The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics 9781472550118, 9780567033215, 9780567012005

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. . . for my mother, Frances . . . and in memoriam: Florence Mawer (1914–90) Judith Seecoomar (1940–91) Roy Mawer (1914–2003)

acknowledgements

While the responsibility for each claim in this study is mine, the whole could not have been written without support from various quarters. I want briefly to acknowledge those who have assisted me during this project, which had its origins as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. Initial thanks must go to scholars associated with Harvard University’s Committee on the Study of Religion and Harvard Divinity School. I owe a pre-eminent debt of gratitude to Professor Ronald Thiemann who directed my dissertation and whose appreciation for the essential claims and fine nuances of Barth’s writings have had a huge impact upon me. It was a privilege to work with him; I value his friendship and counsel more than I can adequately say. I am indebted also to the unfailing support of Professors Sarah Coakley (who helped to launch my theological studies in her capacity as tutor in theology at Oriel College, Oxford University, and who served on my dissertation committee), Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, William Graham, David Hall, Gordon Kaufman, David Lamberth (who also served on my dissertation committee), Kevin Madigan and Richard R. Niebuhr. All have left a mark, in various important ways, on my thinking about Barth and Christian theology. Past and present students at Harvard have also given much support, not least through astute feedback on various issues considered in this work. I want to give especial mention to Danielle Abraham, Susan Abraham, Thomas Arnold, Ben Dunning, Timothy Dobe, Curtis Evans, Tamsin Farmer Jones, Ittzés Gábor, Grace Kao, Christian Lange, Ann McClenahan, Mark McInroy, Piotr Malaysz, Tovis Page, Joel Rasmussen and Sarah Sentilles. I cherished their friendship, intellectual companionship and solidarity in the sometimes-odd world of graduate studies; I look forward to our continued life together in the often-odd world of academia. Beyond Harvard, various people have helped to bring this project to fruition through conversation, correspondence, and general encouragement. I thank particularly Professors Philip Clayton (Claremont School of Theology), Richard Cross (University of Notre Dame), George Hunsinger (Princeton Theological Seminary), Bruce McCormack (Princeton Theological Seminary), Paul D. Molnar (St. John’s University), Katherine Sonderegger (Virginia

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Theological Seminary), John Webster (University of Aberdeen) and Michael Welker (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg). I am also grateful to members of the Karl Barth Society of North America, who allowed me to rehearse some ideas about Barth’s reading of Gethsemane during the American Academy of Religion meeting in November 2004, and to those involved in the Karl Barth Conference at Princeton University in the summer of 2006, who heard and responded to my lecture on ‘Barth’s Christological Exegesis’. Finally, thanks to all involved in the Wissenschaftlich-Theologisches Seminar at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. The friendship and intellectual acuity of Marcus Höfner, Paul Cumin and Stephen Lakkis contributed, in particular, to a very rewarding stay in Germany. I owe a terrific debt of gratitude to my colleagues at the University of Virginia. The Department of Religious Studies has been generous in its support for my scholarship and stalwart in its commitment to helping myself and other young scholars contend with the dual pressures of research and teaching. Thanks especially to Liz Alexander, Asher Biemann, Larry Bouchard, Jim Childress, Valerie Cooper, M. Jamie Ferreira, Paul Groner, Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Kevin Hart, Judith Kovacs, Charles Marsh, Chuck Mathewes, John Nemec, Peter Ochs, Vanessa Ochs, Liz Olmsted and Kurtis Schaeffer. Extra special thanks to the denizens of the trailer; to Chuck, Kevin and Larry for reading my work with such care; and to Keith Starkenburg, presently a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Virginia’s Religious Studies Department, for editing suggestions and proofreading. For financial support, I thank Harvard University for funding my doctoral studies; the Harvard Graduate Society, for the award of a Graduate Society Fellowship in Spring 2004 and a Graduate Society Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2005–06; the DAAD (Deutsche Akademischer Austauschdienst), for the award of a Graduate Research Scholarship that funded a year in Heidelberg in 2004–05; and the University of Virginia, for the award of a Summer Research Grant in 2007. Numerous others, relatively unconnected with my academic life, have also contributed to this project. Kate Becker takes pride of place. I would not have been able to write this work without her support, critical acumen and love. I thank her from the bottom of my heart. I cannot promise she will become the only ‘KB’ in my life from now on, but she will always rank before her Swiss competitor. Also important for my work over the last few years – sometimes for helping me to forget about it, sometimes for helping me to keep on with it, often for making me realize that there is more to life – have been Bill and Michelle Becker, Linda Becker and Patrick Hayden, Stan Byers, Caroline Chen, Russell Harnett, Lene Hemmingsen, Heather and Hugh Hinton, Melissa Kerin, SØren Elmer Kristensen, Paige McDaniel, Thomas and Rachel Pankhurst, the Ray family (Sue, Andy, Simon, and Clare), Marc and Monika Schattenmann, Ruth and Simon O’Shea, John Henry Rice,

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Danielle Stillman, Matthew Utterback, Christopher and Regina Walton, Luke Whitmore and Katrina Wuensch. I am more appreciative of their friendship than they know. Finally, I owe profound thanks to my family. In innumerable ways, my Mum and Dad have lovingly supported and encouraged my work over the years, despite an acute bafflement regarding my intellectual interests. My brother and sister (ditto, vis-à-vis the intellectual interests) have also been enduring sources of strength, insight and good humour. Though I will resist the temptation to name members of my broader family – for they too have supported, in large and small ways, my academic pursuits – I want to make special mention of three relatives now deceased: my maternal grandmother, Florence Mawer; my maternal grandfather, Roy Mawer; and my aunt, Judith Seecoomar. Each would vigorously object to any theological position I might take. But each treasured the freedom of intellectual enquiry and, with great love, pushed me again and again to think for myself. In addition to dedicating this work to my mother, then, I also dedicate it to their memory. Paul Dafydd Jones Charlottesville, Virginia January 2008

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abbreviations

Works of Karl Barth I/1

Church Dogmatics, vol. I, part 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2nd edn, 1975) I/2 Church Dogmatics, vol. I, part 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956) II/1 Church Dogmatics, vol. II, part 1(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957) II/2 Church Dogmatics, vol. II, part 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957) III/1 Church Dogmatics, vol. III, part 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958) III/2 Church Dogmatics, vol. III, part 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960) III/3 Church Dogmatics, vol. III, part 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960) III/4 Church Dogmatics, vol. III, part 4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961) IV/1 Church Dogmatics, vol. IV, part 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956) IV/2 Church Dogmatics, vol. IV, part 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958) IV/3.1 Church Dogmatics, vol. IV, part 3: first half (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961) IV/3.2 Church Dogmatics, vol. IV, part 3: second half (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961) IV/4 Church Dogmatics, vol. IV, part 4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1969) KD Die Kirchliche Dogmatik (13 vols; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1932 and thereafter Zürich: EVZ, 1938–65). Individual volume abbreviations as above.

Others HTR JTS KJV NPNF RSV SJT ZdTh

Harvard Theological Review Journal of Theological Studies King James Version Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace; 2nd series; 14 vols; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004). Revised Standard Version Scottish Journal of Theology Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie

Theological work is distinguished from other kinds of work by the fact that anyone who desires to do this work cannot proceed by building with complete confidence on the foundation of questions that are already settled, results that are already achieved or conclusions that are already arrived at. He cannot continue to build today in any way on foundations that were laid yesterday by himself, and he cannot live today in any way on the interest from a capital amassed yesterday. His only possible procedure every day, in fact every hour, is to begin anew at the beginning.1 Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore.2 It is not repugnant to the human will to be inwardly moved by God; and, notwithstanding divine impulses, it still continues to be a human will, for God’s will works volition.3 The greatest object in the universe, says a certain philosopher, is a good man struggling with adversity; yet there is still a greater, which is the good man that comes to relieve it.4 And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again’ (Jn 8.1).

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Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (trans. Grover Foley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 165. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (London: Gollancz, 2006), p. 195. I. A. Dorner, History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, Vol. 1, division 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1869), p. 335. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (ed. Stephen Coote; London: Penguin, 1982), p. 180. Coote identifies the philosopher as Seneca; he references De providentia, II, 6.

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introduction

I One of the most important American novels of the last half-century is Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren.1 An elaborate and labyrinthine work, startlingly prescient of the postmodern condition in its treatment of shifting identities, fluid temporal and spatial structures, and myriad new opportunities for the abuse of the marginalized, Dhalgren is a vehicle by which Delany redescribes, and thereby aims to incite reflection about, the United States. It attests to what one might call an intensively recombinative imagination.2 While the materials Delany uses to portray the dystopian cityscape of Bellona and his unnamed antihero are more or less familiar – the urban, racial and sexual complexities of late twentieth-century North America – the author’s imaginative genius works up, recasts and confederates these materials to create something quite unique. Were the text more frequently read, the United States might well appear less recognizable, less definable and more disquieting than many would have us believe. Certainly, the providentially minded arrogance of the United States’ recent foreign policy would at least be haunted by an alternate vision of the ‘homeland’. As it is, Dhalgren bears the dubious status of an underground classic, buried under the weight of rather more palatable (i.e., ‘patriotic’) perspectives. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics compares intriguingly with Dhalgren. In many respects, the works could hardly be more different. Barth would not appreciate having his theological efforts compared with a novel; he would bristle at the idea that his theology bears kinship with a ‘worldview’, postmodern or otherwise.3 Equally, many of the topics that Delany handles – sexuality,

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Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (New York: Vintage, 2001). Dhalgren was first published in 1975. William Gibson’s cryptic foreword to Dhalgren, ‘The Recombinant City’ (pp. xi–xiii), informed this characterization. ‘Worldviews’ meet with caustic denunciation in a late volume of the Dogmatics. Barth associates them with an evasion of revelation and therefore deserving of Feuerbachian critique. Thus IV/3.1, p. 257: ‘A world-view is the glorious possibility of evading this offence [of the Word], of fleeing from it. So long as man, viewing the world, is observer, constructor and manager, he is safe, or at any rate thinks he is safe, from this offence.’ For postmodern readings of Barth see, inter alia, Walter Lowe, Theology and

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gender and existential confusion in particular – made the Swiss theologian acutely uncomfortable. The materials employed in constructing the Dogmatics are also quite different from those commandeered by Delany. To help make sense of the vivid reality of divine revelation witnessed in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Barth draws chiefly on classics of the Christian tradition and an ad hoc medley of appropriated philosophical resources (far in excess, incidentally, of anything anticipated in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana).4 Finally, there is nothing ‘underground’ about the Church Dogmatics. Few Christian theologians and modern philosophers of religion lack familiarity with this work and most, even if wary of its contents, acknowledge its importance for twentieth-century religious thought. However, Barth’s work, like Delany’s, also attests to a recombinative imagination, albeit one now employed for the purpose of redescribing and inciting reflection about Christian faith. If the materials used seem familiar, even frustratingly old hat, the overall impression amounts to something quite unique. In responding to the event of revelation, Barth combines a critical engagement with traditional claims with an indefatigable concern to rethink every issue that comes his way. Paul Tillich’s identification of Barth’s theology as ‘kerygmatic’ (the ‘greatness’ of this author being constrained by his ‘orthodox fixation’)5 does the Church Dogmatics a terrible disservice. Few other twentieth-century works manage to balance an engagement with established theological topics with a reconstructive agenda of such radical proportions. At the same time – and this is not to disparage the more contemporary writer – Barth’s ambition exceeds that of Delany. He petitions his readers not only to inhabit, but also to enact, delightedly, a new world. If Dhalgren represents a postmodern and post-Christian transmutation of Augustine’s City of God, the Church Dogmatics amounts to a discursive realm that appeals to each reader to seize, and to live out, a new kind of identity. Each is commissioned to act on a future that God graciously proposes and enables; each is tasked, more specifically, to constitute the ‘church’ that Barth freely, but sometimes enigmatically, references. Like Bellona, the centre of Dhalgren’s world, Barth’s church has no fixed location, few created structures of surety and often finds itself undermined by the actions of its presumptive citizens. Unlike Bellona, Barth’s church has a reality that

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Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) and Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a critique of such perspectives, see Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth: Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Part Two)’, ZdTh 13.2 (1997), pp. 170–94 (177–87). See Augustine, On Christian Teaching (trans. R. P. H. Green; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 64–7. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology; Vol. 1, Reason and Revelation, Being and God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 5.

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INTRODUCTION

extends beyond the pages of the text – a reality that gains substance with each endorsement of God’s hope for covenantal partnership. I open with this unusual comparison for a simple reason. While much recent work on Barth criticizes, implicitly or explicitly, the misleading imputation of ‘neo-orthodoxy’ common in English-language scholarship, a reaffirmation of the idiosyncrasy and novelty of Barth’s thought remains a necessary preamble to interpretation. The Church Dogmatics is not about theological retrenchment. It does not entail nostalgia for past norms and habits of thought. It does not make common cause, to put it even more sharply, with those who would hope for a rediscovery of ‘orthodox’ Christianity – a rediscovery that enables spiritual fortitude, given ‘the new dark ages that are upon us’,6 or that spurs Christian renaissance in the facilitative context of postmodernity. Barth’s abiding concern is simply to respond to the event of revelation as it happens here and now, and to do so in a way that does justice to God’s overflowing and exuberant love. By exemplifying intellectual alertness and creativity in face of God’s action, genuinely believing that ‘[d]ogmatics springs from the salutary unrest which must not and cannot leave the church’ (I/2, p. 780), Barth aims to inspire and support those who would participate in, and thereby help realize, God’s lively and peaceful future.

II In what follows, I develop a reading of Karl Barth’s mature Christology that pays close attention to his description of Jesus Christ as a human being. While I reference other works, my primary source is Barth’s magnum opus, the multivolume Church Dogmatics – a text that remained incomplete, in spite of the work of over three decades, at the time of his death. Given the vast amount of attention that this text has garnered, a few words explaining this project are necessary. A limited goal is to refute a charge common in English-language scholarship – namely, that Barth’s strong affirmation of Christ’s divinity makes for an enfeebled account of Christ’s humanity.7 It is difficult to know why this 6

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Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, 1985), p. 263. See here, inter alia, John Baillie, God Was in Christ. An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), esp. p. 53; Herbert Hartwell, The Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), pp. 185–6; Charles T. Waldrop, Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Alexandrian Character (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984); Alister McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology: From the Enlightenment to Pannenberg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 108–16; John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (London: SCM, 1990), esp. pp. 14 and 287; Colin E. Gunton, ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T

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charge gained currency. Following Kathryn Tanner,8 one might view it as symptomatic of the modern assumption that divine action and human action are mutually exclusive – an interpretative modulation, perhaps, of the ‘mysterious monophysite undercurrent’9 that makes Christology either a matter of Christ’s divinity or a matter of Christ’s humanity. Alternately, it may be that undue preoccupation with Barth’s ‘Christocentric’ method has provided tacit licence for interpretative laxity with respect to his Christology as such. Or, to twist the knife again, it might reflect the tendency of English-speaking scholars to focus on the earlier volumes of the Dogmatics, while neglecting the later. In any case, the claim that Barth neglects Christ’s humanity ought not to go unchallenged. Not only does it bespeak a fairly drastic misreading of the Dogmatics, but also it perpetuates the facile assumption that Barth’s thought amounts to a mirror image of the liberalism he allegedly deplored – its failings (an attenuation, if not loss, of Christ’s divinity) becoming his strengths, its strengths (a clear grasp of Christ’s humanity), his failings. Although some commentators have gestured towards more viable readings of Barth’s Christology,10 a full-length investigation of the issue is needed.

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Clark, 1995), esp. p. 129; idem, ‘Salvation’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 153 and 157; and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Christology: A Global Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), pp. 114–15. Roger Haight does not criticize Barth directly but insinuates a problematic one-sidedness: ‘Barth’s christology is pure christology from above’; see his Jesus, Symbol of God (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999), p. 310. Worries about Barth’s Christology are not, one must add, restricted to English-speaking scholars. In The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (trans. Edward T. Oakes; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), Hans Urs von Balthasar writes: ‘Barth’s Christology, in spite of all the lovely things he has to say about the descent of God’s Son, is basically a Christology in the manner of Cyril of Alexandria. And of course (even if because of a misunderstanding) behind Cyril stands the figure of Apollinarius’ (p. 401). Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Karl Rahner, ‘Current Problems in Christology’, in Theological Investigations; Vol. 1, God, Christ, Mary and Grace (trans. Cornelius Ernst, O.P.; New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 188. See, for example, David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), pp. 39–55. Although Kelsey’s principal concern is not Barth’s Christology in this text, he provides an outstanding sketch of Barth’s description of Jesus as the ‘royal human’ which has parallels with the perspective I develop in Chapter 3. See also John Thompson, Christ in Perspective: Christological Perspectives in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 74–97 (spoiled by the qualification that Christ’s ‘real humanity is . . . underestimated’ in view of a preponderant emphasis on his ‘true humanity’ (75)); and Hans Boersma, ‘Alexandrian or Antiochian? A Dilemma in Barth’s Christology’, Westminster Theological Journal 52.2 (1990), pp. 263–80. More recently, as will become clear in subsequent pages, Bruce McCormack has paid close attention to the Christology of the Dogmatics, offering numerous suggestive claims.

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INTRODUCTION

My more positive purpose is to support and further a new wave of scholarship, attentive to and enthusiastic about Barth’s rich sense of human agency. This interpretative development, along with other new lines of inquiry, such as Bruce McCormack’s identification of Barth’s work as a ‘critically realistic dialectical theology’,11 has done a great deal to displace the outmoded paradigm of neo-orthodoxy,12 transforming Barth studies and opening the way for a future in which Barth is repositioned within discussions ongoing in the fields of Christian theology and religious studies. Within the ambit of such work, my particular concern is to describe and analyse the anterior ground for Barth’s understanding of human agency – his construal of Christ as a human who lives and acts in ‘correspondence’ to God’s prevenient direction. If my interpretation convinces, George Hunsinger’s remarks about ‘double agency’ and John Webster’s account of Barth’s ‘moral theology’13 will rest on firmer foundations: Barth’s understanding of human action as a distinctive and utterly real event will be shown to have its condition of possibility in the christological outlook that regulates and materially informs his work. Close attention to Barth’s understanding of Christ’s humanity enables, more generally, a fresh take on key claims forwarded in the Dogmatics. While depending often on close textual analysis of particular paragraphs, this essay ranges across the entirety of Barth’s vast text: it takes the form of a culminative argument, identifying and following a single melody that sounds throughout the whole. Barth’s doctrines of God and election, his theological anthropology and his views about covenant, reconciliation and sin, therefore, all receive consideration from a new and, I hope, illuminating viewpoint. I endeavour particularly to engage what might be called the conceptual substructure of the Dogmatics: terms such as decision, love, patience, gratitude and obedience feature prominently in the following pages. In addition, in order to refine various points of analysis, I set Barth in critical 11

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Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a history of Barth’s reception in the United Kingdom and the United States which positions ‘neo-orthodoxy’ in the context of various other responses to Barth see Richard H. Roberts, ‘The Reception of the Theology of Barth in the Anglo-Saxon World: History, Typology and Prospect’, in Stephen W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 115–71. The limits of this essay are suggested by its title: Roberts shows no interest in, or awareness of, the reception of Barth’s thought among non-‘Anglo-Saxons’ who live in an ‘Anglo-Saxon world’. James H. Cone’s two pioneering works, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997) and A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990) – two texts that draw extensively on Barth and which, in their own way, make significant contributions to scholarly appreciation of the Dogmatics – are conspicuous in their absence. See here George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and idem, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

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conversation with a range of theologians (and, to a lesser extent, philosophers), some of whom will be familiar to readers; others, less so. The reason for the interpolated conversations can be stated plainly. This study does not only aspire to restore Barth’s christological credibility and to promote new angles of sight on the Dogmatics; it assumes, also, that Barth is best understood when positioned within the broad context of Christian thought. Barth was right to think ‘the boundary between a dogmatics that reports’ the contents of church tradition ‘and an appropriately critical dogmatics cannot be determined in general’ (I/1, p. 282 rev.); it is in the interests of ensuring a ‘critical’ report on the Christology of the Dogmatics that this study situates Barth in the eclectic intellectual context in which he thought and worked. The most important goal of this book, however, is to commend the Church Dogmatics as a resource for theological reflection in the present. Generally, Barth’s thought has tremendous value for individuals and communities who wish to think theologically – which is to say, all those who aspire to reflect carefully, critically and imaginatively about the intellectual possibilities resident in various kinds of Christian faith. Barth’s treatment of theological ideas is often matchless; his intelligence and creativity remain an enduring and instructive resource for systematic and constructive work. And I suspect that, beyond the elemental theological claims that Barth forwards, it is exactly the astonishing conceptual substructure of the Dogmatics, not to mention its relatively unexplored nooks and crannies, that could most usefully inform constructive endeavours today and in the future. (What rewards might accrue, for instance, were a Christian doctrine of God to begin with a discussion of divine patience?). More particularly, I believe strongly that Barth’s work could invigorate contemporary christological reflection. While the European and North American Reformations and Enlightenments, broadly construed, facilitated the collapse of a sometimes dubiously enforced ‘orthodoxy’, thereby heralding the possibility of an increased diversification of christological discourses, this development was quickly followed by a certain truncation of reflection, arguably due to an overbearing interest in the ‘historical Jesus’. Barth protests this truncation (which continues to the present day) and provides an alternative trajectory for thought – one that that entails a fascinating approach to the New Testament witness, an audacious account of Christ’s ontological complexity and personal simplicity, and a remarkable description of Christ’s human contribution to reconciliation. Animated by the belief that Barth has more to teach us than we have realized, this study attempts to bring these aspects of the Church Dogmatics into view. In what follows, I do not dwell much on exactly how Barth could (and does) inform contemporary constructive work; I do not position, for example, Barth in relation to any ongoing christological projects. I would also add that my largely positive judgement about Barth’s work does not debar criticism. Beyond some strictly dogmatic issues that will be considered in due course,

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INTRODUCTION

Barth’s incorrigible sexism deserves, and will receive, sharp rebuke. My principal ambition is more modest – to encourage readers to be patient with the Dogmatics, to attend to it in an open and fair-minded manner, to resist snap judgements based on first impressions, and thereby to learn to think with Barth, ‘after Barth’. Specifically, I hope to show that Barth’s Christology is stranger, stronger, more interesting, and, as my concluding pages intimate, more politically vital than many have suspected.

III The first chapter of this study establishes a point of entry into the Christology of the Dogmatics. I assess Barth’s early interest in the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula in light of claims tendered in Bruce McCormack’s acclaimed study, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936; I consider whether Barth’s Christology is usefully named ‘Chalcedonian’; and, focusing on Church Dogmatics I/2, §15, I adumbrate the early stirrings of Barth’s portrayal of the humanity and human agency of Jesus Christ. I first show that the affiliation of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula with the ‘dialectic of veiling and unveiling’, while important for a reconstruction of Barth’s theological development, raises some tricky questions about Christ’s human being and human agency. If, given Barth’s neo-Kantian epistemological assumptions, Christ’s humanity constitutes a ‘veil’ for God in God’s self-revelation, might not Barth risk neglecting Christ’s human being and acting? Is Christ’s humanity only a medium that God utilizes in order to reveal himself? Second, I argue that in Church Dogmatics I/2 and thereafter, Barth takes a circumspect attitude to the Chalcedonian Definition, a document often considered normative for christological reflection. While Barth approves the basic import of Chalcedon and emphasizes its value in exposing ‘liberal’ prevarication about Christ’s divinity, he shows little interest in one of its key conceptual elements, viz., the concept of ‘nature’ (physis), used to advert Christ’s being fully divine and fully human. He adopts instead a decidedly minimalist alternative – Christ as vere Deus vere homo. So much signals Barth’s interest in charting a christological course ‘beyond Chalcedon’, one that is, funded by direct reference to the biblical narratives and animated by way of a highly actualistic ontology. Third, I identify some aspects of the ‘special Christology’ of §15 pertinent to my interpretative interests. Barth’s concern to integrate dogmatic and exegetical reflection, his preference for a Reformed differentiation of Christ’s humanity and divinity, his clear sympathy for dyothelitism (the claim that Christ possesses both a divine will and a human will), an identification of Christ’s humanity as judgement-bound ‘flesh’ and a keen interest in Christ’s agony in Gethsemane – these are all a sign of things to

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come, and attending to their elucidation in I/2 prepares the way for the analysis of later chapters. My discussion of these aspects of I/2 demonstrates, furthermore, that Barth’s espousal of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula does not lead to a neglect of Christ’s humanity. In fact, it is quite the opposite. While carefully circumscribing the function of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing, the second half of the first volume of the Church Dogmatics shows Barth beginning to craft a Christology that describes Christ’s humanity carefully and imaginatively. Fourth, and by way of a conclusion to the chapter, I comment on the relationship between modern research into the ‘historical Jesus’ and Barth’s Christology. Chapter 2 identifies Church Dogmatics II as the basic point of departure for understanding Barth’s mature Christology. After indicating that the doctrine of election is materially decisive for understanding Barth’s late work – so much so that certain claims in Church Dogmatics I are significantly qualified – I examine the doctrine of God in Church Dogmatics II/1, arguing that an intriguing manipulation of the neoplatonic language of ‘overflowing’ helps Barth to describe God’s unremitting eagerness to create, sustain and relate lovingly to humankind. I then suggest that II/2 builds upon and radicalizes this perspective. God is not just favourably disposed to humankind; rather, for the sake of establishing a permanent and irrevocable relationship with humankind, God self-determines in terms of Jesus Christ. God ‘selfdetermines’ in the sense that, in deciding to be the ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, God sovereignly wills to take on an identity, as Son, that is, always being transformed by the incarnation. The Son is the divine ‘person’ who is always moving towards, and is always being shaped by, the fact of his becoming flesh. This radical act of divine self-determination, epitomized by a deft distinction between ‘sovereign’ and ‘eminent’ grace, goes hand in hand with Barth’s affirmation of Christ’s humanity, understood to be differentiable from, but inseparably united with, Christ’s divinity. It is emblematic of God’s loving ‘patience’ (Geduld) that, even as the divine Son binds his identity to, and directs the course of, the concrete life of Christ, God affirms the ontological reality and distinction of the humanity that the Son assumes. The chapter then contends that, coincident with the Son’s incarnational self-determination, election entails the establishment of humanity as God’s covenant partner. Gottes Gnadenwahl is not just a matter of God embracing radical ontological difference within the divine life. It means also the establishment of Christ’s distinctive human agency. Christ, Barth suggests, lives and acts as the original human, enacting an identity that is, determinative for all humankind. To delineate further Barth’s understanding of Christ’s human agency, Chapter 3 focuses on Church Dogmtics IV/2. The chapter’s first section considers the organization of the doctrine of reconciliation, discussing Barth’s treatment of the munus triplex, his concern for accumulative christological description and his rejection of christological thinking that disjoins 8

INTRODUCTION

Christ’s person and work. The second section of the chapter examines some technical christological distinctions used by protestant scholastics: the communio naturarum, the communicatio idiomatum, the communicatio gratiarum and the communicatio operationum. I show that, whereas Barth’s Göttingen Dogmatics (1924) offered a fairly humdrum, indeed textbookish, construal of these terms, Barth now forwards a creative reconceptualization of their meaning, supportive of his radically actualized understanding of the incarnation. While maintaining a Reformed emphasis on the distinction of Christ’s humanity and divinity, Barth uses these terms to argue that Christ’s human agency is established and provoked by grace, actively involved in the union of divinity and humanity definitive of his person and given an indispensable role to play in the event of reconciliation. The third section of the chapter contends that Barth grants his own dogmatic perspective on Christ’s human act and being, anchored by the word ‘correspondence’ and conceived as Christ’s perfect response to God’s prevenient direction, priority over reworked scholastic definitions. Paying close attention to Barth’s exegetical remarks on the canonical Gospels, I offer an analysis of Christ’s correspondence organized around four terms: wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance. Subsequently, and with the help of Harry Frankfurt, I engage the issue of Christ’s sinlessness. So doing provides further indication that Barth’s frequent remarks about God’s ‘determination’ of Christ’s humanity do not slide into a problematic kind of determinism. Anticipating the conclusion to the study as a whole, I also reflect on the political import of Barth’s Christology. Chapter 4 ‘turns back’ to IV/1, for by initially engaging the doctrine of reconciliation via IV/2, my analysis has gained sufficient interpretative momentum to grapple with the fast-paced christological programme advanced in this part volume. Recalling and expanding the interpretative contentions of Chapter 2, I first provide an analysis of Barth’s understanding of the word ‘history’ (Geschichte). This analysis considers, among other things, Barth’s understanding of time; his relationship with Martin Kähler, Rudolf Bultmann, Johannes Cocceius and G. W. F. Hegel; and his understanding of story and narrative. Second, I offer an interpretation of Barth’s understanding of obedience (Gehorsam) as a christological category. I present obedience as an intra-divine event and a human event. In terms of divine obedience, IV/1 tenders a Trinitarian amplification of the doctrine of election outlined in Church Dogmatics II/2. At issue here is not some kind of ‘ranking’ between Father and Son, even though Barth’s patriarchal biases sometimes lead him to suggest as much. Rather, obedience helps Barth to describe God’s application of God’s loving intentions. It connects what is classically called the begottenness of the Son with the Son’s active – which is to say, incarnational – enactment of divine love. In terms of human obedience, Barth here specifies a crucial dimension of Christ’s human contribution to reconciliation. Commending a model of atonement centred on the idea of 9

THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST

substitution (Stellvertretung), Barth describes Christ’s participation in the justificatory event of the cross, focusing particularly on Christ’s willingness to self-constitute as the human who undergoes punishment for sin. Third and finally, I consider Barth’s treatment of Gethsemane. I suggest that Barth’s remarks about this intriguing moment in the Gospel narratives show his Christology in full flight and deepen still further his description of reconciliation as an event divinely and humanly contrived. My concluding chapter has two purposes. First, I summarize the basic interpretative contentions of this book and note possible lines of future research. Second, I experiment briefly with the ethical and political implications of my interpretation, attending particularly to Barth’s provocative understanding of punishment. I suggest that this aspect of Barth’s Christology might help to disrupt the militaristic ethos currently ascendant in many western nations and, in some small way, lend support to those who believe that Christian faith must exhibit a ‘basically undiplomatic’ character.14

IV A few comments about the overall character of this work provide a useful close to this introduction. As will be apparent from the preceding overview, this work has little interest in upholding disciplinary boundaries. It moves freely between modes of reflection that, according to convention, are typically kept distinct. On one level, I betray an unwillingness to restrict my interpretation to specific dogmatic loci. Indeed, while I have a good deal to say about Christ’s divinity, Christ’s humanity and the ‘mode of union’, I pass rather quickly over some issues contiguous to these topics (the standing and operations of Christ’s humanity after the resurrection, Barth’s evaluation of ‘faculty’ psychology, his pointed insistence that Christ’s humanity must be reckoned as ‘flesh’, for instance), while dwelling at length on others (the logos ensarkos, Barth’s understanding of the Trinity and the atonement, and the political import of the Dogmatics, for instance). On another level, as noted earlier, I consistently refuse to draw a sharp line between historical and dogmatic theology, even though my analysis is obviously preoccupied with the latter field. This leads to ad hoc comparisons, passing and protracted, between Barth and theologians as diverse as Maximus Confessor, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Gottfried Thomasius and Jürgen Moltmann. It also means that I read the Dogmatics synchronically and diachronically, pursuing the meaning of the whole while also identifying shifts of perspective within the text. And to make matters worse,

14

Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, Vol. 1 (ed. Hannelotte Reiffen; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 244.

10

INTRODUCTION

crisscrossing both the historical and dogmatic realms, I engage philosophical texts and ideas as seem fitting: my interlocutors here include Kant, Hegel and Harry Frankfurt. Finally, the boundary line between interpretative and constructive theological work becomes somewhat fuzzy at points. Such fuzziness is probably most apparent during my last chapter, which draws on Barth’s Christology and his understanding of the atonement to formulate a critical attitude towards the so-called war on terror currently being waged by some western governments – my goal being to hint at a Barth-inspired option for the contemporary ‘theopolitical imagination’.15 What follows, then, is a somewhat eclectic piece of theological reflection that, while offering a particular ‘take’ on the Dogmatics, risks the charge of interdisciplinary wildness. A tripartite apologia for the methodological idiosyncrasy of this study is therefore in order. First, and with respect to my disregard for the standard theological loci, my hope is that the losses incurred through a contravention of dogmatic boundaries will be offset by a keener appreciation of the deep coherence of Barth’s thought, engaged here from a hitherto unconsidered vantage point. On this reckoning, what follows is not intended to be an exhaustive account of Barth’s Christology that focuses particularly on Christ’s humanity (though of course I hope it has some claim to comprehensiveness). My goal is rather to pursue a topic that runs through the Dogmatics. Precisely because Barth does not restrict the issue of Christ’s humanity and human agency to (say) an exploration of the hypostatic union or an amplification of the dyothelite current in Christian thought, but allows this reality to affect various aspects of his dogmatic proposal, so too does my interpretation range across various loci. It follows Christ’s person as he makes his presence felt on the Dogmatics. It attempts to describe Barth’s sense of the one who has ‘passed through the midst’ (Lk. 4.30) – one who cannot be captured in person, much less confined by thought, but one who can, perhaps, be rightly glimpsed. Second, and with respect to the meshing of systematic, philosophical and historical reflection, my intention is not, of course, to draw attention away from Barth’s keen sense of the integrity of Christian dogmatics as a rational craft, uniquely animated by the revelation of God witnessed in scripture. It is certainly possible and profitable to analyse Barth’s work in ways that pay scant attention to other authors, no matter what guild it is to which they belong and no matter what time period it is in which they write. My preference, however, is to advance scholarly understanding of the Dogmatics by emulating Barth’s appropriation of diverse historical and philosophical resources. If Hans Frei is right to say that Barth operates in a 15

I borrow this phrase from William T. Cavanaugh; see his Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (London: T&T Clark, 2002).

11

THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST

‘philosophically eclectic’ manner, ‘employing the particular “conceptuality” or conceptualities . . . that serve best to cast into relief the particular theological subject matter under consideration’,16 might it not also be the case that an analogous ‘eclecticism’ has a role to play in interpretative work? For sure, there are risks here. The propriety and value of any staged conversation between Barth and other thinkers is open to critique after the fact; undisciplined utilizations of extra-dogmatic resources have the potential to wreak real interpretative havoc. My hunch, however, is that careful uses of extra-theological ‘conceptualities’ can illumine valuably our understanding of the Dogmatics, casting light on some of its most intriguing claims and nuances. And my hope is that this book, in some modest way, shows how a diverse range of comparative reflections helps one to appreciate better Barth’s monumental achievement. Third and finally, there is the matter of my willingness to blur the distinction between interpretative and constructive work. Do my theological sympathies warp my reading of Barth on certain dogmatic topics? And do my political leanings corrupt my sense of what Barth’s Christology portends for Christian ethics, and Christian politics, in the present day? One can of course deflect such questions by arguing that the distinction between interpretative and constructive work is basically illusory. Everyone reads from somewhere; the ideal of an ‘objective’ reading simply betrays attachment to hermeneutically naïve suppositions. But such an evasion will of course not do. Recognizing that a scholar’s location shapes his or her reading of a text does not sanction some kind of interpretative free-for-all. On the contrary, it obliges that scholar to demonstrate that his or her reading of said text is not determined exclusively by contextual pressures – even though such pressures will have stimulated inquiry in the first place. Moreover, an interpretation forwarded by a ‘situated reader’ must be checked against the original text, assessed according to various canons of argumentative rigour, subjected to independent theological, ethical and political critique, and so on. Since I will not avail myself of excuses, two points about the distinction between the interpretative and constructive dimensions of this work seem appropriate. On one level, I do believe that the following work offers an accurate account of Barth’s mature Christology, particularly with reference to the issue of Christ’s humanity. It can and should be taken as an attempt to read Barth well. While the study doubtless betrays certain constructive sympathies – a commitment to ‘postmetaphysical’ but ontologically minded dogmatic reflection; an interest in narrative, agency and identity, informed in part by the works of Hans Frei and his students; a liking for finely grained

16

Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology (ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 162.

12

INTRODUCTION

scriptural exegesis; a fondness for ‘scholastic’ distinctions in dogmatic reflection; and a commitment to certain feminist principles (an unusual quintet, to be sure!) – I believe that these sympathies have facilitated and not corrupted my reading of the Dogmatics. Of course, I leave it to my readers to affirm or contest this belief. On another level, I make no apologies for ‘stretching’ my interpretation at certain points (say, with respect to divine patience) and for drawing political conclusions at the end of this text. Christian theology should learn from Barth; it learns well as it thinks with Barth, after Barth. To my mind, this means delighting in and affirming the basic coherence of his audacious christological proposal; examining this proposal in creative ways; challenging those aspects of his thought that appear unclear, misguided or contrary to the basic impulses of Christian faith; and embracing the claim that ‘[t]he Church must stand for social justice in the political sphere’, and, as proves necessary, speak as a ‘wholesomely disturbing presence’ vis-à-vis the state as civil community.17 It means taking seriously the fact that the Dogmatics inspires new presentations of Christian doctrine and Christian ethics for the present day: presentations that have nothing to do with the pursuit of novelty, and everything to do with the glorious and unsettling presence of the living God. I am tremendously fond of a trio of sentences in the second edition of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans: ‘In God I am what I am; I cannot therefore wait to be what I am. Under grace, and aware of the message of Christ, I am exposed to the full and unavoidable earnestness of [God’s] demand, claim, and promise; I am subjected to a vast and vehement pressure. To be a Christian is to be under this pressure’.18 Building on the findings of four fairly technical chapters about Barth’s Christology, the final section of this book sketches what I believe to be one dimension of the ‘vehement pressure’ exerted on those who confess Christ crucified and raised in these difficult times. It asks after the contemporary significance of Barth’s Christology.

A note on language, citations and translations Barth’s extensive use of male pronouns can prove disconcerting for Englishspeaking readers. It is of course part of the original text, though the German lacks the capitalization of ‘He’, ‘Him’ or ‘His’ that irritates some newcomers to the Church Dogmatics. Barth also used the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ without

17

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Karl Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, in Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings 1946–1952 (ed. Ronald G. Smith; New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), pp. 33 and 36. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns; London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 229.

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THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST

awareness of the concerns raised in scholarship influenced by, or expressive of, feminist and womanist commitments.19 Since I worry that some uses of gendered language for God might uphold patriarchal habits of thought and behaviour, this study often employs the term ‘God’ as both a noun and pronoun. I also purposefully exploit Barth’s own terminology of Seinsweise, referring to God as ‘one in three ways of being’, or talking about God in God’s first and second ways of being, in order to avoid overusing ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. And in many of my own translations, I replace German pronouns. Er becomes ‘God’, sein becomes ‘God’s’, and er sich becomes ‘God Godself’; Mensch becomes ‘the human’, ‘humanity’ or ‘humankind’. At the same time, I often follow Barth’s use of the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ and, on occasion, I use male pronouns for God. I do so for reasons beyond the stylistic (though, for sure, consistently employing ‘way of being’ would make for unwieldy prose). First, these terms are basic to Barth’s own thinking. To remove them would be to misrepresent his thought; it would suggest that the form and content of his theology could be easily separated. Indeed, to expunge male pronouns and images entirely from this work would draw attention away from Barth’s complicity in a (perhaps) problematic tradition of theological rhetoric. Second, I am not yet convinced that Christian discourse, at least when it holds fast to the principle of sola scriptura, can dispense with gendered language for God. Although one might viably prescind from naming God tout court (i.e., God in God’s full triune reality) as ‘He’ or ‘he’, the names of ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are perhaps unavoidable when specifying intra-Trinitarian relations and actions. For how else does Trinitarian thinking maintain continuity with the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament? And might not gendered terms be necessary for an adequate explication of the triune God’s immanent being and economic actions? Problems, for sure, still lie close at hand. Barth himself does not manage to separate a dogmatic use of gendered language from an endorsement of patriarchal standards (see Chapter 4); it is also possible that tethering Trinitarian language to biblical names and pronouns ends up colluding in the baleful history of patriarchalism. At any rate, I have chosen not to 19

It is difficult to anticipate Barth’s response to concerns about gendered language for God. He might be resistant to change, arguing that the biblical witness to revelation ought to determine the language of dogmatic reflection. (Thus I/2, p. 493: ‘The form cannot . . . be separated from the content, and there can be no question of a consideration of the content without the form.’) Since Jesus calls God ‘Father’, should not the theologian follow suit when naming God in God’s first way of being? However, Barth was sensitive to the socio-cultural import of dogmatic terminology. His preference for Seinsweise over ‘person’ is a case in point. Though one can easily insist that God defines what ‘person’ means, the modern individualistic connotations of the term cannot be ignored; using a different term is therefore advisable. Might Barth have realized, then, that naming God repeatedly as ‘He’, or more specifically as Father and/or Son, could prove problematic?

14

INTRODUCTION

remove all gendered language from this book. Should I undertake constructive projects in the future, I will of course have to make some decisions, given that I will not be able to position myself behind the barrier of interpretative propriety. Quotations from the Church Dogmatics are indicated in the body of the main text: I simply use the volume number and part volume number, followed by the page number. The citation ‘rev.’ indicates where I offer a revised translation; the letters KD indicate when I translate directly from the original German. I would add that I often follow the original German with respect to emphases, which Barth uses liberally, even though these are rarely included in the English text. To avoid overly cumbersome notation, I have not indicated when these emphases have been reinserted. For biblical quotations, I typically draw on the New Revised Standard Version.

15

1 approaching barth’s christology

Can there be any more urgent task for a theologian than Christology? And once this task is recognized, can the disputation be avoided? Is it not the case that once intractable tasks have been posed, they must be disputed, even if they are incapable of solution?1 Barth denkt neutestamentlich.2

How does one engage the Christology of the Church Dogmatics? Difficulties immediately arise because of the size of this work: Barth’s multiloquence daunts even the most devoted reader. Still more troublesome is the absence of a circumscribed treatment of Jesus Christ in this vast text. No single paragraph, chapter or part volume conveys the essence of Barth’s Christology. Conversely, every paragraph, chapter and part volume of Dogmatics conveys some part of Barth’s Christology.3 The fact that ‘in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5.19) never falls from view. Why so? Because whatever the impression made by the second edition of his commentary on Romans, Barth does not view God’s Word as a brute fact that leaves the theologian dumbstruck. An additional claim came to the fore in Barth’s Göttingen lectures and thereafter received massive explication in the Church Dogmatics: God’s speech enables a conceptual elucidation of every aspect of Christian faith. And since Jesus Christ is God’s Word, ‘the definition of

1

2

3

Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, 1923 (trans. Darrell L. Guder and Judith J. Guder; Louisville: WJKP, 2002), p. 160. Hans Stickelberger, Ipsa assumptione creatur: Karl Barths Rückgriffe auf die klassicher Christologie und die Frage nach der Selbständigkeit des Menschen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1979), p. 56. Thus Thompson, Christ in Perspective, p. 1: ‘In [Barth’s] theology there is no Christology as such; on the other hand, it is all Christology.’

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APPROACHING BARTH’S CHRISTOLOGY

revelation arising out of revelation itself’ (I/2, p. 10), each doctrinal locus bears witness to its christological index. Thus the often-quoted claim that a ‘church dogmatics must . . . be christologically determined as a whole and in all its parts’ (I/2, p. 123). Perhaps, then, engaging the broad range of ‘christological perspectives’4 developed in the Dogmatics ought to trump any pursuit of Barth’s Christology as such. Might it be better to reckon with Barth’s appreciation for the capaciousness and vitality of God’s Word than to cramp his theology with an interpretation focused on Christ’s humanity? Maybe. Yet this study does tackle Barth’s mature Christology, hoping especially to engage Barth’s description of Christ’s human being and action. The propriety of this interpretative ambition can only prove itself in the pages ahead; there is nothing gained by trying to defend it on point of principle. Suffice it now to say that, while somewhat in tension with Barth’s preference for ‘circling a high mountain which, although it is one and the same mountain, exists and manifests itself in different shapes,’5 such specificity of focus does not debar interest in the diverse outworkings of Barth’s Christology. Exactly because Barth applies his ‘christological concentration’6 in a thoroughgoing manner, a sound grasp of its material basis facilitates a more fruitful engagement with the broad dynamics of the Church Dogmatics than would otherwise be possible. If readers find their interest piqued by this huge text – and they need not be bound to a particular denomination, committed to a distinct doctrinal standpoint or even initially sympathetic to the text for such interest to arise – coming to grips with Barth’s description of Jesus Christ will help those readers to navigate, and to understand better, many of its most important claims. The question therefore remains: how does one engage Barth’s Christology? My answer begins with this chapter’s first section, which considers Bruce McCormack’s dazzling study, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. Of paramount importance is McCormack’s claim that Barth’s affiliation of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing with the ‘dialectic of veiling and unveiling’ marks a key moment of intellectual maturation – the point at which Barth firmly secures a Christocentric orientation for his theology. I use this aspect of McCormack’s analysis to frame two proximate questions, thereby launching my own interpretation. Does Barth’s use of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing imperil a robust acclamation of Christ’s humanity? More specifically, might Barth’s use of this pairing undermine his dogmatic account of Christ’s human agency? 4

5 6

The subtitle of Thompson’s text, Christ in Perspective, is ‘Christological Perspectives in the Theology of Karl Barth’. Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 34. Karl Barth, How I Changed My Mind (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1966), p. 43.

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The chapter’s second section considers what standing Barth grants the Chalcedonian Definition.7 Although various interpreters have used the adjective ‘Chalcedonian’ profitably with respect to Barth’s mature Christology – and George Hunsinger is the outstanding example here – I argue that the term should only be applied to the Dogmatics loosely and with due reservations. Certainly, Barth views Chalcedon as a riposte to liberal hedging regarding Christ’s divinity. The Definition, more specifically, provides support for Barth’s concern to coordinate an affirmation of Christ’s ontological complexity (his being divine and human) with an affirmation of Christ’s personal simplicity. Furthermore, Hunsinger is astute in identifying a ‘Chalcedonian pattern’ that pervades Barth’s later work and informs Barth’s sophisticated appreciation for the concurrence of divine and human action.8 However, Barth’s attitude to the Definition is more complex than Hunsinger and other commentators have realized. While approving the gist of Chalcedon in Church Dogmatics I/2 (1938) and thereafter, Barth sidelines a key element of its conceptual apparatus – specifically, the word ‘nature’ (Natur, Wesen)9 – initially replacing the phrase ‘one person in two natures’ with the minimalist formula, vere Deus vere homo. Such circumspection vis-à-vis Chalcedon, which endures throughout the Dogmatics, highlights two of Barth’s abiding concerns: ensuring that scripture, not abstract categories, funds christological reflection and conceptualizing Christ’s person and work in actualistic terms. The third section of the chapter sketches some important christological moves in I/2, thereby introducing issues considered throughout the rest of the book. While I consider the complex relationship between Barth’s prolegomenal ‘Doctrine of the Word of God’ and later volumes in Chapter 2, this section identifies a less-than-humble claim in Barth’s first preface (‘I do at least know what I am after’ [I/1, p. xvii]) as telling with respect to matters christological. Barth’s concern to integrate dogmatic and exegetical reflection; a commitment to a Reformed differentiation of Christ’s divinity and humanity, over against Lutheran habits of thought; an interest in dyothelitism (Christ’s having two ‘wills’: one divine, the other, human); the suggestion that the Son’s assumption of humanity means the assumption of sinful ‘flesh’, judged and condemned by God; and intriguing hints about Christ’s human agency, framed in terms of his agony in Gethsemane – these elements of I/2 advert enduring features of Barth’s Christology that undergo extensive elaboration as the Church Dogmatics progresses. Sketching these

7

8 9

See here Philip Schaff (ed.), The Creeds of Christendom; Vol. 2, The Greek and Latin Creeds (rev. David S. Schaff; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), pp. 62–5. Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, esp. pp. 185–8. Barth favours the latter term (Wesen) while not abandoning the former. They seem basically interchangeable for him.

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APPROACHING BARTH’S CHRISTOLOGY

provisional stirrings indicates also that Barth avoids the christological problems that might have accompanied his affiliation of the dialectic of veiling and unveiling with the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing. Not only do these theologoumena ultimately bear little weight in the elucidation of his Christology but Barth also ensures that their epistemological function does not compromise his dogmatic affirmation of Christ’s humanity. In light of this reading of I/2, I also suggest that the textbook distinction between the Christologies of Antioch and Alexandria is not profitably applied to the Dogmatics. Finally, I consider the relationship between research into the ‘historical Jesus’ and Barth’s dogmatic portrayal of Jesus Christ. My basic claim is this: Barth’s disinterest in historical–critical research does not signal any neglect of Christ’s humanity. Certainly, since Barth pays scant attention to such research he risks accusations of uncritical fideism, hermeneutical naivety and (worst of all) a lack of intellectual generosity. Nevertheless, his understanding of theological inquiry as a critical dialogue between the noetic dimensions of Christian faith and scripture’s witness to revelation allows him to tender a description of Christ as human that pays little mind to the findings of geisteswissenschaftlich scholarship. Accordingly, while questions about this aspect of Barth’s Christology ought not to be dropped (for how can a Christian theologian not reckon with new, and possibly valuable insights about Christ’s life and times?), they can, at least for a little while, be set aside.

The anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing The importance of McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Theology lies most generally in its ‘genetic’ style of analysis, which integrates historical and systematic reflection. Drawing on the best German-language research to date and showing remarkable judgement with respect to the contingent factors that shaped Barth’s theological development, McCormack returns Barth to the historical context in which he lived, thought and wrote. The principal interpretative gain is an identification of Barth’s theology as ‘a thoroughly modern option’.10 With lucid analyses of lectures and articles in the 1910s and 1920s, the first and second editions of Romans, the Göttingen Dogmatics, the Anselm study and the early volumes of the Church Dogmatics, McCormack shows that Barth’s intellectual formation depended on, and was defined by, encounters with a diverse range of thinkers and intellectual trends. Scholars must now accept that a fascinating intermixture of Marburg neo-Kantianism, Wilhelm Herrmann, the Religious Socialism associated with Herrmann Kutter and Leonhard Ragaz, and the 10

McCormack, Dialectical Theology, p. 466.

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philosophical work of Heinrich Barth (Karl’s brother), as well as a circumstantial encounter with Heinrich Heppe’s Die Dogmatik der evangelischreformierten Kirche, funded and shaped Barth’s theology.11 The basic elements of McCormack’s analysis admit of quick summary. Distinguishing what one might call the diachronic and the synchronic registers of his argument is a useful way to proceed. With respect to the diachronic register, McCormack challenges Hans Urs von Balthasar’s claim that Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum marks Barth’s transition from a dialectical to an analogical mode of reflection – the former term characterizing his work in the immediate aftermath of the break with liberalism until the early 1930s; the latter, the monumental Church Dogmatics.12 On McCormack’s reckoning, von Balthasar lacks a nuanced understanding of dialectic and its abiding role in Barth’s thought. Concomitantly, von Balthasar fails to recognize that Barth’s writing had analogical aspects from the first edition of Romans onwards. The latter point has particular importance. The analogia fidei is not, strictly speaking, a kind of theological ‘method’ that Barth adopted to consolidate and finesse his ‘break’ with liberalism but rather testimony to Barth’s enduring belief in the orderly cognitive consequences of God’s action upon the Christian believer – the fact that God gives knowledge of God its distinctive ‘shape’ and validity. The interpreter therefore ought not to dwell on the question of whether Barth’s thought is analogical (it certainly is). The real challenge is to understand how Barth relates analogy and dialectic in different ways in his work. In terms of the synchronic register, McCormack promotes a new paradigm for reading Barth’s work from the mid-1910s onwards, summarized by the phrase ‘critically realistic dialectical theology’. Barth’s thought is ‘critical’ because it upholds, or at least refuses to shuck off, modern epistemological convictions. Like many of his nineteenth-century liberal forebears, Barth accepts the perspective of Kant’s first critique (as interpreted by the Marburg thinkers Herrmann Cohen and Paul Natorp),13 whereby the faculties of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) and understanding (Verstand) decisively organize the sense data received by human beings. Barth’s thought is ‘realistic’ because, even granted Kantian assumptions about the active human knower, it insists on the irreducible reality of God and God’s self-revelation to human beings. Against any ‘postulation’ of God – as suggested, for example, in Kant’s first and second critiques, and internalized in much Ritschlian theology – Barth takes up 11

12

13

The text is available in translation; see Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics: A Compendium of Reformed Theology (ed. and rev. Ernst Bizer; trans. G. T. Thomson; London: Wakeman Great Reprints, n.d.). See von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, esp. pp. 59–167. For Barth’s study of Anselm, see Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (London: SCM, 1960). See here also Simon Fisher, Revelatory Positivism? Barth’s Earliest Theology and the Marburg School (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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and radicalizes Wilhelm Herrmann’s sense of God’s self-authenticating objectivity. The tenuous association of divine reality and divine revelation characteristic of much liberal theology is rejected; Barth asserts a bold confidence in God’s sovereign actuality and God’s distinctive and purposive self-presentation.14 In characterizing Barth’s thought as ‘dialectical’, McCormack builds on Michael Beintker’s pioneering Die Dialektik in der ‘dialektischen Theologie’ Karl Barths, which offers a nuanced analysis of the various permutations of dialectic in Barth’s early work.15 McCormack identifies the dialectic of veiling and unveiling as having fundamental importance, given that it allows Barth to coordinate his critical and realistic commitments in the context of a sophisticated theological epistemology. On the realism side of the dialectic, Barth insists that God’s revelation truly discloses God in Godself. The ‘Unintuitable . . . become[s] intuitable’16 because God, the pre-eminent Subject who humans cannot know by dint of their limited powers, makes God’s own self known. Liberal suppositions about human subjectivity as theology’s point of departure are therefore overtopped by an awareness that God’s prevenient and revelatory action suffices for God to reveal Godself. On the critical side of the dialectic, the ‘Unintuitable . . . becomes intuitable’ because God makes Godself an object apprehensible to human thought. An object? Exactly so. Since only phenomena – that is, objects that appear in time and space – are susceptible to human apprehension, God commandeers and ‘hides’ in creaturely media when revealing Godself to human beings. This ‘veiling’ or ‘concealment’ allows God to ‘unveil’ Godself, while not annulling the regular processes of human cognition. The upshot is that Barth overcomes and maintains ‘the problem of the divine subjectivity in revelation’,17 assuring the reality of God’s self-revelation while simultaneously chastening the tendency of theological liberalism to gauge God’s being and action according to human standards. On the one side, God remains the presupposition of 14

15

16 17

For a development of this line of reasoning, see Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Revelation and Theology in Transfoundationalist Perspective: Karl Barth’s Theological Epistemology in Conversation with a Schleiermacherian Tradition’, Journal of Religion 78 (1998), pp. 18–37. Michael Beintker, Die Dialetik in der ‘dialektischen Theologie’ Karl Barths: Studien zur Entwicklung der barthschen Theologie und zur Vorgeschichte der ‘Kirchlichen Dogmatik’ (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1987), esp. pp. 25–59. Focusing on Romans II, Beintker deftly distinguishes the following: a ‘complementary’ dialectic, whereby two poles remain in unsublatable antithetical relationship (God and world); a ‘supplementary’ dialectic, whereby one pole ‘overcomes’ the other, given its greater potency (Christ and Adam); a ‘noetic dialectic’ that delights in the rhetorical tension of point and counterpoint; and a ‘dialectic of life’, which identifies the contradictions of human existence. McCormack, Dialectical Theology, p. 249 (my emphasis). Ibid., p. 208 (emphasis removed).

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God’s self-disclosure. ‘God can make himself known only by God’,18 and God does makes himself known by way of God’s revelatory action. On the other side, the Christian is disabused of the sense that she can ‘possess’ God by way of religious experience, moral activity, reflection on the vicissitudes of history or even (though McCormack does not press this last point) an overblown doctrine of inspiration that makes the Word of God inherent to the Bible, as opposed to seeing the Bible as a discursive realm wherein the Christian hopes to encounter divine speech.19 At no point does a creaturely veil become the content of revelation; at no point does God surrender God’s own reality, thereby becoming a fixture of human religiosity. The ‘infinite qualitative distinction’, endures. The word ‘theology’ describes the intellectual task faced by the Christian, given God’s revelation and the knowledge inherent to faith. Whatever perplexities and hesitations arise when the Christian thinks out her beliefs, claims about God can and must be ventured. God’s self-disclosure, mediated by scripture and actualized in faith by the Spirit, incites and enables orderly reflection about God’s being and action. Without doubt, theological work has a provisional character. Not only do human beings not ‘hear’ the Word without mediation, but also the project of ‘following up God’s revelation’ (I/2, p. 5) necessarily entails the approximation of all-too-human language to God’s self-communicating speech. The theologian must in fact settle for a frustrated existence. She can never presume her efforts to talk of God have adequacy; she will never provide a transcription of divine truth; the possibility of hubristic Christian religiosity haunts her every declaration. But she cannot abjure the duty to theologize and, in view of God’s gracious advance, cheerfully hopes and expects that her thought and writing will conform to God’s self-knowing. The corrigibility of theological discourse, one might say, proves tolerable because of the hope that God renders the veils of revelation transpicuous and conforms human speech to God’s Word. The synchronic dimension of McCormack’s argument is joined by diachronic claims at various points, not least in a masterful treatment of Barth’s work throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. For my purposes, though, the most important intersection of diachronic and synchronic reflection occurs during McCormack’s discussion of Barth’s discovery and adoption of the anhypostatic–enhypostatic ‘model’ of Christology in the early 1920s.20 Before he took up a professorship at Göttingen, Barth’s dialectic of veiling and unveiling lacked for fixed mooring. Given his desire to emphasize God’s 18 19

20

Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, p. 212. Barth makes this point powerfully in §19, ‘The Word of God for the Church’. He inveighs against a ‘docetic’ view of scripture (a problem among post-Reformation scholastics; see I/2, pp. 514–26) just as much as he criticizes the liberal circumvention of revelation. McCormack, Dialectical Theology, pp. 327–74, esp. 358–71.

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untrammelled freedom, revelation was not securely bound to any single event in time and space. It would, of course, be wrong to suggest that Barth portrayed revelation in diffuse terms; a careful reading of Romans adverts a perspective distinguished by its intensive christological focus. But it was also the case that any ‘bit’ of creaturely reality could, in principle, function as a veil for God’s self-disclosure: at this stage of his career, Barth’s Christocentrism was less a matter of dogmatic principle, more an instance of sound dogmatic practice. However, when preparing for his first lectures in dogmatics, Barth found a way to stabilize and to render more precise his understanding of revelation – the idea that Christ’s human nature was anhypostatic and enhypostatic to his divine nature. Heinrich Heppe’s compendium of Reformed dogmatics was his source. Following Heppe closely, Barth took anhypostasia to mean that Jesus’ humanity lacks subsistence and reality in itself, independent from its creation and assumption by God qua Son. The accompanying claim of enhypostasia means that (a) Christ’s human nature has subsistence and reality only in light of its union with God qua Son; and (b) lacking a hypostasis of its own, Christ’s humanity has personality only derivatively, in light of that possessed by the divine Son. How did this relatively obscure bit of christological dexterity help with Barth’s doctrine of revelation? Well, discerning an elective affinity between the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing and the dialectic of veiling and unveiling, Barth used this affinity to coordinate his ‘critical realism’ with a new emphasis on Christ’s person as the norm that governs theological reflection. On one level, talk of the anhypostasia and enhypostasia of Christ’s humanity was compatible with Barth’s abiding conviction about the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ of God and humanity. It allowed an avowal of the unio personalis that did not compromise the distinction between God and humanity; Christ’s humanity could function as a veil for God’s self-revelation while remaining clearly distinguished from that revelation. On another level, revelation was now made local to Christ. The anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing was not only ‘well-suited for clarifying what was at stake in speaking of revelation as revelation in concealment, as indirect communication’, but Barth could also specify ‘the Subject of revelation [as] the Person of the Logos who has veiled Himself in human flesh’.21 Tethered to Jesus Christ, the veiling/unveiling dialectic could shed even the possibility of functioning in a non-christological manner. Barth’s doctrine of revelation was now bound firmly to the incarnation of the Son. Accordingly, even though Barth’s move towards Christocentrism was initially impeded by a commitment to ‘pneumatocentrism’ – which meant, ironically, that his theology sometimes appeared to be Christocentric in principle, but not in practice, until the mid1930s – the Göttingen Dogmatics established the foundation upon which the Church Dogmatics would be built. 21

Ibid., p. 362.

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While I will have occasion to return to McCormack’s work throughout this study, it is his analysis of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula that requires close attention at this juncture. If McCormack’s reading of Barth’s intellectual development convinces, as I believe it does, what does it portend for an interpretation of the Christology of the Dogmatics? How, in particular, might Barth’s pivotal association of anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing with the dialectic of veiling and unveiling bear on his later descriptions of Jesus Christ as truly divine and truly human? An initial issue relates to the meaning of anhypostasis and enhypostasis. It seems probable that various protestant scholastics, and thereafter Heppe, Friedrich Loofs and Barth treated these terms with undue license, mistakenly reading the ‘e0n [of enhypostasis] as a localizing prefix rather than as simply the opposite of an alpha privative’ in order to clarify the standing of Christ’s human nature. The terms therefore gained a definitional clarity that did not exist, and was never intended, among early Christian writers.22 So while Barth declares that ‘the doctrine of the anhypostasis and enhypostasis of the human nature (Natur) of Christ’ was ‘a doctrine unanimously supported’ (I/2, p. 163 rev.) in the early church – and may even have believed his own bluster – such a claim does not take due note of a quite complex doctrinal history. It functions primarily as a means for Barth to accredit his own perspective with patristic precedent, over against the alleged failings of liberal Christologies. One wonders, also, whether Barth’s rather credulous embrace of Heppe’s construal of this ‘doctrine’ might not hamstring his Christology at a later stage. For example: what does it mean to say that Christ’s ‘human nature acquires existence (subsistence) in the existence of God, specifically in the way of being (in der Seinsweise) . . . of the Word’ (I/2, p. 163 rev.)?23 How is the preposition ‘in’ used here? Is ‘inexistence’ simply

22

See here Brian E. Daley, ‘ “A Richer Union”: Leontius of Byzantium and the Relationship of Human and Divine in Christ’, Studia Patristica 24 (1993), pp. 239–65 (241). Also useful are Aloys Grillmeier, ‘Die anthropologisch-christologische Sprache des Leontius von Byzanz und ihre Beziehung zu den Symmikta Zetemata des Neuplatonikers Porphyrius’, in Herbert Eisenberger (ed.), Hermeneumata: Festschrift für Hadwig Hörner (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), pp. 61–72; Matthias Gockel, ‘A Dubious Christological Formula? Leontius of Byzantium and the Anhypostasis–Enhypostasis Theory’, JTS 51.2 (2000), pp. 515–32; and Richard Cross, ‘Individual Natures in the Christology of Leontius of Byzantium’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 10.2 (2002), pp. 245–65. Two studies that trace connections between patristic thinking, protestant scholasticism and Barth are F. LeRon Shults, ‘A Dubious Christological Formula: From Leontius of Byzantium to Karl Barth’, Theological Studies 57.3 (1996), pp. 431–46; and U. M. Lang, ‘Anhypostatos–Enhypostatos: Church Fathers, Protestant Orthodoxy, and Karl Barth’, JTS 49.2 (1998), pp. 630–57. There is no need to assess the respective merits of these essays here. The important point is that the role of the anhypostasia/ enhypostasia pairing in patristic and scholastic thought, not to mention its dogmatic import, remains a matter of debate.

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a matter of the derivative status of Christ’s humanity, given the hypostatic union? Or does ‘inexistence’ necessitate reflection about the created time and space actualized and possessed by God as incarnate Son? Indeed, in light of Barth’s epistemological commitments, might one say that the Son was ‘in’ Jesus of Nazareth qua human – as in ‘concealed in’ – even though Jesus’ humanity is enhypostatic to the Son’s being? Barth’s identification of Christ’s anhypostatic and enhypostatic humanity as a veil that ‘conceals’ God raises still more pressing concerns. Does Barth’s deft application of these theologoumena threaten the integrity of a Christology that seeks to affirm Christ as fully human? Veils typically do little more than embellish, or perhaps camouflage, those who wear them; they often have the status of dispensable and fairly insignificant adornments. So what does it mean for Christ’s humanity to be described as a veil? Does this veil have any positive meaning, in christological terms? Or does the establishment and assumption of Christ’s humanity signify nothing more than God’s solicitude for the cognitive processes of the human? These questions are not only urgent in light of McCormack’s interpretative breakthrough with regard to Barth’s early work. They arise, also, because the rhetoric of the Dogmatics can imply disregard for Christ’s humanity, thereby giving credence to the charge of an unbalanced Christology: God all, and the human, nothing (or, at least, not much). For if ‘[a]part from its concrete existence in God in the event of the unio’, Christ’s human nature ‘has no existence (Dasein) of its own’ (I/2, p. 163), has not Barth foregrounded the primacy of God qua Son in a way that hobbles subsequent elucidations of Christ’s human decisions and actions? If the ‘only Subject here is the second Person of the Trinity’,24 is God also the sole agent defining Christ’s person? These questions are of course intended to provoke. In this and subsequent chapters, I identify the quite limited role of the anhypostasia and enhypostasia in Barth’s Christology (a role so limited that, in the final analysis, it matters little whether he or Heppe has warped their original meaning); emphasize that the dialectic of veiling and unveiling has a strictly circumscribed epistemological function that does not bear negatively on Barth’s positive christological claims; and argue that Barth’s willingness to deny a discrete ‘personality’ to Christ’s human essence, complementary to a powerful affirmation of the Son’s divine presence and action, does not compromise his affirmation of Christ’s full humanity and genuine human agency. Nevertheless, an important point has come into view. If Barth is to promulgate a Christology that attaches significant meaning to Christ’s humanity and 23

24

See here also I/2, p. 193: ‘the enhypostasis of the human nature of Christ [means] that He also exists as a man, not in virtue of a possibility of existence proper to his humanity, but solely in virtue of His divine existence in the eternal mode of being of the Word or Son of God’. McCormack, Dialectical Theology, p. 366 (my emphasis).

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human agency, coordinate with an avowal of his being fully divine, he will need to treat the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing carefully and, most likely, move beyond it.

Barth and the Definition of Chalcedon Over the last fifty years or so there has been an increased awareness that one must contend with what the Definition of Chalcedon (451 ce) does not say, as well as what it does say. Karl Rahner suggested as much when he identified Chalcedon’s ‘incompleteness’ in his classic article, ‘Current Problems in Christology’.25 More recently, Richard Norris and Sarah Coakley have offered nuanced accounts of Chalcedon’s reserve, their efforts indicative of the fact that, even as the Definition is gaining new credibility in different quarters of the English-speaking academy, its dogmatic import remains a matter of debate.26 Obviously, I cannot consider this document in detail in this context. My chief concern is to tease out Barth’s attitude towards it. Doing so points to Barth’s own reserve towards the Definition, tackles some of the questions raised in the previous section and, most importantly, helps to illustrate the central role given to scripture in Barth’s Christology. While various commentators have identified Barth’s Christology as Chalcedonian,27 the most important articulation of this description, and one

25 26

27

Rahner, ‘Current Problems in Christology’, p. 151. See here Richard Norris, Jr, ‘Chalcedon Revisited: A Historical and Theological Reflection’, in Bradley Nassif (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Theology: Essays in Memory of John Meyendorff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 140–58, and Sarah Coakley, ‘What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian “Definition”’, in Daniel Kendall, Stephen T. Davis and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 143–63. Hans Urs von Balthasar contends that I/2 ‘begins with a ringing affirmation that the teachings of Chalcedon still hold true and are binding, which implies the same for the concept of nature, physis. Of course, the concept cannot dissolve the lasting mystery of revelation and the Incarnation. But it can depict it’ (Theology of Karl Barth, p. 115); Berthold Klappert suggests that Barth’s description of Jesus Christ, guided by a coinherence of ‘person’ and ‘work’, affirms Chalcedon: ‘Die Zwei-“Naturen”-Lehre ist (for Barth) ein Implikat der Doppelbewegung des Versöhnungsgeschehens’ (Die Aufweckung des Gekreuzigten: der Ansatz der Christologie Karl Barths in Zusammenhang der Christologie der Gegenwart (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1971), p. 93); David Ford deems Barth’s theological ‘conclusions’ with regard to ‘the relation of divinity to humanity in Jesus Christ’ ‘impeccably Chalcedonian’ (Barth and God’s Story: Biblical Narrative and the Theological Method of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1981), p. 126); and, although he would later qualify this claim somewhat, Bruce McCormack describes Barth’s Christocentrism, post-1936,

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of the best Anglophone pieces on Barth’s Christology to date, is George Hunsinger’s brief essay, ‘Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Chalcedonian Character’.28 Hunsinger’s analysis proceeds in three stages. First, he follows recent scholarship in emphasizing the Definition’s minimalist cast and limited purpose. While there is dogmatic content here – and therefore not ‘grammar’ in a merely formal sense – since the Definition attests to the reality of Christ’s saving person, the document has a basically regulative function. It establishes rules for appreciating Christ’s personal simplicity and ontological complexity; it aims thereby to facilitate a good exegesis of the New Testament. At the same time, the Definition does not inhibit a bounded christological pluralism, for this document’s light conceptual freight and ‘open-textured reticence’29 deftly ‘demarcates a region in which there is more than one place to take up residence’.30 Chalcedon, in other words, licenses a variety of christological options, requiring only that the dogmatic truth of Christ’s being one person in two natures that are inconfuse, immutabiliter, inseperabiliter and indivise be upheld. Second, and turning to the Dogmatics, Hunsinger argues that Barth’s Christology entails a ‘strategy of juxtaposition’,31 whereby an Alexandrian sensibility, which emphasizes Christ’s divinity and personal simplicity, stands in dialectical relationship with an Antiochene counterpoint that emphasizes Christ’s humanity and ontological complexity. Even though the Alexandrian focus has ‘relative superiority’32 for Barth, given that it accentuates Christ’s person as divine and recognizes the asymmetrical relationship between divinity and humanity in his person, the insights of Alexandria and Antioch are represented throughout the Dogmatics. Barth occupies the ‘region’ marked out by the Definition in a complex way, shuttling his readers along two paths that, though conventionally viewed as divergent, can actually be rendered complementary. Indeed, noticing this ‘strategy of juxtaposition’ exposes the error of forcing the complex currents of Barth’s Christology into the straits of a single paradigm. It need not be thought that Barth is either Alexandrian or Antiochene; it is better to realize that his Christology draws on Alexandrian and Antiochene trajectories in an attempt to do justice to Christ as a personally simple and ontologically

28

29 30 31 32

as entailing the derivation of doctrines from a ‘highly actualistic a posteriori Chalcedonianism’ (Dialectical Theology, p. 454). More recently, see Patrick Patterson, ‘Chalcedon’s Apprentice: Karl Barth and the Twentieth-Century Critique of Classical Theology’, Toronto Journal of Theology 16.2 (2000), pp. 193–216 and Hans van Loon, ‘Karl Barth und Chalkedon’, ZdTh 19 (2003), pp. 162–82. George Hunsinger, ‘Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Chalcedonian Character’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 127–42. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 139.

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complex reality. Third and finally, Hunsinger praises the outworking of Barth’s Chalcedonianism. Among other things, he applauds Barth’s actualistic construal of the incarnation as a ‘concrete history’,33 approves the uneven weighting of love and punishment in Barth’s doctrine of atonement, and commends Barth’s affiliation of reconciliation and revelation. Hunsinger’s essay shows an exceptionally skilled interpreter at work. A detail of great importance, as will become evident, is Hunsinger’s perspicacity with regard to the connection between actualism and agency with respect to Christ’s person. He is quite right to note that, given Barth’s construal of Christ’s divine and human essences, Christ possesses ‘two wills or operations’ which together undertake the ‘common and single work’ of reconciliation.34 The accuracy of Hunsinger’s reading is compromised, however, by a lack of clarity about the nature and extent of Barth’s Chalcedonianism. Hunsinger uses the Definition’s four famous adverbs, conciliatory of two different christological emphases, to guide his exposition. He associates the Alexandrian idiom with the claim that the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity is ‘without separation and division’, being established by the prevenient act of God and defined by the person of the Son; he views the Antiochene perspective as emphasizing that humanity and divinity relate ‘without confusion or change’, thereby ensuring due attention to Christ’s genuine humanity. Yet this interpretative move, while rightly identifying Barth’s concern to do justice both to Christ’s personal simplicity and his ontological complexity, averts close attention to Barth’s attitude towards ‘nature’ as a concept basic to the Definition. Swayed by the minimalism he perceives in the Definition, Hunsinger does not pause to ask whether Barth himself views physis as an innocuous placeholder, devoid of significant connotative freight, betokening nothing more than the fullness of Christ’s divinity and the fullness of Christ’s humanity. Indeed, by retrojecting a rather Lindbeckian assessment of doctrine upon the Definition and Barth’s handling of it,35 Hunsinger does not wrestle sufficiently with the fact that Barth, even as he makes positive use of Chalcedon, effectively discards the language of ‘nature’ in his mature Christology. For while Barth endorses the gist of a hallowed benchmark for christological reflection, his own Christology bears a more idiosyncratic character than the Chalcedonian label suggests, involving a quiet eschewal of a key element of the Definition’s conceptual apparatus. It is useful to articulate these claims more fully. To offer a four-part summary of what follows: Barth’s complex attitude towards Chalcedon entails (a) a polemical use of the Definition against nineteenth-century liberal protestants; (b) a concern to have the biblical witness fund christological 33 34 35

Ibid., p. 134. Ibid. I allude here to George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).

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description; (c) worries about the understated soteriology of the Definition; and (d) a replacement of the phrase ‘two natures’ with a formula of unambiguously minimalist proportions – Christ as vere Deus vere homo. An excursus on ‘altkirchliche Christologie’ (KD I/2, p. 138)36 exemplifies the polemical dimensions of Barth’s position.37 In contrast to liberal dismissals of the Chalcedonian Definition, Barth’s approval could hardly be more emphatic. The Zweinaturlehre does not aim ‘to solve the mystery of revelation’; its purpose, rather, was ‘the establishment of the fact regarding the acting subject in revelation’ (I/2, p. 126 rev.) – a fact unhappily neglected by protestant thinkers disinclined to affirm much beyond Christ’s religious genius. Furthermore, the Definition supplies a patristic endorsement of the perspective sketched in Church Dogmatics I/1, offering edifying testimony to God’s self-presentation via the ‘veil’ of Christ’s human being. Systematicians today would do well to theologize in a comparable manner, as opposed to relying on the shifting sands of religious experience, moral upbuilding and historical research! Barth also defends Chalcedonian Christologies against those who, following Adolf Harnack’s lead, bemoan the ‘undeniable meticulousness with which the church fathers, the scholastics, and the postReformation orthodox pursued the task of explaining, of determining more precisely, and guarding against misunderstandings, the cardinal statement vere homo vere Deus’ (I/2, p. 127 rev.). The logic-chopping zeal of pre-liberal thinkers does not signify rarefied academicism, derivative of a ‘Greek’ philosophical mindset that fatefully buries the simple ‘essence’ of Christianity under the weight of metaphysical abstraction.38 It signals, rather, an 36 37

38

This phrase is laxly rendered ‘primitive Christology’ in translation. Useful comments on this excursus, and the larger question of Barth’s relationship with patristic writing, are offered in E. P. Meijering, Von der Kirchenvätern zu Karl Barth: Das altkirchliche Dogma in der ‘Kirchlichen Dogmatik’ (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1993), esp. pp. 14–19 and 121–4. Note particularly Meijering’s skilful description of the critical freedom that Barth reserves for himself: ‘Wenn es sich nach Barth im Bekenntnis zu Jesus Christus um ein Bekenntnis zu ihm als vere Deus vere homo handelt, so schliesst er sich damit zweifellos an die Intentionen des Dogmas an, aber es bleibt die Möglichkeit, gerade die Ausdrücke “wahrer Gott” und “wahrer Mensch” anders zu deuten also im Dogma vorausgesetzt und in der orthodoxen Dogmatik expliziert worden ist. Der Gegensatz zur liberalen Theologie besteht darin, dass er sich vom Dogma das Problem der Christologie, ausgedrückt in den Worten vere Deus vere homo, geben lass will, aber er erhält die Freiheit, dieses Problem in seiner eigenen Art und Weise zu behandeln und seine eigenen Antworten zu geben’ (p. 123). Harnack’s assessment of the Hellenic ‘lapse’ of early Christian thought – a transposition of heresy, that accredits German liberalism as orthodox – finds nuanced expression in the monumental History of Dogma (trans. Neil Buchanan; 7 vols; New York: Dover, 1961), first published in 1886. Interestingly, Barth uses Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) to attack liberal Christology in his excursus. Why such indirection? Because it helps Barth to associate protestant liberalism with a figure renowned as a philosopher – the implication being that, in contrast to his wayward forebears, Barth

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admirable commitment to investigating the ‘mystery’ of Christ – an object, granted in faith, that drives the Christian theologian towards complex modes of thought that discern ontological complexity alongside personal simplicity. Barth also rejects Harnack’s more particular charge that docetism and a ‘naturalistic mystico-magical-mechanical’ (I/2, p. 128) soteriology gradually dominated, and compromised, patristic thought. Since Schleiermacher, Barth argues, ‘nature’ has been improperly understood. Early Christian writers used this term to describe the multidimensional totality of an entity; their soteriology, whatever its faults, encompassed the ‘physical’ and ‘ethical’ dimensions of the human being. As such, and setting his sights now on both Ritschl’s ethical preoccupations and Herrmann’s spiritualized understanding of the Christian’s ‘communion’ with God through Christ, Barth contends that early Christian writing showed a balance sorely lacking in liberal protestantism, which, ‘apart from a faint, wistful echo of soul mysticism, capitulated to the moralism of exemplaristic Christology’ (I/2, p. 129 rev.), betraying ‘a horror of physis, of externality, of corporeality; it breathes in only the thin air of moral judgment and of psychic experiential capability’ (I/2, p. 130 rev.). In sum, then: ‘Whatever may be alleged against the altkirchliche Christologie . . . at every decisive point we have good reason to take our stand on its side and not on that of its accusers’ (I/2, p. 131). This excursus continues the critique of liberal Christology forwarded in §13, which tarred liberal and idealist Christologies with the brushes of ‘ebionitism’ and ‘docetism’, respectively.39 It cannot be counted among Barth’s finest moments. The analysis of liberalism is undermined by indiscriminate generalizations; the reading of Chalcedon slanted and made anachronistic by Barth’s neo-Kantian understanding of revelation as God’s ‘veiled’ self-presentation; the assessment of altkirchliche Christologie, lacking in detail. Yet, in view of Barth’s constructive project, such interpretative waywardness does not lack for justification. Given that his goal is to oppose Christologies that circumvent revelation and, more positively, given that he aspires to reinvigorate a sense of Christ’s divine-humanity, the scorned Definition provides welcome support. It is a breath of fresh air, redolent of the ‘true’ trajectory of Christian thought, which exposes neo-protestantism

39

writes as a real (i.e., churched) theologian who deals with revelation, not the idolatrous self-projections of the bourgeois European. Barth’s later lectures on nineteenth-century protestant theology also help to explain the focus on Herder. Barth here argues that Herder takes a fateful turn in light of Kant’s philosophy, lapsing into ‘anthropocentrism’ while hinting at a properly theological perspective. Thus Herder is appraised as ‘the inaugurator of typical nineteenth-century theology before its inauguration by Schleiermacher’. See here Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, new edn, 2001), p. 325. See here I/2, pp. 14–23 and 168–71; also I/1, pp. 402–6.

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as ‘an esoteric tradition’ (I/2, p. 610) that fails to reckon seriously and sufficiently with the incarnation. Yet one must not suppose that Barth’s admiration for patristic Christology equals an unqualified approval of Chalcedon. Nothing in the excursus suggests that Barth favours ‘nature’ language, even as he fulminates against the Definition’s detractors. The characterization of the Zweinaturlehre of the early Church as ‘very abruptly formulated’ (I/2, p. 129) in fact signals considerable cautiousness. Barth’s concern is to reorient a theological environment thrown off course by protestant liberalism, not to make the conceptual apparatus of the Definition normative for christological reflection in the present. Indeed, the concept of physis (translated both as Natur and Wesen) plays no significant role in the preliminary Christology of §15, which surrounds the excursus in question, or, in fact, in any paragraph of the Dogmatics. Barth’s reticence with respect to this term and its cognates reflects, in part, a context-bound suspicion of physis. But more basic to his marginalization of substantivist terminology is a circumspect attitude towards conceptual abstraction, itself a consequence of a stalwart commitment to the principle of sola scriptura – a commitment that tethers every dogmatic claim to the scriptural witness that God inspires. Obviously, Barth does not suffer the conceit that the theologian can somehow ‘opt out’ of her Greek heritage (or whatever philosophical context it is in which she operates) and therefore simply rehearse biblical claims and figures.40 Indeed, if dogmatics entails the ‘criticism and correction of Church proclamation’ (I/1, p. 283 rev.), it does well to utilize whatever philosophical concepts render its declarations maximally precise. Nevertheless, Barth treats all candidate concepts with a selectivity that recalls Calvin’s Institutes.41 The criterion of

40

41

Barth makes this point memorably in the Göttingen Dogmatics, writing that ‘[o]f none of us is it true that we do not mix the gospel with philosophy’ (Göttingen Dogmatics, p. 259). Subsequently, he remarks that ‘we may cold-bloodedly tell ourselves that our philosophy, whether good or bad, whether academic or dilettante, is a factor that can and should help to determine my hearing of the Word of God inasmuch as the Word comes to me, a human being, a thinking person, a person who thinks in this particular way’ (p. 260). Thus it is that Calvin, during a defence of his explication of the Trinity, contends: ‘If they call a foreign word one that cannot be shown to stand syllable by syllable in Scripture, they are indeed imposing upon us an unjust law which condemns all interpretation not patched together out of the fabric of Scripture . . . we ought to seek from Scripture a sure rule for both thinking and speaking, to which both the thoughts of our minds and the words of our mouths should be conformed. But what presents us from explaining in clearer words those matters in Scripture which perplex and hinder our understanding, yet which conscientiously and faithfully serve the truth of Scripture itself, and are made use of sparingly and modestly and on due occasion?’ See here Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols; Louisville: WJKP, 2006), p. 124.

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selection is that concepts must arise, in some way, from scripture (the preeminent human derivate and witness of revelation) and be conducive to an interpretation of scripture. Whatever difficulties attend the maintenance of this hermeneutical circle, the theologian’s conceptual choices must be scripturally defensible and evince due pragmatic worth. ‘Trinity’, for instance, passes muster, since ‘it translates and exegetes the text’ (I/1, p. 308) in a way that enables greater understanding; words such as ‘tripartite’ or ‘threesidedness’, on the other hand, would interfere with the faithful reception of scripture and therefore ought not to be employed. And one can justifiably hypothesize that, given that neither a Lindbeckian reading of Chalcedon nor a sense of the connotative richness of substance terminology in early Christian writing42 were available to Barth, ‘nature’ would immediately meet with suspicion. The word is simply not one that appeals to Barth. It chafes against his preference for language that conveys the concreteness, actualism and sheer eventfulness of biblical descriptions of Christ; it struggles, more particularly, to depict the integration of Christology and soteriology basic to the New Testament.43 Certainly, Barth would not summarily disavow physis because it implies the ‘summary of all finite existence’; more generally, he would never grouse about the ‘inescapable contradictions and absurdities’ that attend ‘all attempts to solve the christological problem in terms of the two-nature theory’.44 There is little need for hard and fast terminological definitions, even less for totalizing denunciations of classical terminology. 42 43

44

See here G. C. Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). Thus IV/1, p. 127 rev.: ‘The Christ of Nicaea and Chalcedon in himself would be and is naturally a being who, even if one could successfully, consistently, and illuminatingly explain his peculiar structure to some extent conceptually as such, could not possibly be proclaimed and believed as the one who acts historically, because of the inevitable timelessness and historical remoteness of the concepts (person, nature, Godhead, humanity, etc.). He could not possibly be the one who, under the name Jesus Christ, the Christian church has in fact, above all and in all times, proclaimed and believed. An abstract doctrine of the person of Christ, though it might presume its own importance, is an empty form, in which that which can be said of Jesus Christ, cannot possibly be said.’ The placement of this claim in IV/1 is doubtless a sign of the greater freedom Barth has won for himself; after Church Dogmatics I, II and III, he does not need to emphasize his distance from his liberal forebears. Whether this challenge to Chalcedon is fair is another matter. With Hunsinger and various others , I consider the Definition to have genuine soteriological import. Its authors would find inconceivable an ‘abstract doctrine of Christ’; they would never differentiate Christ’s ‘person’ and ‘work’. On this point, see Brian Daley, ‘“He Himself is Our Peace” (Ephesians 2.14): Early Christian Views of Redemption in Christ’, in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 149–76. See here Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), p. 392 and Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology; Vol. 2, Existence and the Christ, (London: SCM, 1957), p. 146.

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But given a concern to maintain a vital relationship between the dynamic saving reality of Christ’s person, the details of scripture and christological inquiry, Natur and Wesen take up no meaningful role in Barth’s Christology in Church Dogmatics I/2 and thereafter. They go the same way as ‘person’ in intra-Trinitarian discussion, albeit with much less fanfare. Barth upholds the gist of Chalcedon when forwarding christological claims; he has little interest in retaining each and every component of its conceptual apparatus. To where do these understated concerns about the concept of ‘nature’ lead? They lead to a stripped-down formula, consistent with the import of Chalcedon and evocative of protestant traditionalism, but disencumbered of the abstract connotations Barth wants to avoid: Jesus Christ as vere Deus vere homo.45 This quite bland summary of Christ’s ontological complexity, which anchors §§13–15, serves a simple purpose. Barth hereby announces that he intends to keep the closest possible connection with the biblical witness when doing Christology. Since the unique name of Jesus Christ functions as something akin to a dogmatic synthetic a priori – for when faithfully apprehended in terms of the scriptural witness, this name’s axiomatic personal 45

This formula is certainly not original to Barth. The Chalcedonian Definition uses the phrase perfectum in deitate et eundem perfectum in humanitate (in Greek, qeo\n a0lhqw~j kai\ a1nqrwpon a0lhqw~j). The fifth-century Athanasian Creed, or Quicunque, describes Christ as perfectus Deus, perfectus homo (Creeds, Vol. 2, p. 69; for a useful summary of scholarship, see Roger John Howard Collins, ‘Athanasianisches Symbol’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), pp. 328–33). Many classical Protestant documents made use of the spare language of the Athanasian Creed, which may have spurred Barth to adopt vere Deus vere homo. For example, Luther’s ‘Smaller Catechism’ (1529) describes Christ as ‘wahrhaftiger Gott vom Vater in Ewigkeit geboren und auch wahrhaftiger Mensch’, in Schaff (ed.), Creeds of Christendom; Vol. 3, The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, (rev. David S. Schaff; Grand Rapids: Baker, 6th edn, 1998), p. 79; the First Helvetic Confession, composed in Basle in 1536, uses the phrase verusque Deus, et homo verus (Ibid., p. 215); the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) titles its eleventh chapter De Jesu Christo, vero Deo et Homine (Ibid., p. 254); the eighth article of the Scots Confession talks of Jesus Christ as ‘very God and very man’ (Ibid., p. 444); the Belgic Confession (1561) describes Christ as ‘vrai Dieu et vrai homme’ (Creeds, Vol. 3, p. 404); and Barth’s treasured Heidelberg Catechism (1563) – ‘the Reformed confessional work, as it still is to this day’ (1/2, p. 638) – describes Christ as ‘wahrer Mensch und wahrer Gott’ (Creeds, Vol. 3, p. 322). Perhaps most strikingly, the important First Confession of Basle (1534) – known to Barth (I/2, p. 637) and a pivotal document in the Swiss Reformation – writes of ‘Von Christo Warem Gott und Warem Mensch’/De Christo Vero Deo, et Vero Homine (see Collectio Confessionum in Ecclesiis Reformatis (ed. Herman Agathon Niemeyer; Leipzig: J. Klinkhardti, 1840)). Obviously, the mainstream of the Reformation did not scorn the language of ‘nature’ or ‘essence’. A polemical disengagement with the supposed ‘excesses’ of Roman Catholic scholastic terminology did not entail a disavowal of the classical documents of early Christianity. But with the vere Deus vere homo formula Barth may have been paying tribute to the terminological austerity of the early years of the Reformation, while also tipping his hat to his hometown.

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simplicity coincides with awareness of its bearer’s ontological complexity (‘the knowledge that God’s Son or God’s Word is identical (identisch) with a human, with this human, whose name is Jesus of Nazareth – or the knowledge that a human, this man, Jesus of Nazareth is identical (identisch) with the Son or Word of God’, (I/2, p. 16 rev.)) – then vere Deus vere homo provides only the slightest of expansion. Vere Deus: the Son of God, ‘identical’ with Jesus of Nazareth, is God’s second way of being. Vere homo: Jesus of Nazareth, ‘identical’ with the divine Son, is a member of the species ‘humanity’, sharing the common human properties of body, soul, will, emotionality and so on. Indeed, by virtue of its paucity, the formula keep[s] in view the fact that . . . the statements about God and man, about Jesus and Christ . . . point beyond themselves to the ultimate Word, Jesus Christ, which as such can only be explained in terms of the reality thereby indicated and nothing else . . . In obedience to Scripture as the witness to God’s revelation we shall . . . be aware that we have . . . more than enough on our hands in listening to the Name and then to the two penultimate words, very God and very Man. (I/2, p. 25) Put a little differently: the negligible conceptual freight of the adverb ‘very’, in contrast to the more loaded nouns, Natur or Wesen, clears a pathway that runs from scripture to dogmatics and then back again to scripture. Vere Deus vere homo in fact compels Barth to return to scripture after a move towards abstraction: there is nowhere else for him to go. Two further comments help to clarify Barth’s christological modus operandi. First, apposite here is Barth’s doctrine of scripture and the proximate question of how the theologian ought to treat ‘orthodox’ resources.46 Paragraphs 19–21 of Church Dogmatics I/2 attempt to establish ground rules on this front, coordinating a radicalized understanding of sola scriptura with the ascription of various levels of ‘relative authority’ to patristic texts, confessions, creeds, symbols and so on. These paragraphs are dense and sometimes difficult, primarily because of the consistent interweaving of polemic and constructive claims. While laying forth his own perspective, Barth attempts to expose common ground between Roman Catholic and liberal approaches to the Bible, arguing that both approaches inhibit the freedom of the Word, problematically subjecting it to the mediation of ‘tradition’ on the one side and the historical-critical method on the other.47 Barth’s sexism also makes its presence felt. After a suggestive initial excursus in §20.2, which claims

46

For an extended treatment of this issue from which I have profited greatly, see Georg Plasger, Die relative Autorität des Bekenntnisses bei Karl Barth (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2000). See also John Webster’s remarks in Barth’s Earlier Theology: Four Studies (London: T&T Clark, 2005), esp. pp. 41–66 and 91–117.

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that authority in the church ought to be understood in terms of Ex. 20.12 (‘Honour thy father and mother’), Barth shows interest in only church ‘fathers’; he seems unwilling to put into practice a genuinely egalitarian approach to early Christian writing. The crucial point for my purposes, though, is the ‘relative authority’ granted to ecclesial pronouncements, for this illumines further Barth’s attitude to the Chalcedonian Definition. ‘Relative authority’ does not bespeak a highhanded – that is, superciliously dismissive – approach to the ecclesial tradition. Such would reprise the hubris of the more extreme neo-protestants and, by extension, the deutsche Christen, who showed active disinterest in, if not disdain for, patristic, medieval and classical Reformation resources.48 Barth insists that God genuinely commandeers extra-canonical creaturely media when superintending Christian intelligere, thereby enabling valid theological speech in past and present. He can even tender a claim that would set on edge the nerves of anyone radicalized by the revolutionary stance of Romans II, writing that if ‘[i]n the visible form’ of the confession ‘we see only the creaturely material’, at the same time, ‘in this creaturely material we see the guiding hand of the Lord of the Church’ (I/2, p. 635). The faithful reception of revelation does happen in the church; God’s noetic generosity ensures, and has ensured, that the Word of God is well received – which makes for declarations of abiding importance to which the theologian should attend. However, while alluding plainly to God’s providential guidance of the church, Barth stops short of applying the dialectic of veiling and unveiling to ecclesial pronouncements. He maintains a radicalized construal of the ‘scripture principle’ that blocks the uncritical recourse to ‘tradition’ he associates with Roman Catholicism. The ‘guiding hand’ of God never accredits non-biblical texts as revelatory witnesses to the Word; the ‘definite limit of insight’ (I/2, p. 627) of confessions means, specifically, that there can be no ‘unreserved attachment to . . . pre-Reformation authorities’ (I/2, p. 614). Even though the theologian will draw on the wisdom of the past, then, his or her theology must not become (and Barth here plays on phraseology used by Schleiermacher) ‘an institute of antiquities’ (I/2, p. 619).49 47

48

49

This claim is also prominent in the Göttingen Dogmatics, which deems Roman Catholicism and neo-protestantism ‘counterbalancing heresies’ (Göttingen Dogmatics, p. 211). See also Barth, Credo (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1962), pp. 179–83. So I/2, p. 590: ‘There will always be time and occasion for criticism. My first duty is to love and respect [the confession of the church] as the witness of my fathers and brethren.’ Notice that Barth’s attitude towards prior ecclesiastical declarations is consistent with his viewing each human as a ‘sign’ of the humanity that the Son assumes. See here I/2, pp. 424–7. Schleiermacher infamously stated that ‘[e]very holy writing is merely a mausoleum of religion’; Barth switches the reference to signal wariness towards any uncritical lauding of the ‘tradition’. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (ed. and trans. Richard Crouter; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 50.

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At stake here is the belief that the theologian may not adjourn responsibility for listening to the Word of God as it happens in the Bible. She certainly must not presume a regula fidei that suggests that God’s Word inheres in non-biblical documents; Barth’s understanding of scripture’s revelatory power demands a theological attitude alert to what God is saying, by way of the human words of scripture, now. Confessions, symbols and so on simply cannot share the pre-eminent authority of the biblical witness, for they do not form a discursive realm in which God’s speech can be hoped for and expected.50 Indeed, though a confession may be formally comparable to scripture – both are human documents, relativized by the divine authority of revelation – its normative standing is always secondary to, and derivative of, scripture. The Bible alone provides unique witness to God’s self-revelation and reconciling action. Thus Barth: After [a] privileged hearing of the Church confessions, we have to go and tread our own way in the understanding, exposition, and application of Holy Scripture. The confession cannot and will not deprive us of our own responsibility to Scripture. We shall enter that way ‘confessional determined’. But fundamentally that can only mean that we have dealt with the confession as an authority of first rank and taken the direction (Richtung) indicated by it . . . That does not mean that we have to make our own its particular theology and the details of its Biblical exposition. We can be loyal to its direction and still think that in detail and even as a whole, as our confession, we would rather have put it otherwise. (I/2, p. 650)51 This passage amounts to a near-perfect summary of Barth’s attitude to Chalcedon, positioning him firmly in continuity with the stance towards time-honoured creedal documents adopted by Melanchthon, Luther, Calvin and numerous other protestants.52 The Definition functions only as ‘the horizon of our own thinking and speaking’ (I/2, p. 651). The ‘direction’ it charts 50

51 52

Thus I/2, p. 620: ‘The confession and its authority does not stand above or alongside, but . . . under Holy Scripture’. Plasger makes the point aptly: ‘Die Bibel bezeugt und die Kirche verkündigt es’ (Relative Autorität, p. 44). See also Paul T. Nimmo, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2007), p. 80. For other mentions of a confession’s ‘direction’, see I/2, pp. 653 and 655. See here Philip Melanchthon’s Loci Communes Theologici, in Melanchthon and Bucer (ed. Wilhelm Pauck; Louisville: WJKP, 2006), pp. 63–6; Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (trans. Robert C. Schultz; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), pp. 7–8; and Calvin, Institutes, pp. 1166–79. Although these ‘magisterial’ Reformers wanted primarily to detach Christian thought from medieval conciliar injunctions, their commitment to sola scriptura bears also on their assessment of early ecumenical councils. Hans W. Frei is precise: ‘Whatever Calvin’ – and, by extension, many other early protestants – ‘might have thought about . . . “tradition” . . . as a coherent framework

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certainly helps the theologian to respond to her encounter with God’s speech, indicating the reality of Christ’s divinity, the reality of Christ’s humanity and the nature of their union in his simple person. A dogmatician would be foolish not to heed this bit of past wisdom when thinking christologically. But the standing of the Definition ought not to be overestimated, nor its conceptual apparatus maintained uncritically. As an ‘authority’, it provides only ‘guiding lines’ (IV/1, p. 127) for a Christology that takes its bearings from the witness of scripture.53 Second, notice that the term ‘Chalcedonian’, even if applied to Barth’s thought with due qualification, would leave unconsidered key dimensions of his mature Christology. What Sarah Coakley has aptly named the ‘riddle’ of the Definition refers not only to its minimalism but also to its theological insufficiency. Indeed, given the swift dissolution of the consensus forged at the council of Chalcedon, it is proper to say that this statement’s reserve incites argument, with the resolution of one set of dogmatic issues providing the point of departure for a new series of debates. For Barth in particular – and I will touch on these issues in the next section before tackling them at length in Chapters 2–4 – questions press about the ultimate identity of God qua Son, given God’s act of incarnation (issues surrounding the logos asarkos and logos ensarkos loom here); about the effecta personalis, given the union of divine and human (the manner in which Christ’s divinity or humanity might, or might not, be altered by the hypostatic union); about the existence, relationship between, and action of the divine and human essences constitutive of Christ’s person; and about the relationship between Christology and soteriology. Even if one wishes to apply the term ‘Chalcedonian’ to Barth’s theology – and I would not rule out this interpretative option, even granted the comments above – the most intriguing elements of the Christology of the Dogmatics still remain at large.

Early moves Thus far, I have provided little substantive analysis. Having formulated some questions about Barth’s Christology relating to the humanity and human

53

for analyzing biblical texts, he was firm about declining it as a substitute for an actual reading of the narrative text.’ See The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 35. Barth does not depart from this conviction. Thus an important passage at the outset of Church Dogmatics IV: ‘We must not forget that if in the doctrinal decisions of Nicaea and Constantinople and Ephesus and Chalcedon it was a matter of the being of Jesus Christ as such, these decisions had a polemical and critical character, their purpose being to delimit and clarify at a specific point. They are to be regarded as guiding lines for an understanding of His existence and action, not to be used, as they have been used, as stones for the construction of an abstract doctrine of His “person” ’ (IV/1, p. 127).

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agency of Jesus Christ, I then indicated that Barth’s response to these questions will be mediated by a fairly complex, and at points standoffish, attitude to the Chalcedonian Definition – an approval of its gist and adverbial stipulations that goes hand in hand with a quiet disengagement from the category of ‘nature’. Some further questions now press: what manner of Christology does Barth intend to develop? If the name ‘Chalcedonian’ ought not to be summarily applied to Barth’s Christology, what shape does the Christology of the Church Dogmatics take? Does Barth’s perspective fall victim to the perils possibly attendant to a utilization of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing? To provide some preliminary answers, this section continues to interrogate Church Dogmatics I/2. This interpretative move might appear somewhat odd. As the next chapter demonstrates, Church Dogmatics I does not fully cohere with later volumes. It must be positioned within a theological trajectory that stands on the cusp of Barth’s definitively mature theological outlook, which is anchored in a revolutionary refashioning of the doctrine of election. Furthermore, the prolegomenal volume of the Dogmatics simply does not intend to offer an expansive description of Christ’s person and work. The principal aim of Church Dogmatics I is to establish that God’s Word, revelatory of God’s triunity and mediated through the Bible, constitutes the exclusive subject matter of theological work; other dimensions of this mammoth text form only scaffolding for structures as yet unbuilt. Church Dogmatics I/2, in particular, functions primarily as a tribute to Calvin’s description of the trinitarian quality of Christian faith and thought. It amounts to an extended amplification of the claim that, by way of ‘a kind of mutual bond the Lord has joined together the certainty of his Word and of his Spirit so that the perfect religion of the Word may abide in our minds’;54 it aims chiefly to describe the ‘fulfilment’ (Vollstreckung) of revelation, considering how God’s revelatory advance engages the human ‘objectively’ (in Christ) and ‘subjectively’ (in the Spirit). Quite reasonably, then, Barth defers a more lengthy explication of his ‘besondere Christologie’. Paragraph 15 promises no more than a passing glance: ‘We shall invade the sphere of it only so far as it is absolutely necessary for a complete answer to our question about revelation, especially about its objective reality’ (I/2, p. 123). So what advantage accrues from considering the Christology promulgated in Church Dogmatics I/2? Well, this part volume provides an intriguing preview of christological claims that endure throughout the Dogmatics. It signals, most importantly for my purposes, Barth’s keen interest in the humanity of Christ. A brief examination of the christological sections of this text therefore readies the reader for the more intensive interpretative work carried out in Chapters 2–4 of this book. In what follows I focus on five

54

Calvin, Institutes, p. 95.

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aspects of §15: Barth’s integration of dogmatic and exegetical reflection; his Reformed insistence on the irreducible differentiation of divine and human in Christ; his affirmation of dyothelitism; his association of Christ’s humanity with condemned ‘flesh’; and his remarks on Gethsemane. Subsequent to this analysis, I note the impropriety of using the Alexandrian/Antiochene paradigm to interpret Barth’s Christology. I then turn, once again, to the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing. Notice, first of all, that Barth uses Jn 1.14 to organize, and to fund conceptually, an exposition that deals successively with Christ’s divinity (‘The Word became flesh’: §15.2.I), Christ’s humanity (‘The Word became flesh’: §15.2.II) and their union (‘The Word became flesh’: §15.2.III). Given §13, readers already know that Barth insists that the point of departure for the New Testament witness, viz., the name Jesus Christ, norms christological inquiry. And when interrogated as to its implicit ontology, this name admits of only the lightest expansion: the ‘Son of God’ elucidated by the phrase vere Deus; the human individual, Jesus of Nazareth, by the phrase vere homo. However, as if wary of even this degree of abstraction, in §15 Barth draws his readers’ attention back to the New Testament, using Jn 1.14 to insist that vere Deus means God’s Word or Son (not the Godhead as such) and that vere homo means human flesh (not humanity in the abstract). Barth hereby lays his dogmatic cards on the table. Whatever conceptual difficulties might arise in his consideration of Christ’s unique person and work, their resolution depends upon an integration and coordination of exegetical and dogmatic reflection. If the New Testament spurs christological claims, and if those same christological claims are purposed to facilitate the Christian’s (re)reading of scripture and (re)assessment of the church’s proclamation, this (non-vicious) hermeneutical circle must be kept in view. Barth intends ‘actually to grant Scripture primacy and precedence’ (I/2, p. 721 rev.) when describing Jesus Christ. Biblical exegesis will shape his Christology. Second, in Church Dogmatics I/2, Barth adverts his commitment to classically Reformed christological habits of thought. Chief among these is a strong emphasis on the differentiation of divinity and humanity in Christ – a belief that the Chalcedonian adverbs inconfuse and immutabiliter have elemental importance for christological reflection.55 Thus in the opening paragraph of I/2, Barth writes about the ‘antithesis (Gegensatz) of divinity and humanity’ (I/2, p. 25) that obtains in Christ’s person; the end of §15 then pointedly reprises this claim. Why this preference for the Reformed disjunctive, over against the Lutheran unitive? On one level, it allows Barth to uphold a cherished conviction, namely that the relationship between God

55

A representative statement of this position is found in the ‘Second Helvetic Confession’ (1566); see esp. ch. 11, art. 6 (Creeds, Vol. 3, p. 255). See also Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, new edn, 1996), p. 326.

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and humanity entails an ‘infinite qualitative distinction’.56 Just as in the ‘irregular dogmatics’ of Romans II, so too in the ‘regular dogmatics’ of I/2: with respect to Jesus Christ, there is ‘no merging or fusion of God and man, no exaltation of humanity to divinity, no overflowing of God into human nature’.57 God and humanity are not ontologically contiguous, much less ontologically continuous; this dogmatic ‘principle’ must be upheld at all times. On another level, Barth judges the Reformed disjunctive better suited to uphold his belief that the incarnation entails a ‘sovereign act of lordship’; that ‘[i]n the sentence “the Word became flesh”, the Word is the Subject’ (I/2, p. 134 rev.) definitive of Christ’s person. It is not only Schleiermacher’s supposedly exemplaristic Christology that spurs concerns on this front.58 If one posits a perichoretic interpenetration of divinity and humanity in Christ, as Barth believes that classical Lutheranism does, the prospect of an admixture of divinity and humanity arises.59 And with clarity lost regarding Christ’s ontological complexity, one risks neglecting the fact that God’s revelation and self-presentation in Christ is a ‘divine act’ (I/2, p. 171) brought about by nothing other than God’s free decision. Over against the drift of Lutheran Christology, then, a Reformed sense of the ontological distinction between Christ’s divinity and Christ’s humanity ensures a clear grasp of the incarnation as a preveniently effected event. Given this anti-Lutheran stance, issues regarding the extra calvinisticum and the relationship between the logos asarkos and logos ensarkos obviously arise. One particular clutch of questions is unavoidable and will be considered at length in the next chapter: does God’s incarnational action have an impact on God’s second way of being as such? Does the Son’s economic action have immanent ramifications? Even granted his prolegomenal brief, Barth initially gives this matter short shrift. His sympathetic (though rather uneven) remarks about the extra calvinisticum as a ‘protest’ against the Lutheran genus maiestaticum are of a largely historical nature; his concern 56 57 58

59

Barth, Epistle to the Romans, p. 10. Ibid., p. 30. Note that Barth does Schleiermacher’s Christology a disservice in I/2. To say that ‘Christ means simply the continuation and completion of the development initiated by the creation of humanity in the direction of an energising of his God-consciousness’ (I/2, 134) is unfair. Schleiermacher insists that a divine act grounds the incarnation: Christ ‘must have entered into the corporate life of sinfulness, but He cannot have come out of it, but must be recognized in it as a miraculous fact (eine wunderbare Erscheinung)’ (Christian Faith, p. 381). That Schleiermacher also argues that the word ‘miracle’ has a specific meaning, neither ‘absolutely supernatural’ nor ‘supra-rational’ (pp. 62–8), does not undermine his basic approach to the incarnation: a prevenient act of God brings the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth into being. Thus I/2, p. 167: ‘if the concept “Word” and the concept “flesh” are both taken seriously but are considered as mutually conditioning . . . is the statement of Jn 1.14 an understandable statement at all?’

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to uphold the self-sufficient subjectivity of God qua Son prompts only a passing affirmation of the logos asarkos (‘The Word is what it is even before [bevor] and apart from [ohne] the fact that it is flesh’ [I/2, p. 136 rev.]). Barth simply does not ask whether God wills to complicate, ontologically, God’s being in light of the Son’s assumption of humanity. And one gets the distinct impression that, at this point, Barth would not want to dwell on such a question, lest the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ appear to be compromised. At the same time, sidestepping this issue has obvious benefits. Instead of worrying about what the unio hypostatica ‘does’ to Christ’s humanity, and being disinclined to think through the ‘theo-ontological’ ramifications of God’s incarnational action, space is cleared for Barth to think intensively about the humanity and human agency of Jesus Christ. As with Church Dogmatics IV/4’s remarks about baptism, so too with I/2: the advantage of a clear distinction between divinity and humanity, between divine and human action, is that the theologian gains the opportunity to formulate an expansive description of the latter as it concurs with the former. This leads to my third point. In §15, Barth criticizes monothelitism and offers a ringing endorsement of dyothelitism. Though proponents of both monothelite and dyothelite Christologies could in principle appeal to the Definition of Chalcedon (for does completeness of human nature necessarily include a ‘will’?), Barth notes that ‘one can see the justification of those who, in the so-called monothelite controversy of the seventh century, defended and finally led to victory the claim that, with the true human nature of the God-human, there must also not be denied his true human will, different from the will of God, though never independent of it’ (I/2, p. 158 rev.). Barth’s measured rhetoric at this point ought not to distract: these words form a historical postscript to a section in which Barth thinks about Christ’s human volition with an intensity reminiscent of Maximus Confessor,60 albeit in a way that eschews talk about the will as a ‘faculty’ and prefers a more radical affirmation of ‘the unity of act and being’ that characterizes Christ’s divine–human person.61 Running through §15, in other words, is a powerful affirmation of Christ’s distinctive human agency, understood expansively to 60

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As is well known, Maximus provides the most important elucidation of dyothelite Christology in the earlier stages of Christian history. Opusculum 6 exemplifies his position; it is excerpted in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), pp. 173–6. See also Opusculum 7, reproduced in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 180–91 and ‘The Trial of Maximus: An Account of the Proceedings which Took Place between the Lord Abbot Maximus and His Companions in the Chamber’, in Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (trans. George C. Berthold; New York: Paulist, 1985), pp. 15–31. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center (trans. Edwin H. Robertson; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978), p. 48.

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encompass cognitive and affective processes, decisions, and the realization of intention. Barth articulates this expansive dyothelitism during a discussion of Christ’s humanity as ‘flesh’. Having affirmed the coessentiality of Christ’s humanity with ours, and having blocked adoptionism with remarks about Christ’s humanity as an individual ‘possibility’ that God actualizes, he launches a line of reflection that continues throughout the entire Dogmatics. God Himself is actively present in the flesh. God Himself in person is the Subject of a real human being and acting. And just because God is the subject, so – and not otherwise – are this being and acting real. It is a real and true human being and acting . . . As the one of us who is God’s Word in person, he [Jesus Christ] represents us to God, and he represents God to us. In this way he is God’s revelation to us and our reconciliation with God. (I/2, p. 151 rev.) Barth here adverts the understanding of the concurrence of divine and human action that pervades Church Dogmatics II, III and IV, and which will receive much attention in the following chapters. Divine action does not displace human action. Divine action grounds and enables human action, making that action coterminous with it, though still ontologically distinctive. This is in fact paradigmatically the case in Jesus Christ: because God assumes, superintends and indwells the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth, therefore this human’s being and action have ontological and agential reality, even granted that the Subject defining this human is the divine Son. Implicit here, too, is a further claim about Christ as a human. The absence of a human hypostasis/supposit in Christ – that is, the lack of human personhood, or the impersonalitas of Christ’s humanity as such – does not undermine the reality of Christ’s human being and acting. Personality as such does not count among the necessary conditions of genuine human agency; it is a contingent (even ‘accidental’) property of human being. Although typically present in individuals, it is neither necessarily nor invariably present; it need not be deemed a conditio sine qua non for full human being as such. It is therefore quite proper to say that the Son’s ‘personal’ assumption and indwelling of Christ’s human essence goes hand in hand with the genuine acting of this human essence.62 62

This claim – that, negatively, the absence of a human personhood in Christ need not put into question an affirmation of the integrity of Christ’s humanity; and that, positively, it is theologically and philosophically cogent to view personhood as a nonnecessary property of human being, even if this non-necessary property is present in the vast majority of human beings – has received marked attention in some recent essays of an analytic bent. See Thomas Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001), esp. pp. 62–70; Brian Leftow, ‘A Timeless God Incarnate’,

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The matter of human action brings me to a fourth point. By identifying Christ’s humanity as ‘flesh’, Barth aims to move dogmatic discussion beyond a plain assertion of Christ’s coessentiality with humankind. Generally, Barth uses the word ‘flesh’ (in the New Testament, sa/rc) to accentuate the abiding connection between Christology and soteriology. Since ‘those who are in the flesh (e0n sarki\) cannot please God’ (Rom. 8.8), only as God qua Son fully involves himself in our human condition – that is, the concrete condition of humanity as such – changing it from within, are reconciliation and redemption secured. It follows that Christ’s person must not be described without reference to his action and its salvific consequences. The systematic distinction between Christology and soteriology has only heuristic value; it ought not to be reified in ways that suggest separation between Christ’s person and work. More particularly, Barth’s understanding of ‘flesh’ positions him within a christological trajectory that understands the incarnation in terms of God’s intimate involvement in the world of sinful humanity. Rejecting the idea that God assumes a ‘generic’ human essence (which bears, say, only the ‘formal’ marks of human being – mind, soul, will, body, etc.) and following a sometimes marginal christological trajectory that runs through Luther, P. T. Forsyth, Bonhoeffer and others, Barth construes the humanity that God assumes as humanity under judgement. Christ’s sinless humanity, in some complex way, is therefore of apiece with corrupted humanity, with humanity in its wilful disobedience towards God.63 For the Son to unite with human flesh means, moreover, that God intends to enburden Godself with the punishment owed to sinful humankind. Thus Barth: ‘[t]he nature that God has assumed in Christ is identical with our nature under the presupposition of the fall into sin . . . God’s Son assumed not only our essence, but entered the concrete form of our essence, in which we stand before God, specifically as

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in The Incarnation, pp. 273–99, esp. 277–87; and Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 61–6. Behind many of these perspectives stands Thomas Aquinas – see here esp. Summa Theologica, III, q. 2, a. 2 and a. 5; and III, q. 4. Also useful is Michael Gorman, ‘Christ as Composite According to Aquinas’, Traditio 55 (2000), pp. 143–57. (When citing the Summa, I draw on St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province; 4 vols; Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria, n.d.). T. F. Torrance suggests that because Christ’s person and work were separated from the fifth century onwards there arose the misguided sense that ‘it was not our fallen humanity that Jesus took from the Virgin Mary, but humanity in its perfect state’ (see ‘Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy’, SJT 39 (1986), pp. 461–82 (476–7); see also, idem, The Mediation of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers and Howard, 1992)). Although I am unsure about Torrance’s dating of this ‘separation’, he is right to suggest that Barth’s identification of Christ’s humanity as sa/rc bespeaks sympathy for a relatively marginal christological trajectory. For a solid treatment of this trajectory and an important constructive statement, see Thomas Weinandy, In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993).

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the damned and the lost’ (I/2, p. 153 rev.). Dogmatic accounts of the incarnation therefore overlap and cohere with dogmatic accounts of the justification that God effects; the claim that the ‘Word become flesh’ carries with it the claim that God takes on responsibility for human sin, rendering himself, as Son, the object of God’s punishing yet purifying wrath. Connecting an understanding of substitutionary atonement with the motif of obedience (which will be picked up and explored at length in Church Dogmatics IV/1), Barth can make this point with dramatic flare: ‘Jesus Christ’s obedience consists in the fact that He willed to be and was only this one thing with all its consequences, God in the flesh, the divine bearer of the burden (Last) which man as a sinner must bear’ (I/2, p. 156). While I say more about ‘divine enburdenment’ in later chapters, notice now that Barth’s claim about God bearing sin forms only one side of his understanding of Christ as the ‘Word become flesh’. An accompanying suggestion is that Christ humanly constitutes himself as the one bears sin, that Christ humanly wills to be the ‘flesh’ that the Word becomes, embracing and absorbing the punitive outworking of God’s reconciliatory justice. Granted that Christ qua human gains his ‘personality’ from the divine Son, who forms the Subject of his being, and granted that Christ’s ‘sinlessness’ has much to do with his being the divine Son, it is the whole person of Christ, divine and human, who disposes himself as the one who endures the punishment owed to sinners, so as to disburden sinners of the same. Thus Barth: Jesus’ sinlessness obviously consists in his direct admission of the meaning of the incarnation. Which means: unlike Adam, as the ‘second Adam’, he does not wish to be like God, but in Adam’s nature, he confesses before God an Adamic being, the state and position of fallen humanity, and bears the wrath of God which must meet this humanity – not as a fate (Schicksal) but as a righteous, necessary wrath. Which means: he does not avoid the burden of this state and position, but takes upon himself the conditions and consequences . . . He made good what Adam made wrong. He judged sin in the flesh, in that he recognised the order of reconciliation, i.e., in that he, put in the place of a sinner, bowed his head under the divine verdict and commended himself solely to the grace of God. And that is his hallowing, his obedience, his sinlessness. It therefore does not consist in an ethical heroism, but precisely in a renunciation of heroism, including the ethical. (I/2, p. 157 rev.) One catches glimpse here of claims that become tremendously important in later volumes of the Dogmatics. To say that Christ acts humanly, and to say that the Son assumes a human essence defined in terms of the ‘flesh’, is accurate but dogmatically insufficient. To say as much would not really distinguish Barth from Calvin, who insists that ‘it is a person, Christ, who mediates . . . but he mediates only on the basis of both his natures, each of 44

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which is essential’.64 What Barth gestures towards here is a construal of ‘essence’ framed in terms of decision and action. It is by way of Christ’s divine and human self-disposing that he becomes and is the person who bears the sin of the world on the cross. Both as divine Son and as the human perfectly united to, and existing as, the divine Son, Christ self-constitutes as flesh under judgement, ascertaining humanity’s guilt and willing that God’s negative response be concentrated upon him. The two agencies operative in his person are dogmatically discriminable, even though they are not ontologically separable in terms of Christ’s concrete person; acting in a perfectly unified way, these divine and human agencies comprise and, in a genuine sense, define the simple person that Christ is. The fact that the divine Son superintends and defines Christ’s human life, then, does not cancel the reality of his human being and action. Rather, in ‘recognizing the order of justification’ and enburdening himself with punishment owed to sinful humankind, Christ as a human being plays a crucial role in the event of justification, facing and embracing the crushing ‘weight of divine severity’ in order that reconciliation might occur.65 My fifth point clarifies still further how Barth understands Christ’s humanity and human agency. In §15, Barth indicates that Christ’s travail in the garden of Gethsemane holds a vital clue for understanding more precisely what the event of justification requires of Christ as a human being. While the quotation above has a suggestive air, the excursus that concludes §15.2.II makes matters explicit. The New Testament has . . . treated the vere homo with such seriousness that it has portrayed the obedience of Jesus throughout as a genuine struggle for obedience (Ringen um Gehorsam), as a seeking and finding . . . The temptation narrative (Mt. 4.1ff) obviously describes the very opposite of a mock battle (Scheingefecht) and it would be wrong to conceive it as merely ‘external molestation by Satan’ . . . The point is that, in the state and situation of fallen humanity before God, Jesus did not take flight. Rather, he took it upon himself, lived it and bore it himself as the eternal Son of God. How could he have done so, if in his human existence, he had not been exposed to real inward temptation and trial? If like other humans, he had not trodden an inner path? If he had not cried out (geschrien) to God, and wrestled (gerungen) with God, in real inward need? Even in this wrestling, in which he was in solidarity with us to the last, there was done that which is not done by us, the will of God. (I/2, p. 158 rev.)

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Stephen Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 33. Calvin, Institutes, p. 517.

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Barth’s point here is readily discernible. The realization of justification involves Christ in an existential trial of nearly unthinkable proportions. Granted that Christ’s human being and action never happens independently of the being and action of God qua Son, this human individual undergoes a nightmarish struggle in Gethsemane. This struggle happens as Christ strives humanly to achieve his identity,66 to orient and define himself as the condemned flesh that the Word wills to become and unites to himself. And the exertion expended cannot be underestimated. There is no quick ‘realignment’ of Christ’s human comportment in the garden; Emil Brunner’s passing (and rather haughty) treatment of Gethsemane in The Mediator is not paralleled in I/2.67 Christ’s passion means a quite terrible venture of obedience. His solidarity with us requires nothing less: in that God assumes, and preserves, the true humanity of Christ, so too does God require that Christ humanly struggle when endeavouring to understand and apply God’s justifying love. Indeed, with this construal of Christ’s humanity, Barth offers a far subtler contestation of the so-called liberal christological trajectory that runs from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Wilhelm Herrmann than that advanced by Brunner in The Mediator. In terms of Schleiermacher, Barth objects to the claim that Christ’s perfect God consciousness entails the absence of psychic turmoil. The suggestion that Christ’s development, and entire life, was ‘wholly free from everything which we have to conceive as conflict’68 – a hallmark of near-docetic Christologies that, ironically, finds vestigial expression in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre – cannot stand. If Christ’s humanity 66

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My phrasing here is of course reminiscent of Hans Frei, who writes: ‘In that kind of passage from free intention into action . . . a free man gains his being. He becomes what he is; he gains his identity. Something like this seems also to be the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus, in this portrayal, was most of all himself in the short and climactic sequence of his public ministry, rising to this resolve and this entry into the situation of helplessness’. See here Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays (ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 57. The influence of Frei’s work on my interpretation of Barth will become apparent in the pages below. Brunner suggests that Gethsemane entails Jesus’ ‘struggle with the conviction that the way of complete failure is the one which is ordered by God, and absolutely necessary’. Barth might agree with this claim. But whatever sympathy he might muster would be quickly offset by Brunner’s additional remarks. Brunner writes that Jesus ‘always manifests not only complete self-possession, but in each situation He reveals His complete adequacy, the same inimitable originality revealed in the mastery of a particular situation. This gives to His figure an aspect of regal repose and dignity, of absolute self-possession and mastery of all that is non-spiritual and accidental’. And after the earlier sentence about Gethsemane, Brunner writes that ‘all the temptations of Satan glance off Him harmlessly like blunted arrows’ – suggesting that Christ’s struggle in Gethsemane was nothing of the sort. See here Emil Brunner, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (trans. Olive Wyon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1942), p. 365.

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is coessential with our humanity, and if, in fact, our humanity has its ground in Christ’s own life, then neither the Christian, nor the theologian, can evade the turmoil of Gethsemane. The ‘awkward’ details of the scriptural witness certainly may not be explained away by recourse to idealized understandings of the human; they must rather stimulate new texturings, even new expansions, of the christological and dogmatic imagination. In terms of Herrmann, Barth protests the suggestion that Christ’s serene and composed inner life – a life freed, of course, from the inquisitive eyes of historical-critical scholars and the deadening declamations of orthodox holdouts – mediates a Christian’s communion with God.69 For Barth, Christ’s inner life is not the model for Christian faith; it constitutes, rather, one dimension of Christian faith as it thinks about the achievement of justification. Knowing this to be the case, the theologian is obliged to provide a conceptually adequate account of a human existence, assumed uniquely into union with the Son, that includes the nearly unimaginable distress of Gethsemane and then the atrocity of Calvary. Two final comments serve to complete this section. First, it can now be stated plainly that the interpretative paradigm of ‘Alexandria vs. Antioch’ does not greatly assist an in-depth investigation of Barth’s Christology. It is true that George Hunsinger and others have applied this paradigm usefully;70 it is also true that Barth associates these ‘schools’ with the different

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Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 382. Note also Schleiermacher’s remarks in his 1832 lectures, which recall a medieval sleight of hand: ‘If we examine the story of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, we see that it is clearly of such a character that we cannot regard it as original. We need only reflect on the threefold repetition of the prayer to convince ourselves that the story is not a literal account . . . It is clear that this is an example of Christ’s prayer in his own personal interest as it is described, beginning with the expression of an urgent wish and closing with submission to the divine will, was a model for other people, and therefore is presented in such a way that it is clearly indicated that it is to be a model . . . [T]he reference to Christ’s depression [sic] belongs to the form that the story was given in order to make it more useful as an example to others who could experience a similar state of mind’. See here The Life of Jesus (ed. Jack C. Verheyden; trans. S. MacLean Gilmour; Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1997), p. 396. See here Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God: A Discussion in Agreement with the View of Luther (trans. J. Sandys Stanyon; London: Williams and Norgate, 1895). For Barth as Antiochene, see Regin Prenter, ‘Karl Barths Umbildung der traditionellen Zweinaturlehre in lutherischer Beleuchtung: einige Vorläufige Beobachtungen zu Karl Barths neuester Darstellungen der Christologie’, Studia Theologica 11.1 (1957), pp. 1–88. ‘Antiochene’ actually does not say enough: Prenter accuses Barth of promulgating a Christology that interposes a ‘nestorianische Kluft zwischen den beiden Naturen’ (p. 28) and which ‘in monophysitischer und halbdoketischer Richtung bewegt’ (p. 78). He also accuses Barth of misguided idealism, platonism and ‘christomonistischen Universalismus’ (p. 73). These seemingly incompatible claims are held together by way of an acute misreading of Barth on the covenant, complemented by a refusal to

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emphases of the synoptics and the fourth gospel on the one hand, and the Reformed and Lutheran traditions on the other.71 But such precedents ought not to govern interpretation. On one level, there is the matter of historical accuracy. Instead of supposing extensive conflict between Alexandria and Antioch, it is preferable to think in terms of a dispute that, despite the vitriol expended, could not have taken place save for extensive prior agreement.72 Frances Young has recently shown that the exegetical strategies associated with Alexandria and Antioch were more diverse and less oppositional than is usually presumed: the supposition that thinkers in the former camp traded in allegory while those in the latter opposed Origenist excess with a down-to-earth ‘historical’ approach amounts to a misleading dichotomization, reflective of modern suppositions that did not obtain in late antiquity.73 And as it goes with exegesis, so with Christology: the dividing line between so-called Alexandrian and Antiochene descriptions of Jesus Christ is more elusive than has been recognized. Even between Nestorius and Cyril there are points of fascinating continuity: opposition to Arianism in various forms; an emphasis on the superordinate and prevenient action of God as Son in the person of Jesus Christ; and agreement on the reality of Christ’s human agency,74 for example. It might even be said that debate over the most adequate conceptualization of the ‘mode of union’ distracted from a basic consensus on key christological issues during the politicized mudslinging during the run-up to Chalcedon.

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appreciate the Lutheran nuances of Barth’s Reformed stance. For more on Prenter, see the next chapter. A more successful application of the Alexandrian/Antiochene distinction is Waldrop, Barth’s Christology. The problem with Waldrop’s proposal, as George Hunsinger indicates in ‘Karl Barth’s Christology’, is the presumption of a non-christologically normed understanding of humanity. Imposing a decidedly ‘modern’ view of the human upon the Dogmatics, Waldrop fails to see that the primacy of God’s initiative in Christ (a putatively Alexandrian claim) does not exclude Christ’s real human being and acting (the Antiochene side of the equation). Thus I/2, p. 24. While this paragraph represents a viable account of the ‘christological controversy’, it should be noted that some favour a different perspective. Important here is Donald Fairbairn, Grace and Christology in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which argues that Theodore and Nestorius represented a minority position, in contrast to the consensus position forwarded by Cyril. On this reckoning, there was no Alexandria/Antioch split; it was rather a case of the majority view of ‘orthodoxy’ in East and West exposing the outré confusions of two thinkers rightly adjudged ‘heretics’. While Fairbairn makes an impressive case, I remain unconvinced. The claim that Theodore and Nestorius viewed grace as ‘God’s giving power, assistance, and co-operation to help people progress towards the second katastasis’ (p. 63) whereas Cyril et al. viewed grace in terms of God’s self-giving as Son strikes me as overdrawn. See Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002).

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The privilege of hindsight, however, enables one to appreciate how much ground the opponents held in common. And such hindsight renders even a heuristic use of the Alexandrian/Antiochene pairing undesirable. Even were the postulation of a sharp opposition between a Logos-sarx Christology (Alexandria) and a Logos-anthropos Christology (Antioch) historically tenable, there would be little warrant for using this pairing as an interpretative aid for reading the Dogmatics. Barth takes it as read that Chalcedon’s deft mediation of the fifth-century contretemps, itself consolidated and developed by the sixth ecumenical council at Constantinople (681 ce),75 has abiding value for dogmatic reflection. Christ being one person with a divine and a human essence; each essence bearing all the properties that qualify it as divine or human; each essence possessing an active ‘will’; and the relationship between the essences being thought in terms of both unitivity and distinctiveness – these aspects of patristic Christology are not disputed by Barth, and he is readily positioned within a dogmatic trajectory that embraces the insights of Cyrillian and Nestorian modes of thought. The key is to realize that Barth aims to think beyond the dogmatic disputes of early Christian writers, bringing to prominence a christological perspective of his own devising. So much has become clear, I hope, in the brief consideration of Church Dogmatics I/2 in this chapter. A concern to integrate exegetical and systematic reflection; an emphatic affirmation of the ontological differentiation of Christ’s divine and human essences, which goes hand in hand with a strong affirmation of the logos being the ‘subject’ of Jesus Christ; an affirmation of dyothelitism, expanded into an exploration 74

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Thus John McGuckin’s claim that for Cyril ‘[t]here is no instance of a purely divine act in the incarnation (no sole Logos-act), nor is there any instance of a purely human deed (a man’s act), just as any ordinary human being cannot choose to do anything that is either purely psychic or merely physical. Each and every single act of the incarnate Lord was, for Cyril, an act of God enfleshed within history; and thus an act where deity and humanity were synchronised as one mystery that at once allowed the divine majesty to stoop down to the encounter with humanity at a direct and personal level, and the humanity to be caught up in this divine condescension so as to be elevated into a new condition and a realm of utterly new possibilities’ (St. Cyril of Alexandria, the Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 200). This seems right. If, following McGuckin’s lead, one avoids a Nestorian construal of mi/a fu/sij tou= qeou= lo/gou sesarkwme/nou in terms of krasis (mixture as confusion), then a kind of dyothelitism becomes discernible in Cyril, even granted his emphasis on Christ’s single subjectivity. The Son’s assumption of human nature means the assumption of ‘everything that went along with it’ (Cyril, cited in ibid., p. 221) and this necessarily includes human agency. Thus McGuckin concludes that ‘[f]ar from being less than human, because he was God, Christ demonstrated, for Cyril, the most quintessential human life of all, a life that was fully alive, vibrantly merciful and sublimely compassionate’ (p. 226). Key extracts from this council can be found in The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF 14; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), pp. 325–53.

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of Christ’s human agency as such; an association of Christ’s humanity with condemned flesh; and an interest in Christ’s agony in Gethsemane – these dimensions of Barth’s prolegomenal statement augur an outlook that reaches far beyond anything suggested by labels like ‘Alexandrian’ and ‘Antiochene’. I am of course not suggesting that Barth ought not to be compared with early Christian writers, even though Barth’s reliance on secondary literature can complicate interpretation.76 Comparisons prove illuminating with reference to Cyril, Nestorius and Theodoret of Cyrus; both Leontius of Byzantium and Maximus Confessor, more particularly, help to set Barth’s perspective in vivid relief.77 Nor would I claim that Barth’s Christology necessarily improves on the work of early Christian writers, whether these be of an orthodox or heterodox persuasion. My point is rather that Barth’s description of Jesus Christ ought not be accessed with recourse to tired and potentially distortive paradigms, nor tethered to patristic precedents. A preferable interpretative strategy, employed in the chapters that follow, entails ad hoc conversations with a diverse group of thinkers – ancient, medieval and modern. This strategy keeps in view the eclectic dialogicalism of the Dogmatics itself and, more importantly, ensures a clearer sense of the complexity and originality of Barth’s Christology. Second, notice that the initial concerns raised about the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula can now be laid to rest. Certainly, Barth gives these theologoumena a role in his Christology. On one level, they provide a bulwark against adoptionism and crude Nestorianism. It is not that an alreadyexistent human who meets with God’s favour is indwelled by the divine Son (thereby occasioning the ‘two sons’ problem that Cyril deplored);78 rather, in light of a unique act of God that is ontologically distinguishable from God’s providential creative and sustaining action, Christ’s human essence is brought specially into existence. On another level, the theologoumena block crude and sophisticated forms of docetism.79 Against crude docetism, Barth ensures that the enhypostatic standing of Christ’s human essence underscores the reality and individuality of that same essence. Christ’s humanity may be 76

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Thus E. P. Meijering’s dry observation: ‘Barth hat weder bei den Antiochenen noch bei den Alexandrinern Quellenforschung betrieben, sondern er arbeitete auch hier mit dem bekannten Material aus dogmengeschichtlichen Lehrbüchern’ (Von der Kirchenvätern zu Karl Barth, p. 134). Of course, one ought not to overplay the point. Barth did not crib everything from Heppe; the sureness of his remarks on many patristic writers shows extensive engagement with the original sources. See here chapters 3 and 4. It should be noted that Nestorius’s later writing responds to the ‘two sons’ charge, coming close to coordinating an affirmation of Christ’s ontological and agential complexity with a sound awareness of his personal simplicity. See The Bazaar of Heracleides (ed. and trans. G. R. Driver and Leonard Hodgson; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002). Stickelberger is good on this point; see Ipsa assumptione creatur, pp. 107–62.

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a ‘potentiality of being in the flesh’ (I/2, p. 149) from the perspective of the Son’s pre-temporal existence, but as logos incarnatus the Son actualizes this possibility in terms of an utterly particular spatial and temporal event, thereby giving it genuine reality. Barth makes the point nicely: ‘The Word appropriated this possibility (Möglichkeit) to Himself as His own, and He realized (verwirklichte) it as such when he became Jesus . . . As the Son of God made His own this one specific possibility of human essence (Wesen) and existence (Dasein) and made it a reality, this Man came into being, and He, the Son of God, became this Man’ (I/2, pp. 149–50). Against the more sophisticated docetic option of monothelitism, Barth insists that the absence of a human hypostasis ‘in’ Christ does not mean the absence of human agency. While deriving personality from the Word, Christ’s human acting is preserved (and genuinely so, given its unceasing superintendence by God qua Son). Nevertheless, it is crucial not to overstate the importance of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing. McCormack is quite right to claim that the terms play a vital role in ‘christologizing’ Barth’s doctrine of revelation and theological epistemology, stabilizing and localizing the dialectic of veiling and unveiling. But this does not mean that Barth grants the terms a major role in his dogmatic description of Christ’s person and act as such. He is more interested in formulating a description of Christ attentive and responsive to the biblical witness. Think, for example, of an important claim in Church Dogmatics I/1: that Christ’s humanity must not be adjudged revelatory, even though revelation should be considered in terms of his person, for it is God’s ‘concealing’ of Godself in the flesh that must be of central dogmatic interest.80 The enhypostasis/anhypostasis formula underpins this contention and serves a useful purpose: it emphasizes the prevenient quality of revelation, centred on the divine Subject who reveals himself in Christ, with Christ’s humanity providing a phenomenal occasion for this self-disclosure. Yet Barth’s manifest disinterest in Christ’s humanity at this point – legitimate, so far as it goes – does not undermine his elucidation of Christ’s humanity in Church Dogmatics I/2 or thereafter. While Christ’s humanity functions merely as a veil with respect to revelation, with respect to Christology 80

See for example I/1, p. 323: ‘Can the incarnation of the Word according to the biblical witnesses mean . . . that God’s revealing has now been transmitted as it were to the existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth, that this has thus become identical with it? . . . when this view has really been held, there has always been more [or] less discernible the very thing which, as we have seen, the Old Testament tried to avoid with its concept of the holiness of the revealed God, namely, the possibility of having God disclose Himself through man, of allowing man to set himself on the same platform of God, to grasp Him there and thus to become His master.’ As will become evident in the next chapter, Barth’s doctrine of election means that he cannot sustain this view in the later volumes of the Dogmatics. In that God self-determines eternally as Jesus Christ, making the Son this ontologically and agentially complex person, there is a sense in which Christ’s humanity is bound up with God’s self-revelation.

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proper, this humanity has relevance in and of itself, and merits a description that passes beyond formulae culled from Heppe. In effect, Barth distinguishes the epistemological breakthrough enabled by the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula – which particularizes God’s self-revelation in Christocentric terms – from the dogmatic question of Christ’s being and acting as one who is fully divine and fully human.81

Christology and the ‘historical Jesus’ This chapter has provided a point of entry into the Christology of the Church Dogmatics. My first section used Bruce McCormack’s work to frame a line of inquiry organized around two closely related questions: how does Barth construe Christ’s humanity in its unity with Christ’s divinity? How, more specifically, does Barth describe Christ’s human agency? Second, I considered Barth’s attitude towards Chalcedon, suggesting that Barth’s frank approval of the Definition goes hand in hand with a disinterest in the conceptuality of ‘nature’. Recognizing this point helped to make prominent a key element of Barth’s christological modus operandi: a concern to maintain, at every moment, as close a connection with the New Testament witness as possible.

81

An otherwise perceptive piece by Ivor Davidson on the Göttingen lectures and the Church Dogmatics risks missing this point. He writes: ‘for all the rightful refutations of docetism by Barth and others, it does sometimes appear difficult for a Christology of an- and en-hypostasis to render an account of Jesus which is genuinely reflective of his earthly history taken as a whole . . . Can an enhypostatic Christology avoid the mistake, committed in extreme form by Apollinarius, but potentially there in Alexandrian approaches from Athanasius onwards, of making the Word’s control of the flesh so direct that the flesh is reduced to passivity, devoid of developmental process and normal self-determining agency?’ (‘Theologizing the Human Jesus: An Ancient (and Modern) Approach to Christology Reassessed’, IJST 3.2 (2001), pp. 129–53 (147)). Davidson’s answer to his own question, which forms a gentle critique within a sympathetic reading of Barth, is – probably not. He argues that the problem could be alleviated, were there a greater emphasis on the operations of the Spirit upon the humanity of Christ. ‘This might preserve the notion of enhypostatic humanity from becoming a portrait of a pre-programmed Jesus whose progress through the world is intrinsically calm, and speak of the divine saving action as a process that is accomplished humanly in time and space by one whose character is fully earthed in and affected by created reality’ (p. 151). This is an interesting suggestion, but given that Barth does not offer ‘a Christology of an- and en-hypostasis’ it does not really tackle what Barth is about. The theologoumena in question are not asked to bear the weight of his Christology, or more specifically, the weight of his reflections on Christ as a human being. He is fully aware that more is needed. This is why the theologoumena have a marginal role in §15; why Barth turns to the communicatio gratiarum and the communicatio operationum when dealing more fully with scholastic distinctions; and – as will become evident – why Barth makes powerful use of the concept of Entsprechung.

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My third section identified five aspects of the christological statement of I/2. This section also indicated that an initial worry about Barth’s Christology – namely, that an affiliation of the dialectic of veiling and unveiling with the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing imperils Barth’s description of Christ’s humanity – can be set aside. Why so? Well, simply because Barth does not allow these epistemologically useful theologoumena to set the agenda for his Christology proper. Quite the opposite: I/2 launches a christological programme that evidences keen interest not only in Christ’s divinity, but also in Christ’s humanity and human agency. This part volume suggests, in fact, that close attention to Christ’s humanity and human agency in the subsequent volumes of the Church Dogmatics might prove both intriguing and revealing. One further issue requires attention before turning to Church Dogmatics II – the relationship between Barth’s Christology and research into the socalled historical Jesus. As is well known, this relationship has consistently troubled theologians in the late modern west, raising the distressing prospect of a standoff between the realms of ‘faith’ and ‘history’. For sure, some scholars have explored profitably the tension between historical-critical and dogmatic reflection: geisteswissenschaftlich discoveries have enabled a heightened appreciation of Christ’s humanity and, on occasion, have spurred christological proposals of tremendous power.82 But what Lessing memorably referred to as an ‘ugly, broad ditch’83 has not typically invigorated christological reflection. For the most part, this ditch has proven difficult to traverse. Positioning Barth within the history of varied negotiations connecting the ‘historical Jesus’ and theological reflection would be an interesting project, partly because he wrote mainly in the interval between the first and second ‘Quests’84 and partly because it could shed further light on his relationship 82

83

84

Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Jesus: God and Man (trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe; Philadelphia: Westminster, 2nd edn, 1977) can be read as a work that turns the ‘problem’ of the historical Jesus to dogmatic advantage. Certain texts of Latin American liberation theology might be viewed similarly; I think here especially of Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth (trans. Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006). The recent work of Roger Haight might also be noted for drawing positive constructive lessons from the efforts of historical-critical scholarship; see his Jesus, Symbol of God and, more briefly, The Future of Christology (New York: Continuum, 2005), esp. pp. 13–31. Note that in the works of Pannenberg, Sobrino and Haight an emphasis on Christ’s humanity does not undermine a lively sense that ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5.19). Christological perspectives that find positive meaning in historical-critical work are not invariably of a ‘low’ sort. Gotthold Lessing, Lessing’s Theological Writings (trans. Henry Chadwick; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), p. 55. Martin Kähler concluded the ‘first Quest’ in the 1890s, with Albert Schweitzer banging the nails into the coffin with Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906). The ‘second Quest’ began with Ernst Käsemann’s work in the 1950s.

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with Rudolf Bultmann and his followers. My concern in this section, however, must be limited to the question of how Barth’s dogmatic Christology relates to historical-critical scholarship. I intend only to show that Barth’s relative disinterest in such scholarship does not detract from, or jeopardize, his dogmatic affirmation of Christ’s humanity. Put a bit differently: the supposition that, in the modern period, historical-critical work provides a necessary bulwark against docetism does not apply to Barth.85 He presents Jesus’ humanity effectively without recourse to geisteswissenschaftlich efforts to recover the ‘historical Jesus’. Immediately, of course, there is the matter of definition. Because the phrase ‘historical Jesus’ wants for precision, it has the potential to obscure some important distinctions. Sarah Coakley reckons with this problem in her incisive study of Ernst Troeltsch’s Christology, distinguishing the ‘earthly Jesus’ (the individual named Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in Palestine around two thousand years ago); the ‘historians’ Jesus’ (the individual described in scholarly works); the ‘Gospel portraits of the earthly Jesus’ (narratival representations of Jesus’ ‘earthly career’, written from the perspective of Christian faith); and the ‘historic Jesus’ (the individual who has had an impact on human history).86 And this analytic grid provides only a starting point. It might be augmented with additional categories (such as the ‘fictional Jesus’) or with a subdivision of some rubrics (the influence of the ‘historic Jesus’ might be viewed in Herrmannian perspective, with the ‘inner life’ of Jesus stretching across history; or in Marxist perspective, with the name ‘Jesus Christ’ enlisted to support diverse mechanisms of economic and social control); one ought also to note that the line between the ‘historical– critical’ and the ‘historic’ Jesus can become rather blurry.87 Nevertheless, Coakley’s distinctions are important because they clarify an ambiguously

85

86

87

A recent instance of this supposition, replete with some troubling generalizations: ‘Against any attempt by pious Christians [sic] of a mystical [sic] or docetic bent to swallow up the real humanity of Jesus into an “orthodox” emphasis on his divinity (actually a crypto-monophysitism) [sic], the quest [for the “historical Jesus”] affirms that the risen Jesus is the same person who lived and died as a Jew in 1st-century Palestine, a person as truly and fully human – with all the galling limitations that it involves – as any other human being’. See here John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus; Vol. 1, The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 199. Sarah Coakley, Christ without Absolutes: A Study of the Christology of Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 137–9 (some emphases removed). Reimarus’s Fragments and Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede might be read as classic instances of the creative tension between historical research and appraisals of the ‘historic Jesus’; a more recent example might be Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

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open-ended phrase and bring into focus a critical question: which ‘historical Jesus’, if any, interests Barth? One must begin to answer this question by noting that Barth would not presume any of Coakley’s options to be wholly off-limits for the dogmatician. Barth certainly does not shun the geisteswissenschaftlich method that underwrites the ‘historians’ Jesus’ (loosely construable as a relatively dispassionate attention to the textual details of the New Testament, the context in which Jesus of Nazareth lived and the environment in which the canon was formed). Whatever the charged atmosphere of his dispute with Harnack in 1923, whatever the ‘one-sidedness’ that characterized his earliest postliberal work, and even granted the assertion that, with regard to the historical Jesus, ‘I do not know this man’,88 Barth understood historical-critical treatments of the Bible to have a positive role in theological reflection. Because the Bible is a human document, it can and should be investigated with whatever tools lay to hand. More specifically, the ‘methods of observation used in general hermeneutics’ and a consideration of the ‘questions . . . which arise from that point of view’ (I/2, p. 726) are invaluable aids in a preliminary explicatio of the text. These ‘methods of observation’ might even usefully remind an exegete that the principal witness to revelation includes the mediation of fallible human writers, thereby supplying a useful challenge to docetic construals of inspiration. However, Barth does want to draw a clean distinction between historical-critical endeavours and dogmatic work as such. His worry is that modern theology’s enthrallment with the historicalcritical method distracts from the event of revelation, witnessed by scripture and attended (perhaps) by faithful reading. ‘[T]he totalitarian claim of a general hermeneutics’ (I/2, p. 472), in other words, has the potential to divert dogmatic attention from a true plurality of interpretative options, not least among which is the possibility that scripture refers to something beyond the historical context in which it was written, witnessing ‘eccentrically’ to God’s self-presentation. The dogmatician ought therefore to approach Jesus‘quests’ cautiously. Rather than functioning as propaedeutic aids that assist the theologian, these quests risk mediating and upholding a form of Christian religiosity that evades the proper subject of dogmatic inquiry.89 And that, of course, will not do. The dogmatician ought to keep her eyes fixed firmly on the Christ known in faith, glancing only occasionally towards the everchanging world of historical-critical scholarship. 88

89

Reported by Eberhard Jüngel in Theological Essays II (ed. J B. Webster; trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and J. B. Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 87. Jüngel offers no source for this remark. Thus: ‘the “historical Jesus” of modern Protestantism . . . was purposely discovered, or invented, in order to indicate an approach to Jesus Christ which circumvents His divinity . . . [it is an] approach to a revelation which is generally understandable and possible in the form of human judgment and experience’ (I/2, p. 137).

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Yet it is exactly at this point that Barth seems open to critique. Does he interpose too much distance between the realms of historical-critical study and dogmatic reflection? Does he circumscribe the relationship between these realms in a way that insulates dogmatic work from ‘awkward’ new discoveries? I would say not. To pick up Coakley’s distinctions once more: at issue for Barth is not the ‘earthly Jesus’ (inaccessible apart from the human mediation of the text), nor the ‘historians’ Jesus’ (accounts of whom do not wrestle with the Sache itself), nor the transhistorically efficacious ‘historic Jesus’ of Wilhelm Herrmann (potentially a product of the human spirit, as opposed to the One made present by the action of God), nor simply the ‘gospel portraits of Jesus’ as such. At issue is what one might call the Jesus of biblical faith – the human that God as Son assumes into union with himself, the human that God makes known to the Christian in light of her ongoing encounter with scripture.90 And this individual cannot be adequately accessed by way of investigations into the past; he is only properly considered in the context of the present, with regard to the hic et nunc of Christian faith. It is not only that the ‘risen one encounters us’,91 rendering himself present and authenticating himself as the reality that grounds faith. It is also the case that Christian faith carries with it an awareness of Christ’s ontological and agential complexity. Faith in fact enables the Christian to parse the name ‘Jesus Christ’, discriminating its implicit ontological structure in terms of the titles ‘Son of God’ (indicative of Christ’s divinity) and ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ (indicative of Christ’s humanity); belief in Christ’s personal simplicity is coordinate with an awareness and appreciation of his ontological and agential complexity. The Christian theologian then discerns the possibility of reflecting critically upon the humanity and human activity of Jesus Christ as such. Certainly, any focus on Christ’s humanity does not (or should not) come at the expense of an acknowledgement that this human lives in union with, and as, God qua Word. The theologian must recognize that the title ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ lacks for meaning when separated from the title ‘Son of God’; she must not lose sight of the fact that the humanity and human action of Christ never take place in isolation from the being and action of God’s second way of being. Nevertheless, Christian faith does have the capacity to think concentratedly about the humanity of Christ, distinct (but not separable) from the divinity of Christ – just as it has the capacity to think about ‘Baptism with Water’ in its distinction from (but, one hopes, not separation from) ‘Baptism with the Spirit’ (so IV/4 on ‘The Foundation of the Christian Life’). And all of this gives Barth a tremendous freedom vis-àvis the results of historical-critical study. In the Church Dogmatics he is able 90

91

In affirming the reality of Christus Praesans, Barth stands in continuity with both Calvin and Schleiermacher. See here Dawn DeVries, Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher (Louisville: WJKP, 1996). Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, p. 74.

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to tender a full description of Christ’s humanity that pays little attention to the ‘historical Jesus’, all the while sticking close to the particulars of the New Testament.92 But perhaps one ought not to let Barth off of the hook so easily? One cannot avoid the impression that Barth homogenizes various approaches to the ‘historical Jesus’; also that he risks hermeneutical naivety regarding the relationship between revelation, scripture, faith and academic scholarship. Whose faith is it that guides christological reflection? Why not accept that historical-critical work informs many Christian encounters with revelation? And might not Barth’s Christology be consistent with, or even unconsciously funded by, certain strains of New Testament scholarship?93 Such questions, to put it mildly, can hardly be dispatched with the kind of alacrity presumed by Barth. Yet it is also the case that Barth’s disdain for nuance is quite deliberate. In forcing a clear distinction between the realm of Christian dogmatics and putatively ‘neutral’ investigations of the Bible, Barth offers an important challenge to those scholars who would embrace credulously the findings of historical-critical work, thereby shutting down certain forms of christological reflection (among whom Adolf Harnack continues to figure as a pre-eminent example).94 Barth intends to provoke questions that theologians and exegetes like to avoid, even post-Kähler and Schweitzer. Barth seeks, to apply a current parlance, to press the issue of exegetical ‘positionality’ in the Dogmatics, just as in Romans.95 Why and how does one read? Do the discoveries of modern scholarship facilitate a transformative engagement with scripture – or does the thrill of unpicking the seams of the text come at the 92

93

94

95

For a more general reading of Barth on historical-critical work, somewhat proximate to the position taken here, see Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Historical Criticism and Dogmatic Interest in Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis of the New Testament’, in Mark S. Burrows and Paul Rorem (eds), Biblical Perspectives in Historical Perspective: Studies in Honor of Karlfried Froehlich on His Sixtieth Birthday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 322–38. At least one scholar has engaged questions such as these; see Josef Blank, ‘Karl Barth und die Frage nach dem iridischen Jesus’, ZdTh 2.2 (1986), pp. 176–92. See here esp. Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? (trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978). Notice that Harnack’s credulity has its limits; he is resistant to those historical-critical perspectives that do not accord with his theological sympathies (i.e., Weiss and Wrede). Albert Schweitzer challenges Harnack on this point: see The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (trans. W. Montgomery; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 252–3. And did so with some success. Even Jülicher’s hostile review of Romans (which accused Barth of ‘Gnosticism’ and ‘Marcionism’) admits: ‘Barth forced me point-blank to make a decision about the question of the significance of practical exegesis of Scripture compared to strictly scientific exegesis’. See here Adolf Jülicher, ‘A Modern Interpreter of Paul’, in James M. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, Vol. 1 (trans. Keith R. Crim and Louis De Grazia; Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1968), p. 73.

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price of recognizing what happens noetically when a reader catches a glimpse of God’s salvific project, brought to term in the person of Christ? Why not tarry with the possibility that God’s ‘speech’ gave rise to the New Testament and that its texts incite and shape investigations of faith’s ratio? Even granted the difficulty of ‘bracketing out’ the results of modern scholarship, why not still endeavour to allow scripture itself to govern christological inquiry? The absence of methodological anxiety in the Dogmatics in fact illustrates that, for Barth, the business of integrating dogmatic and exegetical reflection ought to displace hermeneutical disquisitions about the relationship between historical-critical scholarship and dogmatic Christology. He wants extratheological discourses to be secondary to substantive theological claims, ventured in light of an engagement with scripture. His wager, one might say, is that God animated the scriptural witness to Christ, and that this animation continues in the present in terms of the text itself, in terms of the Christian’s reading of the text, and in terms of the Christian’s encounter with, and apprehension of, Jesus Christ, vere Deus vere homo.96 The under-theorized quality of Barth’s approach therefore ought not to distract overmuch. It has a prima facie validity, even granted the inevitable (but not necessarily damning) charge of fideism. Christ’s ‘factual effectiveness’97 in the context of a biblically funded faith suffices as the foundation for christological reflection. It allows various concerns about ‘faith and history’ and ‘revelation and reason’ to be held at bay; space is opened for Barth to think intensively and imaginatively about Christ’s humanity and human 96

97

I am deliberately suggesting some affinity between Barth’s perspective and the ‘postcritical’ practice of ‘scriptural reasoning’ recently developed by Peter Ochs, David Ford, Afed Nayed, et al.; see here the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, at http://etext. lib.virginia.edu/journals/ssr/, accessed November 2007. On the one hand, Barth offers a comment that could act as a motto for this line of research: ‘I draw my categories of logic from the Bible’, John D. Godsey (ed.), Karl Barth’s Table Talk (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), p. 39. On the other hand, the relationship between Barth’s thought and the sophisticated interpretative stance promulgated by Ochs et al. does not admit of easy identification. Barth might agree that ‘[t]he return to the text is . . . a means of participating once again in a tripartite relation among God, world, and a community of interpretation’ (see Peter Ochs, ‘Returning to Scripture: Trends in Postcritical Interpretation’, Cross Currents 44.4 (1994–95), pp. 437–52). But he might ask whether ‘scriptural reasoning’ risks ascribing an inherent value to the text, as opposed to understanding this value as graciously (and non-necessarily) bestowed. Does it assume the Bible constitutes revelation as such, thereby compromising the axiomatic claim that God is the presupposition of revelation? I do not wish to overstate this point. In a period in which some Christian, Islamic and Jewish voices intend an uncrossable gulf between the so-called Abrahamic traditions, and in which fanaticism is on the rise, the practice of ‘scriptural reasoning’ has tremendous value. But it may be that it will take an unusual form in the context of Reformed Christian thought. Eberhard Jüngel, Theological Essays I (trans. J. B. Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), p. 227.

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action, paying only glancing attention to geisteswissenschaftlich work. There is, moreover, sufficient reason for me to defer concentrated investigation into Barth’s attitude towards the ‘historical Jesus’, and to concentrate instead on his dogmatic claims. Once a clear sense of Barth’s Christology has emerged, then the fraught question of the relationship between christological inquiry and historical research can be revisited.

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2 election and christology

The well-known definitions of . . . God and . . . His freedom, containing such terms as ‘wholly other’, ‘transcendence’, or ‘non-worldly’, stand in need of thorough clarification . . . The above definitions might as well fit a dead idol. Negative as they are, they most certainly miss the very center of the Christian concept of God, the radical affirmation of free grace, whereby God bound and committed Himself to man, making Himself in his Son a man of Israel and the brother of all man, appropriating human nature into the unity of His own being . . . God’s freedom is essentially not freedom from but freedom to and for . . . God is free for man, free to coexist with man and, as Lord of the covenant, to participate in his history. The concept of God without man is indeed as anomalous as wooden iron.1 God . . . is essentially love and grace. His mercy unto man is not merely an accidental thing: it is the essence of the divine heart . . . He [ Jesus Christ] is the mercy of God, he is the love of God, he is the open heart of God.2

Church Dogmatics II (part one, 1940; part two, 1942) is a landmark achievement of twentieth-century European theology. In a historical context disfigured by unbridled cruelty, Barth produced a work distinguished by its optimism, depth and unflagging intellectual audacity. These qualities abound in Barth’s treatment of election, which dominates Church Dogmatics II/2. Barth here marks sharp disagreement with the characterization of God implied by many Calvinistic accounts of predestination. For Barth, such accounts distort a basic Christian conviction – that God, the one who loves in freedom, relates graciously to humankind. Election is therefore anything but a ‘mixed message of joy and terror, salvation and damnation’ (II/2, p. 13), 1

2

Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (trans. Thomas Newton and Thomas Wieser; n.p.: John Knox, 1960), p. 72. Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church: A Commentary on the Apostles Creed (trans. Gabriel Vahanian; London: Fontana, 1960), pp. 26 and 32.

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whereby God seemingly consigns one portion of humanity to death and another portion to salvation. It is rather the ‘sum of the Gospel’ (II/2, p. 1). It is God’s pledge, realized in the person of Jesus Christ, to establish and maintain loving companionship with humankind. Indeed, as a doctrine, election provides a pre-eminent point of departure for theological reflection: it identifies, in striking fashion, how the doctrines of God and Christ relate and co-inhere.3 The goal of this chapter is to explore this co-inherence for, the instructive stirrings of I/2 notwithstanding, it is in Church Dogmatics II that Barth lays the foundation upon which his mature Christology is built. In what follows, I trace an arc that stretches from Barth’s understanding of God’s being to his description of Jesus Christ as a human agent. The first part of my first section, having clarified the relationship between Church Dogmatics I and II, presents the doctrine of God in Church Dogmatics II/1 as essential groundwork for the christological statement of II/2. Building on this analysis, I then suggest that Barth construes Gottes Gnadenwahl 4 as an event of abiding consequence for God: an action of divine selfdetermination, whereby God constitutes Godself qua Son in terms of Jesus Christ. This means more than a deemphasized logos asarkos concept. To draw on an idiom developed by Eberhard Jüngel,5 it means that God’s ‘being in becoming’ entails an event of divine self-qualification; that God decides, freely, that the economic elective activity of the Son, realized by way of his union with a contingent human being, should prove eternally determinative for God’s second way of being.6 Thus it is that God’s ‘primal decision’ 3

4

5

6

Walter Kreck underscores this point nicely: ‘Barth . . . rückt die Lehre von der Erwählung an den Anfang des Ganzen, in die Gotteslehre, die ihrerseits wieder nur christologisch zu gewinnen ist, und vor hier aus bekommt alles theologisches Denken seinen archimedischen punkt’. See Grundentscheidungen in Karl Barths Dogmatik: zur Diskussion seines Verständnisses von Offenbarung und Erwählung (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1978), p. 188. Bruce McCormack takes a similar line in ‘The Sum of the Gospel: The Doctrine of Election in the Theologies of Alexander Schweizer and Karl Barth’, in David Willis and Michael Welker (with the special collaboration of Matthias Gockel) (eds), Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 470–93. See esp. p. 491: ‘That the doctrine of election is the sum of the gospel means ultimately for Barth that it is a doctrine which shapes both the form and the content of all other doctrines.’ The English translation often abbreviates this phrase as ‘the election of God’ – unhelpfully so. Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase (trans. John Webster; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001). I am using, and will continue to use, a whole cluster of terms – self-determination, selfqualification, self-constitution, self-conditioning, even self-transformation – to describe this aspect of Barth’s doctrine of God. The reason for this cluster is to ensure that analysis does not get bogged down in semantic disputes but rather focuses directly on the radical way in which God qua Son takes on an identity inclusive of the concrete life of Jesus Christ.

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(Urentscheidung) and ‘primal history’ (Urgeschichte) come to include the contingent history of Jesus of Nazareth, the human assumed by the divine Son. Thus it is that the divine Son not only humbles himself by, as Cyril of Alexandria puts it, ‘economically submitting himself to the limitations of manhood’;7 it is also that, by his being the logos incarnatus, the divine Son makes this free act of humiliation basic to – that is, immanent to – the triune life as such. The chapter’s second section considers Barth’s construal of Christ’s human agency in Church Dogmatics II/2. I argue that Barth’s understanding of divine self-determination goes hand in hand with a continued interest in, and development of, the expansive dyothelitism sketched in Church Dogmatics I/2. I focus especially on Barth’s suggestive presentation of Christ’s humanity in terms of ‘history, encounter, and decision’. This conceptual cluster develops further Barth’s claim that Christ humanly plays an integral role in the achievement of reconciliation. My concluding section looks ahead to this book’s third and fourth chapters.

Divine self-determination The relationship between Church Dogmatics I and II Two interrelated questions animated Church Dogmatics I. First, how does one begin to think theologically? Second, about what should the theologian think? Barth answered the first question in a way that challenged entrenched liberal protestant modes of thought. Eschewing interest in religious experience, Christian moral upbuilding and the course of history as bases for thought, Barth argued that God’s revelation, witnessed in scripture, initiates and shapes theological reflection. For sure, faced with revelation, the Christian theologian’s initial response may well be bewilderment. This event can neither be incorporated into the sphere of human religiosity nor be subsumed by any geisteswissenschaftlich category of thought. It stands apart from, and over against, all human possibility; it effects, to use Barth’s early phraseology, the krisis of ‘a new world, the world of God’.8 But revelation’s ontological and ontic singularity does not prove permanently inhibitory for thought. Quite the opposite, for in generating faith as its correlate, revelation invites a reflexive consideration of the structures of faith; it encourages the believer, superintended by God’s ongoing activity upon her, to conform her thinking to that which she faithfully knows. Theology begins, one might say, when 7

8

St Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ (trans. John Anthony McGuckin; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), p. 86. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (trans. Douglas Horton; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 45.

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Christians individually and collectively consider the noetic consequences of God’s revelatory speaking in its ‘objective’ and its ‘subjective’ dimensions (the incarnation and the activity of the Spirit, respectively) and ‘give an account of . . . faith to itself and the world’ (I/2, p. 622).9 Or to borrow from Anselm: ‘after becoming well-grounded in the faith’ – i.e., having acknowledged the event of revelation, witnessed in scripture – the Christian ‘conceive[s] a desire to exercise himself in the investigation of its logic’10 and embarks on the difficult task of venturing theological claims and arguments. Barth answered the second question with a programmatic description of the divine Subject of revelation. Revelation is not merely the impartation of information unattainable by human effort. It is also, and in fact primarily, an event in which God presents Godself to humankind: an event in which God reveals and conveys God’s eternal being as sovereign and triune. And this self-presentation enables, in principle, a precise and extensive conceptual redescription of God’s being. In contrast to Schleiermacher’s deferral of significant questions about God’s ultimate identity – intensive ontological reflection upon God’s triunity being displaced by an intriguing, but ultimately dissatisfying, summarization of the elemental dynamics of a local Christian consciousness at the end of The Christian Faith11 – Barth shows little reticence when it comes to tendering strong claims about God’s being as such. He channels a radicalized Herrmannian sense of divine objectivity into Calvinian straits, beginning theological inquiry with a bold statement about God as one person in three ways of being. He hereby binds together the ‘subject matter’ and ‘Subject’ of theology, correlating the ‘formal’ characteristics of revelation, as a concrete and biblically mediated event, with claims about the ‘content’ of God’s being. Ingredient to the Bible’s basic description of revelation (‘Gott offenbart sich als der Herr’) is therefore the Christian’s knowledge of God’s eternal triunity as Father, Son and Spirit. The unity-in-difference that characterizes the (economic) event of revelation and its consequent cognitive apprehension corresponds to the unity-in-difference definitive of God’s eternal (immanent) being.12 However, one cannot say that Church Dogmatics I correlates the economic and immanent trinities in thoroughgoing fashion. In this volume, Barth does not apply what is sometimes called ‘Rahner’s rule’13 radically, for his 9

10

11 12 13

Barth uses this phrase to describe church confessions in §20. It illumines nicely his understanding of the task of dogmatics, albeit with the qualification that this ‘accounting’ has the specific task of testing proclamation against the normative witness of scripture. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 260. See Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, pp. 738–51. See I/1, pp. 295–489. The locus classicus for this so-called rule: Karl Rahner, The Trinity (trans. Joseph Donceel; New York: Crossroad, 1997).

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association of God’s revelatory ‘work’ and God’s eternal being stands under an ontological reservation. That is to say: God’s immanent being and God’s revelatory activity must be cleanly distinguished, for God exists as a selfsufficient Subject before, beyond and unrelated to God’s self-presentation. Certainly, God is not other than the way that God appears in the event of revelation. The Christian need not worry about the reliability of the information communicated; as ‘God’s own Doppelgänger’ (KD I/1, p. 333), God reveals and conveys Godself with a clarity that surpasses every creaturely mode of communication. ‘Who’ God is can be paired up with the ‘what’ of revelation – God as the Father, God as the Son and God as the Holy Spirit. However, like Rahner, Barth will not annul the distinction between the economy and God’s immanent life. He worries that God’s transcendent subjectivity might be rendered equivalent to the contingent event of revelation, thereby giving sanction to pseudo-theologies that replace confessions of divine sovereignty with the comforts of evasive religiosity. He therefore insists that God, as Lord, ‘precedes’ revelation. God’s prior and immanent Subjectivity – God’s jealous self-sustenance of God’s being, set apart from God’s relationship with humanity – forms the anterior ontological condition of God’s economic self-disclosure.14 The consequence of this reservation is that Church Dogmatics I does not cohere fully with the perspective advanced in ensuing volumes.15 Barth’s early vision of God’s self-sufficient Lordship sits awkwardly with the later contention, dominant from Church Dogmatics II onwards, that God wills 14

15

On this point see Wilfried Härle, Sein und Gnade: Die Ontologie in Karl Barths Kirchlicher Dogmatik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), esp. pp. 13–28. For more on this issue, see Hans Theodor Goebel, ‘Trinitätslehre und Erwählungslehre bei Karl Barth: Eine Problemanzeige’, in Dietrich Korsch and Hartmut Ruddies (eds), Wahrheit und Versöhnung: theologische und philosophische Beiträge zur Gotteslehre (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1989), pp. 147–66. Goebel describes the problem in terms of Barth’s accent on the ‘ability’ of God in Church Dogmatics I being inconsistent with his later emphasis on the will of God. Thus: ‘Von hierher ist zu fragen, ob in dem Entwurf der Trinitätslehre in den Prolegomena zur Kirchlichen Dogmatik die Frage nach dem Können des Subjektes der Offenbarung und seinem ewigen Grund nicht in einer gewissen Abstraktion alles erkenntnisleitende Interesse trägt. Mübte die Frage nach dem Können nicht in ein nachgeordnetes Verhältnis zur Frage nach dem Willen des Subjekts der Offenbarung gesetzt werden und diese Frage dann bestimmend werden für die trinitätstheologische Explikation?’ (p. 154). Other commentators take a similar line. Thies Gundlach argues that ‘die Erwählungslehre als eine korrigiende Präzierung der trinitätstheologischen Offenbarungslehre Barths verstanden werden muss’ (see Selbstgrenzung Gottes und die Autonomie des Menschen: Karl Barths Kirchliche Dogmatik als Modernisierungschritt evangelischer Theologie (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), p. 164) and Bruce L. McCormack offers a powerful statement of this position in ‘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, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 101–4.

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eternally to be ‘with us’; that, more specifically, God orients and determines Godself, ab initio and eternally, in terms of a concrete companionship with humankind effected in Jesus Christ. To draw on Bruce McCormack’s periodization of Barth’s work: since Church Dogmatics I falls within the ambit of a ‘dialectical theology in the shadow of an anhypostatic-enhypostatic Christology’ powered by ‘pneumatocentrism’,16 this volume must be situated within the penultimate stage of Barth’s theological development. Why so? Well, when Barth applies his Christocentrism radically – that is, in Church Dogmatics II and thereafter – earlier assertions of God’s self-sufficient and isolated Lordship diminish in quantity and take on a rather different role. A clean distinction between God’s immanent existence qua Son and God’s economic activity qua Son no longer holds; the epistemological function of Barth’s ‘christological concentration’ is now complemented by ontological claims about God’s free decision to determine himself, as Son, in terms of the concrete life of Jesus Christ. And this means that Barth’s preliminary Christology must be seen as an incomplete, though not wholly misleading, anticipation of things to come. In particular, the minimalist formulation, vere Deus vere homo is superseded. Barth now resolves to parse the name ‘Jesus Christ’ as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’. He undertakes a thoroughgoing integration of his doctrines of God and Christ, whereby God’s sovereign elective act – God’s extreme love for humanity, realized by way of the incarnation – transforms God’s eternal being. Indeed, it is not improper to say that Barth’s mature Christology only ‘finds its feet’ once the Dogmatics is up and running. With respect to matters christological and (strictly speaking) theological, the prolegomenal perspective of Church Dogmatics I is aufgehoben. In an important recent article, McCormack provides a strong exposition of this point, paying attention to the development of Barth’s Christology in a way that expands the analysis forwarded in Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology.17 McCormack argues that Barth’s initial christological statement (§15) entailed a problematic commitment to ‘the abstract metaphysical subject of Chalcedon’.18 In this paragraph, what God does, in and as Christ, has no bearing on who God eternally is; Barth’s early concern for God’s immutability and self-sufficient ontological priority requires a clear-cut dissociation of God’s eternal being qua Son and God’s concrete incarnational existence qua Son. Only in II/2, and under the direct influence of Pierre Maury’s lecture on ‘Election et Foi’,19 does Barth shake off this way of thinking 16 17

18 19

McCormack, Dialectical Theology, pp. 327–449. Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Barths grundsätzlicher Chalkedonismus?’, ZdTh 18.2 (2002), pp. 138–73. Ibid., p. 143. This lecture was first given at the International Calvin Congress of 1936. See Pierre Maury, ‘Erwählung und Glaube’, Theologische Studien 8 (1940), p. 4–24.

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and begin to conceive God’s act in and as Christ as an event of divine self-constitution. At this point, Barth’s doctrine of election begins to have an impact on his understanding of the triune life. Barth contends that God’s elective ‘decision is not a mere role play, but rather a decision with ontological significance’;20 he closes the ‘ontological gap’21 that separates the eternal Son (the logos incarnandus or logos asarkos) and the incarnate Son (the logos incarnatus or logos ensarkos). The ontological reservation basic to Church Dogmatics I therefore falls away. Barth’s concern now is to describe Jesus Christ as an event and person constitutive of God in God’s second way of being. And why is such a description required? It is simply because God sovereignly wills to be God in this way. God wills that, as the Son, ‘God is, antecedently (zuvor), in himself in eternity, the way of his selfrevelation in time’; God wills that the ‘elemental decision (Urentscheidung) in which God decides to be the electing God in his second way of being is a decision that has never not already taken place’.22 Another consequence is that the conceptuality of Barth’s Christology shifts. So much becomes evident in the doctrine of reconciliation (Church Dogmatics IV). Sidelining the Chalcedonian formula of Christ being ‘one person in two natures’ – although not, of course, denying the relative accuracy of this claim – Barth favours instead a description of Christ’s twofold history (Geschichte). On the one side, God’s ‘participation’ in Jesus’ life means God’s self-determination as the incarnate Son. On the other, Jesus’ human ‘participation’ in God’s life means involvement in God’s ‘history through his active obedience to the will of the Father’ – an exalting ‘obedience, which brings his history into conformity or accord with the history of God’s self-humiliation . . . and thereby is made the vehicle of it’.23 Obviously, I would quibble with McCormack on some points of detail regarding I/2. The epithet ‘Chalcedonian’ ought to be used more carefully with respect to Barth’s prolegomenal statement. I would also argue that many of Barth’s early christological moves anticipate, in important and revealing ways, arguments found in later portions of the Dogmatics. And I will have much to say about ‘participation’, ‘history’ and ‘obedience’ in the next two chapters: while McCormack’s gestures in this direction are on-target, they require a good deal of expansion. But in claiming that the doctrine of election grounds and shapes Barth’s Christology, McCormack identifies a point of tremendous importance. The construal of election as divine self-determination forwarded in Church Dogmatics II/2 binds together the doctrines of God and Christ in striking fashion. Not only does Barth hereby prohibit any easy disaffiliation of the immanent life of the Son 20 21 22 23

McCormack, ‘Barths grundsätzlicher Chalkedonismus?’, p. 154. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., pp. 156 and 157. Ibid., p. 165.

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(the logos asarkos) from his incarnate life as Jesus Christ (the logos ensarkos); he also begins to consider how God wills that the economy of revelation and reconciliation, as it pertains to the Son’s assumption of humanity, is drawn into, and ramifies within, the eternal life of God. Let me make this point more fully. Having dispatched myriad epistemological issues that relate to God’s self-revealed Lordship in Church Dogmatics I, Church Dogmatics II confronts squarely an important clutch of ontological questions. Does God’s action, in Christ, have an impact on God’s being as such? In what way does one coordinate the doctrines of God and Christ, and can they, in quite radical fashion, interpenetrate? What might it mean to think of the Son’s self-determination as the incarnate One? In answering such questions, Barth does not allow narrow understandings of God’s selfsufficient Lordship to constrain his thinking. He understands the freedom of God as a freedom to be whomsoever and whatsoever God wills to be – even if this freedom complicates (but does not annul) the axiomatic conviction that God is ‘wholly other’. Barth recognizes, moreover, that an ongoing task for dogmatics is the discrimination and employment of words and concepts that describe the identity that God preveniently assigns Godself. Concomitantly, Barth comes to believe that an adequate description of God’s preveniently assigned identity, as Son, must be tethered to a description of the life lived by the incarnate Son. This means, once again, that a strict partition of God’s immanent being as Son and God’s economic work as Son is no longer dogmatically viable. God wills that God’s elective act should have an impact on whom and what God ultimately is, and all theological descriptions of God’s identity must take account of this fact. So while at the beginning of Church Dogmatics II/1 Barth will still say that God ‘is who He is without’ God’s works (II/1, p. 260), that God ‘is free from all . . . conditioning or determination from without, by that which is not Himself’(II/1, p. 307), and even that ‘God confronts all that is in supreme and utter dependence’ so that God ‘does not transform Himself’ in relation to created beings but rather ‘in His relationship and connexion with them, He remains who He is’ (II/1, p. 311) – somewhat appropriately, for God does ‘precede’ the event of revelation and incarnation in some sense, given that it is only by dint of God’s pre-temporal decision that the incarnation affects the divine being – by the end of this volume, such claims function primarily as negative counterpoints to Barth’s positive assertion: God wills, in God’s second way of being, to be God’s incarnational ‘work’ ad extra, viz., the ontologically and agentially complex person of Jesus Christ. This claim about divine self-determination amounts to one of the more controversial issues in Barth studies, as evidenced by recent controversy over the reading of election sponsored by McCormack.24 It is also one of the 24

See here Paul Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity (London: T&T Clark, 2002), esp. pp. 60–4; Kevin Hector, ‘God’s Triunity and

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more challenging aspects of Barth’s thought. Barth is not only attempting to overcome (neo)-Kantian agnosticism about God’s being, endemic to much nineteenth-century European liberal theology; he wants also to overhaul the way Christian theologians think about God’s aseity, establishing a basic and ontologically significant connection between the doctrines of God and incarnation. Beyond complicating the distinction between the immanent and economic trinities – itself a somewhat mind-bending move – Barth’s doctrine of election necessitates a reconsideration of the position of the Trinity in theological reflection, sets up a new framework in which the divine attributes (or, as Barth prefers, the divine ‘perfections’) are conceived, and raises tricky questions about time and eternity. Exacerbating the interpretative challenge still further is the fact that Barth only gestures towards his revolutionary doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II/1. Although II/1 can and should be read as preparatory for the radical moves of II/2, Barth probably had not committed fully to the future trajectory of his thought when writing this part volume. So much is evident throughout ‘The Reality of God’ (chapter 6). However, important groundwork for the treatment of election, and Barth’s subsequent Christology, is laid in II/1. To elucidate the claims advanced above, then, the next subsection considers Church Dogmatics II/1. Armed with an analysis of God’s being as ‘the one who loves in freedom’, I then tackle Barth’s doctrine of election at close quarters.

‘God is’ means ‘God loves’: Church Dogmatics II/1 Paragraphs 28–31 of Church Dogmatics II/1 showcase Barth’s conviction that God’s lordship extends to God’s own being: these paragraphs might well be read as an extended meditation on Exod. 3.14a (most accurately translated, ‘I will be what I will be’; not ‘I am who I am’).25 Crucial to Barth’s presentation is his construal of decision (Entscheidung) as an ontological

25

Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar’, IJST 7.3 (2005), pp. 246–61; Paul Molnar, ‘The Trinity, Election, and God’s Ontological Freedom: A Response to Kevin W. Hector’, IJST 8.3 (2006), pp. 294–306; Edwin Chr. van Driel, ‘Karl Barth on the Eternal Existence of Jesus Christ’, SJT 60.1 (2007), pp. 45–61; and Bruce McCormack, ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Chr. van Driel’, SJT 60.1 (2007), pp. 62–79. Also useful are Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-Theological Comparison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 158–97 and Nimmo, Being in Action, pp. 4–12. For a lucid account of McCormack’s constructive position, see his essay, ‘The Ontological Presuppositions of Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement’, in Charles E. Hall and Frank A. James III (eds), The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical & Practical Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Roger R. Nicole (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), pp. 346–66. ‘And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh”. He continued, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you’ ” ’. See Tanakh, a new translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the traditional Hebrew text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication

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category descriptive of God’s capacity for, and enactment of, self-definition.26 Decision means that God’s willing, vis-à-vis God’s own identity, is not adventitious but abidingly constitutive. God decides on God’s character; God’s ‘own conscious, willed and executed decision’ (II/1, p. 271) determines who and what God will be. Accordingly, Barth calmly insists that a fundamental theological conviction – that ‘God is’ – neither functions as a bland statement about the objectivity of God nor represents a lapse into so-called onto-theology, whereby various philosophical understandings of ‘Being’ prepossess and corrupt theological statements about the divine reality.27 ‘God is’ amounts

26

27

Society, 1985), p. 88. For a detailed treatment of this verse, see Werner H. Schmidt, Exodus, Vol. 2 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1974–88), pp. 169–79. Schmidt’s translation, offered in Vol. 2.2, is: ‘Da sprach Gott zu Mose: “Ich werde sein, der ich sein werde”’ (p. 102). Thus Jüngel: ‘Decision does not belong to the being of God as something supplementary to this being; rather, as event, God’s being is [God’s] own decision’ (Being Is in Becoming, p. 81). This aspect of Barth’s thought has also been noted more recently by Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology; Vol. 1, The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Thus: ‘According to Barth, God’s being is most decisively construed by the notion of decision. God is so unmitigatedly personal that his free decision is not limited even by his “divine nature”: what he is, he himself chooses’ (p. 140). Paul Molnar is curiously resistant to this aspect of the Dogmatics, arguing that, so far as Barth is concerned, ‘God’s being is not the result of his will’ (Divine Freedom, p. 63). If Molnar means that God’s being is not necessarily conditioned by God’s willed action in the creaturely sphere, then Barth would of course agree. But if Molnar means that God cannot and does not will to be conditioned by a particular action in the creaturely sphere, then he is actually inhibiting God’s freedom, removing the possibility of God conditioning Godself. At issue here is not divine being in the abstract. At issue is what kind of being God decides to be – how God exercises God’s freedom in shaping God’s own being. And there is no reason to presume that God’s determination of God’s being must exclude God’s freely willed incorporation of one of God’s works ad extra. How is Molnar’s principal concern – ‘to recognize, uphold, and respect God’s freedom’ (Ibid., p. ix) by way of a doctrine of the immanent Trinity – aided by driving a wedge between God’s essence and God’s will with respect to the divine Son? Why is God’s freedom compromised, if God wills an identity inclusive of the ontologically complex person of Jesus Christ? Is not God’s freedom manifested in God’s assigning himself this identity? Härle makes this point clearly: ‘was “Sein” in Anwendung auf Gott heibt, nach Barths Auffassung nicht geklärt werden mittels einer Verständigung über den Seinsbegriff im Allegemein, so mub der umgekehrte Weg beschritten werden: der Seinsbegriff in seiner Anwendung auf Gott ist zu bestimmen aufgrund der Analyse des Seins Gottes’ (Sein und Gnade, p. 10). Jüngel’s remarks in the 1975 Epilogue to God’s Being Is in Becoming are also important. He expresses exasperation that the ‘ontological implications of theology’ are too readily disdained – so much so ‘that positive use of the little word “ontological” in the circle of so-called Barthians nowadays triggers complete phobia. The fact that Barth himself made uninhibited use of this word clearly does not prevent critics sensing in any interpretation which seeks to bring out the ontological relevance of Barth’s theology an attempt to subject it to the yoke of an ontology acquired in

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rather to an analytic starting point for theological reflection that is controlled and filled out by the decisions that God makes about God’s identity. Given that God decides about God’s identity, God can properly be described personalistically. Barth portrays God as the originary ‘I’, the pre-eminent subject, the ultimate ‘decision-maker’. God’s freedom to self-constitute is ‘the freedom of a knowing and willing I . . . which distinguishes itself from what it is not, and what it is not from itself, an I which controls nature’ (II/1, p. 267).28 God is ‘genuinely always an “I” . . . who knows about itself, who wills itself, who, in this very act of perfect power establishes and distinguishes itself in full self-sufficiency’ (II/1, p. 268 rev.). God, indeed, ‘reveals what . . . a person originally and genuinely is’ (II/1, p. 286 rev.), since human beings display this characteristic only derivatively. At the same time, Barth explicitly reproves those who would reify the concept of divine personality. He uses the language of selfhood under an important qualification, made explicit in an excursus about divine personality in eighteenth and nineteenthcentury thought.29 Barth here notes that the language of personality, person and, by extension, subjectivity, risks overemphasizing the formal condition of possibility of God’s self-ordained identity – that is, the liberty of divine self-constitution – thereby drawing attention away from the content of God’s identity. A theologian’s awareness that God can decide upon God’s own identity must ultimately be of secondary interest; his or her primary concern must be to describe what kind of subject God wills to be. The language of ‘personality’ could, at a pinch, even be discarded: one can ‘do without it so long as what is intended in it is assured and accepted . . . What must be proclaimed is not that God is a person, but rather the particular person that God is’ (II/1, p. 296 rev.).

28

29

independence from theological knowledge’ (Being Is in Becoming, pp. 129–30). Both authors’ remarks, made over thirty years ago, would be well heeded in current debates about God and ‘being’. If some theologians have fallen prey to the ‘yoke’ of ontotheology – and I remain unconvinced that a large number of figures are genuinely susceptible to this charge (does Calvin promulgate ontotheology? does Schleiermacher? does even Tillich?) – Barth cannot be numbered among them. He expressly avoids ‘yield[ing] to a revulsion against the idea of being’ (hardly a transparent philosophical category, by the way) while also ‘resist[ing] the threatened absorption of God into a doctrine of being’ (II/1, p. 260). The German attests to Barth’s appropriation of his idealist heritage: God’s being ‘die Freiheit eines wissenden und wollenden, sich selbst von dem, was es nicht ist, und das, was es nicht ist, selbst von sich selbst unterscheiden, über die Natur verfügenden Ich’ (KD II/1, p. 300). II/1, p. 287–97. Note the frank claim on p. 296: ‘nothing at all depends on the statement that [God] is or [God] has personality . . . The concept of personality as such [i.e., detached from God’s self-assigned identity as the one who loves] is too colourless to form a necessary basis for our description of this absolutely indispensable moment in the doctrine of God.’

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The irrepressible question, then: if ‘God is a self-constituting agent who exercises sovereign control over [God’s] own identity’,30 upon what identity does God decide? Who does God will to be? As is well known, Barth launches his answer with the claim that God’s revelatory advance shows God to be elementally ‘act’ (Tat), ‘event’ (Ereignis), ‘happening’ (Geschehen), and ‘life’ (Leben). Negatively, this cluster of terms protests the attribution of inert substantiality to God. God is not analogous to a creaturely ‘thing’; God is certainly not comprised by some kind of static immaterial ‘stuff’. Positively, the terms attest to Barth’s preference for construing God’s being dynamically. Using phraseology that could warm the heart of many a process theologian,31 he writes: We cannot escape God’s action for a non-acting God. This is not because we ourselves cannot [imagine God in this way], but because there is nothing above or beyond of God’s action – because a transcendence of God’s action is nonsense. We are dealing with God’s being, but with respect to the being of God the word ‘event’ or ‘act’ is a final word, not a word that could be outbid or somehow put in question. In its very depths, God’s Godhead consists in the fact that it is event. Not any one event, not event in general, but rather the event of God’s action. (II/1, p. 263 rev.) This claim has foundational importance. ‘God is’ means that God happens; ‘God is’ means that God’s being is distinguished by an incomparable vitality, a unique and unceasing liveliness. Accordingly, to describe God without predicating activity of God’s being would be a lamentable dogmatic misstep. Activity is never an evanescent occurrence for God; it cannot be thought of as an accidental property, contingently or temporarily associated with the divine. It is a property of God’s being that God makes basic to God’s being. When one thinks of God, one must think act and being as perfectly coincident. God is not just ‘actus purus’, though; God is ‘actus purus . . . et singularis’ (II/1, p. 264). Most simply, this claim signals that God’s self-assigned identity is utterly particular. God distinguishes Godself as unique in relation

30

31

Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 139. The comparison of Barth and process thinkers is consistently informative, even granted fundamental disagreements. See for example Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Sheila Greeve Davaney, Divine Power: A Study of Karl Barth and Charles Hartshorne (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986); and Michael Welker, ‘Barth’s Theology and Process Theology’, Theology Today 43.3 (1986), pp. 383–97.

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to other beings; God is sui generis in the most radical sense imaginable.32 More profoundly, Barth proposes that God’s unique identity is inherently relational. Relational in a twofold sense: God relates to Godself ‘internally’ (i.e., immanently) and to the creaturely other ‘externally’ (i.e., economically). Originally and most basically divine relationality happens on an immanent level, being definitive of God’s triune life. ‘[O]nly as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . living with and for and in another . . . not in solitude, but rather in fellowship (Gemeinschaft)’ (II/1, p. 275 rev.) is God God. Or, to use Wilfried Härle’s felicitous phrasing, best kept in the original German: ‘zwischen den drei Seinsweisen Gottes spielt sich dieses Geschehen ab.’33 Notice, in particular, Barth’s willingness to employ Gemeinschaft to describe God’s triune interrelating. Whatever proponents of a ‘social doctrine of the trinity’ might charge, and granted that Barth will never satisfy theologians who want to push Trinitarian reflection to the point at which each divine ‘person’ has a distinct centre of consciousness, Barth does not view God’s self-constituting decision in terms of monadic simplicity. Gemeinschaft indicates plainly that God exists as a unified event of ceaseless, interactive, and tri-dimensional interrelationship. On the heels of the first volume of the Dogmatics, II/1 in fact establishes the basis for Barth’s later acclamation of ‘plurality in the being of God’ (III/1, p. 192), even ‘a confrontation in the divine being and sphere’ that is also ‘peace, unity and common determination’ (III/1, p. 183). God orders God’s life in terms of a triplex uniting, with the divine Seinsweise of Father, Son and Holy Spirit constantly participating in, and purposefully upholding, God’s personal simplicity.34 But God’s triune identity must not be thought of as exclusively selfreferential. Divine self-relating portends the postulation of the creaturely 32

33 34

Barth will later consider this point in the context of God’s ‘perfections’; see II/1, pp. 442–5. Härle, Sein und Gnade, pp. 47–8. For a classic statement of ‘social Trinitarianism’, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). As will become evident, I find it difficult to understand why Barth stands under the suspicion of being too ‘Latin’ in his doctrine of God. At root, this misreading seems to derive from an unwillingness to view I/1 as prolegomenal, matched with a persistent disregard for the outworking of Barth’s Trinitarianism in later volumes of the Dogmatics. A careful reading of III/1, for example, shows how strenuously Barth upholds the idea of God’s being as Gemeinschaft. His exegesis of Gen. 1.26 includes comments on the ‘intra-divine unanimity of intention and decision’ (III/1, p. 182); considers co-humanity as analogous to the fact that ‘[i]n God’s own being and sphere there is a counterpart: a genuine but harmonious self-encounter and self-discovery; a free co-existence and cooperation’ (III/1, p. 185); and offers a frank affirmation of ‘plurality in the divine being . . . the differentiation and relationship, the loving co-existence and co-operation, the I and Thou which first take place in God Himself’ (III/1, p. 196). None of this sounds a typically ‘Western’ note; there is no sense in which an acclamation of divine unity overpowers an appreciation of divine plurality.

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other; it anticipates God’s creative action ad extra. Church Dogmatics I/1 hinted at this point when describing the triune relationships as the anterior condition of revelation.35 Paragraph 28 radicalizes the earlier epistemological claim, conceptualizing God’s self-relating as the precursor of God’s decision to be ontologically productive ‘outside’ of Godself. God’s living as Miteinander and Füreinander in Godself foretells God’s intention to generate and sustain a relationship with finite creation as such. The fellowship ‘internal’ to God’s being is the precedent, or more accurately the occasion, for God to seek fellowship external to God’s being. One can even say that the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ that distinguishes God and creatures obtains because God seeks a fellowship in excess of that which characterizes God’s own existence. While God enjoys the infinite riches of intra-divine relationship – and why should God want anything more? – God does not ‘settle’ for the perichoretic interplay of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God’s identity is outgoing in an utterly surprising sense, for God wills to be the one who is ‘seeking and creating . . . fellowship’ (II/1, p. 276 rev.) with the creaturely other.36 Indeed, God wills to be the one who is never not seeking and creating fellowship with that which is not God. It is crucial to underscore the importance of love for Barth’s doctrine of God at this point. The emergence of love as a dominating theme in II/1 both provides the stimulus needed for Barth to overcome the self-referential Herrschaft motif of Church Dogmatics I and forms the basis for his doctrine of election. The phrase is well known: God decides to be ‘the one who loves in freedom’. And quickly one must add: this does not mean that God wields and exercises an autarchic right to love according to God’s changeable whims! At issue here is not the arbitrariness of divine favour. The phrase summarizes, rather, God’s eternal eagerness to create, sustain and relate companionably to a reality otherwise than Godself. God does not wish to be God in any other way; God does not decide upon an identity without the creaturely other; God wills that ‘God is’ means that God stands, lovingly, in relationship to that which is not God. Barth will certainly remind his readers

35

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Goebel is precise: ‘Die “drei Seinsweisen” der Trinität verhalten sich danach zueinander wie die innergöttliche Möglichkeit der Offenbarung (“der ewige Sohn”), die innergöttliche Möglichkeit der Möglichkeit der Offenbarung (“der ewige Vater”), die innergöttliche Möglichkeit der menschlichen Wirklichkeit und Möglichkeit, die Offenbarung Gottes zu glauben und zu bekennen (“der ewige Geist”)’ (‘Trinitätslehre und Erwählungslehre’, p. 152). This phrase, in various forms, is repeated throughout §28. See for example II/1, pp. 273, 278, 285 and esp. 353: ‘Grace is the distinctive mode of God’s being in so far as it seeks and creates fellowship by its own free inclination and favour, unconditioned by any merit or claim in the beloved, but also unhindered by any unworthiness or opposition in the latter – able, on the contrary, to overcome all unworthiness and opposition’.

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that God is self-sufficient, that God ‘could’ have remained in relationship only to Godself, that God was not ‘bound or obliged to give us a share in His glory’ (II/1, p. 672). But, for the most part, such qualifications need to be understood as sideways glances, intended to train readers’ eyes more firmly on the utter graciousness of God’s primordial decision to be pro nobis. Such glances typically function dialectically to intensify Barth’s most elemental assertion – that God decides upon an identity always-already establishing, reaching towards and involving itself with the creaturely other; that, in fact, God’s being is itself grace.37 Thus it is that Barth’s awareness that God does not ‘need’ the creaturely other is secondary to the insistence that God lives as the one productive of, positioned in relationship to, and in companionship with, the loved creaturely other.38 Barth pairs a keen sense of the ‘unnecessariness’ of God’s relationship to humanity with an assurance of its permanence and actuality. The way in which Barth articulates this perspective deserves close attention. Of crucial importance are his remarks about the loving ‘overflowing’ of God’s being. Thus: It is not part of God’s being and action that, as love, it must have an object in another different from Godself. God is sufficient in Godself . . . [and] would not be less the one who loves, if he were to love no object different from Godself. As God determines to love such another, God’s love overflows (überstromt). It is not exhausted in it, not limited and conditioned by it; rather, this overflowing (Überstromen) is conditioned by the fact that while it could satisfy itself, it has no satisfaction in self-satisfaction. As love for another it can and will be still more than that which could satisfy itself. While God is everything for Godself, God wills again not to be everything only for Godself, but also for this other. While God could be everything only for himself (and his life would not on that account be pointless, motionless, and unmotivated, nor would it be any less majestic or any less the life of love), he wills – and this is for us the ever-wonderful twofold dynamic of his love – to have it not only for himself, but also for us. (II/1, pp. 280–1 rev.)

37

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Barth makes a good deal of God’s being as grace, placing it first in §30 (‘The Perfections of the Divine Loving’ (II/1, pp. 351–439)). Rather than grace describing an act of God, grace is itself constitutive of God’s being. ‘[G]race is the very essence of the being of God. Grace is itself properly and essentially divine’ (II/1, p. 356). During an analysis of love, Eberhard Jüngel makes this point in a way that nicely describes Barth’s position. Thus: ‘For in love the I gives himself to the loving Thou in such a way that it no longer wants to be that I without this Thou. I do not want to have myself anymore without the beloved thou’. See God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism (trans. Darrell L. Guder; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 318.

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Also: [God’s] loving is the turning of the loving one to a beloved different from Godself, an overflowing (Überflub) of the loving with which God is blessed in Godself. This is how God loves. And truly and actually, God loves in only this way. And this loving is God’s being in time and eternity. ‘God is’ means ‘God loves’. (II/1, p. 283 rev.) Passages such as these cut to the heart of Barth’s doctrine of God and lay the groundwork upon which the doctrine of election, and Barth’s Christology as a whole (indeed, the doctrine of creation, also), is built.39 In sovereignly willing that God’s love should ‘overflow’ creatively, God assigns Godself an identity productive of radical ontological difference. Such divine productivity does not, note, entail God launching an exitus of entities ontologically continuous with God’s own being. While Barth appropriates the rhetoric of neoplatonism, he declines its ontology: in no way does God’s ‘overflowing’ make for a ‘procession’ that ‘preserves an identity betwixt engendered and engendered’, whereby ‘the product in some sense remains in the producer.’40 Nor can one say that God’s ‘overflowing’ is analogous to a Hegelian understanding of Spirit’s processual self-differentiation and self-realization. It is not only that God does not depend, in a complicated way, on God’s interaction with God’s creation; it is also the case that the loved one’s ‘difference’ from God, as a creature, entails an ontological alterity that breaks out, permanently, of the metaphysical plurality-in-unity that characterizes Hegel’s construal of Geist.41 God’s love is such that God creates and turns to another utterly different from Godself. This other is irrevocably defined by finitude, a property that will never be aufgehoben, no matter how dramatically its

39

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There are of course others. See for example I/2, p. 377; II/1, pp. 206, 273, 274, 280 and 283; III/1, p. 15; IV/2, pp. 755 and 760 and IV/3.1, p. 382. Such comments have not passed without misinterpretation. For example, while noting Barth’s emphasis on ‘overflowing’, Moltmann believes counterfactual claims about what God ‘could be’ are theologically corruptive. Even when Barth complements freedom and love, ‘there is still an arbitrary element’, a residual emphasis on ‘the nominalist doctrine of potentia absoluta’ (Trinity and the Kingdom, pp. 52 and 55). I would disagree. Proclus, The Elements of Theology (trans. E. R. Dodds; Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd edn, 1963), p. 35. I use this passage only to show Barth’s relationship to a classic statement of neoplatonism; the broader question of Barth’s relationship with various permutations of Christian neoplatonism cannot be tackled here. The relationship between Barth, Hegel and the broader tradition of German idealism is a terrifically difficult issue. Further comments are offered in Chapter 4. Suffice it here to say that ascertaining lines of connection between Barth and Hegel is a complicated affair, given that Barth’s familiarity with Hegel was perhaps slight. See here Michael Welker, ‘Barth und Hegel: zur Erkenntnis eines methodisches Verfahrens bei Barth’, Evangelische Theologie 43 (1983), pp. 307–28.

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relationship God undergoes (salvific) transformation. When God ‘overflows’, God takes on an identity that creates, sustains, relates to and – most importantly – loves the creature as creature. Two points are needed to round out this subsection. The first amounts to an important qualification, paired with an anticipation of my analysis of Barth’s doctrine of election. Notice that II/1 does not conceive of God as simply adopting a favourable attitude towards ‘creation in general’. Barth’s Christocentrism, intensified in the 1920s in light of his adoption of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula, is operative here; a relationship with humankind anchored in the unique person of Christ constitutes the telos of God’s overflowing love. Christians simply do not know of God’s love other than by way of the incarnation. However, at the same time, Barth’s description of God’s creating, sustaining and seeking relationship with humanity attains neither the intensity nor the specificity of the doctrine of election in II/2, which rivets attention on Christ as God’s act of human-focused love. For while direct and indirect references to the incarnation abound, Barth is not willing to ‘christologize’ his doctrine of God in radical fashion. That is to say, Barth does not really explore the ways in which his doctrines of God and Christ might co-inhere on a deep level. While the epistemological commitment to Christocentrism adverted in Church Dogmatics I/2 is amply evident, the ontological potential of this Christocentrism remains untapped. Thus, some moments of fascinating ambiguity notwithstanding, II/1 holds apart the immanent and economic trinities, doing so by implicit recourse to an infralapsarian construal of election. Thus it is that Barth follows (to use a proximate example) Hermann Bavinck, viewing ‘the creation of humans in God’s image [as] a supposition and preparation for the incarnation of God’ and understanding the incarnation as the ‘climax, crown, and completion’ of revelation.42 As will become clear, though this position is both coherent and defensible, it does not survive Barth’s revolutionary treatment of election. My second point has to do with interpretations that ascribe to Barth an importunate fascination with the ‘radical autonomy of God’.43 Such interpretations, which emerged in Germany in the 1970s, locate Barth’s thought

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Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics; Vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ (ed. John Bolt; trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), pp. 277–8. Compare here II/1, p. 274, where Barth describes Christ as the ‘the crown and final confirmation’ of God’s ‘seeking and creating of fellowship’. Trutz Rendtorff offers the most powerful statement of this position; see ‘Radikale Autonomie Gottes: zum Verstandnis der Theologie Karl Barth und ihrer Folgen’, in Theorie des Christentums: historisch-theologische Studien zu seiner neuzeitlichen Verfassung (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1972), pp. 161–81. See also Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Die Freiheit der Entsprechung zu Gott. Bermekungen zum theozentrischen Ansatz der Anthropologie Karl Barths’, in Trutz Rendtorff (ed.),

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within the tradition of German idealism and suggest that Barth effects a ‘recapitulation of the thought-processes of the Enlightenment’44 – a ‘recapitulation’ which is at once an inversion, since traits associated with the autonomous and sovereign human are now assigned to God. Thus Barth himself appears vulnerable to Feuerbachian critique: rather than working from the basic fact of God’s self-revelation, an objectified and ‘projected’ human trait has infiltrated, and taken control, of Barth’s dogmatic perspective. Now while this is a fascinating argument, it does not really prove convincing. Trutz Rendtorff and others were of course right to note Barth’s appropriation of Enlightenment-inspired language about subjectivity when describing God’s self-constituted sovereign identity. And it might be that this appropriation was problematic, or at least susceptible to misunderstanding, in Barth’s early work, preoccupied, as it was, with restoring a vital sense of divine reality. Yet the overall perspective of the Dogmatics can hardly be said to be materially determined by an Enlightenment-inspired model of subjectivity. Church Dogmatics II/1 (and to a lesser extent I/1)45 contends that God decides upon an identity utterly dissimilar to the enlightenment subject – or rather the self-positing Fichtean Ich that Rendtorff sets up as an interpretative norm. On one level, God constitutes Godself in terms of trinitarian Gemeinschaft, thereby indicating a stark disconnect between divine ‘subjectivity’ and the often non-relational anthropology promulgated by many Enlightenment thinkers. As Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God seems decidedly dissimilar to the solitary Ego who surveys and controls the world of appearances. On another level, God self-constitutes as one who stands in loving companionship with the creaturely other, graciously bringing the human into being. Barth’s acclamation of this unnecessary act, this startling

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Die Realisierung der Freiheit. Beiträge zur Kritik der Theologie Karl Barths (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1975), pp. 76–118. This reading of Barth made its way into Anglophone scholarship, thus Rowan Williams’s claim that Church Dogmatics I depicts God as ‘something comparable to an individual human subjectivity’, ‘Barth on the Triune God’ (see Stephen W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), p. 181). John Macken provides an accessible summary of Rendtorffian and other interpretations of ‘autonomy’ in The Autonomy Theme in the Church Dogmatics: Karl Barth and His Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); see esp. pp. 88–152. Rendtorff, ‘Radikale Autonomie Gottes’, p. 179. As will become evident, Rendtorff’s complementary claim, that ‘Der völlige Sieg der Autonomie Gottes ist erst erreicht, wo das Handeln des Menschen stillgelegt ist’ (Ibid., p. 170) also does not pass critical muster. The ‘autonomy’ of the human, paradigmatically enacted in Jesus Christ, the ‘elected human’, is exactly what God’s overflowing love ensures. Granting that the doctrine of election entails a paradigm shift, Gundlach notes that I/1 can hardly be read as propounding an autarchic view of God since ‘Die Prolegomena haben in Barths Dogmatik soteriologische bedeutung’ (Selbstgrenzung Gottes, p. 113).

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pursuit of relationship, can hardly be said to be rooted in, or dependent on, the philosophical milieu of the eighteenth century. It might even be that Church Dogmatics II/1 is best understood as a contestation of those construals of God dependent upon ‘enlightened’ anthropologies that celebrate the solitary Self, given that, on occasion, Barth presciently attempts to head off the interpretative line pursued by Rendtorff and others.46

Jesus Christ – ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’ In Church Dogmatics II/2, Barth’s construal of God’s loving ‘overflow’ attains a radicality that outstrips anything found in II/1. Barth now aims to show that God ‘loves concentratedly, not haphazardly, ramblingly, or distractedly’.47 He argues, more specifically, that God determines Godself in terms of an incomparably positive relationship with a particular creaturely ‘object’ – namely, humankind. How does God achieve such a relationship? God makes humanity part of God’s being. Divine identity is not unyieldingly ‘inviolate’ (i.e., ontologically uncomplicated, constituted only by ‘pure, unadulterated divinity’), because God freely incorporates ontological difference into the divine life. And in encompassing, bearing and preserving the reality and distinction of the beloved creature in God’s own being, God ensures that God’s relationship to humankind has an ontological validity commensurate with that possessed by God Godself – even granted that humanity, as a creaturely reality, remains a creaturely reality and neither does nor ever will bear the exclusively divine attributes of omniscience, omnipresence and so on. Indeed after II/2 it becomes pretty much unthinkable for Barth to conceive of God without emphasizing God’s relationship to, and love for, humankind.48 Theological descriptions fail if they do not reference God’s humanity. For once God has decided thusly about Godself, God’s decision ‘belongs to the reality of God which is a reality not apart from but in this decision’ (II/2, p. 6). This is what impels II/2’s incisive polemic against the idea of a Deus absconditus and, more specifically, Barth’s criticisms of the Calvinistic motif of God’s predestining decretum absolutum, which appears to consign some to perdition and to assure others of divine favour.49 If God qua Son wills eternally to be human, theological descriptions of God’s attitude 46

47 48

For example, during an explication of God’s ‘unity’ as a perfection of God’s being, Barth argues that monotheism ‘is the reflection of the subjective sub-consciousness, the requirement of freedom and the claim to mastery on the part of the human individual’ (II/1, p. 448) and has no place in Christian theology. Barth, Evangelical Theology, p. 200. See here Jüngel’s ‘. . . keine menschenlosigkeit Gottes . . . zur Theologie Karl Barths zwischen Theismus und Atheismus’, in Barth-Studien (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1982), pp. 332–47 and, of course, Barth’s small masterpiece, ‘The Humanity of God’, in The Humanity of God, pp. 37–65.

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towards humankind must be nothing less than utterly positive – as positive, one might say, as theological descriptions of God’s own subjectivity.50 A crucial qualification is needed here. Talk about the ‘humanity of God’ must not be thought to insinuate the incorporation of an abstract or generic humanity into the divine life. God’s self-determination is grounded in, and particularized by, the realization of God’s elective will in the person of Jesus Christ. The humanity of God is therefore derivative of God’s loving selfdetermination, as Son, to become incarnate as Jesus Christ. This means, moreover, that God’s humanity is only rightly construed in light of God’s self-election as Jesus Christ – a self-election that, amazingly, God wills should have an impact upon God’s own being. Or to put it a bit differently, when Barth talks of God’s ‘unconditional self-determination’ (II/2, p. 100), he wants to describe more than a self-determination that is economically purposive, with the divine Son pre-temporally intending to incarnate, realizing this intention in the ‘fullness of time’ and then restoring himself to a human-less immanent existence. God’s incarnational self-determination, by dint of God’s sovereign decision, is ontologically self-involving for God. So when Barth writes that ‘in a free act of determination God has ordained concerning Himself; He has determined Himself’ (II/2, p. 101), he means that God shapes God’s being, as the Son, according to the Son’s economic action. The identity of the divine Son is eternally inclusive of the concrete life of Jesus Christ.

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Appears to do so? Exactly that – and such an appearance ought not to be taken as the whole story. One must do justice to the standard Reformed account of double predestination and not suppose a lack of theological sophistication, motivated by the supposition of divine caprice. It is not as if God damns human beings without due cause. All have sinned, after all, and deserve nothing other than God’s wrath, justly excited and justly executed. Thus the first article of the first head of doctrine, declared at the Synod of Dort: ‘As all men have sinned in Adam, lie under the curse, and are obnoxious to eternal death, God would have done no injustice by leaving them all to perish, and delivering them over to condemnation on account of sin.’ Moreover, it is not necessarily the case that God actively damns a portion of humanity. It is rather that God permits God’s just judgement to fall upon sinful humanity, while graciously saving a remnant according to God’s good pleasure. Thus God’s gracious predestination of some for salvation is not logically complemented with reprobation. It is simply accompanied by the fact that ‘others are passed by (præteritos) in the eternal decree . . . God hath decreed to leave [others, i.e., the reprobate] in the common misery into which they have plunged themselves . . . permitting them in his just judgment to follow their own way’ (Creeds, Vol. 3, pp. 581 and 584; for the original Latin, see pp. 551–2 and 555). For a classic twentieth-century statement of this perspective, see Lorraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, n.d.). The question of Barth’s alleged ‘universalism’ cannot be treated here. Suffices it now to say that the radical way in which Barth thinks about God’s love for humankind makes it impossible for him to allow anything other than the best future for each and every human being.

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God wills not to be ‘the absolute God in Himself who is neither conditioned nor self-conditioning’; rather, God decides upon an identity in which the ‘Son of God . . . is self-conditioned and therefore conditioned in His union with the Son of David’ (II/2, p. 134). This act of divine self-determination has two discrete elements, which relate respectively to Barth’s understanding of Christ’s divinity and Christ’s humanity. On one level, the divine Son conveys God’s act and being to humanity, living and acting as the subject of Christ’s person. Such is God’s self-giving. In that Jesus Christ is truly the ‘electing God’, the divine Son actualizes, under the conditions of creaturely time and creaturely space, God’s decision to be truly ‘with us’. On another level, Barth does not dissociate God’s economic action, as the divine Son, from the immanent being of the Son. Because the Son self-determines as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, his identity becomes irrevocably bound to the life of the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. The doctrine of election therefore entails an event of divine self-qualification, as God draws the contingent existence of the ‘elected human’ into the time and space of God’s being. God wills, in fact, that the concrete life of Christ should transform God’s life – such is Barth’s understanding of the extent, and the extremity, of God’s love.

Jesus Christ – ‘electing God’ Throughout §§ 32 and 33 of the Dogmatics, Barth writes strikingly of election as God’s ‘primal and basic decision’ (Ur- und Grundentscheidung) (II/2, p. 76) to be pro nobis. Because of this primal decision, the incarnation happens. God’s second way of being becomes and lives as Jesus Christ, ‘God with us’. The Son’s being this person does not, one hastens to add, simply count as one occurrence within a series of economic actions that God performs. Rather, the concrete person of Christ represents the fulfilment of an intention uniquely associable with God qua Son, for ‘from all eternity in an act of unconditional self-determination (unbedingter Selbstbestimmung), God has determined Godself to be the bearer of this name’ (II/2, p. 100 rev.). To begin to understand more precisely what all this means, the expression ‘electing God’ can be considered from four angles: a statement about God’s eternal loving intention, appropriable especially to the divine Son; an affirmation that God as Son presents Godself and acts in human history; a claim about the divine subject who grounds and directs the life of Jesus Christ; and the contention that God himself, as Son, bears the rejection owed to sinful humankind. I turn first to God’s loving intention. Throughout II/2, Barth’s goal is to describe the election of Jesus Christ as an economic outworking of the identity upon which God eternally decides. To say merely that election entails God’s eternal decision, though, risks understatement and imprecision. Strictly speaking, anything that pertains to God’s self-willed identity (holiness,

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omniscience, everlastingness, etc.) might conceivably carry the attribute ‘eternal’. With the doctrine of election, Barth strives to underscore that God’s decision to incarnate is coincident and coordinate with, and therefore has equivalent dogmatic importance to, God’s decision to exist as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.51 He wants to insist that God’s decision to elect must be as much a Leitmotiv of theological reflection as an acclamation of God’s triunity. It is for this reason that election is described as God’s ‘primal decision’ (Urentscheidung);52 it is for this reason that Barth employs striking temporal expressions, writing often about election as ‘God’s beginning’ (II/2, p. 95) or referring to a decision made im Anfang. Claims such as these indicate that God orders God’s life around this elemental act of freedom, appropriable to the Son. They signal that, alongside God’s originary selfdefinition as triune, election (and consequently the will to establish and maintain the covenant with humankind) is an event utterly basic to God’s being. And because God orders God’s life in this way, so must the theologian order her thinking. Thus, in a memorable passage that makes deft use of rhetoric associated with the pactum salutis motif of Reformed covenantal theology, Barth writes: In the beginning, before our time and our space, before creation and therefore before there was any reality distinct from God that could be the object of God’s love, before there could be a stage for the acts of God’s freedom, God in Godself – in the power of God’s love and freedom, of God’s knowing and willing – anticipated and determined this as the goal and meaning of all God’s dealings with the as yet nonexistent world: that God would be in God’s Son gracious to humanity, that God would unite Godself with humanity. In the beginning it was the choice (Wahl) of the Father to establish this covenant with humanity, that he would give up his Son for humanity, in order that he 51

52

I use the words ‘coordinate’ and ‘coincident’ to avoid making the doctrine of election logically anterior to the doctrine of the Trinity. There is no need to prioritize either the Trinity or election. One can simply say that God’s elective self-determination, as Son, is an event coincident with God’s Trinitarian self-definition and that these two moves are basic for God. On this point, I disagree with Bruce McCormack, who has suggested that the doctrine of election might, in dogmatic terms, have logical priority over the doctrine of election (see ‘Grace and Being’) and favour a stance closer to that expounded by Kevin Hector in ‘God’s Triunity and Self-Determination’. McCormack rightly notes that this description of election as a ‘primal decision’ hearkens back to Barth’s early writing, while announcing a different theological orientation: ‘[t]he word [Urentscheidung] has logical force, describing the “logical origin” behind which it is not possible to inquire further and, as such, takes the place of the category Ursprung which had been used widely in Barth’s two commentaries on Romans’ (‘The Sum of the Gospel’, p. 489).

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[the Son] might become human in the fulfilment of God’s grace. In the beginning it was the choice of the Son to be obedient to grace, and therefore to give himself and to become human, in order that this covenant might have its reality. In the beginning it was the resolve of the Holy Spirit that the unity of God – the unity of the Father and of the Son – would not be disturbed, much less torn apart by this covenant with humanity, but rather that it should become more glorious, that the deity of God, the divinity of God’s freedom and God’s love, should confirm and prove itself in this giving of the Father and self-giving of the Son. (II/2, pp. 101–2 rev.)53 For all eternity, the Triune God wills to direct God’s being and action toward the event of Jesus Christ.54 Not only is there no God ‘back of’ God’s decision to love the creaturely other, but there is no God other than the God who intends, surrounds, supports and takes God’s defining centre from the incarnational project associable with God’s second way of being – the Son being the divine person who will realize God’s elective intention.55 Which means, 53

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Interestingly, Herman Bavinck writes in a similar fashion: ‘In the Son, the Father is from all eternity the Father of his children; the Son is eternally their guarantor and mediator; the Holy Spirit is their Comforter. Not just after the fall, not even first at the creation, but in eternity the foundations of the covenant of grace were laid. And the incarnation is not an incidental decree that emerged later: it was decided and determined from eternity. There was no time when the Son did not exist; there was also no time when the Son did not know he would assume and when he was not prepared to assume the human nature from the fallen race of Adam. The incarnation was prepared from eternity’ (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 3, p. 230). What separates Barth and Bavinck, as will become evident, is the way in which Barth radicalizes, in ontological terms, the incarnational act carried out by the Son, pressing it back into the being of God. Thus McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, p. 100: ‘the being of God in eternity, as a consequence of the primal decision of election, is a being that looks forward. It is a being in the mode of anticipation.’ Jüngel is right to argue that Barth’s appropriation of the incarnation to the Son does not violate the principle of opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa. While Barth distinguishes God’s concrete self-differentiation, appropriating acts to God’s respective Seinsweise, he maintains also a sense of the perichoretic indwelling of Father, Son and Spirit. So while ‘[a]ppropriation is . . . a hermeneutical process for defining the being of God, through which particular attributes and operations of the Trinity (in the unity of its modes of being) are ascribed to one particular mode of being . . . appropriation in no way excludes the attributes and acts ascribed to one particular mode of being from the other modes of being. For appropriation ought never to go along with “the forgetting or denying of God’s presence in all His modes of being, in His total being and act” [I/1, p. 375]’ (Being Is in Becoming, pp. 48–9). But does Barth uphold the indivisa principle? Donna Bowman claims that ‘[t]he triune exposition in this passage [II/2, pp. 101–2] is more confessional than theological; Barth’s election doctrine proceeds dualistically, for the most part, presenting the elected paired with the rejected. The Holy Spirit is largely absent from the discussion, with the passage cited above an

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furthermore, that God commits eternally and irrevocably to be the companion of humankind in, through and as Christ, even before creation itself comes into existence. The ‘beginning’ of God’s election is this elemental pretemporal decision. Note that when Barth adds that ‘[a]s subject and object of this choice, Jesus Christ was at the beginning . . . He was not at the beginning of God: God has indeed no beginning . . . But he was at the beginning of all things, at the beginning of God’s acting with the reality distinct from Godself’ (II/2, p. 102 rev.), he neither launches a defence of the doctrine of the immanent trinity, nor signals a strong role for the logos asarkos motif in his theology. Barth is blunt: ‘There is no such thing as Godhead in itself’ (II/2, p. 115). God’s ‘immanent’ triune life is only rightly understood when the theologian rivets her attention on the event of the incarnation, thereby ensuring that her (quite proper) appreciation of God’s sovereign freedom does not distract from her understanding of God being definitively pro nobis. This distinction between God in Godself and the person of Jesus Christ therefore functions as a passing acknowledgement that the divine being, in strictly logical terms, is ontologically prior to the creature in terms of which God self-determines – for the predicate ‘eternal’ cannot be applied to the creature as such, even when that creature is the human essence assumed by the divine Son. It reminds the reader that God’s self-determination, in terms of the concrete person of Jesus Christ, is a prevenient event: God need not have acted in this way; there is some dogmatic value in recalling God’s life ‘prior’ to the incarnation, even granted that such recollection proves intellectually dizzying.56 Yet a proviso such as ‘He was not in the beginning of God’ only subserves

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exception, as Barth focuses on Jesus Christ as the object and the subject of election. Since the subject-object structure is inherently dualistic, it is not surprising that Barth’s use of this framework prevents him from developing a truly triune doctrine of election.’ See here The Divine Decision: A Process Doctrine of Election (Louisville: WJKP, 2002), p. 33. She goes on to say that a greater role for the Spirit in Barth’s doctrine of election might have counteracted such dualism. Bowman is on to something, for the Spirit does have a marginal role in II/2 – though a case could be made that other volumes of the Dogmatics compensate for this imbalance. I am less happy about Bowman’s association of ‘dualism’ with the pairing of ‘election’ and ‘rejection’. Barth could have maintained this pairing, which refers to the direct confrontation between God’s love and human sinfulness and is therefore inevitably two-sided, while making his presentation more Trinitarian. Jenson makes a similar point with characteristic panache, albeit in a way that tends towards overstatement when applied to Barth: ‘What might be thought to be unknowable is an actual unincarnate Logos lurking somewhere before or behind or beyond Jesus the Son. There is no such thing, to be known or unknown. What there is, is the possibility, stipulable by contrary-to-fact propositions and not otherwise, that the Son could have been an unincarnate Son. What created minds cannot accomplish is to predict the way of God’s life were it not what it is – indeed, we cannot even know if God himself could make that prediction’ (Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, p. 142).

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Barth’s more basic claim: in God’s pre-temporal eternity, God always purposes to establish a distinctive kind of companionship with humankind, given that God elementally intends the incarnation.57 Second, to identify Jesus Christ as the ‘electing God’ means that he is the genuine conveyance of God’s act-in-being in the context of contingent history. God’s pre-temporal intention is executed; it transpires as ‘an event in human history’; Christ is God’s ‘self-giving’ (II/2, p. 53), the being and action of the divine Son in the time and space of creation. Really God in God’s selfgiving, though? Really God, as God truly is, in God’s second way of being? Barth wants desperately to avoid any weakening of the claim that Christ is truly the divine Son. And he faces a potential problem at this juncture, for he detects in standard accounts of election the possibility of a God who looms, rather ambiguously, behind the God encountered and known in the incarnation. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, identifies Christ as the ‘passive’ object of election, contending that Christ’s human nature is created, assumed by the Son and hallowed by God.58 This distinguishes Christ qua human as ‘praedestinatus, the first of the elect’ (II/2, p. 107), the head of God’s redeemed people. Barth does not think this claim is false. But he worries that it is not positioned within a sufficiently robust theological context since Aquinas, and scores of others (with Athanasius and, to a lesser degree, Cocceius figuring as honourable exceptions) fail to adjoin the assertion that the divine Son is also, and pre-eminently, the active Subject of election. For whenever the being and action of God qua Son – the ‘person’ who intends to incarnate and the one who actively realizes this intention – is not foregrounded, the economic event of election seems to become rather detached from the actual life of the Trinity. Seemingly straightforward affirmations of the full divinity of the Son are then fringed by the possibility of a God who exists behind the incarnational event; the Christian has ‘knowledge only of the election of the man Jesus as such, and not of the election and personal electing of the Son of God which precedes this election’ (II/2, p. 107). And this, in turn, undermines the assertion that God is truly present and revealed

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Thus Kreck: ‘Was Gottes Ziel mit Mensch und Welt ist, dies Letzte, mub auch bereits das Erste sein’ (Grundentscheidungen, p. 191). At least one interpreter argues that Barth misreads Aquinas. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. proposes that Aquinas views Jesus Christ as ‘election’s very matter’, thereby avoiding the choice ‘between the possible subjects of election, God in se or God in Christ’. The upshot is that Thomas offers ‘as Christ-informed an account as any Barth praises, and one more secure than any he rejects’ (Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 80). Rogers argues that Barth’s mistake is to use Summa Theologica III, q. 24. a. 1 as a source – exactly ‘the wrong place to look for Thomas’s contribution to the question of God’s eternal self-determination for human beings’, since this issue is treated in terms of ‘the [triune] relation of mission and procession’ (Ibid., p. 232).

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in Christ.59 For who, exactly, does the Christian meet in Christ? The true God, or a God who has taken on a role that may or may not be congruent with God’s eternal being? Has not a gap opened up between the logos incarnandus and the logos incarnatus, between Jn 1.1–2 and Jn 1.14? Barth therefore emphatically connects Christ’s divinity with the Son’s actualization of God’s elective decision. Jesus Christ is none other than the Son who realizes God’s intention to be ‘with us’. Thus it is that God’s second way of being is ‘no less the original Subject of this electing than He is the original object’ (II/2, p. 105). Christ is ‘primarily and properly the divine freedom itself in its operation ad extra’ (II/2, p. 104): the actual event of God’s second way of being, personally present and active in created space and time. The third aspect of Barth’s claim that Jesus Christ is the electing God follows on directly: the divine Word stands as the origin of, and animates primarily, the ontologically complex person of Jesus Christ. On one level, the existence of the human assumed by the Son proceeds from an especial action of God. Unlike other creatures, this individual does not emerge from the immanent nexus of created reality, even though he is situated within it (specifically, within the history of Israel recounted in the Hebrew Bible). Rather, he is brought about by a ‘new act of God’ (IV/2, p. 37), patently distinguishable, for the Christian, from God’s providential governance of creation. On another level, Christ’s human existence manifests the directive presence and action of the Son. Even as the divine Son wills to live under the conditions of finitude, embracing the limits and peril of a human existence, this self-limitation goes hand in hand with God’ being the Subject of Christ’s person. It is God, then, and God alone, who provides the ‘effective determination’ (IV/2, p. 92) of this human life. Without doubt, Barth interests himself in Christ’s human being and human agency. So much will become clearer and clearer in the pages ahead. But one must never forget that the directive being-in-act constitutive of this person is the divine Son. The presence and prevenient direction of God qua Son define Christ’s entire being. One cannot emphasize strongly enough God’s freedom and sovereignty in this act. One cannot assert strongly enough that in the election of grace it is a matter of the decision and initiative of the divine good-pleasure, 59

‘If we say only what Thomas would say, then we have knowledge only of the election of the man Jesus as such, and not of the election and personal electing of the Son of God which precedes this election . . . [T]rust in the divine decision depends upon whether that decision can be and actually is manifested to us as God’s . . . And this is impossible unless it can be and actually is manifested to us as the decision of Jesus Christ . . . How can it really be manifested to us as the decision of Jesus Christ if we can think of the reality of the divine-human person of Jesus Christ only as one of those divine works which come about under the divine foreordination, and not as the work of works, not as the content of the Word and decree of God at the beginning of all things, not as the revelation of the mystery of predestination itself?’ (II/2, p. 107).

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that God as the electing one has absolute precedence over the One who is elected. One can hardly go too far or say too much along these lines, when one remembers that divine election concerns primarily the relationship between God and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. Who has the initiative? Who always has precedence? Who decides? Who rules? God, always God! God founds and maintains the union between Godself and humanity. (II/2, p. 177 rev.) It is not only, then, that God originally and exclusively ‘initiates’ the incarnation. The divine Son is the person of Jesus Christ; the divine Son functions as the principal agent in the life of the individual human that he assumes into union with himself. Thus whatever Christ does humanly is framed by, and consistently subserves, the divine being-in-act that defines his person and being. Indeed, in logical and not temporal terms (for Christ’s person is perfectly unified, with Christ’s divine and human ‘essences’ acting coincidentally), the entirety of Christ’s human life is always nachfolgend, responsive to the eternal decree enacted by God’s second way of being, before the Father. Fourth and finally, the description of Christ as ‘electing God’ adverts Barth’s remarkable understanding of the atonement. Although I will have more to say more on this matter, suffice it now to note that God’s elective action, in Christ, goes hand in hand with God’s rejection of humanity’s sinful waywardness. Unnecessarily and inexplicably, God’s seeking and creation of fellowship meets with creaturely rebuff. This rebuff does not only dishonour God. It also throws the entirety of creation into a downward spiral. Yet because God will not tolerate the jeopardizing of God’s fellowship with humanity, no matter humanity’s past, present and future atrocities, God himself takes on the consequences of humanity’s rebellion. Thus Barth: [God] willed to make good this affronting and disturbing of His majesty, this devastating of His work, not by avenging Himself on its author, but by Himself bearing the inevitable wrath and perdition, by Himself mediating on behalf of the one who must necessarily be rejected, who had necessarily fallen victim to damnation and death, by allowing His own heart to be wounded by the wrath which, if it had fallen upon man, could only have obliterated and destroyed him. (II/2, p. 166) God’s pursuit of companionship with humankind does not fail, no matter the imperilling fact of sin. It does not fail because, while God is the one who rejects human sin (and how could God do anything other than reject that which blocks loving relationship with humankind?), God is also the one who bears God’s rejection of sin. The full weight of sin is loaded upon the divine Son, acutely so at Calvary. And exactly because God can and does bear this weight in its entirety, drawing the monstrousness of human wrongdoing 86

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into the only place where it can have no future, the Christian knows that, in the final analysis, ‘there is no condemnation – literally none – for those that are in Christ Jesus’ (II/2, p. 167).

Jesus Christ – ‘elected human’ A good point of departure for understanding Jesus Christ as the ‘elected human’ is Barth’s continued employment of the figure of ‘overflowing’.60 In II/1, this figure described God’s exuberant decision to create and to relate favourably to the creature. Of course, Barth did not conceive God’s ‘overflowing’ in terms of a generic sympathy for creation. Rather, a loving relationship with humanity, achieved through the person of Jesus Christ, was considered the culmination of God’s action vis-à-vis humankind. But to a significant degree, II/1 held apart God’s immanent self-definition and God’s economic incarnational activity. The person of Christ was not thought to have an effect on the being of God as such. While the doctrines of God and Christ interlocked and cohered, they did not co-inhere on an ontological level, for Barth interposed an interval between God’s immanent being and God’s economic action in Christ. With II/2, however, things change. On one level, Barth reverses the direction of his earlier thought, which presented Christ as the culmination of divine activity. Creation does not move towards Christ; now it begins with Christ. God wills Christ qua human as the most immediate, and utterly delimited, consequence of God’s ‘overflowing’. The particularity of God’s identity as elementally electing is re-expressed in the particularity of the human creature that is originally elected.61 On another level, Barth now suggests that God’s ‘overflowing’ – that is, God’s exercise of God’s love in freedom – means God creating and then drawing the creaturely alterity of the human, Jesus of Nazareth, into the divine life. And this action shapes eternally the being of the divine Son. One can put it boldly: God’s ‘being in becoming’ (Jüngel) results in God’s self-transformation. At one point, Barth articulates this new position in a particularly powerful way. He writes: And so is this human Jesus, as the object of the eternal decree of God, at the beginning of all divine ways and works, the ‘firstborn of creation’. 60

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Barth deploys this figure throughout II/2. See, for example, II/2, pp. 9–10, 121–2, 168, 176 and 178. Thus Hans Stickelberger: ‘Jesus Christ ist Grund und Inhalt der Schöpfung, nicht aber ihr höchstes Produkt’ (Ipsa assumptione creatur, p. 39). Thus Hans Theodor Goebel, Vom freien Wählen Gottes und des Menschen. Interpretationsübungen zur ‘Analogie’ nach Karl Barths Lehre von Der Erwählung und Bedenken ihrer Folgen für die Kirchliche Dogmatik (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990), p. 29: ‘Die Exklusiv-Bestimmung des Objektes der Erwählung entspricht der Exklusiv-Bestimmung des Subjektes der Erwählung.’ See also IV/3.1, p. 222.

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For the first time, in him, it happens that God wills and posits another, different from God, as God’s creature . . . God is not in need of any particular ways or works ad extra, any creature; God could have been satisfied with the inner glory of God’s threefold being, God’s freedom, and God’s love. That God is not satisfied, that God’s inner glory overflows and becomes outward, that God wills the creation and the firstborn of the whole creation the human, Jesus – that is grace, sovereign grace (Gnade, souveräne Güte), an inconceivably tender condescension . . . But this determination of the will of God is eminently grace (in eminenter Weise Gnade) to the extent that with respect to this other, God’s creation, God’s first thought and decree consists in election – in the fact that in his Son, God makes the being of this other God’s own being, that he allows the son of man Jesus to be called and actually to be his own Son. In and with God’s lordship over this other, in and with the creaturely autonomy of this other (der geschöpflichen Eigenständigkeit dieses Andere) – even that is grace! – in the beginning, God wills and decrees and posits God’s own fatherhood and also the creature’s sonship. That is more than mere kindness and condescension. That is self-giving (Selbsthingabe). That is how God’s inner glory overflows (überstromt). (II/2, p. 121 rev.) The key here is the fine distinction between souveräne Güte and eminenter Gnade, phrases given typological emphasis in the original. Despite the insistence that God might have decided to exist without creation, souveräne Güte affirms that God does not choose a life of isolation. Church Dogmatics II/1 adverted this point, describing God’s being as love in exuberant pursuit of relationality with the creature. Barth now particularizes this earlier claim in incarnational terms. He contends that God’s loving exuberance delimits itself primally in terms of the human, identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. To say Jesus of Nazareth is the ‘elected human’ is to identify this specific individual, this distinctive creature, assumed by the Son, as God’s first ‘work’. Such is the extremity of God’s love. God does not rest content with the perfections of deity; God intends the radical alterity of a particular creature with whom God can live in relationship.62 The phrase in eminenter Weise Gnade 63 announces another new claim. Because God pursues an unsurpassably definitive relationship with the human creature, God renders the human 62

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To borrow from Evangelical Theology: God’s love is a ‘sovereign seeking of the other one . . . This seeking is sovereign precisely because it is directed and oriented not to the sovereignty of the one who loves but to the sovereignty of the beloved one’ (p. 201). In employing this term, Barth alludes to the communicatio gratiarum. This Reformed permutation of the communicatio idiomatum references the gratia unionis – also described as the gratia eminentiae – that distinguishes Christ as first among all creatures, given his bearing a unique clutch of ‘charisms’ and ‘habitual’ graces. For a concise

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assumed by the Son a constitutive part of God’s second way of being. God’s ‘sovereign’ action portends God’s ‘eminent’ decision to transform God’s being qua Son, for all eternity, by way of an abiding personal union with the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. ‘Transform’ in the sense that this loving action lends God an identity, the form of which is other than that which God possesses pre-temporally and the content of which is other than the ontological simplicity characteristic of God’s pre-temporal, human-less, triune interrelating. For the sake of validating, ensuring and upholding God’s relationship with humankind, God makes this representative human, this ‘first work’ of God, a permanent dimension of God’s being qua Son, thereby securing for all humans the favour of divine companionship. Thus the claim that ‘God makes the being of this other God’s own being, that he allows the son of man Jesus to be called and actually to be his own Son’ does more than signal God’s intimate relationship with the human essence assumed by the Son. It indicates, also, God’s free decision to qualify himself as Son on an immanent level, with the logos incarnandus becoming and being the logos incarnatus, the concrete person of Jesus Christ. Moreover, even as God establishes an (indirect) identity between the divine Son and the human Jesus, it is emblematic of God’s patience that this sovereign exercise of love does not entail any diminution or alteration of Christ’s humanity. While drawing this assumed human into the divine life, God safeguards his distinctive ontological and agential integrity. Christ’s human non-identity with God persists; God upholds Jesus’ humanity as humanity, even as this humanity becomes definitive for, integral to, and transformative of the divine Son as such.64 As such, Barth’s marginalization of the logos asarkos motif – or, to be a touch more accurate, and positive, Barth’s suggestion that God renders Godself qua Son as the logos ensarkos – goes hand in hand with

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description of Christ’s ‘eminence’ see Johannes Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, in Reformed Dogmatics (ed. John W. Beardslee III; New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 92–3; Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 434–9; Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 324; and Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), p. 72. I offer a fuller explication of Barth’s construal of the communicatio gratiarum in Chapter 3. Note here, though, that Barth’s construal of ‘eminent grace’ goes beyond anything anticipated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although Barth might agree that God grants Christ’s humanity ‘eminence’ and confers ‘charisms’ upon him, he claims also that the Son is qualified by this engraced human. Jüngel alludes to this aspect of Barth’s outlook when he says that ‘God’s gracious election holds a place for the man Jesus in the being of God for all eternity . . . God, by his eternal election of the temporal being of Jesus of Nazareth, has created space within himself for another being, alien to himself. There is a realm of grace within God himself. Here, in this space, created for the man Jesus from all eternity in the being of God, the essence of humanity finds God before it finds itself’ (Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy (trans. Garrett E. Paul; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), p. 130).

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a full affirmation of the ‘inconfusedly’ and ‘unchangeably’ adverbs of the Chalcedonian Definition, now applicable to a description of the Son in time and in eternity.65 This is a tremendously difficult set of claims; Barth’s contentions are nothing short of staggering. The ‘metaphysical’ moves of II/2, in particular, require of the reader some strenuous intellectual labour. Complicating matters further is the fact that Barth did not draw especial attention to his innovative thinking about God’s self-transformation. Even granted the clarity of his presentation, both in terms of its particulars and its generalities, Barth’s exposition of the ontological co-inherence of the doctrines of God and Christ is a fairly concise affair. The co-inherence is noted, but it is not tarried over. Things move along briskly. And there is here a crucial reminder of the challenge facing those who read the Dogmatics: while delighting in the richness and expansiveness of its rhetoric, one must remain alert to concisely stated points of crucial dogmatic import. (An irony known to those intrigued by Barth: how we wish that, on certain occasions, he had said more!). To work out more precisely how Barth understands the ‘elected human’, then, the remainder of this subsection elaborates Barth’s outlook from a negative and then a positive angle. Turning first to the negative angle: If the distinction between souveräne Güte and eminenter Gnade underpins Barth’s conviction that the ‘Son is not only very God [but] is also called Jesus of Nazareth’ (II/2, p. 7) and that ‘as the beginning of all things with God we find that decree that God himself, namely in the person of God’s eternal Son, should give himself (hinzugeben) to the Son of Man . . . indeed, that in the person of the Son, God should be the lost Son of Man’ (II/2, p. 157 rev.), then some readings of Barth on election must be ruled out. Emil Brunner’s claim that Barth retrojects the entirety of election into divine ‘pre-temporality (Vor-Zeitlichkeit)’,66 thereby lifting the event of election out of history, making the pre-temporal logos equivalent with the incarnate Word, certainly cannot stand. Brunner assumes that the model of revelation operative in I/1, whereby God ‘repeats’ and ‘copies’ Godself, reiterating God’s immanent identity in economic terms, applies, simpliciter, to the doctrine of election. But this assumption fails to reckon both with the change of orientation effected by Church Dogmatics II and

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Jüngel makes this point deftly, noting Barth’s Reformed christological tendencies (an issue treated in the next chapter); see Barth-Studien, p. 338. Emil Brunner, Dogmatik I: Die christliche Lehre von Gott (Zürich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1960), p. 354. He states: ‘Lehrt man die ewige Präexistenz des Gottmenschen, so ist die Inkarnation kein Ereignis mehr; sie ist nicht mehr das Grobe Weihnachtswunder. Während im Neuen Testament das Neue gerade dies ist, dab der ewige Gottessohn Mensch wurde . . . [sondern] ist dies alles nun vorweggenommen, aus der Geschichte herausgebrochen und in die “Vor-Zeitlichkeit”, in die Präexistenz des Logos hineingestellt.’

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with Barth’s explicit claim that the divine Son embraces an identity inclusive of the contingent life of the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. Barth means what he says: God makes the individual human essence assumed by Son, in all of its ‘creaturely autonomy’, part of God’s own being. There is no simple recourse to a pre-temporal divine event; there is rather the frank contention that God embraces the reality of human life, situated at a particular location in time and space, within God’s own being.67 Equally mistaken is Walter Sparn’s contention that election seems ‘to substitute for the “other” as such God Godself as subject’, given that Jesus Christ ‘corresponds fully to a pure object of the choice of God – that is to say, he exists as a moment of the subjectivity of God’.68 Rather than recognizing Barth’s contestation of his idealist heritage, Sparn projects a flattened-out version of it upon the Dogmatics. He fails to see that, for Barth, the grace that brings into existence the concrete person of Christ entails the creation of a human individual, characterized by an unsublatable ontological alterity. This human individual, identifiable as the man Jesus, is not overrun by God, even as he is determined by God, even as he is drawn into the divine life. Barth is precise: election is an ‘event which in its entirety is as such the will of God, but in which God encloses (eingeschlossen . . . ist) as such the human – his will and decision, his autonomous existence’ (II/2, pp. 180–1 rev.). This ‘enclosure’ does not compromise the integrity of Christ’s humanity any more than it compromises the integrity of those who live ‘in Christ’; ‘enclosure’ here entails the protection and preservation of Christ’s humanity. And although the entirety of Christ’s divine and human being can be said to ‘happen’ in eternity, since God draws Christ’s concrete person into the divine life, the eternal event of God includes the spatially and temporally localized event of the incarnate Word, the Son who assumes, and exists as, a concrete and agentially vital human agent. Also untenable is Paul Molnar’s suggestion that Barth should be counted among the defenders of the logos asarkos. Molnar rightly notes Barth’s occasional affirmation of this theologoumenon.69 Barth offers such affirmations

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Though McCormack rightly notes that Brunner’s reading of Barth on election amounts to ‘a fairly drastic misunderstanding’ (‘Grace and Being’, p. 92), it persists in various forms. Donna Bowman, for example, makes a point parallel to Brunner’s while reprising the charge of platonism against Barth. She argues that Barth views God’s eternal decision to incarnate as Jesus Christ as suggesting ‘a kind of anticipatory realm of substances, even particular concrete individuals . . . brought into effective existence through election, before or outside of creation’ (Divine Decision, p. 32). Walter Sparn, ‘“Extra Internum”: Die christologische Revision der Prädestinationslehre in Karl Barths Erwählungslehre’, in Trutz Rendtorff (ed.), Die Realisierung der Freiheit: Beiträge zur Kritik der Theologie Karl Barths, pp. 59 and 66. Molnar cites Church Dogmatics III/1, p. 54 and IV/1, p. 52 on this front. He also notes discussions in I/2, 168ff.; III/2, 65f. and 147f.; and the Göttingen Dogmatics (see Divine

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for good reason. The logos asarkos signals that God is not inevitably conditioned by God’s economic action; that God freely decides upon the constitution of God’s being; that God’s eternal being, as Son, is logically and ontologically ‘prior’ to the human creature, identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth, who is caught up in God’s economic work. But Barth maintains an emphasis on divine sovereignty while sidelining logos asarkos motif. Not only is this motif not necessary to preserve an emphasis on divine sovereignty and freedom (why presume that God being ontologically ‘pure’ – that is, God being a being who never takes leave of his pre-temporal state – forms a necessary correlate to God’s ontological priority?), but were Barth to emphasize it, he would compromise his belief that God wills that God’s pre-temporal elective intention, appropriable to the Son, not be divorced from its realization. For with respect to the divine Son (and only the Son), Barth’s interest lies not with the logos asarkos; his concern is rather what the logos makes of himself.70 So when he writes that ‘God himself in his own Son wanted to become, was, is, and will be, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man, the true human’ (IV/2, p. 69 rev.), he is doing more than noting Christ’s divinity and personal simplicity. He is describing the identity that God assigns Godself qua Son; he is making an assertion about God’s decision to make this (and only this) Freedom, p. 71). I am dubious about some of these citations. For example, in III/1 Barth admits that the logos asarkos has ‘shown itself to be necessary to the christological and Trinitarian reflections of the Church [and] to-day it is indispensable for dogmatic enquiry and presentation’. But he then writes that the New Testament ‘does not speak expressly of the eternal Word as such, but of the Mediator, the One who in the eternal sight of God has already taken upon Himself our human nature, i.e., not of a formless Christ . . . but of Jesus the Christ’ (III/1, p. 54). This is hardly a ringing endorsement; it is more akin to an acknowledgement of the logos asarkos as a qualifying aside. More generally (as will become clear) Barth does his utmost to downplay talk of the logos asarkos, given that it distracts from his primary claim about divine self-determination. For example, Barth writes that ‘according to the Fourth Gospel, it is not merely the eternal but the incarnate Logos and therefore the man Jesus who is included, in the divine circle of God’s triune interrelating (III/2, p. 65). A little later he adds: ‘the humanity of Jesus and his participation in the Godhead are not irreconcileable [sic] and antithetic . . . His very participation in the divine . . . is the basis of His humanity. The Johannine Jesus is man in and by the very fact that He is the Son of God and that He is included in the circle of the inner life of the Godhead’ (III/2, p. 66). In IV/2, pp. 100–1, Barth puts it as follows: ‘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. Thus the human essence of Jesus Christ, without becoming divine, in its very creatureliness, is placed at the side of the creator, pro\j to\n qeo/n (Jn 1.1). It 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. He is God in the flesh – distinguished from all other idols imagined and fashioned by men by the fact that they are not God in the flesh, but products of human speculation on naked deity, lo/goi a1sarkoi’ (my emphases).

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economic action relevant to God’s immanent life. He is certainly not holding the proviso, ‘in terms of the economy’, in reserve; he is suggesting that the concrete life of Christ has consequence for the being of God as such. Molnar’s mistake, then, is to suppose that Barth epitomizes what he presumes to be dogmatically needful in the present day, namely, ‘a clear and sharp distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity’,71 the corollary of which is an affirmation of the logos asarkos. This dogmatic claim inflates regulative claims about the independence and prevenience of God to the point at which they distract from Barth’s own convictions about the divine being. The plain (and assuredly crucial) fact of divine freedom tells only one part of the divine story. Barth’s focus is on what God does with God’s freedom. His suggestion is that the economic event of Christ ramifies in the time and space of God’s immanent life.72 To take up the positive angle of interpretation: this reading of II/2, proximate to the perspective championed by Bruce McCormack and favoured by several German scholars, views election as an act whereby God qualifies God’s second way of being. Given God’s actualization of God’s pre-temporal intention, the contingent human life of Jesus of Nazareth, in all of its irreducible particularity, becomes an event that happens eternally in God’s being. Barth, I would suggest, presents God’s identity as ‘electing’ and ‘elected’ in terms of an ontological narrative that describes God’s free self-constitution as the incarnate Son. At the beginning of the narrative, there is God’s pre-temporal intention to convey Godself in human history, with God’s self-conveyance associated particularly with the ‘mission’ of the Son. Consequently, there is the narrative’s middle: God ‘overflows’ in an act of souveräne Güte, producing and uniting himself, as Son, with the human individual identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. The narrative’s end occurs as 70

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Goebel makes this point with great accuracy: ‘Selbstbestimmung Gottes heibt hier: der lo/goj a)sarkoj bestimmt sich selbst zum lo/goj e0nsarkoj, der er ohne diese Selbstbestimmung nicht ist. Damit ist die Erkenntnis festgehalten, dab der ewige Sohn Gottes der lo/goj e0nsarkoj allein durch seine eigene und freie Selbstbestimmung ist’ (Vom freien Wählen Gottes, p. 52). Note also comments made by Barth himself to English-speaking students between the winter of 1953 and the summer of 1956: ‘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’ (Godsey (ed.), Table Talk, p. 49). Molnar, Divine Freedom, p. 64. A final comment seems useful here. Although I wish to defend McCormack against Molnar’s criticisms, I disagree slightly regarding the former’s description of the logos asarkos motif. McCormack argues that once Barth had begun to understand election as an ontological event, he could have discarded the logos asarkos. That Barth maintains the theologoumenon is only explicable in terms of its function as a rather distracting ‘Begrenzungsbegriffe’ (see here ‘Barths grundsätzlicher Chalkedonismus?’, esp. p. 156). But is it really a mistake for Barth to preserve this ‘limit-concept’? It has genuine value, given that it affirms the priority of God and the prevenient origin of the human that God assumes.

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the concrete life of Jesus Christ, comprised by the being and action of God qua Son in union with this assumed human, is enclosed within, and made a constitutive part of, the divine life. Thus it is that this human, Jesus of Nazareth, pre-exists, im Anfang, with God; thus it is that the divine Son is Jesus Christ, vere Deus vere homo, for all eternity. Indeed, the end – Christ’s ‘session’ at the right hand of the Father – becomes the beginning. Such is God’s eminenter Gnade – God’s eternal incorporation of Christ’s humanity into the divine life. In terms of God’s second way of being, time and eternity are not diametrical opposites but ontologically distinct realities that, by dint of God’s free decision and free Lordship over God’s being, are united in Christ and comprise the simple being of God qua Son.73 The structure of §33 reflects this narrative. In this pivotal paragraph, Barth looks at the election of Christ first from the perspective of eternity, with glances towards its temporal ‘end’, and then later from the perspective of time, with references back to an eternal ‘beginning’. To begin at the beginning: the paragraph opens with an account of God’s intention and action that concentrates on the divine life, with a brief excursus on Jn 1.1–2 considering the pre-temporal decision of the logos asarkos to become and be the logos ensarkos.74 Barth acknowledges, initially, that o9 logo/j e0n a0rxh=| (Jn 1.1) must not be rendered equivalent to Jesus as the prwto/tokoj th=j kti/sewj (Christ as ‘the firstborn of all creation’, Col. 1.15). ‘The Word as such’, he writes, ‘is before and above all created realities. It stands completely outside the series of created things. It precedes all being and all time’ (II/2, p. 95). The logos asarkos here serves its limited function. One must beware of collapsing the distinction between created time and eternity. One must acknowledge God’s absolute sovereignty as the prior condition of God’s incarnational action; indicating the ontological priority of God in Godself is a useful way to achieve this end. But Barth quickly moves on to say that the divine Word ‘points forward’. The theologian ought to present the pre-temporal 73

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George Hunsinger, though not endorsing the idea of divine self-qualification as I present it, makes this point nicely in a critical discussion of Robert Jenson’s God after God: The God of the Past and the Future as Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969): ‘What Jenson sees . . . is that Jesus Christ in Barth’s theology is the unity of time and eternity. Eternity is not to be understood in abstraction from Jesus of Nazareth. However difficult the resulting conceptuality might turn out to be (or however illuminating or deep), eternity is defined as inseparable from the particular temporality of Jesus, as ontologically filled and shaped by it’ (How to Read Karl Barth, pp. 16–7). The following reading of the excursus, close to that offered in Jüngel’s Being Is in Becoming (see pp. 94–8), is of course not the only possible one. Jochen Denker’s examination of the role of John’s prologue in the Dogmatics views II/2 in terms of a concern to connect Jesus Christ with the people and history of Israel. See his Das Wort wurde messianischer Mensch: Die Theologie Karl Barths und die Theologie des Johannesprologs (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2002), pp. 96–108.

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existence of the Son as always readying to move from eternity into time, for if one holds Jn 1.1–2 and Col. 1.15 too far apart, affirming the logos asarkos without describing God’s being-as-act as always-already reaching toward the human, Jesus of Nazareth, a truncated description of God ensues. Indeed, the evangelist describes God’s being as Son as ‘the Word’ because God eternally intends communication with humanity through the person of Christ. Accordingly, Jn 1.1–2 has a provisional purpose, with o9 logo/j ‘having the character of a placeholder (Platzhalters), of a preliminary indication’ (II/2, p. 96 rev.) that ‘points us to that which fills the place indicated by the concept Logos’ (II/2, p. 98).75 And as the pre-temporal intention of the Word is realized in (finite) time, the place opened up inside of God, by God, is ‘filled’ by the human assumed into union with the Son. Thus the final line of the excursus: ‘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’ (II/2, p. 99 [my emphasis]). The prevenient beginning of the narrative comes to embrace its ‘end’ in the concrete person of Jesus Christ. God’s selfdetermination has the consequence that, in terms of the divine Son, God becomes and is, eternally, the ontologically and agentially complex person of Jesus Christ. Paragraph 33’s second half focuses on the end of the ontological narrative – an end that loops back to and becomes the beginning. Looking at eternity from the perspective of created time, it indicates that God draws Christ’s human life into God’s being. At one point, Barth makes this claim in an allusively brilliant way, playing on the distinction between ‘sovereign’ and ‘eminent’ grace: ‘God does not need man, yet wills not to be without him . . . [God] has caught up humanity into the sovereign presupposing of Godself’ (II/2, p. 176 rev.). This ‘catching up’ of humanity into God happens originally when God brings the ‘elected human’, Jesus of Nazareth, into union with the Son as ‘electing God’. Barth does not compromise his belief in an 75

Barth here reprises a claim from his 1925/26 Münster lectures on John (revised 1933). The Word, he writes, ‘obviously plays for the author the role of a locum tenens. It is simply the provisional designation of a place that something of someone else will later fill . . . in the prologue ho logos is a substitute for Jesus Christ. His is the place which at one and the same time is occupied, reserved, and delimited by the predicates which are ascribed to the Logos, by the history which is narrated about him’. See here Witness to the Word: A Commentary on John 1 (ed. Walther Fürst; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), p. 23. Incidentally, Barth seems to have lifted sections from these lectures to pad the excursus in II/2. What changes is the attitude to the logos asarkos. In 1933, Barth could still say (of Jn 1.4, specifically) that ‘[i]nasmuch as every word here relates to Jesus Christ, it also relates to the Logos as the revealer of God who announces himself before and even apart from Jesus of Nazareth’ (p. 43) and that ‘the Logos is what he is even without this predicate.’ Yet by the time he writes II/2, things have changed. Barth now affirms Jesus Christ as the subject of election; his use of the logos asarkos is strictly circumscribed.

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unsublatable contrast that separates God and humankind; he holds fast to this ‘complementary dialectic’ (Beintker). But he now puts it to work in a manner unforeseen in Romans and in a way that upsets the classical Reformed commitment to the extra calvinisticum. In light of Gottes Gnadenwahl, the logos asarkos directs itself towards, and ultimately embraces an identity inclusive of the genuine human existence of Jesus of Nazareth, the human assumed by the simple person of God qua Son. Consequently, the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ pertains to, and is maintained within, God’s second way of being – even while God’s second way of being has appropriated to himself, for all eternity, the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. A striking articulation of this claim occurs when Barth associates Christ’s identity as ‘elected human’ with the act of prayer. He writes: If Jesus Christ was that man, if from the very beginning he was the elected human, then we must now say: God’s eternal will aims at the life of this praying human. This is the man who was in the beginning with God [my emphasis]. God’s love intends and seeks this human. This is the human to whose existence the whole decreed work of God from eternity is applied. And if we now consider God’s eternal decree in its entirety, then we see that as it is the decree of the living God, that God Godself lives divinely. Indeed, from the beginning God is living in all of God’s ways. It is so since in the bosom of God there is this event – the history, encounter and decision between God and humanity. (II/2, p. 180 rev.) To say that Jesus Christ, ‘this man of prayer’, is ‘in the beginning with God’ and that in the ‘bosom of God’ there is ‘history, encounter and decision’ between God and humanity provides clear testimony to the union of time and eternity constitutive of God’s second way of being. On one level, as a ‘man of prayer’, Jesus cannot be thought otherwise than a human who lives in the realm of creaturely reality, encountering and responding to God. Prayer is an incontrovertibly human exercise of agency, not an intrinsic dimension of God’s immanent life, carried out by an individual (an ‘Israelite out of Israel’ (II/2, p. 204)) who exists in a particular time and space. On another level, as the man Jesus is ‘intended’ and ‘sought out’ by God’s love, God ‘adopts’ this praying human (the verb is risky, but useful), making him a constitutive aspect of God’s being qua Son. The beginning and end of the narrative that God makes definitive of the being of the divine Son – the pretemporal decree of election and the consequential temporal event of Christ’s prayer – are joined together by virtue of God’s being ‘the living God’: the one who, as Son, encompasses both time and eternity. God’s love for humanity is so radical, so jealous, that God decides about God’s being in this way. In specifying the ‘comprehensive autonomy of the creature . . . constituted originally by the act of the eternal divine election and which has in this act 96

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its legitimate reality’ (II/2, p. 177 rev.), Barth pushes this point to a radical conclusion. Although the term Autonomie raises the issue of Christ’s human agency, its more basic function is to show that the divine Son’s radical assumption of the man Jesus includes an unceasing concern for the ontological integrity of his humanity. One might well say that patience (Geduld) attends God’s exercise of eminenter Gnade.76 Recall Barth’s description of patience as a divine ‘perfection’ in Church Dogmatics II/1. God does not overbearingly dictate the life history of God’s creatures; rather, God’s patience grants the creature ‘space and time for the development of its own existence, thus conceding to this existence a reality side by side with His own, and fulfilling His will towards this other in such a way that He does not suspend (aufhebt) and destroy it as this other but accompanies it and sustains it and allows it to develop in freedom’ (II/1, pp. 409–10).77 In II/2, one discovers the anterior condition of God’s patience towards creatures in general: God’s originary exercise of patience vis-à-vis Christ as a human being. Even as this human is rendered (indirectly) identical with the divine Son, even as this human is drawn into the eternal time and space of the divine being, this man, Jesus, a distinctive and utterly irreducible instance of human being, retains his creaturely integrity. Indeed, in deciding to be the ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, God risks Godself. God draws into God’s being a creaturely reality that, simply by virtue of not being God, could conceivably turn against God. Barth makes the point powerfully at one point in §33: What did God choose . . . when God willed to be the Son of Man in Jesus Christ? . . . If for a moment we attempt the impossible task of picturing to ourselves humanity neither fallen nor sinful, we must at least say this. Such humanity is not God, and the fulfilment of humanity’s

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Although I am not aware of any extended treatment of Barth on patience, it has received comment: see John Webster, ‘Freedom in Limitation: Human Freedom and False Necessity in Barth’, in Barth’s Moral Theology, pp. 104–5 and Nimmo, Being in Action, p. 98. For further remarks on patience, indebted in varying degrees to Barth, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (trans. Geoffrey Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 438–41; Eberhard Jüngel, Wertlose Wahrheit: zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens. Theologische Erörterungen III (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1990), pp. 183–93; and Rachel Muers, ‘Silence and the Patience of God’, Modern Theology 17.1 (2001), pp. 85–98. Note also II/1, p. 407: ‘Love does not necessarily bear [the characteristic] of patience. Love can be extremely honest . . . It may want to possess its object immediately or in a specific qualitative or quantitative way. It may wish to devour it, or, if it is frustrated, vindictively to destroy it. Similarly, grace in general or mercy in general may behave with great impatience. We can mean only the love and grace and mercy of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and not of an imaginary god, if we confess that love and grace and mercy must also be patient.’

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vocation – to live in God’s glory – is in any case a matter of creaturely freedom and decision. The human is entirely other than God, not sovereign like God, at least questioned by the boundary of the impossible, the excluded, the boundary of that which is contradictory to God’s will . . . Will this human do right? What a risk (Gefährdung) God brought upon Godself when God willed to take up the cause of the created human, even in his original purity, when God constituted Godself his God and determined Godself to solidarity with him. (II/2, pp. 163–4 rev.) Why risk? Why is it that when ‘God spoke God’s Word, God gave even himself, risked himself, hazarded himself. Not for nothing, but rather for the human, the human created by God and fallen away from God’ (II/2, p. 161 rev.)? Well, because God’s loving patience never coerces response. Think of it in terms of our own lives. Even if a lover offers the most perfect love that surrounds, guides and dignifies the beloved, there is no guarantee that the beloved acts predictably, acceding to the lover’s proposal for a common life. The price of a truly patient love is the possibility of thwarted and sullied companionship: while the lover may insist that companionship is preferable to solitariness, the irreducible ontological and agential distinction of the beloved ensures that being spurned is an ever-present possibility. The cliché gets it right: if you love, you risk a broken heart. And God took and takes the original risk of patience, the risk of having God’s own heart permanently broken – shattered, even – when the Son assumes human flesh, and constitutes himself in terms of the life of Jesus Christ. Barth does not flinch from the radical consequences of his doctrine of election, even as it complicates, or, more positively, shows the radicality of, his belief in divine sovereignty. With Gottes Gnadenwahl, God gives up thoroughgoing control over God’s being. The extremity of God’s grace is such that God jeopardizes the peace of God’s own life, binding the Son’s identity not simply to the ‘form’ of the incarnation (the word taking flesh) but to the autonomous decisions and history of the human that God assumes. Care is of course needed at this point. The constancy of Christ’s obedience to God is a given for Barth. Christ’s humanity cannot be thought in isolation from the divine Subject that defines his being. And Christ’s humanity never asserts some kind of autarchic independence from God; it reflects and copies the action of God without exception and without remainder. Set in union with God qua Son, and seamlessly obedient to the Father in a way that renders the person Jesus Christ utterly simple, the assumed humanity of Christ is both sinless and, in some sense, perfect. Christ really is ‘the true human’ who does what we do not. He lives as God’s one true covenant partner. Nevertheless, if faith’s knowledge of the ‘elected human’ is assured in view of Christ’s constancy (and, of course, his vindicatory resurrection),

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talk of ‘risk’ and ‘hazard’ show Barth recognizing that such assurance is contingent upon Christ humanly realizing his identity as the ‘elected human’. Although the theologian might enjoy with Paul the ‘boasting’ of faith – for the gospel narratives depict how Christ ‘learned obedience’ (Heb. 5.8) and therefore ‘pioneered’ our salvation (Heb. 2.10) – she may not lose sight of the possibility that Jesus, simply in view of his creatureliness, simply in view of the ‘impossible-possibility’ of sinfulness, might have refused, somehow, God’s gracious advance; that the unity of time and eternity could have fractured were he to have disdained, at any moment, the divine movement of love and freedom superintending his being. It seems useful to conclude this section on a somewhat philosophical note, engaging some questions that have not yet received sufficient attention. Is there not something about Barth’s perspective that boggles even the most dialectical imagination? How can a concretely temporal event become a constitutive moment of God’s eternal being?78 Does Barth drift towards unintelligibility with the claim that ‘before all created reality, before all being and happening in our time, before our time itself, in God’s pre-temporal eternity, the eternal divine decision . . . has as its object and content the existence of this one created being, the human Jesus of Nazareth, his work in his life and death, in his humiliation and exaltation, in his obedience and his merit’ (II/2, p. 116 rev.)? A full answer to this question, as well as the adjunctive question about divine and mundane space,79 would require a full-length study of Barth’s understanding of eternity and time, not to mention a discussion of Barth’s relationship to scholars such as Wolfhart Pannenberg and Robert Jenson. But one can sketch the outlines of an answer (and in this respect I am indebted greatly to George Hunsinger’s fine work on Barth’s understanding of eternity, although he may well disagree with my application

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McCormack poses exactly this question: ‘wie kann Gott als das Subjekt der Erwählung bereits der fleischgewordene Herr “sein” – auch nur in Antizipation – wenn doch das Sein des fleischgewordenen Herrn die Konsequenz der Entscheidung ist? Aber sicher muss er doch – im Moment der Entscheidung – etwas anderes sein als das, was er als Konsequenz dieser Entscheidung sein wird?’ (‘Barths grundsätzlicher Chalkedonismus?’, p. 156). The question may be reframed as follows: how can a concretely limited event – the contingently local ‘space’ of Jesus of Nazareth – be the object and content of God’s pre-spatial infinite extensivity? The answer given would resemble formally the response tendered below. God ought to be understood neither as ‘spaceless’ nor as mundanely ‘spaced’. God’s own spatiality is the prior condition of created space: exactly because in God there is ‘divine proximity and remoteness’, there is a ‘created proximity and remoteness’ (II/1, p. 463). Furthermore, because God’s spatiality is both proximate and remote, with an overreaching extensivity characterizing (loosely) God’s ousia and a distinctive locality characterizing (loosely) each hypostasis, God is ‘ready’ to include and sustain the particular locality of Jesus Christ in God’s own spatiality.

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of it).80 Everything hangs on Barth’s understanding of time as a ‘primarily positive determination of eternity’ (II/1, p. 610 rev.) and the correlative ‘positive relationship’ (II/1, p. 619) that divine eternity has with time. In positing the ‘positive quality’ of eternity, Barth argues that God’s being should neither be construed in terms of an aloof transcendent timelessness, that is, a nunc stans pushed to the point at which time is alien to God, nor in terms of a linear transhistoricality, whereby God is held hostage to a prior metaphysical framework in which God’s past is past, his present quickly gone, and his future still to come: an exaggerated nunc fluens. Time and eternity are not antithetically opposed for God. Coincident with the decision to be neither monadic nor triadic, but rather ‘rich’ in the multiple perfections that attend God’s triune life, God chooses an identity neither wholly timeless nor wholly temporal, but ‘rich’ in that temporality is included within God’s eternity. Thus it is that God can be described as being pretemporal, supra-temporal and post-temporal. Indeed, such temporalized eternality, as Hunsinger indicates, can be mapped loosely on to God’s triunity, God’s hypostatic distinction and the perichoretic indwelling of God’s three ways of being: it is at once ‘pure duration’ (unity), ‘a beginning, middle, and end’ (hypostatic distinction), and ‘simultaneity’ (perichoresis) (II/1, pp. 608ff.). Barth also connects this view of eternity with God’s positive relationship to created time. On one level, the fact that God’s eternal being includes ontological and temporal distinction as such forms the prior ground 80

George Hunsinger, ‘Mysterium Trinitatis: Karl Barth’s Conception of Eternity’, in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 186–209. See also How to Read Karl Barth, pp. 238–42. A degree of tentativeness necessarily attends the claims that follow, since I am applying insights culled from the later stages of Church Dogmatics II/1 to the new dogmatic environment of II/2. On the one hand, the procedure is quite defensible. II/1 contests the vision of God’s self-sufficiency in I/1; it is ‘on the way’ to the doctrine of election of II/2. One might even discern a ‘turning-point’ in Barth’s treatment of God’s perfections, particularly with regard to the issue of God’s eternity. Thus Barth writes that in ‘this pure divine time [of pre-eternity] there took place the appointment of the eternal Son for the temporal world, there occurred the readiness of the Son to do the will of the eternal Father, and there ruled the peace of the eternal Spirit – the very thing later revealed at the heart of created time in Jesus Christ’ (II/1, p. 622): a direct anticipation of the passage found in II/2, pp. 101–2 (cited above). If II/1 looks forward to the doctrine of election in these ways, why not use its contents to help solve puzzles that later arise? On the other hand, one cannot underestimate the ‘breakthrough’ quality of Church Dogmatics II/2. Barth reorients himself with the doctrine of election; a new clarity emerges even in the opening pages of this part volume. Yet Barth cannot quite let go of the logos asarkos in II/1. While he will say that ‘eternity itself bears the name of Jesus Christ’ (II/1, p. 622), the formulation of ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’ is conspicuous in its absence from the discussion of God’s perfections in §§29–31, not to mention the programmatic description of God in §28. With II/1, Barth stands on the cusp of orienting his entire thought in terms of the doctrine of election – only the cusp.

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of the ontological and temporal distinction of creation. On another level, God’s Lordship over creation means that created temporality is eternally present to God in multiple ways. God in Godself is simultaneously pretemporal, supra-temporal and post-temporal vis-à-vis created time; God knows created time before it exists, while it exists and after it exists. Thus, focusing on God’s supra-temporality, Barth writes: God’s eternity includes time. Its whole extension from beginning to end, each single part of it, every epoch, every lifetime, every new and closing year, every coming and going hour of our time, is inside eternity like a child in its mother’s arms. Time does not limit eternity; it is not its constituens; it does not exist as an independent reality over against it. Rather, it is eternity’s creation and as such it is preserved and kept under the law and confidence of its presence. (II/1, p. 623 rev.) By making time a predicate of God’s eternity, Barth discloses the condition of possibility for God’s relationship to created time. Because God in Godself is time (properly so, in fact), God creates and embraces creaturely time; because God has time for himself, it is fitting that God gives us creatures time for ourselves. One can apply this reasoning to understand how Christ’s being and activity is both temporal and eternal or, to put it a bit differently, how it is that the eternal Son is also the man identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth, a person both pre-existent and locatable within the contingent nexus of time and space. Just as God embraces creaturely time, in its entirety, in God’s eternal life, so too, but far more radically and quite uniquely, does God embrace the particular time (and space) of Christ, as a human, and make it constitutive for the being of the divine Son. The enclosure and maintenance of Jesus’ particular contingent history ‘inside’ and as God’s eternal second way of being in fact forms the ontological basis for God’s (rather different) enclosure of created time in God’s eternity. Hunsinger is precise: the ‘logic of the doctrine of the trinity’, in its temporalized eternity, ‘intersects with the logic of the doctrine of the incarnation’, so that the ‘dialectical inclusion’81 of (divine) time in (divine) eternity is the ground upon which, in Jesus Christ, God ‘enter[s] . . . into time [and] takes time, created time into himself’82 – not violating, but upholding its irreducible contingency. One might even venture a complex analogy. In the same way that God the Father, in God’s pre-temporal eternity, precedes the Son in a logical (but not chronological) sense, the eternal Son ‘precedes’ the incarnate Son in a logical (but not a chronological) sense. And just as logical precedence, figured in terms of ‘begetting’ and ‘being begotten’, obtains between Father and Son without imperiling the eternal unity of 81 82

Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, p. 202. Ibid., p. 203.

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God, so too does the eternal unity of Christ, the logos incarnatus, endure the logical precedence of the Son qua ‘electing God’ and the subsequence of Jesus of Nazareth qua ‘elected human’. While the (electing) divine Son is not the (elected human) Jesus, but logically prior to him, both the divine Son and the man Jesus are constitutive of God’s second way of being. While the divine Son as such is logically prior to creation, even prior to the assumed ‘firstborn’, the identity embraced by the Son encompasses time and eternity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s deliberately paradoxical claim – ‘[t]he humanity [of Christ] is taken up into the Trinity. Not from all eternity, but “from now on even unto eternity”’83 – is applicable to the christologically normed doctrine of election expounded in Church Dogmatics II/2.84

Jesus’ covenantal humanity It should now be clear that Church Dogmatics II forwards a christological outlook rather different to that drafted in I/2. The vere Deus vere homo formula has been aufgehoben. Christ is not merely ‘truly God’; he is God’s conveyance of God’s elective love. Christ is not merely ‘truly human’; he is the human who, given God’s sovereign decision and God’s exercise of eminenter Gnade, transforms the divine life. While offering nothing in the way of explicit retraction,85 Barth forges a new christological path in Church Dogmatics II/2, epitomized by the striking doublet – Jesus Christ as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’. Fascinatingly, even as Barth forwards his audacious understanding of election, his interest in Christ’s human agency shows no sign of flagging. It forms a remarkable subtext to II/2, just as in Church Dogmatics I/2. To explore further this subtext, this section asks: if Christ is 83 84

Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, p. 105. With these comments I am marking sharp disagreement with Richard Roberts’s work, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications’, in A Theology on Its Way? Essays on Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), pp. 1–58. Roberts’s reading of Barth on time reprises Walter Sparn’s mistakes. Apparently, throughout the Church Dogmatics, the ‘utter self-sufficiency of the divine act’ (p. 32) robs mundane reality and mundane time of any real integrity. Barth preaches ontological difference; he practises ontological monism. There is, consequently, a ‘profound theological totalitarianism’ (p. 56); a ‘theological alienation of the natural order’ (p. 37); an overpowering divine forcefulness that ensures that creation and created time ‘enjoy a merely derivative and secondary status over against the self-authenticating reality and objectivity of revelation’ (p. 44). While I will desist from pressing the question of which Christian theologies do not see creation and created time as ‘derivative’ and ‘secondary’ in some sense (are they self-originated and primary?), it need hardly be said that my reading takes a diametrically opposed interpretative tack. Creation and created time are not ‘merely’ anything: they are the ontologically distinct products of God’s overflowing love, the first expression of which is the creation of the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth.

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the human being who is originally ‘set . . . up as a subject’, awoken to ‘genuine individuality and autonomy’ (II/2, p. 179), what elucidation of this event does Barth provide? How do the instructive stirrings of I/2 play out in a new dogmatic context framed by Barth’s doctrine of election? These questions are important for two interrelated reasons. First, Barth insists that a dogmatic explication of the elective divine self-determination of God qua Son, not to mention the personal simplicity of Jesus Christ, must be complemented by a clear sense of the distinction between Christ’s human and divine essences. Anticipating a stance associated recently with Robert Jenson,86 Barth could have argued that the human individual, Jesus of Nazareth, simply is the second person of the Trinity. He could have argued that the claim ‘the Son of God became Jesus of Nazareth; Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God’ points towards the utter coincidence of divinity and humanity in one person – this near tautology being a ‘direct statement of identity’87 (Bonhoeffer), aptly descriptive of the one simple person that is Jesus Christ. Yet this is the road not taken. Barth wants to affirm God’s selfdetermination qua Son as Jesus Christ – a self-determination whereby God freely transforms God’s immanent being, with the Son’s concrete existence as Jesus Christ, the divine-human who lives under the conditions of finitude, becoming definitive of the identity of the Son as such – while also upholding a lively sense of Christ’s ontological and agential complexity. For Barth, adjunctive to any acclamation of Christ’s personal simplicity must be due recognition of his being ‘one person in two natures’. A second point follows on directly: exactly because Barth maintains a clear sense of the distinction between divinity and humanity in Christ’s person, he is freed up to develop a striking understanding of Christ’s life as a covenantal event. On the one side, as the ‘electing God’, Christ discloses God’s intention to exist in a genuine relationship with humankind, indeed, to be present to humanity as a ‘counterpart’. That God is present to humanity under the conditions of finitude does not undermine the reality of this relationship. Christ, after all, really is the ‘electing God’. As the divine Son, with the Father and Spirit, Christ is the person in whom God relates to, and 85

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Barth does offer what could be read to be an implicit retraction. So II/2, pp. 5–6: ‘We should still not have learned to say “God” correctly . . . if we thought it enough simply to say “God.” However well-grounded or critical our utterance, if it has a logical exclusiveness, if it is only “God”, it will not suffice. For if it is true that in Jesus Christ there dwells the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2.9), then in all the perfection with which it is differentiated from everything that is not God, and thus exists for itself, the Subject God still cannot, as it were, be envisaged, established and described only in and for itself. We must not be so exact, so clever, so literal, that our doctrine of God remains only a doctrine of God . . . To be truly Christian, the doctrine of God must carry forward and complete the definition and exposition of the Subject God.’ See, for instance, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, pp. 138–44. Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, p. 103.

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truly lives with, humankind. On the other side, as ‘elected human’, Christ grounds and exemplifies the proper human response to God’s election, living and acting as God’s ‘partner in the covenant decreed and founded by God’ (II/2, p. 509). And whatsoever Christ does as God’s human partner, he does for humanity as such: the entirety of humankind is enclosed within, and ontologically determined by, the ‘firstborn of creation’.88 To emphasize this point, II/2 offers a thumbnail sketch of Christ’s agential comportment. Barth signals hereby that the doctrines of incarnation and covenant overlap and interpenetrate. The divine Son’s self-determination happens in the same moment in which Jesus Christ, the flesh that the Word has become, grounds and restores God’s relationship with humankind. As God’s grace establishes and upholds the ontological integrity of Christ’s divinity and humanity, God calls forth the human agency of God’s originary covenant partner; one who demonstrates what ‘God rightly wills of us’ (II/2, p. 567) and establishes humanity as it ought to be (and is). Furthermore, as in I/2, Barth indicates that the distinctive event of reconciliation – the restoration of our relationship with God, despite the sorry tale of human sin – is an event inclusive of Christ’s human agency. God’s self-transformation therefore goes hand in hand with ‘the existence of a being which in all its non-deity and therefore its differentiation can be a real partner . . . capable of action and responsibility’ (III/1, p. 184), even to the point at which this partner has a hand in securing the covenantal future that God intends. In pursuing this line of reflection, Barth inverts the doublet that summarizes Christ’s identity. This person is not only the ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’; he is also the electing human who elects God.89 God’s ‘overflowing’ is not only productive of ontological difference; it is also productive of agential difference. Gottes Gnadenwahl entails a genuinely reciprocal relationship

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Barth makes this point with panache throughout II/2. See, for example, II/2, p. 606: ‘this person [Jesus] is not a private person representing only himself and standing over against us. His commission and work do not extend only to the sphere of His own existence, but to the existence of all men. This person is appointed and stands before God for the person of all other men. We all have to recognize in the commission and work of this person the accomplishment of the will of God . . . Root and branch, we all belong to this person and not to ourselves.’ Goebel puts it deftly: ‘die Geschichte Jesu Christi ist als die exklusive Geschichte des wahren Gottes und des wahren Mensch in dieser einen Person die inklusive Geschichte gegenüber den vielen Anderen, die sie an sich selbst in ihrer analogischen Struktur partizipieren läbt’ (Von freien Wählen Gottes, p. 19). Goebel organizes his brilliant monograph on election and analogy around this doublet and its inversion. Barth’s ‘theo-logisches Spiel’ (Ibid., p. 21) is staged around four interrelated claims: ‘(1) “Jesus Christus ist der erwählende Gott”; (2) “Jesus Christus ist der erwählte Mensch”; (3) “Jesus Christus ist der erwählende Mensch”; (4) “Jesus Christus ist der erwählte Gott” ’ (Ibid., pp. 26–7). My agreement with Goebel on various issues will become evident below.

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in which ‘the one elected from all eternity can and does elect God in return’ (II/2, p. 178). Christ qua human certainly must not be viewed as a ‘puppet’ or a ‘mere mouthpiece (Sprachohr)’ (II/2, p. 178 rev.)90 of which God makes instrumental use. He really does ‘confirm and to some extent repeat as elected man the election of God’ (II/2, p. 105). To elaborate this ‘confirmation’ and ‘repetition’, Barth deploys the terms ‘encounter’, ‘decision’ and ‘history’ towards the end of §33, using this conceptual cluster to illustrate the nature of Jesus’ human activity before God. It is true that that these terms can only be prised apart artificially. Additional interpretative difficulties arise because Barth’s discussion shifts between Christ’s originary human encounter, decision and history with God, and that of those ‘in him’ – a move that adverts the basic connection that Barth establishes between election and theological anthropology. But the cluster still provides useful information about Christ’s human agency, actualized in view of God’s pursuit of relationship with humankind. It shows that the new dogmatic environment framed by the doctrine of election, while much interested in God’s Christic selftransformation, effects an intensification of Barth’s earlier interest in Christ’s human agency. Examining this aspect of II/2, moreover, prepares the way for the treatment of Church Dogmatics IV offered in the next two chapters. Before a closer look at the text, two further points of clarification are needed. First, my suggestion that Barth integrates the doctrines of incarnation, covenant and reconciliation ought not to be viewed as continuous with Regin Prenter’s interpretation of Barth’s Christology. Prenter argues that a Nestorian construal of the Zweinaturlehre grounds Barth’s view of the covenant. On this reckoning, ‘the unity of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ’ is ‘truly dissolved, because God and man are placed opposite one another as two partners in a covenant relationship’.91 This is a drastic misinterpretation. Not only does Prenter seem oblivious to Barth’s insistence on Christ’s personal simplicity, but also he confuses the Reformed drift of Barth’s Christology (which emphasizes the unsublatable difference between Christ’s divinity and Christ’s humanity) with the general question of the relationship between humanity and God. He fails to recognize that covenantal relating pertains to Christ’s relationship to God qua Father, not to the relationship between the divine Son and the humanity assumed by the Son. Prenter also overlooks a claim fundamental to the Dogmatics – namely, that God’s action, first and foremost, ensures God’s covenantal relationship with humankind. While Barth has much to say about Christ’s human agency, this person is primarily defined by God’s second way of being. It is because the Son as logos incarnatus ‘stands in our place’, constantly superintending a humanity that relates properly to God, and bringing to fulfilment God’s 90

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Barth reemploys the figure of the puppet to emphasize the reality of human action in the beautiful §68 (‘The Holy Spirit and Christian love’); see esp. IV/2, pp. 800–1. Regin Prenter, ‘Karl Barths Umbildung der traditionellen Zweinaturlehre’, p. 20.

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covenantal intention, that a proper covenantal relationship is secured. There is partnership here, but partnership of an irreducibly asymmetrical kind. Second, there is the tricky question of whether Barth promulgates a specific kind of covenantalism. If I am right in discerning an intensive interpenetration of the doctrines of Christ and covenant, might it not be useful to identify historical precedents for Barth’s position? Certainly, much would be gained from an in-depth investigation of Barth’s attitude towards different construals of the covenant in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Advantages might also accrue from an examination of Barth’s reception of Calvin, Cocceius and other Federalist theologians, and Jewish perspectives on the covenant.92 But there is no need, I think, for this work to offer conjectures as to Barth’s relationship to previous outlooks. Within the context of Barth’s thought, the person of Christ cannot be subsumed under a particular ‘model’ of covenantal relations, since Christ does far more than exemplify humanity’s proper relationship with God. Uniquely, this person’s life encompasses both the paradigmatic realization of partnership with God (sanctification) and the condition of possibility for partnership with God, routed through the substitutionary event of the cross (justification). Thus Barth repeatedly describes Jesus’ life as the ‘fulfilment’, ‘completion’ or ‘execution’ of the covenant – the history that displaces the Fall as definitive of the ontology of each human and brings God’s plan for companionship to fruition.93 We live within the covenant of God’s grace because of Christ; his life is more the covenant’s condition of possibility, less its model. For my purposes, then, the question of how Jesus ‘completes’ God’s intention is the most pressing issue; working out what manner of covenantalism Barth advances more generally need not be of concern.

Encounter (Begegnung) Barth’s use of Begegnung entails the appropriation and contestation of a concept typically associated with Western existentialism. In negative terms, this means that ‘encounter’, as a term applied to Christ, bears scant resemblance

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Barth in fact considered making ‘covenant’ the organising rubric of Church Dogmatics IV – see here Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 377. Thus a comment in Joseph L. Mangina’s excellent introduction to Barth: ‘The word “fulfilment” or Vollzug suggests an action carried to completion’. See Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Louisville: WJKP, 2004), p. 59. Although Mangina forwards this claim in the context of a discussion of Barth’s theological epistemology, it also captures nicely the christological meaning Barth lends the term. See also Hans Küng, Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection (trans. Thomas Collins, Edmund E. Tolk and David Granskou; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), pp. 18–27.

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to the hyperawareness achieved by the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, who comes face to face with the terrifying and irreducible contingency of being: ‘[e]xistence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, forever and everywhere; existence – which is limited only by existence’.94 And while one could reasonably suppose that ‘[a]ll life is encounter’95 for Jesus, given his ongoing relationship to God and his interactions with his fellows, and while Barth certainly ‘borrows’ the rhetoric of dialogical personalism on many occasions, the deep structures of Martin Buber’s dialogicalism do not find reiteration in II/2. It is not as if Christ’s encounters with a diverse range of human beings mediate his relationship with God as the originary ‘Thou’. In positive terms, Barth’s use of ‘encounter’ exchanges Sartre’s ‘existence’ and Buber’s ‘Thou’ for the objective command (Gebot) of God in God’s first way of being.96 It means the call for Jesus to dispose himself as the ‘elected human’ before the Father (and with the Spirit); it means God’s demand that Jesus enact an utterly specific identity.97 Such occurs even as the assumed human lives in unity with, and as, God in God’s second way of being. Christ humanly encounters God’s petition, in all of its particularity, strangeness and specificity, in the context of created time and space. As is well known, the word Gebot anchors Barth’s challenge to the ethical quietism he associates with Schleiermacherian theology and the bourgeois (and therefore, to my mind, faux) Kantianism he finds endemic

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (trans. Lloyd Alexander; New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 133. Antoine Roquentin’s ‘encounter with existence’ happens in a garden; an allusion to Eden, Gethsemane or the conversion of Augustine of Hippo is surely intended. Martin Buber, I and Thou (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 62. I do not mean to suggest that Buber did not influence Barth. Barth’s implicit engagement with Buber in Church Dogmatics III suggests some kind of relationship, even though the details of this relationship are difficult to grasp. My claim, rather, is that an I–Thou model does not accurately describe Jesus’ relationship with the Father. For more on Barth and Buber, see Dieter Becker, Karl Barth und Martin Buber – Denker in dialogischer Nachbarschaft? Zur Bedeutung Martin Bubers für die Anthropologie Karl Barths (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984). I have also learnt much from Mark McInroy’s unpublished piece, ‘Karl Barth and Personalism: A Critical Appropriation’, delivered as a lecture to the Karl Barth Society of North America at the American Academy of Religion Meeting in San Diego in November 2007. At one point, Barth states explicitly that ‘primarily and properly [Jesus Christ] is man confronted by God’s command’ (II/2, p. 737). In deploying the language of enactment, identity and intention in the following analysis, I am of course drawing on a conceptuality associated with P. F. Strawson and Stuart Hampshire and given powerful theological application by Hans Frei; see The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975) and Theology and Narrative, especially the chapter titled ‘The Accounts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection’ (pp. 45–93).

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to Ritschlianism.98 The term disallows theological ethics any refuge in anthropocentric self-legislation. It underscores God’s ongoing and sovereign superintendence of human existence; it signals that God makes concrete demands of each human (not least those who know themselves to be ‘in Christ’).99 Less obvious, but no less important, is Barth’s suggestion that Christ’s encounter with God’s command forms the condition of possibility for subsequent human encounters. Christ forges a human identity receptive and responsive to God’s command, even as, given that Christ is the incarnate Word, Christ conveys that same command. Barth puts it plainly: Jesus lives as the ‘happily obedient doer of [God’s] command . . . who [acts] in the e0cousi/a of the one permitted to do what he is commanded’ (II/2, p. 605 rev.). Yet Christ’s human obedience to the divine command also entails a decidedly atypical relationship with God. God demands that Christ enact an utterly unrepeatable identity as the ‘elected human’; that Christ humanly conform himself to the directive address of God’s first way of being, so as to effect the reconciliation of God and humankind. Christ is therefore called to obey God’s command under the conditions of time and space in a unique way: he must live out a life that moves, inexorably, towards the atrocity of Calvary.100

Decision (Entscheidung) If ‘encounter’ describes God’s demand that Christ humanly take up a specific identity, ‘decision’, a word also laden with existentialist connotations,101 describes Christ’s effective response. It signals that Christ realizes the identity that God intends for him, living ‘as an agent enacting his own intentions’102 98

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For an important treatment of Barth’s ethics that attends to the category of command, see Nigel Biggar, The Hastening that Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). More recently, see Nimmo, Being in Action, pp. 17–40. The concrete particularity of the divine command – over against a requirement embedded within a ‘general theory’ (II/2, p. 548) – is of course a central feature of Barth’s ethics. Thus: ‘God seems hardly to be interested at all in general and universally valid rules, but properly only in certain particular actions and achievement and attitudes . . . Nothing can be made of these commands if we try to generalise and transform them into universally valid principles . . . Their content is purely concrete and related to this or that . . . particular situation. It consists in what God wills that [a human] should do or not do in a specific situation. Commands of this sort must be left as they stand. They belong directly to a specific history, and they must be left in all their historical particularity and uniqueness . . . God’s commanding can only be this individual, concrete and specific commanding’ (II/2, pp. 672–3). The issue of intra-triune obedience looms at this point. Barth writes of ‘the obedience which [God] renders as the Son of God is, as genuine obedience, His own decision and electing’ (II/2, p. 105); of ‘[t]he beginning in which the Son became obedient to the Father’ (II/2, p. 162); and of the ‘obedience of the Son to the Father, and the genuine obedience of man to God’ (II/2, p. 740). But Barth does not unpack these claims until §59. As late as III/2, he keeps his options open. Thus: ‘for all the rich differentiation

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and constituting himself as the human who exists in perfect union with the divine Son. As with Barth’s description of God’s being, then, so with his description of Jesus’ humanity: decision functions as an ontological category. Indeed, in deciding to be the human assumed into union with the divine Son, Jesus of Nazareth is the human assumed into union with the Son; he is the ‘elected human’ who is also the ‘electing God’. Actualism, agency and self-constitution transpire on the divine and the human level, the result being that Christ’s ontological complexity funds Christ’s personal simplicity. The paradigmatic expression of Jesus’ self-constituting decision is his utterance in Gethsemane: ‘Not mine, but thy will be done! (Nicht mein, sondern dein Wille geschehe!’ (Lk. 22.42).103 Barth does not view this statement as a resignation of human agency. Rather, it epitomizes the comportment of the human agent who attests (in word) and enacts (in deed) the identity to which he is called. In that he attests his identity, Christ disposes himself as the human vehicle (or ‘veil’) that assures the conveyance of the divine Word. And Christ does this without compromising the divine origin and divine content of revelation. Indeed, he does so in ways that disclose God’s being and action, for ‘he attests . . . the freedom of God’s love, but obviously and far more the depth, the uniqueness of God’s love. He witnesses that the event transpiring between God and humanity, according to God’s predestination, is grounded wholly in God’s initiative’ (II/2, p. 176 rev.). Already in II/2, then, Barth anticipates IV/3’s identification of Jesus as ‘Prophet’: one who speaks both as the divine Son of the Father and the human before God, the ‘firstborn’ of a redeemed humanity. In that he enacts his identity, Christ humanly realizes the existence that the Son wills to have. Barth puts it powerfully: This human Jesus is not a puppet that God moves this and that way, not a mere reed that God’s Word uses as an instrument. This man

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of God, there is no higher or lower in His unity, no prior or posterior in His individual perfections. There is order in God, but no subordination or superordination’ (III/2, p. 371). For more on this issue, see Chapter 4. For a powerful theological reflection on the category of decision that draws on existentialism see Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero; New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1958). A representative quotation, illustrative of the resonances that obtain between Barth’s later Christology and Bultmann’s early work: ‘for Jesus the essential meaning of human life . . . is that man stands under the necessity of decision before God, is confronted by the demand of the will of God, which must be comprehended in each concrete moment and obeyed’ (p. 101). Thiemann, Revelation and Theology, p. 119. As is perhaps already evident, I am much indebted to Thiemann’s reflections with regard to questions of identity, intention and agency. I have also profited from Thomas F. Tracy, God, Action, and Embodiment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984). This is Luther’s 1545 translation, which Barth uses. See KD II/2, pp. 194–5.

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Jesus prays. He speaks and acts, and thereby makes an unheard of claim that makes him appear as a madman and finally brings upon him the charge of blasphemy. He understands himself as the Messiah, the Son of God. He allows himself to be named Kyrios and he actually conducts himself as such. He speaks of his suffering, not as a necessity laid upon him from outside but as something that he himself wills. So his glorifying is for him not a matter of vague expectancy and hope, but rather the goal to which he strides with the same sovereign certainty as to the preceding fulfilment of his humiliation. In this wholehearted obedience, in that he elects God alone, he is wholly free – the witness to the kingdom of God whose establishment cannot be withheld, of which he, the human, Jesus, can and should and must be the true King. (II/2, pp. 178–9 rev.) The passage is almost too rich: a subtle rebuke to the (potentially) problematic Athanasian description of Jesus as the ‘instrument’ of the Word,104 which bleeds into an ingenious deployment of Johannine motifs (the blasphemy charges of Jn 10.33 and 19.7; the dialectic of suffering and glorification), which merges with a subtle discarding of the distinction between active and passive obedience, which passes into a polemical refiguration of Ritschlian phraseology about the Kingdom of God. The important overarching claim, though, has to do with Christ’s performance of his identity. Beyond his active conveyance of divine speech, Christ humanly realizes an identity that unites with, as opposed to just ‘being united to’, the identity of the ‘electing God’. On every step of the divine Son’s journey to the cross, Christ humanly affirms his assumption by the Son, determining himself as the ‘elected human’.105 His human agency, in fact, functions as a secondary but indispensable

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The charge is familiar: sanctioning a rhetorical device that will plague Christology across the centuries, Athanasius drifts rather too close to Apollinarianism, attending neither to Christ’s human soul nor his human will. Thus he claims that the Logos ‘takes to himself as an instrument a part of creation’, making Christ’s body ‘his very own as an instrument’, yet ‘he was not bound to his body, but was rather himself wielding it’. See here On the Incarnation, in Christology of the Later Fathers (ed. Edward R. Hardy and Cyril C. Richardson; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954) pp. 97, 62 and 71 respectively. See more generally Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition; Vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451) (trans. John Bowden; Atlanta: John Knox, 2nd edn, 1965), pp. 308–28. To note that the language of ‘instrument’ makes for a potential problem is important. Khaled Anatolios has offered an impressive reconsideration of Athanasius’s understanding of Christ’s humanity, challenging the claim it suffers neglect. In ‘The Soteriological Significance of Christ’s Humanity in St. Athanasius’ (St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 40.4 (1996), pp. 265–86), he shows that Athanasius’s relative disinterest in Christ’s human soul should not distract from his affirmation of Christ’s humanity as defined by its receptivity to grace. For Anatolios’s broader reading of Athanasius, see his Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998).

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condition of his personal integrity and simplicity. As God qua Son actualizes Godself, self-determining as Jesus Christ, so too does Jesus of Nazareth humanly actualize himself, self-determining as Jesus Christ.

History (Geschichte) If encounter describes Christ’s confrontation with God’s Gebot and decision specifies the quality of his response, ‘history’ lends Barth’s construal of Christ’s humanity and human agency diachronic breadth. It shows, first, that Christ’s decisions occur throughout the course of his life and, second, that these decisions contribute to the achievement of reconciliation. Barth’s comments about ‘steadfastness’ illustrate the first point remarkably: And now we must say, too, of the elected human Jesus (apart from the fact that he is what he is by grace, and that his grace consists in bringing many to freedom) that in his mercy God remains just as faithful to him as he, in his readiness (Bereitschaft) to do God’s will, remains faithful to God. There is steadfastness on both sides (Es handelt sich von beiden Seiten um ein Beharren). On God’s side, it is the steadfastness of grace even in the judgment to which God condemns the elect. It is the constancy of love even in the fire of the wrath that consumes him. It is the steadfastness of election even in the midst of the rejection that overtakes him. And on the side of the elect, it is the steadfastness of obedience to God, and of calling (Schreien [lit. crying]) only upon God, and of confidence in the righteousness of God’s will. It is in the unity of this steadfastness both divine and human that we find the peculiar secret of the election of the human Jesus. (II/2, p. 125 rev.) The richness of the passage again overwhelms: there is sideways glance at the souveräne Güte and eminenter Gnade distinction; a backwards look at earlier remarks about the knowledge of God (specifically, §26.2, ‘The readiness of man’);106 the deployment of one of Barth’s favourite metaphorical clusters (fire, love and wrath); and a startling remark about Jesus’ ‘crying out’ to God that encompasses the cry of dereliction and the agony in Gethsemane. It is the word ‘steadfastness’ (Beharren), however, that carries Barth’s point. This biblical motif describes Christ’s life as a constant alignment and identification with God’s being and action. The man Jesus persists in seizing the role of the human being that God assumes and makes his own; he rewards God’s patience, one might say, by undertaking

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Goebel argues similarly in Von freien Wählen Gottes. As the ‘elected human’, Jesus not only elects God but he also affirms God’s election. This means that he elects himself, even as he is elected. See here II/1, pp. 128–78.

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and realizing the identity assigned him at every moment in his life. God’s constancy (the Son’s unflagging self-determination to be Jesus Christ) and Jesus of Nazareth’s human constancy (an unflagging self-determination to be the Son) together comprise Christ’s identity, even as he cries out from the depths of God-abandonment. The second claim – that Christ humanly decides for, and thereby contributes to, the achievement of reconciliation – is articulated precisely when Barth connects prayer and election. Thus: And the answer of human steadfastness is the prayer in which Jesus assents to the hard will of God as it confronts his own will. This prayer is his intercession with God on behalf of his people. And yet it is also a prayer that he teaches his people and places on their lips . . . The divine and human steadfastness (reflected in the resurrection and prayer of Jesus) constitutes the meaning and purpose of Jesus’ election. (II/2, p. 126 rev.) Important here is another deft allusion to the Gospels, which anticipates Barth’s later distinction of sanctification and justification.107 On one level, in uttering ‘thy will be done’ (Mt. 6.10b and par. [KJV]), Christ enacts the covenantal relationship with God that God desires. Because all people live ‘in Christ’, the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ is thereby already placed ‘on the lips of his people’: a posture of attentiveness and cooperation with God is rendered basic to each and every human. On another level, ‘thy will be done’ references Jesus’ confrontation with God’s command in Gethsemane. God’s ‘hard will’ is the demand that Jesus contend uniquely with the irruption of sin and its devastating consequences. Because of human waywardness, God requires that ‘this man . . . should reveal and confirm and verify both positively what [God] is and wills, and negatively what [God] is not and does not will’ (II/2, p. 141). One aspect of the ‘negative’ dimension of Christ’s life entails his differentiating himself from evil in time, thereby paralleling the eternal event of divine self-definition in which God differentiates Godself from evil. As the divine Son undertakes this act in created time and space, so must the human assumed by, and living as, the Son do likewise. Thus in Christ is ‘Satan resisted, defied, and defeated by the God against whom he [Satan] had rebelled and by the human over whom he had triumphed. In him is the Word of God spoken and the answer of humanity given. Together the Word and the answer represent the decision willed by God in all God’s ways and

107

Goebel picks up this point: ‘Das Gebet ist der Grundakt menschlicher Selbstbestimmung . . . als ein Grundmodell des Gebetes Jesus versteht Barth das dem “Willen Gottes seinem eigenen Willen gegenüber” rechtgebende (Gethsemane-Gebet bzw. das hohepriesterliche) Gebet Jesu’ (Von freien Wählen Gottes, p. 47).

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works, and therefore constitute the content of the will and counsel of God in the beginning’ (II/2, p. 125 rev. (my emphasis)). Always present to Jesus is the temptation, personified here as Satan, to resign his identity as the human who acts with God. Always present to Jesus is the temptation to break off his mission – which is, of course, the mission of the Son. To resist, defy and defeat Satan is for Jesus constantly to say ‘no’ to the unreal, Satanic option that is embraced by each and every other human. He alone provides a ‘demonstration (Erweis) of God’s self-differentiation in time, in the space of God’s creation’ (II/2, p. 142 rev.).108 And it is exactly because Christ does not resign his identity but rather lives as God’s perfect covenant partner that evil is overcome. Even granted that Christ’s human action has as its condition of possibility God’s prevenient and gracious act, this human action plays a role in the achievement of reconciliation. Yet there is another aspect to Christ’s ‘negative’ revelation and confirmation of God’s will. Christ does not only humanly resist Satan. He also humanly implements, in unity with and as God qua Son, God’s response to human sinfulness. Thus a crucial claim, to which I will return, made in the course of Barth’s brief sketch of a revamped supralapsarianism: It is God’s will that elected man should repudiate what He repudiates . . . but [also] for the sake of the fulness of His glory, for the sake of the completeness of His covenant with man, for the sake of the perfection of His love, He wills and affirms this man as sinful man, i.e., as man laden with sins and afflicted by their curse and misery, and He wills and affirms this man as one who stands like Himself in opposition to sin, as His companion in the necessity of repudiating it, as the one foreordained to utter the same No and thus to corroborate the divine Yes . . . And it is inevitable that this confrontation with what God repudiates, with evil, should mean for man, who is certainly not God and not almighty, that evil confronts him as a hostile power, a power that is, in fact, greater than his own power. In his case, then, the defeat of the evil power cannot be so self-evident as it was in God’s case. In this case it must take on the character of an event. It must become the content of a history: the history of an obstacle and its removing; the history of a death and a resurrection; the history of a judgment and 108

Goebel articulates the vital connection between Barth’s modified supralapsarian and his Christology nicely, using the category of ‘witness’ to good effect. Thus: ‘Indem der erwählte Mensch als Zeuge Gott lebt, lebt auch er – “wie Gott selbst” – in der Konfrontation mit dem Bösen und in der Unterscheidung seines Seins und Willens als Erwählter von dem Sein und Willen des Nichterwählten, entspricht auch sein Nein seinem Ja . . . Die Entsprechung in der Unterschiedung des Menschen entspricht der Entsprechung in der Selbstunterschiedung Gottes. Der erwählte Mensch bezeugt in seiner Lebensgeschichte als Zeuge in der Zeit die Selbstunterschiedung Gottes’ (Ibid., pp. 36–7).

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a pardon. In God himself there is a simple and immediate victory of light over darkness, with the issue never for one moment in doubt. In the creaturely sphere and for man . . . this victory must take on historical form, thus becoming an event in time. (II/2, p. 141) Barth’s point is this. Christ’s repudiation of sin does not entail only his saying ‘no’ to the ever-present possibility of sinful behaviour. His part in God’s ‘repudiation’ requires also that he load upon himself the sin and evil that captivates humankind. Christ as human therefore moves with and as the Son of God towards the cross, enacting a life in which his election concludes with his utter rejection.109 God does not only relinquish control over God’s own being, willing to be conditioned by Christ’s human life; God wills also that Christ humanly participate in the most terrible moment of God’s justificatory project. Christ’s history means that he lives (paradigmatically) as the elected human who elects God and that he dies as the human (uniquely) rejected by God: the one who takes upon himself the dreadful and chaotic catastrophe of sin.

Summary remarks And if we consider God’s eternal decree in its entirety, we see that as it is the decree of the living God, so it is itself divine and living . . . Everywhere we see the divine sovereignty and the divine initiative. This decree is wholly and utterly an election of grace. And yet the decision of the sovereign God, His election of grace (in the concept of which there can arise no reversal or comparison of the two partners) has as its sole content that God elects humanity in order that it be awakened and called, that it might also elect God, pray to God, give itself to God, and that in this act of electing and therefore prayer exist in freedom before God. Humanity, the reality in nuce distinct from God and yet bound to God in joy and peace; humanity as the meaning of the whole creation; humanity, who in its own realm can and should have genuine autonomy and a kingdom. (II/2, p. 180 rev.)

This passage provides a useful way to summarize the aspects of Dogmatics II considered in this chapter. It can be read in terms of three concentric circles, the last of which announces the interpretative agenda of this study’s next two chapters. First and most generally, the passage depends on Barth’s identification of God as the ‘one who loves in freedom’. God does not love arbitrarily but with the exuberance of one who seeks relationship. It is for this reason that God creates, sustains and elects humankind as a partner. 109

Again Goebel: ‘Er wählt das ihm zugedachte Kreuz als sein Kreuz und nimmt darin teil an der Verwerfung’ (Ibid., p. 65).

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God does not will to be God other than in relationship with humankind. Second and more particularly, the passage indicates that God acts, radically, to ensure God’s relationship with humankind. Given God’s wish that humanity be truly ‘united’ to Godself in ‘joy and peace’, God grants humankind a reality commensurate with God’s own being. Commensurate? Exactly this. While actively (and therefore genuinely) conveying himself to humankind as the Son, God also makes a human, in all of his particularity, part of God’s being. God in fact transforms God’s being: this is the extent to which God puts God’s freedom in the service of God’s love, drawing a human being, and derivatively all of humankind, into the eternal time and space of the divine life. Third and still more particularly, God’s establishment of ontological difference goes hand in hand with the establishment of agential difference. The anterior condition of this agential difference is Jesus of Nazareth. Even as God assumes this human, uniting him to God qua Son for all eternity, God’s patience is such that God elicits, upholds and makes his human action integral to the event of reconciliation. My next two chapters focus on Barth’s description of Christ as a human agent in the remaining volumes of the Dogmatics, examining in turn Barth’s description of Christ’s ministry prior to his (final) visit to Jerusalem and Christ’s passion as such. These chapters build on the suggestive remarks of I/2 and II/2, detailing further Barth’s presentation of Christ as both the original covenant partner of God and the (only) human who, in union with and as God’s own Son, bears God’s rejection of human sin, substituting himself for all others. At every turn, there will of course be due acknowledgement that God qua Son lives and acts as the primary agent in Christ’s person. As the last paragraph of §33 insists, ‘the fact that this human does not commit sin, and positively, the prayer by which he for his part elects God, and the obedience in which He takes it upon Himself to bear the sin of all other men – these are no more than the confirmation of his election’ (II/2, p. 194). ‘No more’, surely, but also no less! While Jesus’ human decision forms not ‘the second point in an ellipse, but the circumference around the one central point of which it is the repetition and the confirmation’ (II/2, p. 194), Christ humanly realizes God’s decision, following the path charted for him, even to the point at which (and again Barth references Gethsemane) ‘he acknowledges our sin (Ungerechtigkeit) and drinks to the bitter dregs the cup of temporal and eternal destruction which must follow our transgression’ (II/2, p. 749). Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to describe precisely this event, thereby filling in the somewhat sketchy remarks in the later stages of my first and second chapters. Given the abstraction of the analysis offered thus far, a further word on the aims of this study seems appropriate at this juncture. I am not only aiming here to provide a more effective reading of the Christology of the Church Dogmatics. I am also attempting to gain purchase on the political register of Barth’s thought. Something of this register can perhaps be discerned in 115

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Church Dogmatics II. Contesting the supposition that, in face of the unrelenting cycle of strike and counterstrike, ‘vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule’,110 Barth now suggests that the ‘eternal destruction’ of God’s punishing wrath has passed – that, whatever ‘destruction’ might mean, this meaning is exhausted, given Christ’s death on the cross. Thus the final paragraph of II/2, the Leitsatz of which claims that God ‘judges us in order that He may make us free for everlasting life under His Lordship’ (II/2, p. 733). Might, then, Barth’s integration of election and Christology provide the foundation for an ethics that is grounded in, but always looking beyond, Christ’s passion? To return to Barth’s remarks on Jesus’ prayer: With this prayer he proves himself to be God’s Son who is rejected for the sake [of humanity] and yet who is still the elect of God even in his rejection. Hereby he undertakes to be both priest and victim; he affirms for his part the salutariness of the holy wrath of God. In this prayer he fulfils his creaturely office in the history of creation as it was determined and prepared by God; he affirms the fact that he is the King who was appointed by God to be at the head and in the place of all elect as their Lord and head; he affirms that he in his own person is the Kingdom of God. The divine and human steadfastness, the resurrection and the prayer of Jesus, constitutes the meaning and the purpose of his election . . . [Those elected in him] can love, honour, recognise, and laud him . . . their rejection being put behind them and beneath them, rejected in and with his rejection. (II/2, p. 126 rev.) The fulfilment of the covenant of course comes at a price: Christ’s agonizing death, a ‘victimization’ that entails his bearing the full force of God’s holiness and rejection and suffering a heartbreaking end. But if rejection has passed, does not this mean that there can be no more wrath, no more rejection? Does not this passing mean that there must be no more victims? Perhaps, given Christ’s steadfast loyalty to the cause of God, a loyalty both divine and human, the only option that remains for each human (and therefore the most basic claim of theological ethics) is that she enjoy and enact a new steadfastness in Christ, defined by and responsive to the overflowing exuberance of God’s steadfast love.

110

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (ed. Richard Maxwell; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 185. The chief organizer of the assault on the Ancien Régime offers this comment.

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3 jesus christ – embodiment of grace

It is an axiom of Barth’s theology, inscribed in every major doctrinal statement of the Church Dogmatics – election, Trinity, Christology, pneumatology, and not least, Christian life and service – that God’s omni-activity (Allwirksamkeit) is not to be construed as his sole-activity (Alleinwirksamkeit).1 Being wholehearted means having a will that is undivided. The wholehearted person is fully settled as to what he wants, and what he cares about. With regard to any conflict of dispositions or inclinations in himself, he has no doubts or reservations as to where he stands. He lends himself to his caring and loving unequivocally and without reserve. Thus his identification with the volitional configurations that define his final ends is neither inhibited nor qualified . . . There is no part of him – that is, no part with which he identifies – that resists his loving what he loves.2

Christology in Church Dogmatics III and IV Having established something of an interpretative agenda in Chapter 1, the previous chapter identified Barth’s doctrine of election as foundational for his mature Christology. My following two chapters consider Barth’s Christology in Church Dogmatics III and IV. Church Dogmatics III/2 (1948) proposes itself as an obvious starting point for further analysis. In this part volume, which offers a christologically normed theological anthropology, Barth successively describes Jesus as the

1

2

Daniel L. Migliore, ‘Participatio Christi: The Central Theme of Barth’s Doctrine of Sanctification’, ZdTh 18.3 (2002), pp. 286–307 (298). Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 95.

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‘Man for God’ (§44.1), the ‘Man for others’ (§45.1), the ‘Whole Man’ (§46.1) and the ‘Lord of Time’ (§47.1). This culminative description makes apparent some of Barth’s key christological principles: scepticism vis-à-vis ‘phenomenal’ (i.e., philosophical, cultural, naturalistic) claims about the human, given the possibility of their disfiguring biblically funded descriptions of Christ’s humanity and humanity as such; an endorsement of ‘history’ as a basic christological category, alternative to the person/work division; and, most importantly, the development of a rich theological anthropology, later employed in various descriptions of Christ’s humanity and human agency. In addition, Barth’s philosophical acumen is strikingly displayed throughout this part volume, especially when he critiques and appropriates ideas from figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber and Karl Jaspers. One catches not a few glimpses of the broad humanistic learning that borders and interlaces Barth’s dogmatics; one becomes more finely attuned to Barth’s concern to develop a christologically framed anthropology that sets itself apart from, but does not disparage highhandedly, the efforts of putatively ‘worldly’ intellects. A close reading of III/2, then, would appear to yield tremendous interpretative benefit. Tracking the fascinating interplay of Christology and theological anthropology, it could show Barth’s Christology gaining ideational bulk and conceptual precision in preparation for the doctrine of reconciliation. The interpretative strategy of McCormack’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology might even be reapplied: just as the Göttingen Dogmatics is best accessed by way of a historically sensitive analysis of Barth’s writings in the 1910s and 1920s, so might Church Dogmatics IV be usefully approached by way of close readings of Barth’s work in the 1940s. There are, however, at least two reasons for not undertaking a close reading of Church Dogmatics III/2. First, and with respect to the application of a ‘genetic–historical’ interpretation, à la McCormack, note that the doctrine of election brings to Barth’s thought a new and conclusive stability. As such, while small shifts in perspective are noteworthy, there is less need for an interpretative approach sensitive to moments of development within the Dogmatics. A preferable strategy of reading, post-II/2, pursues the synchronic coherence of the Dogmatics; it is legitimate to engage Barth’s elaboration of the christological foundation established in Church Dogmatics II without dealing with the part volumes in sequence. Second, even granted its obvious preoccupation with Jesus’ humanity, I am unsure whether a direct engagement with Church Dogmatics III/2 best serves this explication of Barth’s Christology. In spite of its often-startling conceptual richness and brilliance (I think here especially of §44.3 and §47), there are moments in this part volume at which Barth’s ‘christological concentration’ drifts from its moorings, caught in the swell of philosophical, social-scientific and cultural discourses. The programmatic christological sections are sometimes curiously brief, even out of joint with the anthropological reflections that follow. 118

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Consequently, Barth’s most vital insights, while surely not drowned out by waves of appropriated resources, sometimes gasp for air.3 Barth himself suffers the fault he finds with Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre: unduly preoccupied by the intellectual trends of his day, ad hoc annexations of philosophical and cultural claims distract from his engagement with scriptural particulars.4 Paragraph 45 provides a good illustration of this second point.5 While Barth offers an intriguing reworking of Buber’s I–Thou pairing, the paragraph rather strays from its initial comments about Christ’s human life, undertaken before the Father, with the Spirit. It is as if a facility with dialogical personalism undermines, briefly, Barth’s commitment to the principle of sola scriptura, and distracts from the programmatic standing of the Trinity in dogmatic reflection: Barth’s presentation of Jesus as the ‘human for others’ is all too often routed through a binary-like construal of the ‘I–Thou’ pairing. In addition, swayed by patriarchal assumptions about the (unequal) ‘complementarity’ of the sexes, Barth crudely genders his description of sexual difference, legitimizing the superordination of men over women and bolstering a line of thought incepted in III/1 and elaborated further in III/4.6 The haste with which Barth hurries away from potentially egalitarian comments about co-humanity and towards fairly hackneyed readings of Gen. 2.18–25, Eph. 5.22–33 and so on, hence sidelining the complex portrayal of gender relations in the Gospels, again bespeaks a failure to hold fast to, and to tarry over, the biblical witness. Indeed, the fact that Barth does not engage a broader range of scriptural options in §45.3 invites the quite understandable suspicion that Church Dogmatics III, ‘among other things . . . is an attempt to inoculate readers against the spread of feminism’.7 Barth’s theological reasoning, in sum, misgives at points in III/2, evidencing 3

4 5

6 7

Thinking in terms of ‘appropriation’ is crucial. For a good discussion of Barth’s view on the relationship between philosophy and dogmatics that compares Schleiermacher’s ‘borrowing’ propositions from humanistic disciplines (in order to ‘correlate’ dogmatics with the scientific temper of the times) with Barth’s ‘annexation’ of various philosophical ideas, see Hans Frei, ‘Barth and Schleiermacher: Divergence and Convergence’, in Theology and Narrative, pp. 187–99. Also useful are ‘Karl Barth and the Task of Constructing a Public Theology’, in Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville: WJKP, 1991), pp. 75–95 and Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, pp. 61–3. See here especially Protestant Theology, pp. 411–59. The analysis of this paragraph runs parallel to that offered by Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.; see his Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 180–91. See here III/1, pp. 288–329 and III/4, pp. 116–240. Suzanne Selinger, ‘Charlotte von Kirschbaum in Dialogue with Karl Barth on Women’, ZdTh 16.2 (2000), pp. (181–201) 192. See also idem, Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth: A Study in Biography and the History of Theology (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Paul S. Fiddes, ‘The Status of Woman in the

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a tendency to misappropriate philosophical ideas and to sanction ethically dubious ideologies. This slows the growth of Barth’s Christology and damages the theological and ethical credibility secured by earlier instalments of the Dogmatics.8 This study will obviously not ignore III/2. Despite its inexcusable remarks on gender and some ill-advised conceptual ventures, this part volume displays numerous moments of quite remarkable innovation. The key is to focus on the application of the insights here won; to ascertain how claims advanced in III/2 fund Barth’s subsequent christological work. Church Dogmatics III/2’s description of Jesus as the ‘Man for God’ and ‘Man for others’ provides, for instance, a foundation for the christological material of Church Dogmatics IV: it signals the deep imbrication of what might crudely be labelled the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions of Christ’s existence, with his love for his fellow human beings ingredient in, and necessitated by, his love for God. And Barth’s elegant categorial description of humanity in terms of ‘gratitude’ and ‘responsibility’ in §44.3 (the latter term being subdivided into ‘acknowledgement’, ‘obedience’, ‘invocation’ and ‘freedom’) provides crucial background for Barth’s description of Christ’s justifying and sanctifying existence. In the next two chapters, then, I engage the enduringly important claims of Church Dogmatics III/2 as Barth ‘puts them to work’ in Church Dogmatics IV. My next chapter focuses on IV/1 (1953); this chapter concentrates on IV/2 (1955). The obvious question: why begin analysis in medias res? Why treat Church Dogmatics IV/2 before Church Dogmatics IV/1? A defence of this somewhat unusual move provides a useful orientation to the ensuing analysis, with four points being of especial note. First, in IV/2, Barth engages some

8

Thought of Karl Barth’, in Janet Martin Soskice (ed.), After Eve (London: Collins and Marshall Pickering, 1990), pp. 138–55; and Sheila Briggs, ‘Men and Women in the Theology of Karl Barth’ (a paper presented at the conference ‘Karl Barth: Confessional Theology and Political Crisis’, held at The Stony Point Center, New York, in 1986). I am aware that this is a strong reading of Church Dogmatics III/2. I am also aware that the question of Barth and gender must not be shut down by way of denunciation. As always, one must be willing first to listen, then to understand; criticism, for the most part (though not always) should not be one’s first port of call. However, I think a sharp tone at this point is quite appropriate. Throughout his life, Barth proved sympathetic to various progressive political causes. With respect to economics, voter enfranchisement, race, the militarism of the Cold War and other matters, Barth favoured sociopolitical innovation. And he did so in a way that was driven by, and reflects, the belief that Christian identity goes hand in hand with a commitment to social justice, understood as the genuine democratization of human culture and society. Yet when it comes to gender, Barth stumbles dreadfully. I have found myself unable to come to any other conclusion but this: Barth treats the relationship between men and women in ways that shore up Christianity’s dreadful complicity with patriarchal thought and action.

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debates internal to the realm of protestant orthodoxy9 – specifically, clashes between Lutherans and Reformed over the ordering of the unio hypostatica and the communio naturarum, the precise effecta of the hypostatic union with respect to Christ’s humanity, and various permutations of the communicatio idiomatum. This engagement is not only emblematic of Barth’s continued affection for a theology that, by most accounts, appears to be ‘out of date, dusty, unattractive, almost like a table of logarithms’.10 It also serves a constructive dogmatic purpose. It enables him to clarify his understanding of Christ’s humanity, thereby lending greater precision to and augmenting significantly the claims of II/2. Moreover, as the next section of this chapter demonstrates, a notable difference between certain christological sections in the Göttingen Dogmatics and IV/2 is the freedom, confidence and creativity with which Barth handles – or, perhaps, manipulates – the work of his forebears. Even if he still impresses as a ‘scholastic of a higher order’11 (who, on occasion, happily reproduces, nearly word-for-word, passages from earlier lectures in the Dogmatics),12 his theological outlook now represents a fascinating Aufhebung of the past. Barth fulfils his promise to ‘swim . . . in the freely flowing river’l3 of Reformed thought, lending new meanings to ‘old’ theologoumena. Treating IV/2 before IV/1 not only facilitates my investigation into Barth’s construal of Christ’s humanity; it attests, also, to the manner in which Barth engaged constructively protestant scholastic texts in his later years. 9

10

11

12

13

Although I refer to ‘protestant orthodoxy’ generally, one must of course beware of homogenizing a diverse range of authors. For an introduction to this important strand of protestant theology, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics; Vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), pp. 13–52; idem, ‘Approaches to Post-Reformation Protestantism: Reframing the Historiographical Question’ and ‘Scholasticism and Orthodoxy in the Reformed Tradition: Definition and Method’, in After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 3–21 and pp. 25–46, respectively. See also Carl R. Trueman and R. S. Clark (eds), Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999). So Barth in his ‘Foreword’ to Heppe’s textbook. See Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics: Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources (ed. and rev. Ernst Bizer; trans. G. T. Thomson; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), pp. v–vii (v). This phrase was used in the title of McCormack’s dissertation, later expanded into Dialectical Theology. Compare, for example, KD IV/2, pp. 115–16 with Unterricht in der christlichen Religion; Bd. 3, Die Lehre von der Versöhnung/Die Lehre von der Erlösung 1925/1926 (ed. Heinrich Stoevesandt; Zürich: TVZ, 2003), pp. 60–2. Theology of the Reformed Confessions, p. 27. The surrounding sentences elaborate beautifully, replete with a partisan gibe: ‘The Reformed formation of confessions is . . . not a frozen river like the Lutheran, on which one could walk . . . It is rather a freely flowing river, in which one can only swim, despite the bulky bodies it carries along. Looking backward to a normative past is not the Reformed way.’

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Second, in contrast to some paragraphs in III/2, Church Dogmatics IV/2 prefers biblical exegesis to abstract philosophical reflection. Attending to Barth’s exegetical remarks confirms, rather strikingly, the validity of an interpretative decision integral to Chapter 1 – to take seriously Barth’s ambition ‘actually to grant Scripture primacy and precedence’ (I/2, p. 721 rev.) in theological reflection, and to treat his exegetical comments as especially pertinent to the elaboration of his Christology. Wolf Krötke’s claim, that because the ‘self-actualization of Jesus Christ . . . is only accessible by way of the scriptural witness, so the formation of Christology can itself be nothing other than scriptural exegesis’,14 has particular pertinence for Church Dogmatics IV/2, since Barth embeds many important christological claims in excurses that consider gospel stories, verses, even single Greek words. Barth’s exegetical ventures texture and sharpen his description of Christ’s human life as ‘correspondence’ (Entsprechung) to God. They demonstrate, to borrow now from David Kelsey, how the ‘biblical narrative can be taken as rendering an agent whose identity and actions’15 the theologian subjects to analysis. Subsequent to an examination of Barth’s scholastic endeavours, and deploying a four-part heuristic scheme, organized around the categories of wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance, I focus on the question of Jesus’ ‘correspondence’ to God in the third section of this chapter . Third, tackling IV/2 sets this analysis directly amidst the classical motifs that pattern Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation.16 This huge volume, as is well known, structures its investigation of Christ’s identity as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’ in terms of the munus triplex (the threefold office of Priest, King and Prophet)17 and the status exinanitionis and exaltationis (the two ‘states’: God’s ‘humiliation’ in the person of the Son and the ‘exaltation’ of the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth). Atop this basis, Church Dogmatics IV offers detailed expositions of sin (pride and fall, sloth and misery, falsehood and condemnation), salvation (the duplex gratia of justification and sanctification, augmented by the category of vocation), pneumatology and ecclesiology. It need hardly be said that Barth hereby situates himself within a complex theological history. The dominant pattern of 14

15 16 17

Wolf Krötke, ‘Die Christologie Karl Barths als Beispiel für den Vollzug seiner Exegese’, in Michael Trowitzsch (ed.), Karl Barths Schriftauslegung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1996), p. 1 (emphases removed). Kelsey, Uses of Scripture, p. 39. I provide a schematic diagram of Church Dogmatics IV in Appendix 1. This order upsets convention. Following Calvin, Reformed scholastics typically adopted the sequence prophet-king-priest; the Lutherans preferred the sequence prophet-priest-king (thus Johann Gerhard, Loci Theologici, Vol. 1 (ed. Eduard Preuss; Berlin: Gustav Schlawitz, 1863), pp. 602–3). In the Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth followed the Lutheran sequence (see Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, Vol. 3, pp. 74–197).

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the munus triplex, for example, has a fascinating past that wends its way from patristic roots to Aquinas’s suggestive formulations, through various versions of Calvin’s Institutes to sixteenth and seventeenth-century creeds and manuals, and concludes with disputes internal to nineteenth and early twentieth-century European protestant thought.18 Although this heritage is of course not unimportant for understanding Church Dogmatics IV,19 the more pressing question at present is this: what christological purposes are served by such architectonic audacity? On one level, Barth hereby protests the abbreviation of christological reflection he finds endemic to classical protestant theology. While the canny redefinitions of ebionitism and docetism in I/2 anchored Barth’s opposition to Ritschlian and idealist Christologies, the dispersal of christological claims over multiple volumes of Church Dogmatics IV contests the tendency of the ‘older dogmatics’ to confine christological reflection to a ‘single complete and self-contained chapter on Jesus Christ’ (IV/1, p. 123).20 Put more positively: Barth’s manipulation of the munus triplex and duplex status ensures a description of Christ’s being and activity commensurate with his ontological and agential complexity and the multidimensional event of reconciliation predicated of him. The length of Church Dogmatics IV does not bespeak 18

19

20

Aquinas attributes the roles of lawgiver (legislator and legifer), priest (sacerdos), king (rex) and judge (judex) to Christ in the third part of the Summa. For Calvin, see Institutes, pp. 494–503. With respect to post-Reformation Reformed orthodoxy, see Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 452–87. In the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher endorsed reluctantly the munus triplex (Christian Faith, pp. 438–73); this endorsement was paralleled, in later years, in more conservative doctrinal compendia (e.g., Heinrich Schmid, Die Dogmatik der evangelischen-lutherischen Kirche, dargestellt und aus den Quellen belegt (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsman, 7th edn, 1893), pp. 246–71). For two critical (but not wholly negative) appraisals see Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation; Vol. 3, The Positive Development of the Doctrine (ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1902), pp. 417–34 and Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith: Based on Lectures Delivered at the University of Heidelberg in 1912 and 1913 (ed. Getrud von le Fort; trans. Garrett E. Paul; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1991), pp. 89–90. Strong historical treatments of the munus triplex are offered by E. F. Karl Müller, ‘Jesu Christi dreifaches Amt’, Realencyklopädie für Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, Vol. 8 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich’sche Buchhandlung, 3rd edn, 1900), pp. 733–41; Robert S. Franks, The Work of Christ: A Historical Study of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1962), esp. pp. 333–61 and pp. 410–47; Pannenberg, Jesus – God and Man, pp. 208–25; and Ludwig Schick, ‘Das Munus Triplex – ein ökumenisches oder Kontroverstheologisches Theologoumenon?’, Catholica 37 (1983), pp. 94–118. See Phil Butin, ‘Two Early Reformed Catechisms, the Threefold Office, and the Shape of Karl Barth’s Christology’, SJT 44 (1991), pp. 195–214. On the side of the Reformed, a good example is Johannes Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, pp. 86–115. On the Lutheran side, see Martin Chemnitz, Loci Theologici, Vol. 1 (trans. J. A. O. Preus; St. Louis: Concordia, 1989), pp. 83–127 and Gerhard, Loci Theologici, Vol. 1, pp. 447–608.

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indulgent verbosity. It makes a profound point: given the nature of the object to which the theologian responds, he or she is driven towards a mode of reflection characterized by discursive and categorial density.21 On another level, this organizational scheme signals Barth’s concern to overcome the bifurcation of Christ’s ‘person’ and ‘work’ typical of much post-Reformation protestant scholastic theology.22 The last two chapters have already intimated this to be an emergent concern; Church Dogmatics IV makes Barth’s position explicit. Berthold Klappert puts it nicely: Barth protests the ‘separation of soteriology from Christology’ since, with respect to Jesus Christ, ‘the working person and the personal work imply the being of the person in his personal work’.23 It is of course consistent with Barth’s actualism that Christ’s essence and existence not be thought in isolation from one another. What the theologian says about Christ’s divinity or Christ’s humanity may not be detached from his or her consideration of Christ’s enactment of reconciliation. Indeed, since Christ’s ontologically complex person is an irreducibly concrete act-in-being, how could one even think this person’s divinity and humanity in isolation from the acts that he undertakes? As Barth himself suggests, Christ ‘exists in the totality of His being and work as the Mediator – He alone as the mediator, but living and active in His mediatorial office’ (IV/1, p. 123). It is for this reason, as the ensuing chapter shows, that Barth makes the category of history, already used to dramatic effect in II/2 and again elaborated in §44.1 with respect to Christ being the ‘Man for God’, basic to his Christology. 21 22

23

See here John Webster, Barth (London: Continuum, 2nd edn, 2004), pp. 50–1. Richard A. Muller might be right in arguing that ‘[b]y means of the munus triplex the unity of Christ’s person is bound to the unity of Christ’s work; for in the historical– scriptural pattern of Calvin’s Christology, the doctrine of the threefold office confirms the fundamental testimony to the God revealed in the flesh for the work of mediation and redemption’ (Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986), p. 31). Stephen Edmondson has also offered a strong reading of Calvin’s Christology, organized around the munus triplex (see his Calvin’s Christology). But Barth is probably not wrong in claiming that post-Reformation codifications of Calvin’s thought reinforced the division between these two moments of christological reflection, thereby interposing a problematic interval between Christ’s work and person, as opposed to understanding Christ’s work as definitive of his person, and vice versa. It may be that interest in the ‘historical Jesus’ compounded the problem, with Christ’s person and work separated in new ways (on this point, see Hans Frei, Theology and Narrative, pp. 26–44). In any case, Barth argues that ‘[w]hat is needed in this matter is nothing more or less than the removal of the distinction [Aufhebung der Trennung] 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’ (IV/1, p. 128; see also III/2, pp. 61–2). Klappert, Die Aufweckung des Gekreuzigten, pp. 91 and 93 (emphasis removed), respectively.

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The connection forged between the munus triplex and the two states adds further complexity. Again, Barth mounts a challenge to his orthodox forebears. While he contends that classical Lutheranism used the status exinanitionis to account for Christ’s mundane human existence prior to his exaltation and the status exaltationis to describe the genus maiestaticum, revealed fully in the resurrection, and while he faults the Reformed for finding only ‘incidental application’ (IV/1, p. 133) for the states with respect to the logos incarnandus and logos incarnatus, Barth’s own Christology affords the states a quite prominent role. But there is a crucial switch of reference. Humiliation and exaltation no longer relate to the course of Christ’s life; they now anchor dogmatic descriptions of the modes of existence that respectively characterize his divine and human essences. The states therefore render more precise the terms ‘electing God’ and ‘electing human’: they specify Christ’s history as a ‘double movement (Doppelbewegung)’ (KD IV/3, p. 5) in which the divine Son ‘descends’ into humiliation in order that humanity, in Christ, might ‘ascend’ to exaltation. Concomitantly, the states describe the ‘inner dialectic’ (IV/3.1, p. 5) of the reconciling history of Jesus Christ. Humiliation is linked particularly (but not exclusively) with the event of justification through the cross; exaltation is linked particularly (but not exclusively) with the event of sanctification, effected in Christ’s ministry. The motifs of exaltation and exinanition ensure that the ‘electing God’/‘elected human’ doublet can never be dissociated from the event of reconciliation, nor tacked on to Christ’s life in an ad hoc manner. One final and quite crucial point requires mention. The organization of the doctrine of reconciliation makes patent one of Barth’s most abiding convictions – that the prevenient incarnational action of God qua Son includes the distinctive action of Christ qua human. It is not only that God’s elective ‘overflowing’ carries with it an originary exercise of divine patience, with God creating and upholding the integrity of Christ’s humanity and human agency – even to the point at which this humanity and human agency, by dint of God’s free decision, proves transformative for the being of the divine Son. Barth also suggests that the conjunction of divine and human action in Christ’s person plays out in terms of reconciliation. The salvation achieved by Christ, in other words, is a divine and human achievement. Eschewing the facile assumption that a Christology ‘from above’ excludes a Christology that proceeds ‘from below’, Barth complements the Son’s (justifying) movement into ‘the far country’ with a discussion of humanity’s (sanctified) ‘homecoming’ to God, humanly enacted and fulfilled by Christ. Church Dogmatics IV/1 and IV/2 must therefore be read alongside one another, with the reader constantly switching her gaze between the part volumes. Only in this way does one discern the humanity and human agency of Christ, alongside the preponderant (but not exclusive) emphasis on his divinity in the first part volume; only in this way does one discern the divinity and divine agency of Christ, alongside the preponderant (but not 125

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exclusive) emphasis on his humanity in the second part volume.24 Only in this way, in fact, does one grasp that the person of Jesus Christ is not only God’s grace towards us (although he is certainly that) but also that ‘Jesus Christ is our human response to God’.25 Certainly one cannot look only at §59 and gain a full sense of Barth’s Christology. So doing disregards the concurrence of divine and human action that Barth aspires to foreground; it fails to discern, in particular, Christ’s human contribution to the event of justification. I turn first, then, to IV/2, in order to clarify how Christ humanly contributes to the event of salvation. So doing supplies the interpretative leverage needed to ‘look back’ to IV/1 in the next chapter and to appreciate anew the nuances of the opening of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation.

Christology in critical conversation with protestant orthodoxy Election reprised Barth’s engagement with the technical christological formulations of protestant orthodoxy occurs in the context of his distinctive basis for understanding Christ, viz., God’s Gnadenwahl. Accordingly, the first subsection of §64.2 (‘The Homecoming of the Son of Man’) offers a précis of the christological moves of Church Dogmatics II/2. It reintroduces key dogmatic claims – obscured, somewhat, by the interposing bulk of Church Dogmatics III – thereby ensuring that Barth’s own theological convictions frame the ensuing discussion about the communicatio idiomatum, the communio naturarum, the communicatio gratiarum and the communicatio operationum.26 Thus, taking up the language of II/2, Barth declares that Jesus Christ ‘was the purpose and resolve and will of God from all eternity and therefore before the being of all creation’ (IV/2, p. 31). An intention to attain genuine companionship with humankind is basic to God’s being. And God realizes this intention in an incarnational action appropriable to the Son. This is of course a prevenient occurrence, independent of prior creaturely contribution: God’s decision to ‘overflow’ and bring into existence the particular human that the Son assumes to himself is an event of free grace. At the same time, God’s action ad extra has ramifications for God’s immanent being. God wills that the concrete history of Jesus Christ as a composite (though 24

25 26

This is what Regin Prenter fails to do, seeing ‘Christus nur erniedrigt wird als Gott und nur erhöht wird als Mensch’ (‘Karl Barths Umbildung der traditionellen Zweinaturlehre’, pp. 22–3). Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p. 80. Jüngel emphasizes election as the foundation for the Christology of IV/2; see Karl Barth, esp. pp. 129–30.

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inconfuse) personal reality should be constitutive, eternally, of the identity of God qua Son; God wills that grace have an ‘eminent’ dimension, above and beyond its ‘sovereign’ productivity. So Barth: The man who by the grace of God is directed to the grace of God, and therefore exalted and caught up in this homeward movement is not one who comes late on the scene and must later still make his exit and disappear. He does not exist only secondarily . . . For in the eternal election of God he is with God’s Son the first, i.e., the primary object and content of the primal and basic will of God. He is not, of course, a second God. He is not eternal as God is. He is only the creature of God – bound to time, limited in other ways too, unable in his own strength to escape the threat of nothingness. But as this creature – because this is what God sees and wills – he is before all things, even before the dawn of his own time. As the primary object and content of the creative will of God he is in his own way just as really before and with God as God is in His . . . At no level or time can we have to do with God without having also to do with this man. (IV/2, pp. 32–3) Such claims are by now familiar. Although one must not collapse the distinction between divinity and humanity, and although one must note, carefully, a pre-temporal existence of the logos asarkos apart from the human assumed by the logos, the dogmatician rightly takes the incarnate life of Christ to be definitive of the identity of God qua Son. This is the way that God wills to be God; this is the identity that God assigns to Godself qua Son; this is the way in which God exercises Lordship over God’s eternal being.27 Barth puts it plainly: ‘at no level or time can we have to do with God without having also to do with this man’. At the same time, while it is possible to argue that the Son is ‘fully (vollständig) defined’ 28 by God’s action in and as Christ, Barth maintains a firm emphasis on Christ’s human distinctiveness. So doing enables him to consider how Christ’s human agency, at once inseparable and distinct from the agency of the divine Son, contributes to the project of reconciliation. Because God seeks a genuine Gemeinschaft with humankind, God wills that Christ should live as the originary and ‘faithful covenantpartner of God’, undertaking ‘participation (Teilnahme) in God’s own, eternal life, in the perfect service of God’s Word and work’ (IV/2, p. 34 rev.). Framed in terms of the analysis of the last chapter: God sets before Christ qua human the task of attesting and enacting God’s will in its positive and negative dimensions, living out a history defined by the command of God in God’s first way of being. Christ’s fulfilment of this task defines him as the 27

28

Note that a brief excursus restates the comments of II/2 on Jn 1.1–18; see IV/2, pp. 33–4. Jüngel, Barth-Studien, p. 338.

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‘elected human’ who elects God and, given that humanity as such is enclosed in him, distinguishes him as the ‘pioneer’ of our salvation (Heb. 2.10). The christological realm beyond II/2 is broached with a bold contention: ‘the true humanity of Jesus Christ is therefore primarily and properly basic – an absolutely necessary concept – in exactly the same and not a lesser sense than that of God’s true deity’ (IV/2, p. 35 rev.).29 This is an important admission, indicative of more than anti-docetism. Because God has self-determined in terms of one fully divine and fully human, and because God grants Christ qua human a role in the achievement of reconciliation, the dogmatician must promulgate a Christology that tenders descriptions of Christ’s humanity as precise and expansive as those associated with his divinity. For sure, descriptions of Christ’s humanity probably ought not to take first place in dogmatic reflection, even though such primacy cannot be ruled out in principle. Church Dogmatics IV/1 focuses on the divinity of Christ for good reason: Barth hereby signals that God’s prevenient and gracious action, God’s decision to be genuinely ‘God with us’, should take centre stage in christological reflection. But foregrounding Christ’s divinity in this way does not require that Christ’s humanity be consigned to the background. From the early volumes of the Dogmatics onwards, Barth is quietly aware that a viable Christology must supply what the Chalcedonian Definition lacks (and what the sixth ecumenical council gestured toward): an account of Christ’s humanity that goes beyond bald affirmations of co-essentiality and regulative assertions about the nature of the hypostatic union. In fact, Barth could well agree with Karl Rahner’s claim that the term ‘nature’ does not suffice to ‘keep sharply before our minds Jesus’ true initiative in his human history with respect to God and before God’, and support the demand for a ‘true theology of the human life of Jesus (not merely a theology of the extraordinary in Jesus’ life)’.30 Only in this way will the ‘absolutely necessary

29

30

Thus also a claim in the first section of §64 on ‘The Second Problem of the Doctrine of Reconciliation’: ‘It would be a strange Christology which did not give the same attention to the true humanity of Christ as to His true deity, or, according to the older view of His work, to His royal office as to His high-priestly office, to the exaltation of the Son of Man’ (IV/2, p. 19). Rahner, ‘Current Problems in Christology’, pp. 157 and 191 (my emphasis). The limits of Chalcedon with respect to Jesus’ humanity have also been noted in an interesting essay on Barth’s early Christology by Trevor A. Hart, ‘Was God in Christ? Revelation, History, and the Humanity of God’, in Regarding Karl Barth: Essays toward a Reading of His Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999), pp. 1–27. Hart argues that the Chalcedonian ‘two-natures doctrine . . . does not offer any clear framework for identifying and evaluating what in positive terms it might mean for the flesh that here God is in [sic] . . . It was purely a formula of careful analytic differentiation, intended to ascribe christological statements to the relevant level of discourse . . . In order to serve this purpose adequately, though, its interest in the humanity of Jesus tends ever towards the general and the shared, that “humanity” which all humans indwell rather than the

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concept’ of Jesus’ humanity, known in faith, gain its commensurate share of understanding. Given this brief, it is unsurprising that Barth offers only passing comments on the Definition in §64. There is little of the enthusiasm regarding the Zweinaturlehre found in §28 of the Göttingen Dogmatics;31 even the nuanced anti-liberal endorsement of Chalcedon in Church Dogmatics I/2 seems a fairly distant memory. Needful now is a conceptually honed and dogmatically expansive description of Christ’s humanity and human agency that moves christological discussion to a different level. To this end, Barth initially engages some technical debates between Reformed and Lutheran scholastic theologians. To these debates I now turn.

The unio hypostatica – anhypostasis/enhypostasis revisited – the communio naturarum Barth’s approach to the hypostatic union – a central element of mainstream Christologies, and of obvious importance for most Reformed and Lutheran theologians – entails affirming the ‘identity (Identität) of the Son of God with the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth’ (IV/2, p. 19). Thus the frequent claim that the Son ‘became and is’ Jesus of Nazareth; or, more fully, that ‘[t]he Son of God exists as Jesus exists, and Jesus exists as the Son of God exists’ (IV/2, pp. 50 and 71). These comments deliberately sound a Cyrillian note. Even as Barth construes ‘identity’ more radically than Cyril, given that the union of the Son with the man Jesus is pressed back into the divine life, Barth affirms the christological emphases associated with his politically savvy predecessor. On one level, a prevenient divine initiative, noetically distinguishable (for the Christian) from God’s ongoing governance of creation, supplies the condition of possibility for the simple personal reality of Jesus Christ. The incarnation is not occasioned by any condition or conditions immanent to the created order; contrary to the (alleged) supposition of some liberal protestant theologies, humankind ‘has not produced Jesus Christ as the realisation of one of its possibilities’ (IV/2, p. 45). And it is not the case that Jesus of Nazareth’s human fidelity is met with the ‘adoptive’ action of the divine Son – as if the man Jesus merited and therefore provoked God’s incarnational indwelling. On the contrary, God alone brings into existence the totality of Christ’s person, uniting to the divine Son an individuated human essence. On another level, there is only one subject in Christ, and this subject

31

particular human character of the man from Nazareth . . . in its constant careful segregation of Jesus’ “human” from his “divine” predicates this doctrine [sic] shifts attention away from the role of the humanity in Jesus in revealing God to us’ (p. 18). Though Hart perhaps overplays the ‘grammatical’ quality of the Definition, these comments are on target. See Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, Vol. 3, pp. 27–35.

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is God in God’s second way of being. God does not merely indwell a human; Christ’s unity entails the divine Son’s being the defining and exclusive subject of his person. Thus sentences of which Cyril could be proud: ‘God Himself speaks when this man speaks in human speech. God Himself acts and suffers when this man acts and suffers as a man. God Himself triumphs when this One triumphs as a man’ (IV/2, p. 51). Granted this emphasis on the ‘sovereignty of the Subject acting in free grace’ (IV/2, p. 68), §64.2 offers several clarifications about the human essence established and assumed by the Son – clarifications not forthcoming in II/2, despite acclamations of Jesus as the ‘elected human’ replacing talk of his being vere homo. Barth defines Christ’s humanity in terms of the common humanity (das Menschliche) shared by human beings, ‘the being and essence (Wesen), the nature (Natur) and kind, which is that of all men’ (IV/2, p. 48). This affirmation does more than guarantee the reality of Christ’s humanity. It indicates that, since the Son assumes the essence common to all humans, there can be no possible mismatch between the means and object of salvation. What God assumes accords with that which God intends to save. Yet Christ’s co-essentiality with humanity is not asserted without an important caveat: viz., that this human does not in himself possess the property of personhood. An affirmation of Christ’s unity, understood in terms of Christ’s person being defined by the divine Son, therefore qualifies an affirmation of Christ’s likeness to us. Why? Well, were God to unite with an existent human person, Christ would be comprised of two hypostases: the divine Son and a human person identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. Barth would then be faced with the ‘two sons’ problem that Cyril espied in Nestorius’s thought; he would undermine his affirmation of Christ’s numerically simple identity.32 In order that Christ’s personal simplicity be upheld, Barth contends that God creates specially the non-hypostatic (i.e., non-personal) human essence of Jesus of Nazareth that the Son assumes into union with himself. Even more deftly than in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, IV/2 heads off potential objections at this juncture. The fact that a human being does not exist before the union does not mean that Christ lacks human individuality, being merely an instance of generic humanity. Following mainly Reformed precedents, Barth insists that a non-hypostatic human essence means ‘an individuum, an exposition of human nature in individual form’33 32

33

See here, for example, ‘Cyril of Alexandria’s Second Letter to Nestorius’, in Richard Norris, Jr. (ed. and trans.), The Christological Controversy (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), pp. 131–5. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 417. Classical Lutheranism agreed. Thus Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ (trans. J. A. O. Preus; St. Louis: Concordia, 1971), p. 76: ‘[neither] did man assume God, nor did the divine person assume a human person. But the divine nature of the Logos, or God the Logos, or the person of the Son of God, subsisting from eternity in the divine nature, assumed in the fullness of time a particular individual unit (massa) of human nature.’

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and signals that Jesus’ humanity is ‘a specific individual form . . . elected and prepared’ (IV/2, p. 48) by God. Concretely, this means that, like all other humans, Jesus Christ possesses a peculiar set of ‘accidental’ characteristics. God sovereignly ‘overflows’ in an ontologically particular way, bringing into being this individual, distinguished by a specific ethnic identity, physiological make-up, psychological quirks and so forth. And underpinning this assertion of human individuality is a further claim (perhaps expressed too indirectly): the absence of a human hypostasis, or human ‘personality’, does not imperil an affirmation of Christ’s co-essentiality with us. Athough a selfindividuating ‘personality’ is possessed, so far as we know, by every other human, it does not count among the necessary properties of human being as such. The hypostasis definitive of Christ’s being can therefore be, and is, God qua Son in such a way that Christ’s humanity suffers neither disparagement nor reduction. One can also legitimately describe, in passing, Christ’s humanity as enhypostatic and anhypostatic to God’s second way of being – granted, of course, that Barth imposes upon these terms meanings of his own (and Heppe’s) devising. Christ’s hypostasis does not refer primarily to an individual human in time and space; it derives its being and significance from God’s second way of being (enhypostasis). And Christ’s humanity does not exist independently of God qua Son; it has no existence ‘external’ to the Son’s assumptive act (anhypostasis). The claims sit beside one another: Christ ‘exists as a human directly in and with the one God in the way of existence of God’s eternal Son and Logos: not otherwise or apart from this’ (IV/2, p. 49 rev.). The advantage of Barth’s continued affirmation of the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing, taken in its limited meaning, pertains to its summary function. The Word preveniently establishes, animates and reveals God by way of a human being specially created; the Word assumes into union with himself this human (who lacks only the non-essential property of self-actuated hypostatic distinction); this human cannot be considered in isolation from the Word. Yet, as indicated in my first chapter, although the anhypostasis/ enhypostasis formula facilitated the stabilization of Barth’s theological epistemology in the 1920s, it hardly resolves christological debate as such. Two questions seem especially pressing. First, what happens to a human essence when that essence is assumed, uniquely, by God, and derives its personality from a being and event – specifically, that of the divine Son – ontologically distinct from itself? What are the effecta unionis personalis? Second, how, given its enhypostatic standing, does one describe expansively Christ’s human agency? What does human agency mean in the context of the unio hypostatica, given the absence of a human hypostasis in Christ’s person? Building on earlier claims, IV/2 offers an ingenious response to such questions. Barth’s answer to the question about the effecta of the union shows fidelity to his Reformed roots. In order to avoid the problematic Lutheran genus maiestaticum, he insists that a frank acknowledgement of Christ’s ontological 131

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complexity must flank any affirmation of the hypostatic union. A Reformed construal of the communio naturarum therefore accompanies ostensibly Cyrillian remarks about Christ’s divine identity and the simplicity and unity of his person. There is absolutely no commingling or perichoretic interpenetration of the two essences, with divine attributes being communicated to, and rendered the possession of, Christ’s human essence. Both essences retain their distinctive properties in the event of the unio. Since it is a necessary property of human being that it be incapable of taking on attributes such as omnipresence and omnipotence, there persists a ‘sharp distinction and even antithesis’, an ‘infinitely qualitative’ (IV/2, p. 61) difference between the two realities constitutive of Christ’s simple person. So while it is right to say that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, he is not only thus: he is also the (elected) human, Jesus of Nazareth, one ontologically distinct, but in no way separable, from the Son of God. And while it is right to say that Jesus Christ is the Son of Man, the one true human, he is not only thus: he is also the (electing) Son of God, the divine ‘person’ who is ontologically distinct, but in no way separable, from the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth.34 In line with his Reformed forebears and against Lutheran hedging, Barth insists that the inconfuse and immutabiliter adverbs of the Chalcedonian Definition be strictly upheld.35 Barth’s answer to the second question goes beyond anything his Reformed forebears anticipated or was hinted at in either the Göttingen Dogmatics or Church Dogmatics I/2. By associating the communio naturarum with a ‘two-sided participation’ (IV/2, p. 64) of Christ’s divine and human essences, Barth conceptualizes Christ’s personal simplicity as an agential event involving both his divinity and his humanity. As suggested recently by Bruce McCormack,36 while holding the Reformed line against the genus maiestaticum, in IV/2 Barth makes the union a dynamic event whereby divine Son’s ‘giving’ is complemented by an active ‘receiving’ on the part of the assumed 34

35

36

See here IV/2, p. 63. George Hunsinger rightly challenges Jenson’s reading of Barth’s Christology as unduly swayed by ‘the hidden influence of a Lutheran doctrine of the communication idiomatum . . . when the Lutheran Jenson encounters the christological “is” (as in “God ‘is’ Jesus”), different bells go off than they would for the Reformed Barth. Identifying the divine otherness in so unqualified a way with the otherness of one human being . . . would have been quite unthinkable for Barth. The Reformed theologian would want that christological “is” to denote an ontological difference in the midst of real though inconceivable unity’ (How to Read Karl Barth, p. 18). Does Barth get his Lutheran opponents right? Does he understand the genus maiestaticum that he opposes? I tackle these questions in Appendix 2 of this book. Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Participation in God, Yes, Deification, No: Two Modern Protestant Responses to an Ancient Question’, in Ingolf U. Dalferth, Johannes Fischer and Hans-Peter Grosshaus (eds), Denkwürdiges Geheimnis: Beiträge zur Gotteslehre. Festschift für Eberhard Jüngel zum 70. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), pp. 347–74.

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human. A ‘willed obedience of the human Jesus’37 to God the Father therefore becomes an event integral to, and coincident with, the obedience definitive of God qua Son. The word ‘participation’ (Teilnehmen or Teilhaben) forms the leading edge of Barth’s drive to ‘actualize’ the entire christological realm, epitomizing a style of ‘thinking and speaking in pure concepts of movement’ that ‘re-translate[s] that whole phenomenology [of the “older dogmatics”] into the sphere of a history’ (IV/2, p. 106). McCormack’s interpretation can be intensified and tightened up somewhat. The key point is this: Barth’s actualism encompasses not only Christ’s human relation to the Father but also the relation of the assumed human to the divine Son. Although the man Jesus lacks his own hypostasis (a non-essential property of human being), he does not lack agential power (an essential property of human being), and he exerts this power in a way that contributes to, and in fact assists in the establishment and preservation of, the personal simplicity definitive of his divine-human person. Specifically, the word ‘participation’, while sidestepping the problematic insinuation of an interpenetrative co-inherence of ‘natures’, allows Barth to suggest that the union of humanity and divinity in Christ’s person is an event mutually confected and, in some respect, mutually forged, given the concurrent activity of Christ’s humanity and Christ’s divinity.38 While unilaterally established, this union is neither unilaterally imposed nor unilaterally sustained. Each essence ‘takes part’ in the task of upholding the numerical simplicity of Christ’s person; ‘on both sides there is a true and genuine participation’ (IV/2, p. 62). Pace McCormack, it is not quite that one essence is particularly involved in ‘receiving’ and the other essence is particularly involved in ‘giving’. Rather, Christ’s essences together enact and realize Christ’s personally simple identity. On the one side, the divine act of incarnation fulfils God’s decision to be the ‘electing God’. God realizes, under the conditions of time and space, the utterly particular identity that God pre-temporally assigns to the divine Son. The divine Son is therefore the subject who directs and animates comprehensively the person of Christ; the divine Son is the ‘who’ of Christ’s person. On the other side, Christ qua human is given, receives and then acts to affirm and uphold the simple identity definitive of his person. Christ’s human essence does its ‘bit’ to ensure that Christ is the person that God wills him to be and that he is – the Word incarnate. By way of the communio naturarum, then, Barth ensures that his actualism, and more specifically his emphasis on agency, ‘goes all the way down’. From a dogmatic standpoint, there is no aspect of Christ’s being that does 37 38

Ibid., p. 354. I borrow the term ‘confected’ from Sarah Coakley; see ‘“Kenoˉsis” and Subversion: On the Repression of “Vulnerability” in Christian Feminist Writing’, in Daphne Hampson (ed.), Swallowing a Fishbone: Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (London: SPCK, 1996), p. 111.

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not evidence the ongoing event of the unio hypostatica, given that ‘two opposed but strictly related movements in [one] history . . . operate together and mutually interpret each other’ (IV/2, p. 106). Or, to put it a bit differently: ‘is there any standpoint from which we can see [the unio hypostatica] as . . . immobile and rigid contiguity . . . ? “Union?” To say this is already to suggest an act, or movement . . . for this oneness a conjunction or unification (Vereinigung) is needed’ (IV/2, p. 109). A description of this union of essences does not require artful metaphysical gymnastics to explain a forced juxtaposition of ontologically irreconcilable realities, even though the distinction between God and humanity must be frankly acclaimed.39 Nor is there any need to think that divinity or humanity is inherently fitted to attain unity with each other, even though a two-sided ‘determination’ characterizes the unio hypostatica.40 Instead, ‘participation’ ensures that Barth’s description of Christ includes the coordinate actions of two agencies that together effect Christ’s personal simplicity.

Permutations of the communicatio idiomatum The immediate consequence of this elegant reworking of the communio naturarum is that Barth, like many Reformed theologians, affirms a communicatio idiomatum not merely figurative (contra Zwingli)41 but ‘really’ descriptive of Christ as a single subject. But he can do so more effectively than many of his forebears. Barth avoids the Reformed tendency, evident in both the Göttingen Dogmatics and I/2, to arrest christological reflection with something of a fait accompli, simply asserting that, given the concrete facticity of Christ’s person in light of the Word’s assumption of humanity, divine attributes can be predicated of Christ qua human, and human

39

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John Hick offers an eloquent critique of incarnational Christology on these terms, arguing that ‘orthodoxy has never been able to give this idea [of Christ as one person, divine and human] any content. It remains a form of words without assignable meaning. For to say, without explanation, that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was also God is as paradoxical as to say that this circle drawn with a pencil on paper is also a square. Such locution has to be given semantic content: and in the case of the language of incarnation every content thus far suggested has to be repudiated’ (‘Jesus and the World Religions’, in Paul Badham (ed.), A John Hick Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 117). To the best of my knowledge, Spinoza first deployed the circle/square figure in a letter to Henry Oldenburg; see here Baruch Spinoza, The Letters (trans. Samuel Shirley; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), p. 333. Karl Rahner comes close to this claim, describing ‘[h]uman being [as] a reality absolutely open upwards; a reality which reaches its highest (though indeed “unexacted”) perfection, the realization of the highest possibility of man’s being, when in it the Logos himself becomes existent in the world’ (‘Current Problems in Christology’, p. 183). See IV/2, pp. 73–6 and Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 439–45. See also Richard Cross, ‘Alloiosis in the Christology of Zwingli’, JTS 46.2 (1995), pp. 105–22.

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attributes can be predicated of Christ qua divine Son.42 How so? Because Barth’s actualistic construal of Christ’s ontological complexity enables a convincing affirmation of Christ’s personal simplicity, which in turn supplies a robust condition of possibility for linguistic cross-attribution. On the one hand, as McCormack suggests,43 Barth attends to the Lutheran concern for the indivise and inseperabiliter adverbs of the Chalcedonian Definition without compromising his Reformed commitments. One can predicate and attribute actually the properties of God qua Son to the human, Jesus of Nazareth, and one can predicate and attribute actually the properties of this human to the Son of God, because Christ’s person is comprised of two acts (asymmetrically related, of course) that are thoroughly directed at, and productive of, the same end. Since no gap obtains between existence and essence, the divine and human essences of Christ are thinkable only in terms of what they do – namely, participate in and bring about the concrete, simple and personal existence of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Barth ensures that the unio immediata does not tip over into a genus maiestaticum. His Reformed construal of the communio naturarum blocks any overextension of the attribution of properties; it ensures that any acclamation of the unio cannot take an interpenetrative turn. Christ’s being-in-act as a human remains human; Christ’s being-in-act as the Son remains divine. The ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ is never lost. Yet, to switch the angle of vision back to the perfect personal unio, Barth can still speak of an ‘identity’ of divinity and humanity in Christ, even granted Christ’s ontological complexity. How so? Once again, because the essences in question are ‘determined’ to comprise, and actively do comprise, a numerically simple person: the determination coming (preveniently) from God and being given to Christ’s human essence, with this human essence realizing God’s determinative intention in seamless unity with the Word. Construing the hypostatic union ‘in actualist terms as a uniting, rather than a completed action, a union’,44 Barth in fact improves the standard Reformed account of the unio hypostatica: he avoids an extrinsicistic description of the relationship between divinity and humanity. One might even put it like this: the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and humanity neither poses a problem for thinking about the simplicity of Christ’s person nor does it impede a robust communication of attributes. Rather, this ‘distinction’ is the point of departure for an actualistic description of the ‘mode of union’ that attends closely to the divine and human agencies that underwrite Christ’s personal simplicity. 42

43 44

This is a standard critique of early Reformed Christology; see for example Dorner, Doctrine of Christ, Vol. 2, part 2, pp. 243–8. Barth’s early work is certainly susceptible to such criticism. The discussion of the communicatio idiomatum in the Göttingen lectures is polemical about the genus maiestaticum, but terse and textbookish when discussing the unity of Christ’s person. McCormack, ‘Participation in God’, esp. pp. 353–5. Ibid., p. 355.

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Yet there is still more to IV/2 than a deft handling of the communication of attributes. To consolidate, emphasize and nuance his account of Christ as a human being, Barth employs two further scholastic theologoumena: the communicatio gratiarum and the communicatio operationum. While these formulae were briefly considered in the Göttingen Dogmatics,45 the difference in Church Dogmatics IV/2, again, is the creativity with which Barth handles traditional material. With the communicatio gratiarum Barth situates himself within a complicated doctrinal trajectory, the roots of which appear to lie in medieval curiosity regarding Christ’s possession of ‘habitual grace’ – itself a development of patristic reflections on grace as it pertains to the incarnation and the adoption of believers into Christ’s body.46 The third part of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica is usefully illustrative here. On one level, Aquinas contends that the gracious action of the entire Trinity effects and sustains the union of divinity and humanity basic to Christ’s person. There is provided here no opening for speculation about prior ‘merits’ possessed by Christ as a human being. Any manner of adoptionism on the basis of an especially impressive human ‘piety’ or ‘dedication’ to God is ruled out; God’s prevenient and gracious action is the exclusive cause of the incarnation.47 On another level, the consequence of the Son’s assumption of Christ’s human essence, and the resulting hypostatic union, supported by the Holy Spirit, is that Christ possesses the ‘fullness of grace’.48 This fullness may be described as habitual, although Aquinas underscores God’s prevenient action as its necessary anterior condition (‘the habitual grace of Christ is understood to follow this union, as the light follows the sun’)49 and notes that grace does not overrun the limits of Christ’s humanity.50 At any rate, Christ is the pre-eminently graced human. Marilyn McCord Adams puts it well: ‘just as God is [the] fontal source of natural being (esse) and goodness in creatures, so Aquinas envisions a cascading flow of grace from the Godhead into the human soul hypostatically united to it; from the soul of Christ into all the members of the Body of which He is the head’.51 45

46

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For the communicatio gratiarum, see Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, Vol. 3, pp. 45–50; for the communicatio operationum, see pp. 60–2. For more on this issue in the patristic period, see Fairbairn, Grace and Christology. For an interesting perspective on the medieval material, see Marilyn McCord Adams, What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999). Thus Summa Theologica III, q. 2, a. 10: ‘if grace be taken as the free gift of God, then the fact that the human nature is united to the Divine Person may be called a grace, inasmuch as it took place without being preceded by any merits’. Summa Theologica III, q. 7, a. 9 claims that Christ’s soul ‘is more closely united to God than all other rational creatures’ and therefore ‘receives the greatest outpouring of His grace’; III, q. 7, a. 13 indicates that ‘the principle of habitual grace, which is given with charity, is the Holy Ghost.’ See also H. P. C. Lyons, ‘The Grace of Sonship’, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 27 (1951), pp. 438–66. Summa Theologica III, q. 7, a. 13.

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Aquinas’s claims made their way into the world of protestant scholasticism, where they were taken up by scholars labouring to formulate a distinctively Reformed Christology. Turning a diffuse medieval background into a theological formula,52 the communicatio gratiarum enabled the Reformed to uphold the finitum non est capax infiniti principle against what they took to be the divinizing proclivities of the Lutheran genus maiestaticum. Moreover, the communicatio gratiarum gave the Reformed something positive to say about the effecta of the hypostatic union, as opposed to simply criticizing their Lutheran opponents.53 Thus, sticking fairly close to Aquinas, the communicatio gratiarum was construed on one side, as ‘the grace of union with the person of the lo/goj (since Christ’s humanity is e0nupo/statoj tw~| lo/gw|)’ and, on the other, as the impartation of ‘habitual graces or charisms’54 from the divine to the human essence – the result being that Christ qua human gains a ‘pre-eminent’ standing over other creatures, specifically in terms of his knowledge (which, contra Aquinas, remained finite) and his power.55 Against the Lutherans, this bestowal of gifts marks the upper limit of the effecta of the hypostatic union. There is no communication of divine attributes that sanctions the predication of (say) omnipresence or omnipotence to Christ’s human nature. Christ’s humanity cannot be augmented in this way if it is to remain truly human; the proprietates divinas must remain the sole possession of the divine Son. Barth highlights the communicatio gratiarum in IV/2 because he shares both Aquinas’s and the Reformed concern to present the incarnation as grounded, established and sustained by divine grace. Yet he does so within 50

51 52

53

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Summa Theologica III, q. 7, a. 11 suggests that the ‘union has been bestowed gratis on the human nature’ and that ‘habitual grace . . . is in the soul of Christ . . . and Christ’s soul is a creature having a finite capacity; hence the being of grace cannot be infinite, since it cannot exceed its subject.’ The obvious question: does divinization ‘exceed’ the natural limits of Christ qua human? Aquinas is cautious on this point, but does note that Christ’s grace ‘has whatsoever can pertain to the nature of grace, and what pertains to the nature of grace is not bestowed on Him in a fixed measure’. Adams, What Sort of Human Nature, p. 52. To the best of my knowledge, the words communicatio gratiae occur only once in Aquinas – specifically in the Catena aurea’s treatment of the Gospel of Luke. See here Thomas Aquinas, Catena aurea in quatuor Evangelia Expositio in Lucam, 22.1.8, available at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/clc22.html. Accessed February 2005. On this point, see Uwe Gerber, Christologische Entwürfe: ein Arbeitsbuch; Vol. 1, Von der Reformation bis zur dialektischen Theologie (Zürich: EVZ, 1970), p. 42 and Alfred Adam, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, Vol. 2 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1968), p. 395. See here Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 434 and Muller, Dictionary, p. 72. So Wollebius, Compendium, pp. 92–3; see also Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology; Vol. 2, Eleventh through Seventeenth Topics (ed. James T. Dennison, Jr.; trans. George Musgrave Giger; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1994), p. 321 and pp. 347–52.

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the context of his doctrine of election, thereby adding an urgency not found in the Göttingen Dogmatics, which treated the communicatio gratiarum rather summarily. It is not only the action of the Trinity, but also the incomparable event of Gottes Gnadenwahl that provides the prevenient ‘origin (Ursprung)’ (IV/2, p. 90) of Christ’s humanity and occasions his being uniquely ‘adopted and controlled and sanctified’ (IV/2, p. 88) by God’s second way of being.56 Still more innovatively, Barth uses the communicatio gratiarum to describe how (a) God petitions Christ, as a human, to enact a certain history and (b) how Christ’s human agency begins with the act of gratitude. This theologoumenon therefore helps Barth to refine the connection between election, incarnation and covenantal relating adverted in Church Dogmatics II/2. It explains still more precisely how Christ’s human response to God happens coincidentally with the self-determination of God in God’s second way of being. The term ‘confrontation’, which Barth immediately associates with the communicatio gratiarum, describes God’s demand that Christ’s human essence participate in a union with the divine Son. Barth will even risk interposing distance between the divine and human essences of Christ’s person to underscore this point, writing that ‘[i]n Jesus Christ there is no direct or indirect identification, but the effective confrontation, not only of the divine with the human, but also of the human with the divine essence’ (IV/2, p. 87). Such words are consistent, of course, with Barth’s construal of the communio naturarum; there would be little need to talk about ‘confrontation’, were Christ in possession of divine attributes.57 Yet Barth is also indicating that, even within Christ’s person, God’s grace is inherently communicative. Not communicative in the sense that divinity is transferred to the human essence, but rather communicative in terms of a divine ‘appeal’ that seeks human ‘answer’. The communicatio gratiarum provides more nuance to the rough conceptuality of encounter and command employed in Church Dogmatics II/2: it identifies God’s ‘address’, God’s ‘turning’ (Zuwendung) and ‘summons’ (Aufgerufsein) to Christ qua human as an ongoing call for him 56

57

Note that, in describing Jesus’ gracious ‘origin’, IV/2 does not really emphasize the virgin birth. The overblown presentation of I/2 (pp. 172–202) is replaced with what I consider a more balanced perspective, passingly affirmative of the virgin birth as a symptom of Christ’s being the divine Son. See here IV/2, p. 90. See here IV/2, pp. 87–8. Regin Prenter notices the importance of ‘confrontation’ in Barth’s Christology, but fails to appreciate IV/2’s actualistic construal of the ‘union’ of divinity and humanity constitutive of Christ’s person and work. He in fact offers no comments on the communio naturarum, communicatio gratiarum and communicatio operationum; he cannot read beyond Barth’s rejection of orthodox Lutheranism. ‘Confrontation’ therefore suggests to him a degenerate Nestorianism, much inferior to the Lutheran alternative. See ‘Karl Barths Umbildung der traditionellen Zweinaturlehre in lutherischer Beleuchtung’, pp. 22–30; see also the critique offered by Stickelberger in Ipsa assumptione creatur, pp. 34–7.

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to effect his union with the Son, a ‘summons’ that goes hand in hand with God’s demand that the simple person of Christ live out a life responsive to the command of the Father. Even granted that Christ’s person is defined by the divine Son, then, Christ’s human essence does not exist as a lifeless, insensible vehicle of the Son’s economic working. Rather, as the human essence united to the Son and, more generally, as the human who the Son becomes and is, the whole person of Christ must respond, perfectly, to God’s directive summons. This summons pervades every moment of Christ’s life; otherwise than an ingrained habitus, it remains ever new. Armed only with a ‘relative knowledge and capacity’ (IV/2, p. 95) – and notice that Barth maintains the Reformed correction of Aquinas – Christ must follow, humanly, the history that God, in God’s first and third ways of being, charts out for him.58 So it is that, Even the man Jesus of Nazareth exists in a concrete history as [the] recipient [of grace]. He takes the road that leads from birth to death, from his secret preparation to the beginning and fulfilment and completion of his human work. He takes the road on which the goodpleasure of the Father, the gift of the Spirit and his own existence as the Son of God must always mean something new and specific at every step. He takes the road on which there can be no permanent state of blessing, and the continuity of which can be assured only (although, of course, definitively) by the fact that he is always the same elect man confronted and surrounded and filled by the same electing grace of God. (IV/2, p. 94 rev.) In the same moment that God’s elective act brings into existence the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth, this human’s ‘confrontation’ with grace carries the petition that he embrace and realize his identity as the Son of Man who is also the Son of God, and that he enact a history that leads from Bethlehem to Golgotha. Subsequent to II/2, Barth has also conceptualized a theological anthropology that pays close mind to God’s prevenient stimulation of human being and action, drawing a direct link between grace and thankfulness as an elemental constituent of human agency. God’s grace does not only just establish

58

Barth writes also that ‘as the Son He is sustained outwardly by the inflexible Yes of the Father . . . and enlightened and impelled inwardly by the comfort and power and direction of the Holy Spirit’ (IV/2, pp. 94). And in an important excursus on the filioque late in §64, he writes – making amends, perhaps, for what Donna Bowman has called the overly ‘confessional’ quality of II/2’s Trinitarianism – that Jesus is ‘from the outset and throughout His existence the spiritual man . . . the true and exalted royal man who lives by the descent of the Spirit of God and is therefore wholly filled and directed by him’ (IV/2, p. 324; see also pp. 332–5).

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creaturely alterity; it also stirs the human to seize and exercise agency in grateful praise of God. Thus Barth in III/2: When we see the human as the being of God’s grace, giving thanks, corresponding to, complementing God – and this is the great step that we now must take in our conceptual picture of the human – we see him for the first time in his own act. Seen here at its root, understood as thanksgiving for the grace of God, this is the act in which he accepts the validity of the act which not he but God has accomplished. But, even so, it is his own act. The human is the subject of his history . . . Hidden in thanksgiving, and therefore hidden in the act of man, grace itself, which flowed out from God in God’s Word, returns to its origin, to God. Gratitude, the acceptance of grace, can be understood only as grace. The human performs nothing special, does nothing peculiar and arbitrary, in that he thanks God. The human is obliged to thank God and has the freedom to do so. And yet it is true that the form of grace, in this return to its origin, is the human’s action and deed. (III/2, p. 168 rev., my emphases)59 This passage, which again demonstrates Barth’s deft manipulation of neoplatonic themes, underwrites the second dimension of Barth’s construal of the communicatio gratiarum (point [b]). God’s gracious petition originally impels the ‘firstborn of creation’ towards agency; it marks the natal moment of Christ’s human being-in-act as one of gratitude. Of course, Barth does not relax his emphasis on God’s prevenient action. He opens his discussion of the communicatio gratiarum with the claim that grace means that God ‘determines to address Himself to man, and to do so in such a way that He Himself becomes man’ (IV/2, p. 84). And God’s address is God’s selfconveyance. God really does present God’s own self to humankind in the person of Christ, doing so in a way that establishes and maintains Christ’s person as utterly simple. Barth also suggests, however, that, having received a determination from the divine, Christ qua human is not only acted upon. He is also spurred to act humanly. And he does so act. He presents himself

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The connection between grace and gratitude is not, of course, peculiar to Church Dogmatics III/2; it can be found in various part volumes. In I/2, thankfulness is a vital part of §18, ‘The Life of the Children of God’, the last subsection of which focuses on praise (I/2, pp. 362–454); in II/1, it plays a role in the culminating subsection of chapter 5, ‘The Knowledge of God’ (§§25–7; II/1, pp. 3–254); in II/2, Barth describes election as allowing the human to ‘become simply gratitude’ (II/2, p. 413); in III/1: ‘thankfulness is shown to be the essence of the creature’ by Christ (III/1, p. 26); and in IV/4, discussing water baptism, Barth remarks that ‘[t]he gracious God, showing Himself to be such to a man, wills, makes possible, and demands at once the total life-act of this man which is to be performed in gratitude’ (IV/4, p. 42).

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as a human cognizant of, and responsive to, God’s gratuitous advance; he gives thanks. In so doing, he qualifies each human as an agent capable of grateful decision making and action. To what is Jesus ‘exalted’?, Barth asks at one point. The answer is telling: ‘To that harmony with the divine will, that service of the divine act, that state of thankfulness (Dankbarkeit)’ (IV/2, p. 92).60 Exaltation means the birth of human agency in Christ’s act of gratitude. Our thankfulness, tied up, as it is, with the mysterious event of conversion (§66.4), has as its condition of possibility Christ humanly giving thanks, responding to God’s prevenient advance with a spontaneous and delighted movement towards God, rendering himself the human that God has made God’s own Son. Accompanying Barth’s adroit handling of the communicatio gratiarum is his treatment of the communicatio operationum.61 This forms an appropriate finale to Barth’s discussion of technical christological distinctions, given the actualist tenor of §64.2 (‘there is not a great deal more to be said as we conclude our fourth main point. It may be said, indeed, that all the time we have been thinking and speaking with this concept of the communicatio operationum’ (IV/2, p. 105)). The external point of reference is here less complicated. Building on the endorsement of dyothelitism at the sixth ecumenical council, Reformed and Lutheran theologians agreed that both of Christ’s ‘natures’, each having and exercising a will of its own, were active throughout the course of his life. There was therefore a united front against the docetic idea that Christ’s humanity was a lifeless and non-volitional medium of which the Word made merely instrumental use.62 Certainly there were different emphases. Barth notes that the Lutherans specified a genus apostelesmaticum, which was connected to a perichoretic construal of the communio naturarum, whereas the Reformed underscored the distinctive operations of the natures by naming a causa principalis and a causa minus principalis.63 But in stark contrast to fractious debates regarding the glorification, ubiquity and ‘deification’ of Christ’s humanity, there was substantial overlap. Both camps believed that both essences undertook Christ’s mediatorial work. The divine and human essences of Christ, ‘internal’ to the simple 60

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My emphasis. This is not an isolated claim. Barth also writes of Jesus’ ‘grateful affirmation of the grace of God addressed’ to him (IV/2, p. 30) and of the conferral of the potestas offici joined by an ‘action of the most profound human thankfulness’ (IV/2, p. 63). Barth indicates that the Reformed specified also a communicatio apostelesmatum. The distinction is fine but worth noting. The communicatio operationum points generally to the distinctive but unified operations of Jesus Christ’s divine and human nature. The communicatio apostelesmatum concerns the particular end intended, describing the ‘alliance of the two natures for the mediatorial operations’ that bring about reconciliation as such (Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 445). For an example on the Reformed side, see Wollebius, Compendium, p. 93. On the Lutheran side, see Chemnitz, The Two Natures, pp. 215–39. IV/2, pp. 104–5. See also Muller, Dictionary, pp. 74–5.

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person of Jesus Christ, the subject of whom is the divine Son, together will his reconciling activity. Again, what Barth does with this theologoumenon proves more important than historical precedents. At issue here is the uptake of God’s gracious petition by Christ as a human being – the fact that, to borrow from Barth’s early lectures on the Reformed confessions, ‘through grace’, the human ‘has really been put on his feet in order to walk’.64 Barth’s handling of the communicatio operationum presents Christ’s human essence as actively coordinating itself with that of the divine Son, even to the point at which the dogmatician can tender an account of the contribution that Christ makes, humanly, to the event of reconciliation. Moreover, as with I/2, references to Christ’s divine and human ‘wills’ are replaced by a more capacious understanding of agency, with Christ’s divine act-in-being and Christ’s human act-in-being together effecting his simple person and undertaking his reconciliatory history. Barth opens his discussion by emphasizing the condition of possibility for Jesus’ human agency – God’s prevenient act – and using the language of ‘actualization’ or ‘realization’ (Verwirklichung) to accentuate the origin of Christ’s person. In making Godself genuinely present and active in the world, God implements God’s intention to incarnate.65 The necessary basis for this event is God’s establishment of a human, ‘a specific individual form (Gestalt) . . . elected and prepared’ (IV/2, p. 48), who functions as the medium for the being and action of God qua Son. Barth never tires of the claim: the incarnation is a special divine act whereby the divine Son becomes and is the subject of Jesus Christ, ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’. Two additional moves make things interesting. First, Barth uses the communicatio operationum to describe still more precisely the human contribution to the unio hypostatica. In that Christ’s human essence ‘serves and attests the divine’ (IV/2, p. 115), this essence actualizes itself alongside the actualization of the divine Son, realizing the identity assigned to it in an act of self-constitution. Actualizes itself ? Certainly, Christ’s human self-actualization is posterior, and only loosely analogous, to God’s anterior actualization qua Son, which, with the Spirit, brings Christ’s humanity into existence. Christ’s humanity does not cause its own existence. It is also the case that, on occasion, Barth appears to separate the humanity of Christ from the divinity of Christ, thereby risking the appearance of Nestorianism. Yet, given the need to attain maximal dogmatic clarity about Christ’s person, this is a risk rightly run. Barth wants to show that there needs to be ‘a special actualisation in the identity of this One, the man Jesus of Nazareth, with the Son 64 65

Barth, Theology of the Reformed Confessions, p. 92. Thus IV/2, p. 114: the incarnation ‘needs the novum of the execution of the eternal will and decree in which God elected man for Himself and Himself for man, giving this concrete determination to His own divine being’.

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of God, and therefore in its union with divine essence’ (IV/2, p. 114). That is to say, Christ’s human essence must take up and enact, and does take up and enact, the identity that God proposes. It can even be said that Christ’s humanity fulfils, and therefore in some sense completes, the divinely established event of the incarnation, given that Christ’s human essence wills, constantly, to exist as the human essence that lives in unity with the Son. It can even be said that the human essence of the divine Son plays a part in the establishment of the unique person of Jesus Christ. In a remarkable passage, Barth writes: Common actualisation (Gemeinsame Verwirklichung) . . . 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 (Betätigung) 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 (dab beide sich je als das Eine und je als das Andere verwirklichen); per efficacium distinctam utriusque naturae. (IV/2, p. 115 rev.) Although this counts among the most difficult claims of IV/2, Barth’s point is discernible. If Jesus of Nazareth is the ‘concrete possibility of the existence of one human’ (IV/2, p. 48 rev.) that God brings into being (and Marquardt was at least right to draw attention to the importance of the term Möglichkeit),66 this ‘possibility’ is only provisionally actualized by God. Christ humanly ‘finalizes’ the identity that God assigns him, positing himself as the human assumed by God – even as this action renders his human essence ‘secondary’ to that of the divine Son.67 In its own way, Christ’s human selfactualization is an ontologically creative act, for Christ hereby humanly disposes himself as, and in a limited sense makes himself, the human that God assumes and indwells. As Barth later remarks, deploying terminology used to dramatic effect in II/2: while God effects ‘the absolutely sovereign actualisation (souveränen Aktualisierung)’ of God’s being as Son, establishing Christ as a concrete individual, Christ as a human also exercises ‘the capacity lent [to the creature] by God . . . in the fulfilment of [his] particular being’. The Son’s ‘creative actualisation of being’ therefore happens concurrently with, and is completed by, a ‘creaturely actualisation’ (IV/3.1, p. 40).

66

67

See Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus: Das Beispiel Karl Barths (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1985), pp. 264–75. Stickelberger puts it nicely: ‘Entsprechend verhält sich der Mensch Jesus zu Gott: er kennt keine Selbstbehauptung, kein Beharren auf dem eigenen Recht, sondern was er will und was er tut, ist der Wille und das Tut Gottes selbst; sein Leben ist ein Gott dienendes, dargebrachtes Leben’ (Ipsa assumptione creatur, p. 58).

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This dimension of the communicatio operationum also brings into view an important historical subplot internal to IV/2, implicit to the analysis thus far forwarded. Indirectly, and perhaps unintentionally, Barth is suggesting that the christological perspectives associated with Cyril and the later Nestorians are not incompatible, but, if duly qualified, eminently complementary. While God’s establishment of the hypostatic union forms the initial condition of possibility for Christ’s existence, a ‘moral union’, in which the divine Son and the assumed human act conjunctively, follows in its wake, providing the ‘condition of fulfilment’ that secures Christ’s personal simplicity. Equally, one could say that Barth inherits and reprises Leontius of Byzantium’s focus on the ‘mode of union’. If Leontius views the relationship between divinity and humanity in Christ in terms of a ‘relating’ of divine and human essences, so that the principal christological issue is ‘not the nature of the God who has appeared in Christ, nor the natural constitution of the human person as capax Dei, but the manner in which those two utterly distinct realities . . . work together to form a single, concrete, contingent, historical individual’,68 then Barth’s construal of the communicatio operationum is a modulation of his patristic predecessor’s outlook. The concrete reality and event of Jesus Christ entails the unificatory intention and activity of the divine Son and the assumed human, which together comprise the simple person of Jesus Christ, ‘elected God’ and ‘elected human’.69 Second, the communicatio operationum provides further testimony to Barth’s daring claim about the ‘how’ of reconciliation. Beyond God’s indwelling and direction of Christ’s humanity and Christ’s human involvement in the unio hypostatica, salvation depends upon, and is actively effected by, two coordinate but asymmetrically related agential realities. Thus it is that, on the heels of his remarks about ‘common actualization’, Barth offers a description of an enactment of an utterly specific person and history – a ‘pattern of . . . performance’70 that proves constitutive and disclosive of God’s reconciling action, and that is effected by Christ qua ‘electing God’ and Christ qua ‘elected human’. This finale to Barth’s discussion of the Christology of the ‘old dogmatics’ merits lengthy quotation. [The divine and human essence] are coordinated – commonly actualized (gemeinsam verwirklicht) – in his work. It is where the divine rules and reveals and gives that the human serves and attests and mediates. The one Word of Jesus Christ is his self-expression as God’s eternal Word and it is also the corresponding, but not identical, word of 68

69

70

Brian E. Daley, ‘Nature and the “Mode of Union”: Late Patristic Models for the Personal Unity of Christ’, in The Incarnation, p. 167. Stickelberger also considers the connection between Barth and Leontius; see Ipsa assumptione creatur, pp. 91ff. Tracy, God, Action, and Embodiment, p. 33.

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the proclamation of this man as humanly articulated and conditioned. The one will of Jesus Christ is the eternal will of God and it is also – absolutely conformable for all its dissimilarity – the motivated human will (bewegt Wille) which determines the way of this human life as such. The one power of Jesus Christ is the omnipotent power of God and it is also the distinct but fully attesting power, the great and yet limited power, in which this man as such does signs and wonders. The one death and passion of Jesus Christ is the final depth of the selfhumiliation of God and it is also, following and completing it as a human death and passion, the way which the man Jesus entered and traversed secretly from the very outset, and publicly to his last living day (an seinem letzen Lebenstag), even to the extremity of misery and need as prepared for him, but by God himself . . . In the work of the one Jesus Christ everything is at one and the same time, but distinctly, divine and human, so that the unity of both factors at no point becomes a singularity. Where Jesus Christ is really known, there is no place for a monistic thinking that confuses or reverses the divine and the human. Rather, there can be only a historical thinking, for which each factor has its own distinctive character. In the event of the unification of the divine and the human, there is no interchangeable above and below, but, even so, their relationship is one of genuine action. (IV/2, p. 116 rev.) The dialectical to and fro of divine and human action of this passage describes powerfully Christ’s divine and human history as it moves from speech, to will, to power, to death in God-abandonment. It is not quite enough to contend, as George Hunsinger does, that Christ’s humanity entails a ‘pure if active reception’.71 Beyond an active receipt of God’s direction, God wills that the task of reconciliation, in part, be humanly carried out, and the weight of God’s justification, in part, be humanly borne by the human assumed by God’s second way of being. With and under the direction of the Son, but genuinely and gratefully nevertheless, the man Jesus must ‘hold the line’ an seinem letzen Lebenstag; he must determine himself, by way of his own ‘motivated will’, and enact unceasingly the determination given him. Why? Why does God make this man, who, despite a uniquely engraced existence, remains as fragile as any other, integral to reconciliation? Why is the ‘saving work in which He serves His fellows . . . the task (Auftrag) which He is given by God’ (III/2, p. 217)? Again, because Barth knits together the doctrines of election, incarnation, covenant and reconciliation. God’s Christic self-determination goes hand in hand with the decision that the reconciliation of God and humankind should not be a unilateral and invisible decretum absolutum but rather the (re)establishment of a vital 71

Hunsinger, ‘Karl Barth’s Christology’, p. 139.

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relationship between ontologically and agentially distinct parties. And how could this relationship be vital, be a genuine partnership, if God imposes it upon humanity? God’s incarnational action forms only one aspect of a reconciliatory endeavour that includes Christ’s human agency. Because Christ humanly lives out the reconciling existence that God commends, the project of sanctification comes to term, and the relationship between God and humanity is set on firm footing. Note finally that, as with the communicatio gratiarum, Barth’s treatment of the communicatio operationum lifts to the surface undercurrents set in motion in Church Dogmatics III. While this modulation of the communicatio is most immediately associable with Barth’s explication of sin as sloth (Trägheit) – humankind’s inexplicable sluggishness, despite the rousing gift of grace72 – it recalls also the discussion of ‘responsibility’ (Verantwortung) in III/2. Previously Barth partnered this term with gratitude, using it to emphasize that grace spurs the exercise of agency. Appropriately, then, given that Christ is himself the ‘real human’, the constituent parts of responsibility – cognitive acknowledgement (An/Erkenntnis) of God’s will, the ‘practical’ exercise of obedience (Gehorsam), acts of invocation (Anrufung) and, culminatively, a life of freedom (Freiheit) – highlight different aspects of Christ’s human working. In order to posit his own existence in the Gestalt that God proposes, Christ traces the shape of the divine summons, acknowledging the divine will not effortlessly but humanly, as it confronts him over the course of a human life that ‘necessarily . . . trod a human way’ (IV/2, p. 95). He practises obedience in that he acts with and as the flesh that the Word has become, undertaking the particular ‘task for which [he] is commissioned’ (III/2, p. 180). He calls upon God as God calls upon him, reiterating the divine Word in human speech. And, most importantly, he ‘chooses himself ’ in the reconciling ‘possibility’ that God sets before him and thereby founds the ‘one positive meaning’ of human freedom: not the bare power of choice, but ‘freedom . . . exercised in the fulfilment of responsibility before God’ (III/2, pp. 196–7). Indeed, just as the communicatio gratiarum and communicatio operationum are mutually inextricable in IV/2, so does Barth subtly remind his readers that the categories of gratitude and responsibility coinhere: they anchor an articulation of Christ’s existence and activity that consolidates, and renders precise, Barth’s acclamation of Christ as the ‘elected human’.

Summary remarks – the genus tapeinoticum The analysis above justifies a bold claim: while the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula marked a defining moment in his early theological development, Barth’s highly creative construal of the communio naturarum, communicatio 72

IV/2, pp. 403–83.

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idiomatum, communicatio gratiarum and communicatio operationum/ apotelesmatum represents a highpoint in the articulation of his mature Christology. In contrast to the 1920s, though, when Barth’s Christology (and theological epistemology) took its bearings from Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics, the claims of the ‘older dogmatics’ now form but a point of departure for Barth’s own reflections. Barth’s tribute to protestant orthodoxy is subordinate to the goal of rendering more precise his own christological perspective. The unio hypostatica is thoroughly actualized and rendered agential, making the cross-attribution of properties readily comprehensible; Christ’s human agency is construed in terms of a relationship between grace, gratitude and responsibility; and reconciliation is framed in terms of the conjunctive activity of the divine Son and the assumed human. The suggestive stirrings of I/2 and the rather different claims of II/2 have been consolidated, nuanced and expanded. And the anhypostasis/enhypostasis pairing continues to be of fairly incidental purpose – at least when it comes to Barth’s positive explication of Christ’s being and act. Claims about the standing of Christ’s humanity are useful, but less important than descriptions of what this humanity does – namely, participate unceasingly in the ontologically complex existence of Jesus Christ and play an indispensable role in the event of reconciliation. One final issue merits attention before taking leave of the world of protestant scholasticism: Barth’s apparent disinterest in the controversial genus tapeinoticum. This permutation of the communicatio idiomatum, implicitly endorsed by Luther73 but rejected by his orthodox successors and their Reformed counterparts, predicates passibility, and therefore some manner of mutability, to God’s second way of being. Such is the upshot of a perichoretic construal of the hypostatic union, whereby the divine not only interfuses the human nature, in light of which one can predicate divine attributes of Christ’s humanity, but also human attributes affect Christ’s divinity, which enables predication in the opposite direction. Barth obviously knows of this genus and its rejection by classical Lutheranism; he alludes slyly to the ‘malicious question’ (IV/2, p. 85) of the Reformed, as to how the reciprocatio only goes one way, effecting a divinization of the human but not a humanization of the divine. Intriguingly, Barth also writes that the ‘older Lutherans . . . were too careful (ängstlich)’ (IV/2, p. 78) on this front. This comment anticipates a more radical claim. Rejecting the idea that God ‘has no part in the suffering of Jesus Christ’, Barth writes: No, there is a particula veri in the teaching of the early Patripassians . . . it is God the Father who suffers in the offering and sending of His Son, 73

See here Marc Lienhard, Luther’s Witness to Jesus Christ: Stages and Themes of the Reformer’s Christology (trans. Edwin H. Robertson; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1982), pp. 335–46.

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in His abasement. The suffering is not His own, but the alien suffering of the creature, of man, which He takes to Himself in Him. But He does suffer it in the humiliation of His Son with a depth with which it never was or will be suffered by any man – apart from the One who is His Son. (IV/2, p. 357) Barth here makes explicit a consequence of his construal of election: given the elective event of self-determination, God’s ‘heart’ is affected by Christ’s suffering and death. How could God not be affected, given that God’s incarnational ‘becoming’, in the person of Christ, bears on God’s eternal and immanent being? Indeed, it is to Barth’s credit that he does not restrict suffering to God qua Son. While there is no perichoretic interpenetration of humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ, perichoresis does characterize the triune life of God, given that ‘the divine modes of being mutually condition and permeate one another’ (I/1, p. 370).74 If the (eternal) Son suffers as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, God as Father (and, by extension, God the Spirit) shares in this suffering. A certain (and limited) kind of patripassianism is a necessary consequence of Barth’s doctrine of election. The obvious question, then: why does Barth not endorse the genus tapeinoticum in his treatment of protestant orthodoxy? Why not make cross-denominational mischief, setting Luther against the Lutherans? An evasive answer, which depends on the assumption that IV/2 deals only with Christ’s humanity, obviously will not suffice. Barth does not apportion claims about Christ’s divinity and Christ’s humanity to separate part volumes. The first two instalments of Church Dogmatics IV may have different emphases, but they do not run on separate tracks: Barth offers crucial claims about Christ as the divine Son in IV/2 and crucial claims about Christ as a human being in IV/1. A better answer can be detailed, which discloses a little more about Barth’s Christology and anticipates additional comments in the next chapter. First, IV/1 has described Christ, as the divine Son, in a manner that renders the genus tapeinoticum irrelevant. Barth’s claims about intra-divine ‘humility’ and ‘obedience’, which are discussed at length in the next chapter and which describe the Son’s relationship with the Father, would not be clarified, but unhelpfully complicated, were this theologoumenon brought into play. Why? Well, given Barth’s insistence that Christ’s incarnate life constitutes the identity that God freely assigns to himself as Son, the genus tapeinoticum could suggest that God suffers ‘in light of’ – that is, as an unavoidable consequence of – the incarnation, thereby interposing exactly the gap between the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos that Barth seeks to close. It would ascribe adventitious change to God, given the incarnation, as opposed to focusing on the sovereign act of self-transformation upon which God decides. Yet for Barth, God qua Son is never not humanized; God qua Son 74

See also Jüngel, Being Is in Becoming, pp. 42–53.

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is never not the Christ who undergoes suffering. Rather, God’s decision to ‘become and be’ the Son in union with the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal content of God’s second way of being: the Chalcedonian adverbs indivise and inseperabiliter have been pushed back into the divine life. So while God suffers (among other things) because Christ suffers, God does not undergo transient change. The Son is eternally transformed by Jesus Christ: the contingent history of this individual, to put it somewhat paradoxically, supplies the unchanging content of God’s life qua Son. Second, recall again that the divine Son’s participation in human life has a different quality than that of Christ’s humanity in God. When Barth writes that ‘[t]he participation of His divine in His human essence is not the same as that of His human in His divine . . . The determination of His divine essence is to His human (zu . . . hin), and the determination of His human essence from (von . . . her) the divine’ (IV/2, p. 70), he alludes to this exact point. On the one hand, there is a sense in which God’s self-transformation has a radicality that exceeds anything associable with the assumed human essence. While God is not essentially changed by the incarnation, given Barth’s actualism (for the Son is eternally ‘becoming’ the concrete person of Jesus Christ – this event of self-transformation constitutes his immutable identity), the Son does take on an identity that he need not have, given that he assumes a human essence and lives out a life under the conditions of finitude. On the other hand, despite the radicality of God’s becoming, Barth does not relax the distinction between Christ’s divine and human essences – so much is signalled by the prepositional finessing of a determination that moves ‘from’ the divine ‘to’ Christ’s discrete humanity. And the corollary to Barth’s claim that Christ’s humanity does not undergo any essential alteration, by way of divinizing interpenetration, is that Christ’s human suffering remains his own – both in time and as God incorporates it into, and makes it integral to, God’s eternal life. While the divine Son suffers, in view of God’s self-determination, one must still distinguish, analytically and ontologically, Christ’s suffering as human suffering. The inconfuse and immutabiliter adverbs of Chalcedon apply. Accordingly, while Barth might sympathize with Jürgen Moltmann’s concern to define God’s triunity in Christic terms, and might find intriguing the suggestion of a ‘death in God’, even to the point at which God’s own life includes ‘the whole abyss of godforsakenness, absolute death and the nonGod’,75 he would caution against any flattened-out, non-dialectical absorption of suffering into the divine life. Just as there ought to be no ascription of direct identity between God qua Son and the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth – Moltmann’s (neo-Hegelianized) Lutheran move to equate the Son 75

Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 207 and 246.

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and Jesus without sufficient ontological differentiation ought to be resisted; and the ambiguous claim that, in light of God’s kenotic self-emptying, the ‘divine being must encompass the human being and vice versa’76 would certainly rankle with Barth – there must be no direct identification of divine and human suffering. God as Son may be Jesus Christ unreservedly, but the Son does not collapse his being into that of the elected human. The ontological complexity basic to Christ’s person simply does not allow of circumvention; Christ’s humanity ought never to be lost sight of. Barth’s disregard for the genus tapeinoticum, then, is emblematic of his enduring commitment to the ontological differentiation basic to Christ’s person. Even granted that God’s elective act draws the humanity of Christ into the divine life, this humanity retains, to the terribly bitter end, its ontological and agential distinction.77

Jesus Christ, the ‘königliche Mensch’ ‘Correspondence’: The form of Jesus’ life When engaging the finessed christological debates of protestant orthodoxy, Barth achieves a balance rare in twentieth-century theology: an appreciative yet critical conversation with the tradition that goes hand in hand with genuinely constructive work. By way of an imaginative manipulation of certain classical distinctions, he nuances and enhances the christological outlook launched in II/2. But it should not be thought that the technical discussions of §64.2 form the leading edge of Barth’s mature Christology. Barth does not wish to present himself as simply the inheritor of protestant scholasticism. His creative treatment of the communio naturarum, communicatio gratiarum, communicatio operationum and so on provides only background support for his own account of Christ’s humanity. To understand this account, a term prominent in Barth’s theological lexicon, elementally descriptive of Christ’s human agency, must now be set front and centre. This term, dominant throughout §64.3, is ‘correspondence’ (Entsprechung). Correspondence plays a negative and positive role in Barth’s Christology (and, by extension, in his broader account of human agency).78 Negatively, 76 77

Ibid., p. 205. For more on Barth and Moltmann, see the useful analyses of Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 112–23 and pp. 135–43. Note that Fiddes faults Barth for not fully affirming God’s suffering: he detects an ontological ‘reservation’ in Barth’s position, whereby the immanent life of God is kept apart from God’s economic activity and therefore left unaffected by God’s suffering in Christ. I disagree with this criticism. Whereas Fiddes detects in Barth a concern ‘to retain an untouched hinterland in the immanent being of God’ (p. 121), given statements about what God ‘could’ have chosen to do – namely, remain ‘satisfied’ in Godself – my analysis of Barth on election suggests there is no such ‘hinterland’ subsequent to Church Dogmatics II.

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it signals that divine action and human action ought not to be thought mutually exclusive. An acclamation of their ‘non-competitive concurrence’ can occur without worry.79 Indeed, because the New Testament conveys the actuality of such concurrence, the a posteriori theological task is to describe this event; a priori contestations of its possibility and/or plausibility can be ignored. Positively, Entsprechung suggests that Christ’s human activity goes hand in hand with Christ’s divine activity; that the act and being of the Son, rather than displacing human agency, enables its exercise. The anterior condition of Christ’s human agency is of course God’s prevenient action. But human action gains its creaturely distinction and integrity hereby: grace provokes not just ontological but also agential difference. One might even say that, as the word ‘determination’ (Bestimmung), beloved by Barth to describe God’s action vis-à-vis the individual, emphasizes the prevenient terminus a quo for Christ’s human agency (God’s prior ‘preparation’ and ‘shaping’ of Christ’s humanity), the word ‘correspondence’ specifies the end of the process, its terminus ad quem: Christ’s human enactment of the identity that God intends for him. On one level, Christ’s human essence is given a determination ‘from’ Christ’s divine essence, and corresponds itself perfectly to this determination. On another level, Christ as a ‘whole’ – that is, Christ as the Word become flesh and Christ as the flesh that the Word has become – corresponds himself to the command of the Father. On both counts, Christ’s human agency is active and ongoing. This construal of correspondence connects, more specifically, with Barth’s concern to remedy shortcomings inherent to the protestant theological tradition: a neglect of Christ’s humanity in scholastic texts, given an excessive interest in his divinity80 (something that, curiously, makes its presence felt as

78

79 80

This paragraph expresses a point of view consistent with recent work on Barth’s understanding of human agency, albeit with attention focused on Christ’s genuine human being and acting as the condition of possibility for genuine human being and acting. See Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, esp. pp. 185–224; Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation; idem, Barth’s Moral Theology; and Nimmo, Being in Action, esp. pp. 110–35. For an earlier and more wide-ranging discussion of ‘correspondence’ and the function of analogy in the Church Dogmatics, see Jüngel, ‘Die Möglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem Grunde der Analogie: eine Untersuchung zum Analogieverständnis Karl Barths’, in Barth-Studien, pp. 210–32. Also useful are Thiemann, Revelation and Theology, esp. pp. 92–111 and Tanner, God and Creation. Tanner, God and Creation, p. 152. Barth notes that the ‘evangelical record’ of Jesus’ life ‘was often neglected in older dogmatics’ (IV/2, p. 117), given that the orthodox were ‘preoccupied with the general and fundamental question of the Godhead and manhood of Jesus Christ. And in this question it was more interested in the former than the latter’ (IV/2, p. 156). Although this charge may not do justice to the commentary work of many sixteenth and seventeenth-century theologians, I suspect that it holds more than a grain of truth.

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late as Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre)81 and a neglect of Christ’s divinity in much liberal theology (which, under the pressure of research into the ‘historical Jesus’, strained to conceive of Christ’s humanity as coincident with Christ’s divinity). Barth seeks a via media between the two extremes. The claim that Jesus ‘as a human exists analogously to the mode of existence of God’, so that ‘his thinking and willing, his action and his attitude, happen in correspondence; in the creaturely world, they parallel the plan and the purpose, the work and the conduct of God’ (IV/2, p. 166 rev.) does not only commence a christological trajectory that moves beyond formulae garnered from the scholastic realm; it signals also Barth’s attempt to overcome the one-sidedness of his predecessors, liberal and orthodox alike. Of course, analysis must not rest with the bare contention that Christ’s humanity works seamlessly ‘alongside’, and in perfect union with, Christ’s divinity, or, more generally, be content with the bare claim that Christ as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’ responds constantly and perfectly to the command of God in God’s first way of being. So doing would hardly do justice to the scripturally textured content of Barth’s presentation; it would in fact disregard Barth’s concern to overcome both the christological shortfall of orthodoxy and the flatfootedness of liberal historicism by way of an intensive engagement with the narratives of the New Testament. Correspondence, one must say, functions only as a conceptual signpost that directs the reader to the doxological and moral density82 of Christ’s humanity and human agency. The christological remarks of IV/2, on this reckoning, do not aim to prove merely that Christ qua human acts with God; they aspire rather to show how he acts with God and what his so doing entails. Thus, often by way of excursive comments on synoptic pericopae, IV/2 describes the qualities that distinguish Jesus’ ‘kingship’, enabling thereby a deeper appreciation of his human contribution to the event of reconciliation. In order to make prominent the key features of this presentation, this section pairs up dogmatically basic affirmations about God’s reconciling being and action with 81

82

Thus the following Athanasian-sounding claims, modulated by Schleiermacher’s romanticist sensibilities: Jesus’ God-consciousness entailed a ‘domination . . . at each moment complete in the sense that nothing was ever able to find a place in the sensenature which did not instantly take its place as an instrument of the spirit’ and ‘the existence of God in the Redeemer is posited as the innermost fundamental power within Him, from which every activity proceeds . . . everything human (in Him) forms only the organism for this fundamental power’ (Christian Faith, pp. 383 and 397). I use these two terms – the former suggested to me by Michael Welker of RuprechtsKarl-Universität Heidelberg – in order to parallel Barth’s identification of ‘gratitude’ and ‘responsibility’ as keynotes of ‘true humanity’. The latter term, ‘moral’, aims to describe Jesus’ inhabitation of what John Webster names ‘“moral space” . . . a space defined by the action of God and the corresponding acts of God’s partners which God’s grace evokes’ (Barth’s Moral Theology, p. 115); it has a broader meaning than what is ethically correct.

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dogmatically basic affirmations about Jesus’ human being and action. The argument allows of concise summary: for Barth, correspondence means Christ’s active human iteration of God’s reconciling action in the context of finitude – an iteration that Christ performs humanly in coordination and unity with, and as, God qua Son, before the Father. In order to elaborate this argument, I access Barth’s presentation by way of four interrelated concepts: wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance. Before embarking on an analysis organized by way of these concepts, a difficult question, perhaps too long neglected, requires answer. Precisely how does one ascertain when Barth considers Christ’s human agency as such? The previous section demonstrated conclusively that Barth attributes two agential powers to Christ’s person. Yet the word Entsprechung makes it clear that Barth has no intention of relaxing his emphasis on Christ’s personal simplicity. The name ‘Jesus Christ’ refers not to two separable entities, one divine, the other human, but rather to the utterly simple divine-human person who corresponds himself to God. The agential complexity of Christ’s person, in fact, does not manifest a ‘causal joint’,83 in light of which one can easily differentiate human and divine operations. Barth’s prose provides ample proof of this point, flitting unselfconsciously between remarks about Christ’s divinity and Christ’s humanity in a way that disdains clear-cut ascriptions of agency. Barth mixes referents freely, insisting, for example, that ‘in fulfilment of the divine action and therefore in His passion Jesus Christ has acted for us as this new and obedient and free man. As the Son obedient to the Father – and therefore in the freedom which, like the freedom of God Himself, has the character of obedience – He has brought in the man who is the child of this God, this new and obedient and free man’ (IV/1, p. 258), and writing that the ‘act of God’ in Christ ‘coincides (zusammenfällt) with the free action . . . of a human’ (IV/1, p. 245 rev.). In such instances, Barth is not aiming to frustrate his readers by wilfully fudging the issue of ascription. Quite the opposite – his purpose is to illustrate the deep and thoroughgoing concurrence of divine and human activity definitive of Christ’s person; to signal that such depth and thoroughgoingness mean that Christ really does act singly; to underscore that Christ is one concrete person, not a confederation of human being and divine being. In doing this, he avoids a vulgar Nestorianism that presumes one might ‘pick out’ the operations of Christ’s divinity or humanity as one would an individual from a series. For were one able to isolate operations in such a fashion, one would suggest a twofoldness to Christ that imperils an affirmation of his being a simple person: the ‘electing God’ who is also the ‘elected human’, the one freely obedient human who is also the divine Son.

83

Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1967), p. 65 and passim.

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It does not follow, however, that Barth does not dogmatically discriminate and re-describe the operations associated respectively with Christ as ‘electing God’ and Christ as ‘elected human’. The analysis of the preceding chapters has provided ample proof that Barth does exactly this, albeit in a way that deferred any explication of how Barth achieves such discrimination and re-description. Given the analysis ahead, though, it is worthwhile to detail how Barth draws attention to Christ’s humanity as such. The key here is a particular noetic skill that Barth believes to be characteristic of Christian faith as it thinks dogmatically about Jesus Christ – a capacity to discern and identify meaningfully Christ’s agential complexity while also proclaiming Christ’s personal simplicity. While not explicitly considered by Barth at any one moment, this skill has at least three dimensions. Recall, first of all, Barth’s differentiation of the synoptics and the fourth gospel, outlined initially during a discussion of docetism and ebionitism in I/2. The synoptics focus on the (indirect) identity of the human, identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth, with the Son of God; John focuses on God qua Son in his (indirect) identity with Jesus qua human. The object in question remains constant; the angles of sight differ. This assumption about the New Testament witness endures throughout the Dogmatics. Accordingly, when Barth considers synoptic passages, as he does frequently in IV/2, he dwells more on Christ’s humanity than his divinity. His interest is in showing the (indirect) identity of the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth with the Son of God; this interest is signalled by explicit indications,84 subtle markers (‘the man Jesus’, a phrase reminiscent of 1 Tim. 2.5,85 is sometimes but not always telling) and by a range of framing devices – particularly the identification of attitudes and actions that are most comprehensibly associable with Christ’s humanity. On these occasions, Barth underscores the intra-Christic relating of the divine and human essences and, more generally, draws attention to Christ’s being the ‘elected human’ who lives out a life responsive to the command of the Father. Of course, the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth responds to God’s covenantal demand in ways that coincide perfectly with the operations of the divine Son. Neither essence is separable or independent of the other; both actively unite to effect the personal history of Jesus Christ. Yet each can be given particularized dogmatic attention, and a basic goal of Church Dogmatics IV/2 is to balance the Christology of IV/1, paying attention to Christ’s action as a human being. Second, the moments at which Barth considers Christ’s ‘confrontation’ with God typically signal attention to his humanity. In combating the alleged excess of the Lutheran unitive – or, more positively, in upholding a Reformed focus on the disjunctive basic to

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See, for example, IV/1, p. 156. The full verse: ‘For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2.5, KJV). Barth’s use of ‘the man Jesus’ also intimates Rom. 5.

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Christ’s person – and in emphasizing that Jesus Christ, while properly understood as the Son of God and the Son of Man, exists under the condition of finitude, Barth uses passages in the New Testament that describe Christ’s ‘confrontation’ with the Father to facilitate a ‘thick description’ of Christ’s humanity. The importance of this ‘confrontation’ will become clear in the following remarks; it will receive intensive consideration when the next chapter tackles Barth’s treatment of Gethsemane. Third and finally, Barth’s rhetoric has a form fitted to its christological content. Not only does Barth never suspend his commitment to the distinction of Christ’s divinity and humanity, but also the twists and turns of his prose illustrate consistently that ‘God’s omni-activity’ does not equal ‘God’s sole-activity’.86 A description of Christ’s humanity is rarely far from view in the Dogmatics; the challenge is to acknowledge, and then to keep pace with, the relentless dialecticism of Barth’s writing.

‘Correspondence’ as wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance To describe the Jesus Christ as wholehearted – a word that Barth himself does not often foreground, but which has precedent in Reformed thought87 and that been set to work in Harry Frankfurt’s discussions of human agency88 – emphasizes that Christ humanly commits to, and enacts unreservedly, a history iterative of God’s reconciliatory activity. Just as God determines Godself totally as an event of love and freedom, Christ possesses humanly an analogous purity and simplicity: he is never less or other than the human who lives in complete accord with God’s being and action. So, paralleling his eschewal of ontological ambiguity regarding God, Barth contends that Christ’s human existence is absent any manner of ambivalence regarding his purpose:89 ‘In His life . . . there is no place for the well known dualism of

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Migliore, ‘Participatio Christi’, p. 298. Think, for example, of Calvin’s claim that doctrine ‘ought to penetrate the inmost affections of the heart, take its seat in the soul, and affect the whole man a hundred times more deeply than the cold exhortations of the philosophers’ (Institutes, p. 688). One might read Jonathan Edwards’s use of ‘heart’ as a massive amplification of this claim. See here especially Harry G. Frankfurt’s ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, in The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 159–76 and ‘The Faintest Passion’, in Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 95–107. Frankfurt presents ambivalence as the opposite of wholeheartedness. In contrast to volitional resolution and contentment, it entails ‘conflicting volitional movements or tendencies’ (Necessity, Volition, and Love, p. 99) that prevent an individual achieving a determinate identity. This does not mean, however – and this point pertains to the treatment of Gethsemane in the next chapter – that an individual passes through life

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word and act, for the nervous tension between theory and practice’ (IV/3.1, p. 47). And clarity of identity goes hand in hand with clarity of action. Christ’s is a ‘life . . . offered up to God’ (IV/3.1, p. 380); he ‘does not will to be man without God, but only with Him . . . He does it with a Yes in which there is no hidden No’ (IV/3.1, p. 379). Christ wills to actualize and enact a single identity humanly – the individual identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth being the human assumed into unity with, and who exists as, God’s second way of being – just as the Son wills to actualize and enact a single identity divinely – the ‘person’ identifiable as Son being the divine way of being who assumes a human into union with himself and who exists as that human. Jüngel is quite right to say that the man Jesus lives in an unequivocally anhypostatic relation to God’s Word: ‘Only in the act of the Word of divine lordship does the man Jesus exist as a human. Without divine lordship, the humanity of Jesus would not receive independent existence; it would receive only non-being’.90 But Barth’s Christology demands also that one view the act of the man Jesus as coincident with the ‘act of the Word’. The man Jesus is not merely placed ‘utterly in the service of God’ (III/2, p. 64), though this is obviously the case; he also serves God, actively fulfilling the demands of the office assigned to him. It is helpful to distinguish three aspects of wholeheartedness, thereby highlighting in turn its cognitive, volitional and psychosomatic dimensions. First, Christ is thoroughly attentive to God’s will, living as the ‘perfect hearer of God . . . who knows God perfectly’ (IV/2, p. 409) given his active apprehension of the divine will. This attentiveness neither strays nor lapses, even though it takes different forms. Jesus devotes each and every moment of his life to discriminating – to ‘acknowledging’, more technically – the economic movement of God’s justifying and sanctifying grace, actualized in his person, under the command of the Father. The genre oddity of the Gospels in fact suggests as much. Since Jesus shows interest in nothing other than discerning and proclaiming the Gospel, so the evangelists disregard mundane

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without internal struggle. One cannot immunize oneself from environmental, interpersonal or spiritual conflict. Thus ‘the unity of a healthy will is compatible with certain kinds of virulent psychic conflict. Wholeheartedness does not require that a person be altogether untroubled by inner opposition to his will. It just requires that, with respect to any such conflict, he himself be fully resolved. This means that he must be resolutely on the side of the forces struggling within him and not on the side of any other. Concerning the opposition of these forces, he has to know where he himself stands’ (Ibid., p. 100). Eberhard Jüngel, Unterwegs zur Sache: Beiträge zur evangelischen Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1988), p. 136. Barth invites this construal of anhypostasis while not pursuing it himself, writing that Christ is ‘wholly and utterly the bearer of an office’, and that ‘we cannot detect a personality with its characteristic concerns and inclinations and affections independently of its work’ (III/2, pp. 56–7).

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biographical details (issues such as marital status, physical appearance, culinary tastes and so on simply do not pertain to this ‘character’).91 Second, Jesus’ wholeheartedness means that the entirety of his life manifests attention to God. His cognitive comportment is matched by an unparalleled ‘volitional unity’:92 the being and activity of this human are inseparable, integrated in an identity that enacts perfectly the history that God intends. So ‘His life-act was wholly His Word . . . it was also wholly His activity’ (IV/2, p. 209), and the ‘totality of His being . . . was identical with the totality of His activity’ (IV/2, p. 193).93 The most fundamental decision that Christ makes about himself as a human being, to elect God as God elects him (and, to double again, to elect himself as the human elected by God) resounds decisively across his whole life: intention, purpose, action and identity coincide.94 Third and finally, to reach back to the theologically and politically rich §46 of III/2, Jesus’ wholeheartedness entails an ordered correspondence to God. Jesus maintains, and thereby establishes, the proper comportment of the human as a psychosomatic unity: the soul superordinate, the body subordinate, together comprising a differentiated but integrated totality, a ‘significant and ordered economy’ (III/2, p. 351). The distortions that invariably characterize sinful humanity – an excessively cerebral posture that despises the body or an exaggerated corporality that neglects reflexive cognition – are overturned. To identify Jesus’ humanity as sovereign draws a parallel with God’s power of self-determination. God’s capacity to decide upon God’s identity has an analogue in Jesus’ human life as he freely intends and realizes the identity that he wills himself to have. Thus, when describing the superordination of human soul over human body in Christ in Church Dogmatics III/2, Barth appropriates Kantian rhetoric to describe the ‘autonomy’ that so fascinated and exercised Trutz Rendtorff and others, yet exchanges the theological register of autonomy, prominent in I/1, for a description that underscores Christ’s human act of self-constitution. Jesus . . . is his own principle. For him, the meaning, the plan, the intention, the logos of his life is thus not exterior and accidental. It is no foreign law to which he would bind himself, but which comes from elsewhere, that is established over him. Rather he is his own law (seine eigenes Gesetz) and he is subject to it in free obedience arising in himself and proceeding from himself. Jesus wills and fulfils himself. He is

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See here IV/2, pp. 165 and 210; also III/2, pp. 329–30. Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love, p. 102. On this point see also III/2, pp. 58–64. I borrow the language of ‘resonance’ and the connection between a decision and what is ‘decisive’ for a human from Frankfurt; see What We Care About, pp. 167–74.

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his own ground, his own intention. He lives in such a way that command and obedience, superordination and subordination, plan and execution, goal and intention, proceed from himself and thus partake of an equal inward necessity . . . He lives sovereignly. (III/2, p. 332 rev.) Interpretation must obviously tread carefully here. As with the ‘coactualization’ of the divine Son and the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth, considered in the previous section, any analogy between divine and human self-determination has its limits. Unlike God’s autonomy, Jesus’ is neither unconstrained nor unconditioned. It happens within the context of God’s prevenient advance; one must not conceive this human sovereignty in isolation from the determinative influence of God’s ‘sovereign grace’, realized directly in the presence and action of God qua Son. Yet the primacy of God’s elective activity does not cancel out the spontaneity of Jesus’ human volition; it simply demands that the theologian think ‘non-competitively’ (Tanner) about divine and human agency. Just as the divine Son realizes his identity in the context of finitude, so does the human whom the Son has become realize his identity in the context of finitude. Barth is frank: the agency of the ‘true human’ is an agency that ‘arises in himself’. Christ is seines eigenes Gesetz. God’s prevenient establishment and superintendence of human action are not only necessary prerequisites for, but also compatible with, this creature’s own self-moving autonomy. Or to put it a bit differently: while Jesus is obedient, Barth typically adds that he is freely obedient. As such, Jesus ‘shames’95 the comparatively slothful human, submerged and controlled by his or her environment. He alone constitutes the ‘full and direct witness’ of ‘divine sovereignty’ (IV/2, p. 161); he alone gives the title ku/rioj a meaning that surpasses honorific usage;96 he alone is unmistakably the ‘free human’, ‘subject’ only to a divine imperative that he decides to embrace, so that ‘not arbitrarily [or] under any outward compulsion or constraint, He came and went with absolute superiority, disposing and controlling, speaking or keeping silence, always exercising lordship’ (IV/2, p. 161). Sovereignty also means that Christ possesses an extraordinary ‘authority’, described frequently in the New Testament as an e0cousi/a sorely lacked by the religious elites of his day.97 Such authority certainly must not be conceived in terms of an exceptionally captivating presence. Nor is it to be construed, more precisely, along Weberian lines: while Jesus obviously does not exercise power by occupying an office defined according to ‘legal’ standards or relying on a ‘traditional’ mandate, Barth would also shrink from

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See here IV/2, pp. 384–97. See here IV/2, p. 162. ‘They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching – with authority!”’ (Mk 1.27).

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describing this authority as ‘charismatic’.98 A dogmatic appropriation of this sociological category could suggest that Jesus numbers among a series of awe-inspiring humans, perhaps championing a clutch of values vividly attractive to a particular stratum of society (as opposed to effecting an unNietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’ [IV/2, p. 169]); it would ignore, also, the fact that Christ’s e0cousi/a entails his corresponding his humanity to the disregard of God in the world, living as the humiliated and obedient Son.99 Authority means, rather, that the concrete command, summons and address of God to Christ qua human finds analogous expression in Jesus’ relationship with other humans. Just as God confronts Jesus, so too does Jesus confront other human beings, issuing the ‘call to discipleship’ (§66.3).100 He iterates God’s identity as Lord in the context of created time and space. Characteristic of Christ’s human authority is a collapse of the distinction between that to which he refers in speech and act and the reality of that same referent. Accordingly, just as God is the content of God’s own revelation (so I/1), so too is Christ humanly the content of his proclamation. As he actualizes himself as the human being who lives in unity with the Son of God (and by way of God’s eminenter Gnade, is the Son of God), Jesus does not just announce the Kingdom of God. Jesus lives the Kingdom, instantiating the future of divine and human togetherness that God intends. So Barth: It is decisively in this sense that the man Jesus is called the eu0aggelizo/menoj in the Gospels. The event of which He speaks, and His speaking of it, merge at bottom into the fact that as this One He is Himself the good thing, that which awakens joy, and that He speaks as its messenger and publisher (a1ggeloj) . . . eu0aggelion tou= qeou= is what Jesus proclaimed even in Rom. 1.1 and Mk 1.14, and there is no point in disputing whether this means the good news that speaks of God (objective

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See here Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich; 2 vols; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 212–45. Weber himself identifies Jesus as possessing charisma; see Economy and Society, p. 1114. This is not to suggest enmity between Barth and Weber or, more generally, to insinuate incompatibility between Barth’s theological stance and certain sociological perspectives. As noted previously, Barth happily appropriates from other disciplines in order to assist in the elucidation of faith. And he shows considerable sympathy for Weber’s still-controversial correlation of Calvinism and capitalism (see here, for example, II/2, p. 113 and IV/3, p. 28). Thus IV/2, p. 167: ‘As the exalted Son of Man He did not deny the humiliation of the Son of God, but faithfully represented and reflected it even to the minutest details . . . it pleased Him as man to exist in the same isolation, the same obscure and shameful corner, as was the lot of God in the world which had fallen away from him’. The next chapter might be read as an extended analysis of this claim. See here IV/2, pp. 546–53.

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genitive) or the good news that God Himself has spoken in the world (subjective genitive), for it obviously means both. (IV/2, p. 196–7)101 On these terms, Jesus’ sayings and acts, miraculous and otherwise, do not intimate an impending future reality. They constitute symptoms of the event as it takes place. They render the eschatological ‘at hand’ (that tricky verb, h!ggiken) a present reality. Yet if Christ as a human is genuinely the image of God, remarks about his sovereignty ought not to be overplayed. Just as God’s perfections must be analysed primarily in terms of love and secondarily in terms of freedom (thus II/1, §§29–31), Barth suggests that Christ’s humanity requires analogous construal: a being and activity defined principally and substantively as love, the condition of possibility for which is sovereign freedom. Or, to borrow from Christoph Schwöbel, if for God ‘freedom is the form of love, but love is the content, the body of freedom’, Christ humanly attests this objective fact with unparalleled clarity.102 His human history, sanctifying and justifying at every moment, never means a neutral exercise of autonomy; it always means a shaped movement of ‘positive freedom’ (IV/2, p. 226) that realizes, relays and affirms God’s love for humankind. So Barth: The decisive point . . . is that the kingly human, Jesus, reflects and represents the divine Yes to humanity and humanity’s cosmos . . . He reflects and represents the love with which God has loved, loves, and will love the world; the faithfulness that God has sworn and holds; the solidarity with it that God has entered into . . . The man Jesus is decisively ‘created after God’ in the fact that, as a human, he is the work and revelation of the mercy of God, God’s Gospel, God’s kingdom of peace, God’s reconciliation; that he is God’s creaturely, earthly, and historical correspondence in this sense. (IV/2, pp. 180–1 rev.) Living as the ‘Man for others’ (§45.1),103 Christ humanly subjoins himself to, and therefore makes manifest, God’s decision to be wholly pro nobis. He takes part in the conveyance of God’s identity as the ‘one who loves in

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This claim anticipates, of course, the description of Jesus’ prophetic office in IV/3. Thus Barth: ‘He [Jesus] does not need to look or point beyond Himself to attest the fulfilment of the covenant, the executed judgment, the realised promise, the present glory of God and salvation of men, the kingdom of God come to earth. In relation to all these things, He cannot abstract from Himself. The actualisation of His own life is coincident with them’ (IV/3.1, p. 51). Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Imago Libertatis: Human and Divine Freedom’, in Colin Gunton (ed.), God and Freedom (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 80 (emphasis removed). See especially III/2, pp. 208–16.

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freedom’; he participates in the realization of God’s eternal and gracious intention in a relational existence committed to human flourishing.104 Accordingly, no tension arises between Jesus’ being the ‘human for God’ and the ‘human for others’. Exactly because he repeats God’s loving identity and action, Jesus manifests humanly God’s gratuitous concern for each human, regardless of his or her merits (or lack thereof). He ‘lived wholly for God and therefore wholly for men, wholly for men because wholly for God’ (IV/4, p. 60). And this love manifests itself especially in terms of care for the marginalized and troubled. In enacting an identity coincident with the Son’s movement into the ‘far country’ (die Fremde) and representative of the human identity that God wills us to adopt, Christ humanly moves towards the ‘foreigner’, the wage slave, the scuffling misfit. He turns to ‘those with whom things are going badly; those in difficulty and affliction, fearful and distressed . . . those who are in every sense unfortunate’ (IV/2, p. 221 rev.), brought low by the destructive workings of das Nichtige. The covenant is established, at least in part, because Jesus lives out a life on these terms, conveying God’s demand that we turn constantly to ‘the least’. A human existence defined by love prompts Barth to employ, on occasion, the same figures used to conceptualize God’s identity in his description of Christ’s human activity. Thus in an excursus that considers, among other things, the story about the man born blind (Jn 9), Jesus acts as ‘the One who brought the free grace of God in its overflow (Überschub)’ (IV/2, p. 237).105 These figurative echoes indicate the full extent of the analogy Barth draws between Jesus’ humanity and God’s self-constitution as love. Christ exhibits what one might call an unprecautious eagerness to convey God’s love. Not unprecautious in the sense of anarchic or unthinking, but in the sense that he realizes humanly God’s ‘outgoingness and worldliness’,106 God’s overflowing and risky exuberance, in his concern for the other.107 Put more simply,

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The point is captured with characteristic accuracy by Jüngel. ‘In der Analogie ereignet sich die Weiderholung eines Seins, das selbst Ereignis und als Ereignis Relation ist. Das innere Sein Gottes nimmt nach auben in Jesu Menschlichkeit Gestalt an, so dab eine Analogie behauptet werden kann zwischen dem Wesen Gottes als Ereignis ewiger Liebe (in der Gott as Vater den Sohn, als Sohn den Vater liebt und als Vater vom Sohn, als Sohn aber vom Vater wiedergeliebt wird) und dem Werk Gottes, das in Jesu Christus die von Gott dem Menschen zugewendete Liebe ist, wie sie in der Menschlichkeit Jesu erkannt wird’ (Barth-Studien, p. 214). Thus also IV/2, p. 236, which describes the two blind men cured in Mt. 9.27–31 as recipients of an ‘overflow of this mercy’. Jüngel, Karl Barth, p. 132. It is for this reason that Jesus heals on the Sabbath, in express contravention of Pharasaic opinion. Thus Barth: ‘Can it really be the case that the cause in whose interests He made use of this freedom is a matter of indifference, the interesting thing in His attitude being simply transgression for the sake of transgression? If this seems highly improbable, we can only assume that what the tradition wishes to emphasize is that,

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Jesus shares and reveals the urgency of God’s desire for relationship with humankind. And since he will not settle for anything less than human flourishing, he iterates humanly the creativity of divine love, provoking agency in others, for God’s love ‘makes the human free to imitate God’s divine action in the sphere and within the limits of human action, and therefore to love humanly, as God loves divinely’ (IV/2, p. 778 rev.). His words therefore exhibit no hint of self-interestedness, veiled as cognitive reflection; his miracles entail no rehearsed or stereotypically curative technique. Both are purely expressive of an abundance of concern for the other: a concern that seeks and creates more agents who are able to love in freedom. But love means more than Jesus performing actions that tackle the ‘external’ conditions of suffering (blindness, disease and the like). Barth’s remarks on Mt. 9.36108 – ‘But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd’ (KJV)109 – illustrate how intensively he renders Jesus’ correspondence to God. Barth here establishes an analogy between God’s loving

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although He did not always heal on the sabbath, He did so deliberately and gladly because His own coming meant that the seventh and last day, the great day of Yahweh, had dawned, and the healing was the specific Word of God that He had come to accomplish on this day . . . it was a matter of defending His positive freedom on the sabbath . . . to set up the signs of the kingdom of God as the kingdom of healing and salvation’ (IV/2, p. 226). IV/2, pp. 184–7. Barth treats this verse earlier in the Dogmatics in a fashion that anticipates his later comments; see here III/2, p. 211. See also IV/3.2, p. 774. Barth’s rendering: ‘Matth. 9, 36, wo es heibt: “Da Jesus das Volk sah, erbarmte es ihn, denn sie waren abgequält und erschöpft (‘verschmachtet und zestreut’) wie Schafe, die keine Hirten haben”’. This largely follows Swiss precedents. The Zürich Bible reads: ‘Als er aber die Volksmenge sah, fühlte er Erbarmen mit ihnen; denn sie waren abgequält und erschöpft wie Schafe die keinen Hirten haben.’ The verb erbarmte is of course important for Barth: it recalls his discussion of God’s ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’ (Barmherzigkeit) in II/1. At the same time, there is a sideways glance to Luther’s translation, both in the construction of the initial clause and in the parenthetical words that Barth interpolates: ‘Und da er das Volk sah, jammerte ihn desselben; denn sie waren verschmachtet und zerstreut wie die Schafe, die keinen Hirten haben.’ Here the evocative verb, jammern, is used to translate e0splagxni/sqh: it carries the connotation of being sharply distressed or grieved. The text quoted above is from the King James Version, used in the English translation of the Dogmatics; it does a passable job with the original Greek verb. The RSV offers a terribly bland translation: ‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’. Luther’s translation and the Zürich Bible rendering can be viewed beside one another, along with the translations offered by Fritz Tillman and the New English Bible in Tetrapla 1964; Das Neue Testament in vier Übersetzungen: Martin Luther, Zürcher Bibel, Fritz Tillman, New English Bible (Stuttgart: Evangelischer Bibelwerk and Katholischer Bibelwerk, 1967), pp. 47–9.

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self-determination, in terms of the human other, and Jesus’ loving selfdetermination, as a human, in terms of the human other. The verse’s key term is the earthy aorist passive, e0splagxni/sqh: it indicates that Jesus was wholly absorbed by the suffering of his peers, so much that ‘it went right into his heart (in sein Herz), into himself, so that it was now entirely his misery’ (IV/2, p. 184 rev.). Jesus’ love is such that, in an action analogous to God’s incarnational self-determination – for God’s concern to be ‘with’ humanity is so radical that God draws humankind into God’s own eternal life – Jesus humanly identifies and enburdens himself with the suffering of those around him, drawing their travail into his being.110 Barth uses one of his most powerful metaphors to underscore this claim. Just as God’s ‘heart’ is touched and transformed (eternally) in face of the other, as God makes humanity, in Christ, integral to God’s being, so too is Christ’s ‘heart’ touched and transformed as he makes others – those sinful, awkward, suffering, miserable others – constitutive of his being. He decides upon an identity that meets the need of these others (and, ultimately, all others) as his own; he determines his own being in view of the calamity that besets the suffering mass in the most radical way imaginable. As if wary of letting the point slip by, Barth makes the connection explicit, using terminology prominently deployed in II/2: God’s gracious and merciful ‘self-giving’ (Hingabe) finds a correspondent act in Jesus’ own ‘self-giving’.111 His love is such that the disadvantage of these others requires nothing less than this most extreme act of ‘unity and solidarity’ (IV/2, p. 185),112 a decision to be the Shepherd and Servant who is genuinely ‘responsible for them’, who will ‘act solely on their behalf’ (IV/2, p. 186) sharing and rooting out affliction. Just as Jesus’ ‘work’ sanctifies in remedying the sloth that blights humanity (§65.2), then, so too does his vicarious compassion sanctify, absorbing and therefore relieving the ‘misery’ that assails humanity (§65.3). And, needless to say, the consequences that attend such sanctifying solidarity lie close at hand. Jesus’ self-giving is so extreme that the ‘misery of the common people that Jesus saw, which

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See also III/2, p. 212: ‘so the being of Jesus for His fellows really means much more. It means that He interposes Himself for them, that He gives Himself to them, that he puts Himself in their place, that He makes their state and fate His own cause, so that it is no longer theirs but His, conducted by Him in His own name and on His own responsibility.’ The full quote: ‘To the mercy of God which brings radical and total and definitive salvation, there now corresponded the help which Jesus brought to men by his radical and total and definitive self-giving to and for their cause. In this self-giving which aroused him in this qualified way to see human beings, he was on earth as God in heaven. In this self-giving he was the Kingdom of God come on earth’ (IV/2, p. 184 rev.). See here also IV/4, p. 58, which describes Jesus’ baptism as an act in which ‘He is committed unreservedly to solidarity with men’.

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moved him to compassion, which he took away from them and took to Himself’ (IV/2, p. 186 rev.) eventually overcomes him.113 Barth’s treatment of miracles expands this understanding of love. Initially, Barth’s rhetoric seems to echo his work in the late 1910s and early 1920s, insisting that Christ’s ‘acts of power (duna/meij) . . . done in a divine and unconditional freedom’ can only be deemed ‘absolutely sovereign, alien, incomprehensible, and transcendent in relations to all the orders, forms, and developments known to humanity’ (IV/2, p. 219 rev.). (The prepositional specification that these acts happen ‘in’ divine freedom, incidentally, is precise: by avoiding a term such as ‘by’, Barth upholds the coincidence of divine and human agency on a syntactical level. Why assume that God singly brings about the miraculous?). However, the krisis of Christ’s miracles is now not only tethered to an acclamation of divine sovereignty. Barth develops his perspective in a way that construes Christ’s power as set in service of Christ’s transformative love. Thus: It is therefore more than a maximal freedom . . . which, abstractly considered, might well be maximal evil, the power of the devil . . . [In] the miracles . . . what always takes place . . . is that in and with them a completely new and astonishing light – and in all its different manifestations the same light – was cast on the human situation. And in the strict sense it was simply this light, and its shining, and the radiance which it shed, that encountered men as the unconditional power of God in the miracles of Jesus. (IV/2, p. 220) In making this point, Barth shows a deliberate and refreshing disinterest in the Enlightenment-bound debate about the so-called plausibility of miracles, stretching as it does from Hume and Kant to the recent dialogue between theologians and scientists. At issue is not an unforeseeable contravention of regularities inherent to a causal nexus (the binds of which twentieth-century physics has, in any case, loosened). Thinking along such lines could in fact suggest that Jesus humanly issued decreta vis-à-vis the material world, manifesting power without love – a christological false move analogous to that challenged in Barth’s doctrine of God. Of all the ‘orders, forms, and developments’ disrupted by Christ’s miracles, the apposite common denominator is the fundamental fault of human existence – hostility to God’s love and grace. It is more proper to say that Jesus’ entire life has a miraculous character, in fact, that to fixate on discrete miracles. While his ‘acts of power’ constitute vivid symptoms of love, in the final analysis they are neither more nor less wondrous than any parable or saying.114 They are 113

Thus also Thiemann: ‘Jesus’ identification with sinners, his obedience to his mission, is so complete that he suffers their fate – God-forsakenness’ (Revelation and Theology, p. 128).

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simply arresting ‘signs’ (as the fourth gospel puts it) that betoken a new era in which divine action, in love and freedom, complemented by human action, strikes against a realm of dissipation and death. They attest, more positively, to a newly creative humanity oriented towards the other; they signal that human love, when spurred by and overarched by God’s capacitating grace, breaks through the corrupt status quo of egotistic limitation. Thus Christ’s loving creativity does more than ‘manipulate’ the created environment in unpredictable ways. It lifts humans into new ways of being, characterized by a new and vital temporality, analogous to that definitive of God’s own being: ‘Jesus does not first look at their past, and then their tragic present in the light of it. But from their present He creates for them a new future’ (IV/2, p. 223).115 Christ’s love, in other words, turns human beings into forwardlooking creatures – it creates for them a new eschatological sensibility. A loose connection with Ritschl’s description of Jesus as the ‘kingly prophet’116

114

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For an example of the miraculousness of Jesus’ sayings, think of Jn 8.1–11. When a woman charged with marital infidelity is brought before Jesus by a group of zealous scholars, Jesus refuses to sanction faultfinding and condemnation. He instead plays with the sand. When pressed, he changes the tack of the conversation, asking who among the accusers is sufficiently faultless to begin the process of stoning the woman. At this point, a kind of collective exorcism takes place, and a sexist and punitive lynch-mob mentality is driven from the scholars. They are gradually relieved of their eagerness to stone the woman (or, at least, humiliate her in the eyes of another prestigious male teacher). When they have all gone away, and the threat of violence has abated, Jesus then turns his attention to the woman himself. He does not condemn her sin, but, as Barth says, ‘goes right past sin, beyond it and through it’ (IV/2, p. 225). He abjures the entire judgemental process that catches human beings in an endless cycle of strike and counterstrike. He simply tells the woman that she is not to be bound to her (possibly) dubious past; that she is free. Now what could be more miraculous than this turn of events? That there is no suspension or alteration of the ‘laws of nature’ surely should not disqualify our marvelling. Jesus in fact does something more breathtaking than alter material reality. He breaks into and annuls the typical mode of human conduct, which aims (in particular) to connect male gain with female loss and (in general) to perpetuate an interminable sequence of violence and punishment. And he does so simply in light of the powerful motive of love, wishing only to cure both accuser and accused of their wrongdoing. Jüngel makes a similar point: ‘Der Zeitbezug der Gottesherrschaft ist so zu verstehen, dab die Gottesherrschaft sich in unserer Zeit ihre Zeit zeitigt’ (Unterwegs zur Sache, p. 131). Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, p. 447. That a connection can be drawn between Barth and Ritschl in the context of IV/2 is unsurprising. As Claude Welch has indicated, Ritschl’s Christology requires that ‘ideas of [Christ’s] justifying and reconciling work . . . be translated from legal categories into concepts appropriate to moral fellowship. The kingly or royal office, rather than the prophetic or priestly, becomes dominant’. See Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century; Vol. 2, 1870–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 21.

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obtains here, albeit with a broader compass than Ritschl’s revamped Kantian moralism would allow and with a shift from justification to Barth’s understanding of sanctification: Christ lives ‘autonomously’ as the first citizen in the coming-yet-present Kingdom of God, his reconciliatory love enabling and tasking humans to act lovingly, faithfully exercising the ‘unconditional and unlimited capacity’ that God lends to ‘God’s partners’ (IV/2, p. 242). The final element of Barth’s construal of Christ’s correspondence to God has now come into view: the life of the royal human has concretely transformative consequences. It is not only a sanctified existence; it is materially and spiritually sanctifying existence. It is a way of acting and being that challenges human involvement with sin and death and engenders the participation of women and men in the Kingdom of God. Christ’s human activity, undertaken and realized in obedience to the address of the Father, spells, in a word, deliverance for his fellows. Deliverance has negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, Jesus ‘reveals the Nevertheless of the Creator who is superior to chaos’ (IV/2, p. 167) because he enacts ‘defiance (Schutz und Trutz) against the force of destruction which enslaves humanity, of fqora/ in all its forms’ (IV/2, p. 232 rev.). A striking illustration of this defiance comes with Barth’s comments regarding the raisings of Jairus’s daughter (Mk 5.21–4, 35–43 and parallels) and Lazarus (Jn 11.1–44). With regard to the little girl, Barth draws out the significance of Jesus’ sharp rebuke to, and then dismissal of, the mourners. Why this harshness? He stood before the cult of death which all, in solemn sentimentality, reckoned an unshakeable fact and therefore an instance of highest majesty, a self-evident command of reason and good custom. Jesus said ‘No’ to this majesty and ‘No’ to this command. ‘The child is not dead, but rather she is sleeping’. And then, ‘Talitha kumi . . . Child, I say to you, arise!’ Therefore: the reality of the almighty God in his mercy, set against the manifest reality of death! Which will prove as the greater, the true reality? Jesus alone sees this decision. He himself stands in it; he carries it out (vollzieht sie). His solitary No to death in the power of his solitary Yes to the almighty mercy of God is the sense of his harshness in the house of death. In that he enters this house, death can and should not remain! (IV/2, p. 227 rev., my emphases) Granted the weight of custom, granted the apparently inviolable dictates of reason, granted even the unspeakably unsettling and tragic fact of an infant’s corpse, Jesus’ ‘harshness’ has a purpose. The physical event of death may not be fetishized, idolatrously worked up into an ultimate reality. Such a valuation of death distracts from God’s more basic decision about life. For death is only properly viewed in light of that which God has rejected and disdained for all eternity, namely those forces of destruction that imperil God’s 166

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salvific identity and action. Cognizant, then, of the true order of things – standing ‘in’ the time and space of God’s own decision – Jesus offers a startling illustration of God’s eternal rejecting in the context of human existence. His intolerance for a perverse interest in the end of finite existence occasions an iteration of God’s prior self-differentiation (for life, against death) and God’s covenantal favour towards humankind (giving life, against death). He shows that ‘chaos has no message of its own, nothing to say in its own cause’ (IV/2, p. 231) when pitted against the objective fact of God’s loving determination of reality. And he does so somewhat ironically, thereby underscoring the superfluity and exuberance of God’s love: even as the fetishization of death is undercut and overturned, still the family receives anew their little girl. Such ‘harshness’ does not mean that Jesus suspends solidarity with those who suffer. Quite the opposite: his tears over Lazarus’s demise show the full extent of his comradeship with the downtrodden: ‘Jesus does not fight against sad and sorrowing men, but stands in solidarity at their side’ (IV/2, p. 227 rev.). And this solidarity is exactly what spurs Jesus’ repudiation of misplaced sorrow. As suggested by the treatment of Mt. 9.36, the man Jesus is always drawing human despondency into his own being in order that he might show a human overcoming of such despondence – in order that he might forge a humanity that shares the concretely transformative ‘No!’ that God speaks. His solidarity with those who suffer forms a starting point that is always overcome by the transformative love of God, understood now as a covenantal act. In raising Lazarus as he did Jairus’s daughter, Jesus overcomes death with life. ‘Arise!’ (Mk 5.41) and ‘come out!’ (Jn 11.43) together form ‘the word, spoken at once in the present and the future, as indicative and imperative, that Jesus flings into the sphere of death’ (IV/2, p. 227 rev.). The positive side of deliverance complements Jesus’ demonstrative repudiation of suffering, sorrow and despair. Deliverance means that Jesus’ love makes a genuine difference to those with whom he comes into contact. This difference amounts to more than the bare fact of individuals brought back to life, a collection of healings, exorcisms, reinvigorated eschatological hopes and so forth. It also means more than socio-political change, the reconfiguration of cultural life or moral upbuilding (though it may include such things). It means that Christ establishes a new way of being human; that his actions alter fundamentally the mode of existence for those whom he loves. Thus Jesus not only ‘brought the free grace of God in its overflow as physical healing’, but also there are those who ‘received this overflow’ (IV/2, p. 237). Since God’s overflow is a gracious act, productive of ontological and volitional difference, Christ’s action ensures that this event does not terminate in his person. The gratitude and responsibility characteristic of his human existence spread outwards, enabling others to live in accord with God’s loving hopes for creation. Again: Christ humanly realizes God’s intention, even as he is God’s action by dint of his being the divine Son; his human 167

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activity completes the work of divine love by rendering it covenantal. David Demson is right to argue that the ‘appointment, calling, and commission’ of the disciples is integral to Jesus’ identity.117 This local event points to a broader claim: God does not wish to be the only one who loves in freedom! Jesus’ life of deliverance enables and presses each and every human to take up an existence in correspondence to God. At one point Barth deploys martial metaphors to describe the positive aspects of deliverance. Immediately prior to remarks about Jesus’ ‘defiance of the force of destruction’, he describes Jesus’ miracles as ‘military actions (Kampfhandlungen) . . . in the service of God, as accomplishments of His own work . . . as declarations of His will and essence, as manifestations of . . . His kingdom’ (IV/2, p. 232). This claim connects Barth’s presentation with Calvin’s description of Christ’s kingship as a defence for the churched Christian (Christ ‘arms and equips us with his power in spiritual battle’).118 However, contra Calvin, Barth strikes neither a spiritual nor an ecclesiastical note (the ‘church militant’) at this juncture. Barth’s fundamental point is that Christ’s person and work, Christ’s history, enables faith. Not faith in the bland terms of right belief, piety or ecclesial allegiance, but faith in the sense that the human is granted a ‘completely new freedom’ (IV/2, p. 244) that lives off the capital of God’s rejection of death and the conveyance of divine love. Deliverance therefore entails a liberating empowerment subsequent to, and otherwise than, any kind of battle. Christ’s life as the flesh that the Word has become in fact grounds a new noetic and praxealogical capacity, bequeathed to each and all: to ‘think rightly and desire rightly, wait rightly and hasten rightly, obey rightly and defy rightly, begin rightly and end rightly, be with and for men and by themselves rightly . . . [in] the freedom for which God Himself has freed them’ (IV/2, p. 242). Christ inaugurates, more specifically, the space of God’s Kingdom – a space that envelops all of humankind and that Christians are privileged to know and inhabit purposefully. To draw a connection with Ritschl once again: deliverance, as the prior ‘gift’ of Jesus’ life, inaugurates and makes possible the Christian ‘task’ – thinking and acting as those who belong to the community of the elect. The Christian is not only given new time by Christ; she is also given a new realm to inhabit. Is there a way to summarize these four themes? Without wishing to abridge Barth’s perspective with a single overarching conceptuality, one could certainly employ here the word freedom (Freiheit) – the culminating figure of Barth’s discussion of the ‘real human’ in III/2 (§44). Wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance parse this term; they elucidate the content of 117

118

Thus David E. Demson, Hans Frei and Karl Barth: Different Ways of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). While Demson’s focus differs from mine, there seems to be considerable overlap in the way we read Barth’s Christology. Calvin, Institutes, p. 499.

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Jesus’ perfect correspondence to God. On this reckoning, the human freedom of Christ obviously does not mean a neutral choice between extant options. It means rather an actively loving comportment that realizes God’s intentions. However, and in keeping with my earlier analysis, one might also say that, as the one true human, Jesus rewards the patience that God extends him. He occupies and fills perfectly the space allotted: God’s provocation of human agency is met with a human activity perfectly responsive to God’s command for fellowship. As such, §64 does not only show that Christ countermands the invariable lapse of each human into sloth, exercising a human life within the context of God’s covenant. It signals also that the ‘risk’ that God takes, in overflowing in this way – indeed, overflowing in a way that has consequences for God’s eternal being – proves worth taking. Jesus does not disappoint; he does not try God’s patience. As God’s patience ‘awaits’ the human response of Jesus of Nazareth – really so, even granted the assumption of this instance of human being by the divine Son and even granted that Christ’s life is superintended by the Son – this response is originally and perfectly offered in ways that fulfil God’s desire to live in true fellowship with humankind and that exemplify what it means to live with, and for, one’s fellows.

Agency and freedom – Jesus and revolution Agency It seems useful, at this point, to assess the preceding analysis from a slightly different angle. Reprising a fairly common worry about Barth’s Christology is a good way to begin. Even granted claims ventured in the preceding section, is it really the case that Barth balances his understanding of the divine determination of Christ’s life with an affirmation of Christ’s self-moving and spontaneous human activity? Or does God’s determination of Christ’s humanity, a determination actualized primarily by the Word who constitutes the subject of Christ’s person, devolve into a determinism that vitiates Barth’s affirmation of Christ’s humanity and human agency?119 A good deal rides this question. If Barth fails at this point, not only his Christology suffers; problematized at root is his entire understanding of the covenantal relationship between God and humanity. For without a robust description of Christ’s human acting, Barth’s multifaceted discussion of Christian existence and human existence in general, commenced in earnest in the second half of II/2 and elaborated throughout Church Dogmatics III and IV, lacks for adequate grounding. And if Barth obfuscates at this point (not a lesser offence, in dogmatic terms), the situation improves not a whit. Barth has then asserted 119

Barth would not approve this wording of the question; see his remarks on Calvin, Zwingli and Luther (IV/2, pp. 494–6). The question is valid nevertheless.

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confidence in a key tenet of Christian faith – viz., the reality of Christ’s human being and acting – without providing a cogent account of the understanding that accompanies it. Thus far, I have highlighted dimensions of the Church Dogmatics that suggest Barth recognizes and gives a sound explication of the agential integrity of Christ as a human being. The affirmations of dyothelitism in I/2; the treatment of Christ as ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’ in II/2; the development of sophisticated anthropological categories in III/2; the import of the communicatio idiomatum, communio naturarum, communicatio gratiarum and communicatio operationum; and the elaboration of ‘correspondence’ in IV/2 all point towards a coherent affirmation of Christ’s genuine human acting. While Christ is the divine Son, he is not only this. He is also the human elected by God, who elects God in return; he is also the human who obeys God’s loving command gratefully, responsibly and freely. Accordingly, when Barth writes about the ‘divine Yes echoed by the royal man Jesus’ (IV/2, p. 180), this echo should not be construed as an involuntary reflex or as an automatic consequence of God’s action – akin, say, to a voice echoing in an empty cave. Christ’s ‘echo’ is a human act, even as it is also a divine act; it is a ‘speaking after’, a response to God’s prevenient advance which, while enabled by that advance, has its own ontological and agential integrity. In a very basic sense, correspondence means answering. It means human freedom – an event constituted by (a) an act of genuine human spontaneity and (b) the consequent exercise of agency that is (c) directed by, sustained by and performative of God’s loving intention. An obvious concern, though, is whether Barth manages consistently to keep in play these constituents of human freedom or whether, at crucial moments, the balance fails, and God’s action is so dominant as to render talk of human agency meaningless. A particularly sensitive moment arises with respect to Jesus’ sinlessness. Barth’s treatment of this sinlessness in fact provides a good test case for ascertaining whether, in the thick of intensive christological inquiry, Barth sustains his affirmation of Christ’s genuine human agency. Consider the following statement: ‘Because and as he was human only as the Son of God, [sinfulness] was excluded from the choice of his acts. Given this origin of his being he was unable to choose it. Therefore he did not choose it. And he did not do it’ (IV/2, p. 93 rev.). ‘Excluded’? ‘Unable’? Such words seem quite problematic: they appear to suggest a toooppressive determination of Jesus’ humanity. Bestimmung looks here less like a ‘shaping’ of Jesus’ humanity, more like God’s consigning him to an existence that makes talk of his human and elective choice, complementary to and coincident with God’s elective choice, ring hollow. Does Barth’s Christology stumble at a crucial moment, then? Might the charge that Barth fails to give a robust account of Jesus’ humanity have validity after all? I think not, but this judgement merits a more precise defence than has been provided thus far. 170

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First, note that for Barth an ‘excluded’ possibility, even an ‘impossiblepossibility’, is not necessarily unrealizable for the human creature. While strong affirmations of God’s sovereign governance of the universe make creaturely insubordination vis-à-vis the divine will unthinkable (‘where is the creature which ever does anything different or differently from that which the will of God has ordained for it?’ [III/3, p. 189]), sinful human actions give the unthinkable concrete reality. Although the theologian may be noetically confounded by sin – obliged, in fact, to acknowledge a genuine aporia in her thought, analogous to that conceded by Kant in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason120 – noetic inexplicability does not annul her awareness of sin’s actuality. Indeed, Christ’s defiance and passion make the Christian directly aware of the (pseudo)reality of das Nichtige, a chaotic force concretized and rendered real by human activity. Mutatis mutandis, the claim that Christ ‘could not sin’ does not mean that God renders Christ’s human will immutable by way of divine fiat. The hypothetical impossibility of Christ’s sinfulness is not incompatible with its factual concretization. Even granted that Christ is the human personally indwelled and defined by the Son, even granted that the Christian knows, in faith, Christ to be sinless, one cannot foreclose the possibility that this human might, inexplicably, have abjured God’s love and acted sinfully. Christ might be deemed sinless, but he cannot be deemed impeccable – at least when impeccability is understood as a state unilaterally imposed on him by God. Second, when considering Barth’s description of Jesus’ sinlessness, it is important to think more carefully than is customary about the nature of human agency. The principal issue is whether ‘volitional inability’ – that is to say, hypothetically plausible courses of action that, for all intents and purposes, prove truly unavailable to an individual – counts as a possible property of the human agent. Now volitional inability means something different than that which a human being, under dint of his or her own unassisted power, could not conceivably achieve in a given situation (eating a 120

See here Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in Religion and Rational Theology (ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 69–97. Kant admits frankly that evil cannot be encompassed or comprehended by reason in its practical mode. In face of the moral law – and notice the language here, which plays on protestant rhetoric about grace – ‘which imposes itself on [the human] irresistibly’ (p. 82), no account of the human’s forfeiture of freedom and consequent wrongdoing will be forthcoming. The ‘propensity to evil’ therefore ‘remains inexplicable’, having ‘no conceivable ground’ (p. 88). Barth’s construal of das Nichtige is a fascinating dogmatic transposition of this claim, expanded out into both the ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ registers of thought. In face of God’s irresistible grace, which imposes itself on human beings through Christ, the dogmatician can find no ground for wrongdoing. Just as Kant was baffled by evil in his ‘rational theology’, so too is Christian thought undone when faced with the absurdity of human sin.

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billion bars of chocolate, for example). Volitional inability refers rather to conceivable courses of action that a particular human person would never intend or chose to carry out and therefore, his or her identity remaining constant, never could carry out – even granted that a different person would not be so constrained. While an affirmation of human inability, based on the limited capacities reasonably attributable to a man or woman seems philosophically and theologically respectable, if not a bit trivial, talk of volitional inability in this more specific sense seems more questionable. For surely ‘free will’ implies unrestricted options for conduct? Well, I would say not. Obviously, human conduct is conditioned and constrained by contingent circumstances. On one level, these circumstances are specific to the psychosomatic unity definitive of an individual person: physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual factors (the list could be endless) are relevant here. On another level, individuals are shaped by a range of environmental conditions: the place and time in which they are born and the manner of their upbringing being of especial significance. Accordingly, no matter what I wish, it is not only that I will never be able to eat a billion chocolate bars (an act in excess of the powers possessable by a human); I also will not wake up tomorrow fluent in Welsh and prone to making remarkable discoveries in the field of nuclear physics (acts in excess of the environmental factors shaping my person). Less obviously, another register of volitional inability has pertinence for Barth’s construal of Jesus’ sinlessness. Certain decisions that humans make, concurrent with their psychosomatic particularities and environmental conditions, delimit the range of actions possible for them to undertake. Typically, each human decides upon certain courses of action that, given that these decisions and actions recur and consolidate over time, configure human personality in highly specific ways. ‘Self-determination’ in this sense, does not refer only to the liberty to undertake various courses of action but also to the fact that one shapes one’s own self according to one’s own decisions. It is of course true that the knot comprised by what is psychosomatically given, environmentally imposed and volitionally structured into an individual cannot be easily unpicked. It would be impossible, not to mention perverse, to claim that a parent loves his or her children (a) because that is what a parent is biologically inclined to do, or (b) because that is what society expects or (c) because that is a course of action upon which the parent has decided. But the difficulties that beset an analysis of any given situation do not undermine my point: individual, environmental and self-imposed volitional factors have a hand in qualifying and defining a human’s character. Harry Frankfurt’s work is especially instructive with regard to the selfconstituting power of human decision. He argues persuasively that human decisions may be productive of ‘volitional necessity’.121 On this reckoning, certain configurations of the self prove abidingly definitive of identity.

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Subsequent to a coherent set of self-constituting decisions – decisions to love or care about this or that, for example – a person can, for all intents and purposes, do nothing other than act, or not act, in a certain way. Her freedom is circumscribed by the bounds of an identity that she has had a hand in establishing. So Frankfurt: About certain things that are important to him, a person may care so much, or in such a way, that he is subject to a kind of necessity. Because of this necessity, various courses of action that he would otherwise be able to pursue are effectively unavailable to him. It is impossible for him to pursue them. He may well possess the knowledge and skill required for performing the actions in question; nonetheless, he is unable to perform them. The reason is that he cannot bring himself to do so. It is not that he cannot muster the necessary power. What he cannot do is muster the will. He is held in the grip of a volitional necessity that renders certain actions impossible for him – not by depriving him of the capacity to perform them but by making it impossible for him to use that capacity.122 Frankfurt’s point is that the unyielding refusal to carry out a course of action – or, more positively, a compulsion, to use the word in a non-pejorative sense, to act only in this or that way – need not necessarily represent a distortion or curtailment of an individual’s freedom of choice. It might rather make manifest prior a self-constituting decision (or, more likely, a series of qualitatively similar decisions). To use one of Frankfurt’s own examples: when Martin Luther said, ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’, this steadfastness was a result of volitional inability, or ‘volitional necessity’, expressing itself in an entrenched resolution to ‘hold the line’ no matter what.123 One can of course hypothesize alternate reasons for Luther’s resolve. One might point to Luther’s education and position in the culture of his time, apply psychological paradigms, or simply suspect a temperament inclined to pigheaded obstinacy. But these candidate explanations, while legitimate and plausible, do not exclude the possibility that Luther imposed limits upon himself. One can reasonably suppose that Luther’s individuality is expressed and defined by such volitional inability, and that this inability – an unstinting disavowal of certain courses of action – represents a consequence of prior decisions that he made elementally formative for his person. Such inability marks Luther as the person who he was; it is an aspect of the fundamental identifiability

121 122 123

See here Frankfurt, What We Care About, esp. pp. 80–94 and 177–90. Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love, p. 111. Ibid., p. 80.

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of his person; it indicates how ‘the character of [this] person’s will constitutes what he most centrally is’.124 Obviously Frankfurt’s line of reasoning does not fit easily with Barth’s Christology. Frankfurt’s implicitly materialist frame of reference needs jettisoning; Barth’s understanding of God’s prevenient advance, concretized particularly in the action of the Son, must govern an interpretative appropriation of this philosophical resource. And Frankfurt’s tacitly Jamesian sense of habituated thought and action125 sits awkwardly with Barth’s actualism: although the line between habituation and self-constitution might be hard to draw, Barth insists that Jesus’ self-constituting decisions are ongoing throughout his life, not the consequence of cultivated habits. This means that his reflexive self-constitution, while perhaps bound in some way to past exercises of agency, remains a definitively present event. Or as Barth puts it, since Jesus has ‘chosen God and God alone . . . the practice of His life is an analogy of this choice, and thus consists in an actual series of choices and decisions which faithfully correspond to this choice of God’ (IV/3.1, p. 380). Nevertheless, some of Frankfurt’s key moves admit of illuminating transposition. In terms of Christ’s human ‘individuality’ and attendant ‘environmental’ factors, there is the basic fact of God’s elective grace. God produces and shapes Jesus’ humanity as enhypostatic to the Word; God confronts and determines this human, petitioning him to exist as the human united to, inseparable from and existing as, the divine Word. At no point, then, is Christ asked to be other than the human that the Word has become. At the same time, Christ humanly wills to correspond and unite his human being and action with that of the divine Son. He self-constitutes in a particular way that ‘rules in’ certain courses of action and ‘rules out’ other courses. Because Jesus humanly decides, wholeheartedly, to be who he is, because he is ‘so satisfied to be in [the] grip’ of God’s love, sinfulness ‘is not a genuine option’.126 Because Jesus humanly decides upon and enacts an identity that is nothing other than sinless, that is utterly for God’s reconciliatory project, so he is sinless, the ‘Man for God’ and the ‘Man for others’ (§§44.1 and 45.1). Certainly, his human willing happens in way that is logically subsequent to and, from an external point of view, utterly indistinguishable from his prevenient determination to be the ‘elected human’ who is also the ‘electing God’. Jesus’ sinlessness has as its condition of possibility God’s incarnational action. But his human decision and action happens nonetheless. To say that

124 125

126

Ibid., p. 114. See especially William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, in Writings 1878–1899 (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1992), pp. 137–51. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 49.

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the man Jesus ‘could not sin’ identifies, for Barth, a way of being and acting that is divinely and humanly actualized. Thus Barth: [T]he sinlessness of Jesus was not a condition of His being as man, but the human act of His life working itself out in this way from its origin. And on this aspect, too, the determination of His human essence by the grace of God does not consist in the fact that there is added to Him the remarkable quality that He could not sin as a man, but in His effective determination from His origin for this act in which, participant in our sinful essence, He did not will to sin and did not sin. As a determination for this act it is, of course, His absolutely effective determination. [But] He accomplished it, He did not sin, because from this origin He lived as a man in this true human freedom – the freedom for obedience – not knowing or having any other freedom. The One who lived as a man in this harmony with the divine will, this service of the divine act, this correspondence with the divine grace, this thankfulness had no place for sinful action. (IV/2, pp. 92–3, my emphases) Barth, then, balances Jesus’ sovereign ‘grace of origin’ – what might loosely be deemed the overriding ‘environmental’ factor that bears upon his life, provocative of sinless conduct – with a human realization of sinlessness. Berthold Köber is right to view Christ’s sinlessness as a function of his being the obedient Son of God. As ‘true God, he cannot rebel against himself and set himself in contradiction’.127 But one must neither disregard nor underplay Christ’s human affirmation of, actualization of, and contribution to the sinlessness definitive of his person. Doing so risks the monoenergism that Barth wants to challenge; it misses the crucial claim that while Christ qua human does not possess a self-actuated hypostatic personality (a nonessential property of human being) he does possess and exercise agency (an essential property of human being) and that this exercise of agency comprises a necessary constituent of his sinless existence. Christ humanly applies the decision for sinlessness throughout his life. This decision forms an elemental part of the history that he enacts, in gratitude and responsibility – and sometimes in struggle – in correspondence to God. To say that Christ ‘could not sin’ is to say that, within the time and space of God’s prevenient action, Christ humanly imposes sinlessness upon himself. Once one considers Barth’s approach to Christ’s sinlessness in this way (and this is my third point), sinlessness no longer appears as a deductive claim, consequential upon the Son’s overbearing and coercive superintendence of the humanity he assumes. Instead, the sentences noted at the start 127

Berthold W. Köber, Sündlosigkeit und Menschein Jesu Christi. Ihr Verständis und ihr Zusammenhang in der protestantischen Theologie der Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), p. 27.

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of this subsection, replete with seemingly problematic claims about Christ’s ‘inability’ to sin, provide an a posteriori description, derivative and reflective of the particular history that Christ humanly undertakes. Barth’s ascription of sinlessness follows from an awareness that Christ humanly achieves a life exclusive of sinfulness; that the narratives of his life, witnessed in the Gospels, tell of an identity in which the temptation to be other than the human assumed by God qua Son is constantly overcome. Jesus Christ really could have been other than he was. Because of his humanity, Christ had the capacity to think of, be tempted by and even to carry out a set of actions incommensurate with the identity proposed to him; the ‘impossible-possibility’ of sin means that that which is logically and ontologically excluded by God does not disable this human’s ability to stray.128 ‘Could not sin’ designates, then, both that Jesus was ‘constrained’ by God’s elective grace and that he enacted, humanly, an intention to correspond to, act upon and complete God’s determination of his being. Determination does not lapse into determinism; Jesus’ sinlessness and the freedom of self-constitution are compatible. To give Barth the last word: Jesus’ ‘sinlessness was therefore not his condition, but rather the act of his being in which he fought off temptation in his condition, which is ours, in the flesh’ (IV/1, pp. 258–9 rev.).

Jesus and revolution The next chapter will expand and complicate these comments, given Barth’s suggestion that justification includes Christ’s uptake of the commission to live ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom. 8.3) since God ‘made him to be sin’ (2 Cor. 5.21). However, before turning to such matters, an excursus in IV/2 that describes ‘the pronouncedly revolutionary character of [Christ’s] relationship to the orders of life and value current in the world’ (IV/2, p. 171)129 128

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Thomas Tracy makes a comparable point: ‘if God intends that there be finite free agents, then there will be a further constraint upon the uses of God’s power: God’s enactment of his purposes for the agent’s life will respect the creature’s purposes for himself. God’s acts will introduce elements into the orienting conditions of human action that (a) we must take into account as we formulate our projects, and that thereby (b) affect the direction of action by shaping the range of possibilities that we confront. But insofar as we are free, this contribution to the processes by which we recognise and choose among projects will not causally necessitate a particular outcome in action . . . how God’s influence upon us enters into our actions is something that we will have at least some power to determine in those of our actions that are free’ (‘Narrative Theology and the Acts of God’, in Brian Hebblethwaite and Edward Henderson (eds), Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), p. 193). By extension, one might say that the (impossible) possibility of Jesus resisting God’s superintendence – a (impossible) possibility that attends the non-coercive character of grace – is the condition of possibility for human sin. Such is the risk that God takes in seeking covenantal relationship. IV/2, pp. 173–9.

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raises questions about the political register of Barth’s Christology. Another interpretative interlude is therefore appropriate. It need hardly be said that there are innumerable ways to access ‘Barth’s politics’. One point of departure is historical context. With respect to IV/2, one might consider European society and culture subsequent to the Second World War; one might also consider how this somewhat neglected part volume has related to movements for political liberation in the latter half of the twentieth century.130 I want to offer a more text-focused perspective, though, using two options for reading IV/2 as a staging post for the articulation of some broader claims. One option focuses on the connection that Barth adverts between Christology, Christian discipleship and the pursuit of social justice. It takes Barth’s affirmation of the ‘pronouncedly revolutionary character of [Christ’s] relationship to the orders of life and value current in the world’ (IV/2, p. 171) to signal a need for Christ-focused political action. The other option acknowledges frankly that large swathes of IV/2 show little sustained interest in political matters. On this reckoning, while Barth himself involved himself vigorously in politics before, during and after the Second World War, IV/2 and the Dogmatics as a whole do not really aspire to engender new forms of political action. Beginning with the first option: on the one hand, Barth indicates clearly that the repudiation and transformation of oppressive socio-economic structures is integral to Christ’s life of deliverance. In defying the chaotic effects of das Nichtige as it infiltrates and corrupts society and culture, the life of this ‘incomparable revolutionary’ (IV/2, p. 179) can be read as an ostensibly leftist Urtext for social, political and cultural critique.131 Jesus questions religious custom, the family structure, the economic order and political institutions, and lives as a ‘partisan of the poor’ (IV/2, p. 180). At the same time, God’s act, realized definitively in the person of Jesus Christ, is an ‘invading kingdom’ (IV/2, p. 177) with concrete political consequences. The implication? Just as the Christian ought to conform her thought to God’s self-revelation in Christ, so ought she to pattern her conduct on Christ’s transformative life. On the other hand, Barth’s reluctance to push a christological agenda for action can hardly be ignored. While ‘encroachment’ functioned as a conspicuous and politically charged motif in §26 (for a very different kind of encroachment was jeopardizing millions of lives in 1940, when II/1 was 130

131

On this last point see, for example, Dirkie Smit, ‘Paradigms of Radical Grace’, in Charles Villa-Vicencio (ed.), On Reading Barth in South Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), pp. 17–42. See here also IV/2, pp. 546–53. This excursus parallels that in §64, describing how Jesus’ ‘revolutionary’ life was played out in the radical demand that the disciples abandon worldly goods, forget rank and status, forsake the use of force, relativize worldly attachments and dispense with religion and piety.

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published), in IV/2 Barth tucks away many claims about Jesus’ potentially liberative attitudes towards the family, economic behaviour and so on in an exegetical excursus that counterbalances ‘revolution’ with ‘passive conservatism’ (IV/2, p. 173). Even though the former term ultimately predominates, this excursus does not add much, in the final analysis, to the paragraph as a whole. And Barth certainly downplays the question of whether Jesus’ life is paradigmatic for Christian discipleship. There is no return to the outspokenness of ‘Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice’,132 even granted that Barth has discarded the Herrmannian style of theologizing that mediated (and tempered) his Safenwil socialism. As with many other volumes, IV/2 eschews explicit political comment, even while Barth does not discourage his readers from drawing political inferences. Deriving a political meaning directly from Barth’s Christology in particular, or the text in general, therefore requires a hermeneutical strategy that feeds on scraps, hints and insinuations – and by virtue of this mode of survival, is prey to critical questioning regarding its validity. Where does this leave the interpreter? Well, the key is to view this tension in the text as productive, as opposed to a problematic. It does not reflect ivory-tower ambivalence about the ‘real world’ on Barth’s part; it does not mark an unwillingness to engage in political comment after the subsiding of the Nazi threat. It bespeaks rather an attempt to rethink the way in which systematic theology, and more particularly Christology, engages political matters. While this issue will receive further attention in my final chapter, I want here to make three points that deal, respectively, with the political character of the rhetoric of the Dogmatics; the concrete teleology of Barth’s writing (or, more simply, how Barth envisages the relationship between text and reader); and, finally, the doctrinal location of Barth’s political claims. First, and most generally, one must discard the facile presumption that theological writing must ‘sound political’ in order to be political. Barth’s preference for an indirect mode of communication became evident in the 1930s, most vividly in ‘Theological Existence Today!’ and the Barmen Declaration. This idiom avoids overt comment – such is patent with the claim that one must keep doing theology ‘as though nothing had happened’133 – but only for the purpose of intensifying the political position promoted, the radicality of which outpaces conventional modes of expression. This intensification and outpacing does not, I hasten to add, make Barth’s politics impossibly elusive.134 Though Barth works ‘without direct references’,135 his politics always happens between the lines of the text, awaiting the recognition of the reader. The task is to follow Barth’s dogmatic reasoning to the point at which

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Karl Barth, ‘Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice’, in Karl Barth and Radical Politics, pp. 19–45. Karl Barth, ‘Theologische Existenz heute!’, Zwischen den Zeiten, suppl. 2 (1933), p. 3.

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a new construal of the political – or, to borrow a useful phrase from the postMarxist discourse of radical democracy,136 a new ‘political imaginary’ – comes into focus. 134

135 136

Church Dogmatics I/2, which was of course written in the context of the rise of National Socialism, provides a striking example of this point. Direct mentions of Nazism are rare. But always close at hand is an utterly uncompromising condemnation of each and every aspect of Nazi ideology and a fierce challenge to those Christians who might be drawn to, or involved in, fascist activity. First, and most obviously, Barth insists on the irreducible autonomy of revelation as God’s act. Revelation can therefore never be possessed by any church, whether it be protestant, ‘neo-protestant’, Roman Catholic or, most appositely, an ecclesiastical mockery, governed by a Reichsbishof such as Ludwig Müller. Second, against those deutsche Christen who wished to rewrite the Bible, voiding much (if not all) of the Old Testament and ‘adjusting’ the ‘problematic’ parts of the New, Barth insists that the Hebrew scriptures witness God’s Word. ‘We cannot eliminate the Old Testament or substitute for it the records of the early religious history of other peoples [as has been suggested by] many recent fools in the case of Germany’ (I/2, p. 488); the Bible, as a ‘witness of divine revelation is in its humanity a product of the Israelitish, or to put it more clearly, the Jewish Spirit’ (I/2, p. 510). All such revisionist efforts amount, in fact, to a disavowal of Christ. ‘Once we have raised even our little finger in Anti-Semitism, we can produce such vital and profound reasons in favour of it, and they will apply equally well to the Bible, not only to the Old but also to the New Testament, not only to the Rabbi Paul but also to the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth’ (I/2, p. 511). Third, there is the ethical perspective of §18 (‘The Life of the Children of God’). In the context of heightened militarism on all sides, Barth forwards the revolutionary suggestion that each human being is a ‘sign’ of Jesus Christ. Thus: ‘Our fellow-man becomes to us the compassionate neighbour because he is seen in the reflection of the sign which gives to the great sign of the Church, in all its meaning for humanity generally, its origin, basis, and stability, in the reflection of the human nature of Jesus Christ’ (I/2, p. 424). And: ‘we must . . . be prepared and ready for the fact that man, our fellow-man generally, can become our neighbour, even where we do not think we see anything of the Church, i.e., in his humanity he can remind us of the humanity of the Son of God and show mercy upon us by summoning us in that way to the praise of God’ (I/2, p. 425). The implication is obvious. To do violence against another is not merely a violation of ‘human rights’ (although it is of course that). It is an attack on God. And hereby it is violence against the humanity of, and the humanity enclosed in and exalted by, Jesus Christ. Fourth and finally, there is an intensive treatment of Luther in this part volume. Notice especially the quotation from Luther ‘In Place of a Foreword’, in which Luther asks that Christ might ‘sustain His little flock [and] comfort and strengthen it, that it may be firm and steadfast against all the crafts and assaults of Satan and this wicked world’ and hopes that ‘there be an end of this murderous pricking and biting of the heel, of horrible poisonous serpents’ (I/2, p. xi). There should be no mistaking Barth’s purposes in beginning I/2 in this way. He here protests the manipulation of Luther’s prestige, used as a means of deutsche Christen accreditation. So far as Barth is concerned, Luther provides no support to National Socialism. He is its antithesis. Barth, ‘Theologische Existenz heute!’, p. 3. See here, of course, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2nd edn, 2001).

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It can hardly be denied that this rhetorical strategy has its share of shortcomings. It might well be that a rhetoric of indirection was better suited to the 1930s than, say, the 1950s: absent an ostensible political threat comparable to Nazism, it becomes easy for readers to defang or sequester political claims (e.g., in terms of discussions about the relationship between ‘church and state’) or simply ignore them (as happened, for the most part, in the Anglo-American construction of neo-orthodoxy). Nevertheless, Barth maintains, with a degree of success, this earlier rhetorical strategy throughout the Dogmatics. The lack of direct participation in the worldly discourse of politics does not bespeak quietism. Rather, it aims to offer an alternative commentary on the world and thereby engender a political mindset which, being different from the multiple party platforms that jostle for supremacy, lays a more serious claim on each individual than she might realize. What this alternative political commentary lacks in explicit and exclamatory grandstanding, it makes up in terms of a powerful undercurrent that one can avoid but that one cannot ultimately suppress. (Oliver O’Donovan is astute in describing Barth’s ‘own political theology as a magnificent, but incomplete, beckoning movement’; I would add that the ‘incompleteness’ of such beckoning need not be viewed as a failing, given that it lends the politics of the Dogmatics a distinctive kind of power.)137 By extension, while Barth’s remarks on Jesus’ ‘revolutionary’ character are important, one ought not to expect them to carry much political weight. They are in fact an untypically direct set of statements that function only to remind the reader that the political dimension of Barth’s work remains vital. They only make sense when nested within the broader political programme of the Dogmatics. My second point: Barth’s indirect rhetoric hopes to engender direct action. Assuming the validity of my analysis of Jesus’ human life as wholehearted, sovereign, loving and effective of deliverance, notice that this description entails a movement that begins ‘internal’ to Christ himself and resolves itself in the transformation of the ‘external’ world. What I earlier called the provocation of agency launches a progression that passes from wholeheartedness, to concrete action carried out in sovereign love, and finally to deliverance as material change. This christological progression is paralleled more generally in the movement of each part volume of the doctrine of reconciliation and points towards the kind of Christian existence that Barth commends – humanity being ‘set in motion from its very centre by the act of the Subject who exists here’ (IV/2, p. 29). Beginning with Christ, God’s grace, fired and broadened by the guidance and presence of the Holy Spirit, stimulates the reconciled (but still sinful) human to move out from her faltering and false existence, to involve herself in the ongoing event of the church and to engage actively the affairs of the ‘world’. On this reckoning, the basis of ‘Barth’s 137

Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 286.

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politics’ is that the Christian, called and commissioned by Christ, will conform herself not only to the noetic but also to the praxealogical dynamic of grace and will do so inside and outside the church. To borrow (a little unfairly) from George Lindbeck, it is not enough to say that the ‘scriptural world’ will, or at least should, ‘absorb the universe’138 of the Christian in community, even though Barth would find such a claim persuasive. God requires also a performance of a new world by the Christian – a full-blooded participation in the covenantal partnership that God has enabled; an inhabitation of the new time and space of God’s kingdom. A good illustration of these claims is §64.4. Headed up by the pregnant title, ‘The Direction (Weisung) of the Son’, the conclusion to ‘The Exaltation of the Son of Man’ makes good on the suggestive remarks of §58 (‘The Doctrine of Reconciliation (Survey)’),139 insisting on the integration of christological reflection, pneumatological reflection and the activity of saintly discipleship. The concluding remarks of the main text are, to put it mildly, highly suggestive. As instruction (Unterweisung) the direction (Weisung) of the Holy Spirit says from Yes and Forward! . . . It awakens and calls the human – with authority, precision, and sovereignty – to the application, to the act of freedom in Jesus, to good work that wants in unqualified obedience to Jesus to be done here and now. My work, because and in that ‘I am not mine own, but rather belong to my faithful savior Jesus Christ’. Such is the glorious positive element of the Spirit’s instruction, which distinguishes itself from all fanciful self-instruction because it shows itself to be the instruction of the living Jesus himself, because it clearly awakens and summons us to participation (Teilnahme) in his exaltation. (IV/2, p. 374 rev.) This fascinating passage, which switches between the third person singular, first person singular and first person plural in order to underscore the relevance of the Spirit’s ‘instruction’ to all that live ‘in Christ’, bears out my point. Christ’s work is not best viewed as a template for action that is situated in the past. By dint of an economic operation appropriable to the Holy Spirit, Christ lives as a present event who urges constantly the realization of God’s future. Alongside suggestions of Barth’s later discussion of vocation in IV/3.2, the christologically freighted term, Teilnahme, has now been broadened in order to describe and demand Christian action – a conjoining of oneself to the economic movement of the Spirit of Christ, a human implementation of God’s covenantal call for love in freedom. And though this

138 139

Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 117. See here especially IV/1, pp. 108–22.

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movement is inseparable from Christ’s own ‘revolutionary’ existence and therefore inclines in specific ways (for Barth, ‘practically socialist’, if not ideologically or scientifically so),140 it cannot be equated with any particular political programme. While political ideologies depend on suppositions immanent to, and confined by, the imagination of the world, the gracious activity of Christ and his Spirit seeks human praxis correspondent to God’s objective economic action. It asks the human to apply the ‘new capacity’ (IV/2, p. 244) of freedom, grounded in faith. On this reckoning, the political import of Barth’s Christology does not rely on a flattened out version of the imitatio Christi, with Christ’s life operating as a paradigm for social justice in the present day.141 Rather, it commends the task of inhabiting and realizing a future enabled by Christ’s sanctifying existence and the work of the Spirit. The filioque, one might say, has been transformed from a point of trinitarian doctrine into a starting point for theological ethics: the Spirit draws the Christian ‘back’ to the Son and enlivens Christian action on behalf of the Son with the Father. Or, to make the point a little more lyrically: if Jesus is the human with whom God is originally patient, and the human who originally rewards God’s patience; if God does not have to suffer Jesus’ refusal to coordinate his life with grace, because Jesus does not try God’s patience but acts as the covenant partner that God wills to have; if Jesus lives as the ‘firstborn of creation’, overcoming the laziness that afflicts all other human beings, seizing and enacting the identity that God assigns him, then the Christian task of discipleship means rewarding again God’s patience, honouring Christ by living vitally in him, under the direction of the Spirit, in covenantal relationship with God. The sin to be fought against, in the church and in the world – especially in the political sphere – is sloth. The ideal of Christian life is to participate in the work of the Spirit, thereby honouring Christ’s existence as wholehearted, sovereign, loving and productive of deliverance with its continued enactment. At issue must not be the tired and disturbingly unreflective question as to what Jesus might do, but the imperative of Christian existence in the time and space opened up and animated by God’s second and third ways of being. But care needs to be exercised at this point. Were this the sum total of Barth’s perspective, its political import would remain somewhat indistinct. Unhooking Christian political existence from a fixed ideological mooring does not answer precisely the question of what kind of future the Christian is called to participate in. The exact application of wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance remains vague; an all-too-comfortable brand 140

141

William Werpehowski, ‘Karl Barth and Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, p. 236. Barth can be perfunctory in his opposition to some construals of the imitatio; see, for example, IV/2, pp. 533–4.

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of bourgeois moderation threatens, susceptible to takeover by ineffectually reformist political programmes. To dispel this indistinction (and this is my third point), Barth orients his political thought less in terms of Christ’s life and more in terms of his death. Thus the connection between Christology and political action finds but a secondary (though certainly indispensable) expression in Barth’s description of Christ’s ‘revolutionary’ and sanctifying life. The primary dogmatic location for considering Christian discipleship in its political aspect is the doctrine of justification, which takes its bearings from the biblical descriptions of Christ’s passion. This means that Barth’s understanding of the punishment that Christ undergoes for the sake of a sinful world provides the principal clarification regarding the type of life to which the Christian is called. This life enacts a manner of human being, of human freedom, in which acts of judgement, punishment and coerced sacrifice have an a priori invalidity; in which evil is never privileged with meaningful ontological standing (i.e., ‘named’ as an extant reality, in terms of individuals or organizations); in which the basic imperative of Christian ethics is ‘Be what you are!’ (IV/2, p. 364 rev.) – an agent empowered to live as God’s covenant partner in exuberant love and freedom.

Exaltation and exinanition The aim of this chapter has been to investigate critically Barth’s presentation of Christ’s human agency as it develops beyond the foundation established in Church Dogmatics II/2. To this end, I focused on IV/2, albeit with forays into other part volumes. Initially, I demonstrated that Barth’s engagement with protestant scholasticism enabled him to nuance and enhance his christological perspective. Barth’s constructive uptake of various technical theologoumena helped him to affirm and describe Christ’s humanity in radically agential terms – an act of gratitude and responsibility or, more simply, an act of freedom. This act of freedom happens ‘within’ the unio hypostatica as Christ’s divine essence and human essence together instantiate the simple person of Christ. And this act of freedom happens in terms of Christ as a simple person, the divine-human who, before the Father, disposes himself as the ‘electing God’ and the ‘elected human’. The upshot is that Barth’s integration of the doctrines of election, incarnation, covenant and reconciliation gains further depth and precision. I then showed that Barth’s analysis does not trade primarily in scholastic distinctions but rather depends on his own, rather more idiosyncratic, terminology. The crucial term here is correspondence. In terms of Christ’s humanity, correspondence functions as a shorthand description for a human existence at once wholehearted, sovereign, loving and productive of deliverance – an existence which iterates God’s eternal identity in terms of a human history. This analysis, in turn, 183

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enabled a closer consideration of Barth’s understanding of Christ’s human agency and spurred some reflections on the political import of his Christology. The role played by the christological statement of IV/2 now stands in plain view. Christ accomplishes, divinely and humanly, the sanctification and resanctification of human existence. Christ’s life sanctifies because his existence in correspondence with God sets each and every human in covenantal partnership with God; Christ’s life re-sanctifies, because his existence countermands the damaging effects of sin, specifically in terms of the invariable lapse of all humans into sloth and misery. As a consequence, no matter the efforts of each human to live sinfully, each remains determined by the wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance that Christ has made basic to his or her being. In a life wholly defined by the being and action of the divine Son, yet for this very reason genuinely human, Jesus of Nazareth refashions humanity from the inside. So Barth: Jesus lives. He lives as the Doer of this act of the free and victorious human will breaking the circle of sinful human action and being, the will of the new man, the holy man introduced by God in His person, the man who is free for Him and for us. As such, He lives for us. And in Him we also live as men of the same free will, as those who break through that circle, who overcome and conquer our misery, as free men. In Him the mercy of God which limits our misery is really present as the gift of freedom – our own freedom. (IV/2, p. 493) None of this means, of course, that humans do not continually realize the impossible-possibility of sin. We clearly do. It means rather that relative to the ontological definition of humanity accomplished in and by Christ, our sinful life never achieves the standing of a truly meaningful reality, endorsed and upheld by the love of God.142 Yet this analysis needs to be expanded. Sanctification constitutes but one ‘moment’ in the total event of reconciliation. The other moment is justification, the doctrinal locus that Barth pairs with his discussion of Christ’s exinanition. Whatever his misgivings about protestant orthodoxy’s inattention to Christ’s humanity, he will not risk the soteriological exemplarism of nineteenth-century Vorbildschristologie, which, at its most extreme (that is, Harnackian) pitch almost emptied the cross of dogmatic significance. Crucifixion is the event towards which Jesus’ kingship moves; it marks the moment in which Christ’s ‘being and work, His history and existence, are completed’ (IV/2, p. 142).143 Granted, Barth avoids being overly reactive. 142

Thus also IV/4, p. 21: ‘if [Christ] acts extra nos pro nobis, and to that extent also in nobis, this necessarily implies that in spite of the unfaithfulness of every man He creates in the history of every man the beginning of his new history, the history of a man who has become faithful to God’.

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He avoids making justification crudely superordinate to sanctification; he affirms the dogmatic necessity of presenting this pairing as a dialectical unity. He wants to affirm a ‘double grace’ (Duplex gratia), and does so by developing a christological perspective that sounds the two notes of Christ’s reconciling act separately (IV/1 and IV/2) and simultaneously (IV/3).144 But this caveat should not distract from a more fundamental claim, viz., that it is because of Christ’s substitutionary death that his sanctifying ministry has permanent bearing on humankind; that it is because of a ‘divine self-humiliation . . . that there also takes place the exaltation of the human’.145 The next chapter therefore considers Barth’s Christology in light of the doctrine of justification. It examines Barth’s understanding of Christ as the one who embraces the ignoble death of a criminal, an outcast, an insurgent. In particular, my interpretation returns to themes and issues outlined in the second half of Chapter 2. Given God’s act of eternal self-differentiation – that is, God’s decision to constitute himself as one who loves humankind and not otherwise – Christ’s life as the first covenant partner of God requires him to ‘repeat’ this event of divine self-differentiation. Just as God rejects sin and death in Godself and in God’s creation, so too must Christ humanly reject sin and death. Indeed, in the preceding treatment of Christ’s ministry, an important dimension of such ‘rejecting’ has come into view: the harsh dismissal of mourners lamenting the demise of Jairus’s daughter shows Jesus’ impatience with the fetishization of death. Yet the doctrine of justification also requires that rejection be viewed in another way. In order to halt the progress of death, Christ must bear God’s rejection of humanity’s hostility towards God in his own person. He himself must be rejected; he must be the person in whom God’s ‘No’ to wrongdoing is expressed. Specifically, Christ overcomes sin not only with ‘defiance’ but ‘by not refusing to accomplish the humiliation of the Son of God to become a sinful creature’ and with a willingness ‘to repent as such . . . to suffer and die as a criminal (Verbrecher) among criminals’ (IV/2, p. 92 rev.), thereby ‘following and completing’ God’s passion ‘as a human death and passion’ (IV/2, p. 116). 143

144

145

Thiemann makes the point precisely with respect to Matthew’s gospel: ‘as Jesus acts and suffers in his passion and crucifixion he is also most clearly identified’ – indeed, conclusively identified – ‘as the unique Son of God who obediently enacts the intentions of his Father’ (Theology and Revelation, p. 115). What Hunsinger names the ‘Chalcedonian pattern’ structures Barth’s discussion of justification and sanctification. The pair must be ‘distinguished, but they cannot be divided or separated’ (IV/2, p. 505; more generally, pp. 501–11). See also Hunsinger’s essay, ‘A Tale of Two Simultaneities: Justification and Sanctification in Calvin and Barth’, ZdTh 18.3 (2002), pp. 316–38. Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Justitia Aliena: Karl Barth in Conversation with the Evangelical Doctrine of Imputed Righteousness’, in Bruce L. McCormack (ed.), Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), p. 183.

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This heartbreaking end for Christ’s life in fact means that his history entails a reversal of the lively upward movement of self-transcendence, whereby the creature is lifted out of herself and into joyful companionship with God. Because Christ ‘faithfully represented and reflected to the last’ (IV/2, p. 167 rev.) the humiliation required of him, he leads himself into death as God-abandonment, crucifying himself even as he is crucified. He constitutes his humanity in terms of a willingness to die in the strongest sense of the word, suffering God’s annihilating rejection in Golgotha and thereby ensuring the covenantal fulfilment of God’s reconciliatory project. If Christ is the ‘light of the world’, as the fourth gospel claims – and Barth of course makes this figure basic to Church Dogmatics IV/3 – he is so as one who travels towards ‘a true and final darkness . . . which even He Himself could not see through directly, but which had to be traversed like a tunnel’ (IV/2, p. 251).

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4 ‘obedience unto death’: achieving the salvation of the world

Jesus Christ . . . took upon himself all humanity’s sin, suffering as his death the death all had incurred, in that he offered himself, freely and willingly, as the sacrifice that must take place when God justly sets Godself against humanity; in that he wills to suffer the wrath of God, this burning of God’s love, in his own soul, in his own body. (IV/1, pp. 94–5 rev.) Christ of his own accord . . . paid, on behalf of sinners, a debt he did not owe . . . he gave his life, so precious; no, his very self; he gave his person – think of it – in all its greatness, in an act of his own, supremely great, volition.1 In his general intention to enact, in obedience to God, the good of men on their behalf, and at the crucial juncture in his specific resolve to do so if necessary in this terrifying way – and in the event in which this intention and resolve were enacted – Jesus was most of all himself in the description of the Gospels. This was his identity. He was what he did and underwent: the crucified human savior.2 . . . if his heart broke, his soul never did, nor his will.3

In considering the final act in the drama of reconciliation, this chapter complements the ‘Abelardian’ tone of the previous with an ‘Anselmian’ counterpoint.4 My focus is Jesus’ path to a justificatory death, which Barth describes primarily in Church Dogmatics IV/1 (1953), particularly in §59. 1 2 3

4

Anselm, Why God Became Man, p. 349. Hans Frei, Theology and Narrative, p. 57. P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Independent Press, 1961), p. 66. I use these distinctions loosely. The so-called objective and subjective emphases were not mutually exclusive for medieval authors; see here Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian

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I turn first to the category of history (Geschichte), prominently positioned as the gateway to §59. A consideration of this category enables a review of interpretative contentions ventured thus far, positions Barth in the context of modern western thought and points to the narratival dimensions of his Christology. The chapter’s second section inspects the conceptual rubric basic to §59: obedience (Gehorsam). On one level, Barth presents obedience as an intra-triune event associated with God’s second way of being. So doing helps him to strengthen the connection between the doctrines of Trinity and election, with Gehorsam describing the Son’s active application of divine love. On another level, obedience describes an elemental quality of Jesus’ human comportment, thereby fortifying Barth’s description of reconciliation as an act carried by the ‘electing God’ and by the ‘elected human’. Against Schleiermacher’s claim that Christ did not think ‘his death was necessary as an essential part of redemption’,5 Barth embraces and expands the portrayal of Christ’s human action offered in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. The loving and justificatory end that God posits and actualizes as Son – enburdening himself with the weight and consequence of sin, so as to disburden humankind of the same – is exactly the end that Christ humanly posits and obediently actualizes for himself. Is this death ‘necessary’? Absolutely, for only in this way is humanity’s involvement with the horrors of das Nichtige truly undermined. The chapter’s third section examines §59’s excursus on Gethsemane. My initial decision to pay close attention to Barth’s exegesis of New Testament texts here receives conclusive validation. Foregrounded in this excursus is Jesus humanly committing to the end that God requires of him. To use phraseology favoured by Hans Frei, whose own Christology is a worthy descendant of this section of §59: Gethsemane constitutes a pivotal moment of Jesus’ history in which he enacts the final truth of his identity.

History With the opening lines of §59, Barth indicates that the word history (Geschichte) frames his understanding of the justification achieved by Christ and, more generally, holds significance for the entire doctrine of

5

Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine; Vol. 3, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 106–57 and Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Power in the Blood: Sacrifice, Satisfaction, and Substitution in Late Medieval Soteriology’, in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 177–204. Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus, p. 385.

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reconciliation. The suggestive stirrings of II/2 have been worked up into a foundational claim. Thus: The atonement (Versöhnung) is history. Whoever wants to know it, must know it as such. Whoever wants to think of it, must think of it as such. Whoever wants to speak of it, must recount it as history. Whoever wants to try to grasp it as supra-historical – which is to say, ahistorical truth – is quite unable to grasp it. It is indeed truth, but truth that happens in a history and in this history as such is revealed . . . The atonement is the most particular history of God with humanity, the most particular history of humanity with God. (IV/1, p. 157 rev.) Barth here invokes a highly contested category, the connotations of which, to name only some prominent options, stretch from the speculative (Hegel) to the political (Marx), to the historical-critical (‘quests for the historical Jesus’), to the ecclesiastical (Loisy). Barth’s purpose is twofold: on the one hand, to contest previous construals; on the other, to lend the term new significances, directly supportive of his theological interests. He is able to pursue this bold strategy because Church Dogmatics II and III have already intimated meanings for Geschichte alternative to those forwarded by major thinkers in the modern West. Paragraph 59 activates and refines these meanings, drawing various conceptual undercurrents to the surface of the text. As such, by way of a brief preamble to the paragraph, Barth combines polemic with key constructive claims. Analyzing Barth’s construal of history, which forms the burden of this section, deepens several interpretative contentions, allows a contextualization of Barth’s Christology and signals the importance of narrative in §59.6 God’s pre-temporal elective intention, discussed at length in Chapter 2, supplies the first notable meaning of Geschichte. Basic to God’s life, in a decision coordinate with God’s self-assigned identity as three relating Seinsweise, God intends to create, sustain and relate companionably to humankind. Accordingly, God predestines the Son to be the logos incarnatus: Jesus Christ, ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, is ‘the content and object (Inhalt und Gegenstand) of the first divine will, purpose and resolve’ (IV/1, p. 50 rev.). Even ‘before’ God’s creation of humankind, God anticipates fellowship with us. That God acts in this fashion im Anfang does not, of course, mean that the incarnation is only the ‘ultimate continuation of the history (Geschichte) in which God is God’ (IV/1, p. 203 rev.) – even though such words nicely describe God’s execution of God’s incarnational intention. The idea that 6

A necessary qualification: the following section does not provide an exhaustive analysis of ‘history’. There are certainly levels of meaning neglected, not least among which is the connection of creation and history forged in Church Dogmatics III. A broader contextualization of Barth’s Christology would also be possible.

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the divine Son retains a humanless identity in light of the incarnation does not survive the reorientation effected by Church Dogmatics II; Barth’s treatment of election alters the relationship between Christology and the doctrine of God, making these loci ontologically co-inherent (in a limited sense, of course). My point is that, given a ‘primal decision’ that predicates ontological and agential complexity to God qua Son, God pre-temporally anticipates God’s relationship with the human creature. In that the divine Son is never not becoming the person of Jesus Christ, God is always intending a history between God and humankind, anchored in the life of Christ. Considered from the angle of God’s pre-temporal being, God ‘awaits’ a continuation of God’s own history (the will to be ‘with us’) in which humanity responds to God (our being ‘with God’). This meaning of history reasserts some of Barth’s most basic ‘metaphysical’ convictions. He does not conceive Geschichte in light of an understanding of creation as a divine issuance, ontologically continuous with God’s being, that wends its way back to God (as in neoplatonic soteriological schemes, broadly construed). Nor does he postulate the human’s eschatological engraftment into Christ’s being, whereby she comes to share Jesus’ deified state (as in some Lutheran and Orthodox soteriological schemes). Even as God plans the most ‘exuberant and extravagant (Überflüssiges)’ act, in which the divine Son commits pre-temporally to ‘binding, limiting, compromising, offering himself in relation to humanity’ (IV/1, p. 158 rev.), the intended future between God and humankind will always reflect the strict and unsublatable distinction of God and humanity in Christ. Indeed, the ontologically and agentially complex identity of the one who will be (and is) ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’ shows Barth rejecting ab initio any slide towards ontological monism, preferring instead a clear distinction between creator and creature. With this register of Geschichte, Barth also contests the often-assumed connection between divine eternity and divine timelessness, for which the loci classici are book 11 of Augustine’s Confessions and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.7 Like many other twentieth-century theologians,8 Barth views eternity as an event characterized by a certain kind of temporality. God is of course not necessarily bound by the matrix of conditions that God makes 7

8

See here St. Augustine, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 221–45 and Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (trans. Joel C. Relihan; Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), pp. 144–50. For a solid treatment of temporality in recent German and American Trinitarian thought see Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville: WJKP, 1993). Useful remarks on the gradual move away from the affirmation of divine timelessness in Christian theology since the late medieval period, including a passing acknowledgment of the interconnection between Barth’s affirmation of divine temporality and his understanding of the incarnation, can also be found in Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, rev. edn, 1993), pp. 223–9.

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inherent to the finite sphere. It is not as if God exists as a co-implicate of finite time. It is rather that God decides to shape God’s eternal life in temporal terms – specifically, ‘in the totality, in the connection, in the play (Spiel), in the history (Geschichte) of [the] relationships’ (IV/1, p. 203 rev.) between Father, Son and Spirit.9 As such, the theologian rightly predicates a ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’ of God, even granted that such ‘periods’ are only loosely analogous to the temporality known by humans, given that they occur simultaneously for God. And, significantly, this temporalization of divinity facilitates Barth’s concern to demonstrate the co-inherence of the doctrines of God and Christ. Because God renders Godself in some way temporal ab initio, God is receptive to the ‘subsequent’ incorporation of Christ’s concrete history. God’s aboriginal triune temporality provides the condition of possibility for the inclusion of Christ’s concrete history in the divine life, specifically in terms of God’s second way of being.10 The second meaning of history can be summarized by a pair of closely related claims: (a) the life of Jesus Christ constitutes the identity of Jesus Christ, which, in turn, (b) God makes constitutive of the identity of God qua Son. The first claim of the pair signals Barth’s unease with certain christological conventions: specifically, the language of physis, basic to the Chalcedonian Definition, and the division of Christ’s ‘person’ and ‘work’, typical of protestant orthodoxy. To Barth’s mind, neither convention much assists with the christological task. On one level (as per I/2), talk of ‘nature’ (Natur, Wesen) struggles to convey the dynamic reality of Christ’s person and attenuates the connection between Christology and scripture. On another level, the person/work division forgets that an acclamation of Christ’s person is an acclamation of his work, and vice versa. In contrast, whatever the elasticity and myriad connotations of Geschichte, it indicates that Christ’s divinehumanity undertakes, and has no meaning in isolation from, the reconciling life witnessed in scripture. As Barth puts it in a dense yet precise sentence: ‘Jesus Christ is very God, very man, and very God-man [in] that He works, and He works in the fact and only in the fact that He is this one and not another. His being as this One is His history, and His history is this His being’ (IV/1, p. 128). Christ’s person cannot be thought without reference to his activity; Christ’s activity bears directly, and constantly, on a dogmatic description of his person. The second claim of the pair has a more controversial import. God renders Christ’s ontologically and agentially complex life – the totality of the intentions, actions and events associable with, and constitutive of, this person11 – 9 10

11

See also III/1, p. 66: ‘the pure, eternal being of God [is] historical in its eternity’. David Ford recognizes this point, writing that ‘Barth’s definition of eternity is tailormade for making Jesus Christ’s history eternal’ (God’s Story, p. 141). I owe this phrasing to Hans Frei, who contends that an individual is ‘not merely illustrated [but] constituted by his particular intention and act at any given point of his life

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constitutive of God’s second way of being. God wills that Christ’s life should have a hand in shaping God’s identity; God transforms Godself qua Son in terms of the personal history of Jesus Christ. ‘Transforms’, again, in the sense that the actualization of God’s pre-temporal intention – the prevenient act whereby the logos asarkos becomes and is the logos ensarkos – lends an identity to the Son, the form of which is otherwise than that possessed ‘prior’ to Jesus’ human life, and the content of which lies beyond that which the Son possesses immanently, ‘prior’ to the execution of God’s pre-temporal intention. Thus, if God’s overall ‘being is in becoming’ (Jüngel), the Son’s ‘becoming’ entails the addition of a qualitatively distinct ontological and agential reality to the divine life, viz., the ontological and agential reality that the Son assumes to himself. Accordingly, in IV/1 Barth again sidelines the logos asarkos motif (as in IV/2 and IV/3).12 While the identity of God qua Son and the man Jesus is in some respect ‘indirect’ (for one must maintain a Reformed construal of the communio naturarum), and while it is useful to recall God’s self-sufficient anteriority on occasion, the identity of the Son cannot be thought apart from the Son’s self-revelation and self-actualization as the ontologically and agentially complex person of Jesus Christ. Barth’s way of putting it is telling: ‘Jesus Christ is himself God as the Son of God, of the Father, and with God the Father the origin of the Holy Spirit, united in one essence in the Father by the Holy Spirit. That is how he is God. He is God as he participates (teilnimmt) in the event which constitutes the divine being’ (IV/1, p. 129 rev.). To push this claim in a way that Barth does not, one might even say that by way of the incarnation, God not only realizes God’s pre-temporal intention but God also sovereignly ‘concludes’ God’s triune identity. God becomes who God is – the Father, the Son who is Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. To stretch the point still further, one can even suggest that God organizes the temporalized eternity of God’s second way of being around Christ’s contingent existence. The ‘beginning’ of the Son’s eternity is God’s pre-temporal intention to incarnate; the ‘end’ of the Son’s eternity, the event of the resurrection, anticipatory of redemption, and Christ’s session at the right hand of the Father; the ‘middle’ of the Son’s eternity, the incarnate life of Christ. And interior to this middle, an irreducibly localized temporal complexity: Christ’s life as it passes from its beginning (the provocation of agency); to its middle (a ministry of wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance); to its end (rejection). While an emphasis on the temporal sequence of events associable with the divine Son must of course be complemented by an acknowledgement of the simultaneity of divine eternity, Geschichte indicates, then, that Barth applies his particularism radically, pushing the concrete passing of

12

and – one must add – by the sum total of the intentions and actions of his life’ (Identity of Jesus Christ, p. 44). See here IV/1, pp. 51–3 and 362; also IV/3.1, pp. 9 and 232.

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Christ’s life back into God’s being. Thus, ‘whoever says Jesus necessarily says: history (Geschichte) – his history – the history in which he is who he is and does what he does. In his history, we know God’ (IV/3.1, p. 179 rev.). In knowing God through Christ, the Christian knows that God qua Son assigns himself an inherently diachronic identity, bound to the irreducibly contingent life of Jesus Christ.13 This register of Geschichte also merits a glance back to issues treated in the final section of Chapter 1. I argued there that Barth challenges the distortive effects of a particular geisteswissenschaftlich mode of reflection, the ascendancy of which has characterized much European theology over the last two hundred years. Instead of allowing the results of ‘value-neutral’ historical research to regulate a conceptual redescription of Jesus Christ, Barth insists on the normative force of the ‘Christ of faith’. Paragraph 59’s pointed embrace of Geschichte provides a further endorsement of Kähler’s challenge to nineteenth-century Vermittlungstheologie, indicating that theologians who defer to historical-critical scholarship risk stumbling when describing Christ’s person and action.14 Even while Barth grants historical-critical work some positive role in theological inquiry (in this he follows Kähler), he will not allow the presumption of ‘strong ties’ between dogmatics and research into the ‘historical Jesus’, lest they tighten to the point at which theology attains a ‘blood relationship . . . to science in general’.15 Geschichte challenges the basic presumption of mediating theologies: that there can be a systematizable relationship between theology and the human sciences. 13

14

15

Given Robert Jenson’s work, I offer these claims cautiously. Jenson’s early interpretation of Barth has stood the test of time; the comments above, indeed my entire interpretation, has various points of connection with Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002). But Barth would worry about Jenson’s constructive insistence on ‘a conceptual move . . . from the biblical God’s self-identification by events in time to his [God’s] identification with those events’ (Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, p. 59). Barth could agree that the divine Son selfdetermines in terms of the events definitive of Jesus’ life. Yet he would insist that Christ’s life be described with due attention to its ontological and agential complexity (the claim that ‘the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him’ (p. 137) would certainly rankle). Barth would also, I think, query Jenson’s bold construal of divine temporality: a ‘sequentially palpable event like a kiss or a train wreck’ (p. 214). This seems to make too lopsided the balance between directionalized ‘duration’ and ‘simultaneity’ that Barth wants to uphold as definitive of God’s eternity. It is also, perhaps, rather one-sided: what about divine spatiality? See here Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ (ed. and trans. Carl E. Braaten; Mifflintown, PA: Sigler Press, 2002). Adolf von Harnack, ‘Fifteen Questions to the Despisers of Scientific Theology’, in Martin Rumscheidt (ed.), Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at Its Height (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 87. Barth’s response to Harnack can also be found in this volume; see ‘Fifteen Answers to Professor Adolf von Harnack’, pp. 87–90.

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The decisive question for Barth, as for Kähler, is simply this: What is it that norms theological reflection? If it is faith, cognizant of God’s self-revealed objectivity, then research into der historische Jesus may not administer the relationship between credere and intelligere. This relationship takes its bearings from a singular event – the conforming of the Christian’s noetic faculties to the event of divine self-knowing, effected by God’s prevenient action, localized in the unsubstitutionable person of Christ, and mediated by the witness of holy scripture. These issues have added urgency in IV/1, since Geschichte now does more than cast a vote for Kähler’s theological programme. It also forms an important front in the mid-century battle over Kähler’s legacy, for it anchors Barth’s critique of Bultmann’s project of demythologization, itself dependent on the distinction between a historisch Jesus and geschichtlich Christ.16 Barth is rarely explicit in his challenge to Bultmann,17 but his rejection of his former ally’s perspective is obvious nonetheless: dogmatics ought not to engage ‘the name of Jesus Christ in a purely “nominalistic” way, as a formal historical (historisches) or symbolical sign of the event of atonement’ (IV/1, pp. 122–3).18 Generally, Barth worries that Bultmann makes the believer’s existential response to God’s action, set at something of a remove from the ‘objectifying’ mythic forms of the New Testament, the starting point for theological reflection, thereby allowing liberal ‘anthropocentrism’ a new lease of life. More particularly, he doubts seriously that a theology based around the conviction that ‘the decisive thing is simply the “that” (Dass)’ of Christ’s life can do justice to the object of Christology.19 The Dass is not a noetically baffling event but a concrete person, resident to and constitutive of a faith tethered to the Gospel narratives and distinguished by a particular set of ‘accidental’ attributes (such as Jewishness),20 character traits, spatial location and so on. This life grounds a reflexive faith that can ‘unpack’ itself and describe its object in intensively conceptual terms. The work of Christology, on this reckoning, is not about ‘pointing towards’ the singular event of the incarnation (though such pointing obviously has its place). Rather, it is an intellectual response to God’s loving generosity, the christological character of which is known by a faithfulness that is, textured by the biblical witness.

16

17 18

The question as to which theologian gets Kähler right cannot be considered here. Suffice it to say that Kähler himself, intending chiefly to disrupt the course of liberal German Vermittlungstheologie, did not clearly articulate the positive aspects of his presentation, thereby allowing multiple interpretations of his position. See IV/1, pp. ix–x. Thus also IV/1, p. 21: ‘[the name of Jesus Christ] is not merely a cipher, under which that which it really means and has to say leads its own life and has its own truth and actuality and would be worth proclaiming for its own sake, a cipher which can at any time be omitted without affecting what which is really meant and said, or which in other ages or claims or circumstances can be replaced by some other cipher’.

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The third meaning of history concerns Christ’s life as a reconciliatory event that mediates the relationship between God and humanity. The basic claim is now familiar. By coordinating God’s self-determination with the establishment of Jesus as a human agent, Barth interlinks the doctrines of incarnation, covenant and reconciliation. Christ’s human correspondence to God’s will, specifically, contributes to ‘the maintenance, accomplishment, and fulfilment of the covenant that God established with humanity . . . the eschatological realisation of the will of God for Israel and therefore for the whole of humankind’ (IV/1, p. 34 rev.). Subsequent to God’s prevenient assumptive act, Christ humanly and divinely enacts an identity iterative of God’s intention, with his uptake of God’s petition and realization of God’s will effecting ‘covenant faithfulness on both sides’ (IV/3.1, p. 4). Consequently, partnership with God becomes basic to humankind, forming the ‘most original history of every human’ (IV/1, p. 157 rev.). The covenant as ongoing commerce between God and humanity is set in train; humans are always-already 19

20

For a brilliant statement of Bultmann’s infamous ‘Dass’, see his Das Verhältnis der urchristlichen Christusbotschaft zum historichen Jesus (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1960). The quotation comes from p. 9. Also useful are idem, ‘New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation’, in New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 1–43 and ‘Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung’, in Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1965), pp. 128–37. An early admirer of Bultmann summarizes nicely this christological outlook: Christ ‘has no other meaning than that of being the origin, the point of departure for Christianity [sic; the author means faith]. He is simply the starting point of the “statement” of the liberating judgment upon mankind’. See here L. Malevez, The Christian Message and Myth: The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (London: SCM, 1958), p. 78. See here esp. IV/1, pp. 166–76. Barth’s affirmation of Christ’s ‘Jewish flesh’ (IV/1, p. 166) contests the fantastic portrayals of Jesus as a displaced Aryan advanced by scholars supportive of National Socialism and, more generally, is consistent with his rejection of anti-Semitism. For more on Nazi Christology, see Susannah Heschel, ‘When Jesus Was Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda’, in Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel (eds), Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), pp. 68–89 and Peter Head, ‘The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus’, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 2.1 (2004), pp. 55–89. For broader discussions of Barth and Judaism, see Katherine Sonderegger, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s ‘Doctrine of Israel’ (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Eberhard Busch, Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden 1933–1945 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1996); and Mark R. Lindsay, Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Also useful are Eberhard Busch, ‘Indissoluble Unity: Barth’s Position on the Jews during the Hitler Era’ and Katherine Sonderegger, ‘Response to “Indissoluble Unity”’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), For the Sake of the World: Karl Barth and the Future of Ecclesial Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 53–79 and 80–7, respectively.

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lifted to the status of empowered agents; a ‘new history’ (IV/1, p. 228) awaits each of us. Or as Barth later puts it, Christ’s ‘history has been, but it has not passed’ (IV/3.1, p. 224). The life of the incarnate God is not ‘old news’; it is a fact that penetrates and defines the present. The polemical claims activated here deserve close attention. On one level, IV/1 extends Barth’s critical consideration of Federal Theology, ongoing throughout the Dogmatics.21 Certainly there are numerous continuities between Barth and this particular strain of protestant thought, prominent in the seventeenth century and associated especially with Johannes Cocceius. Barth commends the Federalists’ concern ‘to understand the work and Word of God . . . dynamically and not statically, as an event and not as a system of objective and self-contained truths’ (IV/1, p. 55); he also approves Cocceius’s attempt to forge a connection between the doctrines of election and salvation – even though the ‘grim doctrine’ (IV/1, p. 57) of double predestination ultimately obstructed this train of thought. But Barth’s admiration has definite limits. First, he objects to the supposition that the covenant can be split two ways. The Federalist differentiation of a foedus operum and foedus gratiae perpetuates a problem endemic to the reformed tradition, for it does not take seriously the fact that God is unremittingly gracious to humankind. Even Cocceius, whom Barth reads as making the ‘covenant of grace’ logically prior to the ‘covenant of works’, stumbles at this point, promulgating a disordered subordination of gospel to law. Second, and more pertinently, Barth faults Cocceius et al. for succumbing to an understanding of history that lacks basic connection to the biblical description of Christ. Instead of defining the general through the particular, the terms are reversed: Cocceius incorporates the singular happening of Jesus Christ into a broad ‘biblical history’, which prepares the way for a ‘philosophy of general religious history’ (IV/1, p. 56). Third, and most importantly, Cocceius et al. struggle to ‘christologize’ their thinking about the covenant and the atonement on an ontological level. Thus Barth: What we have to do with . . . is not only an action of God towards himself but also the basis of a relationship between God and humankind. How can even the most perfect willing in the bosom of the Godhead, if and so far as this happens alone in God in himself, be the origin of the covenant, if it is effected in the absence of the one who 21

For a good overview of this theological approach, see William Klempa, ‘The Concept of the Covenant in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Continental and British Reformed Thought’, in Donald K. McKim (ed.), Major Themes in the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 94–107. For recent expositions of federalist theology, see Michael S. Horton, God of Promise: Introducing Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006) and idem, Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology (Louisville: WJKP, 2005).

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must be there as the second partner at the very first, if the covenant is to be a covenant: namely, the human being? . . . This can certainly now be called a decree, an opus Dei internum ad extra, or therefore a pact: God’s free election of grace in which even in God’s eternity, before all time and before the foundation of the world, God is no longer alone with himself, already no longer rests content with himself, already no longer wants to restrict himself to the richness of God’s perfections and God’s own inner life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In this free act of the election of grace there is . . . already present, already anticipated, already assumed into unity with God’s own existence as God, the existence of the human whom God originally intends and loves . . . the human, in whom God wants to bind all other humans to Godself. In this free act of the election of grace is the Son of the Father already no more just the eternal Logos, but as such, as true God from eternity at the same time already the true God and the true human that he will be in time . . . He, in whom the covenant of grace in history is fulfilled and revealed, is also its eternal ground. (IV/1, p. 66 rev.) Note that Barth’s critique goes beyond concerns about the postulation of an intra-triune pactum, transacted ‘immanently’ between Father and Son. More is at stake. Cocceius fails to see the covenant as an event whereby the divine Son self-qualifies in terms of the concrete person of Jesus Christ, with God freely and sovereignly opening Godself to the impact of election and incarnation. And this lapse – an inflated construal of the logos asarkos – prompts further error, since the establishment and fulfilment of the covenant now lacks connection to Christ’s perfectly obedient and reconciling human action. Barth aims to preserve what Cocceius disregards: God’s relationship with humanity as an event indexed in the concrete and agentially complex life of Jesus Christ, with Christ’s human history – ‘God’s partner at the very first’ – contributing to the fulfilment of God’s foedus gratiae.22 22

While an in-depth consideration of Barth’s relationship with Cocceius cannot be offered here, the obvious question is whether Barth interprets Cocceius fairly. Barth’s reading is basically that of Gottlob Schrenk (see here Gottesreich und Bund im älteren Protestantismus, vornehmlich bei Johannes Cocceius (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967)), who claimed that Cocceius introduced the idea of ‘salvation history’ into theological reflection, thereby paving the way for German idealism. An alternative reading has recently been offered by Willem J. van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669) (trans. Raymond A. Blacketer; Leiden: Brill, 2001). Asselt integrates what he calls Schrenk’s ‘evolutionary model’ with a ‘synthetic model’ forwarded by other scholars, showing how God’s eternal pactum with Godself (as Father and Son) goes hand in hand with God’s application of God’s covenant in history. What holds together the resolutions of the immanent Trinity and God’s economic action is Cocceius’s underappreciated pneumatology. The Holy Spirit draws attention to God’s pursuit of friendship (amicitia) with humankind – a relating

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On another level, Geschichte signals a deft riposte to the charge of Hegelianism, easily leveled against Barth given his intensive utilization of the motif of Aufhebung throughout the Dogmatics. Barth’s basic response to the charge is easily imaginable: dogmatics has no fundamental relationship with the apprehension of Geist offered by ‘philosophic history’; it does not read ‘world history’ as Spirit’s ‘field of actualization’, with nations and prominent individuals functioning as vehicles of Spirit’s drive towards selfrealization.23 Nor, more specifically, are the life, death and resurrection of Christ especially illustrative of Spirit’s progress,24 even granted that the pictorial Vorstellungen of ‘revealed religion’ apprehend this ‘true content’25 in advance of speculative thought.26 Whereas for Hegel Geist’s outworking manifests itself in the person of Christ, Barth uses Geschichte to underscore that Christ, as an irreducibly particular person, is one who is ‘logically indispensable’ to and ‘materially decisive’ for a dogmatic account of reconciliation.27 Thus Barth: The Christian message does not at its heart declare a concept (Begriff) or an idea (Idee) . . . it recounts [a] history (Geschichte) and speaks of its inclusive power and significance in such a way that it expresses a name, binding the history strictly and indissolubly to this name and representing it as the story of the bearer of this name. (IV/1, p. 16 rev.)

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whereby God ‘liberates humanity and thereby elicits action’ (p. 320). The question Barth would pose: does not the eternal pact between Father, Son and Spirit still disregard the being and action of Jesus of Nazareth as a human being? Does not Cocceius’s approval of the logos asarkos principle mean a neglect of Christ’s concrete person and history? G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History with Selections from the Philosophy of Right (trans. Leo Rauch; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), pp. 10 and 58. See especially G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, One Volume Edition. The Lectures of 1827 (ed. Peter C. Hodgson; trans. Robert F. Brown, Peter C. Hodgson and J. M. Stewart; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 452–70. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 463 and 472. The complicated question of the relationship between religious ‘representations’ and the ‘Absolute Knowing’ of Geist in its advanced point of development cannot be treated here. Suffice it to say that the interpretation that religious figurations are, in some way, aufgehoben by thought and thereby rendered ‘relics’ does not suffice. Given that protestant Christianity, as the ‘revealed religion’, possesses ‘true content’, it is not ‘overcome’ in the same way that (for example) Persian, Indian, Greek and Roman religions are overcome. Indeed, the atoning death of Christ is itself the nativity of the ‘pure subjectivity of substance’ (Ibid., p. 476). This event, in its (irreducible and indispensable?) specificity, provides the impetus for human thought as self-conscious reflexivity. See Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 134–43.

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Since Geschichte draws meaning exclusively from the concrete person of Christ, it cannot function as a bridging term, facilitative of the subsumption of theological claims to an idealistic framework that lacks logically basic reference to Christ’s person (contra Ferdinand Baur and Alois Biedermann).28 The exposition of the phrase ‘God with us’ at the outset of IV/1 – the quotation above being taken from its climax – in fact sets firm constraints on the ‘Hegeling’ in which Barth cheerfully indulged.29 A theological account of reconciliation attains explicative adequacy only when it takes Christ’s particular life as its implicative index. Thus the fourth and final connotation of history: Christ’s reconciling lifeunto-death as the way of covenant fulfilment. The concluding paragraph of the last chapter hinted at this point; IV/1 provides an extensive articulation of it. Christ’s ‘history must be a history of suffering (Leidensgeschichte)’ (IV/1, p. 175) in which he accepts and enacts the transition from election to rejection. In order that humanity’s complicity with sin and death be permanently undercut, rendered part and parcel of a superseded and ‘old’ humanity, God wills that Jesus Christ’s reiteration of God’s No against sin and death merge into his bearing God’s No, suffering the punishment of sinful humankind. Christ therefore constitutes himself as the object of this punishment; his death completes a history in which he absorbs both the waywardness of humankind and its rejection. Only in this way is the human made new. While Barth’s construal of the ‘blessed exchange’ receives close attention in the next two sections, the urgent question at this point is this: how does he engage Christ’s history in its movement from election to rejection, with Christ’s ‘defiance’ of sin passing into his being the sin that God punishes? Negatively, by insisting that the (re)establishment of the covenant not be viewed as a single moment or, pace Berkouwer,30 encompassed by a single concept. Positively, by insisting that reconciliation be described as an occurrence that is, bound to the sequence of events associated with, and definitive of, Jesus Christ. Thus Barth’s ‘methodological’ axiom: ‘To speak of [atonement], we must recount it as history’ (IV/1, p. 157 rev., my emphasis).31 An adequate dogmatic account of reconciliation depends on a narration of 28

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For an excellent overview of Baur and Biedermann, see Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century; Vol. 1, 1799–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 155–67. So Barth in 1953: ‘As Christians we must have the freedom to let the most varied ways of thinking run through our heads . . . I myself have a certain weakness for Hegel and am always fond of doing a bit of “Hegeling” ’ (Busch, Karl Barth, p. 387). G. C. Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (trans. Harry R. Boer; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956). See also II/2, p. 188: ‘[The event of Christ] in time . . . can only be history. Who and what Jesus Christ is, is something which can only be told, not a system which can be considered and described’ and IV/3.1, p. 166: ‘Christology’ means the ‘narration (Erzählung) of history’.

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Christ’s life that moves from cradle, to cross, to resurrection, and Barth aims to respect the diachronic movement of the gospels, reading and retelling these ‘passion narratives with extended introductions’ (Kähler). Furthermore, the word Geschichte indicates that narrative and reference are not to be thought as diametrically opposed. The German word has a broader meaning than its English counterpart, connoting both ‘history’ (a cluster of events in time and space, potentially susceptible to narration) and ‘story’ (a retelling of events that draws attention to their coherence and meaning). The objective fact of Christ’s reconciling life-unto-death, ontically present to faith, and the second-order noetic apprehension of this event by faith, animated and sustained by way of the Christian’s engagement with scripture, therefore go hand in hand. Or, to put it a bit differently, the original transpiration of God’s reconciling self-determination as Jesus Christ, as an event in time and space, gives rise to the gospel stories, which in turn shape the Christian’s cognitive apprehension of this event and her subsequent theological reflection. Paragraph 59 as a whole accentuates this point, with Barth operating as a narrative theologian who maintains an emphasis on the objectivity of the events described.32 The paragraph approaches Christ’s life in a way that challenges the liberal ‘de-dramatization’ of Christology33 and contests (more gently) the remoto Christo procedure of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, since Barth’s ‘telling’ of Christ’s life reiterates the structure of the canonical gospels.34 While Christ’s ‘end’ is anticipated at every point, Barth follows the story as it unfolds, emphasizing the passage from election, to rejection, to vindication.35

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David Ford is therefore right to claim that (in terms derived from James Barr), ‘[Barth’s] exegesis is referential, but, because a person (Jesus Christ, whether prefigured, incarnate, or resurrected) is its reference and no extra-biblical sources are admitted, the process of exegesis is nearer to Barr’s “poetic or aesthetic”’ (God’s Story, p. 65). See also Thiemann’s Revelation and Theology for an expansive account of the propriety of connecting an affirmation of divine prevenience – and, by extension, the ‘objectivity’ of the events recounted in the biblical record – with a theological posture attentive to scripture’s narratival dimensions. See here the excellent work of Hans-Wilhelm Pietz, Das Drama des Bundes (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 1998), esp. pp. 16–20. This is not to say that the content of Barth and Anselm’s understandings of atonement differs; there are various points of continuity. Barth grants that there are various ways to make the narrative of Christ’s life central to dogmatic reflection; he does not object in principle to non-narratival depictions (see I/2, pp. 8–10). Barth would perhaps concur with a recent assessment of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: a ‘logical system that [has] a missing link right in its centre . . . that is, absolutely necessary for the logical integrity and acceptability of the whole system. The existing links are carefully fitted together to form a gap exactly in the shape of one missing, who is Jesus Christ, as he is known through faith and from the Scriptures’. See here Dániel Deme, The Christology of Anselm of Canterbury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 21.

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The first phase of Christ’s life involves a pre-eminent and immediately intelligible ‘Subject’ who stands apart from his immediate socio-cultural setting. Jesus Christ lives as a human being, yet remains unintelligible to the world, given that his obedience bespeaks the ‘activation, the demonstration, the revelation of His deity, His divine Sonship’ (IV/1, p. 211). This corresponds (roughly) to §59.1, ‘The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country’, where Barth foregrounds the prevenient establishment of Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God. The second phase of Jesus’ life describes the transition from election to rejection, as Jesus actively disposes himself as the one who bears God’s retort to sin. The turning point of the narrative is the agony of Gethsemane, which shows vividly the transition from Jesus’ judging to his being judged. Subsequent to this occurrence, ‘Jesus no longer seems to be the subject but rather only the object of the event here recorded: his speech almost only that of silence, his work only that of suffering’ (IV/1, p. 226 rev.). Or as Barth later puts it, nuancing the claim that Jesus is an ‘object’, in order to keep his agency in view: ‘Without ceasing to be action, as action in the strongest sense of the word, as the work of God on earth attaining its goal, His action becomes passion’ (IV/1, p. 238). Jesus wills to absorb the punishment that God wills should meet sinful humankind; his sovereign self-determination coincides with the events that overtake him and bring about his death. (Hans Frei is precise: this ‘character’s intention and action meshes mysteriously with external events’.)36 This ‘middle’ of Christ’s narrative is treated mainly in §59.2, ‘The Judge Judged in Our Place’. And after a section break in which the unrepresentable fact of crucifixion happens, the third phase of the narrative describes Jesus’ acknowledgment by God in God’s first way of being. Thus §59.3, ‘The Verdict of the Father’, which presents Christ’s resurrection as the revelation that Christ’s history will be complemented and honoured by Spirit-led human histories, lived in ‘the power of . . . corresponding becoming’ (IV/1, p. 227).37 35

36 37

This tripartite delineation of Jesus’ life is sketched by Barth; see IV/1, pp. 224–8. Note that this tripartite delineation has tremendous importance for Hans Frei’s christological perspective. Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, p. 105. Berthold Klappert emphasizes also that Barth sees the life of Jesus in three stages, whereby Jesus is subject, object and then the vindicated one: together, ‘[d]ies macht Barth zufolge die eigentliche Dramatik der synoptischen Evangelien aus’ (‘Gott in Christus – Versöhner der Welt. Die Christologie Karl Barths als Anfrage an die Christologie der Gegenwart’, in Versöhnung und Befreiung: Versuche, Karl Barth kontexuell zu Verstehen (Düsseldorf: Neukirchener, 1994), p. 153). Klappert’s own interpretation of Barth follows Barth, as Barth follows the New Testament record, moving from ‘Das Subjekt dieses Geschehens’ (pp. 146–52) to ‘Der Inhalt dieses Geschehens’ (pp. 152–7), to ‘Das Licht dieses Geschehens’ (pp. 157–61). But Klappert does not make as much of ‘history’ as I do; nor does he engage specifically the question of Christ’s human obedience.

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While Barth offers a Christology acutely responsive to the biblical ‘story that narrates the identity of Jesus’,38 he of course remains aware that its main actor must be treated on his own terms – this person being both ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’. Certainly, Barth’s focus in §59 is Christ’s divinity. There is no mention of a reworked communio naturarum or various permutations of the communicatio idiomatum; there is markedly less interest in Jesus’ human correspondence to God than in §64. Barth in fact opens the doctrine of reconciliation with §59 to underscore the prevenient action and presence of God in Christ, over against liberal wariness with regard to Christ’s deity. But an emphasis on Christ’s divinity does not mean disregard for his humanity. While Barth had not detailed his understanding of Christ’s humanity when he began Church Dogmatics IV, he was fully cognizant of, and attentive to, the types of claims that he would later make. Just as it is legitimate to read IV/2 in light of IV/1, then, it is legitimate to read IV/1 in terms of IV/2.39 Barth alerts his readers to this very point when, emphasizing that Christ does not ‘raise himself’, he describes Christ’s history as animated by two agential powers. The way to the cross and death in which this judgment took place is indeed the work of the Son of God obedient in humility. But it is also as such the work of the obedient man Jesus of Nazareth in His identity with the Son of God, just as His condemnation and execution, although it was determined and willed by God, was also the work of the sinful men who put into effect the decision and will of God, the Jews and Gentiles into whose hands Jesus was delivered, or delivered Himself. 38 39

Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, p. 16. This is of course not an incontestable claim. In a sensitive treatment of §59.2, Günter Thomas critiques Barth’s decision to open the doctrine of reconciliation with a portrayal of Christ as judge (see here ‘Der für uns “gerichte Richter”: kritische Erwägungen zu Karl Barths Versöhnungslehre’, ZdTh 18.2 (2002), pp. 211–25). Particularly, Thomas argues that forensic imagery hems in Barth’s presentation, preventing him from construing reconciliation as an event involving not only the prosecution of judgement, but also the gracious healing of the creature. More generally, Thomas laments Barth’s neglect of Christ’s life prior to the passion and wonders whether Barth would have been better served by setting IV/2 before IV/1. But is not this analysis rather flatfooted? It is quite permissible for a thinker to defer treating an issue for the sake of clarity. Barth’s decision to concentrate on Christ’s humanity after his divinity, and the cross before Christ’s ministry, is a tactical rebuff to liberal precedents and an attempt to restore a clear sense of the order of knowing basic to faith; it does not mean that Barth is negligent of Christ’s humanity or ministry. Barth’s hope, in fact, is that the reader will recognize that the volumes of the Dogmatics interweave, providing a discursively thick description of Christ that can be accessed at any point. Moreover, as will become clear, Barth does anticipate adequately the claims of IV/2 in IV/1. The survey in §58 provides a programmatic sketch; §59’s treatment of Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane adds nuance.

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As the judgment of God, the event of Golgotha is exclusively the work of God. Its fulfilment is ordained by God even in detail. But all the same it has a component of human action – both obedient and good on the one hand and disobedient and evil on the other. (IV/1, p. 300)40 In spite of the fact that Barth gives less attention to the ‘work of the obedient human, Jesus’ in §59 – some passages in the paragraph read like an inversion of Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity,41 with Christ’s humanity rendered ‘incognito’ as God shows Godself – he insists, then, that human action is an indispensable part of Christ’s story. There is a subplot to §59 that awaits recognition – a narrative that happens ‘beneath’ Barth’s focus on Christ’s divinity and which recounts Christ’s human obedience to God the Father, even unto death.

The obedience of Jesus Christ: Christology in light of the Passion In Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, Barth writes that the event of Jesus Christ can be viewed from two vantage points: ‘from above, it is actual in the free act of grace for which God determines Himself and upon which He resolves in Jesus Christ. Seen from below, it is actual in the free act of obedience in which man acknowledges the doing of the will of God active in the divine act of grace’ (IV/3.1, p. 166). These vantage points are taken up in the analysis of obedience that follows. I first consider the obedience of the Son as an event of divine self-determination: God’s actualization as the Word incarnate, responsive, in the context of finite space and time, to the directive address of God’s first way of being. I then turn again to the question of Christ’s human agency: his disposition and comportment as the human who undertakes a specific history that justifies humankind. Attaining clarity on God’s obedient self-determination qua Son and the concurrent obedience rendered by the man Jesus uncovers the elemental christological claims of §59 and points towards the importance of Gethsemane for Barth’s Christology.

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Barth does not want this point to be missed. In the section of IV/2 that parallels §59.3 (i.e., §64.3), he reminds readers of ‘the strict reality of the self-humiliation of God in His Son, which the Son of Man had to follow, and did follow, with the same strictness; the completeness of the divine but also the human will, and the divine but also the human act, in what took place at Calvary, not in appearance but only in truth, even to the dereliction of the Crucified’ (IV/2, p. 301). Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity (trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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Divine Obedience Barth approaches the question of divine obedience by way of a consideration of God’s ‘self-humiliation’, using a discussion of the ‘outer moment’ of the Son’s ‘way into the far country’ to set the stage for his treatment of ‘the first and inner moment of the mystery of the deity of Christ’ (IV/1, p. 192). By ordering discussion in this way, Barth shows, perhaps unwittingly, that the christological perspective of §59 is both continuous with, and a radicalization of, the stance he favoured in the 1920s and early 1930s. The point of continuity is epistemological, for Barth remains committed to the neo-Kantian assumptions that underwrote the ‘dialectic of veiling and unveiling’ in Romans and the Göttingen Dogmatics. In Church Dogmatics IV/1, as in earlier texts and lectures, Barth suggests that God employs a creaturely medium, qualitatively dissimilar to God’s own being, in order to reveal Godself to humankind. God ‘conceals (verbirgt) His glory’ (IV/1, p. 188) when journeying into ‘the far country’, assuming a form apprehensible by human beings. This action evidences, among other things, God’s solicitude for the cognitive operations basic to human beings. Since only phenomena can be known, an experienceable event in time and space – viz., the ‘veil’ of flesh, assumed by the Son – is necessary for human apprehension of God’s self-revelation. Absent such fleshy covering, God’s self-presentation would pass by unnoticed. Yet this self-veiling does not inhibit the Christian’s knowledge of God. Rather, when God grants faith, specifically in light of the discrete action of the Spirit, the creaturely camouflage assumed by God becomes transpicuous. The believer now sees through the veil; she knows Christ to be ‘qualitatively different from all other men’ (IV/1, p. 160), for the directive subject of this person is none other than the divine Son. Revelation occurs: a divine communication of God’s being-in-act. A key element of McCormack’s analysis of the early Barth applies, then, late in the Dogmatics. Upholding the Marburg neo-Kantianism of his early career, Barth contends that the Bible ‘regards and describes [Christ’s] form as a human . . . as the veiling of his actual being and describes his actual being as Son or Word as a concealed being’ (IV/1, p. 163 rev.). The point of radicalization is Barth’s decision to think with and beyond Martin Luther, conceiving God’s ‘self-humiliation’ (Selbsterniedrigung) as a claim about God’s free self-constitution as Son. Recall the ‘Heidelberg Disputation’ (1518), where Luther expressed vividly his theologia crucis. ‘True theology and recognition of God are in the crucified Christ’,42 he wrote. While what Luther meant here can obviously be debated (for it forms but one thread in a tangle of claims about divine ‘hiddenness’ that interlace

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Martin Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (ed. Timothy F. Lull; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 44.

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his corpus),43 the point of comparison relates to Luther’s willingness to swing between an epistemological claim, which discerns revelation in Christ crucified, notwithstanding its being ‘hidden’ an inglorious creaturely medium, and an ontological claim, whereby the theologian rethinks how God’s being ought to be conceived, in light of the cross.44 In view of his doctrine of election, Barth seizes on, and then radicalizes, Luther’s powerful equivocation. While maintaining the epistemological register of concealment, he affirms the ontological relevance of the incarnation for thinking about God’s being. Thus, concomitant with God’s self-humiliating condescension to the cognitive capacities of the human, Barth argues that ‘concealment (Verborgenheit), and therefore His condescension as such, is the image and reflection in which we see Him as He is’ (IV/1, p. 188, my emphasis). God qua Son self-determines in a manner that accords with God’s assumption of the veil of flesh; the humiliation of the Son in the incarnation provides the economic clue for an appreciation of God’s immanent life. God’s self-humiliating veiling, to push the dialectic to its limit, unveils God’s triune character as inclusive of the Son’s eternal obedience to the Father. But how does this correlation of the immanent and economic trinities relate to Barth’s claims about God’s elective self-determination, analysed in Chapter 2? What theological purposes are served by Barth’s specification of the ‘astounding conclusion of a divine obedience’ – God as ‘a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility’ (IV/1, p. 202)? My answer has three parts, relating respectively to the Son as the divine ‘subject’ of Christ, the ontological consequences of God’s incarnate act and God’s absorption of judgement on the cross. Each part suggests that Barth’s treatment of divine obedience clarifies and deepens the understanding of election proposed in Church Dogmatics II/2. First, obedience supports Barth’s conviction that it is truly the divine Son who indwells Jesus Christ; that God’s second way of being is not other than the way of being revealed in this person. Thus: ‘Even in the form of a servant, which is the presence and action of Jesus Christ, we have to do with . . . true deity’ (IV/1, p. 193). Barth does not tender this claim simply

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This tangle certainly cannot be unpicked here. For an excellent treatment of Luther on hiddenness, see Brian A. Gerrish, ‘“To the Unknown God”: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God’, in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 131–49. Also useful is Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, pp. 20–34 and 179–98. Rowan Williams makes the point nicely: ‘For the Lutheran, what is involved in the revelation of God in suffering and darkness is a real communication of God; the worldly circumstances of the Cross and dereliction themselves say something about God. They are not merely a concealing vehicle: the mercy of God is such that the opus proprium “translated” into worldly form is necessarily and properly the cross’ (‘Barth on the Triune God’, in Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method, p. 155).

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to underscore the soteriological efficacy of Christ’s person.45 As with the doctrine of election, he wants also to avoid the interposition of an ontological gap between the logos incarnandus and the logos incarnatus. If God qua Son forms the subject of a person whose pre-eminent characteristic is the execution of commands associable with God’s first way of being, it follows that obedience is a disposition predicable of the Son as such. Were the theologian to prescind from ascribing this disposition to God in Godself, she would risk suggesting that the eternal Son could be different from the Son revealed in Jesus Christ. She would leave open the possibility that the Son of the immanent Trinity has a character otherwise than that which is revealed economically. And were the theologian to account for the Son’s obedience by exclusive reference to Christ’s human demeanour, not only would she ‘split’ Christ’s person but, worse, she would cast doubt upon the reliability and intelligibility of revelation. For whom or what is being revealed, if Christ is humanly obedient, but God the Son is not? Barth therefore does not shrink from embracing a difficult affirmation: ‘the humility (Demut) of Christ is not merely a conduct associated with the human, Jesus of Nazareth, but rather the conduct of this human because – according to the fulfilled reconciliation that happens in him (and according to the revelation of God in him) – there is a humility grounded in the being of God’ (IV/1, p. 193 rev.).46 Gehorsam reaffirms an axiomatic claim: that Jesus Christ as ‘electing God’ is none other than the divine Son of the Father. Second, divine obedience helps Barth to sharpen up his understanding of incarnation as an event of divine self-determination. Specifically, the claim that ‘the humiliation and lowliness and supremely the obedience of Christ [are] the dominating moment in our conception of God’ (IV/1, p. 199) deepens and nuances Barth’s description of God’s sovereign and loving selftransformation. How so? Well, in elucidating the Trinitarian backdrop to God’s Gnadenwahl, the word obedience binds together Barth’s consideration of the Trinity (Church Dogmatics I) and Barth’s doctrine of God as such (Church Dogmatics II). It effects a post hoc integration of doctrinal loci that, while obviously intertwined during and after Church Dogmatics II/2, still require explicit connection. Divine obedience therefore does not amount to ‘one of the most unhelpful bits of hermetic mystification in the whole of the Dogmatics’.47 On the contrary, it reaffirms and deepens Barth’s integration of election, Christology and the doctrine of God. 45

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Thus IV/1, p. 193: ‘The One who reconciles the world with God is necessarily the one God Himself in His true Godhead. Otherwise the world would not be reconciled with God.’ See here also IV/1, p. 209: ‘The Son is therefore the One who in His obedience, as a divine and not a human work, shows and affirms and activates and reveals Himself – shows Himself to be the One He is – not another, a second God, but the Son of God, the one God in His mode of being as the Son’. Williams, ‘Barth on the Triune God’, p. 175.

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Recall that §59, like many other paragraphs of the Dogmatics, repeatedly affirms the Son’s ‘identity’ with the human, Jesus of Nazareth. Granted that such identity is qualified by Barth’s insistence on Christ’s ontological complexity, notice now how the category of obedience clarifies the manner in which the Son sovereignly self-constitutes. So Barth: The one true God himself is the Subject of the event of reconciliation in such a way that God’s presence and action as the reconciler of the world coincide and are indeed identical (identisch) with the existence of the humiliated, abased and obedient human, Jesus of Nazareth. God acts as reconciler in that God . . . becomes and is (wird und ist) humiliated, abased and obedient. (IV/1, p. 199 rev.) The words ‘becomes and is’ have cardinal importance. God’s ‘being in becoming’ (Jüngel) is not merely the Son’s taking on the form or veil of humanity. Nor can it be viewed only as a matter of God’s being ad extra corresponding to God’s pre-temporal immanent life. It also expresses something about the precise character of God’s loving ‘overflowing’. Barth’s suggestion is that the Son’s economic action, the Son’s incarnational ‘becoming’, answers the Father’s eternal call for friendship with humanity. This answering of God’s salvific intention is so radical that the Son freely takes on an identity that is, bound to his incarnate existence. Obedience names the Son’s willingness to realize God’s love in the most radical way imaginable. It names the way in which Son puts into effect God’s love; it identifies his willingness to undergo an eternal ontological transformation, to be the conduit by which Christ’s humanity and human history is drawn into the time and space of God’s being. Let me make this point more fully. While confidently dispatching objections about the conceivability of God’s self-determination as the logos incarnatus (for the fact that God does self-constitute in this way, embracing a divine existence constrained by, and respectful of, the conditions of finitude, intercepts and undercuts speculative concerns about how God ‘could’ self-constitute in this way),48 Barth pushes discussion beyond an acclaim for God’s capacity for self-definition. The obedience of the Son is presented in terms of a love that goes to extreme lengths – a love that stops at nothing,

48

Thus the famous claim: God ‘can be God and act as God in an absolute way and also a relative, in an infinite and also a finite, in an exalted way and also a lowly, in an active and also a passive, in a transcendent and also an immanent, and finally, in a divine and also a human – indeed in relation to which He Himself can become worldly, making His own both its form, the forma servi, and also its cause; and all without giving up His own form, the forma Dei, and His own glory, but adopting the form and cause of man into the most perfect communion with His own, accepting solidarity with the world’ (IV/1, p. 187).

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not even the complication of God’s being – to realize companionship with humanity. Gehorsam demonstrates, more specifically, the way in which ‘there is no reservation in respect of [God’s] solidarity with us’ (IV/1, p. 215). It describes God’s second way of being as the leading edge of God’s graciousness; the divine ‘person’ who ‘activates (betätigt) the freedom of God’s divine love’ (IV/1, p. 187 rev.) for humankind. On this reckoning, if the Son’s ‘begottenness’ describes the Father’s logical priority and the Son’s logical subsequence, ‘obedience’ functions as a complementary term that describes the Son’s active enactment of an intention elementally proposed by God qua Father. And in light of this enactment, ‘the inward divine relationship between the One who rules and commands in majesty and the One who obeys in abasement becomes identical with the quite different relationship between God and one of God’s creatures . . . God becomes what God had not previously been’ (IV/1, p. 203 rev.). The Son exchanges the intra-divine context of time and space for human time and space, accepting an identity circumscribed by finitude and harassed by sin, as God’s ‘participation (Teilnehmen) in the being of the world’ means ‘that God’s own being, God’s own history, plays itself out (sich nun abspielt) as world history and under the entire burden and in the entire danger of world history’ (IV/1, p. 215 rev.). It could even be said that the transformation of God’s being coincides with the revelation of God’s triune being in transformation; that the obedient Son of the Father wills always to undergo transformation in light of the union basic to Christ’s person, and that God reveals this event to faith. Might it also be that the ‘immanent’ distinctions between God’s first, second and third ways of being are radicalized by the Son’s incarnational act? Perhaps, though one ventures here beyond the text of the Dogmatics. At any rate, whatever the connotations of the term in the minds of his readers, for Barth, obedience describes the love of the Son as a willingness to have his identity indexed in Jesus Christ’s contingent history. Gehorsam explains how God loves in freedom. The third register of obedience follows on directly from the second: obedience as a ‘blessed exchange’, whereby God bears the judgement for sin that humankind deserves. In addition to determining Godself qua Son according to the constraints of finitude, God’s obedient act entails a singular process of self-substitution. As the Son draws a human life into God’s being, God absorbs God’s rejection of sin, thereby relieving humanity of the same. This claim is rarely far from view in §59, as in other volumes of the Dogmatics: ‘He, the eternal electing God, willed Himself to be the rejected and therefore perishing man’ (IV/1, p. 175). Or, as von Balthasar puts it, in characteristically visceral terms: ‘the Son of God took human nature in its fullest condition, and with it, the worm in its entrails’.49 Humanity cannot effect its

49

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale (trans. Aidan Nichols; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 22.

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own salvation; God alone can alter our degraded condition. And God does so, suffering and dying in our stead. Barth’s paraphrase of this claim – the ‘judge judged in our place’ – evidences a preference for a forensic conceptuality that departs from the figure of priest, integral to traditional treatments of the munus triplex. While I will say more about this figurative switch in due course, I want initially to access Barth’s thinking by way of the conceptual pairing of enburdenment and disburdenment. This pairing signals nicely how substitution entails a task with consequences for the agent who undertakes it. Because God predestines the Son to be the ‘burdened one’ (der Belastete) who bears the weight of sin and eternal death, humanity can be disburdened of the same. We become die Entlasteten; God lifts the weight of sin and death from human shoulders and transfers it to God’s own being. Certainly, Christ as a human is rejected. God’s judgement must exert itself upon the creature hostile to God’s love, lest it be an arbitrary judgement that fails to strike its proper target. But the anterior condition of possibility for this event is God’s own receipt of God’s judgement. God’s solidarity with humankind is such that God self-determines in terms of the future that flesh wills for itself, viz., total separation from God. The claim of I/2 persists: God makes Godself responsible for the waywardness of God’s covenant partners, accepting the consequences of our depraved complicity with das Nichtige, so as to acquit us. He is now the unrighteous one . . . the burdened one, amongst those who have been unburdened by him, amongst those who have been acquitted, since the judgment destroying them falls against him. He, who is the electing God and the elected human in one person is, as the rejecting one, the God judging sin in the flesh in his own person, also the one rejected human, he the lamb, who bears the sin of the world. (IV/1, p. 237 rev.) Why force the event of salvation through such macabre straits? Simply in order to establish humanity as a genuine covenant partner. Inexplicably but invariably, each human ruins the loving companionship with God that God intends, disdaining covenantal relating by actualizing the impossiblepossibility of sin. To countermand this disruptive event, God reasserts a true essence for human being as such, establishing and directing the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ. But this reassertion takes place in light of the calamitous fact of sin, which itself threatens to curtail the scope of God’s salvific working. Accordingly, God ‘permits’ the human drive towards nothingness to carry out a strike not just against Christ’s humanity but also against God Godself on the cross. God hereby draws das Nichtige, and with it human sin, into God’s own being, where its elemental truth as nonexistence can be re-realized, where its limited ontological force is outbid by God’s originary self-differentiation (for love, against evil), where God re-rejects 209

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what God has eternally rejected. God lets humanity’s death-directed ‘misery, which could be and remain quite remote, approach God, and go into God’s own heart (zu Herzen gehen)’ (III/3, p. 357 rev.),50 in order that we might be permanently restored. While this construal of justification receives further elucidation below, notice again that Gehorsam allows Barth to reinforce his understanding of God’s loving self-determination, now to the point at which Christ’s death happens in God’s own being. Berthold Klappert describes this aspect of §59 precisely. It is not merely that the cross is ‘the central interpretative point [for thinking about] the divinity of Jesus’. Barth’s more radical concern is ‘to think through, to the end, the theologia crucis, the way in which the cross impresses itself upon the concept of God’.51 As the Son’s obedient and loving self-transformation has its end in the cross, God Godself suffers the horrors and consequences of human sin. And because God himself is obedient unto death, ‘our sin is no longer our own’. In Christ, ‘God – He Himself as the obedient Son of the Father – has made it His own’ (IV/1, p. 238). In light of the popularity of talk about divine suffering in post-war German theology and other contexts, this claim requires careful handling. It is certainly fair to say that, as far as Barth is concerned, God really does suffer and die on the cross, and that this event forms the condition of possibility for God’s reconstitution of each human. The fullness of God’s self-determination not only sanctions, but in fact requires statements about divine suffering, for the divine Son is always going ‘the way of sinners to its bitter end in death, in destruction, in the limitless anguish of separation from God’ (IV/1, p. 253). Since the Son has no identity apart from Christ’s ontologically complex existence, and since this existence concludes with cruelty, degradation and torture, how can one not attribute suffering to God in some sense? This one, the Word become flesh, suffers this death: he is the homo crucifixus. At the same time, one must not unbalance theological description by neglecting Christ’s life before the crucifixion, on the one side, or the victory of God and humankind, achieved on the cross and declared in the resurrection, on the other. The whole narrative of Christ’s life must govern a description of God’s identity as Son. Accordingly, Moltmann’s incautious claim that the revelation of the ‘mystery of the triune God’ entails God’s threefold ‘experience’ of humanity’s (and creation’s) passion (‘God suffers with us – God suffers from us – God suffers for us’)52 would not so much be inaccurate for Barth as it would be monochromatic, suggestive of a theologia crucis that has lost sight of the movement of God’s action and identity – a movement that always 50 51 52

See also III/3, p. 304 and IV/1, p. 452. Klappert, Die Aufweckung des Gekreuzigten, pp. 151 and 181. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 4. While Moltmann’s text evinces some of the dynamism associated with Barth’s actualist perspective, comments such as these problematically immobilize God’s being.

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passes from cradle, to cross, to resurrection. While God’s obedient suffering requires due acknowledgment, given that God sovereignly encompasses the cross within the divine life, the key is to give it proportionate attention. A decisive moment of the Son’s incarnate history, yes; the entirety of that history, no.53 Three further comments to round out this analysis. First, while I intend to bypass the debate over whether IV/1 revises the trinitarian sketch of I/1 – a debate based on dubious premises, since it grants Barth’s prolegomenal reflections an importance in excess of their limited function and ignores their subsequent Aufhebung in light of Barth’s doctrine of election54 – it can certainly be said that §59 refines Barth’s doctrine of God. On one level, even if working only with Church Dogmatics I, II and III, those who argue that Barth leaves ‘no room for a plurality of persons in the one God but only for different modes of being in the one divine subjectivity’ or who claim that Barth promulgates a sub-Christian ‘monotheism’55 already appear hard-pressed to substantiate their criticisms. For while Barth obviously has Augustinian sympathies (he would never posit the ‘co-workings of three divine subjects’),56 his radically actualized ontology overcomes the unnecessary idea that either an affirmation of God’s personal unity or God’s tri-personality must have logical priority.57 Indeed, Barth only reiterates his affirmation of God’s being a vital Gemeinschaft in IV/1 when he declares

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Of the numerous theologians who have endorsed some understanding of divine suffering in recent years, it is probably James Cone who stands closest to Barth; see God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, rev. edn, 1997), pp. 150–78, esp. p. 161. A recent contribution comes from Iain Taylor, ‘In Defence of Barth’s Doctrine of the Trinity’, IJST 5.1 (2003), pp. 33–46. This article has much value. It suggests, specifically, that the adoption of Seinsweise in I/1 goes hand in hand with a fairly classical appreciation of intra-triune relationality. Seinsweise functions similarly to ‘person’ in the Göttingen Dogmatics; reading Isaac Dorner prompted Barth to alter his terminology, not to rethink his basic dogmatic convictions. At the same time, because Taylor fails to engage the massive reorientation of Barth’s thought in Church Dogmatics II, what he defends has only tangential relevance to Barth’s final understanding of God’s triunity, routed and radicalized, as it is, through the doctrine of election. Thus Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, p. 296. See also Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, esp. pp. 63 and 139–44. Samuel M. Powell highlights the irony of these charges: Moltmann and Pannenberg ‘fault Barth for the same tendency, Sabellianism (i.e., failing to concede full reality to the Trinitarian persons), for which he criticized nineteenth-century theology’ (The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 220). Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 94. Moltmann argues that it is preferable to ‘begin . . . with the trinity of the Persons and . . . go on to ask about the unity’ (Ibid., p. 18). But if God reveals Godself as triune, why suppose that the starting point of theological reflection about God must be either de Deo trino or de Deo uno? Does not this simply invert a previous error? Why not begin with the complex fact that ‘God is’ means ‘God is in three ways of being’?

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that God’s ‘unity . . . is in itself open, free, and eventful . . . a unity of One with Another . . . a dynamic, not static, a living, not dead, unity’ (IV/1, p. 202 rev.) – the simplicity of the divine person being an event of collective uniting (somewhat analogous to the unio hypostatica, granted obvious differences), not a blandly monadic singularity. On another level, armed with §59’s proposal that the Son responds eternally and determinatively to the petition of God’s first way of being, Barth’s trinitarianism attains an even clearer profile. In terms of reconciliation, God’s triunity is ‘active in itself’ to the point at which specific acts are patently appropriable to different Seinsweise, with the divine relationships being ‘played out’ in the respective operations of the Son (incarnation), the Father (vindication) and the Spirit (the gathering of the community). It might even be, once again, that the incarnation, as an elective event of divine self-transformation, intensifies God’s triune self-differentiation, with the Son relating to the Father in a way that ‘sharpens’ their different roles. On this reckoning, Barth would be moving beyond the category of ‘appropriation’, while not embracing anything like the idea of three ‘centres’ of consciousness; he would be suggesting that the (sovereign) action of the Son is such that it reconstitutes the way in which God interrelates. At any rate, §59 conclusively rebuts the charge that Barth ‘reduc[es] the concept of “person” to the concept “relation”’.58 The concrete history of Jesus Christ reveals a divine triunity in which the specific actions of God’s Seinsweise gain increased clarity and definition, being conspicuously related to distinctive economic and immanent actions. Second, it must be acknowledged frankly that, towards the end of §59.1, Barth’s presentation of the Son’s obedience has a dimension that must be adjudged ethically and doctrinally injurious. While connecting ontologically the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation, Barth shows a troubling tendency to describe obedience in terms of a crudely hierarchical relationship. It is almost as if he loses focus towards the end of §59.1, with the consequence that Gehorsam is tied to the suggestion of a chain of command between Father and Son, with ‘an above and a below, a prius and a posterius, a superior and a junior and subordinate’ (IV/1, p. 195). This leads to the notorious question: ‘Why should not our way of finding a lesser dignity and significance in what takes the second, the subordinate place (the wife to her husband, for example!) require correction in the light of the homoousia of the ways of divine being?’ (IV/1, p. 202 rev.). This question does not only expose Barth’s incorrigible sexism (for, no matter the ‘correction’ provided by the homoousia, the wife remains ‘subordinate’ to her husband). It also shows Barth’s sexism again exerting a doctrinally corruptive influence. On one level, the analogy itself is flawed. It transmutes a parental figuration of God’s first and second ways of being into a marital relationship; it then insinuates that

58

Ibid., p. 172.

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God’s Fatherhood vis-à-vis God’s Sonship is analogous to sexual difference, construed hierarchically in the context of a heterosexual marriage. But what possible justification is there for such a move, given that the titles of Father and Son are not gendered in such a way in the biblical witness, never mind in the tradition of Trinitarian thought as such? Is not Barth’s thought here warped by a concern to uphold social and cultural mores? On another level, a gendered construal of a trinitarian ‘ranking’ distracts from Barth’s basic conviction: that the incarnation of the obedient Son is the ‘fulfilment (Vollzug) of a divine decision’ (IV/1, p. 194 rev.) freely made and freely executed. By the time the parenthetical remark occurs, Barth has done everything necessary to rethink the word Gehorsam and apply it to God in a fresh and creative way. The term obedience ought, in principle, now simply to subserve Barth’s basic claim about the Son’s Christic self-determination, indicating that the free application of divine love has its condition of possibility in God’s triune self-organization. It ought simply to indicate that the Son ‘put into effect (in Betätigung) [God’s] almighty mercy’ (IV/1, p. 418), sovereignly willing to qualify himself and suffer the punishment owed to humankind. It ought simply to identify the Son as the leading edge of God’s free economic and reconciliatory action. But with a single parenthetical comment – a passing aside, really, but all the more menacing for it – Barth undermines his reconceptualization of the term. Gehorsam is now figured in terms of a crude hierarchalism, being pressed into the service of outmoded mores. Barth’s basic point, that obedience, in the context of God’s triune interrelating, has to do with the application of God’s overflowing love, is both obscured and compromised. Third and finally, there is the issue of ken oˉ sis. Although this term is not prominent in §59, Barth cannot avoid it, since talk of the Son’s humiliation and obedience makes reference to Phil. 2 unavoidable.59 Earlier in the Dogmatics Barth had glossed ken oˉ sis in Cyrillian terms, spurning any sense of incarnational self-emptying as a diminishment, limitation or suspension of divinity.60 Specifically, I/2 described ken oˉ sis in terms of the Word’s sovereign

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Thus the excurses at IV/1, pp. 180–3 and 188–92. Thus I/2, p. 37: ‘From the reality of Jesus Christ, we gather that revelation is possible on God’s side, that God is free for us, in such a way that His Word in becoming Man at the same time, is and remains what He is, the true and eternal God, the same as He is in Himself at the Father’s right hand forever. The kenosis, passion, humiliation which He takes upon Himself by becoming man signifies no loss in divine majesty, but, considered in light of its goal, actually its triumph.’ A further treatment of ken oˉ sis comes in II/1, pp. 515–18, when Barth connects the term with the dialectic of veiling and unveiling. See also Karl Barth, Epistle to the Philippians (trans. James W. Leitch; Louisville: WJKP, 2002), pp. 60–5. I use the word ‘Cyrillian’ with due awareness of its limits; doubtless, ken oˉ sis did not have a stable meaning in the Alexandrian’s own work. A passage in the ‘Second letter

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condescension – that is, the Son’s willingness to subject himself to an incarnate existence – while retaining his divinity. Ken oˉ sis was therefore initially understood in terms of union as ‘addition’, with the Son adjoining to himself a human essence in the context of his economic mission, and thereby existing as the Subject definitive of Christ’s simple but ontologically complex person. This meaning of ken oˉ sis is also present in IV/1, but in an obviously more radical sense, for Barth now argues that God wills that the incarnation should prove ontologically transformative for the divine Son. Thus it is that ken oˉ sis as ‘self-divestment (Selbstentäuberung)61 . . . does not mean that God ceases to be himself as human, but rather that God takes it upon himself to be something quite other’ – this be, of course, not being restricted to the Son’s economic existence – ‘than that which corresponds and befits his divine form, his co-equality with God’ (IV/1, p. 180 rev.). Barth therefore supplies a new twist to his earlier Cyrillian understanding of ken oˉ sis. Charged with a meaning proximate to Gehorsam, ken oˉ sis now describes an event of divine self-determination. But the fact remains that Barth declines to give ken oˉ sis a significant role in §59 or, indeed, in any paragraph or part volume of the Church Dogmatics. One reason for this move is obvious: the term Gehorsam both sufficiently conceptualizes the reality of Christ’s divinity and clarifies the intra-Trinitarian basis for the incarnation. If ‘obedience’ does the dogmatic work that seems needful, why bring in additional concepts? Does not conceptual thrift conduce dogmatic clarity? Another reason is a fear of association with nineteenthcentury neo-Lutheran kenoticists such as W. F. Gess, Ernst Sartorius and Gottfried Thomasius.62 The subtleties of Thomasius’s Christi Person und

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to Nestorius’ does provide, however, support for the above claims: ‘We do not say that the Logos became flesh by having his nature changed, nor for that matter that he was transformed into a complete human being composed out of soul and body. On the contrary, we say that in an unspeakable and incomprehensible way, the Logos united to himself, in his hypostasis, flesh enlivened by a rational soul, and in this way became a human being and has been designated “Son of man” . . . the Logos was born of a woman after he had, “for us and for our salvation,” united human reality hypostatically to himself’ (The Christological Controversy, pp. 132–3). On this reckoning, while it is proper to claim that Christ was the Word ‘enfleshed’, it is also proper to say that the Word ‘enfleshes’ himself, ‘adding’ to himself a human nature. Entäusserung is difficult to translate; ‘self-divestment’ is probably the best bet. Bruce L. McCormack makes exactly this point; see ‘Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism’, IJST 8.3 (2006), pp. 243–51. While McCormack’s own construal of ken oˉ sis in this essay – a ken oˉ sis that construes the Son’s character as being ‘receptive’ to the human nature assumed – is an important constructive move, I suspect Barth would have concerns. On the one hand, he would approve the idea that God self-constitutes, as Son, in terms his incarnate life. As McCormack says: in the final analysis, ‘Jesus Christ is the subject of election; not the eternal Son or Logos’ (p. 249). On the other hand, Barth does indeed embrace what

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Werk (a text that anticipates some elements of Barth’s Christology) notwithstanding, the legacy of these authors was to restrict the meaning of ken oˉ sis to divine ‘self-emptying’.63 When Barth wrote, the potentially broad connotative freight of the term had not yet been recovered.64 No matter his Cyrillian sympathies, ken oˉ sis suggested to Barth a subtraction of properties originally and properly predicated of God Godself. And this hardly fits with a concern to insist that God ‘became flesh without reservation or diminution’ (IV/1, p. 418). Certainly, Barth contends that, in becoming Christ, the Son exists under the conditions of finitude – even to the point at which the Son must ‘achieve freedom and obedience as a link in the chain of an unfree and disobedient humanity’ (IV/1, p. 216 rev.), sharing the cognitive and practical limitations that define humanity as such. God’s solidarity ‘with us’ entails exactly this extremity of divine self-determination. But for Barth, the self-limitation of God in the incarnation is the consequence of God’s sovereign self-determination, not its anterior condition of possibility. God’s love is not ‘self-denying’,65 as Thomasius suggested, but ‘self-giving’ even to this point. There need be no acclamation of God’s divestment of attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and so on) that do not square with Christ’s human existence. The theological task is rather to correct human thinking about

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McCormack finds dogmatically baffling, namely a communicatio operationum (see here Chapter 3) whereby two agencies concur in Christ’s person. Barth would not say that the Son’s ‘humility’ and ‘receptivity’ are exclusive of an affirmation of the Son’s activity in the person of Christ – which is what McCormack seems to imply (see esp. p. 250). For if the unio hypostatica is thoroughly actualized, with each essence understood in terms of what it does – namely, form and uphold the simple person of Christ – then one is no longer dealing with the problems thrown up by a substantivist version of dyothelitism. Barth would argue that the divine Son’s (active) humility and (active) obedience not only amount to the positive exercise of God’s freedom under the conditions of finitude, but also that this humility and obedience includes the full human being and acting of the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. For the most important sections of Christi Person und Werk, see Gottfried Thomasius, Christ’s Person and Work. Part II: The Person of the Mediator, in Claude Welch (ed. and trans.), God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology: G. Thomasius, I. A. Dorner, A. E. Biedermann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 23–100. Note that Thomasius argues that theology ought to be governed by a ‘christological concentration’; emphasizes God’s prevenience against liberal exemplarism; construes Christ’s humanity as a natura humana (not an extant person) that God establishes and assumes; defines sa/rc as Christ’s enburdenment with the sin and judgement owed to humankind; makes love the sole motivating factor of God’s incarnate action; upholds the reality of Christ’s divinity; and, most importantly, anticipates Barth’s doctrine of election, writing of an ‘extra-temporal decree of the eternal God’, which means that ‘being-man has become the permanent form of existence for God the Son’ (Ibid., pp. 84 and 83, emphasis removed). See here Coakley’s excellent analysis in ‘Ken oˉ sis and Subversion’, pp. 84–93. Thomasius, Christ’s Person and Work, p. 49.

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divine attributes: to show that God’s elective love has less to do with a power that must necessarily forgo the glory of God’s immanent interrelating, more to do with an exuberant and transformative overflowing that stops at nothing to secure companionship with humankind.

Human obedience While §59 does not place much emphasis on Christ’s human obedience, the interpretative work of the last chapter enables the identification of a christological subplot that runs through this famous paragraph. This subsection brings this subplot into view, showing how the priestly office of Jesus Christ, like his kingly office, involves not only the agency of the divine Son but also the agency of the human identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth. It engages Barth’s claim that Jesus’ ‘obedience . . . corresponds to the Lordship of God and reflects it’ (IV/1, p. 208); that in Christ there is ‘a human action – but in and with the human action it is also a divine action’ (IV/1, p. 280); that, most profoundly, ‘the sinlessness, the obedience of this one man, means that he himself as God’s Son did not refuse to be delivered up for us all, taking the place of us sinners’ (IV/1, p. 237 rev.). The following analysis shows, more particularly, that the unusual charge Barth lends to divine obedience (his indefensible comments about gender notwithstanding) extends to his remarks about the obedience of Christ as a human being. Gehorsam does not imply an enforced deference to authority analogous to that required of, or at least proposed for, individuals in various social, political, cultural and religious settings. Rather, it refers to Christ’s distinctive human response to God’s prevenient and loving direction; it describes how Jesus definitively occupies the ‘space in which the human can be obedient’ (III/1, p. 266 rev.), conforming himself to God’s loving direction and thereby establishing a new future for humankind.

Covenantal obedience and justificatory obedience What God has done God has done without us, without the whole world, without the counsel or assistance of that which is flesh and lives in the flesh – except only for the flesh of Jesus Christ. God has done it entirely in this his Word become flesh . . . In him (Christ) the covenant that God has faithfully kept, which humanity has broken, is renewed and restored. Representing all others and substituting himself for them in himself, he is the human partner of God in this new covenant. He in the authenticity, validity and force of his suffering and dying! (IV/1, p. 251 rev.)

These sentences provide a perfect précis of Barth’s understanding of justification, with the important stipulation, ‘except only for the flesh of Jesus Christ’, holding the clue to the meaning of Christ’s human obedience. To engage this meaning, it is useful initially to step back from the details of §59 216

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and to retell the narrative about sin that frames this paragraph. So doing indicates that Barth’s comments on evil, dispersed across the broad plains of Church Dogmatics II and III and succinctly conveyed in the ‘theological microcosm’66 of §50, provide the conceptual backdrop for his description of Jesus’ approach to the cross in Church Dogmatics IV/1. Barth’s narrative commences with a now-familiar claim: God’s pre-temporal elective decision, coordinate with God’s triune self-organization, is to love and relate companionably to humankind. God then realizes this decision, by way of an action appropriable to the divine Son, in the context of created time and space. With the incarnation, God encloses humanity within the divine life, thereby granting it a reality that has comparable (but not equivalent) validity to that possessed by God Godself. Concomitantly, Christ enacts an identity that shapes humanity as God’s covenant partner. In light of his history of wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance, each human is covenantally positioned and rendered covenantally compliant. Furthermore, this covenantal posture entails more than God and humanity merely ‘being together’,67 for Christ heralds a future in which God and humanity act together. A future, in fact, in which God’s originary self-differentiation (for human flourishing and against every alternative) is repeated in human lives. Since Jesus Christ declines a human identity that refuses active companionship with God and lives as the ‘human for others’, those ‘in him’ are always-already poised to do likewise. Incredibly, each and every human seizes an identity contrary to that bestowed upon him or her. The bare fact of human finitude and the adjunct capacity for self-determination provides, somehow, humans with the opportunity to undertake actions performative of that which God does not will.68 And human beings invariably seize this opportunity. Instead of acting within the space of God’s prevenient direction, each human pursues projects of godless self-aggrandizement. This occurrence, this impossible-possibility, is necessarily baffling for the Christian theologian. For how, and why, would the

66

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John C. McDowell, ‘Much Ado About Nothing: Karl Barth’s Being Unable to Do Nothing About Nothingness’, IJST 4.3 (2002), pp. 319–35 (319). Wolf Krötke, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth (ed. and trans. Philip G. Ziegler and Christina-Maria Bammel; Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005), p. 22. Thus III/1, pp. 108–9: ‘The creature can be . . . foolish. It can become guilty of the inconceivable rebellion of looking past the Word of God . . . All this can happen because in its distinction from God the creature as such, while it is not ungodly, is non-divine, so that to posit it at all is undoubtedly a risk, since it is to posit a freedom which is distinction from the freedom of God.’ Barth’s suggestion here is that the sheer fact of finitude provides sufficient occasion for rebellion. This does not mean, of course, that this ‘occasion’ makes for inevitable lapse; sin arises only when the precariousness of creaturehood is complemented by the perversity of disobedience.

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human act in ways contrary to his or her original ontological determination? How is it that those made in the image of God, enclosed in the person of Christ, squander their inheritance? To emphasize the incapacity of the theologian at this point, Barth adopts a stance that parallels Kant’s perspective in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Just as no philosophically tenable explanation for humanity’s disregard for the categorical imperative can be tendered, so too does Christian theology reach its limit when confronted by sin.69 Since Christ defines human existence, one simply cannot say why those ‘in him’ overturn their original orientation. Testimony to theology’s ‘necessary brokenness’ (III/3, p. 293) with regard to sin is Barth’s portrayal of das Nichtige (nothingness, nihility), a fascinating reworking of the Augustinian tradition70 in which he is situated. On one level, what God ‘does not will’ is deemed ontologically invalid in both eternity and time. Das Nichtige lacks the predicate of being. It is no ‘thing’: dispossessed, bereft, unwanted, it stands outside of God’s positive determination of Godself, humanity and creation. On another level, what God does not will functions as the anterior ‘cause’ (I use the term very loosely) of nothingness. While nothingness is no thing, it is not unequivocally nonexistent; it is neither akin to non-possible hypothetical entities (e.g., square circles) nor to creatures that God does not create (e.g., talking cats). Rather, the fact of God not willing a certain identity for Godself and God’s favoured creature engenders a range of possibilities actively opposed to God. When the human sins, she realizes and concretizes these possibilities. She gives das Nichtige a lease of life; she enables das Nichtige as an ‘antithetically anhypostatic being’ that threatens God and God’s creation.71 Certainly Barth’s narrative stumbles somewhat at this juncture. It is certainly legitimate to ascribe a distinctive positivity to God’s acts, in light of which the theologian imagines alternate courses of action, passed over. Barth’s rhetoric trades freely in counterfactuals; they intensify the reader’s sense of the identity that God takes on and the reality of the actions that God undertakes (God could have done x . . . God could have done y . . . yet

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Barth himself notes this connection. ‘To use the phrase of Kant, [the human] lives by an “evil principle,” with a “bias toward evil,” in the power of a “radical evil,” which shows itself virulent and active in his life, with which in some incomprehensible but actual way he accepts solidarity’ (IV/1, p. 495). While an analysis of Barth and Augustine on evil cannot be offered here, suffice it to say that Barth, like other twentieth-century theologians, creatively appropriates his Augustinian heritage. For a recent treatment of this trajectory of thought, see Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, p. 51. Despite the utility of this phrase, the term ‘being’ is perhaps a step too far: Barth’s das Nichtige lacks the ontological credibility God grants creatures.

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God does z). Yet Barth’s reasoning strains when he contends both that ‘Nothingness is that which God does not will’ (III/3, p. 352) and that ‘on this basis . . . nothingness “is”’ (III/3, p. 351, my emphasis). Why does the nonexercise of an option for divine self-constitution and action engender a malicious (pseudo)reality? Even so, the oddity of Barth’s etiology need not distract overmuch; his comments on this front, to reference Kant once again, might be seen as dispensable dogmatic paraerga.72 Barth’s more basic claim is that, given humanity’s endemic sinfulness, das Nichtige as a destructive ‘alien factor’ (III/3, p. 289) gains a foothold in creation. In light of human sin, what God rejects, eternally, transmutes from a denied possibility into a sinister and threatening (pseudo)reality – for ‘when the creature crosses the frontier from the one side and it is invaded from the other, nothingness achieves actuality in the creaturely world’ (III/3, p. 350). Note that humanity is solely at fault in effecting this transmutation. We usher in the operations of Nothingness; we establish a rival ‘creation’ to God, unaware that our actions begin a chain of de-creation, a perverse inversion of God’s gracious creatio ex nihilo. And the consequences are terrible. Barth might well quote Athanasius: ‘the race of man was perishing; the rational man made in God’s image was disappearing, and the handiwork of God was in the process of dissolution’.73 He would also insist that this claim neither be taken as mere rhetoric, nor thought to apply only to humankind as such. Given that each human ‘lets hell loose’ (IV/1, p. 450) with his or her sinful involvement with das Nichtige, the entirety of creation is destabilized and jeopardized. Not figuratively, but actually. Because the covenant constitutes the ‘internal basis’ of creation (III/1, §41.3), the waywardness of God’s covenant partner threatens the integrity of the world as such.74 Now while God patiently ‘permits’ the terrible consequences of human disobedience (the Fall, humanity’s pride, humanity’s misery, and so on), God 72

73 74

John Webster makes a similar point: ‘questions of [sin’s] ancestry are entirely subservient to the main Christological handling of the theme . . . the logic of Barth’s position is such that he is unlikely to be profoundly occupied with origins’ (Barth’s Moral Theology, p. 67). Athanasius, On the Incarnation, p. 60. For more on this point, see ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, in Karl Barth, Community, State, and Church: Three Essays (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), p. 155. See also IV/1, p. 411: ‘evil is not an element in the orderly course of the world, but an element, indeed the element, which absolutely threatens and obscures it – the sowing of the enemy in the good field, the invasion of chaos, the nihilist revolution which can result only in the annihilation of all creatures’; and III/3, p. 78: ‘The non-existent is a more dangerous factor, its menacing of the creature is greater, and the creature’s need of the divine support and preservation is more penetrating, than the older theology could ever reveal, confined as it was by the outlook and language of its metaphysical basis’. One cannot but think that the advent of nuclear stockpiling gave Barth’s rhetoric such urgency. Since the 1940s, a staggering truth has come to light: humanity really can destroy the world.

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does not acquiesce to these consequences. The election of Jesus Christ expresses what might be called a divine obstinacy or, more biblically, a loving jealousy. God refuses to accept a thwarted future with humankind; God insists that the covenant attain its proper form.75 Indeed, in the same moment at which ‘there obviously takes place an intolerable menacing of the whole work of God’ (IV/1, p. 411 rev.), God’s intolerance is always-already acted upon, given God’s elective intention to become and be the logos incarnatus. God’s actualization of this intention, moreover, evidences God’s concern for a covenantal response to sin. God does not intend to impose unilaterally ‘order and peace’ (IV/1, p. 217), simply removing the possibility of rebellion and reasserting divine control over creation, foisting a reconciliatory settlement on the warring parties. The incarnation of God in Christ, an ontologically and agentially complex person, signals that God wills that humanity should recreate itself in the same moment in which it is recreated by God. And Christ’s human correspondence to God, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, serves exactly this purpose. At every moment of his life, Jesus Christ is the one who fulfils God’s will, guaranteeing that God does ‘not contend with nothingness without allowing His creature a share in the contention, without summoning His creature to His side as His co-belligerent’ (III/3, p. 355). Although God deems Christ’s exemplary human existence a necessary condition for the overcoming of sin and evil, it is not in itself a sufficient condition. Recall a claim made during Barth’s reworking of supralapsarianism: election means ‘the history of an obstacle and its removing; the history of a death and a resurrection; the history of a judgment and a pardon. In God Himself there is a simple and immediate victory of light over darkness, with the issue never for one moment in doubt. In the creaturely sphere and for man . . . this victory must take on historical form, thus becoming an event in time’ (II/2, p. 141). Which is to say: God requires that humanity’s correspondence to God be both positive and negative; that humanity repeat God’s self-differentiation (for love, against das Nichtige) in the finite sphere. While Christ’s history provides some portion of this repetition (his wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance being positively iterative of God’s identity; his rejection of sinful behaviour being negatively analogous to God’s non-willing), the remaking of humanity as God’s covenant partner takes place in the context of a humanity that has so thoroughly entangled 75

Thus IV/1, p. 534: ‘Whatever man may do in the folly of his pride, he cannot disrupt [the] self-determination of God’. See also IV/2, p. 772: ‘God’s love is not a divine state. It is an act. Indeed, it is the life-act of God. It is the act of His self-giving, of His selfgiving to sinful man . . . If He loves this man in spite of the fact that he is sinful, this carries with it the fact that He opposes to man’s sin His divine defiance and therefore His contradiction and resistance . . . God forcefully withstands man on his evil way . . . commanding him to halt: Thus far and no farther.’

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itself with das Nichtige that sanctification, in and of itself, is not sufficient. God wills nothing less than the expulsion, the killing off, the utter negation, of the sin that threatens creation, all the while preserving humanity as God’s covenant partner. Christ’s passion, then, is the radical divine action which attacks and destroys at its very root the primary evil in the world; the activity of the second Adam who took the place of the first, and in so doing brought in a new human, founded a new world and inaugurated a new aeon . . . It is only as his [Christ’s] passion that it can be this action; only as sin . . . is destroyed by the destruction and eternal death that threatens the world . . . For the sake of the best, the worst had to happen to sinful man: not out of a divine desire for retaliation and revenge (Vergeltungs- und Rachsucht), but because of the radical nature of the divine love, which could ‘satisfy’ itself only in the outworking of its wrath against the sinful human, only by killing him, extinguishing him, removing him. (IV/1, p. 254 rev.) The obedience that God requires of Christ encompasses both the ‘new’ human that God wills to include in the covenant and the ‘old’ human that God wills to exclude. A love that kills, extinguishes, removes, even ‘burns’?76 Why write so drastically, given the genocidal horrors of the last century? Why must justifying grace have this annihilative dimension? Simply because of the fierceness of God’s love, which will not settle for anything less than the best covenantal relationship possible. To have the intended covenantal relationship undermined by humanity’s realization of das Nichtige, marred by that which is contrary to the love and freedom that God intends, corrupted by something other than the perfect and covenantal realm of peace that God desires – all this is not only ‘intolerable’ to but literally impossible for God, given God’s sovereign and elective decision to bring human beings into joyous companionship with God and each other. Were humanity to maintain its sinful self-determination, each exercise of human agency, while enabled by God’s love (for God’s creative and providential care never ‘lets up’, and is the condition of possibility for human action as such), would in fact be emblematic of human hostility to God. Humanity would then be a pale and pathetic reflection of what God intends; each human would be less than she ought to be. To avoid this eventuality – or, more positively, to perfect, utterly, God’s relationship with humankind – God concentrates the entirety of human wrongdoing in a single person and then ‘suspends’ God’s patience towards sinful humanity. The passion, in other words, provides a needed temporal iteration of the future of non-covenantal and sinful humanity – a future in

76

Barth is especially fond of this figure; see, for example, IV/1, pp. 393, 539 and 542.

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which sin is stopped, cornered and forever cancelled. With the crucifixion, God kills off the ‘old’ human, leaving in place only the ‘new’. Humanity and creation are therefore remade. Definitively so, since ‘the refutation of darkness by light . . . has been inaugurated once and for all and cannot be reversed but only continued’ (III/1, p. 118). Barth describes this event as having both epistemological and ontological dimensions. On the one hand, Christ’s obedience ensures that the operations of das Nichtige are drawn out ‘into the open’.77 Given human falsehood, das Nichtige ‘cover[s] its tracks’,78 rendering its operations less-than-serious by way of evasive talk. Human beings therefore cannot tell themselves about sin; its character and operations can only be fully revealed by God, through Christ.79 The cross, specifically, provides the cognitively and theologically orienting demonstration of what das Nichtige intends: not only an attack on humanity and creation but, also, an assault on the divine benefactor himself. Christ’s role as judge therefore coheres with his revelatory prophetic office; his life is the ‘place where we have to do with human sin in its absolutely pure, outworked, and unambiguous form’ (IV/1, p. 397 rev.). His divine and human obedience unto death, one might even say, entails an ongoing exorcism; the passage and conclusion of his life epitomize the command, ‘Come out!’ (Mk 1.25), pushing the demonic into the cold light of day.80 The ontological register involves God willing that das Nichtige and sin be drawn into God’s own life. Given that humanity itself is implicated in its concrete existence and sustenance, sinful humanity cannot of itself contend with nothingness. But neither can Christ, sinless as he is, humanly overcome

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Barth intimates something of the fascinating claim that God tricks the devil into thinking he could overcome God by way of the cross. For a classic portrayal, see Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (trans. A. G. Herbert; London: SPCK, 1937), pp. 63–71. For the patristic locus classicus, see chapter 24 of Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechism, in Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, etc. (NPNF 5; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), p. 494. Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, p. 81. The ‘through Christ’ qualifier is essential. Barth has misgivings about the opening of Calvin’s Institutes; he worries also about the treatment of sin in post-Reformation protestant dogmatics, during the Aufklärung, and in liberal protestant work. See IV/1, pp. 362–87. An important qualification is needed here. Barth is not suggesting that the Christian’s knowledge of evil is restricted to the events surrounding Christ’s death. The Christian is able and of course does identify various outbreaks of wickedness in history without drawing explicit connection with Golgotha. Barth’s point is rather that elemental character of sin as ingratitude and hostility towards God is exposed by, and ought to be analysed in terms of, the cross. He would agree with Luther: ‘the main benefit of Christ’s passion is that man sees into his true self and that he be terrified and crushed by this’. See ‘A Meditation on Christ’s Passion’, in Luther’s Works; Vol. 42, Devotional Writings (ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen; St. Louis: Concordia, 1969), p. 10.

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nothingness. Only as the Son determines himself as the logos incarnatus is sin truly engaged, for God hereby turns its chaotic menace upon Godself, concentrating it in the time and space of Christ’s death and thereby drawing it into God’s own ‘heart’,81 into the time and space of God’s being, where it simply cannot be. To say, then, that the divine Son is the ‘judge is judged in our place’ on the cross, means that the encroachment of das Nichtige is rerejected, re-invalidated as an impossibility, its arrogated power rendered null by God’s originary preference for love and freedom; that the cross is the moment of Christ’s history at which God ‘exercises the non-willing under which [nothingness] alone can have existence, and God’s jealousy, wrath and judgment achieve their purpose and therefore their end, which is also the end, the destruction of nothingness’ (III/3, p. 355 rev.). Sinful humanity receives a transformative pardon when, drawn into the fire of God’s loving being, the most elemental fact about nothingness – that it has no hold over God or the human essence that God creates – obtains reconfirmation. Krötke is precise: God ‘turns upon himself the fullest nihilation of nothingness’82 in order to negate the sinful self-nihilation of humanity. Here, finally, the most significant dimension of Christ’s human obedience comes into view. God does not reaffirm God’s rejection of das Nichtige on the cross ‘alone’ (an imperious pax divina; a decretum absolutum); rather, God wills that rejection include the event of Christ’s human obedience. Thus it is that Christ divinely and humanly effects justification. Specifically, the man Jesus constitutes himself as sinful flesh, even as he is so constituted; he disposes himself as the vehicle for God’s absorption of evil into Godself; he renders himself the ‘object’ upon whom God’s confutation of human waywardness is exerted. He wills to become, and indeed does become, the sole human who encounters the crushing force of God’s fierce love. Recognizing that God must both assert the invalidity of a sinful, non-covenantal humanity (for only in this way is the sin of humanity acknowledged and expelled) and uphold covenantal partnership (for love, against sin), Christ humanly makes himself, with and as the Son, the ‘old’ human that God ‘condemns and kills and causes . . . to perish’ (IV/1, p. 574). He renders himself the one rejected human. A comparison with Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo brings this point into stillclearer focus. Obviously, Barth does not conceive the incarnation and passion in feudal terms, whereby an offended divine ‘honour’ requires quantitatively excessive recompense, the offender ‘pay[ing] back more than he took, in proportion to the insult which he has inflicted’.83 But Barth seizes on two of Anselm’s most foundational claims. The first claim intersects with Barth’s view of election: whatever the terrors of the cross, its meaning is logically 81 82 83

See here IV/1, p. 411. Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, p. 110. Anselm, Why God Became Man, p. 283.

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posterior to, and materially derivative of, God’s love for humankind.84 As Anselm insists that, most basically, the cross bespeaks God’s pursuit of human well-being, so too Barth. The second claim connects with Anselm’s conviction that the ‘Father did not coerce Christ to face death against his will, or give permission for him to be killed, but Christ himself of his own volition underwent death in order to save humankind’.85 Barth radicalizes and expands Anselm’s focus on the concordance of divine and human wills in the passion (a concordance that, as Katherine Sonderegger has noted, forms ‘the nerve center of [Anselm’s] whole treatise’).86 Jesus qua human, specifically, complements and co-enacts God’s condemnation and rejection of humanity’s involvement with sin because he perceives that, via the cross, God’s love might hereby attain its perfect covenantal form. Such an embrace of the cross makes God’s response to sin an event mutually contrived: less a matter of iustitia distributiva, more a salvific transformation of the beloved, the natal moment of the human as a creature oriented purely towards correspondence with God, with the old ‘history’ of sin set in the past and a glorious future emplaced. As God ‘begins again’ with humanity, Christ humanly contributes to the conclusion of the ‘old’ human, affirming the death of sinful humanity by constituting himself wholeheartedly as sin, in order that God might draw sin into Godself. He carries out the sole obedient act of the old human, taking responsibility for its waywardness, as a covenantal partner must. Indeed, Christ humanly bears and enacts judgement upon sin, even as Christ divinely bears and enacts judgement upon sin. While punishment comes from God alone, its application depends on Christ’s being the human who, against wrongdoing, makes himself the ultimate wrongdoer and says, with God, that the only future for sin is – no future at all. Granted this comparison with Anselm, Barth’s outlook (like most others) obviously cannot be associated with a single ‘model’ of atonement. Indeed, in the course of his exposition, Barth adjoins to his forensic emphasis both the elastic figure of satisfaction and the Christus Victor motif – necessarily so, given his conviction that God’s rejection is exhausted on the cross, and

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Ibid., pp. 268–9, 315–19, 354 and esp. p. 317: ‘ . . . if it is recognized that God has made nothing more precious than rational nature, whose intended purpose is that it should rejoice in him, it is utterly foreign to him to allow any rational creature to perish . . . It is necessary . . . that God should finish what he has begun.’ See also Katherine Sonderegger, ‘Anselm, Defensor Fidei’, IJST 9.3 (2007), pp. 342–59. Anselm, Why God Became Man, p. 275; see also pp. 277, 279–80, 341–3, 345, 347, 349 and 351. In order to underscore Christ’s personal simplicity, Anselm does not always distinguish cleanly between the divine and human wills of Christ; talk of Christ’s ‘voluntary’ but ‘necessary’ death entails reference both to the divine Son and the humanity assumed by the Son. That Anselm upholds a dyothelite position, however, seems undeniable. Katherine Sonderegger, ‘Anselm, Defensor Fidei’, pp. 342–59 (353).

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his understanding of God’s and humanity’s overcoming of sin. Although I consider briefly Barth’s diversified figuration of atonement in my concluding chapter, it is most needful at this juncture to indicate that interpretations that emphasize Barth’s conviction that ‘humans are judged and made righteous in Jesus Christ outside themselves’ require augmentation.87 It is of course appropriate to foreground Barth’s vital sense of God’s justifying action in the passion, and thereby to advert the connection forged between divine punishment, divine reconciliation and divine victory. But a focus on divine action must not be bought at the price of an appreciation of Christ’s human action vis-à-vis his passion. Justification, like sanctification, is a mutually confected event. Christ’s embrace of the cross means that humanity is remade by God Godself and, by the grace of God, by the obedience of humanity’s one true representative. As the culminating point of §50.4 makes clear, das Nichtige ‘is that which in this One who was both very God and very man has been absolutely set behind, not only by God, but in unity with Him by man’ (III/3, p. 363). Because the one true human condemns and punishes himself, confessing and bringing humanity’s guilt before God, evil is now actively and covenantally rejected. Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological but ultimately Kantian claim about evil can therefore be applied to the different environment of the Dogmatics: ‘However radical evil may be, it cannot be as primordial as goodness’88 – not for God, and not for humanity. Affirming the propriety of God’s punishment, living and dying as the one justifiable occasion of punishment, Christ ensures that humanity becomes what God intends, from all eternity, humanity to be: a creature that corresponds itself both to God’s love and to God’s rejection of sin.

Obedience as achievement, venture and absolute death Before turning to Barth’s treatment of Gethsemane, three additional points ought to be made. First, and most generally, notice that since the history of the divine Son ‘plays itself out as world history and under the entire burden and in the entire danger of world history’ (IV/1, p. 215 rev.) in a way that requires him to ‘apply . . . freedom and obedience in the chain of an unfree and disobedient humanity’ (IV/1, p. 216 rev.), so must Christ humanly achieve, enact and maintain obedience. So much is evident even in §15: divinely and humanly, Christ has to live out a life in which exaltation is cut across by abject humiliation, even unto death. It is not quite right, then, for R. Scott Rodin to say that, for Barth, God ‘fixed the outcome’89 of God’s contestation 87 88

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Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, p. 87. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (trans. Emerson Buchanan; Boston: Beacon, 1967), p. 156. R. Scott Rodin, Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 200.

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of das Nichtige. Reprising Berkouwer’s basic mistake of making grace a ‘principle’, Rodin here disregards Barth’s insistence that God’s victory draws meaning from the concrete history of Jesus Christ.90 There is no reconciliatory fait accompli. For Barth, the justificatory application of divine love includes Christ’s struggle for obedience, which persists until he draws his dying breath.91 Though the Christian, living in the bright light of resurrection, knows that victory is assured, this assurance does not make him or her oblivious to the fact that Christ had to effect this victory – and that were he to have faltered, things would have turned out quite differently. Second, obedience amounts to a venture for Jesus. Even granted that the Son is the defining subject of this person, since the Son assumes humanity to himself and wills to exist under the conditions of finitude, there is no assured path from cradle to cross. While Christ comes to understand that his own history and death reconciles humanity as such, Christ does not know of his

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Openly challenging Berkouwer in Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, Barth vigorously contests the idea that das Nichtige’s defeat is a ‘sham-battle’, with a clear victory foreordained. The word ‘triumph’ is appropriate, as far as the conclusion of Christ’s life goes, but one cannot neglect the struggle preceding this triumph. Thus: ‘How do we know that the overcoming of evil is resolved and even accomplished in the eternal will of God, and that the evil which opposes this will is nothingness? We know it quite simply because we have before us the conflict which takes place between them in Jesus, in His encounter with the world. We know it because we take seriously the manner in which the conflict is waged in Him as the source of our sure and certain knowledge of this matter. In other words, we know it because we try to be consistently christological in our whole thinking on the subject. Jesus! And we cannot avoid using such words as “conflict” and “event” to describe what is before us. To say “Jesus” is necessarily to say “history,” His history, the history in which He is what He is and does what He does. In His history we know God, and we also know evil and their relationship the one to the other – but only from this source and in this way. But at this point a way is trodden. A question is raised and answered. A sentence is pronounced and judgment is executed and offered. A faith and obedience are demanded and displayed. Prayer is offered. A cross is borne, and on this cross, suffering is endured. From the deepest depths a cry is raised to heaven. Nothing is self-evident, obvious or matter-of-course. The day must be carried against the fiercest opposition’ (IV/3.1, p. 179). This point is nicely captured by Ernstpeter Maurer in ‘“Für uns”: an unserer Stelle hingerichtet. Die Herausforderung der Versöhnungslehre’, ZdTh 18.2 (2002), pp. 190–210. After citing the important passage about God’s history ‘playing itself out’ under the conditions of world history, Maurer writes: ‘Kontingenz und Faktizität sind bezogen auf unverfugbare Entscheidungen, die in der Regel auf den Willen einer Person zurückgeführt werden. Wenn Barth das Thema “Versuchung” . . . sehr breit narrativ entfaltet, zeigt sich, dab der Wille nicht ein “Vermögen” ist, sondern nur in einer Geschichte Wirlichkeit hat . . . es macht einen Unterschied, ob ich mein “selbst” “habe” oder “verwirkliche” oder gar “begründe”, oder ob mein “selbst” Ereignis ist und vielleicht gar Geschenk. “Selbst” ist in Jesus Christus jedenfalls Ereignis zwischen Gott und Mensch’ (p. 191).

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own victory in advance. He lacks supernatural or preternatural foreknowledge of the Father’s vindicatory affirmation of his righteousness; he goes to his death without expecting his resurrection. Barth is blunt: ‘the purpose of God’ that addressed ‘the one who was really and finally humiliated, who was thrust into the deepest darkness . . . was concealed from him as from all humans’ (IV/1, p. 458–9 rev.) as he moved towards his end.92 One might even say that the final (and eternal) identity of Christ, crucified and risen, becomes known to him only as the event of resurrection happens. Christ’s eventual session at the Father’s right hand, though an eternal event from one angle, does not present itself as a ‘sure thing’ when Christ is nailed to the cross. Moreover, because Christ’s self-constituting human decisions – decisions that are of course superintended by the action of the divine Son – happen throughout his life, his is a history of ‘dutiful willingness’,93 that requires him continually to ‘grow in wisdom’ (Lk. 2.52) and ‘learn obedience’ (Heb. 5.8) as a human being. Recall the qualification regarding my annexation of Frankfurt’s work with respect to Jesus’ sinlessness. It is not that Jesus habituates himself to resist the resignation of his identity, ‘fixing’ his character once and for all (say, at the moment of baptism); rather, Christ is constantly deciding for sinlessness. Ignoring the difficult classical distinction between active and passive obedience,94 then, Barth understands Christ’s obedience as an ongoing exercise of agency that crescendoes towards a horrific climax. Christ’s final days are akin to a terrifying surge of noise that overwhelms the steady note of sanctification definitive of his ministry: ever more intensively, he propels himself towards the cross, even as he is there propelled by the sinfulness of humankind and the justifying proposal of God the Father. Third and finally, obedience means that Christ’s life heads towards a unique and nearly unthinkable end. In that he constitutes himself as the means by which God draws wickedness into the divine life, he is tasked to render himself as ‘pure sin’ – an embodiment of das Nichtige that God utterly 92

93 94

See also IV/1, p. 391, where Barth writes that Christ faces God’s wrath ‘without reckoning on any sudden turn in His favour, simply in hope in God, but in that hope only in the form of the obedience in which Jesus Christ allowed that God was in the right and He himself – and therefore the old man and ourselves whose place He had taken – in the wrong’. Anselm, Why God Became Man, p. 279. For a sampling of claims see Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 458–68. For historical background, see Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edn, 2005), pp. 272–5. This distinction found its way into Schleiermacher’s theology; see Christian Faith, pp. 451–66. Roughly summarized, ‘active obedience’ relates to Christ’s obedience to the Law and ‘passive obedience’ to Christ’s (willingly) bearing punishment for sin on the cross. Both kinds of obedience occur throughout Christ’s life, although ‘active obedience’ is more prominent during his ministry and ‘passive obedience’ more prominent in his passion.

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rejects; ‘the actuality and the totality of evil’ (IV/1, p. 399); flesh in the worst sense, flesh that is, truly forsaken by God.95 Indeed, since Christ disposes himself as the human who faces God’s holiness without mediation, one might even say that he alone enables God to ‘split’ God’s character for one excruciating moment, since in the cross God separates out the perfection of holiness from its complement, grace. In this way, not only in his divine nature, but also in his human nature, Christ becomes, is and will be the sinful human that God need not tolerate, the one whom God does destroy. One of the quotations at the outset of this chapter conveys something of this point, mentioning the ‘burning of God’s love’ that transpires in Christ’s ‘own soul, in his own body’. This ‘burning love’ entails Christ’s envelopment in the time and space of nihility itself, a macabre inversion of God’s envelopment of Christ’s person in the time and space of the divine life. Thus Barth: Taking our place, suffering the judgment of our sin, undertaking our case, he gave himself to the depth of complete helplessness, of utter incapacity and indisposability lacking thereby the help of God; to the depth in which he had nothing other than nothingness under, behind, and beside him, and nothing other than God before him and above him: nothingness in all its unfathomability and power and God as the one into whose hands he was delivered up without reservation and without claim. (IV/1, p. 458 rev.) It is not quite precise to say that Christ’s death means ‘God-abandonment,’ even though Barth’s rhetoric suggests as much. Since God self-determines as Christ, there is no absolute event of diremption within the divine life. But the expression captures the radicality of Barth’s understanding of the cross as a unique humiliation for Christ as a human being – a humiliation inseparable from, and coincident with, that which God himself wills to undergo. Indeed, theology cannot adequately describe Christ’s person on the cross, because Christ constitutes himself as the noetically inconceivable fact of sin: Barth’s reticence regarding Jesus’ experience of crucifixion (and the reason why he could never author a text like Mysterium Paschale) is reflective of the genuineness and totality of his rejection. Jesus is not merely alienated from God; Jesus becomes, literally, nothing to, and nothing in God, damned without anticipation of reprieve, as the ‘onslaught of nothingness prevails against him’ (IV/1, p. 173). Martin Luther, a continual presence throughout Barth’s treatment of justification, is precise: ‘Not only my sins and thine, but the sins of the world, past, present, or to come, take hold upon Him, go about to 95

‘God has never forsaken, and does not and will not forsake any man as He forsook this man. And “forsook” means that He turned against Him as never before or since against any – against the One who was for Him as none other, just as God for His part was for him as He never was nor is nor will be for any other’ (IV/3.1, p. 414).

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condemn Him, and do indeed condemn Him’.96 The obedience of Christ, divine and human, wills this end for his life and work.97

Gethsemane This humiliation, this human existence of Jesus in the flesh and therefore under the wrath and judgment of God is neither accident nor fate, but rather his own and therefore actually obedient will. The Gethsemane story . . . shows two things. First, that we have to do with his genuine human decision; and second, that this is a decision of obedience. He chooses, but he chooses that apart from which, being who he is, he could not choose anything else . . . Jesus would not be Jesus were his way different or were his work of a different character. (IV/1, p. 166 rev.)

Barth’s excursus on Gethsemane is neither the most conspicuous nor longest in Church Dogmatics IV.98 It spans a little over fourteen pages in the German, four of which consider Jesus’ temptations in the desert. Nevertheless, it counts among the most important sources for understanding Barth’s construal of Christ’s humanity, deepening Barth’s account of Christ’s human agency and providing, to recall a point made in Chapter 1, a riposte to Schleiermacher’s claim that the idea that Christ ‘must somehow have aimed at his death . . . contains a secret docetism’99 and Herrmannian accounts of Jesus’ serene ‘inner life’. Appearing at the climax of §59.2’s progressive description of Christ and judgement, this excursus explains what it means to say Christ ‘acted justly in our place’ (IV/1, p. 273), bearing and executing God’s rejection of sin. My interpretation proceeds in four steps, pushing deeper and deeper into Barth’s outlook. The first step describes Christ’s history as headed towards utter crisis; it signals how seriously Barth takes the saviour’s cognitive and emotional distress, when confronted with the end that God intends for him. The second step casts Christ’s justificatory obedience in terms of the anthropology of §44, indicating why Barth frames the Gethsemane excursus in terms of Heb. 5.8. It considers how Jesus ‘learned obedience . . . maintain[ing]

96

97

98

99

Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (trans. Erasmus Middleton; Grand Rapids: Kregel Classics, 1979), p. 168. Apposite here, of course, is Barth’s understanding of Christ’s descent into hell. For a careful treatment of Barth’s views on this matter, see David Lauber, Barth on the Descent into Hell: God, Atonement and the Christian Life (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Lauber’s interpretation of Barth on justification connects with mine at several points; I have learned much from his work. I have dealt with Gethsemane elsewhere; much of what follows parallels Paul Dafydd Jones, ‘Karl Barth on Gethsemane’, IJST 9.2 (2007), pp. 148–71. Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus, p. 362.

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it in freedom in a way which was not by any means self-evident’ (IV/1, p. 260), when he takes on the task of bringing God’s reconciliatory project to term. The third step examines the consequences that attend Jesus’ struggle – the fact that this travail, though facilitating justification, eternally marks both God’s life and human being as such. The fourth step portrays Jesus’ human struggle as the ground of a covenant that rejects sin and evil in favour of a divine-human relationship characterized by freedom and love. It considers, specifically, how Christ assents to God’s using das Nichtige to liberate humanity from its involvement with sin.

Jesus’ history: A movement towards crisis Describing Jesus’ state of mind in the garden, Barth writes of a shattering realization: ‘It now came to him’ (IV/1, p. 266) – or, more vividly, ‘Es brach jetzt über ihn herein’ – that his steadfast obedience would culminate in death. Previous understandings of his person find themselves outpaced: Jesus realizes that his life constitutes the exclusive point of conflict between what humankind intends for itself (sin and the propagation of evil) and what God intends for humanity (loving companionship with God).100 Jesus grasps, moreover, that he has been assigned a uniquely negative role within the context of God’s justifying action. He must dispose himself as the one in whom God’s love takes a unique turn, so that the death of the ‘old’ human clears space for the birth of the ‘new’. ‘Es brach jetzt über ihn herein’ – prominent here is Barth’s concern to accentuate both Christ’s epistemological limits and the emotional trauma of his prayer. Christ has to discriminate and wrestle afresh with his identity as elected human; he must define himself vis-à-vis God once more. Certainly, Christ has already committed himself to an identity as condemned sa/rc. As Barth’s later treatment of his baptism by John makes clear, a confession of sins shows Christ’s ‘whole readiness for the risking and sacrifice (Hingabe) of his life in the service of God and of humanity, the meta/noia which was necessarily demanded of him in even this form’ (IV/4, p. 63 rev.).101 But an initial ‘willingness to bear [sin’s] shame and curse in place of all’ (IV/4, p. 59) does not ‘freeze’ or ‘fix’ Jesus’ identity. There is no guarantee that he will persist in obedience, even granted that this human lives in perfect union with, and as, God qua Son, under the directive address of God’s first way of being. Barth puts it bluntly when, earlier in §59, he anticipates the Gethsemane excursus: ‘it is not self-evident that He should be given this cup to drink and that He should take it upon Himself to drink it’ (IV/1, p. 238). Only in 100

101

Maurer makes the point nicely: ‘Es geht in der Person Jesu Christi um eine sehr konkrete Konfrontation, in der sich zwei Geschichten ineinander verwickeln’. See ‘“Für uns”’, pp. 190–210 (200). This excursus provides an important complement to Gethsemane; Barth himself makes the connection between Jesus’ baptism and his later agony. See IV/4, pp. 61–7.

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Gethsemane, faced by God’s singular Gebot, does Christ’s staurological future take on a categorical, as opposed to hypothetical, standing. Even though the ‘necessity’ of punishment had been determined by God, and although Jesus had already readied himself for his demise (think of Mk 8), Gethsemane announces a future with which he had not fully reckoned: death as utter rejection by God. Might Jesus have been overwhelmed by this prospect? Might he have faltered? Barth does not flinch: ‘It was one thing to enter and continue on this way, it was another to tread it to its necessarily bitter end in this world; it was one thing to speak and stand against the tempter, another to see him actually triumphant in this world’ (IV/1, p. 266 rev.). Salvation hinges on Jesus humanly cognizing and concretely enacting an appalling end. His doing so cannot be taken for granted. Of course, so much is consistent with Barth’s highly actualistic understanding of Christ’s sinlessness – the fact that Christ must constantly dispose himself as sinless, in order that he might always be sinless. By prefacing his treatment of Gethsemane with remarks about the temptation narratives (an exegetical connection proposed by Calvin and others),102 Barth indicates again that Jesus’ life always carries the possibility of his disavowing his identity. Satan’s initial assault provides a dramatic reminder of an ever-present range of alternate possibilities, open to Jesus, that admit of realization.103 And it is not as if Jesus only suffers Satan’s guiles in the desert. Nevertheless, the ‘temptation’ of Gethsemane has a distinctive quality, since the previous array of possibilities for working with God is now reduced to a single point: God’s petitioning Jesus to realize one possibility that, while bringing each and every temptation to an end, will conclude his life in abyssal misery. And Barth does not minimize the shock of realization; he shows no interest in preserving Jesus’ equanimity.104 To emphasize how Christ is ‘confronted with the final fruit and consequence of what He had begun’ (IV/1, p. 265), 102

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See John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Vol. 3 (trans. William Pringle; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), pp. 225–37, esp. 226. Barth’s discussion of these possibilities occasions some especially fine writing: ‘Why not set up a real kingdom of God on earth? an international order modelled on the insights of Christian humanitarianism, in which, of course, a liberal-orthodox, ecumenical, confessional Church might also find an appropriate place? Note that to do this He was not asked to renounce God or go over to atheism. He had only to lift His hat to the usurper. He had only to bow the knee discreetly and privately to the devil. He had only to make the quiet but solid and irreversible acknowledgment that in the world of splendour the devil should have the first and final word, that at bottom everything should remain as it has been. On this condition we can all succeed in the world, and Jesus most of all’ (IV/1, p. 262). Not only the liberals, but Calvin himself labours at this point, caught between a classical understanding of the human’s moderation and self-control (derived primarily from Seneca) and the details of the biblical record. See David Foxgrover, ‘The Humanity of Christ: Within Proper Limits’, in Robert V. Schnucker (ed.), Calviniana: Ideas and Influence of Jean Calvin (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers,

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Barth deploys an arresting rhetorical strategy – mixing Greek with simple, evocative and alliteratively dazzling German. Thus he notes Jesus’ e0kqambei=sqai (amazement), his a0dhmonei=n (dismay), his a0gwni/a (agony) and his lupei=sqai: a ‘sorrow, heaviness, an oppression (Betrübnis, Bekümmerung, Bedrückung) which was “even unto death”’ (IV/1, p. 265). This draws attention to the fact that justification passes through the fragile straits of Christ’s human life. Although God’s work here transpires, there is also a human ‘work that Jesus must carry out, which he is determined to bring to a conclusion’ (IV/1, p. 267 rev.). Barth would of course grant that faith and assurance go hand in hand. Things are ‘eternally settled’ (IV/3.1, p. 170), because Jesus does not falter. He really is the victor, and grace really does triumph. The narrative of each gospel moves from the cross to the empty tomb; the serenity of John offsets the terrors of the synoptics; the resurrection not only supplies the anterior condition of faith but also announces God’s vindication of Christ’s covenantal obedience. But Barth’s point is that the noetic security of Christian faith includes an awareness of Jesus’ struggle and existential tumult as he walks the path to victory. The theologian, by extension, may not bury the possibility that Jesus might have been overcome and that God’s justifying love might have miscarried. Had Berkouwer attended more closely to IV/1, he would have realized that grace cannot be separated from the person of Christ; also, that this person cannot be thought in isolation from the history that he pursues, even to the bitter end. For it is by way of the free act of this one, Jesus Christ, the ‘electing God’ and the ‘elected human’, that justification comes to pass. For his part, Barth shows an unflagging attention to the particulars of the biblical witness. He not only narrates Christ’s journey to the cross; he insists on reckoning with Christ’s question in the garden. ‘Does all this have to happen?’ (IV/1, p. 264).

The achievement of justificatory responsibility Earlier in §59, Barth described Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane as ‘a remarkable historical complement to the eternal decision taken in God Himself, one 1988), pp. 93–105. Also important on this front is R. Michael Allen, ‘Calvin’s Christ: A Dogmatic Matrix for Discussion of Christ’s Human Nature’, IJST 9.4 (2007), pp. 382–97. While Allen nicely distinguishes between ‘fallen nature’ and guilt as such, my sense is that Barth would not want to differentiate the two with respect to the passion. If Christ saves, Christ saves humanity from sin and guilt: humanity is rescued from alienation from God because Christ excises both the disease and its outworking. For when Jesus Christ renders himself the one upon whom God’s rejecting wrath is laid, he draws into his being the entire scope of human wrongdoing: the broken promises, violence, cruelty, theft and, yes, the guilt that attends each and every treacherous action. While Jesus himself is rightly acclaimed as sinless, he dies as one made a ‘curse for us’ (Rom. 3.13).

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which was not taken easily but with great difficulty, one to which He won through, which He won from Himself’ (IV/1, pp. 238–9). Here again one finds Barth emphasizing the integrity and distinction of Christ’s humanity. What is added with the Gethsemane excursus is a localized description of Christ’s uptake of God’s singular command that he realize his death on the cross. This localized description gives still more texture to Barth’s understanding of Christ’s human participation in the event of justification. It indicates that the prospect of death exacted a specific exercise of agency of Christ’s part, so much that ‘the obedience of the cross was the particular form that Jesus’ free obedience took: It was . . . that which he did with his own particularity, that which enabled him to be and do what was truly and distinctively himself’.105 Barth’s specification of a decision that is, ‘won’ by Jesus is important. The English translation is fair, although necessarily approximate; the crucial verb, abringen, suggests a decision and course of action that Jesus wrenched or, better, wrested from himself. A concern to underscore the reality of such wresting pervades the Gethsemane excursus as Barth reframes the Christus victor motif in terms of Christ’s struggle to launch the series of events that lead him to the cross. As with the treatment of the communicatio gratiarum and communicatio operationum, the description of human agency proffered in Church Dogmatics III/2 funds Barth’s presentation. Recall that Barth considers responsibility and gratitude basic to human being and action. Responsibility, specifically, characterizes the event in which the human corresponds herself to God’s prevenient advance. Two particularly important registers of responsibility are ‘acknowledgment’ and ‘obedience’ – terms that might be loosely correlated with Kant’s distinction between the operations of theoretical and practical reason. Acknowledgement describes the human’s active cognition of God. As God brings her into the sphere of divine knowing, the human conforms herself noetically to God, making her acknowledgement of God participant in God’s self-knowing.106 Obedience functions as the practical complement to the theoretical act of acknowledgement. It describes human action in response to, and in conformity with, God’s direction.

105 106

Gunton, ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 129. This construal of human knowledge was of course a feature of Barth’s thought from an early date: it can be found in Romans I and II (see McCormack, Dialectical Theology, pp. 159 and 248). Note also that Barth associates human knowledge of God with the event of incarnation. The possibility of our knowing God depends on Jesus, as a human, knowing God: ‘Our flesh is . . . present when He knows God as the Son the Father, when God knows Himself. In our flesh, God knows Himself’ (II/1, p. 151). Thus also II/1, p. 153: since Jesus Christ, ‘is inside, where God is knowable to Himself, the Father to the Son, therefore, God is also knowable to him, man’. I consider this issue further in the conclusion to this study.

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Even though Barth has already elucidated acknowledgement and obedience as traits of the ‘true human’, Gethsemane shows these traits being forged by Jesus. On one level, in asking ‘must it all happen?’ Jesus endeavours to trace the shape of the divine will and to discern clearly the telos that God intends for him. Barth has little time for sleights of hand to ensure Jesus’ omniscience and intellectual perfection;107 indeed, unlike Maximus Confessor, he leaves in absolutely no doubt the fact that Jesus possesses, exercises, and thereby defines, a human ‘gnomic will’.108 Although at his baptism Jesus had already ‘listened to God’s Word . . . as the Word of God’s coming rule, judgment and forgiveness’ (IV/4, p. 63), he now labours to engage an ostensibly macabre logic of justification, with God employing evil in order that God might defeat evil. And this entails a wrestling more extreme than Jacob’s struggle with the angel (Gen. 32.23–30); it entails a process of discernment of nearly unimaginable proportions. Must it happen in this way? Barth writes: ‘In this solemn moment, understandably enough but unexpectedly and disruptively in light of all that has gone before, there is a pause (Aufhalten). Jesus himself, Jesus in prayer to God, places everything once more in question’ (IV/1, p. 264 rev.). And why would Christ not pause and give himself up to prayer? Having lived out a history committed to the dispersal of God’s overflowing love, he is now called to dam up this love – no, more, to confound, to withhold that love – and to assent to the revolting operations of das Nichtige. Thus Barth’s startling claim that a ‘riddle (Rätsel) confronts him with all the horror that it evokes: that of the impending unity (Einigung) between the will of God . . . which He had hitherto obeyed . . . and the power of evil which He had withstood’ (IV/1, p. 269). From Gethsemane to Calvary, Christ has to embrace this riddle as definitive of his person. On another level, there is the act of obedience. Having traced the shape of God’s will, having ‘learned obedience’ (Heb. 5.8) and grown in wisdom (Lk. 2.52) once more, Jesus resolves to follow out the history that God intends, taking up a singular death – one prefaced by Judas’s treachery and 107

108

For a useful analysis of patristic reflections on the extent of Christ’s knowledge, see Kevin Madigan, ‘Christus Nesciens? Was Christ Ignorant of the Day of Judgment? Arian and Orthodox Interpretation of Mark 13.32 in the Ancient Latin West’, HTR 96.3 (2003), pp. 255–78. For an introduction to medieval quarrels, see idem, ‘Did Jesus “Progress in Wisdom”? Thomas Aquinas on Luke 2.52 in Ancient and High-Medieval Context’, Traditio 52 (1997), pp. 179–200. Maximus’s position regarding Christ’s gnomic will – roughly, the human facility for ‘moral’ deliberation – is something of a moving target. What does seem clear is that after initially adopting a circumspect and non-committal outlook, Maximus later denied that Christ possessed a gnomic will. For the non-committal Maximus, see (for example) Ambiguum 42, Ad Thalassium 21 and Ad Thalassium 42 in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, esp. pp. 83–4, 112 and 120–1. For Maximus’s denial of a gnomic will, see (for example) Opuscule 3 and Opuscule 7 in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, esp. pp. 185–7 and 192–8.

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concluded with the sickening spectacle of an imperial execution. Again: Jesus does not resign himself to being led by God, accepting his death as a cruel but unsurprising twist of fate, familiar to those who resist the powers that be. It is certainly not the case, as Augustine and others suggest, that Jesus ‘wanted something other than the Father wanted’109 in Gethsemane. Barth is crystal clear on this point: ‘“Thy will be done” . . . is not a kind of return of a willingness to obey, which was finally forced upon Jesus and fulfilled by Him in the last hour’ (IV/1, p. 270). It is a deliberate continuation of his basic disposition of obedience, now transposed into an utterly startling and novel form. And in lieu of his acknowledgement of God’s intention, Jesus sets out to act accordingly, thereby ensuring the integrity and constancy of his human obedience. He willingly propels himself to his own death. Barth’s description of this moment is worth quoting at length: It is decidedly a positive and not a negative prayer, because the statement – which goes far above and beyond Jesus’ answer to the tempter in the desert – is in its open core a radiant Yes (ein strahlendes Ja) to the actual will of God. Radiant, because the decision which it declares and completes leaves behind all other potential divine possibilities; because it engages only the one actual will of God – “what You will” – and says to this an unconditional Yes. It is not a defeat; it is the highest victory. It is not a retreat, but rather Jesus’ great and now unstoppable forward stride. It is also no renunciation before God. It is the expression of the highest single praise that God expects of the human and which is offered up, for all humans, by the one standing in the place of all: the praise that comes out of the knowledge that God does not make any mistakes, that God’s way – namely, the way of the one whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts – is a way that God himself actually goes in holiness, justice, and grace. (IV/1, p. 270–1 rev.) This ‘unconditional Yes’, uttered in the face of the worst of all possible ends, anchors salvation and assures the covenant as an agential relationship between God and humankind. ‘A radiant yes’, though? Quite so: Christ is indeed ‘the light of the world’ (Jn 8.12 and 9.5). Because he resolves to stand substitute for sinful humanity, reiterating and ratifying God’s punishment of that humanity, he propels humanity towards a covenantal existence that leaves behind the hubris of autarchic self-orientation and that finds itself 109

St. Augustine, Answer to Maximinus the Arian in Arianism and Other Heresies (ed. John E. Rotelle; trans. Roland J. Teske; Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), p. 2.XX.2. I was alerted to this passage by Kevin Madigan’s interesting piece, ‘Ancient and High-Medieval Interpretations of Jesus in Gethsemane: Some Reflections on Tradition and Continuity in Christian Thought’, HTR 88.1 (1995), pp. 157–73 (see esp. 160).

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constantly illumined by God’s clarifying grace. Exactly at this point does God’s own light, now joined by a truly human light (which need not be hidden under a bushel), flood into view. It is of course true that acknowledgement and obedience form but one dimension of Jesus’ justificatory decisions and actions in Gethsemane. In a moment of allusive brilliance, Barth draws attention to the broader sweep of his theological anthropology, grounded as it is in Christ’s own life. Describing Jesus’ prayer as a confutation of human pride, he writes: We must . . . see that in the “Thy will be done” he emerges from very serious, yes, inevitable astonishment and oppression, in which he had prayed that the cup might pass from Him. He now stands upright – upright, one must say, in a supreme pride (in höchstem Stolz) – and faces the reality, the avoidance of which he had so earnestly desired. Because it is the reality of the will of God, he grasps it as that which is better, that which alone is good. (IV/1, p. 270 rev.) This ‘rising to walk’, this enburdenment with, and willingness to undertake, a history diametrically opposed to that offered to every other human, recalls an earlier claim: that when the human responds in obedience to ‘the divine call: Come! the human pushes open the gate and takes a stride into freedom’ (III/2, p. 189 rev.). Barth’s point is unmistakable. Not only is Jesus himself responsible and legitimately proud in his tacit ‘amen’ (his willingness to step out of the garden and towards God’s mortifying silence) but at this very moment, human freedom is truly forthcoming. The movement towards the rejection of the old human, and the natal moment of the new, gathers pace.

The consequences of Jesus’ struggle The previous subsection attests to the most important result of Jesus’ struggle. Barth is blunt: ‘“Thy will be done” means that He put this cup to His lips, that He accepted this answer of God as true and holy and just and gracious, that He went forward to what was about to come, thus enabling it to happen’ (IV/1, p. 271, my emphasis). In freedom and responsibility, and more specifically in acknowledgement and obedience, Christ humanly fulfils his unique role in God’s justificatory project. His human work is of course not sufficient; it would have no reconciling efficacy were it not united with, and in fact utterly inseparable from, the action of God qua Son. Nevertheless, this work forms an indispensable aspect of the justification of humankind. Yet there are other consequences that attend Jesus’ agonized prayer. To bring these into focus, it is useful to pursue two further angles of interpretation. The first remains ‘internal’ to the Dogmatics; the second sets Barth in conversation with the great John Calvin. 236

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The internal angle considers the connection Barth forges between the doctrine of election and the act of prayer. As argued throughout this work, Barth renders the doctrines of God and election ontologically co-inherent, suggesting that God patiently opens himself to the effects of Christ’s contingent history. Such is the extent of God’s solidarity with humankind. It is also the case that, as God allows Jesus’ specific decisions and self-constitution to shape the time and space of God in God’s second way of being, so too does God allows other humans to affect God’s being, specifically by way of the act of prayer. In view of God’s self-transformation in Christ, the human creature may ‘participate . . . in the divine lordship’ (III/3, p. 239), even to the point at which those who live ‘in Christ’ are granted, in some highly mysterious way, the derivative opportunity to affect (but not, to be sure, to transform) the divine life.110 The Gethsemane excursus enables finer purchase on this dimension of Barth’s thought; it discloses the prior ontological condition of God bestowing an ‘objective bearing’ (III/3, p. 284) upon prayer. Because God has determined Godself qua Son as the logos incarnatus, God absorbs a history in which Jesus asks whether the course of salvation might be otherwise. Within the time and space of the divine life, there is a human history in which the ‘frightful thing’ (IV/1, p. 265) that Jesus confronts is never not happening. One can even say that, given the Son’s self-determination, God himself undergoes, prayerfully, what Jesus undergoes, prayerfully, in Gethsemane. Thus: And now a stumbling, if only for a fleeting, passing moment. But a moment in which, not only on earth and in time, not only in the soul of Jesus which is ‘sorrowful unto death’ (Mt. 26.38) but also, so to speak, in heaven, in the bosom of God Godself. In the relationship between the Father and the Son there is a pause (Aufhalten) and delay in which the question of another possibility arises – other than the divine and necessary actuality that has been relentlessly realized previously. (IV/1, p. 265 rev.) ‘A fleeting, passing moment’, to be sure. The gerunds are crucial: this terrible moment is always overcome; this terrible moment is one that God is always moving past, for Christ’s history is not reducible to the agonies experienced in the garden. Nevertheless, given God’s elective self-determination, Christ’s disorientation is ‘held over’ in the divine life, marking the Son for all eternity. 110

While Barth develops this point within the Dogmatics, it also gains powerful articulation in the seminars he gave in Neuchâtel between 1947 and 1949. The minutes of these seminars have been transcribed from the original French into German and also into English. See Karl Barth, Prayer (ed. Don E. Saliers; trans. Sara F. Terrien; Louisville: WJKP, 2002). See also the excellent though brief comments in Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, pp. 221–3.

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Before and in addition to the terrible event of the crucifixion, the consequence of Gethsemane is that ‘God himself will remain scarred by the traces of the battle with nothingness’111 – a ‘battle’ that includes Jesus’ uncertainty as to whether God’s righteousness must really follow this course. Within the divine trinity’s Mozart-like interrelating, one might say, there sounds strains of Beethoven, asking, ‘Must it be? It must be!’112 And as it goes with Christ, the ‘elected human’, so it may go with those elected in him. The ‘impact’ that he has on God is the condition of possibility for all others gaining the capacity to affect God, albeit, once again, in a highly mysterious and non-transformative manner. For as God opens himself to Christ’s travail, so does God open himself to the other doubts, terrors and panic-stricken flailings under which human beings labour, and that are offered up to God in prayer. To pick up the external angle of interpretation, with the Gethsemane excursus, Barth marks quiet disagreement with Calvin’s commentary work on the gospels. Within his Commentary on the Harmony of the Evangelists, Calvin draws a parallel between the Christian’s existential turmoil in general and Christ’s particular travail. He writes: ‘When God alone is witness, the believing soul unfolds itself with greater familiarity, and with greater simplicity pours its wishes, and groans, and anxieties, and fears, and hopes, and joys, into the bosom of God’.113 Barth’s deft allusion to the ‘bosom of God’ in the previous quotation adverts a rebuff to the earlier author. It is not that Jesus’ prayer is best explained by Christian prayer, but the other way around. Christian prayer – that is, the freedom to unburden oneself before God, to struggle with what God asks, to view torment and disorientation as not alien but native to one’s humanity – has as its anterior condition Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane. Christ forges this difficult pathway to God’s heart, the consequence being that we might follow in his footsteps. His travail grounds, and in fact legitimizes, the agonies, struggles and doubts of those who live ‘in him’.

Justification enacted Barth writes that ‘the coincidence of the divine and the satanic will and work and word was the problem of this hour, the darkness in which Jesus 111 112

113

Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, p. 104. Barth’s affection for Mozart is well known and is pithily articulated in CD III/3, pp. 297–9. My proposed counterpoint derives from a phrase used by Beethoven with relation to his last numbered string quartet (Op. 135 in F major). The final movements bear the note: ‘Der schwer gefasste Entschluss: Muss es sein? . . . Es muss sein!’ It is of course impossible to know whether Barth had this remark in mind when he wrote about Jesus’ prayer. Perhaps not, given that he admits to finding Beethoven ‘extremely tedious’. See here Karl Barth, Letters, 1961–1968 (ed. Jürgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt; ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 152. Calvin, Commentary, p. 229.

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addressed God in Gethsemane’ (IV/1, p. 268).114 A difficult claim, to be sure: God enlists and employs das Nichtige in order to effect justification; God wills that evil be divinely utilized, even endorsed, in order that Christ’s death might justify humankind. This chapter has paid a good deal of attention to Barth’s understanding of justification. On one level, it is God’s act. The meaning of the Son’s obedience is his willingness to incarnate and self-constitute as an ontologically and agentially complex person, existing under the conditions of (sinful) finite reality, enacting and bearing God’s rejection of sin. By way of God’s self-transformation and God’s embrace of the cross, humanity’s collusion with nothingness is drawn up into the divine life; there, it meets the annihilating fire of God’s love. On another level, justification has a human dimension. Humanly, Christ constitutes himself as the vehicle by which sin, the concretization of das Nichtige, is lifted into the time and space of the divine being. In becoming and being the flesh that the Word assumes, Christ humanly participates in God’s condemnation and punishment of evil. He shows himself ‘ready to pronounce this judgment himself and therefore on himself; indeed, he was ready himself to fulfil the judgment by himself assuming his suffering and dying at the hands of a(martwloi/ . . . to execute the divine judgment by undergoing it himself’ (IV/1, p. 271 rev.). Facilitating the suspension (the one and only suspension) of God’s loving patience, Christ brings the history of the old human to a decisive close. But there is still more to Barth’s outlook. Implicit in the analysis above, and enabled by the findings of previous chapters, are three further points of dogmatic interest. Identifying these points brings to a close my account of Barth’s understanding of Christ’s humanity and human agency. First, notice that in accepting the coincidence of God’s will and the operation of das Nichtige, Christ must withhold the dispersal of God’s overflowing love that has characterized his life up to this point. Having discerned the ‘impending unity between the will of God . . . and . . . the power of evil which He had withstood’ (IV/1, p. 269), a history defined by wholeheartedness, sovereignty, love and deliverance must now come to a halt. Christ’s humanly self-constituting decision must match God’s revocation of the ‘benefits’ (§42.1) granted him. He must shut down his sanctifying work, for only then will the very event that ‘shook him’ in prayer, viz., ‘the coming concealment of the lordship of God under the lordship of evil and evil men’ 114

Barth repeats this claim several times in the excursus. See IV/1, p. 306: ‘According to the disposition and in the service of God death and nothingness are brought in and used for the reconciliation of the world with God, as instruments in His conflicts with the corruption of the world and the sin of man – but death and nothingness in all their evil and destructive power’; also IV/1, p. 408: ‘ [evil] was impressed into the service of God and contrary to its own nature became necessarily an instrument of the divine triumph’.

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(IV/1, p. 269), come to pass.115 Indeed, if the majority of his life had involved his living as a ‘veil’ that allowed God’s self-presentation to humankind, Christ must now unveil the horrors of das Nichtige, precisely as they triumph over his person and work. Achieving this end, so far as Christ knows, constitutes the final act of his life: the actualization, undertaken at God’s behest, of the impossible-possibility of evil. Second, Barth suggests that in Gethsemane Jesus disposes himself as the agent who, alongside God’s providential direction and the machinations of his fellows, effects his own death.116 Directive in this endeavour is of course God the Father. The assumed human, the man identifiable as Jesus of Nazareth is only ‘secondarily’ participant in God’s pursuit of humiliation; he does not initiate the process by which God draws sinful humanity into the loving fire of the divine life. But Christ must humanly ‘match’ the liberty God grants evil, so as to secure his death; he ‘must and will allow himself to be the one great sinner among all other men . . . to be declared to be such by the mouth of man, and treated as such at the hand of every man’ (IV/1, p. 239). The man Jesus, then, the flesh that the Word has become, synchronizes his actions with those of the Father and those of a humanity enthralled by the murderous perversity of sin. Corresponding himself to a ‘divine permission’ (IV/1, p. 271) of unprecedented proportions, he ensures that evil can and will do its worst. Think of his diffidence and evasiveness in face of the religious elites (Lk. 22.66–71); his petulant response to Pilate (Mt. 27.11: ‘“Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus said, “You have said so”’); even his taunting disclosure of the ‘messianic secret’ in Mark’s Gospel, which overturns his prior sullen silence (Mk 14.62: ‘“Are you the Christ . . . ?” And Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power”’). For Barth, none of these sayings are cryptic rhetorical parries; much less are they remarks that destabilize the Gospel writers’ acclamation of Christ’s messianic status. These sayings are rather testimony to a decision made in Gethsemane. Christ puts into effect God’s will, actively and humanly 115

116

See here also IV/1, p. 271: ‘ It was the matter of the triumph of God being concealed under that of His adversary, of that which is not, of that which supremely is not’. Hans Frei makes this point with characteristic panache: ‘[ Jesus is] not simply that coincidence of those opposites that come together in and about him, nor is his saving activity a function of their coincidence. His saving activity, though nothing without his enactment of it in his and his people’s circumstances, is in one sense prior to these circumstances and even to the qualities which he comes to embody. He intends the enactment of his saving love, and he consents to its defeat. And in harmony with his intention, his power as well as his helplessness take shape in appropriate response to varying circumstance. It is he who holds the pattern, including that of opposites, together, not they him – not even love as the most dominant quality, which would tie itself and its opposite into one’ (Theology and Narrative, p. 55). The influence of Hans Frei in this final subsection of my treatment of Gethsemane, needless to say, is considerable.

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shaping finite time and space, in order that evil might exert itself fully, leading him to death. They are Christ’s own strategic interventions, effected by way of a perfect coincidence of divine and human agency, that push his history towards its terrible end, ensuring that Satan ‘is impressed into the service of the will of God as fulfilled in [his] suffering and death’ (IV/1, p. 272). For while in God’s providential ruling there is no need for any mundane manipulations of finite reality, a covenantally effected salvation requires Christ’s human correspondence to the divine ‘permission’ granted to evil. Exactly Christ’s stubborn silences, his sullen goadings, his occasionally defiant outbursts, are needed for God’s salvific project to reach full term. In this way, Jesus makes himself the target for the coincidence of the divine and ‘satanic’ wills. In this way, Jesus enacts what Schweitzer described as the ‘deliberate bringing down of death upon himself’117 and ensures his rejection. Third and finally, with Jesus’ agony and achievement in Gethsemane, Barth transposes some key moves of his Christology into the rather different context of Christ’s justificatory rejection. Specifically, Barth connects Christ’s unity-and-complexity with the action of God qua Father and the action of das Nichtige as a unity-and-complexity. On one level, there is the ‘answer of God . . . identical with the action of Satan’ (IV/1, p. 268).118 An overreach that ascribes to das Nichtige a reality inconsistent with its ontological (non)status? No. Das Nichtige gains this kind of reality because God makes it God’s will and work, because God ‘assumes’ evil into union with God’s justifying action. In the course of the passion, then, God’s active ‘permitting’ of evil passes into an event of ratification, since God suspends God’s protection of Christ: God, one might say, no longer allows Jesus to pass unnoticed through a murderous crowd (Lk. 4.29–30). On another level, the concrete actuality of das Nichtige seizes on this ‘divine permission’, thereby speaking a terrible ‘yes’ that takes the place of God’s silence (‘Crucify him!’ shout the crowd in Mk 15.13). God allows evil to do its work, carrying out an attack on God’s beloved Son, on God’s own being. Finally, with and as God qua Son, Christ humanly enables the coincidence of the actions of his enemies and the rejecting will of God. Just as he participated in God’s action when challenging wrongdoing, he now participates in God’s ratification of evil. In seamless unity with and as the divine Son, before the Father, Christ humanly places himself in the time and space of pure evil, pure death. He catches sight of God’s terrible demand; he prays, crying and despairing of his fate; he acknowledges the divine work whereby ‘the inbreaking of the night . . . in 117 118

Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 392. This is not the first instance of this claim. In his remarkable comments on Judas in II/2, for example, Barth writes that ‘in the case of Judas, the apostle who perverted his apostleship and served Satan the two [divine paradou=nai (handing over) and human paradou=nai] coincide. As the human paradou=nai takes place, the divine takes place directly, and the divine takes place as the human takes place’ (pp. 502–3).

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which the good will of God will become indistinguishably one with the evil will of humans, of the world, and of Satan’ (IV/1, p. 271 rev.); he steps out of the garden. If the episode in Gethsemane opens the final chapter of his justifying history, his final cry of dereliction, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ closes this chapter, announcing finally – for our sake, since God himself cannot and will not speak at this moment – that humanity is justified.

Beyond tragedy With Barth, there is always more that can be said. One might examine the sources that fund Barth’s powerful fusion of forensic motifs, Christus Victor imagery and idealist dialecticism; one might consider the import and viability of Barth’s sacerdotal account of justification, experimentally outlined at the end of §59.2; one might reflect on the intriguing connections between Barth and Luther; one might speculate further about the precedents that inform Barth’s treatment of Gethsemane (archival work on Barth’s knowledge of Maximus would be important here, as would closer attention to his correction – perhaps unwitting? – of Calvin). But it is time to take leave of interpretative questions. After summarizing the findings of this study, my next and final chapter raises some questions heretofore deferred. What ought thoughtful Christians, interested in a political theology funded by the Dogmatics, to make of Barth’s understanding of atonement? In particular, should the difficult figure of punishment be sidelined as an anachronistic embarrassment? Or, if Barth’s theology ‘has the problem of ethics in view from the very first, and it cannot legitimately lose sight of it’ (III/4, p. 3), could this figure have importance for the present day? Before tackling such questions, it is important to close this chapter appropriately. The harrowing narrative I have identified ought not to draw attention away from a crucial claim: that, for Barth, justification means nothing other than salvation. A comparison of Barth’s perspective with the soteriology haunting the pages of Albert Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede proves instructive on this front. Anticipating the Herrmannian Christ-mysticism of his final chapter, Schweitzer talks of Jesus’ radicalization of Jewish apocalypticism: Soon after [John the Baptist] comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and he throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong 242

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enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign.119 While this passage provides a good example of the delicate dialectic between the historisch account of Jesus as a disconsolate eschatological prophet and the vitalizing religious ‘energy’ that defines the Christian’s reception of his transhistorical spirit, it also points to Schweitzer’s christological pessimism. Even though Schweitzer will manage to claim that ‘like every great tragedy’, Jesus’ death is ‘a liberating and life-giving influence’,120 ultimately, this perspective is trumped by a more tragic attitude. Jesus does not bring the end; rather, even as he destroys the ‘eschatological conditions’ of the end, he crushes himself and dies a tragic, even pitiable, death. In contrast, Barth neither supposes eschatological disappointment on Christ’s part, nor does he believe that Christ is without hope for others. Rather, Christ undertakes an end that vouchsafes God’s perfect relationship with humankind. The one thing that is known by Christ on the cross, even granted that he finds himself engulfed by the full and unremitting force of God’s rejecting wrath, is that humanity as such has been disburdened of sin. Accordingly, not only does §59.3 describe the resurrection as God’s loving vindication of Christ’s life and person – a ‘public’ revelation of God’s decision to be pro nobis – but Barth even concludes the Gethsemane excursus positively. Jesus’ agony gives way, somehow, to a renewed resolve to realize God’s will. Thus: One thing is clear. In the power of this prayer Jesus received, i.e., renewed, confirmed and put into effect, His freedom to finish His work, to execute divine judgment by undergoing it Himself, to punish the sin of the world by bearing it Himself, by taking it away from the world in His own person. (IV/1, p. 271) Having traced the shape of the divine will and resolved to enact it, in Gethsemane Christ is somehow energized by the realization that judgement will happen (an appropriate locale, of course: in this garden Jesus undoes the Fall that took place in Eden).121 Granted the awful end that confronts 119

120 121

Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, pp. 370–1. Thiemann makes intriguing use of this quotation; see Revelation and Theology, pp. 133–4. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 255. Martin Luther draws this connection: ‘I think that Christ endured the pains of hell in that very delightful place [Gethsemane]. Therefore he hated it and called it Gehenna. For when He prayed in the garden, He was in Gehenna and hell. Perhaps the tree of knowledge and of Good and Evil also stood there. To that valley, then, the Savior had to go and sweat blood, and this sweat testifies abundantly that he tasted death, which is hell.’ See here Luther’s Works; Vol. 7, Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 38–44 (ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen; St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), p. 302.

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him, Jesus approaches the cross with some kind of joy. Joy? Quite so, for human freedom never happens joylessly.122 In joyous freedom, Jesus moves towards the end of a life that sanctifies and justifies each and every one of us.

122

P. T. Forsyth is also quotably pithy: ‘The agony in the garden heals all the agony of the race’ (The Justification of God: Lectures for War-Time on a Christian Theodicy (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999), p. 50). ‘The one who may love and therefore give . . . entering into relationship with the loved one, may have joy – great joy – in doing so, no matter how high may be the cost or how little the success in the form of a response of love on the part of the one whom he loves . . . This is the blessedness of him who loves – unsought, unplanned and undesired – even when his love beats against a stone wall, receiving no answer, or only a more or less hostile answer, from the one whom he loves’ (IV/2, p. 789).

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Faith is the possibility of daring to know what God knows, and of ceasing, therefore, to know what He no longer knows.1 After Christ’s resurrection, death is no more, nor does sin rule. Indeed death and sin continue to exist but as vanquished things. Their situation is similar to a chess player’s who has already lost but has not acknowledged it yet. He looks on the game, and he says: ‘Is it already finished? Does the king still have another move?’ He tries it. Afterwards he acknowledges there was no more possibility of winning. That precisely is the situation of death and the devil: the king is checkmated, the game is finished and the players do not acknowledge it as yet. They still believe the game will go on. But it is over. The old ‘aeon’, the old time of death and sin is over, and the game only appears to be going on. ‘Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new’ (2 Cor. 5.17).2

Writing in the censorious atmosphere of the German Democratic Republic, Wolf Krötke alluded to some of the political implications of Barth’s thought. With respect to sin, he suggested that the Church Dogmatics opened up ‘new perspectives for evaluating the contemporary reality of the world’. Specifically, the human, as ‘God’s partner . . . is summoned to take nothingness seriously in a manner which corresponds to God’.3 This ‘summons to correspondence’ has two discrete elements. On one level, it means that the Christian knows that nothingness is always ‘passing away’, always being overcome and cancelled. Granted, das Nichtige cannot be deemed wholly non-existent, since the ongoing fact of human sin (absurd and nonsensical though it may be) confers upon it some kind of reality. Nevertheless, in light of Christ’s sanctifying life and justifying death, the Christian is required to view sin as something fundamentally discredited, unreal in comparison to the creaturely realities that God lovingly creates, sustains and upholds. On another level, the Christian’s correspondence to God means that she acts, with God, to maintain das Nichtige’s unreality. Graciously swept into a covenantal relationship, the Christian is empowered and obliged to participate in an ongoing struggle against the ‘impossible-possibility’ of sin. While such 1 2 3

Barth, Epistle to the Romans, p. 202. Barth, The Faith of the Church, pp. 88–9. Krötke, Sin and Nothingness, p. 108.

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participation does not suppose that Christ’s work requires supplement (it does not), it does indicate that those who live ‘in Christ’ should confirm their salvation. Christ’s people, specifically, are tasked to live up to – or, better, to live into – the covenant. Christian theology, for its part, encourages ‘human struggle’ in ‘prayer and . . . action’4 so as to ensure das Nichtige’s continued non-realization. Krötke’s remarks, necessarily abstruse given the context in which he wrote, help to introduce the constructive proposal tendered in this final chapter. Subsequent to a synopsis of the interpretative claims advanced, my concluding pages attempt, albeit in a very sketchy way, to honour Barth’s claim that dogmatics, ‘without ceasing to be dogmatics . . . is itself ethics’ (I/2, p. 371).

Summary remarks Reviewing the argument Rather than reprising the compressed précis of my introduction, a dense sentence can now summarize the findings of this book. The sentence is as follows: in the Church Dogmatics, Barth offers a biblically funded and radically actualized Christology, descriptive of Jesus Christ as an irreducibly complex ontological and agential event: a divine-human person established by God, communicative of divine love, whose history anchors and achieves the salvation of the world. As biblically funded, Barth’s mature Christology takes shape in light of an intensive engagement with the scriptural witness. Both the form and content of Barth’s description of Christ show an indefatigable concern to dwell on, be guided by and respond creatively to the biblical texts. Negatively, this means that while Barth happily draws assistance from a range of ‘traditional’ christological declarations (creeds, symbols, councils, etc.), he consistently refuses to bind his theology to the wisdom of the past. Past findings must not stand substitute for the task of thinking about scripture in the present. Positively, this means that Barth’s most profound christological insights are often found within the more ‘mimetic’ passages of the Dogmatics. The unpredictable twists and turns of scripture’s ‘realistic narratives’ (Frei) occasion the articulation of the most daring dimensions of Barth’s Christology, particularly so when it comes to Christ’s humanity and human agency. So much is evident in the discussion of the raising of Jairus’s daughter, which illustrates Christ’s iteration of God’s self-differentiation. So much is evident in Barth’s extended meditation on the word e0splagxni/sqh, which shows Christ humanly paralleling God’s elective self-constitution as he draws into his ‘heart’ the plight of those around him. Although Barth’s seemingly extemporized blend of 4

Ibid., pp. 113–14, respectively (emphases removed).

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exegetical and dogmatic reflection may infuriate some readers – not least those who want Barth to come clean about what manner of hermeneutic he employs when reading scripture – a combination of close reading, confidence in the inexhaustible meaning of scripture (inexhaustible, of course, by dint of the Spirit’s activity) and ludic creativity animates the Christology of the Dogmatics. To describe this Christology as radically actualized references Barth’s ontology, characterized, as it is, by a thoroughgoing refusal to dissociate being and action. Certainly Barth’s actualist commitments affect the way he handles classical christological precedents. On the one hand, Barth offers a quiet but telling affirmation of dyothelitism, recognizing that this christological stance reckons seriously with the agential complexity of Christ’s simple person. One might even say that, while Barth’s Christology is viably named Chalcedonian, it is even more aptly labelled ‘Constantinopolitan’, vigorously following up the interpretation of Chalcedon offered at the sixth ecumenical council (681 ce). On the other hand, and granted that Barth affirms the ‘direction’ of the Chalcedonian Definition as valuable for, and corrective of, a context unaccustomed to thinking properly about Christ’s person, Barth pays little heed to the category of physis (Natur/Wesen). Specifically, he does not ‘regard speaking of the two natures of Christ as legitimate except in the context of his history’,5 and worries about theologies that fail to attend to Christ’s concrete life and action. Barth also protests the disjunction of person and work associated with post-Reformation theological schemes of an orthodox and scholastic bent. Again, it is the integrative category of history that supplies an alternative. This category indicates nicely that Christ’s complex-but-simple identity cannot be understood in isolation from the acts he undertakes and the life he leads. Barth’s treatment of classical conventions has less importance, of course, than the constructive outworking of his actualism. Important again is the connection that Barth forges between actualism and agency; this frames the way Barth thinks both about Christ’s humanity, in its union with the Word, and the way Barth describes the being of God qua Son. On one level, although Christ’s humanity is rightly said to be anhypostatic and enhypostatic to the person of the divine Son – for this human essence is established by God, exists only in union with God, and gains ‘personality’ only in light of the assumptive act of the divine Son – the absence of a selfpossessed human personality does not inhibit Christ’s purposeful human activity. It is not only that the Son lives under the conditions of finitude; it is also that the human assumed by the divine Son lives in perfect union with, and in fact lives as, the divine Son. Barth’s Cyrillian emphasis on the Word as the subject of Christ does not displace, but in fact sharpens his description of Christ’s human being and human action. While the dogmatician 5

From a letter Barth sent to Dr. Setsuro Osaki in 1967; see Letters, 1961–1968, p. 240.

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cannot disjoin the human and divine operations of Christ, given that they concur and coincide seamlessly, she can describe the distinctive ‘workings’ of Christ’s humanity, identifying the actions of the flesh that the Word has become and detailing conceptually how Christ, the ‘elected human’, is also the human who elects God. On another level, Barth views God’s incarnational action as determinative of the being of God qua Son. The sovereign decision of God to be the ‘electing God’ who incarnates as the ‘elected human’ transforms Godself eternally; Christ’s concrete existence becomes eternally constitutive of God’s second way of being. So much is epitomized by the fine but important distinction between God’s souveräne Güte and God’s eminenter Gnade, and is suggested by another element of the proposed summary sentence – Jesus Christ as established by God and communicative of divine love. To say that Christ is established by God indicates that Christ’s ontologically and agentially complex person derives exclusively from an irreducibly particular operation of grace (souveräne Güte). Only as God ‘overflows’, compelled solely by the pressure of God’s decision to be pro nobis, does Christ, ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, exist. Genuinely exist, that is, as the one who is wholly divine and wholly human: God does not simply ‘repeat’ Godself in the person of Christ, wielding human form as a mere instrument. Rather, in God’s loving act of election, God brings into being the paradigmatic instance of radical ontological difference. Jesus Christ, as a human being, really is the ‘firstborn of creation’ (Col. 1.15). And it is a mark of God’s love as patience that God preserves and honours the creaturely reality assumed by the Son, even as God unites with and makes this individual creaturely reality enhypostatic to God’s eternal being, ‘adopting’ it for all eternity (eminenter Gnade). Christ as communicative of divine love? In one respect, in Christ, God conveys Godself as Son in the creaturely realm; indubitably so, since the action of electing is appropriable to, and definitive of, God in God’s second way of being. In this way, the time and space of God’s eternal love are brought into the time and space of creation. In this way, God remakes humankind ‘from within’, as opposed to relating to it ‘as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it’.6 In another respect, in Christ God reveals that divine love awaits the response and contribution of human beings; that divine love has an inherently inclusive character. Concomitant with his being the ‘electing God’ and ‘elected human’, then, Christ is the ‘electing human’ – the one who represents humanity before God. Exemplarily in Christ, divine love anticipates, provokes and finds its sought-after ‘completion’ in partnership with human being. 6

Barth, Romans, p. 30. I am being a little unfair here; this phrase is actually used to describe how, with the resurrection, ‘the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the world of the flesh’. But the comparison with Romans II is still apt. Barth’s later work has a strong sense of God sanctifying human being; Romans II is more preoccupied with the justification of humankind.

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To identify Jesus Christ as an irreducibly complex ontological and agential event and person brings into focus further aspects of Barth’s Christology. Three points have particular importance on this front. First, Barth maintains a Reformed emphasis on the ontological distinction of divinity and humanity in Christ. An abiding affirmation of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humanity regulates Barth’s description of Christ’s person. Differentiable divine and human essences underwrite this person’s simple being; they do not intermix in a way that allows divine properties to be predicated of the human essence. Barth therefore protests the divinizing undertow of the Lutheran genus maiestaticum. To his mind, it is a necessary property of humanity that it not take on divine attributes, even when an individual instance of this humanity is assumed into union with God. And such an ‘antithesis’ between divinity and humanity is never relaxed. Even as the divine-human person of Christ is drawn into the divine life as such, even as the logos asarkos is always becoming and being the logos ensarkos, Barth’s Reformed construal of the communio naturarum endures. Second, Barth’s actualism is adjoined to a striking understanding of the unio hypostatica as mutually contrived. Certainly, God specially creates the humanity assumed by the Word; Barth avoids anything close to the ebionitism he finds endemic to liberal protestant theology by way of an unflagging emphasis on divine prevenience. But as God qua Son ‘actualizes’ himself as the logos incarnatus, as the divine Son ‘condescends’ to live under the conditions of finitude as Jesus Christ, so does Jesus of Nazareth humanly ‘actualize’ himself as the human united seamlessly to God qua Son. Both essences, then, realize the event of Jesus Christ: each essence intends and enacts this person’s concrete simplicity. While the divine Son may (and does) ‘lead’ and the assumed human may (and does) ‘follow’, it is the coincident activity of the divine Son and the man Jesus that actively sustain the perfectly simple person of Jesus Christ. Third, Barth argues that reconciliation entails the agency of Christ’s divine and human essences. Specifically, provoked by grace, Christ selfconstitutes, divinely and humanly, as one who works with God in pursuit of salvation. Unilateral divine action never happens in Christ’s life (although it does happen after his death, as §59.3 insists), even granted the asymmetry between God’s second way of being and the assumed human. There is only concurrence: Jesus Christ, vere Deus and vere homo, the divine-and-human person, acknowledges and obeys the Gebot of the Father. Thus the next claim: Christ’s history anchors the salvation of the world. This final element of my Leitsatz must be viewed from two angles, so as to encompass both sanctification (IV/2) and justification (IV/1) – these doctrinal loci being construed in the context of Barth’s appropriation of the munus triplex and the ‘states’ of exaltation and exinanition, with Christ’s identity as ‘king’ and ‘priest’ (judge) associated with the exaltation of his humanity (IV/2) and the abasement of God’s second way of being (IV/1) respectively. Granted the distinct emphases of the two volumes, though, it is crucial to 249

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perceive Barth’s abiding sense of Christ’s human integrity and human action. While God ‘exalts’ humankind in Christ, this exaltation includes the actions of the man Jesus. And while God ‘abases’ Godself, propelling himself as Son to the cross and bearing the punishment owed humankind, so does Christ humanly enburden himself, willing, for the sake of God’s love, to ‘bear the burden of God’s wrath’ (rejection) ‘and so obtain for and restore to us righteousness and life’ (Heidelberg Catechism).7 The duplex gratia, christologically rendered, is consistently an event of ‘double agency’. In treating Christology in the context of sanctification, Barth employs various technical distinctions employed in post-Reformation scholastic writings. Two distinctions have particular importance: the communicatio gratiarum, which makes gratitude basic to the human, given God’s gracious address, and the communicatio operationum, which describes the concurrent working of divine and human agencies in Christ’s enactment of reconciliation. IV/2 shows, interestingly, little of the deference towards the ‘tradition’ characteristic of the Göttingen Dogmatics. Barth now reworks scholastic christological formulae in order to refine his own description of Jesus’ humanity and human agency. At the same time, while Barth remains a ‘scholastic of a higher order’ (McCormack), this scholasticism provides only a backdrop for Barth’s own treatment of Christ’s human correspondence (Entsprechung) to God. Specifically, in that Christ consistently acknowledges and acts in accordance with God’s intention, he realizes the covenantal relationship that God wills to be definitive of God’s relationship with humankind. To access Barth’s account of Jesus as the ‘royal human’, I developed a four-part categorial scheme. Wholeheartedness describes Jesus’ unqualified attention to God’s address and his unremitting enactment of God’s will. Sovereignty characterizes Jesus’ power to actualize his own response to God, spontaneously to constitute himself as the human who elects God, just as God elects him. Love describes the shape of Jesus’ sovereignty, identifying his conduct as unprecautiously iterative of God’s identity as pro nobis, wholly directed towards the needs and sufferings of others. (‘Jesus did not ration his love’, to quote the late Herbert McCabe.)8 Deliverance shows the concrete impact and goal of Jesus’ realization of God’s love – an alleviation of human suffering and the stimulation of personally and communally transformative ways of living. These four elements form the basis of each human life since, given God’s elective decree, Christ’s (sinless) history has an abiding impact upon human being as such. 7

8

Creeds, Vol. 3, p. 312. The quotation forms the answer to question 17: ‘Why must [Christ] be at the same time true God?’ I am here applying the phrase to Jesus’ human contribution – a viable reading, given that the answer says ‘[t]hat by the power of his Godhead he might bear, in his manhood, the burden of God’s wrath’ (my emphasis). Herbert McCabe, ‘He was Crucified, Suffered Death, and Was Buried’, in God Still Matters (ed. Brian Davies; London: Continuum, 2002), p. 97.

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Basic to Barth’s Christology in the context of justification is the word obedience (Gehorsam). On one level, obedience distinguishes the anterior trinitarian condition of God being the ‘electing God’. It clarifies God’s triune self-organization, connecting the Son’s ‘begottenness’ with the Son’s active application of God’s love. In heeding and responding to the Father’s call for loving fellowship with humankind, the Son is the ‘person’ who transforms himself as the logos incarnatus and absorbs the punishment due to sinful humankind. On another level, obedience points to the radical character of Christ’s human comportment. Recognizing the need to re-forge a corrupted covenant relationship, Christ, divinely and humanly, takes on the punishment due to humankind. He is unequivocally flesh, living in solidarity with all of humankind. Particularly in Gethsemane, Jesus ascertains that evil has gained a potentially catastrophic hold over humankind and that, if humans are to participate in the best possible future, this warped relationship between God and humankind cannot be tolerated. After a prayer characterized by nearly unthinkable struggle, Jesus wills to free every human from involvement with evil. He self-constitutes as sinful flesh; he coordinates God’s will and the operations of das Nichtige; he enacts an abject and abyssal separation from God. Like no other, Jesus has ‘experienced human misery in its breadth and depth, in its actual essence and darkness’ (IV/2, p. 487 rev.).

Unanswered questions Whatever the benefits of this interpretation (and the preceding summary necessarily glides over many nuances), it has a limited range. Without doubt, further comparative investigation would form a productive starting point for further study. A careful consideration of Barth’s Christology in relationship to the Thomistic tradition, both at its root and in its modern modulations would certainly prove useful. Profitable, also, would be continued investigation into Barth’s relationship with his peers: the Christologies of Bultmann, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Paul Tillich remain of interest, not least because they help the interpreter to ‘open up’ Barth’s Christology from new vantage points. And it need hardly be said that a more sophisticated account of Barth’s relationship to the complex world of classical Reformed and Lutheran Christology would illumine further how Barth navigated a line that, while not equidistant between these two prominent protestant options, aspired to draw insights from both. While working out Barth’s mature relationship to the Reformed scholastic tradition – that is, considering what transpires when he moves beyond Heppe and Schmidt, as he does to an increasing degree in the Dogmatics – is an interpretative challenge of daunting proportions, I have little doubt that it would yield significant rewards. As it is, I leave this work for others. I want now to touch on a few systematic issues: the relationship between Christology and theological epistemology; Barth’s 251

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view of the covenant; and, finally, the controverted question of the relationship between Christology and pneumatology. First, then, there is the issue of theological epistemology. Building on earlier thinking regarding the anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula, Church Dogmatics II/1 forwards the intriguing suggestion that the unio hypostatica forms the condition of possibility for each human’s ‘readiness’ (Bereitschaft) to know God. That God brings the man Jesus into the realm of God’s selfknowledge enables, in principle, the derivative acknowledgement of God by the human who recognizes that her life is ‘hidden with Christ’ (Col. 3.3). Church Dogmatics IV/3 expands this idea, presenting Christ as ‘prophet’ – the person who grounds the knowledge of Christian faith and, in an act of ongoing and active witness, bathes the world in the revelatory light of grace. This elaboration of the munus propheticum amounts, it is fair to say, to a christological Aufhebung of the theological epistemology of Church Dogmatics I: Barth now complements the protestant tradition’s preoccupation with Christ as the Word with an ‘optical’ perspective centred on the motif of light. Indeed, as Barth routes his enduring claim about God’s ‘unveiling’ through a revamped doctrine of election, he suggests not just a specific organization of the Christian’s noetic patterns but an enhancement of her noetic reach in light of God’s gracious action. This is not an enhancement that ought to occasion some kind of epistemological triumphalism, but an enhancement that gives to the Christian the capacity to view the world as transformed and superintended by God’s governance. The possibilities thrown up by this line of thought merit consideration, even though Barth himself did not live long enough to address them. Specifically, ought the enclosure of each human ‘in Christ’ to allow, in some way, the question of ‘natural theology’ to be reopened? And why not consider a natural theology that gets beyond tired questions about the orderly processes of nature? How might Barth’s presentation of Christ as the ‘light of the world’, kindling other lights, shape a theologian’s attitude to non-Christian religions and the uncontainable event of ‘religious experience’, endemic, as it is, to the late modern West? What consequences, in short, follow the christologized epistemology of IV/3? What if investigations of Barth’s epistemology were to begin here, as opposed to Church Dogmatics I/1?9 Second, there is Barth’s understanding of the covenant. In Chapter 2, I took the methodological decision to defer speculation about precedents for Barth’s perspective. The validity of this decision should now be evident. Barth’s understanding of covenant appears to be a highly unusual affair that traverses various dogmatic loci, encompassing God’s intention im Anfang; Christ’s ‘confrontation’ with, and response to, God’s commanding address;

9

For more on this issue, see Hunsinger’s excellent remarks in How to Read Karl Barth, pp. 234–80.

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the remaking and making of the human in light of Christ’s life (justification enabling, and sanctification informing, covenantal existence); and the future activity of those humans who, living in Christ, participate in a newly ordered relationship with God. For sure, the idiosyncrasy of Barth’s perspective need not prevent an investigation into the historical background. I have already touched on the important relationship between Barth and Johannes Cocceius, the leading federalist of the seventeenth century; further research might tackle Barth’s relationship to other classical views of the covenant and neglected modern theological and political currents. But the most intriguing prospect for research involves a systematic and constructive interrogation of Barth’s integration of Christology, covenant and redemption. While necessarily conjectural at points, given the absence of Church Dogmatics V, further consideration of this topic might disclose more about Barth’s political thinking – what it means to be a Christian ‘during’ the world, as well as ‘in’ the world.10 What form does Christian life take in light of the covenant’s fulfilment? What does a Christian’s confirmation of Christ’s true humanity entail, both in terms of thought and in terms of praxis? How does one live in the time and space of the covenant of grace? Third, there is the perennially fraught question of Barth’s pneumatology. Granted that Barth did not live to write his doctrine of redemption, this study raises an intriguing question: could the whole Dogmatics be read in terms of one of Barth’s favourite phrases, Veni Creator Spiritus? Recall the structure of each completed part volume of Church Dogmatics IV. Beginning with Christology, each part volume then discusses the negative side of anthropology (the doctrine of sin); it then moves to consider ecclesiology and pneumatology; finally, it gestures towards a Christian existence essentially but not merely ecclesial, with invigorated Christian thought and action always-already spilling out into the world at large. Perhaps the doctrine of reconciliation might be read as a recasting of the filioque? Might one understand Church Dogmatics IV as pressing a technical trinitarian claim into the service of a highly (but indirectly) politicized ecclesiology, with the Christian being charged and enabled by the Spirit to realize, concretely, the future enabled by Christ’s reconciling life, death and resurrection?11 Certainly it is

10

11

For an important contemporary statement on this issue, see Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Thus each part of Church Dogmatics IV, to my mind, ends on a highly political note. IV/1 concludes with comments on the necessity of ‘confession’ (IV/1, pp. 777–9); IV/2, with remarks on the active love required of each Christian (see esp. IV/2, pp. 783–824); IV/3, with an extended meditation on ‘vocation’ (thus the entirety of IV/3.2); and IV/4 with comments on the necessity of baptism as the initial step towards Christian activity. Indeed, is it not appropriate that prior to the excursus that closes the last ‘official’ instalment of the Church Dogmatics, Barth writes about baptism as ‘a very humble and a very bold action, free from all allusions and yet profoundly sober, yet bold and

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the Spirit, working in the here and now that draws the Christian ‘back’ to the Son, ‘up’ towards the Father and then ‘down’ and ‘out’ into the world. While humanity’s enclosure in the person of Christ is one condition of possibility for new life, Christ in himself is not sufficient to apply the newness of life. This newness remains a potential for human existence, save for the miraculous fact that the Spirit’s illuminating action now ‘gives us knowledge of . . . liberation’, urging us ‘to come to ourselves’ (IV/2, p. 312) as elected, capacitating us to honour and to continue (but of course not complete) Christ’s covenantal work. Thus it is that Barth’s understanding of Christian life, in the Church Dogmatics as in Romans, adjoins to a classical Reformed sense of ‘assurance’ the demand that the Christian open herself to the surprising and unsettling vitality of God’s action, the result being ‘indestructible rest and unappeasable unrest’ (IV/2, p. 319).12 Those who live in Christ have much to do; it is the Spirit who ensures we know what it is we must do; it is the Spirit who ensures that we can do what we ought. Does it not make sense, then, that Barth understates his pneumatology, leaving open the possibilities for the Spirit’s prevenient action in the present and thereby readying the reader and her community for a Christian existence that cannot be anticipated or described but can only be enacted? To redeploy some lines from the first preface to Romans: after the ‘preliminary undertaking’ of the Dogmatics, perhaps Barth’s pneumatology ‘must – wait’13 for the Christian community, if and when, inflamed by the Spirit, it takes the ‘concrete stride into the freedom of decision and act’ (IV/2, p. 545 rev.)?

Potential problems Although the more obvious shortcomings of Barth’s perspective have not disappeared from view – the ethically dubious and dogmatically corruptive effect of Barth’s sexism, in particular, has garnered attention in Chapters 3 and 4 – the interpretative focus of this study has left little room for negative comment. Justifiably so: though Barth’s Christology stands among the more interesting systematic options in the modern period, it remains both underappreciated and misunderstood. An in-depth study of Barth’s understanding of the humanity of Christ will doubtless not remedy this problem, but it will perhaps go some way to ameliorating it. Nevertheless, my obviously positive attitude towards Barth’s mature thought ought not to be mistaken for unequivocal approval. In order to model the open-minded approach to Barth’s

12

13

heaven-storming’ (IV/4, p. 210)? That the paragraph that ‘unofficially’ concludes the Dogmatics is named ‘The Struggle for Human Righteousness’ (The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV, 4, Lecture Fragments (ed. Hans-Anton Drewes and Eberhard Jüngel; trans. Geoffrey Bromiley; London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 205–71)? Compare here the striking phrase in Romans, p. 32: ‘May their peace be their disquiet, and their disquiet be their peace!’ Ibid., p. 2.

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work that I favour – an approach that avoids both blanket approbation and casual denigration – I want to outline three very broad points that merit further consideration, before offering some political reflections. The first of these points has to do with the Church Dogmatics; the second two interrogate Barth from two quite different constructive angles. First, there is the issue of Barth’s intensive reliance on juridical imagery in the description of justification. This reliance obviously has its advantages. In emphasizing humanity’s active disloyalty and guilt, it underscores both the reality of human agency and the responsibilities of the human before God. Barth also manages to construe the ‘censure’ of the cross as a liberative event, thereby forestalling the crude suggestion that Reformed forensicism figures God primarily in terms of anger and hostility; he integrates the ideas of propitiation and expiation in a way that makes ‘wrath’ – or more precisely, rejection – subservient to, and expressive of, God’s overwhelming love. The problem, however, is that the dominance of juridical imagery in IV/1 sometimes inhibits a more diversified figuration of Christ’s passion. Barth acknowledges as much: after the Gethsemane excursus, he notes the possibility of treating the passion in terms of a financial or military conceptuality and then provides a brief account of the content of §59.2 in sacerdotal terms. But these passing remarks only set the problem in clearer focus. Are not the nuances of Barth’s understanding of Christ’s obedience liable to be missed, given the dominance of his juridical focus? Even granted the elasticity of words like ‘judgement’, ‘punishment’ and so on, they do not capture Barth’s remarkable understanding of the exhaustion of evil on the cross. To do justice to the suggestion that Christ takes God’s rejection of sin into his being, in order that it might be ‘burned up’ in the ‘redemptive fire’ (IV/1, p. 490) of divine love, Barth ought to have made still greater use of sacerdotal imagery, mapping the roles of priest and victim directly onto Christ’s ontologically and agentially complex history. So doing would also have amplified nicely Barth’s reliance on the Christus Victor figure. The contention that Christ ‘allows’ the crucifixion often carries the provocative patristic idea of God ‘tricking the devil’, albeit with the figure of the hoodwinked adversary replaced by the claim that God allows evil to ‘overextend’ itself, in order that it might undo itself. Thus: ‘God . . . let evil do its evil work . . . to the very limit of its capacity, in order to reduce it ad absurdum and bring it to shame by its own action, its attack upon Himself in the person of His Son’ (IV/1, p. 566). Certainly this point should not be overstated. The intensity with which Barth maintains a forensic focus in Church Dogmatics IV/1 pays dividends: this part volume bestows an astonishing density of meaning upon a seemingly ‘tired’ cluster of concepts, sometimes to the point at which the denotative integrity of words nearly collapse under the weight placed upon them (‘judgement’ is an obvious example). And it certainly cannot be said that Barth ‘drops’ sacerdotal and dramatic imagery: talk of the ‘fire’ of God’s love provides, in particular, a striking reminder of an important non-forensic 255

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conceptual undercurrent that runs through this part volume.14 My worry is that Barth’s tendency towards conceptual onesidedness distracts from the more interesting elements of his presentation. Had he made fuller use of a range of motifs – or, less charitably, had he been a little less enamoured with foregrounding his Reformed credentials – he could have articulated the most interesting elements of his perspective more clearly. And in so doing, he would have provided a salutary reminder that the New Testament does not offer a single understanding of justification but rather a suggestive disarray of claims and themes that require, perhaps, an ‘unsystematic’ systematic response. An issue long deferred forms my second point of concern: the question of how christological reflection relates to research into the ‘historical Jesus’. My first chapter licensed a postponement of this question, insisting on the prima facie validity of Barth’s interest in the ‘biblical Jesus’ known in faith. However, given the analyses of Chapters 2–4 the insufficiency of Barth’s answer to the question of ‘faith and history’ has probably become apparent. Some remarks from Jüngel’s essay, ‘The Dogmatic Significance of the Question of the Historical Jesus’, prove illuminating on this point. Barth could agree with Jüngel’s Kählerian claim that ‘historical knowledge . . . can never be the foundation of dogmatic responsibility’ and that the Christian’s ‘knowledge of God is knowledge of revelation, and as such knowledge of faith’.15 But Barth lacks Jüngel’s frank admission that one cannot cleanly differentiate revelation, faith and history. Not because the theologian is obligated to justify her labours before the criteriological bars of extrabiblical disciplines, but because of the manner in which God wills to reveal Godself. Jüngel is blunt: ‘all dogmatic judgments in theology are related back to historical knowledge. For God has revealed himself in the medium of historical events’.16 This could be put more strongly, given Barth’s doctrine of election. It is not simply that God has revealed Godself in the ‘medium’ of historical events. God has determined Godself as Son in terms of an ontologically and agentially complex person, the existence of whom has an irreducibly contingent historical reference. And in view of God’s

14

15 16

This figure often provokes some of Barth’s best writing. While he talks about God’s wrath as the ‘fire which consumes man’s opposition . . . burning it to the ground’ (IV/1, p. 393), thereby insisting on the reality of God’s judgement, fire also amounts to the re-forging of the human, given God’s own embrace of the cross. Thus as ‘on the left hand . . . God judges [and] man has actually to die . . . a whole burnt offering in the flame of which both he and his sin are burnt up, disappearing in the smoke and savour, and ceasing to be . . . on the right hand . . . God accepts His creature and elect genuinely and truly and altogether . . . the faithfulness which He displays . . . does not flicker like an exhausted lamp but shines out brightly like the sun’ (IV/1, p. 542). Jüngel, Theological Essays II, p. 83. Ibid.

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self-determination as Son, a self-determination to become and be the ontologically and agentially complex concrete person of Jesus Christ, there are surely good reasons not to glide past the issue of the ‘historical Jesus’. Certainly, research into the ‘historical Jesus’ cannot displace the Christian’s apprehension of what I earlier called the ‘Jesus of biblical faith’. There is a line in the sand here: if a dogmatician embraces Barth’s Anselmian construal of the dogmatic task, the primary material with which that dogmatician works is the ‘understanding’ that accompanies faith – an ‘understanding’ shaped by the scriptural witness to revelation and considered in the context of the church. Yet exactly because of the manner in which God determines the identity of God’s second way of being, historical-critical inquiry has a role to play a role in theological reflection. Since God takes the contingencies of history seriously, so must the Christian theologian. This line of reflection might be expanded in a couple of directions which, while not displacing the primacy of revelation, faith and Christian knowledge, could open investigation into issues that Barth’s opposition to nineteenthcentury liberalism tends to obscure. I have already suggested that while God’s self-determination in terms of Christ does not require a systematic relationship between theology and historical research, it does lend credence to the idea that such research might have an informal, but nevertheless abiding, connection with christological inquiry. While the findings of geisteswissenschaftlich research will never administer the relationship between credere and intelligere, they might usefully assist the Christian in thinking through God’s self-qualification qua Son – providing, for example, a more nuanced appreciation of the socio-economic and cultural context of Christ’s life and times. Beyond this lies another option. Might historicalcritical work provide the theologian with a surer sense of the Bible as a corrupted witness to revelation? A range of recent New Testament studies have exposed, in compelling fashion, the ways in which the early Christian movement distorted the event of revelation, even as that same Christian movement testified to that event of revelation. An awareness of the oftenbrutal power dynamics resident to the early Christian movement could push Barth’s appreciation of the ‘humanity’ of the biblical text into a fuller appreciation of the flawed character of the biblical witness.17 An acclamation of what one might call ‘scriptural sinfulness’ would be a way of calling the church to account at its inception, illustrating the (nonsensical) persistence of sinful and punitive behaviour in the period immediately subsequent to 17

A good starting place for this project would be the rigorous work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Her classic treatment of the ‘kyriarchal’ dynamics of the early church is In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1994). More recently, see Schüssler Fiorenza’s important critique of scholarship into the ‘historical Jesus’: Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2001).

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God’s revelation of a new future – even as the Bible itself attests, singularly, to that new future. The doctrine of ‘inspiration’ would, I hasten to add, not hereby be compromised. A ‘high’ view of scripture would simply be framed in even more dialectical terms. For God does speak in scripture; God does take up the fragile and broken testimonies of the first disciples, making them, somehow, revelatory of God’s being and saving actions. My point is simply this. Although Jüngel is right to say that ‘the respect which we owe to history [is] nothing other than responsibility for our own possibilities’, it is not only our own possibilities that are at stake.18 Our possibilities are derivative of the possibilities that God throws up for us – possibilities that are inexplicably squandered with every passing moment. Realizing how Christian communities have been marked by ingratitude and irresponsibility from the very first could help ground a properly critical (which is to say, a properly theological) attitude to the discipline of ‘church history’. Third, there is the issue of whether ‘contemplation’, particularly of a ‘selfeffacing’ sort, ought to be weighted positively in theological anthropology. Sarah Coakley’s important collection, Powers and Submissions, has pushed this issue into the Anglo-American theological consciousness, making a provocative case for the positive valuation of a particular kind of ‘contemplative waiting’ in theological anthropology.19 While the details of Coakley’s perspective cannot be engaged here, her work raises the prospect of an unusual, but quite fascinating, critique of the Dogmatics. It might run as follows: Barth’s sexism not only makes its presence felt in his theological anthropology; it also damages his Christology. For is not his description of Christ’s person funded by a masculinist understanding of the omni-active male? Specifically, in forwarding the idea that action defines the human, does he preclude there being much role for ‘contemplation’, and proximate terms, as christological categories? By extension, might Barth’s theology suppress appreciation for the diverse possibilities of Christian ‘spirituality’ (for, whatever Christian spirituality might entail, it will surely take its bearings from an understanding of the person of Christ)? Barth, in turn, could help in shaping an intriguing critique of Coakley’s perspective. If God is the one who acts sovereignly and eminently, being the ‘one who loves in freedom’, and if Christ qua human does nothing other than actively correspond himself to God’s action, might the idea of ‘self-effacement’ require less emphasis in theological anthropology, not more?20 Or does even the possibility of such a debate signal the need to dispense entirely with the binary of ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ in Christology – a binary that in fact reiterates fundamental differences between the descriptions of Christ tendered by Barth and Schleiermacher? 18 19

Jüngel, Theological Essays I, p. 225; emphasis removed. Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)

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Barth’s Christology today How might Barth’s Christology relate to the challenges of the present day? In conclusion, I take up this question by focusing on the motif of punishment. My remarks are necessarily brief and decidedly experimental. At first blush, Barth’s understanding of punishment seems unlikely to appeal to Christians who favour a ‘practically socialist’ (Werpehowski) or even ‘seriously socialist’ (Barth)21 posture in the present day. Some words from Mark Lewis Taylor, a thinker who has deftly conjoined a Tillichian theological sensibility with a sharp denunciation of the criminal justice system of the United States: Many Christian sources . . . [have] described [Jesus] as a kind of scapegoat, able to have all sin and evil put upon himself, thus to take away from us the wrongs attributed to or suffered by others. Such Christian readings, taught to countless generations . . . have disseminated the destructive idea that we can derive a better life now or in some future time of salvation by means of someone else’s sacrifice. From this perspective, Christian scapegoating interpretations of Jesus’ death bear a significant responsibility for today’s theatrics of terror, as we suffer it in the form of prisons, endemic police brutality, and state-sanctioned executions. Christians who wish to counter this theatrics of terror with something really new, must lay aside the scapegoating myth of Jesus’ death.22 Despite un-nuanced generalizations about ‘Christian sources’ and granted the rather Girardian construal of sacrifice operative in this passage, Taylor indicates that Barth has a case to answer. Does the motif of punishment risk legitimizing the atrocities that Taylor exposes as characteristic of North American society – disproportionate and racist strategies of incarceration,

20

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22

An apposite passage: ‘If faith in its negative form is indeed an emptying, then it is certainly an emptying of all the results of the practices of self-emptying. It begins at the point where all the works of man are at an end, including his quiescence and silence and anticipatory dying. Christian faith is the day whose dawning means the end of the mystical night’ (IV/1, p. 629). Although this passage depends on a fairly ill-informed attitude towards ‘mysticism’, it at least reflects Barth’s insistence on faith as necessarily inclusive of action. I am tweaking Barth’s words here. My source is Frank Jehle’s informative monograph, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906–1968 (trans. Richard and Martha Burnett; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 90. Jehle reports that Barth uses the phrase ‘serious Socialism’ in a letter to a German theologian in 1950, citing Karl Barth, Offene Briefe 1945–1968 (ed. Diether Koch; Zürich: TVZ, 1984), p. 210. Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), p. 108.

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the increasing militarization of police action, the pervasive brutalism of imprisonment and the consolidation of imperial ambition? More specifically, does theological interest in the theme of punishment, understood in the Dogmatics as an outworking of the idea of substitution (Stellvertretung), risk buttressing the ‘theatrics of terror’ currently structured into many Western countries’ response to new forms of transnational religious militancy – a response that mimetically legitimizes that which it claims to oppose?23 No risk, no gain. In the current political climate, an expurgation of punishment from the lexicon of our ‘theopolitical imagination’ risks ceding its definition to those who would use it to justify dubious political adventures. The issue is not whether to construe Christ’s substitutionary death as some kind of punishment; the issue is rather what punishment, understood Christianly, is going to mean. And it is here the Church Dogmatics has tremendous relevance, primarily because of Barth’s firm insistence that, in light of the singular event of the cross, the only meaning attachable to punishment is that it has passed. The judge has been judged in our place; God’s just love has ‘satisfied’ itself; God has both censured humanity and established, miraculously, the opportunity of new covenantal relationships. It follows that the principal ethical task for each Christian and the Christian community (and, by extension, theological ethics) must now be the enactment of a world ‘beyond punishment’. Since humanity is already-always ‘caught up in the transition’ (IV/1, p. 573) from death to life, punishment is always that which has been set behind us. It is something from which each human is now moving away, given that all are moving towards a new future. Thus Barth: That which has been in Jesus Christ is still present in Him as that which has been – the wrong which is blotted out, and the wrong-doer with it. This cannot and must not happen again. It must never again become the future. Rather the future will always be the past of human wrong and the human wrong-doer. This is something upon which in all our future we can only look back. Israel cannot again return to the depths of the Red Sea, where it was kept by the mighty hand of God, and the enemy was destroyed. What Jesus Christ has done to put our sin and death behind him and, therefore, behind us, He has done once and for all. He cannot and must not do it again. It cannot become for us a fresh problem of our future, as though it had not been done . . . Our justification, as it has taken place in Him, has given to God’s history with us – notwithstanding its coherence and totality – a very definite direction.

23

Catherine Keller makes this point adroitly: ‘terror may seem to be the only way to defend one’s terra. But destructive modes of resistance, operating out of their own deformed messianism of reterritorialization, only empower the dialectic of domination’. See God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), p. 44.

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If we look at Him, we can look and go only in this direction, from here to there, but not in the reverse direction. (IV/1, p. 558) ‘A very definite direction’ – one that is, always moving past punishment, perhaps glancing back briefly, but forging on with gentle enthusiasm and quiet confidence. Christian faith, and so by extension Christian dogmatics, therefore necessarily refuses to conceive the human in punitive terms. The only possibility is for humanity to be understood in terms of a history in which a sinful ‘Whence’ heads, inexorably, towards an exalted ‘Whither’ (IV/1, pp. 543ff.). What is the worst doubt a Christian can entertain? Well, if faith depends on God’s revelatory action, then the Christian ought fundamentally to do no more (and no less) than dispose himself or herself as grateful for gifts given, responsive towards the tasks ahead and patiently expectant of the best future imaginable. The space between gratitude and patience need not, for the most part, be doctrinally policed; accusations of ‘heresy’ and defensiveness towards theological innovation rarely improve the life of the Christian community. Bouts of boundary-drawing, in fact, typically distract from what is most needful, now more than ever: the ever-evolving pursuit of Christian discipleship, carried out in word and deed, and forged in light of the adamant yet tender directives of God. The quotation above does suggest, however, that Barth sharply disapproves of those who would question the adequacy and completeness of the cross as punishment. Here there is a line in the sand. Since God does not do things halfway, the (implicit or explicit) supposition that God’s punishment needs human supplement suggests a crippling lack of confidence in, and disloyalty to, God’s salvific work.24 Indeed, when Christian life lacks confidence and loyalty, it quickly loses shape. Failing to enact the ‘subjective realisation of atonement’ (IV/1, p. 643), the Christian finds himself or herself in the throes of contradiction. He or she somehow ends up hurrying back to Calvary, hoping to ‘add’ to the punishment now realized on the cross – not realizing that he or she is always already propelled forwards, thrown into a life animated and illumined by the vitalizing sun of righteousness. What does it mean for a Christian to busy himself or herself with punitive action? It means nothing other than that Christian providing a pitiable display of his or her disregard for the new life imputed to each human – a new life that, given Christ’s history, always moves from a state of condemned guilt towards the delight of redemption.

24

George Hunsinger makes this point nicely during an explication of Barth’s duplex gratia: ‘the work of reconciliation, which [Christ] accomplished for us there and then, must not be conceived as less than it is. It must not be conceived as though it were somehow unfinished, insufficient, repeatable, or in need of repetition’ (‘A Tale of Two Simultaneities’, p. 330).

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It means nothing better than intolerable self-contradiction: a futile (and, even though the consequences often prove catastrophic, somewhat laughable) attempt to overturn the most basic determination of human being. On Barth’s reckoning, Christian ethics, or, more simply, the life of the church, means nothing more and nothing less than a world ‘beyond punishment’, realized in unprecautious love and freedom. It means a constant recollection of the past, present and future fact that ‘the great divine Yes has been spoken’ and, therefore, that ‘things cannot, must not and will not go on as before in the world and in human life’ (IV/3.1, p. 241). Christ’s life, death and resurrection, understood as the defining revelation of God as ‘the one who loves in freedom’, function as a steady but sharp provocation. The Christian knows only that she, and every other, is petitioned to act with God in love and freedom; she knows that her only option, in the final analysis, is a sober but steady joy that lives after the cross. Moreover, since God’s punishment of sin includes the most perfect remaking of humanity, with evil wholly extirpated from human being, evil ought not to function as an ontologically prominent or ontologically stabilized category in Christian thought. Certainly, given that the Christian ‘dares to consider all other [humans] in light of the fact that . . . judgment has been passed on them [and] pardon applies to them’ (IV/1, p. 634), evil cannot be ‘named’ or ‘pinpointed’ definitively. It is of course true that horrific atrocities occur daily and that a huge number of these atrocities are result of human irresponsibility – which is to say, my and your irresponsibility. It is also true that individuals feel compelled, maybe even obligated, to describe certain events with the adjective ‘evil’. Not doing so does an injustice to those who labour under the atrocious machinations of human sinfulness. But if one concurs with Barth’s construal of justification, the Christian ought neither to deem any one human essentially evil nor to suggest that evil now exists as such – say, in the form of a group or a nation state. The Manichean presumption that ‘personal’ and/or ‘cosmological’ evil have a reality commensurate with other realities, and the accompanying suggestion that evil must be defeated and expunged by human efforts, can only appear to the Christian as an instance of faithlessness. In the final analysis, the Christian is permitted to recognize only the ontologically transformative impact of divine love, worked out in the history of Christ. Thus Christian theology’s most ‘totalizing’ series of claims – reality has been changed, once and for all, with evil overcome; your identity has been shaped by God’s elective grace; you live in Christ, and therefore, in some sense, in the time and space of God in God’s second and third ways of being; and you – all of you – are good. The contention that evil may not function as a stable category in theology and, more specifically, theological anthropology (which is not to say it will not make an occasional appearance, not least when the theologian reflects on what has passed) draws me back to my initial claim about punishment. Given that no human can be deemed essentially evil, no matter what atrocities 262

CONCLUSION

he or she has performed, a Christian political perspective will have nothing positive to say about ventures that aspire to punish supposed ‘evildoers’. To borrow from Michel Foucault: there certainly cannot be support for ‘a policy of terror . . . to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign’; a ‘power that [must] demonstrate not why it enforce[s] its laws, but who [are] its enemies, and what unleashing of force threaten[s] them . . . a power . . . recharged in the ritual display of its reality as “super-power”’.25 Ventures that assume the need for such punishment dishonour Christ’s death. The only viable theological narrative about evil begins with the words, ‘It is finished’ (Jn 19.30); with the awareness that evil has been expelled from each human; with the frank admission that that all lapses into wrongdoing are inexplicable. How does one then forestall the temptation to designate others as evil? How does one suppress the desire to punish, given, for example, the escalation of international terrorism, with all the horrors that attend it (there are surely more to come); pre-emptive military attacks, justified on specious grounds and bolstered by crude jingoism (also probably forthcoming); and the ever-increasing occurrence of human rights violations carried out by ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ (likewise)? Through active disbelief, Barth might suggest. Disbelief, since no satisfactory explanation of why atrocity occurs can ever be tendered. There can only be the terrible recognition that, for some curious reason, human beings do not always, and in fact hardly ever, realize the movement away from peccator and into iustus.26 Active disbelief, since the Christian’s only goal can be to recall the engraced dignity of perpetrator and victim, and to realize a present and future after punishment. Punishment, one might say, is a temptation that must be exorcised from belief; it requires ‘an act of the unbelief that is, grounded in faith’ (III/3, p. 521). Obviously this politicization of Barth’s Christology, which has obvious reference to the so-called war on terror that has occupied, and may well continue to occupy the modern west for years to come, entails a degree of utopianism. Appropriately so: since the Dogmatics presents Christian faith in its ideal form, so Barth inspires an immoderate theological ethics. The new 25

26

Thus Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan; New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 49 and 57. I use these sentences because of their precision. They also suggest that the foreign policy pursued by many Western states ought to be (a) situated within a history of punishment (the claims are made, incidentally, in the first part of Discipline and Punishment, titled ‘Torture’, which deals with punishment prior to the rise of the modern prison and associated institutions) and (b) that recent events may complicate Foucault’s analysis, since punishment has become an international, as opposed to a largely domestic, phenomenon. Might it also be said that, even granted the ethical quandaries that attend the rise of the modern prison and associated conventions, much foreign policy at present is governed by a premodern mentality? See CD IV/3.1, pp. 196–7.

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history offered to each human means a ‘strange righteousness’; it ‘will always be to us a strange to-day, although it is ours’ (IV/1, p. 549). Notice, though, that such utopianism need not make for vapid impossibilism (or, worse, Christian triumphalism). Think of Emmanuel Levinas’s frank admission in Otherwise than Being: ‘ethics as first philosophy’ must ultimately become inclusive of socially mediated justice, since a ‘relationship with the third party’ necessitates ‘an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at’.27 In the moments in which the vis-à-vis becomes plural, in which face-to-face dialogicality contends with the (inevitable) multiplication of faces, ‘responsibility’ is forced into an unholy alliance with the pragmatics of the everyday. In a real sense, this means nothing short of betrayal, for the self’s categorical and substitutionary duty must now be routed through the straits of pragmatic negotiation. But, given that this is a necessary betrayal, the challenge is simply to understand as much. Perhaps Barth would offer a formally similar response with respect to punishment? While a politics beyond punishment marks the point of departure – no, the mandate – for Christian action, an individual cannot absent herself from the difficulties of organization, half-measures and compromise. This means betrayal – a process of negotiation that dishonours the identity imputed to each human being. But haunting each instance of betrayal, making every ‘emergency concession’ well-nigh intolerable, is the Christian’s persistent sense of punishment’s impropriety and, even as this draws her into the difficulties of self-contradiction, a refusal to participate in its enactment. Despite the incompleteness of these comments, the indulgence of a concluding literary comparison seems appropriate. This time, I turn not to Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, but rather to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. During a courtship troubled by Will Ladislaw’s conceitedness and Dorothea Brooke’s impetuous marriage to Mr. Casaubon, Eliot overhears a remarkable conversation. She writes: ‘ . . . I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me’. ‘What is that?’ said Will, rather jealous of the belief. ‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil – widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower’. ‘That is a beautiful mysticism – it is a – ’

27

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 158. Quotation adjusted for spelling.

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‘Please do not call it by any name’, said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. ‘You will say that it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it’.28 This passage attests to the kind of Christian action that Barth invites his readers to undertake. Barth might well flinch at Dorothea’s refusal to talk theologically about her faith (though he would surely approve her admonition regarding self-serving academicism). He would also probably question Dorothea’s rather un-christological assessment of ‘divine power’ and her appeal to belief as a ‘comfort’ (though I hope he would be delighted that her theological instincts outmatch those of her future husband). Nevertheless, the passage exemplifies the faithful comportment Barth sought to describe and engender – the Christian who, finding herself ‘caught up’ in God’s project of love and freedom, strives to realize a future in which evil is always passing away – even while, as Dorothea admits, she does ‘not understand [her] action . . . For I do not the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Rom. 7.15a and 19). Barth knows that faith includes struggle. Each human bears the memory of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. And each Christian recognizes her distance from Christ, even as she knows herself to be ‘in Christ’: she knows that, for the most part, her endeavours to offer adequate noetic and praxealogical responses to grace end, at best, in low comedy and, at worst, in injurious failure. But Dorothea’s inability to ‘part’ with what she has ‘found’ – or, Barth would interject, that which has found her – coheres with a basic claim of the Church Dogmatics. Christian thought protests every overestimation of tragedy, even as it acknowledges the tragic. Irrespective of the current state of the world, God’s love abides; God’s love grounds, shapes and encourages each human to correspond himself or herself to God’s movement in the world. Knowing this fact to be true, a full-blooded participation in God’s project of grace and love cannot be absent from any Christian life – or, even, the aspiration to live Christianly. In light of the divine and human steadfastness definitive of Christ, you cannot not think and act with God. Not really. Your only task is to be who you are: someone loved by God; someone liberated from sin, guilt and punishment; someone who moves, slowly but surely, towards God’s lively and peaceful future.

28

George Eliot, Middlemarch (ed. Rosemary Ashton; London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 391–2.

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Appendix 1 the organization of CHURCH DOGMATICS iv 1

IV/1 Christology ‘Person’

IV/2

IV/3

The Lord as Servant: Jesus Christ, Son of God munus sacerdotale status exinanitionis (§59)

The Servant as Lord: Jesus Christ, Son of Man munus regale status exaltationis (§64)

Doctrine of Sin

Pride and Fall (§60)

Sloth and Misery (§65) Falsehood and condemnation (§70)

Soteriology

Justification (§61)

Sanctification (§66)

Promise of God; vocation (§71)

Upbuilding the community Love (§§67, 68)

Sending the community Hope (§§72, 73)

Prayer

Eucharist

‘Office’ ‘State’

Pneumatology Holy Spirit in the Gathering of community the community Holy Spirit in the Faith (§§62, 63) individual ETHICS, IV/4 The Christian life

1

Baptism

The True Witness: Jesus Christ, the Mediator munus propheticum Jesus as the light of life; unity of states (§69)

This diagram is based on a schematic in Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth, pp. 48–9.

266

Appendix 2 barth and the GENUS MAIESTATICUM

During my discussion of Barth’s relationship to sixteenth and seventeenthcentury scholasticism, much was said about his preference for a Reformed christological stance. Integral to this preference is a fairly sharp critique of classical Lutheranism, centred on the charge that its theologians failed to appreciate adequately the ontological differentiation of divinity and humanity basic to Christ’s person. A key point of contention is the genus maiestaticum – apparently the first step along a road that leads to the ‘speculative anthropology’ of Hegel and that facilitates the rise of ‘secular humanism’ (IV/2, p. 83). But is Barth’s critique fair? To consider this question, this brief appendix looks at a justly famous text by Martin Chemnitz.1 In writing about this third genus of the communicatio idiomatum (pp. 241–402), Chemnitz distinguishes two ways in which divine majesty is communicated to Christ’s human nature. First, and this point tallies with the Reformed construal of the communicatio gratiarum, Christ gains a superabundance of ‘gracious finite gifts’ (p. 247), qualitatively comparable to those conferred upon the saints, but quantitatively in excess of anything any other human has or will receive. Christ’s human nature is therefore ‘augmented’ (p. 252) in a distinctive manner. Second – and here is the point at which the Reformed and Lutheran perspectives diverge – beyond these finite gifts, God communicates divine attributes to Christ’s utterly unique human being. Thus: in addition to the created gifts and finite qualities, we must also posit another exalted classification of giving or communion (koinwni/a) whereby the assumed nature in Christ by reason of the hypostatic union possesses along with the attributes and characteristics of the

1

In what follows, page numbers refer to the text cited in chapter 3: Martin Chemnitz, Two Natures in Christ.

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divine nature of the Logos the same kind of communion that iron has with fire, whereby the power of giving light and heat, which is and remains the essential property of the fire, is communicated to the heated iron without any commingling because of the union (p. 259). As with the iron and fire, the ‘essential’ properties of divinity ‘become proper and essential…through the interpenetration’ (p. 291) of the humanity that exists in unity with the Word. To ensure this bold claim does not run away with itself, Chemnitz offers various caveats that attempt to preserve a solid sense of the disjunctive basic to Christ’s person. He insists, in particular, that there is no crude commingling of divinity and humanity. The interpenetration of divine and human, consequential upon the unio hypostatica, is not such that the essential properties of divinity become the essential properties of Christ’s human nature. Divine attributes are rather communicated to Christ’s person. He bears the divine majesty concretely; his human nature, in and of itself, remains wholly human. Also, talk of divinization is avoided. Despite relying on John Damascene, Chemnitz is aware that such talk could suggest the essential transformation of Christ’s human nature that he wants to rule out. Now if this is what Barth is arguing against, he does not give at least one of his scholastic Lutheran opponents a fair read. For example, he is correct to concede that for the Lutherans, the genus maiestaticum ‘happens without a cancellation (Aufhebung) or alteration of the human nature’. But the claim that Christ’s human essence ‘experiences the additional development (beyond its humanity) of acquiring and having as such all the marks of divinity, of participating directly and immediately (unmittelbar) in the majesty of God, of enjoying in its creatureliness every perfection of the uncreated essence of God’ (IV/2, p. 77 rev.) does Chemnitz, and probably a fair few others, an obvious disservice. The ‘as such’, as well as the unqualified unmittelbar, obscures Chemnitz’s insistence that there is no essential alteration of Christ’s human nature in itself – just as the iron is not essentially changed when surrounded by fire. Equally, claims about an ‘apotheosised humanity’ (IV/2, p. 80) and the ‘divinisation of human essence in Jesus Christ’ (IV/2, p. 81) are rash. At stake is not divinization as such. At stake is the communication of divine attributes to the concrete divine-human person of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, I am not quite ready to take leave of Barth’s critique. Even granted Chemnitz’s adroit arguments, his insistence that there is no ‘commingling, changing, or equating’ of divine and human essences does not take account of an ambiguity inherent to the idea of interpenetration. The plainly materialistic analogy of iron and fire is significant, since its use by Chemnitz forgets what the Reformed took to be dogmatically basic: that it is a necessary property of a human nature that it not take on divine attributes. This figuration of augmentation and communication must be firmly ruled out: it

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suggests a conferral of properties that bleeds into the substantial transformation of the object upon which the properties are conferred. And the fact that Chemnitz does not recognize as much is telling. Moreover, as Barth indicates, the genus maiestaticum makes for problems down the line. It leads to fairly laboured understandings of divine keno¯sis as ‘retraction’, ‘non-use’ and so on, given the need to justify the manifest absence of divine ‘majesty’ in many parts of Christ’s life (thus the debate between Giessen and Tübingen). And, most importantly to my mind, the genus maiestaticum undermines a vivid and dogmatically important sense of Christ’s human agency. If Christ’s humanity gains the attributes of deity, beyond the finite gifts God especially confers upon him as a human being, it becomes difficult to understand how Christ humanly plays a part in sanctifying and justifying humankind before God – even granted Chemnitz’s affirmation of a genus equivalent to the communicatio operationum. Of course, a revamped critique of Chemnitz hardly settles the issue. An advocate for classical Lutheranism would be frustrated at the comments above. She would surely insist that interpenetration does not entail mixing, especially if one disavows a crudely substantialist metaphysics; she would also note that the genus maiestaticum has the advantage of preserving a good sense of Christ’s personal simplicity – something that Reformed dogmaticians have struggled to achieve. A Reformed interlocutor, less inclined to worry about the unitive, might retort by pressing the question of divinization: does not the Lutheran concern for a certain view of the Eucharist govern christological inquiry, thereby drawing attention away from the Chalcedonian inconfuse and immutabiliter? The Lutheran opponent would say ‘no’; she would argue that it is exactly an articulation of the genus maiestaticum that provides the christological basis for a dogmatic description of the holiness of the sacrament in question. And the arguments could easily continue. What does seem clear is that important questions still require answers. Does Christ’s personal simplicity require that the effecta personalis include some manner of divinization, albeit one very carefully circumscribed (such as is described in some patristic and medieval Christian works)? Or does Christ being vere homo forbid any transfer of divine properties to his human nature? And, most appositely, does the genus maiestaticum protect or undermine Christ’s human role in the achievement of salvation? It may well be that neither the post-Reformation Reformed or Lutheran traditions have the conceptual resources needed to respond effectively to such questions. What seems most needful is the type of dialectical to-and-fro offered in the Dogmatics: a text that cherishes, and draws inspiration, from both wings of the magisterial Reformation.

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bibliography

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index

actualism 133, 174, 247, 249 Adams, Marilyn McCord 136 adoptionism 42, 50 Alexandrian school of Christology 27–8, 47−9 anhypostasis/enhypostasis formula 7−8, 17−26, 50−3, 76, 131, 146−7, 252 Anselm 63, 187–8, 200, 223−4, 257 anthropology, theological 118, 139, 170, 258, 262 Antiochene school of Christology 27–8, 47−9 Aquinas, Thomas 84, 123, 136−9 see also Thomistic tradition Arianism 48 Athanasius 84, 110 atonement, doctrine of 44, 86, 199, 261 Augustine, St (and Augustinian tradition) 2, 190, 211, 218, 235 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 20, 208, 228, 251 Barmen Declaration 178 Barth, Heinrich 20 Baur, Ferdinand 199 Bavinck, Hermann 76 Beethoven, Ludwig van 238 begottenness 9, 101–2, 251 Beintker, Michael 21, 96 Berkouwer, G.C. 199, 226, 232 Bible, the 22, 34–7, 39, 55–9, 122, 154, 240, 246, 257−8 Biedermann, Alois 199 Boethius 190 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 43, 102−3 Brunner, Emil 46, 90 Buber, Martin 107, 118−19 Bultmann, Rudolf 9, 53−4, 194, 251

Calvin, John 31, 36, 38, 44, 106, 123,168, 231, 236, 238, 242 Calvinism 60, 63, 78 see also Reformed tradition categorical imperative 218 Chalcedon, Definition of 7, 18, 26−38, 41, 52, 65–6, 89−90, 128−9, 132, 135, 149, 191 Christocentrism (and ‘christological concentration’) 4, 23, 65, 76 Coakley, Sarah 26, 37, 54−6, 258 Cocceius, Johannes 9, 84, 106, 196−7, 253 Cohen, Herrmann 20 communicatio gratiarum 136−41, 146−7, 150, 170, 250 communicatio idiomatum 134, 147, 170, 202 communicatio operationum 136, 141−7, 150, 170, 250 communio naturarum 132−5, 138, 146, 150, 170, 192, 202, 249 confessions (and creeds) 34–7 Constantinople, ecumenical council of (681CE) 49, 128, 247 correspondence concept in Christology 150−69, 183 covenant 106, 195−6, 245−6, 252−3 covenantal humanity of Jesus 102−6 crucifixion 221−8, 233, 238, 243−4, 255, 261 Cyril of Alexandria 48−50, 62, 129−32, 144, 213−15, 247 decision God’s 66, 68–71, 81 Christ’s 108–11, 166–7 Delany, Samuel R. 1−2

287

INDEX Göttingen Dogmatics 16, 23, 118, 121, 129−38, 204, 250 grace 9, 88–90, 93, 97–8, 126−7, 136−42, 146, 151, 158–9, 180−1, 248−9

deliverance, Christ’s provision of 166–9 Demson, David 168 dialogicalism 107 docetism 30, 50−1, 54−5, 123, 141 dyothelitism 7, 11, 18, 41−2, 49, 141, 170, 247 ebionitism 30, 123, 249 ‘elected human’, Christ as 87−104, 107−9, 122, 127−30, 142, 144, 153−4, 170, 183, 188−90 ‘electing God’, Christ as 80−7, 102−3, 109, 122, 153−4, 170, 183, 188−90 election, doctrine of 8−9, 38, 60−2, 66−8, 73−6, 80−109, 116, 118, 122, 126−30, 137−8, 142, 144, 188−90, 206, 237, 248, 256 Eliot, George 264−5 encounter, 106–8 enhypostasis see anhypostasis/ enhypostasis formula eternity, God’s 99−102, 190−1 existentialism 106–8 extra calvinisticum 40, 96 Federal Theology 196 feminism 13−14, 119 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 77 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 77 fideism 19, 58 filioque 253–4 ‘flesh’, meaning of 43 Forsyth, P.T. 43 Foucault, Michel 262−3 Frankfurt, Harry 9, 11, 155, 172−4, 227 Frei, Hans 11–12, 188, 201, 246 geisteswissenschaftlich mode of reflection 53−5, 58−9, 62, 119−20, 193, 257 gendered language for God 13−15 genus tapeinoticum 147–50 Gess, Wolfgang Friedrich 214 Gethsemane 45−7, 50, 109−12, 115, 188, 201, 203, 225, 229−43, 251, 265

Härle, Wilfried 72 Harnack, Adolf von 29−30, 55, 57, 184 Hegel, G. W. F. (and Hegelianism) 9, 11, 75, 189, 198−9 Heidelberg Catechism 250 Heidelberg Disputation 204 Heppe, Heinrich 20, 23−5, 52, 147, 251 hermeneutics 55 Herrmann, Wilhelm 19−21, 30, 46−7, 54, 56, 63, 178, 229, 242 ‘historical Jesus’ 53−9, 152, 189, 193−4, 256−7 history as theological concept 111–14, 124, 188–203 Hume, David 164 Hunsinger, George 5, 18, 27−8, 47, 99−101, 145 hypostatic union (unio hypostatica) 129−37, 142−4, 147, 183, 212, 249, 252 identity Christ’s 108−13, 217, 247 God’s 69−77, 80−1, 126−7, 191−2 incarnation, doctrine of 9, 23, 31, 40−4, 63, 68, 76, 79−86, 104, 125−6, 129, 136, 142−3, 146−9, 174, 189−95, 206−8, 214−15 James, William 174 Jaspers, Karl 118 Jenson, Robert 99, 103 John the Baptist 230 Jüngel, Eberhard 61, 87, 156, 192, 207, 256, 258 justification, doctrine of 183−4, 216, 239, 242, 251, 255−6 Kähler, Martin 9, 57, 193−4, 200, 256 Kant, Immanuel 11, 20, 164, 171, 218−19, 233

288

INDEX Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 238 munus triplex 8, 122−3

Kantianism 107−8, 157, 165−6, 225 Kelsey, David 122 kenosis 213−15 ˉ Kierkegaard, Søren 203 Klappert, Berthold 124, 210 Köber, Berthold 175 Krötke, Wolf 122, 223, 245−6 Kutter, Herrmann 19 Leontius of Byzantium 50, 144 Lessing, Gotthold 53 Levinas, Emmanuel 263−4 liberal theology 4, 20−1, 28–31, 46–7, 62–3, 152, 249, 257 Lindbeck, George 28, 32, 181 logos asarkos 89−96, 127, 192, 194, 249 logos ensarkos 94, 148, 192, 249 logos incarnandus and logosincarnatus 206−7, 222−3, 237, 251 Loisy, Alfred 189 Loofs, Friedrich 24 love God’s 73−6, 80, 87−8, 98, 114−16, 160−3, 207−10, 239, 248, 255−6 Jesus’ 160−3, 250 Luther, Martin 36, 43, 147−8, 173−4, 204−5, 228, 242 Lutheranism 18, 39−40, 47−8, 121, 125, 131−2, 135, 137, 141, 147−50, 154, 190, 249, 251 McCabe, Herbert 250 McCormack, Bruce 5, 7, 17−22, 24−5, 51−2, 65−7, 93, 118, 132−5, 204, 250 Marquardt, Friedrich-Wilhelm 143 Marx, Karl 189 Marxism 54 Maury, Pierre 65−6 Maximus Confessor 41, 50, 234, 242 Melanchthon, Philip 36 miracles 164−8 Molnar, Paul 91, 93 Moltmann, Jürgen 149−50, 210 monoenergism 175 monothelitism 41, 51

Natorp, Paul 20 natural theology 252 Nazism 177−80 neoplatonism 75, 140, 190 Nestorius and Nestorianism 48−50, 105, 130, 142, 144, 153 das Nichtige (and ‘radical evil’) 209, 217–29, 234, 239–42, 245–6, 251, 255, 262–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 118, 159 Norris, Richard 26 O’Donovan, Oliver 180 obedience 9−10, 44, 98−9, 108−10, 133, 153, 158, 175, 188, 203, 251, 255 divine 204−16 human 216−30, 235 ‘onto-theology’ 69–70 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 99 patience 8, 97–8, 111–12, 115, 169, 182, 239 patriarchalism (see also sexism) 14, 119 patripassianism 148 perichoresis 148 personal simplicity and ontological complexity of Christ 27−33, 109, 135, 153−4, 207 personality divine 70 human 42, 130–1, 247 Pilate, Pontius 240 pneumatocentrism 23 pneumatology 253−4 political activism 172−3, 180−3, 245, 253, 263 Prenter, Regin 105 process theology 71 punishment 259−64 Ragaz, Leonhard 19−20 Rahner, Karl 26, 64, 128 ‘Rahner’s rule’ 63−4

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INDEX reconciliation, doctrine of 8−9, 66, 122, 126, 180−1, 184−5, 195, 199−202 Reformed tradition 9, 18, 23, 39–40, 47–8, 121, 125, 129–35, 137, 141–2, 147, 154, 255–6 Rendtorff, Trutz 77−8, 157 revelation, doctrine of 22−3, 64, 66, 73, 76, 256 Ricoeur, Paul 225 Ritschl, Albrecht (and Ritschlianism) 20, 30, 107−10, 123, 165−6, 168 Rodin, R. Scott 225−6 Sartorius, Ernst 214 Sartre, Jean-Paul 106−7 Satan 112−13, 231, 241−2 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 30, 35, 40, 46, 63, 107, 119, 151−2, 188, 229, 259 Schmidt, Werner H. 251 Schweitzer, Albert 57, 241−3 Schwöbel, Christoph 160 Seinsweise 14, 189, 212 sexism 7, 34, 119–20 212, 254, 258 sinlessness of Christ 9, 43–4, 86−7, 98–9, 114−15, 170−6, 199, 209, 231 socialism 178, 259 Sonderegger, Katherine 224 soteriology 29−32, 37, 43, 124, 184, 190, 205−6, 242

sovereignty of Christ 157–60 Sparn, Walter 91 spirituality 258 steadfastness of Christ 111–14, 116 Tanner, Kathryn 4, 158 Taylor, Mark Lewis 259 Theodoret of Cyrus 50 theopolitical imagination 11, 260 Thomasius, Gottfried 214−15 Thomistic tradition 251 Tillich, Paul 2, 251, 259 Trinity, doctrine of 14, 32, 38, 63–8, 72–3, 77, 81–2, 101–2 182, 188, 192, 205–6, 208, 211–12 Troeltsch, Ernst 54 ‘veiling and unveiling’, dialectic of 7, 19−25, 29−30, 35, 51−3, 204−7, 240 ‘volitional inability’ and ‘volitional necessity’ 171−3 war on terror 11, 263 Weber, Max 158 Webster, John 5 wholeheartedness of Christ 155−7, 180−4, 250 Young, Frances 48 Zwingli, Huldreich 134

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