his divine essence, and what He does as the Son of Man and in exercise of His human essence, He not only does in the conjunction but in the strictest relationship of the one with the other. The divine expresses and reveals itself wholly in the sphere of the human, and the human serves and attests the divine. It is not merely that the goal is the same. The movement to it is also the same. It is determined by two different factors. But it is along the same road.114

But at the same time Barth maintains the unconfused distinction of the natures in their common actualization: What Jesus Christ does as the Son of God and in virtue of His divine essence, and what He does as the Son of Man and in exercise of His human essence, He does (in this strictest relationship of the one to the other) in such a way that they always actualise themselves as the one and the other: per efficaciam distinctam

CD IV/1, pp. 126–27. CD IV/1, p. 34. 114 CD IV/2, p. 115. 112 113

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utriusque naturae [through the distinct efficacy of both natures]. Joined in the One who is very God and very man, they are always as different as God and man are different. And it is in this difference that they are coordinated—commonly actualised—in his work.115

Barth states further that the divine essence is fully realized in the inner life of God, and needs no further actualization.116 (This emphasizes God’s perfection in se, God’s lack of contingency upon the world. At the same time, it also stresses the freedom of God in determining Himself according to the incarnation.) But because of God’s decision to become incarnate, by the act of God’s condescension a “new” and a “special actualization” is necessary. The obedience of Christ unto death is now understood to be the key not to the humanity of Christ but—as impossible as it seems—to his divine nature!117 Likewise human essence is already actualized in each and every man and woman. But in the incarnation there is a “special actualization” by virtue of its union with the divine.118 Humanity is addressed and directed to a new end. Both the divine essence and the human essence therefore find an historical fulfillment and outworking in Jesus Christ. In him they are not separated by an infinite qualitative divide, nor are they abstract concepts for dogmatic parlor tricks, but are now grounded in the will and ways of the redeeming God. But they are also commonly actualized. They are never independent of one another. The divine essence is actualized in terms of the humiliation of the Son of God; the human essence is actualized in terms of the exaltation of the Son of Man. The determination of the divine essence takes place vis-à-vis its union with the Son of Man, and not prior to it. And the determination of the human essence takes place vis-à-vis its union with the Son of God.119 All of this occurs in the one event that is Jesus Christ. In contrast to the classical notion that some actions of Jesus have human significance and others divine significance, the practical result of common actualization is that a single act will always be considered both according to its human and its divine significance. “In the work of the one Jesus Christ everything

118 119 115 116 117

CD IV/2, pp. 115–16. CD IV/2, p. 113. CD IV/1, p. 199. CD IV/2, p. 114. As T. F. Torrance puts it, “In him there takes place such a union and communion between his divine and human natures, that the divine acts are acts in his human nature, and the human acts are acts in his divine person” (The Incarnation, p.  226, emphasis mine). There are hints here of PseudoDionysius’ critical reversal of Leo’s formula (see Chapter 1).

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is at one and the same time, but distinctly, both divine and human. It is this in such a way that it never becomes indistinguishable.”120 Barth’s unusual placement of the communicatio operationum in the third and concluding position of his treatment has rhetorical effect as well.121 The traditional presentation moves from the idiomatum to the operationum and climaxes with the gratiarum—the glorification of Christ’s human nature—so that the scandal of the incarnation is almost qualified away: Christ is fully human, but not merely human nor an ordinary human. His humanity is endowed with divine power and honour, and so even when we confess vere homo we still have vere Deus in mind, ever inoculating our sensibilities against the scandal of his fleshliness. But by placing the operationum at the climax, Barth has reemphasized the unio personalis as an event. Further, with “common actualization” Barth ends his presentation not with a list of the ways in which Jesus’ humanity is unlike ours but with an affirmation that, even as divinity is abased in the hypostatic union, so humanity is exalted. In their common actualization the two natures are mutually grounded in one another—the Son of God obedient, the Son of Man lifted up. The operationum may therefore be taken as a satisfying summation of Christ’s work as Mediator, even of Barth’s actualist Christology taken as a whole. In Barth’s hands, then, the communication of natures becomes more than a formal grammar for elucidating the gospel narratives according to Chalcedon’s unity-in-distinction requirements. It speaks of the Son of God as embodying the Father’s redemptive will in history—not only in His work, but in His very person. It is not simply figurative speech by which the New Testament authors occasionally transgress proper distinctions between the divine and human. Nor is it technical jargon for explaining the unity of the two natures, “the mere shibboleth of a correct knowledge of Jesus Christ.”122 Rather, the communicatio naturarum is synonymous with the divine condescension and human exaltation that take place in Jesus. This common actualization of the natures is determinative

CD IV/2, p. 116. He follows Johannes Wollebius’ 1626 Compendium Theologiae Christianae “as affording the best survey” (CD IV/2, p.  73). Barth may have first encountered the reference in Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics (p.  434), but likely made use of Wollebius directly—having devoted a discussion group to the Compendium for more than a year, from the summer semester of 1937 through the summer of 1938. In his dogmatics lectures at Göttingen Barth had followed Heppe’s order of gratiarum, idiomatum, operationum (Unterricht III, §28). For examples of the traditionally ordered presentation, see Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, pp.  171–266; Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 2, p. 322; and Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 324. 122 CD IV/2, p. 60. 120 121

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of the true humanity God has willed for us, and even of the divinity God has elected for Himself.

Humiliation and exaltation: The status duplex The twofold state of the Word of God—His humiliation and exaltation—provides Barth with the most basic structure of his doctrine of reconciliation. This is in no way surprising, since the classical doctrine of the status duplex conjures images of movement and event, of the divine Son setting aside his glory and sojourning among fallen creatures, entering into their condition to redeem it from the inside, and then being vindicated and exalted back to the state of glory: “Jesus Christ is indeed God in His movement towards man, or, more exactly, in His movement towards the people represented in the one man Jesus of Nazareth, in His covenant with this people, in His being and activity amongst and towards this people.”123 CD IV/1 opens with a summary overview of this structure, and proceeds to describe the person and work of Jesus Christ in terms of “The Lord as Servant,” the way of the Son of God into the far country. The Son’s humiliation or humbling is His assumption of humanity and obedience to the Father, in keeping with Phil. 2.6–8: [Christ Jesus], though he was in the form of God, did not reckon equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and women. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

In CD IV/2 Barth considers the same event from the other direction: “The Servant as Lord,”124 the homecoming of the Son of Man. In this sense the Son’s assumption of humanity (and not only his resurrection and ascension, though these remain dogmatic foci) is His exaltation—both of Himself and of human existence with him. This is in keeping with Phil. 2.9–11: Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven CD II/2, p. 7. Barth prefers the titles “Lord as Servant” and “Servant as Lord” over the offices of king and priest, because they include within them not only the work of Christ but also the earlier doctrine of his person (CD IV/1, p. 135). The three offices of Christ are structurally present in CD IV/1–3, but unlike the status duplex are not materially decisive.

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and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Two states—or, more accurately, a single, twofold state—characterize the redemptive existence of God the Son as a human subject. But Barth is clear that these are to be thought of not as “a being in the particular form of a state” (i.e. statically) but as “the twofold action of Jesus Christ, the actuality of His work: His one work, which cannot be divided into different stages or periods of His existence, but which fills out and constitutes His existence in this twofold form.”125 Jesus Christ is both the High One who has brought himself low, and the lowly human who has been raised up. Our purpose here is to explore this theme not only as the structure of Barth’s Christology, but as providing him with a key material insight into Jesus Christ’s relationship of identity with the eternal Word.

Status Exinanitionis and the obedience of the Son The humiliation of the Son of God includes the whole of His assumption of human existence, including its finitude, its fallen nature, and the capacity to suffer and to die. The state of humility is the narrated history of the life of Jesus, comprehending his whole existence as a human. But Jesus is no ordinary human, and his life no mere happenstance: it is the activity of God in His second way of being, a life undertaken in love and freedom for the sake of creatures. The Son does only the will of His Father in heaven (Jn 4.34; 5.19–47; 6.37–40; 10.17–18), even to the point of the anguish of Gethsemane (Mt. 26.36–46). This much Barth has in common with the whole of the orthodox tradition. Where he departs is in the suggestion that this relationship of humility and obedience—the Son’s relationship to God the Father—is not phenomenal to the mortal life of the man Jesus (from the manger to the tomb) but is a dynamic of the inner life of the Trinity. By virtue of their filial relationship, God the Son exists eternally in an orientation of submission to the Father: We have not only not to deny but actually to affirm and understand as essential to the being of God the offensive fact that there is in God Himself an above CD IV/1, p. 133 (emphasis mine). In the traditional use of the language of states the being of Jesus Christ in fact “lost the material distinctiveness of its historicity” (CD IV/2, p.  110). This is why Barth generally avoids the classical language of “status duplex” (except when making reference to the history of doctrine) despite the fact that the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ in his activity structure Barth’s Christology both formally and materially. The key excursus on the traditional doctrine, and how Barth differs in his employment of it, is in CD IV/1, pp. 132–35.

125

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and a below, a prius and a posterius, a superiority and a subordination. And our present concern is with what is apparently the most offensive fact of all, that there is a below, a posterius, a subordination, that it belongs to the inner life of God that there should take place within it obedience.126

Barth has considered that this relationship might be strictly economic but rejected this based on the fact that the economy is nothing but a true and accurate revelation of who God is. Whatever is true of God’s activity is true of God’s being. “The self-emptying and self-humbling of Jesus Christ as an act of obedience cannot be alien to God,” since God is the agent who is at work in Christ.127 The Son’s humility and obedience, therefore, is His realizing of a possibility grounded in (and, indeed, intrinsic to) the very life of the triune God. According to Barth, then, Jesus Christ—in his divine-human unity—is the second person of the Trinity. “Jesus Christ is Himself God as the Son of God the Father and with God the Father the source of the Holy Spirit, united in one essence with the Father by the Holy Spirit. That is how He is God. He is God as he takes part in the event which constitutes the divine being.” Yet we must add at once that as this One who takes part in the divine being and event He became and is man. This means that we have to understand the very Godhead, that divine being and event and therefore Himself as the One who takes part in it, in the light of the fact that it pleased God—and this is what corresponds outwardly to and reveals the inward divine being and event— Himself to become man. In this way, in this condescension, He is the eternal Son of the eternal Father.128

This, Barth believes, is how God is God. If the Son is obedient to the Father in the history narrated by Scripture, then He is obedient to the Father essentially—for His human existence is divinely determined, and the economy of the divine life corresponds to God’s life in se. The humility that is demonstrated by Jesus is therefore the eternal humility of God the Son; it is not arbitrary but a decision of obedience. God is not subject to caprice or chance, Barth says, and so the work of God in Jesus Christ is in obedience to a divine decree given far in advance. Jesus does not come to earth seeking a way to redeem humankind, only eventually discovering the mode of the cross; rather from the beginning “it was the will of the Lord to crush him” (Isa. 53.10; cf. Mk 8.31; 10.45).

CD IV/1, pp. 200–1. CD IV/1, pp. 193–95 (quotation on p. 193). 128 CD IV/1, p. 129. 126 127

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His humility is therefore something that is chosen by God the Son. This is necessary in order for divine condescension to retain its gracious character. Jesus Christ is the electing God, and God’s determination to be subordinate as the Son serves His self-giving to the world in love. In doing so, Barth says, God so loves the world that He even puts at risk His own being as God. He exposes Himself “to the greatest danger. He sets at stake His own existence as God.”129 But this risk is countered by God’s enduring freedom: in His giving God “does not give Himself away,” does not come into conflict with Himself. God has the freedom to exist in this way, but in making the being of the human to be His own being—even in this apparent ontological contradiction—God “acts as Lord over this contradiction even as He subjects Himself to it.”130 Indeed, it belongs to the unity of God to be differentiated as “both the One who is obeyed and Another who obeys”131—calling to mind Augustine’s illustrations of the Trinity as Lover, Beloved, and the bond of Love, or as the Mind and its Knowledge and Love of itself.132 The generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are the one God’s acts of self-differentiation, making Himself both subject and object, initiating an eternal fellowship of I and Thou. In assuming a human existence, God the Son dwells in the world as another, as a counterpart to God the Father. Mere mythology suggests that God would have no counterpart unless two deities of unequal or competitive divinity coexisted; but the triune God has otherness, and therefore fellowship, properly in Himself. His own counterpart is coequal and indeed coexistent with Himself, because the unity of God is simply not equivalent with singleness and solitude. Barth is clear, then, that the inner subordination of the Son to the Father is not the ancient heresy that goes by the name Subordinationism.133 It is this heresy, according to Barth, that assigns to the obedience of the Son “the character of an event in this world”—that is, making obedience within God a strictly economic phenomenon.134 But the Son stands with the Father as an other not because He is a second and therefore lesser deity, nor as one possessing divinity in an improper sense. He stands on the side of creatures not as distinct from God, but precisely as God—as one who is human without ceasing to be divine, as one who is humble without ceasing to be exalted. The humility of the Son is thus not a subordination

131 132 133 134 129 130

CD IV/1, p. 72; cf. CD II/2, pp. 162–64. CD IV/1, p. 185. See also Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 64. CD IV/1, p. 201. De Trinitate 8–9. See CD IV/1, pp. 196–200. CD IV/1, p. 196.

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in essence but a subordination in role and function; it is not “lesser than” but rather “subject to”—and this willingly, as an act of supreme condescension. It thus properly belongs to the Son to go into the far country, to die in fulfillment of the Father’s will, and to be vindicated in His resurrection to glory. As Barth is attentive to the danger of Subordinationism, he is likewise alert to the trinitarian heresy on the other shore: Modalism. The lowly and obedient Christ is no mere mode of appearance of the one true Godhead, depriving him not only of divinity but of true and proper being. Only because there is real obedience in the life of God is there real differentiation of the persons of the Trinity. But that command and obedience which distinguishes Father and Son is also the sign of unity between them—not just a unity of will but an identity of will, the one divine will which pertains to both.135 The Son thus stands on the side of creatures, as other than the Father, not as the appearance of God but as God Himself—God in all His humanity. Here Barth draws attention again to the identity of the immanent and economic, or the “proper” and “improper” being of God: his worry is that the latter is treated as “the forecourt of the divine being, only . . . a mode of appearance of the true Godhead which is untouched by this dualism of above and below.”136 If the status exinanitionis is limited to the economy and is not true of God in His inner life, then the humanity of Christ is a mere apparition and his divinity has no value for us. Most fundamentally, both Subordinationism and Modalism fail because they attempt to solve the mystery of the incarnation by juggling it away. They begin from the shared assumption that the full divinity of Jesus Christ cannot be true: and so Christ must be either a creature distinct from God, or a mere mode of His appearance. Neither can take seriously, with the full weight of its implications for the doctrine of God, that this Nazarene preacher is vere Deus. How, then, can the Son be subordinate to the Father and remain equal with Him in essence? How can Jesus obey and yet be the sovereign Lord? Three points summarize the vitality of Barth’s doctrine of the status exinanitionis. First, Barth insists that the humility of God the Son in no way entails His diminution. “For God it is just as natural to be lowly as it is to be high, to be near

CD IV/2, p. 351. CD IV/1, p. 197; cf. CD II/1, p. 330. It is Modalism that takes what is purely economic (including Jesus Christ) to be the “improper being of the true God,” Barth believes. But “if His economy of revelation and salvation is distinguished from His proper being as worldly, does it bring us into touch with God Himself or not? Has He Himself really taken up the cause of the world or not?” (CD IV/1, p. 196, emphasis mine). But we see and understand “the proper being of the one true God in Jesus Christ the Crucified” (CD IV/1, p. 199).

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as it is to be far, to be little as it is to be great, to be abroad as to be at home.”137 The Son’s obedience to the Father does not imply a gradation or an inferiority in God—and “nothing of cringing servility and therefore of suppressed ill-will or potential revolt.”138 Rather this dimension has its own dignity, and in His entering into it “God is not in any sense smaller but all the greater. He attests that there is in God the free choice—the choice of His grace—to be lowly as He is exalted and exalted as He is lowly.”139 Therefore, what we presume about the dignity and significance of Jesus’ subordination and humility is to be corrected in the light of the real homoousia of Father and Son.140 In pursuing fallen creatures into the far country Jesus acts not in the curtailment or suppression of his deity (as in some accounts of kenosis) but in genuine correspondence with and enactment of it—for he is the one who loves in freedom. Even in the form of a servant, which is the form of His presence and action in Jesus Christ, we have to do with God Himself in His true deity. The humility in which He dwells and acts in Jesus Christ is not alien to Him, but proper to Him. His humility is a novum mysterium for us in whose favour He executes it . . . but for Him this humility is no novum mysterium. It is His sovereign grace that He wills to be and is amongst us in humility, our God, God for us.141

It is, in fact, precisely in light of this fact of his humiliation that his Godhead is to be filled out and understood.142 We know God in this way and as this God, and in and as no other. There is no question of His being lesser for it. Second, the humility of God the Son in no way entails a change in His being. Rather, because the status exinanitionis is true of the Son in the inner life of God and not strictly in the economy, it is an eternal state of being. Once again, appeal should be made to the time-eternity dialectic: that which the Son is to become in time He already is in the eternity which comprehends time, if in a different way. Like His humanity, the humility of the Son in eternity is in a sense proleptic and anticipatory: not that it relies upon the created world in which the Son enters into time, but rather the state of subordination to God the Father is already true of God the Son. In the obedience He renders as human, the Son reveals Himself

CD IV/1, p. 192. God is “the One who can be and wills to be true God not only in the height but also in the depth—in the depth of human creatureliness, sinfulness and mortality” (CD IV/1, p. 134). See also Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 52. 138 CD IV/2, p. 352. 139 Ibid. 140 CD IV/1, p. 202. 141 CD IV/1, p. 193. See also CD I/1, p. 316; CD IV/2, p. 351. 142 CD IV/1, p. 130. 137

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to be the One He is as God.143 In fulfilling the requirements of the covenant, then, it is fitting that the Son—and precisely the person of the Son—enter into history as a creature who is obedient to God. The divine essence is therefore unchanged by the Son’s entrance into this state of humility, because the Son is already humble. He does not change in giving Himself. He simply activates [betätigt] and reveals [offenbart] Himself ad extra, in the world. He is in and for the world what He is in and for Himself. He is in time what He is in eternity (and what He can be also in time because of His eternal being). He is in our lowliness what He is in His majesty (and what He can be also in our lowliness because His majesty is also lowliness). He is as man, as the man who is obedient in humility, Jesus of Nazareth, what He is as God (and what He can be also as man because He is it as God in this mode of divine being).144

Barth repeats in summation that the incarnation of the Son of God is “the activation [Betätigung], the demonstration [Bewährung], the revelation [Offenbarung] of His deity, His divine Sonship.”145 That Sonship which exists in eternity is revealed in creaturely history—but it is not merely revealed. His being as God is repeated in His being as human, and thereby demonstrated. And God is actus purus in this event of revelation; thus the Son’s deity is also “activated” or realized in this, His temporal mission. Third and finally, it is precisely in His humility and condescension (and not in spite of them) that God’s essential power is exercised. It is neither a negation nor a suspension of divine power that the Son becomes human, but the concrete activity of that power: “the humiliation of God to supreme glory, as the activation and demonstration of His divine being.”146 Not counting the glory of God (which is his by right) a thing to be exploited (Phil. 2.6), Jesus Christ demonstrates this glory in humility itself. God has the freedom to exist as servant, as one debased and pierced for our transgressions: “He is God in the fact that He can give Himself up and does give Himself up not merely to the creaturely limitation but to the suffering of the human creature, becoming one of these men, Himself bearing the judgment under which they stand, willing to die and, in fact, dying the death which they have deserved.”147

145 146 147 143 144

Cf. CD IV/1, p. 208. CD IV/1, p. 204 (KD IV/1, p. 223); cf. CD III/2, p. 66. CD IV/1, p. 211 (KD IV/1, p. 231). CD IV/1, p. 134. CD IV/1, p. 130 (emphasis mine).

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Status exaltationis and “true humanity” Because the one Lord is also servant, it is evident that for Barth the status exinanitionis will intimately correspond to Jesus’ enduring status exaltationis. By virtue of his human existence Jesus Christ is the new and true and royal man who represents all other men and women by virtue of his participation in the work of God and his rendering of proper honor to God.148 This is his movement from below to above, from men and women to God—the homecoming of the Son of Man which is also the necessary human response to the divine work of grace. The exaltatio of Jesus Christ is evident first in his resurrection from the dead (including the subsequent appearances of his resurrected body), and then in his ascension and session at the right hand of the Father. But it is by no means strictly limited to these events late in Jesus’ life, according to Barth, but like his exinanition is most fundamentally an eternal state that is never surrendered. As God the Son He has His existence in divine glory and does not depart from that when He enters into time and space and becomes human. For Barth, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ are “two distinct but inseparable moments in one and the same event,” which is the event of His self-declaration.149 The former is the terminus a quo of this event, the latter its terminus ad quem. Because it is vindicating the resurrection is the evidence of Jesus’ exaltation.150 It gives retroactive context to the whole of Jesus’ life and work. To who Jesus is and what took place in him his resurrection and ascension add “only the new fact that in this event He was to be seen and was actually seen as the One He was and is. He did not become different in this event.”151 It is simply the historical counterpart of his eternal, divine glory. As a lifting of the veil, it attests to the fact that the humiliated man of Calvary is in truth the Lord of glory, who serves and suffers with us and ministers to us, yet who in his death did not cease to be life itself. Hidden under his humiliation is an exaltation that, in truth, had no hiatus. More than this, the fact that the Lord did so endure humiliation and suffering is his exaltation. By obeying the will of the Father, by entering into humiliation and suffering, Jesus “gave human proof ” and fulfilled (or “historically actualized”) his mission as the Son of Man.152 His resurrection is not only a revealing, therefore,

150 151 152 148 149

CD IV/2, p. 3. CD IV/2, pp. 150, 133. CD IV/2, p. 299. CD IV/2, p. 133; cf. 248, 294, and CD IV/1, p. 135. CD IV/2, p. 290.

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but also the final accomplishment and completion of his being and activity—the humiliation of the Son of God and the exaltation of the Son of Man that were “virtual and potential from the very beginning of His history and existence.”153 From his birth (and indeed, we should say, from eternity) he was moving toward this. His existence as the Mediator and Savior was first revealed only in the form of anticipation, Barth says, but after the resurrection “in definitive actuality.”154 As the true imago Dei, Jesus’ humanity “is not merely the repetition and reflection of His divinity, or of God’s controlling will; it is the repetition and reflection of God Himself, no more and no less.”155 It is not only Jesus Christ in the fullness of his humanity who is exalted, but also—as he is the Son of Man and the true human—men and women with him. The history of Jesus Christ includes not only his sharing in the reality of human existence, but in correspondence to that, His giving men and women “a part in the history in which He is God.”156 His humanity is unequivocally a “fellowhumanity.”157 Their redemption includes participation in Christ, which is their exaltation to fellowship with God the Father. Put differently, Christ not only reflects humankind but causes them to reflect the image and likeness of God— that image which, because he is God, he renders perfectly in his obedience.158 This is Barth’s doctrine of sanctification. Any human attempts at self-exaltation are sin, for there is no ground for any atonement other than the existence of Jesus Christ, the humiliation of God that at once reveals God and unites creatures with Him. Our exaltation took place in him, who was humiliated “to brotherhood with us” and also elevated and exalted as the one in whom the Father is wellpleased. Therefore “this exaltation of His is not only His, but also that of those for whom He humbled Himself.”159 This is not the creature’s deification, of course—Barth is in full agreement with the Reformed tradition there160—but the restoration of her true humanity.

CD IV/2, pp. 140–41. CD IV/2, p. 141. CD III/2, p. 219. CD IV/1, p. 203. CD III/2, pp. 208, 212. CD IV/1, pp. 208–9. The direction given to men and women Barth calls “the Direction of the Son” (§64.4), that is the power of Jesus’ existence as their brother, or the subjective sharing of his true humanity with them. 159 CD IV/2, p. 294; see further The Humanity of God, p. 48. Barth’s full doctrine of sanctification is in CD IV/2, §66. 160 See CD IV/2, pp. 6, 106, 117. Men and women are exalted not as God but to the side of God, to a true fellowship in which they are restored to a new and true humanity. The same is true even of Jesus vis-à-vis his identity as the Son of Man: his human essence is not divinised but given a divine determination (CD IV/2, p. 153). 155 156 157 158 153 154

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The “actualisation of His redemptive will by Himself opens up to us the one true possibility of our own being,” which “does not mean the extinguishing of our humanity, but its establishment.”161 This humanity is “true” in the same sense that the man of sin has become an “impossible possibility,” the old man crucified with Christ, who “can only be a lie, an absurd self-deception, a shadow moving on the wall.”162 The human person, meanwhile, has been restored as the faithful covenant partner of God, her true being hidden and enclosed and laid up for her in Christ. The Son of Man returns home from the far country with his human essence as “the spoils of the divine mercy,” taking that which was at greatest distance from God and placing it in closest proximity.163 In this aspect the status exaltationis of Jesus Christ is therefore the exaltation not only of Jesus’ creaturely essence but of human existence broadly construed. This is, in part, because “the anthropological sphere is genuinely dominated by the Son of Man as its Lord”—thus “our knowledge of ourselves is included and enclosed in the knowledge of Jesus.”164 The divine determination of Jesus’ human essence is not the “private history” of Jesus alone, but is public: “The history of this One is world history,”165 the history of the head in which all men and women participate as brothers and sisters. This is a history into which we are taken up apart from ourselves and without respect to our attitude toward it. The faith and obedience that is created in men and women is the faith and obedience of their Lord, and not something that emerges from their own “abstract and subjective selfhood.”166 In their participation in Jesus’ state of exaltation, they are made to live and to be ec-centric.

The simultaneity of the two states To those familiar with Karl Barth’s dialectical method it will come as no surprise that he takes the two movements of the classical status duplex to be intimately related. The humiliation of the Son of God to servitude and the exaltation of the Son of Man to lordship are simultaneous, two movements in the same event, two ways in which Jesus Christ exists both in eternity and in time. But

CD IV/1, pp. 14–15. See also CD IV/2, p. 100; and especially CD III/2, §45.2 (“The Basic Form of Humanity”). CD IV/1, p. 89. 163 CD IV/2, p. 100. 164 CD IV/2, p. 268. 165 CD IV/2, p. 269. On this theme see further Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. 166 See CD IV/2, pp. 270f. 161

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one has its origin in the other: one state involves divine initiative and the other creaturely response, so that “without the condescension of God there would be no exaltation of man.”167 Therefore the exaltation given to humanity “took place and is always grounded in God’s humiliation,” taking place according to Christ’s response of gratitude to the grace of God.168 Since the exaltation of humanity is grounded upon the logically prior divine act of grace, there can be no claim to exaltation that is based within anthropology. Humanity does not act but is acted upon, assumed by the Word of God by whom and through whom it was made. The states of humiliation and exaltation are “strictly related moments in that history which operate together and mutually interpret one another,”169 “two undivided and simultaneous, although distinguishable, moments or forms of the one divine action”—and one action supremely at the cross.170 Barth’s exegetical justification for the simultaneity of the states includes Jn 3.13 (“No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man”) and Eph. 4.9–10 (“He who descended is the one who also ascended higher than all the heavens, that he might fill all things”).171 The going out of the Son of God and the coming in of the Son of Man are both implicated in the one work of atonement; one is his justification of human persons, one his sanctification. It was God who went into the far country, and it is man who returns home. Both took place in the one Jesus Christ. It is not, therefore, a matter of two different and successive actions, but of a single action in which each of the two elements is related to the other and can be known and understood only in this relationship: the going out of God only as it aims at the coming in of man; the coming in of man only as the reach and outworking of the going out of God; and the whole in its original and proper form only as the being and history of the one Jesus Christ.172

Yet, just as the Son is exalted precisely in his humiliation, so does he remain humble in his exaltation. This is why the status duplex may not be held apart as two successive and distinct moments; the humiliation of God the Son in His incarnation and death is itself His exaltation, and in the resurrection and glorification of the risen Jesus He remains humble and fleshly. He is “exalted in His lowliness” and does not set it aside.173 169 170 171 172 173 167 168

The Humanity of God, p. 48. CD IV/2, p. 47. CD IV/2, p. 106. CD IV/2, p. 731. CD IV/2, p. 110. CD IV/2, p. 21. See CD IV/2, p. 299. Humanity “is a clothing which He does not put off. It is His temple which He does not leave. It is the form which He does not lose. It is an organ the use of which He does not renounce” (CD IV/2, p. 101).

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The two states are united and yet distinct, and so formally the doctrine of the status duplex mirrors that of the hypostatic union: two evidently incommensurate states are joined by God according to a relationship of unity-in-distinction, being inseparably joined but without their confusion.174 And as both of Christ’s natures (or essences) are mutually conditioned by their unity, so are the two states mutually conditioned. There is no humiliation of the Son of God without an exaltation of the Son of Man, and no exaltation without a humiliation. But furthermore, Barth is explicit that this formal similarity also bears material consequences: the doctrines of the two states and the two natures even mutually interpret one another. The doctrine of the two natures relates to the person of Christ and the doctrine of the two states to his activity. Since, then, Barth insists that the person and work of Christ are dependent loci, so are the doctrines of his natures and his states dependent: “We cannot, therefore, ascribe to Jesus Christ two natures and then quite independently two states. But we have to explain in mutual relationship to one another what Jesus Christ is as very God and very man and what takes place as the divine work of atonement in His humiliation and exaltation.”175 Finally, Barth is conscious of the fact that he has reversed the objects of predication of the two states from those of the older dogmatics: it is the Son of God who is humiliated and the Son of Man who is exalted.176 It had been more common to speak of the glory of the Son’s divinity and the humility of His existing in creaturely form—but Barth believes that these are mere tautologies that do nothing to explain the significance of the states. For, as we have seen, “the peculiar thing about the humiliation of Jesus Christ, the significant thing, the effective thing, the redemptive thing”177 is that its subject is the Lord of glory. Likewise, the significant thing about the state of exaltation is not that God is so transcendent, free, and above the world, but that the subject of the exaltation is human—and irrevocably so, with no shadow of a divinization that takes it out of its creatureliness. It is this, the humiliation of God and the exaltation of the human, that makes Jesus Christ the Mediator and the fulfillment of the covenant. The same is true of the acts of justification and sanctification as the “two moments” in Jesus Christ’s one act of reconciliation. See CD IV/2, pp. 503–5. 175 CD IV/1, pp. 133–34. Herbert Hartwell and Berthold Klappert are among the few commentators who note this important point. See Hartwell, The Theology of Karl Barth, p. 136; and Klappert, “Gott in Christus—Versöhner der Welt,” in Versöhnung und Befreiung, p. 143. 176 Barth is taken to task for this variance from the tradition by Fred H. Klooster, who believes that it undermines his claims to Chalcedonian orthodoxy. See Klooster, The Significance of Barth’s Theology, pp. 95–96. This matter will be taken up in Chapter 4. 177 CD IV/1, p. 134. 174

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It is clear, then, that the twofold humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ “is not something incidental to His being,” according to Barth: “It is the actuality of the being of Jesus Christ as very God and very man.”178 The two states are not temporally distinct, for their mutual conditioning determines the being and history of Christ as the one who is humble without ceasing to be exalted, just as he is human without ceasing to be divine. In the final chapter we will attend to a few of the consequences of this creative reworking for the doctrine of the incarnation.

Conclusions From our treatment of four pairs of themes—covenant and election, eternity and time, the communication of divine and human essences, and the states of humiliation and exaltation—the basic shape and character of Barth’s Christology has emerged. Clearly he is working with the doctrinal concepts of the ancient church and of the Reformation traditions. From the history of doctrine he takes principles usually neglected by the reigning Protestant intellectuals, including the communicatio naturarum and the status duplex. But he does not adopt them uncritically. Furthermore, Barth’s Christology is deeply shaped by his reading of the Bible, particularly the decisive role given to God’s covenant with creation and His election of men and women to fellowship with Him in Jesus Christ. And his Christology is further grounded by a particular view of eternity and God’s relationship to created time, as well as convictions regarding a theological ontology which he believed owed more to philosophy and speculation than to revelation. Barth rejected what he saw to be a basic distinction between being and act underlying the ontology common to the theological tradition. This necessitated a new (and distinctively modern) ontology—one supported and even necessitated by Holy Scripture as the witness to God’s activity in Jesus Christ—which was then brought to bear upon Protestant dogmatics in a critical way. With this agenda Barth succeeds in a recovery and reappropriation of a neglected doctrine in the communicatio naturarum, first maintaining the traditional position that the communication of the natures is real and not merely verbal, and second magnifying its importance for dogmatics. He further demonstrates its significance for divine ontology and anthropology when these CD IV/1, p. 133.

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are considered in light of the common actualization of divinity and humanity in Christ. This enables Barth to depict the incarnation and life of Jesus Christ as taking place in the simultaneity of divine humiliation and human exaltation— such that the eternal Word of God is a human subject while He continues to fill and sustain the whole of creation by virtue of His divine life. Further, God the Word can exist simul and realiter (and not just instrumentally or economically) in both of these states because the eternity in which God exists as pure duration does not exclude but rather fully circumscribes and comprehends the time of creation. Finally, that God exists in this way—the Son of God condescending and the Son of Man exalted in Jesus Christ—is the result of His eternal decision to be Deus pro nobis and not to be God in any other way. Barth’s actualism therefore gives him resources to describe this relationship of “above” and “below” in the person of God the Son without recourse to a Logos asarkos as a subject who is abstracted from His human existence. When we combine the insights of Barth’s negative critique of Logos Christology and his positive presentation of the person of Jesus, new answers to the questions with which we began this study begin to take shape. What is the relationship between the Word of God and the man Jesus—or, as Barth asks, “What can we try to mean and say when we accept the confession: Amen, yes, Jesus Christ is the only Son of God?”179 How does Barth’s dialectical approach and invocation of simultaneity and mutual conditioning make sense of the ontological duality of this singular subject? And does his approach to the doctrine of Christ find any viable path through the impasses of doctrinal history? Before concluding with a reevaluation of these issues in the context of Barth’s revised Christology, we turn next to a question that has silently stalked our discussion of Barth’s creative, sometimes innovative presentation: that of its orthodoxy.

CD IV/1, p. 206.

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4

The Question of “Chalcedonianism”

Thus far we have considered Karl Barth’s Christology from two vantage points: his negative critique of the ancient “Logos” tradition (including its Reformation forms), and his own positive account of Jesus’ person and work. Together these provide us with a picture of Barth’s Christology as a critical appropriation of the tradition—one that (unlike liberal Protestantism) seeks to make use of its insights, yet without retreating from modern challenges to a pre-critical stance. His creative reworking of this doctrine under the conditions of modernity may help us to resolve, or better to express, a great number of theological issues. But does it finally leave him outside the boundary of the historic church and her confessions? Has Barth set aside so much that the church would be wise not to follow him? Here I will evaluate his Christology within a rubric of Chalcedonian “orthodoxy.” Similar evaluations of Barth’s Christology have varied greatly in their conclusions. Charles T. Waldrop has suggested that its basic character is not Chalcedonian but, in fact, Alexandrian.1 This is due to Barth’s concern with a single subject, and to this end with the identification of Jesus with the Word of God. This thesis is offered in response to Henri Bouillard and Fred Klooster, who identified Barth as Antiochene—or, in the case of Klooster, as even more radical than Nestorianism.2 In this charge Klooster joins Regin Prenter in Charles T. Waldrop, Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Alexandrian Character. Those in agreement with the Alexandrian hypothesis include Herbert Hartwell, The Theology of Karl Barth, pp. 185–86; and Walter Günther, Die Christologie Karl Barths, p. 27. It is also true that there is some sympathy from Wolfhart Pannenberg when he characterizes Barth’s Christology as “from above.” See Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, pp. 33–34. 2 Henri Bouillard, Karl Barth: Parole de Dieu et Existence Humaine, vol. 1, p. 22; Fred H. Klooster, The Significance of Barth’s Theology, pp.  94–96. Waldrop admits he was initially convinced of the Antiochene thesis with respect to Barth’s Christology, and oddly retains 80 pages of analysis sympathetic with that line of interpretation (Chapter  2)—even crossing into clearly Nestorian territory by suggesting two subjects who work together to accomplish the plan of God. See Waldrop, Karl Barth’s Christology, pp. vii, 84–86. 1

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characterizing Barth’s Christology as both Nestorian and Docetic.3 Cornelius Van Til concluded that Barth had rejected the doctrine of the two natures altogether, so thoroughly that perhaps Van Til would suggest that the debate over the Alexandrian or Antiochene character of his Christology misses the point of Barth’s Umdeutung entirely.4 On this reading Barth fails to keep the two natures separate, and so could even be accused of Eutychianism.5 Such a broad range of interpretations, including both orthodox possibilities and heterodox extremes, illustrates the difficulty of evaluating not only the material of Barth’s Christology but his method of critical appropriation, as well. Waldrop’s thesis in particular is called into question by the fact that historians no longer see the model of “Word-flesh” versus “Word-man” Christology to be particularly helpful—especially when applied anachronistically to modern figures. He takes for granted that any given Christology will fall into this binary typology, and astonishingly fails to consider the third option that is obvious even within these narrow confines—that Barth’s Christology may be neither one nor the other but simply Chalcedonian, that is faithful to the synthesis achieved by the Council in its mediation between the most vocal advocates of the two schools.6 More recent and, in my view, measured judgments of Barth’s Christology have concluded that it is neither Alexandrian nor Antiochene but is, in fact, Chalcedonian—though its shape differs enough from the fifthcentury standards that this must be worked out carefully. John Thompson avers Barth’s Chalcedonianism but does not sufficiently defend the position.7 Hans Regin Prenter, “Karl Barths Umbildung der traditionellen Zweinaturlehre in lutherischer Beleuchtung,” Studia Theologica 11 (1957), pp. 10–43; Klooster, “Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology,” Westminster Theological Journal 47 (1985), p. 316. 4 See Cornelius Van Til, Christianity and Barthianism, especially p. 462; The New Modernism; “Has Karl Barth Become Orthodox?,” Westminster Theological Journal 16.2 (1954), pp. 159–75; and “Karl Barth on Chalcedon,” Westminster Theological Journal 22.2 (1960), pp. 193–216. 5 Van Til, “Karl Barth on Chalcedon,” p. 152; but cf. 163. He cites CD IV/1, p. 133, but misunderstands Barth’s point here. Barth argues not that the two natures doctrine should be done away with, or that the natures are not distinct, but that this doctrine cannot be taken up in abstraction from the two states and therefore from the work of Jesus Christ. In this context Barth is seeking to interpret the two natures together, not as indistinct but as following the priority typically given by the Reformed to the unio personalis rather than the communio naturarum (cf. CD IV/2, pp. 51–52). There is some irony in the fact that Barth was most misunderstood at the point where his theology was arguably its most Chalcedonian—that is, an interpretation of the two natures strictly according to their personal unity in the Christ-event. 6 Waldrop acknowledges the limits of the label “Alexandrian,” but not the questionable nature of the historical paradigm itself. He does believe that Barth has incorporated aspects of Antiochene Christology, but not such that there is “a genuine synthesis which avoids making a choice between the two theologies” (Karl Barth’s Christology, p. 172). See further George Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Chalcedonian Character,” in Disruptive Grace, pp. 146–47; and McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology: Just How ‘Chalcedonian’ Is It?” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 203–4. 7 John Thompson, Christ in Perspective, pp. 18–19. 3

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Boersma rightly concludes that Barth is more immediately concerned with the Christologies of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack, and has effectively put the debate between the Antiochene and Alexandrian traditions behind him.8 George Hunsinger notes the minimalist nature of the Definition, and believes that Barth is Chalcedonian because he deliberately alternates back and forth between Alexandrian and Antiochene idioms.9 And finally, Bruce McCormack has argued that Barth’s historicized Christology successfully preserves the values of the Chalcedonian Definition and so is faithful to its witness, but relies upon a radically different theological ontology.10 While Barth is Chalcedonian where it counts, then, this judgment comes with a not insignificant caveat: “Materially,” McCormack believes, “the two Christologies are sufficiently different . . . that we mislead ourselves and others where we speak simply of Barth’s ‘Chalcedonian’ Christology or even only of Barth’s ‘basically Chalcedonian’ Christology.”11 Why does the Chalcedonian character of Barth’s Christology matter? In contemporary discussions this issue bears significantly upon the reception of his theology as a whole, particularly among more conservative evangelicals and confessionalists. If Barth can be successfully disqualified from orthodox status where his Christology is its most formal, the whole of his project can be marginalized. If, on the other hand, Barth remains orthodox even where he is unconventional, then his contribution to the doctrine of the person of Christ must be given a serious reckoning. Barth is such an important figure because of his attempts to mediate between modernism and the classical tradition: to recover a sense of biblical and confessional authority for the task of dogmatic theology in the wake (and defiance) of liberal Protestantism, and also to bring the insights of contemporary thought to bear on the question of the sufficiency of ancient expressions for today. His relevance is therefore measured, to a great degree, by how successful he is at attending both to orthodoxy and to the context of the church’s contemporary theological endeavors. Hans Boersma, “Alexandrian or Antiochene? A Dilemma in Karl Barth’s Christology,” Westminster Theological Journal 52.2 (1990), pp. 263–80. Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Christology,” pp.  131–47. This thesis and its relation to Barth’s biblical exegesis will be considered below. 10 Bruce L. McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology,” pp.  201–33. Additional supporters of Barth’s Chalcedonianism are Hermann Volk, “Die Christologie bei Karl Barth und Emil Brunner,” in Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht (eds), Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, pp. 613–73; Piotr J. Malysz, “Storming Heaven with Karl Barth? Barth’s Unwitting Appropriation of the Genus Maiestaticum and What Lutherans Can Learn from It,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 9.1 (2007), pp. 73–92; and Paul D. Jones, The Humanity of Christ, pp. 26–37. A further list may be found in Jones, The Humanity of Christ, pp. 26–27n.27. 11 McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology,” p. 222. 8

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This brief survey of the state of the question in the literature on Barth demonstrates that it is no easy matter to map such an innovative approach as his onto the more static schema of the fifth-century church. Fortunately, in its execution Barth’s Christology is not all that foreign to such principles as “two natures united in one person.” But, as Barth himself says, his actualist method is a re-translating of this model into the language of movement and history: We have “actualised” the doctrine of the incarnation, i.e., we have used the main traditional concepts, unio, communio and communicatio, as concentrically related terms to describe one and the same ongoing process. We have stated it all (including the Chalcedonian definition, which is so important in dogmatic history, and rightly became normative) in the form of a denotation and description of a single event. We have taken it that the reality of Jesus Christ, which is the theme of Christology, is identical with this event, and this event with the reality of Jesus Christ.12

This “actualizing” move is provocative at first glance, but I believe it becomes less so when readers attend to just how it is Barth is reading Scripture and describing the person of the incarnate Son of God. Barth’s stated aim in his appropriation of the communicatio naturarum is to make use of the traditional concepts of union and communication but lose the static character he saw in their use by the tradition. He believed that his restatement of the doctrine is in continuity with Chalcedonian Christology, while acknowledging that this actualizing move was innovative and would not win him any praise for his “orthodoxy.”13 The new form given to Chalcedonianism attests to the person of Christ not as the static product of a metaphysical formula but as himself a dynamic event. This has taken place and is not now an artifact of history, but an event that continues to take place today by virtue of Christ’s resurrection to a new and eternal life. Barth’s “translation” of the Christology of the ancient church into a conceptual scheme that is so fundamentally different poses significant challenges to the task of material comparison. One important task in what follows, then, is to identify a basic definition of what it means for one’s Christology to be Chalcedonian, and whether Barth himself believed that his own theology should be classified in this way in spite of his efforts to re-express the tradition’s concepts in the sphere of history and activity. This includes his explicit comments about the Christology of the ancient church as well as his CD IV/2, p. 105. CD IV/2, p. 106.

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deliberate rejection or modification of classic conciliar language including “person,” “nature,” and “homoousios.” This illustrates that, while he regards theology as free from the formal strictures of the past, Barth is also concerned to maintain what he takes to be the Fathers’ material intent—what he calls the “direction” of the ancient creeds. To begin, however, our task requires an excursion into Barth’s views on the nature of confessional authority. Regardless of how we might describe Chalcedonianism and its material values in a modern context, what is the Christian theologian’s responsibility with respect to past ecclesial proclamations? To what degree must she adhere to the Council’s decree in order to be orthodox, and in order to be faithful to the same gospel that is entrusted to the church in its proclamation? With these considerations in place we may then move on to apply our definition of Chalcedonianism to Barth’s Christology as we have described it in previous chapters, and evaluate just how well Barth’s critically reformulated doctrine preserves these distinctives. This approach will allow us to judge without bias his fidelity to the orthodox tradition.

Ecclesial authority and the confessions Barth’s Christology is informed by the confessions of the ancient church, though his stance toward them remains critical. We begin by considering his views on the nature of ecclesial authority before moving on to Barth’s explicit statements about Nicaea and Chalcedon in particular, and the place he affords them.

Authority under the Word Barth believed that the church’s confessions and creedal statements are the necessary context for dogmatic theology, since this discipline is a task of the church—the body of Christ, which continues to hear its Lord speaking in Scripture by the mediation of the Holy Spirit. Theologians, therefore, cannot disregard or move too quickly past the historic documents, but must regard those who wrote them to be their own fathers and mothers and brothers. The hearing church listens to its Lord, but it also has listened to its Lord in the past. Dogma thus ought to be regarded like the father’s advice to his child: “The son should listen to the father before he says he is wrong. The rightness cannot be decided in advance. We must listen to the Church Fathers in the same way. If we

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believe they are wrong, then we must prove it exegetically”—but “one must not speak without having heard.”14 The question of tradition therefore falls under the Fifth Commandment: Honor your father and mother! “Certainly that is a limited authority,” Barth says; “we have to obey God more than father and mother. But we have also to obey father and mother.”15 In honoring her theological progenitors, then, the theologian remains cognizant of two contrasting matters: that tradition is not revelation but is subject to the Word of God, and that the centuries of Christian reflection may not be leapt over in favor of a “pure” biblicism. In the re-expression of doctrine today the confession therefore has an authority that is—like all theological work—relative and provisional. It is relative because the confession is a human articulation of doctrine, based upon the careful explication of Scripture, but still subject to the primacy of that Scripture. It does not achieve the status of that proclamation of the church which, in Heinrich Bullinger’s sense of the preached word, becomes the Word of God.16 Rather the confession is exegesis, a commentary on the Word.17 Because it has been ratified and promulgated by the church, the theologian owes to it a benefit of the doubt: Dogmas must be approached with some prejudgment in favor of their truth,18 though as “insight given for the moment” the confession is subject, in theory, to revision and ultimately supplantation—insight “always to be given again, to be given new, purer and deeper.”19 The church (and her theologians) therefore properly refrains from making “any direct appeal to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in support of its words and attitudes and decisions, by not trying to speak out as though it were infallible and final,” but by subordinating itself to Scripture as the lord and judge of its doctrinal formulae.20 This is the theological nature of the confession. But there are also practical limitations that qualify its authority.21 First, it has a geographical limit: the confession is produced in, by, and for the use of a particular ecclesial community. It has, furthermore, a shifting relationship with political, cultural, and economic Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 54. An extensive discussion of Barth’s view of the relative authority of the confessions can be found in Georg Plasger, Die relative Autorität des Bekenntnisses bei Karl Barth. Also see E. P. Meijering, Von den Kirchenvatern zu Karl Barth; and John Webster, “The Theology of the Reformed Confessions,” in Barth’s Earlier Theology, pp. 57–65. 15 See Barth, Credo, pp. 179–83 (quotation on p. 181). 16 CD I/1, pp. 88–99; cf. Bullinger, Second Helvetic Confession (1566), Chapter 1. 17 See CD I/2, p. 621; Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 54; and Barth, “The Desirability and Possibility of a Universal Reformed Creed,” in Theology and Church, p. 118. 18 CD I/1, p. 310. The primary locus of Barth’s discussion of this topic is CD I/2, pp. 585–660 (§20.2). 19 Karl Barth, “Universal Reformed Creed,” p. 114. 20 CD I/2, p. 586. 21 For what follows see CD I/2, pp. 625–37. 14

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forces. It also has a temporal limit: the confession is the product of another era, with its own problems and its own ways of grappling with them. And while it is true that the great heresies of old continue to resurface in new forms, the ancient answers to them are conditioned by the fact that they speak illic et tunc and not hic et nunc. “It may well be that the false statements against which the confession was then and there directed are no longer or not yet familiar to the Church here and now in their original form, or at any rate in their actual significance.”22 Finally, then, the confession has a material limit in that it arises not as “a free and comprehensive exposition of the faith of the Christian Church” but in a definite antithesis and conflict.23 It is a doctrinal expression by which the church seeks to oppose error in the particular form that is afflicting the community, and thereby preserve its unity. In refining its testimony the church actively opposes a competing confession (those of Arianism and Nestorianism, for example). In this way the confession is a No. The further danger, then—and Barth suggests it is even inevitable—is that because our positive confession is in fact a reaction to error and confusion, it will be formed and directed on the terms of the error itself. The form it takes will attest to false doctrine (in its negation), and so “keep it alive—even if only as a reflection.”24 As a response to particular situations the creeds of Nicaea, Chalcedon, and others thus have a particular prehistory, and their promulgation is the form of the church’s decision regarding that which made the confession necessary (and not a free and unconditioned doctrinal reflection, a “truncated summa theologiae”).25 That a confession retains these limits, of course, does not by any means suggest that its real truth, and its authority in the church, are marginal. Barth simply means to make clear just what sort of thing a confession is, so that we who owe so much to the Fathers do not mistake it as something else. In fact, it is upon its very limitation that the authority of the confession decisively rests: this admits its humanity, and therefore shifts the burden of truth and authority off of the human speech of the church and onto the Lord of the church who guides it. That a confession is conditioned by its immediate context only goes to show that the authority it continues to bear for Christian witness is an authority not its own. The result of all of this is Barth’s conviction that, in each new generation, the dogmas of the church not only can be subject to scrutiny and revision but 25 22 23 24

CD I/2, p. 653. CD I/2, pp. 627–28. CD I/2, p. 633. CD I/2, p. 628.

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must be so—because “in every century the Church has had to find out anew the meaning of Scripture.” The task remains. We must trust that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. We have no pope in Protestantism, but we do have secondary criteria. Sound exegesis will be done within the communion of saints. The Bible is given to the community of the Church. Tradition helps us toward sound exegesis, and tradition includes the whole history of the Church (including the nineteenth century!). Confessions also help, but none of these is an absolute criterion. In interpretation, tradition and Church Fathers and confessions are our “parents” whom we must respect and honour, but there are times when a breach must be made (Reformation!).26

Confession and dogma rest upon Scripture and so continually point the church back to it. But “the confession cannot and will not deprive us of our own responsibility to Scripture”—to hearing, understanding, and applying it.27 And since theology is a human work, the confession of the church and of the theologian is a task left unfinished until its own eschatological consummation— which itself is, Barth says, not in the church’s dogma but its praise offered to God. The authority of the confession “is thus an eschatological concept, to which no present actualisation corresponds, to which every reality of Church confession, everything we now know as dogma old or new, can only approximate.”28 But what of those symbols of the church that are evidently not so geographically and temporally limited, but which were formulated under an ecumenical banner and adopted (almost) universally by the Christian churches—in particular, the christological definitions of the seven ecumenical councils, including those of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon? Do they not speak with a special authority by virtue of their more nearly universal status? In practice this is true, Barth believes, although in theory they are also human reflection upon the biblical witness and so just as reformable.29 The christological creeds are subject to revision on two fronts: first, they will not be overturned but rather extended and clarified. Indeed this is how the Nicene Creed came to stand alongside the Apostles’, and how the Definition of Chalcedon came to stand alongside the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.30 And while Chalcedon has a certain pride

28 29 30 26 27

Karl Barth’s Table Talk, p. 97. CD I/2, p. 650; cf. 652–56. CD I/2, p. 657. The Göttingen Dogmatics, p. 247. CD I/2, p. 627.

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of place in the history of christological doctrine, it does not have the final word on Christ’s person. Again, in the sphere of church dogma and on this side of the eschaton there is no such final word. Second, Barth suggests a vital distinction between the content of a creed—its declarations about Jesus Christ, his relation to God the Father, and his relation to humankind—and the form of its expression. The former is its “direction” [Richtung], the latter its particular “statements” [Sätzen]. As the church continues to bear witness to the gospel under the authority of its confessions it is challenged to maintain their direction and intent; but the forms in which this is stated are subject to those limitations described above, namely the place and time and occasion by which they were conceived. Primarily and decisively it is not the wording of a Church’s confession, not its form as geographically and temporally and historically limited, but its direction (which is, of course, only real and recognisable in its statements and form), whose exposition can constitute the necessary horizon of the present-day Church and as such have and be authority. . . . Its statements give us the direction in which it itself, the Church then and there, has sought and found [the unity of faith]. It is not by agreeing with these statements and appropriating them, but by learning the direction from these statements that we respect the authority of the confession. For that reason it may well be that in learning that direction from it we have to oppose critically certain or even many of its statements. This criticism will mean, therefore, that going in the direction indicated and respecting the authority of the confession we think we ought to prefer other statements as better following that direction.31

Because this is the case, Barth’s appropriation ought to be described as selfconsciously critical. The details of those statements which account for the form of the confession, including the authors’ philosophical language and presuppositions, are not necessarily material to the direction that Christian theologians ought to maintain. This is precisely what Barth believes he is doing in his own reckoning with the incarnation. “It is one thing to take one’s bearings from the fathers, to learn from them and actually to accept their imperishable insights—if this is what is meant, I am happy to be dubbed ‘orthodox’ by my neighbours on the left—but quite another thing to try as a matter of principle to think and speak according to their judgments and confessions, or according to a particular ecclesiastical structure.” Confessions exist, Barth says, “in order CD I/2, pp. 655–56.

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that we may go through them (not once but continually), but not that we should return to them, take up our abode in them, and conduct our further thinking from their standpoint and in bondage to them.”32

“Primitive” Christology and the modern critique Clearly Barth has reasons to defend historic expressions of church dogma against their modern, cultured despisers. Liberal Neo-Protestantism had not simply assumed a proper, critical stance toward dogma but had convinced itself that the church had nothing to say that was worth listening to—and certainly no authority to which the theologian should subordinate herself. It was precisely the dogma of the confessions, and other such ecclesial strictures, that had to be (in Schleiermacher’s words) “banished from the system of doctrine” and handed over to the annals of history.33 But Barth is unconvinced by the dismissive attitude of so many of his teachers and forebears, a “freewheeling modern caprice which chafes at an orthodoxy that it usually does not know and which thinks it can feel free before it has made any attempt to let itself be bound.”34 While “even the most central and universal dogmas can be corrected or transcended,” such criticism comes from within, from Holy Scripture, and not from the stance that liberal Protestantism takes above and apart from Scripture and tradition. One must take up residence within the church, which means under its authority, before one has any right to critique the church and its dogmas. Barth engages on two fronts what he calls modernism’s charge of intellectualism against “primitive” Christology.35 Modernism’s formal reproach is its accusation of theological hair-splitting. With “unmistakable meticulousness” the Fathers, the scholastics, and the post-Reformation orthodox theologians pursued the task of explaining the cardinal statement vere Deus vere homo. While Barth is sensitive to the points at which this charge obtains—that is, insofar as the conceptual language has drifted from the New Testament—he defends the tradition here. The purpose of the Chalcedonian statement was not to solve the mystery of revelation with the formula of Christ’s two natures, but only to “begin to think, and only describe the beginning of [man’s] thinking.”36 And if CD III/4, p. xii. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 411 (§97.5). His particular target in this passage is the ancient doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. 34 Göttingen, p. 247. 35 Barth cites particularly J. G. Herder, Albrecht Ritschl, and Adolf von Harnack. On the following discussion see CD I/2, pp. 126–31. 36 CD I/2, p. 126. 32 33

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the modern theologian attempts to shake off the scaffolding of orthodoxy and to describe the reality of Jesus as vere Deus vere homo strictly off the face of the New Testament, he will come to see that the church’s Christology did not come from nowhere but was born out of necessity in the face of the errors it actually faced (and continues to face). If he works at this task himself for a little while, he will realize that if he attempts to remove the conceptual burdens rather than ignoring them, he will become involved in the very same difficulties as those faced by the early church.37 Barth concludes, then, that the only decisive question with respect to the Christology of the ancient church is not whether they drifted from revelation to metaphysical speculation, but whether under the conditions of the day they did not in fact have to do so, and whether in walking this path they were trying to do real justice to the task. Modernism’s charge of intellectualism also has a material reproach, which Barth regards as the more substantial point of criticism. This deals with the charge of metaphysical speculation. The school of Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack identifies two-natures Christology as concerned with “a naturalistic, mystico-magico-mechanical conception of salvation” whereby salvation is procured in the incarnation by an essentially “physico-mechanical” uniting of immortal divine nature with mortal human nature. The reproach of intellectualism argues that the result of such an event “can be only the object of a theoretical faith, which is really to be described as speculative vision.”38 Barth believes that this reproach is equally ill-founded, and that the modern intent to read the tradition so unsympathetically—to “catch out” the Fathers in some obvious mistake—is incongruous with their desire to deal seriously with the fact that the mystery that is God’s revelation to humankind cannot be solved, but only recognized. With respect to the charge that ancient Christology deserves to be marginalized due to the strong influence of Greek philosophy upon the Fathers, Barth’s position is therefore more complex than is often reckoned. He does believe that contemporary theology can (and must) follow the direction of the creeds but not hold to their form, which certainly includes the way in which the Fathers had come to understand the basic concepts with which they were working—as we will examine below. Barth wrote in a 1928 letter to Rudolf Bultmann that he wished to adopt into his vocabulary the terminology of the CD I/2, p. 127. CD I/2, p. 128 (emphasis mine).

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older dogmatics “without identifying myself with the underlying philosophy.”39 On the other hand, theologians today cannot simply dismiss the form that the ancient expressions took, chiding the Fathers for being caught up in ways of thinking foreign to the New Testament before demonstrating how much better suited we are to the task because we recognize Greek thought forms and their potential to influence doctrine. (This is the intellectualist charge of Ritschl and Harnack, and does not belong to Karl Barth.40) The voice of the church ought to be heard, even if that requires a degree of self-conscious accommodation to Aristotelian or Platonic ways of thinking.41 The modern dismissal of ancient Christology rests finally upon pride, Barth says—a false humility that shakes its head at the intensity of debate in the fifth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in so doing finally circumvents and conjures away the mystery of revelation in the incarnation.42 Having broken away from this history, modern liberal Christology relies upon the human’s own powers of judgment, and its impulse is away from the paradox of incarnation and toward either Docetism or Ebionitism. The charge against primitive Christology has its root in “a half-bold, half-puzzled failure to see what the New Testament actually says and what is actually heard in the Church and by the Church.”43 Whatever allegations may be marshalled against primitive Christology, Barth concludes, at least it was not guilty of this failure. Therefore, “in spite of the reproach in question, at every decisive

Karl Barth to Rudolf Bultmann, June 12, 1928, Karl Barth-Rudolf Bultmann: Letters 1922–1966, p. 41. Barth’s appropriation is therefore a “conceptual eclecticism,” to borrow a term from Patrick Patterson. See Patterson, “Chalcedon’s Apprentice: Karl Barth and the Twentieth-Century Critique of Classical Christology,” Toronto Journal of Theology 16.2 (2000), pp.  193–216; cf. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, pp. 400–1. In the 1930s Barth reflected that in his christological concentration he had discovered a freedom from “the egg-shells of philosophical systematics” that once hampered him. See Barth, “How My Mind Has Changed in This Decade: Part Two,” The Christian Century, September 20, 1939 (reprinted July 4–11, 1984), p. 684. The greater challenge, of course, is to identify the specific influences of classical philosophy that Barth has in mind with respect to Christology, and how he believes these influences shaped the expressions of the ancient church. 40 See CD I/2, pp. 654–55. In contrast, a sympathetic account of the early church’s adoption of Greek philosophical forms is provided by Norman P. Tanner, “Greek Metaphysics and the Language of the Early Church Councils: Nicaea I (325) to Nicaea II (787),” in The Church in Council, pp. 208–13. Rather than merely accommodating itself to Greek thought forms, Tanner suggests, the early church “forged from the Greek language a specifically Christian vocabulary, one that was open to developments in the future” (ibid., p. 213). 41 See Barth-Bultmann Letters, p.  42. The philosophical terminology of the ancient church appears alien, Barth believes, “only because modern critics insist on reading into it philosophical content which the Fathers did not necessarily intend it to bear” (Patterson, “Chalcedon’s Apprentice,” p. 196). 42 CD I/2, pp. 129–31. 43 CD I/2, p. 131. 39

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point we have good reason to take our stand on its side and not on that of its accusers.”44

Person and work in the ancient church Barth’s own critique of the tradition is markedly different, which one case study will help to demonstrate. In evaluating the Christology of the ancient councils he suggests that a division between the doctrines of Christ’s person and work inevitably arose as a consequence of the polemics that prompted new theological precision in this area. In undoing this error, Barth believes, he is cultivating the theologian’s first duty to Scripture—yet without violating the real spirit and intent of the early church. Though the New Testament knows nothing of the conceptual strictness that arose in later centuries, Barth insists that Chalcedon’s “more exact determination of the relationship between God and man . . . which has become normative for all subsequent development in this dogma and dogmatics, is one which in our understanding has shown itself to be factually right and necessary.”45 The Council’s attempt to describe the person of Jesus Christ abstractly in terms of his two natures is not to be banished to history, but is a true statement when taken on its own metaphysical grounds. On the other hand, Barth worries that it entails one abstraction that is not true to the New Testament: a fundamental distinction between Jesus’ person and work. According to our understanding there can be no question of a doctrine of the two natures which is autonomous, a doctrine of Jesus Christ as God and man which is no longer or not yet related to the divine action which has taken place in Him, which does not have this action and man as its subject matter. There is no such doctrine in the New Testament, although we cannot say that the New Testament envisages the being and relationship of God and man in Jesus Christ in any other way than it became conceptually fixed in the doctrine of the two natures.46

While it was a necessary step for the church to take in the fifth century, under the pressures of Eutychianism and Nestorianism, we should not conclude from this accidental truth of history that the abstraction of Christ’s person is materially necessary to dogmatics. Just the opposite is true, in fact: as helpful Ibid. CD IV/1, p. 133; cf. Göttingen, pp. 153–54. 46 CD IV/1, p. 133. 44 45

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as it is in explicating the church’s witness to Jesus’ full and unconfused divinity and humanity, the abstraction only proves that his person cannot be understood fully and properly apart from his work. This is Barth’s condemnation of what he calls a “special Christology” in CD IV/1—an independent doctrine of the person of Christ, which merely picks up clues from the New Testament but in fact articulates the union of divinity and humanity in metaphysical terms and largely without reference to Jesus’ work of atonement and eschatological restoration.47 The traditional approach has been to treat Christ’s person and work as separate (if related) loci, with Christology preceding and providing the groundwork for the explication of this agent’s activity in reconciliation. These loci are further distinguished in the older dogmatics from the two states of Christ; and again from the subjective application of salvation to women and men; and finally from a doctrine of the church as mediate between Christ and the Christian.48 Soteriology and ecclesiology followed from Christology, Barth believes, as related but relatively autonomous doctrines—suggesting by their “existential relevance” that all this abstract talk of hypostatic union and two natures might be dispensed with in a pinch. The result was that “Christology takes on the appearance of an ontology and dramatics arbitrarily constructed from Scripture and tradition.”49 In this way of viewing the relationship between Christology and soteriology, Barth suggests, the unio of the divine Logos with humanity consists in “only a static and idle being, not an act or a work”50—a being that, in turn, is the basis upon which his activity as the Mediator may be described. Ultimately, the person of Christ is but a formal presupposition for the doctrine of reconciliation. Barth’s judgment of this whole dogmatic approach, including the implication that who Jesus Christ is can be determined on any other basis than his mission and activity in the world, should be quoted at length: In Himself and as such the Christ of Nicaea and Chalcedon naturally was and is a being which even if we could consistently and helpfully explain His unique structure conceptually could not possibly be proclaimed and believed as One See CD IV/1, pp. 122–28. CD IV/1, p. 123. In Hans Boersma’s insightful analysis, “Barth’s lack of a distinction between the doctrine of the person of Christ and its soteriological consequences is the basic reason that he cannot be placed in either the Alexandrian or the Antiochian camp. He interprets Chalcedon in redemptive rather than ontological categories. Or, to put it more succinctly: ontology and redemption become identical. Where act and being, person and work, natures and states, ontology and redemption have become identical the Alexandrian-Antiochian dilemma is resolved” (Boersma, “Alexandrian or Antiochene?” p. 280). 49 CD IV/1, p. 124. 50 CD IV/1, p. 127. 47 48

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who acts historically because of the timelessness and historical remoteness of the concepts (person, nature, Godhead, manhood, etc.). He could not possibly be proclaimed and believed as the One whom in actual fact the Christian Church has always and everywhere proclaimed and believed under the name of Jesus Christ. An abstract doctrine of the person of Christ may have its own apparent importance, but it is always an empty form, in which what we have to say concerning Jesus Christ can never be said.51

Like the Logos asarkos,52 the “person of Christ” as an independent locus has a place to fill in the system of Christian doctrine. Historically, it was necessary in order to meet the particular challenges of the early church. But we should not mistake this construct for the genuine article, the Jesus of the New Testament, the one whom the church actually worships and proclaims. Frighteningly, even the Christ of Chalcedon may become an idol, and orthodoxy something menacing and dangerous, if “the living God in Jesus Christ” who comes to the Christian and engages her whole being is neglected for a Christ of objective speculation, a “Christ without living Christians.”53 Barth therefore condemns “special Christology” because the church’s talk of the metaphysics of the incarnation are empty speculation if they lack attention to the actual life that Jesus lived. In his own work, Barth seeks at every point to integrate the loci of Christ’s person and work: what is needed “is nothing more or less than the removal of the distinction between the two basic sections of classical Christology, or positively, the restoration of the hyphen which always connects them and makes them one in the New Testament.”54 They must remain ever connected, though not to the detriment of either one, and not such that either doctrine is absorbed and dissolved into the other, but only to properly secure each in its own place. We should take up Barth’s revision of the doctrine only after registering this defense of “primitive” Christology against the Neo-Protestants. He does not disagree with the argument that the creeds are colored by Greek thought forms, or that this includes metaphysical speculation. What Barth objects to is NeoProtestantism’s decision to reject the tradition based upon such facts. As we turn to Barth’s own criticisms of the forms of ancient Christology, then, we must remain keenly aware that for him this motivates not a rejection of Nicaea and

54 51 52 53

Ibid. Cf. CD IV/1, pp. 52–53. CD IV/3, pp. 655–56. CD IV/1, p. 128.

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Chalcedon but their careful appropriation and extension to engage the needs of the church today.

Chalcedonian concepts and speculative metaphysics While Barth believed that Schleiermacher and his inheritors rejected the concepts of ancient Christology as unsuitable to the task, he himself sought to engage the tradition at this point and to recover its positive contributions. Hypostasis, physis, ousia, unio, communicatio—the language of the ancient church and the concepts to which they are tied formed a common tongue by which conversations and conciliar decisions on christological matters could take place.55 Such terms and formulae need not be suspect simply because they do not appear in the Bible, but are “fashioned when it is necessary to summarize briefly, tersely and strongly, in delimitation against misconceptions and mistakes and for continuing use, insights which have been won from the Bible and are to be developed in accordance with it. They are to be interpreted in the light of the insights, and not vice versa.”56 In dialogue with this tradition Barth therefore took up much of the language (though he set aside certain terms and concepts at key points) and, in many cases, gave the terms new meaning in how he used them.

Nature Most significantly, in his mature Christology Barth largely rejects the received word “nature” (physis, natura) as a way of speaking about Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity. When the theologian begins to speak about a divine or a human “nature,” Barth believes, the temptation to define that according to her own observation of the phenomenal world is unavoidable. We are human, and we believe that we know what it is to be a created being of this species. So certainly, the theologian presumes, she can accurately describe the human nature that the creeds affirm of Jesus. Likewise, we may have some (admittedly limited) capacity

I will use these terms in their broadly Chalcedonian sense. Of course there are many voices in the tradition, including Cyril of Alexandria himself, who use the terminology in subtly (and sometimes radically) different ways. Does physis, for example, speak of person (as Cyril had it) or of nature? Is an ousia the same as a nature? For more on this dilemma, see John A. McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, pp. 138–51. 56 CD IV/3, p. 178. 55

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for describing the qualities of a truly divine nature, such as the “Three Ways” of the medieval church: divine being is the exact opposite of creaturely finitude (via negativa), the highest and most pure instance of the good we possess, such as love (via eminentiae), and the logically deduced first cause of that which is known in the creaturely sphere (via causalitatis). This way of thinking about divinity and humanity dominated the Western church in particular from the fifth century right up until the modern period, and Barth associates it with the analogia entis—the theological presumption that creatures may know something true about God by means of analogical reason from creatures to the Creator in whose image they are made.57 We have to remember that it is fatally easy to read out of the word “nature” a reference to the generally known or at any rate conceivable disposition of a being, so that by the concept “divine nature” we are led to think of a generally known or knowable essence of deity, and by that of “human nature” of a known or knowable essence of man, the meaning of the humanity of Jesus Christ—for this is our present concern—being thus determined by a general anthropology, a doctrine of man in general and as such.58

Against this method, Jesus Christ “claims conversely that in His true humanity no less than His true deity He may be known only in the particular way in which He gives Himself to be known.”59 There are no general concepts for giving definition to the content of Christology—only the life of the Savior narrated in Scripture. Divine nature, human nature, and the human “un-nature” that is the flesh spoiled by sin60 can be learned about only from him. Efforts to know of Jesus according to a general anthropology “will do violence to Him with its attempt to comprehend Him in its categories. This is the cul-de-sac into which we must not be enticed by the concept ‘nature.’”61 On the analogia entis and Barth’s treatment of it, see Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, and Thomas Joseph White (ed.), The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or Wisdom of God? 58 CD IV/2, p. 26. Barth points out that he has already demonstrated in CD III/2 “that there is no such anthropology.” Cf. CD III/2, §43.2. 59 CD IV/2, p. 26. 60 “Flesh,” in the language of the New Testament, refers to the human person as sinner, as one standing under the divine judgment. See CD IV/1, p. 165. 61 CD IV/2, pp. 26–27; cf. CD II/1, pp. 284–85. Tom Greggs suggests that Barth’s christological derivation of the meaning of divinity and humanity leads to an inevitable circularity in his Christology (Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, pp. 43–45). Greggs is right insofar as he suggests that the uniqueness of Jesus’ humanity is not necessarily prescriptive for our humanity, leaving dogmatics in a difficult position when identifying those qualities Jesus possesses by virtue of his “true humanity” and those he possesses by virtue of either his divinity or his unique mission. This is a point at which Barth is not entirely clear, though he offers some direction with his treatment of the communicatio gratiarum. See Chapter 3 of the present work. 57

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In the tradition, language of ἐν δύο ϕύσεσιν was subject to serious misunderstanding, Barth says, and showed itself to be in need of reform (but not abandonment). By presuming that we know of what we speak when we describe divinity and humanity, the theologian loses her footing in revelation. This is the reason for Barth’s necessary reinterpretation of physis for describing the incarnation. Rather than the German Natur Barth opts for Wesen—usually translated “essence,” though one must be careful not to import substantialist notions into Barth’s use of this important term. It is closely related to his use of Existenz, and the English “existence” perhaps more explicitly captures the dynamic quality Barth intends. A nature is not a substance held in common by the divine persons or a universal in which all members of a species participate. There is, Barth believes, no universal called “being,” whether divine or human.62 Modern Protestants subtly import all of this narrowly defined, metaphysical baggage when they hear the word “nature,” rather than thinking of divinity and humanity each “in its unity and its totality.”63 But Barth means for Wesen to serve as the equivalent of what the ancient church meant by “nature” at its least complicated: “[all] that which Jesus Christ has in common with the Father and the Holy Spirit as the Son of God” in distinction from creatures; and all that which he has in common with human creatures, “that which marks off His being and its nature from the being and nature of God.”64 This certainly appears to be what the pro-Nicene theologians of the fourth century and the Chalcedonians of the fifth intended with their talk of natures and consubstantiality. With “essence,” then, Barth intends to carry on with their explanation of the way in which Jesus is like God the Father and like other humans, but without depending upon the same principles of common being, or natures as metaphysical constructs (whether abstract or concrete). Stripped down to its conceptual basics, and over-against the heavily freighted and extrabiblical “one person in two natures,” then, Barth prefers the minimalist confession that Jesus Christ is vere Deus vere homo.65 Jesus exists as the unity of God and humanity—and this unity is an ongoing event. He is the middle point between 64 65 62 63

CD IV/2, p. 44; cf. 26f., 60–61. CD I/2, p. 128. CD IV/2, pp. 60–61. CD IV/1, pp.  126, 133; CD IV/2, pp.  25–28. Barth makes this formula the title of §15.2. Paul D. Jones over-reaches, however, when he suggests that “the concept of physis (translated both as Natur and Wesen) plays no significant role” in CD I/2 and beyond, as Barth traded it out for the less static “vere Deus vere homo” (The Humanity of Christ, p. 31). Barth uses Wesen over Natur copiously and self-consciously throughout CD IV/2, giving it particular importance in §64.2. In fact, as I argue in Chapter 3, in CD IV/2 the communication of divine and human “essences” is one of Barth’s primary concepts for discussing the existence of Jesus Christ.

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the two, the one who not only occupies but fills the infinite distinction between the Creator and creatureliness and thereby closes it in his person. Put negatively, the key insight regards that which the category of nature is not able to convey. It is not an amalgamation of metaphysical attributes, and it is certainly not drawn from general observation about creatureliness, or other such forms of natural theology. We might say that Jesus Christ does not possess a human nature (which assigns to him fixed attributes) so much as a human existence, a life that is irreducibly vere homo. Who we understand Jesus to be as a human subject, therefore, is to be gleaned not from our categories but from his lived history. How far or in what way is he divine? He is divine like the living God, Father and Spirit, commanding even the winds and the waves. How far or in what way is Jesus human? He is human like us, bleeding from his open wounds until he has breathed his last.66 When speaking in and with the context of ancient Christology, Barth does employ nature language in order to make clear that his own linguistic substitutions are not an artificial imposition on the history of doctrine, but that he means to speak of the same thing that the tradition called “nature.” We might use this term from the older dogmatics, Barth says, “so long as we are careful— when we apply the term to the humanity of Jesus Christ—to keep the expression free from any idea of a generally known humanum, and to fill it out only as it can be filled out in this connexion.”67 And so the concept is filtered through the particularity of “one concrete possibility of human existence”68—which is the life that Jesus lives. The Son did not take up a human nature (particularly one substantially construed), but rather actualized the concrete possibility of existing as the man Jesus. The existence of God the Son as Jesus Christ is not a general reality that is already part of the created order, which He merely acquired, but is creatively sourced—a new thing born from the power of God. And what of divine nature? Barth insists that the deity of Christ is equally not to be understood in static terms—neither as a substance he possesses along with his humanity nor even as the shared essence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Like the being of God, the essence of deity is expressed in God’s particular activity: That God as God is able and willing and ready to condescend, to humble Himself in this way is the mystery of the “deity of Christ”—although frequently it is not

This does not mean that Barth takes the state of fallen humanity as definitive for what it means to be human, of course. In fact he does quite the opposite, insisting that while Christ’s humanity consists in his life with us and as one of us, it is his life of perfect obedience to God that shows us what is “true humanity.” See CD II/1, p. 286. 67 CD IV/2, p. 47. 68 CD IV/2, p. 48. 66

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recognised in this concreteness. This deity is not the deity of a divine being furnished with all kinds of supreme attributes. . . . The meaning of His deity— the only true deity in the New Testament sense—cannot be gathered from any notion of supreme, absolute, non-worldly being. It can be learned only from what took place in Christ. Otherwise its mystery would be an arbitrary mystery of our own imagining, a false mystery. . . . Who the one true God is, and what He is, i.e., what is His being as God, and therefore His deity, His “divine nature,” which is also the divine nature of Jesus Christ if He is very God—all this we have to discover from the fact that as such He is very man and a partaker of human nature, from His becoming man, from His incarnation and from what he has done and suffered in the flesh.69

If God has revealed Himself in the life of Jesus Christ, as the Christian testifies, then the theologian is to seek her understanding of divinity there. There is no other, and certainly no greater, source of the knowledge of God.

Substance and ousia Since Nicaea the orthodox tradition has stressed that Christ is homoousios (consubstantialis) with God the Father—what Barth calls “the famous shibboleth of Athanasian orthodoxy.”70 This suggests the sort of “essence” conceptuality that Barth wishes to avoid in his use of Wesen—essence as substance or as a universally common thing in which all members of a species participate. For the orthodox tradition, his two ousia are that which Jesus Christ has in common with God the Father (with respect to his divinity) and with us (with respect to his humanity). By this the pro-Nicenes meant that he is of the same kind (homoousios) with God, the Son generated from the Father, and not another sort of being (i.e. creaturely). This trades on the Aristotelian distinction between substance—the true essence of a thing that “stands under” its phenomenological manifestation—and accidents, the qualities of a thing that make it knowable, whether by intuition or by rational correlation. But Barth regards homoousia to be historically and materially ambiguous (e.g. it is utterly unique in predicating unity and distinction of the same objects), and hence “considered in itself it serves the knowledge of God very badly.”71 Barth is not opposed to the concept, nor is he especially motivated to embrace it,

CD IV/1, p. 177; cf. 129, 186–88, and CD II/1, p. 281. Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, p. 265. 71 CD I/1, p. 440. See pp. 438–41 for Barth’s full discussion. 69 70

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“for in all its folly it is more true than all the wisdom which has voiced its opposition to it.” . . . We are under no illusion as to the fact that we do not know what we are saying when we take this term upon our lips. But still less can we be under any illusion as to the fact that all the lines of our deliberations on the deity of Christ converge at the point where we must assent to the dogma that Jesus Christ is ὁμοούσιος τ πατρί, consubstantialis Patri.72

Ousia thus goes the same way as nature. Barth rejects the implication that a thing—and especially the person of Jesus Christ, the God-human— is most basically a substance or essence which, being fixed in its whatness, then engages in activity through a lived existence. On such a reckoning, one’s essence is entirely predetermined and unaffected by this history. While Barth acknowledges the important role of concepts such as homoousia and physis in the early church’s efforts to articulate basic christological decisions, he worries that they make for an abstract doctrine of Christ that is always and only an empty form.73 In his own constructive work, therefore, Barth prefers to speak of the being of God, and of God in Christ, not in terms of substance but as activity and event. Creaturely being, in turn, exists in its being set in fellowship with its Creator.74

Person Finally, Christology in the line of Nicaea and Chalcedon also relies upon the idea of person (prosopon, persona). With this comes the language of hypostasis, that which grounds the two natures of Christ in and as a single, concrete individual.75 By the time he reaches Christology Barth has already undercut this category. In his doctrine of the Trinity he dropped “person” language in favor of Seinsweise, mode (or way) of being.76 He is concerned that the notion of “person” was never CD I/1, p. 441. CD IV/1, p. 127. CD III/1, p. 185. The comparable Latin term is substantia, though its use in the West was more akin to what the Greek Fathers meant by “nature” than “person.” A helpful discussion of this semantic problem is in Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, pp. 297–301. See also Tanner, “Greek Metaphysics,” p. 211. 76 CD I/1, pp.  355–60. On the historical background of Seinsweisen and Barth’s construal of divine “persons,” see Bruce L. McCormack, “The Doctrine of the Trinity After Barth: An Attempt to Reconstruct Barth’s Doctrine in the Light of His Later Christology,” in Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday (eds), Trinitarian Theology After Barth, pp. 98–102. The term is present in Barth’s earlier Münster dogmatics, as well. See Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, p. 259. 75 72 73 74

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adequately clarified when first invoked with respect to Jesus Christ in the ancient tradition, nor in its later use in the history of dogma. Boethius’ definition of a person as naturae rationabilis individua substantia (“an individual substance of a rational nature”) is generally agreeable, Barth says, but it led the scholastics to establish this concept as having “a special systematic content.”77 Thomas Aquinas, for example, argues that this definition of person can be applied to God—something Barth finds quite troublesome.78 Modern notions of “personality” have only confused things further by adding to persona the attribute of self-consciousness.79 This intonation made it increasingly problematic to speak of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as three persons; under the influence of the notion of personality the end result could only be a social trinitarianism, three individuated minds, wills, and energies of operation who share a common divine essence. Thus the designation of persons in God was accepted “on linguistic presuppositions which no longer obtain today.”80 Rather than attempting to rehabilitate the term, Barth trades it in for something with less historical, philosophical, and psychological baggage. His intent is not to outlaw the concept, but to use it cautiously “as a reminder of the historical continuity of the problem.”81 Along with Seinsweise Barth favors speaking of a subject (Subjekt) rather than a person in the classical sense. “To be person means to be subject, not merely in the logical sense, but also in the ethical sense,” Barth says. It is to be a free subject, “a subject which is free even in respect of the specific limitations connected with its individuality, able to control its own existence and nature . . . and also able to select new possibilities of existence and nature.”82 A person is a knowing, willing, acting “I,” and human personhood is only possible as the one who is the true person confronts the human as an other. Because God is an utterly free subject, Barth says, He is a “real person” in the full and proper sense—something that is doubtful of humans who exist in contingency: “Man CD I/1, p. 356. Barth is content with “subsistence” so long as it is not confused with “substance” (CD I/1, pp. 359–60; cf. 351, where he says that “identity of substance” is necessary for the doctrine of the Trinity, and CD IV/1, p. 205). Boethius gives his definition in Liber de Persona et Duabus Naturis, III, identifying it with the Greek term hypostasis (over-against prosopon). 78 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 29–30; cf. CD I/1, p.  356. Schleiermacher, too, had objected to the way in which the tradition had seemed to use the notion of “person” differently in the doctrines of Trinity and Christology. So, too, “nature” had been presumed to be a universal common to both divinity and humanity, in order to allow these two kinds of being to be wrongly coordinated to one another. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 395 (§96.1). 79 CD I/1, pp. 355, 357; CD II/1, pp. 284–97. 80 CD IV/1, pp. 204–5. 81 CD I/1, pp. 358–59. 82 CD I/1, p. 138. In discussing the incarnation, I have followed Barth’s preference for “subject” over “person.” 77

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is not a person, but he becomes one on the basis that he is loved by God and can love God in return.”83 God is one subject, of course, and not three—one subject existing in three ways, which in its trinitarian use is what the term “person” was always intended to mean.84 This redistribution of the elements that had come to be associated with personhood—individual subsistence, self-consciousness, etc.—into subject and modes of being allows Barth to speak of the doctrines of Trinity and Christology with greater clarity. “Persons” had come to imply a heterodox plurality of subjects in the one triune being. Among the benefits of Barth’s reconceptualization is a breaking free not only from social trinitarianism but from Sabellian modalism, which Barth regarded as the only refuge of NeoProtestant theology once it had taken on board self-consciousness as an aspect of personhood.85 The impact of this upon the doctrine of the incarnation is profound indeed. As we saw in Chapter  1, the ancient problem regards the way in which to relate the composite person who is Jesus Christ to the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God. The basic Christian testimony suggests that these two persons are one and the same: Jesus Christ is the Word of God, made incarnate by the addition of a human nature. But Jesus is not the Logos simpliciter, who preexists the incarnation and who, with the Father and the Spirit, is simple in His being. Has the second person therefore undergone a change in His being? Or is Jesus Christ only “God the Son” in an imprecise manner of speaking? In our final chapter I will suggest that Barth’s rebuke of the language of person helped him to cut this Gordian Knot, which had tied the doctrine of the Trinity to the incarnation in an arguably irreconcilable manner.

Conclusions As we explored in detail in Chapter  3, Barth wished to keep the concepts of traditional Christology but lose the static and sometimes materialist character with which they often have been construed—two natures in what becomes, in

CD II/1, p. 284; cf. CD I/I, pp. 138–39. CD IV/1, p. 205. 85 CD I/1, p. 358. This is the only evident refuge, it should be pointed out, because Barth has already rejected as tritheism what would today be called “social trinitarianism”—that is, one God with three minds, wills, and centers of consciousness. 83 84

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unguarded moments, an almost spatial relationship with one another (e.g. the Lutheran teaching of perichoresis). We have left no place for anything static at the broad centre of the traditional doctrine of the person of Christ—its development of the concepts of unio, communio and communicatio—or in the traditional doctrine of the two states. We have, in a sense, kept company with the older dogmatics in each of the three concepts, as in those of exinanitio and exaltatio, to the extent, that is, that they are all terms which speak of actions, operationes, events. But—thinking and speaking in pure concepts of movement—we have re-translated that whole phenomenology into the sphere of a history. And we have done this because originally the theme of it, which here concerns us, is not a phenomenon, or a complex of phenomena, but a history. It is the history of God in His mode of existence as the Son.86

Such is Barth’s reflection on his own method when it comes to the christological concepts of antiquity. Christology as a task of dogmatic reflection must be controlled exclusively by Jesus Christ in his lived existence. The dogma of Christ’s person as consisting of two natures, composited in unity and distinction, is retranslated in toto into the sphere of history—the theater of God’s activity, God’s movement toward creatures. This recasting (and not rejecting) of ancient terms and concepts is critical to understanding Barth’s theological project, in whole or in part, as well as how it is that he can be thought of as both orthodox and modern in his sensibilities. A driving question for the examination of classical Christology (and, indeed, any Christology), then, is this: Where are the underlying metaphysics in control and where are the doctrinal priorities allowed to remain independent of them? Barth’s own decision with respect to this formal problem is vital for understanding his approach to church dogmatics. In Christology, justice must be done to the living Jesus: But who is He? The older Christology gave us the right answer that He is the Son of God and Son of Man who as such is of divine and human essence. A Christology which does not give this answer does not speak about Him at all, but about a fantastic divine essence or an equally fantastic human essence. In the first instance, we can only return the answer given by the older Christology. To that extent we are in continuity with it. We accept its insight, even if we have to give it another form. But the whole point is that we do have to give it another form.87 CD IV/2, p. 106. CD IV/2, pp. 108–9 (emphasis mine).

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This “other form” that is faithful to the answer given by the tradition was Barth’s constructive goal. And so, again, contemporary dogmatics is to regard the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon as guiding lines in understanding who Jesus is and what he has done, and not “as stones for the construction of an abstract doctrine of His ‘person.’”88 Dogmatics must still reckon with the fact that the New Testament, the rule of Christian theology, knows of no doctrine of two natures autonomous from the divine action which takes place in and as the history of Jesus Christ. It is at this point that the later tradition of mature Chalcedonianism was incriminated.

The Chalcedonian character of Barth’s Christology Our study so far suggests a basic definition of what it means for a Christology to be Chalcedonian in character. Before we evaluate Barth’s work on these terms, a brief look at the Definition promulgated by the fifth-century council is in order: Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the Godbearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.89

Though elsewhere the Fathers filled in such terminology as “Godhead” and “manhood,” “natures” and “person” with further content (including in

CD IV/1, p. 127. Translation from Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church, pp. 51–52.

88 89

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Chalcedon’s supporting documents), it is worth observing that the Definition itself is decidedly minimalist in this respect.90 On the one hand, it is concerned with ruling out positions the church had deemed heterodox and not with constructing a full and cataphatic doctrine of Christ. On the other hand, the minimalism of the Definition reflects the fact that these important theological terms are left undefined within the creed itself. “Godhead” seems to mean simply “whatever it means to be God, like the Father,” and “manhood” “whatever it means to be human, like us.” Only outside of the Definition are these terms filled out with the more metaphysical definition of a nature and its requisite attributes. In the same way the minimalist use of homoousios simply points to the Father on the one hand and human persons on the other, and does not itself attempt to render a full description of these two kinds of ousia.

A working definition Building upon the work of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, the Definition maintains: (1) the full divinity of Jesus Christ, which means his equality with God the Father (against Arianism, as well as Ebionitism); (2) the full humanity of Christ, which means his equality with other men and women (against Apollinarianism, as well as various forms of Docetism); (3) the perfect unity or simultaneity of the two, by which the creed means that Jesus is not first one and then the other but both together; (4) that he is so without his Godhead and his humanity being confused, changed, or melded together into a tertium quid; (5) that he is so without his Godhead and his humanity being separated or divided, so that their unity is a real unity; and (6) that this unity exists within a single subject (or “person”), one Son who is both “God the Word” and the “Lord Jesus Christ.” (I take this final point as an expression of the Fathers’ implicit attention to the identity problem—though the Definition itself only affirms the identity of Jesus and the Word, and does not explain it.) This is a sufficient working description of the “direction” of Chalcedonian Christology. In order to maintain fidelity to the orthodox tradition any modern expression of the doctrine—especially those that replace or redefine the Council’s formal nomenclature—must manage to affirm these convictions about the existence of Jesus Christ.

Sarah Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition,’” in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Incarnation, pp. 143–63; Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Christology,” p. 132.

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George Hunsinger makes two further observations about the Definition of Chalcedon. First, in keeping with its apophatic character, the Definition does not define one specific Christology as orthodox but “demarcates a region in which there is more than one place to take up residence.”91 The boundaries that define this region, including the affirmation that Jesus Christ is vere Deus vere homo, identify what it means to be Chalcedonian in the broad sense. Yet these boundaries are also fluid “and can shade off into matters of degree,” so that there are relatively Alexandrian and also Antiochene ways to be Chalcedonian.92 As Hunsinger summarizes the direction of the creed, the Chalcedonian pattern is one of unity-in-distinction and distinction-in-unity. However one is to describe the person and work of God in Jesus Christ, the union of divinity and humanity and their respective, abiding integrity are mutually conditioning factors. Second, Hunsinger suggests that Barth is faithful to this pattern—and perhaps uniquely so among the orthodox tradition—by virtue of his dialecticism. Barth does not argue for a single, synthetic position but alternates back and forth between Alexandrian and Antiochene idioms for describing the relationship of divinity and humanity in Jesus. The characterization of Barth as christologically Antiochene is highly dubious; but for Barth the proper way to be Chalcedonian is to employ a diversity of idioms. Hunsinger suggests that Barth relies upon his readers to read him dialectically in order to see the incarnation in all its dimensions.93 In this way he emulated the strategy of the New Testament by attending to both the Synoptic and Johannine-Pauline perspectives without seeking to harmonize them.94 Christology must do justice to both witnesses, hearing one and then the other, and so the two together—and it was the error of the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools to synthesize the two or to privilege one over the other: “They opt for the unified thought at the expense of the

“Karl Barth’s Christology,” p. 132. Similarly: the “critically realistic” aspect of Barth’s theology, “like the Chalcedonian formula . . . points out errors on the right hand and on the left without giving positive expression to the truth in the middle. And the reason is quite simply that the truth in the middle can only be expressed by God.” Bruce L. McCormack, Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, p. 464. 92 “Karl Barth’s Christology,” p. 134. 93 “Karl Barth’s Christology,” pp. 135, 140. He cites as proof CD I/2, p. 24, where Barth observes that “in their original New Testament form the antitheses are not solved. Rather do they mutually supplement and explain each other and to that extent remain on peaceful terms.” The strategy of alternating between idioms seems consistent with Barth’s stated desire for a “twofold theological school” in CD I/2; but in my view the later Barth has done more to synthesize the two through the actualistic account of the history of God the Son. 94 Barth theorizes that Paul, while not providing a synthesis between the Synoptic and Johannine approaches, does equally represent them (CD I/2, p.  16); but he is also happy to associate Paul’s approach particularly with John (CD I/2, pp. 165–68). This would seem to be supported by the fact that Paul’s first encounter was with the risen and glorified Christ (Acts 9.1–9). 91

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ineffable actuality. Yet once the project of constructing a fully cohesive system is abandoned, the relative value of each can be appreciated and retained”—which is precisely the victory of Chalcedon.95 On Hunsinger’s account, then, it is Barth’s dialectical method—thinking through Christology in accordance with the diversity of the New Testament—that makes him “Chalcedonian.”

The “direction” of Barth’s Christology When his critique of the formal structures of “primitive” Christology is taken into account it is a simple matter to demonstrate Barth’s affirmation of all six elements in our working definition of “Chalcedonian.” He clearly affirms that, in addition to Jesus’ being fully God and fully human, his divine and human essences are united without division or separation and without confusion or change, and that he is a single subject, the very Word of God become human. I will consider each element in order, relying upon the previous exposition of Barth’s Christology rather than further proof-texting. (1) Jesus is fully God. In addition to Barth’s frequent invocation of “vere Deus,” an important theme in the Dogmatics is that the subject of revelation and redemption—and therefore the one who is active in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—is God Himself. This agent is not a human adopted by God into the service of revelation but is God in His second way of being, who in his very person is the true revelation of God. Thus Jesus is the content of revelation, not merely its enactor. This would not be the case if he were not fully God. But is he lower than the Father in status (if not in essence), since Barth argues for the Son’s eternal subordination to the Father? By no means: as we saw in Chapter 3, this subordination is strictly functional (or perhaps we should say “relational”) and not ontological;96 and Barth argues compellingly that for God “it is just as natural to be lowly as it is to be high.”97 Precisely in His self-subordination to the Father, in this actualization of His freedom as God, the Son is not diminished but is all the greater. The homoousia of the Father and the Son, in fact, must correct our assumptions about what this subordination means for their essential equality.

“Karl Barth’s Christology,” p. 136. It is, however, grounded in the ontology of God’s self-determination. See Darren O. Sumner, “Obedience and Subordination in Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology,” in Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (eds), Advancing Trinitarian Theology: Essays in Constructive Dogmatics. 97 CD IV/1, p. 192. 95 96

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(2) Jesus is fully human. Though Barth makes an important epistemological distinction between Historie and Geschichte, it is indispensible to his understanding of Jesus Christ as the revelation and reconciliation of God that his existence as a human subject occurs within the created order and is in every sense complete and genuine. Just as he argues against an Ebionite Christology on the one hand, so does Barth oppose any shadow of Docetism. Jesus Christ is not just the electing God, but also the elect human—and so the history of his human life must be as ours is: real, historical, and under the conditions of the Fall. If it were not so he could not represent us as God’s covenant partner, could not put to death sin in his own body. (3) Jesus’ divine and human essences are perfectly united. Barth makes use of the classical unio hypostatica in his actualist approach, centering his Christology on the fact that the two essences are not merely “together” but are mutually conditioning. The hypostatic union is historicized when Barth defines it as “the direct unity of existence of the Son of God with the man Jesus of Nazareth.”98 This is most evident in his treatment of the communicatio naturarum, where Barth states that both essences—though of themselves they have their own determination—receive a special determination in their union with one another.99 The divinity of Christ is actualized according to its union with human essence, and the humanity according to its unity with the divine essence. This, for Barth, is what it means for the two to be “hypostatically” united. But it is described as such in terms of the history in which it takes place, as an activity of God the Son, not as a state of two natures that pseudo-spatially touch or inhabit one another. (4) In Christ the divine and the human are not confused or changed. Their common actualization does not mean that the one is altered by adapting itself to the other. Barth maintains the Reformed rejection of the Lutheran genus maiestaticum and any sort of perichoretic uniting of the natures. Were this the case, Barth believed (again, with Calvin and the Reformed scholastics), the integrity of Christ’s true humanity would be imperilled and with it the possibility of human redemption. Instead, in the event of Jesus Christ the divine and human essences retain an oppositional orientation toward one another—and it is this confrontation that is the impetus of their mutual determination.100 CD IV/2, p. 51. “[The Son] does this by causing His own divine existence to be the existence of the man Jesus.” For more on the unio hypostatica and its history see Barth’s full excursus here, pp. 51–60. 99 CD IV/2, pp. 113–16. 100 CD IV/2, pp. 86–88. 98

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(5) In Christ the divine and the human are not separated or divided. On the other hand, Barth’s actualism gives him a unique capacity to part with the Reformed at a number of key junctions, adopting instead what he takes to be the better parts of the Lutheran testimony. This includes the more strict identification of Jesus and the Word that allows him to confess, without excessive qualification, that God the Son has suffered and died; and it includes the marginalization of the extra Calvinisticum and the standing of the Logos asarkos. Each of these dogmatic decisions are motivated by Barth’s hearing of the Lutheran and Alexandrian witnesses in the dialectic, which place greater stress on the fact that in their distinction the divine and human essences of Christ are not held apart. Under the conditions of Barth’s historicization of Christology, any ontological distinction between Jesus and the Word is unthinkable. (6) Finally, then, Barth’s Christology is determined—more than most—by the singularity of subject in the incarnate Christ. The human essence assumed by the Son of God may not be treated as a subject in its own right, as it has no self-standing existence. Barth rigorously maintains that: (a) God is the active subject of the incarnation and the life of Jesus Christ; and (b) Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God and the Son of God is Jesus of Nazareth. Barth affirms that the Son is who He is precisely in His incarnate existence and not apart from it, and so follows the single subject of Chalcedon to its necessary (if also, from the perspective of the classical tradition, radical) conclusion. If our evaluation of the direction of Barth’s Christology is correct, then, he has satisfied each of the six elements set out in our definition of what it is to be Chalcedonian—those borders which demarcate the region in which historically orthodox Christologies operate. He has done so, however, in a way that distinguishes this material direction from the form given by the ancient church, preserving what he believes the Fathers actually intended with the language of “person,” “nature,” and unio hypostatica. Though he does not alternate back and forth between the Alexandrian and Antiochene perspectives, Barth does manage to account for both sets of priorities in a manner that is authentic to the Chalcedon consensus. Yet he has done so under radically different ontological conditions, so that the result is still creative and original. What about the more innovative, and therefore controversial, aspects of Barth’s Christology, then? Our evaluation will not be complete until we consider whether any of these substantially undermine the material description above, and so disqualify Barth from Chalcedonian orthodoxy.

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Innovation and Christology’s “new form” As an example of modern dogmatic theology, Barth’s Church Dogmatics is creative and attentive to the demands of his time. These include a need to engage not only with the ancient, medieval, and Reformation ecclesial traditions but also with three centuries of Enlightenment philosophy, and especially German idealism—Kant’s epistemological critique, Lessing’s historical challenge, Hegel’s ontology, etc. To these were added the sociopolitical and cultural pressures of twentieth-century Europe. In each case, Barth finds that the problems of modernity do not invalidate theology done in an ecclesial voice, nor may they be permitted to set the agenda for dogmatics. But neither can the contemporary church ignore challenges to the way in which the ancient world viewed the nature of knowledge, history, personhood, and existence; in performing her task adequately the theologian speaks into this modern context without capitulating to its judgments. Barth’s own desire, therefore, was to follow the example of the Reformers and give the Bible a candid hearing. But as he sought to do so, he worked also within a context that was theretofore unique. Our discussion of Barth’s Christology suggests six areas in which it is especially innovative. In considering each of these in turn, I will again rely upon the previous exposition: (1) Barth changes the language of Christology. We have seen how Barth rejects or redefines the terms and concepts of the classical doctrine—substituting Wesen for “nature,” Seinsweise for “person,” etc. These we have characterized as the mere form of the ancient doctrine. But does their repudiation suggest a material loss, as well? In fact, it is worth observing again that Barth explicitly intends to use his terms in the same way, as having the same meaning, as the Fathers intended with the traditional vocabulary. He critiques “person,” “nature,” and the like, not because they are bound up in Greek metaphysical thinking so much as because the ancient church did not sufficiently explain them, the result of which is that they now have come to take on subtly different meanings in the intervening one and a half millennia. He believes that he is not inventing something new but rather overriding centuries of the evolution of concepts, not rebuking the councils but re-authenticating them. Barth’s evaluation of “person” and “personality” in CD I/1 is a case in point, and the presence of various social models of the Trinity in contemporary evangelical theology ought to demonstrate the soundness of his judgment. Rather than questioning the validity of Seinsweise and Wesen, theologians today are hard-pressed to justify how their own use of “person” and “nature” comports with the intent, or the direction, of the ancient church.

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(2) Barth describes the person of Christ as history and event. But are such categories capable of accounting for that which the older dogmatics sought to articulate in more static ways? For all its static thinking Chalcedon, too, kept the mission of Christ in the corner of its eye: the incarnation of the Son was “for us and for our salvation.” The strategy of distinguishing being from act—describing a person’s characteristics, abilities, and limitations before proceeding to speak of his activities—is logically appealing. Thus the church’s theologians have historically believed they could articulate doctrines of Christ’s person and work as distinct loci. But Barth abjures the static concepts not only because of the baggage they have accrued in the history of thought but—and this is decisive— because they are unrevealed. If they were introduced as a merely explanatory apparatus, in their speculative nature they came to control what it is theologians could say about the presence of God in Christ. The way in which the identity of Jesus was described, in other words, came to be implicated in an act of natural theology. In place of this, Barth understands “history” not as a new apparatus to replace an outdated one, but as a way of thinking and speaking more closely aligned with the form of the biblical witness and with the medium of revelation itself. The benefits of Barth’s dynamic approach are to be explored in some detail in the following chapter. The question that occupies us here is whether this is in conflict with Chalcedonianism. Certainly it is methodologically quite different. But Barth is still able to account for Jesus’ full divinity, humanity, and the perfection of the union in a single subject, without thinking about those natures as two things, each of which has an intuitable set of properties. He even conscientiously avoids the classical terms “God-man” (theanthropos), “divine-human,” and “divine-humanity.” Though these terms are “possible and tempting,” he believes they obscure the dynamism of the relationship of His divinity and humanity and obliterate “the historicity of the subject: the Son of God who as such became and is the Son of Man.”101 In Barth’s actualistic account much of the same work of Christology can still be done—unio, communio, and communicatio—but these necessarily will be worked out within the immediate context of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and not in terms of either an inventory of essential attributes or the subjugation of one nature to the metaphysical requirements of the other. It is these events that the New Testament narrates; therefore they cannot be relegated to a series of logical preconditions for an independent doctrine of Christ’s person (cur Deus homo?). There can be no such special Christology, CD IV/2, p. 115.

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but only a view of the hypostatic union that is mutually coordinated with the status duplex, the existence of the Mediator as the humiliated Son of God and the exalted Son of Man. (3) Jesus’ states of humiliation and exaltation are simultaneous. Despite the fact that theirs is a more straight-forward reading of Phil. 2.5–11,102 Barth believes that the Reformation traditions erred in treating the two states as sequential and separate. This introduced new problems: namely, kenoticism among Lutherans, and for the Reformed the extra Calvinisticum’s further severance of the Logos from Jesus. The Reformed in particular should have had the imagination to identify the two states of Christ as simultaneous and thereby overcome a contradiction in their Christology.103 They could not extend the state of exinanition into eternity, of course, but they could have admitted a status exaltationis that perdured during the Son’s life on earth. Still, nothing in the simultaneity of the states as advocated by Barth stands at odds with Chalcedon itself, where these topics were not under direct consideration. Chalcedon is, in fact, concerned with the simultaneity of Jesus’ Godhead and humanity, which is arguably more consistent with Barth’s Christology than it is with these two Reformation positions. Barth’s account of the status duplex requires no setting aside of divine attributes or reductio of the divine essence, nor is it incapable of attributing the state of exinanition to the eternal Logos. (4) The divine and human essences are mutually conditioning. The tradition was strict in maintaining the essential and functional superordination of Christ’s divine nature over his human. In traditional dyothelitism, for example, the human will remains in submission to the divine. And the Reformed in particular emphasized that the unio hypostatica was a unio personalis, a uniting of the human nature not merely with divine nature but with the living person of the Logos. The humanity of Christ is determined in a variety of ways by this union (including the communicatio gratiarum)—but it was unthinkable to suggest that in turn the human essence conditioned the divine. Barth’s concern is that, by

If one were to exegete the Christ hymn in a deliberately diachronic fashion, much hinges on the ambiguous διὸ of 2.9. An atemporal reading is plausible, with God the Father exalting Christ on the basis of an eternal humility that is demonstrated in the temporal execution of his obedience. Christ is exalted not simply subsequent to his death on the cross, but on account of (διὸ) his eternal humility that is actualized in time. In this sense, Barth has exegetical space here (however narrow) to speak of the eternal exaltation of the Son as never entering a hiatus. This is consistent with the typical Reformed exegesis of kenosis: the act of taking on the form of a servant (2.7) is not the Son’s setting aside the form of God, but rather His refusal to exploit that which He indeed retains (2.6). For examples of this interpretation among the Reformed scholastics, see Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 488–509. 103 See Chapter 5. 102

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ruling out any conditioning of the divine nature by the assumptio carnem, the tradition erred in maintaining an implicit distinction between the real being of Jesus Christ (the compound God-human) and that of the Logos (the simple person of the Trinity). To directly identify Jesus with the Word, the being of the Word had to be more fully implicated in His act of incarnation—that is, a real openness and vulnerability to fallen human existence. Paul Molnar interprets Barth as more favorable to the traditional position, and argues that Barth in fact rejected the notion that divine and human being are mutually conditioning.104 He worries that a determination of the divine by the human would result in a surrender of the divinity of the Word, making it contingent upon creaturely reality. Though there is some evidence in volume I of the Church Dogmatics to support this interpretation,105 Barth is explicit on the mutual determination (Bestimmung; also participation, Teilnahme und Teilhabe) of the two essences in CD IV/2: “By and in Him the divine acquires a determination to the human, and the human a determination from the divine.”106 The sort of conditioning that he advocates, however, ought to lay to rest Molnar’s concerns. That the divine essence of the Word is conditioned vis-à-vis its unity with the human is not a surrender of divinity but the free exercise of that divinity in determining Himself for the forma servi. God the Son remains the acting subject, and the mutual determination of His essences is carefully delineated as irreversibly from the divine to the human. This is still a determination of the divine essence—but the active subject of that determination is not the humanity itself but the Word who acts to assume and to unite. Christ’s divinity is therefore not conditioned by his humanity, strictly speaking, but by the event of their union—that is, by the Word’s free decision for incarnation. Their mutual determination is therefore asymmetrical, with the priority resting on the side of divine willing and self-giving. Nevertheless, it is important to Barth’s Christology that he specifies that the divine life of the Word is not sealed off from His experience of human existence but instead is receptive to it. Thus Barth can say that, in committing Himself to creatures, God puts at risk His own being.107 This is the “special actualization” of the divine essence that is non-necessary but still ontological. Because God’s self-

Paul D. Molnar, “Can Jesus’ Divinity Be Recognized as ‘Definitive, Authentic and Essential’ if It Is Grounded in Election? Just How Far Did the Later Barth Historicize Christology?” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 52.1 (2010), pp. 40–81. 105 CD I/2, p. 167. 106 See especially CD IV/2, pp. 69–88 (quotation on p. 70). 107 CD IV/1, p. 72. 104

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determination is free, however, Barth is able to retain the sense that in Christ the divine essence is superordinate. (5) Barth denies the classical doctrine of divine impassibility.108 With respect to this concern, it should be immediately noted that the matter of orthodoxy is not at issue. The impassibility of God is a position held by the vast majority of the ancient tradition, but never promulgated by an ecumenical council. Those who hold a passibilist position have a lot of work to do to justify its continuity with the values of Christian antiquity—but it is not for this reason heterodox. Impassibility seems to be implied by Chalcedon’s inconfuse and immutabiliter: if suffering and death are uniquely creaturely possibilities, they cannot be predicated of the divine essence (or the person of the Logos) simpliciter.109 Yet the tradition wished to be able to identify the one who suffered and died as the Son of God; thus the eventual emergence of Cyril’s economic distinction, the communicatio idiomatum and the strategy of reduplication, and eventually the decree of Constantinople II. Barth believed it was necessary to rethink this nearly universal position, based on the identification of Jesus and the Word and the belief that the Fathers had thought their way to the doctrine of impassibility not from the Christ event but from the philosophical presupposition that divine nature does not change or feel the assault of pain by definition. If Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, Barth believed, the fact that he suffers and dies should call into question all human belief about what God can and cannot do. Indeed, the resurrection—the fact that death is undone—is the answer to the “impossibility” of His death.110 (6) Barth’s Christology depends upon his actualist method and ontology. The fundamental distinction between being and act made by the tradition suggested an essentialist way of thinking about God and God’s relation to creation, whereby God could (and must) be described in se, and the necessary characteristics of the divine nature elucidated, prior and without reference to God’s works ad extra. Doctrines such as immutability and impassibility, and christological strategies such as reduplication and the communication of natural attributes, were the result. Barth’s account implicates the being of God in God’s activity in the world, though in a way quite different than Hegel—that is, by divine freedom and love, See Chapter 5 for a full discussion of this point. Christ’s impassibility qua God could be deduced from the Council’s intimation that the divine essence does not take on attributes of the human nature. An example of this extension of Chalcedon’s logic is in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 432–34. The Council, to its credit, did not enumerate the natural attributes, nor did it specify the nature of the communicatio idiomatum in any detail beyond the basic definition in the Tome of Leo. 110 The Knowledge of God and the Service of God, p. 86. 108 109

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an execution of His potentia ordinata that is non-necessary. This is consistent with the tradition in its affirmation—to the nth degree—of God’s sovereignty. Barth’s God still has an eternal, triune life in se but has committed Himself to creatures out of free grace, not only creating and redeeming men and women for fellowship with Himself but determining God’s very being for fellowship with creatures. Expressed in terms of the eternal covenant and its historical enactment, this actualist approach is deeply biblical and not at all at odds with the direction of Chalcedon. But because it rejects natural theology and classical metaphysics it sharply reorders the findings of mature Chalcedonianism, and thereby challenges the church to reconsider both the presuppositions and the logical consequences of the way in which it describes the incarnation.

Conclusions: The question of necessity Our description of Barth’s critical appropriation of the traditional doctrine of the incarnation might indicate other points of caution, as well. It was long suggested, for example, that Barth does not give sufficient place to the real humanity of Christ—a thesis that now has been discredited.111 But, to conclude, it is worth noting that Barth himself asked the same question we have put to him here: Is the new form that he has given to Christology “really a legitimate and possible and necessary form?”112 Or is an actualist Christology merely a new alternative among many? “The transposition of the static statements of older dogmatics into dynamic is undoubtedly an innovation which, although it does not really jettison or ignore any of the relatively more important elements in the older conception, may well arouse suspicion because of the radical alteration in form”—and Barth had earlier confessed anxiety over his departure from the theological tradition in his doctrine of election. “But if there is a real necessity, the legitimacy cannot be questioned in spite of every suspicion.”113 This question is thus decisive, for if the form of Barth’s Christology is made necessary by revelation then it is certainly legitimate and possible. He attempts to defend this necessity from three points of view. This is the task of Paul D. Jones, The Humanity of Christ. CD IV/2, pp. 106–12. 113 CD IV/2, p. 108. Barth’s statement on his earlier anxiety is in the preface to CD II/2 (p. x), where he states that his meditation on the Bible drove him “irresistibly to reconstruction.” Cf. CD III/2, p. ix. 111 112

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First, the transposition of Christology from static to dynamic ways of thinking—from essence to act, and from nature to event—appears to involve logical difficulties that did not affect the older conception (or perhaps, Barth says, that were carefully concealed): How can a being be interpreted as an act, or an act as a being? How can God, or man, or both in their unity in Jesus Christ, be understood as history? How can humiliation also and at the same time be exaltation? How can it be said of a history which took place once that it takes place today, and that, having taken place once and taking place today, it will take place again?114

Barth concludes that the older Christology engaged in a certain amount of evasion, using terms that suggest movement and activity (unio, communio, and communicatio) yet arriving at a static conception of Jesus’ personhood—“that calm at the centre of the older doctrine of the person of Christ.”115 Is this not itself a translation from the narrated history of the New Testament, of God’s covenant activity with men and women and the reconciling death and resurrection of God’s Son, and therefore a concealment of God’s being in act? Barth suggests that everything depends upon the theologian’s doing justice to the living Jesus Christ, which means not talking about the one who exists in this way, as God and human, without speaking also of “the act in which He became it, and therefore His becoming.”116 Second, to speak of Jesus Christ as Son of God and Son of Man, or as both God and human, is to speak of the humiliation of the Son of God and the exaltation of the Son of Man—what the older Christology intended in its doctrine of the status duplex. Where it failed to give proper account of this one Son, however, was where the event of humiliation and exaltation was treated in terms of two fixed states, one succeeding the other. This, Barth suggests, robbed the two states (and therefore the incarnation as the movement of God to humanity and humanity to God, and therefore the doctrine of Christ’s person) of “the material distinctiveness of its historicity, which is that of God humbling Himself in His grace and at the same time that of man exalted in the reception of God’s grace. For where, now, was the ‘at the same time’?”117 Where Jesus is taken to be one and not the other—here humbled but not exalted, there exalted but no longer humbled—the unity in which he exists as God and human, the living Jesus 117 114 115 116

CD IV/2, p. 108. CD IV/2, p. 109. Ibid. CD IV/2, p. 110.

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Christ, is suppressed. What the church wanted to affirm, therefore, it only ended up concealing. (“How fortunate,” Barth says, that this tearing apart of the unity of his descending and ascending “could never be carried out in practice!”118) Finally, Barth worries about the way in which the older Christology has related Jesus to time. It affirmed that “He was and is and will be” (Rev. 4.8) but locked He was (i.e. the history of his earthly existence) away from He is and will be (his eternal being). “There in the past it saw Him in the known and recognisable form of His history as it then took place,” that is the man from Nazareth. “But here, unfortunately, as the present and coming Jesus Christ, it saw Him as basically formless, or in a form which can only be briefly sketched, the details being left to pious phantasy.”119 How is theology to do justice to him, then? Barth suggests that we cannot move on from He was (then) to He is (now) and will be in a way that leaves the former behind, cut off from his present existence and activity as the Lord, as if time is a boundary that prevents him from continuing to be the one he was—the humiliated Son of God. Just as the incarnate Word does not leave behind his divinity, and therefore his exaltation, so the resurrected and glorified Christ does not leave behind his humanity, and therefore his humility. Is his historical activity “then” not once-for-all, an act which has no need of being augmented or superseded or completed by a Son who is finally free of His humiliation—free of a temporary binding to a human essence? As with its preference for the static over the dynamic, and for fixed states rather than a coherent, twofold state, in its Christology the church has not given “free rein to its imagination” in seeing Jesus Christ today as the one who remains God and human, exalted and humble, resurrected and crucified. It has therefore reduced the history of the living Christ, the activity of the God who has His being in act, and therefore the activity that does not cease to be active, to an abstract theory “which analyses the unity of His being instead of accepting it.”120 Once the six points in our definition of “Chalcedonian” have been achieved, it appears that the creed is remarkably freeing for creative reflection. Restatements are indeed possible under different conditions. It may be that Barth’s own Christology will come to be regarded as distinctively twentieth century, or as post-nineteenth century, and will not retain its relevance for a millennium. But that is precisely his point in giving the doctrine of the incarnation “another form”: Barth does not intend to overturn the classical tradition, but rather

Ibid. CD IV/2, p. 111. 120 CD IV/2, p. 112. 118 119

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sees it as the task of theology to hear the gospel in Scripture and the church’s confessions and to proclaim it anew in a relevant way. No generation is free from this imperative. But Barth’s Christology also has the benefit of hindsight and does not merely restate the tradition, but registers a number of critical corrections to the way in which the fifth-century form was worked out. Through his rigorous fidelity to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, his aversion to speculation, and his demonstration of the tradition’s shortcomings, Barth believed that he had confirmed the necessity of an actualist approach.

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Barth’s Christology and the Challenge of the Incarnation

At the outset of this study I suggested a number of different ways in which the early church attempted to account for the unity of God and humanity in a single subject, Jesus Christ. This one is both the eternal Son of God and the enfleshed Son of Man, begotten by the Father from eternity and also conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary in first-century Palestine. Prior to the fifth-century christological controversies (and particularly within the Alexandrian school) the relationship between the Word of God and His humanity generally had been understood to be instrumental; from the era of the Council of Chalcedon onward the incarnation came to be regarded increasingly in compositional terms. Here the being of the Word appeared to be complicated by the addition of a human nature. Because the church held as sacrosanct that God is simple and does not change, a distinction between the Word’s immanent and economic modes of existence held His life in eternity and His life in time as nonidentical. The Word of God, then, is believed to be vere homo, and the Mediator between God and humanity, with respect to the economy alone. And the Word’s humanity thus came decisively to be regarded as inessential to Him in this, His more original and basic existence. Neither approach to the incarnation, I have argued, sufficiently accounts for the identity of Jesus Christ as the very Word and Son of God, but rather both suggest implicitly that the person of the Word is active in and through, or is a constituent part of, the God-human (a notion some theologians have not feared to make explicit). As profoundly instructive as it is, the ancient doctrines leave our understanding of Christ’s person vulnerable at a number of points. This, Barth believed, is because they so basically rely upon a set of independently formulated beliefs about what divinity and humanity are. More than anything, such “metaphysics” as Barth understood it relies upon the creature’s own (if

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God-given) capacity to comprehend God—which Barth finally rejected as a starting point for theology. While others may be adduced, in Chapter  1, I identified four problematic aspects of a Christology so derived: (1) Jesus’ identity with the Logos, and not merely his relationship to the Logos; (2) divine immutability, that is how the incarnation may be basic to the identity of God the Son without introducing change into God’s being; (3) kenosis, that is the incongruity of the natural attributes that are predicated of the same subject, and how this one should be described as “humbled” or “emptied” (Phil. 2.7–8); and (4) divine impassibility and the possibility of a single subject with two natures undergoing an experience in, or with respect to, only one of them. This final problem is particularly acute where theologians have suggested that Christ suffered only in and through his humanity, or strictly “as man,” such that his divine life is excluded or is present on the cross in a strictly nonparticipatory way. Now that we have examined in some detail Karl Barth’s critique of the ancient tradition and his own positive Christology, we may analyze the ways in which this modern appropriation of the doctrine addresses such tensions. We will interrogate Barth’s Christology with respect to these four issues. How does he offer a better account of the incarnation—one that is more consistent and biblically attentive—than that of the received tradition? How does he better account for the real humanity of the Son of God—and, paradoxically, the real divinity of the Son of Man—at those points where classical Christology comes up short? The answers that I will suggest are not always those given explicitly by Barth himself; rather on my analysis these are the implications his Christology has for the identity problem and related issues as I have described them. The commanding themes of Barth’s Christology discussed in Chapter 3 will serve us well in addressing these questions. First, we will take up the matter of Jesus’ identity with respect to Barth’s rather atypical account of the status duplex. This includes his judgment on the extra Calvinisticum, wherein he registers an important correction to the Reformed doctrine (without rejecting it outright). Second, the relation of time and eternity will shed new light on the issue of divine immutability at the Son’s incarnation. Third, we will then make note of Barth’s objections to kenotic Christology before reconsidering this problem in light of the notion of obedience and humility in the divine life. The common actualization of Jesus’ divine and human essences will then help us to identify Barth’s reasons for rejecting the Son’s impassibility. The advantages of the themes of covenant and election, as providing Barth’s Christology with its structure and

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actualist impulse, are implicit in each of these, since God is in Christ by virtue of His free decision to be so.

Identity and the status duplex The most doctrinally successful solution to the problem of the Word’s humanity in the ancient church might also inevitably be its greatest liability. Cyril of Alexandria distinguished between two modes in which God exists: in the repose of the inner divine life, and in and for creation and its redemption. For the doctrine of the incarnation this implied that the unity of God the Word and human nature is to be restricted to the economy. Apart from this unity He also exists asarkos within the fellowship of the Trinity. This had numerous advantages: it advanced beyond the limits of fourth-century instrumentalism, and it preserved the immutability of God in the unio hypostatica. But at what cost? Because the Word is human strictly in the economic mode, the Christology of Cyril and the later Chalcedonian tradition implied very subtly that the man Jesus and the Word are not an identical subject. Rather, Jesus is the name given in time to the fleshly manifestation of the Logos, who remains the more basic “person” as He exists prior to and beyond the limits of the incarnation. Barth does not by any means reject the theological distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity. But he does turn it on its head, and this for christological reasons. Barth (quite unoriginally) understands the economy as the venue not only of God’s activity for creatures (in creating, sustaining, and redeeming them) but as the venue of God’s revelation to creatures. Because this revelation is of God’s own self, he insists, God as He is designated by “the economy” must not differ from God as He is designated by His life for Himself. The Cyriline distinction offers benefits to the system of doctrine—but it is merely heuristic. It does not describe two Trinities, nor a God who acts with respect to creation in a way that is fundamentally other than He is—particularly with respect to His personal presence and activity in the Christ event. Restricting the immanent-economic distinction to a formal register would seem to put at risk certain aspects of the relationship between God and creation as maintained by the tradition. If the incarnate Christ and the eternal Logos are personally identical, must the doctrine of divine immutability not be abandoned? The Logos, after all, becomes flesh. Furthermore, if the Word is human at a most basic level—whether in eternity or through temporal change—it would seem that God has been made contingent upon His own creation. If Barth is to avoid

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such undesirable consequences of making God-for-us identical with God-inHimself, he must secure the doctrines of divine immutability and freedom by another way. We will return to immutability below; our first concern is with Barth’s strategy for identifying Jesus as God the Son without the economic qualification. To this end we should look at his critique of the extra Calvinisticum, which amounts to a correction of the unintended ontological separation of the Word from Jesus Christ. We will then examine the way in which Barth’s reconfiguration of the doctrine of the status duplex relocates Jesus’ dualism (as both divine and human in essence) away from a classically metaphysical two-natures doctrine. In Barth’s thought, the eternality and simultaneity of humiliation and exaltation allow for the divine life of the Word to be identical with the divine-human history of Jesus Christ.

Extra Calvinisticum and the person of the Logos Barth observes that Protestant theologians in particular have treated the status duplex almost invariably as a sequence of two states (rather than a single, twofold state): as one who exists in glory the Son first limits himself and becomes human, living and dying in the state of humiliation; and then he is exalted again in his resurrection, ascension, and heavenly session. When he read Heinrich Heppe’s compendium of Reformed dogmatics, Barth found Heppe stating the common view that “the Logos became man in the state of humiliation and from that passed over into the state of exaltation, in such a way that in the former he predominantly executed his high-priestly work, in the latter predominantly his kingly office.”1 The states are temporally distinct, according to the standard reading of Phil. 2.5–8 and 9–11, and even further broken down into multiple stages that progress from Christ’s birth to his heavenly session.2 It is easy enough to see the Logos ensarkos perduring into Christ’s glorification: the older dogmatics speak of the glory and the gifts given to Christ’s humanity, and his ascension and Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 488. For further examples see pp. 488–509; and Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, pp. 376–407. Dogmaticians did, at times, make use of the term “twofold,” but as an either-or and not with the sense of simultaneity. Heppe distinguishes between exinanition (kenosis) and humiliation (tapeinosis) (Reformed Dogmatics, pp.  488–89). Because he identified humiliation and exaltation with God’s veiling and unveiling in the earlier portions of the Church Dogmatics, Barth, too, had identified the states as “two coherent steps, inseparably linked yet also clearly distinct” (CD I/2, pp. 167–68). 2 Such is the form of Ernst Sartorius’ exposition of the two states, in The Doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ, pp. 47–62. See also John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xiii.2; II.xvii.6; and Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, pp. 378–80. 1

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session according to the flesh as going to a place where the Logos ensarkos has never been.3 The difficulty is in conceiving of the Logos asarkos as implicated in the Son’s humiliation; at least for the Reformed, the extra Calvinisticum would seem to rule this out. Indeed, the very point of the state of humility seems to run counter to the idea that the Son humbled himself while at the same time remaining in glory. There is a tension, then, between the extra as it is traditionally construed and the Reformed view that the status exinanitionis temporally precedes and stands distinct from the status exaltationis. (This explains why the older, Reformed dogmatics treat the doctrine of the two states as rather unimportant, brought in for the sake of completeness but having only an incidental application to the material of Christology, according to Barth.4) The Logos asarkos never exists in the state of humility—or, as François Turretin says, with respect to the divinity of Christ his humiliation is merely a concealment. Deity itself “was not lessened in the humiliation, nor increased in the exaltation. But emptying is ascribed to it as to concealment and restraining of glory and majesty under the form of a servant.”5 This is precisely why Lutherans took the extra Calvinisticum as implying an incomplete incarnation or a two-subject Christology—what Isaak Dorner called a “double Logos theory.” If He remains etiam extra carnem, does the Word Himself fully become human? While the extra Calvinisticum freed the Reformed from problems inherent in the Word’s kenotic abasement, in doing so it truncated their ability to engage fully with Christ’s state of humiliation and the metaphysical challenges presented by such passages as Phil. 2.5–11. But just as kenosis was not a necessary problem for Reformed Christology, so was the status duplex more compatible with the Lutheran position. Because they believed the Word does not exist asarkos during his time on earth, Luther and his followers could naturally speak of His entering into a temporary state of humility and then taking His resurrected humanity with Him back into glory. As two, successive states the status duplex fit the system perfectly. (It also accorded with the temporal sequence of the ordo salutis.6) For the Reformed, however, it was a potential problem: by arguing that the Word is

Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 504–6; cf. Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, pp. 407–10; and Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 2, pp. 332–34. 4 CD IV/1, p. 133. 5 Turretin, Institutes, p. 334. Note the need to employ an improper “ascription” to the Word’s emptying, so that kenosis may be interpreted as an addition (the veil of concealment) rather than a reduction. See also Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 488–96, 504. 6 CD IV/2, p. 502. 3

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etiam extra carnem, they risked the implication that the Logos asarkos existed in both states, as well. Following a cue from Cyril of Alexandria, their solution was not far off. Reformed orthodoxy came conceptually to map the Word’s twofold life as asarkos and ensarkos not onto His two states but onto the “immanent” and “economic” distinction in the doctrine of the Trinity. As Heppe put it, the subject of Christ’s humiliation “is not the Logos in and for himself, and still less the human nature adopted by him, but the Logos become man.”7 As He exists in the immanent Trinity the Logos remains in glory, and only the Logos-become-human enters into the state of humility. There remains but one Logos. But if the Logos asarkos refers to the immanent Word, which is unaltered when He becomes human, then the Logos ensarkos would refer strictly to His visible existence in the economy. In short: the status duplex in its totality could be confined as itself a phenomenon of the economy, so that the immanent life of the Word is unaffected by His existence in humility. This has the further benefit of complementing the classical tradition’s exclusion of the humanity of Christ from the personal essence of God. Of course, it did not take long for opponents to identify shortcomings in this solution. Dorner even associated the position with Gottfried Thomasius, suggesting that by limiting his claims about the incarnation to the economy, distinguishing “between the external Logos of the economic Trinity and the immanent Logos, [Thomasius] gains nothing but might well end up losing a great deal.”8 The distinction itself threatens the coherence of what theology says about God’s reconciling presence: for if the incarnated Logos is not identical with the immanent Logos, “the incarnation would be neither an incarnation of God nor an absolute revelation. A double Logos, the immanent alongside of the economic, is untenable. It would lead to an inadmissible duality in God, and introduce a separation in the concept of incarnation that would subvert its very meaning.”9 Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, p.  488; cf. 494, 500, 502. In contemporary Reformed dialogue, George Hunsinger also suggests that in the incarnation the Logos asarkos corresponds to the Word’s immanent life as one of the Trinity, and the Logos ensarkos to his human existence in the economy—but with the additional qualification of the relationship between time and eternity. “As intimated by the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum, the Logos subsists in two modes (asarkos in eternity/ensarkos in history) simultaneously (through a pattern of unity-in-distinction). It is one and the same unabridged Logos in two simultaneous modes of existence—totus/totus, primary and secondary objectivity. The logos asarkos becomes the logos ensarkos without ceasing to be the eternal logos asarkos in God’s relationship in and for himself to all eternity.” Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth,” in Modern Theology 24.2 (2008), p. 194 (thesis 25); cf. 191 (theses 15–16). Interpreted in this way, the extra Calvinisticum services the classical doctrine of God. 8 Isaak August Dorner, Divine Immutability, p. 71; cf. Chemnitz, The Two Natures, pp. 403–5. 9 Divine Immutability, p. 71. 7

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Barth recognized this tension in the history of Reformed dogmatics, between the desire to affirm both the simultaneity of the Logos asarkos and ensarkos and that the Word’s two states of humiliation and glory are sequentially ordered and necessarily without overlap. Between Jesus’ birth and resurrection, then, the Word would have existed in the status exinanitionis both within and without the flesh, according to the extra Calvinisticum. Yet the humiliation of the Logos asarkos is, on the view of the Reformed, precisely what must not be affirmed. In turning to the immanent and the economic as two distinct ways of existing, Barth believed, the Reformed put at risk the truth of the incarnation as a revelation of God’s self. As we saw in Chapter 3, Barth’s elegant solution was to suggest that the two states are, in fact, simultaneous—“a single event and being.”10 Just as the extra Calvinisticum advocates with respect to the Logos asarkos and ensarkos, one status of the Word does not exist at any moment without the other. According to the doctrine of the election of grace as the election of Jesus Christ, of God’s movement toward humanity, these two forms are eternal; any division of the two states “into two distinct historical periods will assuredly result in abstracting the true man as separate from the true God.”11 The one life of the Logos as asarkos and ensarkos is coordinated to this twofold state, rather than divided up and coordinated to the concepts of immanence and economy. If there is one Word who exists as such, then the humiliation of the divine Son belongs just as much to the Logos asarkos as it does to the Logos ensarkos—if in a different way. Further, exinanition is not a diminution of His deity but “the humiliation of God to supreme glory, as the activation and demonstration of His divine being.” And the exaltation of the man Jesus is not the deification of his humanity, but “the exaltation of man as the work of God’s grace which consists in the restoration of his true humanity.”12 In this way Barth addresses the issues of concern to the Reformed—namely, that humanity is not divinized in Jesus, nor is divinity evacuated from the person of the Son. Moreover, the two states are not merely coordinated but interdependent: one does not take place without the other because the one is actualized in and through its union with the other. The exalted Son is who He is in His humanity—that is, in His determination for humility and commiseration with fallen creatures. And the humanity of Jesus is what it is in its exaltation to union with the divine. Everything depends upon the interconnection, the “hypostatic union” of humility and exaltation in Jesus. CD IV/2, p. 65. Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, p. 135. CD IV/1, p. 134.

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The Word as asarkos and as ensarkos—in His glory and His humility—mutually participate in the history of the one Christ. This, for Barth, is simply another way of speaking of the hypostatic union—but speaking of it as a dynamic event between God and humanity and not as a static condition of coordinate natures.13 The states of humiliation and exaltation “operate together and mutually interpret one another,”14 and this simultaneity allows us to affirm both that the Son is never limited to human form, never abandons the throne or ceases to sustain the universe, and also that He is one, undivided subject who cannot be sought other than in Jesus Christ. It has the advantage of affirming what the Reformed took of value from the extra carnem without succumbing to its failings. It also binds the doctrine of the two natures to soteriology, not allowing it to float autonomously from the narrative of the New Testament: for the matter of Christ’s person is “not a phenomenon, or a complex of phenomena, but a history,”15 the history of his reconciling work on the cross. It is evident, then, that Barth’s reconfiguration of the status duplex placed the difficult matter of the extra Calvinisticum into a new light. It enabled him finally to articulate just where the Reformed deployment of this doctrine into the thorny field of Christology was coming up short, and how the life of the Logos asarkos may yet be affirmed (against Lutheran kenosis) in such a way as to reach the goal for which Calvin had set out, yet without succumbing to the dangers of a double Logos or an evacuation of the doctrine of the incarnation of any meaningful content. But where the humiliation of the Son of God and the exaltation of the Son of Man are understood to be a single event, His life beyond the incarnation no longer speaks the definitive word about His eternal identity. By His election the Son is eternally in the forma servi. This simultaneity of the states, of the Logos asarkos and ensarkos, further supported Barth’s insistence upon the identity of Jesus Christ and the eternal Word as one and the same subject. The humiliation and exaltation of Jesus do not describe his years on earth exclusively; rather both states are temporal and eternal in character. The status exaltationis is eternal and uninterrupted, so that the Word remains asarkos (or etiam extra carnem) during Jesus’ life on earth; and likewise the status exinanitionis is eternal and uninterrupted, so that the Word is always humble, obedient to the Father, and ready to be incarnate in CD IV/2, p.  110. “In comparison with older dogmatics,” Barth averred, “our presentation has undoubtedly the advantage that it does far greater justice to the particular doctrine of the two states,” as well as to its scriptural importance. See CD IV/1, pp. 132–33 (quotation on p. 132). 14 CD IV/2, p. 106. 15 See CD IV/2, pp. 106–8 (quotation on p. 106). 13

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time. The Logos asarkos is eternally the Logos incarnandus: “The life of Jesus begins, and therefore it was once future. But the man Jesus already was even before He was. Hence the time before His time, the time when it was still future, because it hastened forward to His future, was also His time, the time of His being.”16 Thus the Word does not enter into the state of humility in order to become Jesus; He has always existed exinanitio. It is for this reason that Jesus Christ himself—as Jesus Christ, the God-human—may be confessed as eternally preexistent. Indeed, Barth came to believe that only Jesus—and not an abstract Logos—may be confessed as the eternal Son and Word of God.

Humility and humanity in God The classical tradition had been unable to affirm such a strict equivalence between Jesus Christ and the Word precisely because of this problem of temporal continuity. Either the Word is Jesus Christ only after He has assumed flesh for the purposes of redemption; or, Christ is the God-human composed of divine and human natures. In either case there was no conceptual ground for speaking of the eternal Word of God, the Logos asarkos, properly as “Jesus Christ”—because in the eternal moment neither the humanity of the Word nor His humility existed in reality. Here, then, is where Barth’s actualist ontology is decisive: God the Son has His eternal being in the determination for incarnation, for revelation and reconciliation. By virtue of God’s superordination to time, and the eternal decision of God for covenant relationship, the subjective distinction between the Logos asarkos and ensarkos is no longer absolute.17 And the distinction between the subject of the divine Word and the man Jesus is no longer meaningful. The Word of God has His being in the eternal decision to be the man from Nazareth, and in the historical actualization of that decision, and (logically speaking) never one without the other. Basic to the identity problem is how to describe the Jesus of the gospels according to his divinity and his humanity, holding together two kinds of being that are utterly different. Nestorianism had located Christ’s ontological dualism in two intimately related subjects, and Chalcedonianism in the one subject’s two essential natures. To this the tradition added the incongruous CD III/2, p. 464. This does not mean that Barth is vulnerable to the charge of Eutychianism, or a confusion of the two natures in Christ. In the one subject the divine and human essences remain distinct, Barth explains, because their mutual determination is an event of confrontation and not of harmonization. See CD IV/2, pp. 86–88; cf. 116.

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modes of divine immanence and economy. But Barth, while not rejecting the Chalcedonian logic, extends the duality of Jesus Christ to his two states. Christ is one subject who exists as divine and human, but also as exalted and humble. This is definitive for his Christology. Jesus’ two essences subsist in the lived reality of his self-humiliation and glorification—humanity cohering with divinity in his eternal glory, and divinity finding a special determination in his eternal humility. As we will see, this has further implications for Jesus’ life with the Father and the Holy Spirit, his undiminished Godhead, and his experience on the cross. The status duplex is therefore the key to Barth’s Christology, which includes his doctrines of revelation and reconciliation and is ultimately the beating heart of his dogmatics. It is the theological explanation of the covenant, of “God with us” and “we with God.” Insofar as this doctrine helps us to navigate the difficult problem of Jesus’ identity with the Word, three points must be highlighted. First, according to Barth both of the two states, humiliation and exaltation, are essential to the being of God the Son—not only in the economy but in His inner life as one of the Trinity. Without ceasing to be God, the Son has chosen humanity as His way of existence. What He elects for Himself is His exinanition, the condescension to creatureliness of the very one in and through whom all things are made. But this one is also the elected human, who is in turn drawn into renewed fellowship with God and who brings all of humanity to new life, mediating the divine covenant and uniting men and women with his body by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 6.3–11). This is his exaltation, the lifting up of the one for whom all things are made, the one who “leads a host of captives and gives gifts to men and women” (cf. Eph. 4.8). What seems to us a contradiction— that a created essence is made essential to the Creator—is maintained by the freedom of God, who “acts as Lord over this contradiction.”18 Because God has determined Himself for creatures, for incarnation and redemption, this event is constitutive of the Son’s identity. Second, Barth suggests that Jesus’ two states are themselves “hypostatically united”—in a pattern of unity and distinction—so that his person does not exist in one state without the other. This is due to the simultaneity of these events: Christ did not set aside his glory when he humbled himself (though he did not exploit that glory, Phil. 2.6), nor did he forsake his humanity in his resurrection, ascension, and glorified session. His humiliation and exaltation remain differentiated. One is not the other. But they are also mutually coordinated, CD IV/1, p. 185.

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the one serving the other, so that Christ is glorified by his own gracious act of humiliation. Finally, the humiliation and exaltation of the Son are eternal in their existence and in their unity. His humility is the Son’s orientation toward the Father. He assumes the flesh of the forma servi, offers Himself as a sacrifice for sin, stands under its just judgment and condemnation, and is raised from the dead. All this is fitting to who He is as the eternally humble and obedient One. And just as He has always possessed humility, so when He enters into creation and is born of a woman the Son does not forsake the glory of the Father, His perfect representation of the Father, and His continual sustenance of all things by His powerful word (Heb. 1.3). The Word does not enter into the state of humility only in an historical moment, becoming something He was not—nor does the man Jesus Christ enter into the state of exaltation only at the end of his earthly life, also becoming something he was not. Rather these two movements— the humiliation of the true God and the exaltation of the true human—are coordinated as one event. In the history of the covenant His glory will shine out in His condescension and suffering, and His humility will be the means by which creatures are drawn up into fellowship with God. What is the benefit of all this? Earlier we observed how the identification of the Word’s humanity strictly with His economic composition as the God-human led classical Christology to basically different descriptions of the ontology of Jesus and of the Logos. To the Protestant scholastics the sharp distinctions between the states of humility and exaltation, such that one logically excluded the other, seemed to require the same conclusions. By relocating Christ’s duality to the two states (though not giving up on the two essences in an actualized sense), Barth undercut this implicit differentiation. Jesus could now be immediately identified with God the Son, without metaphysical remainder. If Jesus is eternally divine and human, if his divinity is not compromised by but rather exercised in the very expression of humility (“the humiliation of God to supreme glory”), then there is no need for theology to qualify his identity with God the Son, or to reduce him to an economic manifestation of the Son, or to identify his real personhood with a Logos asarkos. Barth does retain an instrumentalist impulse with respect to humanity as the medium of God’s revelation, however, and here we should register one qualification of a very different kind. With respect to his personal identity Jesus is God the Son; thus Waldrop is right to conclude that Barth directly equates Jesus Christ with God. This identity is personal: Waldrop is concerned to establish that, for Barth, God does not act in the incarnation by uniting Himself with the

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man Jesus as a separate and distinct subject.19 With respect to the human nature itself, however, this is a medium that bears the image of God—and so it is “only indirectly and not directly identical with God:”20 it is not the thing itself (i.e. Jesus’ humanity is not divinized) but an authentic representation, and so it involves both a real disparity and a correspondence and similarity. The consequence of this is that the personal presence of God in Christ was not perspicuous to those who knew him in Judea, nor to those historians who inquire into his life. Divinity cannot be read off the face of Jesus, because the medium of humanity is concealing (even as it reveals). But revelation is also an unveiling, and in this respect God is knowable in and through the creaturely medium by faith, which is to say that “the presence of God in the medium of revelation—however hidden it may be outwardly, to normal perception—is the presence of God, complete, whole and entire.”21 In this regard Barth goes on in CD III/2 to specify that the humanity of Jesus in fact “does not belong to the inner sphere of the essence, but to the outer sphere of the work of God. It does not present God in Himself and in His relation to Himself, but in His relation to the reality distinct from Himself ”—and therefore we cannot maintain identity between God and the human nature of Jesus.22 There is, perhaps, some discontinuity here with the christological line we have traced through volume II and especially volume IV of the Dogmatics—that in the incarnation God has taken humanity into God’s own life. But here Barth is focused predominantly upon “the humanity of Jesus”—that is, his nature For example: CD I/2, p. 162. See Charles T. Waldrop, Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Alexandrian Character, especially pp. 119–20. As Waldrop demonstrates (pp. 129–64), this identity of subject (and not the communicatio idiomatum, per se) is Barth’s justification for mixing language of divine and human agency with respect to the acts of Jesus (as Paul does in 1 Cor. 2.8, for example). By contrast, Bruce McCormack worries that a direct equation of Jesus Christ with the Word cannot account for unity in the triune life of God, since “a direct identification of the second person of the Trinity with a human being must inevitably give rise to a conception of the members of the Trinity as three distinct ‘subjects’ (each equipped with its own mind, will and energy of operation),” since the Word would then be a suffering subject who is distinct from the Father. See McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8.3 (2006), p. 247. It is not evident, however, why this must be at all inevitable: to say that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity is simply to say that God is human (uniquely) in His second mode of being. We may retain the commitment to single subjectivity in God, particularly if the works of the three persons ad extra are indivisible. By virtue of the personal appropriations the direct identification of Jesus and the Word does not threaten divine unity any more than does the ascription of, say, humility strictly to the Son. 20 CD III/2, p. 219 (emphasis mine). Barth’s instrumentalist language with respect to the mediating humanity of Jesus is most evident in CD II/1, §25.1 (especially pp. 16–23). 21 See McCormack, “Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth,” in Orthodox and Modern, especially pp. 109–12 (quotation on p. 110); “Dankeswort,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 21.2 (2000), pp. 214–15; and “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology: Just How ‘Chalcedonian’ Is It?” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 214f. 22 CD III/2, p. 219. 19

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considered in abstracto or anhypostatically. God is not identical with this medium of His self-presentation. Rather, it is in the person of Jesus Christ (who exists ever in divine-human unity) that “we must recognize at once the identity of God with Himself.”23 This is unique to Jesus: on the level of person it cannot be said of any other creature that we encounter God directly there. But here “in this man, the vision and concept of the Creator are both direct and immediate.”24 Furthermore, we should attend carefully to the epistemological conclusions Barth draws here. Our fellow-humanity with Jesus is not to be made the basis of a baptized anthropology which takes the Son’s humanity as grounds for an analogia entis, and can only lead to a new natural theology.25 This would be the consequence of identifying God directly with Jesus’ human nature—its epistemological, if not also ontological, divinization. (Thomasius had implied as much when he suggested that the creation of men and women in the image of God made humanity suited to the possibility of an incarnation—natura humana capax divinae.) Such a move uproots the superordination of the divine essence in the unio personalis and reduces the revelation of God in the Christ event to a mere elevation of human nature. It detaches the status exaltationis from the status exinanitionis, retreating from the humility of the divine Son of God to single-minded attention to the new possibility given to creatures. It is for this reason that Barth calls the humanity of Jesus a work of God ad extra, so that Jesus’ being for humankind is in correspondence with his being for God but not identical with it. If we are to go on and speak of the Son’s humanity as “eternal” and “drawn into the very being of God,” then, we must specify this as a divine work of sheer gratuity, as reflecting and authenticating the life of the Trinity, as having no basis in created humanity itself, and therefore as providing no independent (i.e. creaturely) basis for any knowledge of God. With such a carefully defined actualist ontology it is proper to speak of the eternal humanity of the Son, since the Son is eternally humble and eternally exalted, having chosen unity with human essence as the form of His own existence as God. To speak of the Son’s eternal humanity is not to suggest that some thing—either flesh or a pseudo-substantialist nature—is present in and with the being of God in eternity. Rather it means that God is present to humanity even in God’s eternity: “His presence and revelation in man, this man, CD III/2, p. 68. Ibid. (emphasis mine). See especially CD III/2, p.  220; cf. 55, 222. Throughout §§44–45 Barth is concerned with giving anthropology its proper foundation in Christology, yet without confusing the two.

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is not just a fact but an act.”26 As the Son, Jesus Christ, God is not in “possession” of His humanity in eternity so much as He is living in the reality of His divinehuman existence. The Son exists ever in the unity of His two essences—as He exists in the unity of the two states—in a mode of prolepsis or “readiness.” From eternity, then, the mission of the Son is to be the sent one, the Mediator of the covenant, and thus also the divine-human one. He is so first in anticipation, and then in time as the historical actualization of divine intent, which is to say that in history Jesus’ mission and His unity of essences require only an actualization, not an originating constitution. To say that the incarnation of the Son is the actualization of His eternal humanity is not, however, to suggest that this was merely a potential that was not real for the life of God prior to or apart from history. Here Barth agrees with the Thomist tradition that, since God is perfect, He does not stand in need of any movement that completes or fulfills His being. Barth’s actualism is therefore not the execution of any mere potency, but a way of speaking about divine ontology itself vis-à-vis the relation of eternity to time. This is necessary in order to overcome the identity problem: if in becoming human God has actualized a mere potential, then the doctrine of God as actus purus, as well as God’s simplicity and perfection, require that this actualization be a work in which God’s inner being is not implicated. Such was the conclusion of the classical tradition: since God Himself contains no unrealized potency, a temporal becoming such as the incarnation must be inessential to the person of the Son. But if the God-human Jesus Christ is immediately identical with God the Son then, Barth indicates, the incarnation is in a sense a divine work ad intra et extra: God has actualized in history the Son’s own eternal reality. He has done this as a work outside of the inner life of the Trinity that is yet in the closest correspondence to it. The mission of the Son corresponds intimately with His divine procession, His birth with His eternal generation—and, importantly, vice versa. To conclude: Barth’s solution to the identity problem runs throughout his doctrine of reconciliation, and is materially opposite to what we have seen in the instrumentalism of the fourth century. Athanasius achieved a direct identification by making the Word supereminent: the Jesus of the gospels is in reality none other than the Logos, who makes use of the flesh outwith His own being and ascribes to Himself that which He experiences through it. Jesus of Nazareth is, in a real sense, a role that the Word plays on the stage of creation. This attitude toward the human essence was maintained in the Chalcedonian CD III/2, p. 69.

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tradition and by the Reformers, who likewise identified the hypostasis of the Logos as the real “I” hidden in the life of Jesus. Barth reverses this. According to him, the personhood of the Son is located in the one who is both God and human, so that we may properly say that the second person of the Trinity has the name “Jesus Christ.” “Logos” is, in turn, a theological designation that is justified by Scripture as a way of speaking about the preexistence of Jesus and his unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Immutability and the incarnation Based on the high place given to the humanity of the Son, it would seem as though Barth is prepared to reject the ancient doctrine of divine immutability. After all, the Son’s humanity is essential to Him, and yet is a created reality. But instead Barth upholds the doctrine—restated in continuity with his revised ontology. Within his theology are three arguments (or, more precisely, three stages of one argument) for the unchanging character of God’s being. Two are implicit in his Christology and doctrine of God; the third takes us into Barth’s sustained treatment of this topic under the heading of the perfections of the divine freedom. First: Barth joins the ancient and medieval traditions in describing the eternity of God’s life neither as the absence of time nor as the infinite extension of time, but as that which circumscribes time (without being exhausted by it). God exists outside of the temporal sequence of moments—but not, for Barth, as one who is merely timeless. Rather “God’s time” is His pure duration, His simultaneous presence to all moments—past, present, and future. If the human life of the Son is His real presence in and with creation (and therefore in and with creaturely time) then that, too, is a moment to which God is eternally present. The Son assumes the limitations of a temporal life; but before and after this interlude He is, like the Father and the Holy Spirit, always present to that moment. But one further step is required before the nature of God’s eternity can be applied to God’s own being. That God is present to all temporal moments is not to say that He is ontologically conditioned by them. God remains essentially independent from His creation (insofar as He wills to be so). What is determinative is that the Son is human essentially and not instrumentally, and that in His eternal life He has always existed in a state of readiness for or receptivity to this temporal reality. Governed strictly by the dialectic of time and eternity, of divine intention and actualization (we might also say “creativity” and

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“creation”), the humanity of Jesus is eternal. In what way? To explain, we are led into the second stage of the argument. To relativize notions of becoming according to the nature of divine eternity is not inconsistent with the medieval doctors. Where Barth is most original is in his rejection of a metaphysic of being that precedes act, and in its place his desire to form theological judgments according to the gospel as an event. As we saw in Chapter 3, this actualist approach includes a rejection of any distinction between God’s being and act, or His essence and existence, so that God is His activity— He is “the living God.” A description of this activity inevitably implicates God’s covenant relation to creatures, so that “God is” means “God loves”: God has caused His being to correspond to the covenant. Insofar as it relates to time and change, this ontology is patterned by the dialectic of an eternal promise (to become incarnate in Christ) and its historical fulfillment (the birth of God’s Son in Bethlehem). A consequence of this ontology is that the issue of divine immutability is placed into a very different light. On the one hand, the being of God is neither prior to nor distinct from God’s act (logically or ontologically); and on the other, God’s protological decision in election is the more determinative of the dialectical poles. Historicization is the accomplishing of a reality that, for God, is already the case. Bruce McCormack is therefore right to argue that the Son is eternally human in the mode of anticipation (Logos incarnandus), and in time in the mode of historical actualization (Logos incarnatus).27 The solution to the dilemma of immutability is therefore evident: the Son does not change in the incarnation because His assumption of human essence is an eternal act. He has, in a sense, always been human. One obvious objection must be immediately met. The suggestion that Jesus Christ is eternally human appears to collapse time into eternity and negate the historicity of the incarnation, robbing the virgin birth in the stable at Bethlehem of its import as the moment of becoming. Jesus effectively brings his humanity with him from heaven,28 according to this objection, and the Annunciation and Christmas stories are a sort of narrative falsehood—not the Word’s birth as a McCormack, “Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Chr. van Driel,” in Orthodox and Modern, pp. 261–77. 28 That Jesus’ was a “heavenly flesh” was propounded in the sixteenth century by Menno Simmons and opposed by Peter Martyr Vermigli. For a brief account see John Patrick Donnelly, “Christological Currents in Vermigli’s Thought,” Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations, pp. 180–86. The Belgic Confession (1567, Article XVIII) includes an explicit refutation of this “heresy of the Anabaptists.” A seventeenth-century refutation is in Turretin, Institutes, pp. 306–10. More recently, Stephen H. Webb has argued favorably for a reassessment of a doctrine of Christ’s “heavenly flesh.” See Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter. 27

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human but only His transmigration from the heavenly realm to Judea. The way in which Barth has related the incarnation to eternity, however, should make it clear that it is not the case that Jesus brings his humanity with him. As the Son of God he is eternally human only in the sense that: (1) he is present to all temporal moments at once; and (2) he is the Logos incarnandus, the Word who is to become flesh in time, and therefore human strictly in his readiness for God’s eternal covenant designs to be fulfilled among creatures. He no more brings his humanity with him than God hands down to Israel its entirely completed and fulfilled covenant and asks nothing further of them. The point of the actualist account is not that Christ’s humanity is uncreated (it is not) but that the divine person who is Jesus Christ is uncreated—that is, the anti-Arian doctrine of Christ’s preexistence. He would bring his humanity with him from heaven only if it were actualized in eternity, and not in time at all. But creation is the proper sphere of its actualization, the sphere of God’s redemptive work in fulfillment of the covenant, and the place where the Son of God is born (though not begotten). Such is the argument for divine immutability that is suggested by Barth’s actualism—and, if we were to accept his revised ontology, this much might leave us satisfied. It is a clever solution to an ancient theological problem. But if we were to stop here we would not be doing full justice to Barth. Much of this argument, as I have said, is simply implied by Barth’s work. What he says more explicitly, however, indicates that we have not yet gone far enough. The third stage in the argument is to step back from the logic of eternity and self-determination, of the relation of essence to act, and inquire into just what it is that the doctrine of immutability is seeking to secure. What is to be confessed about the character of God? This was Isaak Dorner’s procedure, as well: after defending the necessity of the classical doctrine against those he perceived to be its opponents, Dorner proceeded to redefine immutability according to ethical requirements.29 To state that God is unchanging is to speak not to His metaphysical being but to His moral character. An ethical concept of God as love “leaves room for vitality and movement in God,” since what must remain inviolate is God’s “ethical selfidentity.”30 Barth’s description of the character of God in CD II/1 proceeds on similar lines. Given his removal of the distinction between being and act, it is clear that Barth must specify the immutability of the divine essence in terms of God’s Dorner, Divine Immutability. Barth acknowledges his indebtedness to Dorner in CD II/1, p. 493. Divine Immutability, p. 176 (emphasis mine).

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activity. Without deconstructing or dismissing immutability as the theologians of the tradition have defended it, Barth concerns himself with the faithfulness and constancy of God’s character.31 These, and not the inability to lose or to gain any metaphysical attributes, are what is true of a God who is most basically not a static being but the one who loves in freedom. If this is truly an ontological statement, then God’s freedom even to self-determine cannot be impinged. Whereas the tradition tended toward descriptions of God’s immutability and impassibility as His freedom from external conditioning, Barth calls this freedom God’s constancy (Beständigkeit), His fidelity to Himself: because He is constant, there can be for God no “deviation, diminution or addition, nor any degeneration or rejuvenation, any alteration or non-identity or discontinuity.”32 For God to remain faithful to Himself means also fidelity to those creatures to whom God has committed His being in covenant relation. If we shake off the spell, and try to think of the Godhead of God in biblical rather than pagan terms, we shall have to reckon, not with a mutability of God, but with the kind of immutability which does not prevent Him from humbling Himself and therefore doing what He willed to do and actually did do in Jesus Christ, i.e., electing and determining in Jesus Christ to exist in divine and human essence in the one Son of God and Son of Man, and therefore to address His divine essence to His human, to direct it to it. Even in the constancy (or, as we may calmly say, the immutability) of His divine essence He does this and can do it (new and surprising and alien though it may be to human eyes blinded only by their own pride) not only without violation but in supreme exercise and affirmation of His divine essence.33

Therefore God’s immutability, Barth says, “is not a holy immobility and rigidity, a divine death, but the constancy of His faithfulness to Himself continually reaffirming itself in freedom.”34 It is a doctrine that is subservient to the freedom of God to be the God He is. As with the rest of Barth’s theology, in the statement “God is immutable” it is the subject that determines the nature of the predicate, and not vice versa.35 Insofar as it has been based on a metaphysical notion of the being or essence of God, our definition of what is entailed by the CD II/1, §31.2 (pp. 490–607). See also Bruce L. McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy? Implications of Karl Barth’s Later Christology for Debates Over Impassibility,” in James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (eds), Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, pp. 150–86. 32 CD II/1, p. 491. 33 CD IV/2, p. 85. 34 CD IV/1, p. 561. 35 CD II/1, p. 493. 31

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doctrine of immutability ought therefore to conform to who God is in this act. God the Son is eternally present to His temporal life; and He is eternally human in the mode of anticipation. But in the sense that matters most, He is unchanging in His faithfulness to be the God He has elected to be, to take on flesh in order to reconcile fallen creation to God. In this history—from protological decision to historical actualization to eschatological consummation—God is constant in His free loving, and thus in His essence.

Kenotic humility and obedience As with Dorner’s ethical immutability, the faithful constancy of God admits some degree of what traditional metaphysics would deem to be mutation—but which is not essentially so according to an actualist ontology such as Barth’s, since the “change” in question is, in fact, eternally willed by and present to the God who is sovereign over being. In committing Himself to creatures God, after all, hazards His own being as God.36 One such example of a so-called change that is in truth real for God in eternity is Christ’s kenosis, which in Barth’s Christology finds expression in the Son’s eternal humility and obedience to the Father. God’s commitment of Himself in the incarnation constitutes not only a concealment but a real surrender of the Son’s forma Dei: What was involved, then, when God elected to become the Son of Man in Jesus Christ? In giving Himself to this act He ordained the surrender of something, i.e., of His own impassibility in face of the whole world which because it is not willed by Him can only be the world of evil. In Himself God cannot be affected either by the possibility or by the reality of that will which opposes Him. He cannot be affected by any potentiality of evil. In Him is light and no darkness at all. But when God of His own will raised up man to be a covenant-member with Himself, when from all eternity He elected to be one with man in Jesus Christ, He did it with a being which was not merely affected by evil but actually mastered by it.37

To say that God is without change even in the incarnation is to affirm, as Barth does, that in God’s self-giving God does not “give Himself away.” He remains superior both to the created flesh the Son assumes, and to the fallen state in

CD II/2, pp. 162–63; CD IV/1, p. 72. CD II/2, p. 163.

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which it exists. Even as it overtakes Him God is master of it, for it is the will of God that it overtake Him—and it may do so only because God so wills. But God does truly give Himself. God does not merely act within the sphere of creatures or through a created nature, but in the Son God causes His own divine life to correspond to this creaturely existence. The immutability of the God who acts with purpose and the kenosis of the God who permits fallen humanity to overtake Him are therefore held together in a dialectical unity. Barth is able to affirm both sides, because God is the Lord of both creaturely and divine being. The one who is constant in Himself is also faithful to the other. When Barth rejects kenotic Christology he has in mind the form given by nineteenth-century kenoticists Gottfried Thomasius and, especially, W. F. Gess. He joined Dorner and the majority opinion in concluding that this teaching “meant an open breach with the whole tradition of the Church.”38 In Barth’s judgment its worst feature was not Thomasius’ notion of the Son’s temporary abandonment of certain divine attributes, nor even Gess’s view that the Son ceased to be conscious of His divinity and, as the man Jesus, gradually came to a knowledge of Himself as God. The worst feature of modern kenoticism was that in these teachings it broke the dialectic: it allowed for divine mutability, calling into question the gospel testimony that “God was in Christ.” Though their intentions were good, the kenoticists deviated from both Lutheranism and Calvinism and earned the scorn even of modern liberals—“the taunt that in trying to improve and complete orthodox Christology they had simply reduced it to absurdity.”39 Christology stands in need of constructive restatement, Barth suggests, but it cannot accommodate a metaphysical self-reduction or de-divinization of God. God is unchanged in the incarnation because Jesus Christ is fully God, or else “everything that we may say about the reconciliation of the world made by God in this humiliated One is left hanging in the air.”40 Kenotic descriptions of Christ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, demonstrate the real breadth of this motif as extending far beyond the strategies of Thomasius and Gess. Theology must give some positive account of the “emptying” of which Paul speaks in Phil. 2.7—the origin of kenotic Christology. If it is not a metaphysical divestment of divine essence, consciousness, or attributes, then this prevenient act of Christ is a limitation of another kind. In this broader sense even Barth was a kenotic theologian of a sort—for the CD IV/1, p. 182. CD IV/1, p. 183. Ibid. Ernst Sartorius stresses this point, as well. See Doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ, pp. 22–23.

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humility elected by the Son of God is a driving theme of his Christology. We have established that this humiliation does not admit any change in God—for “God is always God even in His humiliation.”41 Barth’s account of kenosis improves upon the tensions resident in Lutheran Christology. But it does not do so by merely reasserting the Reformed solution in a modern fashion—that is, the perdurance of the full divinity of the Word in a second, hidden mode of existence extra carnem—since this would mean a surrender of the strict identification of Jesus with the Word. Barth’s solution to the problem of kenosis, like his answer to the extra Calvinisticum, is to transcend the terms of this debate while drawing freely upon the best of both Lutheran and Reformed positions. If the answer to the twofold life of the Word—as humbled without losing His divine glory—is found in the simultaneity of the status duplex, then it is the eternal humility and obedience of the Son that unlocks the related problem of kenosis. In a kenosis of humility Barth indicates that the emptying of the Son is not a surrender of attributes (or of their use), but an embrace of His mission. It is the positive, active event of His assumption of the forma servi. By virtue of this decision the Son is humble in Himself and obedient to the Father. His kenosis, therefore, is nothing other than the eternal decision to be so. He wills to humble Himself, to obey the Father and go forth into the world as the Son of Man. Barth’s account of the communication of attributes further supports these conclusions: though he does affirm the fully exalted and divine life of the Word via the status duplex (akin to the anti-kenotic function of the extra Calvinisticum), Barth accomplishes much of what kenoticism set out to do by arguing that the divine existence enjoyed by Christ is specially determined according to its unity with humanity. Barth’s exposition of the eternal humility and obedience of the Son in §59.1 is, in fact, introduced with his exegesis of Phil. 2.7 and his historical summation of the older forms of kenoticism. We are certainly justified, then, in drawing upon this theme to explore Barth’s own version of Christ’s self-emptying. Whereas the theologians of the Reformation had sought to understand Paul’s κένωσις language in terms of the concealment or nonuse of Christ’s divine powers, for Barth “the κένωσις consists in a renunciation of His being in the form of God alone.”42 It is not to be found in a divestment or diminution of

CD IV/1, p. 179. CD IV/1, p. 180 (emphasis mine). It is important to recognize throughout that, when he speaks of Christ renouncing divine solitude and assuming the forma servi, Barth is describing a non-temporal event. It is not as though Christ was a “pre-existent Logos” first, who then became human. Rather the description of his eternal decision for humility and condescension is logical, and not chronological. Only the historical moment of the incarnation, as the actualization of this eternal determination, is temporal.

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his divinity but in the fact that this way of being was not his sole possibility: “It was not to Him an inalienable necessity to exist only in that form of God, only to be God, and therefore only to be different from the creature, from man, as the reality which is distinct from God, only to be the eternal Word and not flesh. He was not committed to any such ‘only.’”43 Instead God had another possibility—that of giving Himself to the being and the fate of men and women, the possibility for the concealment of His Godhead. In choosing the forma servi Christ added to his existence a new way of being, putting an end not to the fullness of his divine life but to the exclusivity of it. To live in such a way that his equality with God is not exploited, but rather the full depth of humanity is embraced—all the way to the cross—is to be simultaneously both humble and exalted. Clearly Barth’s view of kenosis is in sympathy with the Reformed tradition. This is evident in two ways. First, he draws upon the tradition of incarnation “by addition,” the preferred way of speaking of the forma servi as amending and not reducing or replacing the Son’s divine essence. It is the concealment of Christ’s abiding Godhead. Second, then, Barth rejects any divine diminution; God can become human without ceasing to be God. But these points alone are not sufficient to explain why Jesus is ignorant of the day of his parousia, or why he is not omnipresent. And Barth does not (and cannot) fall back upon an appeal to the Word’s life extra carnem as a way of escaping the kenotic dilemma. With the Lutherans, he remains concerned with the divine subject strictly as He is incarnate. Barth’s interpretation of Phil. 2.5–11, then, is motivated by Reformed priorities but executed in a Lutheran vein. As with the matter of divine immutability, kenoticism as it has been treated in the history of doctrine is deeply metaphysical. Theologians in the kenotic tradition, as well as those opposed to it, concern themselves with the attributes of divine nature and those of human nature, as well as how they can be mutually predicated of one subject. We should expect Barth’s account of the humility of the Son to be equally post-metaphysical. Within the actualist framework the problem is reoriented away from the coexistence of natural attributes in a personal subsistence, and instead to the event that is the human life God elects for Himself. (This is why Barth’s Christology appears on the surface to be largely unconcerned with the question of kenosis as it has been classically formulated.) God is not merely in possession of certain attributes, but each one of His CD IV/1, p.  180. Here Barth implicitly identifies the states of humility and exaltation with the dialectic of veiling (“concealment”) and unveiling.

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attributes “constitute and characterize the divine being.”44 Barth’s real solution to the metaphysical dilemma, then, is not to engage it but to embrace the mystery within: it is in His very weakness and humility that Christ is fully God.45 His omnipotence includes the power to be weak. This interpretation of kenosis as the Son’s (glorifying) humiliation is therefore untroubled by the dilemma of the incarnate person’s possession and exercise of abilities that seem to be in conflict with an authentic human existence. What is true of Jesus is what is revealed in his history: he exhibits both divine power and authority on earth and also the limitations and fragility of human life, forgiving sins and raising the dead yet  also weeping and bleeding. Barth is evidently content with what may appear to be a paradox, because the power to assume weakness and to conceal the divine majesty is not contrary to God’s essence. God can do this—and so really it is no paradox at all. In doing so, and in doing so without the loss of Himself, God is shown to be all the greater. Because Barth locates subordination and obedience—the “below” and “posterius” of the Son’s willing submission to the Father—within the Trinity itself, it is here that the Son’s kenotic humiliation is located, as well. The subordination of the Son to the Father is His choosing to be God in such a way that He is also human. What Barth gets from this is more than simply a plausible theological account of the Philippians hymn. The benefit of kenosis is its immediate identification of Jesus and God the Son, an identity that “cannot be merely a postulate.”46 It allows Christology to speak of the real presence of God with creatures, and of His unity and sympathy with them—all the while equally affirming that God has done so without ceasing to be God. It has a further ethical benefit, as well: as Christ humbled himself, so now men and women ought to renounce their claims over others.47 As the act of God’s humiliation of Himself, kenosis is therefore the intersection between the identity problem and immutability: here God’s love and freedom, God’s self-surrender and unflagging

“The attributes of God are nothing other than His being . . . [and] in them the relationship of God to the other, to the created world, is made known” (CD II/1, p. 330). Barth is here citing and interacting with F. H. R. Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit. At this point he also seems to cite Thomasius favorably, noting that God’s aseity—God’s relationship to Himself—is grounds for the affirmation of “immanent or essential attributes in God” (cf. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, vol. I, p. 38). The important point for Barth is that all the divine attributes (or “perfections”) exist essentially in God and “constitute His own eternal glory”; no divine attribute is merely coordinated to an other. See CD II/1, pp. 322–50 (quotation on p. 327). 45 In other words, the apparent Seinsparadox between divine and human attributes is unravelled by Barth’s assertion that humility and suffering are within God’s power and not in contradiction to it. For more on this see John Thompson, Christ in Perspective, pp. 56–58. 46 CD IV/1, p. 183. 47 Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians, pp. 56f. 44

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constancy, are held together in the affirmation that God’s “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12.9).

Impassibility: Communion of essences and the suffering Son As noted earlier, the ancient theological tradition typically maintained a close link between the doctrines of divine immutability and impassibility. The two overlapped in the widely accepted conviction that God, to be God, is not compulsorily affected by anything outside of Himself. This meant both that God is not changed by His encounter with creation and that He does not suffer because of it. (If God were so affected, Thomas Aquinas held, both His simplicity and His perfection would be deeply compromised.48) Remarkably, in order to maintain the full deity of Jesus Christ, this was extended even to the way in which the incarnate Logos experiences such things as fear and emotional anguish, physical pain, and death. As we saw in Chapter 1, the accepted strategy for upholding the impassibility of the divine Son was first to predicate these things of the human nature, and then—as a second step, logically speaking—to ascribe them to the person of the Logos, the one in whom that nature subsists. Put a bit more organically, the divine Son experiences suffering and death not in His own essential nature but in that nature which is accidental49 to Him: the Son suffers only “as man” or “in the flesh.” To employ the strategy of reduplication and confess that God the Son (yes, God the Son!) did suffer as man or in the flesh is perhaps sufficient, since it would seem that it is a natural attribute of human flesh (and not of spirit) to feel the sensation of pain and to submit to death. But it is only sufficient so long as it does not further entail an essential separation between the subject (the Logos) and the locus of His suffering (the human nature). If the human nature is not His

Summa Theologica (hereafter: ST) I, q. 9; cf. ST I, q. 3, a. 4; and ST III, q. 46, a. 12. My point in choosing this term is merely to note that humanity is, for classical Christology, not essential to the Logos. Thomas denied that the relation of the two natures in Christ is either essential or accidental, suggesting a third possibility in order to avoid Nestorianism (ST III, q. 2, a. 6). Since his doctrine of God does not admit an essential union of humanity with the divine Person, Thomas locates the union “midway” between essence and accident—“in a subsistence or hypostasis.” Humanity is not united with the divine essence per se, but with a common hypostasis. The person of Christ thus becomes a medium in which divine and human essences may commonly participate, so that the latter does not affect the former directly. This, I think, is another way of expressing the distinction between immanence and economy as if it were ontological in nature, and only contributes to the identity problem.

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essentially—if it is an addendum to His being, easily dispensed with—then neither is the suffering properly His.50 One must fall back upon the act of an improper ascription in order to predicate such things to God the Son. The classical view included precisely this entailment: because the Logos is impassible His suffering is located ad extra, that is in a nature with which He is not identical. Barth’s post-metaphysical ontology needs for no such connection between immutability and impassibility. And so, while he affirms the former, he dispenses with the latter doctrine almost entirely. God simply has it within Him—that is, God is free enough and loving enough—to choose to suffer and even to die. But this is not because God has lost control in subjecting Himself to creatures; the angry crowd and the thief on the cross speak truth when they suggest that the crucified Jesus has the authority to call down angels from heaven and to save himself (Mt. 27.38–44; Lk. 23.39). This is the single element in the impassibility doctrine that Barth maintains: God in and for Himself cannot be made to suffer by another. It is only by an act of divine willing, the election of grace, that God can suffer—for God wills to suffer and to die for the redemption of creatures. Barth’s theology is passibilist only in this qualified sense: God does not remain impassible in and for Himself because God does not remain in and for Himself. He is the God of the covenant, and so any talk of God’s freedom from suffering is merely counterfactual speculation. It is the freedom that God would have enjoyed had He not elected in love to forsake it.51 It is necessary to insist further that Jesus’ experience on the cross is active and not passive. As the God who is in act, Jesus does not merely submit to suffering in order to effect atonement as the paschal Lamb. The cross is not a fate that befalls him. Rather he is also our high priest, since in his suffering he is profoundly active. The atonement that results is supremely his work. This suffering, we might say, is a “self-suffering,” the active willing and executing of what would appear from a human perspective to be only a passive endurance. Because Barth is concerned to identify Jesus and the Logos directly, the freedom of God to experience suffering in His very essence is paramount to his Christology. The interval between the person of the Son and the locus of suffering cannot be permitted; in the person of the Son humanity is not extrinsic

This is the case, according to figures such as John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas, because God is simple and does not possess a composite nature. See, for example, Thomas, ST III, q. 16, a. 8; cf. ST I, q. 3. 51 See CD II/2, p. 163; cf. McCormack, “Divine Impassibility?” pp. 154–55. This, it may be said, is the nature of Barth’s doctrine of kenosis. In the decision for incarnation the Son surrenders what is rightfully His, and which would otherwise be true of Him. 50

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but has been made a part of the divine life. Therefore the incarnated Mediator is not ontologically other than God the Son, but is rather the very presence of the Son made flesh. The consequence of this way of understanding the incarnation is that God, in His second way of being, is capable of a true and personal experience of human suffering. It is Barth’s doctrine of revelation that undercuts the position of classical theism on this point. Suffering and death seem to be utterly foreign to the divine nature and so were a priori deemed impossible for the Son qua God. But to know what God is like and of what God is capable, Barth believes, is possibly only as we look to the Christ event. Speculation about the nature of divinity in and for itself is an endeavor merely of human reason—and so it is an exercise in natural theology. But true revelation of the divine life has occurred in Jesus. If it is true that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, then God (and God’s nature) must be capable of that which we see Christ doing. Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence. We have to be ready to be taught by Him that we have been too small and perverted in our thinking about Him within the framework of a false idea of God. It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to reconstitute them in the light of the fact that He does this.52

Barth’s rejection of impassibility is thus intended to be, not a callous repudiation of the ecclesial tradition, but a submission to the testimony of Scripture. God is capable of suffering, because the incarnate Son of God suffers. Logically speaking, the events of suffering and death are predicated of a subject (the “one person” of Chalcedon) and not of a nature—as the nature is an abstraction, a product of human reason that is meant to bring clarity to the metaphysics of the incarnation, but that is not revealed. As we have seen, though he recasts the concepts of ancient metaphysics as history and event, Barth does not abandon two-natures Christology wholesale. Insofar as we might speak of Jesus Christ’s divine and human essences, then, how is the event of his suffering properly to be predicated? Most instructive for us here is the “common actualization” of the two essences in their union, in which CD IV/1, p. 186.

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both the divine and the human essences of Christ receive a new and special determination according to their union with one another. As in the classical account of this union, the divine essence remains in a position of eminence: it does not fall victim to human conditioning, but rather the will of God is to allow Himself, in the person of the Son, to be so conditioned. Unlike the classical account, however, Barth does allow for this conditioning to be reciprocal. The two essences, while remaining distinct in their union, affect one another. It is not just the human essence that is elevated by its union with the divine, but the divine essence is also humbled by its union with the human (the pattern of the status duplex). Therefore God does not cease to be fully God, but He does become the God who is essentially divine-and-human. All of this occurs in Barth’s thought under the heading of the communicatio operationum—the ancient doctrine that, in all that Jesus does, he works according to both of his natures. I have argued that in mature Chalcedonianism this necessary principle leads to direct conflict with the impassibility doctrine: John of Damascus argues assiduously for the communication of operations (what I have called theandric activity) before restricting the acts of suffering and dying to the human nature. The two convictions, it seems to me, cannot stand together. Barth’s notion of the common actualization of the essences in their union provides for a more consistent outworking of the operationum, all the way to the cross. The divine essence is fully participant in Jesus’ suffering, not only because it is (with the human essence) constitutive of the subject who undergoes suffering but because it has received a determination for such a vulnerability. But, we will recall, according to Barth the divine essence does not need any such actualization; in itself it does not need the incarnation. In this sense it is impassible. But in its union with humanity it did receive this new and special actualization. And so, rather than the impassible sunlight shining upon the cloven tree in John’s analogy, the divine essence is determined by God to be capable of such affectivity. A further consequence of Barth’s anti-metaphysical approach—particularly the common actualization of essences—is that it in fact undermines reduplication as a useful strategy. Here the acts of the incarnate one cannot be parsed—even logically—in such a manner. There are at least two reasons for this. First, the two essences are united not “side-by-side,” without affecting one another, but in a mutually conditioning way (without confusion, such as with a divinization of the human essence). Predicating an act strictly of one essence (or of the person strictly according to one essence) to the exclusion of the other is no longer possible: “Jesus qua human” is both an historical and logical impossibility.

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Theologically, it is a denial of the incarnation under the guise of its momentary, logical suspension. Second, to make such a predication is to retreat back into a metaphysical account of the union—both in the sense of speaking about “natures” and “subsistence” apart from act, and of departing from revelation and appealing to creaturely reason. Against this, Barth’s Christology would require us to remain on the register of the history and act in which God is. Barth agrees with defenders of the classical doctrine of impassibility that God does not suffer in His divine nature. Suffering remains a human experience. The key difference is that an actualist Christology explains how God has taken this experience into the event of God’s own life, undergoing it not merely ad extra, qua human, but as the one who is essentially divine-and-human. In distinction from the models of “ascription” and “appropriation” in Athanasius and Cyril, Barth’s account locates this human act in the life of God: God has made passible humanity intrinsic to the Son’s eternal existence. Barth is therefore able to maintain that it was by virtue of His assumed humanity that God the Son suffered, while rejecting the implication that God retained another, impassible mode of existence above and hypostatically apart from this event. In the manner of His participation in suffering, then, God manifests not His impassibility but His essential superiority to suffering. This is not a vulnerability, not God’s being acted upon per se, but God’s choosing to be acted upon—not a lack but an ability in God. Such a nuancing permits the resurrection its rightful place: here, and not on the cross, are suffering and death overwhelmed by the life that God has in Himself. It also allows that the divine and the human are not pitted against one another, but may be mutually conditioning. Cyril’s “impassible suffering” is therefore given an entirely new meaning in Barth’s thought, one that does not assign one half of that formula to each nature: God truly suffers but, in so doing, overcomes the power of suffering and death because He remains superior to it. Despite all of this, it is not insignificant that nowhere in the Dogmatics does Barth engage in a sustained discussion of impassibility as a doctrine.53 As with immutability, his work suggests that we step back from the detailed description of unio hypostatica and common actualization and their implications for the divine essence, and consider more broadly the character of God. As the one who lives in freedom God is free not from all external conditioning, but from all that He does not choose for Himself. The Son causes Himself to suffer by For a full study of Barth’s invocation of such language in the Dogmatics see McCormack, “Divine Impassibility?” especially p. 158.

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submitting to the state of humiliation and to human cruelty. Jesus goes willingly to the cross. As God he could have been free from this, from all such experiences of suffering. But He is also the one who loves in freedom. He gives Himself to creatures, not in a way that diminishes His Godhead but in such a way that demonstrates that God’s graciousness can include even self-sacrifice. But in so doing, Barth repeatedly insists, God remained the Lord of suffering. When God took death into God’s own life, the result was not the death of God but the death of death—for God is life in Himself.

Conclusions: The humanity of God It has been the intent of this chapter, and the present work as a whole, to illustrate the significance of Karl Barth’s approach to Christology—not only as it stands at the center of his own theological project but with respect to the history of the doctrine of incarnation, as well. Far from being a curious footnote in the history of modern theology, Barth’s Christology is to be commended as a fruitful way forward in Christian reflection upon the person and work of Jesus. Barth believed that the task of theology is to hear the Word of God—the powerful Yes of God—and to repeat it. This word is to be spoken with reverent attention to the repetition made by our forebears but, more importantly, in such a way that the activity of God among and for creatures may be clearly understood by men and women today. In theological study, then, continuation always means “beginning once again at the beginning.”54 Even (and especially) our understanding of Christ’s person is not a doctrine that has been fixed for all time, but one that must be reexamined anew in each generation so that the gospel never becomes an artifact that is unfamiliar—even foreign—to its hearers. Barth’s Christology is exegetical in origin55 and actualistic in nature, born not so much from a self-conscious, programmatic attempt to purify theology of “Greek metaphysics” as from a desire to comprehend faithfully the revelation of God in the history of Jesus Christ—without allowing previous methods of interpretation to unduly shape that comprehension. Thus the conceptual apparatus of “person,” “nature,” “ousia,” etc. is not to be taken for granted, but rather acknowledged in the intentions of its ecclesial origination and Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 165. One is reminded of Barth’s final advice to his students in Bonn: “Exegesis, exegesis, and again, exegesis! Then, certainly, take care for systematics and dogmatics” (Das Evangelium in der Gegenwart, p. 17).

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reapplied in a critical fashion to the Christ of the New Testament. As clarifying as these principles have been in the history of doctrine it is Scripture, and not the man-made doctrine, that conditions theological expression today. If there is no natural theology, then we must return again and again to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ—where “God is God in His connexion with the human essence of Jesus Christ (and therefore our own) as it has taken place in Him and is indissoluble in His existence.”56 By virtue of the unity of God and humanity we know and glorify and love and worship God in His humanity, since “God cannot be considered without His humanity.”57 In this chapter we have applied Barth’s theological insights in the domain of Christology to four tensions that persist in the classical tradition’s construal of the incarnation. Barth is, to varying degrees, conscious of all of them: he understands the difficulties that a true incarnation poses for divine ontology, and seeks a way to affirm the real humanity of God in such a way that preserves God’s immutability. This matter further implicates the kenosis of the Son, and Barth shares the orthodox tradition’s more conservative instincts in rejecting any sort of ontological divestment of attributes. But kenosis remains an issue with which the theologian must deal, and Barth’s solution is to describe the self-emptying of the Son in terms of His eternal humility and obedience to God the Father. Barth further recognizes the tradition’s reluctance to predicate real suffering and death of one who is God—yet also its sensitivity to the need to do so, as in the confession of Constantinople II that the one who suffered on the cross is one of the Trinity. Because Barth’s Christology attends to the acting subject of Jesus Christ, whose life is an event and not the product of a metaphysical composition, he reaffirms this theopaschite position but not the strict identification of the human nature as the locus of suffering. God is free to suffer—nevertheless, this freedom entails an abiding superiority to that authentic experience. Each of these answers arises fluidly from Barth’s commitment to allow the history of God the Son to trump the metaphysical concepts of the early church where necessary. More specifically, Barth’s answers to immutability, kenosis, and impassibility are founded upon his more basic decision about the identity of God and Jesus Christ—that is, his strict attention to the proper subject matter of Christian theological inquiry. This subject is the God who is personally present in Christ and as Christ, reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5.19). There is no ontological interval between the two, Jesus and the Word, as if one is essentially CD IV/2, p. 101. CD IV/2, p. 102.

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human and the other is not. If God is who He is in this event of revelation and reconciliation, then as Thomas F. Torrance put it, there is no God “behind the back” of Jesus.58 There is no Word who exists for Himself apart from the flesh He assumed in history, no un-changed or un-humbled or un-suffering Word to whom theological appeal might be made when it appears from the biblical witness that He changes, humbles Himself, and suffers in the flesh. It is for this reason that Barth’s Christology and its dogmatic effects differ so greatly from the classical tradition. And yet, by virtue of its fidelity to Scripture and to the values underlying the expressions of the councils, it is rightly understood as orthodox. That God is essentially human in His second way of being, God’s commitment to creatures in the covenant, is the important theme of Barth’s mature Christology. It is the scarlet thread that runs throughout the Church Dogmatics, and a topic to which Barth turned his direct attention in a 1956 lecture.59 What Barth calls the humanity of God represents “God’s existence, intercession, and activity for man, the intercourse God holds with him, and the free grace in which He wills to be and is nothing other than the God of man.”60 It is God’s turning toward humankind, which is never in conflict with His deity but which is rather the elected form of its expression. Here, where God is present as human and where God makes humanity present to His own eternity, is the covenant itself in the fullness of its gracious extension and historical completion. In Jesus Christ we are not dealing with humanity, or with God, in the abstract, not with one who in His deity exists only separated from man, distant and strange and thus a non-human if not indeed an inhuman God. In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man. Rather, in Him we encounter the history, the dialogue, in which God and man meet together and are together, the reality of the covenant mutually contracted, preserved, and fulfilled by them.61

In redeeming us through His free grace and adopting us as His children, God is living in the repetition and confirmation of who He is in Himself as Father

Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 243. “The Humanity of God,” published in The Humanity of God, pp. 37–65. The lecture was originally given at a meeting of the Swiss Reformed Ministers’ Association in Aarau on September 25 of that year. In a 1964 interview with H. Fischer-Barnicol, a reflective Barth observed that for many people this lecture crystalized what had been present all along in the Dogmatics, bringing it to their attention for the first time. “For me it was a retrospective reflection, but for many people it was a discovery” (quoted in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, p. 423). 60 “The Humanity of God,” p. 37. 61 “The Humanity of God,” p. 46. 58 59

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and Son.62 This covenant of grace was elected from all eternity. In willing this, Barth says—in willing Jesus Christ—God willed to give His Word “human form” and “human content” from all eternity.63 This has consequences not just for the economy of God’s presence among creatures but for God’s own being, for “it is when we look at Jesus Christ that we know decisively that God’s deity does not exclude, but includes His humanity. . . . His deity encloses humanity in itself.” In Jesus Christ “the fact is once for all established that God does not exist without man.”64 The rejection of God’s real humanity is born from human pride, and the result has more in common with the absolute Being of philosophical theism than the Christian God.65 That Barth’s Christology originates in exegesis is demonstrated by the fact that he returns, again and again, to the diversity of the New Testament witnesses to Jesus. The Synoptic tradition asks, “Is this man, Jesus of Nazareth, truly the Son of God?” while the Johannine and Pauline traditions ask, “Is the Son of God truly this man, Jesus?” One could argue that the two-natures doctrine took the shape that it did largely by virtue of the focus upon the full and absolute divinity of Christ in the early church. This is, perhaps, because his humanity was historically evident; and so from the fourth century Ebionitism, Arianism, and Nestorianism simply amounted to a greater theological challenge than Docetism and Apollinarianism. Against those views that stressed Jesus’ (mere) humanity, or his ontological subordination to God the Father, orthodox theologians drew more heavily upon the Johannine and Pauline corpus to establish his complete divinity—which meant not only his equality with God but also his own eternal preexistence as the Logos. The result was a “high Christology,” which found its seminal affirmations in such texts as Jn 1.14. The real exegetical problem for thinkers such as Athanasius, then, was to justify why the protagonist of the Synoptic gospels speaks and acts in evidently non-omnipotent, non-omniscient ways. In evaluating classical Christology we have followed Barth in attempting to keep in view both of these rather different perspectives, and to give the Synoptic question a bit more force than perhaps it had in antiquity. That this was Barth’s modus operandi is apparent in, and to some degree justified by, his exegesis

64 65 62 63

See CD IV/2, p. 346. CD IV/1, p. 45. “The Humanity of God,” p. 50 (emphasis in original). Eberhard Jüngel, “‘. . . keine Menschenslosigkeit Gottes . . .’ Zur Theologie Karl Barths zwischen Theismus und Atheismus,” Evangelische Theologie 31.7 (1971), pp. 376–90; cf. Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion, pp. 83–86.

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of the prologue to John’s gospel and the exordium to the Hebrews. These he understands to be most fundamentally about Jesus—the God-human in his divine-human unity—with the concept of the Logos merely pointing to him. This sharply qualifies the “from above” character assumed by the Christology of the ancient church (though without simply dismissing it, as so much modern doctrinal criticism had done). It is this exegetical starting point, taking both the Synoptic and Johannine-Pauline perspectives together, that gives Barth’s Christology its dialectical shape—pointing at the same time to the humiliation of the Son of God and the exaltation of the Son of Man, rather than choosing to prioritize one over the other. Merely to reassert the christological tradition in its final form (as if there were such a thing) would be, in a very real sense, implicitly to claim for John and for Paul an abiding priority in the canon. Thus modernity itself, insofar as it has prompted theology’s return to biblical reflection upon Jesus’ human life, has made a positive contribution to doctrinal development. For Barth, so-called high Christology and low Christology meet one another in the unity of the canonical witness and find their respective relevance in one another. Scripture’s most fundamental testimony to the person of Jesus Christ is therefore not Jn 1.14 alone—“the Word became flesh”—but this together with Mt. 28.6: “He is not here; he has risen!” This resurrection of a dead man, as the divine exaltation of nothing less than humanity itself, is just as constitutive of Jesus Christ. By virtue of God’s eternal, unchanging character and God’s realitymaking intentions, this same Jesus—crucified and raised from the dead—is himself the Son of God.

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Index actualism  9–10, 13–16, 86–92, 95, 100–1, 109, 112–13, 120–1, 124, 130, 136–7, 158, 186, 189–90, 203–5, 207–8, 210–11, 213, 216–17, 222 Alexandrian Christology  11, 20, 22, 26, 29, 73, 95, 155–7, 168, 181, 184, 195 anhypostasis/enhypostasis  34, 84, 92–5, 96, 129–30, 206–7 Antiochene Christology  11, 25, 29, 32, 62, 73, 95, 155–7, 168, 181, 184 Apollinaris of Laodicea  24–5, 27 Aquinas, Thomas  18, 35, 43, 46, 79, 121, 176, 218, 219 Athanasius of Alexandria  7, 22–4, 25, 27, 31, 41–3, 46, 119, 130, 208, 222, 226 Augustine of Hippo  43, 45, 143 Berkouwer, G. C.  12–13, 112 Brunner, Emil  109, 112 Bultmann, Rudolf  6, 165–6 Chalcedon, Council of  3–4, 7, 17–18, 29–31, 37, 43, 56–7, 62–3, 72, 77, 87, 156, 161–3, 167, 179–82, 186, 195 Chemnitz, Martin  7, 44, 49–50 communicatio gratiarum  128, 130, 131–5, 171, 187 communicatio idiomatum  23, 44–5, 48, 66, 77, 128–31, 164, 189, 206 communicatio operationum  5, 35, 37, 58–62, 63, 128, 135–40, 221 Constantinople, Second Council of  17, 32, 43, 59, 189, 224 Constantinople, Third Council of  8, 18, 34, 37, 59, 72, 136 Cyril of Alexandria  7, 21, 26–9, 33, 39, 57–8, 62–3, 66–8, 119, 171, 189, 197, 200, 222 Diodore of Tarsus  25, 26, 29 Dorner, Isaak August  53–4, 199–200, 211, 214 dyothelitism  18, 34, 59, 136, 187

election  10, 101–2, 105–6, 112, 114–20, 201, 210 enhypostasis  see anhypostasis/enhypostasis eternity  120–6, 192, 202–3, 209–11 Eusebius of Caesarea  20–2, 42, 46, 119 Eutychianism  29, 34, 45, 77, 156, 167, 203 exaltation, state of  see status duplex extra Calvinisticum  7, 9, 40, 47, 49, 65, 68, 74–6, 97–8, 101, 103, 106–8, 184, 187, 198–203, 215 genus maiestaticum  44, 101, 129–31, 183 Gess, Wolfgang Friedrich  50–1, 53–4, 214 Gregory of Nazianzus  24–6 Harnack, Adolf von  4, 157, 164–6 Herrmann, Wilhelm  51 humiliation, state of  see status duplex Hunsinger, George  13–14, 126, 157, 181–2 immutability, divine  30–1, 40–7, 126, 197–8, 209–13, 214, 218–19 impassibility, divine  21, 23, 38, 57–68, 189, 213, 218–23 John of Damascus  7–8, 18, 35–7, 43, 60–1, 136, 219, 221 kenosis  40, 48–57, 129, 187, 199, 213–18 Leo  i, 33, 59–60, 62–3 Logos asarkos  9–10, 28, 47, 52, 75, 86, 88, 94, 96–8, 101–9, 126–7, 153, 169, 184, 197–203, 205 Logos ensarkos  28, 39, 75, 94, 97, 103, 107, 109, 126–7, 198–203 Logos incarnandus  10, 203, 210–11 Mackintosh, Hugh R.  50, 54–6, 123 Marcellus of Ancyra  22

244 Maximus the Confessor  18, 28, 33–5, 59 McCormack, Bruce L.  9–11, 14, 26, 85–9, 92–4, 100, 104, 157, 206, 210 Molnar, Paul D.  10, 86–7, 100, 104, 188 monoenergism  17, 33–5 monothelitism  17, 34 natural theology  16, 78, 86, 109, 207, 220, 224 Nestorianism  20, 26–7, 29, 30, 43, 60, 63, 93, 155–6, 161, 167, 203, 218 Origen of Alexandria  21 ousia  82, 170, 174–5, 180, 182, 223 Pseudo–Dionysius  33, 35, 139

Index reduplication  62–8, 189, 196, 218, 221–2 Ritschl, Albrecht  4, 51, 157, 164–6 Sartorius, Ernst  51, 198, 214 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  71, 90, 157, 164, 170, 176 status duplex  5, 113, 140–52, 178, 187, 191–2, 197–209, 215, 221 theandricism  33, 35–7, 60–1, 64–8, 221 Theodore of Mopsuestia  26, 29 theosis  130, 201, 206, 221 Thomasius, Gottfried  50–4, 56, 123, 200, 207, 214, 217 Torrance, Thomas F.  38, 138, 225